‘It’s a sickening example of a colonial mindset’
You’d be hard-pressed to find an interviewee as open and candid as Melanie Steliou. At one point, however, I ask something (I won’t mention what) that she feels unable to answer, at least on the record. I can’t talk about that, she demurs, I’m not qualified. She pauses, as if trying in vain to hold herself back: “However, I have a strong opinion about it…”
Strong opinions, and passionately held beliefs, are her stock in trade – and she’s also vocal about expressing them, and firm about acting on her convictions and putting her money where her mouth is. She was in the news, most recently, on the subject of the British bases, posting an indignant video on her Instagram and interviewed by mostly UK outlets (she’s half-British) after a drone struck RAF Akrotiri, not far from where she lives just outside Limassol.
“It’s a sickening example of a colonial mindset,” she raged, quoted in an article at Declassified UK, adding: “The base shouldn’t be there in the first place”. Meanwhile, on Instagram, she got in a back-and-forth with someone claiming (as per Keir Starmer) that the bases would only be used for ‘defensive strikes’ against Iran:
“What were the ‘pre-emptive strikes then? Were they not attacks?” pointed out Melanie. “What Britain is doing at this moment is called manufacturing consent using the Cypriot people as human shields… Same shit said by Christodoulides regarding the Amalthea corridor. First we feed the Palestinians and then support the Zionists bombing them. They all disgust me.
“The bases have been used to send spy flights over Gaza. They are complicit in every single way. If you accept the sugar coating because they ‘word’ it nicely, I won’t!”
She was always this kind of strong, stubborn person. As a girl, she decided to become an actress when she grew up – not through being inspired by any specific film or trip to the theatre, she just “always knew I wanted to do acting”. Nothing strange there, many little girls share that dream – but Melanie was dead-set on making it happen.
Her high school was the storied Foley’s School in Limassol, not because the family could afford it (they couldn’t) but because her mum was a teacher there, so they didn’t have to pay fees. The obvious next step would’ve been to use the Foley’s brand as a leg-up to a good university – but instead she squandered it by auditioning for drama school. Was she not a good student?
“I was – but I wanted to do acting. And that’s what I wanted to do, so…”
Were her parents OK with it?
“Yeah, yeah.”
What was her Plan B? If the acting thing didn’t work out?
“There was no Plan B,” she replies shortly. “That’s part of my character. I go all the way, I don’t go halfway with anything.
“To me, that’s a good characteristic to have if you’re involved in politics, or a member of parliament – because it means you do whatever you can to deliver what you started… So, to me, it was acting or nothing.”
As it turned out, it was acting – not at Rada in London, where she was accepted but couldn’t afford to go (this was before Cyprus entered the EU), but Theatro Technis in Athens, under Karolos Koun. Melanie did well; still in her early 20s, she appeared in Aristophanes’ The Birds at the ancient theatre in Epidaurus – every Greek actor’s dream – in a production directed by Koun, with music by Manos Hadjidakis. We don’t talk much about acting, however – and that quip about politics and being an MP isn’t just a stray observation.
This, you might say, is her latest dream. A decade as an actress was followed by a segue into TV and media – as presenter, anchorwoman, writer and documentary-maker, first at CyBC then Sigma – then freelance work from 2014, so she could focus on marriage and motherhood. She’s now on the brink of a new evolution, standing as a candidate with communist party Akel in next month’s parliamentary elections.
We meet at Coffeehouse in central Nicosia, down the road from Akel headquarters where she had to go, from her base in Limassol, for some pre-election legwork. She’s intense but friendly, notably stubborn and tenacious in arguing her side (she refuses to let things go), her sometimes-severe expression set off by cool green eyes and a ready smile. She sips an Americano – an ironic choice, given her view of that country’s politics – no milk, no sugar. It’s the last week of March, three weeks before her 50th birthday.
What about turning 50? How does she feel about that?
“It’s a milestone,” she admits thoughtfully – but in fact getting older seems to agree with her. “I think I was most miserable when I was in my 20s… You don’t really know who you are then.” She felt better at 30, even better at 40 – and now, on the verge of 50, she feels “even more mature… and even more sure about what I want to do with the rest of my life”.
Being unsure, I suspect, is a problem for Melanie; her whole disposition craves firmness and certainty. She was never really indecisive – but the difference is perhaps that, in her 20s, she focused all her energy and will on herself, her career.
She joined CyBC in 2000 but kept living (and performing) in Greece till 2005, meanwhile also working with every theatre company on the island. “I was a workaholic,” she shrugs ruefully. “I had no other life. I had no personal life.” Now, on the other hand, not only does she have “a very supportive husband” and a nine-year-old son – but she’s also broadened her focus to encompass the world beyond, lending her voice to all manner of social issues.
Melanie has spoken up for migrants, bicommunal unity, taxing banks’ windfall profits, “saying no to Nato”, the protection of the environment. She’s against oppression, and all forms of segregation. “The only being on this planet that has borders, and throws people in the sea for trying to cross those borders, is the human race,” she tells me hotly. Then there’s the Great Breastfeeding Scandal of 2017 – though in fact it wasn’t very scandalous, and ended in triumph.
