There Was and There Was Not
As I’ve mentioned in the past, historical subjects sometimes track me down, screaming “learn more about me, dagnabbit!”
Over the last few years, the Armenian genocide *--and the controversies surrounding the existence of that genocide in modern Turkey--has been tracking me down in an on-again off-again way.
I first became aware of the genocide, and the controversy surrounding them in Turkey, when I read Elif Shafak’s brilliant novel, The Bastard of Istanbul (2007). Then a freelance assignment or two plunged me into the subject of arrests of publishers, journalists and authors on accusations of violating Turkey’s controversial** article 301, which makes it illegal to insult “Turkishness”. Thousands of authors, including Shafak and Nobel-prize winner Orhan Pamuk, were arrested for statements regarding the genocide. Next up was My Grandmother: A Memoir ( 2004), in which Turkish lawyer and civil rights activist Fethiye Çetin tells the story of her grandmother’s experience as one of the “leftovers of the sword” who survived the Ottoman massacre and was subsequently adopted into a Turkish home.
I thought I had a handle on the topic. I thought I wouldn't read anything else on the subject. Then Meline Toumani’s There Was and There was Not floated across my desk as a possible book for review.
In 2005, Armenian-American journalist Meline Toumani traveled to Turkey, a place she had previously known only as "a terrifying idea", with the intention of studying Armenian-Turkey relations for a month or two, three at the most.. She stayed two years--with the help of regular "visa runs" over the border. The result of her immersion in a culture she had been trained to "hate, fear and fight" is There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia and Beyond: an engaging and deeply personal exploration of ethnicity, nationalism, history and identity.
The conflicting Armenian and Turkish narratives regarding the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 defined the Armenian diaspora community of Toumani's childhood. On the one hand, Turkey has historically denied that the massacre existed, or at best minimized the scale of the deaths. On the other hand, the Armenian community focuses substantially energy on campaigns designed to pressure the Turkish government to recognize the massacre as genocide. Toumani had reached the point where the dominance of the genocide narrative felt like an artistic and emotional chokehold. She set out to Turkey in an attempt to answer two questions: how could she honor her history without being suffocated by it and why did Turks cling to their version of the events of 1915?
Toumani brings the reader along on a voyage of discovery that begins with her growing doubts about the emotional, psychological and political costs of the Armenian diaspora's focus on Turkish recognition of the genocide and ends with Toumani defying rules about neutrality in the press box by screaming her support of Armenia at a World Cup match between Armenia and Istanbul. She tells a story riddled with unreliable narrators, unreliable listeners, lost memories, lost history, false assumptions, and real places transformed by the imagination. She establishes the constantly shifting ground of her experience with the first sentence: her plane lands in Turkey and she realizes she has never imagined Turkey as a physical place. She is stunned by Turkey's beauty, charmed by what she describes as the "particular sweetness of Turkish manners" and actively enjoys learning the Turkish language. (The contrast between Toumani's phobia about speaking Armenian and her delight in learning Turkish is typical of her skilled use of irony and reversal to enrich her narrative.). At the same time, she is repeatedly dismayed and occasionally enraged by the ways in which Turkey erases traces of the Armenian past: the opening ceremony of a newly renovated Armenian church as a UNESCO world heritage site that makes no reference to Armenians, a museum visit in which she discovers that hundreds of years of Armenian civilization in Anatolia*** don't appear on the timeline or the map, brochures and travel guides that describe Armenian artifacts in southeastern Turkey but never identify them as Armenian.
Moving between Turkey and the Republic of Armenia, Toumani shares her experiences of events as important as the assassination of Turkish-born Armenian journalist and civil rights activist Hrant Dink and as small as the street vendors who call their wares on the street outside her apartment. She finds friends and allies among the Turkish activists, journalists, scholars and lawyers who have taken up the Armenian issue, often at the risk of prison or worse. She speaks to millionaires, dentists and cab drivers, Turkish scholars dedicated to cooperating across ethnic lines and Turkey's official historian, Turkish Armenians and Armenians from the former Soviet republic, Kurds, Turkish nationalists and an ethnic Turk who refuses to identify himself as Turkish. She encounters Turks who are uncomfortable with the fact that she is Armenian and Turks who struggle to find a point of connection (described by Toumani as the "narcissism of small similarities").
