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NY Times Book Review
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/books/rev iew/ONeill-t.html?hp
Turks, Kurds, Armenians: View From a Small Town
In 2005, Christopher de Bellaigue, a British journalist, installed himself
in a remote, forbidding Turkish town and, by so doing, acquired an anguished
intimacy with the region's peoples and their secret and mythic pasts. This
extraordinary intervention - which can be read as old-fashioned Orientalism
or, more generously, as a globalized conscience courageously at work or,
most accurately, as a bit of both - has a reflexive subplot, namely de
Bellaigue's own intellectual and moral odyssey, which is of an unusually
vulnerable and romantic character.
>From "Rebel Land"
Kurdish fighters, about 1900.
REBEL LAND
Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town
By Christopher de Bellaigue
Illustrated. 270 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95
As de Bellaigue freely explains in "Rebel Land," a love affair drew him to
Turkey in 1995, whereupon "the love affair ended but Turkey captivated
me." He stayed (in Ankara and Istanbul, writing for The Economist),
learned to speak Turkish fluently and, immersed in a Westernized
environment, more or less unwittingly became a Kemalist, which is to say,
a subscriber to the "foundation myths" promulgated by Kemal Ataturk and
holding sway in Turkey ever since. Notable among these are the notions
that the Turkish republic is a nation-state containing no subgroups with
valid claims to ethnic or political differentiation, let alone autonomy;
that the country has a European and secular essence and destiny; and, more
emotionally, that the achievement of Turkish nationhood was an enterprise
reflective of a righteous people who to this day remain victimized by the
self-interested incomprehension of the West.
In the grip of such prejudicial ideas, de Bellaigue in 2001 wrote an
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14094> article for The New York Review of
Bookscontaining a blandly pro-Turkish account of the fate of the Ottoman
Armenians. To de Bellaigue's somewhat surprising surprise, this excited a
furious response. The controversy led the writer to a searching, shameful
examination of his sources and his soul: "I had been charmed by the Turks,
and perhaps intimidated by their blocking silence" about the Armenians. "I
had helped to keep Turkey's past hidden."
It may strike some as odd that a leading authority on modern Turkey should
be capable of such a blunder; an honest scrutiny of the plentiful and
detailed accounts of the 1915 events provided by (overwhelmingly Christian)
bystanders and survivors makes the case for an
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/internat ional/countriesandterritories/turkey/armenian_geno cide/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> Armenian genocide
hard to resist. On any view of the available materials - the Ottoman
archives remain largely forbidden to scholars - the Armenians suffered a
comprehensive and horrifying ethnic cleansing from their ancient homeland.
But de Bellaigue had failed to scrutinize these materials, for the simple
reason that he had, more or less literally, gone native. It was only after
he left Istanbul for Tehran (prompted by another, happier love affair, with
an Iranian who is now his wife) that his Turkish ties began to shrivel and
he came to realize he was "no longer a Turk." By 2005, he was ready to make
amends for his offenses against history, even if he would thereby go behind
Turkey's back "and betray it."
The betrayal took the form of repeated visits to "a little place in the
middle of nowhere" named Varto, and in this way de Bellaigue climbed "down
from the crow's nest of history" to a place where "the science of history
has been so abused and neglected . . . that it barely exists." Varto, we
learn, is an exceedingly complicated place. Situated in Turkey's beautiful,
mountainous far east, in the early 20th century it was controlled in short
succession by the Ottomans, Russian invaders, Armenian nationalists and
Kurdish rebels. Nowadays the town and surrounding district are populated by
Kurds, a very few vestigial Armenians and a small minority of Turks. (This
part of the world is also home to the Zaza people, but de Bellaigue makes no
mention of them as such.)
This ethnic complexity is aggravated by tribal divisions (among the Kurds)
and by an unruly spillage of religions. Most Varto Kurds are Sunni Muslims,
others are members of the oppressed Alevi sect; ditto the Turks. The
Armenians of Varto are Muslims (their Ottoman ancestors having prudentially
converted from Christianity). Local speech is also a hodgepodge. Kurds speak
Kurmanji or Zaza and in any event Turkish. These languages are likewise
distributed among the Alevis. The Turks speak Turkish and make a political
point of it, unless they are Alevi Turks, in which case they may empathize
with the Kurds and their persecution.
De Bellaigue responds with outstanding energy and courage. Lodging at
Varto's Teachers' Hostel, he is tailed by the police and military
intelligence and suspected of being a spy. Nonetheless, he perseveres,
talking to, on the one hand, the captain of the gendarmerie, the police
chief and the district governor and, on the other hand, herdsmen and Kurdish
guerrilla fighters. He tracks down descendants of famous and infamous
figures in Varto history, and in Germany, he speaks to exiled Kurdish
nationalists. He constructs an unflinching and painstaking history of the
local Armenian apocalypse and deconstructs the Kurds' inevitably shaky
versions of their past.
