Big Traumas on a Small Island of Cyprus

Big Traumas on a Small Island of Cyprus

Readers mail….
From Cem Hudaverdi, Australia

Hi Chris, hope you are keeping well. I have another article for you titled Big Traumas on a Small Island, if you wouldn’t mind having a read. I’ve just seen a theatre performance by Abdullah Öztoprak in Melbourne, Australia. He is a Turkish Cypriot. This is my take on it within the context of Cyprus’s history.

Regards,

Cem Hudaverdi

Big Traumas on a Small Island of Cyprus.

Tragedy came to life again for the Turkish Cypriots of Australia in confronting performances by renowned Turkish Cypriot artist Abdullah Öztoprak visiting Sydney and Melbourne and enlisting the help of a cadre of local young and a few older Turkish Australian volunteers. I watched the Melbourne performance this past weekend with my family. Through his mingling of historiography, fashion, and imagery, he has depicted a history of Cyprus in a show of sound, light, and videography as we have never seen here in Australia.

The stage show commenced

The show commences. He emerges into the world, taking his first breath, and, as it happens, is born into civil strife and a life of trauma on that island, reputed to be the birthplace of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. That perhaps is a cruel irony. Ruled by many empires, the Pharaohs, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Crusaders, including Richard the Lionheart, the Venetians, the Ottomans, and the British, and finally, rent asunder by its accumulated traumas. Much of modern life is based on the diagnosis and discovery of the conditions associated with human behaviour. The micro and the macro can so easily be transfigured to understand, appreciate, recognise, and ultimately tolerate who and what we are, and where and how communities, nations, and states have arrived at their moment in history. It’s all about causation.

The Canadian Holocaust survivor, Dr Gabor Mate, is now more or less the godfather of trauma analysis. We have as human entities political extensions of our communities, our states, countries, nations, derived and shaped by our accumulated traumas. At a micro level, an example of this is physical or mental abuse, or the shock of separation from our parents while infants, the experiences of rape, violence, terror, hunger, discrimination, bigotry, slavery, and all manner of calamity. At a macro level, War between nations, conquest, plague, pestilence, epidemics (ie, like Covid), natural disasters, oppression, genocide, subjugation, Ethnic Cleansing, you get the gist. This is the living embodiment of generational trauma. Öztoprak traces this from the first scene to the last. At a personal level, the lived experience of the traumas he has suffered as a child are played out without airbrushing and is extremely confronting.

The effect on the audience

Many in the audience who had similar experiences in that Civil War period, from the 1950s to 1974, struggle to hold back their emotions. I sensed among the older crowd a swell of emotion and recollection. The imagery and sound elicited raw history, either disremembered or forgotten in this far-flung haven of Australia.

A migration scene hits a raw nerve with all. Most are here unwillingly, forced from their homes, separated from their families, brutalized, apathetic from years of war and strife and discrimination, and thus trauma, trauma, trauma. Most everyone in the audience is a migrant, a son or daughter of a migrant, or a grandchild of one. All are thus living this trauma. Australia itself is trauma. Its indigenous people dispossessed-discovery, settlement, ethnic cleansing, creation of a nation-state, and continuing to take all the traumatized peoples of the world, many fleeing war, poverty, tyranny, famine, discrimination, and hopelessness.

Every scene uninterruptedly evinces some element of trauma. Empires rise and fall…trauma. It is now firmly in the vocabulary of this production. As it is in our daily lives. None can escape the lessons, the consequences, and the reckonings of the past. As much as it can be said, “those who forget the past are condemned to relive it” we are constantly reliving it because, by definition, the average person does forget.

History tells the truth of ongoing conflicts

Archives tell the story. We fight the Germans, the Japanese, and the Italians (the Axis) in a world war, and our co-belligerents are the Russians and Chinese. Now we are asking the Japanese and the Germans to increase their defence spending and arm themselves to the teeth to counter the Russians and Chinese. Trauma. Trauma. Trauma.

