Home & Apart: Spatial Justice in ‘Women of Cyprus’

On the 16^th of June 2011, the West­min­ster Inter­na­tional Law & The­ory Centre hos­ted the Lon­don première of Women of Cyprus, a doc­u­ment­ary dir­ec­ted by Vassi­liki Kat­rivanou and Bushra Azzouz, fol­lowed by a dis­cus­sion with the first dir­ector. The film tries to cap­ture the voices and feel­ings of women both sides of the 1974 Cyp­riot par­ti­tion, namely the North (Turk­ish) side and the South (Greek) side. The main focus of this mov­ing film turned out to be the home and its con­cep­tu­al­isa­tions both as a nation­al­ist strategy and a per­sonal feel­ing, namely as a geo­pol­it­ical line and a cor­por­eal affect.

The film and the ensu­ing dis­cus­sion amply show that the two con­cep­tu­al­isa­tions of home can­not eas­ily be told apart. We wit­ness for example how, in the 2004 UN ref­er­en­dum on the pro­posed reuni­fic­a­tion of the island, the Greek side gov­ern­ment used the concept of home as the main sym­bol of safety for the (Greek) land posed against the poten­tial threat of a Turk­ish inva­sion. The mater­ial aspect of home, its walls and fences, becomes a hardened geo­pol­it­ical line that speaks dir­ectly to the bod­ies of the Greeks: indeed, the argu­ment against the reuni­fic­a­tion was a feel­ing, namely fear of the other side. Like­wise, when the ref­er­en­dum res­ults of the Greek side were revealed to be over­whelm­ingly against reuni­fic­a­tion, the North­ern Cyp­riot Turk­ish women inter­viewed in the film would not hide the fact that they took it not so much as a national but as a per­sonal wound: a body brand­ing as it were, with a thick­set OXI (“no”) that per­petu­ated their exclu­sion from a land which, at least for some, used to be and still is thought of as home. Bod­ies here, homes there, thrown apart by a barbed wire that keeps on prick­ling skins and walls.

One can cross the wire, provided that two con­di­tions are sat­is­fied: the first, strictly geo­pol­it­ical and seem­ingly innoc­u­ous, is to show one’s pass­port at the bor­der con­trol. The second, dir­ectly linked to the first, neces­sit­ates a great deal of defi­ance: the one that crosses even for a brief visit risks being called a traitor by one’s peers. The film begins with a Greek woman cross­ing over in order to “return” briefly to her “home” namely the place she grew up and from where she was exiled after the par­ti­tion. When faced with the Turk­ish res­id­ents now liv­ing there, her body is defens­ive to the point of aggres­sion, her face full of claim­ing emo­tion, her lan­guage bit­ter. When, how­ever, inter­viewed later while sit­ting on an arm­chair pre­sum­ably in her present home, she assumes a cor­rect dis­course of spa­tial and emo­tional bal­ance: it is no one’s fault. She is a well-​educated woman and the dis­course is aca­demic. Once again, an affect and a stra­tegic dis­course (this time sym­path­et­ic­ally used) that co-​exist without annulling each other. The film records her moment of affect­ive trans­gres­sion, when she caresses the face of a young Turk­ish set­tler (set­tlers came from Tur­key and are in some ways the under­class of both nat­ive Turk­ish and Greek Cyp­ri­ots). This ges­ture bravely legit­im­ises the set­tler and crosses a taboo line that later caused her con­sid­er­able oppro­brium, as the dir­ector put it dur­ing the discussion.

Later on, we are presen­ted with another kind of home: not just the place where one is born and takes one’s first steps, as one woman in the film says, but home as a uto­pian ideal. Also per­petu­ated by nation­al­ist tend­en­cies, this long­ing for home looks out, onto the other side, to a place bey­ond reach and there­fore already lost. Home is a place of no return, which for some women rep­res­en­ted the para­dise on earth – espe­cially the North side which is still unspoiled and whose nat­ural beauty sur­passes that of the South side. Once again, how­ever, a woman immersed in nos­tal­gia, talked about a feel­ing: nowhere else does she feel calmer than “there”, namely the other side. Yet, her body remains firmly situ­ated on the South side, voci­fer­ously vot­ing “no” at the reuni­fic­a­tion referendum.

We know of course that this is the essence of biopol­it­ics: the use of the body and its affects in order to cement polit­ical sov­er­eignty. But this film points to some­thing else which I think is more import­ant and which comes out so clearly because this is a film on the women of Cyprus. Every con­cep­tu­al­isa­tion of home, how­ever felt, lived, remembered, reminded, related, con­struc­ted, instru­ment­al­ised, is a dir­ect con­nec­tion between the body and the law. The body desires, and the law chan­nels such a desire. The women were claim­ing the law as a way to come out of their nos­tal­gia, either in order to move bey­ond the tra­di­tional notions of what home is, or to return to what they always thought as their home. The women in the film embrace the law as a cor­por­eal right just as they embrace each other tightly; they chop the law to pieces and serve it at lunch with people from the other side; they step on it to cut lem­ons from what used to be their own garden; they ask the law for a par­don, a ges­ture of recon­cili­ation. The law is not simply the law of prop­erty that dis­trib­utes or the right to vote at the ref­er­en­dum, but an embod­ied affect, a feel­ing formed in the space between the caress­ing hand and the stones around it: I belong here. For the woman in the film, the law is lumin­ous and bitu­min­ous at once, less a tool for power as it would per­haps be in a male ver­sion of the film, and more an affect.

The law is used by both sides in order to deal with the impossible: that both you and I want to be at the same place at the same time. Our body con­tours want to occupy pre­cisely the same space, whether this is mater­ial or con­struc­ted: your home is my home. This is the gash of spa­tial justice: want­ing to be at the same place, the same time. Home is where desire is, not just walls and rooms but the move­ment of a body and the space around it. The body is formed by the space, the space is formed by the body. Home is made of skin and tar.

There was a moment in the film where spa­tial justice seemed within reach – a justice not to come but right here, pop­u­lat­ing and open­ing up the space. A Turk­ish Cyp­riot woman crosses over to the South side and is wel­comed by a Greek fam­ily now liv­ing in her pre­vi­ous home, phys­ic­ally hug­ging her and mak­ing her feel “at home”. They were both mak­ing some­what grandi­loquent claims, con­ced­ing at least emo­tional prop­erty of the home to each other: it is your home, no it is your home. Both parties were retreat­ing from the here of the home. Yet at the same time, they were rather amus­ingly sug­gest­ing that they could essen­tially occupy the empty house next door, and make it her new/​old home. A little ges­ture of with­drawal from the law, a going-​against the law and an open­ing up of a space of justice right here, next to the law­ful prop­erty. In with­draw­ing from the given law, spa­tial justice claims a space that trans­gresses the barbed wire and brings together bod­ies, spaces, dis­courses. In a sub­sequent scene, the two women are bent over a cof­fee cup read­ing their future – a uni­ver­sal act of divin­a­tion in Tur­key and Greece and one of the most gender-​characteristic moments of the film. The cof­fee cup con­tains their gazes, both focused on a space of justice rooted in the here, the cof­fee marks and the inter­lock­ing hands; yet at the same time look­ing out, towards the other side that has already crossed the wire and has moved here, right where they were sitting.

Tags: Justice, Space

This entry was posted on 22 June 2011 at 6:41 am and is filed under Aesthetics, Critical Legal Theory, Film, Jurisprudence, Previously. Published under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License: You are welcome to share and remix this content for non-commercial purposes. Kindly acknowledge and hyperlink the source.