The Washington Post
December 7, 2014 Sunday
Unearthing a profound legacy of bloodshed
Reviewed by Joanna Scutts
THERE WAS AND THERE WAS NOT
A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond
By Meline Toumani
Metropolitan. 286 pp.
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, which places the story outside recorded
time, 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
to which Toumani belongs 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, which is far more important than history.
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 an Armenian
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 blood-curdling 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, from any city or state government worldwide that will
grant it, is “worth its emotional and psychological price.”
On a press trip to an Armenian rest home in Queens, she listens to
elderly residents struggle to articulate their distant memories of the
killings in front of an eager audience of reporters. Over the years,
in countless retellings, the stories have either disintegrated into
fragments or become rote and repetitive, “condensed . . . into
plaintive one-liners.” Toumani soon realizes that no matter how
sympathetic she may be to their experiences, these witnesses – women
now in their 90s and older – cannot persuade her of fundamental
Turkish evil. But without that certainty, that hatred, who is she?
Toumani realizes that if she wants to tell stories without an agenda,
to find her way to “artistic objectivity,” there’s nowhere else 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, which
turns out to be a “giant, open-air museum,” where Armenian sites and
objects are scattered about “like a thousand elephants in the room.”
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 gunman 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, and the author’s gradual
recognition that artistic, or journalistic, objectivity is an
impossible goal.
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 and thus a
part of the “triumvirate of evil” that Toumani has been taught to fear
and hate all her life. Her 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. Although this book
offers plenty of insight – funny, affectionate, often frustrated –
into a unique diasporic culture, 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.
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