Borders Capes As Symbolic Landscapes

1 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes
BORDERSCAPES AS SYMBOLIC LANDSCAPES:

THE FLAGS ON MT. PENTADAKTYLOS
Student Name: Chara Stephanou Institution: Department of Architecture, University of Cyprus Supervisor: Panagiota Pyla
2009 INDEX
BORDERSCAPES........................................................................................................................................................4 SYMBOLIC LANDSCAPES............................................................................................................................................8 MONUMENTALITY ..................................................................................................................................................15 COMMON ARCHIVE ................................................................................................................................................29 VICTIMAGE ...........................................................................................................................................................34 BRANDING.............................................................................................................................................................39 INTENTIONALITY ....................................................................................................................................................55 POSITIONALITY.......................................................................................................................................................64 IMAGES.................................................................................................................................................................81 FIGURE 14 THE TRNC FLAG SEEN ON SATELLITE (TOP), FROM ACROSS NICOSIA (RIGHT) AND INSIDE TASKENT (LEFT)........89 BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................................................................................................................................90 INTERNET SOURCES.................................................................................................................................................91
Introduction
As one travels northwards on the A1 (Nicosia Limassol) motorway with a direction towards Nicosia and to the left of the rear window, a very special spectacle comes to sight. It is monumental and second to nothing else found around. Drawn onto the slopes of the Kyrenia Mountains are the Turkish and Turkish-Cypriot flags created by use of waterproof red and white pigment on stone (Figure 1). The mountain range rises above the capital of Cyprus and for more than 20 years the two gigantic flags are visible, in the north and south parts of the city. As a demarcating object, the flags are positioned in such a way so as to be geographically ever-present in all of Nicosia, connoting the literal space of division. As a demarcating symbol, the flags activate a double monument. For the Turkish-Cypriots, it stands as a memorial to a massacre that took place in August 1974 and as a statement of their existence as a community. For the Greek-Cypriots, it stands as an aide memoire of the division and the ongoing occupation of the northern part of the country. Due to its flamboyant and over-exaggerated nature, the earthwork has been overshadowing the everyday experience of living in a divided city; at the same time, activating a very particular cinematic frame of how Nicosians understand and relate to the space of the capital. Confronted with this view, time after time again, the closing lines of Seamus Heaneys poem North (1975) comes to mind, when in a refracted articulation of his vision of Ireland, he makes use of the idea of the north to contemplate the violence on his home ground in relation to memories of the invasions which have marked Irish history so indelibly. Compose in darkness. Expect aurora borealis in the long foray but no cascade of light. Keep your eye clear as the bleb of the icicle, trust the feel of what nubbed treasure your hands have known.1
1
Seamus Heaney, North in Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1999).
It seems that the essence of this paper is bound by these verses, as it begins by talking about an anticipated aurora borealis gleaming in the horizon of a battle that presents no blinding revelations, only glimmers and illuminations; and it will end with the imperative assertion for a clear eye inviting to an inward search and a trust of personal intuition in avoidance of future violence and retribution. Each section borrows its subtitle from one of the poems closing verses. This has been done so as to maintain a thematic relativity to the poem whilst it opens up, for interpretation purposes, to the context of the divided city of Nicosia, creating parallelisation. The poems semantics have also proven useful to the writing stage of this paper providing an interesting method for theoretical
compartmentalisation. Borderscapes The present paper has been designed to respond to the debate of borderscapes as symbolic landscapes by setting out to examine the intertwining of the physical and symbolic dimensions of demarcating objects in space.2 The more general term borderscapes emphasizes on the study of borders and the hidden geographies and politics found at territorys edge by connecting critical issues of state sovereignty with empirical concerns in order to interrogate the limits of political space.3 In Vladimir Kolossovs4 volume of work, international boundaries
In his collection of poems of the same title (North, Faber & Faber, 1975), the Irish Nobel laureate directly deals with the troubles experienced in Ireland through the 1960s and 1970s, using parallels of past events to explain the problems of the Irish society. The full poem can be retrieved on-line from: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178021 (accessed: November 23, 2009) 2 The author attended the conference Borderscapes II Another Brick in the Wall? in Trapani, Sicily (September 13-16, 2009) presenting parts of this paper. The conference was supported by the IGU Commission on Political Geography, the University of Palermo and the University of Milano-Bicocca. For more information on the conference visit: http://lettere.unipa.it/borderscapes2/ (accessed: November 23, 2009). 3 Prem Kumar Rajaram, Carl Grundy-Warr (eds.), Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territorys End, (University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 4 Prof. Vladimir Kolossov is the head of the Centre of Geopolitical Studies at the Institute of Geography and professor at the Moscow Institute of International Relations. He was
are interpreted not only as an legal institute necessary to protect the state sovereignty and the integrity of its territory, but a product of social practice, a result of a long historical and geopolitical development, and an important symbolic marker of ethnic and national identity. Social practice in border area is, on its turn, strongly influenced by the boundary and its perceptions, and is, in particular, related with cross-boundary interactions. Their scale and forms depend on the understanding of national security by the state and public opinion, and of potential threats originated by each neighbour.5 In recent years, Julian Minghis6 work focuses on a typology of borderscapes, among which he has identified the borderscapes of optimism. Frequently, following a fortuitous event, border regions become the venue for investing political and economic capital in projecting a better future in cross-boundary relations from a variety of levels in the political hierarchy of the states involved. Such investment gives rise to new borderscape symbols defined as optimistic.7
Boundaries represent the line of physical contact between states and afford opportunities for co-operation and discord. Prescott
nominated as Professor at the Universities of Toulouse-Le Mirail (2001-2003), visiting professor at the universities of Paris-Sorbonne IV, Paris-I Panthon-Sorbonne, Bordeaux and Tampere. His research interests lie in the fields of political geography and geopolitics, social geography, world cities and large metropolitan areas. He is the author of more than 300 publications, including the most popular textbook on political geography in Russia. He chaired the International Geographical Union Commission on Political Geography (1996-2004) and now is a one of the vice-presidents of the IGU. Also is on the editorial boards of Political Geography, Geopolitics, BelGo, Eurasian Geography and Economy, Annales gographiques. 5 Vladimir Kolossov, International boundary: a barrier or an open door? The influence of perceptions on crossboundary cooperation. Kolossov presented his paper at Borderscapes: Spaces in Conflict / Symbolic Places / Networks of Peace in Trento, Italy (June 11-14, 2006). The conference was organised by the University of Milano-Bicocca, the University of Trento and by the IGU Comission on Political Geography. For more information on the conference visit: http://www.unitn.it/events/borderscapes/index.htm (accessed: November 24, 2009). 6 Julian V. Minghi is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geography at the University of South Carolina. His areas of interest include political geography, European borderlands, ethnic conflict and cultural regionalism. 7 Julian V. Minghi, Borderscapes of Optimism: Based in Reality or Doomed to Disappointment? The paper was presented at Borderscapes II Another Brick in the Wall? in Trapani.
How these boundaries are used and perceived may in turn have additional impact on the landscape. Rumley and Minghi
In the context of this paper, a borderscape is understood by drawing in the definition of its prefix (border) from Kolossovs and Minghis interpretations, i.e. borders as lines of partition and as lines of contact; the very perception of the border as a threshold that separates one place from another and whence crossed, it evokes the feeling of entering or leaving a place, in other words, there is a change in the nature of our experience. 8 The suffix (-scape), on the other hand, refers to the denoting of an extensive view, scenery, or a picture or representation of such a view, as specified by the initial element (border).9 The current case study, the flags on Mt. Pentadaktylos, fulfils the predefined criteria of something being a borderscape, both in the sense of being a threshold, a boundary between two places and not simply a line in space, and in terms of assembling a forceful representation, compiling symbols upon a landscape that is overtly seen and experience by all the citizens of Nicosia.
The Pentadaktylos Mountains comprise the western half of the Kyrenia mountain range, a long, narrow chain which runs 160 km (100 miles) along the northern coast of Cyprus and rises to a height of 1,085 m.10 From Cape Kormakiti in the west, the range traverses Kyrenia, its satellite towns and villages and shoots along the Karpas peninsula to the peninsulas easternmost tip. It is located about
Paul Atkinson, On-line notes on Cinescapes. http://uob-community.ballarat.edu.au/~patkinson/hx513/cinelec1.htm (accessed: December 14, 2009) 9 Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/scape (accessed: December 01, 2009). 10 D. Fatta (et al), An overview of the water and wastewater management practices in Cyprus, (The University of Cyprus) www.uest.gr/medaware/publications/Fatta_et_al_2.doc (accessed: December 14, 2009).
nine miles north of the capital in the Kyrenia District and its name, both in Greek and in Turkish (Beparmaklar), derives from the five finger-like projections of a peak near Kyrenia (Figures 2 & 3). Though only half the height of the Troodos Mountains, the Kyrenia Mountains are very rugged and rise abruptly from the Mesaoria plain making them very spectacular. The placement of the mountains near the sea made them desirable locations for watch towers and castles overlooking the north Cyprus coast as well as the central plain. Their geographic position, strategic importance and spectacular presence has provided
irrevocable links with the history and the culture of Cyprus. The castles of St. Hilarion, Buffavento and Kantara, generally dating from the 10th through the 15th centuries primarily constructed by the Byzantines, Lusignians and Venetians at different stages sit astride peaks and were of strategic importance during much of Cyprus history, especially during the Middle Ages. Pentadaktylos relationship with Byzantine culture is also revealed in the myths associated with how the peak of the mountain received its five-fingered shape. These myths are invariable connected to the peripatetic hero of Byzantine epic poetry, Dighenis Akritas, who, drowning in the sea between Cyprus and Asia Minor, is said to have reached for land and left the imprint of his hand on the mountain. Another tale recounts how Dhigenis, in pursuit of a Saracen who had fled to Famagusta, grabbed the top of the mountain with his hand and leaped over it, again leaving his imprint. And it is to the mythical Pentadaktylos that Costas Montis, Cyprus's leading modern poet, appeals in his poem, Moments of the Invasion ( ), for help to throw out the Turkish invaders, whose assault on the island began on Kyrenia's shores.11 Raise your back, and shake them off, my Pentadaktylos12 Montis
11
John Akritas, The Occupied Mountain, article in Telegraph.co.uk http://my.telegraph.co.uk/john_akritas/blog/2007/10/08/the_occupied_mountain (accessed: December 14, 2009).
The copiousness of literary, aural and visual instances associated with Pentadaktylos mark it as a heroic and poignant landscape in the consciousness of Greek Cypriots, its presence and history being indelibly marked in the Greekspeaking culture of the island. The mountains symbolic value accumulated after 1974 when, for the first time, the rocky boundary rising in the background of the capital signalled the beginning of a new kind of place, the occupied territories of Cyprus. This faade of division which is typical across the Green Line, recreated a prohibitive proximity to the occupied areas and it became markedly overstressed when in the 1980s the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) scribed the southern slopes of the mountain range with two gigantic national flags (Figure 4). Symbolic Landscapes In order to engage in a conversation about symbolic borderlands, one should at least begin on premises which acknowledge that borders are composed by images and objects that belong to the physical and the imaginary plains, respectively. Then, an analysis of borderscapes as symbolic landscapes would address a manifold symbolism embedded on the materiality and the
immateriality of borders.13 Hitherto, the gigantic flag portraits, national symbols for some, inscribed on the surface of a mountain, a cultural symbol for some others, have been chosen as (a) the separate and (b) combined items of analysis
12
Mavris, ibid.: Montis' poem, set to music by Marios Tokas and sung by Giorgos Dalaras illustrates the symbiotic relationship that has always existed between Cypriot landscape and culture, and the alienness and brutality of the Turkish presence in Cyprus since 1974; a brutal and alien presence symbolised by the painting of giant Turkish flags and slogans on the southern slopes of Pentadaktylos, which loom over Nicosia, a stupid defilement, supposed to daily remind Cypriots of Turkish omnipotence but in fact daily remind Cypriots of how shameless and obnoxious the occupier is. An audio clip of the poem is found on Montis official website http://www.costasmontis.com/multimedia/audio/songs/pentadaktylos.wav (accessed: December 14, 2009). 13 The on-line dictionary Ask.com defines material as the bodily, tangible, important and relevant. Its antonym immaterial is the abstract, ethereal, incorporeal, intangible, mental, immaterial, insignificant, irrelevant, unimportant, unsubstantial. By addressing a borders materiality and immateriality we are addressing a tripartite of physical-abstract, bodily-mental and important-insignificant features.
due to their compositional character that consists of symbols enfolded and juxtaposed on each other, making them an elaborative case study that pertains to a multi-disciplinary interest. The paper will proceed to examine the material and immaterial features and dimensions of the flags before moving on to reexamine their contribution to the Cypriot cultural crisis as a composite symbolical landscape. Tools and concepts from psychoanalysis (Freud: trauma; Lacan: symbolic-real-imaginary), phenomenology (Heidegger: being-here,
presencing, Bachelard: topoanalysis, daydreaming, intimate immensity) and existentialism (Sartre: otherness, alienation) will be employed in an attempt to explain the pathology of a being that has made it a symptom (even a commodity) to simulate its own division.
The term simulation was developed and popularised by the French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard in the 1980s when his focus of work moved from economically-based theory to the consideration of mediation and mass communications. Baudrillard turned his attention to developing ideas about how the nature of social relations is determined by the forms of communication that a society employs. In so doing, Baudrillard progressed beyond formal semiology (Saussure, Barthes) to consider the implications of a historically-understood, and thus formless, version of structural semiology. The concept of simulacra also involves a negation of the concept of reality as we usually understand it. 14 Arguing that today there is no such thing as reality, as everything has been replaced by symbols, tied Braudrillard to the Lacanian discourse that claims that we are born into the Real but from the moment we enter language, we can no longer access the Real, only the Symbolic.
14
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Sheila Faria Glaser (trans.), (Michigan, 1994).
The simulacrum is never what hides the truth - it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true. Ecclesiastes
Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms. Littr
Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary." Baudrillard
In a world of cataclysmal visual information, representation has become a crucial aspect of our consideration when examining issues of truth in appearance. The conclusion of the 1974 war saw the end of a long-term process to split the island into two parts, which subsequently developed culturally, politically and economically independently. The Turkish- and Greek-Cypriot takes on the history of the island have constructed dissimilar historical reports that feature in according fashions through their media and mass communication products (Figures 5). A league of contemporary Cypriot scholars (Papadakis, Hatay, Bryant, Zanou etc.) belong in the new wave of local academia that directs its efforts toward a historical and political rapprochement between the two warring sides by re-examining their written and visual culture. Even so, it remains an irrefutable fact that the political expediency of either side is backed-up by the media industry that exercises strict control, not so much nowadays over the output of information, but more so on its decipherment, so it may always be appropriated to serve its own the political end.
10
In a letter to Marx written from Berlin in March 1843, Arnold Ruge complained about the absence of any signs of revolutionary ferment in Germany, about the spirit of servility, submission to despotism and allegiance that had been prevalent in the country for many years.15 Writing back to Ruge from Kreuznach in September of the same year, Marx replies saying among other that
The internal difficulties seem to be almost greater than the external obstacles. For although no doubt exists on the question of "Whence", all the greater confusion prevails on the question of "Whither". Not only has a state of general anarchy set in among the reformers, but everyone will have to admit to himself that he has no idea what the future ought to be. On the other hand, it is precisely the advantage of the new trend that we do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world through criticism of the old one.16
A century and a half later, this much stands true for Cyprus as well. The new millennium has not brought the country or its people any closer to knowing what their future will be like and it grows dimmer with every new United Nations Plan set on the table of negotiations. Marx goes on in his letter to Ruge
We develop new principles for the world out of the worlds own principles.
and later,
15
Marx-Engels Collected Works, Editors Footnotes from Volume 3. This letter was published in the section From the Correspondence of 1843 in the Deutsch-Franzsische Jahrbcher. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/cw/volume03/footnote.htm#22 (accessed: December 11, 2009) 16 Letters from the Deutsch-Franzsische Jahrbcher, Marx to Ruge, Kreuznach, September 1843. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm (accessed: December 01, 2009).
