In January 2016, the American magazine Foreign Affairs published an article titled, âCyprus in the Middle: Nicosia Holds the Keys to Syria, the Migrant Crisis, and Gas in the Eastern Mediterraneanâ.1 For centuries, most depictions of this island in the English-speaking media have emphasised its position in an important yet volatile geopolitical region, poised âin the middleâ of opposing ideological forces. In recent years, coverage has spanned from Britainâs use of its Cypriot bases to send warplanes to Syria in December 2016 and April 2018, to renewed antagonism with Turkey over hydrocarbon treaties with Egypt, Greece, and Israel. Jonathan Gorvett in the aforementioned article paints the scene of an unstable and unpredictable locus in which competing governments parade their military power as the lingering residues, not only of the Cold War, but the Great Game before it: âBritish warplanes⊠headed for Syria, just 100 miles awayâ, âIsraeli warplanesâ, âRussian warshipsâ, and a âseismic research vessel, chartered by a U.S. company⊠shadowed by a Turkish frigateâ.2 All in one short paragraph, the vivid imagery suggests the inception of a third world war on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean with Cyprus stranded, and fought over, âin the middleâ. Housing numerous foreign military powers, this âfar-flung Levantine outpost, is once again a Gordian knot of regional conflicts and conundrumsâ.3
If one were to trace the representation of the island across the preceding century, it would be evident that little has changed in the discourse that frames it.4 Even following the same magazineâs depiction of Cyprus during the most important years of its modern history is revealing of the discursive parallelism within which it is trapped. In July 1975, a little under a year after partition, âThe Mediterranean Crisisâ was published, stressing that the Eastern âMediterranean today is the scene of serious local conflicts, of which those over Cyprus and over Palestine are the most intractable and the most dangerous [âŠ] Add to this the continuing competition between the United States and Russia⊠and the uncertainty on all sides as to how far dĂ©tente will be applied, if at all, in the Mediterranean and the Middle Eastâ.5 It is clear from the still enduring tension between American and Russian fleets, forty years later, that dĂ©tente is far from being realised. While Gorvett speaks of âgas troubleâ in 2016, his forebear details the âoil crisisâ of 1975.
If we look back further to the year of Cyprusâ independence from the British Empire, Foreign Affairs published one of the earliest commentaries on the twentieth centuryâs most controversial neologism: âWhere is the Middle East?â. Writing in 1960, Roderic H. Davidson, one-time president of the Middle East Studies Association, argues that â[i]nternational crisis is one of the best teachers of geography. Among centers [sic] of crisis that have burst onto the American publicâs map in recent years are Suez, Cyprus, Baghdad, Algeria, the Lebanon and others commonly lumped together under the general label âMiddle Eastââ.6 Framing these events within âthe context of the cold warâ, he also stresses that âno one knows where the Middle East isâ.7 In all three articles, the same textual figures recur. Paramount among them are the alliterative âcrisisâ, âconflictâ, and âcold warâ. Importantly, Davidson indicates a tripartite relationship between politics, âgeographyâ, and epistemologyâa revision of Foucaultâs knowledge and power dialecticârendered threatening when knowledge is found lacking. Perhaps the Middle East is deemed dangerous precisely because it is difficult to defineâincluding the translingual and religiously-mixed Cyprus metonymic of this Mediterranean mediality.
Looking further back still, almost 140 years before the Foreign Affairs subtitle, âNicosia Holds the Keys to Syriaâ, the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli famously declared Cyprus âthe key of Western Asiaâ in his correspondence with Queen Victoria, in which he promises that the island will secure imperial hegemony across the continent and that her âMajestyâs Indian Empire [will be] immediately strengthenedâ.8 The idiom has been repeated frequently by political commentators, travel writers, and novelists throughout the succeeding century. Imbricating political and literary discourses, the years succeeding the acquisition of the island, 1878, saw a sudden rise in published travelogues promoting the âstrategicâ benefits of Cyprus to the colonial project. In 1879, the established travel writers Sir Samuel White Baker and William Hepworth Dixon both released their accounts: Cyprus, As I Saw It in 1879 and British Cyprus, respectively. For the former, âCyprus is the key of a great positionâ as âthe missing link in the chain of our communications with⊠the Suez Canal and the subsequent route to Indiaâ.9 For the latter, the island is âthe key of Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minorâ.10 Nearing the end of this generation of nineteenth-century travelogues, the polyglot and biblical scholar, Agnes Smith, who travelled twice to Cyprus with her sister, repeats this jingoistic imagery to herald the moment which âinduced the British lion to place his foot upon Cyprus, an island which, from its position, might easily be made the key to the Levantâ.11 These motifs echo into the twentieth century. The acclaimed novelist, Angela Carter, writing for New Society one year before the 1974 partition, reiterates aphoristically: âHe who holds Cyprus holds the key to the eastern Mediterraneanâ.12
For all, the image of keys positions Cyprus as a strategic gateway or portal through which military and cultural paradigms are exchanged. It is the limen between Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam, West and East, America and Russia, Greece and Turkey, and the symbolic self and Other of the colonial imagination. Politically, holding these keys allows one to control the portal and extend oneâs hegemony over the other side. Controlling Cyprus has, for most of its history, allowed vast empires to cross continents and consolidate valuable resources. The portal becomes a dehumanised port in which the tools of imperialism have been, and continue to be, stationed north of Suez and east of Jerusalem. Colonisers, crusaders, and caliphs have fought for those keys since prehistory. In the words of Churchill, securing Cyprus in the Second World War meant âthe Levant thus came into a far more satisfactory condition. Our naval and air control over the Eastern end of the Mediterranean became effective, and we obtained⊠control of the pipe line and other resourcesâ.13 Even from these few examples, the intertextual repetition of discourse used to represent Cyprus from the late nineteenth century to the present is clear to see, as is the dependence of politics on literature to disseminate these claims.
The purpose of this book is to interrogate this diachronic literary tradition, particularly within the genre of travel writing. Investigating how cultural practitioners interpellate political landscapes into the textual imagining of space has long been an important facet of postcolonial studies, ever since Edward Saidâs influential theory of the Orientalist discourse used to construct ideological juxtapositions between âEastâ and âWestâ through âimaginative geographyâ.14 Nonetheless, the modern history and literatures of Cyprus have been infrequently featured within established postcolonial oeuvres. It is important, not only to bring the complex Cypriot context into the postcolonial field, but also to observe how Cyprus complicates established classifications of âpostcolonialâ and âworldâ literatures. How does its recent experiences of nationalist movements, partition, and enduring British military bases alter our understanding of the temporal colonial-postcolonial dichotomy? How does the islandâs position between multiple spheres of cultural influence challenge notions of âworldsâ and âthe worldâ? By asking these questions, I aim to showcase the centrality of travel writing for this overlooked region of the post/colonial planet and reveal how the travelogue form employed in the writing of Cyprus opens up a mode of transportal literatures and literary reading practices.
Historical, Linguistic, and Literary Background
For the majority of its history, the island of Cyprus has never not been under the administration of a foreign empire. Its earliest settlers sailed from the Neolithic Levantine mainland following the development of agriculture, beginning a long history of trade and transport between island and mainland. Thousands of years later, successive colonisations by regional powers took place, from Hittites, Egyptians, and Persians, to Mycenaeans, Phoenicians, and Neo-Assyrians. According to Herodotus, Cyprus belonged t...