Wedded to the Land?: Gender, Boundaries, and Nationalism in Crisis (review)

Mary N. Layoun: Wedded to the Land? Gender, Boundaries, and Nationalism in Crisis. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2001. 225 pages. ISBN 0-8223-2545-4. $18.95.

Crises of nationalism are often analyzed from a political and/or power perspective, and these analyses tend to highlight the roles played by external actors and the influence of historical factors. In Wedded to the Land? Mary Layoun, professor of comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, examines instead the social and cultural responses to troubled nationalism. She focuses on three crises: the Palestinian expulsion from Beirut following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982; the displacement of refugees from Asia Minor to Greece as part of the forced exchange of populations between Greece and the newly established Republic of Turkey in 1922-23; and the right-wing coup and subsequent Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974.

The author notes that the prevailing construct of nationalism in these instances and elsewhere is that of a "national terrain for which purity is sovereignty, rape is the violation of sovereignty, and consummation is possession of pure and sovereign land." By examining eyewitness narratives and literature, Layoun suggests that the story of nationalism is really more complex and full of contradictions, silences, and other possibilities when one looks at the questions of whether national community is possible and whether there are alternatives to nationalism.

In each of her first three chapters, Layoun summarizes the historical features of one of her chosen crises. In chapter 1, she describes the forced exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey, the end result of the Megali Idea and the so-called Asia Minor Catastrophe. She ponders whether the ethnoreligious/national homogeneity that resulted was utopian or dystopian.

The first fifteen pages of the first chapter describe the roles of the United States, England, and France in urging Greece to invade Asia Minor in 1919, the subsequent war of 1919-22, the rise of Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, the role of Eleftherios Venizelos, and the July 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. The reader could pause after this tightly written and instructive account of the accepted history and move to the next chapter, but what follows is interesting and provocative. Layoun describes accounts and stories of Greeks who compare and contrast the miseries of their lives as refugees in Greece with nostalgic longing for life in Asia Minor. She also found testimonial accounts of Greek-Christian women who remained in Turkey, married Turkish men, and led full lives as wives and mothers. She concludes that what constitutes ethnic homogeneity is virtually impossible to define.

There was, of course, brutality, violence, death, and misery in the Greek-Turkish War and its aftermath. The author, however, seeks to point out that there were also instances of intercommunal harmony and ambiguity of ethnoreligious distinctions, which can be seen clearly in both eyewitness narratives and literary formulations of the period. There were also disjunctures in perception between Greeks from the mainland of Greece and those from Asia Minor, as well as differences between private "peace" and public strife. Layoun notes in the conclusion to her first chapter that there is an element of skepticism in the refugees' descriptions of their prerefugee past and their accounts relating to the boundaries of community and nation.

In chapter 2, of particular interest to me, the author describes the summer of 1974 in Cyprus and the roles of Nikos Sampson, Glafkos Clerides, and others. She focuses strongly on the speech by President Archbishop Makarios to the United Nations General Assembly on 1 October 1974, which sounded many of the themes that have been maintained as the Greek Cypriot position over the subsequent quarter century of international and internal debate about the Turkish invasion and "the Cyprus problem." She highlights Makarios's emphasis on international (that is, U.S.) responsibility for the events and his failure to emphasize the importance of the pre-1974...