Kemal, Bahriye. Writing Cyprus: Postcolonial and Partitioned Literatures of Place and Space. New York City (NY): Routledge, 2020.

 

Writing Cyprus is not just a monograph, but a scholarly, creative, and lived programme of multiple research and community activities with interrelated projects, which sought to make sense of my/our spatial positioning between the complexities of displacement, colonialism, and conflict in a world divided by borders and binaries, and marked by deadlock. In this context, Cyprus becomes a pivotal vantage point and refuge – what I coin the balcony of the sea (Kemal 2020) – for a rich body of understudied literary and artistic creation and unheard community voices, which is grounded in experiences of crossing colonial and postcolonial histories, geographies, sociology, politics, and ethnography of everyday space and place. This is an important case study that calls for a new innovative interdisciplinary model, which can engage with and move beyond dominant binary legacies of historical-political deadlock, as well as geographic and disciplinary borders. This important case study and the model provides a means to engage, move beyond and co-produce with the most marginalised displaced communities of our cruelly divided hostile world.

The postcolonial literary study for Writing Cyprus began in 2009, while the ethnographic study for it has been an ongoing process since the moment I was born. In this blog, I share the trajectory of the programme ‘Writing Cyprus’, which set the groundwork for scholarly, creative, and community work, e.g., articles, edited collections, monographs, zines and exhibitions. This, in turn, paved the way for a programme still in progress that I call ‘Writing Postcolonial Mediterraneans and Displacement’. The beginnings of this venture can be mapped through the bedtime stories my Cypriot grandmother used to tell me back in 1986 in London:

My sister was sold to the Arabs before I was born; she was beautiful, so beautiful that she was the most expensive girl in our village, Celya. Today I finally found her in Amman.

This story was interspersed with stories about ‘the Greeks’. Here began my spatial shifts between London, Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, Jordan, Palestine, and beyond, between multiple places, spaces and displacements, between my time of arrival in the 1980s and the arrivals and departures before me.

With a distorted anchor in Cyprus, I shifted between multiple-mutable villages that had two, three, four names in the north, the south, and in the middle. This was a shift between my maternal grandmother’s Κελλιά/Celya/Yıldırım in the south before 1974 and Μηλιά/Celya/Yıldırım in the north after 1974; my paternal grandfather’s Κοφίνου/Köfünye/Geçitkale in the south before 1974 and Λευκόνοικο/Lefkonuk/Geçitkale in the north after 1974; between my paternal grandmother’s border village Πέργαμoς/Beyarmudu/Pergama, and my maternal grandfather’s border village Πύλα/Pile. These places come with much historical-political baggage – a spatial palimpsest operating through that postcolonial partitioned concept of ‘name games’ and ‘number games’ (Kemal 2020, 15), rooted in competing nationalist narratives that fracture the island. These are sites of conflict, displacement, and total devastation for all Cypriots, as well externally displaced people from across the region who are placed in The Kofinou Reception Centre or are stuck in limbo in the border villages. The externally displaced refugees and asylum seekers often come into Cyprus from, for example, Syria and Cameroon, on boats. When they arrive in the Republic of Cyprus, namely into the European Union, they are placed in The Kofinou Reception Centre for processing – the only governmental reception centre for asylum seekers in Cyprus – that is located in the abandoned village. Conversely, if they arrive at the de facto Turkish Republic of North Cyprus (TRNC), then they attempt to cross into the Republic via the border villages of Πύλα/Pile or Πέργαμoς/Pergama. This spatial struggle intensified through Cyprus’s very location, at a crossroads between West and East, and North and South, Europe and the Arab world but not quite. To add to this spatial complexity, all this grappling took place in London, my birthplace and our former imperial centre.                

I started to make sense of this spatiality by navigating through the literary/imagined and lived voices of displacement within and between our colonial and postcolonial world. Here I encountered a range of displaced people’s voices about movements going in and out of Cyprus, whilst journeying between Egypt, France, Greece, India, the Caribbean, Jordan, Lebanon, London, Syria, Palestine, Sudan, Cameroon, Nigeria, Turkey, United Kingdom, and beyond. It was clear through these encounters that there is an urgency to respond to and map out these voices of unheard displaced communities (some severely endangered) and their places/spaces; urgent because they contribute to our worlds’ literary canons and counter-canons, as well as to the understanding of colonial and postcolonial encounters and processes that shape displacement, yet they are largely excluded.

