Third Text 2008

Third Text, Vol. 22, Issue
1,
l)\
January, 2A08,85-98
fr
Routledge
laviorstranl;1s1e'P
Bordering the lsland
Nermin Saybagrh
In his essay, .What Children Say', Gilles Deleuze mentions Little Hans
who coloured in maps, inverted, superimposed and assigned them to
their respective leaders: England and Churchill, Germany and Hitler.
Deleuze interprets his re-mapping, which follows world-historical trajectories, in these words:
It is the libido's business to haunt history and geography, to organise
formations of worlds and constellations of universes, to make continents
drift and to populate them with races, tribes, and nations.l
Taking the child-soldier as the main protagonist, I will try to track down
what is behind the appearance of the figure and the image of the child
on the haunted map of Cyprus in reference to contemporary art practices and issues of cultural representation. It is important to note that
'the child' I speak of here does not only refer to certain ages or physical
qualities, but also, and more importantly, to the condition of 'being a
child', especially in the context of nation-building. This 'child' is far
away from 'becoming' a topography whose territory has been captured.
It is to suggest, drawing on another Deleuze essay 'Deserted Islands', a
new understanding of the island as a topography, an alternative collectivity as opposed to territorial unity and a single point of commonality.
'!(e can see the determination of a 'becoming' in the performative speech
of Nege Yagrn in Kutlu$ Ataman's video-installation 1+1=L. Yagrn, a
Turkish-Cypriot poet currently living on the Greek side of Cyprus who
cannot cross to the Turkish side, draws her own cartographic mapping
that turns the fixed immobiliry into a journey across the divided land of
the island, in contrast to Little Hans whose imaginary cartographic
activity lacks traiectories that powerfully turn the imaginary into a
'becoming' of an affective journey.
Gilles Deleuze,'What
Children Say', in Essays
Critical and Clinical, trans
DanielA Smith and
Michael A Greco, Verso,
London-New York, 1998,
p62
PEKF OKAIATNTTY OF THE
CHILD-SOLDIER
In one of the old Turkish melodramas Sezercik KiiEiik Milcahit (Sezercik,
The Little Crusader, director, Ertem Goreg, 1974), Sezer, an orphan boy
searching for his mother from whom he was separated when a baby,
Tbird Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online
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finds himself in the Turkish army at war againsr Greek Cypriots. The
film repeats the basic clich6s one can find in many Turkish melodramas
of the 1950s and 1970s, advertised as children;s movies but actually
widely watched - even now - by adults and which can be read as propagandistic, activating the nationalist feelings of Cyprus as directly linked
to the official 'Family History' of the Republic of Turkey. In these melodramas, the sad and lonely,yet strong and virtuous child, a boy, almost
literally 'thirteen going on thirty', is the central protagonist.2 In films
where the search for the broken family provides the repertoire and space
for melodramatic enactments, the poor - often also an orphan - child has
becomes the figure of the 'saviour' who delivers iustice and happiness to
the world.
Sezer's father, a Turkish pilot and first lieutenant, is killed when his
plane crashes on his journey to Cyprus. His devastated mother goes off
to Cyprus, to her sister and brother-in-law; and gives birth to Sezer. But
while she returns to Turkey for a brief period to visit her ill mother, leaving her baby with her sister,the coup d'etat in Greece set off a series of
murders and tortures of Turkish Cypriots. Sezer's aunt and husband are
murdered by the EOKA (Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston) militants who raid and rob their house. Sezer, unnoticed in his crib by the
militants, is raised by a couple. Sezer's mother in Turkey, who learns of
the death of her sister from the newspaper and believes that her son is
also dead, goes insane and is admitted to a mental institution. In the
following years, the tyranny of Greek Cypriots over Turkish Cypriots
escalates. Through his heroic actions against the oppression and terror
In one of her essays in her
importanr book Kbti)
Qocuh Tiirk (Turk the Bad
Boy), Nurdan Giirbilek
reads the sad and grieving
image of the child shedding
tears, which became a
cherished image in the
1970s and '80s in Turkey,
as the symbol of the whole
society. She provocatively
argues that to bear sorrow
became a 'national value'
an Eastern pride was
derived from destitution,
inabilities or weakness, and
a feeling of 'national
orphanhood'was
materialised in the image of
the child. See Nurdak
Giirbilek, 'Acrlann
Qocu[u', in Kijtil Q,ocuh
Tilrk, Metis Yayrnlarr,
Istanbul, 2001, pp 37-51.
of the Greek Cypriots, Sezer earns the respect of the adults, especially the
soldiers. In his search for his mother, Sezer begins to represent the solitary, brave, just, compassionate Turkish nation. Nothing less would be
expected from the son of a manyr. As the shoemaker, who raised him as
his own son, tells him before being killed by Greek Cypriots, it is his
destiny and duty to become 'an honourable Turkish soldier' as this is 'in
his blood'. Sezer's first heroic deed is to participate in the capture of the
EOKA militants who murdered his family and were planning to raid a
neighbouring village. He is saluted by the soldiers as a 'real' soldier but
does not use the gun given to him by the sergeant to kill the EOKA militants. In this scene of the film, the line between good and bad, right and
wrong, innocent and guilty is conclusively drawn. The Turkish sergeant
shouts at the captured EOKA militants: 'You have killed innocent,
unarmed people. Your nation can't learn how to fight.' And when Sezer
chooses not to raise his gun against them, he continues: 'Even the children of the Turkish nation will not draw their gun on the enemy.' Sezer
is now a uniformed soldier eventually promoted to first lieutenant - the
rank held by his father at his death - after various heroic acts, such as
delivering a letter
to the flagman and thus saving three villages and
rescuing a mother from rape by a Greek Cypriot. His mother recovers
from her illness, after the so-called Cyprus Peace Action, and visits
Cyprus where she learns that her son is alive. She listens to heroic tales
of a son who has become a legend in Cyprus.
