Articulations of the crypt: working-through historical trauma in Cyprus with poetic language and film practice

This Thesis by Papers integrates psychoanalytical and film theory with literary and cinematic practice. It consists of four creative components: my unpublished poetry collections The House and The Middle State, two different versions of my first feature film: Clementine (2018) and an alternative version, re-edited under the new title Forget Me Not (2021). I apply Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s psychoanalytic theory of the crypt (namely, a sealed, post-traumatic intrapsychic region) in two ways: firstly, as a diagnostic tool for the Papers created in advance (The House and Clementine) and, secondly, in shaping the more recent Papers (The Middle State and Forget Me Not) as integral parts of my research. I explore the historical context behind the Cyprus conflict through various post-traumatic emblems and with personal undertones, as I witnessed it for nearly half of a century. I describe how this distressing experience culminated into Clementine, a cinematic articulation of the contemporary historical trauma in Cyprus. My poetry and the two different versions of my film formulate an overview of this trauma through the application of a middle voice, balancing between empathy and detachment. This creates a different perspective compared to pre-existing artistic works which evolve around two contradicting sociopolitical approaches: the victimization narrative and the reconciliation narrative. As I explain, by transcending these narratives and by articulating the crypt’s symbols and various components with a language of poetic ambiguity, a new artistic voice is generated. This can be the voice of the silent post-war generation, haunted by pre-existing, transmitted traumas.