Narratives of Cyprus: Modern Travel Writing and Cultural Encounters since Lawrence Durrell 9780755625796, 9781848859180

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To my family

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. Boy at window in home in north Nicosia. Photo by Jessica Setzer. Figure 2. Courtyard of Bellapaix Abbey. Photo by Benjamin Broome. Figure 3. Deteriorating building in demilitarized zone. Image developed by Benjamin Broome. Figure 4. Door to Lawrence Durrell’s home in Bellapaix. Photo by Benjamin Broome. Figure 5. Flag-painted mountains of the north and skyline of north Nicosia as viewed from the south. Photo by Benjamin Broome. Figure 6. Hala Sultan Tekke outside Larnaca in the south of Cyprus. Photo by Kate Mackay. Figure 7. Wind-blown view of Hala Sultan Tekke. Photo by Jessica Setzer. Figure 8. Lala Mustafa Pasha Mosque in Famagusta, named in honour of Turkish commander whose actions inspired the argument between Colin Thubron and Kemal. Photo by Jacqi Nicholson.

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Figure 9. Map of Greek Cypriot classroom from 2007 with pictures of schoolchildren linked by string to family homes before 1974. Photo by Jacqi Nicholson. Figure 10. Men and boy playing backgammon in Famagusta. Photo by Jessica Setzer. Figure 11. North Nicosia skyline with mountains in background. Photo by Benjamin Broome. Figure 12. The harbour of Kyrenia at dusk. Photo by Benjamin Broome. Figure 13. The late Rauf Denktash with author and Teach Cyprus participants in 2007. Photo by Kate Mackay. Figure 14. Turkish military post on the beach at Varosha. Photo by Jessica Setzer. Figure 15. Turkish-occupied Varosha viewed from Famagusta. Photo by Jessica Setzer. Figure 16. United Nations sign on Ledra Street in divided Nicosia. Photo by Jessica Setzer.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Nobody does it alone. I have many to thank for helping me both imagine this book and see it through to publication. For general inspiration, I am grateful for – and remain in awe of – the hospitality and decency shown so often to travellers by people of Cyprus, Turkey and the wider Middle East. Nesreen Khashan’s determination that audiences hear the stories of travel and cultural encounter from the Middle East led me to the genre of travel writing. The entire editorial staff of Travelers’ Tales and travel writer Tom Brosnahan helped me understand a great deal about the travel writing industry. Ken McAllister encouraged the initial scholarly interest in the topic and its development. Leila Hudson, Ed White and Brian Silverstein helped steer its early trajectory. Kate Mackay, Benjamin Broome and the Fulbright-Hays-sponsored schoolteachers who visited Cyprus had a hand in many of the experiences on the island that inform this book’s analysis. Plenty were kind enough to read early chapter drafts, and so I thank people like David Martins, Jennifer deWinter, Rik Hunter, Jeremy Sarachan, David Farley and Lisa Jadwin for their valuable feedback during the revision process. For the wonderful proofing and indexing I thank Jay Winston. The editorial and production team at

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I.B.Tauris have been true professionals. My family has been there through it all and makes the challenge worthwhile. All of the above had a hand in the book’s construction, but I alone take responsibility for any errors or oversights.

CHAPTER 1 THE CULTURAL STAGE FOR STORIES OF CONFLICT: NARRATED TRAVEL WRITING AND MODERN CYPRUS

Travel narratives have long captured the interest of audiences curious about the lives and landscapes of others. Though they may vary in form and function through time and across cultural contexts, memorable travel stories have a way of tethering themselves to public and private imaginations. The travel text may take the form of an embellished personal narrative, as in the stories of famed adventurer Marco Polo. It may have arrived as a colourful and culturally corrective set of letters to friends from a woman who travelled widely in eighteenth-century Ottoman lands, like the travel writing of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Or it could be journalistic, tongue-in-cheek personal dispatches, such as those penned by a youthful Mark Twain in his nineteenthcentury travelogue Innocents Abroad. Centuries later, these stories continue to circulate among audiences around the world and shape not only how people understand those who live in foreign lands, but also how the publics that consume such stories understand themselves.

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In our modern era of instant communicative technologies and means of verifying narrative details, who tells the story, and how they tell it may matter more than ever before. Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools – books that depict the author’s journey from obscure mountain climber to global humanitarian – provide a compelling case of the impact of travel writing on readers. These books have raised millions of dollars for Mortenson’s charities and granted the author access to some of the highest-ranking military and political figures in the US. Distortions and errors in the two texts that have come to light in recent years, however, have cast doubt on Mortenson’s credibility and undermined the philanthropic initiatives made possible by the financial success of his books and promotional tours. A story well told may move mountains, but, as Mortenson’s example shows, travel writers and their proxy narrators can be held responsible for the veracity of their tales and the effects of the telling. The genre of the travel narrative continues to evolve and accommodate a wider set of narrating subjects and purposes: the pilgrims, colonial administrators, soldiers, Grand Tourists and merchants of earlier centuries find their modern corollaries in religious tourists, diplomats, peacekeepers, foreign students and business travellers. The latter group has been joined in recent eras by leisure tourists, academic researchers, correspondents and backpackers. Narration produced by modern travellers has tended to arrive more self-consciously as book-length memoir, personal essay or political dispatch. Twenty-first century iterations of these genres have been altered by messaging technologies such as the blog, video chat and other types of narration that reduce lapses in time while affording travellers and the audiences for travel stories greater access to the archive of stories available for a given site or type of travel. Though the rise and distribution of communication technologies and literacies may, for many, be shrinking the world we inhabit, stories of travel continue to matter, especially for those who narrate, consume and live the effects of travel texts. Travel narrators undertake their journeys for various reasons and deliver their stories to others in order to achieve different purposes.

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Such has been the case for travel narration set on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, which provides the material for Narratives of Cyprus: Modern Travel Writing and Cultural Encounters since Lawrence Durrell. This study specifically considers as its artefacts travel texts of Cyprus written in English from approximately 1955 to 2005. These texts thus capture a land and people deeply affected by momentous events such as the conflict between Greek Cypriot guerrillas and British colonial authorities that lasted from 1955 to 1959; the intercommunal conflict that occurred throughout the 1960s and that led to political crises between Greek and Turkish Cypriots; the 1974 coup d’e´tat and subsequent Turkish invasion and partition, which led to the internal displacement of one-third of the island’s population; and the continuing era of partition, in which the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities have lived on separate sides of a ceasefire line without a political resolution.1 Though some visitors deliberately set out to travel and write, others may only reluctantly become storytellers of their experiences. Colin Thubron, whose memoir of Cyprus is discussed in depth in this study, visits Cyprus in 1972 as a writer looking to accumulate personal experiences and narrative material in a site of high-profile political conflict. As for Lawrence Durrell, he appears to have journeyed to Cyprus to find a writing refuge where he could complete his fictional works set in Alexandria. Other narrators are even less intentional in terms of the relationships between their travel and personal storytelling. Contemporary domestic labourers living on the island, but originating from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and other countries, also have ‘travel stories’ about their experiences in Cyprus, for those willing and positioned to listen.2 To the extent that people’s literate practices include the circulation of travel stories – as in the case of the narrator of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, who reflects on the power of stories told to him in his childhood by family members about faraway lands – they can be said to represent consumers of the genre.3 Broadly construed in this way, almost everyone is impacted by travel writing, though not all in the same ways. Narratives of Cyprus affirms the work of recent scholars who posit that travel stories shape global and local politics, in ways

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that often involve asymmetric relations of power (Lisle, Kaplan, Edwards and Graulund). It looks to contribute to this body of knowledge by imagining an ethics of travel to guide the critical study and practice of travel as a global, cultural phenomenon. Whether the story arrives as deeply personal memoir or blog, as a commercial travel text with no identifiable narrator but plenty of narration, such as a guidebook, or even as the seemingly innocuous verbal responses offered to friends and family who ask, ‘How was your trip?’ – these texts undoubtedly shape the world we inhabit. Their contents and perspectives inform the discursive terrain of a place as each story’s origin fades into oblivion: ‘Montagu’s Turkey’ becomes synonymous, for some, with the contemporary republic, despite the limitations of such a perspective and the sea changes wrought by intervening centuries; Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons of Cyprus invites us to inhabit an idyllic space that, unfortunately for him, and by extension, his intended Euro-American audiences, has been spoiled by the unbending ideals of its ethnically Greek inhabitants. By what authority does Durrell tell this one particular story of Cyprus, and for what ends? Narratives of Cyprus argues for an approach to travel and travel writing that regards and reconfigures travel, travel narration and the consumption of these stories as ‘cultural work’ – as situated artefacts that impact how people of the world see and understand themselves. Travel stories emerge from a narrator’s limited interactions with local people in particular historical contexts. All travellers who tell their stories to others would be wise to assume the responsibility of doing so in ways that account for the substantial opportunities and risks involved. The analytical work and conclusions of this study bear implications for domestic and global audiences, particularly the claim that travel and travel writing do more good than harm; in other words, it asserts that travel writing has a greater capacity to selfconsciously operate as a force for productive change than to consolidate facts on the ground and fix people in limited, often inequitable and vexed discursive spaces. In the case of Cyprus and its late-colonial and partition-era relations with travel discourse, evolutions within the genre suggest changes in practice that offer

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the land, its people, and the travellers it attracts a more informed, and perhaps even hopeful, path forward. As for the historic functions of global travel stories, these have varied to some degree over time and contexts and are sources of much critical controversy and disagreement. The representation of travel is implicated in many of the greatest glories and tragedies of human history, as well as the rise of social movements and ideological structures that continue to impact our lives and identities.4 Analysis of primary and secondary material on travel writing suggests that while travel writers and their audiences have at times been overly celebratory concerning the genre’s accomplishments, contemporary critics have been too unforgiving. Recent post-colonial scholarship, which has successfully demonstrated the complicity of travel writing in the discourses of colonialism, tends to reduce travel narration to decontextualized reflections of broader geopolitical trends. This study offers an account of how the constraints of a particular cultural moment have shaped the narration of travel, without losing sight of how travel stories emerge as a synthesis of a particular writer’s experiences, motives, and narrative style. Though scene and moment affect the possibilities of experience, travellers and writers still make choices that impact others. Global and local cultural forces, in other words, mark these narratives as products of particular times and spaces without entirely determining their production. No two writers of this study could be said to experience the same Cyprus; nor, for that matter, could they be imputed to possess the same narrating motives. My interest in the motives of writers – and of the first-person narrators with whom audiences vicariously experience Cyprus – informs my own critical, rhetorical perspective on travel and travel writing. Travel texts can and do function as rhetoric, as persuasive discourse that addresses the desires of audiences. Thus, travel narrators can be understood as ethically implicated by the act of storytelling: a travel narrator constructs and projects an ethos or character that is bound not only to the values of a story’s imagined, intended, and predominantly domestic audiences ‘back home’, but also to the people and cultures encountered through travel – whether such responsibility and authority is recognized by the narrator or not.

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Narratives of Cyprus speaks to the fields of travel studies, rhetoric and rhetorical criticism and post-colonial studies, as well as to those interested in Cyprus, Turkish, Greek, and Middle Eastern studies. I analyse a corpus of texts that feature cultural encounters between people of Cyprus and visitors to the island in a way that demonstrates how travel writing operates as rhetoric, as language that affects people and shapes how we see ourselves and others in the world. To the extent that travellers demonstrate what I will call global rhetorical citizenship, their efforts can be said to respond to the shortcomings in the project of cosmopolitanism and in some post-colonial criticism.

Travel Writing as Rhetoric: Stories of Cyprus as Cultural Work A rhetorical approach to travel writing posits a natural and abiding interest in how writers develop their ethos through the first-person narrators they construct. Though rhetoric has historically been more involved in the production and analysis of seemingly argumentative or persuasive dimensions of language, it remains relevant to narration in the sense that narratives are never without contexts, audiences and consequences. Narratives of Cyprus regards travel stories as rhetoric, which means, as James Phelan writes, ‘something more than that narrative uses rhetoric or has a rhetorical dimension. It means instead that narrative is not just story but also action, the telling of a story to someone on some occasion for some purpose.’5 Phelan’s rather uncontroversial move to regard narratives as situated, motivated action also effectively locates travel writers as implicated in ethical communication – they depend on audiences for the standing of their work. Their own motives for and methods of writing merit critical attention, even if not all readers are inclined to consider these in their interpretive calculus. If travel writing represents a type of rhetoric, then one way to analyse a storyteller’s effects on others would be to study the ethos or credibility of the narrator and how this authority is mobilized to accomplish certain effects. Ethos is central to a project of this sort in

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that it focuses on cultural encounters that become material for narration. While ethos has always been used across a range of genres – in academic contexts such as literary criticism, political science, ethnography and cultural studies, and also in journalistic discourses – its roots are as an Aristotelian pisteis, a rhetorical appeal in triadic association with pathos and logos. Aristotle writes: since rhetoric exists to affect the giving of decisions [. . .] the orator must not only try to make the argument of his speech demonstrative and worthy of belief; he must also make his own character look right and put his hearers, who are to decide, into the right frame of mind. [. . .] It adds much to an orator’s influence that his own character should look right and that he should be thought to entertain the right feelings towards his hearers; and also that his hearers themselves should be in just the right frame of mind.6 Though Aristotle originally had in mind political and legal contexts when he developed the idea that character was central to persuasion, ethos continues to be useful for examining how texts work across different communicative genres. In the case of travel narratives, the writer may construct authority in a variety of ways, including the creation of an appealing first-person narrator. Assuming that this character has contact with people of a travel site who share their own experiences, part of the work involves integrating others’ stories into the larger text. Anthropologists and rhetoricians have long been interested in the complex challenges involved in telling other people’s stories responsibly. In his ethnography Angel’s Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and the Rhetorics of the Everyday, Ralph Cintron explains how rhetorical inquiry into human affairs and artefacts compels us to attend to personal interests and their relationship to logic and persuasion: ‘as a rhetorician, I am always concerned with the densities of texts and how to open these to scrutiny, and certainly one of the most significant densities concerns the writer’s ethos, which is typically understood as a person’s moral character or disposition.’7 This notion of ethos as a ‘density’ of a text directs our attention to

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complicated problems of self-representation, relations with others and engagement with audiences: matters that travel writers and their publishers have not always and consistently troubled themselves to address. One such problem concerns the reputation of a travel narrator who has become familiar to audiences. Rhetoricians have disagreed, historically, about whether ethos is something to be manufactured within the text itself (Aristotle’s Rhetoric, with a qualifying note8) or something that precedes the text. The dispute turns on whether ethos is created by superb communication or by the a priori status of a speaker as a classed, sexed, nationalized, celebrated, vilified or otherwise politicized being. How much of the respect afforded to a writer like Lawrence Durrell comes from the wit and charm that readers appreciate in his personal writing and how much from the reputation he has gained as a generation’s most well-known travel writer? How differently might one read and respond to Colin Thubron’s travelogue Journey into Cyprus when reading his work in contemporary times, when his reputation has been well-established, as opposed to in the early 1970s, when few would have been familiar with him? Ethos-oriented questions of this sort have value for the problems they raise about our own interpretive habits. Though it never hurts to bear in mind questions of how prior knowledge and orientation towards a writer might affect our own reading of a text, no definitive formula is available for even the most earnest consumer of travel texts. In fact, Cintron raises the sobering caveat that ethos itself risks becoming just another tool with which a skilled writer can play: ‘By calling ethos a characteristic of texts, I am calling attention to the crafting of ethos and suggesting that a writer’s ethos is the “appearance” of ethos and that I do not know what ethos might be as a “reality” somehow separate from its appearance.’9 Though narrators are not necessarily to be confused as one and the same with the writers who describe their thoughts and actions, they share in a meaningful relationship with one another. Audiences ultimately determine how much value rests in this linkage. Yet we usually have only this ‘crafted’ persona that exists as an inseparable part of the textual experience, one that contributes to the story’s overall persuasiveness.

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And, as Cintron reminds us, ‘knowing something of a person’s character helps us judge that person’s knowledge claims,’ as well as the overall authority of the text.10 In the writing context imagined by travel writers, the impact of one’s words on others – not just the audiences invoked but also those who are represented in these writers’ narratives – assumes a central importance. The writing situation cannot absolve itself of responsibility to others. Nuanced questions about a given person encountered in particular circumstances may or may not be on the aesthetic radar of the travel writer. Travel as rhetoric, in contrast, foregrounds such questions of ethos, compelling the interest of writers whose narratives influence cultural attitudes and geo-political relations. Rhetorical inquiry can at least endeavour to discern the presumed values, knowledge and experiences of the writer and the audiences their stories address. Travel writers do much more than report or document from afar. They organize meaning, categorize cultures and posit civilizational assumptions found in their points of departure. When confronted with people whose experiences, histories and material lives differ from their own, travel writers inevitably weigh in on matters of human rights, freedom of speech, gender equity and the politics of historiography; whether audiences expect or demand conscious commentary or judgments on the part of these writers varies according to the rhetorical situation.

Political and Cultural Dimensions of Travel Writing in Modern Cyprus For parts of three decades, the Cyprus conflict was front page world news that brought NATO allies Turkey and Greece to the brink of war in an era of tense Cold War uncertainties.11 After 1974, the conflict has endured politically and negotiations between the two sides have failed to produce a resolution. The island has become a site of neither peace nor war. Minor skirmishes along the Green Line dividing the two sides have produced some casualties, but most of the violence has been symbolic, as nationalists on both sides have antagonized one another and diminished the likelihood of

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reconciliation and political resolution. Greek Cypriots inherited the Republic of Cyprus and became a member of the European Union, while the Turkish north has become an unrecognized state dependent upon Turkey for its survival. Travel to the island brings visitors faceto-face with the island’s unresolved tensions. Most of the narratives to be examined have been produced for domestic audiences in the US and Europe, although, like so many travel texts, they have managed to find their way beyond these intended audiences.12 The political effects of such travel writing can be far-reaching, informing global subjectivities and sustaining forms of knowledge that often fix people of non-Western lands in subordinate relation to these primarily US and European audiences.13 If we are to assume these texts to be significant in moving audiences and constructing a credible vision of Cyprus, these narrators have likely in some way created an appealing ethos that makes their own characters and texts persuasive. Of course, audience interpretation varies according to many complicated factors beyond the control of a writer. National identity would be one consideration, as British audiences would be likely to know more about Cyprus than US audiences because of a more intimate historical relationship, the enduring UK military presence, and a geographic proximity that brings tourists and pensioners to the island in large numbers each year. However, not all consumers of travel stories are ‘domestic’ audiences, as we shall see later: popular and well-circulating travel narratives have a way of making their way through domestic audiences and back to the actual people who served as the raw material for travel stories.14 I focus a great deal of this analysis on the way Cypriots are represented by travel writers, especially members of the Turkish community who, after 1974, have lived in the northern part of the island.15 The intent of such a move is to heighten awareness of the complexity and internal heterogeneity too often overlooked in centuries of travel literature produced by Western writers to capture and essentialize a wide, dynamic and shifting range of significations. Travellers encounter the landscapes of Cyprus and then turn to the obligatory gestures of explaining, often in general terms, the essential

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qualities of ‘the people,’ Greek or Turk, who have never been the static, unitary, cultural subjects commonly imagined by travellers. Troping of this sort not only affects how people see themselves, but how the larger conflicts are perceived by outsiders. Despite the problem’s diminished stature in light of more pressing events – the violence unleashed by the Cold War’s end, the continuing conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, 9/11 and the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Arab Spring’s unfinished business, for example – Cyprus remains a matter of political importance as an unresolved European problem with serious geopolitical implications. Justifiably or not, the Cyprus problem periodically takes centre stage in Western discussions of Turkey’s place in the world. The textual analysis performed in this study emerges from close reading of travel narratives that provide audiences with representations of people of Cyprus intended to resonate with European and other Western audiences. My approach to travel writing means constantly attending not only to what these writers do and do not produce, especially in terms of personal character and relations to others, but also to why they write as they do under given circumstances, for certain audiences, to particular effects. I have deliberately avoided a one-size-fits-all methodology, instead preferring to examine each text on its own particular terms, accounting as responsibly and accurately as possible for factors like mode of travel, relations to place, political and cultural context, distinctive formal aspects of the narrative and so forth. I have attempted to account for the dominant themes and rhetorical dimensions at play in each travel text considered, leading to some diversity in analytical focus across each chapter.16 While several primary texts receive attention in this study, I mainly discuss the book-length travel texts of the modern era of armed conflict and partition, beginning in 1955 and extending to the present. I choose 1955 as a starting point as this was the year when Greek Cypriot guerrillas began attacking British colonial interests, which effectively transformed Cyprus from a stable colonial and Cold War asset of strategic importance into a political problem in its own right.17 Durrell’s Bitter Lemons, the central text of Chapter 3, narrates

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events of this time period. The most recent texts included in this study were published in 2005, chronicling events from the 1990s and into the early years of the new millennium. Travelogues – longer, narrated texts documenting personal experiences of writers – have been chosen because they generally feature richer detail concerning both narrator and objects of narration. They also tend to carry greater potential to continue circulating among English language audiences in Europe, the US and elsewhere; such texts become valued resources for those with an interest in travel, Cyprus and the troubled relations between people of East and West.18 Despite the absence of war, the Cyprus of the decades following the 1974 coup d’e´tat and invasion has enjoyed a tenuous security at best.19 The proximity of the Green Line and the fervour of the conflicting communities’ distrust of one another have undermined the coherence, stability and fictive ‘peace’ so essential to most functioning modern tourism. Since the cease-fire of 1974 and its subsequent population exchanges, people in Cyprus have lived with neither war nor peace. Though extremists may no longer sow mayhem against each other directly, symbolic violence has continued, enacted through bitter propaganda disseminated through virtually every imaginable aspect of public life, including state-sponsored domains such as tourism, education, the arts and the professions. Whether sparring through their respective national media outlets or squabbling over terms of representation at international forums, people of each side tend to distrust the motives of the other. As the conflict has been internationalized since the 1950s, people on both sides have courted the sympathy of the outside world. Travellers to Cyprus come to know the place in just such over-determined political circumstances.

Witnessing the Cyprus Problem and Making Stories of Travel As Narratives of Cyprus demonstrates, the island presents its own particular opportunities and challenges to travellers with an interest in harvesting narratives out of their time in Cyprus. One

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representative travel text that illuminates the idiosyncrasies of Cyprus travel writing is the dispatch of Harper’s correspondents Sebastian Junger and Scott Anderson. In their first-person, coauthored essay published in 1999 for Harper’s magazine, Junger, in a passage dense with descriptive detail typical of travel discourse, captures the bizarre spectacle of the Green Line that divides the island of Cyprus and functions as a dominant trope for the island’s splintered identity: The line has a strange pull to it, like the edge of a cliff or a third rail; it was the first place I went when I arrived in [Greekcontrolled] Nicosia. I dropped my bags at the hotel and walked past the fancy shops on Ledra Street to a cul-de-sac, where some staging had been set up against a concrete wall along the line. It’s the only place where tourists can look out over the rubble of no-man’s-land, and a flight of metal stairs has been installed to encourage viewing. While I was there an English family arrived and trudged dutifully up to the platform, children licking at ice-cream cones and parents fiddling with camcorders. They looked over the railing at the ramshackle Turkish positions a hundred feet away, clucked their disapproval, and had their photo taken with a young soldier who was standing guard nearby. Then they wandered off to do more shopping.20 South and north contrast visually in ways that outsiders can easily identify. ‘Ramshackle positions’ on one side square off against ‘fancy shops’ on the other, suggesting a Turkish north that suffers impoverishment and a Greek south that enjoys affluence and the company of the European world. The narration also demonstrates how Western tourists who visit this site gaze in judgment at its condition. Junger registers a few digs at the tourists, who strike him as perhaps too self-righteous for the occasion. He likely assumes that they come to know Cyprus through a smattering of de-contextualized news stories, supplemented by experiential episodes such as surreally routinized stop-and-peek visits to Green Line positions squeezed into

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an itinerary heavy with shopping, beaches and perhaps the nightclubbing scene in Ayia Napa. Perhaps such visitors have little or no substantial interest in understanding or being affected by Cyprus. Junger’s impressions of this scene, in which conflict appears to have been transformed into commodity, or at least a tolerable oddity of the landscape, suggests as much. His scepticism is hardly exceptional. Dean MacCannell, in The Ethics of Sightseeing, suggests that the moral economy of tourism precludes personally transformative engagement: Crossing an edge between moralities presents opportunities to experience something new that is fraught with risk. In some instances tourists test themselves by traveling to war zones or to remote ‘primitive’ cultures, precisely to risk exposure to acute difference. These tourists are called ‘travelers.’ Tourists are called ‘tourists’ in the pejorative sense for their failure (‘really’ and ‘truly’) to experience even minor difference. No matter whether difference has been emphasized to enhance experience or minimized to make it tolerable, the primary drive of tourism is to render normative difference visibly interesting but not ultimately consequential.21 Cyprus, at least for most of the period after the tumult of 1974, has not experienced open conflict and the war zone itself remains frozen in time and visible in space. How ‘ultimately consequential’ this space becomes for travellers depends on the visitors’ motives for coming to Cyprus, their openness to the perspectives of Cypriots and a host of other factors. Cynical as Junger and others may be about tourists paying witness to the tragedies of Cyprus, his own travel experience and text may have more in common with these tourists than he is willing to acknowledge, given his, and others’ admittedly irresistible attraction to this living monument of war and division. True, he writes for Harper’s with the ostensible purpose of asserting the island’s relevance as a dark analogy for the future of the Balkans. Beyond this political exigency, however, his description of the Green Line, like other travel texts, contributes to its continued centrality as

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a trope for the entire island: broken, tense, bizarre, alluring, tragically beautiful, frustrating. . . even dead. The space dividing north from south and Turk from Greek functions as a central character in the ‘cover story’ of Cyprus, and it hails travellers as they take in the island’s landscape. What does a writer do with this feature of Cyprus that entices travellers, personally, to its proximity? How will the Green Line and the rest of Cyprus be constructed by those who visit and for what kind of stories? How do the political moment and the cultural context affect travel writers? To what extent do their stories follow the scripts that align with the particular interests of self-conscious Cypriots? These questions matter deeply to the extent that travellers can be bestowed with any meaningful agency in their experiences and narratives. Yet travel writers are never wholly autonomous actors. They also function as literary conduits for cultural and political conditions that shape the landscape and field of possibilities that can be encountered in modern Cyprus. Writers like Junger face a familiar and yet daunting ethical challenge circumscribed by complicated cultural conflicts. At their best, travel writers encounter others with a spirit of openness, earnest curiosity and personal responsibility to the integrity of their experiences and the stories they will tell to audiences about other people. The context of travel in Cyprus conspires against a traveller’s determination to be independent and non-judgmental. Instead, writers face, at almost every turn, a painful political environment that is, for the outsider, as confusing as it is unforgiving. The Green Line – like much of the iconography of Cyprus – identifies the island and its people by their conflict. It offers a sufficiently compelling image to represent a land where two communities live apart from one another, fixed in a complex, longstanding conflict of regional and global significance. Since 1974, this internationally monitored demilitarized zone has buffered the two communities that once lived side by side in towns and villages throughout the island.22 This current physical arrangement has invited travelling observers to assume essential, irresolvable differences between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots.23 Junger’s

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arrival episode at the Green Line in Nicosia at least creates a space for critique of this exasperated status quo. However, like most of the travel writing dealing with Cyprus since 1955, his own narrative nourishes several of the binary pairings that have long delimited cultural relations and conflicts on the island: Christian and Muslim, Greek and Turk, sun-seeking European tourist and politicallysensitive Cypriot, Western imperial/colonizing agent and Eastern colonized subject. Such differences unfold for and are constructed by Western writers, who navigate complicated physical and emotional terrain on the island. Writing about personal travel experiences and describing the landscape and people in Cyprus thus provides a substantial rhetorical challenge for travellers, journalists and other writers. In essence, their task compels them to dance through minefields, posing predicaments for narrators who look to situate themselves ethically within the stories they narrate. In order to demonstrate how Cyprus stands in distinction to other travel destinations, one need look no further than the island’s two respective ‘mother countries’, Turkey and Greece, and how travel writing has thrived in these nearby lands. An effort to catalogue recent travel literature and narratives about Turkey or Greece turns up a slew of material published in the past few decades: dozens of book-length travelogues, memoirs and first-person political narratives, as well as many shorter essays published in a variety of venues, such as anthologies like Travelers’ Tales: Turkey or Travelers’ Tales: Greece or in online compendia. Such has not been the case for Cyprus.24 Why has so little travel writing been produced about a place with such famed historical ruins, natural beauty, geographic proximity to three continents and the Middle East, endless theatrical political intrigue and other sources of interest? One rather obvious spatial explanation would be its liminality within the European imagination. In simple cartographic terms, Cyprus is so far south and east in relation to Brussels and Amsterdam that it is probably one of the last points to be noticed on most maps of Europe.25 Despite an extraordinarily rich history and landscape, Cyprus could be overshadowed by the ancient glories of Egypt to the south and the sacral appeals of Jerusalem and the Holy Lands to the East. In more

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recent centuries, it has been the pawn in imperial games carried out by Venetians, Ottomans and Britons – significant, but not exactly an indispensable piece. The Ottomans did not invest much in Cyprus nor rely on it strategically; the British, with US encouragement, insisted on its importance during the Cold War. Though Cyprus became independent in 1960, foreign forces have never left and have no known plans to do so. The violent past and current militarization of Cyprus probably have done more than anything else to tarnish its attractiveness for most potential tourists and travellers. Cyprus has had something of an image problem as the home to Europe’s last divided capital, a place that has been reductively configured as ‘a problem’ for five decades and counting. Even without actual fighting, the island suffers from its reputation. In one revealing anecdote, a writer pitching a travel piece about Cyprus in 1999 to his editors at The Atlantic Monthly had to first convince them that he would indeed be safe during his weeks of frolicking around the sights of the south.26 No collection of late twentieth-century travel writing about Cyprus exists, in any language, though if it did, most likely it would be in English given the association of the genre with colonialism, and the British imperial presence from 1878 to 1960. The most comprehensive anthology published, English Travel Literature on Cyprus (1878– 1960), stops at the end of the British colonial era. Narrative texts from the time of the Cyprus Republic and into the present era of inter-communal warfare, coup, invasion, partition and stalemate (1963 to the present) have been produced mostly for newspapers and magazines by war correspondents from Western nations. As might be expected in an environment in which highstakes international players mediate a decades-old ceasefire between warring people, sober political memoirs outnumber inspiring travelogues, creating a relative paucity of literature that could strictly be considered ‘travel.’ Texts by political pundits pushing their own takes on the island’s recent history bear titles like Hostage to History and Cyprus: A Troubled Island. To the extent that these texts deploy personal narrative or description of the island’s cultural landscape, they largely comprise

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the corpus of what could be considered travel writing on Cyprus post1974.27 Ultimately, these works focus on the politics and history of the island without much attention to people’s cultural lives and everyday affairs. Their narratives provide assorted political explanations for what has made the situation in Cyprus so vexed, with travel serving as a subordinate lens for interpreting the landscape. Yet travel experiences of political and diplomatic writers find their way into the literature, and some more traditionally travelfocused writers have continued to write about Cyprus. My focus in this study, however, rests primarily on these latter, more readily identifiable ‘travel’ texts, which continue to impact people’s present, lived experiences – in EU and Western cultural politics, for example. Durrell’s memoir Bitter Lemons and Thubron’s travelogue Journey into Cyprus represent the two best-known travel texts about Cyprus. Given their influence on subsequent travellers and writers, each receives its own separate chapter in this study, Chapters 3 and 4, respectively. The remaining texts analysed in Narratives of Cyprus concern travels that occur after 1974, and most of these will be considered together in Chapter 5. Given this study’s particular focus on the Turks of Cyprus, an important contextual note regarding how travellers encounter the island and its people needs to be taken into account. Since 1974, most visitors to the island have arrived through internationally-recognized points of entry in the south, and have tended to remain in the south for the duration of their visits. The literature about this Cyprus, the Greek-controlled Republic of Cyprus, tends to produce landscape pieces concerning people whose lives have been radically rearranged by war – in many cases by personal tragedies such as loss of livelihood, dispossession of land, the death of a loved one and so forth. Roughly one-third of Greek Cypriots were displaced by the 1974 invasion and subsequent population exchanges. Yet travellers to the north can also discern a national narrative of victimhood from Turks of Cyprus, with their own distinct stories of personal suffering. Each side bears the effects of war. Sites along the Green Line and elsewhere have become incorporated into the sensitive modern tourist’s comprehensive

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itinerary – along with beaches, Greco-Roman ruins, medieval castles, Ottoman-era public works and pristine Orthodox churches of the cities and countryside. In the larger picture, however, most visitors can easily recognize how the Green Line and the nationalist monuments of Cyprus articulate the tragedies of the island. They are too ubiquitous for most visitors to ignore. Even with the actions taken in 2003 by Turkish Cypriot authorities to ease restrictions on travellers’ movements on the island so that most people have the ability to experience both sides of the island, the Green Line remains intact. Any text concerning the period from 1974 to 2003 emerges from an era when travel from north to south was impossible and travel from south to north was restricted to one-day passes grudgingly released to foreigners, who were then discouraged from spending money and prohibited from returning with goods from the north. Such measures, and the continuing lack of a proper resolution to the Cyprus problem, make the presence of conflict even more difficult to avoid. Still, some strive in earnest to render Cyprus as ‘normal’ as possible for a storied Mediterranean island of famed antiquities, ancient civilizations, natural beauty and political intrigue. A few writers aspire for rhetorical achievements well beyond this relatively standard fare. Chapter 6 considers just such a text in its goal of proposing an ethics of travel writing and reading, Yiannis Papadakis’s 2005 Echoes from the Dead Zone, as this unusual and important narrative suggests a different type of travel and a different ethic of relation to the other. Before leaving the issue of existing travel literature and text selection, I feel obliged to point out the obvious masculinist slant of this study, as it considers only one text authored by a woman. While women in the north and south are present in public life, male travellers, historically, have had a much easier time meeting and interacting with male Cypriots. Thus, the experiences and perspectives of Cypriot men naturally come off as normative and universal. However, other texts available to travellers serve to counter these cultural histories. Cynthia Cockburn’s The Line: Women, Partition and the Gender Order in Cyprus, for example, is an

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ethnographic account of women’s political lives and projects in the face of a protracted conflict situation. Her portraits of Cypriot women complement and contrast with the cultural characterizations that emerge in existing travel narratives. Almost never do writers focus on women, much less do so through a ‘transversal feminist’ political agenda. By supplying oft-ignored stories of Cypriot women, The Line offers at least one map of the experiences of women on the island, who are routinely ignored or not as easy to access for the primarily male travellers who have visited since 1955. In fact, Cockburn’s text illustrates the problem. Travel writing, like travel itself, has been an historically male-dominated enterprise, and Cyprus has been a site of curiosity for mostly British, male travel writers. In the spaces in which travel writers meet the land to make cultural history – the coffee shop, the castle ruin – women are often absent. Yet their experiences, stories, and contact with travellers should be no less important and representative. Though an increase of women travellers and travel writers from the UK and elsewhere may lead to more culturally complicated narration in the future, one can also hope for the possibility of Greek and Turkish Cypriot women writing, in English or available in translation, about their experiences on the island. With more women involved in travel and travel writing, the ethics of encounter and the troping of people and landscape would undoubtedly mirror some of the same historical and cultural narratives put into discursive play by men. The people, land and landscape, however, would surely be different than what has been imagined by British writers like Durrell and Thubron, as well as Christopher Hitchens and Oliver Burch.

On Rhetoric and Scholarly Ethos: A Personal Note Personal travel experiences in Cyprus, supplemented by intensive study of contemporary travel accounts from the island, lead me to posit an uncontroversial yet significant claim for those approaching travel writing rhetorically: if a traveller plans to meet the people there with the intent of writing about it later, locals will almost unfailingly want to know the writer’s angle and motives: who is this

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person? What is the source of this interest? Some of such interest could be attributed to a simple human curiosity which is quite understandable for people living on an island, albeit the third largest in the Mediterranean. The suffocating saturation of political significance in the minutiae of daily life accounts for the rest. Some travel writers do not much care for this curiosity, as it shifts the focus back onto the visitor, politics and personal agendas. Even worse, reciprocity or engaged dialectics on the part of the traveller threaten to disrupt the privileged totality of the gaze and the project of representing the other. Many travel writers thus prefer that contingencies of the self stay off the table. Thubron, in Journey into Cyprus, takes to feigning sleep when he tires of personal questions. Aspects of his own identity remain inaccessible, thus, to both his audiences and the locals he encounters during his travels. Of course, not all writers avail themselves of the political cover available through the depersonalized aesthetic norms of narration. Papadakis’s Echoes from the Dead Zone presents an alternative ethos for travel narration, in which the storyteller becomes available, even vulnerable, within the journey of travel and through the written text that politicizes the personal (see Chapter 6). My hope is that time, distance, and diverse experiences of travel and scholarship have helped me to become something resembling a critical cosmopolitan, who ‘take[s] seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives’ rather than one who takes a partisan’s stance toward a given narrative.28 Such a balance can be taxing, if not impossible, to produce. I bear in mind here the writing of Christopher de Bellaigue and his own complicated relationship to Turkish culture. In his book about the troubled, complicated past and present of Turkey’s East, Rebel Land, he admits to a period of his youth based in Istanbul as a correspondent during which he was somewhat smitten with Turkey and ‘the East.’ So intoxicated was he by the thrill of difference that he failed to attend sufficiently to unpleasant contradictions of which others were all too happy to soberly remind him. The particular Turkey he came to know arrived through the lens of the secular nationalist elites he befriended in Istanbul. Upon publishing an article in The New York

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Review of Books that is rightly criticized for its political and historical naivete´, he returns to Turkey determined to settle the score and write a history book – inflected heavily by the discourses of travel literature – about the horrors of the past and present in the eastern parts of the country, addressing in the process a host of societal taboos. De Bellaigue works so earnestly and self-consciously to erect an ethos of independence and objectivity that, by the end of the text, one wonders how many people remain as sources for the next story about Turkey. I have no illusions about the price one might have to pay for telling a travel story with integrity. Perhaps Rebel Land serves as one end of a continuum for writing that refuses to look away from the influence of personal motives in narrating conflict. Narratives of Cyprus emerges from a range of personal experiences, such as living among the people of Turkey and north Cyprus for many years, travelling both sides of the Green Line in Cyprus, editing travel writing and studying and teaching rhetoric in universities around the world for two decades; thus, it makes sense to start with the personal, a self-accounting that contributes to the framing of this study. Furthermore, the rhetorical analysis to come later makes ethos and the politics of narration a central matter: who we are and where we come from always matters. Beginning with the personal takes me back to the summer of 1994 and my first visit to Cyprus. As a wide-eyed 25-year-old living abroad for the first time in my life, if I bore any inchoate pretensions of occupying a grander subject position, such as ‘a traveller,’ they took a backseat to the time-sensitive promise of bourgeois leisure. Teaching English to private high school students in Istanbul, Turkey, had its benefits, including summer vacations to tourist destinations in the Eastern Mediterranean. As an educated and curious young person I cared about politics, history, and culture, but not more than the appeal of cheap, scarcely-populated beaches. Modest economic privilege and regional proximity delivered me to Cyprus, where I got my beaches, but spent a lot less time on them than expected. Rather than sunbathing, most of my time in those two weeks went into dusty minibus rides and hitchhikes to the stunning sights of the north and long conversations about ‘the problem.’ The landscape

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included outrageously beautiful gothic castles – unlike any I had seen in Turkey – dotting the Five-Finger mountain range just a few miles from the sea. I met mostly easygoing and open-hearted people, from both Turkey and Cyprus, with plenty to say about the politics of the place. A handful of visitors from Arab countries, Israel and Europe flavoured the atmosphere of the hotels and restaurants of Kyrenia. As for the Turks of Cyprus, certain qualities distinguished them from the Turkish people I had been coming to know in Istanbul. They spoke Turkish differently, their English was Britishaccented, and many drank brandy sours with particular enthusiasm. Did northern Cyprus contain more distinctions from Turkey than similarities, I wondered? This possibility surprised me given the material, historical and political connections to Turkey that superficially dominated the land and landscape. To visit this politically-isolated community takes only a short flight or boat ride from various parts of Turkey. Many Turkish TV broadcasts give weather reports on the north. Back then, going to northern Cyprus meant going to a place where the people spoke Turkish, read newspapers from Turkey and largely considered themselves Turks. How different could Turkish Cyprus be from Turkey? The answer to the above question would be ‘very different,’ were the matter taken up in isolation. The question begs at least this follow-up: how different was the south of the island from the north? This, too, might produce a superficial response of ‘very different.’ Only years later would I begin to discover how much the Greek people of the south and the Turkish people of the north had, despite common cultural features, such as close-knit families and an affinity for certain foods, maintained separate existences throughout the island’s history. And though they often lived nearby one another and shared economic and communal ties, they had grown further apart from one another since the troubles of the 1950s. Indeed, all I knew of Cyprus at the time of the first trip in 1994 was limited to Turkish Cypriot or Turkish perspectives, viewpoints that often turned out to be at odds with those held by most people outside of Turkey. At the time, I was so cavalier about my trip that I neglected to adequately prepare for the passport complexities of

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visiting north Cyprus. Though I had read or heard beforehand that getting a stamp from the authorities of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in my passport could jeopardize travel to Greece, I forgot to request a stamp on a separate sheet of paper and, thus, received an unintended and potentially troublesome memento of this journey. Fortunately, that passport expired before I began to make visits to the Greek-controlled and officially recognized Republic of Cyprus.29 On the whole, the first visit simply left me stunned, delivering the first of many partial apprehensions of Cyprus. After this initial visit, I took several other trips from Turkey into northern Cyprus, during which additional complexities and tensions within the Turkish Cypriot perspective became apparent. What I failed to fully appreciate was just how atypical my understanding and experience of Cyprus was when compared to the prevailing wisdom of travellers and publics in Europe and the US. Most travellers to Cyprus in the post-1974 partition era – even after the easing of travel restrictions in 2003 – have entered through the south (a relative few choose to visit the north for more than a day). The typical visitor becomes familiar solely with the culturally Greek south part of the island and its cultural narratives. After 2003, travel back and forth between north and south has become easier, but most visitors to Cyprus have comparatively little contact with the Turks who inhabit the area north of the Green Line. With travel and research has come increasing awareness. In the summers of 2004 and 2007 I had the opportunity to enter Cyprus from the south to see what was for me ‘the other side.’ During these visits, I was able to meet Greek Cypriots and gain a better understanding of their national narratives and diverse perspectives, which, obviously, differ dramatically from those of their neighbours to the north. In these visits, I was working on cultural education projects designed for US schoolteachers. My role had switched from that of a regional tourist based in Turkey to a cultural facilitator on a federally-funded project run through the US Department of Education; now, in addition to expanding my own understanding, I was framing and interpreting Cyprus for others via design and implementation of programmes that teach cultural history to US

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schoolteachers.30 My niche within the ‘Teach Cyprus’ projects was that of someone with linguistic and cultural knowledge relevant to Turkish Cypriots and Turkey, but doing this work effectively compelled me to better understand and appreciate the experiences of Greek Cypriots and their own complicated internal diversities. I acquired a new way of reflecting on my earlier travels and the stories they produced, which revealed them to be particular to time and location, as well as my own evolving geopolitical awareness. In sum, my familiarity with Cyprus comes from multiple visits over parts of two decades. In this time as a traveller and a cultural tour guide, I have intensively studied Cyprus via firsthand visits, but also through scholarship, a successful US government grant proposal, and participation in academic seminars and conferences. This is not how most people who might end up visiting, relocating to, or otherwise considering the island would come to know it. They might just as likely settle into a travel memoir or consult the blogs or videographies of contemporary travellers. A few of these travel texts would be well known, most others obscure, but each tells an important story of Cyprus, rendering land into landscape as it arranges people and places into a particular narrative logic. The organization of Narratives of Cyprus traces key texts from the modern era of travel writing in Cyprus. These texts illustrate the way context shapes narration and how narrators of diverse eras, purposes, identities and perspectives respond to changes in cultural context. Chapter 2 is an overview of theories of travel germane to this study, with a particular interest in the tension between cosmopolitanism and its post-colonial sceptics; Chapter 3, the first of three chapters about the modern travel writing of Cyprus, examines the neo-colonialist tropes and privileged narrating perspectives appropriated by Lawrence Durrell in his memoir Bitter Lemons; Chapter 4 studies Colin Thubron’s travelogue Journey into Cyprus, a text born of the island’s period of inter-communal troubles that offers an ethical advance in narration, yet not without producing its own troubling consequences; Chapter 5 examines how diverse texts from the partition era reify a narrating trope of the island as a reductive site of dark and light; and the concluding

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chapter, Chapter 6, looks at the future of travel and travel narration in Cyprus and beyond as it considers the ethical implications for travel imagined as rhetoric. The analysis of the book as a whole and its final chapter suggest productive ways forward for travellers, critics, scholars and twenty-first century global citizens.

