Rhythmanalysts of the postcolonial partitioned diaspora: Writing differential Cyprus through Henri Lefebvre and Yi-Fu Tuan

Abstract

This article assigns the literary as the preferred means to write Cyprus because it captures the powerful “truth” of space and place, which exposes the dominant binary so as to generate solidarity between deeply divided and displaced people in postcolonial partitioned cases like Cyprus. The focus is on literatures of Cyprus or literary Cyprus, which can be defined as a transnational world-literature, wherein all the texts are colonial and postcolonial diasporic writings operating through a system of inequality and displacement, especially in relation to literary, cultural, and language centres and peripheries that are outside. This is demonstrated through a survey of literary Cyprus, with particular emphasis on the cypriotgreek and cypriotturkish diasporic identification developed during the last years of British colonial and particularly postcolonial partitioned Cyprus. This is an examination of the literary and lived practices of Stephanos Stepahnides, Aydin Mehmet Ali, and Alev Adil, three contemporary Anglophone writers of the Cypriot diaspora, with emphasis on the ways these pioneers come together actively to write, read, and construct Cyprus in relation to various positions. This includes their own marginalized positions between Britain and Cyprus, as well as the dominant positions between Britain, Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus within the colonial, postcolonial, and partition moments, where the writers produce a Cyprus for their diasporic selves, the Cypriot selves, British selves, and various other selves. In this process they capture multiple Cypruses for multiple selves, which shows that spatial construction determines “identity” formation, where both are always in production. This positioning and production will be illuminated through various empirical–theoretical spatial approaches, with emphasis on Henri Lefebvre’s “spatiology” that enables the “rhythmanalyst” to capture the “truth of space” for a “differential space”, and Yi-Fu Tuan’s closed “place” and open “space”, met with postcolonial approaches to “identity” as “identification” and “positioning”. The article shows that as rhythmanalysts the writers analyse “rhythms” related to many positions and Cypruses, with emphasis on three that capture the humanly lived places/spaces for the actual production of a differential Cyprus.

The truth of space thus leads us back (and is reinforced) by a powerful Nietzschean sentiment: “But may the will to truth mean this to you: that everything shall be transformed into the humanly-conceivable, the humanly-evident, the humanly-palpable!” (Lefebvre, 1991: 399)

Cyprus’s political and cultural history of colonization, partition, and conflicting identities is an issue of space and place.

Between West and East or global north and global south, Cyprus is a strategically located Mediterranean island that has had a distinct experience of major world events. It was once a transit site for Western pilgrims on route to the holy land, later an essential passageway towards conquest for Western and non-Western imperial regimes, more recently an overdetermined tangential area of the Arab uprising, of Islamic State activity, and mass migration. The island’s position across the geo-political world divide is also reflected in its own status; Cyprus has the world’s only divided capital with the south a recognized European state inhabited mostly by “Christian Greek Cypriots”, and the north a de facto entity for “Muslim Turkish Cypriots”. Because of this spatiality, Cyprus is simultaneously at the centre and periphery of various positions that disturb fixed categorizations, thus serving to blur the dominant geo-political binaries within the world and the island. Hence Cyprus has always been in the process of competing productions — for example, Piri Reis’s Ottoman-Cyprus map in Kitab-I-Bahriye (2013/1521), Herbert Kitchener’s first comprehensive 1878–1881 British-Cyprus map (Shirley, 2001), the 1950–1960s competing anticolonial movements that remapped a Greece-Cyprus or Turkey-Cyprus (Kemal, 2017), and the 1974 partition that was an affair of lands and properties — which each aims to gain control by providing total knowledge of this paradoxical island. This processual status shows Cyprus’s pivotal significance to those experiences with space and place that define postcolonial and partition studies, yet Cyprus has been neglected by postcolonial scholars. In this article, I point to the Hellenophone, Turcophone, and Anglophone literatures of Cyprus that have been neglected in both the national and international domain. I suggest that the literary must be assigned as the preferred means to write Cyprus because it reveals the “truth of space” and place in postcolonial partitioned cases. ¹

Henri Lefebvre refers to Nietzsche to strengthen his “truth of space”, which is to expose dominant “mental space” in the interest of dominated “social space” for a “differential space” (1991). To demonstrate this process, the article explores literary−lived practices of three Anglophone writers of the postcolonial cypriotgreek or cypriotturkish diaspora. ² The article examines the ways Stephanos Stephanides, Aydin Mehmet Ali, and Alev Adil actively write, read, and construct Cyprus in relation to multiple positions. These include marginalized positions between their birth country of Cyprus and adopted country of Britain, as well as dominant positions between Britain, Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus within colonial, postcolonial, and partition moments, thus enabling them to produce a Cyprus for their diasporic selves, Cypriot, British, and various other selves. In this process the writers capture many Cypruses for different selves, revealing that spatial construction determines “identity”, where places, spaces, and identities are always in process, operating between multiple positions and productions. This positioning and production will be illuminated through empirical–theoretical approaches, with a focus on Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1977) closed “place” and open “space” and Lefebvre’s (1991, 2004) “spatiology” that enables people to be “rhythmanalysts” who capture the “truth of space” for a “differential space”. Rhythmanalysis is concerned with turning the concept of rhythms into a new interdisciplinary field of knowledge. In doing so, the field enables an analysis of rhythms. Rhythms are formed by repetition, movement, and interaction between a time, a place, and an expenditure of energy. The rhythmanalysts analyse rhythms through a distinct positioning, which includes the position and presences of the body to grasp rhythms, as well as positioning the self in terms of disciplines — analysing rhythms as statisticians, biologists, sociologists, ethnologists, psychologists, and especially as poets (Lefebvre, 2004: 13). These approaches meet postcolonial methods to “identity” as identification, as particularly proposed by Stuart Hall (1994), Paul Gilroy (2004), and Edward Said (1984). The article shows that as “rhythmanalysts”, my chosen writers analyse “rhythms” related to multiple positions and Cypruses. I emphasize three particular examples of positions and Cypruses by authors who generate “diasporic solidarity” (Boym, 2001) for a “differential” colonial, postcolonial, and partitioned Cyprus.

The article is divided into five sections: the first introduces the literatures of Cyprus in relation to place, space, and identities, while section two explains what it means to be a “rhythmanalyst” with a focus on ways diasporic writers position themselves to read and construct Cyprus. This reading and construction will be further delineated in sections three to five, which demonstrate how, as “rhythmanalysts”, the writers actively analyse rhythms related to three different positions and Cypruses. This structure, especially the three sections on positions and Cypruses, mirrors the writers’ identity formation in relation to spatiality. This is identity in Stuart Hall’s (1994) and Paul Gilroy’s (2004) terms: identification with multiple positions that makes a nonsense of fixity, and this is further shaped through Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis meeting Tuan’s space–place. In this way the article is an exposé of the diaspora writers’ identity formation in action, so it mirrors fully the complex practices through which the writers’ identity operates through spatiality.

Stephanides, Mehmet Ali, and Adil negotiate with their three positions and Cypruses in distinct ways; however, given the limits of space, I prioritize their collective similarities over individual distinctions. I feel confident with this approach because it demonstrates Svetlana Boym’s “global diasporic solidarity” (2001: 342), which intends to acknowledge mutual experiences between displaced people. For example, these writers share literary–lived practices, where they have lived in and written from the margins, emphasizing social relations to draw and disturb dominant definitions of Cyprus; together these pioneers negotiate with the broad scope within the literatures of Cyprus, working with authors in Cyprus, Britain, and beyond to shape national and transnational literary turns.

