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  • Unearthing a profound legacy of bloodshed

    The Washington Post
    December 7, 2014 Sunday


    Unearthing a profound legacy of bloodshed

    Reviewed by Joanna Scutts


    THERE WAS AND THERE WAS NOT
    A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond
    By Meline Toumani
    Metropolitan. 286 pp.

    The title of Meline Toumani's memoir, she tells us, is the traditional
    opening for a storyteller in both Turkey and Armenia. Like "once upon
    a time," it signals to the listener that what follows is not to be
    confused with history: It happened, and it did not. But unlike the
    Western fairy-tale opening, which places the story outside recorded
    time, Toumani's story is rooted in a specific year: 1915, when -
    depending on who's telling the story - there was and there was not the
    beginning of a genocide.

    This is not a dispute about facts. Toumani dispenses in a paragraph
    with those: In 1915, a "history-shifting number of Armenians" were
    killed or driven out of the dying Ottoman Empire, until by the time
    the modern Turkish state was founded in 1923, only 200,000 were left,
    of 2.5 million who had lived there for millennia. Since then, Turkey
    has kept silent about or denied the violence, and ever since the term
    "genocide" was coined after World War II, the global Armenian diaspora
    to which Toumani belongs has fought to have the events of 1915
    recognized as such. As this bold and nuanced book reveals, recognition
    and denial - there was and there was not - are two sides of the same
    story, which is far more important than history.

    Toumani was born in Iran and raised in New Jersey. Her Armenian
    identity was forged and maintained through language, religion and an
    all-consuming hatred of Turkey. She describes attending an Armenian
    summer camp in Massachusetts as a child, where the joy of spending
    time among people who looked and spoke like her came at the price of
    nodding along to a blood-curdling celebration of terrorist violence
    against the Turkish state. But as she grows up and becomes a
    journalist, she begins to question the orthodoxies binding her
    community together and to wonder whether the goal of genocide
    recognition, from any city or state government worldwide that will
    grant it, is "worth its emotional and psychological price."

    On a press trip to an Armenian rest home in Queens, she listens to
    elderly residents struggle to articulate their distant memories of the
    killings in front of an eager audience of reporters. Over the years,
    in countless retellings, the stories have either disintegrated into
    fragments or become rote and repetitive, "condensed . . . into
    plaintive one-liners." Toumani soon realizes that no matter how
    sympathetic she may be to their experiences, these witnesses - women
    now in their 90s and older - cannot persuade her of fundamental
    Turkish evil. But without that certainty, that hatred, who is she?

    Toumani realizes that if she wants to tell stories without an agenda,
    to find her way to "artistic objectivity," there's nowhere else to
    turn but in the direction of her enemy. Her first trip to Turkey is a
    tour of the remnants of Armenian culture in the rural southeast, which
    turns out to be a "giant, open-air museum," where Armenian sites and
    objects are scattered about "like a thousand elephants in the room."
    It's during this trip, in 2005, that Toumani meets Hrant Dink, the
    editor of a progressive Armenian newspaper in Istanbul. At the time,
    Dink was dealing with the fallout from a series of articles he had
    written exploring the psychology of the Armenian diaspora, in which he
    suggested that Armenian hatred of Turkey had become "like a poison in
    their blood." His comments had been misunderstood as insulting Turks
    by saying their blood was poisonous, and he was under official
    investigation. Not quite two years later, in January 2007, Dink was
    shot dead in the street outside his newspaper's offices, by a
    17-year-old gunman who had read online that the editor had insulted
    his countrymen's blood.

    Dink's murder was a turning point for Toumani, spurring her to return
    to Turkey, to live in Istanbul, study Turkish, and interview as many
    Turks and Armenians as possible to try to understand the range of
    views on the "Armenian issue." What follows is the story of a
    two-month stay that stretches into two years, and the author's gradual
    recognition that artistic, or journalistic, objectivity is an
    impossible goal.

    There's the moment in her Turkish class, just after Toumani has
    reluctantly admitted she's Armenian, when a glamorous French student
    proudly announces that she lives in a mansion that once belonged to
    Enver Pasha - one of the chief architects of the genocide and thus a
    part of the "triumvirate of evil" that Toumani has been taught to fear
    and hate all her life. Her response is a mixture of uncertainty,
    anxiety and latent fury: Is this ignorance? Deliberate provocation? A
    power play? Again and again, her interactions in Turkey carry with
    them this kind of doubt, pressuring even the most innocent daily
    exchanges and making it clear before long that an objective accounting
    of the "Armenian issue" is impossible.

    Toumani's emotional responses to her experience in Turkey, and her
    honesty in navigating and describing them, lend her story the
    authority that can come only from a storyteller who recognizes that
    history is a matter of both fact and feeling. Although this book
    offers plenty of insight - funny, affectionate, often frustrated -
    into a unique diasporic culture, Toumani is ultimately less interested
    in what makes a person Armenian, Turkish or anything else than in what
    can happen when we start to think beyond those national identities.

    [email protected]

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