In Writing Cyprus: Postcolonial and Partitioned Literatures of Place and Space (2020), Bahriye Kemal has produced a pioneering work on Mother Cyprus’s spatiality and identity. In her hopeful quest to write a unified literary and cultural Cyprus from scholarship obscurity, she examines space, place, and identity formation through the lenses of three moments of Cyprus’s sociopolitical history: colonial, postcolonial, and partitioned moments. Her goal is to “interrogat[e] the powerful truth of space and place in postcolonial and partition discourse” through her synthesized empirical-theoretical spatial model (50), which unites the spatial theories of Henri Lefebvre and Yi-Fu Tuan. The author deconstructs existing Cypriot names, which emphasize inherent dualisms and instead proposes unity through analysis of texts representative of all Cypriots from the 1920s to the present (50).

The book consists of five chapters. Each chapter focuses on a critical moment in the project of writing a plural Cyprus. In chapter 1, Kemal provides a comprehensive introduction to her exploration of Cyprus’s history as a postcolony and partitioned place and the consequences of this spatiality on Cypriots’ identity both at home and abroad. She argues that identity is both an “identification” and a “positioning,” following debates in postcolonial discourse, discussions by cultural theorists, and post-structuralist critiques. In chapter 2, “Literature Education Across Dominant-Emergent (Post)Colonial Partition Positions: Hyphenated Official Turkish-Cypriots and Greek-Cypriotists,” the author’s socio-spatial exercise traces the historical divide between the North and South Cyprus, as sanctioned through production, circulation, and reception of education but also the historical partition of 1974. In chapter 3, “Ethnic-Motherland Nationalists: Mothers’ Blood and Spiritual Place,” Kemal focuses on “ethnic-motherland nationalist identification” (109) as a product of the postcolonial and partition struggle of placemaking. The author examines nationalist literature between the 1955–1974 decolonial moment along ethnic and gendered lines and shows how these literary productions and practices shape ethnic identities, albeit with competing accounts, for a common decolonization agenda. She focuses on the discourses of “enslavement and liberation” critical to the literatures of the mother-country and beginning in decolonial and anticolonial thought (114–15). In chapter 4, the “Colonialist, Communist, Post-1964/74 Partition Moments” represent the three moments of Cypriot identification and correspond to the colonial, sociopolitical, and post-partition literary constructions of Cypriot identity (160). Focusing on the literary productions of post-1964/74 Partition Cypriotists, Kemal offers reparative readings to reconstruct a unified literary Cyprus identity away from imperial, ethnic-motherland nationalist, and partition readings (161).

Finally, in chapter 5, “Rhythmanalysts of Post-Linobambakoi Diaspora: Transnational Whale of Space/Place in the Middle-Sea We Can All Inhabit,” the author employs three frameworks; the whale metaphor in Constantinou M. Costas’s “whale of space,” the concept of “rhythmanalysis” by Henri Lefebvre, and the “womb of space” by Wilson Harris, to show “new ways of positioning the self to read, write, and construct the world in a more inclusive way.” (220) The author employs the “forbidden zone” to signify a “british-cypriotgreek-cypriotturkish tripling border-crossing position and production, which is … a tormenting experience shaped by destructive desires that the diaspora willingly enter to enable ‘third’ possibilities to emerge” (253). This allows Kemal to expand on Homi K. Bhabha’s third space, through the balcony symbol, in the works of Cypriot Turkish poets . The balcony, therefore, becomes an opening. She explains that “this obsession with the ‘forbidden’ enables new possibilities to emerge” (253). Thus, she foregrounds colonial and postcolonial Cypriot diaspora literary writings and emphasizes the marginalization of the Anglophone postcolonial Cypriot diaspora and the feeling of unhomeliness and unbelonging attached to this identity. This unhomeliness and unbelonging, she argues, flow from their multi-spatial lived experiences and the resultant formation of multiple rather than binary identities encapsulated in the “post-Linobambakoi” (213–14). Kemal draws on authors who deploy space as a mode of creating “multiple Cypruses” (214), which expands the diaspora’s location to include localized diaspora. She takes a cue from reflections on “in-between” spaces and how the fluidity and uncertainty of these spaces are propelled by “‘rhythms’ of everyday to capture the ‘truth of space’ for ‘differential space’” (221). This way, her spatial analysis makes “nonsense” of any binary sense of identification, Greek or Turkish Cypriot.

In Writing Cyprus, Bahriye Kemal has written a groundbreaking work from an inventive combined empirical-theoretical method and a postcolonial and partition perspective studying Cyprus literatures. She has shown their intersections to understanding spatiality and identity by centering the island’s unique position and complex cultural and political history. The author expands on spatial theory through her nuanced and refreshing readings of diaspora/exile and the third space. Even though her language is specialized, students of spatial studies and literary cartographical inquiries will find this book helpful. Likewise, seasoned researchers in the fields of postcolonial and partition studies will appreciate how Writing Cyprus rethinks the entanglements of literature, space, political history, and identity.