Olga Demetriou is a research fellow at St Peter’s College, Oxford.
Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide
by yiannis papadakis
London, I. B. Tauris, 2005. 257 pages
Hardback: UK £18.99, US $32.00
“The compelling tale of one man’s voyage of discovery to ‘the other side’ ” is the superscript on the cover of this book, announcing at once its ambivalent location in the genres of both novel-writing and academic monograph, its highly reflexive research approach, and its author’s charming self-mocking humour.
The statement is also accurate in pointing to the book’s concern with voyages: “the other side” is in quotation marks because what is discovered are the views of those that one has learnt to regard as Others, a discovery of ideas about history, nationalism and belonging that are the root causes of cycles of violence everywhere. This discovery is narrated through a series of literal voyages in the geographical locations where these Others are encountered, so that readers are invited on a journey through the Turkey–Greece–Cyprus area. What they learn through Papadakis’s guidance is that Other-ness is not simply ethnic: it can be politicised, localised, and otherwise governed in ways that put into question the distinction between Self and Other. Uses of “we” and “they” are carefully considered and change throughout, as Others become friends and one’s own are Other-ed. In short, what Papadakis offers is a spiral towards empathy to counteract the cycle of enmity.
And this is another side to the heroic image of the lone male voyager: with this book, Papadakis inaugurates a new generation of anthropological writing on Cyprus, which is less concerned with structural explanations about why people have killed one another in the past, and who is to blame for it, than with the complicity of the Self (whoever that may be) in propagating the estrangement that ensued. In proposing this, the author tackles a number of difficult questions, intellectual, political and moral, and does it well enough for the result to be extremely versatile. The book, although in format adhering to models of academic writing fashionable half a century ago (notes for further reading instead of a bibliography, no index, and no source notes), mimics travel writing but in fact reads more like an anti-heroic novel. The embarrassing image of the Greek Cypriot researcher being asked in the third person via his guide whether “he doesn’t know about Bloody Christmas” (p. 82), killings that occurred in December 1963 that are a crucial event for Turkish Cypriot historiography, has something of the quality of the emblematic scene of The Catcher in the Rye: the main figure at the end of his age of innocence tries to cling on to the blissful unawareness he has just lost and begins to come to terms with the violence of memories of death. In this sense, the book might be thought of as an anthropological Bildungsroman—the story of a Cypriot anthropologist, and with him Cypriot anthropology, coming of age.
Crucially, this journey does not have a straight-line trajectory. Places are revisited and with them memories are re-examined and re-analysed in the light of previous encounters. The author remarks that, upon returning to “his own” side after having spent time in northern Nicosia, things “sounded different”:
Say someone said: “We used to live well with the Turkish Cypriots. I had this boy working for me …” Before crossing, what I heard was: “We used to live well with the Turkish Cypriots, I had this boy working for me …” Now, I heard this: “We used to live well with the Turkish Cypriots, I had this boy working for me ...” (P. 141)
And it is this spiral path of increasing awareness of the Other’s perspective that renders the book so compelling.
On first sight, the repetition of place names that make up the chapter titles is indicative of this spiralling awareness: Constantinople, Lefkosia, Lefkosha, Lefkosha/Lefkosia, Istanbul, Pyla/Pile. The metropolis on the Bosphorus (Bo’azichi?) is visited first as the lost capital of Byzantium, before the anthropologist embarks on field research in Cyprus, and revisited at the end of this fieldwork as a Turkish city. The capital of Cyprus is consecutively seen as a Greek Cypriot town (Lefkosia), a Turkish Cypriot one (Lefkosha), a town divided on either side of the partition line (the “Dead Zone” of the title), and two towns connected in invisible ways. As the author’s journey to the Dead Zone is completed, the capital situated on it is experienced as a point of coexistence and liminality: both Greek and Turkish, and neither at once. Yet throughout the journey these classifications are questioned, complicated, fought against, and often mocked.
Personal names, most of which are pseudonyms (politicians’ names excluded), are also given symbolic meaning and are used as devices to push the story forward. Prominent among them is the Turkish name “Savash” (War), an example known in academic writing on Cyprus through Volkan’s analysis.1 The politics of the usage of the author’s name is no less important: the diminutive “Yiannaki” is voiced by people attempting to lend authority to the nationalist discourse they propagate, while the only ones using “Yiannis” are the Turkish Cypriot oppositionists with whom he finds a lot to share—and whom he appropriately “discovers” towards the end of the journey, as if his own identity had been alienated and rediscovered.
