Education and Memory
The "memory" that is so troublesome in Cyprus, whether in north or south, is a constructed memory, built by the educational system, the family, the community, in military service, through the news media, and so on. The uniformity of this memory construction is quite striking. Here, a scholar of Turkish Cyprus describes the process in Turkish Cyprus. This paper is from a 1998 conference in Halki, sponsored by the Center for Democracy and Reconciliation in Southeastern Europe, and is presented here with the permission of the conference organizers.
Nergis Canefe, COMMUNAL MEMORY AND TURKISH CYPRIOT NATIONAL HISTORY:
MISSING LINKS
Introduction
Remembrance, of the communal/collective past is of key importancer both the construction and perpetuation of national identities. Meanwhile, there is a growing trend of turning away from accounts of communal/collective past. This is due to the assumption that communal past is a territory largely invaded and mapped out by nationalist ideologies. Therefore, to get to 'alternative' historical truths, turning to the individual accounts, engagement in micro-histories and letting oral histories speak are commonly prescribed as the new ways in which historians can conduct their craft. In this context, individual accounts of a communal past, a concept so overcharged with contested meanings and allusions, are assumed not to be arranged around conventional, cannonised historical themes; they are seen as the key to open new venues of historical analysis and are believed to highlight aspects of historical reality that are usually left out. If there is such a thing that can be called 'memory-history', it is expected to produce effects that challenge the credibility of a unified national history, national identity, national myth, etc.
And yet, based on the work I have completed so far for my research project titled "Historical Memory and Turkish Cypriot Communal Identity", in this paper I will suggest that 'communal memories', by the very nature of their subject matter, do revolve around 'familiar' themes and sanctified historical categories. In this respect, individualised accounts of the [communal] past do not suffice to salvage the historian looking for new ways of seeing historical realities.
The recognizable themes and subjects of national history delivering stories of sacrifice, endurance, pain and pride are not alien subjects for individually delivered narratives of communal history. Furthermore, there are noteworthy structural convergences between individual accounts of a communal/collective past and cannonised national histories of the twentieth century. These convergences, I believe, are for the most part rooted in the formal history education conducted by the national education system. A common, agreed upon structure to communal/national past is then perpetually reinforced through the dominant political culture within the territory of given nation-state. Needless to say, I do not suggest that everyone who is exposed to 'national history curriculum' ends up with a standard view of what their national and/or communal history entails.
My proposition concerns primarily the existence of a common repertoire of organising themes around which the communal past is narrated, either in a formal/official format or in individual/oral accounts. According to recent literature on memory, indeed memory itself has a history. In this venue, it is commonly suggested that what we perceive and present as memories in the twentieth century substantially differ from memories that belong to the Classical, Gothic or Medieval eras, to the Renaissance, and even to the nineteenth century (Matsuda 1996; Yates 1996; Winter and Sivan 1998). The underlying assumption here is that memories that belong to different epoches are organised around substantially different systems of reference and reveal different orders of the [Western] intellectual universe. If we accept such a historicisation of memory, there emerges an additional complexity for the study of communal memory. As both formal and oral historical accounts of a communal/national past reveal, many of the themes that determine the texture of communal memories in the twentieth century originate from the nineteenth or even earlier centuries and eras. This complex make-up of the historical character of memories can be described via the concept of 'chronopolitics'. Chronopolitics refer to elements of choice, negotiation and contestation that come into play for the ultimate determination of what is remembered. Although chronopolitics constitutes an organic part of daily politics, it refers to a larger realm that relates to the formation of historical knowledge in general.
In this context, the historical axis of communal memories may or may not overlap with the time and space coordinates of the twentieth century. But then, neither does the grand narrations of [national] history necessarily follow a current-century based logic. In fact, the structure of post-1848 national histories tend to fit into an epic format which juxtaposes historical beliefs chosen from an open-ended temporal dimension (Canefe 1998). Keeping this aspect of remembrance in mind allows space for including myth-making and other 'non-rational' forms of human perception of the past in the study of historical memory. It also produces a valuable amount of 'academic tolerance' when one faces convergences between expectedly sub-altern and liberating forms of 'individual' or 'communal' remembrance and the grand central discourses of history commonly represented particularly by state-based nationalisms.