Literatures of Cyprus: Places, spaces, identities

Stephanides, Mehmet Ali, and Adil demonstrate fully my proposed definition of the literatures of Cyprus as a transnational world-literature, wherein all the texts are colonial and postcolonial diasporic writings operating through a system of inequality and displacement, especially in relation to literary, cultural, and language centres and peripheries that are outside. They negotiate with the literatures of Cyprus, which are writings by cypriotgreeks, cypriotturks, cypriotarmenians, and cypriotmaronites, as well as Greeks, Turks, Britons, and others. These are Cypriot literatures positioned between Greek, Turkish, and English literatures — multilingual, uncanonized, minor literatures between major literatures. This is writing about the cultural and political history of colonization, partition, and conflict in Cyprus operating through Britain, Greece, Turkey, and beyond. It is writing across linguistic and geographical boundaries, where places, spaces, and identities are central themes.

Such transnational definitions are contested in Cyprus’s official narratives, where the literatures have been ethno-linguistically defined and divided through the cypriotgreek majority who speak Greek, and cypriotturks who speak Turkish. Paradoxically, these divided literatures have been shaped in similar ways, namely a language or name game operating through pedagogy, publication, and translation. Officially, Greek or Turkish writings are considered legitimate, whilst English is excluded. This is demonstrated in the intra-ethnic name game amongst Cypriots over naming the literatures of Cyprus “Cypriot literature” or “Greek literature” and “Turkish literature” (Papaleontiou, 2007; Yashin, 2000). Here the literatures are defined as either Greek writing by cypriotgreeks/Greeks, or Turkish by cypriotturks/Turks, considered part of Greece’s or Turkey’s “legitimate” canons. By contrast, scholars supporting “Cypriot literature” argue these writings capture life in Cyprus, and that eliminating this name risks eliminating the Cypriot dimension. Opposing this, those supporting “Greek literature” or “Turkish literature” argue that using “Cypriot” risks moving away from the legitimate literary canon. Beyond this name game, some argue for a plural “Cypriot literatures”, inclusive of all writings related to Cyprus (Kappler, 2007; Yashin, 2000). Because the dominant literary aim is to generate an ethnically exclusive name, “Greek literature” and “Turkish literature” have been officially recognized, as shown in pedagogy and publication in divided Cyprus. The literary curriculum in the south is named “Modern Greek”, and in the north it was “Turkish Literature” until 2006 when “Turkish Cypriot Literature” was introduced. Here the canons of Greece or Turkey dominate, ending in limited attention being paid to the Cypriot dimension, and no attention whatsoever given to writings from the other ethnic side or in English. Publication operates in a similar way. Cypriots aim to publish in Greece or Turkey because reception in Cyprus has always been small. Though negligible in size, there have been developments: for example, the British colonial endeavour saw the introduction of the first printing press, aiding local literary outputs in Greek, Turkish, English, and translation; the decolonial moments, especially 1950s–1960s, enhanced mostly Greek or Turkish writings by Cypriot ethnic-nationalists and a few Anglophone writings in fringe magazines such as Cyprus Review. After independence and partition, especially from 1965 to the 1980s, many anthologies used “Cypriot literature”, with cypriotgreek releases in Greek and English translation (Decavalles, 1965; Ioannides, 1997; Kouyialis, 1981; Montis and Christophides, 1974; Spanos, 1981), and cypriot-turkish outputs in Turkish with few in translation (Altay, 1965; Ersavas, 1998; Turkish Cypriot Literature, 1989; Yashin, 2009). Recently, some publications on “Cypriot literatures” — including anthologies (Mizeri, 2001; Stephanides, 2007; Yashin, 2000), literary magazines such as Cadences, and multiple translations — are fully inclusive. These developments, most of them supported by Stephanides, Mehmet Ali, and Adil, foster the emergence of a new literary scene in which writers move beyond ethno-national and linguistic binaries. Writers collectively define the literatures of Cyprus as operating through multiple languages, cultures, nations, and geographies, and hailing Greek, Turkish, and English writing as equally legitimate, whilst exposing that Cypriot literature(s) by Cypriots are marginalized.

“Cypriot literature(s)” share further characteristics: they are separately grouped into literary generations that respond to colonial, postcolonial, and partition moments detrimental to the making and breaking of Cyprus. The writings consist mostly of poetry, and then short stories, plays, novels and life writing; and they engage with place, space, and identities. Regardless of language, ethnicity, and geography, all literary generations share the trope of writing, reading, and constructing Cyprus. Significant generations writing in Turkish or Greek include the 1950–1974 generation, the dominant anticolonial nationalists — Costas Montis, Ozker Yasin, Suleyman Ulugcamgil, Ulkiye Balman, and Claire Angelides — who constructed a Greek or Turkish Cyprus (Kemal, 2017). Then there was the 1974–1990 generation of marginalized Cypriotists — Nese Yasin, Elli Peonidou — who emphasize partition to reconstruct a unified Cyprus. Finally, we can speak of the post-1980s generation — Niki Marangou and Gur Genc — who extend Cypriotist positions beyond Cyprus’s geo-national borders.

Stephanides, Mehmet Ali, and Adil negotiate with these generations that write back to dominant colonizer and nationalist binaries. For example, Mehmet Ali hosted the first bi-communal event in 1980s London, as depicted in the short story “Illicit Lovers” (Peonidou, 2007), when Peonidou met the Yashin siblings, Nese and Mehmet Yashin, and the authors support translation projects which lay a foundation for bi- or multi-communal literary turns. These turns developed further through generations of Cypriot diaspora, which include colonial and postcolonial migratory waves. Most significant are the Anglophone writers of the postcolonial Cypriot diaspora, like Stephanides, Mehmet Ali, and Adil, part of the second largest migration to Britain during the anticolonialism of the 1950s, 1960s postcolonialism, and 1974 partition. Cypriot diaspora also comprises Hellenophone and Turcophone writers, including the aforementioned writers who remained in Cyprus, experiencing internal displacement during postcolonial failures; the colonized diaspora, Tefkos Anthias and Taner Baybars, part of the first migration to Britain in 1930–1940s; and the Cypriot–Greek diaspora in Egypt, with pioneers like George Pierides. There are also Anglophone writers — cypriotarmenian Nora Nadjarian, and the cypriotgreeks Andriana Iecorodiaconou in France, and Miranda Hoplaros from Zimbabwe — who map Cyprus through diasporic sentiments.

This article shows that Stephanides, Mehmet Ali, and Adil negotiate with all the generations and constructs, so as to demonstrate and shape fully my proposed definition of the literatures of Cyprus or literary Cyprus as a transnational world-literature, wherein all the texts are colonial and postcolonial diasporic writings operating through a system of inequality and displacement. It also reveals multiple writings, readings, and constructions of Cyprus by writers from different positions creating an island for themselves, ending in many Cypruses for displaced selves. I argue that Cyprus and its people are always in production, which blurs the dominant binary legacy of historical–political deadlock discourse, particularly between cypriotgreeks and cypriotturks, so as to generate “solidarity” between these deeply displaced and divided people for the creation of many Cypruses. It is Stephanides’, Mehmet Ali’s, and Adil’s positioning between all literary generations and constructs that captures this “solidarity” for the production of differential Cyprus(es).

This “production” of Cyprus can be understood through making use of Lefebvre and Tuan’s useful and useable spatial approaches, which prioritize social agency in order to reveal that

space thus produced also serves as a tool of thought and of action; that in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power; yet that, as such, it escapes in part from those who would make use of it. (Lefebvre, 1991: 26)

Lefebvre’s “spatiology” offers a method with a tripling-triad — representation of space that is a mental space conceived by dominant minds; spatial practice as a physical space that is perceived by the people within and through daily routines; and a representational space, which is social space that is directly lived by inhabitants (1991: 38–40) — that people “use” actively to read and construct space to capture the “truth of space” for a “differential space” (1991: 352–99). Tuan offers the ways in which the world’s denizens can have a vigorous relationship with the environment through a healthy balance between experiencing “space” that is openness, freedom, movement, danger, and longing, and “place” that is an enclosed, secure, paused, and complete belonging. Both Tuan and Lefebvre show that people use these methods through filtration, selecting from the tripling-triad, and “place” or “space”. Supporting these approaches, the Cypriot writers claim their rights to read, construct, and experience Cyprus. Most writers select from the tripling-triad and place and/or space to produce a Cyprus for a specific self. The nationalist writers, for example, select Lefebvrean dominant “mental space” that is “conceived”, particularly through ancient Greek or Ottoman “codes”, as a Greece–Cyprus or Turkey–Cyprus experienced as Tuanian closed “place” for ethnic selves. Few writers make full use of the spatial method, claiming their own and others’ rights to produce many Cypruses for many selves, as demonstrated by Stephanides, Mehmet Ali, and Adil.