Over the course of the book, the clear-cut oppositions with which Toumani begins her project --Armenian and Turk, individual and community, denial and recognition, political and personal---become more nuanced. Even the unity of the Armenian community itself becomes more complex as she examines the different concerns of the Armenian diaspora, Turkish Armenians (described by members of the diaspora community as Bolsahay--a term that avoids describing them as Turkish ), and citizens of the Republic of Armenia, the different experiences of those whose families survived the genocide and those who families were not directly involved, and the ideological divide between those who support the activist Dashnak Party and those who do not.
There Was and There Was Not is neither a history of the genocide nor an examination of its political ramifications for the modern world. It is the story of one woman's attempt to understand her community, its fundamental assumptions, and herself.
Written in a conversational style that is by turns heart-wrenching and unexpectedly funny, There Was and There Was Not will appeal not only to those interested in questions of the Armenian genocide but to readers interested in the larger questions of how individuals define themselves within communities and how communities define themselves.
If you’re interested in learning more about There Was and Was Not, you can read my interview with Toumani here.
* If you’re looking for the short version, this is a reasonably even-handed account: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/timestopics/topics_armeniangenocide.html
**What can I say, the word comes up a lot when you’re talking about the Armenian genocide.
***One thing I realized as a result of reading There Was and There Was Not was that the Armenian genocide was only thing I know about Armenian history. I suspect that the bigger picture will be tracking me down shortly.
Much of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness Maximum Shelf.
History on Display: The Great War As It Unfolds
WARNING: THIS BLOG POST INCLUDES A DANGEROUS TIME SUCK. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK
Recently my friend and writing buddy Evelyn Herwitz introduced me to a fascinating You Tube channel. The Great War follows World War I in real time in weekly summaries that combine the style of a news reel with personal commentary by host Indy Neidel, who looks like he stepped out of a vintage Arrow Shirt ad.*
I'll be following along over the next few years. Care to join me?
Reminder: If you're reading this blog post in an e-mail, you may not be able to see the video. You need to go to the browser by clicking on the post title.
Word With a Past: Genocide
Genocide as an activity is probably as old as the concepts of “us” and “them”.
Genocide as a word is relatively new, coined by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, several years before the world knew about the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps
As a result of studying the history of anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia, the mass murder of Armenians by the Ottomans in 1915-16 (now considered genocide by most scholars), and other examples of violence directed at specific groups, Lemkin made the introduction of international legal safeguards for minority religious and ethnic groups his life’s work. He first proposed such legislation at an international legal conference in 1933.*
When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Lemkin tried to persuade his family to seek asylum outside of German-occupied territories, with no success. (Forty-nine members of his family, including his parents, were imprisoned by the Nazis and later gassed in Treblinka.) Lemkin himself escaped through unoccupied Lithuania and Latvia to Stockholm.
In Stockholm, Lemkin studied Nazi actions through the lens of jurisprudence, using information regarding Nazi laws, regulations and proclamations provided by Swedish diplomats in Nazi occupied territories. In 1944, now an analyst with the United States’ War Department, he published his monumental study of patterns of destruction in Nazi-held territories, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, in which he introduced the term genocide to describe “the crime without a name”:
“By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote the old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing)….It is intended to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.
After the war, Lemkin worked as a prosecutor at the Nurenberg trials. He was able to get the word “genocide” included in the indictments, but genocide was not yet recognized as a legal crime and was not reflected in the final verdicts.
When Lemkin returned from Europe, he took on the task of pushing the Genocide Convention through the newly formed United Nations. The recognition of genocide as an international crime became an all encompassing crusade for Lemkin. He gave up adjunct teaching positions at Yale and New York University in order to give all his time to the task. Impoverished and sometimes homeless, he relentlessly lobbied national delegations and influential leaders for their support. The UN passed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide on December 9, 1948--in large part due to Lemkin’s efforts. The United States finally signed the Genocide Convention forty years later,.
Genocide: the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group
* Several months after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany.