Do You Understand Where I’m Coming from?
Making sense of the way I do history necessarily involves shifting my gaze two thousand miles away from Britain to the small Mediterranean island where my grandparents were born.
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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.
Content warnings: Ethnic cleansing; Mental illness; Suicide; Bereavement; Racism; Cancer.
Historians, like any good superhero or supervillain, have backstories that help explain how we came to choose our craft, and our approach to it. Or rather, we have narratives that we assemble ourselves from the complex mess of structures, contingencies, personal agency, and wider casts of characters that our lives play out at the intersections of. And we tell ourselves these stories as we try to make sense of both the peculiar sets of materials we research, teach, and write on, and the circumstances we do those things in; the latter are also idiosyncratic, inasmuch as different types of rubbish make for rich variety in the scale, colour, and glow of the flames on the bin fire. We do this much more or less reflexively, and if we tell ourselves that it is all about the objective merit of ourselves as scholars and the objective value of our chosen topic of scholarship, than we are in the unfortunate position of being both unimaginative weavers of tales and credulous receivers of them.
Our own pasts that we claim some degree of personal ownership over as protagonists and the other pasts that we claim a different kind of ownership over as experts, the seer from above rather than the doer in the midst, may or may not overlap, but they are always in relation to one another. The main character in one is the narrator in the other, and we inevitably carry over a part of each role as we transition between the two. And perhaps what is attractive about those very similar or different pasts, whether approached through nostalgia or academic history, is the frisson between familiarity and unfamiliarity, between tangibility and intangibility. We cannot know either in its totality, but it is analytically and ethically rigorous to know both at least in part together.
So, the story I tell myself about who I am and where I come from is integral to how I make sense of what I do as an historian, and how I do it. It is to do with my being Greek Cypriot. It is not the only story I could tell, and I could tell it differently, but I do it this way because it resonates profoundly with my sense of self and holds together that which I have with that which I have lost. And when I bring that subjectivity with me into my academic work it enables me to do it in a way that I think is as right and righteous as it could possibly be. The caveat to all this is we tell those stories at the behest of other masters, who consume and commodify historian and the history they produce alike, and the more we bring backstory into the latter, the more of the former they also get their hands on. Caveat noted, the backstory I will tell is above all about ethnicity and migration, which serves as a thread that binds together stories of family, class, gender, illness, empire, and war.
Cyprus, from colony to partition
Cyprus has been an object of territorial acquisition for successive regional imperial powers since Antiquity, accompanied by periodic waves of settlement. Cyprus today has a Greek majority and large Turkish minority populations, along with other smaller groups. Intercommunal tensions among them were further exacerbated by the effects of British colonial rule from the late 19th century, after the Ottoman Empire ceded power to it, as well as intracommunal tensions arising from ideological differences, not least as they pertained to their relationships with the much-disputed motherlands of Greece and Turkey, each of which provided inconsistent encouragement to the island’s respective ethnonationalist contingents.1
During the 1950s, the Greek nationalist paramilitary movement EOKA waged an insurgency against British rule and for wholesale union, or ‘Enosis’, of Cyprus with Greece; something which unsurprisingly did not appeal to the Turkish Cypriot minority, but that also alienated many left-wing Greek Cypriots, given Greece’s own history of anti-communist persecution during and after the Civil War there. The eventual solution reached was the independence of a united Cyprus from 1960, with a political system involving a Greek Cypriot president and Turkish Cypriot vice-president – Archbishop Makarios III, also head of the Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus, being elected to the former role, Dr Fazıl Küçük to the latter – and with Greece, Britain, and Turkey functioning as guarantors of the new state’s constitution. The complex power-sharing arrangements broke down in 1963, however, accompanied by worsening intercommunal violence and segregation, with Turkish Cypriots increasingly moving into enclaves for the sake of their own security. The situation was exacerbated by a right-wing military junta seizing power in Greece, encouraging the revival of organised ethnonationalism among Greek Cypriots.