CHAPTER 2 SEDUCTIVE, DISREPUTABLE YET RESILIENT: MODERN TRAVEL WRITING AND ITS CRITICS

While travel writers might be aware of [. . .] global inequalities, they are often unaware of how the act of writing about travel itself engenders contemporary power formations that are as unequal, unjust and exploitative as those forged during Empire. (Lisle, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel, p. 10) If the tourist traverses boundaries, they are boundaries that the tourist participates in creating; that is, an economic and social order that requires ‘margins’ and ‘centres’ will also require representation of those structural distinctions. The tourist confirms and legitimates the social reality of constructions such as ‘First’ and ‘Third’ Worlds, ‘development’ and ‘underdevelopment,’ or ‘metropolitan’ and ‘rural.’ Created out of increasing leisure time in industrialized nations and driven by a need to ascertain identity and location in a world that undermines the certainty of those categories, the tourist acts as an agent of modernity. (Kaplan, Questions of Travel, p. 58)

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Bruce [Chatwin]’s lack of introspection is old-fashioned, but his style is contemporary. This unusual blend accounts for his distinctive voice. ‘He does not seem to owe anything to anybody,’ says Thubron. [. . .] ‘His inheritance was actually his adventurousness,’ says Thomas Keneally. ‘Modern fiction is sometimes too house-trained. Chatwin’s fiction was not housetrained. [. . .] There is a link between all fine writers and Prometheus. Critics know that creative people have stolen fire, that’s why they are so mean to them. Chatwin had stolen the fire – if you think of fire as the trigger for the tribal circle and stories. He had certainly plundered stories, but I mean, what do you want writers to do? That is almost the job description of writing.’ (Shakespeare, Bruce Chatwin: A Biography, p. 569) Though Cyprus as a site of travel narration has its own distinct historical and cultural context, much of the writing produced by visitors to its shores illustrates the concerns raised by contemporary critics: writing that consolidates unequal power relations and arrangements, including the rationalization of altruistic efforts to see the world ‘developed’ to standards set by particular civilizations; stories that use the pretext of travel narration as a means of configuring personal identity; and tensions over the ‘plundering’ of material to serve narrative interests. In particular, modern travel writing of Cyprus could be said to demonstrate how travel writers and post-colonial critics of this genre often assess global travel very differently – a tension I take up in this chapter before moving into my own analysis of the modern travel writing of Cyprus. Despite the perspectival chasm dividing travel writers and critics, they do at least share a mutual fondness for emphasizing how travellers often discover more about their own lives and cultures than they learn about the actual lives of those they meet on their journeys. A cerebral and sensitive travel writer like Pico Iyer values contact with others, but he acknowledges the ways in which travel comes to represent an inner journey. He writes: ‘travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we

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might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in travelling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we’d otherwise seldom have cause to visit.’1 Though this sentiment does not capture the full complexity of Iyer’s vision for travel, it does explain how, for many travellers, the inner journey can eclipse the outer one, diminishing the significance of contact with other people and lands.2 People encountered by travellers have historically experienced uneven treatment at the hands of those who visit their lands. They often find themselves unwittingly manipulated and deployed as mortar in the narrative resolution of an anxious storyteller’s identity crisis. Propositions of this sort deflate the spirits of those who had imagined travel as a more mutually transformative enterprise – filled, for example, with the promise of shrinking even slightly our confounding world by creating opportunities for meaningful connections with other people and distant lands.3 Yet what does a traveller, travel writer or consumer of travel stories eager for even a minor role in redressing unjust geopolitical arrangements do with such a sobering assessment? Most likely, those who remain largely oblivious to local and global structures of power and one’s place within these structures would be overwhelmed by the implications levied by critics like Debbie Lisle and Caren Kaplan. These and other post-colonialists posit, with ample justification, that the genre has served the interests of empires, their apologists and the legions of global citizens privileged enough to be indifferent to the enduring legacies of historical struggles, such as Western colonialism and the Cold War to name just two examples relevant to the case of modern travel writing in Cyprus.4 Travel writing may not merely fail to correct misunderstandings and critique regimes of domination that haunt global affairs. As these texts circulate among the audiences that take an interest in a place, a topic or perhaps even the celebrity of a given travel writer, they may also exacerbate inequitable relations among people, as Kaplan’s remark about tourist identity suggests. Rigid borders and global hegemonies can always be consolidated, for instance, by culturally

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insensitive narration of others fuelled by a host of both conscious and unacknowledged motives, including: to stabilize a travel writer’s personal cultural identity under the siege of unassimilated difference; to bottle up colonialist nostalgia for a less accessible, more authentic world untainted by modern corruptions; or to bring progress to those in other lands who cannot seem to bridge the cultural chasm between so-called developed and developing nations. Though negative examples of this sort do not represent all travel writing or even the totality of individual stories marked by one or more of these qualities, they afford literary and cultural critics of travel writing sufficient evidence to undermine the genre’s storied promise as a path to personal enlightenment and diminished cultural differences.5 In one example, Mary Louise Pratt’s groundbreaking study Imperial Eyes includes discussion of a trope she dubs ‘monarch-of-all-he-surveys.’ Pratt illustrates the way travel writers from the Victorian to the postcolonial era have used the genre as a tool to assert the meaning of a place by pronouncing its ‘social and material value’ to domestic audiences. Their writing also establishes how a place’s ‘aesthetic deficiencies suggest a need for social and material intervention by the home culture.’6 Unfamiliar terrain, Pratt argues, does not deter travel writers from claiming ‘authoritativeness for their vision.’7 She is particularly critical of the iconic, best-selling travel writer Paul Theroux for the contempt and ridicule he heaps upon others and the vast authority he appropriates as ‘monarch-of-all-he-surveys’ in his travels to Central and South America.8 In another instance, Debbie Lisle castigates celebrated travel writer Bruce Chatwin, whose aesthetically innovative and influential The Songlines, she argues, displays a colonial vision and romanticizes the indigenous Aboriginal people of Australia.9 Cloaked in a seductively cosmopolitan ethos that aims to learn from others and ‘be intrigued by alternative ways of thinking, feeling, and acting,’ Chatwin’s narrative has served as an inspiration to a generation of travellers and a lightning rod for critics disturbed by both the patronizing nostalgia of the narrative and its spellbinding allure to global audiences.10 The Songlines, and its controversial standing as an exemplar of a genre, illuminates many of the problems attending

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modern travel writing in places like Cyprus, where the effects of a violent colonial past continue to haunt present-day cultural relations between a former colonizer and the indigenous people against whom travelling subjects inevitably forge identities. The cultural encounters represented in the travel writing of Cyprus illustrate a familiar tension between post-colonial cultural critics, whose work advocates for more equitable geopolitics, and practitioners of travel writing, whose motives tend to be more restricted to aesthetic and commercial ends. Travel writers are not necessarily unconcerned with the politics of representation, but, nonetheless, their work compels them to risk the inevitable contradictions and messiness attending narration of a self in relation with others. In creating their stories of contact with others, they must do so in ways that engage audiences and are relatively free of factual distortions in order to withstand critical scrutiny. Perhaps some may prove capable of effecting positive change that realizes at least some of the promise offered by travel as a means to diminish misunderstandings and bridge cultural differences that have led to human calamities. Others may not, nor would they necessarily aspire to do so – a point made manifestly clear through the critical work that has been brought to bear against travel writing.

Modern Travel Writing and its Critics A survey of the historical trajectory of travel writing and its modern accomplishments testifies to the genre’s more than occasional complicity in fashioning a perspective that locates European and American subjects as superior, albeit nervously, to global others. Helen Carr’s examination of the early modern era of travel writing, which she marks as 1880 – 1940, notes the central role that racist ideologies and cultural practices performed historically in the achievement of modernism: Travel writing in this period becomes increasingly aware of globalization – not a word used but a condition that was widely recognized – and the resulting mixtures of cultures and

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people it brought with it. At the same time, many writers became increasingly anxious about the condition and value of modern western civilisation: was it and the white race degenerating? Might there be an alternative elsewhere?11 Implicitly racist anxieties of this sort have by no means disappeared from travel writing in more contemporary times, but the focus and purpose of writers have changed somewhat to encompass broader concerns of cultural and national identities. Carr credits travel writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for its contribution to the corpus of ‘modernist texts’ that ‘register a new consciousness of cultural heterogeneity, the condition and mark of the modern world.’12 As the modern era progresses to the middle and late twentieth century, the genre evolves to focus less on ‘the purveying of privileged knowledge’ and more on experiments with subjective form and narrating persona.13 Travel becomes an opportunity for writers to explore the self and sometimes even develop a distinctive voice through the play of narrative aesthetics. By no means does this shift to impressionistic discourse signal an end to social and political involvement – and thus colonial and neo-colonial complicity – of writers with the lands and people they encounter, as the situation of Lawrence Durrell, travel writer-cum-colonial administrator, demonstrates.14 Problems of motive and cultural politics remain, but a more explicit place for the self in stories of travel offers at least the possibility of self-awareness; it creates an opportunity for travel writing to perform cultural work that travel critic Peter Hulme lauds, at its best, as articulating ‘concern for the fate of indigenous cultures and [. . .] appreciation of indigenous lifeways and thinking.’15 Some ethnographic writing that can be considered within this genre provides a space for people of travel destinations, such as Cyprus, to articulate their own perspectives and embody their own complexity, including local people’s relationships to visitors, as we will see later in this book. Such critical voices and perspectives should compel scholarly scepticism of travel and travel writing’s capacity to effect changes in

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unjust global relations within domestic societies and among people of the world. A relatively recent push by certain travellers and critics situates travel and travel writing within the cultural practices of global cosmopolitanism, which seeks to better understand, welcome and be welcomed by others in the hopes of promoting peace and reducing the hold of racist, nationalist ideologies. If these ideals sound too fanciful, Kwame Anthony Appiah, moral philosopher and advocate of global cosmopolitanism, reminds us of the value of ‘getting used to one another’ across lines of difference, rather than remaining bogged down in seemingly intractable differences of principle.16 Such an approach has obvious value. For one, it serves as a practical response to isolation and xenophobia rampant in the base of right-wing nationalist social movements and others reliant on global news/infotainment for their knowledge of global ‘facts’. When I reference cosmopolitanism or global citizenship in this study, I do so less in the hopes that travel and travel stories will somehow resolve the conflicts of the world and more in the likelihood that they represent a potentially meaningful entry into cultural encounter, a first step. Or, as Appiah writes, ‘There’s a sense in which cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge’.17 For liberal modern subjects, the privilege to travel and narrate may even represent an opportunity to address the flaws and inequities produced by Western hegemonic arrangements often passed off as globalization. Iyer could hardly be more sanguine when considering the motives of ‘the traveller’ – by which he means that well-meaning sovereign who acts in humanist traditions to better the world and the self, via travel. In his essay ‘Why We Travel’ Iyer ascribes pretences to the motives for travel that are lofty by any measure, but not so easily dismissed: We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps left by tomorrow’s headlines: When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, for example, where there is almost no paving and women relieve themselves next to

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mountains of trash, your notions of the Internet and a ‘one world order’ grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology. The liberal humanist is bound to admire Iyer’s noble goal of ‘rescuing’ people and places whose identities have been over-determined by forces of obscure origin. Exactly how and why they have become abstracted and ideological, however, represents much headier work that could easily derail a narrator from the already difficult task of accurately describing and processing the minutiae of travel. And who is to say that a given travel writer is or need be equipped with the skills requisite to manage such complicated challenges, especially if we have in mind a person unaccustomed to experiencing difference? In referencing ‘tomorrow’s headlines’, Iyer intimates that stultifying media discourse and the unexamined confidence of globalization functions as a leveller of economic inequities. Worth noting here is his reluctance to locate these inequitable effects as the product of diverse forms of colonialism and hegemonic discourses of ‘the West’. Privileged material conditions in Europe or the US, diminishing though these may be for many, still provide the impetus for a presumed superiority of these nations to poorer countries around the globe. Contrasting these philosophies of travel reveals a stark tension over the matter of agency for the tourist. Iyer’s sensitive, welleducated and well-financed traveller may offer a liberal corrective to the excesses of globalization. Travel, he claims, can disrupt this knowledge for an individual who knows how to do it right – where to go, what to see, how to behave, which questions to explore. Yet more often than not, these liberal gestures and motives supplement rather than critique global structures of power. The effective limits of Iyer’s traveller are set according to notions like awareness or enlightenment, directing travellers to construe their wanderings as the vehicle or muse for personal enrichment. The perspective Iyer articulates here fails to acknowledge that in the US and elsewhere, people tend to believe in naturalizing myths of their own global importance and centrality. The traveller celebrates the

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reach of his or her own agency, a move accomplished subsequent to setting aside abstraction and ideology. Kaplan’s tourist, mentioned earlier, however, remains integrated in global politics, as the traveller or tourist’s economic successes, manufactured desires and endless pursuit of fulfilment of these desires makes this subject complicit with the discourses of colonialism and its enduring effects in the post-colonial era. She asserts that ‘the tourist acts as an agent’ performing on behalf of the West to promote the project of modernity in ideological regimes that are sustained symbolically through metaphor.18 Modern travel writing is an important conduit through which these metaphors circulate culturally. Travel writing is produced through rhetorical moves on the part of writers who deliver insights into not only the landscape but also the cultural identities and ideological allegiances of the narrator. The assumptions and privileges of travel writers are often ascertained rather easily and many post-colonial critics deplore what they perceive in the relations between narrators and the people and lands they encounter. Kaplan essentially posits cultural imperialism as an effect of the synthesis of travel and narration: [T]he occidental ethnographer, the modernist expatriate poet, the writer of popular travel accounts, and the tourist may all participate in the mythologized narrativisations of displacement without questioning the cultural, political, and economic grounds of their different professions, privileges, means, and limitations. Immigrants, refugees, exiles, nomads, and the homeless also move in and out of these discourses as metaphors, tropes, and symbols but rarely as historically recognized producers of critical discourses themselves. EuroAmerican discourses of displacement tend to absorb difference and create ahistorical amalgams; thus a field of social forces becomes represented as a personal experience, its lived intensity of separation marking a link with others.19 For Kaplan, people caught in the crosshairs of narration function as raw material for travel writers, who typically locate themselves as

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self-consciously constructed, rhetorically-motivated, often omniscient characters in scripts comprehensible to a privileged and rarely questioned ‘home’ or ‘centre’. Travel writers accomplish this through a variety of means, such as routinely paying genealogical homage to their predecessors – travel writers of earlier ages and imaginary cultural affiliations reaching far back into the recesses of antiquity.20 They freely dabble in research, analysis and citation practices that many scholars would consider arbitrary, even reckless. At their most indulgent, travel writers miraculously construe civilizational certainties about the people who occupy a landscape, such Turks, Greeks and Cypriots; this is often accomplished with an economy of language that operates without important qualifying concessions, such as ‘according to the handful of Turkish Cypriots I have met’ or ‘as a half-dozen or so Greek Cypriots have mentioned’, and so forth. Instead, audiences are delivered ‘the Turk’, ‘the Greek’, and ‘the Cypriot’. To some degree, this phenomenon can be ascribed to the basic motives and conditions of travel. As Dean MacCannell notes, ‘The lines tourists cross are marked or unmarked boundaries between normative differences. Tourists travel to places where taken for granted, everyday routine behaviour is somewhat or very different from the ways things are done back home. [. . .] Tourists are attracted to difference, or to otherness.’21 It is no great leap to suggest that such attraction intensifies desire for such differences to become central or even distorted within the narratives that travel writers produce. The effects of such attention bear our consideration. As indicated by the work of many post-colonial scholars and critics, travellers and travel writers inform local and global discourses. The effects of this discursive power are mixed, according to the context of narration. In Cyprus, like any destination of travel, the identity of the traveller affects the experience of travel and the traveller’s relations to the other. Given such a trying political dynamic, identity politics matter a great deal – as much as or more than elsewhere. The personal thus shapes key aspects of textual production: the experience of travel itself, the narrativization of the travel, its reach to

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the writer’s imagined communities back home. Travel writers tend not to examine closely the matter of how ‘the personal’, as a political and ideological category, informs the production of their travel narrative, as well as the texts of the primarily Western writers whose paths they retrace. The extent to which personal prejudices and allegiances shape travel narratives, inflect its analysis or enable its troping of land and people poses an important challenge for critics and audiences to consider. Travel experiences and travel texts naturally reflect the cultural and political epoch of the moment of travel, according to factors such as nation, culture, religion, race, gender, language and class. Such categories inform the cultural practices of writers and the ways these writers are received by others. Consumers of travel literature, it should be mentioned, remain a central part of the rhetorical situation, as their own aesthetic preferences validate some narrating personae while rejecting others.22 As for the craft of the first-person narrator, a continuum begins on one end with the solipsistic and self-absorbed storyteller, whose endless personal perambulations and private musings diminish or even eclipse the landscape – for whom the road represents an ‘opportunity to revise the self’.23 On the other end comes the ostensibly present yet more or less fully-cloaked narrator who remains virtually invisible and off-limits within the text. As might be expected, travel writers vary in how much detail they invest in the development of a personal self. In the case of Oliver Burch, author of The Infidel Sea: Travels in North Cyprus, which I examine in Chapter 5, the writer weaves a thread of personal evolution through the narrative to illustrate his discovery that Turks of Cyprus are not exactly the threatening creatures that lore has made them out to be. In acknowledging the effects of personal and cultural bias, his narrative is fairly unlike others. Most travel writers practice their craft in a way that deflects or conceals material personal involvement in a narrative. For example, few writers challenge themselves to calculate the effect of their own presence on their destination of travel or the potential effects of the text they will produce on domestic or global Englishlanguage audiences.

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If travellers from places like the US or the UK recognize any national complicity in the shaping of the landscape, they often choose not to examine or even acknowledge this, particularly when the effects could be construed as deleterious. This predictable manoeuvre assumes a political clean slate and tacitly accepts the inevitable scarring of the landscape. It also fortifies a distance between narrator and ‘the material.’ In considering Cyprus, that means reading the space as a once-colonized island of the Levant considered by many to be a gateway to the Orient, if not, in select places and times, the Orient itself – rather than an island whose fortunes have invariably been linked to exterior, more powerful forces. Edward Said’s formulation of the problem of the Orientalist writer describing the East captures the ethical challenge: Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West. He is never concerned with the Orient except as the first cause of what he says. What he says and writes, by virtue of the fact that it is said or written, is meant to indicate that the Orientalist is outside the Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact.24 This particular articulation of his theory of Orientalism has proven tremendously influential, but may now appear too deterministic – one can never be an ethical Orientalist, after all, and anyone looking to carve a different set of human relations is trapped within a fatalistic matrix of history and empire. Is the existential split always already upon the writer and the people she visits? Said is right to observe the problem of exterior positioning of writers whose nations, passports, and embodied difference obviously inform their experiences of travel and writing. However, to write that the Orientalist or traveller ‘is never concerned with the Orient’ fails to acknowledge the possibilities of writers who have already imagined an ethics of writing that shows concern for the Orient or for others. Still, when people travel for leisure, for military service, for language

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training in order to have careers in business or government, the likelihood will often be that this ethic, if cultivated, will subordinate itself to other motives and obligations. In Cyprus, as anywhere, some writers have remarkably lucid moments and demonstrate ambitious awareness of the politics of space. All travellers are inevitably affected by the Cold War, colonialism, European racial politics, and other such ideological forces that leave people – visitor, Cypriot, Greek, Turk, Briton, American or other international presence – liable to effects of history and global politics. Such pressures complicate the agency that travellers, writers, and audiences imagine they may exercise. Critics and travel writers can both, at times, be guilty of assuming too much or too little agency on the part of a writer, whereas each text represents an argument in its own right, one that is shaped by and contributes to larger forms of knowledge about a place. Producing these texts involves often unacknowledged and underappreciated relationships between writers and their audiences, their publishers, and the people they come to meet in the course of travel. Attention to modern writers’ motives and values invites us to consider the rise of a cosmopolitan ethos among travellers who have been sensitized to historical and cultural contingencies that shape their experiences. The critical reception to Chatwin’s The Songlines demonstrates how such an awareness and concern for global others does not necessarily insulate travellers and writers from narration that echoes the tropes and mentality of colonialism. (See Lisle’s Global Politics for an excellent discussion of this problem.) Still, the critical sophistication at play in efforts to diminish the triumphalism of socalled cosmopolitan travel writing sometimes neglects to appreciate how travel practices and products, as complex, rhetorical acts and artefacts, are inherently beset by concerns of ethics and power. Often, travel writing produces more ambiguous effects – on writers, audiences, and those written about – than critics and casual consumers of these narratives suggest, effects that should never be arbitrarily dismissed as without some positive, even potentially transformative capacities.

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The case of The Songlines represents a pertinent, well-visited example of this conflict that I sketch out. The text is familiar to many travellers, travel writers and post-colonial critics, and it represents not merely an idiosyncratic tussle between an admired text and those troubled by this uncomplicated veneration, but rather a type of conflict relevant to almost all travel and travel writing. Its narrative appeal and ethos have inspired inquisitive travellers to engage their curiosities, and Chatwin’s storytelling prowess has clearly enjoyed mass appeal and critical acclaim. At the same time, Chatwin and his books, especially The Songlines, have also induced harsh rebukes from many quarters, including: indigenous political activists of Australia, anthropologists unable to stomach a travel writer misappropriating their methods and post-colonial critics aghast at The Songlines’ reception as a culturally sensitive work of postmodern pastiche. As for the effects of travel and travel writing in a place like Cyprus, the modern era has, for example, bequeathed on the travel industry and the unfortunate denizens of the island a bittersweet, seemingly intimate narrative of colonialist nostalgia like Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons. That narrative and many others reveal similar tensions between impulses to generously empathize with people and landscape and then to domesticate, generalize, mythologize and reduce the island to a nostalgic trope of empire. My position argues for selective endorsement of post-colonial critiques of travel and travel writing, mitigated by a rhetorician’s acknowledgement of the value of such inherently commercial texts to reach audiences and affect geopolitical attitudes. A reconciling of these two positions is made difficult by many factors, not the least of which is post-colonial cultural criticism’s own insularity of perspective. Edwards and Graulund, for example, note how postcolonial studies have ‘demonized’ travel writing, to the point, I would argue, that one wonders whether isolation from others or silence about cultural encounter are not implicitly forwarded as ethically superior alternatives to the always already compromised narration of travel.25 If anything, we need – as critics, scholars, teachers, travellers and mentors to future travellers and global citizens – better examples of how heterogeneous travellers can move

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about and tell an ethical travel story for all audiences and stakeholders in the enterprises of cultural encounter. Further, we need criticism and practice that appreciates, self-reflexively, the complications of producing and consuming these multi-faceted stories of contact. Travel texts are not likely to lose their capacity to reach all sorts of audiences, including those that might otherwise have little interest in a critical approach to travel, such as armchair travellers, wide-eyed youth, pleasure-seeking expatriates and so forth. A reductive approach to how such texts are borne of distinct and complicated cultural conditions and how they reach audiences in distinct ways neglects the chasm between those whose motives for travel include global change and those for whom the ethical dimensions of cultural encounter bear no particular resonance. Chatwin’s controversial status makes for a compelling example of this ethical conundrum. As a rhetorical critic taking a long view of the effects of travel writing, I find it important to appreciate how his work may, at the cost of some narrative fidelity26 or social scientific authority, also be stirring untold numbers of future travellers and global subjects from their own epistemic complacency or geopolitical perches of privilege – at the risk, I realize, of reifying some of these same disturbing privileges.

The Songlines, its Apologists and Critics, and Ethical Landscapes of Cultural Encounter Stories were Chatwin’s central obsession: digging for them, bringing them to the surface, sharing them. ‘He was looking for stories the world could give him and that he could embellish,’ says Salman Rushdie, who travelled with him for part of his trip through Central Australia. ‘He didn’t give a damn whether they were true or not; only whether they were good.’ (Shakespeare, Bruce Chatwin: A Biography, p. 11)

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[Bruce Chatwin] made life difficult for booksellers, but vastly more interesting to readers. . . (Shakespeare, Bruce Chatwin: A Biography, p. 569) The Songlines is the story of a white, European male narrator’s quest for illumination concerning human motives for movement. The story follows Chatwin’s narrator, also named ‘Bruce’, to Australia’s inner regions, and describes his encounters with Aboriginals and their ancient tradition of mapping landscape through song – a cultural practice viewed by most outsiders as a worldview radically different from their own. Roughly half the book is first-person travel narration set in Australia, while most of the rest is presented as a travelling scholar’s notes on the discourse of nomadism, culled from a near lifetime’s inquiry into the topic. The book is marketed as non-fiction travel writing,27 though the author himself admitted that he did not concern himself too much with a faithful representation of his short stay in Australia. Chatwin biographer Nicholas Shakespeare explains: The Songlines was fiction. (‘A lot of this is fiction, a lot of this is made up,’ he told [Colin] Thubron, who was one of his interviewers. ‘But it’s made up in order to make a story real.’) He had explained his position in a broadcast interview to ABC in Australia. ‘Look at the greatest novel of the nineteenth century, Madame Bovary. Every incident is a compilation of various things. Flaubert researched and researched. Very little is invented. The borderline between fiction and non-fiction is to my mind extremely arbitrary, and invented by publishers.’ [. . .] ‘I can’t say I believe the songlines literally,’ says Thubron. ‘Maybe any third-year anthropology student could shoot it to bits, but what’s wonderful is the passion with which Bruce approaches it, his love of it, the way he writes it, the imagery, so that it involves you while you are in it, you inhabit it.’28

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Chatwin, from the quotes above, does not appear to harbour much concern about this ‘arbitrary’ border between fiction and non-fiction – a remark we could take at face value or one that could be attributed to a self-conscious writer looking to consolidate his own mystique. In Thubron’s praise for the book’s craft and invitation to audiences to ‘inhabit’ its mood and setting, we find one of the central conflicts between a practitioner of travel writing and a critic of the genre’s effects. For a writer like Chatwin and an admirer like Thubron, lands and people are considered ‘fair game’ for someone else’s personal story, and what matters is the quality of the narrative, its prose and its ability to engage readers. At least some of Chatwin’s readers, especially critics, find this distinction between fact and fiction significant – it represents a broken promise to deliver a story that accurately reflects a set of experiences, not to mention an artefact that continues to circulate and affect others. The Songlines, they argue, fixes people negatively in symbolic space and cannot be brushed aside casually as an extraneous problem for publishers to resolve in ways that suit their own interests. To reject any responsibility for the effects of narration undersells the impact of a story and its effects on others. The subject matter of The Songlines deals primarily with a narrated refutation of the commonplace assumption that humans are naturally sedentary. Thousands of years of momentum for a settled, civilized life and its modern securities may appear to demonstrate how settlement is a natural proclivity of humans. Chatwin’s energetic dismantling of this position could well have helped to launch and comfort global audiences that identify with otherwise mysterious impulses for flight. Such audiences likely also identify with the Aboriginal people who embody an epistemic alternative to middleclass life in the modern metropolis. The Songlines sees Aboriginal cultural practices of naming the land and singing its features – and their continued semi-nomadic lifestyle, as he understands it – as representative of a legitimate, timeless alternative to modernity’s compartmentalized notions of land ownership and geographic colonization. Australian domestic political tensions between whites and Aboriginals simmer in the background of Bruce’s narration but rarely take centre stage. Nor does Bruce appear to forward a clear

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political perspective on this conflict, settling instead to focus on Aboriginal life as a case study for his theories on the cultural significance of nomadic lifestyles. In the decades since its publication, the text has been warmly received and decorated by travellers and other enthusiastic cosmopolitan spirits looking for attractive ways to collapse differences with indigenous people of faraway places: in particular, those who share an affinity for a life run counter to the sameness of an undiscriminating and claustrophobic modernity. And here begin the problems I wish to address about this tension between decorated literary practitioners like Chatwin, Theroux and Rushdie and critics like Lisle, Kaplan, Said and Pratt.29 Lisle regards contemporary travel writing like Chatwin’s as oscillating between unrepentant colonialism and naive cosmopolitanism, both of which tend to undermine the genre’s transformative capacities by generating new forms of global power that serve the interests of those already privileged by a certain global order.30 Other critics of The Songlines articulate some of the particular ways that the narration’s popularity has come through negations of others and ways of relating to difference that preclude critical reflection on the part of audiences. Robert Clarke’s essay ‘Star Traveller: Celebrity, Aboriginality, and Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines’ (1987) argues that Chatwin the traveller constructed a narrator in the hopes of gaining celebrity – hopes that were realized almost immediately and that have only grown posthumously. Clarke sees audiences invoke celebrities, like Chatwin, as a means of resolving contradictions and unease with cultural difference. He serves as a way out, a way for cosmopolitan subjects to rationalize the presence of difference that does not assimilate. He writes: [F]rom a post-colonial perspective, the ‘identity work’ that celebrities allow is not simply the adoption of a unified identity; rather, it offers to ameliorate the cognitive dissonance that arises as an inevitable consequence of identification in cultures structured around ethnic, economic, and legal difference, as well as contradiction and inequalities, by

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achieving an apparent reconciliation of competing interests. Identifying with a celebrity traveller [. . .] is a way for modern tourists and travellers who desire engagement with colonized cultures to do so in a way that assuages guilt. The risk is that the failure to address these contradictions may impede reflection on such things as the complicity of the institutions of tourism in the displacement and impoverishment of indigenous cultures.31 Clarke thus imagines Chatwin – or a writer like Lawrence Durrell in the case of Cyprus – as a sort of glamorous proxy that can resolve differences that are built upon long, complex histories of cultural contact and conflict. These matters require considerable time, effort, patience and presence to understand, let alone redress. They also require an audience willing to engage in the sort of difficult, riskladen reflection alluded to in this passage. Unless readers can be assumed to enter the discourses of travel writing with such intentions or radical openness, Clarke may simply be expecting highly unlikely results from a given travel text and writer. Whether or not a particular audience’s experience with The Songlines serves to ‘assuage guilt’ over colonization and the inequitable distribution of land and resources may be impossible to determine, but Chatwin does not appear through his words or writing to have been motivated one way or another to speak to this sort of political tension. If reading a book represents the fullest extent of an audience’s ‘engagement with colonized cultures’, then perhaps Clarke’s scepticism is merited. He posits Chatwin’s popularity as part of a larger trend that ultimately serves tourist industries rather than the people of now-desirable lands that have experienced colonization. Clarke goes on to condemn ‘the neo-colonialism of contemporary travel writing: a genre that, though the display of anti-colonial sentiments is a frequent stylistic gesture, is nevertheless complicit in the mobilization of tourism and its attendant consequences for host – more often than not colonized – cultures’.32 I agree with Clarke that ‘the display of anti-colonial sentiments’ by writers from colonizing countries has become sufficiently common in travel writing as to

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constitute a shallow trope. However, he is himself guilty of speaking for colonized people in his assumption that they do not themselves desire some of these ‘attendant consequences’ or even participate, to certain degrees, in promoting the cultural myths that attract visitors to their lands. The people of a land that experiences tourism are no less complicated than the people who visit them. As such, they may just as likely harbour ambivalence or indifference about the way others narrate their experiences as profess outrage. Chatwin can be considered a rhetor motivated primarily by the stories ‘the world could give him and that he could embellish’.33 Why domestic audiences of travel writing find these stories attractive and what they do with the ethical challenges a narrative suggests represents a matter that rests more within the power of those who consume such texts. Feminist critic Simone Fullagar’s ‘On Restlessness and Patience: Reading Desire in Bruce Chatwin’s Narratives of Travel’ examines his nostalgia for origins, his fear of home, his blase´ detachments. Fullagar sees the obsessive desire to learn – one of the tenets of a cosmopolitan ethos – as a barrier to being present for the self and for the particularities and differences of others that should be the motive of travel: ‘It is a compulsive desire to know that perpetually distracts the subject from experiencing the present’.34 Her critique of Chatwin’s failure to be more fully present for local people – or at least to write a story that values such presence – constitutes a more insightful and productive challenge to adoring audience’s impulses in consuming The Songlines. She argues that ‘this free floating homelessness is indeed a masculine fantasy of detachment, of being able to remain distant from places encountered in order to belong to the whole world’.35 Fullagar forwards Levinas’s notion of ‘patience’ as a relative to Bhabha’s ‘revisionary cosmopolitanism’ and a path forward: [T]he [patient] subject experiences a deeper sense of connection with the world in its particularity. [. . .] To travel with patience means to accept the other’s mystery and involves a recognition of the particular temporal quality of different modes of being. From a feminist perspective, patience is also a corporeal mode of

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knowing, involving an affective relation between self and world and in this way challenges the distance through which western identity has historically been constituted as separate from the world.36 Fullagar posits here a type of travel rather than a way of representing the self in a narrative about others. Her criticism of cosmopolitanism’s unrelenting drive to know and explain others provides a welcome and necessary check on one of travel and travel writing’s historic purposes and motives: to explain others for a domestic audience thirsty for knowledge. How one writes this ‘patience’ and diminishes the ‘separation’ she sees in Bruce seems difficult to imagine without a radical reordering of the relationship and generic contract between a travel writer and audience. To the credit of Fullagar and other post-colonial critics of travel writing, we profit from texts and experiences that share a determination not to erase or reduce particularities of cultural difference. Yet one wonders whether this insistence sets the bar too high for how one should correctly be with others and represent these experiences. The position that travel writing inherently seeks to dominate through distance – a topic I visit in greater depth in my discussion of Colin Thubron in Chapter 4 – skirts dangerously close to a call for silence or isolation. Writers and earnest consumers of this literature may at times need to ‘get it wrong’ in their relations with others before they can appreciate how to engage productively, how to be present without the promise of certainty or resolution. The wouldbe cosmopolitan travel writer is better served by resisting transparent and self-satisfying gestures that identify easily across difference while erasing or diminishing unpleasant histories of inequitable cultural relations, especially in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Travel and writing of this sort would be difficult under most circumstances, but is especially so for writers like Theroux and Chatwin, whose narration thrives on efforts to cross borders – efforts that some argue reify cultural differences, configuring others to be outside the confines of modernity and preferable in their imaginary and pre-colonial states. Clare Johnson’s ‘Crossing the Border: Bruce

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Chatwin and Paul Theroux’ posits these two travel writing luminaries as modern men searching for authentic encounters with difference who, upon finding them, react with colonialist nostalgia. She sees the writers’ descriptive work and relations with others as erecting substantial cultural borders and concludes that ‘by creating racialised spaces and racialised bodies, [The Songlines and Paul Theroux’s The Happy Isles of Oceana ] attempt to maintain clear-cut boundaries in order to reduce the threat posed by [. . .] collapsing boundaries’.37 Johnson explains that: [T]he pattern of representations produced by both Chatwin and Theroux illustrate the before and after of the colonial subject: identification with the before, the ‘primitive,’ instinctual moment is constantly disrupted by the after of colonial contact and the possibility that the other is in fact also the subject of modernity and civilisation. Chatwin and Theroux like to ‘trample across borders’ but they do not like to dismantle them, since in doing so they put at risk their own (albeit provisional) identities.38 To illustrate her point, Johnson concludes, in reference to Chatwin’s bizarre and disturbing hunting trip with a group of Aboriginals, which he describes as an activity enjoyed by other white hunters of years ago, that ‘it is difficult not to see in his nostalgic re-visioning of Indigeneity the impulse to structure and contain difference within his own representational limits’.39 Johnson’s criticism of these writers for their reluctance to risk losing face – vicarious or not, depending on whether we imagine their narrators as alter egos or fictive constructions – seems apt, as does the tension between their relations with people as they existed before and have come to exist after colonial contact. However, the claim that Chatwin, Theroux, or anyone else may not like to ‘dismantle borders’ suggests that, somehow or other, a critic might have found the correct way to accomplish such a lofty, abstract achievement. Perhaps they choose not to risk efforts at collapsing borders because this would be difficult to narrate and impossible to sell to audiences accustomed to stories in

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which description of and interaction with an intriguing border constitutes a reason for writing. This line of criticism returns us to the problem mentioned earlier about motives for travellers, the genre’s raison d’eˆtre as the production of difference and the failure of imagination among writers, publishers and audiences collectively. Not all critics have been so cynical. Ralph Pordzik’s ‘Travel Writing and its Discontents: Culture, Tourism and the Dynamics of Narration in Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia and The Songlines’ is less inclined to dismiss Chatwin’s methods and motives and more intrigued by their paradoxes. Chatwin’s travel narratives, in his view, simultaneously strive to contain particularities and deliver a narrative coherence. Pordzik argues that Chatwin faces ‘the general problem of transforming the foreign and the unfamiliar into continuous narrative and revealing the “momentary disruptions” and instabilities in the processing of western discourses about the cultural Other’.40 In this sense, perhaps Chatwin’s own prose that has so troubled some critics for its colonial nostalgia and detachment actually demonstrates, or at least makes available to readers, its own failures. Chatwin’s work, argues Pordzik, has the effect of ‘further distancing himself from the material realities and prospects of unified experience he wanted to grasp’.41 Pordzik can be highly critical at times, such as when he posits that Songlines ‘at best [. . .] restages the romantic idea of the aesthetic autonomy of the writer in a neo-colonial context. With its pretentious rhetoric, it reproduces the Aboriginals’ ways’.42 Despite these critiques of Chatwin’s brazen acts of appropriation, he still seems to grudgingly admire the work and its effect on others. Still, these critics recognize how Chatwin’s writing does little to interrogate the privilege of detached narration. While the work of such criticism effectively complicates the political implications of travel narration, it too often fails to suggest a path forward for an ethical means of narration – one that engages audiences while affording the people who are encountered on such journeys the dignity, recognition and voice that they must have for travel writing to realize its promise as an engine of positive geopolitical change. Given the manner in which local conditions and

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particularities of context always shape human relationships and written responses to travel experiences, no easy answers or aesthetic formulas await the ethical traveller. Narratives of Cyprus looks to illustrate similar tensions while working towards identification of gestures, habits and motives that can produce and enact new ways of travelling and writing.

CHAPTER 3 FASHIONED FOR STORY'S SAKE: LAWRENCE DURRELL'S BITTER LEMONS AND THE LAY OF A LANDSCAPE TROPED AND NARRATED FOR POSTERITY

Circumstances gave me several unique angles of vision on Cyprus life and affairs, for I did a number of different jobs while I was there, and even served as an official of the Cyprus Government for the last two years of my stay in the island. Thus I can claim to have seen the unfolding of the Cyprus tragedy both from the village tavern and from Government House. I have tried to illustrate it through my characters and evaluate it in terms of individuals rather than policies, for I wanted to keep the book free from the smaller contempts, in the hope that it would be readable long after the current misunderstandings have been resolved as they must be sooner or later. (Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons, p. 9) Back at the hotel I found Mr. Lawrence Durrell, the poet, who had lately taken over the post of Government Information Officer, after a spell as a Pancyprian Gymnasium teacher. Durrell was short and square, with rock-crystal eyes set in a

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craggy face and the grin of a good-natured satyr. He had been told to see that I understood the official point of view. No nation was more devoted to the principle of self-determination than our own, but in Cyprus it was simply ‘not on’. The long chain of British withdrawals, of which the last was from the Suez base, must now end: the island would be held for the sake of the western alliance, and, of course, for the Cypriots themselves [. . .] Durrell was as free from humbug as a Cyprus official could be; indeed, from any strong views on the question. (Foley, Island in Revolt, pp. 11– 12) For Durrell, the lemons of Cyprus were bitter for a few years; for [Costas] Montis, some of the doors closed by colonialism are still closed. Durrell and the British could walk away from the intractable problem that they helped to create on Cyprus; in fact, Durrell never visited the island again. For Montis, the bitter lemons and closed doors remain part of daily life on the divided island. If Montis’s book seems too angry and polemical, it is because both he and his island are still living with the legacy of the colonial government that Durrell served. It may be that we in the West will have to learn how to read ‘answers’ that re-appropriate a colonial narrative before we can truly appreciate them. (Roessel, In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination, p. xvi) In Rhetorical Landscapes in America, Gregory Clark distinguishes between land and landscape, and in so doing asserts the nature of travel writing as a genre prone to fixate on the symbolic dimensions of land: ‘Landscape is not the same as land. Land is material, a particular object, while landscape is conceptual. When people act as tourists, they leave the land where they make their home to encounter landscapes. Land becomes landscape when it is assigned the role of symbol, and as symbol it functions rhetorically’.1 In other words, when tourists and travel writers put ‘land’ into language, they reshape ‘land’, the material object, into ‘landscape’, the symbolic

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construct of profound discursive capacity. Durrell assigns his share of meaning to Cyprus and the island’s people via the landscaping he manufactures in his memoir, Bitter Lemons2. The title and tone of the text capture an important paradox unresolved by the writer. When events experienced on the ground disturb ideals treasured by a writer, Durrell registers some of the dissonance involved in representing authorities that he sees as often out of touch and likely doomed to failure. Critics of his book do not always acknowledge this ambivalence, perhaps because Durrell spends more time and energy lamenting the lost ideals of Greek– British friendship than he does re-examining their original construction. The place itself is rendered, in the end, bitter. While the book produces melancholia in interesting ways, this chapter primarily examines the production and effects of Durrell’s deployment of the symbolic throughout his narrative. Durrell seems to have intended for his story to unfold according to his own motives and self-interests – that is, to tell a story, as he explains, ‘free from the smaller contempts, in the hope that it would be readable’ for many years after its publication. Most who have examined Durrell’s work have chosen to praise its literary merits or castigate its representation of others. This discussion explores the relationship between craft and political effects; it explains how Durrell privileges the former, especially through the construction of his own character, while working, unsuccessfully, to diminish the latter. Were we to judge his effort exclusively by sales and the enthusiastic responses of readers, it would have to be considered a success. The book has sold over 2 million copies and continues to inspire contemporary readers and travellers.3 Critics, however, have not always been so generous, especially concerning matters of the writer’s motives, self-representation and characterization of people. For all his supposed affection for the locals, Durrell ultimately views Cypriots – Greek and Turkish – as unfit to rule themselves and in need of British steering to usher the poor islanders to modernity’s doorstep. As Foley suggests, Durrell, despite some of the professional spin he provides within the memoir and as a spokesperson for colonial authorities, compares favourably to other Britons in Cyprus who took an even

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more nationalist and reactionary attitude towards the uprising of the 1950s.4 This could be due to several factors, such as his comparatively extensive contact with ordinary people of Cyprus, his knowledge of Greek and Mediterranean cultures and histories and his vocational imperative to privilege narrative above national interest. However, he often chooses a narrating style and content that, as one might expect, places his sympathies with British interests and perspectives. Durrell writes to Euro-American audiences that would be likely to identify with the metaphors he chooses to describe cultural difference. His aesthetic performance as a writer – and one determined to augment his own legend – subordinates any pretensions he may have had to create a narrative that would help a diverse body of readers better understand the troubles of Cyprus that he witnessed and ultimately participated in. Durrell is not the only British writer to chronicle the tumult of the 1950s – Charles Foley’s Island in Revolt and Penelope Tremayne’s Below the Tide cover a similar period and are valuable for purposes of comparison. These texts, however, are long out of print and not widely known, while Durrell’s continues to serve as a primary source of knowledge for many visitors to the island. It is also a preferred text, a resource that travellers and publishers are most likely to recommend as an entre´e to life as a visitor to a very complicated place that has witnessed much human tragedy in the twentieth century and beyond.

