A DISCOURSE OF DENIAL: MEMORIES OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
Open Democracy
Aug 7 2014
Sossie Kasbarian
6 August 2014
Why should we return to the now 100-year-old genocide of the Ottoman
Armenian population? The study and acknowledgement of this genocide,
and what it symbolises, is critical to the practice of an emancipatory
politics today.
The inheritor Turkish state continues to deny the genocide of the
Ottoman Armenian population in 1915. This active denialism has been
stepped up in the run-up to the centenary, taking on more sophisticated
strategies termed ‘denial-light’ by G.M. Goshgarian. As the centennial
approaches, friends and colleagues seem surprised that people like
me devote time and energy to an issue that they consider at best,
tangential. There are far more zeitgeist topics to work on, especially
in the pressured world of academia where your career advancement is
increasingly based on ‘impact’ on society and policy-makers, though
no one seems entirely clear on what this is and how it can be gauged.
What is obvious though is that the 100-year-old genocide of the
Armenians of the Ottoman Empire is unlikely to be a subject that
many deem as being of great relevance. And yet, over the years, it
is this genocide and what it symbolises, that I keep returning to in
my own research and politics. I am more convinced than ever that the
Armenian Genocide, its denial and recognition, represent issues that
are of vital importance in the study, research, teaching and practice
of politics today.
Last month, Jo Laycock and I convened a workshop in the emerging field
of Armenian-Turkish Studies at Sheffield Hallam University. This
new space was opened up in the academy by the pioneering Workshop
of Armenian and Turkish Studies (WATS), established in 2000 at the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor by Fatma Muge Göcek, Ron Suny and
Gerard Libaridian. This worked in tandem with the increasing number
of scholars working on the Armenian genocide who had no hesitancy in
calling it just that, with all the political and social repercussions
that it brought.
There have been ground-breaking projects on the shared past of
Armenians and Turks in recent years, and key to wider political
developments has been the emergence of Turkish academics engaging
with these issues in a critical and decisive manner. In late 2008 an
‘apology campaign’ mounted by four Turkish intellectuals circulated
widely, gathering over 30,000 signatures of Turks and Kurds
‘apologising’ for the events of 1915. The works of novelists like
Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak have also had widespread
international impact. They, along with other intellectuals, have
inevitably been chastened by the threats from the state: Article 301
of the Turkish penal code makes it a crime to “insult the Turkish
nation”. Turkey has the largest number of journalists in prison,
and the ‘Armenian issue’ remains a highly controversial topic. In
January 2007, the most prominent voice for Armenians in the Turkish
public sphere and symbol of Armenian-Turkish reconciliation, Hrant
Dink, was murdered by nationalists, exposing a murky underworld and a
‘deep state’.
Selective Memory
Growing up in the multicultural world of the Arab Gulf, I remember
on many occasions wishing that I had a ‘clear cut’ answer to fill
in the space in the ‘nationality’ column in my school diary. My
friends were Indian, or British, Egyptian, Bahraini, Sri Lankan and
so on. It seemed to me that everyone was sure of what they were and
‘going home’ every summer was an unproblematic statement. My stock
answer of “Armenian Cypriot” was the official line, though even to
my young ears this sounded both hollow and weighty. Being Armenian
felt like a burden which set us aside from our friends. This was
epitomised in my parents’ diktat of “speak Armenian” whenever they
heard my brothers and I conversing in English (it remains our natural
language of communication).
Growing up outside an Armenian community also meant that every time we
met Armenians anywhere, or when we returned to Cyprus where there is a
vibrant Armenian community, we were aware of our failings, of not being
Armenian enough. Being a ‘good Armenian’ meant knowing the language,
culture and history, being embedded in a strong extended family, and
active in Armenian community life. My dad’s rows of Armenian history
and literature texts (nearly all in English, reflecting his schooling
in colonial Cyprus) which lined our bookshelves, and the newspapers
and journals he subscribed to (mostly from the US) seemed an attempt
to document something that had been irrevocably lost.
The experience of being ‘third culture kids’, with an acute sense of
the liminality or hybridity of identity, is of course a common one.
What distinguished us from the other expatriate or mixed background
kids in the 1980s was that there was no collective narrative in the
public sphere to have recourse to. Few had even heard of Armenians
or Armenia, which was Soviet until 1991, and foreign to us Armenians
from the Ottoman, as opposed to the Russian, Empire. Our identities
seemed quaint and somehow suspect, even to us. We did not fit into
the nation-state model of the world; diaspora was a concept and term
that had yet to be rejuvenated. We could barely articulate our own
story with any knowledge or conviction, let alone present it to others.
Growing up without an Armenian diasporic community meant there was no
collective narrative, no accepted version of events like a Holocaust,
no clear homeland or home. And alongside all these absences there was
the looming presence of the Turkish state, denying us our collective
memories and narratives, the platforms from which to express them
and to have them heard.