Back when her son was an infant, she put up a Facebook post about having been at an event “when somebody asked me to go to another room because I was breastfeeding”, illustrating it with a (very discreet) photo.
The post was reported and Facebook took it down, though it was later reinstated. Melanie protested, noting that she’d previously done a nude photo shoot for an Aids campaign and no-one batted an eye. “But breastfeeding is offensive?” she added, incredulous.
The whole thing went viral, then a female MP took up her case – and, soon after, the law in Cyprus was actually changed, so that Article 99(B) of the criminal code now makes it illegal (carrying a fine up to €3,000) to obstruct a mother from breastfeeding!
That story is significant in two ways. First, and more importantly, it affirms her strong belief that – even though we often feel helpless in the face of entrenched injustice – things can improve if people speak up about them, which is also what motivates her to go into politics and try to reform the system.
“That is how we change things. From within,” she insists. “And the only way to do that is to ask for things to change! Why do we feel helpless? We feel helpless because they’ve made us feel helpless, they’ve made us believe we can’t change things. No! If we unite and say ‘I don’t want this anymore’, who are they to decide what is our future?
“It was George Bernard Shaw,” she notes, “who said, ‘The reasonable man adapts to the world around him. The unreasonable man expects the world to adapt to him. Therefore all change comes from the unreasonable man’.
“There are people who might think that I’m unreasonable – but no, that’s how change comes about.”
The second reason why her breastfeeding story is significant is because the female MP in that story was Skevi Koukouma of Akel – a reminder of Melanie’s own, slightly counter-intuitive choice of party.
One might’ve expected her to stand for a more progressive party, like Volt – but in fact a lot has changed in the past few years. The debate over ‘woke’ seems a bit silly at a time of global conflagration. (What’s her top priority right now? “To end wars.”) Talk of ‘left’ and ‘right’ is also unhelpful. Some people, stuck in a Cold War mindset, still associate the left (i.e. socialism) with state power and the right (i.e. capitalism) with freedom – but, for instance, it’s Akel that’s leading the charge against the proposed new law granting phone-tapping powers to the secret service.
Melanie is a post-Gaza, post-social media, highly Eurosceptic activist. “This ‘Western alliance’…” she begins, shaking her head. “Western what? What are the values of the West? For now, the values of the West are killing people for no reason and attacking other countries for no reason… It’s just blatant hypocrisy.”
The EU – hence Cyprus – is complicit, she says. Iran gets bombed, then the EU’s response is to censure Iran for retaliating. “Are you kidding me? It’s hypocrisy.”
“Who is it favouring?” she asks of the war. “Is it favouring the people of Europe? No. The people of Europe are seeing the prices of their petrol and food and everything skyrocketing. It’s favouring the very few – the oil companies and gas companies, the military-industrial complex, and the people making a lot of money on the stock exchange. That’s it.”
Should Cypriots be more vocal?
“Yes, of course Cypriots should be more vocal… People should be out on the streets, and they’re not.”
Why not?
“Because people have been occupied with everything else this government has done,” she sighs. “They’re working two or three jobs a day, when do they protest? When do they have time to even think?”
Melanie Steliou keeps thinking, and protesting, and having strong opinions, and being vocal and unreasonable; it’s just who she is. Her Instagram bio is spot-on: ‘Mummy | Activist | Actress | Political Dreamer’. Does it not make her unhappy, though? To feel things so deeply, and be angry?
“I’m not angry,” she instantly replies, then doubles back. “Wait, change that. I am angry about things. But I don’t go around all day being angry.”
She’s a public figure, with nothing to prove. She’s no longer a workaholic either, like she was in her younger days – though her hobbies are exactly as you’d expect, gardening, DIY and “building stuff” (it’s in her genes; her late father was a builder and house painter). Grounded, constructive hobbies, firmness and certainty again.
She also reads, mostly non-fiction these days: Avi Shlaim, Edward Said, Malcolm X, Norman Finkelstein, some Noam Chomsky, “though I’m pissed off with him lately, because he’s in the Epstein files”. All quite political, of course – but then everything we do is political, says Melanie. “The clothes we wear, the shop we shop at, is a political statement… Saying ‘I don’t care’ is a political statement.”
That’s her way, living life as a political person because what else can you do? Some might advise her to relax, lighten up – maybe she should – but “I want my son to live in a better world,” she says firmly.
Things do change, if you push hard enough. People assume the British bases are forever – but then people also thought apartheid in South Africa was forever, and Jim Crow was forever, and indeed that the British empire was forever, yet it still fell.
“Unfortunately they just relinquished power to the United States of America,” says Melanie, looking so displeased that I start to fear for her Americano.
“This has to change. How’s it going to change? I don’t know… But I’m not going to sit and do nothing about it. I’m going to talk about it.” Strong opinions incoming, no doubt.