Refugees and the Meaning of Home

Cypriot Narratives of Loss, Longing and Daily Life in London

Helen Taylor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137553331
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the meaning of home for Cypriot refugees living in London since their island was torn apart by war. Taking an innovative approach, it looks at how spaces, time, social networks and sensory experiences come together as home is constructed. It places refugee narratives at its centre to reveal the agency of those forced to migrate.

1

Contexts and Catalysts

Introduction

All these people who think it’s easy to throw somebody out of their house and then give him another house a few hundred miles away, or put him in a boat and take him somewhere. If you lose your house, where your roots are, you know, where you grew up, it’s not an easy thing. Nothing can compensate that.

These are the words of Dimitris,¹ a Greek Cypriot refugee from Agios Amvrosios, a village on the northern coast of Cyprus which is now in the Turkish Cypriot–controlled area of the island. His was one of a number of Cypriot refugee narratives gathered in London for this study of the meaning of home in protracted exile. Dimitris became a refugee in 1974 and has lived in Britain ever since, where he is the model of a successfully resettled migrant. He has prospered as a businessman, speaks good English, owns his own house and is a committed community activist. Dimitris has personal and financial security, his two children were born and raised in Britain and he can go on holiday to Cyprus whenever he wishes. So why does his lost home still matter so much? This book is an attempt to answer that and other questions, by focusing in depth on what home means to people who are faced with the loss of home and the task of remaking home.

An understanding of home is central to an appreciation of what it means to become a refugee and live in exile. Put most simply, a refugee is someone who is compelled by circumstances beyond their control to leave their home and seek a new home elsewhere, either temporarily or permanently. Yet studies of forced migration rarely reflect on what home actually means. If we want to move beyond a structural assessment of forced migration – which looks at issues such as rising or falling refugee numbers, successful border controls, adequate settlement policies, impacts on host countries and measures to minimise refugee flows – and instead look at the lived experience of exile, then more attention needs to be given to developing a more nuanced understanding of home. I agree with Turton that an over-emphasis on policy has limited the scope of refugee studies, while the tendency to focus on the pain of exile and ignore the quotidian work put into producing home anew has risked presenting ‘the displaced as fundamentally flawed human beings’ (Turton 2005: 276, 278). The lost home and the new home in exile are not discrete, dichotomous entities, even though they are geographically distinct, but are rather part of a continuum. By accepting home as multidimensional, it is possible to identify the connections and reverberations between past, present and future homes that occur during the lifetime work of producing home. However, while recognising home as a process, any exploration of home in the context of displacement also needs to acknowledge that the attachment to the lost home can be intensely passionate and long lasting.

Dimitris makes it clear that, in spite of his successful resettlement in Britain, he continues to feel a sense of loss and injustice as a result of being forced to leave his home in Cyprus and still being unable to return. He is also aware that there can be no adequate compensation for his loss because, even if there were a political solution in Cyprus and his physical property were given back to him, he could never return to the past and reclaim his home as it was at the moment of his flight. As Warner (1994: 171) points out, the possibility of return ‘denies the temporal reality of our lives and the changes that take place over time’. Dimitris’s experience illustrates the complexity of home for those who have been forced to migrate, demonstrating how the impact of losing home can be prolonged even when life in exile has been largely positive. Home for Dimitris is his lost house and village in Cyprus as well as his house and life in London. It is his relatives and friends on the island and his family and community in Britain.

