The Candidate

by Zareh Vorpouni

  Ziya’s murder was set in 1927 in a novel written in 1965 and published in 1967 on the eve of these assassination campaigns and terrorist attacks. Was the novel prophetic? Did it predict crimes that I argue are detrimental to the memory of the victims of 1915–16? It was certainly prophetic, but as a warning, a means of prevention, and a hope of redemption for the victims and for a future without poison and resentment for their descendants. The real murders were exactly what Vorpouni had feared and wanted to denounce in advance. In the deranged act of killing the considerate young Ziya, Vorpouni’s Vahakn also kills the perpetrator in himself, whom he harbors and who forms him, who lives and acts in his place, and for whom he dies. Here we are, all of us, without exception. But this message of Vorpouni’s was never heard. The Candidate is one of the greatest novels in the diaspora, but it came too early and from too far away. It was never read by its presumed audience—the Armenians of the diaspora—and it is entirely unknown to Armenians in Armenia, who rarely address these kinds of issues. Future generations will only hear what is said in the novel about forgiveness and reconciliation from this translation, if they ever hear it at all.

  The Rape

  In Vahakn’s testimony, he describes his memories of the deportations like any other survivor described them. The difference is that Vahakn is already dead when he begins to write; he is dead as a witness, which arguably alters the status of testimony in its entirety. What Vahakn will describe, then, is torture in the proper sense of the word. Do I need to explain that the most dreadful effect of torture is the suppression of the capacity to bear witness, to kill the witness forever?12 And yet, Vahakn tells his story. Life continued for him. He continued to live until the moment he became a murderer, but at what cost? Will we ever understand what he wrote to Minas: “Would you understand if I told you that Ziya’s killer is not the one writing this note? . . . Even when I took Ziya’s neck between my fingers and pressed, it seemed as though I were a witness to a crime being committed by someone else.” The word translated as “witness” here is ականատես (akanates), denoting someone watching from the outside. He committed the murder and was a witness to it. The murder was committed outside of him. This schizophrenic division becomes clear as Vahakn describes how he was tortured. The torture made him a “candidate.” In becoming a murderer, he put an end to this postulation, but he also put an end to his own life. He let the dead within himself—the dead produced by torture—possess him entirely.

  The torture takes the form of rape. On the deportation route, Vahakn’s mother died (I do not comment here on the circumstances of her death, for which her son will consider himself forever responsible) and he was adopted by a Turkish woman named Fatma. Here the terrible rape scenes appear: “That night, Fatma sowed in me the seeds of a murderer.” The description is practically clinical. First, the stiffening of his body: “The skin on my body was like a thick hide that nothing could penetrate.” Then abandonment and retreat, fleeing outside his body, or deeper within it, to an impregnable inner fortress, before complete petrification: “I kept hugging myself tightly, so tightly that even the force of a knife would be powerless against my strength. . . . Closing my eyes to what she was doing, I thought of my mother’s blood, which was still outside on the road.” His orgasm was the result of pure violence done to a body stripped of its soul forever: “The silent shudder through my heart and thighs became the last tremors of death.” The following morning, he found a way to bear this coercive violence.

  It seemed that I had spent a long time in the grips of death. I had found a way to make life bearable, to forget life by living in death. This led to my quest to find the moment that opened the door to nothingness, the door that I would pass through. Can you understand that state of mind in which you can no longer feel anything, where all thought is absent? A vegetative state. What am I saying? At least a vegetable has a drive to live. It knows how to veer its course to avoid an obstacle and mount quiet, stubborn resistance against all hindrances, until at last it emerges into the light. Let’s say that I was like an object that was always subdued and never showed the slightest sign of life. You throw it, it lands where you want it to land. If you throw it into a corner, it stays there. . . . Never does it ever resist. Fatma did all of these things to me and I gave in to them . . . [when] she would come to me . . . I was like a piece of timber. On the inside, I was like a wooden plank.