11
Hence, our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form.
From a materialist point of view, Marxs take on truth summarised in his aphorism, illuminates one aspect of simulation that has to do with language, meaning and representation. The problem of language17 is that it is the finest system of communication humankind has invented, but it is not, nor can it ever be, perfected. According to Sir Ken Robinson, 18 universities design the public education system in their own image,19 producing a closed-up system of hierarchies, in the same way that language produces its own meanings and the way in which the new principles of the world are developed out of the worlds own principles (Marx). A second aspect, one which ties simulation with space and representation, comes from Baudrillard, according to whom the generation of models without origin or reality lead us to a hyperreal world that transcends both the physical space and its representation. It generates an allegorical space, a fable field, the territory of the fable itself.
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or
17
I am referring to language in the broadest sense, which includes the spoken and written word, but also the visual, the aural, the scientific etc. 18 Sir Ken Robinson is a British author and an internationally recognised leader in the development of innovation and human resources. He has worked with national governments in Europe and Asia, with international agencies, Fortune 500 companies, national and state education systems, non-profit corporations and some of the worlds leading cultural organizations. They include the Royal Shakespeare Company, Sir Paul McCartneys Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, the Royal Ballet, the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, the European Commission, UNESCO, the Council of Europe, the J Paul Getty Trust and the Education Commission of the States. From 1989 - 2001, he was Professor of Arts Education at the University of Warwick. 19 Sir Ken Robinson, Schools kill Creativity, Talk on TED, February 2006. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html (accessed: December 15, 2009)
12
a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.20 The symbolic landscape under consideration, consisting of a mountain north of the capital with gigantic flag engravings on its side, is a monumental representation of the 1974 aftermath. Approaching it either over-sentimentally or entirely with detachment is equally unconstructive, however, if I should take a stance it would be one that delivers the borderscape in the light of what it is, what it is not; and most importantly, what it could or could not be. I anticipate that one way of widening the borderscapes meaning would be by the openness21 of the text, i.e. in the way it will interweave the facts and the fiction that surround the borderscapes making present and relate to both from a twoway point of view. Throughout his later work, Heidegger uses several words in order to properly convey presencing (Anwesen).22 Heidegger diverted from
20 21
Baudrillard, ibid., p. 3. I draw the readers attention to this mode of textual tidal weaving that runs throughout the course of the paper. In the context of a more performative writing (and, therefore, reading) it has been a conscious decision to dismiss linear syllogism and replace it with a relational methodology that partially re-invents associations between key ideas and/or writers, and partially aims at widening the spectrum of potential questions to be posed rather than answers to be given. I arrived to this decision hoping that, as a writer, I would be able to maintain a rhythm of thought that I found interesting and an approach to the subject matter that would be the least possible biased. 22 Kevin Winters: As a being-within-the-world, I am at or exist as a 'here' (Da-sein, "being-here"). It is by virtue of my being a 'here' that there can be a 'yonder' or a 'there.' Within so-called 'objective' space, as constituted by absolute coordinates, there cannot be a 'there' as there are no privileged points in space; there are only objective distances between points in homogenous space. But with Dasein, as the being that is concerned with being, including its own being, there is a privileged place that is Dasein's 'there.' Every being is a certain direction and distance from a given Dasein: (pointing) "It's that way (from here)," "When you reach the corner take a right (your right)," etc. Even in the
13
Husserls phenomenology and forever changed the course of philosophy when he introduced spatiality into being, the being-in-the-world (being-here, Da-sein), claiming that there can be no phenomenology of the being without
acknowledging that the being always exists as a here. Being as presencing means enduring in unconcealment, disclosing. What-is, what is present, the unconcealed, is what appears from out of itself, in appearing shows itself, and in this self-showing manifests. It is the emerging arising, the unfolding that lingers.23 Heidegger's later thought added an element to this notion of presencing: that every presencing is also a non-presencing.24 Using his later terminology, every uncovering of entities is also a covering of entities.
They experience the phenomenality of what is present, its radiant selfshowing. Korab-Karpowicz
A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing. That is why the concept is that of horismos, that is, the horizon, the boundary. Space is in essence that for which room has been made, that
case of objectified space--i.e. North, East, West, South, 30 Latitude, 145 Longitude, coordinates (3, -5)--there is still a reference to Dasein, but in a modified sense: each objectified spatiality is enveloped within Dasein's concern (Dasein's world) and each is, in some sense, arbitrary in their measurements. Because of this, they cannot be fundamental. Dasein's spatiality is dominated by presencing, or by making beings present in its concern in the world. http://heideggerian.blogspot.com/2006/06/presencing-and-essencing.html (accessed: December 11, 2009) 23 W. J. Korab-Karpowicz, Martin Heidegger: Overcoming Metaphysics. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/heidegge/ (accessed: December 11, 2009) 24 Jeff Malpas, The Problem of Dependence in Being and Time. The disclosedness or presencing of things in their situatedness, and our own involvement in such situatedness, is indeed a gathering together of what is otherwise differentiated and separated. For there to be disclosedness, then, for there to be situatedness or a there, is just for there to be a certain sort of unfying occurrence in which differentiation is also evident. http://www.utas.edu.au/philosophy/staff_research/malpas/J.Malpas%20Articles/The %20Problem%20of%20Dependence.htm (accessed: December 11, 2009)
14
which is let into its bounds. That for which room is made is always granted and hence is joined, that is, gathered, by virtue of a location, that is, by such a thing as the bridge. Accordingly, spaces receive their being from locations and not from "space."25 Heidegger
Heideggers presencing delivers the decisive knot that ties together the synthesis of concepts this paper deals with. The decision to keep the text performative and open has been taken not only for the sake of aesthetics but essentially for the sake of overcoming the appearance and phenomenality of the borderscape, its radiant self-showing and self-reference; and arrive to an understanding of the borderscapes being received from its location (Bachelard) not from space. Monumentality The paper aims at three more objectives. First of all, it wishes to correct, verify and/or complete any existing information surrounding the creation of the flags. Data verification posed as a problem from the very beginning, since the majority of available information documented was not only non-cited but also inaccurate. The original problem was to gather facts and information that described the flags in a precise manner, partially to comply with the requirements of an academic research and partially claim of because being a precise information landscape would with enhance evidences the of
borderscapes
symbolic
monumentality. But in the meantime it became all the more apparent that the high level of inaccuracies surrounding dates of occurrence and sizes played a defining role in amassing symbolic layers onto the flags, almost in a similar sort of way in which folkloric tales had contributed to Mountain Pentadaktylos be
25
Martin Heidegger, Building, Dwelling, Thinking. From Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, Harper Colophon Books, New York, 1971. http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/heidegger7a.htm (accessed: December 11, 2009)
15
seen as a cultural symbol. The flags and the mountains separate and combined symbolism appeared to be playing back in varied instances of literature and therefore it became a crucial point of my examination to attend to the details of how these symbolisms were expressed and interpreted in different newspapers, blogs, websites etc.
Keeping in mind the borderscapes dimensional and positional specificities, the second aim is to conduct a topoanalysis that aims to open up questions concerning its monumentality. Monumentality here should not be understood in its closed sense only, the one that considers the exceptionality or the immensity of a monument, but also in its open sense that pertains to memorability and commemoration. Thus, monumentality in this text stands for two things: the philosophical moment26 that marks the borderscapes significance and gravity, and the mnemonic agency that triggers memory, trauma, anamnesis and nostalgia. By cross-examining how instances of literature deal with the borderscapes double bill on monumentality, i.e. grandiosity and
commemoration, it becomes obvious that the often contrasting between them decipherments and significations engineer a multi-symbolical borderscape. Bachelards concept of topoanalysis has been chosen as the tool to answer this second section because the notion of topoanalysis ties space to human relations and feelings. One should think of topoanalysis as the psychoanalysis for space. Bachelard starts with the basic premise that the psyche is a place, and the house is an extension of that place. Both the house and human consciousness house memories and the role of the researcher is to map these places and to show how they are developed in time. Topoanalysis, then, is the means of understanding the topography of the self. Such an analysis will always lead to an understanding
26
Momentum in philosophy stands for an aspect of a thing, an essential or constituent factor.
16
of place (topos) in general because the topography of the self is projected onto our physical environment.27
Topoanalysis, then, would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives. In the theatre of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant roles. At times we think that we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the beings stability a being who does not want to melt away, and who, even in the past, when he sets out in search of things past, wants time to suspend its flight. In its countless alveoli, space contains compressed time. Bachelard This is what space is for. 28
"To come to terms with the inner life, it is not enough to constitute a biography or autobiography in narrative terms; one must also, and more crucially, do a topoanalysis of the places one has inhabited or
experienced.29 Casey
Within any experience of space, one should distinguish between interior and exterior topographies. The exterior topography is the purely visual properties of a place, the surface of colour and shape that is accessible to our perception. It is what we see regardless of how we see it. Interior topography is the shape of our memories, how we remember a place and how this memory will affect how we view new places. When we are in a familiar place the two are synchronized,
27 28
Atkinson, ibid. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, (Routledge, 1997, p. 89) 29 Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: a Philosophical History, (Berkeley: University of California, 1997, p. 289).
17
interior topography is mapped onto the exterior topography.30 According to Bachelard, in order for a psychoanalyst of space to conduct a topoanalysis it is important to desocialize his/her memories by removing them from the customary social environment and attain to the remote plain of his/her daydreams. The daydream (reverie), as the state of dreamy meditation, enables one to think of a duration that has been destroyed in the line of an abstract time;
For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.31
In the maze of abstract time it is equally plausible to suggest that similar to daydreams, other kinds of memory also manifest, and this manifestations may often replace the actual with the relative. In this context of fusion and confusion representations participate in a process of simulation constructive fable documents or documentations of the fable.
The finest specimens of fossilized duration concretized as a result of long sojourn, are to be found in and through space. The unconscious abides. Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are.32
If a topoanalysis of the borderscape involves the analysis of the co-present exterior (visual properties) and interior (memories) topographies that are intertwined in the symbolic landscape, and if in order to do so, the analyst needs to desocialize from his customary environment, then, this leads us right into the
30 31 32
Atkinson, ibid. Leach, ibid. p. 89. Ibid.
18
Lacanian arena of the symbolic-real-imaginary.33 The symbolic-real-imaginary forms a trio of intrapsychic realms which comprise the various levels of psychic phenomena. They serve to situate subjectivity within a system of perception and a dialogue with the external world.34 Here, the symbolic emerges within the locked system of the real and the imaginary. 35 Whereas the real concerns the state of nature we are born in but from which we are forever banished the
33
The symbolic-real-imaginary triad of Jacques Lacans three psychoanalytic orders was developed during a series of lectures in the 1950s. Lacans picture of the symbolic-realimaginary orders are deeply rooted in Freudian notions of the Oedipal phase, infantile sexuality, and the project of uncovering unconscious processes through language and associations. Since perception, subject formation, language and image are common stakeholders in both psychoanalytic and mediatic discourses, theories of media (in their various forms and abstractions) are embedded with invocations of these three Lacanian orders and a further concern with their interplay. In a general sense, attempts to theorize media in terms of the intricate and slippery border between the internal and the external, discussions of language, image and sound often begin with Lacans infantile mirror stage and further align the continued reproduction of subjectivity with the influences of external stimuli such as media. From that point, theorists engaged in Lacanian analyses situate the functioning and internalization of media experience/production in terms of the real-symbolic-imaginary (or their designated equivalent) the three orders that, according to Lacan, originate in this mirror stage. 34 Amanda Loos, Theories of Media: Symbolic, Real, Imaginary (The University of Chicago, 2002). From source: http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/symbolicrealimaginary.htm (accessed: December 07, 2009). 35 Loos, ibid. The Real. This concept marks the state of nature from which we have been forever severed by our entrance into language. Only as neo-natal children were we close to this state of nature, a state in which there is nothing but need. A baby needs and seeks to satisfy those needs with no sense for any separation between itself and the external world or the world of others. For this reason, Lacan sometimes represents this state of nature as a time of fullness or completeness that is subsequently lost through the entrance into language. As far as humans are concerned "the real is impossible," as Lacan was fond of saying. It is impossible in so far as we cannot express it in language because the very entrance into language marks our irrevocable separation from the real. Still, the real continues to exert its influence throughout our adult lives since it is the rock against which all our fantasies and linguistic structures ultimately fail. The real for example continues to erupt whenever we are made to acknowledge the materiality of our existence, an acknowledgement that is usually perceived as traumatic (since it threatens our very "reality"), although it also drives Lacan's sense of jouissance. The Imaginary Order. This concept corresponds to the mirror stage and marks the movement of the subject from primal need to what Lacan terms "demand." As the connection to the mirror stage suggests, the "imaginary" is primarily narcissistic even though it sets the stage for the fantasies of desire. Whereas needs can be fulfilled, demands are, by definition, unsatisfiable; in other words, we are already making the movement into the sort of loss or lack that, for Lacan, defines the human subject. The difference between "demand" and "desire," which is the function of the symbolic order, is simply the acknowledgement of language, law, and community in the latter; the demand of the imaginary does not proceed beyond a dyadic relation between the self and the object one wants to make a part of oneself. The mirror stage corresponds to this demand in so far as the child misrecognizes in its mirror image a stable, coherent, whole self, which, however, does not correspond to the real child (and is, therefore, impossible to realize). The image is a fantasy, one that the child sets up in order to compensate for its
19
moment we enter language; the imaginary moves the subject from his primal needs to, what Lacan terms, demand, although a primarily narcissistic order, the imaginary sets the stage for the fantasies of desire. The symbolic is the order the subject enters into the moment he enters language and accepts the rules and dictates of the society. The symbolic is made possible because of our acceptance of those laws and restrictions that control both our desire and the rules of communication:
"It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law."36
The symbolic, through language, is
"the pact which links... subjects together in one action. The human action par excellence is originally founded on the existence of the world of the symbol, namely on laws and contracts."37
The imaginary and the symbolic are, according to Lacan, inextricably intertwined and work in tension with the real. The tension between the symbolic-realimaginary is de facto embedded in the borderscape under examination and, of course, one way to approach the topic would be to use the Lacanian discourse, but this is not what we are interested in per se. Or rather, we are interested in the Lacanian discourse in so far that by doing so we may establish that any
sense of lack or loss, what Lacan terms an "Ideal-I" or "ideal ego." That fantasy image of oneself can be filled in by others who we may want to emulate in our adult lives (role models, etc), anyone that we set up as a mirror for ourselves in what is, ultimately, a narcissistic relationship. 36 Jacques Lacan, crits: A Selection, Alan Sheridan (trans), (New York: Norton, 1977). 37 Jacques Lacan, Freud's Papers on Technique 1953-1954. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1. John Forrester (trans.), Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.), (New York: Norton, 1991).
20
attempt to theorise in terms of the intricate and slippery border between the internal and the external topographies of a landscape, discussions of language, image and sound align with the continued reproduction of subjectivity with the influences of external stimuli such as media.38 This could not have been truer than in the case of our borderscape, where the topographies of cultural and national symbolisms mediate sometimes as arbitrators, others as
interventors and are mediated39 upon a corporal boundary (Figure 6).
A final aim of this paper would be to suggest that the borderscape, as a demarcating earthwork charged with national and cultural symbolisms (the flags and Mt. Pentadaktylos), ultimately, engineers a nationalistic frame, a window of perception, which reproduces rival fantasies and forms of daydreaming that hoard across the Cypriot population. In its original sense, nationalism stood for the will of a nation to become an independent state with clear boundaries and state power, however, in the course of history, it became associated with racialism and racism. The delicacy of this term necessitates a more extensive explication as to its usage in this paper. The nationalistic frame I have referred to, retains the element of patriotism found in the original meaning of the word, but it also suggests the negative consequences that emerged out of the antagonistic efforts of the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus to establish their sovereignty and identity on the islands common grounds.