I thus committed myself to actively engaging with these historical and contemporary voices that prioritised spatiality, which is a practice of reading, writing, and construction of places/spaces and displacements. In this spatial turn, I recognised the power of spatiality for both the dominant and marginalised communities. The marginalised communities and authors/artists give overwhelming importance to the relationship between lived experience, place/space and displacement, to reclaim and write back to dominant historical processes and forces. This turn throws into relief the understudied displaced authors who have written about their lived experiences within the divided city, the hosting villages, or refugee camps, and their writing thus becomes an immersive act of re-writing, re-reading and re-constructing such places in light of exclusionary colonial mapping processes.  These historical and contemporary texts, such as poems, prose or artworks, about the spatial experience, are explored alongside the immersive experiences of the community through, for example, place-based creative workshops with the refugees who read the material about the camp and its inhabitants, who themselves read the camp, and who also write about it.  In this process, wherein the literary/creative texts about and by displaced authors meet the present-day community’s engagement with the existing material and creation of new material, we reconstruct and remap place/space. To clarify with a concrete example, this is an active remapping of  Refugee Camps and Asylum Reception Centres, like Kofinou, by those who lived/are living there, through creating an interactive digital map and place-based writing with the Kofinou villager refugees of the past and the asylum seekers of the present that expose the colonial processes of encampment, hostility and exclusion met with marginalised process of solidarity that made this place. Such differential mapping dismantles the dominant and official ahistorical contemporary mappings by those who have no experience of these places–think news reports about refugees or Kofinou as station for Great Sea Interconnector between Cyprus, Greece, Israil for example.

In this process, I position my scholarly self at a crossroads, like the island of Cyprus itself. My position is grounded in the humanities, specifically in the study of literature, arts, and histories about/by these displaced authors and artists through a postcolonial and indigenous lens, but also crosses into social science, through the study of/with the community by navigating the politics, geography, anthropology, ethnography, pedagogy and performance of everyday place and space. The case of Cyprus and of these displaced communities calls for this interdisciplinary approach; this combination was and is necessary because it enables us to understand the historical processes that displaced and silenced the community, it enables these understudied, unheard, and difficult to access voices not only to be heard but also to be active agents who contribute to both knowledge production and spatial construction.

Using this interdisciplinary approach, I collaborated with Cypriots, Greeks, Turks and other displaced communities to co-create a model to remap postcolonial ‘Cypruses’ (Kemal 2020), the Mediterraneans and our postcolonial world. As I clarify below, the use of plural morphology highlights the multiple and mutable processes inclusive of diverse names and conceptions.  In this co-creation, Cyprus is activated as a ‘balcony of the sea’ (Kemal 2020), enabling us to navigate through displaced experiences by grasping lived, literary, artistic voices operating between post-Ottoman, British, and French colonial and spatial framings. Together we co-created an interdisciplinary multi-method intervention, which interrogates the historical processes of exclusion (Chambers 2008), makes unheard voices of displaced communities visible and audible through archival, literary/artistic and historical narratives, and co-produces new knowledge with present-day displaced communities through interviews, ethnography, creative workshops. In this model, I prioritise voices and experiences excluded from processes of cultural production and knowledge generation, providing new ways of naming, knowing, and understanding the region, and interrogating its meaning, making, and breaking towards the co-creation of differential postcolonial Mediterraneans. This interdisciplinary model is shaped through Cyprus but could be applied to other sites with communities and geographies that have been excluded from knowledge production.

The foundation of the model can be credited to the scholarly and community cultural programme ‘Writing Cyprus’ (2009-2019), which consisted of collaborative work with the creative community (e.g. poets, novelist, artist), the research community across different disciplines, official bodies (e.g., Ministry of Education in Cyprus), and the public in Cyprus and the UK. This resulted in multiple project outputs, such as the single authored research monograph with the same title Writing Cyprus (Kemal 2020), combined with various community outputs like Nicosia Beyond Barriers (Adil et al 2021) and multiple zines that constructed differential Cypruses.