Turkish Cypriot History: One of Many?
This work owes its origins to the question of "how to write the history of Turkish Cypriot communities in Cyprus?" Without a doubt, such a question poses political, historiographical as well as practical and ethical dilemmas. Furthermore, the propositions that inform these dilemmas changed and continue to change in the course of history themselves.
Here, recourse to the rich typology of symbolisms employed by Turkish Cypriot national histories or analyses of emblems, commemorations, rituals, monuments, cannonised texts, sanctified events, etc. do not yield a clear way out. Neither is it possible to 'reconstruct' the Turkish Cypriot past based on the accounts of 'reliable witnesses', since what is remembered is inescapably framed by the now nation-state-based embrace of the themes of war, exodus, loss and historical break. In the case of Turkish Cypriots, communal memories of persecution constituted the very element that provided a direct link between the self-acclaimed Turkish Cypriot state and the individual members of the Turkish Cypriot communities.wever, even in cases whereby such a desperate form of political bonding does not exist, the reliability of individual accounts have to be assessed within their own framework and it is a dangerously isolationist approach to assume that framework to be 'disaffected' by larger political discourses and in particular by nationalism.
Here, there is also another kind of methodological question lurking behind it all: is the difficulty of writing a community's history only due to the subjective nature of individual processes of remembrance and the political selectiveness of official narratives? My answer to this question is rather uncomplicated: there is no absolute, complete, truly accountable history of a nation or a community and in the end, the changeability of communal/national history is not at all an undesirable thing. As the dynamics of nation-building or the character of the political contract change, views of communal past will inevitably change. This aspect of 'communal' historical consciousness promises a potential for new openings as well as closures, and although it may not be welcome by the Rankean premises of disciplinary history, in this case the disciplinary claims themselves might have to absorb the challenge rather than the other way around. Academic history in the era of post-structuralist critique is already made aware of problems around authorship. The next 'paradigm shift' might involve coming to terms with the possibility that authorship of the persons/people who lived in a particular segment of history and therefore claim ownership to the memories pertaining to their past constitute an equally multi-faceted phenomenon.
Since the issues of absence, distance or proximity, remembering or forgetting, witnessing, testimonial accounts or mythologising, narration, nostalgia, genealogical inquiry or chronological order, and of course political will are not external but inherent to the writing of history, there is no formula for getting rid of them. By the same token, it is not only the national, sanctified, official histories that are partial, ordered and selective. Oral history, communal memory and private accounts and narratives are, by their very nature, equally selective, partial and referential.
This is due to the way human perception and memory works. There always has to be a frame of reference and elimination of certain class of items in order to make sense of the chosen, retained ones. Therefore, the search for a total, correct history can never be satisfied, no matter how variegated our methods of inquiry could be. The historian and/or social scientist is, then, Jeft with either adding pieces to the puzzle or identifying patterns through which historical narratives were and are brought together.
In this framework, there are obvious merits of engagement in projects which examine the shaping of 'individual' historical memories of a communal past and their relation with cannonised accounts pertaining to a given period. For the reasons already mentioned above, however, there remains the problem of how to link the two. Making the official narratives the enemy, the archetype of forced totalities or a caricature of selected and reordered representations not only overlooks their highly political and in many cases demotic nature, but also undermines the reciprocity between public and private knowledges and cultures. There is something more to the relationship between individual and official accounts of communal past. In the following pages, I will make the suggestion that this something might be referred to as the relative unity of styles of historical narration in a given epoch. Not only that many of the post-1848 national histories share a common epic format, individual accounts and communal memories pertaining to a 'national past' are organised based on a traceable set of principles informed by that very format.