These writers negotiate with multiple readings and constructions of Cyprus not only of or for their diasporic selves, but of and for all Cypriot selves, as well as imperial selves, and other official-less official selves without any exclusions. This supports Lefebvre’s “right to difference” (1991: 396): the right of all people to construct a city, a country, and a world without discrimination. Through this, the authors capture the “truth of space”, which is tied to social and spatial “practices” that use or call for the tripling-triad, in order to expose contradictions in dominant abstractions for the benefit of dominated concrete realities. This approach recognizes similarities and differences between the dominant abstractions — mental space — and dominated concrete realities — social space — to prioritize the latter severely compromised spaces related to Nietzsche’s “truth” (Lefebvre, 1991: 397–99). For instance, the writers expose the dominant — imperialist and nationalist — constructions, where “mental space” conceals “social space” to produce an abstract Cyprus (Lefebvre), experienced as a controlled “place” without open “space” (Tuan); this then enables them to prioritize “social space” over “mental space”, where they have a balance between experiencing the closed “place” that is Turkey–Cyprus for example, as well an open “space” through Britain–Greece–Turkey Cyprus. Through this “truth of space” the writers produce a “differential space”, which is an “other space that is different, and [w]hat is different is, to begin with, what is excluded […] the spaces of forbidden games” and “desires” (Lefebvre, 1991: 391, 297, 373; emphasis in original). A differential space creates and is created by the other, like the postcolonial Cypriot diaspora, who manipulate dominant mental abstractions to privilege dominated social concrete realities, experienced as “place–space” for a concrete–abstract differential Cyprus. The chosen diasporic writers create this differential Cyprus by making tacit but full use of Tuan and Lefebvre’s spatial method, which I will detail here because it features throughout this article. The writers use the spatial method by becoming aware users who experience and practise through multiple conflicts, where they begin by engaging with movement and pause. This relates to Tuan’s “awareness” to “experience” with intimate feelings, both “space” that is movement in disordered freedom (1977: 52), and “place” that is pause within an ordered enclosure (1977: 12, 161, 182). It relates to Lefebvre’s “users”, the underprivileged and marginalized, who consider space with all senses and “desires”, which capture multiple conflicts to foster explosions of abstract space and production of a concrete space that is other (1991: 391). Here “users” elaborate on various “desires”, especially a desire to “practice” through conflicts — for example movements in stagnation — that produce difference (1991: 391–95). This includes a “practice” between logos that orders with forces dominating and dividing space and anti-logos based on further “desires”, which are energies discharged explosively in destructive or self-destructive ways, that overcome divisions; here logos — “mental space” — is exposed by “social space”. Through this practice the users capture their concrete–core “social space”, which is “representational space” that is directly “lived space” rooted in childhood and everyday life. These concrete spaces are stamped with further conflicts, again related to practices between movement and stagnation such as childhood–adulthood maturation, ephemeral–stable, or dwelling–wandering (1991: 362–63), which expose abstract spaces. In this way “spatial practice” is transformed from being a cohesive system secreting societies’ practices, to a differential “social–spatial practice” with routes and routines shaped by diverse groups which convert homogenized space to heterogenous ambiguity and “desires” that produce difference (1991: 391–95).

In this process the postcolonial Cypriot diaspora identify with multiple positions shaped by multiple readings and constructions for the creation of a differential Cyprus. This process points to an operation between places, spaces and identities, where the former determines the latter and both are in production. This resonates with Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Edward Said’s “identity”, which — in Gilroy’s terms — makes a nonsense of closed, fixed, and reified notions of identity (2004: xi). This is because, as Hall states, it is a “production that is never complete, always in process […] producing and reproducing [itself] anew, through transformation and difference” (1994: 392, 402). Gilroy clarifies this production by calling identity “an always-unpredictable mechanism of identification” (Gilroy, 2004: xi). Hall develops this through the notion of “positioning”, which is based on different ways people are positioned and position themselves, so that they recognize different parts — such as histories, cultures, and politics — of themselves and other-selves for the creation of new, original, different subjects. Such recognition relates to Said’s “awareness”, wherein

[s]eeing the “entire world as a foreign land” makes possible originality of vision. […] Exiles are aware of at least two [cultures] and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that […] is contrapuntal. (1984: 55; emphasis in original)

This “identification”, which is modelled on exiles, provides an understanding of postcolonial Cypriot diasporics who departed from Cyprus to arrive into the British imperial centre among other centres. They lived a life of displacement between different positions and dimensions that enabled them to combine an originality of vision with contrapuntal awareness. This identification can be localized to understand all Cypriots who have been displaced between dimensions within colonial, postcolonial, and partitioned moments. However, unlike the postcolonial Cypriot diaspora, the Cypriot majority refuse to recognize these positions because they consider the diasporic or exiled condition as belonging only to those people who physically departed Cyprus and thus fail to understand a contrapuntal awareness. Stephanides, Mehmet Ali, and Adil consciously capture this identification for themselves and the people in Cyprus; they voyage globally and wander locally between multiple places, spaces, and positions, which accommodate their diasporic and Cypriot dimensions in Cyprus, Britain, Greece, Turkey, and geographies beyond within colonial, postcolonial, and partition moments. This identification can be understood through the lens of Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis (2004).

Positioning the rhythmanalyst: Middle Sea, balcony, whale

Rhythmanalysis is a way of positioning oneself so as to analyse “rhythms” for their production of a “differential space” (Lefebvre, 1991: 352–400). This section shows how the three writers position themselves as “rhythmanalysts”, particularly through concrete metaphors such as Middle Sea, balcony, whale. This forms part of the preparation for their reading and construction of Cyprus that will be explored in the subsequent three sections.

Rhythmanalysis is an approach that provides the right to consciously analyse and actively experience the “rhythms” — movement, becoming, and interaction between place, time, and expenditure of energy — of everyday life. The rhythmanalyst feels, indulges, and grasps rhythms, and conceives, perceives, and lives rhythms to capture “truths of space” for a “differential space”. Lefebvre confirms that the true rhythmanalyst is the marginalized poet, and the ideal site to capture rhythms is in middle sites, especially that of the balcony, where one is simultaneously inside–outside. Stephanides, Mehmet Ali, and Adil can be considered rhythmanalysts because, like Cyprus, they find themselves in an ideal site that is in the middle and always in production. From this positioning, they analyse and experience rhythms, placing emphasis on their diasporic and Cypriot positions. For this in-between positioning, the writers create a genre where their literary practices are their lived practices, a fictionalized “life writing” with a “style” experimenting between fiction, historiography, and travel writing about their “decentred”, “relational”, and “dislocated” selves (Moore-Gilbert, 2009: 1–33, 51–90) between birth and adopted countries. All three writers were born in Cyprus. Stephanides moved to Britain in 1958, spent years moving between Britain, Cyprus, Formosa (Taiwan), Guyana and beyond, and is now situated in Cyprus. Stephanides’ in-progress memory novel The Wind Under my Lips (2018) — consisting of the already-published fragments “The Wind Under my Lips” (2011a), “Winds Comes from Somewhere” (2011b), “Adropos Moves in Mysterious Ways” (2014), “a litany in my slumber” (2015), amongst others — has characteristics of travel writing and autobiography interspersed with prose, poems, and visuals. ³ It is about Stephanides’ dislocations between Cyprus–Britain–Formosa, emphasizing his first years in 1950s anticolonial Cyprus, his departure, and his return to partitioned Cyprus in 1998. Mehmet Ali left Cyprus in the 1960s, lived briefly in America, lived longer in Britain, and returned to Cyprus in 2003; she lives between north–south Cyprus and Britain, where she has dwellings in three locations. Such illicit movements are depicted in Mehmet Ali’s short stories. These are fictionalized lived stories, which capture cinematic shots of her own and others’ gendered experiences in 1950s Cyprus, shifts between Cyprus–Britain–beyond, and her return to partitioned Cyprus. Adil lived in Turkey, Libya, and then Britain with frequent moves between Britain–Cyprus and north–south Cyprus, which is captured in Venus Infers (2004), a poetry collection that has characteristics of autobiography and prose, the film–poetry Fragments from an Architecture of Forgetting (2008), and the web project “Topography of a Text” (2011a). Adil’s writing, like herself, is always on the move, mirroring indefinite mobility and dwellings between her birth-arrival into decolonial Cyprus, adopted settlement in London, and her death-like departure from partitioned Cyprus. As mentioned, the writers demonstrate their rhythmanalyst positioning through literary–lived practices using three interrelated concrete metaphors — the Middle Sea, balcony, and whale. The authors use all three of these concrete metaphors in distinct ways; however, given the limits of space I show how each author uses one or two images, and Stephanides directs much of the discussion in this section. Stephanides engages with these concrete metaphors in “The Wind Under my Lips”, which begins as follows:

