TALKING POETRY

Stephanos Stephanides

Nostalgia for the Future: a Perspective on Cypriot Poetry
The word nostalgia deriving from the Greek words for pain and return was first used as a medical term in the 18th and 19th centuries to describe a disorder of the imagination marked by a condition of excessive melancholy. While it has lost its medical connotations, some postmodern critiques perceive nostalgia as a conservative or even reactionary force that idealizes a false memory of the past. There are defectors from this perspective including myself who see nostalgia as transideological. While nostalgia may seem not to have the knowingness of irony or satire, it has a visceral physicality that can be put to creative and critical use. A few years before I met the poet Gür Genç I was struck by the following poem and statement of poetics:

Not Poetry But Water

For Cypriot poets
The Island has turned into the garbage tip
of love since Aphrodite.
Our feet are tangled in the broken roots
and leftovers of colonist civilizations,
when we try to move, ruins and heaps of bones
crunch under our weight.
The land is heavily burdened with death
salvation is not poetry
but water.
All the stones melted with excessive heat
and flowed into the sea
The sexual invasion of foreign tongues
burn off our mouth like melted copper.
Too much poetry for such a small Island
please don't write anymore
plant trees
and water

The poem's doubling of affect and agency, poetry and poetics, is also a way of thinking about nostalgia and poetry as vehicles for knowledge. To understand how and why nostalgia works in the poetic form and its contexts is also to suggest new ways to approach poetry in the intimate public sphere. We might even say that poetry is in fact, a nostalgic form, creating a world that we live in and contemplate aesthetically, knowing that in the end it is or will be irrevocably past and gone. Poetry therefore enacts an allegory in its impulse to salvage bringing with it an (im)possible promise of fulfilment. Perhaps all narratives seek this promise in time and place – combining Odysseus's desire to return home with Proust's search for lost time – but since all place is sullied by time, we know we will never return except in our creative detour.

While this may be the human condition, this is further accentuated in cultures such as that of Cyprus where diaspora and migration, division and displacement has affected most of the population.

It is useful to remember that in the Cypriot case narratives of displacement and nostalgia are highly politicized and often repeated in official context as well as personal ones. For years after the 1974 partition, State television fed us images of our lost villages with nostalgic music and the slogan ‘I don't forget.' Many refugees and migrants have developed rehearsed stories of home, and these stories are embedded in larger narrative of the official, educational and other institutional structures in which they are organized and contextualized, but for many dislocated people the official perspective does not fully represent the experience. If a switch is flicked at the disturbance of displacement, creative ways to remember, forget, to mourn and (re)build are shaped. Poetry is not detached from the longer-term historical narrative where these are situated. If nostalgia is trans-ideological, there is a need for a critical self-awareness of the imaginary trajectory nostalgia enacts.

It would be useful to trace briefly the trajectory of nostalgia for cultural arrival (or its construction of imaginary homelands) in literary modernity from the beginning of British colonialism to the EU accession. T he conservative re-territorialization and overdetermination of ethnic origins in the post-colonial period in Cyprus emulates the emergence of European nation-states in the 19 th century when nostalgia was linked to notions of the homeland, which in contrast to the Americas seeks ethnic origins rather than syncretism or creolization in cementing nationalisms.

Literary modernity in Cyprus came belatedly with the advent of British colonialism in the 1880s that brought the first newspaper to the island and when the first printing press came as gift from Alexandrian Greeks. In the period 1880-1930, which coincides approximately with the first half-century of British rule, more than 900 texts by about 400 writers were translated by 150 literati. These include European classical and contemporary literature, and Eastern literature (mainly Arabic and Persian). English education in Cyprus, and Cypriots studying in British Universities, were important catalysts in this literary activity. In addition, there was a Cypriot diaspora in Egypt, Asia Minor and the Levant with knowledge of Eastern languages and cultures. The transcultural foundation of literary modernity in Cyprus – no doubt because of it is linked with colonialism - gave way to nationalism. Separate nationalisms of the two main ethnic communities defined the anti-colonial movement, which after independence led to the partition of the island and the dislocation of forty percent of the population. The role of nationalism has since been strong in defining cultural practices both written and oral. We have seen this process in the construction of a literary canon through state publications and prizes, translations and anthologies as well as by organizations such as Cyprus PEN. One PEN publication (Kouyialis, 1983) boldly declares as its title 27 Centuries of Cypriot Poetry, and includes poetry in English translation emphasizing a Greek lineage from the Kypria Epi of Stasinos (7 th to 8 th century BC) to 20 th century voices. In its attempt at a Eurocentric design of identity of unbroken tradition, it narrowly defines cultural frontiers (e.g. exclusion or denial of the Ottoman tradition, no Turkish-Cypriots or other minorities are included),

The call for water at this disjuncture of the island's culture is a recognizable imperative of ‘border thinking,' a departure from the national as defined by two separate ethnic teleologies and the arrival to somewhere else – somewhere between nowhere and now here – a nostalgia for cultural arrival without partition and impermeable boundaries - which involves a new poetics of the image, the imaginary, the imagined as social facts and as political and ethical moves to renegotiate the tensions between incorporation and dispersion. As Lysandros Pitharas - referring to the green line that divides the island - says (writing in English) “and I poke my tongue/into the hole of my history/and wriggle my toes in the damp sand, beyond the cafeteria,/and observe that I can't see this green line, I just can't see it../ and in the same poem evokes an image of people like monoliths looking toward the sea.

