izinsiz gosteri

here was a conclusion made on the radio: poetry isn’t popular anymore. No one is buying it, so no one is reading it. I immediately made a decision – at the Vilnius book fair I’m going to the poetry book presentations. When something becomes unpopular, you recognize what its real worth is. And what you truly long for.

This year at the Baltic Book Fair, which took place at the same time as the annual Vilnius Book Fair, the poets presented were our closest neighbours the Latvians and in terms of the EU, our farthest neighbours the Cypriots. Usually we are not interested very much in our close neighbours, and we know even less about those that are further away. But looking for more information about them I realized, that we are ignorant not only of them, and that we are not alone as such: in our times poetry rarely steps out the boundaries of its own country and language it is written in. Therefore the meeting with the Cypriot poets seemed to be especially intriguing, and promised a new acquaintance with a far-away country and their still distant and little-known poetry.

The beginning of the presentation of the Cypriot poetry collection Sala (An Island) by “Baltos Lankos” publishing house, resembled a welcoming party, which started with red wine, cosy chatting in small groups of people scattered around, and the glances of dark exotic eyes flashing among the pale-white northern faces. Unfortunately, not all of the authors of the book brought together and translated by Dalia Staponkute were able to come to Vilnius – so, in a short while the conversation unfolded on the stage between Alev Adil, Gür Genç, Mehmet Yaşın, Stephanos Stephanides, the translator Dalia Staponkute, and the jazz of Juozas Mila¹ius.

It took a year to select and translate the poems for the collection. It was not only translations from Greek, Turkish and English, told Daila Staponkute presenting the book, but also from her own personal experience, which she has gained during 17 years of her life in Cyprus. There are much more poets in Cyprus than kebab makers, but this collection includes only poems about one’s feelings for homeland, memory of it, a stranger’s feelings about the place in which he or she lives. And as Stephanos Stephanides, who wrote numerous essays on Cypriot poetry, would probably add – these poems are about the impossibility to return to the place once-abandoned and “always already“ sullied by the time, and the poetry itself is an allegory of salvation and most likely a rather misleading promise of plenitude.
Alev Adil started the first readings (her poetry is also opens the collection of ten Cypriot poets). Fourteen years old, when the war divided Cyprus into two parts, she left her birthplace and now lives in London (you can almost unmistakably feel the British influence from her posture), lectures at the University of Greenwich, and is the head of the Department of Creative, Critical and Communication Studies. She writes in English and performs her poetry. The event was in fact much closer to a poetic performance, an action which reminds the very nature of the poetry sang by the ancient Greeks, recited in closed rectangular courtyards, public places and grand halls, whispered in stuffy kitchens in the light of a dim table lamp, and – OK, let it be – cried out from the stages – the nature of poetry expressing itself in live voices, immersing the audience in experiences lived by others or maybe even those that used to be our own. The words of the poets were captured by the sounds of the guitar touching, dropping and slipping, and struggling again: the string plucked tight was joining a far-away island with the buzz of the book fair‘s crowd, and the crashing of waves with a taut nerve, when in that poetry ringing from afar you recall your own memories.

The poetry read even in four different languages, and stories from the writers themselves and translator were testifying to the unique history of the country’s multiculturalism and mixture of languages, a country that has often been fought over since the 15th century and for many years has been divided by the ghostly Green line. It was also a testament to the fate of the Cypriots that have spread out all over the world and those who have finally come back home, those who are returning, and those who will never return. However, in those stories there was something vaguely familiar; something that reminded one of our rather recent but slightly forgotten history (it seems that 16 years is a tax on our Lithuanian memory!) and the mundane life of those who have left Lithuania and have adapted to life elsewhere, and those who have left and did not adapt, joining the strangers and always staying strangers among them.

When asked to tell something about the island’s ancient culture, Mehmet Yaşın, a world famous poet and novelist who writes in Turkish and teaches a course on Cypriot poetry at the University of Cyprus, looked at first shy but later told it with pride, starting his speech with the first question that he always asks, that is: whether we know where Cyprus is? In this case we did know, but how many times have we heard in a foreign country people asking “Where is Lithuania”? “On the school globe / with blue oceans and green lands / we are marked with a small dot / that even I – can you imagine! – can hardly find” (The Cartographer. Andriana Ierodiaconou). These words would equally fit for Lithuania; a lost island on the map of the continent. It crossed my mind, that quite possibly it would be worth starting with cartography when presenting ourselves too.

Cyprus has a culture stretching back thousands of years, one of the oldest alphabets, and epos as from the 8th to 7th B.C. written by Stasina that inspired Homer himself (which Mehmet Yaşın added enthusiastically). The official languages on the island are Greek, Turkish, and English. Even today there are still many people of different cultures, religions, and ethnicities living on the island broken apart and riddled with hollowed places (the avenging angels of this polyglot house now are silenced): Orthodox and Muslims, Greeks, Turks, Armenians…

Cyprus is a small “heaven of boredom”, an Aphrodite’s island teaming with poets (again that familiar feeling, do you remember “Lithuania, a land of poets”?) “Too much poetry for such a small island” (Not Poetry, But Water), writes Gür Genç who, as he himself told us, a few years ago finally returned home to Cyprus after life-long adventures abroad.