  There is something scandalous in this scene. It is not in the conventional style of a testimony. Everything here is dumbfounding—the descriptions of Vahakn’s internal division, of his need to leave his body and take shelter in an impregnable inner refuge, of his petrification, and of his transformation into a corpse. Later on, when orphan collectors take Vahakn from Fatma, his mourning can begin. Until then, it is impossible. Only then does he see the beauty of the world for the first time: “I only knew that as I was crying, a mass of emotion was dislodged in my heart . . . my mother who had lost her mind and, with pleading hands, was still calling after me, and there I was, laying on the road, stubborn and deaf to her pleas. . . . I cried for my childhood, for my tarnished, violated childhood.” Through writing, Vahakn is trying to find the exact moment, however tiny in the ocean of time, which led him to become what he is now. “What was the moment that passed through his senses and was recorded and captured on film? It was the one that would eventually turn Vahakn into an inept stepson of life. In other words, what would turn him into the candidate of his Turcocidal impulse?” Here is the source of the “filth,” the dirt, the feeling of being irreparably dirtied, which fuels his recurring escapes, even on his wedding night: “In any case, the filth was what I always tried to escape. Wherever I was, the filthy feeling would engulf me.” He must rid himself of the filth before all else. He tried using tears to purify himself as he was leaving the village, but they did not rid his soul of the filth: “It was the feeling of being forced to scrub away four years’ worth of crusty sediment and filth that suddenly made me cry with all my heart that day. . . . But it wasn’t the time that had come, it was the unexpected awareness that it was coming . . . because tears wouldn’t be what would wash my soul. And I waited. I waited for the idea to come on its own.”

  We needed to go through all of this analysis and quote Vahakn’s prose to prepare for what is coming now: the most difficult, most surprising, and most violent theme in his letter/testimony. The theme of sacrifice, which occupies the entire remainder of Vahakn’s letter and offers a response to the double enigma: the enigma of the murder and the enigma of the simultaneous suicide. Does sacrifice help solve the enigma? This is what remains to be seen.

  Sacrifice and Forgiveness

  We need purification. We need to purify ourselves from the filth. We need to eliminate the perpetrator we harbor in ourselves because “one day a terrible storm splattered all the mud in our land, expelled us, and settled in the depths of our souls.” As a consequence, “we want to be cleansed, Minas. We want to be cleansed, so we can live.” The need for purification seems straightforward, but how should it be done? The ancients made sacrifices to their gods. They spilled blood to purify themselves from the same mud, from the same sediment, and from the same filth that they certainly felt themselves. “The ancients used to spill the blood of a rooster, a lamb, or a slave, and fathers used to sacrifice their own sons to cleanse their souls.” Here we see the theme of sacrifice most explicitly. Through Vahakn, Vorpouni references “pagan” ritual sacrifice as well as the Old Testament and the Akedah, a father’s interrupted sacrifice of his son by divine command. But Vahakn does not stop there. He also alludes to Christian sacrificial motifs, which he interprets for his own sake. He argues that Christ’s blood no longer fulfills its role; it has become too diluted. There is too much water in that wine. Now new blood is needed to cleanse the soul and eliminate the filth of childhood. Consequently, it is under the sign of sacrifice, in the constellation of sacrifice, that Vahakn will say everything he has left to say about Ziya’s murder. It is hard to believe
. Is he really going to interpret the murder he committed as a sacrifice? What Vahakn has left to say involves the moment when he put his finger on Ziya’s tie to brush off some ash that he might have imagined and when he plugged his ears to what Ziya was saying. What Vahakn has left to say involves the long process of maturation on his frenzied walks through the streets of Paris, until he finally understands what had happened at that moment and what Ziya meant the following day by the short note he wrote to his two Armenian friends. “Please forgive me. . . . Love is so blind that it makes me forget how sensitive you are. Once again, I ask for your forgiveness and beg you not to see any ulterior motives in my words.”