The calamity of WWII with 40 million dead, the Holocaust, displacement, destruction on a mass scale, polarization of the world, Cold War, creation of Israel, Soviet bloc, authoritarianism, proxy wars throughout Asia and the Middle East. Trauma. Trauma. Trauma. Cyprus is in that mix. Ottoman debt and decline opened the door to British administration in 1878. There are plans within plans. The two communities on the island seek prosperity and peace, but the larger community (Greek)seeks overlordship of the smaller (Turkish). British rule lasts 81 years, much like the Venetians who ruled for 82 years before being evicted by the Ottomans whose rule lasted 300 years.

Cyprus ethnic cleansing is the aim

The Akritas scene conjures dread, as all Turkish Cypriots well know its origins, aims, and ramifications. Those brilliant gowns are like the costumes of life. They portray as well as mask the surface beauty of the performer, perhaps a metaphor for the surface beauty of a people, but beneath that the intention is wholly dark, twisted and terrible. Its purpose to destroy a people, to force their flight, to exterminate, to disempower and usurp, and ethnically cleanse, by whatever means to achieve their end. This message I have heard repeatedly from Professor John Mearshiemer when analyzing Israel’s strategy against the Palestinians in Gaza. How many Turkish Cypriots fled? Many, and to all corners of the earth, trauma, trauma, trauma. Perhaps as much traumatized as those who remained.

This is a long tale and tragic in every respect but one. For all those who have struggled against tyranny and resisted violence and confronted an enemy with malign intent, the day of liberation is a moment of destiny. The 1974 killing fields in Cyprus can fill volumes of books. There is a coup in Cyprus against Archbishop Makarios. The coupists commence the wholesale slaughter of Turks and Greeks alike who opposed their aims. Turkey sends troops to protect its people. Turkey is an invader! Really?

Who invaded Cyprus?

In the library at my university in Sydney in the late 80s in the days before global digitisation, I scoured microfilm of the Sydney Morning Herald, the New York Times, and the Times of London. All were carrying stories of Archbishop Makarios speaking at the UN General Assembly, proclaiming rightly, “Greece has invaded Cyprus”.

It’s like Trump saying, “Gaza is no longer liveable, it’s a ruin, so its people should leave and we will rebuild it and make it beautiful again”. It’s surreal. What the Turkish Cypriots have endured is surreal.

Öztoprak has hit the nail on the head. I believe he is an engineer by training, he clearly has a deep understanding of forces and dynamics operating in the shadows. His portrayals are visceral examples of art imitating life.

For the Turkish Cypriot people, the foundation of that life is trauma, but it is not unspoken. In fact, it is communicated and expressed in our very existence and struggle, and our salvation and determination to be heard.

The peace comes with many memories of the past

That is the great lesson of this drama, that we now live without fear, resolute and flourishing, and we never fail to forget the sacrifice of our kin who came across the sea in the moment of our greatest peril, finally to bring peace. A peace which has lasted uninterrupted for 50 years.

Turkey brought peace back to Cyprus

A peace Turkey brought and has kept and has paid for many times over. No more gunfire or bomb blasts or shrapnel (my late father was a Gazi wounded by shrapnel) or knocks on doors in the dead of night or missing persons (my uncle is counted among that number) or barricades or mass graves or armed gangs or enclaves or teenagers going off to fight for their families and homes and people. No more martyrs. This is the healing phase. Band-Aids are insufficient. All trauma requires healing. Individuals and communities are healing. This show is part of the healing. In the macro sense, this is learning the lessons of history, lest the subject is trapped in a spiral of self-destruction.

God keep us from those days of bloodshed, but bless the memory of the fallen in their brave struggle for their people. Öztoprak has done their memory great honour.

Cem Hudaverdi
Melbourne
Australia

To read a previous article by Cem Hudaverdi click here CYPRUS – THE MYTH OF UNITY – CyprusScene.com

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