Back in 1948, when Raphael Lemkin stalked the halls of the United Nations until he finally convinced delegates to pass a convention defining and condemning genocide, he believed that when he found the right word, and the word was put to use, things would change. Could Lemkin ever have imagined the way change would be held hostage to his word?
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WHICH ISN’T TO say that Turkey wasn’t changing. It was shifting in all sorts of ways, but if some of these developments were good for minority groups, others were worrisome for democracy in general.
Before Prime Minister Erdoğan came to power in 2003, the Turkish military was all-powerful, secularists had political and social dominance, and conservative Muslims, although a majority, were disenfranchised, even oppressed. Well into Erdoğan’s second term, which started in 2007, the military was threatening coups and issuing position statements as edicts. But by the start of his third term in 2011, Prime Minister Erdoğan had succeeded in scrambling these long-standing hierarchies of power.
Targeting the secularist establishment, Erdoğan launched a ruthless investigation of a secret network called Ergenekon, which included high-ranking political figures acting as part of what was known as the “deep state.” More than five hundred military leaders, security officers, journalists, and private citizens were arrested and accused of participation in plans to overthrow the government. Several unresolved murders of public figures from the previous two decades—including the assassination of Hrant Dink—were believed to be part of the group’s plan to foment unrest before staging a coup. The novelist Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Laureate in Literature, was said to be on their hit list too. The Ergenekon network was real and extremely pernicious, and dismantling it was a monumental achievement: by 2013, even Kemal Kerinçsiz, who had bombarded Hrant with lawsuits, was behind bars for his role in the group’s plots. But the investigation of Ergenekon was also a mess: justice of the highest order turned out-of-control witch hunt. In this way it resembled Erdoğan’s entire project for Turkey: some of what he did counted as essential progress; other changes were alarming steps backward as he remade the nation to suit his own values. By the end of 2013, Erdoğan’s open target was a fellow pious Muslim with tremendous influence—Fethullah Gülen, a cleric with a massive network of followers all over the world. Thus even the trusty old binary model of secular versus religious power became shaky. But in consolidating his own authority at any cost, Erdoğan was upholding a long-standing tradition. Like many of his predecessors, he also jailed journalists and squashed public protest. Through all of this, his popularity remained strong among a large base of religious Muslims. Now the White Turks who had been the state’s model citizens felt like its unwanted stepchildren, and understandably so.
For minorities, meanwhile, there were some signs of improvement. In 2010, the cathedral at Akhtamar got a cross on its dome at last, and occasional church services were permitted. In 2013, the first baptism in more a century was held there—birth and rebirth, a triumph even if the christening required the presence of eight hundred security officers, bomb-sniffing dogs, and police divers monitoring the waters all around the island. (Sadly, Archbishop Mutafyan, who had blessed the church’s reopening in 2007, could not appreciate any of these advances: he was deep into dementia, diagnosed in 2008 when he was only fifty-one. Who could say whether the stress of his position had hastened his mental decline? Who could feel certain it hadn’t?)
One of the more shocking changes was the fact that in 2013, Erdoğan abolished the mandatory student oath, “How happy is he who calls himself a Turk,” a relic of Kemalist dominance. In a stroke, he transformed the tenor of the Turkish school day. And, like the ruler of a dystopian Sesame Street, he granted freedom to the letters Q, W, and X.
Then, on April 24, 2014, Erdoğan made a statement about what had happened ninety-nine years earlier. The fact that he marked the date publicly was big news in itself, but the content of his speech was an arsenal of strategic verbiage. Its best achievement was that it openly acknowledged that in a democratic society, a variety of viewpoints are not only welcome but healthy. He called for sensitivity and openness to ideas that might feel uncomfortable. He even admitted that the events of 1915 were particularly significant for Armenians. But he also insisted, as his speech’s primary theme, that the Armenians were not the only victims of hardship.
