Silent lines and the ebb of memory: narratives of Our Wall in the island of Cyprus

This paper moves away from ‘‘orientalist’’ visions of the island of Cyprus as the island of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, and looks at the wounds contemporary Cyprus still bears 36 years after its partition. The UN-controlled ‘‘Green Line’’ divides the island into a northern and southern side and its barbedwire and decaying infrastructure renders the violence of the partition and its traumatic consequences impossible to forget. This paper is about dividing lines and impenetrable walls separating territories and nations; it is about ways of remembering and forgetting and about possible routes of overcoming physical and psychological rifts through hopeful representations of friendly cohabitation. In particular it looks at the potential transformations of the Green Line through a reclamation project into a healing inter-communal memory space (Gritching 2010); and provides a close reading of the 1993 film-documentary Our Wall by Panicos Chrysanthou and Niyazi Kizilyürek underlining its significance and influence as counter-discourse to the silence and the re-memorialisation of the years before partition. Both the ‘‘Green Line project‘‘ and Our Wall underline the importance of memory-embedded representations in the emerging genre of ‘‘postcolonial utopianism’’ (Ashcroft 2009), as positive active tools to energise the hope for peace and reconciliation.