38 39
Loos, ibid. media. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/media (accessed: December 09, 2009). Media, like data, is the plural form of a word borrowed directly from Latin. The singular, medium, early developed the meaning an intervening agency, means, or instrument and was first applied to newspapers two centuries ago. In the 1920s media began to appear as a singular collective noun, sometimes with the plural medias. This singular use is now common in the fields of mass communication and advertising, but it is not frequently found outside them.
21
In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined community and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. Anderson
Coined by Benedict Anderson in 1983, the imagined community states that a nation is a community socially constructed, which is to say imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group. It is imagined because it is not (and cannot be) based on everyday face-to-face interaction between its members, instead the members hold in their minds a mental image of their affinity. A large role in the construction of this mental image is played by the media through targeting mass audience or generalising and addressing citizens as the public. Secondly, the nation is imagined as limited and sovereign, limited in the sense of having "finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations" and sovereign insofar as no dynastic monarchy can claim authority over them, an idea arising in the early modern period. Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.40
Andersons nation as an imagined community, ascribes an identity to the members of that nation that has been, therefore, also imagined on the premises of solidifying the existence of this entity we call nation. The fact of being the same, i.e. sharing mutual characteristics as the other members of the nation, also attributes a sense of self that provides sameness and continuity in a personality over time, and it does so by undifferentiating between the private and public traits of the identity of a person. Sartres description of the incident
40
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, (revised edition, London and New York: VERSO, 1991), pp. 5-7.
22
of a man peeping through a keyhole and the change of his self-perception the moment he realises he is being watched by another person,41 is among a series of vivid examples the philosopher assumes in order to explain one of the key concepts of existential philosophy, namely being-for-others. The main difference between a being-in-itself and a being-for-itself is the factor of consciousness that human beings have whereas ordinary objects do not. Up until the moment when the peeping man was unaware of being watched, he escaped the provisional definition of himself as that being who was spying on other people. But everything changes when he becomes aware of the other person looking at him spying, the Peeping Tom becomes the other in the eyes of someone else, who now judges him on the basis of his actions and assigns to him certain character traits which the first man cannot control. The being-for-itself then becomes a being-for-others:
In becoming aware of somebody else looking at me, I become aware of myself as an object for someone else. Webb
Sartre, who speaks about imagined identities albeit from a different point of view from Anderson, remarks how shame and pride are merely the results of a positive or a negative judgement passed to a person. Existing as a being-forothers, as a potential object of the others look, involves alienation because there genuinely is an Other who is aware of us and capable of ascribing essence to us. Sartres claim is that in order to evade the Look that leads to our objectification (existing as an object for the Other) we reverse alienation by objectifying the other and we thus become entrapped in a non-ending procedure of imaginary assumptions about ourselves and the others that creates conflict. The paper is concerned with this double aspect of identity as imagined and as
41
Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, (Routledge, 1990), pp. 259-63.
23
imaginary because it lays a fundamental justification as to why or how it is possible for the private (inborn) and public (socially inherited) aspects of a persons identity to be fused and amalgamated into a single imaginary self who reciprocates meanings and decipherments on the symbolic borderscape always from a fixed, one-sided point of view.
North (means up)
North: [noun] 1) the direction to ones left when one is facing the rising sun; 2) the part of any country that lies further north than other parts. [adjective] 1) of, in or towards the north; 2) coming from the north. [adverb] to or towards the north.42
Of all four cardinal directions, North is treated as the most fundamental in Western culture and it is used, explicitly or implicitly, to define all other directions. The word is traced to the Old High German nord and the Proto-IndoEuropean unit ner-, which means left or under. It is presumed that the concept derives from the natural primitive description of the direction that is to the left of the rising sun. Other languages sometimes have more interesting derivations, so for example in Lezgian, kefer can mean both disbelief and north, and in many Mesoamerican languages, north means up. In the geopolitical culture of Cyprus the usage of the word shifted during the 20th
42
A. S. Hornby, Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary of Current English, Jonathan Crowther (ed.), fifth edition, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 788.
24
century, from noun to adverb to adjective, and it acquired primary importance in, and relevance to, the cultural politics and the political culture of the island since then.
In the beginnings of the 20th century, while Cyprus was still under British occupation and administration, the nationalistic aspirations of Turkish- and Greek-Cypriots began to find more organized and popular expressions. The British mandate was quick to recognize the shifting ambitions that were polarizing the population and already from the 1930s sought to legitimize its permanent presence on the island by pursuing policies that emphasized and formalized the accelerated development of nationalist agendas and interethnic rivalries.
These external influences tended to disrupt the national evolution of selfdetermination and the emergence of an inclusive national identity, aggravating latent antagonism between Greek- and Turkish-speaking Cypriots. Calame
The predominantly anti-colonial character of violence in Cyprus during the early 1950s reversed during the second half of the decade when the Greek-Cypriot paramilitary activities began to indiscriminate between anti-colonial and interethnic violence.43 In May 1956, in an effort to contain the intercommunal discord that was looting the capital, the British military installed barbed wire fencing and five checkpoints in Nicosia. The resulting interface was known informally as the Mason-Dixon Line,44 a temporary, semi-official, dividing
43
Jon Calame and Esther Charsleworth, Divided Cities: Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar and Nicosia, (PENN: University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2009), pp. 126-8. 44 The Mason-Dixon Line (or "Mason and Dixon's Line") was surveyed between 1763 and 1767 by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in the resolution of a border dispute between British colonies in Colonial America. It forms a demarcation line among four U.S. states,
25
boundary.45 Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot populations were distributed between two ethnic enclaves that were created on either side of the interface, with Turkish-Cypriots residing in the north part of the city and Greek-Cypriots in the south.46 It was the first in a lengthy series of steps leading to the permanent, physical division of Nicosia that was completed, eighteen years later, with the end of the 1974 war and the implementation of a UN-controlled Buffer Zone.47
The idea of the north has pre-existed in the geographical and spatial vocabulary of Cyprus, particularly in reference to the interethnic conflict, enclaving and the processes of division that took place. In the geopolitical culture of Cyprus, north ceased to be a noun during the years of displacement and translocation and it became an adverb, so as to connote precisely the spatial movement and eventual division of populations into ever-distinct enclaves. However, the word was bound to a further transmutation in the post-war years. More exactly, by 1975 the leader of the Turkish-Cypriot community, Rauf Denktash, proclaimed the Turkish Federative State of North Cyprus, which he presented as the first component of a future Cypriot federal state and to which he was elected President. Eight years later, on November 15th 1983, Denktash reacted to Greece, when the latter broke the bilateral discussions and submitted the Cypriot question to the General Assembly of the United Nations, by unilaterally
forming part of the borders of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia. In popular usage, the Mason-Dixon Line symbolizes a cultural boundary between the Northern and the Southern United States. In 1958 the very first Green Line, originating from the famous US Mason-Dixon Line, was drawn on a map by British colonel with a green pencil in order to set down the borders of Greek and Turkish sectors in Nicosia. 45 Calame, ibid. p. 129. 46 Calames use of the terms Turkish- and Greek-speaking Cypriots is much more interesting than merely referring to them as Turkish- and Greek-Cypriots because the importance of the prefixes Turkish and Greek shift from connoting a strictly ethnical demarcation to a more cultural differentiation. In this way, the weight is maintained on the suffix Cypriot, which is then presented as homogenizing. So even though in the course of this text I resolve to using Turkish- and Greek-Cypriots for the sake of brevity, I would like to maintain this further reading induced into my terminology, so as to clarify that my stance examines the two Cypriot communities in terms of their cultures and not their ethnic origins. 47 Ibid. p. 128.
26
proclaiming the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). The Constitution of the new state was adopted on May 5th 1985 and presidential and general elections took place on the 9th and 23rd June 1985, respectively. The Unilateral Declaration of Independence contained texts espousing human rights and a desire to live side-by-side with the Greek-Cypriot population, but it ended with a declaration that Northern Cyprus was an independent and sovereign state.48
The United Nations Security Council issued resolutions 541 and 550 proclaiming that the Turkish-Cypriot UDI was illegal and requesting that no other sovereign state should recognize the legality of the declaration, simultaneously asking for its withdrawal. Every year, with each new resolution, the UN Security Council reaffirms its previous resolutions, requesting all states to recognize the Sovereignty and Territorial Integrity of the Republic of Cyprus.49 To this date, only Turkey has given formal recognition to the de facto state, though the Organization of the Islamic Conference recognizes the TRNC as a constituent state of the Republic of Cyprus.50 Despite the fact that the TRNC remains unsanctioned and non-recognized by the international community, it is
interesting to point out how the word north, by altering in usage so as to stand as an adjective in a unilateral political language, began to presage something further. Specifically, it revealed the character of the newfound state that contained the territories and the people lying in the north part of the island. Since its first use in the context of a unilateral official language, north has come to signify much more than just a cardinal direction and a directory of movement.
48
Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Public Information Office, http://www.trncinfo.com/TANITMADAIRESI/2002/ENGLISH/ALLaboutTRNC/Page01.htm (accessed: December 16, 2009). 49 United Nations, Security Council Resolutions on the Cyprus issue, http://www.un.int/cyprus/resolut.htm (accessed: December 16, 2009). 50 The Republic of Cyprus is not recognized by one UN member, Turkey and one UN nonmember, TRNC, as they do not accept that the Turkish military presence on Cyprus is an 'occupying force'. Both Turkey and Northern Cyprus refer to the Republic of Cyprus as "Gney Kbrs Rum Kesimi", Greek Part of Southern Cyprus.
27
Therefore, what had been prior to that a pending spatial issue, a division of localities in a state of emergency, from then onwards as an adjective it conditioned and framed a new political and cultural reality for/in Cyprus. Given the fact that its usage as an adjective has also gradually penetrated the vernacular layers of the grassroots; we are now at a point in time when the Greek- and the Turkish-Cypriots refer to a North Cyprus as way of appointing that, which is ethnically and nationally distinguished from the Republic, whether it concerns the grounds or its people.51 Indeed, this geopolitical specificity should no longer be seen as simply partaking in, but radically enhancing, the spatial, cultural, political and psychological bisection that has been tormenting Cyprus the past years.
Complimentary to the aforementioned point, one should note that today Greekand Turkish-Cypriots refer to one another as those who come from or belong to the other side.52 The double combination of other and side, far from being a mere spatial expression, signifies the new reality in which the post-1974 generations have been brought up in. From a linguistic point of view, but not only, what stands in effect is a joint agreement on a working discrimination taking place between two, in fact, unilateral ethno-political sides which include
51
There is an ongoing political, as well as academic, debate surrounding the capitalization of the word north. Its capitalization, whether in a formal or informal, official or unofficial language would sanction the sovereignty of the TRNC. On the other hand, since 2004 and the opening of check-points for people to cross from the one side to the other by use of their passports, this compromising political action has effectuated its legitimacy and even legality to an important extent. 52 In architectural and urban theory, the term is regularly taken up to evoke neighborhoods and districts that belong to the same city. Usually there exist natural or artificial spatial boundaries that suggest the moving from one area to another, whether that is a river, a bridge, a motorway etc. For this reason many modern metropolises are divided and referred to as Upper and Lower (Manhattan), North and South (London), East and West (Berlin) etc. Capitalization in these cases is permitted, since what it signifies is not the independence between the two spatial entities but a discontinuity within the context of the same city. On the other hand, in cultural and critical theory, the expression on the other side is usually put to use as a counter-argument to an existing status quo. This countering is not always or necessarily negative. Rather, it may be suggestive of a different way of looking at things.
28
specific populations and grounds and exclude, in respect, the other. 53 The interface which divides the two communities does so not only politically and spatially, but also culturally and mentally. It assumes a deep psychological inversion of negation in denegation, or as Gaston Bachelard has put it
an implicit geometry which confers spatiality upon thought. Common Archive The possessive character of the adjective north has found numerous occasions for visual and oral applications. For example, the Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot tourist and real-estate industries, upon which the whole island depends on, have manufactured two independent strands of advertisement and communication described by one-sided propaganda. The varying elements of propaganda contained in Turkish- and Greek-Cypriot websites can be quickly ascertained by a simple internet keyword search using Cyprus and North Cyprus. The majority of Greek-Cypriot web pages occur under Cyprus whilst the majority of TurkishCypriot web pages occur under North Cyprus. The conclusive impressions of the interethnic spatial antagonism are manifested in the global era by the ways in which the virtual space has become contested with optimizing tools that aim to re-direct the internet surfer from Turkish- to Greek-Cypriot web pages and vice-versa. Both strands maintain two quite different and distinguishable narratives that aim to establish, on the one hand, an unchallenged relation of the Greek and/or Turkish sides with the geographical and historical space of Cyprus,
53
I remember that when in my late teens I was completing university applications to study in the United Kingdom, under the identity section, I always used to write Greek Cypriot. That was still at a time before Cyprus entry into the European Union. Although I had not been instructed to complete the section in such a way -the obvious thing to do would be simply to write Cypriot- it seemed important for me at the time to indicate which part I was coming from, partially because I believed that the procedural bureaucracy regarding a Turkish-Cypriot applicant would be much more complicated and even unfavoring. The experience of stating my identity was further enhanced when whilst living abroad, people would always ask me to clarify whether I was Turkish- or Greek-Cypriot, or from which part, the north or the south I came from.
29
but at the same time, making sure that the coming in question relativity of the two sides is kept to a minimum.
Since,
Tourism
and
the
Real-Estate
incorporate
the
problematic
of
non/sovereignty and property ownership, embedded within their effort to advertise the one side of Cyprus as more favourable than the other; there is to be found a co-instant effort to defame one another, by the use of selective historical narration, political propaganda and cultural references that are localized and interiorized. For example, the Turkish-Cypriot side applies historical stress on 1963, the year when severe intercommunal fighting occurred between the two ethnic communities and eventually resulted to the inner migration of the Turkish-Cypriot population into enclaves in the north parts of the island.54 Conversely, the Greek-Cypriot side defines the climax of the islands historical momentum as 1974, the year when following EOKA Bs coup detat engineered by the junta in Greece to overthrow president Makarios III, led to Turkeys military response with Operation Attila and the loss of 37% of the islands territories to the Turks.55 Operation Attila is characterised by Greek-speaking sources as the invasion and occupation of northern Cyprus, and as an intervention and the Turkish Peace Operation by Turkish-speaking sources. 56 The virtual and actual extents of the ethnic rivalry, when that is taking place within the context of a Cypriot visual culture, has been the topic of numerous contemporary academic analyses that attempt to examine the politics at work behind the use of common signs and symbols (Figure 7). What insists across these types of analyses is a modus operandi prescribing how Cypriots
54
The Cypriot Civil War 1963-1964, http://www.onwar.com/aced/data/cite/cyprus1963.htm (accessed: December 16, 2009). 55 U.S. Library of Congress Country Studies Cyprus Intercommunal Violence, http://countrystudies.us/cyprus/13.htm (accessed: December 16, 2009). 56 Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Press Information Office, History http://www.trncinfo.com/TANITMADAIRESI/2002/ENGLISH/HISTORY/PAGE13.htm (accessed: December 16, 2009).
30
multicultural nostalgia founded on the common grounds of history and cultural heritage, is sometimes translated into a semblance of bicommunalism and others, as the essentialism in binary oppositions.