  Ziya, then, asks for forgiveness. In Armenian, the word “forgiveness” comes in two forms: ներէք (nerek’) and ներողութիւն (neroght’iun). There is no one word for forgiveness. Կը խնդրեմ որ ինծի ներէք (Kë khndrem vor intsi nerek’) and ներողութիւն կը խնդրեմ (neroghut’iun ke khndrem) can mean either “I apologize” or “I ask for forgiveness.” The only other word in Armenian for forgiveness is թողութիւն (t’oghut’iun), which has a purely Christian connotation and is used for the remission of sin. The problem is that we are reading a novel, not a theological treatise. Moreover, the novel never says which language Ziya uses with his Armenian friends. Is he speaking French or Turkish? In Turkish, he could have said özür diliyorum, like a group of Turkish intellectuals said in December 2008. Here is the Turkish version of the petition they put online: “1915’te Osmanlı Ermenileri’nin maruz kaldıg˘ı Büyük Felâket’e duyarsız kalınmasını, bunun inkâr edilmesini vicdanım kabul etmiyor. Bu adaletsizlig˘i reddediyor, kendi payıma Ermeni kardes¸lerimin duygu ve acılarını paylas¸ıyor, onlardan özür diliyorum” (My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters. I apologize to them). In English, they apologized. They apologized for something they were not at all responsible for, either individually or collectively. It was disturbing. They did not say in whose name they were apologizing or in whose name they were asking for forgiveness. Was it in the name of their fathers (who were no longer alive to ask for forgiveness)? Was it in the name of the state (which had never given the slightest hint of an apology)? Or was it in the name of humanity (which could not care less)? And if they asked for forgiveness (which is less than certain), they were not asking themselves if there was anyone in front of them to respond or to grant forgiveness in any way. Moreover, as previously discussed, wasn’t the inability to grant forgiveness or even to think about it the most painful, unbearable, and distant consequence of the genocidal event?

  But what does Ziya—a poor, Turkish student in Paris in 1927—have to do with all of these considerations? He asks for forgiveness for not having taken into account the particular sensitivities of his Armenian friends or their vulnerabilities. Why would he have to take their sensitivities or vulnerabilities into account? The secret of these three lines is revealed slowly over the course of the novel. It is not immediately apparent to the reader or to Vahakn himself. In fact, Vahakn had not listened to what Ziya was saying the night before at the café, but his ears had nevertheless registered the content of the conversation. Or perhaps Vahakn had interpreted the conversation through the note that Ziya sent the following day. In the following lines, the “truth” is suddenly revealed in Vahakn’s eyes. It comes as a complete surprise and intervenes in the novel like an anamorphosis, never to be mentioned again:

  You’re to blame. Do you know why? Because you think it’s natural: since you can be in love with a French woman, Ziya can be in love with an Armenian woman. It all seems so natural to you. Perhaps it is natural, but tell me, is there anything natural in our lives? In the life of an Armenian? No, don’t you think he told us so tenderly about the love he had for an Armenian woman to convince us of his sympathy for the Armenians? And to go on talking of ulterior motives, when it was his goal to make us feel that motive in the right way, so that—even though we may be far from them and released from them—we will continue to suffer on these distant shores.

  There was no other mention of this Armenian woman in the novel. We learn that that night at the café in Paris, Ziya had confessed his love for an Armenian woman and that the following day, he had written a note to apologize for his indiscretion by explaining the circumstances and specifying that he had no particular motives. What kind of motives could he have had? To wound? In Vahakn’s eyes, Ziya had written the note to make his motives known in case they had not been paying attention the night before. Ziya asked for forgiveness to make his “insult” even clearer. This is the reason why the novel says nothing about the Armenian woman. The essential component is not what Ziya says, but his motives, or what Vahakn interprets as his motives: an insult heightened by a plea for forgiveness. But is it truly an insult? During the forgiveness campaign in 2008, did the signers add insult to injury? Some people thought that the plea did not weigh heavily enough after a century of humiliation had been added to the initial will to annihilate.13 But the signers had little to do with this humiliation. Eighty years later, Ziya could have been one of the signers. It is true that from the 1920s until 2005, there were not many voices in Turkey that spoke out against the denialist policies of the state. The questions I raised above could be posed to the Ziyas of today. In whose name are they asking for forgiveness? A desire for appeasement and reconciliation is obvious in their actions.

