Island of dreams: Post/colonial imaginaries in contemporary Cypriot Anglophone literature

Crossing the final road to the Gutter, we passed the newly bombed-out mosque that had once been a shot up church that had once been a razed site of worship that had once been the resting space for bodies buried with stone-carved spinning whorls that was still sacred under its concrete rubble and fallen minaret. Deep below it ran one of the subterranean rivers that no civilization had been able to tap. (Manglis, “Losing Count”, 2022).

The Gutter, in Alexandra Manglis’s 2022 short story “Losing Count”, is a liminal space between occupied zones, a literal no-man’s land traversed by the chorus of narrators: three women from different generations. While the setting is at first geographically ambiguous, Manglis combines words from Turkish and Greek in the characters’ dialogue, and describes “mosques”, “churches”, “minarets”, and other structures — such as the “subterranean river”, in the passage above, “that no civilization had been able to tap” — to clue readers into the world of the story (Manglis, 2022: n.p.). The setting is a palimpsest of cultures and histories of colonial endeavour and something ineffable, unconquerable, untouchable, belonging to the land alone.

The setting is, of course, Cyprus.

Those of us who call the island a homeland — particularly those of us in the diaspora — are intimately aware of the complexities and contradictions of that identity, especially as the political formation of the island has proved slippery. For some context: I was born in Cyprus, and moved to the UK when I was around 3 years old with my mother. All of my immediate relatives were viscerally affected by the Turkish invasion of the island in 1974; my mother was even sent to Australia as a child, along with many other Greek-Cypriots, for safety.

In terms of its place in an imperial imaginary, Cyprus is at once Byzantine and Ottoman, of key strategic geopolitical importance as well as a mythologically rich source of culture. Its history started (depending on who you ask) in the fourteenth century BC, when the Mycenaeans settled in Cyprus, or with the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus in 1571, more than a century after the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 (Papadakis, 2005: 5–6). Cyprus was, and is, a critical piece of national symbolism for both sides, enfolded in (as I understand it) the “megali idea” or “Great Idea” of re-establishing the lands of the Byzantine Empire during the Greek Revolution against the Turks in 1821. In the following years it would become a “protectorate” — and then Crown Colony — of the British Empire, gaining independence in 1960 before the clashing ideologies of “enosis” (unification with Greece) and “taksim” (a partition between Greece and Turkey) led to increasing political hostility, culminating in a Greek military coup and a Turkish invasion in 1974.

What then does it mean to call oneself a “Greek-” or “Turkish-” Cypriot rather than simply a “Cypriot”? And how does Cyprus’s membership of the Commonwealth complicate this identity? The new scholarly title of this journal — Literature, Critique, and Empire Today — offers an invitation to explore the complex political and historical formation of Cyprus, and to do so I will be reading two contemporary Cypriot authors, Alexandra Manglis and Polis Loizou, whose Anglophone works both invoke the legacy of the British Empire in Cyprus. I centre the concept of hybridity as it relates to the depictions of Cyprus in these literary texts that redraw the mythical boundaries of Cyprus. I invoke the “mythic” as a mechanism that subverts colonial attitudes towards the island, a mechanism that both authors use to potent effect.

The 2015 edition of the Political Handbook of the World pithily describes Cyprus as being the “largest island in the Eastern Mediterranean [that] supports diverse and often antagonistic ethnic groups and traditions” (2015: 366). Focusing on its political formation in the twentieth century, it is fair to characterize Cypriots as sharing marked anti-colonial sentiment (specifically against British colonial rule) and, again, inhabiting a liminal space that in the Cold War period at least was characterized by “strong and multidimensional antagonism between the East and the West” (Karyos and Papaioakeim, 2022: 8). On 11 February 1959, “the Prime ministers of Greece and Turkey, Konstantinos Karamanlis and Adnan Menderes, respectively, signed the Zurich agreements, which provided that Cyprus would become an independent bi-communal republic” (Emilianides, 2022: 20). The island nation joined the Commonwealth the following year. The process was complex, influenced not only by the aforementioned political and ethnic diversity of the island, but by the fact that “it was the first small state to become a member” (Emilianides, 2022: 1). The membership was initially a provisional one, intended to be reassessed after five years, but the issue “was never mentioned again by either the Government or the HoR [Cypriot House of Representatives]” (Emilianides, 2022: 25).

