Deterritorializing Narrative 
Strategies of New Literatures in 
English: Andriana Ierodiaconou’s 
The Women’s Coffee Shop
Tijana Parezanović
Alfa BK University, Palmira Toljatija 3, Belgrade, Serbia
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4352-5571 
tijana.parezanovic@alfa.edu.rs 
As one of the New Literatures in English, Cypriot Anglophone literature has only 
recently come to be the focus of literary researchers and scholars. This article 
deals with Andriana Ierodiaconou’s 2012 novel The Women’s Coffee Shop in 
the context of the New Literatures in English, starting from the theoretical and 
philosophical premises of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. While situating the 
novel within the framework of minor literatures and rhizomatic narratives, its 
main goal is to define and describe, through close reading, the narrative strategies 
that reflect and/or strengthen the deterritorializing effect as a key feature of a 
minor literature. To this effect, the article analyzes the figure of a deterritorialized 
narrator, characterization that oscillates between deterritorialization and 
reterritorialization, the narrative method of dreamwork and narrative modes that 
potentially create new territories, as well as the rhizomatic narrative gap and the 
open ending. To summarize, the narrative of the novel is exemplary of the position 
that Cypriot Anglophone literature occupies as one of the (minor) New Literatures 
in English.
Keywords: Anglophone Cypriot literature / Ierodiaconou, Andriana: The Women’s Coffee 
Shop / minor literature / narrative strategies / rhizom / deterritorialization 
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Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 47.3 (2024)
New Literatures in English
With large parts of the world permanently affected by the English lan-
guage, due to reasons either historical and ideological (colonization and 
imperialism) or contemporary (globalization), literary fiction is writ-
ten in English in many countries and by numerous authors who do 
not belong to the English or American literary tradition, which are 
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122
generally considered mainstream in the Anglosphere.1 Defining “non-
mainstream” English literature(s) is often complex: relegating it to a 
national literature, for instance, Maltese, Irish, etc., usually does not 
suffice because of the language in which it is written; equalizing it with 
Commonwealth literature is somewhat problematic because of the im-
plications of colonial discourse and cultural appropriation; the concept 
of diasporic literature overlaps with but does not precisely correspond 
to it. The most frequently applied terms seem to be “New Literatures 
in English” and “Anglophone World Literatures,” which “identify an 
array of writing in English in different locations and under different 
circumstances, without limiting itself to authorship by Anglophone in-
dividuals in the original sense” and refer to “the entire spectrum of texts 
in English around the globe, past and present” (Dharwadker 48). The 
origins of some of these “new” literatures in English can be traced back 
to the nineteenth century, while others seem to have appeared in the 
last decades of the twentieth. In either case, there is usually a sense of 
novelty or freshness as well as an immediate effect of defamiliarization 
about literature in English that does not reflect any English/American 
experience. There is also the pressing need for approaching, describing, 
and interpreting new literatures in English from different theoretical 
and methodological perspectives.
This paper aims to offer contribution to the study of new litera-
tures in English by focusing on Cypriot Anglophone literature, more 
precisely, the contemporary bilingual (English and Greek) author 
Andriana Ierodiaconou (b. 1952). Ierodiaconou is the author of two 
novels written originally in English: Margarita’s Husband: A Fable of 
the Levant (2007) and The Women’s Coffee Shop (2012), as well as a 
translator and a poet (the bilingual collection of her poems spanning 
the period between 1977 and 2015 with the English title The Trawler 
was published in 2016). This paper relies on a close reading of her 
second novel The Women’s Coffee Shop. In Cyprus, divided along many 
lines, one of them based on religion (Muslim vs. Christian), the pro-
tagonist Angelou runs a coffee shop which, in a stark contrast to the 
traditional and patriarchally reinforced idea of coffee shops as men’s 
realm, serves women only. Readers follow Angelou as she comes to 
terms with the death by stabbing of her closest friend Avraam Salih, the 
shadow theater master of mixed Muslim and Christian origin, whom 
neither the Muslim nor the Christian community agree to bury. At the 
same time, Angelou struggles with Avraam’s domineering estranged 
1 This article presents research conducted within the MIK project (“Migrations, 
Integrations, Creations in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures”) of Alfa BK University.
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grandfather Hadjimbey, a representative of one line of the island’s tra-
ditional values, and the modern tourism and urbanization tendencies 
which start to effectively exert influence on the individual lives of ordi-
nary Cypriots three years following the independence of the country. 
The plot is driven by discovering what happened to Avraam, but this 
question of death is ultimately left open, overshadowed by numerous 
preoccupations of life in Ierodiaconou’s (imaginary) Cyprus. The anal-
ysis this paper offers is framed within the theoretical concept of deter-
ritorialization, as expounded by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in, 
among other works, their book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, and 
further elaborated by other authors such as Claire Colebrook. The aim 
of the analysis is to identify, explain, and contextualize specific narra-
tive strategies in The Women’s Coffee Shop whose application is indica-
tive of deterritorialized fiction.
Deterritorializing principle of New Literatures
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari claim that deterritorialization is the 
crucial feature of what they call a “minor literature.” Their definition of 
a minor literature corresponds to that of New Literatures in English: it 
“doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority 
constructs within a major language” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 16). 