(Page 2 of 2)
If one thing becomes clear, it's that the region, indeed Turkey itself, is
buried in a thick ethnographic and historical cloud that is only deepened by
its various inhabitants, who, in this regard, are helpless particles of fog.
The people of Varto are smothered by the official narratives of the Turkish
state, credulous of family and tribal lore and guerrilla propaganda, subdued
by censorship and hypersensitized by inherited and actual grievances. Their
sense of themselves and their neighbors is built on vagueness, prejudice,
misconceptions, hearsay and, above all, fear. Fear is general all over
Turkey.
De Bellaigue investigates this mess brilliantly and evenhandedly (if
occasionally emotively). Analytically, however, he can be abrupt. He
describes Varto as "a place under occupation" before concluding, a little
too tersely, that the "Kurdish movement in Turkey . . . is a mirage." With
regard to that hottest of potatoes, the Armenians, he deplores as "a
travesty of history and memory" the divisive obsession with the question of
genocide: "What is needed is a vaguer description for the events of 1915,
avoiding the G-word but clearly connoting criminal acts of slaughter, to
which reasonable scholars can subscribe," thereby promoting "a cultural and
historical meeting between today's Turks, Kurds and Armenians." This is an
important and potentially attractive suggestion, but de Bellaigue declines
to elaborate its moral and philosophical foundations; a pity, since he has
earned the reader's trust.
It's a sense of trust, though, that "Rebel Land" ultimately bequeaths - a
rare, remarkable feat, given the treacherousness of the terrain. De
Bellaigue concludes his personal story with the information that, having
wandered restlessly among "the tall stalks of identity," fatherhood has
returned him to England and to a new appreciation of his citizenship. That
may be so; but whatever his protestations to the contrary, his heart remains
part Turkish. And Turkey, however much it may not like it, is lucky to have
Christopher de Bellaigue. This book ought to be compulsory reading from
Batman to Bodrum.
* 2
Joseph O'Neill's most recent novel is "Netherland." His memoir, "Blood-Dark
Track: A Family History," will be published in paperback in the fall.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/books/rev iew/ONeill-t.html?hp
Turks, Kurds, Armenians: View From a Small Town
In 2005, Christopher de Bellaigue, a British journalist, installed himself
in a remote, forbidding Turkish town and, by so doing, acquired an anguished
intimacy with the region's peoples and their secret and mythic pasts. This
extraordinary intervention - which can be read as old-fashioned Orientalism
or, more generously, as a globalized conscience courageously at work or,
most accurately, as a bit of both - has a reflexive subplot, namely de
Bellaigue's own intellectual and moral odyssey, which is of an unusually
vulnerable and romantic character.
>From "Rebel Land"
Kurdish fighters, about 1900.
REBEL LAND
Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town
By Christopher de Bellaigue
Illustrated. 270 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95
As de Bellaigue freely explains in "Rebel Land," a love affair drew him to
Turkey in 1995, whereupon "the love affair ended but Turkey captivated
me." He stayed (in Ankara and Istanbul, writing for The Economist),
learned to speak Turkish fluently and, immersed in a Westernized
environment, more or less unwittingly became a Kemalist, which is to say,
a subscriber to the "foundation myths" promulgated by Kemal Ataturk and
holding sway in Turkey ever since. Notable among these are the notions
that the Turkish republic is a nation-state containing no subgroups with
valid claims to ethnic or political differentiation, let alone autonomy;
that the country has a European and secular essence and destiny; and, more
emotionally, that the achievement of Turkish nationhood was an enterprise
reflective of a righteous people who to this day remain victimized by the
self-interested incomprehension of the West.
In the grip of such prejudicial ideas, de Bellaigue in 2001 wrote an
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14094> article for The New York Review of
Bookscontaining a blandly pro-Turkish account of the fate of the Ottoman
Armenians. To de Bellaigue's somewhat surprising surprise, this excited a
furious response. The controversy led the writer to a searching, shameful
examination of his sources and his soul: "I had been charmed by the Turks,
and perhaps intimidated by their blocking silence" about the Armenians. "I
had helped to keep Turkey's past hidden."