There is a noted sharing of usage of symbols particular to the Cypriot culture, such as the map of Cyprus, the image of Aphrodite, the Venetian Walls of Nicosia, the jasmine flower, the sand-baked coffee, local delights, visions of the Mediterranean coast, historical monuments etc. Yiannis Papadakis57 semiological analysis of the Cypriot visual culture exposes the double often triple nature of signs, the fragility of their otherwise burglar-proof affirmations through language and their underlying resilience of adaptation to disparate ethnic, political, ideological, cultural and religious discourses. The triangular nature of the aforementioned point can be more properly elucidated by drawing in Papadakis example on the three-fold use of the image of goddess Aphrodite as the cultural symbol of Cyprus from antiquity to contemporary times.
The ideological uses to which the form of Aphrodite has been subjected provide a focal point, from which to explore the multiple forms that denials of the socio-political complexities of Cyprus have assumed during modern history. The symbolic uses of Aphrodite by British colonialism, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots alike offer revealing insights into the islands politics, as they encompass issues of colonialism, nationalism,
historiography, gender and migration. Aphrodite, like Cyprus, is, and has been, a point of tension and contention.58
57
Yiannis Papadakis is a Social Anthropologist and Assistant Professor at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Nicosia. He has been project leader at the PRIO Cyprus Centre during 2005-2006. 58 Yiannis Papadakis, Aphrodite Delights, Postcolonial Studies 9(3), p. 238.
31
The foundation of Papadakis text is build on parallel lines that run across the mythology of the symbol and an official language that in any given occasion denotes its oriental, colonial or hellenic content and significance, whilst at the same time negating all other. This complexity proves to be catalytic to the reproduction of, what he calls, the essentialism in binary oppositions between Asia and Europe that eventually turned Cyprus into a hermaphrodite. Drawing from the same stoke of prestigious mythology and credible European
monumentality indicative of a traumatic past but implicative, nevertheless, of a westernized nurturing the contested historical narratives of Cyprus that emerged after islands independence in the1960s, reveal in their comparison
silences and denials, as one side proposes a history of symbiosis and love while the other one of conflict and war, in a space marked by categorical ambiguities.59
The island of beauty and its people are caught in an infinite love-and-hate discourse that is put forward interchangeably and intentionally, serving at one time political agendas and tourist industries whose main export, in the end of the
59
Papadakis, ibid. p. 241.
32
day, is none other but drama.60 This tension of symbols is also explored in Mete Hatays61 and Rebecca Bryants62 collaborative and individual works.
This flower of nostalgia has been associated first with a city, then with a common past, and finally with a moment of historical change that sparked a revolution. For Greek-Cypriots, the folk song (My Jasmine) with its theme of intercommunal love, gained popularity as part of the rising importance of local identities that coincided with a movement for reunification of the island But the flower became especially important to a new Turkish-Cypriot opposition movement that promoted the possibilities for a common future and named its rebellion the Yasemin Devrimi, the Jasmine Revolution63
The jasmine flower, as a potent symbol of innocence and youth, appeared to represent a new valuing of the local and its multicultural pasts in the context
60
The love-hate discourse is not extrinsic to the nature of goddess Aphrodite herself! According to Greek poet Hesiod, she was born when Uranus was castrated by his son Cronus. Cronus threw his fathers severed genitals into the sea and from the sea foam (aphros) arose Aphrodite. The same source mentions that due to her immense beauty Zeus was frightened that she would be the cause of violence between other gods so he married her off to Hephaestus, god of smithing. Homer in a number of occasions suggests the goddess eristic and often war-like behavior, often plotting against other gods or disagreeable humans. 61 Mete Hatay has been a freelance writer since 1985. He has presented many papers in international conferences and written many articles, on Cypriot cultural history, immigration, Islam and ethnic and religious minorities in Cyprus. Hatay has worked as a director of a consultancy firm (providing media monitoring, social and commercial research, public relations and communication strategy services mainly for international organizations, including the EC Representation in Cyprus). Since 1995, he has been teaching as a part time instructor at the Tourism Department of Near East University, Nicosia. Since January 2005, he has joined PRIO again as a consultant leading a project on the immigrants and settlers in Cyprus. 62 Rebecca Bryant is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at George Mason University. Her work primarily focuses on the anthropology of politics and law. She has done extensive ethnographic and archival research in both the Greek and Turkish communities of Cyprus. She is the author of Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus (2004) and is currently completing a second book, The Past in Pieces: Belonging in the New Cyprus. 63 Mete Hatay and Rebecca Bryant, The Jasmine Scent of Nicosia: Of Returns, Revolutions, and the Longing for Forbidden Pasts, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 26 (The Johns Hopkins University Press: 2008), p. 424.
33
of
globalised
economies,
European
transnationalism
and
the
divisive
nationalisms of Greece and Turkey motherlands. The co-writers explain that although the Jasmine Revolution came to be translated into a semblance of bicommunalism, in reality the demand for reunification of the island actually contradicted the forms of embodied memory evoked by the flower.
For even in l Adalis demand to be given back her jasmine, it is clear that what she actually wanted to regain is a form of communal past specific to the Turkish-Cypriot community Rather than a multicultural nostalgia, this is instead a nostalgia for a period when Turkish-Cypriots lived in enclaves, a period of deprivation but also solidarity. And because it was that specific past that gave the flower its evocative power as a unifying symbol, subsequent events have shown that even the jasmine may have its thorns64 Victimage By looking at the different ways in which the Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots have franchised their common heritage and past from postcards and souvenirs, to travel guides and advertising it is easy to understand how and why certain logos and symbols of the visual language insist in both sides of the island. Save for whether or how we may deconstruct cultural identity so as to provide a common ground of reference for the two communities to relate to, it remains evident that the ethnic resentment at work is not fused by nostalgia alone but by another type of memory. Whereas, nostalgia is constituted through one common archive and shared past, ethnic resentment is well maintained through two, unilateral narratives that work interchangeably between the two communities excluding one anothers testimonies. This memory of the second type often makes use of symbols that more properly belong to the category of
64
Hatay, ibid., p. 425.
34
nostalgia, so as to enhance what Eyal Sivan65 has classified as the perpetrators narrative and perpetrators testimonies,66 but they are programmatically derailed (dtournement)67 into ideological and political contexts that meet purposes of propaganda. The post-1974 generations, i.e. the Cypriots who were born after and therefore have no memory (anamnesis) of whatever took place before them, find within such pictures, what Ronald Barthes calls, a contemplated testimony of history. Unable to having been the historical witnesses, they become the witnesses of history, a history however, which is in any case offered and therefore looked at in very different ways.
Thus the life of someone whose existence has somewhat preceded our own encloses in its particularity the very tension of History, its division. History is hysterical: it is constituted only of we consider it, only if we look at it and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it.68
For the Turkish- and Greek-Cypriot nationalistic fantasy, it was equally a matter of priority to maintain a sense of linearity between History and the personal
65
Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan, Research Professor in media production at the Matrix East Research Lab (MERL) School of Social Science, Media & Cultural Studies, University of East London. Sivans ongoing research focuses on the strategies of redeeming perpetrators narrative and perpetrators testimonies as part of a media project untitled The Common Archive using the 1948 ethnic cleansing campaign in Palestine as a case study. 66 The common archive concept is an attempt to rethink oral history and visual archival material in order to become a base for truth and reconciliation, transitional justice and joint/common historical narratives. Eyal Sivan was a guest speaker during the Liminal Zones conference in Nicosia, Cyprus (November 5-7, 2008). For more information about the conference visit http://liminalzones.kein.org/ (accessed: December 16, 2009). 67 In dtournement, an artist reuses elements of well-known media to create a new work with a different message, often one opposed to the original. The term "dtournement", borrowed from the French, originated with the Situationist International; a similar term more familiar to English speakers would be "turnabout" or "derailment." It may be contrasted with recuperation, in which originally subversive works and ideas are themselves appropriated by mainstream media. Recuperation, in the sociological sense (first proposed by Guy Debord and the Situationists), is the process by which "radical" ideas and images are commodified and incorporated within mainstream society, such as the movement for civil rights in the United States or the push for women's rights. 68 Ronald Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980), Richard Howard (trans.), (Vintage: 2000) p. 65.
35
history of their political subjects. So in a sense, it was necessary for History to be wholesomely destroyed before being reconstructed in the ways which would later come to determine how it would be read and understood, through visual and other texts. Under the I Forget Not and I Fight69 slogan, the Greek-Cypriot nationalistic narration has combined images of historical monuments lying in the currently Turkish-occupied lands, with graphic posters representing the Attila invasion and occupation, and black-and-white photographs of refugees and mothers of missing persons (Figure 8). This set of images has appeared almost everywhere, from history books to newspapers and websites to films, videos and documentaries. In their combination, elements of high culture (such as historical monuments) and picturesque landscapes are set in linear juxtaposition with traumatic images portraying the 1974 war and its aftermath. Similarly, the Turkish-Cypriot narration has created an embroidery of images and words so as to present their version of the (hi)story.
It is the action of society on the body that gives full reality to the imagined drama of the soul. Hertz
Paul Sant Cassia examines the use of photography as an instrument of power and notes that the image has been used extensively in Cyprus to convince, facticize, demonise, and evoke. Building on Susan Sontags note, that the
69
is one of the most prominent national slogans that varies between I Know, I Forget Not and I Fight and I Forget Not. Up until the late 1990s the Ministry of Education and Culture of the Republic of Cyprus had set a very clear and objective goal of transmitting this message through the curriculum of, particularly, primary and secondary education. The "I know, do not forget and struggle" is one of the objectives set by the Ministry of Education and Culture for this school year. We teachers have a duty to help our children learn about the occupied parts of our country and to cultivate in them a fighting attitude, which aims to enlarge in their hearts the desire for the recovery and return to the occupied lands. http://www2.cytanet.com.cy/pervoliadim-la/den_xexno.htm (accessed: December 16, 2009). By the year 2000 the European Union and the United States began exercising pressure on the Ministry of Education and Culture to revise history books taught in Greek-Cypriot schools. http://www.antibaro.gr/society/iwannidhs_istoria.php (accessed: December 16, 2009).
36
camera record justifies, providing a proof of something that took place, Sant Cassia suggests that in the hands of political authorities in Cyprus, the representation of dead bodies (war casualties) found its way through two very different expressions and tactics of propaganda and its examination provides useful insights into the iconography of suffering and victimage (see also Figure 5).
The first concerns the desecration of a human being through its representation as a corpse left unburied, or as a series of photograps (i.e. representations) which symbolically retain the dead permanently as desecrated corpses, and thus as unburied memories. The second is the paradox that to uphold the law the ruler performs an outrage. As with Creon, the Greek and the Turkish Cypriot political authorities also stage representations of the past through the use of photographs in public spaces as instruments of power.70
Writing about North Ireland, Feldman noted that victimage is the generic institution shared by all sides of the conflict as their common material denominator and as the operator of all political exchange. 71For both Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots, photographs both authenticate and facticize claims of
victimage the Greek-Cypriots in the face of the Turkish aggression and occupation, the Turkish-Cypriots in the face of Greek-Cypriot ethnic cleansing.72 This common between them, yet parting from each other, visual language has effectuated a decisive instance in which the Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot populations have assumed the historical position of the victim against the other,
70
Paul Sant Cassia, Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus, (Berghahn Books, 2005), p. 131. 71 Ibid., citation, p. 132. 72 Sant Cassia, ibid., p. 132.
37
which is always taken to be the perpetrator. According to Barthes, [a]s a living soul, I am the very contrary of History, I am what belies it, destroys it for the sake of my own history,73 therefore, the narration that occurs, contradicting as it may be, is not paradoxical. We have seen so far that any symbol is always
charged with meanings and significations and even in the case of a commonlyshared symbol it may be used to serve different agendas. But what happens to the interpretation of a symbol when that is not even shared or culturally relevant to everyone? To this end, there is perhaps no other visually stronger example than the flags on the Kyrenia Mountains that better evokes and summarizes the ambiguity surrounding a perpetrators narrative. To remind themselves of their parting testimonies, all that Cypriots have to do is look up. The following parts of the paper attempt to unfold the various readings and significances enveloping the flags and examine whether these diverse ways of looking may point toward a form of paraphilia, a pathology of the look.74
Aurora Borealis (means northern lights)
Aurora Borealis [noun] (also the northern lights) bands of light, mainly red and green, seen in the sky at night near the North Pole and caused by electrical radiation.75
73 74 75
Barthes, ibid., p. 75. Also known as the gaze or stare. Hornby, ibid., p. 67
38
Aurora Borealis, sometimes called the northern and southern polar lights, are natural light displays in the sky, usually observed at night, particularly in the Polar Regions. The lights are named after the Roman goddess of dawn, Aurora, and the Greek north wind, Boreas. From far away, the aurorae illuminate the northern horizon with a greenish glow or sometimes a faint red colour. The lights can be spotted around the world and most often occur from September to October and from March to April. The Cree people used to call this phenomenon the dance of spirits. Recalling Heaneys poem, the aurora borealis gleaming in Irelands horizon where none other than the tinted fume and fog of battle. For the poet, these lights, found at the back-set of any conflict, cannot be of any further service than merely to highlight the extent of destruction that has taken place. Of such kind are the northern lights one can experience in Nicosia as well.
Branding From the island of Samos the Greeks can very easily see the opposite coast of Turkey and a large Turkish flag drawn onto the ground branding the turkishness of Asia Minor. For the whole of Greece, not just for Samos, the coasts of Asia Minor, a previously Byzantine territory that fell into the hands of the Ottoman Empire, stand for the holy lands of the Greek-speaking and Christian-Orthodox people. Despite having lost Asia Minor to the Ottomans and nowadays considered a territory of modern Turkey, the modern state of Greece maintains a lineage with the Byzantine Empire which was founded on the grounds of Asia Minor. More to the point, the average modern citizen has grown up in a secular system with the presence and influence of the Orthodox Christian Church, with the Patriarchates seat in Istanbul, still very strong.76 The Turks, on
76
Popular aphorisms such as Again in time they (the grounds) will be ours, Meghali Idea etc. circulated through the public education system and mass media, cultivate and
39
the other hand, by branding the coast of Asia Minor with a nationalistic symbol as big and as strong as the one being used employ it having in mind its provocative function, i.e. to constantly and persistently remind their neighbours that such a return is no longer possible. In the village of Kokkina, on the northwest corner of Cyprus there is a pair of Turkish and Turkish-Cypriot flags drawn upon a hillside that look towards the southern coasts of Turkey. Kokkina is a Turkish military-base enclave between Greek-Cypriot soil, rounded by a complex of villages in the area of Tylliria. It is surrounded by Pachyammos on the west, Mosphili on the south and Masoura on the east (Figure 9). From the strand of beaches forming Pomos cape, the village before Pachyammos, one is able to make out the two flags painted on a hillside in Kokkina from an angle viewpoint (Figure 10). It is clear that the flags painted in the area are not meant to be visible to the Cypriots but to the Turkish neighbours. In the case of Samos and Kokkina, the flags are set up in such a way so as to be seen from the opposite coasts. In both instances, the message they are sending across is sharp and precise. Whilst in the first case, the message is directed towards the Greeks to remind them of their loosing past; in the second, the message is directed towards the Turks and their victorious history.
Similar signs can be found all around Cyprus, especially in areas of uninterrupted vista. Just in Nicosia, there is a Turkish flag engraved onto the hill of Aronas in the area of Aglandjia close to the new university campus and another drawn onto the southern slopes of the Kyrenia Range (Figure 10). These flags, which were created by the Turkish Military, appeared in Cyprus after the war may be said to be fulfilling a double function. On the one hand, they brand the turkishness of the grounds lying north of the Green Line and designate emphatically the
maintain Greeces lineage with Asia Minor, having lost its administration during the Asia Minor Catastrophe in 1922.
40
presence of the Turkish military in north Cyprus. On the other hand, they are used as tools of a punctuated, exhibitionist-style narration that presents the islands contemporary history in the light of permanency and inalterability.77 Throughout the islands northern regions there exists an intensive military presence, which is punctuated by the excessive use of a nationalistic visual language. Flags of all sizes adorn the exterior faades of administration buildings, mosques and dwelling houses alike, and photographs of Atatrk are to be found within the interiors of barber-shops, restaurants and gyms. Larger and often illuminated, there are also waving flags on high-rising masts nailed onto the peaks of hills and ranges.78 Large-scale metallic Atatrk figures can be seen from street level, on the way to Kyrenia and Morphou, victoriously arriving to the tip of mountain peaks. And in every single village, town and city of the north there is always a bust of Kemal Atatrk in the middle of plazas, squares and centres (Figure 11).79 Of such force is the ever-presence of the Turkish military in northern Cyprus, that the few aforementioned examples of the ways in which a nationalistic visual language is manifested, though extravagant and
exaggerated, is still anticipated.80

77 78
Like a tattoo on the body of the earth. A ceremony took place on Monday in the Turkish occupied north to unveil two giant flags on the Kyrenia mountain range. The new flags - one Turkish and one 'TRNC' - on the highest peak of the Pentadaktylos mountain range are 50 meters high and cover a total area of 216 square meters. They will be illuminated at night. During a special ceremony yesterday present were the commander of the occupying Turkish forces Huseyin Kivrikoglu, the commander of Turkish Cypriot security forces Mehmet Eroz and Turkish Cypriot brigadier Salih Cem. An existing 'TRNC' flag painted onto the southern slopes of the range, and equal in size to 11 football pitches, already causes ire to thousands. According to reports in the Turkish Cypriot press, both the flags can be seen from Turkish coast. Copyright, Cyprus Mail 2007. 79 During a month-long roadtrip in June 2006, the undersigned was part of a team of writers and photographers who travelled all across the Green Line, from west to east, and passed from all the towns and villages standing in a 10 kilometres ratio from the Green Line. It was during this trip that we all came to realise for the first time that there had been no place that we had visited which did not contain a military camp. The other members of the group were photographer Mikel Ibarrola, poet Francisco Salmeron and translator David Diez Marques, all three from Spain. 80 Perhaps less extravagantly, but I say this cautiously and from a subjective point of view, Greek and Greek-Cypriot national flags can be found throughout the southern part of the island as well. Those do not feature only outside governmental buildings and hotels but very often wave from the terraces of private houses. Similarly, in many GreekCypriot villages there are small monuments ranging from busts and statues to memorial
41
A similar visual language composed of national flags and religious emblems is met in the southern regions of Cyprus, where the Greek national flag and the flag of the Republic of Cyprus prevail and wave outside schools, military camps, important administration and public buildings, but also outside churches, private houses and even restaurants, local shops, workers clubs etc. The closer one moves to the buffer zone, the space of the city seems all the more charged with antagonistic symbolisms, and often enough, those evoke a geometrical symmetry between them. The finest of examples is the route along Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot guard points. Since there is an applied balance of guard points on either side of the interface, in turn it establishes a rival showcase of sovereignties facing each other. To the eye of the visitor Nicosia is unsurprisingly experienced as a heavily flagged city and since the division of space within the city does not answer to a calculable logic, the Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot soils intertwine and interchange, making the heavy use of flags and signs almost unavoidable (Figure 12). Rectifying the layers of sovereign division provides an excuse for the abundance of flags and signs, yet other than stating the precision of partition, such symbolisms always enclose the problematic of provocation, indeed the very messages each side is trying to send across but also implement in their own territory.81
plaques, most often commemorating EOKA A fighters, spots of fight and burial, but also incidents from the 1974 war. It is equally important to stress out that similar to how Turkish- and Turkish-Cypriot national flags always wave next to each other, so do the Greek- and the Cypriot flags. 81 The suggestion here is that the visual dialectics across the Green-Line is primarily concerned with communicating messages to the other side, but at the same time the intentionality of the messages is repeatedly transmitted and maintained through aspects of the political, educational and, even, touristic cultures as well. The Greek-Cypriot side maintains the hope of the return of the occupied lands and a future, peaceful coexistence between the two communities; the Turkish-Cypriot side declares the ablation of the northern territories from the Republic of Cyprus, as the ground where the independence and self-sovereignty of the Turkish-Cypriots is founded and their affiliation with mother Turkey. Neither co-existence nor return are in any ways suggested.
42
However, with what concerns the use of symbolical language in space and more so the branding of the land/body, there is a particular landmark in Cyprus today that evades any clear explaining and justification. On the slopes of the Kyrenia Mountains, lying right next to the Turkish national flag, there is a gigantic Turkish-Cypriot flag.82 In an interview with Mr. Tanju Muezzinoglu, president of the Flag Lighting Association, I was informed that the Turkish-Cypriot flag was drawn onto the slopes of the mountain on October 15th 1983, on the same date the TRNC declared its independence and sovereignty from the Republic of Cyprus.83 In the official website of the Flag Lighting Association it is estimated that the flag is 450 meters wide and 225 meters high.84 According to Mr. Muezzinoglu, the TRNC flag is re-painted every three to five years with acrylic waterproof paint and for this purpose, sixty tones of white and twenty tones of red paint are needed, sponsored by the Turkish military and private donators.85 Designed to be seen from almost any high point in Nicosia, the landmark is not site-specific to the freeway alone or even to the city below it, but such is its
82
The Turkish-Cypriot flag was adopted by Law in n15/1984, enacted by the Assembly on March 7th 1984 and published in the Official Gazette on March 9th 1984. It is based on the model of the Turkish national flag but features an inversion of the original colours, as well as two slim lines on the header and footer of the flag one standing for motherland Turkey and the other for the self-proclaimed TRNC. http://flagspot.net/flags/cytrnc.html#des (accessed: December 16, 2009). 83 October 15th 1983 is nevertheless questionable as the correct date. First of all, the TRNC flag was adopted by Law and enacted by the Assembly a year later. Secondly, if the testimony that the refugees from the village of Tochni are responsible for its creation, then the flag could have been created much earlier, sometime between the 1974 war and 1983, the year of TRNCs independence. 84 On-line reports mention a variety of numbers and sizes that make the pinpointing of the actual size of the flags possible only by approximation. The dimensions mentioned in the text are taken from the official Turkish-Cypriot site of the Flag Lighting Association responsible for the illumination project http://www.kktcbayrak.org/ Other online sources refer to numbers variously close to the aforementioned and compare the total area size to anything between eight and twenty football fields. In his article More Turkish Flags for Pentadaktylos? Simon Bahceli mentions that the existing TRNC flag painted onto the southern slopes of the range is equal in size to 11 football pitches (Cyprus Mail, 22.02.2007 retrieved from: http://www.cyprus-mail.com/news/main.php? id=30941&archive=1 ). Another source compares the total area of the two flags to the size of twenty football fields. The same source claims that the two flags cover a distance of 12 kilometers and it takes up to three hours on foot for someone to traverse them. http://cyprus74.blogspot.com/2009/05/blog-post_19.html 85 Interview with Mr. Tanju Muezzinoglu, president of the Flag Lighting Association (KKTC Besparmak Daglari Isiklandirma Dernegi). June 1st 2009. Byk Han, Nicosia.
43
magnitude as advertised in the on-line encyclopaedia Wikipedia that it can be seen from space. The coordinates are 351658N 332231E allowing the image to be seen via Google Earth.86 Inscribed beneath it is a popular slogan by the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatrk, reading How fortunate is the person who can say I am a Turk (Ne mutlu Trkm Diyene).
On the night of October 29th 2003 coincidently at the same period when the effect known as Aurora Borealis (or northern lights) is visible in the sky the TRNC flag begun to be illuminated, a light installation that reportedly cost oneand-a-half million English Sterlines.87 To this day, the designated spectacle flashes during night hours availably. The illumination session does not last for more than a minute each time and it follows a regular, four-step accumulative rota with a ten second black-out interval between sessions. First to appear is the star, which is singularly illuminated for five seconds, followed by the crescent, illuminated for an equal amount of time. Both are then framed by an outside border for ten seconds before the installation is completed with the illumination of the slim lines, above and below the star and crescent, for a further ten seconds. The sequential light-installation allows, on the one hand, the progressive reveal of the Turkish national flag followed by the TRNC flag, in equal emanation periods. On the other hand, it suggests a hermeneutic performance of
86
This was the contribution of Cyprus to the Guinness Book of Records: the largest flags in the world. Cypriot anthropologist Yiannis Papadakis in his book Echoes from the Dead Zone (2005, 120) claims that the TRNC flag, did in fact make an entry into the Guinness Book of Records (GBR). However, a spokesman for North Cyprus' prime minister was quoted in Yoav Sterns article No conflict is an island saying, This is the world's largest flag, but the Guinness book of records does not recognize it (HAARETZ, 17.03.09 retrieved from: http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1068995.html ). During our interview, Mr. Muezzinoglu verified that a delegate of the GBR is expected in the following months to visit and measure the landmark, therefore its entry at this point has not been decided. 87 The Cyprus Press and Information Office (PIO) in its directory for Turkish Press and Other Media (No.205/03, 30.10.03), reports on an article by the local daily VATAN (30.10.03), entitled The giant TRNC flag has been illuminated, as of the night before, setting October 29th 2003 the day of illumination. According to other sources, the illumination took place on October 28th 2003, the date which commemorates Greek Prime Minister Metaxas rejection ( / Ochi) of the ultimatum made by Italian dictator Mussolini on the same date in 1940.
44
their consequent enfoldment into one another, merging into one and the same (Figure 13). In the days and years that followed the illumination, the Cypriot and international press was caught up in an omnium gatherum. Whether fascinated, disturbed or skeptical about the event, the press was flooded with commentaries pro and against the illumination. A brief examination of sample commentaries found in different local Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot newspapers, blogs and internet forums may serve to sketch the nuances of public opinion. It may also assist in widening the hermeneutic space of the flags symbolism and significance.
Turkish-Cypriot daily locals were quick to report on the illumination as having pleased thousands of (Turkish-Cypriot) compatriots88 but other published commentaries criticized the fifteen-hour electricity shortage that sank TurkishCypriot villages into darkness as a result of the illumination.89 Turkish-Cypriot advocates of the illumination, failing to acknowledge any insult inflicted upon the Greek-Cypriot community, found in the flag a means of expressing their patriotic feelings, at the same time sending open messages that the lands lying north of the Green Line were property of the Turkish nation that was entitled to erect its own flags anywhere.90 Cavlan Suerdim, a spokesman for a group calling itself the Flag on the Zenith Association told the Cyprus Mail
We would like to send a message to the whole world that these lands and region belong to the Turkish nation. This is Turkish land and we can erect
88
The Republic of Media. No.205/03 89 The Republic of Media. No.205/03 90 The Republic of Media. No.205/03
Cyprus Press and Information Office Server: Turkish Press and Other 30.10.03, VATAN, October 30, 2003. http://www.pio.gov.cy Cyprus Press and Information Office Server: Turkish Press and Other 30.10.03, AFRIKA, October 30, 2003. http://www.pio.gov.cy Cyprus Press and Information Office Server: Turkish Press and Other 30.10.03, HARAVGI, October 31, 2003. http://news.pseka.net
45
flags wherever we wish. If anyone doesnt want to live in the shadow of these sacred flags, they are free to move elsewhere in the world.
91
Turkish-Cypriot opponents, ranging from civilians to smaller green and left-wing parties, were much more critical. According to the latter, the flag was illuminated just to provoke peace and solution and served as a message by the Turkish-Cypriots to the world that they do not accept any other solution than that of division.92 Others described the obsessive flag posting happening all around the country as fanatical nationalism warning that such sentiments could in time lead to terrorism.93 What is interesting to note is that advocates and opponents to the flags, evidently discussed the double nature of the flags significance and the kind of messages they were sending out to Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots alike. Greek-Cypriot newspapers, commenting on the occasion of the flags illumination, reported that the incident was shedding light on the intransigence, the provocativeness and the obscurantism of Denktash and on the failure of his policy. According to the same source, the illumination had revealed the regimes intentions to create tensions and fanaticism so as to promote its partitionist plans. It was also revealing of the regimes policy-deadlocks, its frustration, despair and overall agony about the future.94 It appears in many points across various blogs and forums the former category expressing singular opinions, the latter, more democratic, allowing more people to be heard a common among Cypriots conviction, i.e. that the Turkish military is behind the creation and illumination of the flags and that their main aim is none other than
91
The Republic of Cyprus Press and Information Office Server: Turkish Press and Other Media. CYPRUS MAIL, February 25, 2007. http://www.cyprus-mail.com/news/ 92 The Republic of Cyprus Press and Information Office Server: Turkish Press and Other Media. AFRIKA, ibid. 93 CYPRUS MAIL, ibid. 94 The Republic of Cyprus Press and Information Office Server: Turkish Press and Other Media. HARAVGI, ibid.
46
to establish a political ownership over the northern lands and to provoke those who live south of the central plain of Mesaoria.95
The commentaries and posts found in different internet forums have been also suggestive of, at least, a tripartite nuance of opinions; ranging from those which assert a nationalistic pride to those which take an insult, whilst in between, various degrees of apathy, antipathy and empathy were to be found. The treatment of on-line sources, whether those were news-bulletins, press information, commentaries, forum threads or wiki-archives, has been done in a manner that attempts to place less importance on the authority of the source. Instead, adjusts its credibility upon authorship polyphony of the ordinary voices, including tourist-guides, marketeers, reporters, contingent fanatics, anonymous academics, eponymous strangers and mouthpieces of political parties. Their contribution to the ensuing disquisition is such that will hopefully justify the initial assumptions of this paper. Those would accordingly break down to the following:
That the landmarks, symbols and monuments found within Cypriot grounds always stand as signifiers of meaning for both communities, but these meanings are diverse, contradicting or negating of each other.
That the land-as-body gives rise to claims of ownership, however it concerns an ownership that escapes the confines of land registries and title-deeds, and ties itself to common rooted mythological and
95
F. S. Maratheftis, Location and Development of the Town of Leucosia (Nicosia) Cyprus, Thesis, The University of Bristol, 1958, (Nicosia Municipality: 1977), p. 1. Leucosia (Nicosia) lies in the central plain of the island, known as Mesaoria the land between mountains. It is the biggest lowland covering an area of about 200 square miles, about one third of the total area of the island. It is bound to the north by the Kyrenia Mountains or the Pentadaktylos Range To the south and west lies the more complex Troodos massif
47
historiographic narratives, which in turn give rise to alternative treatments of the same subject matter depending on working ideologies or interests. That the somatic nature of landmarks, symbols and monuments is continually revised through visual poetics and because these always appertain to two quite different Cypriot cultures, they lead to ambiguous, yet fixed, branding and become instrumental to the emergence of a hermaphrodite Cypriot status quo. Finally, this hermaphroditic dialectic, superimposed over issues of origin, dialect, federation, visual culture etc. effectuates a cultural gap between the Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots and it remains to be explored where and how their convergence may be met.
It is time to go back to Heaneys poem and recall his final words. For the poet, all composition takes place in the dark. The gleaming northern lights serve only as echoes of a tormenting and violent past warning against future retribution. Of such kind seem to be the northern lights gleaming at night time in the capital. It remains an irrefutable fact that their presence within the cityscape is purposeful and dogmatic. As it is the case with any other kind of monument, the (illuminated) flag was created to remind Cypriots of the unfortunate outcomes of their recent history, but it is also a double-significant commemoration. Nevertheless, the nationalistic symbolism achieved through the combined use of the image of a flag and a strong political slogan scribed underneath it, should be drawn in so as to elaborate on the impressions that the flag activates and which, to this day, casts its melancholic gaze upon all Nicosians.
The problematic surrounding the TRNC flag is in any case multifold. Before proceeding to examine its various significations, we should first underline certain
48
factors that could potentially widen our spectrum of interpretation. It had been suggested earlier that the treatment of the TRNC flag, although evidently falling under a common piece practice of Turkeys militant nationalism, should also be examined in the light of what it is not, i.e. it is not the Turkish national flag per se. It appeared some time after and next to the engraved Turkish national flag but we should wonder what does this event demarcate when keeping in mind its chronology, positioning, scale, visual nature, iconography, material, motives, aesthetics, intentions and flamboyant exhibitionism? As a monument of trauma and memory deeply embedded in a surrounding ideational environment it constitutes itself as an ideal site of violent contact, an iconic galvanizer of its subjects and students.
The debate arising from it, henceforth, raises numerous issues ethical as well as practical- of cognitive accessibility, decipherment, translation, and literal and/or metaphorical vantage points.96 We have seen that the monumental earthwork has established multiple dialogues, which upon their launching are preoccupied with the topicality of motivations and problems that underline its existence. On another level however, in order to fulfil its communicative purposes, the monument has put to work a materiality and a visual rhetoric that is programmed to activate behavioural responses, the nature of which defies its cultural specificity and the constraints of its specific time and place. 97 As a demarcating object, the flags are positioned in such a way so as to be geographically ever-present in all of Nicosia, connoting the literal space of division. As a demarcating symbol, they activate a double monument. For the Turkish-Cypriots it stands as a memorial to a massacre which took place in August 1974 and as a statement of their existence as a community. For the
96
Nassos Papalexandrou, Constructed Landscapes: Visual Cultures of Violent Contacts, Stanford Journal of Archaeology (5) 2007, p. 166. 97 Papalexandrou, ibid.
49
Greek-Cypriots it stands as an aide memoire of the division and the ongoing occupation of the north part of the country. Due to its monumental and flamboyant character the earthwork has been overshadowing the everyday experience of living in a divided city and, at the same time, activating a very particular frame of how Nicosians understand and relate to the space of their city. It is in the context of this particular frame that we would then suggest that there is also an activated way of looking, a type of gazing that relates back to the nationalistic fantasies of the two communities. The remaining parts of this paper attempt to unwrap the variety of
interpretations, decipherments and translations surrounding the borderscape. In doing so it will simultaneously reveal the current ways of looking, not only to what refers to the monument as such but to everything that mark othernesses so strikingly rivalry between them in Cyprus. Hence, Heaneys imperative
suggestion for the necessity of a clear eye should be taken methodologically more seriously. What of this darkness that he speaks about in where composition takes place? And how may an eye clear as the bleb of an icicle assist us in our task to legitimately access and translate the monument? Is it a case of a pure look as opposed to gazing of which so much cultural theory tells us about? How then may such a look occasion what Heidegger calls presencing (Anwesen) of that which at any given time comes to appearance in bringingforth? We will borrow once again the next in line concept to be found in Heaneys poem and shed some light into the questions posed above.
Cascade (means to fall)
50
Cascade [noun] 1) a waterfall, especially one of several falling in stages down a steep slope with rocks. 2) a thing that falls or hangs in a way that suggests a waterfall. [verb] to fall in or like a cascade.98
The term cascade derives from the Latin verb casicare (passive past tense of the verb cadere) which means fallen and the Indo-European suffix ade which denotes in nouns an action or a process. It refers to a waterfall descending over a steep, rocky surface but in another sense it could be used to describe a series of steps for dissipating the momentum of falling. Cascade would then suggest an arrangement of component devices each of which feeds into the next in succession enabling an overflow or what would be presented as a large absorbing surface. When Heaney talks about the aurora borealis in the horizon he explicitly states that those should not to be taken as a cascade of light, i.e. they are not a chained mechanism that could prove to be useful in shedding light to apropos dangers. Hoping to turn this around for us, the third part of the paper explores the subsequent layers of reading and decipherment of the flags on the mountain and at the same time looks for the mechanisms that may assist an informative enlightening.
The first two parts of the paper, whilst primarily aiming at clarifying the contextual framework incorporated in the two flags on the Kyrenia Mountains, were also useful in setting forward a number of important conceptual questions that were left to be answered later. Some of those questions were clearly stated in the course of the text, others were put forward in the footnotes and some
98
Hornby, ibid. 172.
51