The story is based on the events of 1953-1,964 in Cyprus. For
instance, Sezer's pilot father, killed in an plane crash, recalls Lieutenant
Cengiz Topel whose aircraft was hit in 1,964. At the end of the film,
Sezer and his mother are reunited at a military ceremony which typically
87
used to occur in the big stadiums of Turkey during national holidays. In
the final scene, mother and son salute the Turkish soldiers under the
Turkish flag after the so-called Cyprus Peace Action.
Christine Gledhill points out that melodrama refers not only to a type
of aesthetic practice but also to a way of viewing the world. Melodrama,
she argues, 'utilizes a narrative mechanism that creates a blockage to
expression, thereby forcing melodramatic enactments
3
ChristineGledhill,'The
Melodramatic Field: An
Investigation,' in Home Is
rX/here The Heart Is, ed
Christine Gledhill, BFI
Publishing, London, 1987,
P30
4
lbid, pp 31-2
5
By problematising the
matter of the body Judith
Butler argues that instead
of a natural or static
condition of the body, 'sex'
is what Foucault has called
the'regulatory ideal' whose
materialisation is
compelled. This
materialisation takes place
through highly regulated
practices, the processes of
forcible reiteration of fixed
and regulated forms. Butler
points out that what
constitutes the fixiry of the
body, its contours, its
movements, can be fully
material, but in the light of
the dimension of
'performative'
construction, we are able to
rerhink rhis marerialiry as
the effect of power: 'once
"sex" itself is understood in
its normativity, the
materiality of the body will
not be thinkable apart from
the materialisation of that
regulatory form. "Sex" is
not simply what one has, or
a static description of what
one is: it will be one of the
norms by which the "one"
becomes viable at all, that
which qualifies a body for
life within the domain of
cultura I intelligibiliry.'
Judith Butler, Bodies That
Matter: On The Discursiue
Limits Of 'Sex', Routledge,
New York-London, 1993,
pp 1-2.
6
Jacques Derrida, Specters
of Marx, Routledge, New
York-London, 1994, p l0
into alternative
and excessive strategies to clarify the dramatic stakes'.3 It searches for
lost or repressed feelings and thus attests to forces, desires or fears
which, even if they no longer possess physical reality, still appear to
operate in human life independently of rational explanation. \florking
less towards the release of individual repression than towards the public
enactment of socially unacknowledged states,4 melodramas offer an
alternative reality to the familiar, accepted or expected. The fantasies on
the screen can be proiections of the audience's own fantasies; the world
the audience wants to see (power, wealth, beauty, passion) directly
reflects their inner thoughts, fears or desires. By depicting the island as a
geography overflowing with the 'turbulent' waves of Turkish nationalism, Sezercik Kilgilk Milcahit affirms the ongoing construcion of
Turkey's official Cyprus ideology - recalling once again that the film was
shot in '1974, the year of the so-called Cyprus Peace Operation. In every
w?I, Cyprus is 'family business', subject to injustice, cruelty and orphanhood, and yet the motherland will not desert the 'baby-land', reaching
out to the desperate island folk one way or the other, and thus reuniting
kin with the 'main family' in a happy ending
The figure of the 'child-soldier' does not remain a fictional film hero.
The 'real' soldier-children, as central and strategic actors, have long
inhabited public settings in the social topography of Turkey. Small boys,
sometimes wearing military uniforms, can be seen alongside their
parents, participating in protests or national demonstrations. The presence of boys in these events not only affirms the stability of assumed
adult collectivity but also strengthens it. These are the moments in which
nationalism is displayed and actively reproduced.
Is there any'real' body of the child other than the production of what
precedes its very presence? Is not 'being child' like other categories, such
as 'being woman' or 'being black', the end result of discursive practices
that enact or produce that which they name? 'Being child', as a socially
constructed category rather than a natural existence, works in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of a certain body and thus
circulates certain discourses in the social, political and cultural domains.s
\7hat interests me in child performativity is the way in which the
figure and image of the child are mobilised as means to other ends and
the way in which, while engaging in a masquerade, the body of the
child performs a set of already planned activities, produces material
effects, accumulates and distributes certain discourses. This can indicate
only one thing: what is called 'the child' is what is in fact missing from
the picture; it is constantly someone else and somewhere else. If the
materiality of the body is nothing more than the effect of power, as
Michel Foucault has already shown us a long time ago, then the child
is 'the ghost'.
