To be moved by a tragic story that had happened to someone, anyone, was natural. It was another thing to take that tragedy upon yourself as a kind of catchall for whatever pain and grief your own life had held, to brandish it like a badge of honor—or worse, like a weapon, to take from it a lesson of hatred that only perpetuated the kind of thinking that created such tragedies in the first place. My aunt was crying because she felt overwhelmed by my entire Turkey project—threatened by the way her niece was tampering with the story we had all agreed to tell.
We were parting ways now—she was off to the airport—and across the front seat of the car we had a tense hug good-bye.
“I just want to ask you one thing,” she said. “And you may not like it, but I’m asking you anyway.”
It was about Ertan’s family.
“Please don’t stay with those people again.”
* * *
AT HER ARMENIAN high school in Tehran, my mother had studied the map of central Yerevan and claimed she knew the streets by heart. But she had never been there. Neither had my father or my sisters. Finally, after years of saying “next fall” or “next spring,” my parents made the trip, and my sister Lily came too. I flew in from Turkey to join them.
On the last leg of their flight, a connection from Heathrow, my mother warned my father and sister of the first item on her agenda: “I want you to know that when we arrive, I am going to kiss the ground, and I don’t want either of you to try to stop me.”
She was the first among them to emerge from passport control. The new Yerevan airport was designed such that your entrance into Armenia was through the pristine duty-free shop; there was no way to get from the visa checkpoint to baggage claim without walking straight through an assault of Lancôme and local brandy.
But it was Armenia just the same, and my mother began crying the moment she was handed back her stamped passport and ushered in. A young Armenian shopgirl holding a perfume sample intercepted her with a cheerful “Welcome to Armenia!” and leaned in to offer a spritz before she noticed that my mother was in tears.
“Auntie, why are you crying?” she asked in Armenian, returning the perfume bottle to her side.
“Forgive me,” said my mother. “It is my first time here and I am just overcome with emotion.”
“You are crying because you entered Armenia?” the girl asked. “But we cry every day because we want to get out!”
My father emerged from passport control to find his wife locked in an embrace with the clerk.
We teased my mother about her airport incident in the days that followed, but in truth, amusement was the least of my reactions. My parents’ arrival shook something open in me that I had resisted on prior trips. Now there was no talk of Turks and no performances about our “golden homeland.” There were, instead, glimpses of everything that had been forsaken in favor of thirty years of an American life: an emotional connection to the land, traces of personal history, even a kind of instinctive psychological power.
My mother navigated the city center with confidence; she wasn’t exaggerating when she said she knew the streets by heart. Our strolls around town were spontaneous reunions for my parents: on a Saturday evening, rounding a corner, we would be met by a sudden cry: “Oh my God, Monic, is it you?” or “Roubic, I can’t believe it!” They were running into classmates from Iran whom they had not seen since childhood.
Together with my mother and father in a place called Armenia, no longer was I, the youngest daughter, the one with the greater grasp of local culture, the way I was in the United States. In Yerevan, my parents advised me about customs and language, reclaiming their rightful place in the parent-child hierarchy. And soon I was speaking Armenian freely in front of them again for the first time since childhood, a weird reunification of brain and spirit that worked something chemical inside me. (They knew better than to tease me about my mistakes, lest those long unheard sounds went back into their hiding places.)
One day I sat on the balcony of our rented apartment, overlooking Nalbandian Street, waiting for my father and sister to return home from a shopping trip, and I seemed to mistake every passerby for them. Is that Dad? No, it’s some other Armenian man. Is that Lily? No, she wasn’t wearing that dress. What did it do to a person to resemble those around him, or not to?
What did it mean for my parents to meet cousins they had not known for sixty years, children of their parents’ siblings (and how could so many Americans waste this dear connection, not bothering with their cousins at all, I had always wondered)? Decades of family stories had never been shared, and they poured out now over evenings of food and wine and toasts in the Armenian tradition. Those stories were what created a sense of being someone, of belonging somewhere. And this somewhere didn’t need to be Armenia: my father, for his part, saved these feelings of attachment and belonging for Iran. His siblings felt the same; that was their homeland, where they left their hearts and histories.