Readable Until Resolution: Raising and Digesting Bitter Lemons Though his popularity peaked in the 1960s and 70s, Durrell continues to be a familiar modern writer due to his novels, poetry, essays and correspondence with luminaries like Henry Miller. The influence of Miller, a c elebrated American author whose famed memoir Tropic of Cancer pushed the envelope of US censorship laws in the 1930s, can be seen in the content of Durrell’s best known work, Justine. The steamy novel was the first work in a quartet set in Alexandria and written during his time in Cyprus.5 Though Bitter Lemons lacked the sex appeal of these more renowned antecedents of

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travel literature, 2 million copies have been sold worldwide, and the book remains a popular memoir, especially among English-speaking travellers to Cyprus. They may hear of Bitter Lemons through references in many English language guidebooks on Cyprus, which typically cast it as a bittersweet account that captures the atmosphere of Cyprus in one of its most momentous times. As such, it continues to affect how audiences imagine Cyprus and its landscape. Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, a United Nations negotiator appointed in the summer of 2008 to work on Cyprus, came to his position as an admirer of Durrell’s writing, including Bitter Lemons, according to Christou. It would hardly be difficult to imagine him gearing up for his Cyprus assignment by taking another look at Durrell’s Cyprus. What accounts for this sustained popularity? Perhaps above all, Durrell turns Cyprus into a land of intrigue where an outsider’s life never lacks for suspense and the company of colourful characters. Even antagonists of the book concede its narrative appeal. David Roessel commends it for its rhetorical awareness. He writes that, ‘Durrell may seem enjoyable and plausible to American readers because, as part of the English-speaking community, he knows how to frame the story to impress and influence them’.6 Decorations heaped on Bitter Lemons in the UK have done their share to celebrate its reputation. Vangelis Calotychos, an elegant and informed Greek Cypriot critic of Bitter Lemons and the British role in Cyprus’s misfortunes, explains its standing in the UK (and the West): In Britain, the work received c ritical acclaim and is often considered ‘undoubtedly the finest piece of literature to come out of the Cyprus affair.’ It even won Durrell the Duff Cooper Memorial Award (presented by Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother) and the offer, albeit rebuffed by Durrell, of a decoration, the Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George.7 Admirers of Durrell and this work, some no doubt swayed by such seemingly lofty praise, tend to focus on his craft and virtues as a storyteller and landscape artist, while neglecting to consider how politically involved, if not always interested, the narrator and

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narrative turn out to be.8 Some admirers have also done their share on behalf of Durrell’s reputation in Cyprus. Penelope Tremayne, the expatriate nurse and writer who moves into Durrell’s Bellapaix home after his departure, wrote a starry-eyed paean titled ‘Memories of Durrell’, a flattering, occasionally defensive reminiscence of the author as a superior, transcendent, lovable man constitutionally incapable of hating others. Tremayne is unsurprisingly mum on the messier matters of his complicity with the British colonial presence and the policies that exacerbated the violence on the island.9 Essays like Friedman’s and Tremayne’s focus on the writer, the artist, and the person, but not so much on the rhetorical situation and the impact of his musings on others, especially Cypriots.10 Perhaps, too, some have been assuaged by Durrell’s remarkable prefatory comments, which posit that Bitter Lemons ‘is not a political book but simply a somewhat impressionistic study of the moods and atmospheres of Cyprus during the troubled years 1953–56’.11 Whether rigorously ethnographic or superficially impressionistic – and, for the most part, Bitter Lemons is neither – to deny the political character of a personal narrative about life, culture and politics on Cyprus immediately preceding and during a guerrilla war appears preposterous.12 To consider service in ‘Government House’ as just another perspective would be comparable to American writers describing in their memoirs about Iraq or Afghanistan that they just so happened to work for the State Department. Apparently, however, critics can forgive Durrell for this fanciful disclaimer. Some even mention Bitter Lemons’s political knowledge as part of the book’s allure. Friedman, for example, praises its aesthetic achievements and political acumen, seeing Bitter Lemons as the best of the author’s trilogy of island books (the others were Prospero’s Cell and Reflections on a Marine Venus): Bitter Lemons not only captures an atmosphere and a tone, a way of life and a people, but it details and examines the destruction of the Cypriot peace that culminates in the disastrous outbreak of civil war. The sense of place, then, is brilliantly and appropriately subordinated to the sense of the moment.13

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In the case of this quotation, as in the rest of his generally adulatory essay, Friedman presents scant evidence to substantiate such glowing remarks. He cites a letter Durrell wrote to his friend, the aforementioned and celebrated writer Henry Miller, an interview with Durrell and other primary sources from the author; however, he cites no secondary scholarship or even travel writing to measure the accuracy of Durrell’s assessment of Cypriot culture and politics. The factually incorrect mention of Bitter Lemons as a text that explains ‘the outbreak of civil war’ thus becomes telling. Durrell’s narrative ends in 1956 during the anti-colonial campaign against the British, years before widespread inter-communal fighting begins throughout the island. Though Durrell’s dialogues with Sabri, a Turk of Cyprus, which I examine later, hint at the depth of the distrust between Greeks and Turks, precious little else documents, explores or assesses the rising tensions between the Greek and Turkish communities from 1953– 6 in Cyprus. As I will demonstrate below, at least one critic reads this absence as part of a deliberate strategy to fashion a not-tooworldly narrator that would be more palatable to domestic readers. Nor does Durrell consider with much depth (in the memoir, at least) the role the British may have been playing in exacerbating ethnic conflict between Greeks and Turks. Friedman also confuses the fighting between these rival groups that occurs after independence with ‘civil war’, a term that suggests a c onsiderable degree of functional, political integration before violence commences. The Greek and Turkish communities shared power unsuccessfully in the independent Republic of Cyprus for barely three years before the island erupted again, in 1963. For the four centuries prior, though they lived side-by-side in cities and some mixed villages, these populations had largely existed as distinct subjects of the Ottoman and British Empires. As for Friedman’s estimation of Bitter Lemons as a ‘brilliant’ subordination of place to moment, it would be more accurate to note that Durrell told the story according to the narrative arc of his own life on the island. The first half of the book traces his life in the village and attempts to capture the essence of the Cypriot landscape – or better, to use Cyprus as a canvas for the aesthetic practice of his belief

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that landscape determines character. These chapters describe his relocation to Cyprus and the process of getting to know the island and the villagers in what will be his primary residence, the village of Bellapaix, nestled a short distance from the port town of Kyrenia. Durrell colourfully captures the process of rebuilding a traditional house, entertaining guests, and teaching at the Pancyprian Gymnasium in Nicosia. He weaves details from the island’s history and its increasingly tense present into the story, until these political developments eclipse the casual plotline of an expatriate writer’s life on an idyllic Mediterranean island. In the latter sections, Durrell narrates with considerably more gravity and less humour in accounting for his final two years on Cyprus, during which he takes on a position representing the colonial authorities in the midst of the Greek revolt against British rule.14 Though he mentions at the outset that he had never intended to stay for more than four or five years, the book leaves readers with the impression that he had decided to leave because he was no longer welcome or safe in Cyprus – a reality that represents a personal tragedy for Durrell and other outsiders who might, in better circumstances, have come to love the island for its cultural intrigues, especially its people. The book’s narrative structure and focus follow the chronology of his life on the island, and events flow, for the most part, according to arbitrary circumstance more than artful conception. In marketing terms, the arrival of a political and military crisis gave the island unexpected international attention, and Durrell capitalized on this notoriety by getting Bitter Lemons done and published while Cyprus remained a hotspot of world news. Foley notes with a hint of cynicism that Durrell ‘departed with the manuscripts of Bitter Lemons and Justine under his arm’.15 We can only speculate on Durrell’s motives, but, intent aside, Bitter Lemons, as this chapter demonstrates, is very much a political book despite the preponderance of light, often amusing personal anecdotes and portraiture of place. The style and substance, at least in the first half of the book, however, encourage readers to understand this political dimension of the text as unintentional and only reluctantly delivered.

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One ominous scene from later in the memoir, when the island appears on the brink of violence, nicely captures this uncomfortable synthesis of idyllic landscape and impending catastrophe. In the passage that follows, Durrell gets an earful from a Turk of Cyprus who has been observing events closely as the tension rises between British authorities and Greek Cypriots seeking ‘enosis’ or union with Greece. Durrell’s depiction of the moment displays two vexed and recurring tropes central to the landscape of Bitter Lemons, demonstrating his craft as a writer and his method of relaying events of the time through characterization of people and land. The first trope is indolence, a staple in the discursive arsenal of many Orientalist travel writers in the Middle East.16 Greeks, Turks and the island appear to be snared within the Eastern orbit of this deficiency. The second trope is the Turk as cold-blooded, calculating reptile, capable of fearsome comportment in the face of impending violence. Durrell describes his conversation with Sabri as follows: The evening was very still, and the cool silence of ‘The Tree of Idleness’ engulfed us like a mountain pool. Sabri was up there, sitting under the leaves contemplating a black coffee. [. . .] ‘Sit, my dear,’ he said gravely, and I sat beside him, soaking up the silence with its sheer blissful weight. The sea was calm. (Somewhere out of sight and sound the caique Saint George, loaded with arms and some ten thousand sticks of dynamite [for the Greek Cypriot uprising], was beating up the craggy coast by Cape Arnauti, making for a rendezvous near Paphos.) ‘It is so peaceful here,’ said my friend, sipping his coffee. ‘But for these bloody Greeks Cyprus would be peaceful; but we Turks haven’t opened our mouths yet. We will never be ruled by Greece here; I would take to the mountains and fight them if Enosis came!’ Oh dear!17 This gripping passage reveals a c ombination of Orientalist landscaping and narrative intrigue, as Durrell juxtaposes the tranquillity of the sleepy island with the imminent arrival of arms to

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begin a campaign of terror. The scene, under a famed ancient tree in the village of Bellapaix, appears saturated with images of inertia, conveying the classic trope of the Near East as a luxurious space where nothing ever happens, unless, as in physics, an outside force acts upon it. Terms like ‘still’, ‘silent’, ‘idleness’ and ‘calm’ suggest, on the one hand, a natural state of indolence or stasis, a quality that Durrell considers endemic and essential to the character of the land and its peoples, and one in sync with a colonialist’s approach to the subjects of empire. I take the land itself to be included in this trope, since, after losing the Suez, the British had to rely on Cyprus as a constant. If there were to be a time for Cyprus to transform into a dynamic site of political change, that would need to be deferred until some point in the distant future, when a Cold War did not trump calls for self-determination. As for Sabri, he ‘contemplates’ the scene and admits to staying on the sidelines of the impending insurgency, observing closely. Yet he suggests that when he and other Turks do act, it will be with decisiveness and violence. Durrell’s dramatic representation of Sabri in the above excerpt – a man also described earlier in the narrative as a ‘true Turk’ – at least partially illuminates the cultural politics and material circumstances that marked his final two years in Cyprus and ultimately led to the inter-communal skirmishes in the late 1950s and actual fighting that erupted between Greeks and Turks in 1963. Perhaps it is for writing of this sort, which portrays the growing drama engulfing what had been known to outsiders as a peaceful island, that the book is so beloved and recommended. For those with a more abiding interest in Cyprus and in the politics of representation in civilizational and other matters, Durrell’s work has generated controversy for its deployment of the symbolic. As the next section demonstrates, general audiences have understandably admired Durrell’s engaging narration and artful landscaping, while critics have justifiably taken issue with his memoir for its patronizing view of Cypriots and its disingenuous narration of the political situation. A comprehensive view of text and context reminds us how a scholar’s privileged ‘colonialist’ might be a traveller’s inspiration. Each reads, consumes and acts according to varying rhetorical purposes – purposes that I imagine to be set

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according to a given moment’s exigencies, but always contingent and open to change and reflection. Audiences affected by this writer may or may not be moved to condone or condemn what seem today to be colonialist attitudes towards others – this depends on when and how and why they may be engaging with the text. Durrell’s memoir does some odd work with Turks and Greeks of Cyprus and fails to fully acknowledge his complicity with authorities who share responsibility for the tragedies of Cyprus. These represent serious matters worth critical interrogation, but they do not constitute the totality of his narration or its effects – a point that gets lost in the prevailing wisdom of post-colonial critiques of the texts of privileged travellers.

A Harvest of Bitter Lemons: The Context, Critics and Fallout of a Well-circulating Story Several critics have established how Bitter Lemons and the Durrellian oeuvre reads as colonialist and racist in its rendering of people of the Middle East, including Cyprus (Tournay; Calotychos; Gwynne). This scholarship provides examples of how Durrell articulates a certain colonial order to a world culturally dominated by people like himself: white, European men, some of them actively serving to grease the gears of empire. As for the Greeks of Cyprus, Durrell laments and condemns their collective failure to live up to the myths of AngloGreek amity that he had developed through schooling and colonial administrative work earlier in his life. This spiritual bond imagined between the two peoples is deep enough that Durrell was particularly disappointed that Greek Cypriots were unwilling to trust that the British would one day fulfil their promises of self-determination. He was further disappointed that they failed to sufficiently appreciate their ‘special status’ as a superior culture to those living in other British colonies. Foley’s memoir reveals that such sentiments were widespread among the British community in Cyprus. Not all acceded to this notion that Cypriots were somehow distinct among colonial subjects. Foley indicates that some British residents and administrators in Cyprus considered any native of a

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colony a ‘nigger’ or ‘redskin’ – though Foley and Durrell clearly regarded the Cypriots as distinct from this type of subject.18 In the logic substantiating this sort of colonial caste system, Cypriots deserved to be considered superior to African people due to their European qualities, such as literacy and deeper affiliation with the history, culture, and religion of Europe. Apparently, some types of colonization c ould be more easily rationalized if the people demonstrated sufficient cultural and civilizational deficits. In contemporary times their indignant castigation of fellow colonials reads like backdoor racism. Nonetheless, whether they were considered undifferentiated colonial subjects of the British Empire or a special case of people deserving their freedom, their loyalty was largely taken for granted. The violent rebellion of Cypriot Greeks thus posed an unexpected challenge to the colonial order, and attacks on military and civilian targets exacerbated hostilities harboured by besieged Britons on the island. Greeks of Cyprus hoping for an end to British colonial rule – and no one disputes that an overwhelming majority of them felt this way – were, in effect, Durrell’s political adversaries, and they usually take the brunt of his insult and scorn. More common among contemporary scholarship are pieces critical of Durrell’s patronizing, self-aggrandizing characterizations of Cypriots – Greek and Turkish – and their island. The good name and generally unsullied reputation of Bitter Lemons has puzzled and troubled Cypriot audiences, as well as scholars and others acquainted with the politics and cultures of Cyprus. Greek and Greek Cypriot writers and intellectuals have long assailed the book as essentially propaganda for British interests in Cyprus. Costas Montis, a famed Greek Cypriot poet and writer, went so far as to pen a personalized response, now available in English, titled Closed Doors: An Answer to Bitter Lemons by Lawrence Durrell.19 This fictionalized account describes attempts to provide a counter-narrative to Bitter Lemons, which considers the rebellion to be an irrational collective act driven largely by the island’s Greek youth. Translator David Roessel writes in his introduction that Closed Doors represents a ‘clear case of “the empire writing back”, a colonized native answering a former servant in the colonial government’.20 In particular, Roessel notes that

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Montis and other Greek Cypriot writers familiar with Durrell’s influence and style felt a need to narrate in detail and specifics what Durrell often left deliberately vague: ‘Where Durrell wants ambiguity, Montis appears polemical – his self-perceived function is to stress the torture chambers, curfews, communal fines, and blackhooded informers that were part of daily Cypriot life during the struggle. [. . .] Montis [. . .] perceived a deviousness in Durrell’s ambiguity.’21 The way a text may impact the people who live in a site of travel does not sufficiently register with travel writers, their audiences or even critics. The work of Roessel and Montis demonstrates how deeply and intimately travel texts – especially those that become iconic for generations of future travellers – can affect the people who are cast in their scripts and thereafter doomed to struggle against their limitations. Scholars with even less partisan, nationalist interests have taken note of the thinly-veiled racism of Bitter Lemons. In her reading of the text as a product of colonialism, Tournay specifically notes ‘some of the recurring tropes of colonial discourse, such as the native as a child, the native as a cunning or morally deficient person’.22 Other writers make much of the paternalistic relationship between Durrell and the Cypriots, whose childlike innocence and charming sleepiness, Durrell feared, would be threatened on the world stage without the protection of the British.23 The excerpt taken from the preface of Bitter Lemons, which I use to begin this chapter, asserts that the British must stay for the good of the Cypriots themselves, who have profited considerably from their presence. By the time of Durrell’s stay on the island, the British had been its rulers since 1878, and joined the long list of foreigners whose time on Cyprus has left a mark. One of the most trenchant critiques of Bitter Lemons comes from Michael Given, a writer who looks closely at landscape in Durrell’s memoir. His analysis makes a strong case for the inherently political, rhetorical nature of travel writing – even when the textual focus purports to be the innocent literary landscaping of the travel writer. Durrell himself invited his readers and all travellers to consider questions of landscape in an essay he published in 1960 titled ‘Landscape and Character’. In this piece, Durrell lays out his essential

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philosophy of life and travel writing.24 Simply put, ‘landscape determines character’. That is, people do not mould the land and saturate it with meaning so much as the land shapes them, ascribing to them qualities that are inescapable: a sort of cultural destiny. Durrell explains the theory, and the charge of travel writer, as follows: I have evolved a private notion about the importance of landscape, and I willingly admit to seeing ‘characters’ almost as functions of a landscape. This has only come about in recent years after a good deal of travel [. . .] as you get to know Europe slowly, tasting the wines, cheeses and characters of the different countries you begin to realize that the important determinant of any culture is after all – the spirit of place. Just as one particular vineyard will always give you a special wine with discernible characteristics so a Spain, an Italy, a Greece will always give you the same type of culture – will express itself through the human being just as it does through its wild flowers. We tend to see ‘culture’ as a sort of historic pattern dictated by the human will, but for me this is no longer absolutely true. I don’t believe the British character, for example, or the German has changed a jot since Tacitus first described it; and so long as people keep getting born Greek or French or Italian their culture-productions will bear the unmistakable signature of the place.25 And this, of course, is the target of the travel-writer; his task is to isolate the germ in the people which is expressed by their landscape.26 Through Durrell’s conceptual lens, an example might play out this way: if you take a person from the (indolent) East and transplant this subject into the heart of an empire 1,000 miles to the (industrious) West, within a generation or two, the Easterner will embody the supposedly hyper-rational efficiency and emotional composure of a Western subject. Conversely, an expatriate who stays in the East too long will assume its own lethargic pulse. Durrell’s geographic

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determinism appears to betray misgivings for some of the effects of modernization and development and blindly overlooks the power dynamic at work between the narrating subject and his objects of interest, in this case the denizens of a supposedly sleepy island of Durrell’s beloved Oriental East. His philosophy functions as a travel writer’s assertion of essential and enduring difference – an eternal call to travel and encounter ‘the Other.’ Such a philosophy constitutes a depoliticizing gesture that conceals the positionality – and the power – of the narrator, as it redirects us to focus on mythical abstractions of land, architecture and people. One could imagine that Durrell would have been as unsettled by the Arab Spring as he was by the uprising in Cyprus. In the case of Cyprus, Given argues that Durrell effectively and perhaps deliberately de-Hellenises the landscape, putting into doubt, omitting or simply not seeing what could arguably be construed as evidence of Hellenic or Greek cultural heritage – a move of obvious political import. His narrative privileges the achievements of medieval European rulers of Cyprus while diminishing (even effacing) the uncomfortable presence of ‘Greek’ culture, whose professed descendants had so rudely and audaciously turned against the patrimony of a colonial regime that Durrell supported. Bitter Lemons and Durrell operate under the remarkable pretence that the land tells the true story, while the narrators merely serve as the medium. Given notes the folly of such a position: Durrell, Harrison, and others like them claimed that the landscapes, histories, and architectures they produced were authentic expressions of the country itself, not inventions of their own artistic imaginations. And yet it is clear that they were as much the fathers of these landscapes as the children. This may have been a conscious and deliberate manipulation of history for political ends, or else a genuine expression of the worldview of historically situated individuals. What is clear is that Durrell’s construction of the landscape and character of Cyprus radically contradicts his own claim that human beings are an expression of their own landscape. From

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Bitter Lemons, it seems that both people and landscape are expressions of the writer.27 Under other circumstances, such as the travel writing Durrell composed on the comparatively untroubled Greek islands further west, explicit linkage with Hellenism would be normative. One rendering of the politics of such prose, then, would follow as such: in a place like Rhodes, where the British have no colonial interest and the Turks had been expropriated to Anatolia, Durrell was a loyal and enthusiastic philhellene; in Cyprus, where ‘the Greeks’ speak the Greek language and practice religion as Orthodox Christians, he can hardly generate much enthusiasm for their passion to join with Greece. Perhaps as punishment for insufficient gratitude to Durrell and the British, they suffer the indignity of a de-Hellenization of the landscape. Either way, such a structural ploy locates Greeks and Turks as effects of landscape. The British – unsurprisingly – float above consideration as relative newcomers not yet tainted by the deleterious influence of this sleepy island. The taxing labours of stewardship likely prevent a loss of personal industry among expatriates. Among their duties, the British have appropriated the role of guarantor of the island’s cultural treasures – legacies of European empires that could not wisely be entrusted to the locals. Greek claims to historical dominance and continuity are negated, indirectly delivering partisan Turks a felicitous public relations gift, through no achievement or effort of their own.28 Few critics have offered more than passing comment on his depiction of the Turks of Cyprus. For those who do c onsider Durrell’s representation of Turks, the consensus has been that Bitter Lemons does them no favours as it circulates in global public spheres. Petra Tournay, in examining the text as a product of colonialism, offers the general c onclusion that ‘if the representation of the Greek Cypriots has been rather unfavourable, the few references to the Turkish Cypriots are even less so’.29 Given, in his insightful study of the absence of Hellenism from the landscape of Bitter Lemons, notes that for Durrell, ‘the Anatolian [synonymous in the 1950s with ‘Turkish’] character is soft, dreamy, and indolent,

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expressed in the great theme of sleep and idleness’ so present in the narrative.30 Like the Greeks of Cyprus, the Turks also suffer their share of the indignities as landscape fodder for a colonial narrative. Durrell’s Sabri is largely an exception, as he is afforded a stage in which to articulate what many Turks of Cyprus must have been feeling in these times: ‘we Turks haven’t opened our mouths yet.’31 For the most part, Turks come across as bearers of bizarre ethno-national characterizations in Bitter Lemons. Durrell’s description of Sabri’s grave profession beneath the Tree of Idleness may be the closest a Turk comes to demonstrating an autonomous, rationalized political will. In the few other moments in which Turks appear in the narrative, they emerge largely as foils in a storyline that serves up ‘the Turk’ as a host of imaginative and contradictory signifiers that purport to capture an essentialized, ethno-national character. A focus on Turks and representation provides an opportunity to consider how a travel text like Durrell’s continues to provide Englishspeaking audiences in the US, the UK and elsewhere with popular, literary discourse on Turks, Muslims and Middle Easterners. Readers likely glean from Bitter Lemons that Turks, as members of this ethnonational group, simultaneously and paradoxically embody qualities like wisdom and stupidity, languor and thoughtfulness. Further, they are seen to be ‘Zen-like’, slow to anger, guileful and composed on the one hand, while on the other they can be cold-blooded, fatalistic and elemental. Their spirituality and mystical qualities are constructed as cultural assets, at least in a romantic, anti-materialistic sense, but their purported backwardness and potential cruelty come off as civilizational deficits. Such a burgeoning inventory of significations constitutes quite a burden for one ethno-national subject position to accommodate, but contradictory and all-encompassing cultural generalizations have long been stock features of travel narratives set in the East. Analysis of the discursive practices and ideological assumptions common within the genre of travel writing, such as those that reoccur in the discourses of imperialism, explains some of this ambivalent rhetoric. The focus on the question of ambivalence and colonial

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representation returns later in this chapter, at which time I take up the ways in which Stuart Hall (and others) have noted how these contradictions are inherent to the cultural binaries constructed in the representation of the colonial other.32 A close reading of Bitter Lemons and analyses of secondary sources that treat the memoir, Durrell and the genre of travel writing, demonstrate the manner in which the Turks in Cyprus have been cast as contradictory and ambiguous. On the one hand, they are marginal, peripheral, typically silent characters. Yet on the other, they are imagined as potentially fearsome, even awesome creatures who lend an exotic allure to the landscape. As such, they play a relatively minor, yet intriguing role in Bitter Lemons. The following section analyses how Durrell writes about Turks, considers the forces that may have shaped his writing, and assesses how Bitter Lemons informs readers’ negative impressions of ‘Turk’ as a cultural signifier.

Reptilian Turks and other Troublesome Troping in Bitter Lemons Circumstances and an absence of c uriosity, more than wilful neglect, explain why Durrell gets to know so little of the Turks of Cyprus during his time there. As Bitter Lemons reveals, Durrell’s life for his first two years on the island centre around his re-modelled home and social life in the village of Bellapaix, where he entertained numerous friends from the expatriate community within Cyprus and abroad. As for the village itself, it was at the time a small, Greek-populated community adjoining the ruins of a thirteenthcentury Frankish abbey overlooking the sleepy coastal town of Kyrenia on the northern shores of Cyprus. Durrell’s daily routine thus conspired against much social or professional contact with the Turks of the island, who were less than 20 per cent of the population and typically lived near by but not together with their more populous Greek neighbours. During his last two years in Cyprus, Durrell worked in Nicosia in the public relations office of the colonial authorities, where his efforts focused on providing the British government’s perspective and other

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information to the local and international press corps. This work required him to emphasize to members of the international press the importance of the Turkish community on the island, that their desires and the perspectives of Turkey could not be overlooked. Thus, Durrell and many of his peers in Government House have often been accused of taking a ‘pro-Turkish’ position. Here, I fear a conflation of Durrell’s actual work for the authorities and the memoir he leaves us about Cyprus. His work with the authorities would have doubtless made him profess the importance of the Turkish position, but if the memoir is any indication, Durrell was doing no more than merely going through the motions as a loyal spokesperson. In fact, based on what we see in the memoir, Turks are a mystery to Durrell – one that can be exploited for narrative intrigue. ‘The Turk’, I argue, functions as a useful signifier of cultural difference, given their Islamic and Eastern associations, which provide an opportunity to spice up a story that maps Cyprus as a site of substantive cultural difference for British and other Western domestic audiences. In Bitter Lemons, readers are introduced to only two actual Cypriot Turks. The more memorable and elaborated character is Sabri Tahir, a roguish, self-employed businessman based out of Kyrenia. At first, Sabri seems to be little more than a colourful Levantine character whom Durrell hires to help him locate and purchase a property to renovate and inhabit. Later, Sabri’s c landestine activities as an auxiliary police officer and Turkish militia member serve as foreshadowing of the island’s irreversible turn to violence. Durrell and Sabri cross paths occasionally over the years the author spends on the island, and, within the narrative, Sabri’s character takes on the considerable freight of an entire ethno-national subjectivity: he functions, for Durrell and his curious Western readers unfamiliar with Turkey and Turks, as the embodiment of a fictionalized ‘true Turk’. Durrell’s descriptions of this man are as fascinating as they are contradictory. He seems to have genuine respect for Sabri as a businessman and affection for him as a friend. The sentiment was reciprocated, according to New York Times Istanbul Bureau Chief Stephen Kinzer, who tracked down Sabri in the 1990s during a visit to northern Cyprus. Sabri defends Durrell against criticisms levelled

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against him, casting him as a good man who had no prejudice toward Turks or Greeks. Within the text itself, Durrell seems to take pains to insulate himself against such criticism by recalling fondly the times when Sabri and he share confidences – albeit as two presumably superior sons of empire, British and Ottoman Turkish, respectively. Nonetheless, Durrell’s physical descriptions of this ‘true Turk’ locate Sabri as an ethnic representative of a group associated with a host of dubious creatures of nature and myth: reptiles, sharks and dragons,33 to name a few. Shortly after introducing Sabri, Durrell notes that ‘what was truly Turkish about him was the physical repose with which he confronted the world. [. . .] The Turk has a monolithic poise, an air of reptilian concentration and silence.’34 So Sabri, like all ‘true’ Turks, has the bearing of a lizard, presumably capable of waiting indefinitely and without distraction for its prey, or for nothing at all: a creature less burdened by the human need for language use, cold-blooded in its calculations. A similar pattern in the Oriental construction of landscape has been identified by Meyda Yeg˘enog˘lu, in an analysis of nineteenthcentury European travel writing about Istanbul, who notes that, ‘The Orientals are hidden not only behind their words but also behind their silence, for even their lips are a veil; true life is missing, its absence is dissimulated by appearances and masks’.35 Yeg˘enog˘lu’s context differs in that she studies the Western writer’s fixation on the veiled Muslim women of the Ottoman capital, but the interpretation of the silence as dissemblance, pregnant with the potential for trickery, is a well-travelled Orientalist trope. Durrell appears to be dipping from the same well in his construction of Sabri and other Turks as bearers of ‘silence’. One interpretation of this language could certainly be along these lines of ‘dissimulation’ or concealing, with textual evidence available to suggest Durrell at times viewed Turks as a threat. Sabri may have been an intent listener, a thoughtful interlocutor and a shrewd business operator, but in this instance his ‘monolithic air’ conveys a sort of spooky cultural prototype, more than an admirable advocate. Not only Sabri suffers from reptilian troping. Near the end of the narrative, Durrell visits the seaside retreat of a Muslim religious

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figure, a Turk in Cyprus whom he refers to as ‘hodja,’ a title signifying a devout man who may perform some religious duties, a purportedly wise and spiritual person.36 Durrell resumes his troping of the Turk as reptile, an unmistakable echo of his representation of Sabri: ‘[The hodja] spoke in his gobbling Greek letting the reptilian lids of his eyes fall shyly.’37 Gazing through the hodja’s windows to the soul, Durrell’s metaphor fails to apprehend even the same species looking reflecting back to him: ‘gobbling’ Greek, whatever that might sound like, appears not to be the sound a human might produce. The hodja’s Greek would have been heavily accented to Durrell, who studied the dialect of the modern Athenian on the mainland, not the appreciably distinct Cypriot Greek. Further, the Greek spoken here is by a non-native speaker who learned the language through his contact with Greeks on Cyprus, rather than through the scholarly methods of Durrell’s youth. Tournay reads the scene as ‘yet another standard cliche´ in colonial discourse according to which non-Western people are depicted as incoherent. It never occurs to Durrell to question his own inability at speaking Turkish.’38 Nor have critics acknowledged this critical linguistic deficit that Durrell experienced with Turks, which certainly played a role in his preference for attending to the lives of Greeks in Cyprus. The scene here highlights yet again the contradictory nature of Durrell’s discourse: he admired the hodja, ostensibly enjoying his company while the two men took in the waves as Durrell stepped out of time. Durrell also appears to have shared a typically colonial, expatriate affection for the elemental, mystical, anti-modern ways of this religious figure. In an exuberant moment on the balcony when the sun sets on the sea and Durrell indulges in nostalgia for the ancients, the writing continues with tropes from the animal world, creating further ambiguous effects in terms of representation of Turks: When the old man came to join me on the terrace his red turban threw a patch of dancing scarlet on the wall behind us. He crouched down beside me, motionless as a tortoise, unspeaking,

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and together we gazed into the heart of darkness which had begun to overflow and trickle out of the valleys towards us.39 Though the scene appears to trouble the gazing narrator, as the imagery used to describe nightfall c arries a gothic tone of foreboding, for the most part the mood and Durrell’s association with the hodja suggests harmony. We do not know the hodja’s take on Durrell, though this non-English speaking Turk’s earlier linguistic effrontery and Durrell’s linkage of the hodja with the tortoise hardly suggest respect and a spirit of reciprocity. Yet Durrell appears to have derived sufficient pleasure from the moment to wax poetic, nearly positing a state of communion with the hodja. Before Durrell departs, the hodja asks him to bring along a Turkish newspaper on his next visit. Durrell does not have the heart to tell the man that he is leaving the island in days and will not return. He has the paper posted from his office. For the analysis I have been developing thus far, the hodja’s figurative linkage to a tortoise bears consideration. As far as reptiles go, they have enjoyed their share of benign associations with qualities like wisdom, sun, and longevity, with the latter perhaps suggesting a reverence for the ancientness of the Turk, the Muslim and the Oriental. Or perhaps Durrell’s senses were impaired as he was taken with the red turban: travel writers working in the Middle East, the Balkans and North Africa have long been spellbound by the threads that rest upon others’ heads.40 Yes, they may indeed be cold-blooded, reptilian creatures, but in a scene like this one – unlike the charged political atmosphere of his balcony encounter with Sabri – the energy of the life force remains at rest, moving at the existential pace Durrell preferred at this moment. Durrell ruptures the tension of the darkening skies with a gesture of nostalgia for the presumptive progenitors of European civilization who lived and ruled in Cyprus so long ago. Like so many other colonial Britons and their descendants, uncomplicated adoration for the ancients of Greece and Rome comes with the territory. He writes:

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It was a blessed moment – a sunset which the Greeks and Romans knew – in which the swinging cradle-motion of the sea slowly copied itself into the consciousness, and made one’s mind beat with the elemental rhythm of the earth itself. He said nothing and I said nothing; we simply sat there together as if bereft of the power of speech, watching the night encircle us.41 For a moment, Durrell almost seems to be identifying with the preternatural, spiritual being whose presence he shares. He savours the silence. Time compresses within the narrative as Durrell invokes the ancients to express his wonder at the coming night.42 The hodja, like Sabri earlier, becomes for Durrell transformed into an almost preconscious creature of instinct. The narrator in this case envies the purportedly non-intellectualized moment, the un-rationalized occupation of time, maybe even life without time, as he and the hodja take in the ‘rhythm of the earth itself’.43 As for the hodja, his role shifts into an observer of the subjective whims of the narrator. And, at that moment, he once again assumes the qualities of a reptile: ‘I started to walk towards the sunset along that ivory sea-line while he stood, motionless as a lizard, watching me.’44 This particular Muslim Turk – others may only be so fortunate to thus escape contempt as indolent – is here naturalized and associated with a kind of nativist idealization. Though apparently inscrutable, the hodja is paradoxically imbued with the awesome simplicity of other ancient creatures of nature. Taken as such, they, like nature, are to be both admired and feared. These moves could have been taken to mask other motives or betray an anxiety about how little the narrator truly understands about Turks. What Durrell and so many other travel writers seem to screen from possibility is that the Turk, the hodja, even the reptile may watch the movements of a stranger like Durrell in order to better understand the world, to interpret the cultural qualities of difference the stranger embodies, to analyse their presence and impact: in short, to be an acting subject in the world, a politicallysituated agent in history.

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Durrell, in a few moments, ascribes more than animal qualities to Sabri and the hodja, going so far as to turn Turks into monsters, at which point his poetics appear to become either careless or baffling. Turkey, the country, becomes the foreboding region of origin for larger, more dangerous and more magical reptilian beasts: dragons. In describing a thunderstorm that hits Kyrenia on the island’s northern coast, a mere 40 miles from the Anatolian shores of Turkey, the Turk graduates from the imagery of nature to that of the supernatural. Durrell compares the lightning to ‘dragons from Turkey’.45 Sabri then appears out of this menacing storm come from the north, ‘between thunder-flashes like an apparition from the underworld’.46 From dragons, Durrell reaches further into the recesses of demonology in casting Sabri as a ghost from a netherworld. One might be tempted to wonder now what exactly Durrell has to fear about Turkey and Turks to fix them as a locus of the supernatural. Yet effects of this type of representation appear to carry the same sort of ambiguity as his other reptile troping. While, in one sense, the creatures suggest a force with the potential to wreak awful havoc, they also may be held in a kind of awe. For example, though dragons may be wondrous for qualities like their ancientness, their power and their wealth, they would be horrifying to encounter when angered and are preferable when beheld from a distance. Perhaps audiences interpret his writing as innocent literary indulgence, a sort of carefree camp not to be taken too seriously. Or perhaps Durrell is aware of how his primarily Western audiences may be more receptive to Turks and their Anatolian mountains as loci of difference. The spirit of this discussion, though, is to invite a kind of dialogic approach that attempts to calculate how Turks might respond to such metaphor. I find it hard to imagine that its reading publics would deem it too innocent or innocuous given European travel literature’s complicity in the racism of imperial discourse. Durrellian and colonial apologists may now object that the analysis makes too much of this reptilian rhetoric, and that above all, Durrell not only holds no prejudice against Turks, but, in fact, he admires them. Sabri is portrayed as an aesthetic wonder, a man of many skills, but above all a person of extreme patience, calculation,

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and well-expended, purposefully deployed energy – laudatory cultural qualities, it would appear. Durrell, however, diminishes this praise when he compares Sabri’s personal industry to that found in the other Turks of the island: ‘[Sabri] is a pretty sharp business man, of course, which is not usual among Turks who are always half asleep.’47 Durrell emphasizes this essentialized sloth again later in the text, invoking the authority of the historian Sir Harry Luke to buttress his case, as if further evidence were even necessary. Luke describes to Durrell how ‘the Cypriot character’ has been softened by the Anatolian presence: less industry, ambition, enterprise, but more grace, dignity, gentleness.48 These like-minded colonials paradoxically deplore the Muslim Turks and their Anatolian indolence, yet at the same time find these qualities preferable to the pluck and independence of the Greeks, who now threaten to unravel the colonial domination of Cyprus. Durrell provides another example of this sort of backhanded compliment when crediting the Ottoman Turks for the merits of the millet system, wherein religious leaders exercised autonomy over their respective peoples (Muslims, Jews, Orthodox Greeks, Orthodox Armenians and so forth) in the political life in the Empire. He explains that the millet system granted Greek Cypriots religious, language and limited self-rule rights as a ‘recognition perhaps of the enviable qualities of restlessness and imagination that they themselves lacked’.49 Durrell, in the ideological pattern so prevalent in colonial discourse, demonstrates reluctance to bestow unqualified remarks of praise for Turks, whose character, in this text, settles for ambivalence and paradox. This type of representation should not necessarily be surprising given the long tradition of Orientalism found in European travel texts that have been so well documented and analysed by others. Yet the coherence and stability of this troping is continually undermined by certain material presences contradictory to the imagery above. The lazy Turk? Not only does Sabri put in long hours of physically and mentally taxing labour, but so do the men in his employ, in Durrell’s own narrative. These reliably lethargic creatures also conduct the research and physical tasks needed to buy property, erect buildings

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and network with Greek and British interlocutors in commercial exchanges upon which their livelihoods depend. Instead, we are left to wonder what drives these naturally scheming, cold-blooded, reserved and reptilian beings. Durrell’s writing on these matters is at odds with itself: are these pre-rational creatures actually concentrating, reasoning and planning – or just passing the time? Perhaps, goes the thinking, the ambiguity serves them well at the inevitable moment when circumstances become favourably arranged for an attack. Within such a threatening discursive orbit, it becomes easier to understand how quickly and naturally European and Western outsiders came to sympathize with Greek Cypriots in the aftermath of 1974. Concerning the quality of personal industry, a splendid irony unfolds near the end of the narrative, when Durrell sees Sabri for the last time. The author and a Greek Cypriot friend have set out for an afternoon picnicking and gathering flowers. They come across Sabri on the way, engaged in a project with a work crew of fellow Turks. Sabri jokingly laments that some people have to work for a living; the joke, as it would turn out, was on Sabri, for if something even remotely resembling this scene actually happened, Durrell could have been said to be conducting research for his manuscript. At least Durrell chooses not to inquire as to how well the crew handles its tasks while ‘half asleep’. Then again, this cultural proclivity for ease turns out to be not altogether an undesirable quality, as seen above in Durrell’s celebration of the hodja’s harmonious relationship to nature. Sabri also allows his British admirer a glimpse into the spirit of pleasurable ease known as kayf (keyif in Turkish). In addition to being Turks, Sabri and the hodja are Muslims, though in Sabri’s case this would be a more cultural religiosity than one practiced daily in ritual. Their respective practice of and association with Islam apparently affords Durrell an opportunity to explore the more mystical side of these Turks. Though some of Durrell’s writing on this subject features expansive, even farfetched cultural elaborations, his exploration of the religiosity and essential Eastern-ness of the faithful is rendered in a spirit of appreciation. His discussion of kayf illustrates this perspective:

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[Sabri] was obviously endowed with that wonderful Moslem quality which is called Kayf – the contemplation which comes of silence and ease. It is not meditation or reverie, which presupposes a conscious mind relaxing: it is something deeper, a fathomless repose of the will which does not even pose to itself the question: ‘Am I happy or unhappy?’50 To the extent that religious practices of Muslims offer Durrell an antidote to the alienating pace and project of modernity, they become admirable, despite the unsettling possibility that Durrell finds Muslims or Turks incapable of posing a fundamentally rational, humanist question about happiness. Further, the idleness that merited disparagement elsewhere resurfaces, yet now the quality appears socially sanctioned. In his representations as a reptile, Sabri bears the ambiguous pre-rational comportment of the animal world. Here, Durrell introduces an almost sublime spirituality, and the roguish commercial operator acquires the unsolicited association of religiosity, which to this point had not been mentioned as part of his character. In fact, like Cypriot Turks of his and later generations, Sabri has most certainly been more deeply affected ideologically by the secular nationalism of Ataturk and Republican Turkey than by Islam, the state religion for centuries of Ottoman rule. Durrell’s portrayal of kayf conveys no such socio-historical nuance. He also fails to recognize that kayf can just as easily be considered a cultural practice of mixed origins, as applicable to the material lives of the secular as to the pious. Instead, he delivers the concept as a ‘wonderful Moslem quality’, and so we understand its province as essentially religious. But, within his narrative, ethnic and sectarian signification slide arbitrarily back and forth, in and out of the few descriptions of Turks. For good measure, Sabri, like most Cypriots, drinks alcohol, common enough among the island’s Muslims, but somehow disorienting (though surely welcome) for Durrell: as the above scene unfolds, ‘a bewildering succession of cold beers’ arrive at the table.51 Thanks to their de facto association with Islam, deserved or not, Turks, on the question of kayf, end up sounding like enviably wise, spiritual

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beings.52 Political and cultural factors operative at the time offer tantalizing explanations for Durrell’s occasional, skin-deep remarks of affection for Turks. The British provided considerable financial and other support for the Muslim religious community on Cyprus, and particularly for the religious schools, tekkes, functioning as a balance against the growing fervour for Turkish nationalism and the interests of Turkey. Perhaps had Durrell encountered more Turkish Cypriots, he would have been less inclined to pronounce so confidently on the signifiers of an authentic cultural identity. Then, he seems not to be alone in handling the Turks of Cyprus as a static lot. Other British observers of the Cyprus of the 1950s tended to view the community as monolithic, paying almost exclusive attention to the words and actions of leaders like Dr Kutchuk and Rauf Denktash, and almost none to anyone else (see Foley’s Island in Revolt and Tremayne’s Below the Tides for corroboration of this practice). In Durrell’s narrative, as noted earlier, Turks and Turkish communities are virtually absent with the exception of Sabri and the lonely hodja.53 One obvious explanation for their almost complete omission from Durrell’s narrative concerns political exigencies: at the time of his stay in Cyprus, Greek Cypriot nationalist guerrillas (often schoolchildren as young as 12–14) fought colonial Britons while the Turks of Cyprus mainly observed, albeit with great unease. Though some were forming militias and developing other contingency plans behind the scenes, few were stealing the headlines on the island itself, nor doing much of the actual fighting – though some were hired by the English as auxiliary police.54 As neither a teacher nor a public relations official would he have needed to meet and interact with Turks. Nor did many Turkish Cypriots find themselves within the sphere of Durrell’s private life as a colonial resident, for motives that range from lifestyle preferences, to civilizational associations to chance. Though Durrell may be above all an unapologetic colonial Briton, his linguistic and literary interests are linked deeply with ancient and modern Greece.55 While Durrell makes much of the differences of Cypriot language and culture in comparison to the purportedly cosmopolitan Greeks of Athens, his cultural affinities rest squarely

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with Greek Cypriots, not the Turks. Despite rhetorical attempts to appear an even-handed colonialist (granting the contradiction in terms), Durrell settles on a politics that strives to protect the status quo. His position: the British colonial interest had to be protected for the time being, but talks with the Greek Cypriots could be started at some vague point in the future for greater political autonomy. Many Greek Cypriots desired an immediate end to colonial rule and rights of self-determination, setting them at odds with Durrell. That did not, however, necessarily drive Durrell into a cultural alliance with the Turks, even though he and many other Britons had considerable sympathy for the Turkish resistance to enosis. Many subscribe to the theory that the British deployed classic ‘divide and rule’ tactics to exploit the political differences between Greeks and Turks, in an effort to forestall enosis.56 Though such political exigencies are significant in understanding the complicated history of modern Cyprus, they do not appear to have deeply affected Durrell and his attitude towards Turks. These fairly dramatic developments seemed to have outpaced the author’s efforts to analyse and process the troubling politics of Cyprus. Instead, he mostly broods on the deteriorating cultural and intellectual bonds shared by Greeks and Britons from the time of Byron, a mythologized alliance driven by the inherently hostile and threatening presence of the Turk. At the narrative’s c onclusion, Durrell and Panos toast to English and Greek solidarity, ‘a dying affection which might never be revived [. . .] of an England and Greece which were bondsmen in the spirit’.57 Of course, just as Durrell has pronounced last rites on the symbolic passing of the age of British philhellenism, he opens the case for the connection once more, suggesting that some bonds may be eternal. Or, to borrow from the sentiment Calotychos highlights from the ending anecdote of the memoir, the British and the Greeks of Cyprus must carry on in Durrell’s imagination with the work of ‘loving each other to death’. Durrell’s last taxi ride in Cyprus included the wistful opining of his driver to make the point:

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‘Even Dighenis [popular celebratory pseudonym for EOKA leader General Grivas],’ he said thoughtfully, ‘they say he himself is very pro-British.’ It was one of those Greek conversations which carry with them a hallucinating surrealist flavour – in the last two years I had endured several hundred of them. ‘Yes,’ he continued in the slow assured tones of a village wiseacre, ‘yes, even Dighenis, though he fights the British, really loves them. But he will have to go on killing them – with regret, even with affection.’58 Civilizational ‘affection’ of this sort, it goes without saying, does not mark the relations that Greeks and Britons share, respectively, with Turks, who continue to bear the residual baggage as the philhellene’s eternal antagonist.59 Colin Thubron, writing almost two decades later, harbours neither the same romance concerning Greek – British cultural and historical ties, nor the same fear of their differences, but his travelogue Journey into Cyprus (to be discussed in Chapter 4) does bear some of the same hallmarks of Turk troping found in Bitter Lemons. Thubron differs from Durrell in the way he comes to know the people of the island and in the profession of his motives. That is to say, where Durrell claimed, falsely, to have no stake in Cyprus or political motive in his narration, Thubron makes no such claim and yet mostly lives up to much higher standards of objectivity – if perhaps too much objectivity at the expense of sufficient revelation of his own filters.