Panhellenistic ambitions faced a barrier, however, in President Makarios, whose own former support for Enosis had long since cooled. In July 1974, the Greek junta sanctioned a coup against Makarios, carried out by members of the Cypriot National Guard on. Makarios escaped and fled abroad, but was declared dead by the new regime, led by puppet leader Nikos Sampson, which started persecuting supporters of Makarios and Greek Cypriot leftists. Turkey responded by landing troops and achieving territorial control over a narrow strip in the north of Cyprus, citing the threat the new regime posed to Turkish Cypriots, and its role as guarantor of the 1960 constitution. This was followed by violence against and imprisonment of Turkish Cypriots in the south of Cyprus. A ceasefire was soon called, followed by the collapse of the Greek junta and the renunciation of the Cypriot presidency by Sampson, but a peace conference in Geneva failed to reach a satisfactory agreement. In August, Turkey undertook a further military landing, and expanded its territorial control to nearly two fifths of the island. The revived conflict was accompanied by extreme violence against and wholesale displacement of Greek Cypriots from the north of the island, and violence against and displacement of Turkish Cypriots in the south. The island was effectively partitioned at a buffer zone patrolled by a United Nations peacekeeping force. Most Turkish Cypriots who had remained in the south after the conflict departed north in 1975.2
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Despite both the Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaderships formally agreeing that reunification would have to take place along federal lines, negotiations nonetheless foundered repeatedly over the precise details. In 1983, the Turkish Cypriot leadership declared for the formation of an independent Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TNRC), which was condemned by the UN and only recognised by Turkey. Cyprus commencing the EU accession process in the 1997 compelled Turkey and the TRNC to moderate their positions, enabling the reopening of border crossings from 2003. However, when a UN plan for reunification was put to a referendum the following year, most Turkish Cypriots voted for it, but Greek Cypriots voted heavily against. Periodic revivals of talks since have shown signs of promise but failed to achieve any further breakthroughs.
Cyprus, my family, and me
As from other parts of the Empire, many Cypriots travelled to Britain after the Second World War, in the hope that its labour shortages would provide economic opportunities not available back in the colony. One of these was my maternal grandfather, Leondis, who had grown up in Yialousa, on the Karpas Peninsula in Cyprus’s northeast. He arrived in 1947, aged 21, to work as a waiter, eventually reaching Chalk Farm in North London, via stints living and working on a British troopship, in Margate, and then in Croydon. He met and married my grandmother, Androulla, a teacher’s daughter, and the eldest of eight children, on a return visit to Cyprus in 1955, when he was 29, and she 21. She moved to live with him in London, and they had four children together: Nico, Maria, my mother Florendia, and Apostolos.
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My paternal grandfather, Dionysios, had initially moved to London to study in the mid-1950s, but dropped out to return to Cyprus and marry my grandmother, Sotirou, when they were both still in their teens, shortly after which they had their first child, Savoula. My grandfather’s older brother Sotiris had, however, also moved over to, and remained in, London, and my grandfather would return with my grandmother and their very young daughter in the late 1950s. They lived in Clapton in East London and had two more children, my father George, and his younger sister Androulla. However, with my grandmother – who, unlike my grandfather, spoke little English – having already struggled to settle, and my baby aunt then suffering with bad health complications, they returned in the early 1960s to Cyprus, to the village of Gerolakkos, just north of Nicosia. There they had two more daughters, Soula and Chryso.