In his book Specters of Marx,Jacques Derrida outlines a new science
of 'hauntology', a science of 'ghosts', of what 'returns'.6 The 'ghost'
89
*"€lF€€ s iF*
'1F@€#* F *# d#*{
'Where
Giilsijn Karamustafa,
the Continents Meet (installation view), 1997, digital print,
'Werner
fabric, size variable, collection of the artist, photo:
Maschmann
It introduces fleeting modality to material being, and leaves a 'trace' that
'We
marks the present with its absence in advance.
can therefore claim
that 'the body of the child' signifies no more than the invisible 'external'
power that has possessed him. The body of the child, its positioning as a
highly loaded and fetishised sign, carries inscriptions other than its own.
In her installation 'Wbere the Continents Meet (1997), Giilsiin
Karamustafa used a photograph of a boy soldier that she took in a
studio in Istanbul. This photograph reminds us how Turkish parents
were keen to dress their boys of six or seven in uniforms and proudly
display their photographs of this 'special day' in their living room or
family albums. These photographs represent the first stage of the transition from 'being a boy' to 'being a man', a strong one who loves his
country and preferably a soldier who is capable of protecting it. In
'Where
the Continents Meet, the child is located in a landscape of accumulated soldiers' uniforms. Does not the boy look exactly like Sezer save
for the fact that he is not as blonde? He stands on the borderline, a
'sunny land' at his back. And could this not easily be an island, Cyprus
for instance? The caption reads: 'The objects found in Tahtakale on the
European coast at 1.4.37 h,24 March 1,997, and the photo, found in
Kadrkoy on the Asian coast at '1.1,.25 h,7 April 1,997, in Istanbul (where
the continents meet)'. The body of the boy represents the world's
geographical and imaginative crossroads; it is both what connects these
two continents and what dissolves them. Sezer too crosses the barricadelike newly constructed border when the ethnic conflict is at its peak. At
the moment of his crossing, we notice a warning sign on the border wall:
'The Other Side is Greek'. Sezer's acts are performative. His presence
marks the land; his crossing makes the border more visible, loaded with
particular codes and certain meanings.
Judith Butler distinguishes performativity from a singular 'act', theatrical self-presence and performance. In her conception, performativity
cannot be understood outside a process of iterability, a regularised and
89
s€
€€€*@ F
lF.siFs€
* www{
Gi.ilstin Karamustafa, Where the Continents Meet (installation view), 1997, digital print,
fabric, size variable, collection of the artist, photo: rJ7erner Maschmann
It introduces fleeting modality to material being, and leaves a 'trace' that
marks the present with its absence in advance. rWe can therefore claim
that 'the body of the child' signifies no more than the invisible 'external'
power that has possessed him. The body of the child, its positioning as a
highly loaded and fetishised sign, carries inscriptions other than its own.
In her installation .Wbere the Continents Meet (1,997), Gi.ilsiin
Karamustafa used a photograph of a boy soldier that she took in a
studio in Istanbul. This photograph reminds us how Turkish parents
were keen to dress their boys of six or seven in uniforms and proudly
display their photographs of this 'special day' in their living room or
family albums. These photographs represent the first stage of the transition from 'being a boy' to 'being a man', a strong one who loves his
country
and preferably a soldier who is capable of protecting it. In
.Wbere
the Continents Meet, the child is located in a landscape of accumulated soldiers' uniforms. Does not the boy look exactly like Sezer save
for the fact that he is not as blonde? He stands on the borderline, a
'sunny land' at his back. And could this not easily be an island, Cyprus
for instance? The caption reads: 'The objects found in Tahtakale on the
European coast at 1,4.37 h,24 March 1,997, and the photo, found in
Kadrkoy on the Asian coast at '1.I.25 h,7 April 1.997, in Istanbul (where
the continents meet)'. The body of the boy represents the world's
geographical and imaginative crossroads; it is both what connects these
two continents and what dissolves them. Sezer too crosses the barricadelike newly constructed border when the ethnic conflict is at its peak. At
the moment of his crossing, we notice a warning sign on the border wall:
'The Other Side is Greek'. Sezer's acts are performative. His presence
marks the land; his crossing makes the border more visible, loaded with
particular codes and certain meanings.
Judith Butler distinguishes performativity from a singular 'act', theatrical self-presence and performance. In her conception, performativity
cannot be understood outside a process of iterability, a regularised and
90
Gtlstin Karamustafa, Where the Continents Meet (detail)
1,997,
digital print, fabric, size variable, collection of the artist
Butler, op cit, p 95
Giorgio Agamben,'In
Playland: Reflections on
History and Play', in
lnfancy and History:
Essays on the Destruction
of Experience, Verso,
London-New York, L993,
p69
constrained repetition of norms. Butler points out that repetition is not
performed by a subject but, rather, the repetition itself is what enables a
subject and constitutes its temporal condition. This iterability implies
that 'performance' is not a singular'act' or event but a ritualised production reiterated under and through constraint.T In his essay 'In Playland',
Giorgio Agamben notes that ritual in its temporal form transforms
events into structures and functions as a fixing and structuring rhythm of
the official calendar of society.8 As performative events, the depiction of
the child as soldier or the demonstrations and protests the children
partake in can be read as ritualistic events. Through such mostly spectacular events watched by the masses, nationalist discourse achieves its
imagined and desired goals by producing subjects and bodies, determining behaviours and penetrating people's minds.