Conclusion Stuart Hall, among others, reminds us that ambivalent effects are created when representations of others fix people according to poles of a reductive binary. Yet very few binaries could be considered neutral, as one pole tends to dominate the other.60 The representations of Turks in the colonial and Near Eastern contexts in Durrell’s world, when situated within real-world power relations, likely contribute to readers’ impressions of ‘Turk’ as a mysterious and dubious element. The dragon-Turk may be fearsome on the one hand and wondrous on

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the other, but one struggles to imagine how the benign qualities of creatures supplant their less appealing associations as members of the reptile world. Though indolence may be accompanied by a corresponding and coveted ‘bliss’, Bitter Lemons invites readers to detest laziness more than they may be inclined to celebrate the virtues of contemplative ease. While not altogether hostile to Turks, Bitter Lemons prefers to celebrate imaginary ones, rather than the people Durrell and his British employers enlist as allies against the Greeks. In the larger picture, this makes sense, as cultural groups constitute the raw material to be shaped according to Durrell’s demands for a personal literary aesthetic and an expression of the cultural politics of the day. When the criteria for a ‘good story’ are invented and revised according to domestic cultural logics, rather than as a legacy and testament to the people of a travel site, this is to be expected. In this sense, Durrell is no different from Chatwin. From the standpoint of legacy, this complicated man – traveller, teacher, father, husband, expatriate, estranged philhellene, child and servant of empire – remains known in the context of Cyprus for Bitter Lemons. Above all else, he came to Cyprus as a writer and left it as a writer. An analysis of the text and context of Bitter Lemons suggests that Durrell’s ideological allegiances are to his story first, to the imperial authorities second and to the Cypriots, Turkish and Greek, last. Above all, his sense of responsibility is to the readers of his market, to domestic audiences in the US and UK, and to the quality of the story he would tell, to its ability to stand up as a story that travellers and those curious about Cyprus would want to hear. Critics like Foley and Montis understand this well. Read retrospectively, Durrell’s profession at the outset of a political clean slate can be interpreted as wishful thinking or even a guilty admission, an obsessive denial of his complicity in turning people into tropes. Durrell understood the reality that he very much played a part in the mess he characterizes as an ambiguous conflict in which everyone’s grievance had some potential legitimacy. This conceit of innocence, though, is very much a fiction. Roessel writes that this move itself represents a rhetorical manoeuvre designed very much for his audience:

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One of the interesting things about Bitter Lemons is the way that Durrell attempts to present himself as an innocent, even naı¨ve narrator, who is constantly surprised by events – even his own appointment as PIO director. This is, in part, a strategy to make the reader trust Durrell’s narrative, although at times it stretches credulity. For example, Durrell suggests that it was only when he took the job as PIO director that he realized the importance that Turkey would have for the island’s future. Surely that would have been apparent to any intelligent adult with a background in the foreign service? [sic] Why, we should wonder, would the British want someone as PIO director who could not see this?61 Rhetorical c ritic Kenneth Burke refers to this gesture as ‘identification’ and considers it one of the signature moves of a writer looking to gain sympathy with a community of readers by having them see their needs and desires as aligned with his own. Naivete´ is a sort of hallmark subject position for a traveller, and so Durrell – born and raised in northern India by Anglo-Indian parents and himself a savvy veteran of foreign service intimately familiar with world politics – seems an unlikely victim of circumstance, as his story suggests. This particular story of Cyprus continues to produce its own casualties, namely the Greeks and Turks deployed in its service, as well as the audiences for whom Bitter Lemons serves as an outsized source of knowledge about the island and its history.

Figure 1 Boy at window in home in north Nicosia. Photo by Jessica Setzer.

Figure 2

Courtyard of Bellapaix Abbey. Photo by Benjamin Broome.

Figure 3 Deteriorating building in demilitarized zone. Image developed by Benjamin Broome.

Figure 4 Door to Lawrence Durrell’s home i n Bellapaix. Photo by Benjamin Broome.

Figure 5 Flag-painted mountains of the north and skyline of north Nicosia as viewed from the south. Photo by Benjamin Broome.

Figure 6 Hala Sultan Tekke outside Larnaca in the south of Cyprus. Photo by Kate Mackay.

Figure 7

Wind-blown view of Hala Sultan Tekke. Photo by Jessica Setzer.

Figure 8 Lala Mustafa Pasha Mosque in Famagusta, named in honour of Turkish commander whose actions inspired the argument between Colin Thubron and Kemal. Photo by Jacqi Nicholson.

Figure 9 Map of Greek Cypriot classroom from 2007 with pictures of schoolchildren linked by string to family homes before 1974. Photo by Jacqi Nicholson.

Figure 10 Men and boy playing backgammon in Famagusta. Photo by Jessica Setzer.

Figure 11 North Nicosia skyline with mountains in background. Photo by Benjamin Broome.

Figure 12

The harbour of Kyrenia at dusk. Photo by Benjamin Broome.

Figure 13 The late Rauf Denktash with author and Teach Cyprus participants in 2007. Photo by Kate Mackay.

Figure 14 Turkish military post on the beach at Varosha. Photo by Jessica Setzer.

Figure 15 Turkish-occupied Varosha viewed from Famagusta. Photo by Jessica Setzer.

Figure 16 United Nations sign on Ledra Street in divided Nicosia. Photo by Jessica Setzer.

CHAPTER 4 NARRATING FROM AN INTIMATE DISTANCE: TURK TROPING IN COLIN THUBRON'S JOURNEY INTO CYPRUS

When it descends from the heights of mountain ranges and hotel rooms, the gaze of the Western writer penetrates the interiors of human habitation, and it explores the bodies and faces of people with the same freedom that it brings to the survey of a landscape. [. . .] An entire tradition in Western literature [. . .] has built around this trial of penetration into the interior spaces of non-European peoples. In these interiors the confrontation of cultures takes place face to face, or rather eye to eye, and it is here, at close range that the gaze of the writer can have its most powerful effect. (David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, pp. 19– 20) If you’ve ever taken a creative writing class, you will have had this maxim drilled into your head. Don’t tell what your characters are feeling – show it. Reveal their inner selves through what they do and say. Let the reader draw the conclusions. The same is exactly true for travel writing. Your

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piece will be much more powerful and successful if you engage the reader in the creative process of figuring out how the people in your tale are being affected. By the same token, don’t spell out the fact that you were moved by an experience – make the reader moved by the way you describe the experience. Re-create the experience so that the reader is in your shoes – and is moved just the way you were. (Don George in Travel Writing, a popular handbook for travel writers published by Lonely Planet, p. 75) Don George’s advice for aspiring travel writers makes for a compelling articulation of the conventional travel writer’s mission: come to a confident interpretation of the people who represent another culture and then render that culture comprehensible through narrative. The story George has in mind privileges a script that diminishes or even effaces the travel writer’s role in the tale, the personal relationships a writer may develop with others, how those relationships are cultivated and the material circumstances of travel. If attachments develop with a place or person, aesthetic considerations often lead writers to conceal these connections in order not to obscure the message or quality of the story. After all, ‘an entire tradition of Western literature’ continues to be nurtured by publishers and reading publics who naturally look for landscape, rendered as meaningful, to serve as the featured aspect of the story. ‘Show, don’t tell’ may coax more engaging, descriptive prose from novice writers, but to construe this practice as a charge to ‘reveal [other people’s] inner selves through what they do and say’ puts the whole enterprise of travel writing in an ethical bind. By what authority does a travel writer, who may only make passing acquaintances with people, speak for their thoughts and desires, especially those with radically different worldviews that take some effort to understand? Post-colonial scholars like Spurr and many others argue that tropes of travel literature produced by Western writers about the East, like surveillance and aestheticization, demonstrate the ways that this ‘eye-to-eye’ discourse operates: writers probe into their

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subjects for clues of cultural essence, the signs that will make others meaningful to domestic audiences.1 These criticisms sometimes lead to sweeping charges of domination by virtue of presence in and narration of travel in foreign lands. Understanding some of the tropes produced by travel narration can aid consumers and producers of travel texts in developing their awareness of these texts’ partiality – perhaps without the wholesale condemnation of journeys that are often undertaken in the genuine spirit of reducing hostilities and misunderstandings among different people. Circumstances delimit cultural contact and narration in powerful ways, leaving writers with difficult, sometimes compromised decisions about how to produce these texts. The more audiences appreciate about the relationships between lived experience, aesthetic norms and an audience’s preferences for narrative, the better for all audiences and others affected by the work of travel narration. Colin Thubron’s Journey into Cyprus registers, at first glance, as part of the larger ideological formations customary in Western travel writing – another white, European, male, entrepreneurial writer strikes out, seemingly on his own, to explore an Eastern landscape and then render it comprehensible through a non-fiction account of his experiences.2 Thubron may live up to some of these contextual cliche´s; however, a closer examination of his craft and methods demonstrates how accomplished travel writers need to deploy and perform ‘intimacy’ just to have narrative material in the first place. This makes the relationship between traveller and place inherently fraught with the potential for abuse or exploitation of others because travel writers tend to deploy the privileges of intimacy according to aesthetic considerations. Journey Into Cyprus demonstrates both the narrative rewards and the ethical inadequacies in a travel text fuelled by a writer determined to see others clearly while remaining largely invisible himself. Thubron’s venerable mode of travel distinguishes him from modern contemporaries who have written about Cyprus as a destination for travel. He walks the island, narrating from the footpaths of his journey. As a self-conscious travel writer passing

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slowly through town, village and field in the Cyprus of 1972, he appears to exhibit a genuine intent to know and understand ordinary people of the island. One would expect plenty of close encounters with the locals and his story delivers them throughout. He differs from Durrell in the sense that Bitter Lemons provides a deeper and likely more fictionalized picture of a handful of characters from one village, while Thubron gives us a wider range of snapshots from throughout the island. While Durrell attempts to achieve his authority with audiences through personal (if implausible) claims of objectivity, Thubron has no such pretensions. Rather, his near singular focus on people and landscape – illuminating, at times, as it is – erases nearly any trace of the personal. While sharing the intimacy of others, he actually erects a distance between narrator and landscape, emphasizing the ephemeral nature of the contact and his privileged, insular vantage point. I call this master trope of artful, quasi-journalistic discourse ‘intimate distance’, and argue that it spawns a host of other conventional and particular tropes of travel and travel writing, evident through rhetorical analysis of Thubron’s travelogue about his trek across Cyprus in 1972. This chapter explains this rhetoric of ‘intimate distance’ and examines some of the dominant tropes of the local people, especially Turks, produced in Thubron’s narrative and through his narrating perspective.

Behind the Troping of a Foot-travelling Writer: Situating Thubron’s Journey In July 2007 at a bookstore located inside the Larnaca International Airport of the Republic of Cyprus, a conspicuous display of books – a two-pack sealed in clear plastic wrap and stacked in clever circular formation from floor to eye level – rose to greet thousands of visitors. Inside the packaging were two beach-vacation ready, rental-car friendly paperbacks. The first was a murder-mystery set in Cyprus whose title I can no longer recall. The other was a newer edition of Colin Thubron’s Journey Into Cyprus, a travelogue first published in 1975 that details the British writer’s travels by foot across the island

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in the spring and summer of 1972. Front cover advance praise from Bitter Lemons author Lawrence Durrell demonstrates the discursive association of these texts within the genre of travel writing. The two men are linked as the most well-known writers to have treated Cyprus in book-length detail. Durrell expressed the hopes that his memoir would stand as a testament to the Cypriot peasantry, but Thubron’s text, though less familiar to most visitors of Cyprus, comes much closer to realizing such an achievement. Later in this chapter I return to a contrastive analysis of how the two writers approach the conflict of the 1950s that so damaged British and Greek Cypriot cultural relations. Though perhaps not so well known outside of the context of Cyprus or to audiences unfamiliar with Thubron’s decorated body of travel writing and fiction, the non-fiction memoir Journey Into Cyprus continues to reach readers, especially travellers to and writers engaged with the island. Thubron’s detailed, nuanced landscaping and sympathetic, often humorous interactions with the people he encounters make his books appealing to travellers. Don George includes Journey Into Cyprus on a list of 20 travel literature classics.3 Journey has also seen its way into the dispatches of correspondents feeding stories to Western media outlets.4 Guidebooks and reading lists for Cyprus invariably recommend it to visitors, especially those curious about cultural life before partition. Thubron visited Cyprus less than two years before the tumult of 1974 transformed the island forever; the book was published one year after the war and remains in print. Unlike Bitter Lemons, virtually no criticism exists on Journey into Cyprus.5 Durrell’s success with The Alexandria Quartet and the literary fame it afforded him could explain the greater interest in Bitter Lemons, even though some consider Thubron among the greatest modern practitioners of his trade in the UK.6 If Bitter Lemons remains the lone great travel memoir of the late colonial period in Cyprus, then Journey Into Cyprus stands as its equivalent for the 14 tense years of inter-communal struggle prior to Turkey’s invasion of 1974. Based on the writer’s standing and the paucity of substantial travel narratives available, it will likely remain a staple for those seeking more personalized accounts of travel to

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Cyprus. In terms of cultural context, the circumstances of meeting and interacting with people of Cyprus changed radically for visitors after the end of British rule and then, of course, after the population exchanges attending partition. Thubron, of course, did not know at the time how significant his text would become as a document of an era that vanished in a matter of weeks less than two years after his visit. Journey Into Cyprus blends different narrative styles, reading sometimes as a landscape-centred travelogue, other times as a humorous memoir of the narrator’s foibles among the Cypriots. When not offering his own idiosyncratic take on the island’s history, culled from earlier travellers and Western historians, Thubron’s narrative weaves in and out of the modest homes and villages of mostly rural Greek and Turkish Cypriots, who take in and shelter the author during his 600-mile walk across the island. The picaresque writing moves through the landscape according to the whims of the narrator, who says little about why he chooses certain routes and destinations, only what the preceding literature and his encounters reveal to him. Thubron bemoans how the island has fallen from its pre-war halcyon days when he posits in a prefatory note that ‘the world which [Journey ] depicts – a mosaic of Greek and Turkish villages interknit – has seemingly gone for ever, and such a journey, wandering at will among the two communities, is now impossible’.7 This treasured mobility enables Thubron’s insightful encounters with Cyprus locals, Greeks and Turks. As we will see in the next chapter, the political context from 1974 until 2003 made independent travel through the Green Line dividing the two communities virtually impossible. Thubron’s text truly does represent the last of an era in which the many towns and villages of the island could be reached upon the whims of the traveller. Though checkpoints still hampered access to certain locales, the Turks and Greeks of the island were not yet fully isolated from one another, as they were to become shortly after his visit. Thubron’s personal narrative demonstrates a host of complicated subject positions – brave, border-crossing traveller; erstwhile peace-

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maker; romantic; ascetic; spiritual sceptic; ambivalent British national. And his book offers glimpses of how more egalitarian practices and products of travel and travel narration might be realized. Yet, as the lead character in his own narrative, Thubron largely follows the traditions of other successful travel writers when it comes to constructing a self within the text. In other words, he bargains for the promise of narrative coherence and intense scrutiny of landscape recommended by George and exemplified by Chatwin, which calls too often for opacity of his own character’s motives, desires, cultural influences and political and national sentiments.

The Space of Intimate Distance Thubron travels and interacts with others in a way that strives to cultivate intimacy and afford him opportunities to produce portraits, or photographic ‘close-ups’ taken in the homes and private company of others. As a foot traveller apt to arrive at his destination without car or entourage, Thubron lands himself in the living quarters and sometimes intimate lives of everyday Cypriots. Attaining this intimate position affords Thubron the advantage of a partial view of Cyprus as it is seen and lived from the perspective of Cypriots.8 Travel writers routinely deploy more conventional means of plying their trade, such as some form of private transportation and nightly hotel accommodations for shelter, decompression and a modicum of writing comfort. Many also hire English-speaking guides, who are often well-versed in officially-sanctioned national ideologies and sometimes vetted and trained by ruling authorities.9 Deliberately devoid of such standard amenities, Thubron’s narrative unfolds with less cliche´d and more unpredictable interactions in the homes, villages, agricultural fields and checkpoints where the spin of conflict becomes tempered by tea and small talk, albeit of the sort that occasionally crescendos into heated debate and impassioned political memory. Thus, the journey produces an ‘intimacy’ that many travel writers – and consumers of travel literature – would find enviable.10 Thubron chooses a mode of travel with a rich and venerated literary lineage, romantic to some, but seemingly unfashionable to

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many others, including bemused Cypriots. As he explains, ‘To experience a land as varied as Cyprus, I wanted to walk. [. . .] [T]o go on foot was to entrust myself to the people, a gesture of confidence, and to approach the land as all earlier generations had known it, returning it to its old proportions.’11 With the many privations and physical challenges of foot travel come payoffs in the form of regular, intimate proximity with the people, as well as a chronological or geographical mechanism to construct a story. By walking, Thubron creates circumstances conducive to a more picaresque tale: the narrator ambles from monastery to enclave to ancient ruin, never knowing exactly who or what will cross his path next as he passes through checkpoints patrolled by armed militia and soldiers. Traversing the island by foot, from Greek-controlled territory to Turkish enclaves, Thubron’s literal crossing of Green Lines, checkpoints and contested territories enables him to traverse borders that had already been separating people from one another. At his most ethical and responsible, he demonstrates an ability to narrate the conflict with the complexity it deserves, and without the debilitating partisanship that marks the discourse of Cypriots and many others whose writing and narration represents life and culture on the island. Thubron’s travel methodology, marked as it is by the privations and difficulties attending the foot traveller, either inspires or deludes him to imagine relations of intimacy, even reciprocity. He writes: [W]alking has its compensations. Because it shows trust, it is the surest way to reach a people’s heart. In these remote villages the hiker is an almost unknown phenomenon, and his eccentricity momentarily places him on a level with the poorest, and excites a mingled curiosity and concern. And another, subtler factor is at work: so slowly does he travel that the country takes on larger proportions; a man walking among the ruins of the past finds himself knit to the ancient scale of time and distance.12

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Two rewards become available for the foot traveller, both of which display key principles the writer holds about his travel method: walking creates cultural access to living people, and it affords travellers an existential link to the seemingly lost worlds of the past. In the case of the former, Thubron’s humble walker ethos does appear to have earned him substantial intimacies with ordinary Cypriots, creating relations that have in turn informed a compelling narrative. With this text, he accomplishes much more than Durrell or almost any other travel writer seeking to acquaint readers with the realm of cultural positions available to the Greeks and Turks of Cyprus before partition. In terms of cultural experience and analytical material, Thubron’s chosen foot routes put him in a position to meet more Turks than encountered by most travellers. In the dozen or so travelogues and travel texts reviewed for this study, only Oliver Burch’s The Infidel Sea: Travels in North Cyprus and Yiannis Papadakis’s Echoes from the Dead Zone provide more in-depth description of Turkish Cypriots.13 Any personal intimacies Thubron himself may have shared with these people, however, such as details about his family, social class, upbringing or private life or his own relationship to national identity, were not included in Journey. From the narration available to readers, he appears to interact with people in a way that does not invite discussion of his own life, and surely the rigorous pace of travel conspired against much depth in his relations to Cypriots. In one sense, this elision or erasure of the personal appears to validate the criticisms of those who see travel and travel writing as often complicit in the production of inequitable cultural relations. Thubron’s claim that he avoided much personal talk with people because the wide gulf between him and others precluded effective exchange not only feels disingenuous; at worst, it appears to be precisely the sort of dynamic that encouraged critics like Pratt to develop theories such as ‘contact zone’, which emphasize the asymmetric qualities of so much historical cultural encounter. Had Thubron wanted to be better understood and known, a person this thoughtful and adept at language could likely have summoned the words and metaphors to make more reciprocal disclosures possible

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with his interlocutors and then available, as engaging prose, to the readers of his narrative. Instead, most first-person references in Journey refer to Thubron’s physical journeying over the land he perceives and renders into landscape; occasional private thoughts and witty asides to his audience occur regularly, but the narrative remains devoid of matters of personal complicity or conviction regarding issues like the British role in Cyprus, the Cold War, nationalism or racist discourses of colonialism. Any attitudes or convictions emerge through his selective takes on history or within descriptions of his interactions with others. The ‘distance’ I perceive in his narration appears to have been created deliberately. In ‘A Life in Full’, a feature article about Thubron published in The Independent, critic Andrew Barrow observes of Thubron’s encounters with locals that ‘most of the conversations tend to be one-way affairs [with the locals doing the talking] – and this is how he prefers it.’ Thubron’s brand of travel, with its keen interest in culture, history and, to a lesser extent, language, can be considered a version of what Hulme refers to as ‘immersion travel’.14 Practically speaking, he depends on contact with local people to provide him with the raw material and relationships which enliven and enrich his travel and writing. Yet this matter of cultural encounter as a ‘one-way affair’ bears closer consideration. Thubron claims in the interview that those he meets ‘do not have the materials to understand much about my world’, and, writes Barrow, ‘must find Thubron an enigmatic figure, to put it mildly’. With little further explanation – for example, some particulars concerning this mysterious and incomprehensible world the author occupies – Thubron posits a veritable chasm of difference between himself and those he encounters in his journeys. Some of this presumed incomprehensibility is evident in his relations with the Cypriots he encounters in Journey Into Cyprus. However, despite his modest appearance and humble means of travel, as an English male roaming about in a former Crown Colony, he certainly would be less of an oddity than he would be in later travels he takes through remote parts of Central Asia. His national identity immediately casts him as a figure of interest to be peppered with questions about his

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impressions of Cyprus and his country’s past and future role on the troubled island. Peter Hulme, in his essay ‘Travelling to Write (1940– 2000)’, observes that Thubron’s style and persona ‘confronts political upheavals’ and ‘exudes integrity’.15 He further notes that Thubron displays ‘modest signs of sensitivity beneath his bluff exterior’, and this was probably truer in Journey Into Cyprus than in later travel writing.16 Still, his travel method would certainly appear to contribute to the mystery, as most foreigners would not end up so off-the-beaten paths, especially not without a vehicle. In Journey, when people try to push him for his convictions or the motives for his travel and writing, he self-consciously deflects. What he fails to acknowledge here is the potential value in people’s curiosity about him – a curiosity no less important or natural than his own sense of wonder about the people and lands of his travels. Assumptions on the part of both traveller and local, like ‘he must be a spy’ or ‘they couldn’t possibly understand who I am’, if dealt with head-on, might not only constitute intriguing travel discourse, but also reduce some of the distance between narrator and landscape. Perhaps Cypriots would even respond by offering different perspectives than what they make available to a virtual stranger. Such conversations surface only occasionally in Journey. When Thubron does offer clues that inform Cypriots about ‘what he is’, as the Barrow interview suggests he does not appear to give them very much. If he did, in fact, share with the Cypriots more than he has shared with his readers, this suggests that these conversations were deemed too didactic, too self-involved, insufficiently entertaining, or otherwise inappropriate for the service of the narrative. Essentially, he has followed the aesthetic formula suggested by George and others for the successful production of difference. An overarching rhetorical purpose of travel writing, as mentioned earlier, is to capture an insider’s look at a place, to render the place and people knowable and culturally different – not, necessarily, to cast the narrator as a character to be scrutinized along with the locals. The narrator’s celebrated romps with the locals thus appear to be as much about distance as intimacy. And when building and protecting this ‘distance’, an elaborate, considerable divide emerges in paradox:

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despite the writer’s lack of knowledge of the landscape and its difference, the place is nonetheless delivered as familiar, known with a descriptiveness, specificity and troubling certainty. Spurr likens the dynamic to that of the supervisor in Foucault’s panopticon, wherein ‘The writer is placed either above or at the centre of things, yet apart from them, so that the organization and classification of things takes place according to the writer’s own system of value.’17 Though characters from his travels hail his gaze and return his curiosity with stories of their own, these responses come to us filtered through the writer’s privileged and ‘disproportionate economy of sight’.18 Thubron and many other travel writers too often accept this distance as an inherent feature of storytelling about others, rather than as an ethical challenge that demands critical, self-reflective practice, especially in the context of travel to an historically saturated landscape currently experiencing armed and symbolic violence.

Troping the Cypriots Circa 1972 To take up Thubron’s representation of people of Cyprus, in particular the complicated matter of ‘the Turk’ within Journey, first requires some accounting for the term ‘Cypriot’. By the time of Thubron’s visit to Cyprus in 1972, Greek nationalism had been popular for many years and most Greek Cypriots asserted an unquestioned Greek essence for Cyprus along the lines of roots and race.19 In a kind of tragic, inevitable, dialectical dance, Turks of Cyprus – at least the ones who end up becoming de facto representatives of the community in times of turmoil – turned to their own hardliners, who advocated for a stronger Turkish national identity. Turkish nationalism would provide a coherent political identity and a corresponding ethno-national historiography that would undergird claims to legitimacy in Cyprus. The term ‘Cypriot’ had become a term of identification that neither Greek nor Turk was keen to appropriate. The Republic of Cyprus that came into being in 1960 after over 80 years of British rule was a compromise that generated little enthusiasm among either community.20

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Still, the term finds ready use in travel writers’ presentation of a historical narrative of the island, and Thubron’s construction of the island is no exception. One ethical problem with using ‘Cypriot’ without qualification is that historically-time compressed pronouncements on Cypriot character have a specific and specifically non-Turkish meaning. When Thubron makes a generalization about Cypriot peasantry in the Byzantine or Venetian periods and suggests a cultural continuity to the present – as he and many other travel writers are wont to do – the signifier means Greek Orthodox Christian Cypriots. This history does not necessarily preclude any responsible deployment of this term, but rather demonstrates the effects of unexamined claims of historical continuity. Put another way, when travel writers to Cyprus wax poetic about the ancient, unchanging character of the people of the island, they are, for all intents and purposes, constructing an imaginary and exclusionary subject: a ‘Cypriot’ sealed off from those who do not consider themselves ethnically Greek, especially Turks, but also Armenians, Maronite Christians, Latin Catholics, Arabs and others who may have lived in Cyprus for centuries. Turks, for example, see fewer correspondences with a Cypriot historical narrative that suggests uninterrupted Greek continuity through the Hellenic, Roman and Byzantine eras through to the present. Yet, at the same time, Turks in Cyprus – regardless of their personal political inclinations or whether the year is 1958, 1972 or 2008 – could hardly escape the label of ‘Cypriot’, even if it appears as the back half of an ambiguous hyphenation. Given the symbiotic and discursively productive relationship between travel writing and colonialism in Cyprus and elsewhere, this means that ‘Turk’ or ‘Turkish-Cypriot’ in Cyprus will bear its share of symbolic heft in terms of colonialist tropes, including feminization. Thubron, after providing a brief explanation from Herodotus about the cults of Aphrodite active on the island in ancient times, offers one of the first of many generalizations about the supposedly soft, feminized character of ‘the Cypriot’, transferring mythical qualities of the ancient to the not-quite-there-yet moderns: ‘The Cypriot rites [of Aphrodite] lacked both the harshness of the Asiatics and the austerity

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of the northern Greeks. Then as now, there are signs of mellowness in this island moored between Europe and Asia. The Semitic passions are tempered, the Greek pride blunted.’21 In contrasting the soft islander with the ‘Asiatic’ and ‘Semitic’, Thubron appears to be writing in barely coded language to convey that Cypriots distinguish themselves from more hot-blooded Arabs to the east and south and the more dignified, less humorous Greeks to the West. If one subscribes to Durrell’s notion of landscape as determinative of character, then, speaking on a strictly symbolic basis, one would presumably accede to the position that four centuries would be sufficient time for the land to shape Ottoman immigrants, arriving after the 1572 conquest, into such ‘true’ Cypriots. For Greeks of Cyprus, geographical distance – from an implicitly European centre of cultural gravity – is typically deployed by Thubron to explain the seemingly gentle ways of the islanders: ‘The Cypriots, I rather think, were natural members of this dazzling hybrid, Byzantium. They, like it, lay midway between the classical and the oriental. Their softness and conservatism were not Hellenic. To them the character of the Greek mainland was unsympathetically masculine.’22 Given the use of such a generalized past tense, Thubron could be speaking here of attitudes held by Cypriots in the age of Rome, Byzantium, the Latin eras, more modern times or perhaps any time period – again, with continuity assumed, the writer does not compel readers to wonder about which Cypriot he may have in mind. As for the case of the identity of the contemporary Cypriot, feminization still applies. In a mountain village where the allure of the city and Europe would appear to threaten the charm of the place, Thubron continues to trope an eternally easygoing Cypriot: Education is the newfangled god of all these villages, the door to a bourgeois paradise which is welcomed by men whose fathers have broken their lives harrowing rock-filled orchards. The Cypriots take easily to the towns. As soon as they have shed their mountain robustness, they soften to a Mediterranean suavity, almost a voluptuousness. Doubtless they have been accused of this ever since the first Athenian tourist returned

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home from the temple harlotry of Paphos. Without the Arab’s harsh intensity, nor that spine of Greek pride, their hallmark is this nascent sensuality and gentleness (shade of Aphrodite) which has not altered since recorded time.23 His abstractions in this sort of writing portray a contrast between a hearty ‘village Cypriot’ and a townsperson who falls easily for the graces of modern life. Yet the Cypriots we meet in his book in the smaller villages and mountains seem difficult to pin down as exemplars of this vaunted ‘suavity’ and ‘voluptuousness’. Despite the shortcomings of Thubron’s compromised intimacy that I have laid out to this point, this sort of writing at least avoids some of the bizarre conclusions that are often generated from unnamed textual sources – including ‘tourists’ who happen to be Greeks travelling from points further west – who through the ages have ‘accused’ Cypriots of carnal indulgence. Any doubts about Thubron’s own take on this lax Cypriot are put to rest in stinging remarks concerning the violent tactics used by the Greek Cypriot fighters in EOKA against the British and others who opposed them. Thubron writes that such violence was ‘extraordinary for Cypriots, whose peaceableness has made them the natural subjects of empire. They have always been mellow, masters of flexibility’.24 This attempt to naturalize the conquest of one group by another provides a not-so-subtle rationalization of the recent British occupation – not to mention the centuries of domination by outside powers that stretches at least as far back to 1191, with Richard the Lionheart’s arrival on the way to the third crusade. Anyone embodying the signifier of ‘the Cypriot’ apparently remains a suspect candidate for sovereignty, Turks of Cyprus included. Like others before him, Thubron cites many examples of Cypriot character that pre-date Ottoman times, thus loading the trope with a decidedly Greek flavour. The standard nationalist line among Turkish-Cypriots and their patron kin in Turkey dismisses ‘Cypriot’ as a twentieth-century fiction.25 In disowning the term, Turks recuperate some of the dignity missing from the notion of this eminently-ripe-for-conquest ‘Cypriot’; on the other hand, to consciously reject simultaneously diminishes their connection to

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the land, at least compared to their fellow Greek (and now rival) islanders. The alternative identity position available, ‘Turk’, also could be said to carry a sort of ambivalence and, in the years since 1974, an intra-communal dissonance. The point here is that, in the theatre of global cultural production, how one looks from outside – as Cypriot, Turk or Greek – becomes extremely important. At the outset in his text, Thubron proposes that to be Cypriot is to embody me´lange and mixing: ‘So rich and complex is the island’s history, so various is the blood which it has mingled, that it is impossible accurately to trace its maturing. The country’s pageant is that of other races: of western powers travelling eastward – Mycenaeans, Romans, Crusaders; and of eastern powers west – Egyptians, Phoenicians, Turks.’26 Of course, Thubron then proceeds to spend the entire remaining narration examining distinctions and evidence of civilizations retaining differentiating racial and cultural qualities. As for the Turks of Cyprus, though they lived as subjects of British colonial rule for almost a century, they also inherit associations with the three centuries of Ottoman rule, as well as whatever sort of identity they had been developing for themselves in the 12 years of independence prior to Thubron’s time on the island. In Ottoman times, and into the British era at the end of the nineteenth century, most of those considered today to be ‘Turks of Cyprus’ would have been spoken of and classified administratively as Muslims rather than as Turks.27 Locating experiential material to explore, for example, how much a people’s Anatolian or Central Asian racial origins affected their character – a question that would intrigue a traveller like Durrell or Thubron, for example – depends very much on how much actual contact one can manage. Though his endlessly nomadic agenda conspires against repeat visits and more conventional friendships of the sort Durrell enjoyed with Sabri, readers come away with a broader spectrum of characters from whom to glean knowledge of Turks. Like Durrell, Thubron finds ‘Turk’ a bountiful, mysterious signifier, open to memorable moments of descriptive licence. Often, the writing in Journey deploys tropes that deliver an ideologically hefty ‘Turk’, essentialized as a

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mixed bag of laudatory, condemnatory and ambivalent tropes. On the one hand, he finds Turks anti-materialistic, solemn (ironically similar to the ‘northern Greeks’ referred to elsewhere and also not unlike the Sabri that Durrell portrays under the Tree of Idleness), hospitable, easygoing and generally kind-hearted. Yet, in one memorable episode, the Turk becomes a signifier invoking demons of nightmarish racial memories, terribly tempered and warlike. As for their personal industry and political maturity, Thubron finds them alternately charming and pathetic: indolent dreamers, frugal but without much ambition and, like other Muslims and Easterners, suffering from an enviable fatalism that may be central to their humanity, but which renders them still insufficiently modern, ‘unarrived’ subjects. The remainder of this chapter makes sense of these tropes, examining how they emerge from the perspective of intimate distance and arguing that they are organized into a kind of vision that rhetorically accomplishes specific cultural effects. As briefly mentioned before, Turks of Cyprus sometimes, according to principle or the selective omissions of travel writers, pass out of the messiness of ‘Cypriot’.28 Their ethno-national affiliation with Turks, not to mention Islam, the Orient and Orientalism, however, rarely escapes notice. And so, like Turks in Turkey, they bear a mixed legacy within Western imaginations. Turkophobia and a generalized, civilizational fear of the East operate as a familiar anxiety for European and American travellers and their audiences. Though US popular culture has the distinction of having produced Midnight Express and several other texts that posit fearsome, backward and otherwise alien images of Turks, prejudice against Turks in European countries appears to be worse and more widespread than in the US.29 However, this anxiety about what a Turk is capable of represents only one side of the story Thubron has to tell about their status in the Cyprus of 1972. Despite trafficking in some of the same Orientalist paranoia about the existential threat of being swallowed by the ‘Moslem Sea’, Journey’s primary accomplishment is to portray Turks as dignified, kind, transparently salt-of-the earth cultural beings – a romantic, patronizing construction in one sense, yet also a product of the

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hospitality and kindness of the people he encounters. As we shall see, his admiration of Turks in Cyprus could also be understood as a dialectic response to the racism directed toward them – as well as the hostility directed at the British – by many of the Greek Cypriots he meets whose memories of colonization and counter-insurgency remain raw.

The Picnicking Turkish Pilgrims of Hala Sultan Tekke In the course of his narrative, Thubron depicts encounters with many Turks of Cyprus. The remainder of this chapter focuses on three particular episodes: the picnicking pilgrims of Hala Sultan Tekke, an unknown and unnamed group of Turkish Muslim women visiting a shrine outside Larnaca; the Ghaziveran enclave episode, in which he is befriended by the mukhtar’s son and his village cohorts, who treat the writer to a rousing night out; and his verbal sparring with Kemal the Terrible Turk, a rambling encounter with a nationalist ideologue who, among other rhetorical moves, presses Thubron for an explanation of why Western writers tend historically to identify more with Greeks than with Turks. I examine each of these narrative episodes in turn, focusing on how the tropes emerge in personal and cultural context, and how they can be traced to the perspective created from the master trope of intimate distance. Thubron’s encounter with women bathers represents a methodological departure of sorts, in that he remains not only socially but physically distant from the people he describes. He actually has no contact with these women, though they may be aware of his presence nearby. The scene he creates suggests he may have been something of a Peeping Tom, keenly observing and imagining from afar, easing through the orchards outside Hala Sultan Tekke, a pilgrimage site for Muslims adjoining a salt lake just outside Larnaca.30 During his visit to the shrine, Thubron describes not only what a small group of Turkish women do and how they dress, but also what must inevitably be on their minds. The narrator postures as the presumptive modern, based on his pronouncements about the qualities of Islamic cultural practice. He determines that what these women are thinking includes

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not a wisp of doubt or scepticism about the supremacy of faith to explain the workings of the world: I went into the orchards where the women had settled with much smoothing of skirts and rearranging of veils. Their laughter flowed under the trees. In the deep and unexpected grass, overhung by fruit as in the Moslem paradise, they looked already as if their prayers had been answered. Certainty, truth, lay comfortably about them. Strong in the unquestioned, under the cracking dome and palm shadows, they talked and smiled pleasantly together.31 Although the expression ‘strong in the unquestioned’ could be read to suggest something akin to an a priori incapacity for reflection and inquiry, Thubron almost seems to envy these women their certitude. The scene is intriguing not only for how it depicts these women’s tender human qualities and their ease in transitioning from worship to picnic, but also for its suggestion that the comfort they appear to enjoy this afternoon derives from their religious faith. One basic critique of this ‘certainty’ trope for character or faith concerns its accuracy, or even its capacity to be measured: How does a writer actually know and understand what people do and do not question without even speaking to them? The existence of pilgrimage sites and shrines like the Hala Sultan Tekke testifies to a sort of complicated anxiety about certainty itself. Further, and in more concrete terms, Turkish Cypriot men and women had been undergoing dramatic changes in identity and political status for close to a century. Turks of Cyprus had been economically privileged as Muslims in the Ottoman millet system, then later subject to British colonial rule, during which time they began to undergo shifts that would subordinate their sectarian identity as Muslims to a national identity as Turks. Leaders in Turkey and in Cyprus have constructed secular national political ideology to be synonymous with Turkish national identity, further marginalizing religion from the preferred track of the modern subject;32 however, the women, Thubron would have us

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believe, have been keeping the faith and traditional ways of thinking while shielded from modernity. Casting women as repositories of tradition is hardly a novel gesture, and one that has been especially important in the era of nationalism, according to Yuval-Davis: ‘Discourse and struggles around [. . .] “women following tradition” (as have been expressed in various campaigns for and against women’s veiling, voting, education and employment) have been at the centre of most modernist and anti-modernist nationalist struggles.’33 In the particular case of Turkish Cypriot women, they most likely were familiar with Atatu¨rk’s political ideas, such as Turkish nationalism, secularism, state feminism and so forth, as Turkish national textbooks became part of the education system in the schools of Cyprus after the Second World War and, in some cases, even earlier.34 Thubron may even be vaguely aware of this context, yet he still imagines the influence of religion as dominant. Perhaps it is, perhaps it is not. To suggest that Thubron intended only to depict a religious mood that guides the worshippers to feel more ‘certain’ and comforted after prayer would probably be the most generous reading of what drove him to these conclusions. In the next move of this narrative episode, he essentially repeats the pattern of flattering, quotidian physical description, yet this time takes his readers a titillating step further: the women shed some of their clothes, scrub their legs, and all but turn pilgrimage into party: [T]he women had thrown modesty to the winds. They had peeled off their stockings, rolled up their skirts and were squatting on the Roman capitals to wash their thighs at the fountain. One old lady had a bottle of brandy tucked at her side, so soon are Islamic precepts forgotten, and there I shall remember them, laughing and scrubbing round the pool on stones from an age which had once, like they, been certain of its gods.35 Despite his barely contained exuberance at stealing glimpses into women’s personal space and spiritual lives – and seeing them laugh,

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drink and enjoy each other’s company – Thubron finishes the passage with a peculiar and unflattering linkage of these women to godfearing ancients of the island. Both, he claims, were ‘certain of [their] gods’. The trope of the Turkish Muslim woman comforted by an unquestioned core of faith sets up an implicit hierarchy. At its peak, Europeans like Thubron shoulder the burdens of a modern subject’s radical doubt, while the masses to the East stagnate below in blissful superstition. In the case of Thubron’s picture of pre-1974 Cyprus, embedded in the rhetorical situation of the narrative are a handful of particularly painful ironies. Thubron, as a citizen of empire, comes from a society that has, in anthropologist Rebecca Bryant’s terms, helped to shape the terms by which modernity will be realized.36 Religious practices and cultural values of Greek and Turkish Cypriots become saturated with meaning and attention, as the narrating subject romanticizes and fantasizes a mythic epoch of the faithful that comes off as reductive in its characterization of the faiths of others. Nothing, for example, deters Thubron from presenting the island as historically in peril from Islam, as seen in his gushing praise for the Latin kingdoms that had to get by in spite of Islam: ‘For long periods the island was at peace. Alone in a Moslem sea, an aura of romance encircled it.’37 Later, in accounting for the demise of the Latin Catholics in Cyprus, he again equates Islam with a ‘threat’ and, at the same time, makes subtly disparaging remarks about the Greek Orthodox Church: ‘With their kingdom drowning in an Islamic sea, the Lusignans gave up persecuting their fellow-Christians, and as early as the fourteenth century the resilient Greek faith began insidiously to absorb them. The women were the first to succumb. They began to attend Orthodox services.’38 For the brave-hearted European Christian, the choice framed here was either ‘drowning’ in the treacherous waters of Islam or ‘insidious absorption’ into Eastern Orthodoxy. The women, apparently weaker by nature, took the first step down. If history shapes the landscape, then Cypriots seem to lose either way when compared to an idealized and religiously corrected British intellectual subject. Elsewhere in Journey, Thubron accounts for Turkish Cypriot or Turkish motives with non-religious explanations, which makes the

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misguided confidence of the Hala Sultan Tekke episode – and what Thubron imagines it may have meant to be a Muslim in modern Cyprus – so intriguing. In the telling, he appears to have neither perceived nor accounted for dramatic shifts occurring in the political and cultural landscape of Turkish Cypriots. According to Kizilyurek and Gautier-Kizilyurek, ‘Towards the end of the 1930s, the modernists gained the upper hand and the Turkish Cypriot community began to replace the Islamic elements of their identity by secular ethnic elements, as they were developed in Turkey.’39 The scene Thubron constructs could align with some material community of Muslim Turkish women, who just so happen to be pious, mirthful and rock-solid about their religious faith. Though this may not be entirely implausible, social history suggests they would have hardly been considered typical in terms of their presumed faith and Islamic piety, nor in the corresponding absence of ‘questioning’ in other aspects of their lives. Perhaps religion and its faithful adherents serve a useful function within the travel narrative of the arrived modernist, as their subordination reifies the supremacy of scepticism. Tension about the place of accommodation of faith in the lives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Cypriots have been examined by scholars such as Bryant, whose study Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus sees the formation of an identity politics in Cyprus based on the struggle over terms in constructing a ‘modern’ subject. She writes that, The project of modernity was essentially an ethical one, aimed at dispelling the illusions of religion and discovering the ‘real’ truths upon which a better life could be founded. The contradiction at the heart of this ethical vision was that it was founded on a belief in the universally human that was realized in culturally specific terms.40 During the anti-colonial struggle of 1955 – 9, most Greeks of Cyprus imagined and hoped their freedom would arrive in the form of enosis, the union of the island with Greece, not independence. Turks of

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Cyprus countered with calls for taksim, or partition, wherein they would be ‘free’ to develop a closer relationship with their ethnic kin in Turkey. For Cypriots, like so many millions of people in developing ‘modern’ societies in the Balkans and the Middle East, these ‘terms’ of modern political identity inevitably lead to discussions of nationalism and the symbolic construction of nations. And so, through this master trope of ‘intimate distance,’ interconnected tropes such as nation, race, gender and religion play out in and as the landscape of Cyprus, a former and recent subject of empire that became a modern country beset by dual and competing nationalisms. At Hala Sultan Tekke, proximity – not to be confused with intimacy – affords Thubron and his narrative an intriguing glimpse into Cypriot lives. Writing against a conventional cultural script, these women laugh, they drink and they are comfortable with their bodies. Yet the distance of this perspective cannot be underestimated. Thubron, after all, does not hear them speak or understand their words, nor does he inquire into the lives and experiences of these or other Turkish Cypriot women. Nor do I mean to suggest that a strange male visitor from another country with no apparent connections to local people could easily become intimate with women of the island. Had Thubron recognized this narrating limitation and chosen to either bracket his observations as mere speculation or fiction – or omit them entirely in favour of descriptive prose – his description would likely be less at odds with the political facticity of late twentieth-century Cyprus.

The Turk at Ghaziveran: Dignified in Squalor, Decent of Spirit In his travels among Turks along the Morphou Bay in the northwest of the island, Thubron’s writing demonstrates both the rewards of insights gleaned through intimacy and some of the troubling overreaches produced by distance. En route to the village of Ghaziveran, Thubron stops at Kokkina, a village on the northwest

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coast that witnessed episodes of violence in the 1960s and continuing siege-like conditions during his visit. Here, after looking over a handful of modest families subsisting in pastoral lives in mud-tin homes, Thubron is turned away from the community and denied access because of the security situation. Deterred as a traveller, he proves less so as a writer, as he makes some of his first cultural generalizations of Turks, serving up qualities like fatalism, dignity and natural ease as cultural norms. Thubron makes no distinction or qualification of these Turk tropes to the context of Cyprus, as he echoes the nomadic past associated with Turks of central Asia: Even in squalor an air of sufficiency remained. The uprooting of more settled peoples, whose lives are twined in their possessions, can be devastating. But living frugally, and not caring overmuch for business, the Turk, when the time for change arrives, will collect his household on the backs of donkeys and carry it away with as little loss as such a change allows.41 ‘The Turk’ in one sense appears to receive sympathetic treatment here as a dignified, resilient, uncomplicated person whose resolve bests that of more sentimental or materialistic others who become more emotionally attached to their land. Then again, one might naturally wonder how well this ‘Turk’ aligns with the professional classes of Nicosia and the island’s other towns. As for the families he observes nervously tending goats and sheep under the protection of Turkish soldiers, one wonders, too, how someone is supposed to feel in such uncertain conditions, given the political turmoil and displacement that occurred throughout the 1960s and that continued to threaten Turks of Cyprus at the point of Thubron’s journey. To account for any lingering cultural influence of the nomadic ways of past or contemporary people ethnically identified as ‘Turks’ in Cyprus would require considerable ethnographic and/or historical inquiry. However, based on very little experiential evidence from his current journey, Thubron depicts Turks as the inevitable outcome of a racial destiny and continuity with the past,

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which severely underestimates the potential impact of civil upheaval and fighting on people’s outlooks and values.42 Readers are left to guess at the origins of these observations, as the narrating perspective in Kokkina appears to be based not on intimate encounters but rather on some unnamed combination of textual sources, hearsay, roadside glimpses of Turkish peasant families, and perhaps even previous travel in Turkey. After entertaining so much speculative writing about an obscure, shared ‘Turk’ from the past, Thubron’s narrative arrives at Ghaziveran, where he returns to the strength of his writing – dialogue and interaction with people at a more intimate distance. Thubron walks through a checkpoint into the village and falls into the company of Hussein, the mukhtar’s son, who gives him a Turkish Cypriot narration of the fighting in 1964, followed by a night filled with food, film, booze and gambling. He finds the Turks in this episode appealing: likable, kind and humorous – yet not without their imperfections. What Thubron hears and experiences happens through the facilitation of Hussein, who embodies many of the qualities Thubron ascribes to the essential Turk, despite his somewhat exceptional status as the son of the village leader. Using Hussein as material to substantiate certain cultural conclusions, Thubron posits the Turk as anti-materialistic, content to live with a simplicity shaped by the apparently inexplicable influence of ‘Anatolia’ rather than the more modernized, creature comfortoriented ‘Mediterranean’.43 The latter distinction comes across as a coded binary substituting for the more explicit and politically exigent split between Greek and Turk, or even West and East. Taken as a whole, however, the Ghaziveran scene presents a picture of an internally complex and diverse community whose differences were probably effaced by the threat of attack and war. At a makeshift casino, Thubron takes note of the solemn air among Turkish Cypriots and the absence of an ‘effervescence’ associated with the Greeks of Cyprus: ‘They did not quarrel [while gambling]. Perhaps they felt too threatened from outside.’44 And, as the quotation suggests, the difference could have less to do with ‘culture’ than with the dire material circumstances of the times.

