Divided Homelands: Memory, Exile, and Identity in Cyprus and Palestine
October 12, 2026
Neşe Yaşın, a Turkish Cypriot poet, wrote: “One must love his homeland, my dad, always, says that. My country has been split in half. One must love, which one of the two halves?”
The famous Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish wrote, “The earth is closing on us,
pushing us through the final passage, and we strip our limbs to pass through. The earth is squeezing us. I wish we were its wheat so we could die and live again. Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky?”
What happens when a people not only lose access to their homeland, but also the ability to remember it?
This question resonates across two historical places shaped by partition, memory, and conflict: Palestine and Cyprus. Although separated by language, geography, and history, Mahmoud Darwish and Neşe Yaşın provide powerful reflections on what loss, displacement, and belonging mean in modern times.
The poetry of Darwish and Yaşın reminds readers that territorial conflicts are not simply about disputes over borders. They are also about struggles for the collective memory, identity, and the meaning of home. It is about where people’s roots are.
The fear of losing these things has a name — scholars refer to it as memoricide. This is the destruction, erasure, and suppression of the collective memory of a people. Both Palestine and Cyprus have suffered from partition, followed by the physical destruction of buildings and sacred sites. However, something less visible but equally important has also been impacted: the stories, traditions, landscapes, and historical narratives through which communities understand themselves.
Across the Eastern Mediterranean, writers, journalists, scholars, and poets have become guardians against forgetting.
In the context of Palestine, Darwish’s poetry emerges from the experience of displacement following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. After which, there were subsequent decades of conflict and occupation within Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Many Palestinian individuals and scholars understand this period in history as a process of settler colonization, which resulted in large-scale displacement of the historic Palestinian populations, the destruction of many homes, the fragmentation of the Palestinian society, and the destruction of Muslim and Christian sacred and heritage sites. For Mahmoud Darwish, the loss was not only territorial, but also cultural and historical. His poetry repeatedly returns to memories of villages, olive groves, family homes, and familiar landscapes. His writings to preserve memory are a struggle against the political efforts to redefine, rename, or erase Palestinian connections to the ancestral land.
In Cyprus, Yaşın wrote in the shadows of the island’s partition after 1974. After a Greek-backed coup to seek union with the Hellenic Republic of Greece, Turkey intervened militarily to establish control over the northern part of the island, accomplished through population transfers. This resulted in the displacement of both Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot peoples and created a division on the island that endures until today. Many people were dispossessed of their homes, churches, mosques, cemeteries, and neighborhoods that had contributed to communal identity for generations.
Questions of peace and justice are rare in politics. Peace is often unjust, and attempting to achieve peace for all can sometimes feel utopian. War and conflict move with anti-modernist rhetoric, which normally takes the skin of tribalism and nationalism, making the world more conservative. Oftentimes, during conflict, the true price of peace is not something all are willing to pay. To truly resolve the Israel-Palestine and Cyprus-Northern Cyprus conflicts, competing claims of territory, self-determination, security, and historical justice will need to be addressed. As Saint Margaret of Cortona has said, “A sick man can be cured only by revealing his wounds.”
Communities separated by borders often develop competing memories of the same places. Maps are redrawn. Places receive new names. School textbooks tell competing stories. Access to sacred sites changes. Generations may grow up knowing only one side of the inherited stories, political rhetoric, or silence. This is where memoricide becomes relevant.
Memoricide can include the destruction of homes, sacred sites, archives, and other physical places. However, it can also include when the historical presence of a community is excluded or destroyed from public memory. This can include political discourse, demographic change, restrictions on access to religious and cultural sites, and the intentional diminishing of living witnesses. The struggle against memoricide is also a struggle over identity and belonging.
Mahmoud Darwish understood this. He wrote, “Where should the birds fly after the last sky?” Here, Darwish transforms a Palestinian political reality into a universal human concern. There is a question here about where displaced people can go. It also raises a question about how these people can preserve their identities when the landscapes that shaped their memories have become inaccessible to them.
Cypriot writers and poets have struggled with a very similar scenario. The abandoned city of Varosha, the divided streets in Nicosia, and villages emptied by conflict have become symbols of memory suspended in time. For many Cypriots, these places are emotionally significant despite separation. This enduring attachment is captured in the Greek Cypriot phrase Δεν Ξεχνώ (Den Xehnó), “I do not forget,” which has become a powerful expression of remembrance of the division and hope for healing.
The comparison between Palestine and Cyprus shows that territorial conflict extends into everyday life, family history, religious practice, and cultural memory. The poetry of both Palestine and Cyprus preserves what politics ignores. The government’s focus is on borders, but the poets remember the homes. The political leadership debates sovereignty, but the poets remember churches, schools, mosques, neighborhoods, and family stories. Their work resists the reduction of the human experience into geopolitics. It insists that places and memory are more than territories and that communities are more than demographic statistics.
A homeland may be partitioned, occupied, or transformed. Buildings and borders may disappear or change. But as long as people continue to remember, the memoricide becomes incomplete. This is why Darwish’s question still resonates today: “Where should we go after the last frontiers?” The answer, perhaps, lies partly in memory itself.
About the Author: Giselle Soares is an Orthodox Christian who served as an Ambassador Warren Clark Fellow for Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP).