Writing the Catastrophe: Nostalgia and Its Histories in Cyprus

The writings of four Cypriot village women provide a window on local intimacies of nationalisms. Turkish-Cypriot and Greek-Cypriot women from a formerly mixed town describe their lives before the conflicts of 1964 and 1974, utilizing nostalgia as a longing for the homeland. While these women partake of official histories in structuring their own narratives, they do so in ways that create particular sensibilities of belonging, ones that also take on an exclusive character. Moreover, insofar as nostalgia may be seen as a longing to belong, it may take on both a retrospective and a prospective character, leading not only to visions of lost homelands but also of homelands yet to be realized.