Their subsequent observation that “minor” does not designate “specific 
literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within 
the heart of what is called great (or established) literature” (18) does 
suggest that a literature in English from a (geographical) territory other 
than England is not automatically minor, but it also allows for its inher-
ent potential for being minor, due precisely to its revolutionary use of 
language in the process of constructing narratives. According to Claire 
Colebrook’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari, a minor literature does 
not represent the world or its subjects—instead, it “has the power … to 
imagine, create and vary affects that are not already given” (Colebrook 
103). It does not use language simply as a means of communication; 
it uses “a language that becomes sound … or a language that creates 
sense” to produce “what is not already recognisable” (103). A minor 
literature makes language seem foreign,2 and it arguably moves even 
2 An interesting example in The Women’s Coffee Shop is the expression “Your health,” 
which is used throughout the narrative whenever a character takes a sip of any drink. 
While it is presumably rooted in the culture and customs of Cyprus, the expression in 
this form is uncommon in the English language.
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beyond defamiliarization as dislocation of “our habitual perception of 
the real world so as to make it the object of a renewed attentiveness” 
(Bennett 20) into the process of creating—rather than expressing—the 
world and its subjects. The created world is also inevitably connected 
with a particular place or space inasmuch as it reconfigures (or deterri-
torializes) an existing territory (geographical or social) and subsequently 
reconstitutes or reterritorializes it into a new one.
This connection has not gone unnoticed in the case of the 
Anglophone literature of Cyprus. As Marios Vasiliou writes in his 2011 
and 2017 research presenting the work of Andriana Ierodiaconou, Alev 
Adil, Miranda Hoplaros, and Stephanos Stephanides, the contempo-
rary “cultural front” in Cyprus is dominated by “nationalist official 
discourses” in both major communities (Greek and Turkish), and the 
literature written in English “comes into this heated cultural front as a 
discourse that endeavors to re-imagine community across ethnic lines 
and against heteronormal sexual boundaries, taking in the process a 
cosmopolitan orientation” (Vasiliou, “Situating” 48–49). In this pro-
cess of reimagining/creating a community, Cypriot Anglophone lit-
erature occupies a position which is minor both “locally in relation 
to the dominant literatures in Greek and Turkish, and internationally 
in relation to global English” (Vasiliou, “Cypriot English Literature” 
83). Its deterritorialization is seen in its marginal position in Cyprus, 
as Anglophone writers “are cut off from the local Greek and Turkish 
speaking establishments that erect linguistic barriers to them” (84), 
while it is simultaneously distanced from the global literary production 
in English, even from the rather voluminous corpus of postcolonial 
fiction. It constitutes, “from the global perspective … a very small dot 
on the map and appear[s] insufficiently victimised to warrant postco-
lonial attention” (85). In Vasiliou’s view, Cypriot Anglophone litera-
ture stands outside all easily definable and delineable categories and 
is frequently treated as an anomaly, which is precisely what enables 
it to develop its subversive potentialities—the revolutionary impulse 
typical of a minor literature (87). As some of the most distinctive fea-
tures of Cypriot Anglophone literature, Vasiliou stresses its heteroglos-
sic nature, which he traces in Miranda Hoplaros’s 2008 collection of 
short stories titled Mrs Bones and Andriana Ierodiaconou’s Margarita’s 
Husband, and “fragmentation and dislocation both in content and in 
form” (Vasiliou, “Situating” 53), which he discusses in reference to 
both Margarita’s Husband and The Women’s Coffee Shop, particularly as 
regards the character of Avraam in the latter novel, as we shall explain 
in due course.
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According to Deleuze and Guattari, one way for a minor literature 
to deterritorialize the major language in which it is written is “to arti-
ficially enrich [it] … to swell it up through all the resources of sym-
bolism, of oneirism, of esoteric sense, of a hidden signifier” (Deleuze 
and Guattari, Kafka 19). The other way is the opposite: “dryness and 
sobriety, a willed poverty” (19), which pushes expression into utter 
deterritorialization so that representation and signification become 
impossible. Deterritorialization through enrichment allows for subse-
quent reterritorialization, a restructuring of the (social) territory after 
it has been deterritorialized—shattered or ruptured. In addition to 
deterritorializing effect as the major characteristic of a minor literature, 
Deleuze and Guattari distinguish two other elements a minor litera-
ture contains. It has a collective value: as Deleuze and Guattari put it, 
“if the writer is in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile 
community, this situation allows the writer all the more the possibil-
ity to express another possible community and to forge the means for 
another consciousness and another sensibility” (17). The quote evokes 
the marginal position of Cypriot Anglophone literature on both the 
local and the international scene, but as the following analysis will 
show, the collective value also appears as a leitmotif in The Women’s 
Coffee Shop. Finally, a minor literature is always political: “the social 
milieu” in major literatures serves “as a mere environment or a back-
ground,” whereas the “cramped space” of a minor literature “forces 
each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics” (17). 