other, even though they did not appear immediately, they became part of the syllogism, which is still gradually unfolding. A good example of this third category of questioning (and it is useful to set it now rather than later) could be deducted by glancing back at previous footnotes which dealt mainly with the accuracy of the dates and numbers mentioned in the text. Along with everything else then, there emerges a new inquiry category that, on the one hand, wonders as to why there is so much ambiguity surrounding the W questions (when, who, why, what, where), asking why is none of this information properly recorded? Secondly, it raises a further problematic as to how this ambiguity has then served the imagination and fantasy of the Cypriot people and in which ways have those been manifested. These manifestations could be taken into account as further evidence of a hermaphroditic Cypriot culture, which of course links back to what people know or what they think they know; but also open up to how people eventually react or fail to react at the site/sight of conflict that is no longer just ethnic but also cultural.
If the earthwork on the mountains is to be taken as a monument of memory and trauma then it is equally essential to examine its monumentality, as much as it is to examine its memorial and traumatic decipherments. Nassos Papalexandrou99 notes that the unusual monument is dramatically embedded in a surrounding physical and ideational landscape; a landscape which is
99
Associate Professor Nassos Papalexandrou, a specialist in Greek Art and Archaeology, joined the faculty of the Department of Art and Art History of the University of Texas, Austin, in 2002. His first book, The Visual Poetics of Power: Warriors, Youths, and Tripods in Early Greece was published in 2005. He is currently working on a second book that explores the role of monsters in the arts and rituals of Early Greece. Since 1999 Papalexandrou has been excavating a large public building of Cypro-Archaic date (ca. late 6th c. BCE) at Polis Chysochou, Cyprus.
52
both imaginative (in the sense of being a mental image of something) and emotional (in the sense of cultivating or eliciting some spiritual value or idea.100
The physical landscape is none other than the southern slopes of the Kyrenia Mountains (also known as Mt. Pentadaktylos from the five finger mountain tip north-east of the range). The physical orientation of the landmark is above the Turkish-Cypriot village Taskent, carefully placed immediately north of the divided capital and on the line of a notional axis that connects Nicosia with the famous port of Kyrenia, a predominantly Greek-Cypriot city before the war. The same axis may be extended all the way to Turkey. 101 The frame it activates is therefore intentional in two ways, in the sense of planning the earthwork in a location so it can always be ever-present and visible, and in the sense of provoking certain feelings to certain people because of the symbolism it is making use of. The visibility of the earthwork is further secured through its gigantic dimensions, striking colours and illumination, which link it typologically with grandiose monuments such as Behistun or Mount Rushmore.102 The symbolisms it incorporates are the two distinct but closely alike flags, which are based on the model of the Turkish national flag. Their dissimilarity lays in the fact that the Turkish flag engraving on the mountain predates the TRNC and that the latter is regularly painted over so as not to fade away. Furthermore, despite the fact that the TRNC is a de facto non-recognized state, the use of its own flag, however similar to the Turkish one, indicates a possible and perhaps desirable point of escape from the motherland. This is also performatively suggested during the illumination session, when in the last ten seconds, right before its blackout, what pertains in the capitals horizon is the TRNC flag. As an ideational landscape,
100 101 102
Papalexandrou, ibid. siting Ashmore and Knapp (1999: 12) ibid. p. 175 ibid. p. 165.
53
Pentadaktylos draws in the metaphor of the land as a body and the body as a land. According to Papalexandrou,
the evidence for the culturally ingrained tendency of thinking the landscape in terms of somatic metaphors is variegated and richly documented from antiquity to today. Whether it is a matter of cultural poetics or somatic metaphors deeply embedded in everyday vocabulary as toponymical or substantive terms, this phenomenon may offer us a glimpse of the perennial need of humans to create intimate bonds between themselves and their (home)lands. The projection of human categories to the surrounding inanimate world may also register a relationship of mutual respect and interdependence values, that is, currently in crisis in an increasingly urbanized world. However this may be, this peculiar connectedness to the land is a universal cultural phenomenon.
In the case of Cyprus, the geomorphology of which is rich in toponyms and oral traditions, this is especially evident in the case of Mt. Pentadaktylos, a special geomorphologic feature of which still embodies the memory of the epic hero Digenis Akritas a gigantic somatic relic of a heroic age in the Greek history of the island. It is the somatic nature of this feature that may have motivated the creation of the Turkish-Cypriot monument. This gigantic sign, he argues, brands the land/body of Pentadaktylos as an inalienable possession even as it cries out, in image and text, an altogether new but ambivalent identity. This branding of the landscape is literal and metaphorical. It derives its referential capacity from the actual branding of possessions, like cattle or enslaved human beings in the past. Branding is not altogether unusual in Cyprus and the practice has found its way through innumerable instances of cultural and political
54
expression, oral and visual, attaching each time ambivalent cases of signification to all the more equivocal signifiers.103
Intentionality The literal and metaphorical branding of Pentadaktylos is founded on a geometrical association between factual properties (chronology, positioning, materials, dimensions), visual nature (iconography, symbolism, aesthetics, exhibitionism), intentionality (motives, intentions, messages, significations) and conceptuality (memory, trauma, behaviours, reactions). Hence, within any cognitive accessibility, decipherment, translation, and literal and/or metaphorical vantage points one would find a free interplay of such associations. Interviews with Turkish- and Greek-Cypriots, between the ages of 20-50, revealed that the younger generations hardly pay any attention to the monument, some people going as far as challenging the fact that there are two and not one, as they thought flags on the mountain.104 Most people claim not to see it while driving to Nicosia or for others it becomes particularly visible only when they draw closer to the centre. When asked whether they know who made them, when or why, the only knowledge they seem to hold in common is that the Turkish army is responsible for its creation and the more informed would mention that there is some kind of sponsorship behind the project. There are many young TurkishCypriots who are quick to acknowledge that the sight is shameful, for them but
103
The gigantic soldier figures often seen in the northern ranges of Cyprus climbing towards the top of the mountains is a further example that would fall under the same practise category of branding landscapes possessively, whilst at the same time treating them as a body. Branding, in its more general usage can also be linked to the observed phenomenon of franchising the symbols and monuments of Cyprus. 104 The sample of opinions collected has been put forward to highlight a number of points. First of all, not all people think or interpret in the same way. This may come about by simply examining different age and social groups, as much as it appears to be happening between the two ethnic groups. Secondly, it is nevertheless evident that opinions of Turkish- and Greek-Cypriots will tend to converge in matters authorship (who created the flag), provocativeness (what goals does it creation serve) and trauma (as a site which is at the same time commemorative and traumatic).
55
especially for their Greek-compatriots. Still this view is more widely propagated and enhanced by/in Greek-Cypriot media and websites that refer to its sight as shameful, hurtful and provocative; a stabbed and bleeding site. The imaginative and emotional decipherments of the symbolic site range according to what the people who look at it actually know about it. Although all reflections eventually fall under the category of two different nationalistic fantasies that mark the earthwork as something to be proud or ashamed of, the emotional and imaginative nuances are not as straightforward. This is due to the fact that other than its physical and ideational presence, the flag-monument intertwines the memory and trauma of two different ethnic groups, of two different cultures that maintain the position of the victim in the history of the island.
The monumental character of the landmark is twofold. One would go as far as to call it a monument due to its extravagant size, which won it a candidacy in the Guinness Book of Records. But it is monumental also because of its commemorative character, a mnemonic device that serves as an aid to memory. The flag-monument is undoubtedly reminiscent of the bitter and tragic constituents of the modern Cypriot history. As a demarcating object it defines for some the space of occupation and for others the space of self-determination. Because of the various and conflicting interpretations, the illuminated landmark, far from being a cascade of light, stands to this day as aide memoire to the ongoing disagreement between the two ethnic communities. Regardless of whether or not its extravagant size won an entry into the Book of Records, its monumental character is indisputable. In fact, one would argue that its monumentality relies equally on the landmarks location and dimensions, as it does on its function of memorialising. Memory and sight then are intertwined
56
into the symbolic plane, but since we are dealing with two perpetrators archives, this gives rise to also two ethnic fantasies.105
The Turkish-Cypriot narrative considers the flags to be more than just a statement of the existence of the people of North Cyprus. It is also a memorial to a harrowing incident that took place in the violent summer of 1974. In her book Oysters with their Missing Pearls (2005), Turkish-Cypriot journalist Sevgl Uluda106 reports on a story closely related to the creation of the flag-monument, which goes by unspoken and unaccounted for in the Greek-Cypriot side. Accordingly, the flags on Pentadaktylos were created by the remaining TurkishCypriots who escaped a massacre in the village of Tochni ( / Taskent), during the 1974 war.107 The survivors, mainly women and orphans, found refuge in the northern Turkish enclaves, which appeared already from 1963, and painted these flags on the slopes of Mt. Pentadaktylos when they were evacuated to Vouno ( / renamed Taskent in memory) as a reminder of the
105
Jacques Lacan, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New York, London: W. W. Norton, 1977) writes on the notions of the imaginary (imaginaire), symbolic (symbolique) and real (reel). The imaginary is not simply the opposite of real. Whilst the image certainly belongs to reality, the imaginary is the world, the register, the dimensions of images, conscious or unconscious, perceived of imagined. The symbols referred by Lacan are not icons, stylized figurations, but signifiers, in the sense developed by Saussure and Jakobson, extended into a generalized definition: differential elements, in themselves without meaning, which acquire value only in the mutual relations, and forming a closed order. Henceforth, it is the order of the symbolic, not the imaginary that is seen to be determining order of the subject, and its effects are radical: the subject, in Lacans sense, is himself an effect of the symbolic. Drawing a distinction between the symbolic and the imaginary, the relation between the subject and the signifiers, speech, language etc. is contrasted with the imaginary relation between the ego and its objects. The real emerges as the third term, linked to the symbolic and the imaginary: it stands for what is neither symbolic nor imaginary, and remains foreclosed from the analytic experience, which is an experience of speech. This Lacanian concept of the real is not to be confused with reality, which is perfectly knowable: the subject of desire knows no more than that, since for it reality is entirely phantasmatic. 106 Sevgul Uludag is an investigative reporter for Yeniduzen newspaper in Cyprus. Uludag lives in the northern part of divided Cyprus but through her reporting attempts to ease the segregation between the Greek and Turkish communities. In doing so, she has faced many obstacles, including death threats and violent attacks. But neither hate campaigns nor psychological terror keep Uludag from publishing her articles. 107 The story is also recorded in Papadakis book Echoes from the Dead Zone.
57
dreadful day when eighty seven Turkish-Cypriot civilians lost their lives.108 The Greek-Cypriots, at large uninformed and ignorant towards the landmarks memorial significance have, throughout the years, interpreted the flags on Pentadaktylos as a vestige of the 1974 war, the loss of their lands, the forced derouting and the ongoing occupation of the northern part of the island by Turkish forces. Furthermore, since the symbolism on Pentadaktylos is co-opted by a strong nationalistic slogan and the presence of another national flag next to the TRNC flag, then the Turkish-Cypriot statement of existence hinders the commemoration to the massacre, whilst enhancing the commemoration to the war. The monument is considered to be provoking and insulting toward the victims and refugees of the war and, ultimately, not only suggestive of the Cypriot drama but also embodying and solidifying the unresolved nature of the Cyprus problem (Figure 14).
Perhaps the deviating Turkish- and Greek-Cypriot interpretations reside in the fact that there is a working demarcation here, considering the objects as symbols and the symbols as objects. Mt. Pentadaktylos stands as an objectsymbol and the TRNC flag as a symbol-object. The whole mountain-and-flag monument is co-instantly a symbol-object on an object-symbol. As a land/body, the site is branded and therefore traumatized, as a symbol/object, it is traumatizing. In all cases it is mirroring of the nationalistic fantasies of the two communities, always revealing an unsettled between them perpetrator-victim
108
Tochni/Taskent was a mixed village in the south, near Limassol. On August 14, 1974 the village was struck by a tragedy when EOKA B paramilitants entered the village, rounded-up all the able-bodied men, ages ranging from 13 to 74, and were taken to be assassinated and massively graved in a location close to Zygi. On that same day fifteen other Turkish-Cypriot boys and men from the villages of Mari/Tatli and Zygi/Terazi were also killed. From the massacre only one man survived, Suat Huseyin Kafadar, age 19 at the time, from Tochni. The women and children left behind were evacuated from the village on October 25, 1974 by UNFICYP forces and were relocated to Turkish enclaves in the north of the island. The village was reconstituted under the same name near Nicosia, where also the flagmonument currently lays.
58
dynamic. As a demarcating visual/physical border it is positional, done from a specific site outside oneself. As a demarcating imaginary/emotional border it is non-positional, done from a specific position within oneself.109 In its multifold, the monument does not only establish multiple dialogues preoccupied with the topicality of motivations and problems that underline its existence. It also fulfils its communicative purposes that program and activate behavioural responses, the natures of which defy its cultural specificity and the specific constraints of time and place. In its essence one can find the dialectics of outside and inside,110 and those dialectics are simultaneously spatiotemporal and symbolic.
The hermaphroditic state of contemporary Cypriot culture posits itself more clearly when considering the demarcating landmark. Here, the deviating opinions of both communities are reflected upon a symbol/object they share by forced experience, not by culture. The symbol/object appears then to be a much more interesting case study than any commonly-shared cultural heritage symbols. Unlike the image of goddess Aphrodite, the Kyrenia port or even the Hala Sultan Tekke in Larnaka,111 the flags on Mt. Pentadaktylos is a monument within a monument, an enfolded site of trauma, traumatized and traumatizing. 112 Papadakis hermaphroditic reading of the Cypriot status quo suggested that there exists a resilient binary, which demarcates cultural, historical and political artefacts. I would argue that this binary incarnates into a double gaze,113 i.e. two different ways of representation, cognition, decipherment, translation and
109 110
Sartres definitions in Being and Nothingness. See Bachelard, The Poetics of Space the chapter on Dialectics of Inside and Outside. 111 Nassos Papalexandrou, Hala Sultan Tekke, Cyprus: An Elusive Landscape of Sacredness in a Liminal Context Journal of Modern Greek Studies 26 (2) October 2008, pp. 251-281. 112 For a more thorough analysis see Nassos Papalexandrou, Hala Sultan Tekke, Cyprus: An Elusive Landscape of Sacredness in a Liminal Context in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, No. 26, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. pp. 251-281. 113 My term.
59
association depending on the stored visual hypotheses of the subjects. 114 The double gazing, which was founded on two working nationalistic fantasies, onesided selective historiographies, ethnical and cultural differences, and a longterm isolation between the two communities; accounts for the duality of its meaning in two separate ways. The gazing taking place in Cyprus is double, in the sense that the two communities may look at things in two entirely different ways; and double, in the sense of a two-way type of look, a staring contest between Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots, an interchange of scopophobia and scopophilia.115
Fear and pleasure, shame and pride, are the activated behavioural responses to the site, set into place by its programmed materiality and visual rhetoric for communicative purposes. But, from the utterly practical, arises also Gaston Bachelards concept of daydreaming, the poetry of nave consciousness, an imaginary plane coloured by reality, imagination, longing, actual and created memories. By enfolding sight and site, land and body, object and symbol, memory and trauma, the dialectics of space becomes transcendental, a horrible inside-outside; absence and presence becomes an immovable bricolage and a narrative in brick. The flag-monument is at once a wall of division, a mirror of reflection and a screen of projection. Co-instantly, a tool of separation, identification and definition. Its original intentionality may or may had not taken
114
Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame: What We See in Films, Varieties of Visual Cohernce, (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1977, p. 24) citing R. L. Gregory The Intelligent Eye. 115 In Being and Nothingness, Jean Paul Sartre writes about our recognition of out subjectivity in others when the mere possible presence of another person causes one to look at him/herself as an object, and see his/her world as it appears to the other. While they are believing it is a person, their world is transformed, and everything exists as an object that partially escapes them. During this time the world comes to you differently, and you can no longer have a total subjectivity. The world is now his world, a foreign world that no longer comes from you, but from him. The other person is a threat to the order and arrangement of your whole world... Your world is suddenly haunted by the Others values, over which you have no control. This takes us back to the pre-reflective mode of being, it is the eye of the camera that is always present but it is never seen.
60
into consideration these unravelling mental outcomes, but this does not negate the fact that they have been effectuated and are still at work. In the island of Hermaphrodite to talk about division, a double-vision, is sound, critical, extendable, but the discourse it produces is rigid, stale and uncompromising. A bringing-forth is in demand. Bringing-forth brings out of concealment into unconcealment. This coming rests and moves freely within what we call revealing (das Entbergen.) The Greeks have the word aletheia for revealing. The Romans translated this with veritas. We say truth and usually understand it as correctness of representation.116
A correctness of representation poses as many problems and challenges as an assertion of a pure look rid of its stored visual hypotheses. Pragmatically speaking, it is impossible to relief ourselves from the conceptual and contextual framing we are inherently born in. All the same, we must begin again, in an effort to confront all that is known, all that is being suggested, all that still lingers in silence and denial. And to do that we would need to move away from the assumptions that we make about what we see or know and aim for a clearer eye. This was, after all, Heaneys final abetment; if only to clarify the content of nostalgia/s in where daydreaming works.
Clear eye (means pure look)
Stare
at
me.
Dream
about lives
everything.
Abandoned
infatuated by a pure look. Thus I stare at you -now and forever116
Heidegger, 1954.
61
through
this
pure
look
that
loneliness bestows on me."117 --Francisco de Ass Hernandez Salmern.
If Bachelards daydreaming, which contains the idea that the self emerges from remembering, may hold any potential value for us, then according to Philip A. Kafalas, it must be housed in a metaphorical architecture built of remembered space.118 While in most instances, memory presents itself without buildings, in some occasions particularly recalling childhood, trauma or dream memory
houses its remember in highly particularized architecture. These cases do not necessarily offer Bachelards oneiric house, but a vivid personal space that fixes broader social memory and existence in such meaningful structures.119 When we first experience and apprehend a moment, we do so through a relatively restricted framework that colours the experience. However, when from beings of experience we become beings of remembering (rememberers), we incorporate the memory into, perhaps broader, frames and narratives that belong in part to a wider social collectivity. Once locating ourselves within that wider collectivity, our memoirs become also part of a shared space.
117
The full poem by Francisco de Ass Hernandez Salmern can be found here: Stare at me. Dream about everything. Abandoned lives infatuated by a pure look. Thus I stare at you -now and forever- through this pure look that loneliness bestows on me. Think about this encounter for an instant. -Even though we never met each other-. Think about the life I had -that I no longer have- the way I think of it -Do I live it?- in that precise moment, in this loneliness of mine which I never expected and now I confide in you. Stare at me. Dream of me. My body conceals nothing from your eyes. I have lived so much that my body and soul have become one. That is the way I live and flesh out my sincerity. However, I do not expect your comprehension. I merely am -and I have been- the human being you are staring at. Stare at me. Dream about everything. In this encounter, we are joined by a pure look. Translated by David Diez Marques, 2008. 118 Philip A. Kafalas, Mnemonic Locations: The Housing of Personal Memory in Prose from the Ming and Qing Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 27, Dec. 2005, pp. 93-116. 119 Kafalas, ibid. p. 93.
62
Without the various frames of our individual and collective creation, there is no apprehensible experience, no enduring memory, no self. At each step, event is structured, constructed, and reconstructed, so that it can be made knowable and known. In the process, we posit to ourselves the existence of a continuous self that is responsible for the experiencing and remembering, when in fact the self we sense is at least as much an artefact of the process.120
