Tweet
NewsDay
Jan 8 2015
Meline Toumani grapples with Armenian history in new book
Updated January 7, 2015 5:22 PM
By JOANNA SCUTTS. Washington Post Book World Service
THERE WAS AND THERE WAS NOT: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in
Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond, by Meline Toumani. Metropolitan, 286 pp.,
$28.
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, 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
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.
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 a 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 bloodcurdling 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 is "worth its
emotional and psychological price."
Toumani realizes that if she wants to tell stories without an agenda,
to find her way to "artistic objectivity," there's nowhere 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. 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 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.
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. Toumani's
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. 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.
http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/books/meline-toumani-grapples-with-armenian-history-in-new-book-1.9782200
Jan 8 2015
Meline Toumani grapples with Armenian history in new book
Updated January 7, 2015 5:22 PM
By JOANNA SCUTTS. Washington Post Book World Service
THERE WAS AND THERE WAS NOT: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in
Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond, by Meline Toumani. Metropolitan, 286 pp.,
$28.
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, 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
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.
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 a 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 bloodcurdling 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 is "worth its
emotional and psychological price."
Toumani realizes that if she wants to tell stories without an agenda,
to find her way to "artistic objectivity," there's nowhere 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. 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 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.
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. Toumani's
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. 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.
http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/books/meline-toumani-grapples-with-armenian-history-in-new-book-1.9782200