This characteristic is also built into the story of The Women’s Coffee 
Shop, where both politicalness and collective value serve to reinforce 
the deterritorialization effected by the narrative discourse. Relying on 
a close reading of the selected parts of the novel, the following sec-
tions will try to identify deterritorializing tendencies and strategies in 
the narrative discourse, focusing primarily on the narrator, character-
ization, and narrative modes. The novel presents a specific deterrito-
rialized narrator, and most of the characters are shaped through the 
concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The narration 
which is largely based on dreamwork, rewriting of old narratives, and 
narrative gaps, i.e., the lack of closure and the rhizomatic effect of rup-
ture, accentuates the novel’s ambiguous relationship with territory—
the symbolic territory of the English literature as well as the spatial and 
social territory of Cyprus with which its story deals.3
3 Although research on deterritorializing narrative strategies in minor literatures 
seems scarce, some significant efforts to this effect have been made and the following 
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126
Deterritorialized narrator
The Women’s Coffee Shop opens with rather traditional heterodiegetic 
narration, which at the very beginning introduces the two major char-
acters, Avraam Salih and Angelou Pieri, immediately stressing their un-
commonness. In addition to Avraam Salih’s name, which reveals that 
he is an outsider in both dominant communities, his condition is also 
uncommon: “[D]ead. And not only dead, but unburied” (Ierodiaconou 
5). The Christian priest refuses to bury Avraam because he was never 
baptized; the hodja refuses it because he was never circumscribed and 
never attended the mosque. Angelou, a peddler, is described as a manly 
woman: “[She was] strongly built about the throat, shoulders and arms 
… [t]he hands … of a worker … the tanned skin rough. She wore a 
man’s khaki trousers … her feet, on the large side, were shod in the 
leather sandals favored by the farmers and fishermen of the region” 
(5–6). She drives a van, which makes her the first woman her village has 
ever seen behind the wheel, and she keeps a coffee shop, the business 
ran and visited exclusively by men. It is Angelou who buries Avraam, 
near the shore, on a plot of land she inherited from her father, and as 
she buries him, she laments his death—and life—by singing instead 
of praying. The first chapter ends with this uncommon burial, but the 
second opens with a shift in narration towards homodiegetic (“It feels 
strange to be at the center of a story”; 23) and even chapters continue 
to be narrated by the dead man. In his first address Avraam delivers 
an account of his origin and birth, in which all the actors seem equal-
ly out of place. His mother Constantia was disowned by her father 
Hadjimbey, the wealthiest man in the village, and was never married 
to Avraam’s father Mehmet. Avraam’s maternal grandmother Lefki 
was, following her daughter’s elopement, transferred by Hadjimbey to 
a windowless barn where, reduced to the status of an animal, over the 
course of the sixteen remaining years of her life she gradually lost her 
mind. Avraam was born in a small house on the outskirts of the village, 
“worth … close to nothing” (42). Living as “the sole resident Moslem” 
in a Christian village (114) and earning his living as a shadow theater 
master—as he phrases it, “I never put myself on stage” (23)—he liter-
ally spent his career in the shadows. Even as he lies dead in unconse-
crated ground, among the roots of olive trees, “outside the prescribed 
strategies identified: defiance of signification, neutralization of sense, asyntactical lan-
guage, phantasmagorical and absurd tales, quizzical jokes, silly songs, and asubjective 
free indirect narration (Salami and Rahmani). 
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127
confines of a cemetery wall” (23; emphasis added), he is surrounded by 
similar outcasts: a miscarried five-month child and a woman murdered 
by her husband, whose death was never reported.
In his life as well as death, Avraam occupies a marginal position, 
socially as the offspring of a mixed marriage, and spatially as he is 
linked with the outskirts of the village/backstage shadows/unconse-
crated ground near the sea. His house is brutally vandalized follow-
ing his death, which shows the extent to which Avraam is considered 
an outcast. His position, however, becomes utterly deterritorialized as 
soon as the authorities reveal that his grave is empty: “Angelou sensed 
there was something wrong the second the police jeep had rattled to a 
halt in the silent olive grove. … [T]he deserted landscape shimmered 
in the midday heat like a mirage. That was it—the place was deserted; 
there was no one there, dead or alive” (Ierodiaconou 61). In his analysis 
of Ierodiaconou’s other novel, Margarita’s Husband, Vasiliou focuses 
on a chapter titled “Gethsemane’s Story,” in which voice is given to the 
refugee girl, an important but silent character (Vasiliou, “Situating” 
55). In this chapter, she delivers her story in broken English—just 
like Avraam, she becomes an unexpected homodiegetic narrator. Both 
Gethsemane and Avraam are displaced and hence in a way deterrito-
rialized. However, Avraam develops the concept of a “deterritorialized 
narrator” to the extreme. He is not merely a marginalized or socially 
ostracized individual. Once his buried body is displaced, he narrates 
his story from a void in space, and it is only from this void that he 
appears as a homodiegetic narrator. In a spirit-like form, he is present 
in the story from which he is at the same time entirely absent. Avraam’s 
narratorial knowledge is not limited to past events. In chapter eight, 
he reveals himself as enduring presence in the village life, as regard-
less of the fact that he has disappeared from his grave, he knows about 
Angelou’s subsequent clash with a theologian and a journalist over 
the church’s repudiation of Avraam and the media interest in making 
his death political, i.e., their effort to present his death as the mur-
der of a Moslem man in a Christian community.4 While Avraam does 
not discuss contemporary politics, he does subtly declare his political 
position. Describing one of the shadow theater performances he gave, 
4 In chapter ten, Avraam appears as an eavesdropping narrator. The ending of the 
previous chapter relates an argument between Angelou and Ermioni, in which the lat-
ter expresses her belief that Avraam never knew she was Angelou’s lover. Chapter ten 
begins with his words: “Ermioni was wrong: I knew that Angelou and she were lovers” 
(Ierodiaconou 148). The phrasing indicates that Avraam has been listening to or, just 
like the readers, reading the narrative of the previous chapter.
