Vol.15, No.2 | [Article] Mehmet Yashin’s Decolonial Transcultural Proposal

Both Cypriot history and Yashin’s Turkish-Cypriot literary/cultural production are the tangible evidence of E. Said’s idea and take on culture. If the Mediterranean Sea can be understood as a history of crossings (I.
Chambers), Cyprus is the quintessential product of this process and Yashin’s macrotext an aesthetic attempt at attesting it through a sort of deterritorialization of the subject and his/her language, or supposed mother-tongue, be it Greek, Turkish, Arabic or English. Starting from this ground, my attempt will be reading Yashin’s poems in a composite space historically dominated by Ottoman and British empires and other cultures, and so traversed by both colonial and imperial difference. Specifically, the main assumption is that Yashin’s stubborn “spectral” position of non-belonging and betweenness (“A Ghost”) is, at the several levels of identity positionality (ethnic, gender and genre), an implicit resistance to the colonial matrix of power (A. Quijano) informing Modernity, both in the space of colonial difference (P. Chatterjee), due to British colonialism, and in the space of imperial difference (W. Mignolo) due to Byzantine-Ottoman empires.