Invisible shifts, imperceptible but tectonic, take place when you move across the world; when a nation of people is dispersed, forced to rebuild in a place where it has no foundation. And this was the “injustice” we suffered now. This displacement—the anxiety of immigration and assimilation—was what we, the diaspora, knew of trauma today, but instead of calling it what it was we talked about genocides and government resolutions.
* * *
SOME WOULD SAY I was a bad Armenian because I had taken two previous trips to Yerevan that year and had failed to pay my respects at the genocide memorial. Unlike most of the important sights in Yerevan’s small perimeter, it was a place you would not run into without making a deliberate plan; it stood on a hilltop park called Tsitsernakaberd (Swallow’s Fortress). For some diaspora Armenians it was their first stop on arrival and their last stop again before departing. On the last day of my last trip, I decided to go, pretending I had interview plans so that I could visit without my family. I thought I needed to be alone if I were to feel anything, and maybe also because I was afraid I would not feel enough.
I had been to Tsitsernakaberd only once before, four years earlier. That had been an especially hot, dusty August day. After taking a taxi up to the complex, which overlooked the entire capital, the first building I entered was the museum, a low-ceilinged underground chamber lit by skylights. Inside, walls were carved with maps of the regions of Turkey from which Armenians were expelled. Six-digit numbers were scattered over these maps indicating how many residents of each town were killed. Down cool stone hallways, I looked at giant black-and-white photographs: rows of skeletons in a field, a line of disembodied heads with pop-eyed expressions topping pikes stuck into the ground, Turkish soldiers posing beside a mound of dead babies and children. Feeling unmoved and unsurprised then, I had barely glanced at the photos. I had seen it all before.
Outside, I had taken a slow walk along the platform surrounding the monument, a 144-foot-tall, narrow stele of granite with a sharp point piercing the sky. Beside it, twelve massive basalt plates lean into a circle, like the petals of a flower turned inward, guarding an “eternal flame.” But that day, the monument, like everything else in Yerevan, was under construction. The soaring point was all scaffolding, and the famous “eternal flame” that I had seen in so many pictures was, to my disbelief, out of service and sealed over by shoddy planks.
Now, I returned, alone again, to the monument. As I entered the grounds of the vast complex, I heard Armenian hymns floating into the open air from unseen speakers. The music was morbid and angelic, and the breeze seemed to swirl it around me.
In a small park near the entrance, trees were planted in memory of the victims of the genocide. This was a relatively new addition, and the trees, baby evergreens, ranged from waist-height to about eight feet tall, like a Christmas tree farm out of season. Each tree marked the visit of a foreign dignitary: the late Rafik Hariri, former prime minister of Lebanon; Bob Dole, the ex–US senator who had been one of the earliest supporters of a genocide resolution in Washington; and
Frank Pallone, the chairman of the US Congress Armenian Caucus; past presidents of Romania and Latvia; the Ruler of Sharjah, his holiness Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qassimi; the Deputy Mayor of Issy-les-Moulineaux, a suburb of Paris; and on and on. All this recognition astonished me and reminded me of the world outside of the closed one where I’d been living; how quickly my eyes had adjusted to Turkey.
Inside the museum, a display showed photos, postcards, and quotidian documents from various cities in Anatolia, along with the number of Armenian settlements, churches, and schools in each place. Now I had visited these towns and villages—Dikranagerd (Diyarbakır), Kharpert (Elâzığ), Bitlis, Van, Muş—and I chose to linger. Small bowls of soil were protected under glass, soil from towns only a few hundred miles away from this room, yet as distant as if samples from the moon.