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Nor was there total unanimity in perspective even in the midst of enclave. An unusual and revealing discussion with Hussein and his friend Rashid, ushered in with an abundance of booze, demonstrates some of the complexity within the political identity of ‘the Turk’, as well as anxiety shared by many Turks about their standing among the English. The young men’s passionate desire to be understood and recognized by the world is matched by Thubron’s equally stout resolve to stay a step removed from the political fray. I quote at some length to capture the dynamic of power relations at work in Thubron’s travel experience and his narration of these events: That morning the radio had given out news of two Englishmen kidnapped and killed by Turkish anarchists.45 Hussein had fallen into a bitter silence after telling me. ‘Now the English will think us barbarians,’ said Hussein tightly. ‘It will take years to forget.’ But after three bottles of weak brandy and a dish stacked with kebab, Anglo-Turkish relations looked less hopeless to them. Rashid had dissolved into a beneficent heap, splashing the drink down his throat and rolling his eyes. Hussein’s flowered collar was spotted with fat; he grinned idly at the wall behind Rashid, at himself, at me. Would the English forgive them in time? He picked up the last bottle; the dregs gurgled into my glass. What did the English think of Turkey? If you said ‘Turk’, what did they feel? I pretended to have my mouth full. But the English knew, didn’t they, that Turkey would never go Communist. Never, never. Communism was of the Evil One. And they understood, didn’t they, that Cyprus should be partitioned? And if they didn’t, could I say so in whatever-itwas I was writing? Rashid jerked upright and shouted: ‘And can’t you put me in? I expect you’re writing history, but surely, somewhere.’ the Roman curls danced round his dissolute head. ‘I know! Make me a cave-man! That’s historical isn’t it? After all, I eat

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with my hands, and I look like. . . well. . . you see me!’ It was true. The degenerate and the primitive coexisted in him. Neolithic jaw, prehensile stance, overcast eye-sockets. ‘Put me in!’ So there he is.46 Hussein takes a familiar nationalist stance in implying no differentiation between Turks in Turkey and those in Cyprus, which Thubron allows to go by without remark, thus positing a sort of unquestioned national and cultural unity with Turkey. Had Hussein chosen this example of kidnap and murder as a way to differentiate the political scene in Cyprus and Turkey – Turks of Cyprus as distinct from Turks of Turkey, and both communities socio-politically heterogeneous – then he could have passed off this action as something not to trouble Thubron. For example, ‘these were extremists in Turkey, their problems are different from ours here in Cyprus,’ and so forth. Instead, Hussein assumes a sort of filial guilt for the work of ‘anarchists’ who happen to be Turkish. For his part, Thubron never betrays any real concern about this event or his personal safety, at least not in the narrative. This particular patch of dialogue demonstrates that organized and violent political currents opposed to the US, the UK and other ‘imperial’ powers exist within Turkey. Hussein, of course, would have been well aware of the popularity of left-wing politics in the Turkey of the early 1970s, which might account for the strength of his earlier protests about anarchists soiling Anglo-Turkish relations. Though one could have hoped for Thubron to engage with these anxieties more than he appears to have done, his interaction with the young men has at least afforded his narrative the access and depth to introduce internal political conflict among Turks into his story of Cyprus. Though the intimacy appears one-sided, he nonetheless offers a level of detail that represents more complexity than typically afforded in travel literature that imagines ‘the Turk’ to be a monolith of an ethno-national signifier.47 Hussein lays bare his anxiety over the reputation of Turks in the West and the problems of racial memory among Europeans, who may

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be inclined to see them as ‘barbarians’. The dialogue amounts to little of consequence as Thubron takes an amusing pass, at least in the narrative, when queried on the image of Turks in England. Again, he slips out of an uncomfortable situation, this time giving Hussein the stage to trope himself and ‘his nation’ in more positive lights. ‘Turk’, Hussein argues, means an anti-communist political asset that the British should support according to Cold War logic. From his perspective, the Cold War affords Turks an opportunity to secure an allegiance from a powerful Western nation with an historic stake in Cyprus. How these current political affairs and historical prejudices play out culturally in the UK remains external to the narration, however, as Thubron shifts the storyline into physical humour. In the passage above, Thubron jokes his way out of some honest and potentially painful intercultural dialogue: ‘I pretended to have my mouth full’, he deadpans when queried about his own knowledge of the standing of Turks in England.48 Again, he displays his preference to keep his own political knowledge and perspectives out of the story, as he leaves aside Hussein’s pleas in favour of a rather humiliating, if invited description of Rashid. This character, a friend of Hussein’s who fought against Greek Cypriots as a youth during a siege of his village, appears comfortable with self-deprecating humour. Who knows what Rashid would make of his figural construction as a man of ambiguous racial heritage (Roman curls), making for yet another unexpected and perhaps unintentional contrast within the norms of ‘Turk’. To complete the scene, Thubron gives Rashid his wishes – 15 minutes of fame according to the premise that any publicity, even humiliating caveman humour, trumps the obscurity of Cyprus in a Turkish enclave. For Thubron, levity that maintains open channels of discourse is clearly preferable to the unpleasantness of engaging Hussein’s anxiety about relations between Europe and Turkey. He saves direct argument for Kemal, the least appealing of the many Turks encountered in the narrative, and one of the few who manages to shake him out of his deliberate posture of distance – albeit due to a fair share of belligerence and a politics too distasteful to ignore.

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Intimacy Shakes Down Distance: Kemal, the Terrible Turk, Meets Colin, the Ghostly Greek Near the end of his journey, Thubron awakens in a hotel in Famagusta to the greetings of Kemal, a dogmatic, pan-Turkic nationalist who makes a point of speaking with him. Kemal leads him on an interpretive walk through town during public festivities to commemorate the declaration of the Turkish Republic.49 He then delivers a series of rants that challenge Thubron’s sensibilities as a liberal Western European subject wary of fanaticism. The chauvinistic rhetoric ushers out of Thubron a ‘ghostly Greek’ voice that speaks up on behalf of the Greeks of Cyprus so maligned by Kemal. Setting aside his earlier outburst at an elderly Turkish Cypriot treasure hunter peddling Roman antiquities on the Black Market, this encounter with Kemal raises his narrating hackles more than in any other scene in Journey. He seems to make little progress in affecting Kemal’s worldview; perhaps in lieu of this failure to advance the rationalist case for tolerance and pluralism, Thubron takes his grievances to his readers in the form of several revealing retorts under his breath that challenge Kemal’s monolithic projection of ‘Turk’ and the bigotry and irredentist politics of hate so prevalent in Cyprus. Kemal is an English-speaking Turk of Cyprus who is strongly opinionated, relentless and educated. He carries a copy of Toynbee’s War and Civilisation when he bumps into Thubron. His chest-puffing nationalism grates on the narrator, who, like it or not, gets his fill of Turkish pride, the glory of the Turkish nation and the need for symbolic actions to keep the Turkish Cypriots together.50 Thubron politely shares his company while barely concealing growing disgust for Kemal’s ideas about race relations in Cyprus, the island’s history and the true nature of the Turk.51 Still, some of the pejorative language used in describing ‘the Turk’, such as his narration of the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus, betrays an inherently condemnatory tone, established well before he takes the brunt of Kemal’s bellicosity. In referring to the aftermath of the siege of 1572 which vanquished the Venetians, Thubron writes that ‘the Turks had overrun the island’52 and had torn up the bones of the last Latin monarchs and

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‘threw them into the sea’.53 Thubron wields the savagery of Lala Mustapha Pasha and the Ottomans against Kemal’s boasts about his glorious ancestors. In the vituperative retelling of these acts of violence and desecration, he betrays a deep-seated racial misgiving about Turks.54 Though Kemal deflects the topical focus away from the Ottomans and onto the Venetians, this accomplishes little more than further frustrating Thubron. Kemal makes the case that whatever the Ottomans’ excesses, their predecessor regime had its own often overlooked flaws. Each of these claims would make for intriguing entry points into sustained discussion of the Venetian and Ottoman imperial reigns in Cyprus; such does not occur, however, as Thubron’s own melancholia over the demise of Western European Christendom in Cyprus displaces the debate over historical injustices and political memories. Thubron reveals not-so-subtle sympathy for Western civilization as he ambles with Kemal through the famed, disintegrating Gothic ruins of the old city of Famagusta. He mourns their fall into disrepair at the hands of the Ottoman, and now Cypriot, Turks, making note of ‘churches, which ascend like broken prayers’ within the ancient city walls now lived in by Turks.55 Kemal’s own identification with the Ottomans – referred to in the text with the plural pronoun ‘we’ – obviously contributes to the adversarial relationship the two create in Famagusta. They continue to parry about history, with Thubron advancing the case for the Turkish commander’s evil and the Venetian commander’s unjust demise. Kemal eventually concedes a few points to Thubron’s recriminations, even though Thubron assumes Ottoman sources to be false, with only the word of the Venetian/Western sources to go on as reliable.56 As this tense debate about the history of Famagusta occurs, the celebrations of Turkey’s declaration of the republic jar the two discussants back to the present, but Kemal’s fervour has deeply impressed, even frightened Thubron. With singular attention to detail available through their passionate exchanges, the narrator attributes Kemal’s motives and nature to dark forces within his ethnic self:

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Kemal showed the terribleness of the Turk when aroused. At any mention of Ottoman atrocity his burly hands ground fiercely at his knees and his face darkened with patriotism so that one forgot the intellectual forehead and noticed instead his belligerent mouth and nostrils.57 My focus here is not on the historical debate about the circumstances of the violence that followed the siege of Famagusta in 1572, but on the part of the character study of Kemal that locates him as representative of ‘the Turk’ in the imagination of Western observers. Perhaps sensing his own prejudice, Thubron later attempts to dismiss Kemal as just another passionate, or hotheaded, or overly defensive Turkish Cypriot when chiming in on matters of identity and nationalism: ‘You’re not typical. [. . .] I’ve found your people vary’, he claims.58 His commendable efforts here to insist on plurality should not be lost on travellers who find themselves backed into a political corner by those on the island determined to press a reductive take on the island’s history on visitors from abroad. Still, Thubron’s narration delivers – with Kemal’s own blessings, it must be noted – a centuries-old trope of the terrible Turk. Kemal functions as both advocate for and perfect foil of this script. He and Thubron have arrived at an agonistic intimacy, struggling to forward their respective agendas, though yielding little. The distance Thubron prefers elsewhere in the narrative concerning his own political allegiances and the conflict in Cyprus dwindles as he concludes that, pitted against aggressive ideologues like Kemal, his loyalties lie with the long-suffering, imperially subjugated Greeks of Cyprus. Kemal seems to have intuited all along where Thubron’s deep-rooted sympathies lay, as he demonstrates with a partisan, racist rant about the Greeks and unexamined Western identification with Greek culture: ‘Mine are a good people,’ said Kemal as we followed the crowd into the streets, ‘and Cyprus is ours by right. We are conquerors, warriors. The Greeks are only merchants.’

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‘This is an age of merchants.’ ‘You in the West,’ he growled, ‘you think too much of the Greeks. You exaggerate. Don’t forget, civilisation came from the East.’ His thatch of black hair flopped morosely on his forehead with each stride. ‘In any case, these Cypriots – are they Greeks? No!’ He stamped in time to the music. ‘No! No! No! They’re a mongrel lot. Arabs, Arameans, Phoenicians. Slave peoples! All this about ENOSIS – why should they want to be united to Greece? It’s a charade, a trick. There’s no drop of Greek in them.’59 Thubron challenges the ludicrous essentialism, contradictions and double-standards in Kemal’s own Occidentalism with direct rebuttals unlike any found elsewhere in Journey. Tellingly, Thubron pitches his narrative voice in these moments of greatest critique, speaking not as himself but as ‘the churches [that] cried out not to be betrayed’.60 He objects not, for example, as the British citizen and former colonizing agent, but as the ‘ghostly dissenting Greek [. . .] in my mind’.61 Thubron’s narration suggests that this phantom Greek resides within every Western subject because of an intellectual or cultural debt to Hellenism, positing an undeniable, historically material difference with Turks and Turkey. Whether Kemal’s politics can be said to have the last word in the narrative remains an open question. Thubron’s close-range descriptive work in this passage effectively undermines some of Kemal’s posturing, just as it sketches the breaking points of an intimacy available to this particular traveller in a given historical moment. Though the banter between the two men becomes testy, Thubron does include a tender, humanizing picture of Kemal that disrupts the discord, if only momentarily. Kemal pulls him aside and insists that ‘he hadn’t meant to be aggressive [. . .] but he badly wanted the world to understand his country. Not only his country, but his whole people.’62 Still, Thubron ultimately distances himself from this race-based rhetoric, disengaging from Kemal’s vision and favouring instead a series of petty asides, muttered objections and clever, detached ironies through which it becomes clear that the

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two, despite what must have been hours together, have not even agreed to disagree. Thubron’s intimate look at Kemal represents the most exhaustive discussion of any sort of coherent historical narrative for Turks. Though Thubron clearly insists to Kemal that ‘his people’ are hardly a monolith, giving Kemal the longest and final word makes it difficult for any Turk to recover the distance created by the testy exchange and its elaborate treatment in Journey.

Rhetorical Purposes and Political Effects of Intimate Distance: Two Narratives of Cyprus, Two Takes on Torture Tragically, nationalist movements, which have used the universalist rhetoric of rights and the more antique claims to historical priority to claim their own privileged possession of territory and statehood, have rarely had many scruples about violating the rights of others. [. . .] Neither the Greek Megali Idea nor Greater Romania showed much respect for the principles of cultural autonomy, linguistic homogeneity, or ethnic selfdetermination within a separate state when it came to the claims of others. Nationalism’s cultural and contingent origins have never prevented appeals to primordial roots or race. As the claims to nationhood metastasize into the evils of ethnic cleansing and genocide, the task of intellectuals to remind us all of the imaginary quality of much of the ideology and history that has gone into the making of nations becomes all the more acute.63, 64 Scholars of nationalism Suny and Eley identify history, land, antiquity, culture, roots and race as significant features of nationalist movements and politics. In order to measure and assess the effects of intimate distance, I cite the above passage as one very much relevant to the context of Cyprus, where irredentism has informed extremist variants of Turkish and Greek nationalism, as in the example of Thubron’s Kemal in Famagusta. Suny and Eley warn of the dangers of nationalism when its logic goes unchecked and unchallenged, which

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constitutes a call to action on the part of intellectuals to demystify and critique the imaginary dimensions of the nation, particularly when its success threatens others. The rhetorical purpose of Suny and Eley is to pose a challenge to ‘intellectuals’ to contest fictionalizations of history and nation that have led to the suffering of those who fail to conform to an idealized national identity. Thubron’s Journey Into Cyprus creates moments in which a narrating intellectual appears up to the task these scholars present. At other times, however, as evident in this chapter’s analysis, the narrator very deliberately evacuates the scene of dissension, ostensibly following the travel writer’s mandate to demonstrate ‘what your characters are feeling’.65 This rhetorical move tethers the potential solipsist to a less abstract endeavour that compels attention to the other. A narrator’s actual subjective impressions and filters, however, which may include dissonance, ambivalence, personal doubt or prejudice, would not be welcome in the narrative. One wonders where the discussions of Colin and Kemal may have led if the narrator had been willing to discuss British nationalism, colonialism and the effects of empire on people of Cyprus and the region. Perhaps Kemal’s bombast conspired against this level of self-criticism. But perhaps even a level-headed interlocutor could not have coaxed Thubron to look into the mirror of his own, and the West’s, complicated role in helping to shape modern Cyprus and its cultures of nationalism, as seen in Kemal and in his enosis-minded adversaries. Intimate distance disintegrates, productively, when reluctant personal narrators like Thubron divulge cultural assumptions they may have preferred to keep under wraps. A travel writer’s back-andforth work between close-up and long-shot narration could be regarded as yielding a sort of useful complementarity, if readers are sophisticated enough to appreciate the inevitable and necessary contradictions in such efforts; the prejudicial and partial view from the high road takes a stab at broader sense-making, while the upclose and personal descriptions taken from encounters and dialogues with local people illustrate the limits and contingencies of the former claims. Distance may be inevitable in travel and travel writing, but the complications of intimacy make it more difficult

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for narrators to claim neutrality or impartiality. And so we see, for example, that in addition to some of his bizarre typecasting of Turks in Journey, Thubron also speaks well of them in the presence of Greeks. He is nothing if not even-handed in trying to correct the racism and offer moral instruction to partisans of both communities. Who knows how this advice would be received by Cypriots from a British national on an impersonal global stage, but as a humble and solicitous traveller Thubron seems as likely as any visitor to have an impact on Cypriots. As for domestic audiences, Thubron certainly models a kind of active listening and persistent presence that maintains space for personal dignity while not abandoning his own principles and values. The contrast this writing makes as a companion piece to Durrell’s Bitter Lemons should now be apparent. We can see the divergent narrating paths each writer takes by examining how they respond differently in the face of human suffering in which their own national, personal and political identities are implicated. Specifically, both Durrell and Thubron address the painful presence and memories of the British internment camps that held Greeks of Cyprus during the colonial revolt. Thubron enjoys the benefit of hindsight during his tour of a ruined detention and interrogation facility in Paphos, while Durrell visits an active camp in Kyrenia as part of his work in the public relations office. Durrell uses the episode for nervous comic relief and continued belittling of the enosis campaign, while Thubron appears sincerely haunted and disturbed by the incident, enough so that he reveals substantive personal details that shape the essence of his reaction. During the insurgency documented by Bitter Lemons, Athens Radio and other propaganda outlets had been criticizing the British over their detention of ‘terrorists,’ many of whom were schoolboys captured with explosives. British authorities were miffed at facing charges of fascism and human rights abuses, so Durrell is dispatched to the facility to survey the situation and then bring journalists for a walk through. Readers of Bitter Lemons never learn how this public relations campaign turns out, as Durrell chooses not to mention it again. The chapter containing this incident is titled ‘The Feast of

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Unreason’ and features a general theme of Greek irrationality and self-absorption. The logic to which they do not subscribe is colonialism, of course, making Durrell’s condescension troubling to those sympathetic to their desire for political change. But the complication is that they do not simply want to be independent but unified with Greece – a consideration Durrell is well aware of and prepared to manipulate to British advantage. Much of the controversy in this incident concerns toilets and the lack of access to clean, sanitary latrines. Durrell responds with ironic wit and cultural condescension towards the Greek media charges: ‘This seemed to be going a bit far; I was tempted to ask the Greek Ministry of Information a few choice questions about the general state of sanitation in Greece – which has to be experienced to be believed – but I spared him; Philhellenism dies hard.’66 Durrell’s shared indignation with colonial authorities dismisses the appropriative gesture used by Greeks who deign to apply the standards of civilization against those who believe they taught the concept to their subjects. He meets up with some of his old students there, chastises them and shares a few deep sighs of outrage over the Greek moxie of demanding the right to study for exams after being caught trying to harm the British. The boys are held according to ‘detention laws’ that are to protect both the public from the Greek boys and the boys from themselves; they were essentially ‘locked up summarily’ because, Durrell claims, they cannot be charged with a crime without witnesses.67 Durrell uses his colleague Foster as a mouthpiece for the wild accusations and impudence of the detained boys, whose primary grievances concern their inability, in such cramped quarters, to study for their scheduled exams: ‘“They are mad. I can’t take it. First they throw a bomb, then they want to pass their School Cert., and I’m a Fascist because they can’t!” He moaned and rocked from side to side. “It’s like being a male nurse in an institution. Are all the Greeks as mad as this lot?” The answer, of course, was yes.’68 Of the many troubling aspects of this rant – the feminization, infantilization and patronizing postures aside – perhaps most disturbing is the contention that Greek nationalist logic, whatever

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one’s attitude might be towards that ideology, is cast by Foster and confirmed by Durrell as no logic at all. Durrell, the intellectual and experienced diplomat of Balkan and Mediterranean tours, knows better, yet he somehow tries to reconcile his allegiance to empire with his affection for a Greek culture that no longer exists as he had imagined. As he makes his rounds in the prison, he chances upon a former student of his who was caught for throwing a bomb into a churchyard instead of the intended target – a house with two children playing outside. As he ‘interviews’ this young man, Durrell reveals an implicit cultural bias towards the Greeks (and Christianity) that sees them as decent, simple folk whose resistance is read more as petulance or immaturity than as political will: It is, of course, not easy for youths raised in a Christian society, to turn themselves into terrorists overnight – and in a sense his problem was the problem of all the Cypriot Greeks. . . ‘So you are sorry because you didn’t kill two children?’ I said. ‘What a twisted brain, what a twisted stick you must be as well as a fool!’ He winced and his eyes flashed. ‘War is war,’ he said. I left him without another word.69 Again, the circumstances produce in Durrell silence, speechlessness – here a writer, intellectual, wit, seemingly left without words and bereft of the tools of rhetoric to engage in meaningful dialogue with the ones he professes to love. His choice here to not further engage the boy or struggle with the depth of his commitment to enosis demonstrates his determination not to risk vulnerability or even partial responsibility for how the Greeks of Cyprus may have arrived at such startling ‘unreason’. Durrell reports this conversation as one he held with the boy, but we should remember that Foster, the colonial officer doing a tour of duty in Cyprus, looks on. The episode demonstrates the extent to which Durrell’s ultimate loyalty rests with his countrymen who feel compelled to protect their interests. More than a decade after the end of the colonial era in Cyprus, Thubron, who travels without the obvious obligations and

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allegiances lived by Durrell, fashions a much different sort of relationship to the events of the rebellion years. Early in Journey Into Cyprus, Thubron is called upon to witness the physical, material effects of the violent counter-insurgency waged by his country and managed by rhetorical foot soldiers like Durrell against the Greeks of Cyprus a generation before. Perhaps more so than elsewhere in the book, Thubron is pulled, reluctantly, from his aesthetically-imposed detachment and brought into a presence that challenges his determination to suppress personal dimensions of his encounters with others. When history becomes something more than abstraction, a writer’s blueprint for knowing others evidences some welcome alterations. Maria Lourdes Lopez Ropero, in her commentary on Caryl Phillips’s discussion of slave traders and their African accomplices sharing responsibility for their respective participation in the system, remarks that ‘the whimsical spin of history blurs the distinction between torturers and victims’.70 Thubron seems to have captured a similarly horrible collusion between European exploitive power and one subsection of the local community. Though visitors to Cyprus often fail to recognize the complications of the end of the colonial era, in which Turks of the island sometimes aided the British in their campaign to remain in control, the local people tend to remember despite these ‘whims of history’. During his time in Paphos, Thubron is introduced to Christos, now a respected schoolmaster, who insists on taking the visitor through the ruins of the facility used by the British and the Turks to torture Greeks who were involved in plotting or carrying out acts of terror against the British – using water-boarding, among their tactics, incidentally. Christos ascribes his violent plans and actions for freedom to his youth and idealism. Thubron portrays him with sympathy, even dignity, though he does complain about the utter and aforementioned ‘unreasoning’ of Greek passions that lay the troubles of Cyprus at the feet of the British. As Christos describes the actions of his tormentors, Thubron confesses to almost not believe his account, until Christos explains the way the British would terrorize the Greek prisoners:

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‘The captain used to rattle a stick over the corrugated iron to frighten us,’ said Christos. With a cold pang I remembered how, at my own school, the prefects had done precisely that, had run their canes along the sides of the passages when summoning a boy to be beaten. I think only then was I certain that Christos was not lying, and that my own countrymen had done these things. It seemed now that I was naı¨ve not to have believed it before. In every people, when angry or frightened, there is a quality which can be distorted into brutality. In my own, perhaps, it was a lack of sensitized imagination.71 The identification with Christos, fully provoked only by a violent detail directly experienced by the narrator, is jarring, especially in the way it links the violence of domestic England to the violence it perpetrates to maintain its colonies. Nowhere else in the narrative does Thubron personally reflect on how his own life experiences shape his capacity as a traveller to empathize with others. The linkage between systems of social control domestically and abroad should produce considerable discomfort for his audiences in settings like the UK and US. Yet if travellers can best identify with and believe others who suffer violence by remembering their own similar traumas, travel may not be sufficiently capacious for the production of meaningful geopolitical change. The passage concludes with an ironic aside to his readers about the whims of history and their effects on people’s relations with others. Thubron writes: Back in 1958, when these things happened, I had narrowly missed being inducted for National Service before it was abolished. Otherwise I might have been posted to Cyprus, and hunted Christos as a criminal, and he might have planned my death. Instead we were walking together in the sun. When I told him this grotesquery, he only shrugged and laughed in his easy way.

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‘Life is like that.’ So one man’s terrorist is another man’s hero.72 In this poignant snapshot of Christos recalling and Thubron narrating the violent dusk of Cyprus’s long colonization, irony and fatalism have the last word – colonialism, empire, nationalism, the ongoing Cold War. . . these more thorny and ideological explanations find little purchase. Perhaps more complicated theories or metanarratives to account for the woes of Cyprus would only serve to trivialize the scene and its emotional impact on readers. I would argue that in this example Thubron has actually written through the trope of intimate distance and into a type of reciprocal, reflective discourse that elevates the genre of travel writing. The above example emerges from the intimacy Thubron shares with a local person, but what differentiates this episode from so many others is the way that the writer personally reflects upon the materiality and memories of cultural encounter. Yes, Thubron appears to assent to his companion’s fatalism. However, those dissatisfied with that explanation – and Thubron himself seems to be included in this group within different parts of his own narrative – are not precluded from working such a poignant example into something more: a cautionary tale, perhaps, or a principled determination to avoid future national campaigns that compel young people of all countries into such contradictions. One final example from the text demonstrates how Thubron’s quest for intimacy drives the writing. As a liberal narrator frustrated by the discourses of hatred, he provides counter-narratives to the bigotries he sees so often elsewhere in his journey. Here, in a conversation with a farmer, the narrator takes on a position of moral investment and uses the experience as an opportunity to laud the openness of a Greek Cypriot: ‘And where would you have slept tonight if not here?’ the farmer asked. ‘This part is not good for strangers. A man must know his way about.’ ‘I’d planned to stay at Pano Koutraphas.’ He stared at me. ‘There is no more Pano Koutraphas. Our

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people came from there, many of them. But when the trouble started they ran away. And the Turks too – fled.’ He began to scowl at the floor. ‘They’re ready to kill one another now. Yet they’d lived together for centuries in one place. You would see them sitting – Greek and Turk together, Turk and Greek.’ He aligned his forefingers in a gesture of concord. ‘It’s very strange.’ I said bleakly, ‘I’ve liked the Turks.’ Always before, in other families, this opinion had been greeted with silence, the nearest to a rebuke which a Greek will show a guest, or else had been swept away in a gale of political recrimination. But now I heard the farmer say; ‘Yes. The Turks are all right. They are a decent people.’ I smiled back at him in amazement, a great warmth spreading through me. His remark was like one of those comets which burst in a summer sky – lonely among thousands who allowed the Turks no human quality, but a promise that other worlds and other possibilities existed, however remote. ‘This trouble. . .’ he began, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. ‘This trouble. . .’ He held out his hands, clenching and unclenching them, until they drifted back onto his knees. ‘I don’t know.’ He bowed his head. ‘I simply don’t know.’73 Here, Thubron allows himself to express some of the pain and frustration of the political situation. The result: an illuminating script narrated by a secular, humanist, colonial, male character seeking identification with varied ethno-national ‘others,’ including Turks and Greeks. He returns them the favour by narrating their words, actions, and interactions with dignity, humour, empathy, superiority and lament. Descriptive, reflective rendering of cultural encounters may be better served in delivering nuance at the expense of over-reaching for closure. If nothing else, it at least effectively blunts the sort of abstractions so often preferred by scholars, intellectuals and activists. In the case of Cyprus, books of this sort have become a cottage industry. Instead, intimacy that begins with the inevitable distance of

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strangers but that aspires for more affords an opportunity for travel writers to speak passionately and personally of the effects of these larger forces on the bodies and spirits of people. Travel writing can still bear profound political impact on readers without assuming a didactic or authoritative posture or thesis. Audiences ultimately must take on their share of the responsibility for interpreting and acting upon the potential knowledge that stories of travel, such as Thubron’s story of Christos, can produce. In discussing his friend and fellow travel writer Bruce Chatwin in an interview that occurred long after he had completed his Cyprus travelogue, Thubron suggests that Chatwin acted like he did not owe anything to anybody, and therein lay his genius, his seductive, liberatory ethos. Chatwin’s seeming indifference to the effects of his work no doubt contributes to the critical bloodletting on his irresponsible ethics of representation. The more youthful Thubron’s work seems to be of a quality and character that belies such a nihilistic endorsement for a writer’s commitment to aesthetics and narrative. Overall, the story of Journey Into Cyprus does implicitly posit the supremacy of Western secularism and the cultural and political hegemony of the UK and the West over societies like Cyprus and Turkey. Thus, in one sense, people and landscape remain fixed at an insurmountable symbolic distance, in the gaze of colonialism and its attendant tropes. On the other hand, the characters and places Thubron encounters provide in this narrator a range of emotions and complications; he sometimes reveals and addresses the effects of travel and encounter, but, by discursive design, most often leaves them unresolved, at a tantalizing and intimate distance. Given some of the alternatives – and the likelihood that an ethically airtight story poorly told still needs to find and claim its readers – Thubron has produced a text that stands up fairly well to the tumult that has shaken Cyprus and Europe in the decades since its creation.

CHAPTER 5 DAY-TRIPPING TO THE DARK SIDE: NAVIGATING AND NARRATING AN ISLAND DIVIDED

Previous chapters have examined how travel writing – and its attendant troping of people and land – emerges according to the motives and practices of specific storytellers, as well as the cultural circumstances of particular historical moments. Lawrence Durrell, for example, coaxes mystery, spirituality and reptilian intrigue from the Turks of Cyprus, as he occasionally locates Cyprus in an Orientalized East. Weightier political concerns that engulf his narrative ultimately trivialize these fanciful efforts to imagine the island as a site of cultural intrigue for travellers. Colin Thubron journeys through the island amidst uneasy truce, after the anti-colonial rebellion and just before the events of 1974. He scripts more grounded, textured and illuminating scenes of his intimate encounters with Turks. Like Durrell, he deflects away most details of his own participation in – even construction of – these portraits. Both writers, despite the tensions and tragedies they document, were at least fortunate enough to experience the island before it had been partitioned into two ethnically distinct homogenous zones that have proven to be difficult, and even occasionally unforgiving, in what they have afforded the various travellers to the island after 1974.

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This chapter focuses primarily on an eclectic corpus of travel stories focusing on the north of the island after the war of 1974. Review of these texts demonstrates how the aftermath of war and an imposed partition have further affected both the motives of travellers and, more significantly, their access and orientation to the north of the island and the Turkish community that lives there. Travel writing in the era of partition tends to reproduce, unevenly, the global political reality of the north of Cyprus as a place of despair, darkness and illegality. I refer to this representation as ‘uneven’ because these texts and documented encounters often but not always embody the negative tropes associated with the people and the land as they have evolved in the many years since the events of 1974. Conventional forms of travel and adherence to arrangements of sanction and embargo continue to circumscribe the north as a dark ‘other’ to its unreconciled neighbour community in the south. The Cyprus experienced by travellers after 1974 is an island divided into two discrete, isolated cultural and political communities separated by a demilitarized zone. Though only minor skirmishes have occurred since the fighting of 1974, the island remains one of the most militarized places on earth, where citizens, guest workers and visitors are reminded daily of the effects of unresolved conflict. According to the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus, Turkey garrisons approximately 30,000 troops in the north, the Republic of Cyprus features a considerably smaller force of 12,000 active soldiers, and a largely symbolic United Nations peacekeeping force of less than 1,000 patrols some of the territory dividing the two sides and makes its best effort to deter any future violence. If visitors to the island mention that they have travelled to Cyprus, most assume they mean the internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus, the predominantly Greek Cypriot and European Union member state, rather than the self-identified Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which is dependent upon, and recognized only by, Turkey. The turbulent political situations of the 1950s and 1960s have been replaced with ethnic partition and a solidified Green Line that has brought the island a compromised peace: members of the communities no longer kill one another, but rather subject each

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other, and themselves, to symbolic violence that leaves old wounds unhealed. This cycle is fuelled and perpetuated by respective nationalist narratives of victimization that shape the experiences of those who come to Cyprus curious about its cultures, its histories and its trajectory for the future.1 Movements from south to north and vice versa are not restricted as they once were. After a decision made by Turkish authorities in 2003 to allow people to cross its frontiers, passage for foreign visitors and most people living in Cyprus is now possible between the two communities. Still, the vast majority of travellers fly in and out of the Greek-controlled Republic of Cyprus. If travellers entering from and based in the south are interested in visiting the other side of the island, they must decide whether or not to remain in the north overnight, spend money on food and souvenirs that support its economy and subject themselves to occasional questions and criticism upon return to the south. Since 1974 in Cyprus, the quotidian acts of buying an airline ticket, booking a holiday, seeing the sights and telling the stories of travel have become thoroughly saturated in political meaning. In the case of travel to the internationally unrecognized north of the island, this is especially true, and many Greek Cypriots argue forcefully for a travel boycott until a final political resolution is achieved. For anyone paying attention, travel and narration of one’s experiences in Cyprus constitutes an ethical conundrum. Narrators of the texts I examine from the ongoing partition era demonstrate mixed motivations as travellers and writers, often according to subject position. Some writers discussed in this chapter are political correspondents; two are travelling spouses with backgrounds in art and education, respectively. Another is a selfprofessed ‘walker’ and travel writer, albeit less prolific and accomplished than Colin Thubron. This particular traveller visits the north with his wife and two children and uses his career experiences in the automobile service industry throughout his journeys in the north of Cyprus. Differences in the writers’ backgrounds, rhetorical purposes and ways of entering and encountering the north certainly affect the ethical balance. These first-person narrators reveal varying

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degrees of self-consciousness about the politics and ethics of travel, cultural encounters and writing about the north of Cyprus, a place generally configured as ‘the dark side’ through tropes like poverty, victimization and fatalism.

Ethics, Writing and Encountering Other People Any viable definition for an ethics of writing must eventually turn to questions of responsibility. In the context of travel narration, responsibility concerns the types of relationships created by travellers and their audiences; I understand these to include the domestic and global audiences that consume travel writing and the people and landscapes they encounter during their journeys. How much does it matter for travellers and travel writers to tell their stories with a sense of the consequences – a sense that circulation produces effects? With rhetorical and cultural theorist Gary Olson, I locate responsibility as central to my analysis of the ethical appeal, to the ethics of writing. Olson speaks broadly to the ethics of writing scholarship and teaching in light of post-colonial critiques on rationality and the ‘appeal to rules, rule books, priests, and philosophers’. His explanation of ethics resonates in the context of travel narration: Ethics is the encounter with the Other. By definition, all human interactions entail various encounters with an Other, and because we all bring to these interactions our own agendas – our own wishes, desires, needs, motivations – and because these agendas are often in conflict (or at least not in perfect concordance), we are constantly negotiating and renegotiating our interactions. Furthermore, few if any interactions are between equal players; power differentials invariably are at play. Consequently, how we interact with an Other – how we balance our own needs, desires, and obligations with those of the Other – is precisely what ethics is about. How we effect this balance of needs, desires and obligations, how we negotiate our encounter

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with the Other, is a weighty responsibility. [W]e must actively participate in our own moral decision making, no longer abdicating our responsibility to external forces.2 The practice of ethical communication serves as a constant feature of everyday life, as writers, scholars, students and ordinary citizens face the responsibility of negotiating our desires with others in relations typically marked by inequities of power. Taken out of context, the final words of the above excerpt could suggest greater autonomy from ‘external forces’ than is possible in a world in which people cannot always know what compels them. Understanding socio-cultural forces and pressures that discipline human behaviour and circumscribe agency is a constant struggle. Ethical negotiations between writers and cultures have their inevitable challenges – what authorizes a writer to speak about others? How can they profess to know more than their own, severely limited experiences? Still, a writer has to produce and writers clearly exercise agency while narrating their experiences and impressions. In complicated political and economic circumstances, they select and deflect from fragments of memory and cultural narratives already in circulation to tell their stories of Cyprus and of themselves. Olson forwards the imperative for writers, teachers and travellers to balance personal ‘needs, desires, and obligations’ with those of their interlocutors. For ethical communication to occur in the context of travel and travel writing, the narrator needs to be more than merely open to dialogue and listening. In encounters with difference, an ethical narrator must want to hear the stories and experiences that people and landscapes desire to speak. Balancing and negotiating difficulties aside, one cannot begin to engage this type of ethical calculation without attempting to fathom some of the complicated desires, motives and obligations of people in other lands. Power differentials must always be taken into consideration. In Behind the Smile, a study of tourism in the Caribbean, George Gmelch delineates the economic dimensions of interactions between traveller and tourist industry worker – such as the local Turkish Cypriot tour

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guides, private drivers and restaurant operators encountered by the travel writers of this chapter. He writes: Workers, who are mostly from modest educational and social backgrounds, intermingle with guests from distant lands and cultures who have different lifestyles and levels of income. What also makes the interaction unique [. . .] is that during the interaction one is at leisure while the other is at work. One has economic assets but little knowledge of the local culture, while the other has cultural capital but little money.3 Travel writers who visit northern Cyprus certainly suggest the kind of economic disparity Gmelch describes. In fact, as we shall see in the case of tourist industry employees in the north of Cyprus, the trope of the impoverished Turk functions as a central symbol in much of the ‘dark side’ discourse. Never do these writers explain their criteria for the assessment of poverty, nor do most look close enough to perceive differences that would complicate or even disrupt the trope. In partition-era travel writing on the north of Cyprus, characters’ selfrepresentation and the landscape itself document the economic differences among Turks; visible signs of prosperity like the morethan-occasional mention of Mercedes automobiles, for example, testify to this complexity, yet some socio-economic realities need to be taken into account. In the case of north Cyprus, the economics of embargo complicate the rhetorical situation of encounter, especially in the familiar context of touristic consumption. Those coming from the south to the north have faced fairly strict prohibition of goods purchased in the north, thus stripping away one key dimension from the commercial nature of tourism.4 Travellers like Christopher Hitchens, Sebastian Junger, Seamus MacHugh and Libby Rowan-Moorhouse, who could do no more than day-trip to the north from the south, would have needed immediately to post their purchases from the north, had they been inclined to purchase any of the products available there. Based on these accounts, many travellers choose beforehand not to buy from Turkish merchants. The ethics of

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something as simple as shopping constitute a risky proposition; purchasers could risk causing serious offence to their Greek Cypriot hosts, with whom many travellers have already forged relationships and, to some degree, loyalties. Merchants in the north, on the other hand, are by many accounts very grateful for visitors who come to their country and patronize its economy. Responsibility to, not to mention identification with the people of a land, as we see, poses its own ethical dilemmas particular to travellers and writers of divided Cyprus. One such considerable danger of travel and travel writing concerns negative identification. By negative identification, I mean writing that, in its efforts to be persuasive, makes an identification with one group and against that group’s adversaries – guilt by disassociation that facilitates the production of rhetoric that locates a given narrator or text in presumptive conflict with people about whom the traveller or writers knows little.5 Such has been the case in much of the travel discourse on Cyprus, as we will see in several of the texts under consideration. In the case of partition-era travel writing in Cyprus, studying the ethics of narration means balancing of a traveller’s needs and desires with the complex, internally diverse needs of peoples and landscapes at odds within and among themselves. Ethical writing unfolds with awareness of some of its own limitations, its own desires, and openness to hearing the narratives of others. Before proceeding into the analysis of this corpus of partition-era travel texts dealing with the north of Cyprus, it would be helpful to better understand some of the circumstances and travel traditions of this particular site of discursive production that begins after 1974 and continues into the present.

The Physical and Symbolic Landscape of Partition-era Cyprus The travel narratives of Lawrence Durrell and Colin Thubron, in retrospect, convey ample anxiety over the future of the island – anxiety that the upheaval of 1974 appears to have validated. Durrell’s dying colonial bastion faded quickly into history, to be succeeded by

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Thubron’s ‘nervous co-habitation’ and enclave-era Cyprus, which itself turned out to have been a fleeting precursor to the ethnonational division of the island. Contemporary travellers to Cyprus will recognize remnants of and monuments to these earlier times, as well as certain cultural continuities, but the Cyprus troubled in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s by colonialism and reluctant, embattled sovereignty now finds itself as two distinct lands free to elect their own leadership but still tethered to the conflicts of the past. Semi-permanent features like the Green Line separating north from south, as well as the off-limits military bases serving forces from Turkey, the UK and the Greek-Cypriot controlled Republic of Cyprus, continue to restrict the movements and inflect the narration of travellers. Monuments, museums, even archaeological sites skew the past in order to fit dogmas of the present stalemate. In such an environment, several questions pertaining to the ethical dimensions of narration and tropology emerge: What stories get told about Cyprus and why? How do travellers narrate their experiences and imagine the island’s cultures? For writers engaging in first-person narration of travel in Cyprus, what aspects of the personal does a landscape strewn with reminders of war evoke upon visiting and describing the island? And how do these narrators, shaken to varying degrees by war and its unresolved wounds, trope Cyprus and its people – especially the Turks – in these narratives? To what extent does politics function as the dominant, over-determined lens for any narration of Cyprus? The travel texts of partition-era Cyprus, I argue, demonstrate how spatial orientation of the traveller determines the narrative arc and symbolic contours of the landscape. Specifically, the stories emerging from writers based in the south of Cyprus tend to imagine a onedimensional type of Turk that roughly corresponds to what many Greek Cypriots project onto the Turkish community. Given that onethird of the Greek Cypriot community was displaced by the Turkish invasion of 1974 and that the unresolved conflict continues to dominate domestic politics on both sides, these portraits tend to be highly critical and, until ease of access to the north in 2003, difficult to verify. Only one in-depth narrative of travel that I am aware of,

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Oliver Burch’s The Infidel Sea, has been set in the partition-era north and offers a more complicated picture. Still, this imbalance of perspective remains largely in effect. Since the spring of 2003, Greek and Turkish Cypriots and international travellers have been able to easily cross from one side to the other. Though this has led to more contact between people of the north and foreign travellers, most travellers to the island continue to begin and end their journeys in the predominantly Greek and internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus.6 According to information provided by the Embassy of the Republic of Cyprus in Washington, DC, Greek Cypriots recovered rapidly after the invasion, at least until the mid-1990s, when tourism reached its apparent peak: As a result of the invasion, tourist arrivals had declined sharply with only 47,085 tourists visiting the island in 1975 as compared to 264,066 in 1973. However, through the serious efforts exerted by both the Government and the private sector the tourist industry was revitalized and Cyprus was soon reestablished on the World Tourist Map. By 1979 tourist arrivals surpassed the pre-invasion levels and in 1999 tourist inflow reached 2,434,285.7 According to the Republic of Cyprus Statistical Service, 2,464,908 visitors entered the country in 2012. Just under a million of these visitors came from the UK, followed by Russia, Germany, Greece, Sweden and Norway.8 In an average year, in other words, about one million travellers and part-time residents from the UK come to Cyprus, as do many additional English-speaking travellers from other countries, including those who may read travel writing and produce their own texts. In contrast, the Turkish north, according to one travel-industry website operating consistently since 1994, receives fewer than 500,000 foreign tourists annually, though the number rises significantly when counting visitors from Turkey. While the foreign visitors to the north have increased over the years, it is still far more likely that a traveller’s trip to Cyprus will mean a trip to the

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Republic of Cyprus, not to the north.9 If a traveller does come to the north, however, the odds are strong that this will be an Englishspeaking traveller from the UK.10 Book-length travelogues set in the south of Cyprus, such as In the Land of Aphrodite by Libby Rowan-Moorhouse and Cyprus: An Island Apart by Seamus MacHugh, represent two longer texts that I will examine in this chapter. These writers experience and narrate Cyprus from the perspective of the south, implicitly and explicitly defining ‘Cyprus’ and ‘Cypriot’ as Greek; ‘Turk’, as we shall see in the analysis, functions as a signifier of otherness. Though they face subtle and notso-subtle pressure to not visit the north, Rowan-Moorhouse and MacHugh steel their nerves long enough for a series of revealing visits that constitute a distinct phenomenon I dub ‘day-tripping to the dark side’. Travel narratives set in the Turkish-controlled north of Cyprus by a narrator who is staying in the north represent another type of experience. For a variety of reasons, mostly political, Oliver Burch’s 1990 The Infidel Sea: Travels in North Cyprus is the only book-length travelogue account that exists in the period after partition. Scott Anderson, who co-authored the Harper’s essay ‘Dispatches from a Dead War’, with Sebastian Junger, also based himself in the north for his part in that writing project.11 During these writers’ respective visits to the north, travel from north to south was virtually impossible. What a traveller unfamiliar with the south might imagine of Greek Cypriots would be informed by their encounters with Turks of the north and whatever they heard from other expatriates or media. As the only text of its kind, Burch’s travelogue proves a compelling study of an internally complicated and divided community routinely portrayed by travel writers as a socio-political monolith.12 At the same time, his work features blind spots similar to those found in works that emerge from the particular worldview of the south of Cyprus. Narrative and tropological analysis of this range of texts, looking specifically at how writers construct their encounters with Turks in Cyprus, demonstrates how diverse narrating perspectives differentially inform the way these writers navigate the contested

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political and symbolic terrain. Specifically, the Turkish-controlled north of Cyprus that came into existence after 1974 only sporadically finds itself fully included in symbolic constructions of an inclusive ‘Cyprus’. Most narrators, at one time or another in their stories, construe Turks as other to Cyprus. Several dominant tropes for the Turks, as well as for the land and landscape they inhabit, emerge in this corpus of texts, including, for example, the Turk as a denizen of a generalized ‘dark side’ – sombre, impoverished, meek and pitiable; yet, as the circumstances change, the Turk is also paradoxically troped as threatening, especially as the association concerns Turkey. In Burch’s travelogue and occasionally in the texts of Hitchens, MacHugh and Junger and Anderson, the writers offer more complicated portraits of sociopolitical differences, ambiguous memories, racial differentiation and other intriguing distinctions that have largely been, for all intents and purposes, beyond the ethical reach of a generation of travel writers.