It is important to highlight here that Cyprus Studies is predominantly framed within a rich body of scholarly work by indigenous social scientists, including anthropologists (Lisa Dikomitis, Vassos Argyrou, Olga Demetriou, and Yiannis Papadakis to list a few), political scientists (Neophytos Loizides), sociologists (Floya Anthias, Nicos Trimikliniotis), and educators (Michalinos Zembylas). There is only a handful of indigenous humanities scholars, such as historians (Andrekos Varnava), and an even smaller community of literary scholars (Stephanos Stephanides and Mehmet Yaşın). Cyprus Studies is mostly grounded in scholarly work positioned in either social sciences or humanities disciplinary silos, with particular focus on the ‘Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot’ dominant deadlock. This results in the marginalisation of diverse Cypriot and other voices in Cyprus, postcolonial literary voices, and of other encounters. To add to this, postcolonial literary studies and scholars have largely excluded the case of Cyprus – a pivotal site that is unfortunately misunderstood by the research community, the public, and the publishing industry. Scant attention has been given to the importance of literary Cyprus. For instance, when writing the monograph, creative writers with a Cypriot background or those who wrote about Cyprus were/continue to be sparse in publisher catalogues, which calls for alternative ways of accessing what is a very rich body of literature. Similarly, scholarly works about Cyprus are sparse and have been largely rejected by publishing houses and funding bodies; the monograph Writing Cyprus was ready in 2014, yet it received multiple rejections by publishers until a sudden shift in 2018 when book was accepted, welcomed, and gained some traction. Even though there is a slight shift in interest, the case of Cyprus and its creative voices that break new ground are still largely unknown, understudied, and excluded.

Since 2009, I have been interrogating these multiple exclusions informed by the scholarly work and relevant methodologies on Cyprus Studies and intersecting with work by postcolonial literary scholars about well-known cases such as India, Palestine-Israel, Ireland, Africa, the Caribbean, and Australia (Cleary 2002; Ashcroft et al 1995; Williams and Chrisman 1994). This paved the way for me to think through the understudied postcolonial literary and lived case of Cyprus, addressed through a post-British and Ottoman colonial and spatial framing as related to conflict, partition, displacement, and solidarity.

In Writing Cyprus, I offered a comprehensive study of the literatures of Cyprus, or what we can also call literatures of the Mediterraneans. This is a body of work that consists of literary-lived multilingual voices, including in Greek, Turkish, English, Sanna/Cypriot Arabic, Arabic, Armenian, Kurdish, French. These narrative voices are by Cypriots of all different backgrounds (referred throughout the book in a mutable way, such as ‘cypriotgreeks, cypriotturks, cypriotarmenians, cypriotmaronites’, to signal the changing positions and naming as self and spatial conceptions change), as well as visitors to the island (colonisers, slaves, refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, officials) who are Greeks, Turks, Britons, Arabs, Africans, Indians, Asians, and beyond. Thus, through this plural name, I assert that the literatures of Cyprus comprise a transnational world literature (WReC, 2015). In this work, uncanonised minor Cypriot literatures – Cypriot emergent writings – meet four major canonised literatures – dominant English, Greek, Turkish, and Arabic literature – as well as the counter-canon of postcolonial literatures. These literatures are all (post)colonial diasporic/displaced writings grappling with the cultural, social, and political history of colonisation and conflicting identifications as related to place/space and displacement.