These poems we heard are both - a special tool for communication and a form of nostalgia. So much unusual nostalgia, paradoxical, ironic and encouraging to evaluate critically the trajectories marked by one’s memory; nostalgia that, according to Stephanos Stephanides (an English writing poet, a literary researcher, a critic and a professor who after more than 30 years of life in Americas and India, amongst other peoples, returned to his homeland) is not looking into the past but allows the future to come. It is nostalgia for the future in the poetics of displacement. Almost physically felt, like the “veins being cut” or “arthritis slowly embedding” itself into the bones. The themes of un/forgetfullness and non/return, of the im/possibility of having roots in one’s land are expressed through the motives of ancient stories being told in childhood and through the usage if the literary and cultural narratives. A poetical line is fractured by smatterings of conversations, facts, crumbs of history, which lay bare the accidentally opened feeling of fragileness, temporariness and insecurity. An unfulfilled thought (forbidden to be fulfilled) is suddenly interrupted by the details of the surrounding forcing their way into the lived experience – a computer, a videotape, photos, hotels, airports, empty streets, the cemeteries always carried around in our hearts, and foreign languages...As if language wasn’t at all decoded and would sound “natural”, – “coded out”, with torn masks, language clichés cracked open and (something that we probably can’t judge) exposed true character of the Cypriot government official rhetoric. It is poetics, pulling down the veil of words, not allowing one to hide behind them,... and you stand naked, like in a dream, in an airport, in a hotel room, in Rajastan, at home, in Cyprus, in London, in Vilnius, and again at home...This very contemporary and intellectual poetry, with a little sip of elegy but absolutely unsentimental, with a sensitivity that is totally different from ours, and the very organic and natural experimentation of poetical form inspired with the resources of living language, sometimes sparkles with warm humor, light irony, a playfulness, and a thought laid down with aphorisms like out of Eastern tales (for instance the simply beautiful Aunt-ology by Mehmet Yaşın).
In asking why people write or hope to be understood when translated into another language, the poets (by the way, their poetry is translated into many languages, and they themselves, actively creating and participating in literary and public life, are known in many European countries) all answered in a similar way. Alev Adil writes from her heart and doesn’t expect recognition, but love – so this “love letter” of hers might be received by its addressee. Stephanos Stephanides emphasized the paradox of writing: you write alone, but you’re writing about what surrounds you, so actually you are never alone. He said that he didn’t believe in loneliness and isolation and recalled how a small remark in a friend’s letter unexpectedly and paradoxically arose in his memory in entirely different circumstances and became a line of a poem. Mehmet Yaşın told that between the audience and a writer there is an unavoidable and unexplainable connection, while writing is like psychotherapy: he writes in order to be cured with our help (“But reader! Every poem is a confession.”). While Gür Genç, who writes in Turkish, and admits being an imbalanced person, said that he thinks he is not alone and there are more people like him among his readers, thus he believes, that his poetry will help them to get their balance back in the same way as it helps him.

In a hall in LITEXPO (the Lithuanian Exhibition and Convention Centre) that was horribly noisy and totally unsuitable for such presentations, (“Poetry is just an island in our everyday life”, the editor-in-chief of Baltos Lankos sadly apologized) poetry was making its way, brimming with foreign languages ringing strangely, richly, melodiously, and sounding almost enchanting (this is really something, and on other cases it is lost in translation!). And the eyes of the poets (the ever-laughing eyes of Stephanos Stephanides and the “naughty” eyes of Mehmet Yaşın) were looking straight into the eyes of the listeners, and the warmth of this faraway country was emitted from the stage. What arose were new exotic scents, colors, tastes, things, and even strange-sounding names of the poets – a sonorous name of Alev Adil reminds you of the first letter of the alphabet (aleph), the very beginning, and also the mysterious stories by J. L. Borges, and Gür Genç promised to put together his name divided like his homeland, when his country is rejoined. But at the same time those poems written in faraway countries echoed with such familiar impressions. Have you ever been lost in London at night? Have you ever looked at the moon in the South? Or at the grey sky in the North longing for the sun? Do you remember, when you were a child, you fed the birds with crumbs from your hands, visited your aunts, and laughed listening to their stories? Or do you recall your unsent love letters? Have you ever felt how the salt of your homeland permeates into your bones? And then it crossed my mind, aren’t all of us ex-patriots? Ex-patriots are not just those, who were shooed away or have been exiled from their homeland, but also those who feel like that “are not totally at home”, as Dalia Staponkute wrote in her preface letter to the poets: “the spacious apposition ex-patriant could also mean that sometimes we are in our homeland when really we are not, and are not in it when we really are”.

Having had a happier end to our historical collisions than Cyprus, do we feel that we have accepted our own country as it is, or would we say the same as Giorgos Moleskis “Unwelcoming is this land. / It needs not simple love. / It needs crazy love, / mystical and incomprehensible – / love for a stone, the desert, / the past and the future / for ruins, which are ever-increasing, / for bones, / walls, which are ever-decreasing, / for mistakes, mistakes, and everything..." Haven't we had our suitcase packed (just in case)? Aren’t we always waiting for the ship (as Niki Marangou writes)? But the wound of Cyprus is open, and throbbing, and we have almost fallen asleep: if not my birthplace / then my memory / is an occupied country, fearing to turn back and awaken, because we know that “waking exiles us / all over again”. Even having come back home, in spite of how many different gods we worshiped, in spite of how little time is left, are we able to promise following the Cypriot poet, that we won't fly away together with birds again?

An experience common to all of us in Cypriot poetry is based on particular historical and cultural circumstances, while the feeling of displacement and nostalgia is based on the political context. But it’s precisely because of this, and despite this, one can find in this poetry what is shared by all of us – of our faraway neighbours and us ourselves, of their country and our country, culture, memory, and life experience. And at the same time one can recognize some sort of more general calling of poetry – to become an island of “made wishes”, an island built from sounds and words.

It seemed as if the “appearances / disappearances / connections” (the title of one of Alev Adil’s poems) of this meeting were woven into the almost symbolic image of a black plait extending around the bottom of the white book cover, as though it was copied from Alev Adil's tattoo. And being at home I opened the book again, looking for the answers... So after all, where is Cyprus?

2007-03-19*