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ANKARA: When silences speak

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  • ANKARA: When silences speak

    When silences speak

    TDN
    Sunday, April 17, 2005

    OPINIONS

    Opinion by Elif SAFAK


    ELIF SAFAK I first heard the word Armenian while eavesdropping on the
    conversations of elderly Muslim women. Back when I was a child in
    Istanbul, there was a small bakery my grandma would send me to for the
    best yufka in the neighborhood. The place was owned by a modest
    couple, a short woman who never smiled and her shorter husband who
    always did. Coming home from there one day, I found a group of women
    in our living room sipping their teas and praising the yufka of this
    small bakery as they reached for the pastries. Then I heard one of
    them ask, Are these bakers Armenians? My grandma nodded as she said:
    But isn't it obvious? They are such a hard-working couple. One by one
    the women shared with each other memories of the Armenians they knew
    back in their childhoods in Sivas, Erzurum, Van, Istanbul, etc.

    Trying to cross the information I'd just heard with my image of the
    bakers in the neighborhood, I had this vision of an insomniac couple
    baking all kinds of bread every night in their little shops. The scene
    seemed pretty pleasant to me, almost mystical. Eager to learn more
    about these people and their ways, I interrupted the chitchat in the
    room and asked, who on earth were these Armenians? Since that day, it
    is not the answers that remain anchored in my memory but the silence
    that followed. I remember the women being somewhat annoyed by my
    question, and then, annoyed by my very presence in the room. Although
    I had been sitting in front of their eyes for the past half hour, they
    had only now taken notice. Suddenly, I had become an outsider.

    Recalling that memory, I tend to liken it to a widespread and
    deeply-rooted reaction in Turkish daily life concerning the Armenian
    question. We can easily converse about the Armenians in the serenity
    of our living rooms, we can recall distant memories of a past when we
    used to live together with our good old Armenian neighbors, and we can
    even be critical of the Turkish state provided there are no outsiders
    around. We ourselves, on our own initiative can and do frequently
    remember the Armenian neighbors we once had, but we do not like to be
    reminded of them. That afternoon in that living room, I couldn't help
    but notice my interruption caused uneasiness and a decline in
    enthusiasm among the women to keep talking in the same vein.

    There was a nuance that equally remains etched in my memory. Whenever
    she uttered the word Armenian, my grandmother lowered her voice
    without realizing it -- her voice dwindling to an almost confidential
    whisper. To this day, Grandma's intonation changes when she talks
    about an Armenian, any Armenian. Clearly, she does not do it
    deliberately or malevolently. When I ask her the reason why she cannot
    utter this word aloud, she looks back at me in surprise. Does she
    lower her voice? Sure she doesn't.

    In the passage of time, I came to realize I was not asking her the
    right question. When the word is Armenian, it is not the sound of the
    word itself necessarily, but the silence that conveys the uncharted
    depths of oral history of elderly Muslim women in Turkey.

    I conducted the same test on the women of my mother's generation and
    then the women of mine. The results were somewhat different. Younger
    women in Turkey had no real difficulty in pronouncing the word
    Armenian aloud, as if it was just any other word for them. They didn't
    have any reason to pause because they didn't have any particular story
    to tell. They didn't have any particular story to tell because they
    had no common experience with Armenians. Somehow, somewhere, a body of
    knowledge was lost between generations of women. Thus, those who were
    young and didn't know much were the ones who would speak, but, didn't
    have anything personal to tell. Those who were old and had something
    personal to tell were the ones that kept quiet, and as such, their
    stories could not be heard. In either case, the Armenian question
    remained unspeakable.

    History does not only mean written and documented history. History is
    also oral history. The elderly women in Turkey remember the things
    Turkish nationalist historians cannot possibly bear to hear. In almost
    every household in Turkey today, there is a woman of my grandmother's
    generation. The crucial question is: how can we ever bring that
    experience out? How can we decode the silence? It is my belief that if
    we are to look into the dusk of the past and shed light on the
    atrocities we Turks have allegedly committed against the Armenians, we
    should not only focus on the archives or written documents, but also
    pay attention to the unwritten volumes of women's oral histories.

    We need to listen to the suppressed memories of the Turkish
    grandmothers. For, unlike the Turkish nationalists who keep reacting
    against every critical voice in civil society by systematically
    propagating collective amnesia, these elderly women do remember.

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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