À Chypre, Aphrodite "s’est brisée en mille morceaux" : Fragments d’une écriture poétique redéfinie et mémoire "méthistorique"
"Thus poetry is something more philosophical and higher than history; for poetry speaks rather of generalities and the history of particular details”. These words of Aristotle are fully relevant to the case of Cyprus whose history would have been better illuminated by its poets; Costas Montis,...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Presses Universitaires du Midi
2017-11-01
|
| Series: | Caliban: French Journal of English Studies |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/4957 |
| Summary: | "Thus poetry is something more philosophical and higher than history; for poetry speaks rather of generalities and the history of particular details”. These words of Aristotle are fully relevant to the case of Cyprus whose history would have been better illuminated by its poets; Costas Montis, Claire Angelides, Kyriakos Charalambides, Pantelis Michanikos, and others, have become witnesses, those who "wipe away the tears of the people". Their creative journey follows the flow of the contemporary history of the country, which is divided into two periods: a) that of the "1955-1959" struggles against the British Empire and b) the one marked by the brutal invasion of the Turks in "1974" which entailed the geopolitical division of the island. The poetic writing of the first period, studied extensively and published in various anthologies, extols the endurance of the people and the heroism of young fighters. In that of the second period, which will be the object of our study here, the poet, in an effort to exorcise evil spirit and injustice, re-experiences the trauma of being uprooted and of mourning all that has been lost; wandering between myth and reality, truth and fiction, he/she "distils" history so as to redefine poetic art and thus weave "his/her own myth". In order to follow the poetic journey of contemporary Cypriot Greeks, we have borrowed extracts from their most representative works: (i) Closed Doors by Costas Montis, which turns out to be "a response to Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons", (ii) Methistoria by Kyriakos Charalambides, for whom "tragedy alone reveals to us the cosmos of our own existence", (iii) Deposition by Pantelis Michanikos, where the archaic figure of Onesilus prevails, (iv) Breezes of Salamis by Claire Angelides who expresses her nostalgia for the past and her fervent hope to regain Salamis. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 2425-6250 2431-1766 |