Roots

Language Transfer was born in Nicosia, Cyprus, and after having tried to create an LT space everywhere from Germany to Egypt to Argentina, it is suddenly obvious to me that I will be at my most optimal, enthused and focused in a place where the work of Language Transfer is so immediately imperative to my surroundings and connected to my personal life story, as is the case in the divided island of Cyprus and especially in the divided capital of Nicosia.

And I’m getting excited. Parts of me that have been shut down whilst I bounced from one country to another are starting to wake up again. There are elements of being a ‘person’, of ‘being’ that I believe you don’t experience without roots, and also that there are elements of living we are incapable of experiencing with roots too, but maybe there is a time for everything. I’d never change having lived with a more fluid identity or even without one to a large degree, but as much as I can't help feel that identity is an illusion, I know that participation in a society isn’t.  I’ve always wanted to be free of roots, of mandates, of everything almost. I learnt at some point though that freedom is a type of currency. If you don’t spend it, you have nothing but coins, coins you can’t do anything with but spend. If you spend all your coins though, you quickly see that having everything is much like having nothing. I spent a lot of freedom on two things: on Language Transfer and on my dog! I have no regrets. I think it’s time to spend some freedom on roots.

Cypriot refugees often carried little plants or cuttings away with them when they were forced to leave Cyprus. In my uncle’s fish & chip shop in London, there is an olive tree he tore from the home his mother was born in which is now in the part of Cyprus that was partitioned following the Turkish invasion in 1974. Older folk often said that wherever you are, whatever happens, you must remain rooted, you must remember who you are, where you’re from. Hence all those fig trees and grape vines you can spot in front gardens all around North London. I hated such mandates, being told who I was, who was anyone to decide? ‘Anyway, I’m English, I was born here’, I would say ‘What has Cyprus got to do with me?’ I would insist. I didn’t realise that wasn’t quite true; in my school hardly anyone yet all of us were English. Out of the 30 kids in my class there were maybe 5 whose grandparents were from the UK, the most of us refuse from decolonisation, little did we know. 

I had become very interested in general humanities through language, and at some point I realised ‘oh wow, I’m one of those interesting things I study!’. And so, in my mid-twenties I did something I never expected - I went to Cyprus to investigate what all of that meant. What I wasn’t expecting was to find an island littered with Cypriots born abroad, or to learn that more Cypriots lived in London than in Nicosia, to realise I was part of a tangible persisting community and my experience was not just a bit of sadly unique worldly debris. There were South African, Australian, American, etc. Cypriots, all with a shared experience. Just like me, many of them had also lived in various places before ending up 'back' in Cyprus, almost in spite of themselves. What had I stumbled on to? 

I found myself enthused by the Cyprus conflict and enthralled by undoing my own cultural indoctrination in order to better understand what really went on there. I realised I could use what I'm good at to make an impact and I began teaching hoards of people Greek and Turkish in the buffer zone that divides the island. I also started a movement with a call to occupy the buffer zone from both sides of the divide in order to protest the ongoing status quo. In the photo above, I'm editing the first (now replaced) Greek courses there. I never stopped to think about it, but I was suddenly part of a community. For the first time in my life I was experiencing roots come alive in a good way. And from that sense of belonging and inherent permission to belong, sprouted amazing things, not least was Language Transfer. Until now I had blamed it all on youth. So little did I believe in ‘roots’, so forcefully did I reject them.

I’m looking forward to weaving LT back into its roots, into mine, and seeing what comes of that. I look forward to operating within a social context again, to being a protagonist in society rather than just in general avoidance of it. There is no reason for us to accept depression or emotional exhaustion as the status quo, and for me, that might mean being in the walled city of Nicosia where I stop to suckle the nectar from the jasmines I pass, where the ancient city walls hold and ground me, and the newer ones chopping the city in two don't let me forget how important all this work is.