By birth, strangers, he said, I am a Cypriot. I set off from my native land along with my son — on a great ship, and we were gulped down in the mouth of the whale. (Lucian of Samosata)

Journeys become layered with time. […] my journey began when I appeared on the easternmost island in the Middle Sea, which was when I came into the world in the Fall before the new decade that marked the middle of the century. […] I was brand new then when the new century had become middle aged. […] [S]huttling between them [North Sea and South Sea] sometimes I would hop and drop off into the Middle Sea, onto the island from which we all departed. (2011a: n.p.)

Here Stephanides positions himself, like Cyprus, in the “Middle Sea” or Mediterranean between the “North Sea” and the “South Sea”. He does this by personalizing it into his family saga, particularly his parents’ divorce; the “Middle Sea” refers to Cyprus, where they all departed from, “South Sea” to Formosa where his mother lived, and “North Sea” to Britain where his father lived. In island-hopping between the Middle, North, and South Sea, Stephanides consistently names and claims the “middle” position: born in the Middle Sea “when the century had become middle aged”, or “apart from [being born in the middle of] family struggles, the island was in the middle of a colonial war” (2011b: 127). Through this positionality, which is central to all four texts that shift between colonial, postcolonial, and partition moments, Stephanides addresses Cyprus’s position in the middle of the global north–south divide, whilst localizing it to understand partitioned Cyprus as in the middle of the north — the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, and south — the Republic of Cyprus. Thus, Stephanides exposes the ways he, like Cyprus, cannot be identified with either the global north or south, and does not belong to the local north or south; instead he is always in the middle speaking from and to multiple geo-political and cultural positions that disturb the dominant binary of the world and island. Mehmet Ali and Adil also explore this “middle” positionality through writing that deals with their experiences between north–south Cyprus, Cyprus–Britain, and beyond.

The writers further illuminate this middle positionality through frequent allusions to the balcony. In “The Wind Under my Lips”, Stephanides mentions a “green balcony” (2011a: n.p.) from his childhood home in Trikamo, north Cyprus. In the short story “Forbidden Zone”, Mehmet Ali writes about hotel balconies before and after UN-controlled buffer zones started appearing: “wall-to wall balconies […] The pigeons in defiance of orders fly in and out, settle anywhere they wish, shit indiscriminately, even worse dance in courtship and fuck all over the balconies, in full view of the guards” (2013a: 11). In Fragments from an Architecture of Forgetting (2008) Adil captures images of balconies in Cyprus’s largest city of Nicosia, which are associated with her childhood. These balconies point to a positionality that negotiates with partition “places”, particularly by presenting scenes of occupied closures while proposing a pre- and post-partition “space” representing the past childhood and longed-for future scenes of freed openness without division. These partition balconies also point to the ethnic-nationalist balcony. cypriotturkish poets, Balman (2003: 50−72) for example, narrate actual balcony scenes of the Taurus mountains to symbolize Turkey–Cyprus. Similarly, cypriotgreeks, like Claire Angelides (2000), narrate Greek islands and Cyprus as balconies in the sea within a Great Greek unity. Thus, Stephanides, Mehmet Ali, and Adil negotiate with partition and nationalist balconies to create a new balcony where they, like Mehmet Ali’s pigeon, defiantly experience, see, and feel what they please. In this process the balcony exposes the inescapable position of the Cypriot in the middle with Cyprus as the balcony, which positions the writers as rhythmanalysts with rights and agency to analyse and experience the rhythms for the production of a differential Cyprus and world.

The writers’ actual analysis and experiences of rhythms, particularly in relation to the ways the writers engage with — “layered journeys” — the spatial palimpsest or spatial history (Carter, 1987: xx-xxiii), is shown through the whale. Stephanides’ epigraph is from Lucian of Samosata’s True Story, which is about an ancient Greek journey to geographies beyond. The quote is from the episode when the explorers, who are trapped in the 300-mile-long belly of a whale, communicate with a Cypriot who was “gulped” by the whale when journeying with his son. Whilst in the whale’s belly, the explorers are exposed to tormenting encounters with strange beings, and are informed by the Cypriot that the belly is a world: “of so many nations doth this country consist […] a thousand” (Lucian of Samosata, 1894: 103). Adil also refers to this whale: “Let me be the whale to carry you away from the carnage. Become an imaginary boy-swallowed-whole […] a whale to shelter her from the drones, the bombs, for a space of becoming” (2013: 6). Thus, the whale is a complex concrete metaphor: its belly symbolizes tormenting experience of stagnation, entering and seeing the entire world as foreign land, as well as a permeable site, like Cyprus, that allows whatever debris — geographies, cultures, histories — the sea offers to enter. The whale’s movement symbolizes the writers’ uncontrollable “spatial practices”, “routes and routines” between territories and its peoples in the sea that together capture heterogenous ambiguities to defy “homogenous” cultural and national borders (Lefebvre, 1991: 361).

Thus, in identifying with the Middle Sea, balcony, and whale, the writers analyse and experience rhythms from multiple positions — geo-politically between the global north–south and local north–south; geo-nationally and culturally between Britain–Greece–Turkey Cyprus; historically between the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, ancient Greece, and inheritance beyond; ethno-religiously between Muslim–Turkishness and Orthodox–Greekness; psycho-historically between 1950s anticolonialism, 1960s ethnic-conflict, and 1974 partition — related to the Cypriot and the global diaspora. They show that local Cypriot and global diasporic wanderers have mutually experienced, like those in the whale, torturous shifts between belonging to a familiar “place” and longing in a foreign “space”. The writers thus localize Boym’s “global diasporic solidarity” (2001: 342) for Cyprus. This “global diasporic solidarity” operates through “diasporic intimacy” and is the mutual experience of uprootedness, defamiliarization, and longing without belonging between displaced people exploring ways of inhabiting places, spaces, and time zones (Boym, 2001: 252–54, xviii).

Thus, as true rhythmanalysts these authors analyse rhythms from multiple positions shaped by different Cypruses. The remaining three sections will provide examples of ways these rhythmanalysts actively write, read, construct, and experience three positions and Cypruses — British (post)colonial Cyprus for the British–Cypriot position; partitioned Cyprus for the cypriotgreek–cypriotturkish border-crossing position; and transnational Cyprus for the Greek–Turkish–British broader-crossing ⁴ position — that capture “diasporic solidarity” with “truths” for a differential Cyprus.

