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ONE TRAGEDY OF MANY - "MY GRANDMOTHER"
by Nouritza Matossian
New Statesman
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/0 9/fethiye-cetin-grandmother
Sept 4 2008
UK
THE BOOK My Grandmother: a Memoir Fethiye Cetin, translated and
introduced by Maureen Freely Verso, 144pp, £12.99
Fethiye Cetin's granny: a modern Mother Courage My Grandmother
is an innocent little book, easy to overlook, except for the tiny
headscarved woman whose eyes burn with accusation on the cover: an
oriental Mother Courage. Its hundred-odd pages are to be read at one
sitting - and, once read, never to be forgotten. Brevity and shape
add to its authority. But who is this author, whom most people have
never heard of in Europe?
Fethiye Cetin has herself become a Mother Courage in the Turkish legal
system. She is the lawyer prosecuting the murderers of Hrant Dink,
the Armenian Turkish editor gunned down in broad daylight outside his
office last year. She also defended Dink when he was alive against
the preposterous Article 301, for "insulting Turkish identity". Dink
published an ad for her lost relatives in his paper Agos that brought
back an answer from the US, and so her perilous journey began.
In her memoir, Fethiye grows up a fully integrated Turkish Muslim
schoolgirl, reciting nationalistic poems at the top of her voice
and never doubting her origins. On Fethiye's father's early death,
Grandmother Seher takes her widowed daughter and three grandchildren
under her wing. The illiterate grandmother expertly manages the
extended family and a feckless husband, and sensitises Fethiye deeply
with her kindness, industry and sense of rightness.
As she nears death, it is to Fethiye that she confesses her lifelong
secret. She belongs to a people who are supposed not to exist in
Turkey. They have no voice, no name, no history. Close to two million
have been uprooted, driven from their homes and lands, forced to
march across wasteland, tortured, raped and killed. The sheer numbers
of their corpses thrown in rivers changed the course of the waters,
which ran red with blood. In one, Grandmother saw children's heads
bobbing out of the water only to be pushed under to drown by their
own mother, to prevent them from suffering an agonising death. She
herself is plucked from her mother's arms by a Turkish soldier,
adopted and later married off to a Turk, Fethiye's grandfather.
In 1915, the Ottoman government and the Young Turks enforced the state
policy of total extermination. Yet, 90 years later, this mass murder
could not be mentioned without attracting the risk of punishment by
law, hence the delay in producing studies, memoirs and novels on the
subject of the Armenian genocide. The Jewish Holocaust, two decades
later, far outstripped it in commanding world attention with lawsuits,
a huge literature bearing out Hitler's gibe: "Who today remembers
the Armenians?"
As Maureen Freely, the gifted translator of this narrative, writes
in her introduction, Ataturk applied his cauterised official history
to hide historical crimes. A triumphalist nationalist myth poisoned
generations of schoolchildren with a distorted history and ignorance
of their own neighbours - the Armenians, whose lands and property had
been stolen. They were callously taught that it was Armenians who
had massacred Turks, therefore "Armenian" must be the arch-enemy,
a dirty word. So, these people remained nameless, that is to say,
the survivors were given Turkish names and the Muslim religion,
and brutally assimilated as "leftovers from the sword".
This book answers a question I have often pondered: "What happened
to the young women, children and babies who were left behind in
a Muslim society that could not tolerate their religion?" I, too,
had a great-aunt who was abducted on the death march and years later
was seen with blue tattoos on her face in an Aleppo market. Cetin
intercuts her own childhood and adult quest with her grandmother's
words spoken on her deathbed. She has a keen eye for tragedy and
humour. Her family's provincial life has robust simplicity, charm
and a blood-curdling coolness. Courageously she tackles the greatest
taboo in Turkey. There are no accusations, no generalisations, yet
she registers her inner turmoil. Finally, at the Muslim funeral rites,
she yells out her grandmother's real Armenian name, Gadaryan, to the
astonished mourners.
Most harrowing is how the old woman's pent-up craving for her lost
Armenian family, which she knows to be alive, a craving cruelly
sabotaged by the Turkish family she selflessly nurtured, bursts out
of her at the last. How amazed she would be to see her own picture
on the cover of a bestselling book.
Jews, Kurds, Laz, Alevis - today's Turkey is filled with people of
mixed race who rediscover themselves in Cetin's Mother Courage and
hurry to her to confess behind closed doors. Dink once said to me,
"Who do you think is buying all these hundreds of books? We have
over two million hidden Armenians here." As the funeral placards
paraded by more than 100,000 Turks read, "We are all Hrant Dink. We
are all Armenian." Turkey's disenfranchised people are awakening the
conscience of the country to face the truth.