This spatial turn in the literatures of Cyprus called for a distinct method to position the displaced selves. Together with the creative and scholarly communities of Cyprus I co-created a spatial method or model. In this model, we position ourselves as ‘rhythmanalysts’ on the balcony of the sea who capture the ‘truth of space’ for the co-production of a ‘differential space’. For this, I draw on Marxist-sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s spatiology (Lefebvre 1991, 2004, 2014) and Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1977) humanistic geography. The concept of the ‘balcony’ draws on Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis project (2004) shaped through his work on the Mediterranean. Rhythmanalysis is a method based on positioning ourselves at a strategic vantage point – ‘simultaneously inside and outside [like] on a balcony’ (Lefebvre 2004, 36) –enabling us to ‘grasp rhythms’ – repetition, movement, interaction between place, time and lived experience – of the everyday. The person on the balcony is a rhythmanalyst, who ‘grasps rhythms’ through crossing multiple geographic, historical, and cultural borders, including disciplinary borders (Lefebvre 2004, 32), which capture ‘truths of space’ – lived experiences and ‘social spaces’ inhabited by excluded minds, which exposes the dominant ‘mental spaces’ produced by official minds – so to produce an Other space, a differential space (Lefebvre, 1991) – in this case differential postcolonial Cypruses and Mediterraneans.

In this sense Cyprus is a balcony onto the region, that for now I call postcolonial ‘Mediterraneans’. This work engages with the dominant western concept and term ‘Mediterraneans’ as a multiple connecting site (Braudel 1972; Hordern and Purcell 2000), with focus on the interdisciplinary ‘Mediterraneans turn’. I draw on the postcolonial humanities turn that rethinks the region as an incomplete, multiple, and mutable archive with overlapping geographies and interrelated histories (Chambers 2008; Abderrezak 2016; Elhariry 2018; Proglio 2021); on social science studies since the ‘refugee crisis’ that prioritise displaced voices (e.g. UKRI-funded 2015-2016, Guild; Blitz; Crawley; Kirtsoglou; Squire); and on interdisciplinary studies on displacement in the region (e.g. UKRI-funded Fiddyian-Qasmiyeh 2016; Palladino 2020) that use participatory creative methods to engage with displaced communities. I recognise that this ‘Mediterraneans turn’, while leading to the examination of cultural, socio-political, and historical dynamics in the region, has limitations and operates within a framework dominated by western conceptions, rooted in colonialism, and exclusionary mapping processes. To deal with these limitations, I turn to Cyprus so as to capture both western and non-western conceptions, cultures, and languages of the region from antiquity to contemporary times. Through Cyprus, for example, I understand literary-lived production by people in the region who refer to it with numerous names and conceptions; we witness Arabic and Turkish names (e.g. ‘Rūmī [Byzantine Sea], Shāmī [Syrian Sea], Akhd [Green Sea], Mālih [Salty Sea]’and Ak Deniz [White Sea]) (Matar 2019) and conceptions making it a separating disconnected site, as well as interconnecting site as in western colonial and Hellenic conceptualisations (Kemal 2020). From this balcony, I cross ‘dominant and emergent’ (Williams 1977) conceptions to prioritise excluded voices.

The overall programme ‘Writing Cyprus’ brought together hundreds of unheard displaced voices or rhythmanalysts from the region, who themselves built the concept of the balcony through their creative works and everyday experiences. Given the fact that this has been and is a colossal study that crosses disciplines, geographies, histories, and languages, which included a very rich body of understudied literary work and marginalised communities, I worked/have been working on multiple interrelated projects that collectively shape and use the aforementioned interdisciplinary multi-method intervention towards the co-creation of differential Cypruses and Mediterraneans.

The monograph Writing Cyprus is an anchor and starting point that connects voices, disciplines, and methods to read and construct the case of Cyprus through the spatial model, which was grounded in and determined by a study of the literatures of Cyprus. Given the very rich literary production, mainly by Cypriots writing in Greek and Turkish, and limited production (in the traditional publishing sense) by other groups, at first glance the monograph may appear to consist predominantly of ‘Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot’ voices; however, a close critical reader will recognise that this is a book about displaced marginalised communities, who are spectres that shape the book and all my writing and work that followed.

These are the voices I continue to work with today. For instance, the monograph opens and closes with Napoleon Terzis’s poem ‘Home’; Terzis is a ‘cypriotmaronite’ whose ancestors were religious refugees that arrived in Cyprus in four successive waves starting in the eighth century from ancient Syria/Lebanon, and who writes in the severely endangered Sanna (Cypriot-Arabic) language of his ancestors. Other spectral voices from the monograph include, for example, displaced ‘cypriotegyptians’ and Arab refugees. Thus, the monograph offers a comprehensive study of a diverse array of voices through analysing literary, archival, and historical narratives, whilst also turning to ethnography and creative workshops with and by the community.