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128
which dealt with the exploits of Alexander the Great and the significant 
help he received from the traditional (Turkish) shadow play character 
Karagöz, he states: “Moral (noticed by not a single person save the 
puppet-master): there’s always some insignificant little man doing his 
anonymous heroic best behind the achievements of the great. Anyhow, 
the audience enjoyed it; and if they chose to identify with Alexander 
rather than Karagöz, with the master rather than the slave, who was I 
to set them straight?” (Ierodiaconou 95).
It is important to note that, as a shadow theater master, Avraam 
is a narrator by profession, but it is even more important to stress his 
view of his role: “I was nothing but a manipulator of shadow-pup-
pets, a half-breed, the lowest of the low” (Ierodiaconou 74). In other 
words, Avraam equalizes his social status with his narrator’s status and 
considers himself in both capacities an unrecognized, concealed “little 
man.” He therefore subtly indicates his own importance in the narra-
tive, based on his belief that little men are actual heroes, but to retain 
the status of a hero, he needs to remain unrecognized and concealed. At 
another point of his narration, he details how he felt when depression 
set in after his mother’s death: he briefly considered suicide, but “[t]he 
catch was, I dreaded physical suffering; also, I still sneakingly clung to 
the notion that my life was a story, with beginning, middle and end, 
and I wanted to know how it would come out” (123). For this reason, 
he turns to more “non-fatal forms of escape, like reading” and watch-
ing shadow theater performances (124). Avraam acknowledges that he 
must be part of a story while also being nothing and that stories such as 
his play a crucial role in the major political events and developments—
a contradictory position which makes him a deterritorialized narrator 
while highlighting the importance of his implicit political stance.
De/re/territorializing characterization
As Marios Vasiliou notices, “Avraam Salih’s unburiable corpse can 
be read metonymically as the elusive, evasive, and shifting corpus of 
‘minor literatures’” (Vasiliou, “Situating” 53). Had either community 
accepted to bury him, his body would have been reterritorialized, i.e., 
readmitted into one of the dominant groups as well as into “the sym-
bolic order” which minor literatures contest through deterritorializa-
tion (53). As it is, his character represents the unrepresentable; it indi-
cates the resistance to being placed within any confines, the perpetual 
non-belonging, and thus comes to stand—not only metonymically but 
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also metafictionally—for deterritorialization itself, as the dominant 
characteristic of a minor literature, including the novel whose story 
Avraam occupies. In his own words, “[M]y presence [in the shadow 
theater] was hardly registered at all by the majority of the audience” 
(Ierodiaconou 23). Avraam declares to be minoritarian. The Deleuzian 
minoritarian mode of existence is one that rejects all unification and 
standardization (Colebrook 104) while opening space for diversity 
through becoming and creating instead of expressing any already given 
identity. Through free indirect discourse attributed to Angelou,5 the 
narrative states that “Avraam was a rebel, but he staged his rebellions 
alone, elaborating them in private and expressing them only through 
his plays” (Ierodiaconou 109). Therefore, it is in the process of staging 
and performing shadow theater plays that Avraam is revealed as minori-
tarian since through his plays he creates identities (Karagöz, Alexander 
the Great, Hadjimbey, etc.) and develops stories. It is, in fact, in the 
choice of their profession, which serves as a major means of character-
ization, that both Avraam and Angelou (an artist and a woman) reject 
being defined in accordance with standards.
Angelou can be described in terms of yet another Deleuzian con-
cept, that of “becoming-woman,” which is minoritarian because “there 
is no standard or norm for woman” (Colebrook 104) and Angelou 
does not comply with any.6 Her profession of a peddler turns her into 
a nomad (who is still free to cross from the Christian to the Moslem 
parts of the island despite the incipient “troubles”), and the establish-
ment of the (first ever) women’s coffee shop, while putting her once 
again in the position of defiance of standards, is also a manifestation 
of women creating “by making possible a becoming over which they 
do not have ownership, into which they themselves must enter; this 
is a becoming-woman affecting all of humankind, men and women 
both” (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 106). The women’s 
coffee shop indeed appears as a place over which Angelou has no own-
ership: all the women can bring food or prepare drinks, they do not pay 
5 Free indirect discourse is a possible strategy of narrative deterritorialization (see 
footnote 3; Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 106). In this case, Angelou’s 
thoughts refer to Avraam’s rebellious nature, which is pertinent to a minor literature. 
Moreover, “[i]t is in free-indirect style that literature discloses language as a ‘collective 
assemblage’” in which “styles produce speaking positions” (Colebrook 112). Narra-
tives containing free indirect discourse/style reflect the collective value, which also 
bears relevance to minor literatures.
6 Apart from the fact that there is almost nothing feminine about her description, 
Angelou confesses to Avraam that she does not like men (Ierodiaconou 98).
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130
(because, as Angelou explains, women own no money) and can come 
and go as they wish, regardless of whether Angelou is there. Moreover, 
this place for Angelou has a collective value. Having become motherless 
at an early age, she cherishes all moments when she is among a crowd of 
people, and “the daily gathering of women to drink, exchange news, or 
quarrel, stood for the family warmth she had lacked since the death of 
her mother,” offering “intimate, comforting sense of human contact” 
(Ierodiaconou 49–50). Angelou became “an orphaned child” at five, 
and Avraam in his teenage years; both are, however, in their late thir-
ties still characterized as orphaned children, an orphan being “the most 
deterritorialized and the most deterritorializing figure” (Deleuze and 
Guattari, Kafka 79).7 One of their first conversations focuses on their 
mothers. “You remind me of my mother,” Avraam tells her, to which 
she replies: “I remember your mother. … You look alike, in a way. … 
Better than I remember my own mother, really” (Ierodiaconou 97). 