The trajectories of my parents were therefore to take very different routes after quite similar origin points before they eventually crossed again in the early 1980s. Both were heavily tinged with sadness in ways that were inherently shaped by the Cypriot experience, both as a young nation state and its scattered diaspora. My maternal grandmother, Androulla, found separation from her family in Cyprus incredibly difficult, exacerbated by the tragically early death of her mother in a car accident. An artistic woman whose pleasures included music and songwriting, she found it increasingly difficult raising four children in a country whose habits were foreign to her, earning money working from home as a seamstress while my grandfather worked long hours in restaurants. She became severely depressed and delusional, and the atmosphere created in their family home by my grandmother’s mental illness and my grandfather’s routine absence took its toll in different ways upon their children. This was especially the case for the eldest, and in many ways the most Cypriot of the four siblings, who spoke Greek fluently and worked with other Cypriots at a clothing factory, and who inherited his mother’s love and flair for music, but also her sense of loneliness. As a young adult, my uncle Nico’s bipolar disorder worsened, accompanied by increasingly obsessive and compulsive behaviours. In 1989, he died by suicide, aged 32. His death had a deleterious effect on the health of my grandmother, who had previously gained a renewed sense of purpose with the arrival of her first grandchildren. She developed serious diabetes, and died from complications arising from her illness in 1993, at the age of 59.
My father and his family were unfortunately caught up in the conflict of 1974, when my father was just turning 15, and forced to abandon their homes and flee south – as were most of both his and my mother’s extended families. After a spell in a camp for displaced peoples, they were housed in a synoikismos, a housing estate built specifically for refugees, in Strovolos on the southern edge of Nicosia. Shortly afterwards, my father was sent back over to Britain to complete his education, where he lived at different points in time with different relatives in North and Northeast London. The psychological toll of losing his home in a war, then of being separated from his family, was unsurprisingly severe, and my father would suffer badly with depression at times over the remainder of his life. Nonetheless, he managed to complete a BSc in Chemistry, and later an MSc and a PGCE, becoming a further education lecturer. He also met my mother’s cousins, who had themselves moved to London in 1974 after fleeing their home in Famagusta in Northern Cyprus, and through them my mother. They married in Cyprus in 1983, when my father was 24 and my mother 21.
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So, my parents built their new life together in Northwest London and began a family. I arrived in 1985; my sisters Andrea in 1986, and Nikki in 1989. My mother had been working as a teaching assistant before I was born; a career she resumed in the mid-1990s once my sisters and I were all of school age. My father, however, was becoming deeply unhappy with the racism he witnessed and experienced working in further education, as he and other colleagues of minority backgrounds found themselves being routinely passed over for jobs or promotion in favour of their White British counterparts. In 1995, some chemicals went missing from the laboratory at the college where he worked, and my father was questioned about their disappearance, the suggestion being made that he could have stolen them for the purpose of political terrorism related to the Cyprus conflict. This was the final straw for my father, who already badly missed Cyprus and his family there. Later that year, we moved to Cyprus, my father taking up a post teaching at an international school in Paphos, which my sisters and I also attended, and where my mother also later began working. We were in Cyprus for three years, but my mother missed her family back in Britain as much as my father had missed his in Cyprus. Salaries in Cyprus were also far lower than in Britain, the welfare state was much more limited, and we struggled badly financially.
We returned to Britain in 1998, firstly to Central Scotland – where my mother’s sister Maria lived with her family – and then in 2000, back to North London. A few years later, my father was diagnosed with terminal but very slowly progressing brain cancer, which he eventually died from in 2016, aged only 56. In the meantime, I finished school, and went to university to study history, firstly at BA level, then MA, and eventually completing a PhD, before becoming a university lecturer. I also in 2005 met my partner, Jennifer, herself from a large Guyanese migrant family. We have since had three children together.