Day-tripping to the Dark Side with Christopher Hitchens Beginning with Durrell’s Bitter Lemons and carrying through the stories of subsequent expatriate narrators like Penelope Tremayne, Thomas Foley and Colin Thubron, Cyprus has long been characterized as a nexus of darkness, sadness and fatalism. More political polemic than travelogue, Christopher Hitchens’s book Cyprus: Hostage to History essentially extends this trope of Cyprus, south and north, as a sombre land victimized by others. He certainly merits consideration in this discussion for the sheer influence of Cyprus: Hostage to History on travellers and expatriates in the partition era. The fact that Hitchens composed prefaces to three separate editions of the book before his death in 2011 also demonstrates a certain ethical investment in how the island’s problems progress – his analysis is regularly deployed in global political and cultural theatres, especially those of Europe and the US.13 As a political narrator, Hitchens plays up the woe in knowing Cyprus and its misfortunes too well to enjoy it as a site of romantic

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enticement: often stunningly beautiful, but always bittersweet. His account incorporates some narrative elements familiar to travel writing, including a touching daytrip to the Turkish-inhabited village of Bellapaix in the north, once the residence of Lawrence Durrell, and currently the idyllic home to a group of villagers who were relocated here from a village in the south after 1974. Hitchens, in this passage at least, bears the recently relocated Turkish Cypriot villagers no ill will in his retelling of the visit: The Bellapaix Turks hail in the main from Mari, a dusty and undistinguished hamlet off the Limassol road. My friend brought them photographs of the village, which they had not seen for several years, since the ‘population exchange’ of 1974 – 75. The effect when she produced the pictures in the coffeeshop was extraordinary. Men ran to fetch relatives and friends; a circle formed in less time than it takes to set down. The snapshots were passed around endlessly – ‘Look, someone’s put a new window in old Mehmet’s house’ – ‘There’s a lick of paint on the old store.’ The mukhtar of the village treated us to coffee and drinks; our efforts to share the bill were (as always in Cyprus) regarded as just this side of a grave insult. We eventually had to leave, because of the curfew that falls along the border just after dusk. But we were pressed to stay until the very last moment. These people, living in a village which is coveted above all others by tourists and outsiders, were actually nostalgic for the shabby but homely Mari.14 Hitchens’s narration profits from the inside connection his friend shares with this group of people. Without her contacts, perhaps Cyprus: Hostage to History would be devoid of even this passage, a gentle rendering of their emotional attachment to a humble home village. Before and after this passage, in more typical form, he implies that their presence in this coveted location is illegitimate and unfortunate for a site so hallowed to expatriates and poets. An allowance to these villagers of a sort of dignified humanity here barely balances out criticisms of Turkish Cypriots elsewhere in the text for

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political clumsiness and deplorable amnesia. One wonders how Hostage to History may have read differently had Hitchens not been subject to ‘the curfew that falls along the border just after dusk’. Like the day-tripping travellers who follow in his footsteps, Hitchens indulges in some of his own elegiac writing in trying to capture the sad beauty of the island: In a fashion, I envy those who can continue to see Cyprus [as a place blessed with an abundance of allure sufficient to distract visitors from the longstanding international political problems]. But I am a captive of a certain limited knowledge of the place. The eastern Mediterranean affords few better evenings than the one provided by the dusk in Nicosia, the capital. The Pentadactylos mountains, so named for the fiveknuckled and fist-like peak which distinguishes the range, turn from a deep purple to a stark black outline against the sun. To the newcomer, the sight is a stirring one. But to many of my friends, the mountains at that hour take on the look of a high and forbidding wall. Beyond the peaks are their old homes and village, and the charm of the sunset is dissolved into an impression of claustrophobia.15 While most of Hitchens’s text turns on political intrigues, analysis of documents, and interviews with figures central to the story of Cyprus, here he invokes a certain spirit of travel narration – though the condescension implied by addressing other travellers as ignorant newcomers may detract from the appeal of his melancholy landscapes. As for how he views the north, in this passage and elsewhere in his book, Hitchens demonstrates a primary loyalty to the suffering of Greek Cypriots, despite his occasional jabs elsewhere at EOKA and its right-wing links to the Greek junta.16 The Turkish Cypriots, in this narrative, are the pawns for Turkey, which is itself a proxy for the British and the Americans, whom Hitchens sees as the main players in the demise of the Republic and displacement of Greek Cypriots.17 What he witnesses in his political accounting and produces in the making of the landscape largely corresponds with this ethical vision.

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Here, a writer’s determination to counter one prevailing narrative – that the Cypriots have undone Cyprus – manages to trivialize the complexity and relative autonomy of the very people he imagines he speaks for.

Distance, Distortion and the Dark-side Day-trip As for texts that more readily pass for travel writing, two booklength travelogues published in the partition era illustrate what typically emerges as ‘the Turk’ in literature informed under a travel regime involving only day passes to what are considered the occupied territories of the north. Published in 1999, Seamus MacHugh’s Cyprus: An Island Apart represents more of a conventional travel guide, in that the author makes an earnest effort to provide travellers with a sense of what to expect at the island’s premier sites of interest in the south and north of the island. He narrates his visits to historical sites and offers his modest observations of the political landscape, but his writing constructs the landscape of the north of Cyprus by glossing the discourse of other travel writers or historians of Cyprus, rather than relying much on his own experiences there. Libby Rowan-Moorhouse’s In the Land of Aphrodite could better be described as a memoir or illustrated diary than a travel book. Her purpose appears less contrived and more picaresque, with writing that follows her personal life around Cyprus, which takes her to some but certainly not all of the places most celebrated among travel writers and tourists. What these texts share, however, is a fairly standard picture of Cyprus, Cypriots and the conflict as seen from the vantage point south of the Green Line. Neither writer looks to propagandize on behalf of Greek Cypriots, yet the land and landscape they inhabit challenge each respective narrator’s range of possibilities at almost every moment. No matter how historically innocuous the ruin, site or city, the landscape continually plunges travellers back into conflict – with features like the appalling yet alluring Green Line, mountainsides turned into national flags and so forth. In these narratives, the Turks of Cyprus living in the northern part of the island are often reduced to a host of simplistic

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tropes in which they play the role of pitiable victims of more powerful forces, lacking in agency, presumed to lack in political complexity and will, yet ultimately guilty by association for Turkey’s invasion in 1974 and subsequent partition of the island into two ethnically homogenous sectors. Rowan-Moorhouse’s In the Land of Aphrodite narrates – and pictorializes, with her own illustrations – her life in Cyprus in the late 1990s. Her travelogue offers slices of life and reflections of a writer who often makes the effort to know the people of Cyprus, especially those in the village where she and her husband lived. She dedicates her book to these villagers ‘with affection’. She has colourful stories to tell and memories to nourish, as the inspired reflection on Greek Cypriot cultural character suggests in the opening quotation: Here now in the south [of Cyprus], at the end of the twentieth century, prosperity reigns. Only the ugly tenement blocks outside Nicosia, built for the refugees in the seventies, remind us of those desperate times. Living in such conditions was anathema to rural Greek Cypriots, many of whom built themselves new houses, got jobs in tourism and the manufacturing industries and, in record time, pulled themselves up by their boot straps. Not so in the north, where many go on living in rural poverty.18 Turks are a people not well known to the writer, but this does not deter her from symbolic construction of the landscape they control. From what she sees and has heard, they ‘go on living in rural poverty’ or some such well-deserved misfortune. Herein lies an important ethical lapse common to the travel narration of post-partition Cyprus; Turks of Cyprus have typically found themselves both physically off-limits to world travellers and also tainted with a political stigma, regardless of whether or not they have had a chance to meet the travellers who write them into such deficit positions. Rowan-Moorhouse, in this passage, has narrated from afar without meeting any of these so-called rural, impoverished people. What she

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knows about the north comes through the stories and discourses of Greek Cypriots, other expatriates and the mass media available in English. She seems to collect her information and knowledge from English-language newspapers supportive of Greek Cypriot narratives of Cyprus history and politics. These papers refer to the north as ‘occupied’ in most official mentions of its name and tend to only highlight its misfortunes as newsworthy. Rowan-Moorhouse’s isolation from the north comes to an end when she agrees to accompany a Greek Cypriot friend on a quixotic, improbable return to the house and village of her birth, under the pretence of the two making a conventional tourist’s visit to the north’s highlights.19 Their Turkish driver, Ahmed, allows that times were better for him when Greeks and Turks were living together. The narrator and her friend interpret this dissatisfaction to be tantamount with self-hatred, oppression and pity: Our driver introduced himself as Ahmed. As our journey progressed, bumping along in the burgeoning heat in his clapped out taxi, he thawed a little. Just a little. He expressed regret that the life of the old days had gone. It was better, he said, when Cyprus was a united country, when Turk and Greek lived in harmony together.20 Though it is unclear what was better before 1974 for Ahmed, his expression of this preference naturally registers on Rowan-Moorhouse and her Greek Cypriot companion’s radar as evidence for the injustice of 1974 and the status quo. His iciness is considered either the natural or the pitiable outcome of the political and economic situation in the north. In the episode in which they drive by the exit to her family’s village and home, Ahmed refuses to stop there because the visit would be unauthorized and the secret police are following regardless. He professes to feel badly about their inability to visit and would not personally mind her going. Though none of this should be logically construed as a desire for Ahmed to be a neighbour again to Maria or Greek Cypriots, Rowan-Moorhouse’s narration leaves him as a pitiable figure:

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Ahmed made sure we reported back to the border guards sharp at 6 p.m. ‘I’ll come back,’ Mary told him. ‘Who knows? Next time our island may be free!’ Ahmed, looking Mary in the eye at last, gave a sad, unhopeful smile.21 To her credit, the narrator actually ends the journal entry for her visit north with this image, unadorned by commentary, which invites alternative readings of this ‘unhopeful smile’. Earlier, I referred to the dangers of negative identification, which appears to have happened here, as Rowan-Moorhouse, through her emotional connection to Mary, essentially fails to register Ahmed as a complicated person who, though not necessarily pleased with the status quo, may not share her metaphor of the Cyprus problem as one of ‘freedom’ on one side and not the other. That unhopeful smile could have just as easily been a polite way to communicate exasperation or polite resignation: ‘we’re stuck here on Cyprus, aren’t we?’ he could well be suggesting. A little more time spent in the company of Turkish Cypriots, in different circumstances – such as without the company of a Greek Cypriot refugee and the interference of secret police – might have enabled different stories to emerge, allowing for at least some dim light to be cast on the ‘dark side’. As outsiders or day-trippers to the north driving their own private vehicle, Seamus MacHugh and his wife have little contact with Turkish Cypriots aside from crossing point officials, paid tour guides and people working in restaurants or tourist sites. Though travellers certainly gain knowledge and cultural experience by making contact with people living in Cypriot realms, the more ritualized travel encounters of the day-trip or guided tour sometimes distort our impressions of the people.22 In the case of the Turks of Cyprus, MacHugh comes to know only a handful of them and only through his interactions as a day-tripper, while his knowledge of the Greeks of Cyprus comes from an extended stay in the south, where he has the opportunity to know people in more naturalized circumstances.

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For MacHugh, the Greek Cypriots are Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots are Turks who are ‘entitled to call themselves Cypriots, Turkish Cypriots’.23 The narrator provides a sense of how this differentiation plays out through the description of his first daytrip to the north: ‘The border crossing. Cypriot side, Sunday morning, 8 a.m.’.24 Referring to the south as the ‘Cypriot side’ represents a notso-subtle take on who represents the legitimate claim to the term. Travellers moving from south to north typically abide by the political logic that posits an authentic Cypriot as ‘Greek’ unless appropriately qualified. Though his expressed intent is for a kind of fantastic or miraculous reunion of Greeks and Turks, he realizes the unlikelihood of this happening anytime soon, given the tensions of the late 1990s and the increasing separation and distinctiveness of the two groups. Holding an unsteady grasp of political and demographic realities in the north sometimes leads to hasty conclusions, such as when he and his wife approach the Venetian walls of Nicosia and he notes that he has, in tense times, ‘seen small groups of Turkish Cypriot youths approach the rampart edges, not more than 100 [metres] from a UN outpost, to jeer and shout abuse at the Greek Cypriots below’.25 Having spent a good deal of time in Turkish Nicosia myself, I want to suggest that these ‘angry Turkish Cypriot youth’ may have actually been bored Turkish conscripts, some amped with unhealthy doses of nationalist fervour, with another dull day off from military duties; most likely, they had not ever directly encountered a Greek Cypriot, nor did their families share a history of direct conflict with them, as might be suggested by including this group among ‘Turkish Cypriots’. Immediately after this, as if to ameliorate any perceived slight to the Turks of Cyprus, MacHugh remarks on the warm, if slightly off-beat reception they receive upon arrival at the checkpoint in the north: At the Turkish crossing the officials couldn’t have been more pleasant or accommodating. They must have been individually selected by the Northern regime for their low key amiability. The girl who took our money gave us a ‘Good morning’ smile and continued munching her breakfast. The soldier-policeman

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who came ambling over to our car, leaned familiarly on it and told us we were welcome, that we could stay as long as we liked and wished us a pleasant time in the Northern Republic. Neither side stamped our passports, the Greek Cypriots because they don’t recognize the North as an independent state, the Turkish Cypriots because they’re poor and need tourist dollars.26 Here, MacHugh has left readers with contradictory initial images of people in the north: first, angry Turkish Cypriot youth engaged in hostile exchanges with Greek Cypriots, which certainly sets a dark tone for the north, followed by ‘low-key amiability’ and warmth. The speculation that these minor officials would have been ‘individually selected’ betrays an interpretation of this kindness as exceptional – an uncommon human resource and labour asset of the north carefully extracted by a cunning state apparatus. Even this kindness, he suggests, may not be so much natural as a product of economic necessity. His narration fails to express wonder at whether this state of affairs is the work of cunning or circumstance, national need or nepotism. When an overenthusiastic ‘soldier-policeman’ ambles over – giving away his lack of social awareness by ‘leaning familiarly’ on their car – he comes, as the narrator explains, as the representative of a poor, needy state. The Turk of Cyprus seems not to hold together for MacHugh, perhaps because they are deemed an unfortunate fragment of a ruptured whole. Like the response of many visitors from around the world who witness the unhealed wounds of the Green Line, MacHugh indulges a desire to dream, in sanguine abstraction, of a brighter tomorrow. After experiencing the propaganda-scarred road connecting the two sides of divided Nicosia, one poster being noted as representing a ‘particularly gruesome murder’, he writes: ‘From the ashes of a discordant past, Cyprus, phoenix-like, as so often throughout its long history, can rise again to become a unitary state where the rights of both its peoples are equally respected. But it will take goodwill and compromise on both sides’.27 He recites this wish for a unified Cyprus repeatedly, typically at moments when the tension he reads in

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the landscape makes the unlikelihood of resolution appear to be the safest bet going for the speculative at heart. The thought of what he sees in the north continuing along to its logical evolution into a distinct socio-economic destiny from the south sends the narrator into a frustrated rant that equates the Turks of Cyprus with spiteful children, incapable or uninterested in grasping what is good for them: Granted that the North is overall poorer and less technologically sophisticated than the South, the people there will, nevertheless, become increasingly accepting of the status quo, wanting henceforth to continue being bosses of their own destiny, like an adolescent child running away from home and being satisfied to live in a garret as long as he can do his own thing.28 The arrival of one of the colonialist’s favourite metaphors for the Other seems striking at this particular moment in the narrative, when MacHugh moves off the script he has prescribed for this book – an apolitical travel book – to explain his own hopes for grassroots movements in both communities to create an environment conducive to a united future for Cyprus. Though not cast as petulant children, the Greek Cypriots, like the Turks, cause him irritation at their own failure to share the island with their neighbours. In terms of locating a personal history or any personal complicity he, his nation or his civilization may bear in regard to the misfortunes of Cyprus, MacHugh – an Irish-born expatriate, married to an American and based in New Zealand, whose national allegiances remain difficult to pin down – chooses not to dwell on the past. Unlike Durrell or Thubron before him, he takes a transparent swipe at the politics of the UK, ‘a manipulative colonial power’ acting in its own interests to set the island’s division in motion.29 For the most part, MacHugh’s ethical vision involves a future other than that imagined by the ‘hate machines’ of the status quo, one that takes up the vision of those who hope for an end to the Green Line and for those who work actively for reconciliation. This vision gets expressed in his portrayal of Cuma Mertel, a guide he and his wife hire to take

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them to see the sights of the north. MacHugh depicts Cuma as an embodiment of several familiar and favoured Turk tropes for a daytripping traveller, such as kind, open, fatalistic and anti-materialist, yet with some interesting twists: Cuma Mertel, a slight, active man in his late 40s with short dark hair and the almost obligatory Turkish moustache, told me he had two daughters and two vines. He loved all four and, though a Muslim, always managed to keep aside some of his grapes to celebrate Christmas. Sandra and I were in his golden Mercedes 220 taxi on the road to Famagusta. Cuma (pronounced ‘Juma’) spoke English well and did his best, without much practice, to keep up his Greek. Born in a small village, west of Larnaka, he had moved north following the Turkish invasion in 1974. Would he like to go back? No, why go back, life moves on. Here I have my house in a little village on the hillside, we always have water and I bring some every day to my friends. Here are my vines and my two daughters – and one grandson, he added with evident satisfaction. Why go back, my wife and I are happy here but I would like the Green Line to go. I have friends on the other side I would like to meet again, Greek Cypriot friends, he added. Does he think the Green Line will go? Only God knows, not the politicians. He stopped a moment to consider further. Maybe, he added, if the Americans wish it.30 In the context of Turkish politics, a moustache, it should be pointed out, can signify quite a bit about a man and his politics depending on how it is trimmed; based on his conversations with the narrator and his wife, Cuma is clearly not a firebrand nationalist nor an antiimperialist leftist. Having any moustache at all unhelpfully signifies to this traveller one thing: ‘Turk’. More meaningfully, Cuma functions as a kind of idyllic, idealized figure of a man of simple tastes who eschews politics for family and land and who wishes for an end to the stalemate but – as MacHugh is wise to qualify – not a return to

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the deprivations and hostilities of the pre-invasion status quo. The passage’s closing comment about ‘Americans’ blends Cold War savvy with old-world fatalism that sees Greek and Turkish Cypriots as pawns, playing into Hitchens’ and many Cypriots’ own beloved ‘helpless’ trope.31 Though at least partially disproven, the trope carries on as an alluring explanation for the people’s troubles. Some writers specifically question this deployment of Cyprus and its people as the face of a future in which peace gets imposed top-down by outside forces upon a people deemed too primordially at odds with one another to create their own peace.

Learning to Live with Darkness: The Sad Face of Peace in Partition Cyprus To do the reporting for their gloomy 1999 Harper’s essay ‘Dispatches from the Dead Zone’, Scott Anderson and Sebastian Junger each travelled to a different side of the island. Judging from the tone of their narration, both found Cyprus a hard pill to swallow. Yet other than occasional irritation at the overly scripted cultural narratives of the people they encountered, neither writer reveals too much in the way of reader-response narration – in which both are recording, responding to and creating their experiences in ways that connect these experiences to their personal lives. Instead, Anderson and Junger write closer to the style found in the political reporting of Hitchens – a largely depersonalized narration focusing intensively on the landscape and its dominant discourses. Occasionally, they offer disparaging remarks, exasperated sighs and frustrated asides at what the face of ethnically homogenous landscapes look like. This tone of dissatisfaction suggests the manner in which these sober portraits of peoples and landscapes of Cyprus are being deployed. The troping performed by Junger and Anderson serves these writers’ rhetorical purpose: to chronicle the evolution of ‘peace’ in Cyprus as a sombre, even distasteful alternative to the ethno-national warfare raging in the Balkans in the 1990s and elsewhere in the world. From the beginning, the text demonstrates eager self-consciousness, as an editor’s note provides an even-handed distillation of the period

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from 1974 to 1999. A map of the island in its current geo-political configuration, unattributed but apparently created for the Harper’s piece, includes a long explanatory text box. Through measures such as this, the writers and editors use the complicated politics of naming and transliterating the towns and cities of the island to establish with audiences the difficulties of reporting ethically from a place so saturated with conflict. Realities like this have cultivated within the piece’s narrators a sort of silent disapproval and disappointment at the effects of war on people and landscape. The epigraphs selected to begin the narration of the south and the north establish the haunted tone of the piece, leaving little enthusiasm about the futures of those who have experienced war and continue to live in its symbolic and material proximity. Junger opens the essay by positing in Cypriot character a sense of eternal victimization at the hands of unthinking others: A fool throws a stone into the sea and a hundred wise men cannot pull it out. – (Cypriot proverb) Scott Anderson’s opening section begins with this equally haunting proverb: I will tell you a story about Cyprus. Once there was a snake, and one day this snake came into the house of a man who had a son. The snake bit the man’s son and that son died, so in his grief the man took up a knife and cut off the snake’s tail. The next day the snake came back and said to the man, ‘Okay, now let’s be friends.’ The man said, ‘We can never be friends, because you killed my son, and that is a pain I will carry in my heart forever, and I cut off your tail, and that is a pain you will carry in your heart forever.’ So, that is why there can never be peace in Cyprus. – (elderly Turkish Cypriot woman) Hitchens, incidentally, uses the same epigraphic structure in his book, suggesting a prevalent fatalism and mournfulness about the

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past and the harm people have done to each other. As these cultural iterations emerge from the people themselves, rather than from the likes of those suffering from war and struggling for peace the world over, the writers essentially structure their text to make the Cypriots appear to speak their own sad Cyprus. To illustrate one of the more salient constructions of this notion of Cyprus as a sad place suffered in by decent people, Junger and Anderson make the final case for this gloomy vision through the parting image of a disillusioned Turkish Cypriot trapped in the conflict of the island. As their writing begins, so it concludes. Whatever else may come through in their reporting and narration of the two communities, ‘Dispatches’ does its best to suggest a joyless landscape of people who no longer dare to dream: Back in Lefkosha I leave Ayshen at the entrance to the Office of Public Information and watch her walk slowly, head bowed in sadness, up the entranceway. It occurs to me that it is the people like her – the earnest, the ‘peaceniks,’ the good-hearted and forgiving – who are the last, quiet victims of this place. They are to be found in Bosnia and Serbia and Kosovo as well, of course, those who refuse to believe that a culture once torn apart can’t be put back together again, who forever wait for their day to come.32 In one sense, making a place for sadness constitutes an ethical move – an honest, principled, emotional encounter with the lived effects of conflict, war and unresolved hostility. However, after enough repetition of the scene, one begins to wonder why the concordance of grief so routinely accompanies Turks of Cyprus who come into contact with day-trippers and other short-time visitors to the north. For Anderson and Junger, who travel to Cyprus in an effort to imagine how the conflict there may provide a glimpse into the rather unattractive face of peace in the war-torn Balkans, such a narration serves the interests of pragmatists. An earnest concern with understanding dominant narratives, as articulated by politicians, political parties, and journalists, leads them logically to see the tense

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and unappealing visage of the status quo, which continues to produce formidable obstacles to reconciliation. People from outside naturally want to know how the two sides have arrived at this point. In ‘Dispatches from a Dead War,’ blame passes from player to player. The authors report that travellers to Cyprus, who mostly visit the south, look to the north of the Green Line and see Turkey and the Turks of Cyprus as largely responsible for the tragedies of the island, rather than international players or Greek Cypriot leaders and regimes. If attitudes of Western tourists in Cyprus can be taken as representative of wider public attitudes in the US and Europe, then the following example – an explanation from a Greek Cypriot soldier queried by Junger about the hazards of patrolling the Green Line – demonstrates who gets to play the heavy in his cultural script: The soldier had an M-16 slung around his neck and spoke fair English. I asked him if he and his buddies ever talked with the Turkish soldiers on the other side, but he told me that this was the one spot on the Green Line where the Turks don’t post guards. Apparently, tourists who step up to the platform occasionally get carried away and start yelling, and the Turks don’t want to deal with that. Elsewhere, though, the Turks will shout insults at the Greeks or throw rocks. ‘Do you ever yell back?’ I asked the Greek soldier. ‘No,’ he said, smiling. ‘We are careful not to provoke them, because we are the weaker side.’33 This narration adds no commentary, though one cannot help but wonder whether this tradition continues in any form to this day, now that tourists and Cypriots can pass freely through the Green Line. In any event, Turks appear to live on the defensive here, especially since earlier in the passage Junger pointed out that a Greek Cypriot decided to expose himself to a Turkish soldier in the buffer zone and was immediately shot and killed. Taken as a whole, their essay sees neither side as innocent; each has refined a narrative of victimization, wherein little sympathy is afforded to the other side.

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MacHugh, Thubron and others hope for better days ahead and glimpses of people who have tried to make their peace with the past and with their neighbours. Junger and Anderson report no such possibilities, especially in regard to the north of Cyprus. When the narrative switches to Anderson in the north, he picks up on the story of Cyprus where Junger left off, at the Turkish invasion of 1974. Anderson does not conceal his cynicism toward the Turkish narrative of 1974 as the salvation of the Turks of Cyprus: ‘If not much of a “Peace Operation”, the first phase of the Turks’ 1974 invasion was also not much of a military triumph.’34 I will return to the matter of national memory in a moment. Anderson briefly recounts some of the early blunders in the campaign, which the government of Turkey has made efforts to hide or downplay. Though Greek Cypriot and Greek forces fought bravely, they were overmatched by Turkey’s military forces. Martial prowess and love of war has long been a trope of the Turk – Thubron’s warrior from the Asian steppes and Durrell’s Sabri come to mind. What apparently strikes and displeases Anderson is the seeming disjuncture between faces of war and peace. The grandeur of victory finds itself somewhat diminished in juxtaposition with the shabby conditions on the ground. He writes of the contrast: It’s all a little hard to imagine at ground level, however. Up close, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus resembles nothing so much as a quiet, slightly raffish tourist destination. The once-pretty villages along the northern coast have been transformed into sprawls of cheap hotels and fish restaurants, weird concoctions in faux-Tudor or -Bavarian style to lure the British and German vacationers who predominate.35 Measured against a time of ‘pretty villages’ located somewhere in the indeterminate past, Anderson sizes up the landscape and finds it unappealing, polluted with tourists and the trappings they require rather than as it was in earlier, colonial days: pristine, idyllic and authentic.36

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Commercial developments do their share to pock-mark the landscape, but these aesthetic deficits pale in comparison to some of the political monuments constructed by Turkey and Turkish Cypriots to celebrate 1974 and remember the suffering of the past. In what must be considered a rite of passage for the visiting correspondent to the north, Anderson writes up his experience of the Museum of Barbarism, the site of a gruesome murder of the family of a Turkish officer in 1963. His visit provides one disturbing illustration of an official, public, national narrative of victimization. Episodes like this one present public memorials as political facts and suggest a complete correspondence between monument and mentality. When considering the north’s political leader, Anderson follows a similar sort of logic; he makes the case that the north of Cyprus is an immature community led by a cartoon-character obstructionist. Anderson’s cynicism about the north, its regime and its people reaches its apex in his portrayal of now-deceased President Rauf Denktash, a London-trained lawyer dubbed a ‘purported warlord’ in this piece. The south of Cyprus as reported by Junger uses no such tribal terminology. In this light, Anderson’s troping could simply be done to season his script with a Middle Eastern flavour. As the passage progresses, however, the writing demonstrates something short of reverence, respect or responsibility for the leader of the Turkish Cypriots: As purported warlords go, Rauf Denktash, the president of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, doesn’t much look the part. A short portly man of seventy-five who bears a striking resemblance to Homer Simpson, he speaks English with just the trace of a British inflection – a result of his legal training in London in the 1940s – and is most often photographed in baggy sweat suits. On this day, sitting in his office in the heavily guarded Presidential Compound in downtown Lefkosa, he wears a business suit. The office is spacious and sunlit, and he shares it with a large aquarium of tropical fish and three very noisy parakeets, in a cage beside his massive desk.37

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Denktash could either be an eccentric, an oaf or an imposter of a statesman. In any event, Anderson would have readers believe he leads the unquestioning people of north Cyprus with a uniformity teetering on the brink of despotism. In 1999, Denktash may have been a respected representative of his people, but he certainly had plenty of domestic adversaries, whom Anderson dismisses with alacrity, using not even anecdotal evidence: Even more remarkable is the degree to which his take on the ‘Cyprus problem’ and how to resolve it is shared by his countrymen. If a visitor to the TRNC is not careful, he or she will be subjected to the ‘Denktash history lesson’ by virtually anyone. Across the political spectrum – and with over a dozen political parties, that spectrum runs from hard-socialist to neofascist – nearly all party leaders have adopted Denktash’s talk of a ‘bi-communal confederation,’ even if they can’t quite articulate what that means. To a degree I’ve not encountered in any other ethnic conflict zone in the world – not in Bosnia or Sri Lanka, certainly not in Israel – the Turkish Cypriots appear to speak as one, and they have chosen Rauf Denktash to do the talking.38 Time and political reality have rapidly spoiled Anderson’s confident assessment of the Turks of Cyprus. As fate or unimagined political agency would have it, within a few years of this essay, Denktash was pushed into retirement by the results of democratic elections by his own people. Until his death, he still maintained these posh offices in Nicosia and kept an open door to journalists and other international visitors willing to listen.39 Still, not all Turkish Cypriots so fondly remember him for his stubbornness and reluctance to compromise for a settlement to the problem. At rallies in support of the Annan Plan, his opponents carried placards reading ‘Denktash to the south’. Though ‘Dispatches’ could not have predicted such results, Turkish Cypriots were soon to vote the opposition into power and subsequently support the Denktash-reviled and UN-backed Annan Plan. Their

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‘purported warlord’ found himself marginalized and then out of power through peaceful elections. Repudiating a hard-line nationalist strongman may appear to deliver a gratifying political blow to the forces that have kept Cyprus bogged down in stalemate, but Turkish Cypriots of all sorts find themselves caught up in the collateral damage that tropes of despotism and despair participate in effecting. Anderson’s co-narrator Junger winds up in a similar sort of fatalist stance as he renders his experience on Cyprus into a story. Junger sums up what he sees as the template for intransigence, using superficial prosperity to stand in for a lack of interest in putting in the taxing work of reconciliation: I walk downtown for lunch. The weather has cleared, and English tourists are again out in force. They wander in and out of Gucci and Benetton shops and sit at cafes with their faces turned to the sun. A few blocks away, thousands of Turkish troops wait in bunkers for their orders to attack. It’ll never happen, I think. They already have what they want.40 Greek Cypriots have prosperity and commerce, Europeans have a tourist destination and Turks have their own land with which to do as they please, protected by force from threats of enosis. Junger here creates and then deflates the prospect of future hostilities when he constructs the whole image of soldiers who ‘wait in bunkers for their orders to attack’; he diminishes the threat by casting it as part of a cruel and elaborate performance to nourish the status quo. Fatalism represents an attractive trope for observers looking to make prescient insights into the political situation in Cyprus, but one wonders how much an outsider’s ready concession to this perspective seals off the possibility of any meaningful change. Anderson and Junger both dismiss the bi-communal peace efforts that were beginning to generate some momentum in the 90s, based on their interactions with mournful people like Ayshen, mentioned above, who is herself jaded about the prospects for change. The rhetorical efforts of Denktash and his supporters seems to have led outside observers to believe that Turkish Cypriots and Turks would

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never create grassroots political change, and that momentum for reconciliation would never amount to much. Bi-communal peace activists and international observers, however, have been quick to counter that, just a few years later, these social movements were crucial in changing governments in the north and creating momentum for the Annan Plan, which passed with 65 per cent support in the north, against the will of Denktash and other nationalists in the north. If disconcerted audiences had failed to comprehend the futility of hoping for something better in Cyprus, these writers restate the unpleasant likelihood, often vigorously contested by Cypriots, that ‘by steadfastly clinging to the rhetoric of a quarter-century ago, by stoutly refusing to make any concession, you finally have to conclude that it’s because they want it this way’.41 Anderson and Junger invite readers to see Cyprus, in this regard, as not the problem but the solution. The future of peace does not look so pretty, they argue, but imperfect peace can be stomached more easily than the war zones of the Balkans in the 1990s or the Cyprus of 1955 –74. Near the end of his own contribution to ‘Dispatches’, Anderson narrates his visit to the martyrs’ villages near St Barnabas, which compels him to also mention the mass murders of male Turkish Cypriots in 1974. Despite his cynicism at the outset over the partisan narrative of the Turkish Cypriots, he indulges in the more disturbing aspects of the conflict that materially inform their perspectives. Two villagers explain the massacres of Tashkent (Tochni), they and the interpreter collapse into tears, and the weight of the history saturates the narrative. Whatever else could have transpired during his visit here – what the people desire, how they live – fails to make the final edit, as the freight of history punishes the living. Unburdened by the complexities of people’s daily lives and submerged in political rhetoric, Anderson pushes the trope of ‘sad Cyprus’ as far as it can go. He speculates about how best to interpret and situate Cyprus for general readers and extend its inhabitants’ experiences to the wider affairs of humanity:

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But if the history of Cyprus – indeed, the history of most of the world – reveals anything, it is that there is no such thing as justice: you live in your house until the day someone comes along and throws you out, and then he lives there until someone else comes along to throw him out. Just where do you pinpoint the moment in this island’s history and say, ‘Here, we will right this wrong,’ and let all the previous ones go by the wayside? Obviously, you cannot afford to go very far back, because in Cyprus, as everywhere else, there is always a prior victim.42 Ultimately, people are tortured souls – no match for the relentless, daily recurrence of history. What these reporters have seen of war and suffering in Cyprus, in Sri Lanka, in the Balkans and elsewhere informs their rhetorical purpose and haunts their narration. They demonstrate little capacity, however, to layer story upon story – to imagine the stories not being told, the ones that come with confidence, with intimacy. For political correspondents like Junger and Anderson, who travel to destinations on budgets and deadlines, not to mention the day-tripping Christopher Hitchens described earlier, those types of stories are undeniably harder to come by and probably less welcome in the travel-narrative-as-political-theory discourse they produce. Compared to the texts of Hitchens, MacHugh and RowanMoorhouse, the landscape itself speaks a more coherent political narrative here, but one that nonetheless elides cultural differences within the respective communities. The politics arrive with convincing depth and clarity, perhaps because of rhetorical purpose – the desire to analogize Cyprus with the ongoing tensions in the Balkans. Yet a story like ‘Dispatches’ cannot help but feel unfinished, partial and ultimately unambitious for its unwillingness to imagine different possibilities for encounter, identification and creative relationships with Cypriot interlocutors, who too often seem like a stock set of over-determined characters. What might be possible, for example, when relations of travel occur during a more extended stay in a place – rather than days or weeks? What might happen differently if one lives for months in a place, meeting people who are

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not necessarily affiliated with governments or speaking on behalf of political parties? What other tropes and ethical relationships could emerge by visiting the barracks of Turkish soldiers stationed in the north, the businesses of Turkish Cypriots who used to work with the British, frustrated members of the Maronite community, opinionated Danish peacekeepers and others often unseen and unvoiced in the travel narration of Cyprus? To my knowledge, only one text of that sort actually exists about the north.

Letting in Light on the Dark Side: Oliver Burch’s Troping of North Cyprus Those who do encounter the Turks of Cyprus for more than the sporadic day trip have found that inquiry into people’s experiences, desires, needs and obligations can produce some of the same stories and tropes from the day trip travel account, such as fatalism, sombreness and cultural uniformity. Yet these primarily pejorative conceptions of the north represent only a cover story that gives way to more complicated folds of cultural experience. Not surprisingly, given international restrictions and boycotts of the north, few such accounts exist. The Infidel Sea: Travels in North Cyprus by Oliver Burch serves as the only book-length travelogue set in the north of Cyprus after 1974, and the text – created by someone with more moxie than travel writing credentials – demonstrates the potential value of stories uncompromised by agenda and comparatively less circumscribed by restrictions of time and space. Burch’s intriguing narration of life in the north in the late 1980s has apparently failed to reach and inform subsequent narrators like MacHugh and Rowan-Moorhouse, for whom Turkish Cypriots are easy-to-grasp caricatures.43 Taken in comparison, Infidel Sea presents a much more complicated picture of the people in the north, offering a richer sense of the challenge and possibility of negotiated and balanced ethical narration. In particular, he threads into his accounts of the north and its people more of his own subjective screens – such as nation, civilization and personal prejudice – than any traveller considered to this point in this study. And during his months living

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in the north with his wife and two young boys, he comes to know less abstract, more vulnerable and more interesting people than the political heavies imagined by (and trotted out for) so many previous and subsequent narrators of the north: People, for example, who bear their own internal political and cultural divisions, provincial prejudices and personal anxieties about what the future holds for them in the limbo of political life in the north. Burch’s 1990 travelogue takes at least some effort to explain the historical sentiments that have rendered Turks, from the birth of the Ottoman Empire in the fourteenth century, as suspicious and fearsome to Britons and other Europeans. In constructing a history of this phobia, Burch essentially traffics in familiar Orientalist cliche´s. His narrative begins an opening foray into the trope of terror through its unnecessarily ominous title, based on an evening departure from London: ‘Night Flight’. He depicts Cyprus, as a whole, as ‘an outpost of a series of Western civilizations which met the shock of more primeval forces from the East which flowed around it like a hostile sea.’44 Burch seamlessly exchanges ‘hostile’ for ‘infidel’ in describing the eastern Mediterranean waters that surround Cyprus. He even narrates the island’s history from the perspective of Greek Cypriots when he explains at the outset that, ‘In 1974 the infidel sea betrayed them again.’45 ‘These’ Cypriots do not happen to be the Turkish kind, and the narrator posits a sense of European identity that is inclusive of Greeks and Greek Cypriots, but unclear about where to locate Turks of Turkey or Cyprus46 – certainly not within the family of European, Western or other more civilized peoples. In outlining his own thesis for European sentiments towards Turks, he chooses not to burden the language with diplomacy: But, even as a western European, I was aware that my own psyche contained a racial memory, a legacy of those long border struggles between civilisations, cultures and religions, an almost instinctive fear of malevolent forces which come from the East. This racial memory can be found all over Europe. ‘He’s a Tartar,’ they say in England of a man with a dangerous temper.