It is through the modern, nineteenth and twentieth century [westernised and/or globalised] format of memory that historical time assumes the shape of an aggregate of images, epoches, civilisations, many pasts and many presents ordered in a sequential way. This sequential ordering of the past events also follows a certain spatial pattern. Space becomes a different kind of place with the advent of nationalism. The traces of prenationalist forms of belonging to places are transformed into a structured practice of mapping homelands (Geography and Empire; Black 1998). In this context, the concept of chronotope provides a useful guidepost regarding the time-space axis of historical memory. Here, I use the term chronotope as an expression of the chronology-oriented mapping of spatial aspects of reality. However, chronotope is not a unit with unchanging content.
Each genre of narration reveal chronotopes with their own historicity. Furthermore, the generic forms of expression coded by a chronotope owe their legacy to specific cultural traditions. In national histories, due to the multiplicity of temporal points of reference providing anchorage for remembrance, we can comfortably say that there is more than one type of chronotope in action. In this multiplicity, there are regressive and resurgent chronotopes that come into play in the shaping of communal historical memories at a given era. Regressive chronotopes refer to times-past while resurgent ones refer to homecoming, return, and essential forms. If one accepts this framework, in the end, both the determination of the dominant chronotopes and the way they are integrated to the whole of the historical narrative require a thorough knowledge of the era during which a peculiar form of historical knowledge is produced and circulated as part of the everyday culture of a given society. In other words, we may be able to locate the time-space boundaries of different forms of remembrance of the past; but we cannot really understand what they mean or meant unless we can decipher why they are there and in which ways they were and still are used. And that form of historical inquiry calls for the historian to be involved in the mentality of the epoch during which examined acts of remembrance takes or took place (Le Goff). From this perspective, it is possible to look at both national history and communal memory as specific, historical forms of remembrance and thus study them not just in terms of their form and content, but necessarily in terms of their epochal characteristics as well. As such, modern memory pertaining to communal/national past has to be outlined in terms of intellectual traditions and socio-political practices of late nineteenth and twentieth century worlds which were, until very recently, primarily characterised by the economic, military and cultural-political dominance of Western civilisation upon others. More specifically, the memory of 'serial events', of 'nation formation', of 'historical progress', and of 'political community' could not have existed until these names could be produced, circulated and began to deliver a set of mutually understandable or at least recognised meanings. Accordingly, the set of referents that anchor both individual and public/official forms of communal/national memories by definition possess common characteristics since they are both indebted to the invention of a new format, the national history. The differences in the accounts produced about how communities were formed, historical origins of a defined nation or the events that effected a community-cum-nation's lives most, then, result from the political will and ethical choices of the narrators. This proposition is substantiated by the common repertoire of public/official and private/individual accounts of the communal past regarding the actors involved in the depletion of national histories, and, the events identified as historical turning points. Furthermore, these common themes are organised around a chosen set of chronotopes that make the narration both possible and intelligible.
Of course, all this being said, one cannot and should not expect a total overlap between public and private accounts of communal memories, that is, what is remembered as a matter of essence in the making of a community and therefore its history. Here, the issue of omittance is the most important point of contention between private and public accounts of communal histories. This issue, more or less in and of itself, provided the ground-work for a new take on history by historians of various devotions since 1960s. The 'reading' of history as an open text and not as a closed totality of absolutes, the textual and therefore manufactured characteristics of historical narration, the perspectival qualities of the account of a given event or even the vulnerability of the definition of chronological borders of an historical occurrence, the indebtedness of historical understanding to social scientific methods of inquiry, among others, are issues that are by now part of the cannonised history of historiography.
In conclusion, in this paper I propose that despite the differences in the exclusion or inclusion of certain events, or, in the emphasised aspects and even the naming of the chosen set of historical phenomena, there appears to be a common format adhered when communal memory is concerned. Consequently, despite the uniqueness of Turkish Cypriot history, as well as the individual characteristics of its public and private expressions, the Turkish Cypriot national history and its corollary 'communal memory' will be regarded as a product of its era and therefore as one of many.