There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond

by Meline Toumani

  An evening spent hanging out with my Kurdish friends, Hakan, Murat, and Özgür, helped me understand why.

  One Saturday, they took me to the home of a sociology professor they were close with. She really wants to meet you, they said. But she’s tough. Don’t take it personally, they warned me.

  I wasn’t sure what to expect.

  Her name was Derya, and she was like a big sister or an auntie for the guys, about ten years older than they were. She lived alone in a huge, modern apartment, where she often cooked them dinner, doled out advice, gossiped with them, and scolded them when they got too rowdy. In return, they doted on her and entertained her with their Three Stooges–style comedy. Derya was ethnically Turkish.

  She was also the only Turk I met who asked me this: What is it like for you to be here, in Turkey?

  So much was conveyed by this simple question: that my being Armenian was significant—not something to gloss over—but it wasn’t Derya’s problem to manage; that my being in Turkey was not a challenge to her but a challenge for me. How rare, I suddenly realized, to meet a Turk who did not get defensive or try to overcompensate with excessive enthusiasm. I guess by “tough” my friends meant that Derya was honest. So when we began talking about what brought me to Turkey, I felt comfortable being honest in return.

  I told Derya that although I had intended to research and write about Armenian-Turkish relations, with the idea that some kind of “soft reconciliation” was important and valuable—that simply getting Turks and Armenians to interact as human beings would be a major step, more important than forcing anyone to recognize the genocide—I was not sure what I was doing anymore. Not only were people more intolerant than I expected, but my own prejudices had not gone away, either. In fact, sometimes they seemed stronger than ever. And although I had started out looking for a way around the Armenian diaspora’s fixation on genocide recognition, I was starting to realize that in my interactions with Turks, if we didn’t already agree on what had happened in 1915, the barrier between us was too great to make a meaningful connection.

  Derya nodded. “That’s why ‘soft reconciliation’ is bullshit,” she said. “Soft reconciliation is all those people telling you that some of their best friends are Armenian.

  “It’s all about power,” Derya went on, looking me straight in the eye.

  She realized this one day in a conversation with Hakan and Murat, when she was first getting to know them. They were arguing about the Kurdish issue, and the role of the PKK, and Murat said something that shocked her. “He told me, ‘One day I want to be the one riding on top of a tank into the streets of Diyarbakır.’” Diyarbakır, the cultural heart of the Kurdish-populated southeast, was under constant military surveillance; and PKK sympathizers there threw grenades and planted car bombs, the only means they had found to express their anger. Attempts at working within parliament had been mostly unsuccessful for pro-Kurdish politicians; for a party to take any seats at all, it had to win at least ten percent of the national vote, so even when candidates from Kurdish parties gained the most votes in their districts, they were usually disqualified. In cases where they managed to win by running independently, thereby circumventing the party threshold, they were harassed by other MPs and tormented by the media. Turks felt like victims of Kurdish terror, but Kurds saw themselves as the victims—and some saw the PKK as the only way to force change. Murat had no wish to commandeer a tank; he simply meant that he was tired of feeling powerless.

  The fundamental principles of the Turkish state, Derya continued, could not be changed by anything that was less powerful than the state itself. This was as true for the Armenian issue as it was for the Kurds, she said. The only power Turkey would respond to was power from more powerful countries. To that end, Washington had to pass a genocide resolution.

  I challenged her: what about the Armenians in Istanbul and the way the diaspora’s campaigns in Washington were making their lives more difficult?

  If Armenians in Istanbul suffered in the meantime, it was a necessary price, she said, because otherwise nothing would ever truly change for them here. Their second-class status in Turkish society was a direct consequence of that society refusing to make an honest account of what they had endured.

  “I don’t care how many people have these little meetings where they bring together Armenian musicians and Turkish musicians, or Armenian filmmakers with Turkish filmmakers. That’s all fine, but it’s not going to change anything in Turkey.”

  At first I found this compelling: enough with the sentimental nonsense—it takes power to fight power. But what kind of power? The more I thought about it, the more I doubted whether the top-down kind was what we needed here. In a way, Derya’s formulation resembled the right-wing response to the stark increase of school shootings in the United States between 2012 and 2014. They wanted to arm schoolteachers with guns; power against power. But this did nothing to improve the dynamics of the problem; it only changed who had their hands on the levers of power—or the triggers, as it were. Exacerbating the existing power struggle was not a satisfactory solution.

  Likewise, even if I found denial of the genocide immoral and toxic, I did not want to entrust historiography to a government body. Living in Turkey made me more certain of this than ever. On October 10, 2007, a perfect object lesson demonstrated the problem: The US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee voted that the events of 1915 constituted genocide, and recommended that a full resolution be considered on the House floor. The very next morning, a high court in Istanbul ruled that Sarkis Seropyan—Sarkis Bey—and Arat Dink, Hrant’s son—were guilty of insulting the Turkish nation for allowing the word genocide in their newspaper. The US congressional committee’s debate had revolved around the idea that the genocide was a well-documented fact. The Turkish court’s verdict centered on an argument that according to its evidence, there had been no genocide. Both decisions had ample precedent and both would be replicated in the future; the noteworthy element, in this case, was their juxtaposition. In less than twenty-four hours, the rulings emerged as mirror images showing how state power could be used and abused.