Despite the lingering presences of empire in the form of the two British military bases that would remain on the island, then, the sentiment from the political leaders of the time was one of enthusiastic acceptance of Commonwealth membership. In my reading, it was an acceptance based on political and socio-economic advantage, but also something more intangible: a yearning for a “civilizing” presence that was projected onto figures of colonial rule in a deeply unsettling, even taboo, manner. I turn to Polis Loizou’s A Good Year to further explore this entanglement of colonialism and desire.

Loizou is an award-winning Cypriot writer, playwright, and performer whose works explore themes of “history, social politics, folklore, and ‘queerness,’ in all its forms” (Loizou, 2022b). A Good Year is a historical novella set in Cyprus in 1925, the year in which Britain declared the island a “crown colony”, and a period in which “many Greek Cypriots were beginning to understand that a solution to the Cyprus question [i.e. one of sovereignty] which would benefit them would be directly associated with the safeguarding of British strategic interests” (Klapsis, 2013: 774). The novella tells the story of a young Cypriot couple, Loukas and Despo, who are awaiting the birth of their first child over the Christmas period. While Despo anxiously prepares to be a mother and worries for her health and that of her baby, Loukas is tormented by visions of “kallikantzaroi”: malevolent goblin-like creatures that materialize just as an Englishman and his wife arrive in the village, and spark a queer desire in Loukas. The Englishman, William, and Loukas begin an affair that shakes the beliefs of both — and William will go on to mistake Loukas for a “kallikantzaro” in turn. The mythical creatures become a locus for the projections of both the colonizing and the colonial subject, embodying supernatural menace (for Loukas) and a perverse, mythical masculinity (for William).

Loukas is unsurprisingly ambivalent towards British presence on the island, and is keenly aware of the psychological damage suffered by his own father, who volunteered to fight for the British Empire: “Just a few years beforehand, the British had been recruiting for their army. Loukas’s father had stepped forward to join the fight. He’d left the village in his uniform and, less than half a year later, had come back in bandages” (Loizou, 2022a: 30–31). Despo and Loukas form a reluctant relationship with William and his unnamed wife, who give them gifts and pay Despo for working their land. The foreign couple are viewed with suspicion due to the complex political relationship between the British and Ottoman Empires: “Kindness was not expected of these people”, and you “never knew where you stood with their kind” (34). In contrast, the Englishman is enamored by the island and its people, experiencing them not only by interacting with the locals, but through the finds of a team of Swedish archaeologists who excavate “profane tablets and pictures of unspeakable acts” (46). The images

haunted the Englishman, and had even begun to sneak into his dreams. In the night he felt the warmth of the body next to his, which might once have been strewn on a marble table beneath the burning sun, breast exposed, at the mercy of a copper-skinned Cyprian with a monstrous growth. (46)

Loizou introduces the familiar figure of Priapus, the phallic god of fertility and male genitalia, linking it to the figure of desire in the “copper-skinned Cyprian”. William conflates his understanding of the history of the island, romanticized through archaeological artefacts, with his own queer desires for the islanders. The comparison is not unprecedented in historical, Western attitudes towards the islanders; Papadikis writes that “our customs and traditions were said to have so scandalized early Christian writers that they thought the people of Cyprus descended from demons” (2005: 67). The island of Cyprus, like the goddess Aphrodite who is said to have emerged from its waters, was described as the “prostitute of the Mediterranean […] ruthlessly used by others throughout history” (Papadikis, 2005: 68). Of course, the sexualization of a non-Western other is not unique to Cyprus alone, and has been well-documented in scholarship, which frequently draws attention to “the construction of deviant Others as central to imperial power relations and, specifically, Anglo-European colonial rule” (Chevrette, 2022: 3). However, Loizou’s narrative offers a reciprocal perspective from Loukas’s character.

