Hamnet, Cyprus, and the child that never grew up

Political optimism cannot thaw what has frozen the Cyprus conflict for more than half a century. What holds the island back is not simply the geopolitics of failed negotiations. It is something more intimate and less readily acknowledged: unresolved grief.

Last week, Cyprus mourned George Vassiliou, a former president remembered for his insistence that dogma has consequences and postponement of a solution has a price. The condolences that crossed the divide after his death, offered in both Greek and Turkish, were more than a formality. They were a reminder that even in a partitioned country, grief can still create a human bridge.

A divided Cyprus is too often analysed as a strategic puzzle – with adversarial alignments on either side. Yet the deeper truth is that political memory is shaped by losses so powerful they continue to define Shakespeare’s island’s future. I am not writing about Shakespeare’s Cyprus of Othello – the storm-swept outpost where love and jealousy collide – but another Shakespearean story altogether. It is Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, not Othello, that offers the sharper metaphor for the island today.

Chloé Zhao’s film Hamnet, adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, is returning audiences to the story of Shakespeare’s only son, who died at 11. The film’s recent Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture (Drama) has renewed attention to an old question: how does such a profound loss echo through a life – and through the stories a society tells about itself?

In Hamnet, Shakespeare’s “child” never reached adolescence. And it is this lost 11-year-old Cyprus – more than the short-lived promise of 1960 itself – that Greek Cypriot political culture has continued to mourn: a state imagined as whole, sovereign, and continuous. The insistence on “one legitimate government” is not merely a legal claim. It is also a form of denial and yearning: a refusal to accept that something irrecoverable has happened to the imagined whole island. For Turkish Cypriots, the same period is remembered not as a child-state to be recovered but as a time of exclusion and danger – an entirely different grief, often left unacknowledged in the south’s official language.

This is where Shakespeare helps us understand what politics alone cannot. In King John (Act 3, Scene 4), Constance delivers one of the most intense portraits of parental grief in English literature:

“Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words…
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.”

A similar dynamic haunts Cyprus.

If one dares to treat politics as metaphor, the post-1963-1974 11-year order following the first Republic’s birth in 1960 – carrying the dominant Greek Cypriot mantle of the second Republic with the broken bi-communal partnership – can be imagined as a child rising from the ashes: a kind of political phoenix. It lived, in effect, for 11 years. In 1974, the coup and what followed shattered any possibility of restoring that child to what it had been.

In Constance’s case, her son is gone, yet he fills the house with an almost physical presence. She is not merely mourning; she is living inside her mourning.

So too in Cyprus. The lost child of those years still “fills the room” of Greek Cypriot political identity. It lies in its bed – the constitutional architecture still invoked as if time had not intervened. It repeats its words in the comfort of positions that feel like identity.

This is not to deny Greek Cypriot suffering, nor to diminish the trauma of displacement on both sides. It is to recognise something subtler and more dangerous: that unresolved grief can make a society loyal to loss – or, in Constance’s haunting phrase, “fond of grief”. The attachment is not only to what was lost, but to the grief itself, because grief becomes a form of perpetual belonging. And when grief becomes identity, compromise feels like betrayal.

This is why the death of George Vassiliou feels, in its own quiet way, like a national mirror.

Vassiliou’s Cyprus Mail obituary (January 14) reminds us that he came to politics marked by an early education in the costs of dogmatism – expelled from the Hungarian Party for seeking a “human face” in an ideology that demanded obedience. He carried that lesson back to Cyprus. He warned that postponement “always costs much more” and can lead us to what we wish to avoid. He said, with a bluntness that still stings because it feels true, that Cyprus failed as a state because “we did not make it happen.” And crucially – this is the line that belongs inside the Hamnet metaphor – he observed that the post-1974 shock was so great “that we focused on this and forgot everything that had happened before”.

This is grief, described with political precision: the way a single trauma can dominate the room until all earlier complexity is pushed into shadow. The way memory can be sincere and still incomplete.

Vassiliou was not naïve about the other side. He sparred with Denktash. He saw his reticence when it was there. But what distinguished him was that point-scoring was never his goal; reunification was. He rejected the comfort of “talks with preconditions” and insisted on returning to dialogue. He believed that without forgiveness and compromise, the Cyprus problem would never yield.

And he understood something else that Cyprus Mail readers also know: saying “no” is easy. It comes with applause. It comes with the halo of patriotism. Vassiliou wrote that opting for “yes” is harder because it means “shouldering one’s responsibilities” – and many prefer to leave responsibility to the next person – but, given the present set of actors, the next person has not yet arrived.

That sentence is not a party-political jab. It is an ethics of adulthood.

It also matters – especially in the context of the Cyprus Mail tributes – that Akel chose him as its candidate in 1988, and that he ran as an independent, insisting he would not be a “hostage to any party”. Whatever one’s view of Akel at the time, the choice was historically significant: a major party backed a figure whose defining trait was not ideological purity but the insistence that Cyprus must live in the feasible world, not the rhetorical one.

Vassiliou himself later lamented the lack of consistent collaboration among Greek Cypriot political forces who, in different ways, recognised what was feasible but struggled to stand together long enough to deliver it – an obstacle that reformers in very different settings have also faced, including Mikhail Gorbachev, who could see what the Soviet system can become yet could not keep a durable coalition together long enough to carry the political cost of making it so.

Then, as if to underline the argument I am making, Vassiliou’s death produced something the island always says it wants and rarely sustains: a symbolic moment of shared human recognition. Turkish Cypriot leaders and former leaders offered condolences, praising his “distinctive approach” and his commitment to contact and dialogue. Unsurprisingly, in a similar vein, former Turkish Cypriot President Mustafa Akinci called him one of the few figures devoted to a reasonable solution within a federal framework who continued to contribute even after leaving office.

This is what mourning can do when it is healthy: it can widen the room, and as I would argue, it leads to post-traumatic growth.

Which brings us back to Hamnet.

A parent who loses an 11-year-old cannot bring the child back. The child remains beloved, and the love does not become false simply because the loss is final. But adulthood begins when the parent stops “stuffing out” the child’s vacant garments – the child is allowed to be absent without ceasing to be cherished.

Cyprus must do what Constance cannot. It must complete its mourning, and perhaps Vassiliou’s passing can be a catalyst for this long-delayed process.

Not by forgetting. Not by asking either community to deny its suffering. But by acknowledging that the lost child cannot be restored – certainly not by force of rhetoric – and that two living communities can share the island, each carrying a valid experience of pain, fear and dignity.

For Greek Cypriots, this means something particularly difficult and therefore particularly necessary: “recovering responsibility”. Vassiliou’s phrase – “we did not make it happen” –does not erase the wrongs done by others. A mature political culture is not one that relitigates the past forever, nor one that dissolves into amnesia, as I have previously expressed in these columns; it is one that can hold the truth and responsibility at the same time.

For Turkish Cypriots, it means something difficult too: that a politics formed by danger and exclusion must still find room for a shared future, and that dialogue – real dialogue – cannot be only a memory, but a practice sustained in the present. The condolences offered this week are a small sign that such practice is still possible.

What grief teaches is simple but profound: it demands that mourning requires a reckoning with reality. Cyprus does not need more speeches about national vindication that postpone decision-making into the next generation. Vassiliou warned what postponement does; Shakespeare shows what denial becomes.

To mourn with dignity – and to let go – of the irrecoverable political child: the imagined whole, the eleven-year-old Cyprus, is not an ending, but a new beginning that can finally allow adulthood to begin.