Continuing his discussion on remembering, Kafalas goes on to talk about two types of metaphoric self emerging from memory, a differentiation that is also found in Sveltana Boyms The Future of Nostalgia (2001). The purely personal is the self experienced in isolation, enacting a seemingly spontaneous, bodily, timeless, non-essential memory that is stubbornly uncollective. From here, stems what Constantina Zanou121 has classified as the real nostalgia, the wistful desire of return and the sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place and time, experienced in this case by the Cypriot war refugees. The second type of metaphoric self is the one that is made of the remembered give and take of social interaction. Both internal and externally corroborated, social identity is born when the self extends beyond itself, blurring into the community. From this second type arises Zanous imaginary nostalgia experienced by the Cypriots who were born after the war and who, since they were not, they became the witnesses of history. Imaginary nostalgia would then explain the desire of returning to a place unknown and nevertheless familiar.122
120 121
Ibid. pp. 93-4. Constantina Zanou received her Ph.D in History and she is a Researcher for the University of Nicosia. 122 Constantina Zanou, Nostalgia, published in Kathemerini newspaper, 21.06.2009.
63
Positionality In The Poetics of Space (1958) Bachelard calls his approach, topoanalysis, the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives. The oneiric house he evokes needs not to be a real house, but it is the first universe from which all subsequent experience of protected habitation derives.
[T]here exists for each one of us an oneiric house, a house of dreammemory that is lost in the shadow of a beyond of the real past. I called this oneiric house the crypt of the house that we were born in. Here we find ourselves at a pivotal point around which reciprocal interpretations of dreams through thought and thought through dreams, keep turning.123
Nostalgia, trauma, and dream as the types of memory we can find at work in the settings of the flag/mountain monument are produced by a metaphorical housing of memory and a physical architecture that remembers, and which accumulate discreet oneiric emplacements in space. Bachelards concept of daydreaming in the broadest form of any oneiric real-estate evoked not only by narrative processes but also by imaginary ones (and rid of its pleasure principle) begins to signify that the monument, as a house of the imagination, becomes an enclave of personal, individual, daydream.
It is Bachelard's wonderful idea that if self emerges from remembering, then that actively imaginative metaphorical self must be housed somewhere, in some equally metaphorical, primal house that is based on our experience of and memory of space.124
123 124
Bachelard, ibid. p. 15. Kafalas, ibid. p. 115.
64
Like all houses, the house that memory posits for the self is not necessarily just a shelter one, but it is a structure that speaks to a larger society. The variety of daydreams is revealing to the multiple symbolical nuances incorporated to Pentadaktylos landscape, and they suggest that the framing devices behind metaphors and symbols are what memory is made of. In his poetics of space and reverie, Bachelard quotes a poet according to whom [a]s soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere. Bachelard elaborates on immensity, as the philosophical category of daydream, which feeds on all kinds of sights, but through a sort of natural inclination, it contemplates grandeur. This
contemplation produces an inner state unlike any other and the daydream transports the daydreamer outside the immediate world to a world of infinity. It is imaginations trait of enlarging indefinitely the images of immensity by fleeting the object nearby and right away it is far off, elsewhere, in the space of elsewhere. When the elsewhere is in natural surroundings and not lodged in the house of the past, it is immense and daydream becomes an original contemplation. The impressions and images of immensity create a
phenomenology without phenomena and the phenomenology of the immense refers us directly to our imagining consciousness. In analyzing images of immensity, Bachelard concludes, we realize within ourselves the pure being of pure imagination. As beings of imagination, the prerequisite in us would be to set our reverie in motion. In motionless circumstances whether those are occasioned by watching a movie in a cinema theatre, looking outside a house window or living in a liminal city the human body becomes part of an auditorium that finds refuge in voyeurism. According to Sigmund Freud,
[v]oyeurism has its origins in one of the component instincts, the scopophilic instinct voyeurism functions not only in perversion but also in
65
more normal behaviour of seeing and being seen, in various ways of everyday life125
Laura Mulveys126 dialogues on cinema and spectatorship, brought about in the 1970s the definition of the male gaze,127 defined as the voyeuristic practice of male audience in Hollywood movies.
As an advanced representation system, the cinema poses questions about the ways the unconscious (formed by the dominant order) structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking128
Mulveys analysis takes into consideration the restriction of mainstream cinema to a formal mise en scne that reflects the dominant ideological concept of the cinema, but Stefan Sharff adds that peeping is of the normal kind to which cinema as a visual medium is especially susceptible, making the voyeuristic drive an unavoidable part of watching a film. Likewise, in the case of the divided
125
Stefan Sharff, The Art of Looking in Hitchcocks Rear Window, (Limelight Editions: New York, 1997) p. 178. 126 Laura Mulvey is a film theorist. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck University of London. She worked at the British Film Institute for many years before taking up her current position. During the 2008-09 academic year, Mulvey was the Mary Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College. 127 In considering the way that films are put together, many feminist film critics have pointed to the "male gaze" that predominates in classical Hollywood filmmaking. Budd Boetticher summarises the view thus: "What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance." Laura Mulvey's seminal essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (written in 1973 and published in 1975) expands on this conception of the passive role of women in cinema to argue that film provides visual pleasure through scopophilia, and identification with the on-screen male actor. She asserts: "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness," and as a result contends that in film a woman is the "bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning." Mulvey argues that Freud's psychoanalytic theory is the key to understanding how film creates such a space for female sexual objectification and exploitation through the combination of the patriarchal order of society, and 'looking' in itself as a pleasurable act of voyeurism, as "the cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking." 128 Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 1989, p. 15.
66
city, we have seen that the dominant ideologies in the political and cultural space of Cyprus have brought forth two respective types of daydreaming and gazing. Especially in the post-war years when the island was divided and mobility between the two sides of the Green Line was prohibited, the Cypriots on either side were confined, like Jefferie in Hitchocks Read Window (1954), to a wheelchair condition with nothing else to do but indulge in the pleasure of looking.
One would be quick to react to the look taking place in Nicosia as pleasurable. Even if there is an element of pleasure found in nostalgia of times bygone and places lost, the irrefutable character of gazing in the case of the divided city encompasses shame and pride, anger and angst. How far can one go to claim that the aforementioned conditions are also pleasurable? It would be hard to do so without insulting. In Being and Nothingness (1943), Jean Paul Sartre meditates on the power of the look (gaze, stare) and provides us with re-approaching tools.129 Sartres look involves alienation, and as such, something uncomfortable that we want to escape. We can escape it only by denying that there genuinely is an Other, there, aware of us and capable of ascribing an essence to us. And for this reason, Sartre thinks that we respond to our awareness of the Look by objectifying the Other as having a fixed nature determining the way he thinks of us, and so denying his judgement any validity.
129
The basic idea behind Sartres argument is that in becoming aware of someone else looking at me, I become aware of myself as an object for someone else. In doing so, I also become aware of being judged on the basis of my actions as having certain character traits. Whether this judgement is positive or negative is unimportant, pride is the recognition of a positive evaluation and shame of a negative one. But, I am also aware that, unlike in the case of Bad Faith, I am not in control of which character traits are ascribed to me. Thus I, who in so far as I am my possibles, am what I am not and am not what I am behold now I am somebody! (Sartre 1990: 287).
67
In view of this presence of the Other-as-subject to me in and through my assumed object-ness, we can see that my making an Object out of the Other must be the second moment in my relation to him.130
So as to evade the alienation caused by the Others objectification, the defensive reaction to an object-state would be to cause the Other to appear as an object before us, thus denying him the ability to categorize. But the Other in turn becomes alienated and seeks to regain his status by categorizing us. In this mutual exchange of categorizations, us and the Other are caught in a vicious circle, whereby according to Sartre, conflict occurs.
Everything which may be said of me in my relations with the Other applies to him as well. I attempt to free myself from the hold of the Other, the Other is trying to free himself from mine; while I seek to enslave the other, the Other seeks to enslave me conflict is the original meaning of being-forothers.131
From this last claim, conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others, we distil that the look is necessary and inevitable, and something that results from a wrong attitude towards human life (Sartrean Pessimism). But it also reveals the conditions of alienation suggested by the Look, i.e. that the Other fails to recognize our freedom and that we have no control over which character traits the Other ascribes to us on the basis of the part of our behaviour he has observed. In his own analysis of the text, J. M. Webber seeks to reconcile the Look and Bad Faith as ways in which freedom is denied, but what is alienating about the Look is not the denial of freedom, but rather the loss of control over
130 131
Sartre, ibid. p. 310. Ibid. p. 386.
68
which traits are ascribed. Going back to the staring contest between Nicosians on both sides of the city, as in the case of Hitchcocks Rear Window,
what comes to light is a relatively complex and peculiar phenomenon of human activity where the gravity shifts from the possibly mundane and banal to an essential perception of the ineluctable modality of the visible132
But this is only half the story. The epicenter of the film (but also of the city) is the notion of looking, observing and seeing across from the gazer, across from someone.
Hitchcock robs the viewer in the audience of the faculty of simply seeing across without the guidance of a third person, the onlooker: Jefferies is the principal seer, while we (the viewers) see him seeing as well as what he sees. What seems to be limpid is at the same time opaque and odd: the relationship of the onlooker to the view across is complicated by the bizarre notion that the movie theatre audience sees mostly what the protagonist chooses to observe.133
What begins to be suggested is the notion of enframing (Gestell).134 Put somewhat more lucidly, enframing refers to the calling out, impelling, or challenging forth, of humans to reveal, or unconceal the actual (the aletheia/veritas/truth) as ever-present and on call (the standing-reserve). Put differently, [e]nframing, as a challenging-forth into ordering, sends into a way of
132 133
Sharff, ibid. p. 3. Ibid. pp. 3-4. 134 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (1954). Although the corpus of the text is preoccupied with the particular phenomenon of technology and humanitys role of being with it, enframing means the gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e. challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve (Heidegger 1993: 325).
69
revealing. Enframing is an ordaining of destining, as is every way of revealing. Bringing-forth, poiesis, is also a destining in this sense (ibid. 330). Enframing is destining, from which the essence of all history is determined. Enframing is the essence of modern technology, for Heidegger, because he roots modern technology in techne: it is a means for sourcing true forms and ideas that exist before the figures we perceive.135 The frame metaphor in Heideggers enframing corresponds to a common tendency in thinking in terms of boxes. Thus, what characterizes the essence of modern technology, for Heidegger, is the human impulse to put the world into boxes, to enclose all of our experiences of the world within categories of understanding mathematical equations, physical laws, sets of classifications that we can control. So, even though the essay embarks on the question concerning technology so as to prepare a free relationship to it, Heideggers claim that enframing stems from the human drive for a precise and scientific knowledge of the world, would then also be consistent with a mediated look towards the world, activating a look in human beings in the same ways as Hitchcocks protagonist, Jefferies, activates for the audience. In the cinema theatre, Jefferies guides us and we follow him, he is the one who controls the acrossness. Similarly, enframing frames the world across and it (the world) becomes onlooker-controlled.
135
The verb stellen (to place or set) has a wide variety of uses. It can mean to put in place, to order, to arrange, to furnish or supply, and, in a military context, to challenge or engage. Here Heidegger sees the connotations of herausfordern (to challenge, to call forth, to demand out hither) as fundamentally determinative of the meaning of stellen, and this remains true throughout his ensuing discussion. The translation of stellen with "to set upon" is intended to carry this meaning. The connotations of setting in place and of supplying that lie within the word stellen remain strongly present in Heidegger's repeated use of the verb hereafter, however, since the "setting-upon" of which it speaks is inherently a setting in place so as to supply. Where these latter meanings come decisively to the fore, stellen has been translated with "to set" or "to set up," or, rarely, with "to supply." Stellen embraces the meanings of a whole family of verbs: bestellen (to order, command; to set in order), vorstellen (to represent), sicherstellen (to secure), nachstellen (to entrap), verstellen (to block or disguise), herstellen (to produce, to set here), darstellen (to present or exhibit), and so on. In these verbs the various nuances within stellen are reinforced and made specific. All these meanings are gathered together in Heidegger's unique use of the word that is pivotal for him, Ge-stell (Enframing).
70
According to Sartre, objectification occurs in the conflict state between individuals who seek to reaffirm their freedom by disallowing the Other to categorize them. In Sharff we have seen that the audiences look is mediated and controlled by the director by use of his protagonists. The result is a cinematic experience that is subjugated and comes under the spell of a camera that controls the images and frames making up the plot, but also the acrossness. Acrossness refers to the look across the auditorium to the screen, the look across Jefferies rear window to Lisas apartment; ultimately, the look across the auditorium to Lisas apartment and Lisa herself. Heideggers preoccupation with the aboutness of the Being [Dasein] in the technological world led him to enframing, seeing the world through boxes and frames in search of a new ontology. The three terms objectification, acrossness and enframing through their composition, elaborate on the dimensionality of an aboutness, which once it is solved can become assisting to the case study at hand. The TRNC flag on Mt. Pentadaktylos and the symbolic landscape(s) it sets upon Nicosians influences the way they look at each other and how they see their own selves. Those innocuous windows become the frames for the screens of the small movies that are a part of the big film.136 In visual and cultural studies it is unimaginable to remove the look and the constituted voyeuristic drive is unavoidable; but it is always suggested that we should aim for a clear eye, that is, to approach the aboutness of the Other without objectifying or enframing him. To arrive to such a state of mind, which by no means suggests or requires a clean slate, one would need, nevertheless, to begin to get rid of his visual hypothesis. In the case of Nicosia and in the light of
136
Sharff, ibid. p. 5.
71
its various scenarios of unification, the habitants of the city have been facing a serious challenge. The call for a peaceful solution necessitates the acceptance of the degrees of difference and diversity that compile the Cypriot cultural mosaic. Embedded in the cityscape there exist signs of political, ethnic and religious diversity that stand opposite to each other and the nature of its division enhances their opposition, both semantically and spatially. Their opposition is manifested literally through space, since the signs lie across the Green Lines interface and face one another. Most importantly, their opposition is manifested laterally through the content of meanings they carry for the two communities. The challenge then, posits as follows: is it possible to imagine a system of interpretation that would read those signs as non-rivalry and non-threatening to the various ethnic groups? According to Bachelard, outside and inside form a dialectic division and an obvious geometry that blinds us when we bring it into play in metaphorical domains. It has the sharpness of yes and no which decides everything and if not treated carefully, it is made into a basis of images that govern all thoughts of positive and negative. Therefore, a simple geometrical opposition, becomes instead, tinged with aggression and formal opposition is incapable of remaining calm. It becomes obsessed with the myth. Jean Hyppolite wrote in Denegation (1956)
you feel that full significance of this myth of the outside and inside in alienation, which is founded on these two terms. Beyond what is expressed in their formal opposition lie alienation and hostility between the two.
72
In Bachelards phenomenological reading of space, this side and beyond are faint repetitions of the dialectics of inside and outside, wherein everything takes form, even infinity.
The dialectics of here and there has been promoted to the rank of an absolutism to which these unfortunate adverbs of place are endowed with unsupervised powers of ontological determination.
Bachelard was attacking the geometrical cancerization of the linguistic tissue of contemporary philosophy, seeing how philosophical language was becoming a language of agglutination (uniting by glue), i.e. words that are sentences in themselves in which the outside features blend in with the inside and where words sometimes loosen their intimate ties and prefixes and suffixes become unwelded. Nevertheless, this paradigm of language extends beyond the philosophical domain and becomes exemplum of a more generic linguistic cancerization that applies also in the case of the Greek-Cypriot and TurkishCypriot geometry. By means of analogy, here the Turkish- and Greek- prefixes become unwelded as to their suffix -Cypriot. It was Bachelards conviction that prefixes and suffixes tend to want to think for themselves, with the result, that words are occasionally thrown off balance. He used Being-there as his own example, wondering where is the main stress, on being or on there?
In there shall I first look for my being? Or am I going to find, in my being, above all, a certainty of my fixation in a there?
In any case, one of these terms always weakens the other. Often the there is spoken so forcefully that the ontological aspects of the problems under
73
consideration are sharply summarized in a geometrical fixation. The result is dogmatization of philosophemes. The there is so forceful that to designate being by being-there is to point an energetic forefinger that might easily relegate intimate being to an exteriorized place. One should think twice before speaking of being-there (tre-l). Entrapped in being, we shall always have to come out of it. And when we are hardly outside of being, we always have to go back into it. Thus, in being, everything is circuitous, roundabout, recurrent, so much talk; a chaplet of sojournings (a temporary stay), a refrain with endless verses. We are prompted to revise the above question by drawing in an analogy between the being/Turkish/Greek prefixes and the there/Cypriot suffixes and ask again: In the Cypriot shall I first look for my Greek/Turkish (-ness, being)? Or am I going to find, in my being (Greekness, Turkishness), above all, a certainty of my fixation in a there (Cyprus)?
Conclusion
Bachelards philosophical investigations into the dialectics of inside and outside reveal the enfolded relationship between ontology, language and space. They also divulge the rival relationship between prefixes and suffixes, whether those occur in language or in space. Their interdependence, far from forming an alliance between the two actually turns them against each other, forcing upon
74
them a competition that is always trapped in the gap between. Essentially, both in language and in space, the most highly charged element in any geometrical opposition is actually found in the middle, in the link or in the buffer. The dialectics of inside and outside can be applied in spatial theorizing because it allows for an unusual reversal of our perception of space from being something strictly concrete, fixed and measurable, to something liquefied, undefined and in flux. In the case of the city, there are a number of vantage points through which the inside and the outside blur, whether one chooses to focus on the buffer zone or the Venetian Walls. In what relates to the case study at hand, namely the flagmountain monument, it has been shown that the dialectics of inside and outside is composed by a complex system of factors (properties, aesthetics,
intentionality, conceptuality) which are widely composed and interpreted by the receptors. It is not suggested here that meaning is what comes after. But by using intentionality as a footstone we are trying to widen its hermeneutics.
The drama of intimate geometry Bachelard refers to whilst contemplating on the horrible inside-out of space and language alike, re-evokes Heaneys state of mind in the darkness as one withdraws into ones self in order to take ones place in existence. It is also analogous to the Cypriot Problem, whereby each side chooses to withdraw into itself so as to be able to take a place. With what concerns the divided city, one can elaborate on an intimate geometry by looking at the oppositions contesting its surface and transmuting the citys identity. Geometry is apparent from different view points, however, this geometric structure of oppositions should not be misinterpreted as a balance between the two sides of the city. With what concerns the infrastructure, the spectacle, the lifestyle and quality of living even by setting aside the religious, political and cultural factors there is a noteworthy dissimilarity between the north and the
75
south quarters of Nicosia, not just within the old city but also in the new centres and suburbs. It is the geometry of oppositions that evoke the drama of intimate geometry, because it is in their opposition that binaries become dramatic, informative and useful.
