Familial Conduits of Remembrance: Storytelling and belonging in Fractured Cyprus

Abstract

This article is the culmination of thirty years of maternal storytelling and the processes associated with it, vis-à-vis the formation of individual and collective identities in my divided homeland, focusing on how the flow of haunting, familial memories informed my process of becoming. As a second-generation refugee following the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, my mother’s stories became an integral part of my fractured identity through the transmission of trauma and the imaginative re-creation and re-appropriation of the lost space from which I hail. As I dialectally engage with the past, the hypothesis becomes that one can comprehend the complexities of personal, textual and collective identities through navigating familial conduits of remembrance. The realisation is that, in imagining an identity through the gaps of the past-present interaction, there is no buried self that awaits to be unearthed — a realisation which gestures towards a space of infinite possibilities for belonging.