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Nov 5 2014
A Tale of Two Countries: Turkey, Armenia, and a Silent Genocide
November 5, 2014 |
By David Burr Gerrard
In April of 1915, the Ottoman Empire began the planned extermination
of its Armenian population, killing between 1 and 1.5 million people,
an event that contributed to the coining of the term "genocide." In
present-day Turkey, acknowledging this fact is a crime. Nobel Laureate
Orhan Pamuk is only one of many who have been prosecuted or otherwise
legally harassed for speaking out.
As a child growing up in New Jersey, Meline Toumani was sent for
several summers to Camp Haiastan in Massachusetts, where she and other
Armenian-American children learned about Hai Tahd, the effort to gain
recognition for the Armenian genocide. Debate existed about whether
violence in the name of Hai Tahd was justified. As she got older,
Toumani started to wonder whether the obsession with recognition was
detrimental to the Armenian community. In 2004, she wrote an article
for The Nation asking whether the single-minded focus on this issue
was harmful to the country of Armenia by preventing it from opening up
economic relations with Turkey. Focused on this history and how it
might be overcome, she traveled to Turkey, a country that she had
often seen demonized, to get to know its people as people. Her hope
was to forge connections that surpassed the painful history of
genocide.
What Toumani found in Turkey was much more complicated: a country that
was, among many other things, deformed by mandated denial. Her new
memoir, There Was and There Was Not, is a profound and nuanced work
about what it costs to remember the past and what it costs trying to
forget it.
Toumani spoke with Biographile recently at a café in SoHo.
Biographile: Let's start with an obvious question. Why did you write the book?
Meline Toumani: As I was starting out my career as a journalist, I
overtly said I did not want to write about the Armenians or the
genocide. Inevitably, I kept doing it anyway. Every time I wrote
something, it became more controversial than I intended, specifically
this piece I wrote for The Nation in 2004. I was trying to find a way
to say that there's something wrong with the way the Armenian
community deals with the genocide issue, that there's something wrong
with the dominance it has over the community and the way it creeps
into every single realm.
I stumbled into this argument about how the diaspora's obsession with
the genocide causes problems for the country of Armenia, which could
have benefited from economic relations with Turkey. The climate that
the diaspora was creating with its villainization of Turkey was making
diplomatic relations impossible. There's some grain of truth in that,
but I wouldn't make that argument anymore. What I realized over many
attempts to write and think about it is that what I was talking about
was an emotional and psychological problem, not an economic one. As I
started to realize that, I decided that if I didn't explore this and
take it to the limit, I would just keep carving off little pieces of
it in articles and essays. I needed to get it out of my system so I
could work on other things. Even though it took ten years, I think
that that was really true, which means that I'm really looking forward
to working on other things now.
BIOG: One thing that's fascinating about this book is that where many
memoirs have an arc of, "I was angry about something, and then I met
people and learned that we're all human beings," this memoir almost
has the opposite arc.
MT: That's a very interesting way to look at it. In a sense, I started
out with a diplomatic goal, vision, almost a calling. I wanted to
bring people together. In my book proposal, I called it "a literary
act of diplomacy," and I meant that a hundred percent. As I got deeper
and deeper into the material and into the experience of reporting in
Turkey, that optimism started to fall apart.
First, Hrant Dink, the Armenian journalist in Istanbul, was murdered
in 2007, just as I was on my way back to Turkey to really dive into
this. I think I knew very quickly that I had gotten it wrong, but it
took me a long time to admit that on the page, because I didn't want
to end up saying something like the people I had been criticizing at
first. I didn't want to end up saying something that sounded like an
Armenian diaspora lobbyist, showing all the ways that Turkey has
screwed up. That wasn't the literary act of diplomacy I had set out to
do. That brought me through the whole arc for myself. I still haven't
made peace with that myself. I still want to give people a new way of
engaging.
BIOG: In encounter after encounter in the book, you seem to go in with
a lot of curiosity and goodwill, and then are disappointed.
MT: That's true, and it took me a long time to pack up my toys and go
home, in part because I didn't want that to be the answer. In some
ways, the pattern was established very quickly, but it took two and a
half years and the incident at the airport towards the end of the book
to make me realize that I had completely lost my center and that I
needed to get out of Turkey.
BIOG: What recent developments have you seen?
MT: It's hard for me to say what the climate [in Turkey] is like
because I don't like to make assumptions when I'm not there. But it
seems to me from everything I read on a daily basis that at the very
least the criminalization of talking about the genocide has changed
notably in the last couple of years. So while all the official
language and documentation will continue to push this contorted
denialist version of the history, there is notably more freedom for
academics and journalists to speak. Five years ago they would have
been spending all their time in court.
You'll always have the Turkish version of American Confederate-lovers
in the South, people who never fully got on board with modern American
values of tolerance. Twenty-five years from now, though, it will be
much more mainstream in Turkey to acknowledge the genocide. I think.