At the Sheffield workshop, I realised that my childhood experience
of growing up in the pre-internet age and lacking a master-narrative
to counter the denialist stronghold in the public realm was shared
by many of my contemporaries. Being Armenian in the diaspora was a
‘fuzzy’ identity whose tenets and pillars were unclear, distant or
simply too foreign to relate to. The nationalist discourse espoused
by Armenian diasporan political projects, however worthy, felt too
formulaic, too forced (and too masculine) to relate to.
Throughout my childhood, my paternal grandmother and maternal
great-grandmother shared their stories of the old country. But these
stories were told sparingly, as they were invariably accompanied
by great sorrow, which often overcame the sense of duty about the
act of recounting. In the telling, these women were transformed into
the little girls they were when they witnessed these horrors. In her
final days, my paternal grandmother was more focused on stories of the
shadowy family members whose lives had been cut tragically short. We
particularly liked the figure of her gregarious uncle Hagop who had
a flowing ginger beard, and whose booming singing would herald his
arrival. My youngest brother has a touch of red in his facial hair,
and so this spirited ancestor is remembered every time my brother
stops shaving. Hagop, who must have been in his early twenties when
he was killed, so full of vigour for a life unlived, a life that we
can only imagine for him.
My grandmothers’ stories were very much edited, full of gaps and
holes which I rarely felt able to probe, however curious I was about
details. It would be too cruel to prolong the revisiting of these
tales. Editing is a skill that most of us acquire to deal with what
life throws at us. My father only recently told me that his father
continued for years to pay fixers in the port city of Kyrenia for
any news of his relatives from whom he had been separated for decades.
Every now and again there would be an alleged lead, which would mean
more money shelled out and more hopeful trips to Kyrenia (with my
father as a small boy in tow). My heart breaks for this man who I
never met, whose cycles of hope and despair prolonged a pain that
was never fully articulated or acknowledged.
Amidst the cloudy knowledge we picked up as children, it was our
survivor grandmothers that made the past tangible. The grandmother
as a transmitter of contested memories can act as a gatekeeper of
the lived past and a connection to it. Human rights lawyer Fethiye
Cetin’s My Grandmother has been nothing short of revolutionary in its
rippling impact in Turkey and beyond. Cetin’s memoir deals with her
grandmother’s deathbed confession that she had been born Armenian
and survived the genocide by being taken in by a Turkish family,
keeping her secret her whole life. The powerful impact of this modest
book lies in its poignant human story. Columnist Tuba Akyol stated:
“stories can do what large numbers or concepts cannot do…Concepts are
cold, stories can touch you inside”. AyÃ…~_e Gul Altinay has written
of how the book successfully uses “Arendtian storytelling to open up
a creative space for historical critique and reconciliation”.
The need to articulate one’s story, where one came from, is essential
to the dignity of the human being. Gayatri Spivak, when asking “Can the
Subaltern speak?”, argues that a narrative of identity is a necessary
condition for agency and subjectivity. Hannah Arendt says that the need
to hear one’s story from others is key to constructions of identity
and also to social relations. Michel Foucault and Edward Said have
brilliantly deconstructed epistemological projects, revealing the
power structures and agendas they reflect and perpetuate. By denying
the genocide that killed our ancestors and dispersed the remnants all
over the globe, the Turkish state continues its genocide of Armenians,
negating their right to have a clear and undisputed past.
A contested past means the present is only half known and owned, the
future uncertain. Being able to write, read and tell our stories and
to have them acknowledged and understood by others restores wholeness
to ourselves and reinforces our shared humanity. Postcolonial
studies was all about retrieving, reclaiming and re-appropriating
histories and identities from below, which had not been written into
state narratives: the lives of women, the oppressed, minorities
of all descriptions, in short, those who have been excluded from
master-narratives. My father, when browsing in the history section
of a bookshop, would flip to the index of books he was interested in
to check whether there was any entry for ‘Armenians’. He was seeing
whether for this author, we were worth a citation, even as a footnote
in history. I did not recognise this for the political act it was then,
but I sometimes find myself doing the same thing now.
All nations are built on forgetting and remembering selectively. In the
Turkish case, the denial of the realities of the Ottoman past are at
the foundation of the nationalist state and are constantly reproduced
in the hegemonic narrative. Historically the co-existence of different
narratives has not been tolerated, and even now (with the democratic
opening since 2000) they are interpreted as developments that need
to be suppressed, monitored and controlled. Despite this, recent oral
history projects have unearthed an emerging space for counter-memories
and counter-narratives. This has led to a proliferation of exciting
projects in the sphere of art and culture, but also projects with
a more overt political slant, which have extended to transnational
civil society, despite the lack of change in high politics.
The ‘decentring of the state’ in the past eight years has meant that
there are multiple engaged actors in Turkish civil society, some of
which have been at the vanguard of challenging state discourse and
leading critical initiatives on Armenian-Turkish relations. Important
as these developments are, they are still confined to the tiny minority
and rarely permeate beyond a self-selecting group of intellectuals,
activists, artists, human rights and civil society actors. Some might
say, as Chris Sisserian does, that Turkish civil society has reached
“a glass ceiling of understanding” when it comes to Armenian matters;
that we are preaching to the choir and there is an impenetrable
boundary with the rest of the populace.
