Meanwhile, in the New Yorker, the critic Anthony Lane concluded his review of Ararat with an observation that explained perfectly the Armenians’ sense of a lost opportunity: “If I were a Turkish official, I would not be too worried by this picture. Nothing so slippery can stir up indignation.”
But the critic Brandon Judell from Indiewire took this further, accusing the filmmaker of abdicating a moral duty. “If only Egoyan took a chance,” he wrote. “The main problem with his Ararat is that it’s a subject that should overwhelm us intellectually and emotionally. Egoyan’s already made his point time and again that modern technology has increasingly distanced us from experiencing the joys of life and the ability to cope with everyday sorrows. But the Armenians don’t need any more intellectual game-playing with their past. They need a catharsis.”
How enormously this missed the point. We had no shortage of catharsis. I had been reading tragic memoirs and gruesome eyewitness accounts from genocide survivors since I was old enough to read Dr. Seuss. I consumed them greedily and bawled like a professional mourner. I had attended awful theater by Armenian playwrights in which young actors faked the accents of genocide survivors in kitschy attempts at representing trauma, tugging the heartstrings of audiences who handed them over expectantly, as if in a prearranged bargain. Egoyan had taken a huge artistic risk by diverging from this well-worn path, whereas attempts at catharsis of the sort Judell recommended had catered to our most superficial feelings for years already and had led to something very much the opposite of relief.
In any case, the Armenian community’s dissatisfaction with Ararat was short-lived: within a few months all was forgiven, and Egoyan and his leading-lady wife, Arsinée Khanjian, were honored at a black-tie affair at the New York Yacht Club sponsored by the Armenian Prelacy, the leadership council of the Dashnak-affiliated arm of the church. The head of the Armenian lobby from Washington served as master of ceremonies and spoke about how the film might aid in the campaign for genocide recognition. The Archbishop His Eminence Oshagan Choloyan admitted that it was the first film he’d seen in seventeen years. Then, apparently willing to overlook not only the movie’s challenges to the party line, but also its depiction of homosexuality, incest, and nudity, he blessed the project with a prayer and bestowed a medal of honor.
Was this reversal of attitude governed more by cold political strategy or was it shaped by a kind of denial, denial of the uncomfortable feelings, complexities, and questions that Egoyan had tried to articulate? Either way, it amounted to a neatly tautological lesson: First, there is only one acceptable way to talk about the genocide. Second, what you actually say is irrelevant because no matter which questions you ask or what answers you give, you will either be ensnared, appropriated, and controlled, or simply rejected. Even an artist of Egoyan’s stature could not escape this system entirely. It was some kind of clan velocity, some law of ethnic physics by which everything would be swept into the same story in the end. You’re either with us or against us. In the case of Ararat, the balance had fallen toward the first option, a calculation reached, no doubt, because of Egoyan’s clout in the wider world; the solution was to ignore the “slippery” message and replace it with a less confusing one.
These forces left little room for individuality, which meant they left little room for art—a high price to pay for membership in the group. (And speaking of high prices: the Yacht Club event, a few hours on a weeknight, cost a hundred dollars per person to attend. The prohibitive admission fee was typical for Armenian community gatherings, a kind of tithe that all but guaranteed the absence of artists, since only those with corporate salaries would be able to pony up on a regular basis. Each time I received an invitation to another of these black-tie affairs—whose ticket prices served to underline the message I had struggled against all my life, that my passions were merely hobbies and that a real job needed to have the initials MD, JD, or CPA attached to it—I felt a wave of rage.)
Yet somewhere in the midst of all this, a possibility had taken root in my imagination. I had spent a couple of hours of private time with a Turk—a Turkish character on the screen, a fellow named Ali. In the safety of a dark theater, I had been allowed to observe him and consider his behavior, his humanity or inhumanity. Wait—to consider whom? This Turk, whose character was somebody’s thoughtful gay boyfriend one minute and an actor playing a genocidaire the next, this Turk whose actor-character was only half-Turkish, this half-Turkish character played by Elias Koteas, an actor who was Greek, of all things? But his name was Ali, and he was tall, with broad shoulders, black hair, and a pasted-on mustache. He was as Turkish-seeming as I needed him to be in order to carry out what my professors in grad school would have called a thought experiment—a thought experiment that could be summarized as follows: so, there’s a Turk. So what?