Loukas is initially embarrassed by the behaviour — and physical appearance — of his bawdy countrymen in comparison with the perceived civility of the Englishman and his wife. “What must he think of them”, Loukas wonders, “the peasants, with barely a scrap of cloth between them, their teeth black with rot? […] No-one hated the English as they had their former rulers, but you weren’t going to make one of them your best man, either” (Loizou, 2022a: 50). The physical differences between the Cypriots and the Englishman, the former evincing signs of poverty with their “scraps” of clothing and “blackened” teeth, vividly externalize the hopes many had for economic prosperity under British rule — a fact underscored by the aforementioned military conscription of Loukas’s father. “Many Cypriots”, Andrekos Varnava writes, “being poor peasants and laborers, and mainly interested in improving their lot and that of their families, readily ‘volunteered’ to serve in both the British and Greek armies during and after the war [WWI]” (2019: 95). The attraction Loukas feels towards William, I argue, is uniquely colonial in its genesis: the Englishman is desirable because of the tangible benefits of empire he and his wife literally embody, with their “leather shoes” and “fiddlestick” (that is, delicate, unworked) arms (Loizou, 2022a: 50).

When Loukas and William first meet — an encounter narrated from William’s perspective — the Englishman sees a vision of a “horned” kallikantzaro, or goblin, emerging from the woodland, before being startled a second time by the “thin, dark, hairy” figure of Loukas (58, 59), marking another moment of conflation of identities (William continues his perception of Cypriots as semi-mythic creatures, and Loizou renders the meeting ambiguous in the narrative, leaving the reader unsure of whether the goblin was separate from, or in fact an interpretation of, Loukas himself). William’s initial fearfulness turns into desire — but Loukas, for him, is never quite extricated from the malevolent figure of the kallikantzaro, literalizing the implicit understanding of the islanders as sub-human. Loukas lives up to William’s mythologized impression of Cypriot men (or “Cyprians”, as he refers to them), and he is impressed by their “work-strong physiques, black eyes, and copper skin” (59); the detailing of bare “skin” and “work-strong physiques”, after the initial “thin and hairy” goblin-like aspect William notices, speaks to the continued failure to ascribe full humanity to the colonial subject. Loukas, and men like him, from William’s perspective, oscillate between either repugnant demons or idealized, hypermasculine gods. Their immediate attraction is evident, and the two fall into a sexual encounter — read from William’s perspective as a tryst that brings to mind “photographs of primitive sculptures, their potent limbs, and the sordid goings-on in temples beneath the glare of the sun and the gods” (61). Even in this act, he does not really acknowledge Loukas’s specificity as a Cypriot: Loukas becomes an allegorical stand-in, a “primitive sculpture” that happens to yield pleasure with his “potent limbs”. Spotted by one of the village children, Loukas unwittingly leans into the mythological aspect of their affair, telling the child that the Englishman with whom he had a tryst was in fact a “kallikantzaro” that had “attacked him” in the forest.

As their affair develops — in the form of necessarily mute sexual encounters, given the language barrier between them — Loukas interprets the tryst as sinful, influenced by the “Devil”, in contrast to the mythologized imagining of William. The kallintzaroi/Greek mythological figures and demonic Christian figures alike become proxies for the strict taboos against homosexuality in both countries, with sodomy in Britain and Cyprus not legalized until 1967 and 1998, respectively (“male-to-male sexual relations” had been criminalized by the British Empire from 1860) (Han and O’Mahoney, 2014: 269). Loukas and William reconcile their queerness, their transgression, via the multivalent mythologies each associate with the other, grounded in the island of Cyprus; by the end of the novella, both characters find peace through the colonial imaginaries that justified their attraction. William, the Englishman, seeks a redemption for his desires by bathing in the Mediterranean ocean, reflecting “how foolish he was to think he could come here and know the place […] to think that Loukas, the Cyprian, was the one in danger, when this was at least his home” (Loizou, 2022a: 167). This is arguably another example of the fantastical nature of the novel: a wish-fulfilment in rendering a colonial perspective which, in contrast to historical writings from British administrators, is humbled in the face of stark cultural difference. It is a desire that, despite starting from a place of dehumanization (that is, rendering Loukas, and by extension all Cypriots, as desirable, sexually available, and lascivious beings), is undone by the physicality of their union, and by an Anglophone narrative that writes back to the historical British writings that characterized the island/ers as such. Loukas, on his part, experiences a bacchanal in an abandoned barn, where he encounters other queer figures who merge the masculine and the feminine, the mythic and the mundane, outside of his overdetermined encounters with William. He experiences an arguably indigenous queerness that operates outside of a colonial framework; the two men draw apart even as they came together, separated by an irreconcilable cultural difference that has nevertheless been healed, or undone, by their queer trysts. After his encounter in the barn, Loukas, too, finds peace in the ocean in a symbolic absolution, with the Englishman reduced to a “votive candle planted on the sand” (184). Whereas earlier in the narrative William represented a kind of civility, an aspirational figure entwined with a taboo sexual attraction, the man is left as a symbol of peace, enfolded in a religious practice that centres forgiveness as opposed to punishment or Devilish sin.