“It is indisputable that the last years of the Ottoman Empire were a difficult period, full of suffering for Turkish, Kurdish, Arab, Armenian and millions of other Ottoman citizens, regardless of their religion or ethnic origin. Any conscientious, fair and humanistic approach to these issues requires an understanding of all the sufferings endured in this period, without discriminating as to religion or ethnicity.” And as usual, he called for a fair historical accounting, as if one had yet to take place.
His comments reminded me of an essential thing I learned in Turkey: stories, although always important for what they revealed about the storyteller, could be used as a dangerous moral leveler; could be held up to insist on a false equivalence of experience: I’m human, you’re human, we’re all human. I suffered, you suffered, we all suffered. Why don’t we just put these sad stories behind us and move on?
There was and there was not—this should not be taken to mean that all stories are equally true, but that all stories are imperfect. Erdoğan’s statement was definitely imperfect, but it was the closest any Turkish leader had come to acknowledging the genocide. In the tea leaves, or the Turkish coffee grounds, there were many small signs of hope, and I do believe this was one of them.
Hrant once made a speech in which he used an Armenian expression of optimism: “Jooruh jampan g’jari”—Water will always find cracks it can flow through. Water, as in clarity, as in truth. And so while Erdoğan was arranging his words carefully in that ninety-ninth year statement, a few hundred people gathered for a memorial service in front of Istanbul’s Haydarpaşa Train Station, an ornate behemoth looming over the water’s edge, the same station from which the earliest deportees were sent off in 1915. Several diaspora representatives attended. Such an event would have been unthinkable a few years earlier, and now it was one of several April 24 commemorations in Istanbul.
Across town from Haydarpaşa, a memorial took place in an Armenian cemetery. At that event, Nerses, the Bolsahay basketball team manager—the same Nerses who had yelled at me for speaking too openly when we were in Yerevan—now took the microphone as an activist, and did not mince words. He called for accountability, with a message that wouldn’t have been out of place at Times Square in New York: he said he could only accept Prime Minister Erdoğan’s statement about 1915 after justice was achieved for all the more recent crimes against Armenians. Fear was losing ground.
Closer to home, a small development in my life felt like important progress. It was another apology, but a private one: my aunt Nora, who had interrogated me in Yerevan and asked me not to associate with Ertan and his family, told me she was sorry for her behavior. One year after our meeting in Armenia, we sat at her dinner table in Connecticut. “I want to apologize,” she said. “I realized I don’t need to agree with everything you’re doing or even understand it. I care about you, so if you have something to say, I want to read what you write, and in doing so I’ll be able to understand you better. You are your own person. Why wouldn’t I want that for you?” More tears, for both of us—but this time the good kind.
* * *
SHORTLY BEFORE THE Turkish apology campaign, I wrote an article for the New York Times about Gomidas, the Armenian musician who had survived the genocide but had lost his mind, living the last twenty years of his life in a mental hospital in Paris without speaking a word. Actually, that’s not how I put it. I wrote that Gomidas “lost his mind by the age of 46, a misfortune thought to have been triggered by the 1915 massacres of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey.” The copyeditor added the word “misfortune,” which seemed to me an annoying understatement, but the rest of it was my phrasing.
The ar
ticle was about a new recording of Gomidas’s music, but I tried to squeeze in a few sentences describing how he was one of the group of two hundred Armenian intellectuals rounded up on April 24, 1915, how he had watched his peers being executed, how he was exiled to a distant town and eventually saved by the intervention of a well-placed Turkish friend in Constantinople. Most of that was cut for length.
I received an e-mail from an Armenian colleague asking me why I had not used the word genocide. He wanted to know whether I had made that decision or whether the paper had declined to use it. In truth, the choice was mine. After thinking about it for a long time, longer than I spent on the article itself, I had decided to avoid the word. Not as a personal policy, not as a new rule for myself; only for this one story. It wasn’t my editor, who ran the classical music page, whom I was answering to. I could have said genocide if I wanted; the Times had green-lighted the term in its usage guidelines a few years prior.