But I could be wrong.
http://www.biographile.com/tale-of-two-countries/37573/
Nov 5 2014
A Tale of Two Countries: Turkey, Armenia, and a Silent Genocide
November 5, 2014 |
By David Burr Gerrard
In April of 1915, the Ottoman Empire began the planned extermination
of its Armenian population, killing between 1 and 1.5 million people,
an event that contributed to the coining of the term "genocide." In
present-day Turkey, acknowledging this fact is a crime. Nobel Laureate
Orhan Pamuk is only one of many who have been prosecuted or otherwise
legally harassed for speaking out.
As a child growing up in New Jersey, Meline Toumani was sent for
several summers to Camp Haiastan in Massachusetts, where she and other
Armenian-American children learned about Hai Tahd, the effort to gain
recognition for the Armenian genocide. Debate existed about whether
violence in the name of Hai Tahd was justified. As she got older,
Toumani started to wonder whether the obsession with recognition was
detrimental to the Armenian community. In 2004, she wrote an article
for The Nation asking whether the single-minded focus on this issue
was harmful to the country of Armenia by preventing it from opening up
economic relations with Turkey. Focused on this history and how it
might be overcome, she traveled to Turkey, a country that she had
often seen demonized, to get to know its people as people. Her hope
was to forge connections that surpassed the painful history of
genocide.
What Toumani found in Turkey was much more complicated: a country that
was, among many other things, deformed by mandated denial. Her new
memoir, There Was and There Was Not, is a profound and nuanced work
about what it costs to remember the past and what it costs trying to
forget it.
Toumani spoke with Biographile recently at a café in SoHo.
Biographile: Let's start with an obvious question. Why did you write the book?
Meline Toumani: As I was starting out my career as a journalist, I
overtly said I did not want to write about the Armenians or the
genocide. Inevitably, I kept doing it anyway. Every time I wrote
something, it became more controversial than I intended, specifically
this piece I wrote for The Nation in 2004. I was trying to find a way
to say that there's something wrong with the way the Armenian
community deals with the genocide issue, that there's something wrong
with the dominance it has over the community and the way it creeps
into every single realm.
I stumbled into this argument about how the diaspora's obsession with
the genocide causes problems for the country of Armenia, which could
have benefited from economic relations with Turkey. The climate that
the diaspora was creating with its villainization of Turkey was making
diplomatic relations impossible. There's some grain of truth in that,
but I wouldn't make that argument anymore. What I realized over many
attempts to write and think about it is that what I was talking about
was an emotional and psychological problem, not an economic one. As I
started to realize that, I decided that if I didn't explore this and
take it to the limit, I would just keep carving off little pieces of
it in articles and essays. I needed to get it out of my system so I
could work on other things. Even though it took ten years, I think
that that was really true, which means that I'm really looking forward
to working on other things now.
BIOG: One thing that's fascinating about this book is that where many
memoirs have an arc of, "I was angry about something, and then I met
people and learned that we're all human beings," this memoir almost
has the opposite arc.
MT: That's a very interesting way to look at it. In a sense, I started
out with a diplomatic goal, vision, almost a calling. I wanted to
bring people together. In my book proposal, I called it "a literary
act of diplomacy," and I meant that a hundred percent. As I got deeper
and deeper into the material and into the experience of reporting in
Turkey, that optimism started to fall apart.
First, Hrant Dink, the Armenian journalist in Istanbul, was murdered
in 2007, just as I was on my way back to Turkey to really dive into
this. I think I knew very quickly that I had gotten it wrong, but it
took me a long time to admit that on the page, because I didn't want
to end up saying something like the people I had been criticizing at
first. I didn't want to end up saying something that sounded like an
Armenian diaspora lobbyist, showing all the ways that Turkey has
screwed up. That wasn't the literary act of diplomacy I had set out to
do. That brought me through the whole arc for myself. I still haven't
made peace with that myself. I still want to give people a new way of
engaging.
BIOG: In encounter after encounter in the book, you seem to go in with
a lot of curiosity and goodwill, and then are disappointed.
MT: That's true, and it took me a long time to pack up my toys and go
home, in part because I didn't want that to be the answer. In some
ways, the pattern was established very quickly, but it took two and a
half years and the incident at the airport towards the end of the book
to make me realize that I had completely lost my center and that I
needed to get out of Turkey.
BIOG: What recent developments have you seen?
MT: It's hard for me to say what the climate [in Turkey] is like
because I don't like to make assumptions when I'm not there. But it
seems to me from everything I read on a daily basis that at the very
least the criminalization of talking about the genocide has changed
notably in the last couple of years. So while all the official
language and documentation will continue to push this contorted
denialist version of the history, there is notably more freedom for
academics and journalists to speak. Five years ago they would have
been spending all their time in court.
You'll always have the Turkish version of American Confederate-lovers
in the South, people who never fully got on board with modern American
values of tolerance. Twenty-five years from now, though, it will be
much more mainstream in Turkey to acknowledge the genocide. I think.
But I could be wrong.
http://www.biographile.com/tale-of-two-countries/37573/