  In 1965 as well as in 1927, it was too early to imagine appeasement and reconciliation and clearly too early to ask for forgiveness, even fifty years after the fact. Therefore, the novelistic murder emerges exactly at the site of forgiveness. It emphasizes the impossibility of the latter. Conversely, through the concomitance of murder and suicide, it also strives to begin the time of forgiveness, from which we had been barred forever as the most immediate and obvious consequence of the Catastrophe. If the word “catastrophe” indeed means anything at all, it should suggest this impossibility, this malediction over our heads, and this inability to forgive the unforgivable. Jacques Derrida has the most insightful remarks on the topic:

  We often return to the issue of sovereignty. And since we are talking about forgiveness, what makes the “I forgive you” sometimes unbearable, even obscene, is the assertion of sovereignty. It addresses everything, confirms its own freedom or usurps the power to forgive, even as the victim or in the name of the victim. Yet, we must also think of absolute victimization, that which deprives the victim of life or of the right to speech or of this freedom, this strength and this power that authorizes, that gives access to the means to say “I forgive you.” Here the unforgivable consists of depriving the victim of this right to speech, to speech itself, of possibility in all its forms, of all accounts. The victim would still be a victim, moreover, stripped of the slightest, basic possibility of potentially considering to forgive the unforgivable.14

  Beyond the novelistic murder (i.e., the sacrificial killing of the perpetrator whom I harbor in me), the capacity for forgiveness could, therefore, be recovered. This is at least what the novel suggests, which does not mean that the formula “I forgive you” is suddenly within reach. Who are we to forgive? In whose name would we do it? Forgiveness certainly does not depend on us. And yet, beyond the Catastrophe, that which is bequeathed to the survivor is the time of forgiveness: the time that was refused before the Catastrophe or because of the Catastrophe. There was no way to imagine anything like a “moral economy of time.” But, once again, why must there be a murder in a novel for us to at least consider the possibility of recovering a time of forgiveness? The enigma of Vorpouni’s novel revolves around this question. With the murder committed by Vahakn, the victim takes the task of purification upon himself. The victim—represented by the figure of Vahakn—quite explicitly considers himself a high priest of sacrifice in mod
ern times, but a high priest of sacrifice for whom the victim is so similar to himself that the two become indistinguishable. Isn’t this true of all sacrifices once the blood of the sacrificed is shed?

  Consequently, it is clear that Vorpouni envisages the beginning of the time of forgiveness, which is essential for us to return to humanity, within the constellation of sacrifice. The opening up of the time of forgiveness requires a sacrificial act whereby the high priest of sacrifice and the sacrificed become one. At the moment when Vahakn, the absolute victim, thinks he understands Ziya’s motives, he says: “Don’t you think that he told us so tenderly about the love he had for an Armenian woman to convince us of his sympathy for the Armenians?” But then what were his motives? According to Vahakn, they were to make them feel the power of blood and to derive from it a particular jouissance, however subconscious it might be.15 If we understand Vahakn correctly, that jouissance is the epitome of a system of sacrificial domination, again no matter how symbolic and subconscious the blood of the sacrifice might be. Let us admit that it was applied on a large scale in the Ottoman Empire, the empire of sacrifice. And because the empire was run on that basis, it was (and still is) a political jouissance. Vahakn’s obsession is that it will never end, no matter how far we are from the sacrificial empire. We will always be subject to the same process. It inhabits us. We have no way of freeing ourselves from it. It is this obsession with the sacrificial jouissance of the dominant group that is at play when Vahakn interprets Ziya’s note: “His goal [was] to make us feel that motive in the right way, so that—even though we may be far from them and released from them—we will continue to suffer on these distant shores.” Because it is sacrificial jouissance, we can only counter it with a sacrificial act and the shedding of blood—animal or human.