That Sunday, we had an emergency meeting of the Armenian Student Association. The purpose was to plan our retaliation against the Turkish professor. In the four years I had been with the club, we had never faced a politicized situation like this. Usually we carpooled to church picnics around the Bay Area or held potluck dinners where the most excitement one could hope for was that somebody would bring a bottle of Armenian brandy. Now, about twenty of us were collected in a living room south of campus, and Patrick took the floor.
Patrick was a slight fellow, not the type you would imagine getting into a fight. He was the picture of responsibility—like a hired efficiency expert roaming the campus, he wore loafers, khakis, and button-down shirts, the sort of attire one did not often see on Berkeley-dwellers below the age of fifty. It was not entirely surprising that he would take charge in a crisis, but his was not a charismatic leadership; it was more like the bottled-up aggression of a hall monitor.
For the benefit of those who had not been there, he described in detail what had happened at the display table. The professor had stopped in front of the genocide photos and said, “I wish it were true, you lying pigs.” Then the professor said that the Armenians had deserved to be massacred.
I wondered whether Patrick was embellishing the professor’s words—the part about pigs strained belief—but since I had heard only bits of the shouting, I kept my mouth shut.
The offender, Patrick told us, was a professor of Near Eastern Studies. In order to confirm the man’s identity, Patrick had tracked him down to his office and waited outside with a newspaper shielding his face.
Patrick had also spoken to the campus police and had filed a complaint for physical assault. At this news, audible gasps went up in the room. But it made no sense; I had watched the argument from beginning to end. While I hadn’t heard every word, I had seen the entire thing clearly, and recalled no physical contact. Over murmurs of anger from the others, I asked Patrick what, exactly, he meant by physical assault.
“He spat at me,” said Patrick. “That qualifies as physical assault.”
I didn’t know Patrick very well, but I had never liked him. A few weeks earlier our group had attended a reading on campus by the Armenian writer Peter Balakian, and the first question after the applause had come from Patrick: “How do you think Armenian writers can use their work to fight Turkish denial of the genocide?” I had found his question embarrassing—there were non-Armenians present who had come with the impression that they were there to discuss literature—and more important, depressing. I was an English major—a small but hard-won personal triumph since my parents saw this course of study as impractical—and I had come to the event eager to discover some aspect of Armenian culture that wasn’t defined by politics.
The same attitude that allowed Patrick to see literature as only a means to a political end now revealed a willingness to bend the truth for the same purpose. I didn’t even pause to think before blurting out a response.
“Patrick, I was right there. I didn’t see the professor spit at you.”
Patrick glared at me. “I know when I’ve been spat on,” he said. “He spat in my eye. I could have gotten a disease.”
“But you were shouting in each other’s faces. Do you mean that a drop of spit from his mouth flew into your eye by accident? That’s not the same as spitting on you intentionally,” I said.
Patrick ignored me. The spitting question, while it raised a few eyebrows, was put aside. The conversation turned to the problem of how we could get media attention. In my head, meanwhile, I reviewed my memory of the event carefully, trying to determine whether I could have missed an overt act of spitting.
Then the telephone rang, and everybody went silent. This call had been scheduled, it became clear; somebody had arranged for a lawyer from San Francisco to advise us as to how the matter might be pursued in court. He was an Armenian lawyer, naturally. Or was he even a lawyer? Was he even Armenian? He was only a voice on the phone, and he told us by way of greeting that he could not speak long and that he could not be identified to the group.
As we knelt on the floor, heads bent toward a speaker phone that sat on a desk in the corner, I started to feel the way I had as a child at Camp Haiastan on debate night: that either I had missed something important or that something was very wrong. The voice at the other end of the line was speaking only of media strategy and legal ramifications—albeit with an inflated urgency that felt menacing—yet we imbibed his words like loyal operatives receiving our next set of instructions, genuflecting to a chief whose face we couldn’t see.
But there was a difference between summer camp and college: this time I trusted my reaction. Who was this voice on the end of the phone and how important could he possibly be that he couldn’t risk identifying himself? How valuable was his input that twenty undergrads and graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, could not plan a course of action without him? And how could we look each other in the eye and talk about using a claim of physical assault by stray saliva fleck to get the Turkish professor in trouble? I was enraged by the professor’s comments, but if we wanted to see him penalized for his crude treatment of a student group, this was no way to handle it. We could not fight genocide denial by creating new lies of our own.
The matter held the attention of the college paper for some time, and soon the San Francisco Chronicle was weighing in, condemning the professor of Near Eastern Studies as well as the university for not taking swift action against him. The UC Berkeley student senate, at the ready for any battle of the people versus power, passed a resolution calling on the school to fire the professor and to draft new standards against hate speech on campus. A university ombudsperson investigated the affair and concluded that the professor’s remarks, although obnoxious, were protected by free expression policies. Patrick was quoted in the Daily Californian describing the confrontation. “I will not change my story—it’s the truth,” he said. “If somebody comes and says there was no genocide, then that’s going to be my response time and time again.”