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‘There are Moors on the coast,’ they say in Spain, when times are troubled.47 Burch further confesses that growing up in the UK and Europe meant considerable exposure to negative stereotypes of Turks: Edmund Spencer, Delacroix and others offer unveiled contempt and precious little in the way of complimentary remarks on Turks through history. Other critics have painstakingly documented these historical grudges impressed upon cultural memories.48 Burch’s travelogue at least makes the effort to acknowledge that European travel writers bear the burden of such prejudice. The extent to which Burch actually challenges these assumptions remains a separate question. After putting his civilizational cards on the table, he makes numerous rhetorical gestures that convey the civility, warmth and hospitality of Turks in Cyprus, and thus appears to be interrogating his own prejudice, as forecast at the outset of his narrative. Should his encounters and narration be taken to demonstrate a change of heart or an ethical achievement in a land and among people so regularly configured through negative tropes? And how could his experiences be so different from other travellers – why might he get along so well with Turkish Cypriots and come to know them better than most others have before and after? One primary reason for this writer’s constructive encounters with the Turks of Cyprus concerns the way he meets people: as an unhurried traveller based in the north, thus positioned to meet people in the evenings or early in the morning, and without the fear of penalty for failing to reach the Green Line before a day pass expires. Another factor may include his status as a husband and parent, travelling with his wife Joan and two boys, age nine and ten, in a region where tourists have repeatedly been warned not to visit because of its illegal status and lack of emergency resources normally available to travellers who could seek out embassies or consulates in a difficult situation. Burch probably earns many people’s respect by demonstrating a willingness to trust that he and his family will be safe and content in north Cyprus. As mentioned earlier, Colin Thubron’s concern was that people in the Middle East might have

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assumed him to be a spy or otherwise suspect. Whether the grounds for trust were justifiable or not, having children present likely dispelled some of this potential mistrust and made Burch more approachable to those he met. Finally, the writer’s nationality and language appear to serve him well, although others, like MacHugh, Rowan-Moorhouse and Hitchens, do not always appear to enjoy similar goodwill. Contrary to the logic that would assume people in the north to be distrustful of the British for their role in the island’s troubles or any perceived historic hostilities with Turkey and Turks, nationality and language put Burch into a position of shared cultural affinities with many Turkish Cypriots. Turkish Cypriot men and women worked on British sovereign bases in Cyprus in the 1950s and 60s, and men served as auxiliaries or guides during the counter-insurgency against EOKA. After Burch makes a promise to a new acquaintance from his travels, for example, the man tells him and his wife: ‘as you are an Englishman, I know that you will keep your word’.49 These subjective dimensions have much to do with how and why the writer’s narrative allows for some light to penetrate the ‘dark side’. While the narrator and his family’s cultural identity certainly comes into play, Burch focuses throughout on far more interesting and typically less examined storylines regarding cultural identity and character of the Turks of Cyprus and the land where they live. In the case of Famagusta, Burch puts his fair share of energy into whimsical discussion of what makes a city oriental and poses the question of Famagusta’s proper cartographic location: East or West? What he sees and hears of Famagusta convinces him that, if he was not in the East before, he has now arrived: ‘it seemed to us that [Famagusta] was an oriental city’.50 He continues, ‘One might imagine oneself in the old quarters of Damascus or Jerusalem, but surely this could not be Europe?’ A nargile fired up, along with the sight of a Turkish bride in a ‘winged head-dress of Central Asia’ confirms the status of this city as at least a gateway to the Orient.51 By the way, for Burch, ‘orient’ here likely includes signifiers like the following: mosques, palm trees, mainland Turks and poverty. So what does that mean for the rest of the north? Has the light been cast on the rest of the Turkish

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Cypriots to keep them out of the darkness of the orient? For all his self-effacing concern about representation, Infidel Sea is still deeply indebted to earlier travel writers and the discourses of colonialism.52 With the prejudices of history churning in the background, Burch navigates through some ethical challenges more deftly than others. Much like Thubron, Burch generally prefers to concentrate on the words and profiles of the people he visits, and none are more important than Salih. Burch dedicates The Infidel Sea to Salih, the kindly, cultured and industrious Turkish Cypriot gardener and handyperson who works at the villa where Burch’s family stays. Salih quickly impresses Burch – through his words and deeds – as a person whose character is antithetical to stereotypes of the indolent or unworldly Turk.53 He speaks four languages and consistently works long days. He is also the first of many Turkish Cypriots Burch meets who worked as an auxiliary for the British, an historical reality that becomes just one of many that distinguishes these Turks of Cyprus from mainland Turks.54 Salih demonstrates how some Turks of Cyprus participate in their own debasement when he remarks on the odd hitchhiking behaviour of three men he and Burch pass on the road: ‘“Lazy Turkish mens”, he murmured. “Cyprus no is Evropa”.’55 Another Turkish Cypriot, this one a young man born in London and working on a construction project in Famagusta, also bemoans what he sees as the indolence of other Turkish Cypriots. He explains that he has a contract because the people of the town are ‘too bloody lazy’ to do the project on their own.56 Rather than emerging from the travel writer, indictments concerning the lack of sufficient personal industry come from Turkish Cypriots themselves – granted, Burch may have considered these self-criticisms too intriguing to leave out; he may also be using them as a form of political cover: ‘Look, it’s not about me thinking people do not work hard enough – they believe it of themselves.’ Like many who travel with the motive to encounter cultural difference, Burch appears to prefer Turkish Cypriots as they are – somewhat frozen in time, disconnected from Europe, isolated economically and culturally – rather than how they might turn out

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should they continue looking to the West for inspiration. For example, he bemoans the occasional ‘weakness’ of Turkish Cypriots for the allure of French or European style, when the indigenous, ‘authentic’ Cypriot style surpasses it in craft and meaning.57 But there remains plenty of space for a distinctive character, as ample evidence and encounters demonstrate that Turkish Cypriots are secular, drinkers and ascetics, with the exception of their fondness, upon finding financial success, for the beloved Mercedes.58 Turks of Cyprus who interact with Burch assert a curious, distinctive racial identity, as when the narrator asks a restaurant owner about the future, and who will help the Turkish Cypriots: ‘Take my word for it, we must look to Europe. The other Muslim countries have nothing in common with us but the religion. Look how the Arabs treat their women; they still make them cover their faces. We are Europeans and we are white. What have we in common with people like that? Besides, the Arabs are all busy trading with the Greeks. I came to London one time, to visit friends, and everywhere there were rich Arabs. One day, in a restaurant, I was almost the only white man there. I found that extraordinary. I did not expect that in England.’ ‘You have some Negroes here.’ ‘Ah, but they are Turks, not Africans.’59 Cultural logics fuelled by sexist or racist abstractions concerning the status of women or the colour of people’s skin appear here and elsewhere in Infidel Sea, often with little contextual clarification.60 However, in this passage comes a dialogue that explicitly addresses what other writers and informants have only alluded to earlier: that Cyprus is European and Cypriots (Greek and Turkish) are white; further, this particular Turkish Cypriot informant suggests that some of the Turks are the ‘negroes’ of Cyprus.61 When an Englishman refers to ‘negroes’ in Cyprus and a Turkish Cypriot answers ‘yes – but not from Africa’, one would be foolish not to allow for the possibility of a misunderstanding between the two speakers. One interpretation could be that Burch was referring to dark-complexioned Turkish

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Cypriots or Turks of Famagusta, some of whom have the blood and physical appearance of black Africans.62, 63 This particular Turkish Cypriot may be referring to not only skin colour but also to migrant workers from Anatolia who now find themselves at the lower rung of a class or caste system that produces whiteness and darkness to demarcate ‘authentic’ Cypriot identity.64 If the narrator had any discomfort at the prejudice displayed by Turkish Cypriots against mainland Turks, he does not share this with readers; instead, he identifies with the often English-speaking Turks of Cyprus, like Sevinc Bayraktar, a woman Burch and his family helped with a broken-down car. Ms Bayraktar invites the Burches to dinner with her husband, a man fond of politics who enjoys the company of people interested in hearing his views on Cyprus. Over more than one bottle of raki, Mr Bayraktar appears not to disappoint, holding forth on a range of issues. His description of the Turks who have moved to Cyprus after 1974 illustrates the extent of the perceived differences between Turks of Cyprus and the migrant workers from Turkey: ‘they are all nomads who don’t trust the rule of law. If there’s a problem, they solve it themselves because they don’t trust the authorities. If they can’t resolve it they go back to Turkey. It’s their way.’65, 66 Burch documents this prejudice without comment, choosing not to wonder how ‘all’ of these apparently undesirable people could be nomads of the sort suggested here. Most certainly, they represent considerably more socio-economic diversity than suggested by the accounts of islanders unaccustomed to living with outsiders. In my own travels in Cyprus, I have met Turks from the mainland who have worked seasonally in restaurants and hotels and year-round in sectors like education and finance. Relations between Turkish Cypriots and people from Turkey of diverse socio-economic or regional backgrounds are not always so simple or comparable. Travellers and visitors to Cyprus cannot so easily perceive internal differences concerning Turks and Turkish Cypriots living in the north. If a visitor raised the topic with a nationalist Turkish Cypriot or Turk, the issue may be brushed aside, since dissatisfaction with life in the north is used against them politically. Burch, however, manages to meet people like the Bayraktars, whose stories and

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impressions, though not uniformly glowing, disrupt the monolith of the north as the dark side. She explains to the narrator how Greeks in Limassol helped and comforted her in 1974, when she was in danger.67, 68 In another example, she complains about the presence of Turkish soldiers in near proximity to Kyrenia and claims that this probably kills tourism and deprives Turkish Cypriots of the outside contact they desire.69 A profound ethical challenge to Burch concerns the level of complexity he will allow for these contentious cultural differences. Seamus MacHugh probably misspoke of ‘Turkish Cypriot’ gangs roaming the Green Line in Nicosia, whom I imagined to be off-duty conscripts from Turkey; given the opportunity to travel in the north at greater length, he, too, may have learned of further socio-cultural cleavages among the hundreds of thousands of Turkish men who have completed their military service in Cyprus. When he does chime in on the distinctions he perceives among Turks, Burch remarks on the superior human quality of ‘privates in the conscript army’, whom he prefers to the NCOs and officers, whom he considers to be ‘another breed’.70 These primarily mainland Turks win his heart with their kindness. Perhaps Burch did not entirely trust the sincerity of these warm encounters, however. To insulate his affections against what could be an elaborate and well-orchestrated ruse, Burch suggests that these soldiers have been ‘carefully instructed to show every consideration to foreigners, for the authorities were desperate to reestablish tourism, which had virtually dried up after the invasion’.71 This considerable attention to the motives of ordinary soldiers’ kindness – Were they just following orders? Are they from different social classes, with different levels of exposure to Western cultures? – leaves out other worthy possibilities: they could have been genuinely kind, deathly bored and starved for outside human contact, curious about who would be visiting Cyprus at this time and so forth.72 Burch’s apparent dislike of Turkish officers presents yet another intriguing case of how national identity represents an underlying current that informs the encounters of the narrator with people of the north. Elsewhere in Infidel Sea, the narrator reveals almost no negative sentiments toward people he meets, but here the tension seems

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palpable.73 One wonders if the animosity he develops – augmented by the views of Danish members of the UN forces who also disliked the Turkish military – is because these men have been more broadly indoctrinated in Turkish nationalist narratives and motivated to serve Turkey’s interests. Turks of Turkey and Turks of Cyprus have a divergent historical relationship to the British; for the former, the British were World War I rivals who occupied Istanbul; for the latter, they were an imperfect political buffer between themselves and enosis. As a traveller sympathetic to the landscape of Cyprus, he prefers to hear the nostalgic views of Turkish Cypriots who worked with the British in the colonial era, some of whom longed for them to remain in Cyprus as rulers beyond 1959. If the north continues to be plagued by tropes of darkness, Burch’s inquisitive eyes land on the agents of Turkey to explain the source of this misfortune. Taken as a whole, Infidel Sea surpasses most other travelogues by rescuing the people of the island – in this case Turkish Cypriots – from the trope of victimized other and allowing them to be credible, complicated historical subjects. Few other travel accounts of life and culture in Cyprus would allow one to gather as much about the north. Burch’s text creates space for credible counter-narratives to the dominant accounts of Turkish and Greek Cypriot nationalist discourse, making readers wonder about both the veracity and utility of the same sad stories of Cyprus. Burch’s extended stay in the north is not quite the dark side promised by the other narrators of ‘occupied Cyprus’, but rather an illuminating account of a complicated sociopolitical world. As a narrator, he has journeyed into what some may purport to be a fault line between European and Eastern civilizations; he discovers that the lines are never as clear as they appear from a distance, and that the layers of cultural complexity in the north of Cyprus tend to proliferate endlessly. Only an unusually singular-minded or unreachable visitor could fail to apprehend the scars of unresolved conflict and the enduring effects of war. Travel narratives and literature that does exist from 1974 to the present era cannot help but reflect the politics of prolonged conflict, challenging writers with daunting physical and political conundrums like the following: which Cyprus should be

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visited, the internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus of the Greek Cypriots or the unrecognized and (as-of-this-writing) still under EU sanction north of the Turkish Cypriots? And at what political and personal costs, especially since the nation-states and travel agencies of Europe and the world essentially follow the Greek Cypriot policy that views travel to the north as illegal, even dangerous? Under these circumstances visitors come to know Cyprus. For people living in the north of Cyprus, most travel writing of the partition era narrates the space they call their home with respect and responsibility for Greek Cypriots displaced by the fighting of 1974. In limited contact with Turkish Cypriots and Turks living in north Cyprus, most writers have typically produced what one would expect from casual contact with a land and people stigmatized beforehand as sorrowful, isolated, impoverished and controlled by outsiders. Turks of Cyprus, in other words, have been left largely out of the picture when writers construct their ethical appeals. When incorporated into the imagination of a travelling writer like Oliver Burch, who comes to know them better than most, the troping takes on a series of compelling twists: Turkish Cypriots given voice through his narration invite themselves into the European family and appear by and large to be welcome, though some of their ethnic kin from Turkey remain suspect for a variety of reasons. Culturally naturalized qualities like anti-materialism and even poverty are offered political and economic justifications – people who lived through inter-communal fighting and enclaves assert their preference to sacrifice prosperity if that will bring security. And long racial memories that saturate the literature of contact between east and west find little real correspondence with the realities of people living in the north. Writers have configured the partition-era north as inherently and singularly dark. After examining the ethical production of these texts, one can be fairly confident that the forces that keep out the light often accompany the writer from the place of origin, rather than emanating radiantly and self-evidently from the destination itself.

CHAPTER 6 TOWARD AN ETHICS OF ENCOUNTER FOR TRAVEL AND TRAVEL WRITING

Denken ist danken, Martin Heidegger wrote: thought is gratitude. Thanking consists in receiving with embracing hands what is given, holding it together, and showing it to, sharing it with, others. Speaking and writing about what one has seen, and experienced – what one has been given – can be thoughtful, can be thankful. Thoughtful speaking and writing put forth the overall design and inner force of the data – the given – detailing their aspects and inner relationships for view, sharing them with others. Thoughtfulness begins in opening one’s heart to what is given. It involves vulnerability and risk. (Alphonso Lingis, Trust, p. 195) Most travel writers, whether they consider travel writing as work, as a product of leisure or even as an ethical act, would want to have their work considered ‘thoughtful speaking and writing’. Alphonso Lingis, philosopher, teacher and, in the passage above, advocate for ethical travel, locates ‘the given’ with ‘the experienced’, and thus compels in speaking and writing an attention to the personal. Rather than the detached abstraction so common in travel narration – with

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its monarchical tropes, its certainty of claims on culturally-specific topics like poverty and rationality – he imagines how the traveller, speaker and writer needs to be present, available to others and to the effects of telling stories. The narration of experiences to others, with others, presents ‘vulnerability and risk’. Lingis suggests a practice that would satisfy Dean MacCannell’s call for contemporary travellers to break with habits that have become routinized to the detriment of travel’s promise. MacCannell recognizes the potential impact of travel, unrealized and uncertain as it is, when he writes: It is only by rigorous and consistent application of ethics to action that human beings can become more courageous, temperate, liberal, generous, magnanimous, self-respecting, gentle, and just. At the nexus of ethics and tourism there should be hope (as the charter of the World Travel Organization states) for increasing human virtue corresponding to the growth of tourist travel and sightseeing. Or not.1 This appeal to put ‘ethics to action’ can be realized when writers acknowledge the importance of fidelity to the ‘inner force of the data’ and a personal role in the telling of stories. Stories of travel are quotidian, part of global cultural landscapes; they are told regularly and will continue to be shared by travellers and consumed by heterogeneous audiences. Given this reality, scholars, critics, travel writers, travellers and audiences of travel narration can hardly deny the ethical dimensions of travel and travel writing. Thubron, in discussing part of Chatwin’s alleged genius, lauds his ability to write the way he does, not owing anyone anything. Of course, such a simple calculus also fails to appreciate that the stories of travel one writes with such ease become part of what fixes people in geopolitical space: they were not owed a debt, but they pay the bill nonetheless. Ethical travel writing, then, becomes so much more than just telling the story a writer desires. To realize the potential of travel narration as a transformative practice, desire itself requires

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more critical scrutiny and narrative centrality than most travellers have been willing to afford. As the analysis of travel writing in Cyprus demonstrates, travel, travel writing and the consumption of travel texts involves complicated configurations of motive, with varying degrees of responsibility to others and openness to risks. I argue for a rhetorical response to the challenge of ethical narration in travel encounters. Rhetorical travel narration of the sort I have in mind compels openness to others as well as critical interrogation and display of personal motives and effects of narration on heterogeneous audiences. Such an approach offers an ethical mandate and a point of departure for future projects of travel, writing and encounters with difference. Perhaps the very fear of uncomfortable contingencies like ‘vulnerability and risk’ leads writers to seal themselves off from complicity in the current status quo, distort their experiences during travel or cast generalizing and putative claims from afar about other people. Though measures of this sort may sometimes produce winning results for imagined audiences back home, the victory comes at a cost. Post-colonial and other critiques on the effects of travel and travel narration have noted the perils in travel writing and its representation of others. For centuries, great texts from the Western traditions of travel – such as Homer’s Odyssey, Marco Polo’s Travels, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad and many others – have made their aesthetic mark on Western literary traditions and helped to establish the value of humanistic inquiry. These travel stories sometimes demonstrate self-reflective, analytical thinking of narrators and characters, an appreciation for the value, indeed the necessity of historical awareness and a growing acknowledgement of global interconnectedness. At the same time, these texts also can be said to participate in the consolidation of divisive cultural and material borders that make travel and travel writing anything but an innocent enterprise. The continuity of such stories testifies to the genre’s power and authority while simultaneously providing textual evidence of how societies and civilizations configure travel as a means of producing fear of others.

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Future travellers associated by nation or culture with the journeys and narratives of their predecessors may face a burden not easily understood nor removed; as for the people of landscapes that have been distorted by the stories of travellers, they live with the prejudices attached to their names. Domestic audiences that absorb such stories tend to carry on with their cultural and economic privileges intact. Travel writing on Cyprus constitutes a particularly challenging body of texts through which to investigate the ethical aspects of travel writing and storytelling. The land and landscape have been marked by colonization, ethno-national conflict and an unresolved war between two proud communities that are, themselves, former subjects differentially linked to imperialism and colonialism. Unsurprisingly, then, the travel writing about this place and people often depends on, and restricts itself to, tropes of interminable conflict. Though one cannot narrate Cyprus without speaking of war and conflict, too few are the travel texts that recognize just how many particular and competing stories of war and conflict exist among Cypriots.2 This study of travel narratives and first-person writing set in Cyprus can inform possibilities for how to proceed critically in imagining ethos in the rhetorical situations of travel, with implications for the travel writer, editor, publisher and consumer of travel writing today. Travel, travel writing and reading are rhetorical acts that are inherently ethical, compelling us to make a place for ethos and the personal in aesthetic and critical approaches to imagination, production and interpretation of these experiences and their textual effects. An ethics of travel, travel writing, publishing of texts and their subsequent consumption and circulation by global audiences interrogates motives for travel, ways of travelling, the rhetorical dimensions of narration and the diverse audiences for whom such texts matter. While I do not mean to naively discount the stories of those whose travels rationalize empire and colonialism, I do see possibilities to own up to, write against, and otherwise account for the legacies and traditions of travel narration. Syed Manzurul Islam, a scholar particularly interested in establishing an ethics of travel writing, identifies the challenge as nothing less than to imagine how

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a genre that functions as a ‘machine of othering’, troping essential difference at every turn, can be more than this.3 He directs us, for example, to Italo Calvino’s contention that travel texts tend to systematically erase the point of origin – Marco Polo’s Venice in his case, Lawrence Durrell’s nomadic colonial past in the case of writing set in Cyprus – and displace traces of a genealogy that has everything to do with a particularized construction of the other.4 Calvino’s critique shifts the focus from the cities of the travelled landscape to the city of the narrator’s origin. If there is any truth to Durrell’s contention that ‘landscape determines character’, perhaps it is no less credible to acknowledge and account for how ‘identity determines narration’. In rhetorical terms, this means calling upon travellers, whose narration routinely looks to either elide or uncritically exalt the self, to make personal, subjective screens part of the story and part of the encounter. This is no easy matter, of course, especially when a writer chooses to publish and thus tether responsibilities to editors, publishers and markets – constituencies often fixated, naturally, with the story and its aesthetics. For moments of optimism against the weight of colonization’s legacy, Islam notes that ethical travel writing is possible, and it occurs when lived experience, language and narration disrupts borders, as travellers and their texts fall off the maps, break through rigid lines and embrace difference and opposition.5 To accomplish such ethical travel and travel writing, we would be wise to revisit the notion that subjective positions like writer, traveller, tourist, postcolonial critic, publisher, transnational activist, scholar and studentwriter always already arrive as distinct, often oppositional terms. All, I argue, share the ethical challenge of writing about difference.

Ethics of Narration in the Travel Texts in Cyprus In the case of Cyprus, the corpus of primarily book-length travelogues and related genres from Lawrence Durrell to the modern era includes the texts of literary luminaries, political pundits, foreign correspondents, enterprising expatriate travel writers, scholars who write personal narratives and others. Each negotiates the ethical

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landscape according to varying dimensions of subjective experience and rhetorical purposes. Anxiety over risk and responsibility, as examined in the opening epigram by Lingis, may have led Bitter Lemons memoirist Lawrence Durrell to self-serving lies and distortions, such as the dramatic and fictionalized killing of a Greek Cypriot friend at the close of his narrative or the troping of Turks as mysterious creatures of cold-blooded composition. Diverse motives could be read into Durrell’s subordination of the given and experienced to such brazen strokes of fiction disguised as lived experience. Perhaps he intuited that such wrinkles made for the better story. For certain, Durrell’s narration strikes back at the anti-colonialist social movements and guerrilla campaign that had soured Cyprus for him. Perhaps his heart had already been so pained by the betrayal of the Greek Cypriots against the British Empire and the traditions of Anglo-Greek amity that he could imagine no other story. Or maybe Turkish Cypriots were too irresistible as cultural material saturated with symbolic potential. Rather than embrace their differences, he uses Turks as a distant canvas on which to project myriad Orientalist tropes. Had he lived, spoken and written Bitter Lemons more personally enmeshed in ‘the givens’ of Cyprus, more open to its stories, a different, more ethical text may have come of it. Some writers make more substantial investments in getting into the details of experiences, opening one’s heart – or at least small parts of it, in select places – to the quotidian, the people, the landscape. Had this been the case with Bitter Lemons, the narration may have been a touch less bitter and perhaps become no less famous. Though Durrell shares the regular and personal company of some Cypriots, they become more distant to him throughout the narrative. Political circumstances and personal choices disable opportunities for intimacy and too often Durrell narrates primarily from a distance. Subsequent writers – Colin Thubron, but also Oliver Burch and Yiannis Papadakis – have demonstrated more investment in establishing personal relationships and arranging close contact with people in Cyprus. The latter two writers fare better ethically in terms of their narrator’s availability to change, sense of reciprocity and

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critical self-awareness. Thubron’s narrative takes us into the given, the exceptionally ordinary, as well as, on occasion, the personal; however, he compromises his intimacy with a distance that keeps his interlocutors at arm’s length. The chauvinisms and darker achievements of nationalism and empire fail to reach his narrating core, an aesthetically motivated, self-contained narrator. Thubron’s Journey is driven at times by an ethos wishful for an end to the conflict, yet less open to being moved to personal change by the people and land of his 1972 travels in Cyprus. I call his narrating perspective ‘intimate distance’, a position of value and power that finds its ethical capacity sometimes restricted by the traveller’s or narrator’s reluctance to be fully present to others. All too often, transformation is imagined as a gift bequeathed from the narrator to the people of Cyprus – in the form of respecting antiquities, loving one’s neighbour and showing good manners in not interrogating the travel writer, since said traveller is supposed to be the one asking the questions. Cypriots and their storied landscape ultimately earn his respect and affection, but readers fail to perceive that any core has been moved. Debbie Lisle argues that no degree of decorum or distance should be used to occlude inequalities of power. She writes: ‘My point is that questions of power – and of historically constituted power relations – absolutely cannot be sidestepped in tourism encounters, no matter how “respectful” the distance might be between selves and Others’.6 In fact, as I argue in Chapter Four, Thubron performs his most accomplished ethical, engaged writing when he charges through the barriers of respectful distance to acknowledge how national identity and cultural education inform his relations to the people he meets in Cyprus. Lisle appears to locate responsibility in the reading preferences and habits of those who consume travel stories. We fail, she suggests, to demand enough of ourselves and the stories we desire: ‘What we require, it seems to me, are more agonistic and ambivalent understandings of tourist encounters that force us to confront our permanent complicity in the structures of inequality, injustice and violence we spend so much of our time trying to alleviate.’7 Travelling storytellers, I hasten to add, cannot accomplish this work alone. Audiences, too, must begin to more

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consistently demand texts that operate within these less politically sanitized and more ambivalent frameworks. In the post-1974 partition-era of Cyprus, where travellers and writers have faced politically-determined restrictions of movement, as well as the symbolic and material challenges of representing the Green Line and other dead zones, encountering others has everything to do with how writers negotiate travel experiences in the midst of unresolved war. For the Turkish Cypriots, who live in the north and whose mother country, Turkey, often finds itself singularly culpable for the current political landscape of the island, travel writing exists largely as a genre that produces a phenomenon I call ‘day-tripping to the dark side’. Most travellers to Cyprus see the north from the ‘free’, Greek-controlled Republic of Cyprus. The narration of the north typically unfolds from the discursive landscape shaped by its co-islanders in the south, whereby its politically contentious features become determinant of its character and ultimate value: a place of sadness, exploitation, disempowerment, neglect and economic stagnation. For those travellers based in the south but willing to visit what many Greek Cypriots and much of the world refers to as ‘the occupied north’, some of these tropes become more complicated, as narrators scan the landscape for signs of meaning to satisfy their curiosities and rhetorical purposes. Christopher Hitchens, Libby Rowan-Moorhouse and Seamus MacHugh, who write before the 2003 opening of the Green Line to almost unrestricted travel, in the respective genres of political memoir, travelogue and travel guidebook, afford audiences some insight into the cultural life of the north. Hitchens’s greatest oversight and narrating weakness is to configure Cypriots themselves as only minor players in their own national tragedy; he chooses instead to focus on and refute the widely circulating and also insufficiently explanatory belief that ancient hatreds have produced the suffering of Cyprus. Yet in his often brilliant analysis of contemporary global political developments in Cyprus like colonialism, the Cold War and a relatively ineffectual international commitment to the island, the people of the island seem invisible and powerless.

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Rowan-Moorhouse fails to register much beyond a forbidding and pathetic landscape; the only Turk she meets, her driver, is rendered as a sort of domesticated bogeyman: sad, trapped and himself a victim of Turkey’s whims and malice. Her own sympathies, quite understandably, rest with her hosts, whose stories of the history of Cyprus she has come to know, whose newspapers she reads, whose air, land, and food she shares as a resident of a village in the south. Her narration of Cyprus may win favour among some audiences, particularly expatriates and Greek Cypriots. For Turkish Cypriots, with whom she has no relations and sense of their experiences and histories, her narration fails to acknowledge that the north and its people remain, inherently, utterly unimaginable. As MacCannell asserts in Ethics of Sightseeing, ‘The ultimate ethical test for tourists is whether they can realize the productive potential of their travel desires or whether they allow themselves to become mere ciphers of arrangements made for them.’8 On both sides of the divided island, the people and landscape challenge visitors to competing versions of ‘the truth’; a wise and ethical narrator’s first qualification should concern the difficulty of producing something different from what has been carefully scripted by partisans on each side of the conflict. Aside from a few sobering remarks about the unlikelihood of his desires, MacHugh – the final day-tripper of this genre – just wishes that these formerly peaceful neighbours of north and south could get along again and live together. That would mean that his hosts, the ‘truer’ Cypriots, could at least return to visit, perhaps to mourn, their lost homes, orchards and possessions. Neither writer makes too much of his or her own personal investment, desire and experience, though each reveals emotional effects of travel and company shared among people living in such proximity to painful memories and seemingly intractable conflict. Ethos can perhaps be measured instead, if imperfectly, by the values implicit in the writer’s articulation of a transformed landscape – wherein certain myths could meet their makers. Scott Anderson and Sebastian Junger create a story of Cyprus that marks the logical endpoint of the absurdity of Green Line narration, as each writer travels to and interprets the respective party-line rhetoric of north and south in an effort to offer Cyprus not as the interminable

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problem to ethno-national difference and conflict but as the sober solution to stanch the bleeding. A narrator able to be affected by the landscape and its people travels to the island like a patient going for medicine. In terms of personal revelation, the narrators convey a razoredged cynicism that overrides more personal encounters and effects. By the end, each writer has tired of the intransigence of Greek and Turkish Cypriots locked in dead-end postures of self-righteousness. Their over-determined encounters with Cyprus have afforded them with cover stories that fit conveniently into muscular, rigid geopolitical realities that only the most cynical people of Cyprus and beyond would find satisfying. Rather the opposite of MacHugh and Rowan-Moorhouse, Anderson and Junger narrate the contours of a landscape where the best chance of peace continues to mean more of the same. Getting to know the other has meant surrendering to unpleasant realities. Their abortively political telos conspires against the grey areas of cultural conflict. Seeing the future of Cyprus, for the most part, means talking to men in politics, rather than men, women and children outside the most public sphere. Thus, their purpose and mode of narration seals them off from those in Cyprus who might continue to dream of and long for something different, for cracks in the monolith. English auto-mechanic cum travel writer Oliver Burch, his wife and their two children experience partition-era northern Cyprus with an intensity and intimacy not found in most foreign travel texts. At times, Burch eclipses the distance so often erected and maintained between traveller and local, Briton and Turkish Cypriot. Unlike Thubron, for example, he often plunges immediately into politics, if the occasion so warrants. He narrates many of his own commitments to and affiliations with nation, race and history. With the invitation of these rhetorical dimensions to the narration comes a questioning of knowledge and convictions. Rather than attempt to reduce emerging complexities of the north, Burch leaves these open for future exploration. Contradictions show little capacity for easy resolution and, without easy answers, the narration approaches the ethics of encounter imagined by Lingis. Burch travels with gratitude for his encounters, even some of the painful or uncomfortable ones that writers and editors looking to smooth over some of the bumps and

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hiccups of cultural contact might otherwise have excised. He locates his own racial prejudice as part of the story of Cyprus, making efforts to address these subjective dimensions of narration – however imperfectly – with respect and responsibility for both Turks and Greeks of Cyprus, as well as for the British domestic audiences that have consumed travel narration for centuries. Apart from Burch’s, published in 1990, no other book-length travelogue of the north exists; too small is the market and perhaps too heavy is the political price for supporting such an effort. Though more of the same would always be the safest prediction concerning the future of travel discourse on Cyprus, the emergence of hybrid-genre narratives does offer something in the way of ethical alternatives to the status quo. Editors at respected periodicals like The Atlantic Monthly may fear the island or doubt its safety or tourist potential, but such predictable ignorance has not prevented mobile activists, scholars and writers of different nationalities to set their sights on it and embrace the task of narrating its landscape.9 Their work has begun to penetrate the formidable shell that sustains protracted conflict and its attendant fatalism.

Ethnographic Travel Writing: Ethos Alive and Enervating the Dead Zone What might an ethical travel narrative look like, and can a traveller take measures that would more likely produce such an experience and story? In the preface to the second edition of his book Cultural Intimacy, anthropologist Michael Herzfeld sets out his vision of the ethical challenge of representing others while engaged in the study of cultures: While we still study society and culture ethnographically – that is, by describing the minutiae of everyday life at a fairly microscopic level – our work is done in the context of far larger dynamics in which we ourselves are willy-nilly cast as the representatives of powerful and sometimes hated external forces. Nor can we ignore these entailments as our predecessors

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sometimes did with such blissful ease. To many people throughout the world we are both signs and the agents of an intrusion, not just into private lives, but also into the privacy of nations.10 Though Herzfeld’s primary audience may be scholars and students in his discipline, the message he delivers could as well apply to travellers and writers: tread lightly and cautiously, aware of ‘larger dynamics’,’ ‘entailments’, and the disruption to personal and national privacy inherent in experiences like travelling, writing and otherwise encountering and being present for others. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said refers to shifts occurring within the discourse of the Middle East Studies Association, which led to the emergence of ‘a metropolitan story of cultural opposition to Western domination’ and ‘a new receptivity to both liberation movements and postcolonial criticism’.11 Said speaks foremost about scholarly, popular, and other forms of representation of the Arab world; he aspires, in general terms, to promote discursive production leading to the growth ‘of independence, of human rights, and freedom from outside (often imperialist) interference and internal corruption or collaboration’.12 As a writer committed to the ethical examination of internal struggles within both communities of Cyprus and, to a lesser degree, the tensions within the mother countries of Turkey and Greece, Yiannis Papadakis could be said to fulfil the criteria of one of these rebels. His poignant ethnographic narration of Cyprus and cultural histories of the eastern Mediterranean offers a challenge to the idea of travel and travel writing-as-usual in the region. Papadakis’s book Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide narrates his travels into and beyond the Green Line and so-called dead zones of Cyprus. He also travels in this personal journey from his home in Limassol, in the south of Cyprus, to the US, the UK, Turkey and Greece: all the principals, in other words, in the story of modern Cyprus. An anthropologist by training, Papadakis blends ethnographic research methods with the motives of rhetorical travel and illustrates what ethical travel writing set in Cyprus can look like; his work also points to the type of pluralist, native voices necessary in

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order to realize Roxana Euben, Edwards and Graulund and others’ calls for the study of sources that do not primarily involve journeys from West to East. Though Echoes could best be considered a scholarly text, I choose to locate it in this study because Papadakis travels to the other side, the so-called ‘dark side’, and narrates his contact with Turks with remarkable depth and nuance. Unlike most modern travel narrators of Cyprus, he personalizes the experience and works to establish through his story an ethos based on responsibility, revelation and personal rigor. I acknowledge that few travel writers have the advantage of intimate knowledge of a place before a visit, as well as intensive language study and a fairly sophisticated curiosity about how Cyprus is construed differently on both sides of the line, in Greece, Turkey, the US and the UK. These contribute to the writer’s ability to ask a wider range of people more precise questions, often in their native languages. They affect the quality of the encounters. Ultimately, what invigorates Echoes from the Dead Zone, from my perspective of rhetorical travel, concerns the writer’s determination to operate intimately with an aim to bridge differences and respond to people fairly – to go across the divide, rather than cement the division. The narrator encounters considerable challenges: almost irreconcilable differences emerge with people of all ethno-national groups, including among his fellow Greek Cypriots. He makes tortured compromises concerning how to continue his research, how to travel and live among others. These ethical doubts and contradictions serve as part of the story itself, never nearing solipsism or overtaking the narrative. In an opening passage, as he describes his first trip to Istanbul, Turkey, where he will be living in a country and among a people demonized by mass media and public education in the Republic of Cyprus, Papadakis puts his anxieties on the table, yet with a twist: his parents, at least on the surface, did not harbour the basic fears he had been schooled to expect. He writes: ARRIVAL [IN TURKEY, CIRCA 1990] On the plane my stomach took over. What would happen once I arrived? Would I be taken for interrogation? That much

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I had to be realistically prepared for. Would I be put behind bars for a few days until they checked things out? Perhaps I would disappear into a prison. I had told my parents in Cyprus where I was going. I was very pleased that they did not create a huge fuss when I told them. They were very worried, naturally. I expected them to try to dissuade me. I was almost shocked by how understanding they were and how much they trusted me. There was no talk of the film Midnight Express, no mention of Turkish atrocities.13 Life in Turkey for a Greek Cypriot presents him with some challenges, but these have less to do with personal security than interpersonal navigation. The questions placed in the foreground at the outset find their responses in his daily experiences studying the language, interviewing his sources and working through his cultural prejudices. For example, the Turkish Cypriots and Turks he befriends in Turkey rarely mix socially, leading to tensions in his daily life that help him to understand the complicated cultural histories that divide people behind an outwardly coherent fac
ade. Near the end of his book, Papadakis – raised in the heart of the conflict, yet somehow insulated as a child from its everyday reach – demonstrates through personal narration how travel to ‘the other side’ and beyond has deepened his understanding of the forces that have shaped his life. In so doing, he articulates a compelling sense of responsibility relevant to people of Cyprus and beyond. He acknowledges how, after so many encounters with Greek Cypriots, Turkish Cypriots and Turks, the discordant voices of these perspectives leave him without easy answers, with doubts about his own ability to live his principles and face the challenges of past, present and future: I was still trying to shake off the weight of responsibility. I, who was born in 1964, born of and with the Green Line, I, who never did anything, surely I was not responsible. We, the young, had nothing to do with it. We bore no responsibility. But there were many kinds of responsibility. Responsibility for committing acts of violence was only one. Perpetrating

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atrocities only became possible under conditions that, if not encouraged, at least allowed them to happen. This was the responsibility of indifference and inaction. The largest atrocities had often been committed by a few who lived in a society that did not care. A society that did not want to know, one that did not care enough about the victims to bother to know. We still refused to assume any responsibility for the pain and misery we had inflicted upon each other. This only left the wounds festering until acknowledgement and forgiveness was offered. Sadly, even that did not always work. What about outsiders’ responsibilities? Britain, the USA, the mother-fatherlands. They had serious responsibilities without doubt. But I came to believe that more than enough had been said in Cyprus about their roles, though not enough in the countries themselves. In Cyprus we always spoke of others’ responsibilities and so little about our own.14 In other words, Papadakis’s narration of Cyprus leads him to direct us all to the stories we need to be telling, rather than just the ones most readily available given each subject’s treasured cultural orientation. Rather than being evasive or distant, he insists on presence, on personal responsibility to others – even when that means the other person is an intelligence agent or a political adversary. In the passage above, the reference is to the highest profile players and stakeholders in Cyprus. Though western powers have had their influence, he speaks here primarily to Greeks and Turks of Cyprus, including himself. The critique he brings of his own society’s selective remembrance of the past could easily be applied as well to the Turks of the north and the national and international foreign interests who have always had a part to play in Cyprus. In a walking tour with myself and a group of Fulbright-Hays study-abroad fellows in the summer of 2007, Papadakis extended his interest and range of ethical responsibility beyond those normally taken into account, such as Greece, Turkey, the UN, the EU and so forth, to include less enfranchised and represented others. He mentioned specifically the tens of thousands of guest workers on

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both sides of the line. Few travellers have paid much attention to these people, but without them the tourist industry and economy could not function: the Sri Lankans, the Filipinos, the Poles, the Pakistanis, the Arabs and others whose visible presence was ubiquitous in Cyprus at this time. Yet they are almost always left out of the landscape in descriptive contemporary accounts of cultural life on the island.15 Travel scholar Roxana Euben, in her study of cultural encounters between people of the predominantly Christian West and Muslim East, urges us to direct our attention to the omissions so typical of these relations. She writes: Travel narratives have been particularly suspect for the representational power they enact over those they survey, not to mention the western imperial endeavours the travel genre is said to both express and facilitate. Yet this does not exhaust all that travel narratives can reveal, particularly if the travellers and narratives are pluralized to incorporate precisely those perspectives and peoples silenced or eclipsed by the almost single-minded focus on Western journeys abroad.16 Euben’s call for more variety in the types of ‘travellers and narratives’ raises important questions. How differently, for example, might we travel and narrate if our own sources for the experience were to include the voices of local writers reflecting on their place of origin? How would we think differently of ourselves as travelling subjects if we were aware of the ways our own countries appeared through the eyes of ethical travellers from abroad?

Lessons from Modern Travel Writing in Cyprus for the Future of Travel Narration But would people inclined to read travel writing actually prefer a text like Echoes from the Dead Zone when Bitter Lemons or In the Land of Aphrodite promises either a higher pedigree from its narrator or a more readily identifiable narrating position? Would audiences for

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travel texts prefer an earnest expatriate’s interpretation of the landscape or a worldly Greek Cypriot scholar’s? As travellers, global citizens and scholars, our ethos needs to accommodate multiple perspectives. All travel and travel writing is rhetorical. Despite his personal connections to the island, language skills and anthropological training, one does not exactly have to be a metropolitan rebel to create rhetorical appeal by telling a story well and ethically. How do rhetorical critics, travellers and writers bring such narration into being? Alphonso Lingis suggests that what it may take to make such writing happen rests within each of us as humans concerned for each other, as people capable of courage and trust. He writes: Courage and trust have this in common: they are not attitudes with regard to images and representations. Courage is a force that can arise and hold steadfast as one’s projections, expectations, and hopes dissipate. Courage rises up and takes hold and builds on itself. Trust is a force that can arise and hold on to someone whose motivations are as unknown as those of death. It takes courage to trust someone you do not know. There is an exhilaration in trusting that builds on itself. One really cannot separate in this exhilaration the force of trust and the force of courage.17 The rhetoric of travel and travel writing broadly conceived still needs to account for the effects of ideological structures like imperialism, nationalism or the Cold War. The agency available to acts of travel and writing should be exercised with courage and trust – at the risk, always, of vulnerability. Will I be considered naı¨ve? Will my editors and publishers accept my work? Have not a generation of domestic audiences been reared into believing, following the lead of Paul Theroux, that cynicism is seductive? Even if a traveller does muster the courage to trust, will people for whom this person is an outsider accept and invite the visitor into a space of intimacy? If so, what will happen? To narrate a place like Cyprus calls on the traveller to digest and then frame the stories of people who have suffered and who continue to mourn their losses. Yet

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it also means seeing more than the political rhetoric that so often delimits the complex character of people and landscapes. Travellers need the courage to construct relationships to people and places that invite the landscape to speak other truths. It compels us to risk. Distance may be necessary at times, but if it becomes an exclusive practice or a privileged tower from which to wield stories of others, then travel becomes another tool to estrange people of the world from one another. Engaging others in their experiences can be messy, especially in the context of unresolved political conflict that implicates so many others outside its immediate effects. And yet this seems to be just the sort of position from which to enter into potentially transformative relations with others.

NOTES

Chapter 1 The Cultural Stage for Stories of Conflict: Narrated Travel Writing and Modern Cyprus 1. Language used to describe these events is controversial and typically contested by members of both communities and their supporters in Greece, Turkey and elsewhere. Given that this study does not focus on the politics of the conflict, I will keep my remarks on this matter brief. In this book, I refer to the actions of Turkey in 1974 as an ‘invasion’; Turkey considers this an ‘intervention’ authorized by the treaty that provides Turkey, Greece and the UK the right to act militarily if the island is threatened by outside forces. Had Turkey used its forces solely to protect Turkish Cypriots in the wake of the coup (which was supported by the junta in Greece), then perhaps they would have been justified in seeing 1974 as an intervention. As it stands, their decision to advance their troops after the first ceasefire and take control of 38 per cent of the island, which they control to this day, represents much more than an intervention. 2. See Cynthia Cockburn’s The Line for an interesting discussion of the narratives of guest workers in Cyprus and Caren Kaplan’s Questions of Travel for a compelling political argument for expanding our notions of travel stories. Contemporary scholars and practitioners of travel writing have taken up this call, as the work of people like Tim Youngs (Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing) and Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund (Post-colonial Travel Writing) demonstrates. 3. Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, pp. 5 – 10. 4. Early post-colonial scholarship of critics like Edward Said, Mary Louise Pratt, David Spurr and others has inspired a generation of scholars to acknowledge the ways that travel texts have functioned as a tool of domination by primarily

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5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

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Western writers who travel to and subjugate lands and peoples of the South and East. James Phelan, pp. 7 – 8. Aristotle, Rhetoric, pp. 90–1. Ralph Cintron, Angel’s Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life and the Rhetorics of the Everyday, p. 2. Kennedy’s 1991 translation of the Rhetoric demonstrates that Aristotle was himself not always so certain about this clear demarcation, as he would see, for example, the builder and the building as one and the same. Therefore, the Rhetoric does not represent a transparent, foundational Enlightenment text in which subjects are free-floating agents who act in the world on objects from which they can be easily distinguished (see Schmertz). Ralph Cintron, Angel’s Town, p. 2. Ralph Cintron, Angel’s Town, p. 3. Greece and Turkey never declared war on one another during the fighting of 1974, which was contained to the island and primarily involved the Turkish military engaging soldiers of the Republic of Cyprus, which at that point was comprised of Greek Cypriots. In fact, travel writing about a particular place ends up as recommended reading for that place: Montagu’s letters are easy to find in Istanbul bookstores and reading lists for travellers headed to Turkey; the same can be said for Durrell and Thubron’s memoirs of Cyprus, which are readily availed to travellers and expatriates destined for Cyprus. “See Lisle’s The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing for a full discussion of the genre’s effects. Costas Montis’s Closed Doors: An Answer to Bitter Lemons by Lawrence Durrell is one example that I will cover in more detail in Chapter 3. I should also note that UK citizens of Cypriot descent and dual citizens of the two countries number in the hundreds of thousands and further complicate any simplistic notion of a stable domestic/local binary split. Some of the earlier writers considered in this study, such as Lawrence Durrell and Colin Thubron, occasionally referred to ethnic Turks as ‘The Turk’, a signifier I sometimes place in ironic quotations for its failure to imagine internal complexity within that community. The focus on ‘travel narratives’ means that I will not analyze the writing done in guidebooks such as Frommer’s, Lonely Planet and Rough Guide. Texts of this sort use a style that deemphasizes narrative, even when providing cultural information based on the experiences of the investigating travel writer. This style has its own history and purposes. In a 2011 personal interview, Tom Brosnahan, the author of the first Lonely Planet: Turkey books and Bright Sun, Strong Tea, an insightful memoir detailing both his time in Turkey and the rise of budget travel writing, made a compelling case for why guidebooks should strive for objective narration of political conflict. He argued that travel writers should strive not to be the judge and jury for complicated political matters, but

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20. 21. 22. 23.

NOTES TO PAGES 11 –15 rather do their best to represent these complexities in ways that will help future travellers navigate the place without alienating local people. Despite a purpose more focused on orienting travellers to a place, these guidebooks do on occasion present elements of narrative (even without an identifiable first-person narrator). And the work of this sort of writing is political and ideological, as Emilia Ljungberg’s Global Lifestyles: Constructions of Places and Identities in Travel Journalism demonstrates. Still, for my purposes, rhetorical analysis of travel narratives can be more trenchant and expansive when the provenance is known and the writer is actually a character within the story. The above texts, and perhaps some of the issues to be addressed in this text, should support the notion that travel journalism deserves closer attention for the way its writing imagines idealized forms of travellers’ and locals’ identities, as well as their relations to each other. The matter of when, exactly, Cyprus became a ‘problem’, represents a contentious question. While widespread violence began in 1955, British travellers have been writing about the political situation in Cyprus and the popularity of enosis since 1878 (Demetriou and Mas). In that year, the first soldiers and colonial administrative personnel began to arrive to occupy the island, followed by adventurers eager to map and inventory the empire’s newest possession. Acts of resistance to colonial authority in Cyprus have a long history, including the 1931 riots that burned Government House to the ground. Scholars and cultural critics in Cyprus, Greece and Turkey have read and discussed some of these texts, but given the travel writers’ obvious attention to Western target audiences ‘back home’, my primary interest is in the reception of this literature among these audiences. My sense of Cyprus is as a place where residents live with ‘security’ but not ‘peace’. Many Greek Cypriots continue to profess a fear of a future attack by Turkey, often justified through what Papadakis calls the ‘myth of Turkish expansionism’. See Echoes from the Dead Zone. While the large Turkish military presence in the north has reduced anxiety about an attack from the Greeks, Turkish Cypriots harbour their own fears about a change in the status quo. Their parallel myth concerns the belief that EOKA/Enosis remains popular, and that a solution could return them to the peril of Greek nationalists, whose extremists would again attempt to drive them from the island. Scott Anderson and Sebastian Junger co-wrote this piece for Harper’s, with Junger covering and reporting from the south and Anderson from the north. They are credited separately for their respective entries within the text. Dean MacCannell, The Ethics of Sightseeing, p. 19. The expression ‘Green Line’, actually dates to 1964, when a British officer used a green pencil to indicate the ceasefire lines separating Turkish and Greek sectors of Nicosia in early inter-communal fighting. Greeks and Turks may be essentially different, but here and elsewhere they are not rendered equally responsible for the conflict. Junger bears a cynical contempt for the naı¨vete´ of the tourists, exposing the ease by which people can release righteous indignation – here, the Turks take the full brunt of it. How

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these tourists became so certain of the malice of the other is a question few travel writers trouble themselves to consider. I credit Junger here for reporting what he sees but not explicitly editorializing about the conflict per se. His own political position aims for neutrality, but he writes for a politically partisan magazine, Harper’s, and the backdrop to his story – the ongoing ethnic conflicts in Kosovo and the Balkans – suggests a frustration with the cycles of violence so difficult for people to escape. Yet aside from his worldly curiosity and professional mission, his own dash to the Green Line upon arrival in order to gawk at the open wounds of war bears striking superficial similarity to the ogling of the European tourists he mocks. Although Cyprus merits its own Lonely Planet and Rough Guide editions, the Let’s Go series has subordinated the island and its million people to minor sections in its larger books on Greece and Turkey. In an arrangement that essentially recognizes partition to the mother countries rather than troubled independence, the Turkish north finds itself included in Let’s Go: Turkey while the Greek south of the island gets covered in Let’s Go: Greece. A search on the bootsnall.org website – which at the time featured travel writers’ first-person narratives written as long as a decade ago and spanning to the present – turned up not a single entry on Cyprus. The links to Greece and Turkey, of course, overflowed with material from travel essayists. For a few weeks in early 2013, the economic crisis involving its failing banks briefly returned Cyprus to an unwelcome moment of global attention in ways the island had not seen since the Greek Cypriot rejection of the Annan peace plan of 2004. Burns, p. 30. I refer here to Christopher Hitchens’s Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger, which I take up in more depth in Chapter 5, and Andrew Borowiec’s Cyprus: A Troubled Island. Another political memoir of this type is William Mallinson’s Cyprus: A Modern History. These titles represent but a few of many recent ‘memoirs’ focusing almost exclusively on the politics of Cyprus, with the rhetorical purpose of allocating responsibility for the continuing stalemate, rather than attending to how a writer came to know a place through travel. Appiah, p. xv. I did not have to find out for myself whether I would have been turned away from the south of Cyprus or Greece with the ‘illegal’ stamp – I have heard from other travellers and it is reported in some guide books that travellers are sometimes questioned by authorities in Greece about travels to Turkey and northern Cyprus. The trips were run through Fulbright-Hays study abroad grants awarded to the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona in 2004 and 2007. These educators create and implement lesson plans based on what they have learned of Cyprus for classes of their own students. They also are encouraged to share what they have learned with audiences within their professional and personal communities. From a personal perspective, they helped to familiarize me with the perspectives and experiences of Greek Cypriots.