* * *
ONE WEEK AFTER the Yacht Club event, I attended an academic conference about the film, sponsored by the City University of New York. A few scholars of Armenian descent spoke analytically about the film’s complex handling of narratives. Some compared it to Egoyan’s other work. There was a discussion about the reaction of Armenian audiences to the film. Confounding my expectations, the conference was riveting. But the biggest shock came when a man named Taner Akçam took the floor.
Akçam was Turkish. How this was communicated I cannot remember—but since the proceedings took as a given the idea that the Armenians had faced genocide, his participation was strange enough that there might as well have been a flashing purple neon sign that said “TURK” with an arrow pointing at the small man with glasses and thinning gray hair who stood alone behind the podium.
Now a historian, Akçam had fled Turkey in the 1970s after getting in trouble as a political activist. He would later explain to me that it was while he was in exile in Germany, pursuing his studies at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and working alongside Holocaust scholars, that he went “through a certain process” to become comfortable referring to the Armenian massacres as genocide. He was one of the first Turkish scholars to have done so openly, and for that he was facing death threats from Turkish diaspora nationalists in the United States. If he seemed out of place in a conference hall filled mostly with Armenians, it was nothing compared to the alienation he risked among his compatriots.
This was a kind of alienation I was testing out in my own life, not exactly by design. I had begun publishing my first articles as a journalist, and although I thought I wanted to write about anything but the Armenians or the genocide—and although a favorite professor in graduate school warned me that the subject of Armenians and Turks and their “little quarrels” (which cost several million dollars a year in lobbying money and inspired the occasional assassination) would interest no magazine editor—the Ararat events had lured me back in. Even as I cast about my journalistic bait, pitching articles on health care in prisons and immigration reform, I kept coming back to the same story.
Except that for me, the story was changing, and within a year of the Ararat screening, I was writing about the issue with a new outlook, interviewing Armenian scholars and politicians, and, starting with Taner Akçam, communicating with Turkish historians as well. In the fall of 2004, I wrote an essay for the Nation arguing that the Armenian diaspora’s obsession with genocide recognition had become its raison d’être, that it had become inextricable from a general hatred toward Turks, and—here was my big hook—that this was actually harmful to the fledgling post-Soviet Republic of Armenia, which desperately needed the economic benefits of diplomatic relations with Turkey.
Turkey had sealed its border with Armenia in 1993, ostensibly in response to Armenia’s war with Azerbaijan, a Turkic nation and thus Turkey’s national next-of-kin, if there could be such a thing. But I had interviewed Armenian officials who were concerned, privately, that the diaspora’s vilification of Turkey—the lobbying, the protests, the boycotts—was the real obstacle to Turkey ever opening the border. Thus Armenia was in a bind; diaspora philanthropist
s were financing everything there—new streets, schools, hospitals, and an array of NGOs—but the diaspora also fueled a climate of animosity that prevented Armenia and Turkey from establishing neighborly ties. The diaspora obsessed with its homeland was in fact hurting that homeland with its efforts.
With that essay, I had crossed a line, arguing—more or less, and not directly but implicitly—that the genocide recognition campaign was destructive. Several Armenian publications ran articles saying that my moral fiber was damaged, that I had no understanding of the diaspora, and that I was playing right into the hands of Turks. The author of one of these retorts began almost chivalrously, before going on to dispute everything I had written: “I choose to believe that [Toumani] did not intentionally insult the diaspora and demean the citizens of Armenia. Her conclusions indicate that she generally contacted sources who would provide her with answers she apparently was programmed to hear.”
