Ecopoetics of Partition-Space:Decolonising Ecological Narratives of Gardens,States&Borders in Cyprus

Within the post-partition, 'post'colonial "timespace" (Axelsson 59) of modern and contemporary Cyprus, many personal and communal places/spaces of the Anthropocene remain haunted by an affective "strangeness [...] eeriness" that is entirely political (Navaro-Yashin Life is Dead Here, 120). The Mediterranean island's British ruling, shortly followed by the internal conflict and ethnic partition of its mainly Greek-speaking and Turkish-speaking Cypriot communities, left the ecological spaces of Cyprus with various remnants of colonialism.

These remnants emerge within literary and artistic Cypriot imaginations, in depictions of the strange and eery penetrating their personal spaces (houses, gardens); in their confused reactions to changing names and the affective influences of communal ecologies (streets, fields, mountains); in their interactions with the deadlocked, militarised surroundings (checkpoints, borderlands). In my research, I propose to bring the necessary and neglected ecological consideration into the study of these postcolonial spaces, effectively taking on a crucial role in the formation of a study of the Literatures and Poetics of Cyprus on their foundational levels.

Here, I limit the scope of my research into considerations of Cypriot ecological "naturecultures" (Haraway, 20), taking the notion of ecology to be a culturally-constructed relationship with nature, thus leaving it vulnerable against colonial reformulation. Hence, I analyse the "ecopoetics" (Hulme & Osborne, 2) of three bordered spaces of Cyprus by evaluating the ecological perspectives evident within the poetic considerations of these environments.

Zooming out from the intimate to the post-communal, I propose a close and informed ethnographic literary evaluation of the eco-spaces of gardens, partitioned statehoods, and borders.

Following the spatial turn in humanities, the shifting-narratives and poetics of place and spaces in Cypriot studies have been reconsidered, particularly by Bahriye Kemal's monumental Writing Cyprus, and Alev Adil's Border Poetics. I am deeply inspired by these spatiological and stylistic frameworks, and compelled to initiate an academic dialogue with them, in hopes of grafting the spatial turn in Cypriot literary studies with emergent theories of postcolonial and queer ecologies.

Poetic evaluations of the disrupted ecology are ever-present in the postcolonial modern and contemporary Literatures of Cyprus, as well as both nationalist and reunificationist political discourses. Although convergences exist between ecological theory and Cypriot ethnographic study already, such as the concept of "environmental [spatial] melancholia" shared by Mortimer-Sandilands (333) and Navaro-Yashin (16), these theories do not yet expand to consider the attempted (and failed) division of the Cypriot ecology through political borders.

Beyond the Anthropocenic, the ecology is a shared aspect that stretches across and into the two "politically defined territories" (Adil 332) that cause paradoxical logistic and autonomous limitations to the island's human inhabitants, while the indigenous flora and fauna remain largely undivided. As Adil's theories of poetics and Kemal's spatial studies uphold a human-oriented approach, they are only partially applicable to the trans-spatial and trans-partitional narratives of nonhuman imagination within Cypriotist reunification and partition literatures.

Moreover, the stylistic, poetic, and linguistic experimentalism prominent in modern and contemporary Cypriot literatures and arts dealing with the experience of inhabiting postcolonial partitioned spaces and places is not yet closely examined.