Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

ISTANBUL: The renaissance of an Ottoman Armenian feminist

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • ISTANBUL: The renaissance of an Ottoman Armenian feminist

    Hurriyet Daily news, Turkey
    Feb 12 2015


    The renaissance of an Ottoman Armenian feminist

    William Armstrong - [email protected]

    'The Gardens of Silihdar' by Zabel Yessayan (AIWA Press, 163 pages)


    The late 19th century witnessed an extraordinary flourishing of
    Ottoman Armenian culture that has since been described as an "Armenian
    renaissance." The rapid growth of schools, social organizations,
    periodicals and European trends led to a transformation in the
    language and intellectual landscape of the Ottoman Armenian community
    - similar to elsewhere in the empire.

    Along with this cultural ferment was a new emphasis on the advancement
    of women in Armenian society, and a number of women intellectuals
    reached positions of prominence previously unheard of in a rigidly
    hierarchical community. Although her name was almost forgotten in the
    decades after her death in the 1940s, Zabel Yessayan is currently
    experiencing something of a mini-renaissance of her own thanks to a
    couple of new translations of her work by Jennifer Manoukian,
    commissioned by the Armenian International Women's Association.
    Yessayan's pioneering proto-feminism and her descriptions of the
    social details of a fascinating period make "The Gardens of Silihdar,"
    her memoir of growing up in late 19th century Ottoman Istanbul, a
    fascinating artefact.

    Born in the Silihdar neighborhood of Üsküdar, on the Asian side of
    Istanbul, Yessayan provides a vivid portrait of an introverted, deeply
    conservative Armenian community and its characters. What starts as a
    fairly unremarkable memoir develops into a more sophisticated portrait
    of the artist as a young woman, describing her coming of age from a
    restless and tempestuous child to a melancholy, talented young woman.
    French and American schools were proliferating at the time, and new
    fashions and ideas were shaking traditional life in metropolitan areas
    across the Ottoman Empire. Yessayan's father was himself influenced,
    keen not to create obstacles for his daughter, open-minded and
    encouraging Zabel to develop her interests and get a sound education.
    Her portrait of him is as sympathetic as anyone in the book (there
    aren't many sympathetic portraits), although his spendthriftiness
    meant that the household was wracked by financial instability. "The
    days my father needed to repay his debts did not just arrive; they
    exploded like bombs," Yessayan writes.

    As for communal relations, she draws a familiar picture of a guarded
    tolerance being gradually, inexorably overtaken by political tension.
    At one point her family temporarily moves to a Turkish village a few
    miles away for her mother's health, and she reflects: "A few years
    later, it would have been impossible for an Armenian family to live
    safely in an entirely Turkish village, but in those days there were
    still no traces of ethnic tension between Armenians and Turks, and the
    two peoples treated each other with a calm sense of shared humanity."

    Yessayan was born in 1878, and came of age at a troubled time. A
    cultural renaissance may have been going on, but it was also an era of
    accelerating social turmoil, and there are plenty of references in
    this book to the plight of suffering Armenians in Anatolia. Her
    growing up was simultaneously a process of awakening and
    disillusionment. Reflecting on her time at one of the Armenian high
    schools, she gloomily describes it as "just a miniature version of the
    adult world that I would come to know, complete with its dirty
    dealings, narcissism, hypocrisy, lies and selfishness." It was, she
    writes, "as if there were a courtroom in my mind where the people I
    encountered and the things I experienced were subject to harsh,
    endless judgment."

    Yessayan's developing feminism was sharpened by the stultifying
    conservatism of the community. "Those young women could not leave the
    house by themselves," she writes angrily, "some were even forced to
    marry men they despised. They were not free to dress as they pleased
    or behave as they saw fit. Essentially, they were deprived of their
    most basic freedoms and feared that, sooner or later, they would be
    constrained by motherhood - a fate they wished to escape in order to
    create the lives they had envisioned for themselves." Dismissive of
    these tendencies, she had no time as a writer for the "sentimental
    romanticism" that was the literary fashion of the day, and her own
    memoir formally remains quite straightforward and undemonstrative.

    Years after the events described in "The Gardens of Silihdar,"
    Yessayan was included as the only woman on the list of Istanbul
    Armenian intellectuals targeted for arrest and deportation by the
    Young Turk regime on April 24, 1915. She managed to flee the empire
    and almost two decades later ended up in Soviet Armenia, where this
    book was published in 1935. Despite Yessayan's prominence in late
    Ottoman Istanbul, her work was essentially ignored after her death in
    a Siberian labor camp, as a victim of Stalin's Great Purge. Hopefully
    it is now beginning to attract the attention that it deserves once
    again.


    February/12/2015

    http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/the-renaissance-of-an-ottoman-armenian-feminist.aspx?pageID=238&nid=78229&NewsCatID=474


    From: Baghdasarian
Working...
X