But what is happening in Turkey today goes beyond the proliferation of
counter-narratives and counter-memories circulating and undermining the
denialist discourse. In the last few years, there have been a number
of Armenian diasporans visiting Turkey, as tourists, as pilgrims,
and as detectives trying to piece together their past lives.
Ani King-Underwood’s powerful documentaries for Al Jazeera demonstrate
the need, in her words, to “concretise memories”. For her mother and
aunt, the journey to find the house their mother had forcibly left
behind was an essential experience which restored their own identities
and confirmed that the stories they had grown up with were actually
true. Finding their family home which had taken on a mythical quality
in their mother’s narratives, made those lives, and the past, real.
The fuzzy qualities of being an Armenian originating from these lands
is sharpened when there is physical evidence, in the face of denialism.
This desire for the physical ‘proof’ of past Armenian lives and
culture in the Ottoman lands explains the recent phenomenon of the
restoration of Armenian churches in Anatolia, financially backed
mostly by North American diasporans. At the heart of this project
(and others like it) seems the need to validate (and consecrate) the
past co-existence of Armenians alongside Turks, Kurds, Greeks and
others in Anatolian lands. One of the most notable of the projects
has been the recent restoration of the sixteenth-century Armenian
Apostolic Cathedral St. Giragos in Diyarbakır, the biggest Armenian
church in the Middle East with a capacity of 3000. It is important to
recognise that in the wider Armenian-Turkish terrain, the struggle
for negotiating co-existence is premised upon the perceived need to
document past co-existence, and the past lives of Armenians in these,
their historic homelands. The fact that these past inhabitants were
forcefully expelled or annihilated makes this is an extremely charged
and complex mission. By renovating the churches, Armenian diasporans,
together with their Kurdish and Turkish colleagues and associates, are
physically documenting a history that official narratives challenge.
The Armenian perspective
For many of us working in these fields, there is the danger for
complacency to set in. The tide has turned and the British academy
feels like a very different place than it did 15 years ago thanks to
the pioneers who have changed the discourse and its framing. Then,
references to the ‘so-called genocide’ were the norm and anything
Armenian was presented in the denialist framework, and thereby
delegitimised and belittled. Many western diasporans have close Turkish
friends and colleagues, something unimaginable even ten years ago. Our
personal and political lives have been enriched and deeply blessed
by these relationships. In a way, these friendships and associations
hark back to the pre-genocide days, to our grandmothers’ villages where
Armenians and Turks (and others) were friends and neighbours, and where
many Turkish families sought to save their Armenian neighbours from
the savagery that was to come. And yet, beyond this small safe space
that we have actively created and claimed through our friendships and
activism, there is still much work to be done. I was reminded of this
a few weeks ago.
A colleague told me of her English friend, a postgraduate student who
had gone to Istanbul, staying at Airbandb. He had got on tremendously
well with his young male hosts and their friends, who shared his
left-wing politics and had taken him on a tour of Gezi park. One
night, the discussion in the flat turned to ‘the Armenian issue’. A
huge fight ensued and the young man was asked to leave the next
morning. He was shocked that his liberal, progressive and charming
hosts were transformed beyond recognition, to the extent of kicking
him out of the accommodation. This story while poignant in itself,
is indicative of a wider reality: that Turkey’s ‘Armenian Opening’
has been patchy, that there are chasms and dark recesses that are
impossible to discuss in mainstream company; that the protestors at
Gezi Park demanding democratic freedoms are in many cases profoundly
intolerant of counter-narratives and threats to the integrity of
their national story.
In the same week, at a conference in Europe, I met a professor at one
of our leading universities, who works on Turkey. Within minutes I was
astonished to encounter a version of the ‘denialist-light’ argument,
framed around the ‘it was a war, and there were deaths on both sides’
discourse. My surprise was palpable; it had been a long time since
I had heard that position articulated, at least to my face. I tried
to engage him in a discussion but it was clear that he had taken a
position many years ago, and that it had served him well. He was not
interested in hearing ‘the Armenian perspective’ as he called it.
The challenge here is that ‘the Armenian perspective’ is a moral
stance, a political position, a counter-hegemonic narrative which
represents the experience of the dispossessed and the marginalised.
This goes well beyond the Armenian genocide and its recognition. It
challenges questions of what we teach, what we write, how we research
and what we believe. If the voices from below are not acknowledged
and our own part in their silencing unexposed, then we are complicit
in this project of denialism. That is why the acknowledgement of the
Armenian genocide is a tiny cog in our commitment to an emancipatory
politics which attempts to redress the balance between the powerful
and the weak and rewrite pre-ordained political scripts and identities.
My thanks to my colleagues and friends who participated in the workshop
of 9 June 2014, especially my co-convenor Jo Laycock. We are also
grateful to Sheffield Hallam University’s History Department which
funded and hosted the workshop.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/sossie-kasbarian/discourse-of-denial-memories-of-armenian-genocide