These recollections of parents and childhood are their attempt at reter-
ritorialization, finding one’s place, and so is, consequently, their joint 
venture of traveling around the island, Angelou selling and Avraam 
performing. It “takes place in a different space than that of territories, 
namely, overcoded geometrical space” (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand 
Plateaus 222). The traveling van is indeed overcoded with the dual sign 
of a peddler’s van and shadow theater, and it moves across the estab-
lished strata of the island, i.e., through the territorialization which this 
fictional world presents. Angelou’s and Avraam’s movements cannot 
effect any new territorialization—the single existing one concerns the 
“villain” of the novel, Avraam’s grandfather Hadjimbey.
Hadjimbey is preoccupied solely with territoriality, more literally, 
the land: “[H]e already had in hand that most profitable commodity of 
all: land. Cultivated, lying fallow or completely barren—as long as it was 
near the sea, it scarcely mattered in a small country which was quickly 
discovering that its future lay in selling its soul to the devil of tourism” 
(Ierodiaconou 73). Hadjimbey is “careful to steer well clear” of politics 
(71), just like the communist mayor and the nationalist sergeant who 
visit Angelou (“the flotsam and jetsam floating upon the ocean of this 
complex and unhappy political history”; 57) and also insist that politics 
should be left out of Avraam’s death. The two and Hadjimbey embody 
7 Avraam feels “orphaned” when his father leaves for America; he is on the verge 
of “the tears of a six-year-old on his first day at school” as he experiences the complete 
separation from his single remaining parent (Ierodiaconou 154). He also sobs like “a 
lost child” when he finds out that Angelou, the woman he loves, is in a relationship 
with Ermioni (149).
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the territorialized strata which all the other characters seem to over-
flow and struggle with. Though developed to the greatest extent in the 
two protagonists, this deterritorializing, minoritarian aspect is seen in 
other characters as well. Avraam’s mother, Constantia, who is sixteen 
at the time she elopes with Mehmet Salih, is described almost solely as 
a child;8 for instance, “rubbing her knuckles into her eyes like a child, 
[she] began suddenly to cry” (39). Such “strict contemporaneousness 
of the adult and the child” is what Deleuze and Guattari term “a child-
hood block” or “a becoming-child” (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand 
Plateaus 164), which is a minoritarian practice with a deterritorializing 
function. In Constantia (as well as Angelou and Avraam), the child 
coexists with the adult, “in a zone of proximity or a block of becoming, 
on a line of deterritorialization that carries … both off—as opposed 
to the child we once were, whom we remember or phantasize” (294). 
Angelou is described in a similar manner: her desire to be surrounded 
by other people, mostly women, reflects her upbringing, during which 
she lived with a series of aunts after her mother’s death. In a way, her 
childhood remains present in her adult life.
It is possible to consider some of the characters, particularly 
Avraam and Mehmet Salih, as minor in the sense of belonging to a 
minority community in the Cypriot world that The Women’s Coffee 
Shop charts. As such, they are “objectively definable states, states of 
language, ethnicity, or sex with their own ghetto territorialities, but 
they must also be thought of as seeds, crystals of becoming whose 
value is to trigger uncontrollable movements and deterritorializations 
of the mean or majority” (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 
106). Avraam’s movements are constant and become indeed uncon-
trollable after he dies, embodying—to refer to Vasiliou’s observation 
quoted at the beginning of this section—not just the Moslem com-
munity in the 1960s Cyprus, but also the Cypriot Anglophone minor 
literature. Similarly, Mehmet Salih leaves Cyprus and remains pres-
ent in the narrative only in his dead son’s dreams and memories; his 
movements are no longer confined by the island and therefore cannot 
be controlled.
8 Hadjimbey initially thinks of Mehmet as a son he does not have, whereby 
Mehmet is also observed as a childlike figure.
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132
Recreating territories
In his narration, Avraam resorts several times to describing his dreams. 
In one of them, as he states, “[M]y father hadn’t yet gone to America, 
and my mother was still alive” (Ierodiaconou 120). He enriches the nar-
rative with oneirism in making his dreams “objects of narrative report” 
(Walsh). Likewise, some odd chapters include reports of Angelou’s 
dreams. On the other hand, Ermioni’s description of Avraam—
in which she claims that “[h]e was half asleep on his feet” and was 
“[a]lways thinking up stories for his precious theatre” (Ierodiaconou 
139–140)—indicates that he was constantly in a dreamlike state or 
near such a state, which potentially presents “dreaming as itself a kind 
of narration” (Walsh). In either case, dreams present Avraam with 
possibilities of rewriting reality and constructing completely different 
worlds. In the mentioned dream, he conjures up a reality in which 
he is not an orphan. Being, in Ermioni’s words, always half asleep, 
he conjures up imaginary worlds to present in his plays. His shadow 
theater, in addition to serving as a means of characterization of deter-
ritorialized Avraam, is also the ultimate form of creating. In Avraam’s 
words, it “had to take people out of themselves, transpose them into 
an alternative world of the imagination which, for as long as the black 
shapes danced across the screen, felt more real somehow than the real; 
or it was nothing” (Ierodiaconou 162–163).