But perhaps the most explicit reference to this spiral path is the recurring image of Aphrodite. It appears twice in chapter one (in the first and penultimate sections), and progressively moves to the conclusion of each chapter—ten pages away from the end of chapter two, three from the end of chapter three, and occurring in the very last sections of chapters four to six. In keeping with the main aim of the book, Aphrodite’s image becomes increasingly complex as it acquires various aspects of violence.
Thus, on page one, Aphrodite’s description is that given by the author in 1988 as a young graduate seeking to employ the subject of the “Cyprus conflict” as a means of accessing further education in California. Aphrodite is at that point a goddess “of beauty and love” and Cyprus her island, and the conflict to be investigated is the aberration of this pristine image. By the time the author departs from “Constantinople”, where he has met mainland Greeks and Turks and has begun to question the nation-building myths of both motherland states (from the Greek myth of Byzantium’s restoration to the Ataturkist myth of Anatolia being the cradle of world civilisation), he discovers that Aphrodite is appropriated for gain by the Other as well: renamed Venus, she is used in her nakedness by Turkish Cypriot authorities trying to attract prospective tourists.
By the second chapter, Aphrodite has gained agency and is now the mischievous goddess of Greek myth, causing havoc through games of love and war; at this point she also gains other identities and a history that stretches beyond ancient Greece. The author, having conducted fieldwork in the southern part of Nicosia among Greek Cypriots in a run-down area of the city close to the partition line, some of them refugees from the north, has begun to uncover the impact of the conflict on the lives of individuals and to encounter the problems that “talking politics” entails: being suspected of espionage, being patronised by informants, needing to lie to gain acceptance (in this case regarding the taboo issue of having travelled to Turkey). Aphrodite’s different faces as “the goddess of love” and the “goddess of prostitutes” now seem to mirror the discovery of the different sides of Greek Cypriot discourse on the conflict: official rhetoric and lived experience.
In a dramatic third chapter, the author begins to discover “the other side” through the propaganda he is fed by the Turkish director of the press office in northern Cyprus, an office playfully but aptly introduced under the subheading “the public misinformation office”; the author also begins to discover the omissions from the Greek Cypriot stories. A dramatic chapter, not only because it vividly conveys the difficulties of doing fieldwork while being closely policed (fieldwork cut short by the Turkish Cypriot authorities after just one month), but also because it powerfully describes the shock of discovering that the “information” one accepted as objective is flawed. This shock raises the question of how it is possible that atrocities perpetrated by ethnic “Selves” can be silenced across a whole population and over decades, in public as well as in private. Fittingly, in this chapter Aphrodite is no longer simply mischievous: she is associated with ugliness, war, and the violence of castration.
Armed with the knowledge of this national secret, the anthropologist returns to the Greek Cypriot side to question his informants, and discovers the depth of the rift separating the political Right from the Left—associated respectively with nationalist violence and resistance to it. The scenes described in this chapter relate to secrecy, darkness and fear: from the hushed voices of leftists talking about the wrongs of the Right, to the dark alleys of the area where the author lived, to the sewer that is pointed to as a source of hope because of the bi-communal co-operation that its post-war development entailed, and perhaps most poignantly, to the invisibility of Turkish Cypriot inhabitants of the area who, for one reason or another having to live among Greek Cypriots and under a suspicious Greek Cypriot state, had to change their names or otherwise “blend in”. A near-gothic image comes to life in the description of an old Turkish Cypriot woman, who was baptised, living in a dark room among the wax offerings in human shapes she uses for praying to the Christian god of Greek Cypriots—“your Christ”, as she terms him to the author (p. 153). And thus here, Aphrodite is the mother of fear and panic. Her multiple identities are now presented as opposites, but concurrently, the paradoxes meshed: she is a hermaphrodite, goddess of love and death, love and lust, Greek, oriental, even British and Christian.