Identity, politics, and history
Intergenerational trauma has deeply shaped my sense of identity, as I was socialised amid the ongoing effects of complex, harmful processes that had been set underway before, sometimes long before, I was born. I was four when my uncle died, and memories of that day remain burnt into my memory, as do my own childhood efforts to make sense of it, and the horrendous toll it took especially on my grandmother and grandfather, the latter who until his death in 2013 would regularly lament ‘Ah, my son!’ to himself in Greek during moments of reluctant contemplation. I heard from my father about his experiences of the summer of 1974, and witnessed for myself visiting my grandparents in 1990s the lingering collective psychological effects of the war two decades later in their neighbourhood inhabited by refugees and their children. I also heard from my father and other family members about the racism they had experienced in Britain, and routinely saw it for myself and was occasionally on the receiving end of it growing up. Another component of Cyprus’s place in the superficially post-imperial world order was what seemed an almost neocolonial social dimension to Paphos when we moved there: I felt badly out of place among the mainly much wealthier students I went to school with, most of whom were from Britain or Russia, and who lived in secluded exclaves in the mountains around the city.
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Since returning to Britain, I have grown evermore haunted by feelings of regret over my lengthy separation from my extended family in Cyprus, and from my country of origin more generally, and disillusionment with the individualism and cult of the nuclear family that exists in Britain, which respectively jar with the Greek Orthodox faith and kinship networks I was raised in. All of this has been exacerbated by the deaths of my grandfather Leondis and my father George, who for me were incarnate gateways between British and Cypriot culture, past and present. Living most of my life in London, it is highly unsurprising that since childhood I have tended to form close friendships with other minority ethnic Britons who shared that sense of inbetween-ness, coming from Nigerian, Bangladeshi, Turkish, Irish backgrounds, among others, as have my sisters, and our parents before us. It is also a strong point of identification between myself and my partner and her family and fuels my desire that our children grow up equally aware of their own Cypriot and Guyanese heritage.
This is the material that my own politics are hewn from. It provides the basis of my belief in the need for different marginalised peoples to act in solidarity with each other, to reject conditional absorption into dominant structures that only then exploit us, to draw upon our own memories of oppression in vigorously emphasising tolerance and ensuring we are never complicit in the oppression of others. It is also the basis of my belief in the necessity of a politics of care, of regard for and sensitivity to the emotions and traumas of others, and the rejection of narrow economism in favour of centring happiness, flourishing, and wellbeing. The arrival at and adherence to these positions is not an inevitable product of my background, but rather requires active interpretation of it and continued commitment to doing justice by what I have learned from it. There are alternative, very different ideological concepts present in the worlds I have inhabited, which one must unlearn or reject, and whose false promises be ever vigilant against. Forms of masculinity that are patriarchal, productivist, misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic; toxic to their holder and even more towards those around them. Forms of ethnic identity that are exclusionary and supremacist, that refuse to accept difference and see the commonalities beyond it, or that treat passing as ‘White’ or ‘British’ as a welcome rite of passage, forgetting our own previous exclusion from those categories to join in the marginalisation of more recent migrant groups and of people of colour.
I had given the above far less coherent and sustained thought when I commenced postgraduate education nearly two decades ago, not least as to how it pertained to what history I wanted to study. Yet those core intrinsic fascinations were in place: with the relationship between Britain and the wider world, between the domestic and the international, between the familiar and the unfamiliar. My Masters’ dissertation was on British footballers’ encounters with Eastern Europe during the Cold War.3 My PhD was on my home city, but in the main not the part I was from, nor the period in which I or any of my antecedents lived there. Rather, it was focused on carnival processions, leisure, community formation, and identity in London’s outskirts – those bits at the ends of Tube lines whose marginality from the inner London boroughs I had lived in always intrigued me – during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when those areas were still undergoing the transition from rural to suburban. Yet I was equally struck by the imperialist (and frequently racist) costumes and floats that appeared in the procession, as well as causes, such as to support combatants’ dependents during the South African War, and how these functioned as modes of demonstrating respectability amid status-conscious relatively new arrivals from more inner-lying districts.4
My search for an identity as a scholar within a neoliberal, colonial higher education system, the need to make sense of what I do as much for myself as for others, has intensified the flow from my personal experience and political consciousness into my developing historical research, teaching, and writing agenda. The types of history I am most interested in are those that challenge and unmake dominant narratives of national history by emphasising hybridity and mobility, and that emphasise the ubiquity of empire-building and colonisation within nation-building projects that aggressively propelled, and now suppress memory of, those processes. Those that examine the – sometimes unlikely – connections between different locations, and the ways these contribute to or challenge dominant region-building logics, and that put in comparison with one another temporally and geographically disparate loci of political ideas and action to highlight discreet and unrealised potentials. Those concerned with the forging of solidarity through thought and deed, and with the instances where its manifestations were weaker, or functioned to reify rather than break down hierarchies.
