A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond
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NPR Summary
Documents the author’s experiences as an Armenian-American who was raised in a close-knit community and her provocative decision to move to Istanbul to learn the realities of Turkish citizens she was taught to hate.
Read an excerpt of this book
Excerpt: There Was And There Was Not
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1
When We Talk About What Happened
I had never, not for a moment, imagined Turkey as a physical place. Certainly not a beautiful place. But it was all I could do to get through my first taxi ride from the Istanbul airport into the city—the first of perhaps a hundred on that route, as I came and went and came back again and again over the span of four years before I was finished—without letting the driver see me cry. I shifted a bit so that my face would not be visible in the rearview mirror.
The sight of water was what did it. Istanbul is a city laced by three seas: the Marmara, the Bosphorus Strait, and the Black Sea. This struck me as utterly absurd. From as early as I knew anything, I had known Turkey only as an idea: a terrifying idea, a place filled with people I should despise. Somehow, through years of attending Armenian genocide commemorations and lectures about Turkey’s denial of the genocide, of boycotting Turkish products, of attending an Armenian summer camp whose primary purpose seemed to be to indoctrinate me with the belief that I should fight to take back a fifth of the modern Turkish state—somehow in all of that, it never occurred to me to wonder what Istanbul, or the rest of Turkey, looked like. And here it was, a magnificent, sea-wrapped city, as indifferent to my imagination as I had been to its reality.
Was it anger I felt, something like what James Baldwin described when he recalled descending in a plane to the American South for the first time and seeing the stunning red hills of Georgia below him? “This earth had acquired its color from the blood that dripped down from the trees,” Baldwin wrote. I felt something like that, and the thought that now formed in a place I didn’t know I still had within me was: how, after everything they’ve done, do they get to have a place that looks like this?
No, that’s not true. Anger was only what I was supposed to feel, what I perhaps even hoped to rekindle, when I arrived in Turkey, alone, looking out the window as the water chased the road all the way to my hotel. What I actually felt was loss. Not the loss of a place, of a physical homeland—that was for others to mourn. This had never been my homeland. The loss I felt was the loss of certainty, a soothing certainty of purpose that in childhood had girded me against life’s inevitable dissatisfactions; a certainty that as a college student and later as a journalist in New York City had started to fray, gradually and then drastically; a certainty whose fraying began to divide me uncomfortably from the group to which I belonged, from other Armenians. The embracing, liberating expanse of Istanbul’s waters, and the bridges that crossed them, and the towers on hills that rose up and swept down in every direction, made me realize upon sight that I had spent years of emotional energy on something I had never seen or tried to understand.
This was 2005. I had come to Turkey that summer because I am Armenian and I could no longer live with the idea that I was supposed to hate, fear, and fight against an entire nation and people. I came because it had started to feel embarrassing to refuse the innocent suggestions of American friends to try a Turkish restaurant on the Upper East Side, or to bristle when someone returned from an adventurous Mediterranean vacation, to brood silently until the part about how much they loved Turkey was over. I came because being Armenian had come to feel like a choke hold, a call to conformity, and I could find no greater way to act against this and to claim a sense of myself as an individual than to come here, the last and most forbidden place.
Does it sound like I’m exaggerating? Is there such a thing as nationalism that is not exaggerated?
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WHEN WE TALK about what happened, there are very few stories that, once sifted through memory, research, philosophy, ideology, and politics, emerge unequivocal. But there are two things I know to be true.
One: I know that if your grandmother told you that she watched as her mother was raped and beheaded, you would feel something was yours to defend. What is that thing? Is it your grandmother you are defending? Is it the facts of what happened to her that you are defending, a page in an encyclopedia? Something as intangible as honor? Is it yourself that you are defending? If the story of the brutality that your grandmother encountered were denied or diminished in any way, you would feel certain basic facts of your selfhood extinguished. Your grandmother, who loved you and soothed you, your grandmother whose existence roots you in the world, fixes you somewhere in geography and history. Your grandmother feeds your imagination in a way that your mother and father do not. Imagination is farsighted; it needs distance to discern and define things. If somebody says no, what your grandmother suffered was not really quite as heinous as you’re saying it is, they have said that your existence is not really so important. They have said nothing less than that you don’t exist. This is a charge no human being can tolerate.
Two: I know that if somebody tells you that you belong to a terrible group of people, you will reject every single word that follows with all the force of your mind and spirit. What if somebody says to you that your history is ugly, your history is not heroic, your history does not have beauty in it? Not only that, you don’t know your history. What you have been taught by your mother and your father and your teachers, it’s false. You will retreat to a bomb shelter in your brain, collapse inward to protect yourself, because what has been said to you is nothing less than that your entire understanding of who you are is in danger. They will have said to you that your existence is without value. You, who wondered now and then what the meaning of your life was, who made a soft landing place for those worries by allowing yourself to feel a certain richness about where you came from and who and what came before you, will be left empty. The story you thought you were a part of does not exist. Neither do you exist.