While a few friends and relatives confessed they agreed with me, most expressed something like fear.
“Why did you have to publish it in the Nation?” several people asked, wishing that I had raised the issue in a community magazine rather than in a national, American one.
“The people on the Hill read that shit,” one of my old camp friends told another, who reported the concern back to me.
I told her that the Nation had seen better days. But the truth was that I had no interest in community magazines. While there were countless Armenian-American publications that circulated through their diaspora audience with an efficiency and reach that the New York Times might have envied, I wanted to make a name for myself outside the community.
As for my parents, they encouraged me, more or less, and this meant a lot, even if it wasn’t clear how much of their attitude was simply relief that my ambition of being paid as a journalist was bearing fruit (kumquat-sized fruit, in the case of pay rates at the Nation, a nonprofit affair). But they had to answer to their friends, too. What happened to her? whispered the men and women gathering in living rooms for tea. She was always such a nice girl.
* * *
MY ARGUMENT ABOUT the effect of the diaspora’s genocide recognition campaigns on Armenia’s economy was probably flawed, or at the very least incomplete. But it was as close as I could come to finding an argument that would justify a feeling I didn’t know how else to defend: that our obsession with 1915 was destroying us. Emotional logic seemed feeble; I thought I needed geopolitics to make the case. But the case, at its heart, was emotional; it was about the cost to our spirits and our imaginations, to our psychological well-being, and to our ability to flourish creatively as individuals.
The Armenian poet and scholar Leonardo Alishan framed the problem twenty years earlier, in an essay called “An Exercise on a Genre for Genocide and Exorcism”: “Without art, there was madness. But with this madness, what art could there be?”
Alishan argued that telling the story of the Armenian genocide was impossible because the Armenian artist was always partly a propagandist, always struggling between serving his art and serving his community. Until the world, and Turkey, recognize the genocide, he wrote, Armenians (and especially Armenian artists) cannot digest it. Until it is digested, the story cannot be told in a way that preserves artistic objectivity.
Artistic objectivity: the ability to see a problem or an experience from multiple points of view, to tell a story for the sake of a deeper understanding, not to further an agenda. To inhabit the mind of the villain as fully as that of the victim.
The villain, for me, had always been the Turk. It was time to try to understand him.
PART TWO
Alternate Realities
7
“So You Are a Bit Mixed Up Now”
I had only one full day in Istanbul before I was to leave for Van, a city in southeastern Turkey. I had gotten myself invited to travel through the southeast with a small group of researchers who wanted to find out what remained of the region’s formerly Armenian villages. The group was led by a Turkish sociologist named Fatma Müge Göçek.
I had called Müge (she went by her middle name) at the suggestion of Taner Akçam, the Turkish historian I’d first encountered at the academic conference about Ararat. I didn’t know anything about Müge’s travel plans when I called her; the mere fact that she, like Taner, was an ethnically Turkish person analyzing the genocide issue outside of the standard Turkish framework was reason enough for us to speak. After some telephone interviews, I wrote an article for the Boston Globe about how Taner and Müge were working with a small group of Armenian and Turkish scholars in an initiative called the Workshop for Armenian-Turkish Scholarship (WATS), an unprecedented effort at cooperating across ethnic lines.
Talking to Taner and Müge on the telephone had been its own adventure; as I took in the sound of the Turkish accent in English—previously unknown to me, even though I prided myself on having a keen ear for the music of each Middle Eastern ethnic group’s speaking style—I recognized how preposterous it was, and also how undeniably real, that the mere fact of their Turkishness made each conversation feel frightening as well as thrilling. As a corollary, it amazed me—and disturbed me a bit—that their willingness to acknowledge that the Armenians had faced genocide could so completely alter my sense of them, make them seem safe enough. We were researchers talking on the telephone and yet it was not so great a leap to imagine the effect the same dynamics could have if we were young men in neighboring villages.