I also take an approach to historical analysis that examines the reciprocal relationship between grand structural forces and everyday life at a granular level, to better illuminate the workings of both. That connects individual and familial narratives with broader histories. That centres popular cultural forms as spaces where political ideas evolve, reveal their contradictions, and establish their hegemony or challenge that of others. That focuses on the importance of memory and trauma in social and political processes, examines how roles of victim and perpetrator are allocated, accepted, rejected, or negotiated within historical narratives, and reflects upon our own participation in these same practices as historians.
These are, after all, the lenses I have used to interpret the first history I came to know: that of my own life, and by extension the circumstances in which it has taken place. Telling that history here has required selection and occlusion, ordering and contextualisation, self-censorship and sensitivity. It is dynamic and evolves both as my own life unfolds, and as I hone my craft in the appraisal and writing of other histories. Gazing inwards, outwards, and inwards and outwards again, never quite with the same pair of eyes. Cyprus and its diaspora did or does not make me the historian I am or am becoming, for I exercise my own judgement and agency in that, but it is the mirror I look into to see myself first before doing so.
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For the roots of the Cyprus conflict prior and up to the 1950s, see Yiannos Katsarides, The Greek Cypriot Nationalist Right in the Era of British Colonialism: Emergence, Mobilisation and Transformations of Right-Wing Party Politics (Cham: Springer, 2017); Andrew R. Novo, The EOKA Cause: Nationalism and the Failure of Cypriot Enosis (London: I. B. Tauris, 2020); Alexis Rappas, Cyprus in the 1930s: British Colonial Rule and the Roots of the Cyprus Conflict (London: I. B. Tauris, 2020); Ilia Xypolia, British Imperialism and Turkish Nationalism in Cyprus, 1923–1939: Divide, Define and Rule (London: Routledge, 2017).
For more on the dynamics behind the 1974 conflict, see Fiona B. Adamson, ‘Democratization and the Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy: Turkey in the 1974 Cyprus Crisis’, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 116, No. 3 (2001), pp. 277–303; Tozun Bahcheli, ‘Cyprus 1974: Turkey’s Military Success Followed by Political Stalemate’, Mediterranean Quarterly, Vol. 25, No 1 (2014), pp. 6–21; Christos Kassimeris, ‘Greek Response to the Cyprus Invasion’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, Vol. 19, No 2 (2008), pp. 256–273; William Mallinson, ‘US Interests, British Acquiescence and the Invasion of Cyprus’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Vol. 9, No. 3 (2007), pp. 494–508; Özgür Özdamar and Okhan Erciyas, ‘Turkey and Cyprus: A Poliheuristic Analysis of Decisions during the Crises of 1964, 1967, and 1974’, Foreign Policy Analysis, Vol. 16, No. 3 (2020), pp, 457–477.
I am finally in the process of turning this into an article, which is currently under peer review, but a draft version of it is available here: http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.26233.85601.
See Dion Georgiou, ‘‘The Drab Suburban Streets were Metamorphosed into a Veritable Fairyland’: Spectacle and Festivity in The Ilford Hospital Carnival, 1905–1914’, The London Journal, Vol. 39, No. 3 (2014), pp. 227-248; Dion Georgiou, ‘Restaging Mafeking in Muswell Hill: Performing Patriotism and Charitability in London’s Boer War Carnivals’, Historical Research, Vol. 91, No. 254 (2018), pp. 579–809.