Those accusations and their consequences are the first truths we must recognize when we talk about what happened between Armenians and Turks in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. A century after those events, Armenians and Turks—in Turkey, in Armenia, and especially in the widespread diasporas of both countries—believe in two radically different accounts of what happened. “Believe.” It is not a matter of faith, yet it might as well be for the power that these clashing narratives hold.
What did happen? I will tell you—but I am Armenian. It is almost impossible for me to talk about this history. Not because I find it painful to talk about—for me to claim that particular pain would be self-indulgent—but because the terms of the conversation have evolved to leave me no satisfactory options. To tell the Armenian version of the story goes against every instinct in me, not because I disagree with it—I do not—but because I know that even if I wanted to believe that the thing in question did not fit the definition of genocide, it would be impossible for me to find my way into that belief. Even if you wanted to believe that I am objective, it would be impossible for you to do so. I also know the pleasure of healthy contrarianism; so when I encounter an outsider who has been intrigued by the Turkish version of this history, I understand his desire to fancy himself open to an alternative point of view. But then I find myself inflamed, needing to convince him all the more. I am doomed to be what is known as an unreliable narrator. I hate the way it feels.
Newspaper articles dispense with the controversy in the first or final paragraph of any news report concerning Turkey and Armenia:
“Turkey denies that the deaths constituted genocide, contending the toll has been inflated and the casualties were victims of civil war. It says Turks also suffered losses in the hands of Armenian gangs” (AP).
“Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks but denies that up to 1.5 million died and that it amounts to genocide, as Armenia views it” (Reuters).
“The Turkish government says massacres took place in the context of clashes that related to Armenian groups supporting Russia against Turkey during World War I” (Bloomberg).
This expository shrug is the peace that copyeditors the world over have made with the issue that, more than any other, defines the collective psychology of Armenians and of Turks, defines their educations, the development of their cultures, their political horizons, and—let me not call it any less than it is—their souls. Because what else but your soul can we speak of when, one hundred years later in your otherwise liberal and tolerant life, the very sound of the name of a country makes your head blur and your limbs tighten?
Now and then governments get involved, by participating in what Armenians refer to as “recognition.” In my life, this general word, “recognition,” with its various potential applications in the vast and flexible English language, had by the time I was eleven or twelve come to denote, with Pavlovian consistency, only one thing: recognition of the Armenian genocide.
Recognition: It is sought and secured anywhere possible, from the city council of Milan to the parliament of New South Wales, Australia. It has been granted in the form of official resolutions, commemorative statements, and board decisions from institutions large and small, including the European Union and at least twenty countries, forty-three US states, various American cities from Santa Fe to Minneapolis, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the New York Times. Their usage of the word genocide is tracked on lists that are ranked and counted each year in the run-up to April 24, Armenian genocide remembrance day.
For Armenians, recognition is not only institutional; tacit acknowledgment is expected on an individual basis, too. There was the thesis committee in college who reviewed my eighty-page paper about—what else could it be about?—the genocide; and there were friends (the subject has a way of coming up if you are Armenian) and boyfriends, too, and God help them if they tried to tease or argue.
Recognition means all of that, but what it really means is the United States Congress, that mysterious holdout, at once powerfully stubborn and surprisingly malleable and, as of yet, unwilling to fully appease the Armenians. Recognition means an official shift in terminology by the US president and the State Department, and one administration after another has withheld reprieve. On another level of importance, separated by an order of magnitude that straddles the realms of the possible and the inconceivable, recognition means Turkey.
To some Armenians, recognition means reparations from Turkey: to the true zealots, land; to the slightly more pragmatic, money. To most, it simply means the official usage of the word genocide. To me, it came to mean that I could no longer stand to attend any Armenian gathering, because it seemed that whether it was a poetry reading, a concert, or even a sporting match, it was always, ultimately, about the genocide.
Or was it? At some point I started to wonder. Not about what had happened, exactly, and not about whether the term genocide was applicable. It is clear that between 1915 and 1923, in Ottoman Turkey, a history-shifting number of Armenians, probably between eight hundred thousand and one million, were killed outright or driven to death on the watch of a government that was supposed to protect them; another million or so survived deportation to the Syrian desert or fled just in time to avoid it. These events echoed but exceeded earlier pogroms against Armenians, in the 1890s and 1909. The violence happened in fits and starts and was entangled with, though not fully explained by, the circumstances of World War I; and was complicated by the degrees to which different regional leaders throughout Turkey obeyed or defied central orders. In a few of the hundreds of towns and villages affected, Armenian nationalist committees seeking greater rights or independence staged violent resistance, and as a result, about thirty thousand Turks and Kurds were killed by Armenians, too. Of the 2.5 million Armenians then living in the Ottoman Empire, a few thousand men in border cities joined the Russian army against the Turks. When the fighting was over, only two hundred thousand Armenians were left in Ottoman lands, lands Armenians had called home for twenty centuries. Armenians had faced genocide. And the empire that had contained and then expelled them was itself dissolved and reborn as the Republic of Turkey.
