Narrating the Nation? National Identity and the Uncanny in De Bernières’ Birds without Wings

Abstract

Informed primarily by Bhabha and Kristeva's theories of national identity and the uncanny, the article examines the themes of nation building, migration and the uncanny in Louis de Bernières’ Birds Without Wings. It also explores the cosmopolitan nature of the late Ottoman Empire, as portrayed by de Bernières, from the perspective of critical cosmopolitan theory and Bhabha's concept of vernacular cosmopolitanism. The novel depicts the fortunes of a South-West Anatolian village, populated primarily by monoglot Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox Christians and Muslims, through a turbulent historical period, from the First World War to the 1923 declaration of the Republic of Turkey and the subsequent population exchange between Greece and the new Turkish state. Despite the Christian and Muslim villagers’ arguably hybrid identities, forged in the context of a cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire, and their largely shared culture and harmonious co-existence, they are eventually forced to redefine themselves as ‘Greeks’ and ‘Turks’. The Turkish-speaking Christian villagers, exiled to Greece, have an uncanny, unsettling effect on a Greek national identity largely constructed with Turkey as its principal Other; the experience of the new Turkish citizens left behind in the decaying, half-deserted village is an equally unhomely one.