Christopher Atamian
Meline Toumani's puzzling and sometimes maddening first book There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia and Beyond
purports to analyze the hatred still separating Armenians and Turks on
the eve of the one hundredth commemoration of the Armenian Genocide.
The biggest problem with the exposé lies perhaps in Toumani's underlying
assumptions, i.e. that Armenians and Turks all hate each other and in
equating victim and perpetrator. Toumani is usually a fluid writer, but
here she gets lost in an often muddled and contradictory analysis.
The author has a point when it comes to Genocide obsession among certain
Armenians, though by this late date, it is no longer a particularly
original one. Armenians as a group do spend a lot of time talking about
and trying to convince the world of the terrors they experienced from
1915 to 1923 when the Ottoman Turks massacred some 1.5 million Armenians
along with another 1.5 million Christian Assyrian and Pontic Greeks.
For over a decade, others have made the same point that Toumani makes
and more eloquently. Curator Neery Melkonian, for one, has said time and
again that the Armenian obsession with genocide hinders their ability
to move forward as a progressive people and reach their true, brilliant
potential. And theorist Marc Nichanian has argued that it is demeaning
to keep begging the world for recognition: everyone, including those
Turks who really want to know, are aware of what really happened from
1915 to 1923 -- the Armenian Genocide was amply documented and written
about when it happened and afterwards for the last century.
At times, Toumani's book seems to be more of an exposé of her own
insecurities and shame. She reproduces often demeaning stereotypes about
Armenian physical appearance, cultural traditions and all manner of
details that she would be taken to harsh task for were she writing about
another ethnic group. And after all, why shouldn't Armenians in the
far-flung diaspora obsess about the Armenian genocide, one may
justifiably ask? Unlike the Jews and the terrifying Holocaust of WWII
for example, the Armenian Genocide has never been properly acknowledged
and lost property, money and trauma never compensated by its
perpetrator, the Turkish government. The glowing reception that her book
has received in the press seems to buttress those who argue that the
publishing world sometimes works in lockstep with mainstream elites and
governmental structures who have tried their best to get Armenians to
lay down their claims to reparations and thus appease the often
aggressively denialist governments of the modern-day Republic of Turkey.
After recounting how embarrassed she was growing up by all manner of
things Armenian, Toumani recounts her four-year stay in Turkey where she
meets Turks who -- what do you know -- seem human after all. They are
not grotesque aliens, Klingons dead-set on devouring Christian children.
But who ever thought they were? Toumani spends time in Armenia as well.
Upon arriving with a friend in Yerevan, the country's capital, she
writes: "I was embarrassed. I had lured Gretchen along by telling her
that Yerevan was a beautiful city. But the city I saw now looked shabby
and grim on that first glance into the haze." (p. 199) Yerevan is a fact a
pleasant mid-sized city of pink tuff stone increasingly dotted with
modern western-style constructions. In what parallel cultural universe,
one wonders, did Toumani ever expect Yerevan, a city built by
half-starved and tubercular genocide survivors, to equal Istanbul the
former capital of Byzantium, a city of twelve million lining the
Bosphorus?
Early on in her book, the author describes some perhaps lamentable
scenes at an Armenian summer camp in Massachusetts run by the
nationalist Tashnag party. At one point, a howling room of swarthy
teenagers scream at each other in support of or against the Lisbon Five,
a group of Armenian terrorists who, in a botched 1983 attempt to blow
up the Turkish Ambassador to Portugal, blew themselves up instead --
along with the Ambassador's wife and a Portuguese police officer: "-An
eye for an eye! -The ends justify the means!...I noticed a young camper,
Julie, weeping quietly while her friend rubbed her back -- but then
Julie was always crying about something...As the debate continued,
things grew chaotic. A folded-up metal chair slid to the ground with a
clatter...The glass in the sliding doors fogged up. Younger kids
squirmed as the older campers and counselors argued on. Some said the
men were martyrs and that Turkish denial of the genocide was too
powerful for softer measures." (p. 17-18) These people, Meline contends,
are somehow emblematic of the average Armenian viewpoint. But who in
their right mind would ever defend blowing up innocent people in the
name of any cause?
Had Toumani instead attended St Gregory's, another summer camp in Cape
Cod run by Mekhitarist priests, she would have found the emphasis was on
religion. At Camp Nubar, a wildly popular camp in the Catskills run by
the somewhat bourgeois parekordzagan or Ramgavar-affiliated
AGBU, the emphasis was on togetherness and fun. (For the record, I
attended all three). It is not my intention here to argue which
"version" of Armenian life or identity is preferable or even which one I
subscribe to, if any. I am perfectly able to think for myself as are
most of my Armenian friends and colleagues. I have always had Turkish
friends and as a Harvard undergrad, I dated a Turkish girl who later
became a career denialist and Turkish diplomat. Frustration at the
Turkish Government's refusal to do the right thing, I have always felt.
Hope that one day the two people would reconcile, I have always wished
for. Hate, however, was never part of the equation.
Another example of journalistic bad faith. Toumani grew speaking Eastern
Armenian as opposed to Western Armenian like most Armenian-Americans:
one dialect's "t" is another's "d" for example, so that when she heard
the term "Hai Tad" ("Armenian Cause") at camp she didn't at first
understand that it meant "Hai Dat," as Iranian-Armenians pronounce it.
Do Hai Tad and Hai Dat really sound so different?: "Thus the words Hai
Tahd did not communicate anything to me. I sometimes imagined my
elementary school classmate, Todd Twersky, showing up unannounced at the
perimeter of the campground. Hi, Tod." (p. 16) I didn't speak a word of
Armenian when I attended Camp Haiastan, but I never once confused Hai
Tad with any boy named Tod, and I find it hard to believe anyone else
ever did either.
Though I staunchly believe in the need for an apology from Turkey and
proper reparations, the Armenian Genocide is not something that keeps me
up at night. I suspect most Armenians are more similar to me than the
caricatured nationalists Toumani describes in her book. Her apparent
inability to comprehend the feelings of Istanbul Armenians who are
trapped between a cultural rock and a hard place -- neither Turkish
enough for Turks nor Armenian enough for Armenians -- also begs
credulity for someone so bright and well-educated as she. And when she
doesn't get the acknowledgment from ethnic Turks that she was hoping in
Turkey, Toumani admits to being more confused than before she left.
In the end Toumani's book would have been more honest and effective had
she titled it: "Ultra-Nationalism and its Discontents" and simply
studied some of the Armenian community's more right-wing members. That
her book was published in 2015 seems particularly insensitive, as if she
were trying to rub salt in the wounds of collective Armenian memory.
The ultimate irony of course is that of all the thousands of topics
Armenian and non-Armenian that Toumani could have chosen to dedicate her
first book to, she chose what else, but the very one she claims to be
trying to distance herself from.
"Huffington Post," January 28, 2015
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