The phantasmatic staging of nationalist protests or demonstrations
reveals that identification belongs only to an imaginary site. As Butler
points out, fantasy is not an activity of an akeady formed subject but the
staging and dispersion of the subject into a variety of identificatory posi-
tions. 'Identifications are phantasmatic efforts of alignment, loyalty,
ambiguous and cross-corporeal cohabitation; they unsettle the "I"; they
91.
are the sedimentation of the "we" in the constitution of lny "I"'.e
During the discussion of the phantasmatic, Butler mentions Slavoj
Zii,ek's attempt in his book The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) to
link political signifiers like 'women', 'democracy' and 'freedom' as rallying points for mobilisation and politicisation with the notion of phantasmatic investment and phantasmatic promise.lo The body of the child in
the structural events carries the performative character of political signi-
9
Butler, op cit, p 105
10
Ibid, p 191
tl
James R Kincaid, Child-
Louing, The Erotic Cbild
and Victorian Culture,
Routledge, New YorkLondon, 1992,pp77-9
t2 Derrida, op cit, pp
13
1.25-7
Northern Cyprus is called
'baby-land' (yauru-uatanl
in Turkey. At the same
time, as Vamrk D Volkan
and Norman Itzkowitz tell
us, Greece is seen as the
'mother' of the Republic of
Cyprus, who is looking
after it with compassion,
while Turkey is depicted as
a 'father' who threatens to
do everything to destroy ir.
Athens Nerzs, 4-5 June
1,989, p 5; cited by Vamrk
D Volkan and Norman
Itzkowitz, Tiirkler ue
Yunanlar: Q,ahSan
Komsular \Turks and
Greeks, Neighbours in
Conflict), Baglam
Yayrnlan, Istanbul 2002,
p 209.
fier. Political signifiers do not represent pre-given constituencies but are
empty signs which come to bear phantasmatic investments. In this
respect, the child as a political signifier has become mobilised and his
body turned into the site of phantasmatic investment.
I argue that the child is a cultural sign and its meaning never sticks
for long. Sooner or later it is replaced by another, sometimes with its
opposite. The figure of the child-soldier can operate freely or at least
almost unnoticed in the social domain because of the established mythology of childhood innocence. However, the myth of childhood innocence,
as James R Kincaid points out, 'empties' the child of its own political
agency, since innocence is a state of being that was pure nothingness
secretly nourished by its opposite. As a category created but not occupied, the child could be a repository of cultural needs or fears not
adequately disposed of elsewhere. As Kincaid has rightly asserted, 'the
child carries for us things we somehow cannot carry for ourselves, sometimes anxieties we want to be divorced from and sometimes pleasures so
great we would not, without the child, know how to contain them'.11
The body of the child in Karamustafa's work, like that of Sezer, activates nationalist discourses, proudly announcing 'Glorious History' or
'One Turk \forth the \Thole S(orld' and so on. The child comes to life in
the image of a child-soldier, a fetishised object, a borrowed body, an
incarnation of a body. Derrida notes that there can be no 'ghost', no apparition unless there is a body to return to. This body is a visible-invisible
body under institutional or cultural protection; a fetish under armour.
The fetish, in Derrida's words, is 'neither perceptible nor invisible, but
remains flesh, in a body without nature, in an a-physical body that could
be called... a technical body or an institutional body'.12 The child-soldier
standing on the border in the photograph does not have his own body his is a haunted-body. His material body has taken on the apparitional
appearance of the Family, the State and the Motherland.
CI.PRUS : A HAUNTED
ISLAND
Sezer never grew up in his films and, as if sharing his destiny, Cyprus
was also condemned to be an eternal 'child'. 'Being child' in this context
does not refer to certain ages or physical qualities but to being a small
part attached to a greatff whole that ontologically precedes its very presence. This'child',t'ro far ftom 'becoming'in Deleuzean terms, is also a
topography whose territory has been captured, or rather has been
haunted.
The island does not refer to an original entity, just as the two ethnic
groups there do not come readymade with a demand for ontological
existence. Even though the two states (the Turkish one unrecognised)
claim ownership of the island, neither of them can attain ontological
92
status since they see themselves as the organic parts of rwo different
nation-states, namely Greece and Turkey. The island as a territory refers
to rwo other territories outside its space which both precede its existence. It recalls a particular colonial discourse, that in which family and
filial bonds bind the colony to the mother country. In the words of
Achille Mbembe: 'The native was a great child crushed by long atavism,
was incapable of autonomous thought and could make no distinction
between vice and virtue.'14 Two parties - through operations of ownership - have territorialised Cyprut, a previously.olonlr.d land.
Unity on the divided island was imagined on the basis of race and
religion: either being Greek and Christian or being Turkish and Muslim.
The border between two communities on the island is the border
berween Turkey and Greece. Thus it expands and diffuses. This
produces an ambiguity around where the 'real' border lies and escalates
the tension berween the Turkish and Greek Cypriot. In this respect,
Cyprus, the third biggest island in the Mediterranean, constrained
between Turkish and Greek nationalisms, is too 'crowded' in the sense
of being located in a zone of interaction berween regional pressures and
international politics. It is not only seen as a matter of 'national business
and interest' for Turkey and Greece, two hegemonic state forces outside
its territory yet firmly attached to it, recalling the infant's primal relation
to the body of his/her mother,ls but also historically as an 'international
interest' mainly for Britain, the US and the EU. When we look at the socalled 'Cyprus Problem', what we see is that the island has become a
prosthesis, a supplement which opens up its space to external powers
t4 Achille Mbembe, On
the
lony, Universiry of
California Press, Los
P
ostco
Angeles-London, 200
I,
p33
1.t
Drawing on Freudian
theory of human
maturation, M6lanie Klein
notes that the mother, who
is loving, caring for,
helping and feeding the
infant, represents the
whole of the external
world for the infant during
the first few months. But
maturation of the child
depends on gradually
cutting his/her ties from the
maternal body, which as
the source of fantasy stirs
love, hatred and powerful
curiosiry for him./her. See
Melanie Klein, Our Adub
World and Its Roots in
Infancy (19 59];, Tavistock,
London, 1960, pp 4-6, 1,4.
t6 Gilles Deleuze,'Desert
Islands', in Desert lslands
and Other Texts, 1953L974, semiotext(e), ed
David Lapoujade, Los
Angeles-London, 2004,
pp 9-10
and dynamics.
How has an island in the middle of the Mediterranean that served as
the meeting point of various traditions and cultures throughout history
become a bounded space?
For Deleuze, humans can live on an island only by forgetting what an
island represents. The island is either from before or for after humankind. It has to be preserved absolutely separate and alone, and even if it
is inhabited, it is still 'deserted':
tbe island is... the origin, radical and absolute...lt is no longer the island
that is separated from the continent; it is humans who find themselves
separated from the world when on the island. It is no longer the island
that is created from the bowels of the earth through the liquid depths; it is
humans who create the world anew from the island and on the waters.
Humans thus take up for themselves both movements of the island and
are able to do so on an island that, precisely, lacks one kind of movement: humans can drift toward an island that is nonetheless originary,
and they can create on an island that has merely drifted away. On closer
inspection, we find here a new reason for every island to be and remain in
theory deserted.l6
Geographically, an island is born as the result of eruptions and fractures.
It is therefore a counter-geography, a 'line of flight' from any attempt at
localisation. The island is beyond all horizons; it is only related to its own
being. Its very existence, by nature, cannot know any totality outside of
itself. Perhaps it is because of this that the idea and image of the island
symbolises utopian dreams and promises for the future to come. The
opposite might also be the case: the island can be functionalised as a
\
I
93
prison which guarantees the isolation of the most 'notorious criminals' or
the ones being exiled from society.
For Deleuze, the movements of people put an end to the island's
desertedness, but only in appearance. In reality, the 6lan, the mythological figure which draws humans towards islands, and to their death with
its beautiful siren voice, produces the island as deserted. The existence of
the human on the island brings its desertedness to its acme. In other
words, humans cannot really master the island or overcome its existence,
since their existence on the island does not mark any type of belonging.
On the contrary:
... they would give the island only a dynamic image of itself,
a conscious-
of the movement which produced the island, such that through them
the island would in the end become consciousness of itself as deserted and
unpeopled. The island would be only the dream of humans, and humans,
the pure consciousness of the island.17
ness
\fhat
Deleuze calls the desertedness of the island is clearly the opposite
of the notion of territorial unity and absolute belonging:
... human beings live there aheady, but uncommon humans, they are
absolutely separate, absolute creators, in short, an Idea of humanity, a
prototype, a man who would almost be a god, a woman who would be a
goddess, a great Amnesiac, a pure Artist, a consciousness of Earth and
Ocean, an enormous hurricane) a beautiful witch, a statue from the
Easter Islands. There you have a human being who precedes itself.l8
The human's sheer being joins the 'deserted' island, without claiming
ownership and identity, in order not to reproduce something already
known but to create anew. Deleuze's conception can be a prototype of
the collective soul, a constant re-creation from scratch. The philosopher's ideas suggest to us that each island is singular. An island knows
no interiority; it has its own exteriority which cannot be enclosed. It is
'self-organisative'. It borders itself and is itself bordering. In this sense,
the island is what Agamben calls the 'outside':
The outside is not another space that resides beyond a determinate space,
but rather, it is a passage, the exteriority that gives it access - in a word, it
is its face, its eidos.re
1,7
Ibid, p 10
18
Ibid, p
19
Giorgio Agamben,The
11
Coming Community,
University of Minnesota
Press, MinneapolisLondon,2001, p 58
20 Ibid, p 67
21
Ibid, pp 1, 86
This understanding of the island can offer us an alternative mode of
being and a different mode of collectivity taking place in its open and
empty space. In Agamben's conception, 'outside', as a threshold that is a
point of contact with an external space, 'must remain empty'.20 It can
only be inhabited, not rooted, by the 'singularities' which form a
community without having representable identity and absolute belonging, or with respect to a common property such as 'being red', 'being
French','being Muslim'.21
History shows us that in Cyprus the movements of peoples have
never been fluid or without pre-established and planned objectives.
Movements towards the island have been organised and controlled
mostly by forces and powers outside its territory. To sum up the major
events in history: When Ottoman rule started in 1.571., a population
of Muslims was sent to the island in order to 'balance' the Christian
94
22
Cited in Niyazi Krzrlyiirek,
Do{mamrg Bir Deuletin
Tarihi: Birlegik Krbns
Cumhuriyeti (The Story of
An Unborn State: Republic
of Cyprus),iletigim
Yayrnlan, Istanbul, 2005,
pp 84-5.
