The Past in Pieces: Belonging in the New Cyprus by Rebecca Bryant (review)

In this account of Cyprus after the referendum of 2004, Bryant looks at how Greek- Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots have rationalized aspects of the inter-ethnic conflict. Focusing on informants who represent well the dominant political discourses in the two communities, the book points to the gaps in the political expectations across the divide.

As I have noted elsewhere, much of the literature in the aftermath of the referendum has pointed to new directions in the analysis of “the Cyprus conflict,” as this had been shaped up to the early 2000s (Demetriou 2006). The Past in Pieces can be considered part of this genre, as it speaks of public discourses taking shape in the “new Cyprus”—a designation that might refer both to post-referendum Cyprus and to imaginings of Cyprus as it might look following an eventual agreement. Bryant’s informants are presented through their views on the solutions of problems like property, governance, and co-existence. We are informed, through this reading, that these problems are very complex. Refugees from both sides have developed different feelings about the homes they left and the ones they have subsequently lived in. We are also shown that these feelings are most of the time aligned with public political rhetoric, which has, on the one side, insisted on the right to return, and on the other, on the right to forge new lives in safety. These opposing discourses on “rights” are analyzed in detail and placed in conversation with one another, so that the reader may judge which bits of each discourse fail to match other public pronouncements and which ones seem more sincere than others.

This is a well-structured text, which allows us to see the function of mainstream political rhetoric on the island and to understand why the two Cypriot publics have responded to developments in recent years in the ways they have. Anthropologically, this analysis is helped by studies of informants who live lives on the ground, who long for their homes or who are disturbed by intruders claiming ownership over what they have come to see as their own homes, who are nostalgic in different ways: by drawing maps, reminiscing about life in the past, keeping silent about it, writing poems, participating in public events, appropriating and re-possessing objects and buildings, and sharing and refusing to share sociality. In this respect, the book provides insights about the differences between Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots, and as such makes for a good introduction to the Cyprus problem, whose literature has on the whole been mired by political studies of the top levels of government and readings of international law. To this end, the reader is also helped by a guide to further reading sources appearing as notes for each chapter at the end of the book; otherwise, the reader is spared explanatory footnote text and references.

More demanding readers, however, may be expecting more complexity in the account. Differences that override or supplement the ethnic distinctions in Cyprus have recently come to the fore of research on the Cyprus conflict (Constantinou 2007; Papadakis 2005). Such concerns are indeed noted in the book, but they do not seem to ground the analysis. For example, the nationalist underpinnings of public discourse are noted with wit and often humor for their incompatibility with one another and thus ultimately their incompatibility with the professed aim of both leaderships to reach an agreement in their negotiations. But Bryant’s evaluations of the reasons and extent to which informants wittingly or unwittingly internalize these discourses appear to be guided by moral and material factors that refer back to the ethnic divide. The analysis of who has more to gain from particular kinds of agreements, and who has a more justified claim to property, or indeed who has suffered more, so that their expectations of negotiated partition or return may be read as more or less rational, is folded back onto the...