Nouritza Matossian is the author of "Black Angel: a Life of Arshile
Gorky" (Chatto & Windus) and director of the documentary "Heart of
Two Nations: Hrant Dink"
--Boundary_(ID_CIfxarhL1Utbaw269Ci9cA) --
by Nouritza Matossian
New Statesman
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/0 9/fethiye-cetin-grandmother
Sept 4 2008
UK
THE BOOK My Grandmother: a Memoir Fethiye Cetin, translated and
introduced by Maureen Freely Verso, 144pp, £12.99
Fethiye Cetin's granny: a modern Mother Courage My Grandmother
is an innocent little book, easy to overlook, except for the tiny
headscarved woman whose eyes burn with accusation on the cover: an
oriental Mother Courage. Its hundred-odd pages are to be read at one
sitting - and, once read, never to be forgotten. Brevity and shape
add to its authority. But who is this author, whom most people have
never heard of in Europe?
Fethiye Cetin has herself become a Mother Courage in the Turkish legal
system. She is the lawyer prosecuting the murderers of Hrant Dink,
the Armenian Turkish editor gunned down in broad daylight outside his
office last year. She also defended Dink when he was alive against
the preposterous Article 301, for "insulting Turkish identity". Dink
published an ad for her lost relatives in his paper Agos that brought
back an answer from the US, and so her perilous journey began.
In her memoir, Fethiye grows up a fully integrated Turkish Muslim
schoolgirl, reciting nationalistic poems at the top of her voice
and never doubting her origins. On Fethiye's father's early death,
Grandmother Seher takes her widowed daughter and three grandchildren
under her wing. The illiterate grandmother expertly manages the
extended family and a feckless husband, and sensitises Fethiye deeply
with her kindness, industry and sense of rightness.
As she nears death, it is to Fethiye that she confesses her lifelong
secret. She belongs to a people who are supposed not to exist in
Turkey. They have no voice, no name, no history. Close to two million
have been uprooted, driven from their homes and lands, forced to
march across wasteland, tortured, raped and killed. The sheer numbers
of their corpses thrown in rivers changed the course of the waters,
which ran red with blood. In one, Grandmother saw children's heads
bobbing out of the water only to be pushed under to drown by their
own mother, to prevent them from suffering an agonising death. She
herself is plucked from her mother's arms by a Turkish soldier,
adopted and later married off to a Turk, Fethiye's grandfather.
In 1915, the Ottoman government and the Young Turks enforced the state
policy of total extermination. Yet, 90 years later, this mass murder
could not be mentioned without attracting the risk of punishment by
law, hence the delay in producing studies, memoirs and novels on the
subject of the Armenian genocide. The Jewish Holocaust, two decades
later, far outstripped it in commanding world attention with lawsuits,
a huge literature bearing out Hitler's gibe: "Who today remembers
the Armenians?"
As Maureen Freely, the gifted translator of this narrative, writes
in her introduction, Ataturk applied his cauterised official history
to hide historical crimes. A triumphalist nationalist myth poisoned
generations of schoolchildren with a distorted history and ignorance
of their own neighbours - the Armenians, whose lands and property had
been stolen. They were callously taught that it was Armenians who
had massacred Turks, therefore "Armenian" must be the arch-enemy,
a dirty word. So, these people remained nameless, that is to say,
the survivors were given Turkish names and the Muslim religion,
and brutally assimilated as "leftovers from the sword".
This book answers a question I have often pondered: "What happened
to the young women, children and babies who were left behind in
a Muslim society that could not tolerate their religion?" I, too,
had a great-aunt who was abducted on the death march and years later
was seen with blue tattoos on her face in an Aleppo market. Cetin
intercuts her own childhood and adult quest with her grandmother's
words spoken on her deathbed. She has a keen eye for tragedy and
humour. Her family's provincial life has robust simplicity, charm
and a blood-curdling coolness. Courageously she tackles the greatest
taboo in Turkey. There are no accusations, no generalisations, yet
she registers her inner turmoil. Finally, at the Muslim funeral rites,
she yells out her grandmother's real Armenian name, Gadaryan, to the
astonished mourners.
Most harrowing is how the old woman's pent-up craving for her lost
Armenian family, which she knows to be alive, a craving cruelly
sabotaged by the Turkish family she selflessly nurtured, bursts out
of her at the last. How amazed she would be to see her own picture
on the cover of a bestselling book.
Jews, Kurds, Laz, Alevis - today's Turkey is filled with people of
mixed race who rediscover themselves in Cetin's Mother Courage and
hurry to her to confess behind closed doors. Dink once said to me,
"Who do you think is buying all these hundreds of books? We have
over two million hidden Armenians here." As the funeral placards
paraded by more than 100,000 Turks read, "We are all Hrant Dink. We
are all Armenian." Turkey's disenfranchised people are awakening the
conscience of the country to face the truth.
Nouritza Matossian is the author of "Black Angel: a Life of Arshile
Gorky" (Chatto & Windus) and director of the documentary "Heart of
Two Nations: Hrant Dink"
--Boundary_(ID_CIfxarhL1Utbaw269Ci9cA) --