Rauf Denktag's words are
an alarming example: 'I am
an Anatolian boy. Every
part of me is Turkish and
my roots are in Central
Asia. I am Turkish in my
culture, my language, my
history, with my entire
existence. I have a nation
and a homeland. The
culture of Cyprus, a
Turkish Cypriot, a Greek
Cypriot, Federal Republic,
this is all nonsense. If they
have Greece and we have
Turkey, why should we live
under the roof of the same
republic?... There is neither
a Turkish Cypriot nor a
Greek Cypriot, nor even a
Cypriot. Don't ever ask us
if we are "Cypriots". This
might be considered as an
insult and some
misunderstanding might
occur. lJilhy? It is because
there is only one Cypriot
living in Cyprus and it is
the donkey of Cyprus.' See
Ortan't, 13 November
1995, cited by Niyazi
Krzrlyiirek, op cit, p 40.
population. This was followed by the era of British colonialism starting
in 1878. Unlike the decolonisation movements which arose after the
Second World W'ar in other colonial societies, where the idea of 'nation'
was the main driving force for the resistance against imperial power and
oppression, Cypriot society has never been able to go through the process
of nation-building.ln 1,950, as a result of international treaties between
Britain, Greece and Turkey, Cyprus gained its independence and legitimacy as the state of Cyprus. But the words of the Greek leader Makarios
will explain the perception of both the Greek Cypriots and Turkish
Cypriots, which emphasises that this state is not based on a national identity: 'International treaties built a state, but not a nation.' And indeed, the
conflict was soon to come following the pact. In 1963, after the coup
d'6tat in Greece, the Turkish Cypriots were forced into enclaves and
attacked by the EOKA whose goal was enosis (union with a greater
Greece). In 1974, there was a coup d'6tat, this time in Cyprus and mainly
supported by Greece. This was followed by the armed intervention of
Turkey and the island was divided into two. Geographical division was
'sfithin one year of the armed interfollowed by demographic division.
vention by Turkey, Turkish Cypriots were forced to move to the northern
part of the island and Greek Cypriots to the south. From around the
1950s, Turkish Cypriot elites, who aimed to divide the island berween
Turkey and Greece - this partition was called Taksim - and who were
directly supported by the Turkish government and upheld by demonstrations in the big cities, had an agenda to nationalise northern Cyprus as an
organic part of the Turkish homeland. As many Turkish Cypriots left the
island after 1974, heading mostly for Britain owing to financial difficulties, the Turkish government transferred 'Turkish' people to Cyprus to
prevent a decrease in the Turkish population. Rauf Denktag, one of the
chief architects of 'Northern Cypriot Turkish History' and who served as
leader of the Turkish Federated State of Cyprus between 1,97 5 and 1983
and of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus between 1983 and
2005, establishing a systematic Turkish nationalism on the island, stated
that'both the leaving and the comingare all Turkish'. In fact, for him,
those who were coming to Cyprus were even more 'Turkish'. During one
of his public speeches in 2000, the President of the Republic of Turkey at
the time, Siileyman Demirel, referred to Denktag as a 'national hero' and
someone who 'has always held the Turkish flag at the highest point'. For
Demirel, Denktag not only defended and protected the Turkish Cypriots
and Turkey in Cyprus, but also, and more importantly, the 'world of the
Turks' and 'Turkishness'. 'The flag is the same flag', Demirel said, and
added: 'this movement is an event of the great world of the Turks'.22
Political choices, intentions and demands have been defined in relation to
ethnicity. What really matters is who and what you want to be. The
island has been captured as a closed space inhabited by a stable and fixed
identity, either Greek or Turkish, instead of what Deleuze sees as the
fundamental nature of the island - that of being co-inhabited by multiple
subjectivities without a set of social and political concerns or agendas and
not striving for a single point of commonality.23
Surrounded by the flashpoint of ethnic conflict and appropriated by
Turkish and Greek nationalisms which are built on race, blood origin and
religion, Cyprus has lost everything an island represents. As we know'
during ethno-nationalist conflicts in the territory, the main impulse is to
95
redefine the borderline of inclusion and exclusion: to draw a straight line
between 'us' and 'them'. In fact, there is always an inherent paradox in
every border. The singular border is in fact always double for it is always
between two states, each one of which has been marked as the opposite.
In Dervig Zaim's frlm Mud (2003), an allegorical tale about the
Cyprus divide, mud is a metaphor, suggesting that the construction of a
border requires the act of 'othering', the process of abjection. Zaim, who
himself became a refugee in 1974, focuses on the trauma caused by not
'Words
and deeds alike have vanished in the whiteconfronting the past.
ness of the salt lake where Turkish Cypriot Ali is on sentry duty.
A massacre has taken place here on the border berween north and south.
Ali, whose military service will soon come to an end, is struggling to find
a cure for his speechlessness. Ali's close friend Temel cannot find the
courage to acknowledge the existence of the corpses buried under the
mud of the salt lake.