But that was part of the problem: genocide had become a term, a phrasing to be allowed or disallowed, and as such, it was less profound than any other word I might choose to use. It was a secret password, a tool, an emblem—I am one of those who know—and a submission to or violation of guidelines set by authorities. To me, the label had lost any visceral sense of what this particular individual, Gomidas, who was a musical hero of mine, whose songs I had been singing since I was a small child, had seen and suffered. When I imagined Gomidas’s undoing, when I tried to envision what he had witnessed and what unbearable memories kept him mute for the last two decades of his life, I did not imagine this word, genocide. Genocide sounds clinical, like the textbook name for a chemical compound or a disease, not like a human pileup of misery, monstrous individual decisions to raise a knife or a gun, the mutilation of the human spirit alongside the flesh. Genocide sounds like lobbying and politics.
In Armenian, nobody started calling it tseghaspanutiun—the literal translation of genocide, where tsegh means race and spanutiun means murder—until long after Gomidas was gone: sporadically in the 1960s, then widely from the 1980s onward, by which time recognition campaigns were in full swing in the United States and France.
The word that I and many Armenians heard, growing up, was jart. That’s a hard j, like the j in Jesus or jail. Jart means “destruction.” Armenian nouns for abstract concepts are often compound words, with enough syllables to give the Germans a run. Even ordinary nouns usually get at least two. An Armenian word with a single syllable announces itself. And jart stands out for another reason, as an example of what linguists call nominalization—a noun extracted from what had been a verb, in this case jartel, to break things open, or its passive form, jartvel, to be smashed to pieces. These verbs evoke the very physical destruction of something into shards—the shell of a walnut, the roof of a house. Bones. Sometimes when Armenians talk about the destruction they faced in Turkey, it is a godoradz (massacre), an aksor (deportation), an aghet (disaster). But in English, it is always a genocide. I am not making a case, merely exploring an idea.
As a writer, producing that short article about an Armenian musician—whose suffering in the genocide had been well documented, indeed whose entire musical oeuvre had been overshadowed by the story of his suffering—I resented the requirement to use a word as a political statement, especially when I was writing about music, the one little corner of my Armenian life that had been safe shelter from politics, lobbying, hatred, nationalism, protests; the one private Armenian pleasure from which I had never felt alienated.
And in my writing, there is no other thing on earth, tangible or abstract, for which I have ever felt forced to use exactly one particular term. That’s the beauty of language, description, thought, and personality, of stories—that we describe things in a million different ways and as we do so, we add glimmers of meaning, trying to make them felt and known.
Making things felt and known is essential: for this reason, when President Obama referred to the genocide as the Meds Yeghern, it was a mockery of the power of language, a parody: foreign words that were gibberish to the person speaking them. They were nothing more than a strangely shaped puff of air. He said it again every year after, as if repeating Meds Yeghern enough times would make it a new tradition—or at least allow him to improve his pronunciation—but instead the offense was compounded anew.
I am not a president, or a lawyer, or a judge, or a member of a human rights monitoring committee. If I were, I would not muse on parts of speech or metaphors; I would be bound by the legal and political power of language, such as it is. Still, in most of what I have written about Armenia and Turkey, and all over this book, I used the word genocide. Just that one time, in that one article in the classical music section that not too many people would read, I wanted to take a bit of expressive freedom back, a bit of individual agency.
This is what it was all about, in the end: to be Armenian had come to feel like an obstacle to individual agency, to being myself, any self, a separate person, and not only a member of a group that had already made all the decisions.
I did not go to Turkey to question history. I didn’t write this book because I wanted to decide what the US Congress should do, or because I needed to befriend the Turks, although I am grateful for all the friends I made. I went to Turkey and I wrote this book because I was trying to understand how history, identity, my clan, and my feeling of obligation to it, had defined me, and I wanted to understand who I was outside of that obligation—who, if anyone.
What does it mean to be Armenian, or Turkish, or anything else? What does it give you, and what does it keep you from getting?