Some poets have creatively brought out the anxiety in the muffled voices, discerning the forces which generate the borders and mobilizing the feeling of nostalgia in empowering directions by exploring the possibilities of occupying places in different narratives.

Nostalgia may be enacted in different ways, while an attachment to the past and the histories and practices and rapprochements towards our own histories can be sustained with active detachment from and resistance to postcolonial conditions, partition and border thinking. The possibility for this kind of variety of nostalgia, to have threads to the past without being the active enemy of future relationships, engenders its own ironies on how local and national cultural identities are argued and contested. Such nostalgia may bring to practice and permit evocative configurations of relationship and self-action.

Nostalgic configurations of self and other generate the culturally tautological where the loss and gain involved in the transfer from past to future become ambivalent or incommensurable. Niki Marangou's poem, “The Last Limassolian,” peculiarly inverts the official rhetoric of partition by designating the Limassol mechanic as “alone and almighty, reared by the Turks, enclaved and missing in his own town.” These terms are normally applied to the Greeks who were caught by the Turks or stayed north when most of the Greeks fled south, here they are applied to a Greek who stayed home in the south but is “enclaved and missing ” because of the absence of the Turks “who reared him .” The doubling of the apprehension of self (the shifting of the sign/the other/the Turk) splits the moment of revelation in the present, and the nation becomes a liminal form of self-representation, a space that is internally marked by the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples. The tension of the cultural location underlies the discursive ambivalence and paradox of this shipping town “ which no longer travels/does not idle does not play/filled with off-shore companies, brokers, Mercedes” “The Last Limassolian” is like the angel of history (though he is a mere mortal without wings) caught in the violent storm or the “din of battle” with his back to the future, “the sea of Limassol behind.”

It the aesthetic charge of these lines produces the complex feeling we call nostalgia, even if it is hard to say what that feeling is. It also challenges some postmodern theories which claim that nostalgia is simply bad and which unduly simplify its effects and claims on our attention. Nostalgia as critique necessarily depends on identifying as a perceptual and representational strategy with variant cultural politics, one that can only be understood in relation to a text's other goals. To emplot the rhetoric of memory and forgetting in the figure of nostalgia is to explore the crucial position of cultures in the machinations by which heterogeneous cultures are brought together (or apart) and offer nuances of trauma that cannot be easily partitioned between past and future, here and elsewhere. Nostalgia need not signify real longing for a real state of affairs, for the past but a coherent critique of the present and a call for a different future, a nostalgia that enables the future.

If the unimaginable community produced by nostalgia can never be sufficiently read, its anxiety may be identified in its continually dislocated idiom.

Andriana Ierodiaconou says in one of her poems: “Swallows fly to green days directly, without hesitation/we have been walking for years now and the sea has forgotten us and become a word (my translation).“ and in another poem “Just as the ship/we saw on dry land.” If there is a nostalgia for the future to be found in Cypriot poetry, one might find its poetics in disjunctures, rather than continuities – putting our tongues in the cracks – insisting on the non-linear relationship between departure and arrival so that the arrival is not to a particular end but in the process of cultural translatability – in the quest for water and the desire to be remembered by the sea – nostalgia for the permeability of borders.

Ultimately it is an encounter or challenge to border thinking, an expansion of the form of the nation through an intimate listening – and finding the wave to engulf the (land)scape in an initial and inner diversity that the outer form of the nation excludes. Jenan Selçuk states in his poem The Urge

Sea, once
you were our master
but we abandoned you
by going after the earth:
a willing exile to inner-lands,
reversing history.
The sadness of the sands
carried away from the shore
by unconscious feet.
The discomfort of dislocation!

Stranger

- Strange stranger, who do you love most?
- Your father, mother, sister, brother?
- I have no father, no mother, no sister, nor brother.
- And your country?
- I come from a country that does not exist.
- Do you love Beauty, stranger?
- I would willingly love her – that immortal goddess.
- And do you love gold?
- I hate gold like you hate god.
- Then what do you love, extraordinary stranger?
- I love the clouds --- my friends the clouds that pass…
- Those marvellous clouds, over there!

- Free interpretation of Baudelaire's ´ L'étranger¨ in Spleen de Pari s, January 2005

Ars Poetica: Sacred or Daemonic

à tel prix appaiser
Ma chaleur Cyprienne,
Élégie XIX. Pierre de Ronsard (1524-85)

Do not be deluded
I have a split tongue
Moving between reluctant whispers
And inaudible pulse articulating peace
You know you will never find
In the lull of your dead muses
And the platonic lambda
How to reach pure sound?

