3 WOMEN, 3 TRAGEDIES, 3 BOOKS
BY GAREN YEGPARIAN
asbarez
Monday, August 6th, 2012
It’s taken me a few years to finally read these three books which
struck me as related and worth sharing. Each is a powerful statement.
Each represents a time and situation in human history. Even though
they are based on events/situations that occurred (or were created)
a century, half a century, and a decade ago, it seems to me they can
all be tied to processes began in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Diana Apcar’s From the Book of One Thousand Tales deliciously conveys
the flavor of her times. The sixteen stories included in the book
retain the style and language of her time, which is what makes it so
interesting. We all grew up hearing about “Diana Apcar, the Republic
of Armenia’s ambassador to Japan”. Of course that was the first RoA,
not the current, third republic. But that was about it. It was a point
of pride that we’d managed to have an ambassador in faraway Japan,
and a woman at that, back in 1918. It turns out she did a lot more
than act as a diplomat. She helped escaping Armenians find a new,
post-Genocide, life. In the process, she became imbued with the sense
of what was going on in the homeland (her family hailing from Iran’s
Shah-Abbas-created-community of the Diaspora). Through allegory and
fictionalization, she conveys the tragedy that befell the nation
back then and the character of the people, Armenians and Turks, who
went through that hellish turbulence. We owe significant gratitude to
her family who dusted off Diana’s archival materials and discovered
these stories.
Silent Spring is credited with starting the modern environmental
movement in the U.S. Rachel Carson died shortly after she published
this book that described the tragedy of lifelessness caused by the
use of highly toxic herbicides and pesticides. Reading it after it was
republished on its 40th anniversary, I was astonished by how much was
known even before I was born, that I thought was “newer” knowledge,
say 1980s vintage. It was stunning and infuriating that we’ve known how
destructive certain chemicals can be and their insidious, persistent,
effects on ALL life, not just the weeds and bugs they’re “intended”
for. Who knows? The cancer that killed Carson may have been triggered
by exposure to the very toxins she wrote about.
Perhaps the most unnerving of this triad of books is the novel,
The Bastard of Istanbul. This book put its author, Elif Shafak,
on the literary map in Turkey. It also put her in the government’s
crosshairs. She was charged with violating the infamous Article 301
of Turkey’s Penal Code, for “denigrating Turkishness”. The whole
book speaks to the point she made when I heard her speaking at UCLA:
that Armenians are largely one with their history, and the Turks
are cut off from their history- except that which has happened
since 1923 and the founding of Ataturk’s republic. The book traces
the stories of three families, one Armenian, one Turkish, and one
“odar”/Armenian/Turkish. The three story lines (re)converge in
Constantinople after two had diverged from there as a result of the
Genocide. In the process, Shafak presents an Armenian family, with all
its foibles, eerily well. I was surprised (though I probably should
not have been) to see how similar the Turkish family’s interactions
were to ours. In reading this book, you’ll alternately chuckle, cry,
sneer, gasp, and just be generally very impressed. It’s no wonder the
original Turkish version was bestseller of the YEAR in Turkey. And
all this, the potential for bridging and progress among Armenians
and Turks is the outcome of another tragedy. The tragedy of a child
(the author) growing up fearing the life of her diplomat parents
would be taken by an Armenian, in the 1970s and 1980s, working to
break the wall of silence surrounding the Armenian Question. Who said
the actions of those times were unproductive?
But where’s the connection among these three lives/tragedies/books? It
strikes me that it all started with the industrial revolution of the
17th-18th centuries that swept Europe and North America. Naturally
armaments were included, leading to economic and military superiority
of the West over an already weakening Ottoman Empire. This led to
frantic efforts by sultan after sultan to modernize and catch up,
all the while being unable to stanch the collapse. Ultimately,
this desperation led to the racist Pan-Turanist ideology that bred
the Genocide. Meanwhile, industrialization spread to the world of
agriculture and its “chemicalization”, leading to Carson’s inspiring
treatise, hence the connection between the first two books. Obviously,
the connection to the third book is through the Genocide that created
the life conditions that led to the author’s inspiration, plus, the
coincident place of the diplomatic life in Apcar’s and Shafak’s lives.
You won’t regret buying and reading any one, or all three, of these
books. Do it.