 

^{Book cover of Napoleon Terzis's poetry collection Lallenes tel kalbi [My Heart's Tulips, 2025]}

 

I have often thought of the monograph as a ‘deformed (auto)ethnography’, one that shifts between field sites with complete immersion into the everyday life of people that make up my/our postcolonial positions and Cypruses/Mediterraneans. Each chapter is framed around a certain positionality – identity – determined by inhabiting/being immersed in a certain space/place and time, which not only mirrors my own multiple-mutable postcolonial London-Cypriot positioning, but also that of many Cypriots and other communities subjected to displacement and conflict.

Chapter 1, just like the opening statement of this blog, seeks to make sense of my/our spatial positioning between the complexities of displacement, colonialism, and conflict. It provides the contextual and conceptual framing to offer both the case of Cyprus – a marginalised understudied location and community – and the spatial model to postcolonial and partition studies. The chapter positions the island and its people at the crossroad of the social, political, and cultural history of colonialism and conflict that shapes our cruelly divided world; at the same time, it positions the monograph at the crossroad of disciplines.

Chapter 2 offers a study of the national literature curricula in Cyprus from the Ottoman period (1578) to the present, to understand the interrelation between literatures and people as shaped by official policies. We can identify the field site in the dominant pedagogical space in the Republic of Cyprus and in the TRNC, and we identify the participants in Cypriot students. Given my diasporic positionality, the national literature curriculum I knew is the British one, therefore I became the primary student participant studying over 100 textbooks across the secondary school curricula from Cyprus that adopted and adapted those from Turkey and Greece. In this process of research, I decolonised the literature curricula of Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey by exposing the foundations of colonial pedagogical policies and practices that shaped them (Cyprus’s curricula are read through British colonial and Greece’s and Turkey’s neocolonial policies, whilst Greece’s and Turkey’s are read through the neocolonial French and German policies), whilst reflecting on the making of the official exclusionary ‘Greek-Cypriotist and Turkish-Cypriotist’ (Kemal 2020, 25; 55-108) position in Cyprus today.

Chapter 3 turns to the ethnic-nationalist native intellectuals of the 1950-1960s, who lived through the anticolonial movements that shaped Cyprus and the world. These are the narratives that figure in our Cypriot bedtime stories to make sure we uphold a position of division and deadlock. I first encountered Cyprus and the concept of the balcony through these nationalist narratives. The ‘Greek-cypriot’ nationalist narratives turn to Mother Greece with aspiration for ένωσις –the unification of Cyprus and Greece; from their balconies they gaze upon a sea imbued with ancient and modern Greek spirit, mapping a Mediterranean unity preserved from antiquity to confirm an immortal Greek network and superpower emerging from the balconies/islands in the Greek Sea. Claire Angelidou, a refugee poet uprooted from Αμμόχωστος, can be considered my field grandmother, who shared her story through poetry and during interviews on her refugee balcony in Nicosia. On the other hand, the ‘Turkish-Cypriot’ nationalists turn to Mother Turkey with aspiration for taksim – the partition of the island to join Turkey; from their balconies, they replace the repulsive sea with Turkey’s Taurus Mountain as seen from Cyprus. These are narrative mappings of my biological grandmother, as well as poet-martyr Süleyman Uluçamgil who ‘Told the sea to fuck off / From the middle’ (in Kemal, 2020,142) so as to create a Turkey-Cyprus.

Chapter 4 turns to the post-independence and partition period, when the formerly colonised world, namely the postcolonial subjects, entered a revolutionary moment of writing back to native elite nationalists who upheld the legacy of empire in their country. Here I discuss post-1964/74 Cypriotists – ‘Cypriotgreek and Cypriotturks’ (Kemal 2020, 160-211) – grounded in leftist political parties (like Communist Party of Cyprus, Progressive Party of Working People, and Republican Turkish Party). This is an emergent position, like those of my diasporic uncles from Pile, who rejected dominant voices and taught me that ‘we are first and foremost Cypriots then Turks or Greeks’. I encountered this Cypriotist position in my childhood and adopted it fully during my university years in Cyprus (1999-2004). This community rejected the ethnic-nationalist position so to co-create a Cypriot bicommunal perspective, which is grounded in a balcony poetics of peace with a communist-romantic eco-patriotic love for Mother Cyprus and her sea.