I had come to the museum with a reporter’s good intentions, thinking that I would ask a museum guard to describe the typical reaction of a visitor. This was unnecessary. The moment I walked up the steps into the memorial monument, I had to blink through my own tears. The flame was blazing today, and from its heat, the scent of flowers that people had left in tribute ripened and rose. It was near the end of this ordinary weekday in September, and the daily stock of red and white carnations had almost formed a full circle. A man stood on the edge of the ring of stone plates and prayed. Then he disappeared, and I was alone with the echo of Armenian liturgical music. I stared down at the fire until my tears dried to salty traces on my face. When I lifted my head, I saw a white-haired old woman in a navy blue work dress holding a short, handmade straw broom. Where had she come from? She sat on the steps across the circle looking at me.
PART FIVE
Power
18
The Narcissism of Small Similarities
In 1947, the American behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner conducted a study in which he put hungry pigeons into a cage and fed them repeatedly, at short, timed intervals—15 seconds, one minute, and so on, varying the time in different rounds of the experiment. The feeding schedule had no connection to anything the pigeons did or didn’t do, but the birds assumed themselves to have some influence, and began to believe that whatever action they happened to be performing just before they were fed had triggered the feeding. They continuously adjusted their actions, trying to figure out what would do the trick; one flapped in circles counterclockwise; another swung its head like a pendulum. The problem—the point—was that their conduct was irrelevant. The poor birds wore themselves out, “turning, twisting, pecking,” Skinner wrote, trying endlessly to determine how to get the result they wanted.
I was starting to feel like one of Skinner’s pigeons. I had come to Turkey with the idea—the delusion—that if I could find just the right way to speak and to listen, I would be able to connect with Turks, to create meaningful relationships that didn’t depend on agreeing about what happened in 1915. But it wasn’t working. I had less control over how these exchanges unfolded than I had fantasized I would. And too often, the space between “Nice to meet you” and the words “so-called genocide” was only about two minutes long, threatening my composure as well as my goodwill.
When people tried to be polite, I became even more frustrated. Then our conversations were cluttered with bromides straight out of “It’s a Small World.” For example, Turks were very attached to the notion that Armenians were great cooks.
“One of my favorite foods is topik!” they would say to me.
Topik is a type of mezze, or appetizer; a dumpling made of mashed chickpeas and filled with pine nuts, onions, and cinnamon. It is a common menu item at a kind of festive tavern called a meyhane; meyhanes were traditionally owned by Armenians and Greeks since Muslims were not supposed to sell alcohol. Most of the mezze at a typical meyhane is considered Turkish food, but at some point, possibly due to its popularity at a famous Armenian-owned meyhane in the Kumkapı district, topik came to be seen as specifically Armenian. It was a lovely dish, and unique to the Istanbul Armenians; I had never seen it anywhere else. But it was also the only nice thing that many Turks could think of to say about Armenians.
“I love topik!”
Each person who said it seemed to glow with pride for having found such a graceful detour around his own prejudice. Each person seemed to think they were the only one.
The first few times people told me they loved topik, I had to admit I had never even heard of topik. Soon I had tasted a lot of topik, and then, at least, I could smile and tell them that I loved topik, too. But these exchanges were embarrassing. In place of an acknowledgment of a tragic history, compliments to the Armenian chef. To make matters worse, topik is Turkish for “little ball,” as the chickpea paste was often rolled into a round shape. The very sound of the word was condescending. If Turks were oblivious to the patronizing overtones of their love affair with topik, it was all too clear to Istanbul Armenians. A Bolsahay artist had actually put out a small book of cartoons, through Aras Publishing, called Ben Topik Değilim—I Am Not Topik.
Armenians were either a curse word or they were the nicest people you had ever known. If the “Good Armenian” wasn’t an excellent cook, he was a talented doctor. Or he was like an Armenian girl named Violet, a classmate of Deniz’s who had a habit of insisting that she didn’t care about politics, that she wasn’t interested in 1915, that she “wasn’t a historian,” borrowing a line typically used by Turks trying to skirt around the genocide issue. The others in their class took well to this and liked to say that if Violet were elected president, all of Turkey’s problems would be solved. Violet for president, they would tease merrily whenever she came into the classroom. Violet, the Good Armenian.