  Alan Dershowitz, the notorious Jewish-American criminal defense lawyer, and an outspoken supporter of Israel, addressed this bind many years ago, during a symposium at Harvard University about freedom of speech and Holocaust denial: “I don’t want the government to tell me that it occurred because I don’t want any government ever to tell me that it didn’t occur.” He went on, “I am categorically opposed to any court, any school board, any governmental agent taking judicial notice about any historical event, even one that I know to the absolute core of my being occurred, like the Holocaust.… In my experience, government is one of the worst judges of truth.”

  A French-Armenian scholar, Marc Nichanian, had made an argument to similar effect, suggesting that government rulings on the genocide were inherently problematic because they disempowered the victims, put their suffering, their reality, up for cold, official appraisal. As such, formal recognition campaigns assumed a capitulation to power.

  Derya’s words rang true for me, but in a slightly different way than she meant. Yes, it was all about power, but not about governmental power, and not about brute force: the issue was the disparity of power between individuals. This was how I came to understand why I had not become genuine friends with Turks who didn’t acknowledge the genocide: because if they believed a story in which Armenians were not the persecuted but persecutor, they were doomed to discount the current oppression that Armenians in Istanbul lived with every day. If a Turk didn’t acknowledge what happened in 1915 he was also denying an entire complex of discrimination and power dynamics that defined the minority experience in Turkey.

  Which didn’t mean government had no role to play, of course. In Turkey, governmental power enabled the disparity of power between individuals. This, finally, was a reason I could get behind: genocide recognition—anywhere and everywhere—for the sake of equality and democracy in Turk
ey.

  * * *

  UNTIL I TALKED to Derya, I felt disappointed in myself, because although I liked to believe that I could find a way to relate to nearly anyone, I had been keeping certain people at arm’s length. A Turkish TV star who prided herself on her interest in Armenian culture wanted to host a dinner party in my honor, but I managed to defer until the offer faded away. I was repeatedly invited out by a Turkish woman named Rüya who had told me that the diversity of the participants in Hrant’s funeral march proved that Turks had no particular prejudice against Armenians. I often made up excuses to avoid seeing her. Now I understood why, and it was about power: how can you be friends when you are not equals? With the TV star I sensed she wanted to show me off to her peers, a token diaspora Armenian, a defanged, stuffed specimen from an exhibit. With Rüya, I found myself doing strange things—insisting on picking up expensive tabs, for example, even when I was clearly the guest, and this, too, was about power, about me trying to demonstrate some in any way I could.

  No wonder I felt so much more comfortable with my Kurdish buddies than with anyone else. They didn’t have power either. The same was true of a Turkish friend I had gotten to know who was crippled, owing to a childhood bout of polio, and staggered around with a pronounced limp; and another who was gay, and another who had a disfiguring skin condition. They formed a ragtag posse who could relate comfortably to an Armenian because they knew, from their own experience, what it meant to be excluded from the official story. They could challenge it because they didn’t fit into it either.

  My Kurdish friends routinely struggled with this imbalance of power. On another weekend evening I joined Hakan, Murat, and Özgür at a popular bar where we stayed talking and dancing until four a.m. Afterward, we headed for a soup shop, which was the thing to do after a night out in Istanbul. Every table was full with young people guzzling bowls of soup, considered a preventative measure against hangovers. The most effective were made with intestines or cow’s feet, but for the faint of stomach like me there was also lentil soup.

  We had business to discuss. Hakan was upset because earlier in the evening, we’d run into a Turkish woman named Dilek whom he had a crush on. They were classmates at the university, and there had always been some chemistry between them, he said. At the start of the evening, she seemed interested in Hakan, but then something had gone wrong. When we had discussed moving on to a different bar, Hakan had suggested someplace with music, and Dilek had teased him, saying he probably wanted to go to a türkü bar. Türkü is the name for a style of folk ballad rooted in Anatolian villages. Despite the name, many türkü musicians are Kurdish and perform songs with Kurdish influences. The performances tend to draw homesick provincial types or foreign tourists hoping for a bit of authenticity. Hakan had nothing against türkü music, but he didn’t like what Dilek’s comment implied. Despite the fact that they had many friends in common and supported the same causes, this passing remark made Hakan feel like Dilek saw him first and foremost as a Kurd. Which is to say, a villager at best, a terrorist at worst.

  We spent an hour analyzing what Dilek could have meant by suggesting a türkü bar. Maybe she didn’t mean anything at all, we offered. Maybe she just thought he liked folk music. Maybe—probably—she thought it was fair game to tease Hakan about his Anatolian village origins because he joked about this himself, telling stories about growing up near the conservative town of Konya that kept us all in stitches. But even as we tossed around justifications, we knew that Hakan’s instinct meant something. Dilek may have miscalculated on her humor, and she may have even been interested in Hakan, but she had revealed that his Kurdishness was the first thing she saw.