The shadow theater in The Women’s Coffee Shop plays an impor-
tant role—the one given in Deleuzian philosophy to literature, which, 
“when it fully extends its power of being literature, is always minoritar-
ian” (Colebrook 104). According to Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka was 
a great writer “not because he captured the unrepresented spirit of the 
Czech people, but because he wrote without a standard notion of ‘the 
people’ … not as a being with an identity, but as a voice of what is 
not given, a ‘people to come’” (Colebrook 104). This is appropriately 
reflected in the philosophy of Odysseas Kamenos, Avraam’s shadow 
theater instructor and subsequently great friend. Having once during 
a performance been asked by a Moslem audience member what was 
entertaining about the killings of the Moslem people which he staged, 
Odysseas understood that he should no longer do any “patriotic stuff” 
(Ierodiaconou 156). Regardless of his refusal to be patriotic and stage art 
that contributes to the political effort of his (Greek Orthodox) people, 
he remains deeply political in claiming that through his performances 
he wants to convey the idea of freedom—he wants everyone “to be free 
from hatred and killing” (161). He therefore imagines worlds in which 
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there are no divisions along the lines of nationality or religion, and the 
power such creations should project is precisely in the construction of a 
new reality and a new people, unburdened with divisions. It is through 
interaction with Odysseas that Avraam learns how to resist the major 
hegemonic narratives and educational practices in his shadow theater 
art; his apprenticeship is “a second birth into the life [he] was destined 
to lead” (159). This is particularly obvious in the discussion between 
Odysseas and Avraam about Shakespeare.
In Deleuzian terms, “Shakespeare can be considered a ‘minor’ 
author precisely because his works do not offer a unified image of man” 
(Colebrook 105). Reading Shakespeare today should not be a study 
of the history of ideas—instead, it should allow for a re-confronta-
tion with “the formation, genesis or creation of ideas” (64). Various 
theatrical adaptations of Shakespeare have indeed been interpreted as 
examples of a “minor theater” (Fortier) and the fictional examples in 
The Women’s Coffee Shop might fall within the same category. Namely, 
Odysseas proudly introduces to Avraam his “non-patriotic” play called 
The Blackamoor:
It’s a good play. There’s a black man, he’s a general and he’s really brave, so 
when he falls in love with a noble white lady she falls right back, and they 
get married, and it’s all lovey-dovey for a while; then some spiteful guy comes 
along and whispers in the Blackamoor’s ear that supposedly the lady is cuck-
olding him, and he goes crazy with jealousy. Then, not to kill her, he kills 
himself! (Ierodiaconou 157)
The well-educated Avraam is excited to recognize Othello (although 
the story of The Blackamoor is essentially similar to his parents’ love 
too), but Odysseas does not even know who Shakespeare is and claims 
that The Blackamoor is his original invention. Moreover, when Avraam 
explains the plot to him, Odysseas is convinced that Shakespeare was 
wrong: “The way you and this Shakespeare guy tell it, see, jealousy kills 
the lady and the Blackamoor. But the way I tell it, the Blackamoor 
kills jealousy; get it?” (158). On learning that Shakespeare wrote many 
more plays, Odysseas decides to recreate them, giving them new names 
and new ideas: “Lady Macbeth lost all her influence (‘Who’d want to 
watch a play about some guy doing what his wife says?’), Romeo and 
Juliet survived to have children and grandchildren (‘Too sad, killing 
them off like that’), and Titania remained forever in love with Bottom 
(‘Funnier!’)” (159).
The novel thus presents Shakespeare’s stories as permanently in 
the process of becoming, and the shadow theater as a form of art that 
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134
creates new worlds through recreating Shakespeare. Shakespeare is a 
major author only when he becomes part of an industry, such as tour-
ism (Colebrook 104). It is precisely the advance of tourism that threat-
ens the peaceful village of Ayia in The Women’s Coffee Shop, in the same 
way that the advance of film and television in the 1950s and 1960s 
threatens (and largely destroys) Avraam’s shadow theater. However, 
the capitalism that is brought to Cyprus along with independence is 
not the end for it still leaves space, at least for the communities based 
on collective values such as Angelou’s women’s coffee shop, to deter-
ritorialize the majoritarian practices by imagining what they have and 
might yet become—nurses, shop-keepers, even film stars. As is made 
clear from the start with the image of Avraam’s unburiable body, his 
death only entails a multiplicity of the forms of existence and activity.