* * *
IN MY SKINNER-STYLE attempts to make satisfying connections with people, I ended up having an encounter at a coffee shop that I found difficult to classify. The room was crowded, so I had to share a table with a stranger, a Turkish woman, who proceeded to strike up a conversation with me. The woman was visiting from the United States, it turned out; she was a dentist in the Midwest, but she came back to Istanbul, her hometown, every summer. When she found out I was Armenian, she immediately exclaimed that Armenians and Turks were so similar, and proceeded to list the surnames of all her Armenian friends. “Çiçekçiyan, Demirciyan, Avedisiyan…”
Then, in the gentlest tone, she asked me to explain to her why, after living side by side with Turks for centuries, the Armenians had wanted to rebel. On cue, I started my song and dance, explaining just as delicately that it was more complicated than that but that we had all learned different stories and it was important to understand each other’s experiences—yet suddenly I found myself unable to keep it up. I apologized and told her that I hated to offend, but that the story she learned was built on lies.
She changed the subject abruptly.
“Have you ever had dental work?” she asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“I mean braces, like on your teeth.”
“Well, no—”
“Neither have I!” she exclaimed.
I looked at her teeth, and they were in fact remarkable. Blazingly white, and lined up in perfect order along the broad expanse of her mouth. But what did that have to do with anything?
“Look at our teeth!” she said. “We have the same smile! We’re from the same people!”
We beamed at each other like two teenagers on Ecstasy.
“You don’t see smiles like these in America,” she went on. “This is a smile that we share because we both come from this part of the world.”
I wanted so much to believe her. It seemed like the most compassionate statement that a Turkish-American dentist could possibly offer to me. For the rest of the day, I sought vain glimpses of my own smile whenever possible; in store windows, mirrors, and in my mind’s eye, too. I counted my conversation with the dentist as a positive exchange.
Much later, I happened to read the novel America America, by the writer and director Elia Kazan, who was a G
reek from Turkey, born in 1909 in Istanbul. Kazan was also interested in the smile shared by people from this part of the world. He called it The Anatolian Smile, the specialty of the Greek and Armenian characters in his book. But for Kazan it was a fake smile, covering complex emotions. He waxed at length about its meaning. The smile of the “minority person,” he wrote, is “the only way he has found to face his oppressor, a mask to conceal the hostility he dares not show, and at the same time an escape for the shame he feels as he violates his true feelings.”
Were these two different smiles we were describing? Or was it just that I hadn’t yet acknowledged, even to myself, how much anger I was in fact holding back, how much frustration, and how much resentment?
I thought back to the woman in the coffee shop. And what if I had crooked teeth, or a cleft palate, or if I simply didn’t feel like smiling? Would we still be “the same people” then?
A certain kind of clever intellectual type in calm places like America or England, upon hearing of the ongoing hostility between Turks and Armenians, is likely to shake his head and invoke a bit of Freud: “The narcissism of small differences,” he will sigh, chuckling drily at the unruly Orient before going back to his reading.
But maybe the expression has it backward: maybe we should call it the narcissism of small similarities. In clinical terms, narcissism is fundamentally a disease of requiring sameness—of not being able to understand that someone different from yourself can exist according to his own needs and desires, and be entirely worthy of his existence. What could be more narcissistic than needing to believe somebody was the same as you in order for you to tolerate them? “We’re so similar, we’re all the same!” seemed like a cry of connection, of humanity, and in my strange and stressful Istanbul life, I clung to these attempts at kindness. “We are all Armenian.” But although I didn’t fully understand it then—couldn’t quite let myself—I knew this was incomplete.
There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond Page 25