The (post)colonial British–Cypriot position: Hybridity and the third space

As rhythmanalysts the writers analyse colonial and postcolonial places, spaces, times, and energies actively to write, read, and construct Britain–Cyprus for the British–Cypriot selves. Cyprus’s legacy of being conquered, colonized, and partitioned between different cultures exposes the inescapable operation of Homi Bhabha’s “third space of enunciation” (1990, 1994), an identification enabling new positions to emerge, which the writers make concrete through entering this contact zone reigned over by symbolic–concrete processes of “cultural hybridity” between different cultures. The Cypriot diaspora engage with multiple palimpsestic cultural layers mapped by Western and non-Western imperial regimes in Cyprus. That said, they mostly focus on British encounters (1878–1960) to reveal that these had a major power when it came to colonizing and coercing Cyprus, yet this history has been largely obscured by dominant literary constructions. The ethnic-nationalist narratives, for example, replace British moments with ancient or modern Greece or the Ottoman Empire or Turkey. In doing so, they construct a hegemonic “mental space” conceived and experienced as an ethnically “closed” Greece–Cyprus or Turkey–Cyprus “place” for ethno-religious selves. The Cypriotists negotiate with the British alongside multiple regimes to claim all occupying powers as equal. This serves to create a pre-partition unified “physical space” perceived and experienced as a “place” of childhood and “space” of foreignness for all Cypriot selves. The diasporic writers analyse these literary constructions to expose ways they fail to acknowledge the “truths” of Cyprus. They expose this through making the “third space” material, demonstrating full entry into a contact zone that shows the impact that various cultures have had on Cypriot formation. The three authors enter fully the British–Cypriot contact zone with all “truths” that have been directly “lived, conceived and perceived” (Lefebvre, 1991: 38–41, 361–62, 371–72) in British colonial and postcolonial Cyprus.

They show that growing up in British colonial or decolonized Cyprus and migrating to the imperial centre, London, has resulted in them willingly entering this contact zone reigned over by processes of “cultural hybridity” and “translation” between the British and Cypriot cultures. In this process the writers lose sight of any original Cypriot essence because all meaning is generated through interruptive, reproductive, and exchange practices with an ambiguous doubling between the cultures. This in turn blurs the colonizer and colonized, or the British and Cypriot binary to create a “third space” that can accommodate the writers’ British–Cypriot selves. This British–Cypriot position is determined by the production of Britain and Cyprus within a colonial and postcolonial framework. Here the writers prioritize actual “social spaces” that are directly “lived spaces” within the colonial and postcolonial moments, to expose the “mental spaces” and “physical spaces” (Lefebvre, 1991: 38–41, 361–62, 371–72) related to the colonial moment, particularly problematizing mappings by imperialists that claim Britain is culturally superior to Cyprus, the nationalist conceiving Greek or Turkish identity without Britishness, and the Cypriotists’ limited cultural entry. This “truth of space” is captured through literary–lived language and “spatial/social practices” shaped by “desires”, which prioritize Lefebvre’s “representational space” and “lived spaces” marked by conflicts between childhood–adulthood and dwelling–wandering (Lefebvre, 1991: 362–63). This truth is enhanced through Tuan’s “place” of paused childhood belonging and “space” of moving adult longing between the cities of London for Adil and Mehmet Ali or Cardiff for Stephanides and Mehmet Ali, meeting the island of Cyprus. In this way the writers capture the “truth of space”, where they prioritize actual lived human experiences for a differential British colonial and postcolonial Cyprus.

The writers’ “spatial/social practices” (Lefebvre, 1991: 362–95) operate through self-destructive desires within and between Britain and Cyprus, where routes and routines are transformed from a competent–cohesive system to differential ambiguity related to movement in stagnation, difference in repetition, and wandering and dwelling (Lefebvre, 1991: 362–95). These conflicts link to Tuan’s experience between moving space and paused place. Stephanides’ “a litany in my slumber”, for example, draws on his and Mehmet Ali’s routes between Cardiff and Nicosia, and Mehmet Ali’s stories, mostly set in London and Nicosia/Famagusta, are based on routines between these locations. Adil’s (2004) Venus Infers provides the most illuminating example of this “spatial/social practice”, which is captured through the “twin sister” who is an ambiguous symbol of Adil’s self and spatial perception. The twin is depicted through a poetic play with the myth of Eurydice, where Adil takes on the persona of “Orpheus” in search of her “Eurydice”, a twin or other self, with the power to make her twin or other self appear and disappear. Throughout the collection, Adil compulsively “wanders” between London and Cyprus, showing that the ultimate force that drives her movement is the “desire” indefinitely to search for her Eurydice twin/other self. In searching, Adil finds and unites with the twin at irregular intervals to form a complete self in a closed “place” of paused belonging, and escapes separating from the twin to dematerialize into an incomplete self in an open “space” of movement and longing. In this process of longing–belonging and pause–movement in place–space, the twin is deferred through a chain of different conditions: she is Adil’s British-self living in London; Adil’s Cypriot-self in Cyprus; she is other selves in other times; she is dead–alive, absent–present, and placed–displaced all at the same time. This ambiguity of the twin allows Adil to capture her diasporic experience with places–spaces between London and Cyprus, where she produces a probational “dwelling” for her “wandering” shifting selves.

Adil maps London, with an “itinerary where I’ll lose myself” (2004: 80) and a “journey [that] has no grand trajectory | is an everyday back and forth | across the city” (2004: 82), through trailing her absent–present, moving–stagnant twin within London’s transportation zones. In “Appearance/Disappearance/Connections” Adil waits on pause for her twin in transit spaces — “petrol stations, supermarkets, motorway cafes” (2004: 80). In “Eurydice on the Jubilee line at Rush Hour”, the twin, Eurydice, appears located at the “underworld/underground” on the Jubilee line, where she moves between “river[s] […] and tunnels” and speaks, “Don’t come looking for me anymore (2004: 82–83). In “Kings Cross”, this time Adil is located waiting to “meet [her twin] at the station, | at the Burger King at King’s Cross” (2004: 36); however, the twin does not come. In these poems even though Adil consistently finds her twin in London she does not have a perfect union, which draws out Adil’s refusal to entertain the idea of a complete self in closed London, as well as her “desire” to search indefinitely to make claims for her incomplete processual self in open London. Thus Adil/her twin and the city are never static and complete, but instead indefinitely open–closed, moving–pausing, becoming and wandering within the transportation zones, and this is Adil’s probational dwelling in London. Adil’s narratives evince, however, that London cannot accommodate fully her shifting selves because “there’s another journey altogether | that I’ve neglected” (2004: 36), so she sets off on this other journey by searching in Cyprus. At first glance Adil’s search in Cyprus clarifies what happened to the twin — she was born and died in Cyprus in 1974, and is the Cypriot “woman I [Adil] could have been” (2004: 19) if 1974 hadn’t happened and if Adil hadn’t migrated to Britain. The twin is symbolic of Adil’s and Cyprus’s 1974 moment of self-emergence and spatial fracture — which suggests Adil’s attempt to locate a fixed self, paused and belonging in “closed” Cyprus. Adil’s search in Cyprus, however, reveals a maddening dislocation, where she psychotically follows the twin’s ghostly traces that bring her face to face with multiple time zones. The narratives in “Ledra 1973” and “Girne 1997” (2004: 43–46), for example, capture the mirage of the twin “wandering” into Adil’s pre-1974 Cypriot childhood, her present, and her future, where the twin nightmarishly performs between the moments before her birth and after her death. In this process Adil consistently destroys a chronological understanding of her twin/self, confirming it is a “dead end [that] evades your attempts at narrative coherence. You won’t make a story out of her. She’s no fool. She’d lose by it” (2004: 44).