He records on tape his confession of killing three people but destroys
the cassettes soon after. Ali discovers the mud beneath the surface of the
land where he is a border guard. This mud, this unwanted 'abject' that
has no shape and leaves nothing other than dirt and stain, has become a
passion for him. Julia Kristeva's conception, the 'abject' is effectively
established through expulsion. Enclosure has to be achieved; the boundary of the body has to be clearly defined as the first contours of the
subject without leaving any room for permeability; the inside and
outside have to remain distinct. However, by covering his face and body
with it, Ali discovers that the mud is able to cure his mysterious illness.
The more he covers himself with it, the more he breaks his silence and
starts to recover his speech.
Mud shows us that the feeling of division is lived out by the people,
and this implies that the geographically concrete border with its watch
towers and barbed wire exists as a psychological border as well. In
people's minds, the image of the border is so real, so powerful and therefore so material.
'BEYOND' THE BORDER: KEFLECTIONS IN THEMIRRORS
POSS/BIT ITIES
AND OTHER
In Kutlu$ Ataman's video-installation L+1=1 (2003), the border across
the divided island represents the separation from one half of yourself.
The work centres on the life story of the Turkish Cypriot poet and writer
Nege Yagrn who as a child was caught up in the armed conflict in Cyprus
during the 1960s. There is one body but fwo of Nege Yagrn. By doubling
the image, Ataman refers to the 'double life' of Yagrn who now lives on
the Greek side of divided Nicosia. The body is not only a biological
entity but also a psychological topography. The surface of the body is
the point of conversion of the outside into the body and of the inside ozr
(psyche and mind). In Yaqrn's case, the border is a wound. It was not
only inscribed onto her body but was also inscribed into the depths of
her body, penetrating into her psyche and mind.
In the video-installation, two
Nege Yagrns on
two different
screens
simultaneously projected onto adjacent walls in a corner and running
simultaneously recount her experiences and memories on the island,
96
beginning with her childhood. On one screen, she tells the story of how
her father went missing and how they had to flee from the Greeks and
leave Peristerona for Nicosia: 'I grew to feel that in our village we had
been very happy. It was paradise there and when we came to the city we
became very unhappy.' On the other screen, she describes how the Turkish
army took over the northern part of the island, claiming to bring peace.
The implication tn 1+1=1 is that specific social and political circumstances on the island have shaped individuals' lives. Yaqrn's words recall
a memory, a tense and tangled memory, squeezed between the north and
the south of the island. The two screens on which Yagrn endlessly tells
her life story turn into a palimpsest memory that unfolds into a plural
story of a singular reality. The island becomes the metaphor of Yagrn
and Yagrn herself becomes the metaphor for the island. Her mind
provides a kind of landscape, an intensive zone, recalling that Freudian
psychoanalysis had opened up a concern with childhood not as the
process which ends in adulthood but one which goes on contributing to
our personalities, minds and lives.
In Yagrn's video-testimony, the memories recollected and imagined
on the screens can only project the broken and troubling image of an 'I'.
The mirrors in both filmic spaces can only 'reflect' disintegration of the
unified body which is only imaginary, an illusion that returns us to the
narcissistic experience of the child who mistakes the image she/he sees in
the mirror as a complete and perfect self, as Jacques Lacan theorised in
his famous concept of the 'mirror stage'. For Lacan, there is always an
ontological gap at the very heart of our subjectivity. The mirror image,
as the verifier of identity, disguises the truth of fragmentation and alienation in subjectivity. Lacan points out:
The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from
insufficiency to anticipation - and which manufactures for the subject,
caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies
that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that
I shall call orthopaedic - and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of
an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure
the
subject's entire mental development.2a
1-+1-=1. Ya$rn is more than one and her
stories are complex and fluid. Like the reciprocity of mirrors, the work
brings forth fusion and separation, identity and difference at once. The
screens become mirrors which can only reflect the ever changing nature
The mirrors are shattered rn
of the self, the complexity of subjectivity through constantly forming
and deforming Yagrn's image. By appealing to imagination, introducing
new perspectives and anticipating other truths, the mirrors in both filmic
24 Jacques Lacan,'The
Mirror Stage as Formative
of the Function of the I as
Revealed i n Psychoanalytic
Experience', in Ecrits: a
selection, trans Alan
Sheridan, Routledge,
London-New York, 1989,
p5
spaces, far from reflecting the story unfolding on the other screen,
implies deceptive illusions and visualises fractures. Moreover, we the
viewers play active roles in the encounter with these 'mirror-screens'.
They urge us to take part in the diverse and sometimes contradictory
processes of observation, transformation, concealment, frustration,
imagination and so forth. As the bibelot on the table at which Yagrn is
sitting unsettles the perspective and creates effects of distortion, the
'mirror-screens' hint at the relativity of all points of view and thus imply
scepticism. In her book The Mirror: A History, which examines the
power of the reflection, Sabine Melchior-Bonniet indicates:
97
... by simulating
resemblance, the mirror dissimulates another truth, one
that can emerge only.surreptitiously, in a fearsome difference and o-bliq-
uity: 'dubious resemblance' or troubling strangeness, the mirror is
mirror of otherness.zs
a
The mirror therefore can only reveal the indecipherable figure of a
stranger who reveals that in fact it is none other than the unrro;bled and
stable
'I'who
presents the essential problem. As yagrn says:
I think three of the most essential roles in life are rhat of the ryranr, rhe
victim and saviour. But these roles switch places somehow. I mean, the
victims can become the tyrants as they grab the power. The tyrants can be
the victims. The saviours can be the victims. I mean these three roles can
always transform into each other. I used to think that Turkish Cypriots
were always the victims. But then I saw Greek Cypriots becoming the
victims after 1974... Before, there was that dualism for me. The Tuikish
Cypriots were the victims and the Greek Cypriots were the tyrants. This
was learnr. Then this changed. I saw the Greek cypriots becoming the
victims and I saw that the Turkish Cypriots could take the role oT the
tyranr. I lost the sense of us, goodness, and them, baddies. I started to
question this.