I describe this ending as wish-fulfilment on the author’s part — a queer, diasporic Cypriot author imagining queer colonial relationships that turn the imperial gaze back on itself — and a fictive subversion of historical, documented colonial attitudes towards Cyprus and Cypriots. Richmond Palmer, the “autocratic governor of Cyprus” from 1933 and 1939, wrote the following about the island:

Seven thousand years ago a lady called Aphrodite landed in Cyprus, and the island has never recovered. The people of Cyprus made a luxury of discontent and always pretend they do not like to be ruled, and yet, like the lady I have mentioned as a prototype, they expect to be ruled, and, in fact, prefer it. (Palmer, qtd. in Papadakis, 2005: 183)

Note the similar conflation of the mythic with the real-world identity of the Cypriots; Palmer, like the fictional William, believes that knowing the mythology of the island equates to knowing the people (“like the lady I have mentioned”, with Aphrodite becoming a “prototype” for a Cypriot cultural and psychological identity). Loizou short-circuits the colonial imagination at the end of A Good Year, with William realizing that he cannot “know” anything. The relationship between the two men is overdetermined, imbricating economic and political difference, racial identity, and — unavoidably — a transactional dynamic whereby both the Cypriot and the English “read” the other through the lens of what may, or may not, be attained by their union. For Loukas, cleanness, civility, and economic prosperity is emblematized by William, and, in turn, a carnal, distinctly uncivilized sexual pleasure is projected onto Loukas. In many ways, their relationship is an effective proxy for the process of Cyprus navigating its way within the larger national politics of Europe, both in the early twentieth century and projecting forward to independence and Commonwealth membership. Queerness becomes an interrogative lens through which imperial attitudes towards the island are undone.

If Loizou writes to attempt an (albeit uneasy) literary healing or alternative imagining of colonial violence, Manglis offers a less neat view of the political diversity of Cyprus. The remainder of this article will focus on her short story, “Losing Count”, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2022. The story is much more explicit in its references to the island’s political formation — and forces a more violent reckoning with political turmoil. As I touch upon in the opening of this essay, Manglis is not so much invested in reclaiming a monolithic identity for Cypriots; rather, she invokes what Gregoriou terms “cultural hybridity”, whereby “Cypriot utterances are re-citing and negotiating historical tropes and arguments from colonial authoritative discourses [… from which] the local emerges as hybrid” (Gregoriou, 2004). In “Losing Count”, hybridity is represented by the sowing of seeds within an area of conflict; if the characters are passing through a transitional space in the gutter, the flowers they plant offer the possibility of an (albeit delayed) permanence. Rather than the island being the province of “Turks” and/or “Greeks” and/or “British”, Manglis’s narrative reveals the impossible (and misguided) endeavour to draw stable and discrete ethnic boundaries within Cyprus — even if it would benefit colonial institutions to do so.

The relationship between gardening and practices of taxonomy and settler colonialism has been written about by figures including Jamaica Kincaid, who is troubled by the European transplantation and transformation of different species of flower that results in an oppressive hybridity: “Who first saw it [the dahlia, a flower transplanted by Europeans] and longed for it so deeply that it was removed from the place where it had always been, and transformed (hybridized) and renamed?” (Kincaid, 2000: 88). Flowers, like people, migrate — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes by force — and despite the temptation to categorize and demarcate their identities, the process is always subversive, threatening to overspill and subvert easy definitions. The “renaming” Kincaid mentions takes on special significance in the context of Cyprus and wider Greek history, too, with older generations still bitterly referring to Istanbul as “Constantinople”, and city names and street signs throughout Cyprus slipping between Greek, transliterated Greek (English), and Turkish names. The island is, and becomes, in Manglis’s writing, a foil for a colonial desire for “permanence”.