No matter if the signs are Greek or Turkish
I lose my way
Even when there is only one way to go
The police sniff and tell me
My hallucination is out of order
And their dogs label me “under control”
I slip away looking for relief
In everlasting summer or everlasting death
And when I find you
I strip you naked
In reckless desire for your disease
(or was that only in my dream?)
I do not know if it's your malady I want
Or if I am diseased by your desire
I negotiate the pullulating mirage
And my body sizzles in my Cyprian heat
And rolls in flames into the blue of the sea
Embers evaporate in the clarity of the moon
And the tempest of the stars
Weaves halos fudging stories
Of roaming phantoms in an overlay of cities
With statues of your damaged fantasy
Who lost their heads and genitals
In impetuous recklessness
Or in the world's tormented ideology
And I pound your words
Chasing poetry of merely mind or merely sexuality
Two pure white butterflies
Paying off this lack in broken stone

So don't believe me
For different daemons speak within me
All looking for their missing parts
Ars Poetica: Water for Poetry

For Saraswati – the Watery One

Too much poetry for such a small island
please don't write anymore
plant tree
and water…Gür Genç

I add voice to the plosive
Not knowing if it is bursting in or bursting out
And liquid follows g r g r g r
Air passes and I pout my lips
And push my tongue to shape the breath
To catch the vision hidden in the syllable
Neither u not i
Not front nor back
In the slippage of a dream
You give me a code to find you
But one of the numbers drops into obscurity.
A secret hand offers the missing link
Without my bidding
But if I reach out and call
Do I know what tongues will speak?
Instead I send my messengers to fetch you
When they bring you
I do not know your face
I only know the feeling
And touching your hair
I verify it is truly the weed of your lover the sea.
If you really have come, then why do you remain silent?
I now know you are not genç – names lie
You are old as the sea
And the shiv
The ancient dancer
You beckon the silence
That speaks before and after the aa
the uu
and the mm.
I wait for poetry.
Or do I really wait for water?
I close my eyes
I recite the mantra -
gür--.gür – gür.

February 2004

Blue Moon in Rajasthan

For Priya who sent me to the dargahs

Once only did I see a blue moon
Shedding a light as pure as the look of a goddess
In Rajasthani skies.
Her blueness shimmers and insists
Wreaking havoc from another realm
Beyond life's certainties
Lending me her sound
To hear the flesh constantly in flux
On a pilgrimage of broken roads
Trucks trail sluggish cows and scrawny camels
Drivers stub out their love in roadside huts
I stop for hot samosas and instant global cappuccino
Next to a display of Kama Sutras in English and in French
Where is moksha concealed
In decomposition, dust and grime
Or in the lake of my journey born of a lotus
That some careless creator dropped
For us to gather stories with cupped hands
And then scatter them with grain and petals
While white monkeys scavenge
And screech to share in the exchange
In company of others hustling or in need
Or seeking boons
A young Brahmin switches off his mobile phone
To will me into lakeside prayer
And a dispute of whose knowledge and whose agency
Is a boon in the will drawn to chance?
Or in chance drawn to will?

My day is graced with
Five sisters brothers cousins
Surrounding me gleefully in awe
Do I bring with me the smell of the sea?
They shake my hand
Mai and mami smile coyly behind
Which land did I come from they ask
I begin to speak of a faraway island in some sea
Designated the middle of the earth by some
As they await more revelation I think
Of the improbability of my birth
Do I come from any land, I wonder
The European Union, I volunteer
They nod approvingly
Is the encounter their boon or mine?
Our exhilarated farewells
Distract the man pissing on the wall behind
And we drive off through pigs wallowing in mud
Food for outcasts or for export we debate.

A dusky road descends on Ajmer
To the resonance of kettle drums
Syed Irfan leads me to offer my gifts of marigolds
And silk and after recitations of Persian couplets
At Friday evening prayer
I receive sweets for peace
And a candle of bees wax for my island
Flanked by youthful skull-capped priests
I am swept away for celebration at the tea wallah
More handshakes smiles children
Seeking the splendour of
A gift, a rupee, a touch
That will transfigure
A gift that will bring the boon of giving gifts
Dargah sweets stick to my teeth with stories
To swallow and excrete
And with the murmur of the road
And the fragility of a candle in my hand
I evaporate into desert wintry mists
Glaring at the randomness of night skies

I cannot turn away my gaze
Shade your eyes goddess lest I go mad
Let just a residue of blueness trickle through
And a little divination seep from underground
Into my body's waters
So for a moment I may feel
The untouchable in your visible and sensual touch

After a journey to Pushkar and Ajmer, January 2004
At Pushkar the only temple in India for Brahman (the creator) is found near a lake that arose when he accidentally dropped a lotus from the skies in this desert state. One story tells how Brahman fell in love with his own daughter and creation, Saraswati, the goddess of poetry, and as punishment for his act of incest, no temples were built in his name except this one.
11 km away, Ajmer has for centuries attracted pilgrims to the tomb of the Sufi saint Khawaja Moinuddin Chisti, also known as Khawaja Saheb or Sharif. As in other Sufi dargahs, all religious communities are welcome, and this has gained special significance in India in recent years as a symbol of hope and harmony in the face of inter-communal violence.