Dimitris lives what could be described as a transnational life, travelling to and communicating with Cyprus while living in London. However, while the ability to move around the world for work or pleasure is a welcome bonus of globalisation for the privileged, Dimitris’s experience challenges the celebration of universal rootlessness in some quarters of postmodernism. Here, I take a similar view to that of Hannam, Sheller and Urry in their development of the concept of mobilities, which they see as necessarily problematising ‘both “sedentarist” approaches in the social sciences that treat place, stability and dwelling as a natural steady-state, and “deterritorialized” approaches that posit a new “grand narrative” of mobility, fluidity or liquidity as a pervasive condition of postmodernity or globalisation’ (Hannam et al. 2006: 5). Studies of forced migration need to negotiate similar territory, neither pathologising refugees forced to exit the nation state by taking a sedentarist world view nor dismissing the difficulties engendered by those forced to migrate by engaging in the fanciful notion of a world in perpetual movement. As Jansen points out, while the suggestion of ‘essentialised links’ between people and place often causes the conditions for refugee movement in the first place (such as the ethnic cleansing that occurred in Bosnia), ‘the rootless fantasies proposed by some as an anti-sedentarist antidote sound cruelly naive to those violently expelled from “their” places’ (Jansen 2007: 16). While the 21st-century world is one of movement, it is also very clearly still one of borders (Taylor 2013b: 133). Although economic and political alliances have been made between countries, the nation state is alive and well, not least when it is policing its own boundaries. As Mountz (2011: 258) states, ‘Mobile bodies in search of refuge prove a key site where the nation-state is performed in daily discourse’. The recognition that mobility depends upon structures of power and control, which make movement easier for some than for others, is essential in the context of forced migration (Hannam et al. 2006: 3), in order to make the distinction between privileged mobility and limited mobilities (Kabachnik 2012: 217).

The multiple home

Throughout this book, I present home as a construction – something that is complex, multiple and in continual process. As Al-Ali and Koser (2002: 6) suggest, ‘concepts of home are not static but dynamic processes, involving the acts of imagining, creating, unmaking, changing, losing and moving “homes”’. I also view home in the widest possible sense, not as a euphemism for a house or village, nor as the homeland or nation. As others have noted, a one-dimensional and purely spatial understanding of home will no longer suffice. Cresswell and Merriman (2011: 7) state that ‘places and landscapes are continually practised and performed through the movement and enfolding of a myriad of people and things’. Home is an intersection of space, time and social relations (Cieraad 2010: 93; Kabachnik et al. 2010: 317; Koraç 2009: 26; Zetter 1998: 310). It is also intimately connected to our identity and an emotional sense of belonging (Christou 2013: 295; Sirriyeh 2013: 5). Home can also be embodied by ingesting food which is grown in the land and is loaded with cultural meaning, and in the interaction with plants and other organic elements such as soil (Ben-Ze’ev 2004; Sutton 2001; Tolia-Kelly 2010). Home is a gendered construct and is the place where the socialisation of children usually occurs. It is also contradictory, capable of being a place of nurture, safety and security, as well as having the potential to be the location of oppression, subjugation and violence (especially for women) (Koraç 2009: 26; Tolia-Kelly 2010: 28). For those who have been forced to migrate, this contradiction is often writ large, as the lost home is the setting for the good experiences of the past and memories of family and friends, but it is also the place where bad things happened, where the protection of the state failed and neighbours could no longer be trusted. Similarly, the home in exile is capable of being a place of refuge and a safe haven, at the same time as being a place of alienation and discrimination.

For Baxter and Brickell, the fluidity of home is evident in the fact that just as home can be constructed or made, it can also be unmade. ‘Home unmaking thereby recognises that peoples’ domestic lives are rarely fixed or predictable, but rather dynamic and varied’ (Baxter and Brickell 2014: 135). Home unmaking can be liberating and energising when it occurs as part of the natural life course, but for those who are forced to leave their homes, the process can be brutal. By representing home as constructed and under constant renegotiation, I am in no way suggesting that it is somehow trivial, unimportant or easily discarded. The narratives of first-generation Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot refugees in London which feature in this book make it clear that home matters.

Beyond ‘here’ or ‘there’

When the decision to relocate has been made out of necessity rather than desire, it seems likely that the meaning of home will be marked by complexity and contradiction. In spite of this complexity, solutions offered to the ‘problem’ of refugees often rely on a ‘here’ or ‘there’ paradigm (Taylor 2013b: 131). The United Nations’ durable solutions for refugees are settlement, resettlement or repatriation, implying an either/or of starting again in a new country or returning to one’s country of origin. Voluntary repatriation is the preferred durable solution of the UN and policymakers, who often see the future stability of both sending and host nations depending on it (Black 2002: 127; UNHCR 2006). Implicit in this is a suggestion that the natural order of things depends upon people being back in the place where they belong, the place where they came from. Yet this implies that refugees and the home they have left behind have remained static and can be reunited.