Nightmare, says Bachelard, is not visually frightening and the fear does not come from the outside. It has no past, no physiology. Somehow it makes sense to suggest that the anguish inscribed to the heart of the Cypriots is self-inflicted and the inscription had found its place long before images had given it reality. Indeed, sight says too many things at one time and to enframe it, to categorize it or to enslave it is a tactic of manipulation. Unfortunately, Cypriots are brought up under opposite visual dogmas that keep in line with the ethnic rhetoric and it would take a serious effort on their behalf to widen the spectrum of their vision. To be unbiased is farfetched even for those people who have acquired the knowledge or the ability to appreciate difference. But then, I would not like this to be used as the exported conclusion behind my analysis. The paper has not been arguing in favour of the abolishment of signs or even an unbiased decipherment, rather it has tried to focus on the dialogue between different signs and meanings and open up the space of their interpretation. I find this to be a necessary practise that facilitates an understanding of otherness.
With space images, we are in a region where reduction is easy and commonplace. But if everything, even size, is a human value then, even a miniature, can accumulate size. When Bachelard was pondering on intimate immensity he was consulting poets so as to gain understanding of the poetical reverie and daydreaming facilitated by imagination. Accordingly, the smallest of paroles could open a whole region of thought for the daydream to fleet to, and
76
the mind could switch domains from verse to verse. It has been Bachelards proven point that when human imagination does not refer to the physical world, it becomes limitless and immense. But when the mnemonic devise of imagination fleets to a memory sheltered in a house of the past, then the reverie is bound by time and place. It recreates nostalgia for times bygone and a desire to return to a moment which cannot be again. The French philosopher rested his faith on poetry, the ultimate tool for opening up what is enclosed by meanings. Then, on the surface of being, the movements of opening and closing are so numerous, so frequently inverted, and so charged with hesitation, that we could conclude on the following formula: man is half-open being.
With man being half-open half-closed, what is set into understanding is that similar to the city, we can reverse our perception of our being and rather that presuming it to be something fixed, unalterable and bounded to physical, anthropological and emotional laws; one can realise that there are a number of vantage points on our point that allow the outside to nest within and the within to fleet to the outside. Memory and daydreaming are of such kind, whilst the first draws in and stores images and experiences which it later re-evokes upon contemplation, the later grasps upon the exterior images and flies beyond them in search of domains it has once known or utopias that are easily formed. Memory and daydreaming may refer to two types of people, the voyers and the flaneurs. The flaneur has the opportunity to travel unobstructed around his city and enjoy it in all weathers and times. His stroll is carefree, unhurried, epicurean. The flaneur is the type of traveller who appreciates a city once he has conquered it inside and out, and knows all about its decadence and its beauty. The voyeur on the other hand, is the man behind the window. The voyeur is bound and motionless and therefore his reverie suffers the same destiny. The voyeur spies
77
from a handicapped position and therefore his window of looking is always one that is taken to be prohibited. In Jefferies case, Lisa was the item of his gazing. The prohibition would lay in the fact that Jefferies desires another person that he cannot have. In the case of Nicosians, the mountain-flag monument is the item of their gazing. It is prohibited because for the Greek-Cypriots the site is traumatic, taking an insult by the flags and always remind of the war. The prohibition moreover includes everything that lies further and beyond the mountain, the previously owned areas that once used to thrive: Morphou, Kyrenia, Famagusta, Varossi etc. the Greek-Cypriot reverie projects to those occupied lands with the assistance of old photographs that testify times of peace, joy and plenitude. For the Turkish-Cypriot daydreaming, the mountainflag monument is a sending across a message which is shameful for some of them. Whilst a part of the Turkish-speaking population takes pride in the outcome of the war, having secured for the Turkish-Cypriots sovereignty over lands that they now claim to be their own, its permanent position does not fail, nevertheless, to traumatize some others who equally yearn of returning to their houses in the south, people who believe in a peaceful future between the two communities and those who are simply not happy living under the military protection of Turkey. What Nicosians often fail to acknowledge is that the flags are visible not only to the south but also to the north and that it may as well be an injury to some people other than Greek-Cypriots.
If the experience of living in a liminal city prerequisites its habitants to be motionless (even with the new opportunities of travelling across the Green Line) it is apparent that the Nicosians have learnt to navigate within their city and identify its landmarks from a partial point of view. It is relatively unknown what the Turkish community looks at as they gaze towards the south side of the city.
78
Perhaps the villagers in Taskent can make out the roof top of Apostolos Andreas basilica in Strovolos, just as Hagia Sophias Cathedral in the Turkish-Cypriot quarter is visible from any rooftop within the old city. If there is symmetry to be found in Nicosia, it is not always visible, since the privileges of evidence are the property of geometrical intuition. From the point of view of geometrical expressions, the dialectics of outside and inside is supported by a reinforced geometrism, in which limits are barriers. According to Bachelard, we must be free regarding all definitive intuitions (geometrism) if we are to experience the escapades of imagination. Inside and outside, as experienced by the imagination, can no longer be taken in their simple reciprocity, rather the dialectics of inside and outside multiply with countless diversified nuances. Outside and inside are both intimate they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility. If there exists a border-line surface between such and inside and outside, this surface is painful on both sides.
I chose to follow the discussion of borderscapes as symbolic landscapes, by presenting the case of the Turkish and TRNC flags on Mt. Pentadaktylos. This had been an interesting and challenging departing point for the writing of this paper because it provided an example of symbolic juxtaposition and my analysis could not have ignored the weaving of symbolisms found in place. The Kyrenia Mountains, more widely known as Mt. Pentadaktylos are one out of two major mountain ranges in Cyprus, Mt. Troodos being the second. Up until 2004 when the first check-points opened in Nicosia allowing people to move between the two parts of Cyprus, the Nicosians of the south had learnt to acknowledge in the sight of the mountain range a liminal border that would testify the occupation of the territories beyond. Its elevated presence in space dictates the political division taking place across the capital, but its branding with nationalistic
79
symbols and slogans is continuously remindful of the cultural and mental departing of the two communities.
It has been shown that throughout Cyprus, space is consistently flagged with charged signs and symbols which decipher different sovereignties. Political and religious alliances are formed and reproduced both in the Greek-speaking Christian side and the Turkish-speaking Muslim part. Whilst in most cases the rivalry symbolisms are applied uniformally and geometrically opposite, the morphology of the Cypriot soil allows for instances, as in the case of the flags, where the message sent across the Green Line cannot be competed with anything equally magnanimous. Or so it seems. On the way to Nicosia to the left of the highway lies a Greek-Cypriot refugee district. In the heart of that district rises Apostolos Andreas Cathedral, a relatively newly built church. From the highways level the driver passing by can see the refugee neighbourhood below to the left and the new amenities built around Latsia (IKEA, The Mall of Cyprus etc.) on the right. Mt. Pentadaktylos is also present, however the two flags are momentarily hidden. It comes to attention that the height of Apostolos Andreas Cathedral meets the two flags at their own height and length. Indeed, upon closer observation one notices that the cathedral is aligned with the two flags and a notional axis can be drawn across them and extends right down to IKEA and the new Mall.
Perhaps philosophy alone would never be enough to tackle with complex issues that address a reality indifferent to phenomenology. But it enables a different mode of theorizing when critical theory becomes circular and a new mode of criticizing when criticism becomes banal. Aiming for balance, which I
acknowledge it was not always possible to be met, nevertheless, I have tried to
80
argue, neither in favour of nor against either side. My interest in the Cypriot problem stems from a fascination with space and I have tried to use the textbook of the city to explore the degrees of division in place by focusing on notable visual practises that influence the way Nicosians relate to their city and to their fellow citizens. Although the topic is neither exhauster nor complete, it has set forward a number of questions and problematics, which are hopefully of concern. The text has been developed in a style I can only characterise as spiral. By this I mean that the lines of thought have been kept throughout its chapters but each time were developed in new ways. For this reason, the reader might suffer in search of linearity across the document, but I have worked keeping in mind Jean Tardieus methodology, In order to advance, I walk the treadmill of myself, Cyclone inhabited by immobility. But within, no more boundaries! Similar to the spiral being, the spiral text, appears from the outside with a well-invested centre, but the reader never reaches its centre. I have not been able to arrive to a definite answer for most of my questions, but the writing process has helped me to form many that had never troubled me before.
Appendix Images
81
Figure 1 The Turkish and Turkish-Cypriot national flags painted on the south-west slopes of Mountain Pentadaktylos.
Figure 2 Map displaying the division of districts in Cyprus. In blue colour is the district of Nicosia, in pink the district of Kyrenia. The red line running through from the north-west to the south-east represent the Green Line.
82
Figure 3 The Kyrenia Mountains, otherwise known as Pentadaktylos mountain range is located north of the Green Line and belongs to the Kyrenia District.
Figure 4 In the 1980s, following the self-proclamation of the TRNC the Turkish and Turkish-Cypriot national flags were inscribed onto the slopes of the Kyrenia Mountains, in a size and position that made them ubiquitous to all of Nicosia and at a majority of locations along the Green Line in the district.
Figure 5 Left: Greek-Cypriot war prisoners before they were executed and buried in a mass-grave in Tzaos (1974). Right: the murder of a Turkish-Cypriot family at Dr. Nihat Ilhans house (1963), today the Museum of 83
Barbarism in northern Cyprus. Among many other widely circulated pictures, such images have had a profound influence in shaping public opinion on both sides of the Green Line.
Figure 6 A well-circulated and popular Greek-Cypriot banner commemorating the 1974 war and the islands division with the slogan I forget not ( ).
Figure 7 Coats of Arms. Left: On August 16, 1960, Cyprus attained independence from the British after an agreement in Zrich and London between the United Kingdom, Greece and Turkey. Right: On November 15, 1983 Rauf Denkta, the leader of the Turkish-Cypriot community, proclaimed the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus to which he became its first President.
84
Figure 8 Free distribution of notebooks in GreekCypriot public schools with images of towns, cities, landscapes and monuments in the occupied north, were accompanied by the I forget not slogan.
Figure 9 Map of Cyprus showing the area of Tylliria and Kokkina, the Turkish military enclave, isolated from the main Turkish-Cypriot belt of influence.
85
Figure 9 A Google Earth satellite photograph of the Turkish and Turkish Cypriot national flags painted on a hillside in Kokkina (351116.98N, 323711.41E) with an orientation of north to north-west. The flags are approximately 12 m. in height and 20 m. in length, covering an area of appr. 480 sq. m. The flags position is outward rather than inland, meant to be seen from Turkey which is about 160 km away.
Figure 10 Google Earth satellite photograph of Aronas hill in Aglandzia, Nicosia, with the Turkish-flag engraving onto its slopes facing the Greek-Cypriot soil to the west. The position is inward looking, meant to be seen by the Greek-Cypriots.
86
Figure 11 A gigantic metal construction resembling Kemal Atatrk working his way towards the top of the mountain. The pose is said to represent the founder of modern Turkey, with his gaze turned towards Greece, contemplating his next strategic steps.
Figure 12 Left: A chalk message written on the road in front of a Greek guard point facing a Turkish one in Nicosia, featuring the colours of the Greek flag. It reads Our borders are not here. Right: The Green-Line in the Turkish sector takes the form of a fortification, a continuous wall.
87
Figure 13 The TRNC flag seen from any part and both sides of Nicosia during night hours. The illumination sessions stops towards dawn.
88
Figure 14 The TRNC Flag seen on satellite (top), from across Nicosia (right) and inside Taskent (left).
89
Bibliography
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (revised edition) London and New York: VERSO, 1991. Bachelard, Gastone. The Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980), translated by Richard Howard, Vintage: 2000. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, Michigan: 1994. Benjamin, Andrew. Architectural Philosophy. Interrupting confession, resisting absolution: monuments after the Holocaust. London, New Brunswick, NJ: The Athlone Press, 2000. pp. 181-200. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia, New York: 2001. Braudy, Leo. The World in Frame: What We See in Films, Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1976. Calame, Jon and Charlesworth, Esther. Divided Cities: Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar and Nicosia, PENN, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2009, pp. 121-142. Cassia, Paul Sant, Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus, Berghahn Books, 2005. D. Fatta (et al), An overview of the water and wastewater management practices in Cyprus, The University of Cyprus. Hatay, Mete and Bryant, Rebecca. The Jasmine Scent of Nicosia: Of Returns, Revolutions, and the Longing for Forbidden Pasts in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Number 26, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, pp. 423-449. Heaney, Seamus. North, Faber and Faber, 1975. Heidegger, Martin. Building, Dwelling, Thinking. From Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology (1954), in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings from 'Being and Time' (1927) to 'The Task of Thinking' (1964), edited by David Krell, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993. Hornby, A. S. Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary of Current English, edited by Jonathan Crowther, fifth edition, Oxford University Press, 1995. Kafalas, Philip A. Mnemonic Locations: The Housing of Personal Memory in Prose from the Ming and Qing in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 27, Dec. 2005, pp. 93-116. Kolossov, Vladimir. International boundary: a barrier or an open door? The influence of perceptions on crossboundary cooperation, 2006. Lacan, Jacques. crits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton, 1977. Lacan, Jacques. Freud's Papers on Technique 1953-1954. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1. translated by John Forrester and edited by JacquesAlain Miller, New York: Norton, 1991. Leach, Neil (ed.). Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, Routledge, 1997.
90
Loos, Amanda. Theories of Media: Symbolic, Real, Imaginary The University of Chicago, 2002. Maratheftis F. S. Location and Development of the Town of Leucosia (Nicosia) Cyprus, Thesis submitted in 1958 to the University of Bristol. Published by the Nicosia Municipality, June 1977. Minghi, Julian V. Borderscapes of Optimism: Based in Reality or Doomed to Disappointment? 2008. Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 1989. Papadakis, Yiannis. Aphrodite Delights in the Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Volume 9, Number 3, Routledge, 2006, pp. 237-250. Papadakis, Yiannis. Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide, I. B. Tauris, 2005. Papalexandrou, Nassos. Constructed Landscapes: Visual Cultures of Violent Contacts in the Stanford Journal of Archaeology, Volume 5, 2007, pp. 164-182. Papalexandrou, Nassos. Hala Sultan Tekke, Cyprus: An Elusive Landscape of Sacredness in a Liminal Context in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies 26 (2) October 2008, pp. 251-281. Rajaram, Prem Kumar and Grundy-Warr, Carl (eds.), Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territorys End, University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Sartre, Jean Paul. Being and Nothingness (1943). Routledge, 1990. Sharff, Stefan. The Art of Looking in Hitchcocks Rear Window, New York: Limelight Editions, 1997. Uluda, Sevgl. Oysters with their Missing Pearls, IKME & BILBAN, 2005. Marx-Engels Collected Works, Editors Footnotes from Volume 3 published in the section From the Correspondence of 1843 in the DeutschFranzsische Jahrbcher.
Internet Sources
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178021 http://lettere.unipa.it/borderscapes2/ http://www.unitn.it/events/borderscapes/index.htm http://uob-community.ballarat.edu.au/~patkinson/hx513/cinelec1.htm www.uest.gr/medaware/publications/Fatta_et_al_2.doc http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/scape http://my.telegraph.co.uk/john_akritas/blog/2007/10/08/the_occupied_mountain http://www.costasmontis.com/multimedia/audio/songs/pentadaktylos.wav http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/cw/volume03/footnote.htm#22 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.htm l http://heideggerian.blogspot.com/2006/06/presencing-and-essencing.html http://www.iep.utm.edu/heidegge/ http://www.utas.edu.au/philosophy/staff_research/malpas/J.Malpas %20Articles/The%20Problem%20of%20Dependence.htm http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/heidegger7a.htm http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/symbolicrealimaginary.htm http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/media http://www.trncinfo.com/TANITMADAIRESI/2002/ENGLISH/ALLaboutTRNC/Page01. htm http://www.un.int/cyprus/resolut.htm 91
http://www.onwar.com/aced/data/cite/cyprus1963.htm http://countrystudies.us/cyprus/13.htm http://www.trncinfo.com/TANITMADAIRESI/2002/ENGLISH/HISTORY/PAGE13.htm http://liminalzones.kein.org/ http://www2.cytanet.com.cy/pervolia-dim-la/den_xexno.htm http://www.antibaro.gr/society/iwannidhs_istoria.php http://flagspot.net/flags/cy-trnc.html#des http://www.pio.gov.cy http://news.pseka.net http://www.kktcbayrak.org/ http://www.cyprus-mail.com/news/main.php?id=30941&archive=1 http://cyprus74.blogspot.com/2009/05/blog-post_19.html http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1068995.html http://www.cyprus44.com/culture/flag.asp http://www.moi.gov.cy/moi/pio/pio.nsf/ http://czanou.blogspot.com/2009/06/blog-post_21.html http://www2.hawaii.edu/~zuern/demo/heidegger/guide9.html http://www.abdn.ac.uk/philosophy/endsandmeans/vol2no1/gorner.shtml http://www.studyworld.com/newsite/ReportEssay/Science/Social %5CMartin_Heidegger.htm http://www.michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=36 http://www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/04/12/25/TheLook.pdf
92

Borders Capes As Symbolic Landscapes

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originalbeschreibung:

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Borders Capes As Symbolic Landscapes

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

1 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

BORDERSCAPES AS SYMBOLIC LANDSCAPES:

2 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

3 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

4 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

5 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

6 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

7 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

8 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

9 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

10 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

11 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

12 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

13 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

14 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

15 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

16 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

Momentum in philosophy stands for an aspect of a thing, an essential or constituent factor.

17 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

18 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

Atkinson, ibid. Leach, ibid. p. 89. Ibid.

19 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

20 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

The symbolic, through language, is

21 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

interventors and are mediated39 upon a corporal boundary (Figure 6).

22 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

23 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

24 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

North (means up)

25 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

26 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

27 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

28 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

29 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

30 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

31 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

32 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

Papadakis, ibid. p. 241.

33 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

34 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

Hatay, ibid., p. 425.

35 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

36 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

37 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

38 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

Aurora Borealis (means northern lights)

39 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

40 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

41 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

exaggerated, is still anticipated.80

42 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

43 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

44 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

45 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

46 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

47 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

48 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

49 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

50 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes

Cascade (means to fall)

51 STEPHANOU Symbolic Landscapes