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Meline Toumani, the Armenian Genocide and the Politics of Appeasemen

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  • Meline Toumani, the Armenian Genocide and the Politics of Appeasemen

    Meline Toumani, the Armenian Genocide and the Politics of Appeasement
    Posted: 01/28/2015 5:34 pm EST Updated: 01/28/2015 5:59 pm EST

    Huff Post Books

    Christopher Atamian
    Writer/Producer/Director

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-atamian/meline-toumani-the-armeni_b_6548486.html


    Meline Toumani's puzzling and sometimes maddening first book *There Was and
    There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia
    and Beyond* purports to analyze the hatred still separating Armenians and
    Turks on the eve of the one hundredth commemoration of the Armenian
    Gencocide. The biggest problem with the expos©e lies perhaps in Toumani's
    underlying assumptions, i.e. that Armenians and Turks all hate each other
    and in equating victim and perpetrator. Toumani is usually a fluid writer,
    but here she gets lost in an often muddled and contradictory analysis.

    The author has a point when it comes to Genocide obsession among certain
    Armenians, though by this late date, it is no longer a particularly
    original one. Armenians as a group do spend a lot of time talking about and
    trying to convince the world of the terrors they experienced from 1915 to
    1923 when the Ottoman Turks massacred some 1.5 million Armenians along with
    another 1.5 million Christian Assyrian and Pontic Greeks. For over a
    decade, others have made the same point that Toumani makes and more
    eloquently. Curator Neery Melkonian, for one, has said time and again that
    the Armenian obsession with genocide hinders their ability to move forward
    as a progressive people and reach their true, brilliant potential. And
    theorist Marc Nichanian has argued that it is demeaning to keep begging the
    world for recognition: everyone, including those Turks who really want to
    know, are aware of what really happened from 1915 to 1923 -- the Armenian
    Genocide was amply documented and written about when it happened and
    afterwards for the last century.

    At times, Toumani's book seems to be more of an expos©e of her own
    insecurities and shame. She reproduces often demeaning stereotypes about
    Armenian physical appearance, cultural traditions and all manner of details
    that she would be taken to harsh task for were she writing about another
    ethnic group. And after all, why shouldn't Armenians in the far-flung
    diaspora obsess about the Armenian genocide, one may justifiably ask?
    Unlike the Jews and the terrifying Holocaust of WWII for example, the
    Armenian Genocide has never been properly acknowledged and lost property,
    money and trauma never compensated by its perpetrator, the Turkish
    government. The glowing reception that her book has received in the press
    seems to buttress those who argue that the publishing world sometimes works
    in lockstep with mainstream elites and governmental structures who have
    tried their best to get Armenians to lay down their claims to reparations
    and thus appease the often aggressively denialist governments of the
    modern-day Republic of Turkey.

    After recounting how embarrassed she was growing up by all manner of things
    Armenian, Toumani recounts her four-year stay in Turkey where she meets
    Turks who -- what do you know -- seem human after all. They are not
    grotesque aliens, Klingons dead-set on devouring Christian children. But
    who ever thought they were? Toumani spends time in Armenia as well. Upon
    arriving with a friend in Yerevan, the country's capital, she writes: "I
    was embarrassed. I had lured Gretchen along by telling her that Yerevan was
    a beautiful city. But the city I saw now looked shabby and grim on that
    first glance into the haze." (p199) Yerevan is a fact a pleasant mid-sized
    city of pink tuff stone increasingly dotted with modern western-style
    constructions. In what parallel cultural universe, one wonders, did Toumani
    ever expect Yerevan, a city built by half-starved and tubercular genocide
    survivors, to equal Istanbul the former capital of Byzantium, a city of
    twelve million lining the Bosphorus?

    Early on in her book, the author describes some perhaps lamentable scenes
    at an Armenian summer camp in Massachusetts run by the nationalist Tashnag
    party. At one point, a howling room of swarthy teenagers scream at each
    other in support of or against the Lisbon Five, a group of Armenian
    terrorists who, in a botched 1983 attempt to blow up the Turkish Ambassador
    to Portugal, blew themselves up instead -- along with the Ambassador's wife
    and a Portuguese police officer: "-An eye for an eye! -The ends justify the
    means!...I noticed a young camper, Julie, weeping quietly while her friend
    rubbed her back -- but then Julie was always crying about something...As
    the debate continued, things grew chaotic. A folded-up metal chair slid to
    the ground with a clatter...The glass in the sliding doors fogged up.
    Younger kids squirmed as the older campers and counselors argued on. Some
    said the men were martyrs and that Turkish denial of the genocide was too
    powerful for softer measures." (p17-18) These people, Meline contends, are
    somehow emblematic of the average Armenian viewpoint. But who in their
    right mind would ever defend blowing up innocent people in the name of any
    cause?

    Had Toumani instead attended St Gregory's, another summer camp in Cape Cod
    run by Mekhitarist priests, she would have found the emphasis was on
    religion. At Camp Nubar, a wildly popular camp in the Catskills run by the
    somewhat bourgeois*parekordzagan* or Ramgavar-affiliated AGBU, the emphasis
    was on togetherness and fun. (For the record, I attended all three). It is
    not my intention here to argue which "version" of Armenian life or identity
    is preferable or even which one I subscribe to, if any. I am perfectly able
    to think for myself as are most of my Armenian friends and colleagues. I
    have always had Turkish friends and as a Harvard undergrad, I dated a
    Turkish girl who later became a career denialist and Turkish diplomat.
    Frustration at the Turkish Government's refusal to do the right thing, I
    have always felt. Hope that one day the two people would reconcile, I have
    always wished for. Hate, however, was never part of the equation.

    Another example of journalistic bad faith. Toumani grew speaking Eastern
    Armenian as opposed to Western Armenian like most Armenian-Americans: one
    dialect's "t" is another's "d" for example, so that when she heard the term
    "Hai Tad" ("Armenian Cause") at camp she didn't at first understand that it
    meant "Hai Dat," as Iranian-Armenians pronounce it. Do Hai Tad and Hai Dat
    really sound so different?: "Thus the words Hai Tahd did not communicate
    anything to me. I sometimes imagined my elementary school classmate, Todd
    Twersky, showing up unannounced at the perimeter of the campground. Hi,
    Tod." (p16) I didn't speak a word of Armenian when I attended Camp
    Haiastan, but I never once confused Hai Tad with any boy named Tod, and I
    find it hard to believe anyone else ever did either.

    Though I staunchly believe in the need for an apology from Turkey and
    proper reparations, the Armenian Genocide is not something that keeps me up
    at night. I suspect most Armenians are more similar to me than the
    caricatured nationalists Toumani describes in her book. Her apparent
    inability to comprehend the feelings of Istanbul Armenians who are trapped
    between a cultural rock and a hard place -- neither Turkish enough for
    Turks nor Armenian enough for Armenians -- also begs credulity for someone
    so bright and well-educated as she. And when she doesn't get the
    acknowledgment from ethnic Turks that she was hoping in Turkey, Toumani
    admits to being more confused than before she left.

    In the end Toumani's book would have been more honest and effective had she
    titled it: "Ultra-Nationalism and its Discontents" and simply studied some
    of the Armenian community's more right-wing members. That her book was
    published in 2015 seems particularly insensitive, as if she were trying to
    rub salt in the wounds of collective Armenian memory. The ultimate irony of
    course is that of all the thousands of topics Armenian and non-Armenian
    that Toumani could have chosen to dedicate her first book to, she chose
    what else, but the very one she claims to be trying to distance herself
    from.

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