  How could anyone get it right? If your differences were ignored, it felt offensive. If too much attention were paid to them, that felt offensive, too.

  Often, when our conversations reached a point of frustration, we turned to joking about “our party.” This party had nothing to do with the dance club where we had spent the evening. “Our party” was an imaginary political movement the guys had dreamed up; the Leftist Solution Party, they called it. Hakan would be the party chief, Murat the foreign minister, and Özgür the minister of finance (which basically just meant that he paid for everyone’s beer). Deniz, the group’s intellectual heavyweight, was the minister of education. When I came along I was elected minister of culture, an honor bestowed after the guys persuaded me to sing some Armenian folk songs for them. Various other friends, depending on who was on hand at the moment, were appointed to a rotation of posts, minister of whatever they happened to be doing when the subject came up.

  Our party wasn’t just for Kurds, they were quick to say, but Kurds would be among the leading ranks. It was a party for leftists and democrats, for peaceful people who couldn’t get behind any of the parties in the current system. Our party was a joke, but a dark one. It was the minority play-acting at wielding power.

  After soup, we walked down İstiklâl toward our homes. Other than some flocks of pigeons pecking around food wrappers that were twirling in the wind, the street was empty, a rare sight. İstiklâl was normally filled from morning to midnight with teenagers, families, tourists, and peddlers selling stuffed mussels, corn on the cob, roasted chestnuts, and lottery tickets. Now the sun was starting to come up, brightening blank stretches of cobblestone around us. Hakan took the opportunity to try out his political chops.

  “Good morning!” he sang out to the birds, a small-town mayor strolling along Main Street. “Yes, yes, thank you for your vote!” he called into empty doorways. He waved up at darkened windows, first on the right, then on the left, as the rest of us ambled behind him and laughed.

  19

  Excess Baggage

  Every three months, I was required to make a “visa run.” Visa runs were what foreigners did when they wanted to stay in Turkey a long time but didn’t have work papers or a residency permit. Until 2012, when the process was revamped completely, tourist visas were the secret currency of Istanbul’s cosmopolitan life. I knew Americans who stayed for five or ten years without any problems; they simply crossed the border to another country once every three months—sometimes remaining in Bulgaria (the easiest choice) for just an hour, long enough for a spinach pie and a new passport stamp—then got another visa for twenty dollars upon reentry at Atatürk Airport.

  “Turkey is such a lovely country, I just keep coming back,” you would tell the guard with the raised eyebrow in the passport control booth, as he flipped through pages and tried to make sense of your numerous entries and exits. “I love it so much here!” That was all you needed to say, music to a Turkish visa officer’s ears, and you had three more months to play with.

  I liked the way it felt to say this. Sensing those words come to life in my body and hearing them escape from my mouth—“I love Turkey, I’m having a great time here”—was a way to take on a new identity. Like a psychological version of sky-diving, dangerous but exhilarating.

  In the summer of 2009, for my last big visa run, I decided to spend a weekend in Berlin to see some friends. When it was time to return, I stood in line at Tegel Airport to check in for my Turkish Airlines flight back to Istanbul. German efficiency notwithstanding, airport lines for national carriers tend to immediately assume the cultural norms of the passengers. These passengers were all Turkish. Unlike Armenians, who liked to engage in a continuous competition to get to the front even when there was no rush, the Turks seemed relaxed. If you handed people drinks, it would have looked like a cocktail reception; the line had no shape, and the passengers were chatting with whomever was nearby, strangers addressing each other with canım and abi and abla, my dear, brother, sister.

  I thought I would be happy enough to see them, the Turks. But as I took my place in the check-in line, the sight of the group brought with it a heaviness that I had forgotten about for a few days. As much as I had grown attached to Istanbul, the reality was that I couldn’t go an hour without having to explain that I was Armenian, and it was starting
to wear on me.

  Just before going to Berlin, I had gotten a pedicure, and the beautician pushed the issue when I told her I was from New York: “But there’s something else in you,” she said, and then tilted her head expectantly. There was no way I would say I was Armenian at that moment, with my naked pink foot in her hand. It was not merely the physical intimacy of the situation that made such an admission uncomfortable, nor the fact that she was wielding a sharp instrument whose purpose was to scrape the hardened skin from my heels. It was that we were in a setting in which she was supposed to be my subordinate. And I had so internalized the way things were—that as an Armenian, my very existence was a kind of insult to the Turks—that I did not have the courage to tell the truth just then, to subvert the natural order and inform the beautician that she was sitting at an Armenian woman’s feet.

  The weight of a thousand similar interactions resettled on my spirit when I joined the Turks at the airport in Berlin. But then I was distracted by a cluster of passengers who were whispering and gesturing in my direction. I gave a bit of a smile. A woman in expensive European clothes, the sort of woman who has special outfits just for air travel, looked at me and said to the people around her, “I think she’s Turkish.” Bence Türk, she said. She nodded her head slowly as she said it, and met my eyes almost flirtatiously to see if I was listening.

  “Me?” I answered in Turkish. Ben mi?

  “You see!” she said to the others. “I was right!”