Müge and I hit it off. She immediately made me feel comfortable asking questions about Turkey so elementary I hardly knew how to phrase them. I learned that she was raised in a Turkish family that was secular and nationalistic—her grandfather had built his fortune on a flag-making business. Growing up, she had always understood that the Armenians had second-class status, but she had never really known why. Despite having the best education Turkey could offer—Robert College (a liberal, private high school in Istanbul established by missionaries) and then Bosphorus University, which was Istanbul’s answer to Berkeley—she knew little about 1915. It was only when she came to the United States, for graduate school at Princeton, that she began to hear about the genocide. “Suddenly I had to account for why I had killed all the Armenians!” Müge told me. As with Taner, a mysterious alchemy of self-questioning, scholarly work, and chance encounters had moved Müge away from the mainstream narrative she was raised with.
After we had spoken on the phone several times—occasionally I would call with a question, or she would get in touch to report an interesting development—Müge told me she was planning a trip to Turkey’s southeast, to see for herself what remained of the Armenian villages, as part of her research on what she called “the silences in Turkish history.”
To make such a trip was a quietly radical act; Turks who were not from the southeast did not visit the region unless their military duty took them there. It was a far-off place only heard of when state media issued news briefs about roadside bombs and clashes between the Turkish army and Kurdish guerrillas in the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, or the Kurdistan Workers’ Party). If a visit there, in 2005, to track down the ghosts of the Armenian population, was not quite on par with taking a bus to the American South during the freedom rides of the 1960s, it was not so far off, either.
Müge would travel with a seventy-year-old man from Istanbul named Sarkis Seropyan. Seropyan was ethnically Armenian but had lived in Istanbul all his life. He was a former appliance salesman and now the publisher of Agos, an Armenian newspaper there. Müge had gotten to know him when she approached the newspaper’s editor, Hrant Dink, looking for someone to help her with such a trip. Keeping track of Armenian ruins in the southeast was a sort of hobby for Seropyan, so he agreed to come along as a docent.
Müge called him Sarkis Bey, combining his Armenian first name with the Turkish honorific, which was a respectful way of addressing a man. Sarkis had been my grandfather’s name, and its juxtaposition with a Turkish title was, to my ear, a tin
y scandal in itself.
I asked Müge to tell me more about—I tried out the pairing myself—“Sarkis Bey.”
What’s an Armenian still doing living in Istanbul? I asked her. How could there be an Armenian newspaper there? Wouldn’t they get in trouble for tracking down Armenian sites?
Müge laughed and said I should find out all of this for myself. She suggested I come along.
By then, I had mostly gotten used to the strange exhilaration of talking on the phone with a Turk—not just that, but admiring and trusting her, considering her a friend. But to actually go to Turkey?
“Can I bring a tape recorder?” I asked Müge.
“Bring a whole camera crew,” she said, with a tone at once dead serious and slightly sarcastic, and followed by the full-spectrum, unencumbered laughter I would come to think of as inextricable from the sound of her voice.
* * *
IMMEDIATELY, I APPLIED to a Washington-based think tank for a small grant to fund my trip, proposing to interview the residents of formerly Armenian villages to understand how Turks made sense of the Armenian issue. The think tank was an international organization with an interest in European Union expansion, and the grants director there, an enthusiastic German woman, all but promised me funding; the genocide issue was a recurring snag in Turkey’s EU membership talks, and anything that could shed light on the controversy would be relevant. But then she called to say it wouldn’t happen. They had recently opened an office in Ankara, and their Turkish program manager there discouraged the support of my project “in the strongest possible terms,” arguing that it was too dangerous and that the timing was not right.
When I told Müge, she was furious, and immediately looked up the Turkish program manager. A quick Google search told her all she needed to know about his politics. She offered to write to the grants director explaining why allowing that particular Turk to vote on my proposal was equal to guaranteeing its rejection. But the idea of some unseen Turk in Ankara being aware of my pursuits had already shaken my nerves and I opted to move on quietly.
There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond Page 8