Chapter 5 turns to a radical transnational global position, inclusive of all Cypriot positions –‘cypriotgreek, cypriotturkish, cypriotmaronite, cypriotarmenian’ (Kemal 2020, 25) – as well as of displaced marginalised positions in Cyprus and beyond. From the balcony, this community captures multi-communal and multilingual narratives that shift places, times, and energies; they celebrate, navigate, and make sense of the spatial palimpsestic layers that make and break Cyprus, the region, and our world. For example, they embrace the Ancient Greek, Ottoman, and British heritage, cultures and encounters. This global transnational position that figures in Chapter 5 emerged in the 1980s through the meeting of writers of the London diaspora (Alev Adil, Stephanos Stephanides, Mehmet Ali) and Cypriots (Nese Yaşın), and this position that emerged during my birth is the scholarly space and position I chose to inhabit since 2009.

Since 2009, I have worked closely with the displaced communities that figure in the monograph, moving across London, Cyprus, and the sites between and beyond in order to carry out multiple creative fieldwork projects towards physically co-producing differential Cypruses and Mediterraneans. For example, the book Nicosia Beyond Barriers (2021) was the result of the ‘Writing Nicosia’ creative workshops in 2013. This was based on five site-specific place-based embodied workshops facilitated by various creative writers in Cyprus and delivered to over 100 participants, who together walked, wrote, and broke through the last divided capital in the world. Workshop leaders included, for example, Lisa Suhair Majaj, a ground-breaking Palestinian American poet; participants included figures like Melisa Hekkers, a journalist and author who captures the refugee voices in camps in Lesvos and Kofinou. Other such community activities and workshops gave way to the co-production of zines, exhibitions and creative events (Kemal et al 2014; 2014b; 2017; 2015; 2020).

‘Writing Cyprus’ (2009-2019) paved the way to writing the ‘Postcolonial Mediterraneans and Displacement’ programme, expanding and spotlighting the displaced voices and interdisciplinary multi-method by continuing to co-create and co-map with the marginalised creative, critical, and lived communities. This includes, for example, co-producing with queer voices the Queer-Kuir-Κουήρ Cyprus Mega-Zine and event (2021). This also includes embodied and place-based performances with women and girls navigating trauma and mental health issues through projects like Collectiva Inanna (2020), Unbordering Heritage (2022) and Child Brides (2023-) – the latter being with/about women like my great-aunt defined as ‘sold to the Arabs’. It includes the ‘cypriotmaronites’ whom I have lived with by doing ethnographic and creative work in Kormakitis village, towards co-creating new projects; for example, the recently published multilingual poetry collection entitled My Heart's Tulips (2025) by Napoleon Terzi, with the first ever examples of poetry in Sanna (Cypriot Arabic). I continue to chart the ‘cypriotegyptian’ and Greek Egyptian voices by delving deeper into the archives of the Theodosis and George Pierides brothers together with their children. I navigate through Black voices, particularly with descendants of African slaves from Sudan like Afro-Cypriot author Serap Kanay, as well as Nigerian students like Chigozie Obioma (2019) in Cyprus. I map out further the voices of refugees and asylum seekers who took refuge in Cyprus. This includes turning to pioneering voices of the 1948-1990s, such as Syrian-Kurdish Salim Barakat, and Palestinian Samira Azzam and Mahmoud Darwish, among others who took refuge in Cyprus. These Arab refugee voices of Nakba, Naksa, and Israeli invasion combine with the voices of Holocaust survivors who were put in camps in Cyprus in 1947. These historical-literary voices meet the contemporary refugee voices in camps in Cyprus. All these voices, which we first meet in ‘Writing Cyprus’ continue to shape my scholarly, creative, and lived programme of activities towards co-creating differential ‘postcolonial Mediterraneans and Displacement’, which provides new ways of understanding displacement in our cruelly divided and hostile world.

 

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