Rhizomatic stories
Multiplicity is one of the principles on which rhizomatic forms, as de-
scribed by Deleuze and Guattari, are based. Multiplicity, “treated as a 
substantive … ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or object, 
natural or spiritual reality, image and world” (Deleuze and Guattari, 
Thousand Plateaus 8). Other principles are connection and heterogene-
ity, which dictate that “any point of a rhizome can be connected to 
anything other, and must be” (7), asignifying ruptures, which lead to 
the cutting, shattering, or breaking at any given spot of the form, which 
in turn inevitably starts “up again on one of its old lines, or on new 
lines” (9), and cartography and decalcomania, meaning that a rhizome 
is not generative or structural, but, like a map, “detachable, reversible, 
susceptible to constant modification … torn, reversed, adapted to any 
kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social forma-
tion … drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as 
a political action or as a meditation” (12). Rhizomes, described in this 
way, are constantly going through the mutually dependent processes 
of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, just as a minor litera-
ture does. As the narrative of The Women’s Coffee Shop draws towards a 
close, its rhizomatic potentials become more prominent. For example, 
chapter eleven depicts a protest organized exclusively by women aim-
ing to prevent Hadjimbey’s construction of a hotel in their village. The 
protest is heterogeneous in that it includes absolutely all the women of 
the village, from the youngest to the oldest. It operates on the principle 
of multiplicity as the women organize as a single body, which continues 
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135
to cater for the needs of the village men and children while staging the 
successful protest. Like a map, it allows for numerous points of entry, 
which is depicted by the two journalists, Osman and Theo, interview-
ing the people chosen in accordance with their own preferences and 
thus offering different points of view. Finally, the rupture is seen in 
the bulldozer accident which kills Ermioni. Ermioni’s death breaks the 
body of the protest and reshapes it into the funeral procession, but 
Ermioni curiously seems to go on living as Angelou recognizes the spe-
cific color of her eyes in the turquoise of Pulcheria the cat’s eyes, and 
this makes her happy (Ierodiaconou 179).9
Ermioni’s death is not the only rupture in the narrative. There are 
other holes which, in line with Wolfgang Iser’s idea of a narrative gap as 
an element of the story which is unexpressed in the narrative discourse, 
are left to the reader’s interpretation, imagination, and involvement. 
An example relative to the process of deterritorialization is Angelou’s 
account of her teenage years spent with her father. It is implied in the 
narrative (in a chapter narrated by Avraam) that she was abused by 
her father. As Avraam half-narrates Angelou’s confession, he stresses 
that “[s]he never once said the word ‘father,’ only ‘he.’ She made it 
sound as though the word ‘father’ was impossible to say” (Ierodiaconou 
149). Avraam is unable to relate the story of the abuse in the same 
way that Angelou is unable to say the word. Their inability reflects 
deterritorialization. A complete account of this traumatic childhood 
memory would provide Angelou with reterritorialization, as memory 
“yells ‘Father! Mother!’” whereas the opposite, deterritorializing pro-
cess of becoming-child “is elsewhere, in the highest intensities that 
the child constructs with his sisters, his pal, his projects and his toys” 
(Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 79). Avraam indeed comments at this 
point that he “wished [he] could make her a child again and restore to 
her a child’s proper nightmares, about wolves and being lost in the for-
est, instead of the others, the unspeakable ones which had been forced 
on her” (Ierodiaconou 150). While not literally a child, Angelou exists 
simultaneously—or alternatively—as an adult woman and a child, as 
has been pointed out in previous sections. She goes through a series of 
rhizomatic states in the process of constant de- and reterritorialization: 
she sells her father’s land after his death, but she keeps a plot by the sea 
to which she returns often, usually in difficult moments. She accepts 
to film the documentary Avraam was commissioned to make since she 
9 In Angelou’s dream which follows, Ermioni is transformed into Pulcheria and 
then back again into her human shape (Ierodiaconou 200).
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136
believes the story about a women’s coffee shop could deterritorialize the 
dominant narratives in the same way that the women’s protest managed 
to stop the construction of a hotel. However, the producer Theo, while 
delighted with her story, immediately reterritorializes it: by exclaiming 
“Amazons! Lysistrata!” (146) he gives away his wish to fit Angelou’s 
story in the existing, long-established myths, which ultimately leaves 
her disappointed in television industry. Finally, when following the 
dream in which Avraam refers her to his suitcase with shadow theater 
puppets, she finds his mother’s chain of gold, which Avraam left there 
for her, she reconnects with the past—but the figure whose inheritance 
she receives is the deterritorialized, exiled Constantia. In line with the 
rhizomatic principles of connection and heterogeneity, Angelou gives 
the chain to young Xenia’s baby, on the condition that the baby is 
named Constantia, whereby she reworks Constantia’s life into one of a 
heroine (who did the right thing, as Angelou states) and rewards it with 
a future through the child that will bear her name.
Avraam also describes his experience of being deterritorialized after 
another rupture—the news of his father’s death in America: “[A] curi-
ous feeling came over me, as of my body dissolving from the centre 
outwards; I felt an urge to go over and look at myself in the wardrobe 
mirror, which I wouldn’t have been surprised to find empty of any 
reflection. Then, slowly, my flesh seemed to coalesce about my bones 
again, but in a subtly different configuration” (Ierodiaconou 183). He 
does not cry but instead dreams “the same dream almost every night 
for the next few years: in it, I was standing in a very high place, on a 
tower or a cliff-top, with the darkness and the wind about me” (183). 
In the dream, he recreates the death of his father, who fell from the 
girders of a skyscraper construction site. Avraam believes his father in 
fact jumped because he was retracing his movements from the West 
to the East coast—he believes that his father wanted to effect a home-
coming through suicide. When in chapter fourteen Avraam narrates 
his own death, he attempts to effect a similar homecoming. He opens 
the chapter with a metanarrative comment: “I clearly hear you saying, 
reader: so, what’s going on here?” (203).10 Since he is utterly deter-
ritorialized, he does not provide readers with any final solutions and 
instead presents a rhizomatic, decentralized narrative with numerous 
paths, options, and points of entry, whose greatest enemy, according 
to Deleuze and Guattari, is fixed signification (Deleuze and Guattari, 
Kafka 3). “If I am a spirit,” says Avraam, “well, I am not just any spirit, 
10 It is the first comment which reveals that Avraam is “concerned with the act and/
or process of narration” (Neumann and Nünning).