Here Adil demonstrates that in applying “a level of competence” (Lefebvre, 1991: 33; emphasis in original) in her self/spatial practices, she will lose by entering what Lefebvre calls an “illusion of transparency” (1991: 27–29) where she will “conceive” Cyprus “as innocent, free of traps secret places [or] anything hidden or dissimulated — and hence dangerous. […] Comprehension is thus supposed without meeting any insurmountable obstacle” (1991: 28). Instead, Adil’s spatial practices transcends from competent cohesion to ambiguous difference to expose the “illusion of transparency” in dominant Cyprus. cypriotturks are trapped in and trap post-1974 contemporary Cyprus, where they dissimulate the past and future in the interest of “conceiving” an ethnically homogenous north Cyprus. cypriotgreeks trap and are trapped in pre-1974 past Cyprus, where they demolish the present and future in the interest of returning to a pre-partitioned ethnic order. Thus, through her incomprehensible twin, Adil ambiguously shifts between pre- and post-1974 time zones, moving between the dead, stagnant, paused present and/or the past closed “place”, and an open “space” of movement and freedom in the interest of producing future Cyprus for Cypriot selves. This site between the time zones is Adil’s probational dwelling in Cyprus. Adil’s consistent engagement with departure points — “Marash 93” by the sea, “Girne 1997” near the port, and “Ledra Street” between borders — proposes a sea network with channels to wander between probational dwellings in London and Cyprus zones, giving way to her production of a third cultural geography, where she grants her British–Cypriot selves, so her doubling destructed self, indefinite leave to remain. Thus, this reading and construction of Britain and Cyprus generates a British–Cypriot position and production through and for the marginalized diasporic selves. Diasporic writers extend upon this “third space” doubling position and production for Cypriot selves who are subject to this indefinite leave to remain; I call this the border-crossing position for partitioned Cyprus.

Partitioned border-crossing position: Forbidden zone

As rhythmanalysts the writers analyse rhythms actively to read, construct, and experience partitioned Cypruses that shape border-crossing selves. Here again the writers negotiate with literary constructions of partition by the nationalists and Cypriotists. The dominant nationalist constructions focus on a “mental space”, which divides Cyprus by locating the self on one ethnic side without engaging with the other selves, sides, and times. Accordingly, the cypriotturks locate their selves in the north, emphasizing the necessity for the north–south divide through ethnic suffering during the 1960s conflict. The cypriotgreeks locate their selves in the south, with emphasis on removing the divide through ethnic suffering during the 1974 partition and transfer. The Cypriotist narratives blur these ethno-geographic binaries, where without entering the nationalist constructs, participants create an imaginary pre-partition without any borders. In this way the diasporic writers demonstrate that their readings and constructions, unlike the nationalist and Cypriotist abstractions, are based on actual concrete border-crossing positions, wherein multiple selves enter north–south sides so as to experiences places and spaces in pre- or post-1974 times for the actual production of different partitioned Cypruses.

In this border-crossing position the writers compulsively focus on crossing the north and south border, where they enter, pause, and play with various sites — especially the buffer zone with focus on crossing checkpoints along the green line — of partitioned Cyprus. In obsessively entering, pausing, and playing between this crossing, the writers name and claim these sites or contact zones as a forbidden zone, which is a personalized “third space” where they maintain and extend its definitive operations through expanding the colonizer–colonized and British–Cypriot hybridity to a cypriotgreek–cypriotturkish understanding. The writers thrive between the north and south forbidden zone to generate a new — cypriotgreek–cypriotturkish — doubling that gives way to a — cypriotgreek–cypriotturkish–British — tripling in and for the reading and construction of partitioned Cypruses. This border-crossing position is again determined by Lefebvre’s “spatial/social practices”, especially everyday routes and routines operating through ambiguities and self-destructive “desires”, which expose dominant “mental space” that systematically divides (logos) to prioritize “social and lived spaces” that overcome divisions (anti-logos) (Lefebvre, 1991: 362–63, 391–95) related to north–south and cypriotgreek–cypriotturkish partition. This exposes the ways in which partition is a site of contradiction shaped by excluded places, spaces, and times of forbidden games, zones, and desires, experienced as a Tuanian “place” that is controlled on pause, and as such stagnant and a “space” of dangerous free movement.

The writers capture actual “lived spaces” of partition through showing childhood to adulthood processes, with the latter often experienced as movements in “space” and the former as paused “place”. They engage with lived experiences of movement and crossing through the north–south divide: Stephanides, for example, frequently walks across the divide, narrating his adult crossing from the south to his birth and his childhood stagnant “house with the green balcony in Trikamo” (2011a: n.p.) northwards when the checkpoints opened in 2003. Adil repetitively flies from Britain to the north or south of Cyprus, often playing with crossings before and after 1974 and 2003. Finally, Mehmet Ali has a house on both sides, and records diverse experiences of crossing the north–south divide.

The writers elaborate on these actual border-crossings through obsessively writing about crossing, pausing, and entering the UN-controlled buffer zone in Nicosia, especially the Ledra Palace crossing point, which they associate with the forbidden zone. This crossing is, for example, depicted in Adil’s film–poem, “A Small Forgotten War”, which fuses together a gallery of photographs with Adil’s poetic voice. The photos depict a relentless movement around the capital city from both sides of the populated divide, with multiple images of barriers, towers, and signs that consistently bring Adil and the viewer to the dead and forbidden end of partition, and to her voice:

I am drawn to the dead-end streets that mark the border. I follow the fault line from both sides of the city, hungrily photographing the lines of barbed wire, the observation towers […] I film my walks until the border guards order me not to. (2008: n.p.)

Adil also shows her obsession with entering and pausing in this dead or forbidden zone — where she captures forbidden images of houses and buildings in ruins, the Ledra Palace Hotel that “now announces itself as a UN exchange point”, the “bus stuck in no man’s land” — between the north and south checkpoints. Whilst located in this zone, Adil shifts between photos of the north and south checkpoints, and states:

crossing the Green Line was something I did every day as a child. […] When the check points opened again I kept crossing and re-crossing; the journey was cosy and nostalgic. […] I like crossing from one side to the other, and back. It doesn’t disturb me. War has been home to me. (2008: n.p.)

Through these “spatial/social practices”, Adil shows her own marginalized experience with the city and its forbidden zone as one of ambiguous desires based on movement in stagnation: it is a Lefebvrean “mental space” that dominates and divides and therefore is experienced as a Tuanian “space” of unfamiliar dead ends, dangers, disturbance, as well as a Lefebvrean “social space” and “lived space” rooted in a childhood past that overcomes divisions and is experienced as a Tuanian “place” of homely familiarity; it is a “social space” experienced as a “space” of nostalgia, imagination and freedom past, as well as “mental space” experienced as a “place” controlled by UN and military soldiers present.

Mehmet Ali also engages with the forbidden zone in contestatory terms, particularly through the repetitive appearance of her grandfather, for example, in “no granddad no” and “old man” (2005: 111–19). These narratives focus on the relationships between three generations, elaborating on her childhood without depicting crossings into the forbidden zone. However, in an interview in 2010, ⁵ Mehmet Ali confirmed her grandfather’s relationship with the crossing and forbidden zone, which she subsequently addressed in “Pass…port control” (2013). Here Mehmet Ali writes about experiences with immigration officers at checkpoints in Cyprus:

[A]s a “Turk” I don’t have a right to be here, I am on the wrong “side” […] [M]y grandmother and grandfather live here, in Limassol. They refused to go there! I used the word “refuse” deliberately, because that’s exactly what they did, despite their daughter’s, my mother’s, pleading to go to Nicosia. (2013: 128; emphasis in original)

During the 1974 population transfer, Mehmet Ali’s grandfather refused to cross to the north along with his children and most cypriotturks, instead choosing to remain with cypriotgreeks in south Cyprus. Consequently, Mehmet Ali’s family were separated by the north–south partition, where both sides and especially the site in-between ambiguously became a “mental space” experienced as a disturbing dangerous space, and a “social space” experienced as a familiar homely place. In this process Mehmet Ali claims a position for marginalized people like her grandfather who willingly stranded themselves on the “wrong” or forbidden side, whilst a majority of their ethnic community and family were on the other “right” side.