Dualism is not the split between body and soul.
It is rather
the revolr
within the self itself not only against all outward injustices but also
against the injustice of outwardness. If to tesrify is to accomplish a
Sabine Melchior-Bonniet,
The Mirror: A History,
Routledge, New YorkLondon, 2002, p 224
Shoshana Felman,
'Education and Crisis, or
the Vicissitudes of
Teaching', in Testimony:
Crisis of Witnessing in
Literat ure, P sy c h oan alysis,
and History, eds Shoshana
Felman and Dori Laub,
Routledge, New York-
London, 1992,p
5
27 Avery F Gordon, Ghostly
Matters: Haunting and the
So ciological Imagination,
Universiry of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis-
London, 1997,p 134
28
Ibid, p 19
p€rformative speech-act, rather than simply formulate mt"t.--.nr, as
Shoshana Felman has pointed out,26 Yagrn's testimonial speech is
'performative' and actively makes connections to larger contexts of
geographical location, historical events, social and political life. During
h..r speech, the past and the present are connelted to the cursed;
ghostly_ history of society. Nothing in the pasr has simply ended. Some
part of it or some affect continues to 'live on' not only in the social
geography where people reside but also in the collective unconsciousness of society in which repressed thoughts, fears or desires are
collected and kept. In that sense, Yagrn does not simply speak in the
language- of memories. Her speech refers to haunting and thus to a
future of memory which itself holds a promise for justice. In the words
of Avery F Gordon:
Haunting is an encounter in which you touch the ghost or the ghostly
matter of things: the ambiguities, the complexities of po*.t and fersonhood, the violence and the hope, the looming and rc.rdittg actualities, the
shadows of our selves and our society.2T
Concentrating on the act of haunting enables one to contact 'spectral'
realities that are embedded, lingering in the social topography.
The body of Yagin has been invaded by the spectte of t*o borders,
neither of which she can identify with, each of which as the Ego State
=
thrust itself upon her. lfhen she speaks about her life, she also means
'I am the one who has been haunted'. For Gordon, as a constitutive
feature of social life, haunting is a mediation, a particular kind of
process that 'links an institution and an individual, a social structure and
a subject, and hisrory and a biography'.2s But it seems that yaqrn has
haunted the borders as much as she has been haunted by them:
98
Every kind of institution and authority felt like an element of the oppression I was subjected to. So what does one do? If your father oppresses
you, you run away from home. You do something and save yourself.
If you are married and your husband oppresses you, you get divorced.
But if a state, if an army oppresses you, then what do you do? So I chose
to dissent. I wanted to free myself. Because I could not bring myself to
accept such a rule that if you are a Turkish Cypriot, for you the most
suitable side of the island, not even the most suitable but the suitable side,
is the north side of the island and you shall live there and if you are
^
Greek Cypriot you shall live in the south side of the island and forget the
other side.
But she has freed herself through her transgressions that know no limit
or boundary, nor respect any system or order. She tells how she twice
crossed ro rhe south with the help of a smuggler for the sake of overcoming what is forbidden, for the feeling of freedom. She recounts long and
difficult journeys undertaken to expose the difference of 50 metres. By
flying first from Nicosia to Istanbul, then from Istanbul to Athens, and
frorn Athens to Larnaca and back to Nicosia, she shows how ridiculous
the 'divide' is and that she does not fear armies or authorities.
The argument that motivated this article was the conception of
Cyprus as a produced/fabricated geography in a state of 'being a child', a
crushed land stuck in perpetual childhood. But what lies beneath Yagrn's
transgressions, her 'free journeys' across the bounded geography of the
island, can be read as an attempt to transform the state of victim to a
situation of performer of her own life story. Perhaps that is why Yagrn
speaks so eagerly and ceaselessly.
began thir .rs"y with Deleuze and will close with him: 'Children
never stop talking about what they are doing or trying to do: exploring
I
Deleuze,'What Children
Say', op cit, p 61
milieus, by -."ns of dynamic trajectories, and drawing up maps of
them. The maps of these trajectories are essential to psychic activity.'2e
He then concludes: 'In its own way, art says what children say. It is
made up of trajectories and becomings, and it too makes maps' both
extensivi and intensive'.30 Yagrn lays out paths and routes, not in the
actual geography, but in the emergent visual counter-cartography_
realised by hei performative speech act. Ataman makes a portrait of
Yagrn which does not have representational visibility. She instead
assumes the privilege of mapping herself away from rwo nation-states'
from those ostensibly unshakable authorities defining the identity of
those living on each side of the divided island, and inserts her own
Ibid, p 55
trajectories. This is itself a journey.