The field of refugee studies initially reflected the preoccupation with a ‘here’ or ‘there’ solution, with many studies focussing on the conditions that led to flight, aspects of resettlement in a host country or the process of repatriation. However, research since the late 1990s has taken on board the potential for multiple allegiances and the existence of transnational links, which imply an ongoing connection to more than one country (see, for example, Al-Ali & Koser 2002; Koraç 2009). According to Yuval-Davis (2007: 562), the ‘multiplicity of citizenships’ to ‘local, ethnic, religious, national, regional, transnational and international political communities’ which shape us all are more pertinent to migrants and refugees precisely because their belonging has been brought into question. Rather than seeing migrants and refugees as ‘out of place’, transnationalism sees flows of people as symptomatic of a globalised world in which goods, services and information also flow. This allows for the possibility that refugees might maintain a deep, emotional attachment to the lost home, while at the same time making a new home in the country of exile, or indeed in another country altogether. However, while adding complexity, theories of transnationalism still only tell a part of the story, privileging the spatial aspects of home(s) and the movement between territories.

The concept of home as a journey is useful if the journey is not simply conceived of in physical and spatial terms. Home as journey, according to Kabachnik et al. (2010 : 317), embodies ‘the conceptualization of home as a continuous process and renegotiation’ as ‘[t]he individual is permanently in the process of transition from his/her primary home to an ideal future home’. However, there is a danger that privileging the transition from the primary home of the past to the ideal home of the future risks neglecting the lived experience of home now, which is the position from which all assessments of home must be made. This is especially important when considering the meaning of home for refugees, because of the tendency to characterise displaced people as pathologically unable to function in exile in the present when removed from their lost home and their past. For this reason, Sørensen criticises what she sees as a preoccupation with the psychological dimension of displacement, which sees the displaced person as ‘a kind of social non-being’ existing ‘in a space in-between’ (Sørensen 1997: 145).

Framing home

This book explores the interplay between the different spaces of London and Cyprus and the way in which displacement impacts upon the meaning of home for a group of Cypriot refugees. The physical and temporal distance from the lost home, as well as three or more decades of lived experience in the exilic home, made this a fruitful theoretical location from which to examine what home actually represents for people who are forced to leave and remake home. The book is premised on the understanding that the meaning of home is likely to be complex, multiple and often contradictory. For the Cypriots who spoke to me, home is knowing where to find a cool breeze near Kyrenia’s harbour, the scent of jasmine in a London garden, a traditional village house built alongside the houses of grandparents and uncles, the sense of belonging in an Orthodox church congregation, the memory of a football game played with friends in the village square, pastries from Yasar Halim’s bakery on Green Lanes in the north London borough of Haringey, the cultural diversity of Larnaca before the divide, a handful of village soil from Cyprus scattered on a father’s grave in London. These evocative fragments are at the heart of what home means and how it comes to be constructed over time.

In writing this book, I needed a way to convey this complexity, fluidity and intertextuality. While no neat structure can adequately contain a concept as large and as slippery as that of home, I settled on a framework that enabled me to focus on four key themes that recur in the narratives: the spatial, temporal, material and relational home. The spatial home is made up of landscapes, cityscapes and the built environment. It is not just the house or the other structures we dwell in; it is also the surrounding houses, shops, places of worship and streets which make up the village or town, within the physically boundary of the nation (Appadurai 1996: 180–182). Home is also always inherently temporal, incorporating memories of past homes, the lived experience of the present home – which is in constant flux – and dreams of future homes (Cieraad 2010: 93; Morton 2007: 159; Tolia-Kelly 2010: 88). The temporal home is in daily routines as well as in cyclical events such as birthdays, religious festivals and harvests, which shape our experience of home. The material home is found in the embodied and sensory experience of food eaten and scents inhaled, the trees which provide shade, fuel and fruit and the soil in which food is grown and ancestors are buried, all of which engage the senses to produce the taste, smell and texture of home (Sutton 2001: 3; Tolia-Kelly 2010: 74–75). Home cannot be imagined in the abstract without its human (and animal) elements, the complex webs of individuals, alive and dead. The relational home refers to the close bonds with family and friends as well as the weak ties with wider social networks, all of whom engender emotional affect and produce social and cultural capital that enables lives to run smoothly and productively (Granovetter 1973; Koraç 2009: 38; Loizos 1981: 176).

