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Book: Shadowboxing history of the long-buried Armenian genocide

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  • Book: Shadowboxing history of the long-buried Armenian genocide

    The Seattle Times, WA
    Dec 7 2014


    Shadowboxing history of the long-buried Armenian genocide

    In her memoir "There Was and There Was Not," Amenian American
    journalist Meline Toumani attempts to pierce the veil of unknowingness
    that the official record of Turkey throws over the Armenian genocide.

    By Melissa Davis, Seattle Times assistant features editor


    'There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility
    in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond'

    by Meline Toumani

    Metropolitan Books, 276 pp., $28

    Touching stories about reconciliation are not hard to find. Germans
    and Jews helping each other, Israelis and Palestinians playing music
    together. These types of stories are possible, in part, because both
    sides start from acknowledgment of atrocity and understand that
    violence slowly kills the perpetrator, too.

    It's harder when the crime is not just buried, but purged. How can you
    seek reconciliation when your enemy believes, and insists that you do,
    too, that there's nothing to reconcile? It's tough, as journalist
    Meline Toumani discovered. As an Armenian American, she had nowhere to
    turn when she wanted to explore the divide between Armenians and
    Turks, still gaping a century after the murder of more than 1 million
    Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The
    Turkish government has never officially acknowledged a genocide.
    Throwing the word around freely violates the country's penal code,
    under the charge of "insulting Turkishness." National census records
    do not match those of the Armenian clergy. The planned elimination of
    an entire group does not exist in textbooks. Rather than continue to
    hate, "I wanted to understand what drove Turks to cling to their
    view," she states in the book's opening chapter.

    Toumani, whose family came to the U.S. from Iran, was steeped in
    genocide lore. Her family did not patronize Turkish businesses or eat
    Turkish food. "Turk" was a term of derision. In fact, it "was a very
    long time" before she realized that none of her grandparents was among
    those captured and shot, or among those who perished in the horrific
    death marches of 1915. Yet, "The villain, for me, had always been the
    Turk. It was time to try to understand him," she decided.

    "There Was and There Was Not" is her chronicle of what was intended as
    an eight-week trip to Turkey but became a two-year stay in which she
    careened from one surreal encounter to another. She spent time with
    other outcasts, such as Armenian journalists (one of whom was
    murdered) and Kurds. Modern, younger Turks were puzzling to her. A
    Turkish acquaintance said he didn't need to know anything about the
    Armenian genocide; in his eyes, if the government denied the
    slaughter, that meant the opposite -- that it actually happened. And he
    didn't need to delve any further. The Museum of Anatolian
    Civilizations in Ankara presented an even bigger puzzle. Toumani gaped
    at a timeline of 3,000 years of human settlement ... with no mention
    of Armenians whatsoever. The trip could no longer be about why
    something happened, but whether.

    This could have easily become a mawkish more-feelings-than-facts
    story. Toumani's reportorial approach, laced with healthy skepticism,
    elevates it. She shares a deeply personal point of view, but an
    accessible thread of geopolitics and history is woven throughout.
    Before setting out on her first trip to Turkey, she makes a naive wish
    list: "I would learn to speak Turkish, and I would meet with Turks
    from all walks of life, and I believed -- truly believed -- that if I
    spoke to them in a certain way ... I would be able to make some sort
    of breakthrough."

    There is no happy ending here. Toumani is unsparing in her reactions
    to Turks and Armenians alike. At the end of her trip, she truthfully
    recounts she was weary of what it took to "pass" in Istanbul; rather
    than widening her horizons, her background had constricted them. She
    couldn't meet people simply as human beings. If they did not deny the
    past outright, they were too carefully insisting that she was the same
    as they were; there were no differences to overcome.

    A disappointment, sure, but one that led her to this humbling insight:
    Without the recognition of genocide, what was left to the Armenians?
    "Nothing holds us together; we are no longer together at all. Now all
    possibilities are available to us, and that is terrifying."


    http://seattletimes.com/html/books/2025154372_armeniamelinetoumanixml.html



    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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