Meanwhile, the university police came to the same conclusion as I had about the spitting: that an accidental droplet had crossed the inches separating two shouting men. The case was closed.
* * *
I OFTEN WONDERED what became of the Turkish professor, whose name, Hamid Algar, had never left my mind. Thinking back on the incident a decade later, I consulted the Internet. What I discovered, at my desk in my living room, the sounds of Brooklyn traffic screeching outside my window, left me dazed: the offending professor was not Turkish. He was an Englishman.
How was this possible? It had seemed obvious that a man named Hamid Algar who harassed a group of Armenian students, who said there had been no genocide, must have been a Turk. I wasn’t aware that Hamid had fallen out of fashion as a name for Turkish boys around the time that Abdul Hamid II, the last real Ottoman sultan, lost his grip on the empire and became a symbol of irredeemable decline. On the Internet, I learned that Professor Algar had converted to Islam while a student at Cambridge, and had changed his first name to Hamid. As for Algar, it had struck my ear like as Turkish a name as any, a cousin of Altun or Altınay, or maybe something with an Arabic twist—Al-Qar? But no: Algar is an old Anglo-Saxon name meaning “noble spearman.” Its variants include Elgar, as in Sir Edward, the British composer, or Alger, like Horatio.
I couldn’t square this new information with the image that in the course of a decade had developed in the darkroom of my mind—a room dark enough that I had been positive that the man I’d seen storming up to our table had a face with the stereotypically Turkish blend of yellow-olive skin tone and faintly Asian eyes. Now I saw that Hamid Algar’s students had made him a fan page on Facebook, and in his photograph he had round eyes and blushing cheeks and a rusty speckle of a beard. He might have stepped out of any London pub.
There were so many layers of confusion in what had happened. For starters, the content of the fight between Patrick and the prof
essor was a clash of narratives. In addition, they reported the incident differently. As a bystander, my version was different still. Then there were media accounts and official statements. But beyond all of that, when I realized the most basic assumption I had made—that the professor was ethnically Turkish—had been wrong, and that this inaccuracy had been curing in my mind for ten years, only fortifying my contempt for Turkey, I saw that the entire mess was even more toxic than I had feared. How easily certainty took shape. How hard it was to dismantle.
What other hazards of perception, what other false assumptions were at play between Armenians and Turks? What else might we, or they, need to reconsider, and which questions were too dangerous even to entertain?
6
“With This Madness, What Art Could There Be?”
My first trip to Turkey happened quickly and with little planning. I bought my ticket only two weeks before leaving, hardly enough time to read a book or study a map—not that doing either of those things had occurred to me; I was operating on instinct. Looking back, I can see that instinct had been leading me away from the Armenian community for a while already, but this did not mean I was any more comfortable with Turks or Turkey than I had ever been. It was as if I had been moving in a certain direction without knowing it, until suddenly I realized I was on the edge of a cliff. My decision to go to Turkey was a surprise even to myself.
I was well traveled by then. I had spent the two previous summers working in a provincial Russian city as a journalism teacher, had enjoyed a few precious weeks rediscovering Iran with my parents, had done all the usual backpacking through Europe with my sister the summer I finished college. I had beloved relatives in Paris whom I visited anytime I could find an excuse. I had made a first, obligatory pilgrimage to Armenia, getting there by car from Georgia, where I stayed in Tbilisi as a guest of the presidential family—long story—and I had taken trips to Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and other places that could make me seem adventurous, open-minded, savvy. How was it possible, then, that I never even paused on the fact that Turkey was a country that could be visited? How did curiosity never move me, especially after the Internet had made curiosity as cheap as breath, to consider that I could enlist Google’s help, buy a plane ticket, get some kind of visa, or at the very least read an article in the Travel section of the New York Times, skim a dispatch from Istanbul or some colorful Turkish seaside resort? Would you believe me if I said those small exploratory endeavors would have felt, right up until the moment they didn’t, like something acidic spreading through my insides? But this was irrelevant. When you don’t want to see something, you don’t look for it, don’t even know you are avoiding it.
It suited me to believe that the first trip happened without much planning because a whim required less justification than a quest. But it was a quest, a quest that would eventually be disguised in the finery of important-sounding freelance writing assignments, and ultimately supported by the best excuse of all: a book contract. But that was all later.
I couldn’t have seen it then any more than you can see a leaf growing if you stare at it, but a very definite series of events had led to the day that I arrived in Istanbul, and those events began with an evening three years prior—a night at the movies.
* * *
“ON NOVEMBER 15 WE ALL HAVE THE SAME PLANS.” In the fall of 2002, I received an e-mail from a stranger that began with this capitalized decree. I had just moved from California to New York for graduate school, a writing program at NYU, and already the local Armenian e-mail networks had me in the loop. You didn’t question how an Armenian organization had gotten your e-mail address; our e-mails were collective property, and unsubscribing was useless as it would quickly be overruled by a new list that someone compiled.