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Chapter 2

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Seductive, Disreputable yet Resilient: Modern Travel Writing and its Critics

1. Pico Iyer, ‘Why We Travel’. 2. At the same time, one could easily argue the counter-position to this focus on interiority. Bill Bryson waxes sceptical on what people may actually learn about others in their journeys. He asserts that travel is not ‘the least bit broadening unless you want it to be. I think it’s very easy to travel and not become the tiniest bit broadened by it’ (Shapiro, p. 143). 3. More testimony of this sort comes in travel publisher Arthur Frommer’s claim that travel ‘is a serious subject, whose rewards go well beyond that of entertainment and recreation. [. . .] The only things that interest me are people and ideas’ (Shapiro, pp. 176– 7). 4. Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes and David Spurr’s The Rhetoric of Empire are two of the better known sources to document the relationship between travel discourse and empire. Fewer sources have examined the intersection between the Cold War and travel writing, though Debbie Lisle’s The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing does take up this matter. As for primary material, Tom Brosnahan’s memoir Turkey: Bright Sun, Strong Tea represents one example of how travel and Cold War politics were inextricably linked in the case of Turkey’s slow embrace of tourism. 5. By ‘storied promise’, I allude to not only the general sense that it does a person good to see the world, but to the liberal, enlightening impulses of the Grand Tour, as articulated historically by travellers such as Thomas Boswell and Laurence Sterne; in more modern times, institutions and cultural practices, such as gap-year travel in the UK, study abroad programs run through colleges and universities, everywhere summer backpacking trips overseas for US youth and even federally-subsidized programs such as Fulbright-Hays study abroad often justify their utility above all on the premise that meeting others reduces ignorance and promotes openmindedness for everyone involved. 6. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 2–5. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., pp. 217–21. Theroux, for his part, does the field of travel writing and ethically-minded practitioners the further disservice of mocking criticism of his ‘harsh’ treatment of others as ‘meaningless and irrelevant’. Anyone interested in reading bigoted travel writing, he quips, should consult early modern figures like Greene, Waugh and Malinowski. As for his own work, he takes solace in the integrity of his method: ‘my inner voice has directed me to the truth’ (Shapiro pp. 157 – 8). Pratt observes that Theroux’s popularity derives from the perception that his work provides a ‘realistic’ view of culture, as opposed to the commodified version depicted by the global mass tourism

NOTES TO PAGES 30 – 41

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

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industry (p. 221). Still, he uses the same tropes of domination, density of meaning and aestheticization used by Victorian explorers like Richard Burton a century before him (p. 217). Lisle, Global Politics, pp. 61–7. Appiah, p. 97. See Appiah’s discussion of cosmopolitan curiosity in his chapter on ‘imaginary strangers’. Chatwin may not live up to these ideals, but he certainly seems aware of their appeal. Helen Carr, p. 73. Ibid., p. 74. Ibid. Carr notes that prior to Durrell, writers like Gertrude Bell, T.E. Lawrence and Freya Stark represent well-known examples of figures connected to British political interests in the Middle East. Hulme, p. 92. Hulme refers specifically here to Peter Matthiessen’s Snow Leopard, Chatwin’s In Patagonia and Robyn Davidson’s Tracks. Appiah, p. 85. Appiah, p. xv. Kaplan, p. 58. Ibid., p. 2. Plenty of earlier travel writing exists on Cyprus, as evident from a brief look at the diversity and depth in texts like Claude Delaval Cobham’s Excerpta Cypria: Materials for a History of Cyprus, Tim Boatswain’s A Traveller’s History of Cyprus and English Travel Literature On Cyprus (1878 – 1960) edited by Eroulla Demetriou and Jose Ruiz Mas. Ancient Greek and Roman travellers and later the medieval French and Italians, followed by the Ottoman and British writers and scholars make for a rich tapestry of what has often been construed as ‘travel literature’. Texts from before 1960 remain significant for Cyprus studies for many reasons, especially due to the continuing fascination they hold for contemporary travellers like Durrell, Thubron and Burch. MacCannell, Ethics of Sightseeing, p. 212. Audiences, too, cannot avoid complicity in the cultural reproduction accomplished through the circulation of these texts. Gregory Clark, ‘Writing as Travel, or Rhetoric on the Road’, p. 16. Edward Said, Orientalism, pp. 20 – 1. In The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing, Tim Youngs argues ‘the public enthusiasm for travel writing may be a reason for the slowness of academics to give it the attention they bestow on other literary forms or historical documents’ (p. 7). The factual truth of a travel story raises a number of compelling issues that implicate the writer, editors and publishers and consumers themselves. One need look no further than Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson’s legal troubles borne of his proclivity to compress time and stretch truth to realize that, no matter the motive, a story marketed as nonfiction that turns out to be

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27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

NOTES TO PAGES 41 –53 fiction at some point after publication can have devastating effects on writers and their legacies. Or, in the case of Durrell, the writer’s distortions and falsehoods could go relatively unnoticed or unremarked upon, depending on the audience. Penguin editions of The Songlines indicate, in an easy-to-overlook publisher’s note found before the title page, that Chatwin ‘was the author of In Patagonia, The Viceroy of Ouidah, On the Black Hill, The Songlines and Utz. The last three he considered works of fiction’. The publishers make no mention of their own position on the matter. Nicholas Shakespeare, Bruce Chatwin: A Biography, p 512. Theroux and Rushdie also write essays of criticism and some critics do also produce narrative nonfiction, but for the most part these roles remain distinct. For critics especially, this represents a lost opportunity to appreciate the challenge in producing travel texts that effectively engage audiences while also enacting a sophisticated ethos that embodies the politics of travel their criticism demands. Lisle, Global Politics, pp. 10–11. Robert Clarke, ‘Star Traveller: Celebrity, Aboriginality, and Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines’, p. 242. Robert Clarke, p. 243. Shakespeare, p. 11. Fullagar, p. 13. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., pp. 18–19. Clare Johnson, ‘Crossing the Border: Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux’, p. 61. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 63. Ralph Pordzik’s ‘Travel Writing and Its Discontents: Culture, Tourism and the Dynamics of Narration in Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia and The Songlines’, p. 388. Ibid., p. 389. Ibid., p. 386.

Chapter 3 Fashioned for Story’s Sake: Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons and the Lay of a Landscape Troped and Narrated for Posterity 1. Gregory Clark, Rhetorical Landscapes in America, p. 9. 2. This text is also known in later editions as Bitter Lemons of Cyprus. 3. According to sales data and reader comments in June 2012, the book continues to generate praise and recommendations. One reader credited Durrell’s writing

NOTES TO PAGES 53 –62

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

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with encouraging her and her husband to leave their jobs in Los Angeles and relocate to Greece for a year. This also appears to be the first travelogue on Cyprus to be published as a Kindle Book. See the opening quote from Foley, as well as details from pages 11 and 17 of his memoir, where Foley documents fairly typical British governing attitudes toward the rebellion and toward the colonial subjects of the island. The tetralogy of critically and commercially successful novels referred to as the ‘Alexandria Quartet’ includes Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea, four books written from distinct perspectives about a single event happening around the time of WWII in Alexandria, Egypt. As for his literary reputation, one anthology promising a collection of ‘some of the world’s best books’, includes Durrell’s Justine in the lead category of ‘On Everyone’s List of Literary Classics’, between Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (Kanigel). David Roessel, Introduction, Closed Doors, p. x. Vangelis Calotychos, p. 170. Foley’s memoir describes Durrell as ‘free from humbug’ and lacking strong views on the politics compared to many others in colonial government; this is not to be construed as absent of a political perspective (p. 12). Her own memoir of Cyprus, Below the Tide, shows little difference in perspective from Durrell’s: Greek irrationality and barbarity cannot be understood, only condemned. Durrell penned a flattering preface to Tremayne’s book. Tremayne appears to be responding to Greek nationalists who were at odds with Durrell for his decision to work for the British colonial authorities, but she does this by focusing on innocuous anecdotes, rather than the material political realities of colonialism’s messy swan song in Cyprus. P. 9. And, for that matter, any personal narrative is ‘political’ in its capacity to project, affect and neglect attitudes that inform arrangements of power. But even those who would quibble with this would be hard-pressed to deny that someone working in the public relations department of a political authority waging a harsh counter-insurgency would have a hard time writing a firstperson narrative account of Cyprus that was not a ‘political book’. Friedman, p. 64. The most politically neutral description of the actions taken by Greek Cypriots in the 1950s would term it a ‘revolt’ or ‘rebellion’. They can also be described as ‘anti-colonial’. When they are described as the movement for ‘enosis’, the politics become more complicated, as this refers to the specific desire for union with Greece. This movement was sufficiently popular that it would often be treated synonymously with the rebellion. Foley, p. 111. See Edward Said’s Orientalism and David Spurr’s The Rhetoric of Empire. Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons, p. 175. P. 17.

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NOTES TO PAGES 62 –75

19. Montis also served as a political consultant for EOKA during the time of Durrell’s stay on the island. As a public intellectual and sympathizer with those who were attacking and killing British military and civilian targets, he was more intimately familiar with Durrell’s work in the public relations office. 20. David Roessel, Introduction, p. ix. 21. Ibid., p. x. 22. Petra Tourney, p. 159. 23. Calotychos, p. 179. 24. Durrell does not here credit Herodotus for this thesis, but he may elsewhere, given his knowledge of Greek language and ancient literature. 25. Durrell, ‘Landscape and Character’. 26. Ibid., p. 3. 27. Michael Given, p. 62. 28. The rightful custodians for a land so rich in history and strategically significant, of course, are none other than the British, as Durrell implies in Bitter Lemons. 29. Petra Tourney, p. 162. 30. Michael Given, p. 58. 31. Durrell, p. 175. 32. Stuart Hall, pp. 262–3. 33. Durrell, pp. 48, 54, 67. 34. Ibid., p. 48. 35. Meyda Yegˇenogˇlu, p. 50. 36. The term also refers to teachers, so perhaps Durrell was also embodying the rare position of a student learning from one more learned, in some way, than himself. 37. Durrell, p. 239. 38. Tourney, p. 162. 39. Durrell, p. 240. 40. One decorated travelogue on life in modern Turkey, Jeremy Seal’s A Fez of the Heart, fuels its narrative engine with the promise of a quest for meaning through the study of the fabled fez of late Ottoman times. The fez was outlawed in the 1920s in Turkey in order to make way for Western-styled brimmed hats for male citizens who presumably no longer need headgear designed for Muslim prayers. 41. Durrell, p. 240. 42. The scene also includes Durrell mentioning the ‘Greek’ presence on the island, a point that weakens Given’s argument for Durrell’s de-Hellenization of the landscape. The Greeks may not always be physically present, but Durrell has a hard time shaking their echoes when celebrating the island’s storied history. 43. Durrell, p. 240. 44. Ibid., p. 241. 45. Ibid., p. 54. 46. Ibid., p. 46. 47. Ibid., p. 51.

NOTES TO PAGES 75 –82 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

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Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., p. 72. The Ottomans rarely garnish much praise from European travel writers for their three hundred-plus year rule of Cyprus. They tend to be remembered for the violence of the conquest of Famagusta, the flaying of the Venetian commander Bragadino and the pre-emptive murder of dozens of bishops and Orthodox Greek clergy in Cyprus at the outset of the 1821 Greek War of Independence. Sabri, gave Durrell an earful on the matter on multiple occasions, urging him and the British into taking stronger measures to bring the Greeks to heel. The hodja’s request for a newspaper – a Turkish one – clearly suggests some awareness and interest in the events unfolding across the island and beyond. Within a year of his departure, the first barbed-wire separations of the two communities would be established after an act of Turkish subterfuge (Hitchens, pp. 3 – 4). In the narrative, Durrell comes to sympathize with the widely held view that modern Greece is much more the inheritor of Byzantium than of ancient Athens at its moments of apex. One source of controversy noted by many observers of and participants in the Cyprus conflict concerns the British policy of using Turkish auxiliary forces as police during the EOKA campaign. Some certainly joined the police in an effort to combat the EOKA forces that threatened to turn Turks of the island into minority citizens of Greece. Others may have been induced to join because of diminished economic opportunities as relations between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities and economies became further strained. In some cases, their work had been linked to economic activity controlled by Greek Cypriots, but they were fired or ‘voluntarily’ left work because it became too dangerous to continue. This example can also be seen as part of a larger effort for the British to actively cultivate the development of Turkey’s interest in Cyprus. Durrell, p. 222. Ibid., p. 251. David Roessel’s impressive study In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination provides ample examples of the negative symbiotic relations in literature between Greek and Turk. He begins his book with a conversation between Henry Miller and a younger Lawrence Durrell, who, stoked by the passionate poetic legacy of Byron, needed to be persuaded not to join the Greek army at the outset of World War II. Durrell, p. 235. Roessel, p. xiii.

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NOTES TO PAGES 85 –89

Chapter 4 Narrating from an Intimate Distance: Turk Troping in Colin Thubron’s Journey Into Cyprus 1. For the full discussion of these tropes, see Spurr’s The Rhetoric of Empire, Chapter 1, ‘Surveillance: Under Western Eyes,’ and Chapter 3, ‘Aestheticisation: Savage Beauties’. 2. Though I consider texts of these sorts creative nonfiction by genre, a case could be made for reading this text and others like it as fiction: travel writers have been well known to compromise veracity as they compress and manipulate time, characters and events in a travel story in order to enhance its aesthetic appeal. Distortions of this sort and outright fictionalizations posing as nonfiction are endemic to the genre. Greg Mortenson’s books provide an example of the former. For the latter, Thomas Kohnstamm’s book Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? offers the perspective of an unscrupulous guidebook writer who ‘wrote up’ places he never even visited. Regardless of what a text like Journey Into Cyprus gets labelled, the point is that these narratives are read and consumed as nonfiction; as such, they merit critical attention for their continued production, circulation and effects. 3. George, p. 248. 4. In Michael Theodoulou’s ‘Divided Cypriots unite to preserve ancient Famagusta’, the writer, a Christian Science Monitor correspondent, invokes Thubron to testify to the glory of the medieval ruins within Famagusta’s walls. 5. The travelogues and novels published by Thubron today receive considerably more attention, as his reputation and body of work has developed considerably in the three decades since his work in Cyprus. 6. A January 2008 Times of London list of the greatest post-1945 British writers ranked Colin Thubron at 45. Chatwin, incidentally, was ranked one spot behind Thubron. 7. Thubron, p. xi. 8. I use the term ‘perspective’ with a nod of recognition to its favoured status in so much of the work of Kenneth Burke. In fact, he confidently substituted ‘perspective’ for ‘metaphor’, positing that ‘metaphor is a device for seeing something in terms of something else’ (503). 9. Thubron does not reveal which languages he uses to communicate with people of Cyprus, and I am assuming throughout that he speaks English, which would have been widely known (and of varying competency) among Cypriots who had attended school. If Thubron did use any Greek or Turkish, he does not reveal this to his readers. 10. Penelope Tremayne’s Below the Tides shares some of this perspective, as it is informed by her experiences as a Red Cross nurse, rather than as a journalist, scholar or colonial official. Morgan credits her with having ‘more contact with Cypriots than most’ (214).

NOTES TO PAGES 90 – 99 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

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Thubron, pp. 2 – 3. Thubron, p. 177. I take up these two texts in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, respectively. Thubron, p. 97. Thubron, p. 95. Thubron, p. 96. Thubron, p. 16. Thubron, p. 17. Not everyone agreed with the actions or values of far-right nationalists. Communists of the island, for example, may have disagreed with the ends of the nationalists and chosen not to join EOKA or EOKA B. However, they were likely to have held the value of Cyprus as a ‘Greek island’. Tabitha Morgan points out in Sweet and Bitter Island: A History of the British in Cyprus that the 1881 policy decision to educate Greeks of the island using texts and curricula from Athens was partly responsible for this de facto nationalist sentiment that grew over generations (213). Former President Glafkos Clerides described the flag of Cyprus as the best flag in the world because it was the only one that no one was willing to die for. Though preferable to colonial rule, Greeks of Cyprus have always been ambivalent about this as a national identity. As for Turks, the Turkish members of the government withdrew in 1963, effectively ending the power-sharing experiment and their participation in the Republic of Cyprus. Thubron, p. 9. Thubron, p. 102. Thubron, p. 128. Thubron, p. 127. Former President and long-time political leader Rauf Denktash took up the ethnic essentialist line with dark humour: the only true Cypriots, he remarked, are the donkeys of the Karpas. For Denktash and nationalists of Greek and Turkish persuasion, Cyprus is an island with Greeks and Turks. Thubron, p. 4. Per British governing policy, children are educated using the textbooks of the ‘motherlands’. After the Republican era begins in Turkey, Turkish schoolchildren in Cyprus begin to use textbooks from Turkey (as the Greek children had been doing) and thus their sense of Turkish, secular national identity begins to take hold. In the decades leading up to 1974, many Turks of Cyprus had come to emphasize their Turkishness in order to promote the cause of taksim, or partition. In a discussion with a Turkish Cypriot at a checkpoint, for example, Thubron questions how a Turkish Cypriot can rightfully call himself a Turk when he has never even been to Turkey. When Thubron asks ‘Do you feel a Turk?’ the man replies confidently that ‘I am a Turk’ (180). Oliver Burch provides a brief but colourful history of European prejudice against Turks at the outset of his travelogue The Infidel Sea: Travels in North Cyprus. For more timely analysis of this question as it plays out in European

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31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

NOTES TO PAGES 99 –107 publics today, see Azade Seyhan’s ‘Is Orientalism in Retreat or in for a New Treat? Halide Edip Adivar and Emine Sevgi Ozdamar Write Back’ and Sabine Strasser’s ‘Europe’s Other: Nationalism, Transnationals and Contested Images of Turkey in Austria’. Finally, Turkish Studies scholar Justin McCarthy provides the most exhaustive take on the subject of US attitudes towards Turks and Turkey in his book The Turk in America: The Creation of an Enduring Prejudice. The site is a shrine that commemorates the location of the death of the prophet Mohammad’s maternal aunt, Umm Haram. Journalist Simon Bahceli explains that it has long been a popular picnic site for Turkish Cypriots, who are known for their heterodox and casual Islamic traditions. Thubron, p. 193. My mention of secular nationalism as the dominant ideology of Turks and Turkey refers to the period before the rise of Muslim nationalism as articulated by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which came to power in Turkey in 2003 and has remained in power to the present. Thubron, p. 23. Kizilyurek and Gautier-Kizilyurek, p. 41. Thubron, p. 194. Ibid., p. 5. Thubron was hardly the only European intellectual taken by allure of this island as the ‘last’ outpost of (Western) Christendom to be found in the East, as he explains: ‘[Cyprus] inspired the poets Philippe de Novare, who fought in its civil wars, Chaucer, Petrarch and Guillaume de Machaut. Thomas Aquinas dedicated his treatise on kingship, never finished, to the young Hugh II, and Boccacio his Genealogy of the Gods to Hugh IV. The island royalty held a half mystical appeal. In the cathedral of Famagusta, nearest of their cities to the Holy Land, the sovereigns on their accession were still crowned kings of Jerusalem. They were heirs to the dashed hopes of the waning mediaeval age, the lost conscience of Christendom’ (157). Ibid., p. 206. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 53. Elided here is the reality of substantial migration of Turkish Cypriots to places like London, Australia and Turkey for political and economic reasons. According to Robins and Aksoy, ‘Turkish Cypriots migrated from Cyprus largely as a consequence of the bitter ‘inter-communal’ conflicts of the 1950s and 1960s, and then the political and economic problems of the 1970s and 1980s, following the partition of the island. Britain was their favoured destination because, as former colonial subjects, they had, or felt that they had, a ‘special’ historical relationship with the colonial heartland. In Britain, however, it turned out that they quickly became an “invisible population”. Very little has ever been written about them’ (685). History may testify to more tumult than the solemn donkey ride out of the village suggests here. Though I still object to

NOTES TO PAGES 107 –111

43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49.

50.

51. 52.

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his general claim that Turks of Anatolian stock are constitutionally and domestically equipped to respond stoically to change and movement, I will admit to hearing a similar sentiment during a visit to a Turkish-Cypriot family living in Guzelyurt in 2004. ‘We moved once in the 60s to escape the troubles, again in 1974, and, if the Annan Plan were to have been approved’, he continued with a wry smile, ‘we would move again’. His family joined him in gentle, nervous laughter. In Bitter Lemons, Durrell invoked a similar trope, and my own travels through rural Turkish Cyprus in recent years confirm this observation. Thubron, p. 76. Though left-wing or ‘anarchist’ organizations were operating in Turkey (just as they were in places like Italy, Germany, and throughout Europe) and known to target US and British political and economic interests, I have been unable to verify this particular event. The more noteworthy point concerns the importance of Turkey as a Cold War ally to the UK – a political necessity troubled, perhaps always in doubt, due to an unsettling (and simplistic) racial memory of Europeans. Some have obviously nourished this anxiety for political purposes in places like Cyprus. Thubron, pp. 74 – 5. Since Turkish Cypriots formed their own governing authorities and political parties after partition, plenty of different political entities have existed. Until the 2003 elections, right-wing nationalist politics held sway. Leftists, tradeunionists and those ambivalent about Turkey and nationalism have always been present among Turkish Cypriots, but perhaps not so easy to locate for the itinerant foot traveller. Thubron, p. 75. Naming this character ‘Kemal’ could be interpreted as a deliberate reference to Mustafa Kemal Atatu¨rk, nationalist icon and founder of the Turkish Republic (though no Pan-Turkic ideologue); however, Thubron nowhere indicates that he has changed the names of those he meets in his journey to protect their anonymity after publication. And for a Turk of Cyprus born after 1923, Kemal would surely have been a popular name, especially among families that embraced his secular nationalism. I refer here to Kemal’s ‘reading’ of Toynbee as a misreading because he concludes that the history of war and domination naturalizes a certain order in the world, such that some people are fit to be enslaved and others are fit to rule. Toynbee apparently compiled War and Civilisation in order to demonstrate the horrors of war and urgently make the case for modern nations to act and prevent further calamities. Kemal, like many Turkish intellectuals, would have come to know of and revere Toynbee for his reporting of the Turkish perspective during the War of Independence in 1923. I do not imagine Toynbee would have approved of Kemal’s appropriation of his scholarship. Thubron, p. 206. Ibid., p. 206.

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53. Ibid., p. 207. 54. Almost every travel writer passing through Famagusta remarks, naturally, on the violent circumstances of its siege: the ruins of the old town date to the Lusignan era and the scars from the battle remain present in the form of cannonballs and pock-marked buildings. Sir Harry Luke, Durrell, Thubron and others have described in tragic terms the fall of the hopelessly outnumbered Venetian garrison against an overwhelming Ottoman force. Yet no writer outdoes Christopher Hitchens, who uses Titian’s allegorical Flaying of Marsyas—which supposedly signifies Europe’s moral outrage at the actions of the Turks—as the cover art for his book about the politics of the 1974 events. 55. Ibid., p. 209. 56. Ibid., p. 211. 57. Ibid., p. 211. 58. Ibid., p. 214. 59. Ibid., p. 212. 60. Ibid., p. 213. 61. Ibid., p. 214. 62. Ibid., p. 213. 63. Ibid., pp. 11 –22 emphasis mine. 64. My point here is certainly not to call out Greeks or Romanians, as other nationals (Britons, Americans, Turks and so forth) have modern histories, even narratives of origin, marked by rationalized violence against racial others. 65. George, p. 75. 66. Durrell, p. 198. 67. Ibid., p. 198. 68. Ibid., p. 201. 69. Ibid., pp. 200– 1. 70. Lopez Ropero, p. 82. 71. Thubron, p. 39. 72. Ibid., p. 40. 73. Ibid., p. 135.

Chapter 5 Day-tripping to the Dark Side: Navigating and Narrating an Island Divided 1. The scholarship of Rebecca Bryant and Yiannis Papadakis, among others, explains this phenomenon well. 2. Olson, p. 85. 3. Gmelch, p. 25. 4. People on day-passes who buy from merchants in the north had to either consume or smuggle purchases back into the south. Travellers arriving from

NOTES TO PAGES 130 –136

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6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

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Turkey, with connecting departures across Europe and the Middle East, could in the past and still can buy as much as they wanted. As mentioned elsewhere, this type of traveller, of which Oliver Burch is an example, represents about a tenth of the total arriving in the Republic of Cyprus. See Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives for a discussion of identification. Negative identification, in a personal sense, also refers to the challenges in my own processes of coming to know the Greeks of Cyprus and their own perspectives. As someone who had previously lived in Turkey and travelled exclusively in the north of Cyprus before visiting the south, my reflexes have been to bring to bear cultural knowledge and relationships from these contacts. Most, but not all travellers can now pass easily through the checkpoints. Turks from Turkey still face restrictions on their travel to the Republic of Cyprus, as Turkey refuses to recognize its legality. Information provided by the Embassy of the Republic of Cyprus to the United States. UK visits to Cyprus peaked at 1,486,703 in 2001 and have since declined significantly, down to approximately one million per year between 2009 and 2012. These numbers include UK citizens of Cypriot descent who may be visiting with family and thus are somewhat distinct from the travel narrators analyzed in this study. Statistics about travel to the north vary widely and are not easy to locate. Other commercial websites from the tourist industry claim a million or more annual visits, most of which originate from Turkey, but these sources cite no official statistics. According to numbers provided by the Republic of Cyprus, UK visitors to the south side of the island have been slowly declining since 2005, but as of 2013 they still represent close to half of all European travellers. ‘Dispatches from the Dead Zone’ represents a sort of hybrid genre in which the writers – two political correspondents for Harper’s, one assigned to the south, one to the north – give roughly equal interest and investment to the two landscapes. As a product of the pre-2003 era of highly restricted movements of people, this approach represents a creative effort to see the island’s politics in greater breadth and accuracy. Though it clearly poses more complexities, costs and logistical challenges, stationing one reporter on each side of the line constituted an improvement over the hearsay and half-truths propagated by day-trippers. Very few travellers have been able to experience and examine Cyprus from both sides of the Green Line, but as we will see in Chapter 5, one writer created the opportunity and exercised sufficient wherewithal to cross over. In so doing, he abandoned comfortable political certainty for the possibility of knowing and writing about each side more ethically. Hitchens married a Greek Cypriot in 1981 and had two children from this marriage. He does not mention this personal connection as part of the motive for writing Hostage, though it presumably shaped his position on the conflict. Hitchens, p. 26.

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NOTES TO PAGES 137 –152

15. Ibid., pp. 19 –20. 16. He also uses the platform to indict the Cold War-era players like Denktash, Turkey, the CIA and Henry Kissinger, a figure he ultimately (and incorrectly, according to the work of Jan Asmussen) holds responsible for 1974. 17. Hitchens’s book disputes the ethnic-autism thesis used by diplomats and policy-makers inclined to point to Cyprus as a model for the future of places like the Balkans. In his account, he routinely downplays material factors on the ground in Cyprus leading up to 1974, leaving the particular policies and actions of players like Denktash, Archbishop Makarios, and the moderates of both societies largely unexamined. 18. Rowan-Moorhouse, p. 119. 19. Greek Cypriots were only granted access to the north in exceptional circumstances. Mary was the name used for Maria, a Greek-Cypriot who was raised in Australia and who travels with the narrator using this passport. 20. Rowan-Moorhouse, p. 148. 21. Rowan-Moorhouse, p. 153. 22. Gmelch reminds us of the inherent power differential in his study of tourism cited earlier in this chapter. 23. MacHugh, p. 276. 24. Ibid., p. 108. 25. Ibid., p. 109. 26. Ibid., pp. 109– 10. 27. Ibid., p. 111. 28. Ibid., p. 112. 29. Ibid., p. 112. 30. Ibid., p. 157. 31. Historian Jan Asmussen’s 2008 book, Cyprus at War, based on archival research from the period of the coup d’e´tat and invasion, finds no evidence of US and UK conspiracy to divide Cyprus in 1974. In fact, it argues the opposite: that the Turks outmanoeuvred the US, and that Kissinger, rather than acting as a puppeteer of assets and events, was several steps behind his former student, Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, perhaps because of the turmoil caused by President Nixon’s Watergate troubles. 32. Junger and Anderson, p. 62. 33. Ibid., p. 47. 34. Ibid., p. 51. 35. Ibid., p. 52. 36. Much of the architecture was likely erected while the town grew as a tourist destination in the 1960s, when it was controlled by the Republic of Cyprus. 37. Junger and Anderson, p. 56. 38. Ibid., p. 57. 39. I visited Denktash with a group of US schoolteachers who were travelling in Cyprus as part of a Fulbright-Hays study abroad grant in the summer of 2007.

NOTES TO PAGES 153 –161 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

201

Junger and Anderson, p. 61. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 62. Burch’s book is out of print; it could still be found in bookstores of the north as of 2007, but is not typically available in the south. Burch, p. 1. Ibid., p. 2. Burch on occasion stands up to chauvinism he encounters towards Greek Cypriots in the north, but, like Thubron he seems ethically committed to an independent position in regard to the conflict. He had intended to travel to the south and write a subsequent book focusing just on the south, but for reasons I have not been able to determine, that project never materialized. Burch, p. 2. Arguments about the historical roots of European cultural prejudice toward the other in the Enlightenment period, for example, reveal a disjuncture from actual encounters and relationships between people of the British and Ottoman Empires. Nabil Matar makes this case persuasively, allowing that Muslims could do little about these negative attitudes. For example, ‘Britons categorized the Muslims [of north Africa and the Ottoman Empire] as barbaric even though they, the Britons, had not dominated them, perhaps even because of it: the Muslims were doomed to alterity whether they were conquered (as the American Indians had been) or not’ (15). Burch, p. 207. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 87. Burch seems especially fond of Samuel Baker’s account of Cyprus from 1879, when the writer essentially catalogued Britain’s ‘new possession’ (80). He also mentions the scholarly work of Claude Delaval Cobham, which culled together and translated 80 earlier works of historians and travellers to Cyprus. For a fuller discussion of this Orientalist assumption, see Chapter 3, where I discuss Durrell’s invocation of this particular trope. Burch, p. 11. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 98. Ibid., p. 208. Ibid., p. 194. Ibid., pp. 204– 5. In Burch’s discussion with a Turkish Cypriot of Kokkina who is bitter about the support Europeans have provided for their Greek Cypriot co-religionists, this man brushes off the idea of Muslim countries chipping in to help Turkish Cypriots: ‘We are Muslims, but we are Europeans, not Arabs or Africans. Only Turkey helps us’ (129). Arabs are treated with a general lack of respect in this passage and elsewhere in the discourses of travel literature of Cyprus. The irony of all the protestations of

202

62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

73.

NOTES TO PAGES 161 –164 racial and cultural difference here becomes apparent at other times in the text, as Burch reports that Turks of Cyprus are clearly doing business with Arabs and monitoring their markets closely (129; 228). Not only do Turkish Cypriots— many of whom know their Turkish nationalism and World War I history too well—traffic in this prejudice, but so, too, do many travel writers like Thubron and Durrell, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Burch, p. 97. These Famagustan Turks could likely have arrived through migration or through the slave trade, which as late as the nineteenth century was still operating covertly through Kyrenia, so as not to offend the European consuls in Larnaca. Mainland Turks who have moved to Cyprus have sometimes been insultingly referred to as ‘black beards’ for their dark complexions. Burch, p. 214. The attitude Ms Bayraktar displays about Turks, that ‘they are all nomads’, may have been widespread among Turkish Cypriots at the time of Burch’s visit in 1987; I have detected some softening of this type of prejudice in the intervening decades, as Turkish Cypriots have realized that not only are not all Turks who come to Cyprus for work ‘nomads’, but that these people are not quite as they have been made out to be by islanders unaccustomed to living with outsiders. Burch, p. 191. Later, she indicates her belief that Makarios was actually a good person who just could not control his people, a sentiment I have not before or after heard from a Turkish Cypriot. However, she also claims that Turks of Cyprus have never married Greeks, and that living apart from them is necessary. Burch, p. 191. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 15. Travellers to Cyprus can often be quick to assume, with some justification, that people are coached in how to treat others in order to win political favour in what appears to be a politically terminal condition of conflict. I have my doubts about this thesis. On my first visit to Cyprus, when wandering with a companion along the Green Line in Nicosia, we approached too closely for the comfort of a young Turkish sentry. He brought his weapon down and pointed it directly at us, at which point we quickly turned around and left. Apparently, he missed the briefing from military and other authorities about the desperate need to treat tourists with gracious indulgence. Another example of Burch becoming upset came during a discussion of politics, in which a Turkish Cypriot criticized the British for the conflict with Ireland. Burch confesses to being tempted to bring up a host of political problems Turkey faces in its relations with the West: the Armenian massacres, the Kurdish issue and so forth, but decides to back off instead.

NOTES TO PAGES 167 –182

203

Chapter 6 Toward an Ethics of Encounter for Travel and Travel Writing 1. MacCannell, The Ethics of Sightseeing, p. ix. 2. Rebecca Bryant’s book The Past in Pieces represents an excellent source for those curious about how Cypriots themselves remember their history differently based on locality, political affiliations, social class and ethno-national identity. 3. Islam, pp. 118– 20. 4. Ibid., pp. 71 –2. 5. Ibid., p. 77. 6. Lisle, ‘Joyless Cosmopolitans’, p. 147. 7. Ibid., p. 153. 8. MacCannell, p. 6. 9. Burns explains how the legacy of violence continues to shape the reputation of Cyprus as a travel destination. Of the process of pitching this story to editors at The Atlantic Monthly, he writes, ‘political realities and bureaucratic contrivances may suggest to some that visiting Cyprus is dangerous. Indeed, the question of safety was raised by The Atlantic’s editors when I proposed this piece. I dutifully consulted my Cypriot friends and government authorities. They were dumbstruck’ (30). 10. Herzfeld, pp. ix – x. 11. Ibid., p. 261. 12. Ibid., p. 261. 13. Papadakis, p. 3. 14. Ibid., p. 236. 15. Cynthia Cockburn’s The Line: Women, Partition and the Gender Order in Cyprus offers extended treatment on this community of guest workers, examining, for instance, the experiences of women left out of most discussions of the type of society Cyprus will become in the future. 16. Euben, p. 8. 17. Lingis, pp. x– xi.

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INDEX

‘A Life in Full’ (Barrow), 92 Anderson, Scott 13, 134, 146– 155, 174– 75 Angel’s Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and the Rhetorics of the Everyday (Cintron), 7 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 33 Aquinas, Thomas, 196 Aristotle, 7 – 8, 185 Asmussen, Jan, 200 Atlantic Monthly, The, 17, 176 Barrow, Andrew, 92 Behind the Smile (Gmelch), 129– 30 Bellaigue, Christopher de, 21 – 22 Below the Tides (Tremayne), 54, 78, 191, 194 Bhabha, Homi, 46 Bitter Lemons (Durrell), 4, 11 – 12, 18, 40, 51, 53 – 82, 86, 87, 117– 118 Bruce Chatwin: A Biography (Shakespeare), 28, 41 – 42 Bryant, Rebecca, 103, 104, 203 Bryson, Bill, 188 Burch, Oliver, 20, 37, 91, 133, 134, 155– 165, 175– 176, 195 Burke, Kenneth, 82, 194, 199

Calotychos, Vangelis, 55 Calvino, Italo, 171 Carr, Helen, 31 – 32 Chatwin, Bruce, 3, 28, 30, 40 – 50, 81 Cintron, Ralph, 7 – 9 Clark, Gregory, 53 Clarke, Robert, 43 – 44 Closed Doors: An Answer to Bitter Lemons by Lawrence Durrell (Montis), 62 Cobham, Claude Delaval, 201 Cockburn, Cynthia, 19 – 20, 203 contact zone, 91 cosmopolitanism, 33, 44, 46 – 47 ‘Crossing the Border: Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux’ (Johnson), 47 – 48 Cultural Intimacy (Herzfeld), 176– 77 Culture and Imperialism (Said), 177 Cypriot (term), 94 – 94 Cyprus, 3, 12, 126– 127, 132, 184, 185, 186, 195, 197 Cyprus at War (Asmussen), 200 Cyprus, a Troubled Island, 17 Cyprus: An Island Apart (MacHugh), 134, 138, 141– 46 Cyprus: Hostage to History (Hitchens), 135–138

210

NARRATIVES OF CYPRUS

Defoe, Daniel, 169 ‘Dispatches from the Dead Zone’ (Anderson, Junger), 134, 146–155 ‘Divided Cypriots unite to preserve ancient Famagusta’ (Theodoulou), 194 Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? (Kohnstamm), 194 Downer, Alexander, 55 Durrell, Lawrence, 3 – 4, 8, 11 – 12, 32, 40, 51, 53 –82, 86, 87, 117– 120, 125, 171, 191 Echoes from the Dead Zone (Papadakis), 19, 21, 91, 177– 180 Edwards, Justin D., 40 Eley, Geoff, 115– 116 enosis, 104 English Travel Literature on Cyprus (1878 – 1960), 17 ethics of encounter, 20, 167, 175 Ethics of Sightseeing, The, 14, 174 ethos, Aristotelian, 6 – 9 scholarly, 20 – 26 Euben, Roxana, 178, 181 ‘Europe’s Other: Nationalism, Transnationals and Contested Images of Turkey in Austria’ (Strasser), 196 Famagusta, 111– 113, 115, 159 ‘Feast of Unreason’ (Durrell), 117–118 feminization (trope), 96 fez, 192 Fez of the Heart, A (Seal), 192 Foley, Charles, 52, 54, 58, 61 – 62, 78, 81 Foucault, Michel, 94 Friedman, Alan, 56 – 57 Fullagar, Simone, 46 –47 Gautier-Kizilyurek, Sylvaine, 194 George, Don, 83 – 84, 87 Ghaziveran enclave, 100, 105– 110

Given, Michael, 63, 65 –66 global citizenship, 33 Global Politics of Contemporary Travel, The (Lisle), 27, 39 global rhetorical citizenship, 6 globalization, 31, 33, 34 Gmelch, George, 129– 130 Graulund, Rune, 40 Green Line, 9, 14 – 16, 18 – 19, 186 Hala Sultan Tekke, 100– 103, 105 Hall, Stuart, 80 Happy Isles of Oceana, The (Theroux), 48 Harper’s, 13 – 14, 134, 146– 155, 187 Heidegger, Martin, 167 Herzfeld, Michael, 176– 177 Hitchens, Christopher, 20, 135– 138, 199, 200 Homer, 169 Hostage to History, 17 Hulme, Peter, 32, 92, 93 identification, 82 Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus (Bryant), 104 immersion travel, 92 Imperial Eyes (Pratt), 30 In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the British and American Imagination (Roessel), 52, 193 In the Land of Aphrodite (RowanMoorhouse), 134, 138– 141 indolence, 59, 75, 77, 99 Infidel Sea, Travels in North Cyprus, The (Burch), 37, 91, 133, 134, 155–165 Innocents Abroad (Twain), 1, 169 intimate distance, 172 ‘Is Orientalism in Retreat or in for a New Treat? Halide Edip Adivar and Emine Sevgi Ozdamar Write Back’ (Seyhan), 196 Islam, Syed Manzurul, 170

INDEX Islands in Revolt (Foley), 52, 54, 78 Iyer, Pico, 28 – 29, 33 – 35 Johnson, Clare, 47 – 48 Journey Into Cyprus (Thubron), 8, 18, 21, 80, 85 Junger, Sebastian, 13 – 16, 134, 146– 155, 174– 75 Kaplan, Caren, 27, 29, 30, 35 – 36 kayf, 76– 77 Kenneally, Thomas, 28 Kinzer, Stephen, 69 Kizilyurek, Niyazi, 194 Kohnstamm, Thomas, 194 landscape, 52, 57 – 58, 63 –64, 96 ‘Landscape and Character’ (Durrell), 63 – 64 Levinas, Emmanuel, 46 Line: Women, Partition, and the Gender Order in Cyprus, The (Cockburn), 19 – 20, 203 Lingis, Alphonso, 166– 167, 175 Lisle, Debbie, 27, 29 – 30, 39, 43, 172 Luke, Sir Harry, 75

211

Greek, 94, 115 Turkish, 77, 78, 94, 102 negative identification, 131, 199 New York Review of Books, The, 21– 22 Odyssey, The (Homer), 169 Olson, Gary, 128– 29 ‘On Restlessness and Patience: Reading Desire in Bruce Chatwin’s Narratives of Travel’ (Fullagar), 46– 47 Orientalism, 38, 59, 99, 157 panopticon, 94 Papadakis, Yiannis, 19, 21, 91, 177–181 partition, 3 Past in Pieces, The (Bryant), 203 Phelan, James, 6 Phillips, Caryl, 120 pisteis, 7 Polo, Marco, 1, 169, 171 Pordzik, Ralph, 49 Pratt, Mary Louise, 30, 91 Questions of Travel (Kaplan, 27)

MacCannell, Dean, 14, 36, 167, 174 MacHugh, Seamus, 134, 138, 141– 46 Matar, Nabil, 201 McCarthy, Justin, 196 ‘Memories of Durrell’ (Tremayne), 56 Midnight Express, 99 Miller, Henry, 54 modernity, 35, 43, 44, 47, 48, 77, 104 ‘Montagu’s Turkey,’ 4 Montis, Costas, 52, 62 – 63, 81 Morgan, Tabitha, 195 Mortenson, Greg, 2, 189 Museum of Barbarism, 151

Rebel Land (de Bellaigue), 21 – 22 revisionary cosmopolitanism, 46 Rhetoric (Aristotle), 8, 185 Rhetorical Landscapes in America (Clark), 52 Rhetoric of Empire, The (Spurr), 83 Rhetoric of Motives, The (Burke), 199 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 169 Roessel, David, 52, 54, 62 – 63, 193 Ropero, Maria Lourdes Lopez, 120 Rowan-Moorhouse, Libby, 134, 138–141, 174 Rushdie, Salman, 41

nationalism, 92, 102, 105, 111, 113, 115, 122, 195, 196 British, 116

Said, Edward, 38, 177 Seal, Jeremy, 191 Seyhan, Azade, 196

212

NARRATIVES OF CYPRUS

Shakespeare, Nicholas , 28, 41 – 42 Shakespeare, William, 169 Songlines, The (Chatwin) 3, 30, 39 – 50 Spurr, David, 83– 85 ‘Star Traveler: Celebrity, Aboriginality, and Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines’ (Clarke), 43 – 44 Stones Into Schools (Mortenson), 2 Strasser, Sabine, 196 Suny, Ronald Grigor, 115 –116 Sweet and Bitter Island: A History of the British in Cyprus (Morgan), 195 Tahir, Sabri, 69 – 70 taksim, 105 Teach Cyprus, 24 – 25 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 169 Theodoulou, Michael, 194 Theroux, Paul, 30, 47 – 48, 188 Three Cups of Tea (Mortenson), 2, 189 Thubron, Colin, 3, 8, 21, 80, 85 – 124, 125, 172 on Bruce Chatwin, 28, 42, 124 tourists, 14 Tournay, Petra, 71 travel writing, 185 colonialist, 5 consumers of, 37 ethics, 128– 131, 132, 166– 183 as inner journey, 28 – 29 literary antecedents, 169 masculinist, 19 postcolonial criticism of, 27, 29– 31, 40, 83 – 85, 184– 85 as rhetoric, 5 – 9, 20 – 26 women, 19 – 20 Travel Writing (George), 83 – 83 Travel Writing and its Discontents: Culture, Tourism and the

Dynamics of Narration in Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia and The Songlines’ (Pordzik), 49 Travelers’ Tales: Greece, 16 Travelers’ Tales: Turkey, 16 ‘Travelling to Write (1940– 2000)’ (Hulme), 93 Travels (Polo), 169 Tremayne, Penelope, 54, 56, 78, 191, 194 Trust (Lingis), 166– 167 Turk (trope), 36, 37, 185 ancient, 72 ‘dark side,’ 135 Durrell, 59, 60, 66 – 78 helpless, 146 history (of trope), 158, 195 impoverished, 130 indolent, 75 lazy, 75, 160 monster, 74 moustache, 145 ‘negroes,’ 161 otherness, 134 reptile, 59, 68 –71, 77 silent, 70 Thubron, 98 – 99, 106– 107 ‘true,’ 60, 69, 70 victimhood, 18 Turk in America: The Creation of an Enduring Prejudice, The (McCarthy), 196 Twain, Mark, 1, 169 ‘Why We Travel’ (Iyer), 33 – 35 Yeg˘enog˘lu, Meyda, 70 Youngs, Tim, 189 Yuval-Davis, Nira, 102