In obsessively performing in the forbidden zone between the north–south, the writers point to the ways in which this zone is experienced as a Tuanian “space” of movement and “place” on pause, ambiguously oscillating between Lefebvre’s dominated “social space” and dominant “mental space”, where the former often exposes the latter. The zone is at once an unfamiliar dangerous “space” of dead ends and war and a familiar childhood “place”; it is a dominant and divided military-controlled “mental” closed stagnant “place”, and a social “space” of lived routines crisscrossing with a radical openness, freedom, and negotiation beyond divisions. Through such ambiguous experiences with and desires for the forbidden zone, the writers destructively move between north–south without defining either side as the prior essence; here they Cypriotize Bhabha’s hybridity to a north–south and cypriotgreek–cypriotturkish understanding. This cypriotgreek–cypriotturkish hybridity is enhanced through the writers’ play with an “other” ethnic self, who is a personalized literary–lived double from across the divide that they self-destructively and obsessively live and write through. In “the dedication”, Mehmet Ali introduces her double, Maro, a cypriotgreek childhood friend: “Where are you Maro? My other self” (2005: 90). In “Pink Butterfly”, Mehmet Ali recollects when she exchanged school notes with Maro: “I wanted to see what she had learned at school […]. She had a blue Greek flag in her book, I a red Turkish flag. […] She read the lesson, then I read it” (2005: 109). Maro and Mehmet Ali went to separate ethnic schools and these “notes” are individual recordings from their ethnically motivated lessons during the reign of anticolonial nationalist contest in 1950s Cyprus. Similarly, Adil has Lysandros Pitharas (Adil, 2004: 100; 2008), and Stephanides has Gur Genc (2005: 16), with whom they exchange words and worlds. Through these literary–lived doubles, the writers show actual exchanges between cypriotgreek–cypriotturks, which expose the dominant “mental space” experienced as a “place” that is a stagnant Greek or Turkish Cyprus, so as to create an open processual social “space” that is a cypriotgreek–cypriotturkish Cyprus.

The writers do not only submit to a destructive doubling and crossing between two positions, as in Bhabha’s hybridity, but they expand on this cypriotgreek–cypriotturkish hybridity through maintaining the British position. This is a tripling, so a crossing between three positions: they use Turkish and Greek in their English texts and, as Mehmet Ali states, this is “poetry, in our three languages, Turkish, Greek and English” (2005: 90). They obsess over all “three” things. For instance, Stephanides and his parents are “three islands, and the three of us would become three islands” (2011a). Adil shifts between the past, present, and future. Meanwhile, Mehmet Ali’s stories are hosted by three familial generations, characters or objects in threes — in “Pink Butterfly” (2005), for example, three British soldiers enter her childhood home, and consequently she panics and hides three bullets in a box. Such tripling relates to Lefebvre in that he, like the writers and this article, obsesses over all things in threes, a tripling that destroys binaries and divisions in order to capture truth of space for a differential Cyprus.

The “forbidden zone” is the term I give to this British–cypriotgreek–cypriotturkish tripling border-crossing position and production, which is, like the “British–Cypriot position”, a tormenting experience shaped by destructive desires that the diaspora willingly enter to enable “third” possibilities to emerge. This “forbidden zone” expands Bhabha’s third space not only through revising the dualistic colonizer–colonized hybridity with a Cypriotized doubling and tripling, but through illuminating that it is this obsession with the “forbidden” that enables all possibilities to emerge. The writers submit to being marked as traitors in contradictions, yet with pleasure they hybridize themselves and the island through welcoming what is considered and erased by the Cypriot majority as the forbidden British imperial side and the other ethnic sides. This enables the writers to capture actual lived experiences of diasporic and Cypriot selves considered to be on the forbidden side of the border, which ambiguously transforms the dangerous excluded “space” into a familiar homely “place”. In this process, the writers expose that all Cypriots have experienced this ambiguous destructive desire because of postcolonial partition failures, when, for example, unfamiliar “spaces” — the 1960s enclaves, the pre-1974 houses the Cypriots departed from, the post-1974 houses they arrived into, and the other side — transformed into familiar “places”, especially in 2003, which gave way to border-crossings and forbidden zones in order to transform from a “mental space” divided and experienced as a closed controlled “place” to a “social space” beyond divisions experienced as a “space” of open freedom.

Thus, this “forbidden zone” captures the “truth of space”, particularly exposing and blurring the dominant north or south and cypriotgreek or cypriotturkish divisions, to prioritize the secreted lived experiences with destructive desires that create postcolonial partitioned Cyprus. This forbidden zone enables the diaspora to expose the dominant nationalist productions, which is developed fully in the broader-crossing position.

Transnational broader-crossing position: Global diasporic solidarity

The diaspora writers analyse places, spaces, times, and energies related to crossings into different national geographies, which produce transnational postcolonial Cyprus for the broader-crossing position. This position is shaped by the writers’ analysis of nationalists’ and Cypriotists’ literary crossings and constructions. Here the writers analyse broader-crossings, particularly the competing ethnic-nationalist readings of Mother Greece or Mother Turkey that create Greek–Cyprus or Turkish–Cyprus (Kemal, 2017). They also analyse Cypriotist readings of multiple national geographies for united Mother Cyprus. Through this analysis of three different Mothers, the diaspora writers show how they provide a “forbidden zone” solution, if these productions spoke to rather than prohibited and negated each other. To find the tool that enables negotiation between these competing productions, the writers turn to the migrants of the world, another kind of broader-crossing, where they localize Boym’s “diasporic intimacy” (2001: 255) and “global diasporic solidarity” (2001: 342) to capture the truth of transnational Cyprus.

Adil’s “social/spatial practices” are based on broader-crossing into different national geographies with frequent movements and pauses between Ottoman and modern Turkey, Britain, and Greece. For example, Adil engages with modern Turkey through writing about her actual experiences between Istanbul and Ankara (2004: 47; 2011b: 25, 45, 72). She engages with Ottoman–Britain–Cyprus through capturing actual experiences of her Ottoman great grandfather, Imam Mustafa Nuri Efendi, in the photographic exhibition “The Topography of the Text” (Adil, 2011a). Nuri Efendi, an Ottoman Turk in Cyprus during the Gallipoli campaign, was considered an enemy alien to the British war efforts because of his involvement in underground resistance that supported the Ottoman “brothers” in war and that mobilized to reunite Cyprus with its Ottoman “Mother”. As a consequence, the British incarcerated Nuri Efendi in Kyrenia Castle, where Nuri Efendi made his prison notebook (A5 size) refashioned from an English magazine of the time, and consisting of his Turkish handwriting in Arabic script. Adil integrates pages from this notebook into the exhibition with the following commentary:

I want to consider how the topography of the page, this coming-into-being might be mapped through erasure, palimpsest and the unreadable line. […] Unreadable past which speaks of the future-now as much as of the past-present. […] Those pages speak of my Turkish Cypriot and English heritages. (Adil, 2011a: n.p.)

Here Adil suggests that these lived practices have formative agency in Cyprus. Through Nuri Efendi’s notebook, Adil illuminates that these lived moments shape Ottoman Cyprus, which is one of many palimpsestic layers, sometimes unreadable, at other times erased marks that are traceable, and often secreted by competing nationalist or Cypriotist narratives. Here Adil also shows that Ottoman Cyprus consists of a mixture of cultures and times, which include the British symbolized by the English magazine, the Venetians symbolized through Kyrenia Castle, and Arab cultures shown in the Arabic script. In in this way, Adil reads Ottoman Cyprus by prioritizing her great-grandfather’s “social spaces” and “lived spaces” that pause in a specific “place” — Muslim Ottoman in 1915 in Kyrenia — whilst moving between different “spaces”, religions, cultures, and times. She thus exposes the ways in which the nationalists’ Ottoman Cyprus is a “mental space” “conceived” through imaginary recreation of Islamic Turkish heroic or barbaric conquest fixed in time and “place” (1571 Nicosia). In other narratives, especially Venus Infers (2004), Adil broader-crosses into another critical palimpsestic layer, her Greek lineage, where with and as her ancient Greek companions she wanders between Britain–Cyprus–Greece–Turkey and the world. Similarly, in The Wind Under my Lips, Stephanides engages with palimpsestic layers that make Cyprus, where he also addresses Greece and Turkey. Stephanides crosses into Greece by recalling his childhood chants for Mother Greece — “enosis-Eleftheria” (2011b: 127; emphasis in original) — identifying with ancient Greek Gods: “I was their little Hermes” (2011a: n.p), and by playing with Modern Greek popular culture with emphasis on films like Stella that Cypriots would watch “from the[ir] terraces and balconies” (2011a: n.p.). This “balcony”, met with the frequent reference to the “green balconied room”, suggests again the play with the ethnic-nationalist balcony to create a new transnational balcony. Stephanides writes: “on clear days we would discern the silhouettes of mountains of Syria and Turkey […] Or perhaps these places were always already within us — implosions in our imagination, like islands exploding in the sea floating here and there” (2011a: n.p.). Stephanides’ balcony gazes towards the Taurus mountains symbolizing Mother Turkey and towards Greek islands floating, symbolizing the Great Greek network with Mother Greece; his balcony captures a global network between different nations, including Greece, Turkey, Britain, the Arab territories, and geographies beyond, all within “us” Cypriots.

Adil and Stephanides analyse this network of energy between people, places, spaces, and times, which prioritizes social concrete reality over mental abstractions to produce transnational Cyprus. The writers expand upon this transnational network through broader-crossing into the postcolonial metropolitan centre, London. In this crossing, the writers turn to the energies of diasporic communities in London, simultaneously to claim a position for the thousands of displaced Cypriots and for the constructive “spatial/social practices” of the global diaspora in London. In “London is my city”, Mehmet Ali states:

Green Lanes is where Cypriots created “Little Cyprus” along the “Ladder” from Newington Green to Wood Green. While divisions and nationalist discourse raged in Cyprus, Cypriot men quietly drank coffee and played backgammon in the sanctity of the mixed coffee houses, named after villages in the “homeland”. (2006: 91)

The passage shows that the cypriotgreek and cypriotturkish diaspora communities move beyond Cyprus’s territorial border narratives of a dominant “mentally conceived” Greece or Turkey Cyprus, intimately interacting in coffee shops with a village energy and desire that creates a “socially lived” “Little Cyprus” in Green Lanes. Mehmet Ali also captures other postcolonial little nations created by different diaspora communities: “Bangla in Brick Lane, India and Pakistan in Green Street […] Caribbean in Brixton” (2006: 87–88). In the process, Mehmet Ali criticizes the ways these communities evince a “lack of going ‘outside’” (2006: 93) their cultural and national communities, where they “pause” in a closed “place” refusing to “move” towards open “space”; this resonates with both Boym’s and Said’s individual commentaries arguing that this type of broader-crossing has its limitations: “[the diaspora] reconstitute a mini-nation state on foreign soil, failing to see the diasporic dimension that feeds on their narrowly defined cultural intimacy” (Boym, 2001: 255). And for Said,

the least attractive aspects of being an exile emerge: an exaggerated sense of group solidarity as well as a passionate hostility toward outsiders, even those who may in fact be in the same predicament. (Said, 1984: 51)

In scrupulously mapping and mixing together multiple little nations, Mehmet Ali simultaneously displays and disrupts these limitations, where she negotiates with a Boymian-like evolution from a closed “cultural intimacy” to an open “diasporic intimacy” (2001: 252−354) that captures the “dimension” and “predicament” shared between the diaspora communities in London. Mehmet Ali shows Boym’s “diasporic intimacy”, which captures shared experiences of uprootedness, defamiliarization, and longing without belonging that exist in migrant communities from different parts of the world (2001: 252−354). Through mapping multiple postcolonial little nations, Mehmet Ali shows that these migrants have all been uprooted from a familiar homely “place” and adopted an unfamiliar “space”, which has resulted in them reconstructing hostile, exclusive, little national “places” that reduce longing and induce belonging, where they fail to go “outside” their cultural intimacies to feel these diasporic intimacies. This exposure of diasporic intimacies, particularly mutual experiences that often escape the diaspora, gives way to the creation of “global diasporic solidarity” (Boym, 2001: 342), which Mehmet Ali captures and creates in her city of London. This London hosts an extreme enclosure with processes of “pause”, and a “radical openness [with] processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multi-culture an ordinary feature of social life in Britain” (Gilroy, 2004: xi). The former colonial centre now accommodates multiple nations with the “right to difference”, where marginalized diaspora communities are a social force actively creating a differential London. The writers also broader-cross into multiple nations that have experienced marginalized displacements, to capture a global diasporic solidarity between others of the world, who comprise a social force actively creating a differential transnational world.

Such broader-crossing processes are localized for the reading and construction of Cyprus. Cyprus’s legacy — Ottoman Turkey, Greece, Britain, postcolonial ethnic conflict, and the 1964/1974 partition — has subjected all Cypriots, as in the global diaspora, to uprooting from their homes, constantly moving and entering unfamiliar “space”, where they long without belonging to a closed “place”. Cyprus is a site that hosts “solidarity” between displaced Cypriots, who inescapably shift between multiple rhythms — radical openness and movement of space and enclosed paused place, times, and energies — related to multiple “positions” shaped by different Cypruses. Like the diaspora communities discussed by Boym, Said, and Mehmet Ali, however, most Cypriots fail to recognize these mutual diasporic experiences that feed on their narrowly defined fixed positions and Cypruses.

Closing truth of Cypruses: Permanent open closures indefinitely moving to remain

This article demonstrates ways the postcolonial Cypriot diaspora actively produce Cyprus. With emphasis on Lefebvre and Tuan, the article shows that as true “rhythmanalysts” the writers analyse rhythms — conceiving, perceiving, and living many places and spaces in colonial, postcolonial, and partitioned time zones — relating to different positions and Cypruses. The authors’ “spatial/social practices” operate through a desire to capture conflicts, especially related to movement and stagnation, which expose dominant “mental” abstractions for the benefit of dominated “social” concrete realities. To clarify, the article focused on three “positions” shaped by three Cypruses: the British–Cypriot position operating within a third space, which is shaped by a self-destructive childhood–adulthood wandering–dwelling between London or Cardiff and Cyprus within a British colonial and postcolonial framework. The border-crossing position, which Cypriotizes the third space into a doubling and tripling called the “forbidden zone”, is shaped by self-destructive childhood–adulthood movement–pause between the past, present, and future in relation to post-1963/1974 partitioned Cyprus. The broader-crossing position, which extends from the “forbidden zone” to engage with “diasporic solidarity” is shaped by ephemeral and stable spatial histories of Greece–Turkey–Britain–Cyprus and beyond. In this process the writers expose that without a single culture and nation they blur the dominant binaries — namely cypriotgreek–cypriotturk or north–south — in and for the production of Cyprus. This production analyses multiple places, spaces, times, and energies with destructive desires mutually practised and experienced by all Cypriots, where the writers respond to, rather than forbid, and show all the possibilities within, rather than depict an illusionary abstraction without the concrete actualities of British–Greek–Turkish Cyprus. Here the writers reveal that the island and islander can never solidify the dominant ethno-national binaries, escape from the permanence of the cultural palimpsestic, heterogeneous, and hybrid realities, nor find a resolution by means of an imagined retreat, homogenization, and/or banishing of history. These actualities are here to stay, so the writers deal with them by transforming colonialism, postcolonialism and partition into “the humanly-conceivable, humanly-evident, humanly-palpable!” (Lefebvre: 1991: 399). Through this “truth” they capture the “right to difference”, acknowledging all Cypriot displacements without discrimination, which gives way to Cypriot solidarity in differential Cyprus. This differential Cyprus is the best and only possible way to deal with the ultimate “truth” that colonialism, postcolonialism, and partition are permanently open–closed and indefinitely moving to remain.