It is in the next chapter, however, that she is placed in a direct relation to the author. After spending time in Istanbul, now rediscovered as a place to hear the Turkish Cypriot voices of the opposition and to experience the parallel Right–Left rifts of “the other side”, he declares that “[g]oing back to meet Aphrodite was also getting to be more difficult” (p. 205). At the same time, as he develops a clearer sense of which voices he likes to hear and which not, he also becomes aware of which Aphrodite he most likes: “The version I preferred was Aphrodite as the most liminal Goddess, one situated between opposites—day and night, love and war, mortals and gods—demonstrating that there was common ground” (ibid.).
And appropriately, the next and last stop is this common ground of the liminal space of the village of Pyla/Pile, inhabited both by Greek and Turkish Cypriots, on the partition line, under United Nations control, and under watch by all sides. This chapter is pervaded by the stuffy atmosphere of being constantly under surveillance, of seeing the “smallest event” being reported in the two sides’ media “in large headlines, ringing the alarm bells” (p. 211)—an atmosphere that is at the same time dissipated by the author’s ability to poke fun at the situation, with plenty of humorous incidents and appropriately chosen section titles. It is at this final point that Aphrodite’s multiplicity is no longer exhibited or elaborated. Her Cypriot‑ness is articulated through the words of Sophocles, but argumentation is no longer the objective. The conclusion we are instead left with is that the original question, about who is to blame, was the wrong one. Instead, some of the most difficult questions are laid open: about collective responsibility, about acknowledgement, and about writing the story anew.
The postscript does not feature Aphrodite. Instead, it takes up these questions, which have been glanced at earlier without being explicitly addressed. Here, in one of the least literary but most engaged parts of the book, the author lays bare his own politics, at a time when support for a position that has been rejected by the majority of the Greek Cypriot electorate (approval of the UN-brokered “Annan Plan” to resolve the Cyprus problem) is still difficult to articulate in southern Cyprus—at least in words that do not carry the hopelessness of defeat. There is no explicit offer of hope here, rather a quite bitter sense of uncertainty. But there is a continuation of the humorous thread running throughout the book: images of a donkey being stopped at the checkpoint, a doctor diagnosing “political symptoms”, a storm of dust from Africa blowing through Cyprus on the eve of the island’s accession to the European Union.
Indeed, it is perhaps this thread that constitutes the biggest question mark about this style of writing, raising doubts about the propriety of seemingly laughing the problem away. But as an attempt to look at the Cyprus conflict from a different angle, the author’s approach is definitely an experiment worth undertaking. This is what makes the book a must-read for area experts across the social sciences, and a good read for the general anthropology student and conflict analyst. In fact, one of the strong and at once weak aspects of the book is its attempt to address a vastly diverse audience. Instructive points are made regarding anthropological research methods but also about political responsibility—that of researchers as well as of the silent citizenry. There is enough background to make the book accessible to the general reader, and it is also enjoyable in quasi-novelistic fashion.
Occasionally, however, this background threatens to get in the way of the writer’s story—the explanation of the Sun Language thesis in chapter one, for example, and the rather long summary of interviews with Turkish Cypriot politicians in chapter three. This last is in stark contrast with the absence of the narrative of the sole Turkish Cypriot male to survive the August 1974 massacre in the village of Tashkent/Tohni. Similarly, chapter five, the shortest in the book, appears to call out for further elaboration. Describing the author’s experiences in Istanbul, it doesn’t adequately relate the attitudes and behaviour of the Turkish Cypriot students he befriends there towards Turkish mainlanders.
Perhaps the greatest discomfort in reading this book is the overpowering position death is given in it. But this is the discomfort of the Cyprus conflict, and of any conflict; and in this sense, the book acts as a reminder that death goes well beyond the state rhetoric of heroes, martyrs, justice and hatred. Indeed, one of the strongest features of the book is the author’s exemplary willingness to confront his own prejudices and open a space for finally addressing the silenced sides of death, pointing in all but name to one of the individuals (now dead) known for killing Turkish Cypriots during the conflict. In a context where the finger of blame has never been lifted for such crimes in Cyprus, if this bold move inspires further steps in the direction of public acknowledgement and self-examination, the book will have been a cornerstone not simply in the literature, but in the resolution, of the conflict.
Endnotes
1. Vamik Volkan, Cyprus: War and Adaptation (Virginia: Virginia University Press, 1978).