This particular e-mail went on to explain that on the evening of November 15, all Armenians in the New York area would attend the premiere of the film Ararat, by the Canadian-Armenian director Atom Egoyan. It was touted as the first-ever feature film about the genocide. Anticipation had been building in diaspora newspapers and magazines for at least a year. And now, the logic went, if enough Armenians attended the limited opening run in New York and Los Angeles, we would help guarantee wider distribution of the film.
Here it was again: the expectation, the obligation, that if a thing were good for the Armenians—which could only mean good for the cause of genocide recognition—nothing else mattered. We would support this film whether we liked it or not.
I went, of course, as much to see the movie as for the spectacle of an Armenian mass descent upon the Angelika Film Center in SoHo. In the hallway outside the screening room, Armenian women in dresses and heels kissed one another on both cheeks and sized one another up as though it were the red carpet at the Oscars.
It was not until the lights went down that a problem emerged: this was Atom Egoyan, director of peculiar, nonlinear films best appreciated by film buffs in art house cinemas. Although he had been nominated for two Academy Awards and five Palme d’Or prizes, he was not known as a crowd-pleaser. And so it turned out to be not so clear that the film was good for the Armenians after all.
The plot centered on an Armenian director (played by French-Armenian luminary Charles Aznavour) making a movie about the genocide, focusing on the Siege of Van, one of the few incidents in which the Armenians put up serious resistance against Turkish forces. Parts of the story are told through the eyes of the Armenian painter Arshile Gorky. The genocide scenes take place on a cartoonishly colored film set, with crew and cameras visible, creating a sense of unreality and encouraging the audience to maintain critical distance. Mount Ararat is transplanted to the wrong side of the set, geographically, because the showbiz-minded film producer (another Armenian performer, Eric Bogosian) feels it looks better there. Throughout the film-within-the-film, scenes of bloody fighting between Armenians and Turks are shown at length and then interrupted by the director’s commands to the cast, which serve as abrupt reminders that the scenes are not the thing itself, but a story under construction. Death marches, rapes, the torching of a circle of Armenian brides doused in kerosene and forced to dance, all are started and then stopped short, with the equivalent of a “Cut! Let’s run that again” or “Let’s break for lunch and then redo the rape scene.”
A half-Turkish character named Ali, an aspiring actor who happens to be gay, wins the role of Jevdet Bey, a notoriously brutal Turkish governor during the genocide era. (Ali is actually played by a Greek, Elias Koteas.) We see Ali at home preparing dinner, chatting with his boyfriend about the film. At first he feels uneasy playing such a villain, but when he begins reading about the history, he finds there are people who argue that the Armenians had it coming, a notion that helps him embrace his part more freely.
Several intense side plots explore the theme of manipulating stories to serve emotional needs. An Armenian art historian named Ani (played by Egoyan’s wife, Arsinée Khanjian) is hired as a consultant on the film; she is obsessed with Arshile Gorky’s life, and especially with explaining his death. She herself has been widowed twice; her first husband was an Armenian terrorist, and their son, Raffi, is seeking a way to honor the legacy of his father, whom he prefers to call a “freedom fighter.” Ani’s second husband, not an Armenian, supposedly killed himself, but his daughter Celia (Ani’s stepdaughter) believes Ani killed him. Both offspring are consumed by their fathers’ deaths. The two of them have an affair that threatens to destroy Raffi’s relationship with his mother. (Given the extreme sexual repression in Armenian culture, a graphic sex scene between the stepsiblings could have been the film’s undoing if the stakes were any lower.)
But the most haunting story line unfolds when young Raffi returns from a secret trip to what he calls “Western Armenia”—Turkey—where he has gathered footage for the film-within-the-film. At the airport in Canada, a customs officer (played by Christopher Plummer) interrogates him for hours about whether his sealed film canisters might actually contain heroin. The interrogation
drags on well beyond what the conventions of entertainment would seem to allow and generates a creeping confusion for the viewer about where Raffi has been and what he has done; Egoyan seems to be demonstrating the inherent instability of a narrative whose goal is to persuade—such as the narratives on both sides of the Armenian genocide. When Raffi tries to tell the truth about his trip—and to explain why the film’s director can’t bail him out, because Raffi did not tell him he was going to gather this footage—his story sounds so convoluted that he resorts to lying to make it seem more true. In the end, the officer turns off the lights, opens a film canister, feels for the contents, and—leaving mysterious what was inside—lets Raffi go. Later, telling his son (who happens to be the boyfriend of the half-Turkish actor Ali) about the incident, the officer muses on the question of whether the canisters indeed contained heroin. “What difference does it make?” he says. “He didn’t believe he could do something like that.”
Through all of these threads, the film grapples with a question that Egoyan later articulated in an interview: “How do you know what you know?”
* * *
AT THE ANGELIKA Film Center, for a brief spell after the credits rolled, the Armenians allowed themselves their disappointment. Many said they wished it had been a more clear-cut rendering of the story of 1915, that Egoyan blew our big chance—to secure genocide recognition via Hollywood, that is.
“Why couldn’t he have done something normal, like Schindler’s List?” people asked.
“It was too confusing” was a frequent refrain, another way of saying that the film wasted its capital on ideas and emotions that were not politically instrumental.
There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond Page 7