How much texture and complexity are sacrificed, lost when we retreat to our trenches? We produce a press release instead of a poem or novel. This shrinks us, in the end, makes us less alive. If survival, the future, the avenging of a genocide should be manifested in the flourishing of a people, what makes the soul flourish? Let it all live.
And if we move on from genocide recognition, with or without Turkey’s olive branch, what holds us together then? If there is no better answer to this question, maybe the answer is simply, nothing. Nothing holds us together; we are no longer together at all. Now all possibilities are available to us, and that is terrifying. We become individuals.
Acknowledgments
This is my first book. As I finish it, I feel grateful not only to those who helped with this particular project, but to those who helped me build my career and sensibilities as a writer. Susie Linfield, of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at NYU, provided unforgettable practice in the art of questioning one’s assumptions. Robert Boynton has been an essential mentor and a morale-boosting friend. Michelle Goldberg lent crucial help early on, especially by introducing me to my agent (back when I wasn’t even sure what an agent did). Mitch Stephens sent me to Russia for a project that opened my horizons and led to my first Armenia trip. I would also like to acknowledge the late Ellen Willis; her encouragement got me started and emboldens my work still.
James Oestreich warmly welcomed my writing about music, an essential antidote to my writing about genocide. Gerry Marzorati, my boss at the New York Times Magazine just before I left for Turkey, gave me important opportunities for which I remain thoroughly grateful. As I developed my ideas for this book, several editors worked with me on articles about Armenia and Turkey that informed the larger project: Keith Gessen, Allison Lorentzen, Adam Shatz, Jennifer Schuessler, Peter Terzian, Charles Sennott, and Thomas Mucha all have my sincere thanks.
In this book’s incipient stage, Daniel Menaker’s enthusiasm meant a lot. Later, Andy Ward’s editorial talents left an impression far out of proportion to the short time we worked together. This book owes some of its spirit to his feedback.
Many scholars influenced my early research for this book. Their names listed here are in no way a suggestion that they agree with any of the opinions I’ve expressed. Fatma Müge Göçek, a visionary in her scholarship and her handling of the politics around it, taught me not only a
bout Turkish society and history, but about cooperation and keeping one’s priorities straight. She was unceasingly generous in sharing ideas and contacts, while also being a delight to spend time with. Ronald Suny and Jirair (Gerard) Libaridian provided insights that shaped my work from the start, and reset my standards for clear, fair thinking about this utterly volatile subject. Taner Akçam was a major inspiration. Donald Bloxham’s work added depth to my understanding, especially with regard to larger conceptual issues in historiography.
I benefited tremendously from the fascinating, maddening, game-changing e-mail microcosm that was the WATS listserv. Likewise for the discussions on Reconcile This. If I did not always have the mettle to jump into the fray, I am nonetheless grateful to those who put themselves out there so tirelessly and enriched our larger conversation.
For research input, help making connections, or other favors along the way, I would also like to acknowledge Ayhan Aktar, Armen Aroyan, Melissa Bilal, David Gaunt, Rachel Goshgarian, Sinan Küneralp, Neery Melkonian, Baskın Oran, Razmik Panossian, and the late Aris Sevag.
I do not know how to thank all the people who helped me in Turkey. Some of them are already named in the book and accustomed to being public figures, but for those who are not, I am wary of burdening them by associating their real names with a book that may run into problems in the Turkish legal system. Although in the past few years, the Armenian issue has become less dangerous in public discourse, some risk remains. Most important in this group are my two primary translators: this project would have been impossible without their wide-ranging help on a daily basis and their companionship throughout a vulnerable time. In addition to the two of them, please imagine here a list of the names of other friends and colleagues in Turkey who sat for interviews, invited me into their homes, challenged my assumptions, and, sometimes best of all, met me across a table at a backstreet café called Badehane to ease off the weight of the day. I hope you know who you are, and how much meaning you added to my experiences.
There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond Page 30