It is true that these elements occur in everyone’s lived experience of home, as well as in all our nostalgic reflections of homes that existed in another time or location, whether we have migrated across borders or not. However, the focus on the meaning of home for Cypriot refugees in London offers a chance to see how homes are made, unmade and remade in challenging conditions. The preoccupations, therefore, are universal but can be expected to be heightened for those whose everyday process of constructing home has been disrupted by exile. The juxtaposition of the spatial, temporal, material and relational aspects of home illustrates the complexity of home and demonstrates how its multiple aspects are interconnected and inseparable. The spatial home always has a temporal dimension, as Cypriot refugees making their first return visits to Cyprus discovered when they found that the houses and villages that had been frozen in their memories were now vastly altered. Similarly, the social networks of the relational home are disrupted, at least in the short term, for refugees finding themselves in the different spatial context of exile. Meanwhile, the tastes of the material home are inextricably linked to the relational through the people with whom we prepare and eat food.

My decision to focus on these four aspects of home represents just one way of reading the refugees’ narratives and is not meant as a definitive blueprint for understanding or as a comprehensive list. I made a conscious decision, for example, not to explore the national home or homeland as a separate theme, although it inevitably occurs throughout the discussion. This is because questions of nationalism and national identity have dominated debate and research on Cyprus, for understandable reasons when one considers the island’s troubled history. There have been some excellent studies of these issues in recent years which have shed new light (see, for example, Bryant 2004, 2010; Calotychos 1998; Hadjipavlou-Trigeorgis 2000; Papadakis 1998, 2005; Pollis 1998). However, as a result of the centrality of these considerations to Cyprus and to Cypriots, individual stories have often been read through the prism of nationalism, assessing the level of their adherence to national discourses. This study tries to move away from the master narratives which have come to define Cyprus and focus instead on refugees’ own stories of home. Of course, each individual narrative is produced in a wider political and social context and is influenced by the narratives of the state, church, political parties and the wider community, which will be reflected in the discussion of home.

The ‘problem’ with Cyprus

In order to place this book in context, I will briefly turn to how Cyprus became a country of forced migration, as well as the historic relationship between Cyprus and Britain that frames this research. Cyprus is rarely mentioned in political arenas without the word ‘problem’ attached to it. It has been caricatured as a troubled island, a place of ethnic division and inevitable conflict, partly due to its strategic location in the Middle East, 50 miles from Turkey and 270 miles from the nearest Greek island of Rhodes (Calotychos 1998: 4). Over centuries, the island has been colonised or ruled by the Greeks, Romans, Lusignans, Venetians, Ottomans and British and served as a major trade route (Calotychos 1998: 5; Dubin 2002: 399–414; Gunnis 1956: 5–22). As Ahmet told me, ‘If you read the history of Cyprus in the last 4,000 or 5,000 years you find that ... all the big powers have been after it ... So I think it will always be troublesome place. We are a bit unlucky to be born there.’ Britain rented the island from the Ottomans in 1878, and Cyprus became a British Crown Colony in 1925, when i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Contexts and Catalysts
• 2  Theres No Place Like Home The Spatial Home
• 3  Rhythms of Life The Temporal Home
• 4  Senses of Belonging The Material Home
• 5  Home Is Other People The Relational Home
• 6  The Constructed Cypriot Home Concluding Remarks
• Appendix: Research Participants
• Notes
• References
• Index