It may strike some as odd that a leading authority on modern Turkey should
be capable of such a blunder; an honest scrutiny of the plentiful and
detailed accounts of the 1915 events provided by (overwhelmingly Christian)
bystanders and survivors makes the case for an
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/internat ional/countriesandterritories/turkey/armenian_geno cide/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> Armenian genocide
hard to resist. On any view of the available materials - the Ottoman
archives remain largely forbidden to scholars - the Armenians suffered a
comprehensive and horrifying ethnic cleansing from their ancient homeland.
But de Bellaigue had failed to scrutinize these materials, for the simple
reason that he had, more or less literally, gone native. It was only after
he left Istanbul for Tehran (prompted by another, happier love affair, with
an Iranian who is now his wife) that his Turkish ties began to shrivel and
he came to realize he was "no longer a Turk." By 2005, he was ready to make
amends for his offenses against history, even if he would thereby go behind
Turkey's back "and betray it."
The betrayal took the form of repeated visits to "a little place in the
middle of nowhere" named Varto, and in this way de Bellaigue climbed "down
from the crow's nest of history" to a place where "the science of history
has been so abused and neglected . . . that it barely exists." Varto, we
learn, is an exceedingly complicated place. Situated in Turkey's beautiful,
mountainous far east, in the early 20th century it was controlled in short
succession by the Ottomans, Russian invaders, Armenian nationalists and
Kurdish rebels. Nowadays the town and surrounding district are populated by
Kurds, a very few vestigial Armenians and a small minority of Turks. (This
part of the world is also home to the Zaza people, but de Bellaigue makes no
mention of them as such.)
This ethnic complexity is aggravated by tribal divisions (among the Kurds)
and by an unruly spillage of religions. Most Varto Kurds are Sunni Muslims,
others are members of the oppressed Alevi sect; ditto the Turks. The
Armenians of Varto are Muslims (their Ottoman ancestors having prudentially
converted from Christianity). Local speech is also a hodgepodge. Kurds speak
Kurmanji or Zaza and in any event Turkish. These languages are likewise
distributed among the Alevis. The Turks speak Turkish and make a political
point of it, unless they are Alevi Turks, in which case they may empathize
with the Kurds and their persecution.
De Bellaigue responds with outstanding energy and courage. Lodging at
Varto's Teachers' Hostel, he is tailed by the police and military
intelligence and suspected of being a spy. Nonetheless, he perseveres,
talking to, on the one hand, the captain of the gendarmerie, the police
chief and the district governor and, on the other hand, herdsmen and Kurdish
guerrilla fighters. He tracks down descendants of famous and infamous
figures in Varto history, and in Germany, he speaks to exiled Kurdish
nationalists. He constructs an unflinching and painstaking history of the
local Armenian apocalypse and deconstructs the Kurds' inevitably shaky
versions of their past.
(Page 2 of 2)
If one thing becomes clear, it's that the region, indeed Turkey itself, is
buried in a thick ethnographic and historical cloud that is only deepened by
its various inhabitants, who, in this regard, are helpless particles of fog.
The people of Varto are smothered by the official narratives of the Turkish
state, credulous of family and tribal lore and guerrilla propaganda, subdued
by censorship and hypersensitized by inherited and actual grievances. Their
sense of themselves and their neighbors is built on vagueness, prejudice,
misconceptions, hearsay and, above all, fear. Fear is general all over
Turkey.
De Bellaigue investigates this mess brilliantly and evenhandedly (if
occasionally emotively). Analytically, however, he can be abrupt. He
describes Varto as "a place under occupation" before concluding, a little
too tersely, that the "Kurdish movement in Turkey . . . is a mirage." With
regard to that hottest of potatoes, the Armenians, he deplores as "a
travesty of history and memory" the divisive obsession with the question of
genocide: "What is needed is a vaguer description for the events of 1915,
avoiding the G-word but clearly connoting criminal acts of slaughter, to
which reasonable scholars can subscribe," thereby promoting "a cultural and
historical meeting between today's Turks, Kurds and Armenians." This is an
important and potentially attractive suggestion, but de Bellaigue declines
to elaborate its moral and philosophical foundations; a pity, since he has
earned the reader's trust.
It's a sense of trust, though, that "Rebel Land" ultimately bequeaths - a
rare, remarkable feat, given the treacherousness of the terrain. De
Bellaigue concludes his personal story with the information that, having
wandered restlessly among "the tall stalks of identity," fatherhood has
returned him to England and to a new appreciation of his citizenship. That
may be so; but whatever his protestations to the contrary, his heart remains
part Turkish. And Turkey, however much it may not like it, is lucky to have
Christopher de Bellaigue. This book ought to be compulsory reading from
Batman to Bodrum.
* 2
Joseph O'Neill's most recent novel is "Netherland." His memoir, "Blood-Dark
Track: A Family History," will be published in paperback in the fall.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress