Sartrean Drive in Nicosia: Reproducing Personal and Public Affiliations in Ivi Meleagrou’s Eastern Mediterranean

This article analyses Ανατολική Μεσόγειος [Eastern Mediterranean], a novel written by the Greek Cypriot novelist Ivi Meleagrou, in 1969. This work recounts the tense political situation in Nicosia during independence from 1960 to the beginning of intercommunal troubles at the end of 1963. Though the work does not follow many post-1974 Greek Cypriot novels in placing rape or violation at the centre of its representation of a traumatic private and public life in Cyprus, the issue of reproduction, both literal and symbolic, is of central importance to the narrative. It allows for the exploration of the coercive demands placed upon the individual by socio-political turmoil. Equally, however, we see how an individual’s choice, in turn, affects the outcome of those very socio-political events. By analysing how Meleagrou’s deployment of modernist techniques and themes, reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre, allow her to speak to the imbrication of personal and public space in Cyprus, the article will focus on the ways that the body and mind of a female protagonist become the locus for the reproduction of social and political power in Cyprus, even before 1974. In this attempt, it will be shown that the representation of the city of Nicosia, far from serving as a mere backdrop, plays a dynamic and crucial role in setting this national narrative into motion.