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137
but that of a shadow theatre master; and while I am forbidden to tell 
you what actually happened, I can deploy my shadow-figurines one last 
time, in the guise of some of the persons in this story, to show you what 
might have happened. After that, which ending is the right one will be 
up to you to decide” (Ierodiaconou 203). He offers five different end-
ings, phrased identically except for those parts which describe differ-
ent possible deaths. In one ending, Ermioni stabs Avraam; in another, 
Kamenos is the murderer. In the third and fourth option, unidentified 
men from the village kill him on Hadjimbey’s orders or because of his 
religion; in the last one, he stabs himself after Ermioni tells him that 
Angelou was pregnant with his child and had an abortion. All endings 
finish with the same sentence, which reflects Avraam’s wish for reter-
ritorialization by dying in his home, the house on the outskirts. Like 
his father in America, he retraces his steps from the bridge to the house: 
“Once in my yard, I gave a small sigh, and died” (Ierodiaconou 209, 
213, 219, 224).11
Literature in process
Analyzing Andriana Ierodiaconou’s The Women’s Coffee Shop as an ex-
ample of a minor literature in English, hailing from Cyprus, which is 
based on politicalness, collective value, and above all, deterritorializing 
tendencies, reveals a set of narrative elements that reinforce the idea of 
deterritorialization as an overall narrative strategy. As a deterritorialized 
narrator who is at the same time at the center of the story and nowhere, 
Avraam himself stands for a void, a rupture which makes the narrative 
rhizomatic—filled with different voices and branching in many direc-
tions. The reader is aware of these voices and directions immediately 
from the titular concept of a women’s coffee shop, a collective organized 
as a rhizome where women (marginalized by virtue of their very birth) 
of all backgrounds gather and talk. Most of the characters, primarily 
Avraam and Angelou, are described in terms of their defiance of the 
established territorial strata and, consequently, their shifting positions 
in the surrounding spatial and social territory. Their relationship is an 
attempt at reterritorializing their positions, and while Avraam’s death 
prevents it, it also creates other possibilities. To this effect, the narrative 
11 The last ending, in which Avraam becomes aware of having lost a child, is dif-
ferent: “I gave a small sigh, and died” (Ierodiaconou 227). The idea of an unwanted 
child is generative rather than rhizomatic, and therefore it simply breaks the structure 
without offering any transformative options which a rhizome would provide.
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138
relies on the shadow theater as a minoritarian practice to create new ter-
ritories, reinventing, among other things, Shakespeare to reflect the ideas 
of the 1960s Cyprus. The shadow theater as an element of the story has 
its parallel in dreamwork as an element of the narrative discourse, which 
is also a minoritarian practice due to its power to affect reality. The voice 
of a spirit-like eavesdropping narrator, the construction of characters 
who exist simultaneously as (orphaned) children and adults, the narra-
tive method of dreamwork and the creative use of the theater all contrib-
ute to the deterritorializing process which Deleuze and Guattari describe 
as enriching. On the other hand, the ultimate inconclusiveness in leaving 
the reader uninformed about “facts,” the gaping void in the story that 
surrounds Avraam and his death, deterritorializes the narrative by, con-
ditionally speaking, impoverishment. Conditionally, because while the 
story is devoid of its central element, it ushers the reader into its world, 
making him or her able to follow the rhizomatic branches and create 
bridges for the narrative gap. This is a means of involving the reader with 
the political as much as literary intrigues of the heterogenous Cypriot 
world. Just as Avraam and Angelou constantly oscillate between being 
deterritorialized and yearning for a reterritorialization, so is Cypriot 
Anglophone literature—like other New Literatures in English—in the 
process of becoming, charting new territories of literary fiction in a map 
that remains essentially incompletable.
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Deteritorializacija pripovednih strategij novih 
književnosti v angleščini: Ženska kavarna 
Andriane Ierodiaconou
Ključne besede: anglofonska ciprska književnost / Ierodiaconou, Andriana: The 
Women’s Coffee Shop / manjšinska literatura / pripovedne strategije / rizom / 
deteritorializacija
Ciprska anglofonska književnost kot ena izmed novih literatur v angleščini je 
šele pred kratkim pritegnila pozornost literarnih raziskovalcev in raziskovalk. 
V tem kontekstu članek obravnava roman Andriane Ierodiaconou Ženska 
kavarna (The Women‘s Coffee Shop) iz leta 2012, ki se ga loteva na podlagi teore-
tičnih in filozofskih izhodišč Gillesa Deleuza in Félixa Guattarija ter ga umesti 
v okvir manjšinskih literatur in rizomatskih pripovedi. Glavni cilj članka je 
z natančnim branjem opredeliti in opisati pripovedne strategije, ki odsevajo 
in/ali krepijo deteritorializacijski učinek kot osrednjo značilnost manjšinske 
literature. V ta namen se analiza osredotoča na lik deteritorializiranega pripo-
vedovalca, karakterizacijo, ki niha med deteritorializacijo in reteritorializacijo, 
pripovedno metodo sanj in načine pripovedovanja, ki potencialno ustvarjajo 
nova ozemlja, ter rizomatsko pripovedno vrzel in odprt konec. Kot se pokaže, 
romaneskna pripoved odraža položaj, ki ga zaseda ciprska anglofonska knji-
ževnost kot ena od (manjših) novih literatur v angleščini.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK 821.111(564.3).09Ierodiacu A.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v47.i3.07