“Losing Count” follows a group of women navigating the enigmatic Gutter: a described “no-man’s land” that its inhabitants, the three female narrators, complicate by telling one another the “true”, complex history of the land. Just as the “road leading up to” the Gutter is inscribed and re-inscribed with monuments (“churches”, “mosques”, “resting spaces”), the flora of the Gutter, the “low-lying shrubland”, was “four millennia in the making”, transformed from “indigenous oak forest” to a depleted brush that is a direct result of the ruining of the topsoil characterized as “man-made depletion” (Manglis, 2022: n.p.). The deep history narrated by one of the older women emphasizes the stratified nature of the region’s history; it has seen change, and will continue to, even by the women’s own hands, who open the story by narrating their flinging “hollyhock seeds” over a fence bordering the Gutter. But the land isn’t just a symbolic palimpsest of colonial history: it is also a tangible and deadly nesting ground for land mines. “Modern warfare” becomes a physical and threatening presence in this narrative: a foreshadowing of the violence the characters will face in their journey across the terrain. Bullets are just as tangible as seeds in this narrative, but bring no transformation, only finality.

The concept of cultural ambiguity also plays out in the ethnic identity of the narrators, who slip between Greek and Turkish vernacular languages; British colonial presence is more implicit, but is arguably enfolded via the language of the story itself (English). Pondering whether or not they could remain still, standing unmoving upon a landmine if accidentally encountered, one of the women imagines a wail leaping from their bodies “like an upside-down adhan” (an Islamic call to prayer), while later in the story they refer to one another as “agapi” (a Greek word for “darling/loved one”) and imagine a utopian future in which national specificity is “smoothed over” and the land bears fruit, sustained by their “mixed blood”. Arabic and Greek cultural traditions alike are entwined in the three women, and prove vexing for the military-colonial figures they encounter. The transcribed words challenge English-speaking readers to parse the cultural identity of the characters: are they Cypriot? Turkish? Or both/more? Significantly, this imagined utopia follows a violent encounter with two soldiers, who bar the women’s pilgrimage across the contested territory.

Enforcing the curfew of the militarized zone, one of the soldiers tells the women to turn back: “His accent made our skin tighten. He wasn’t from around here. He spoke like a mainlander, his consonants clipped the same way primary school teachers encouraged the local students to talk (Manglis, 2002: n.p.). The detail of his being a “mainlander” evokes the island setting, and his accent is an enforced elocution wherein the language becomes “clipped” in a manner reminiscent of floral cuttings, of symbolic horticultural practice that attempts to create its own purity. The other soldier aggressively asks them “where they pray”, similarly inviting them to categorically remove the racial ambiguity that marks their (undescribed) appearances. This second soldier speaks in a “thick local dialect”, causing the youngest of the women to wonder “if she knew him”. The vehemence of his conduct in comparison to the mainlander belies an anxiety to be seen as separate from the transgressive narrators, despite their shared identity. When one of the women attempts to calm him, calling him “son”, the man responds with increasing aggression, affirming “I’m not your son, you stupid fucking crone”. The pejorative “crone” is one of the few physical descriptors for the narrators, but it is an important one, not so much for their age, but for the diffracted perspective of history that it implies. The women’s various ages represent the past, present, and future of the island, with the eldest of them having the aspect of an old woman “who had seen it all”. The unsettled present holds no permanence for the narrators, as they know — as the land knows — that history is in a continual state of flux: rewritten, layered, imperfect. Tragically, the soldiers see this in one of the women, whom they insult thus: “You think I don’t recognize you? You, your traitor-fucking mother, your pathetic grandmother? You think I don’t know where you live? Don’t know who your father was? That you’re the worst kind of mixed-blood whore?”

Intimacy — specifically, miscegenation — disrupts the reductive binary between colonizer and colonized, between Greek and Turk. To engage in intimacy with the other makes one a “traitor-fucker”, and it is an intimacy that magnifies across generations, with the insult threaded through the narrator’s “mother” and “grandmother” and “father”. The “mixed” concept, language, or body, is very much a deliberate invocation on Manglis’s part. Just as in Loizou’s queer narratives, in this tale, the admixture of bodies and languages is not so much utopian as troubling in its implications for both the subjects of empire and empire itself. To desire the colonizer is deeply problematic; to desire the colonized is similarly so. And yet desire persists, sex and sexuality persist, diluting ethnic and geographical boundaries that allow clear lines of demarcation to be drawn between us and them, past and future. Manglis’s story presents a moving and poetic expression of the “permeable and historically disputed terrain” that, as Ann Stoler writes, undoes “colonial politics of exclusion” (1991: 53). The women of “Losing Count” resist categories and boundaries from the very first sentence of the story, and thus constitute an irredeemable threat to colonial taxonomies. The act of sowing flower seeds returns as a revolutionary act in contrast to colonial projects of hybridization and transplantation.

