Postcolonial Ghosts in New Turkish Cinema: A Deconstructive Politics of Memory in Dervis Zaim’s ‘The Cyprus Trilogy’

Postcolonial intercommunal violence on Cyprus and its after-effects have been studied extensively in the social sciences and humanities over the past five decades. However, the cinematic representations of the postcolonial condition in Cyprus have not yet received significant critical recognition. This dissertation is a response to the scarcity of scholarship on cinematic representations of the postcolonial history of the island. By analysing cinematically recreated and visualised ghostly matters of interethnic strife and post-conflict situation in Cyprus, I want to contribute to the current debates on the politics of postcolonial memory in Cyprus. My discussion focuses specifically on a film trilogy by the Turkish-Cypriot art house film director Dervis Zaim, ‘The Cyprus Trilogy’: Mud (Çamur, 2003), Parallel Trips (Paralel Yolculuklar/ Ta parállila monopátia [Τα παράλληλα μονοπάτια], codirected with Panicos Chrysanthou, 2004), and Shadows and Faces (Gölgeler ve Suretler, 2011). This trilogy is the most remarkable set of critical films about the partition of the island that have been produced in post-Yesilçam Turkish film history. My analysis of Zaim’s film trilogy departs from the assumption of the primacy of the phenomenological experiences of the postcolonial Cypriots over geopolitical and macro-historical explanations. The reading of Dervis Zaim’s works about the intercommunal civil wars in postcolonial Cyprus raises the question of the haunting/hauntedness. Therefore, this Ph.D. thesis addresses hauntological themes such as disjointed time, memory, historical justice, haunting, visor effect, voice, silence, ghost story, haunted house, haunted body, and the absent other that appear persistently in the films. Throughout this thesis, the spatial/temporal, vocal/narrative, and embodied/disembodied aspects of Zaim’s film trilogy are discussed, drawing primarily upon a Derridean hauntology. Building a theoretical bridge between hauntology and postcolonial cinema, the relationship between postcolonial memory, film, and haunting is examined in the context of Cyprus. This thesis concludes by discussing the extent to which Dervis Zaim and his spectral realist films have achieved the deconstruction of postcolonial memory through challenging both the imperialist and nationalist structures imposed by dominant discourses