Writing Gifted Baby Cyprus: Anticolonial Ethnic Motherland Nationalist Literatures

This essay assigns the literary as the preferred means to write Cyprus because it exposes the power of place and space in postcolonial partitioned cases; it shows that spatial production determines the formation and agency of identity in Cyprus, which serves to sharpen and to blur the dominant binary legacy of historical–political deadlock discourse, so as to generate conflict and solidarity between the deeply divided people in postcolonial partitioned Cyprus. The focus is on the Greek-cypriot and Turkish-cypriot nationalist identification that dominated throughout the last decades of British colonial and into postcolonial Cyprus. This is an examination of ethnic motherland nationalist literatures, with emphasis on capturing the ways writers actively write, read and construct the dominant production of Cyprus. Even though nationalists’ writings are based on deeply competing narratives, they have used the same processes and practices to produce a Cyprus for their ethnic selves. This spatial competition and solidarity will be examined through various empirical–theoretical spatial approaches, with emphasis on illuminating the postcolonial and partitioned inventions of gendered nationalism, through making use of Yi-Fu Tuan's healthy balance between experiencing place and space and Henri Lefebvre's spatiology. The essay demonstrates the shared ways in which nationalist writers attempt to produce an ethnically homogeneous mental place through two gendered processes – a maternal principle and ancestral journeys operating with fetish spectacles, objects and substances – that manipulate social, historical and spatial practices to make the abstract nation appear concrete. This place is thus depicted as a gift from the mothers to the children of Cyprus and as Baby Cyprus.