I had the privilege of interviewing Manglis for an issue of Vector, the journal of the British Science Fiction Association, during which she delineated an authorial intention to “imagine, in the realm of sf, a bicommunal community where language and ethnicity wasn’t divisive” (Manglis, personal communication, 24 January 2022). She speaks of both the Turkish/Cypriot and English/Cypriot divide, attempting to rehabilitate the universal identity of “Cypriot” through the English transcription of both Turkish and Greek words, even as the stories she tells are clear-eyed in the violence threatened by such an intervention. Just as Loizou’s characters see through and outside of the mythic past of Cyprus, so do Manglis’s; her characters reckon with the individual and the communal, the local and the metaphysical. Cyprus becomes fractal in these writers’ anti-colonial imaginaries: offering wealth, military advantage, carnal delight, colonial privilege, and indigenous life-worlds at once.

Cyprus of the twenty-first century is arguably more accessible than it has ever been for Cypriots of all backgrounds. Turkish- and Greek-Cypriots alike can move freely between the “buffer zone” that marks the transition from the Republic of Cyprus to Northern Cyprus — a change that happened in my own lifetime — and the island enjoys a relative peace. Following the island’s joining the European Union in 2004, public opinion has perhaps unsurprisingly shifted from celebrating its membership of the Commonwealth to that of this wider geopolitical network. In a study carried out in 2020, data revealed that “60% [of Cypriots surveyed] viewed the Commonwealth with caution and considered it as a colonial institution, with 72% even believing that the Commonwealth is ‘manipulated’ by the UK” (Emilianides and Ioannou, 2022: 47). At the same time, contemporary Cypriot writers — Anglophone or otherwise — view Western attitudes towards Hellenic culture writ large with similar suspicion: “Westerners are convinced they ‘know’ my tradition by general familiarity”, writes Athena Andreadis in a recent issue of Vector (2022: 32). Post-Brexit, the island’s self-conceptualization “gives weight to the benefits and ideology of being associated with the notion of being ‘European’” (Emilianides and Ioannou, 2022: 47) over membership of the Commonwealth — and yet, as these readings have shown, contemporary writers invoke and move beyond the colonial past of the island, creating a hybrid, complex imaginary that defies easy national or cultural boundaries. This, too, is arguably not new.

Palmer’s derogatory evocation of the “prototype” Cypriot represented by Aphrodite evinces this assumed “familiarity” with the subjects of the then-empire — but look closer, and the goddess indeed becomes an unexpectedly appropriate metaphor for Cypriot identity, in all its multiplicity:

Aphrodite is a transformation of the Near Eastern goddess Ishtar/Astarte, and was known as Milytta by the Assyrians, Alilat in Arabic, Mitra by the Persians, and Argimposa by the Scythians. [She] was also sometimes depicted as male, with a beard, and a “dreaded patron of war”. She/he did not just go by the name “Aphrodite,” but Enoplos (“arms-bearing”), Androphonos (“slayer of men”), Epitymbia (“one of the grave”), and Melaina (“dark”). (Papadakis, 2005)

In my mind, the god/dess is a perfect image of the power, terror, beauty, and complexity of my island’s history: one that continues to critique the ongoing projects of empire, in whatever form they may take in the decades to come, moving through and beyond institutions that served their purpose in the past, and may offer nothing more, going forward. Language itself, as we have seen, becomes a vehicle for this new hybridity. As Loizou writes, A Good Year was conceived as a folk tale “told by a Cypriot, even though I was writing in English” (Loizou, 2022b: 53). By turning the lens back onto the island — using a colonial language, reclaiming it — contemporary Cypriot Anglophone authors complicate the fantasy of Cyprus as an island of dreams, and create new dreams of their own.