What I started to wonder about was whether “recognition”—propagating the usage of the word genocide to every corner of the world like a smallpox shot—was what we really needed. Arguments for recognition spoke of “justice” or “honoring the memory,” but these had turned into hollow platitudes for me. Claims that human rights were at stake seemed disingenuous; and when Armenian lobbying groups yoked the cause to a platform of saving Darfur, it seemed motivated more by PR than conscience. Then there was that well-intentioned but unattainable promise, the favorite argument of first and last resort, repeated over and over by scholars and laymen alike: “Never again.” That if a tragedy were recognized by the world, if massacre were transfigured into punishment and compensation, such a horror would not be repeated. Doesn’t all evidence suggest that this is untrue?
Let me put it less coldly: I wondered whether our obsession with genocide recognition was worth its emotional and psychological price. I wondered whether there was a way to honor a history without being suffocated by it, to belong to a community without conforming to it, a way to remember a genocide without perpetuating the kind of hatred that gave rise to it in the first place. And as I questioned the underlying needs that drove my own community, I wanted to understand what drove Turks to cling to their view. Why couldn’t they admit it? This was the simple (or simplistic) question that took me to Turkey.
In both Armenian and Turkish, a particular phrase signals the start of a story: “There was and there was not.” In Armenian, Gar u chgar. In Turkish, Bir varmis bir yokmus. There was, and also there was not, a long time ago, in a place far away, an old man, a talking horse, a magical kingdom. Once there was, and once there wasn’t. It is an acknowledgment not only of the layers and complexities of truth in a given story, but of the subordination of a storyteller to the tale she tells. It is my way of saying that this is where we find ourselves now—locked in a clash of narratives that confuses outsiders, frustrates officials, stifles economies, and warps identities—and no matter what was or was not, this is where we must begin.
Copyright © 2014 by Meline Toumani
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Author Explores Armenian Genocide ‘Obsession’ And Turkish Denial
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![Earlier this year, protestors in Los Angeles called for recognition of, and reparations for, the 1915 Armenian genocide executed by Ottoman Turks. Earlier this year, protestors in Los Angeles called for recognition of, and reparations for, the 1915 Armenian genocide executed by Ottoman Turks.](https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2014/12/26/486517113_wide-aea1f79fc5cb5489a3116379ec2f2567b6378f69-s700-c85.jpg)
Earlier this year, protestors in Los Angeles called for recognition of, and reparations for, the 1915 Armenian genocide executed by Ottoman Turks.
David McNew/Getty Images
Writer Meline Toumani grew up in a tight-knit Armenian community in New Jersey. There, identity centered on commemorating the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War I, a history that’s resulted in tense relations between Armenians and Turks to this day.
In her new book, There Was and There Was Not, Toumani recounts her attempts to understand Turkey and the Turkish people — people she was always taught were her bitter enemy. She also explores what she calls the Armenian community’s “obsession” with genocide recognition, which she herself harbored.
“There would be moments where I felt almost embarrassed by a certain deep-seated prejudice in me,” Toumani tells NPR’s Eric Westervelt. “For example, if a friend comes back from vacation in Turkey and they’re talking about it and I’m kind of bristling or brooding and just waiting for that to be over because I know that I can’t say what I feel — which is, you know, ‘I would never go to Turkey. The Turks, you know, killed the Armenians in 1915.'”
Interview Highlights
On why she decided to move to Turkey, a sort of forbidden place for Armenians
I’d have these feelings rise up in me and they didn’t fit anymore in the life that I had created, which was otherwise very progressive and intellectually oriented. And that was when I decided I kind of need to explore this. And through a series of events, it entered my mind that exploring it would mean going to Turkey, talking to Turks; not to try to take seriously the Turkish version of the history of the genocide, but just to understand how does it happen that another group of people have learned this history in a completely different way leading to a completely different conclusion? And is there any way that we can connect if I find the right way to talk about it, or the right way to listen about it?
On being attacked on Armenian-American news sites for taking on this project
It’s actually surprisingly painful given that I’ve just written a book that describes the kinds of attitudes that lead to that kind of criticism. … I knew that there would be people who would feel that way, and yet part of what my book is about is this incredible tension between belonging to a community and trying to individuate from it.
And it’s sad for me to see that some people are so threatened that they’re not even willing to engage, because most of the people publishing those attacks haven’t read the book. In fact, one of them celebrates the fact that he hasn’t read it and in the same breath calls for a boycott.
On how people in Turkey reacted when they learned she was Armenian
I was perhaps recklessly optimistic in thinking that things wouldn’t be quite as bad in Turkey regarding the Armenian issue as I had been taught to believe. … In some ways, they were even worse. The thing that shocked me the most was the fact that on a daily basis, you know and this is over the course of two and a half years of living there, people would find out that I was Armenian and sometimes the reaction would be so blunt: “Well, I guess you came here to prove that there was a genocide. I want you to know that I don’t believe that that’s what happened.” Or something like that. And those moments were really jarring and made it very difficult for me to ever really relax. There was a lot of stress in my daily life.
And I want to be clear, of course, that I also had the opposite reactions, you know. There was a young man who I met outside of a restaurant with some friends, just totally at random on a Saturday night, and when he found out I was Armenian he put his hand over his heart and he said, “I want to welcome you back to your country and I want to apologize on behalf of the Turkish nation.”
So I would have every manner of reaction, but to be honest, most of the reactions ranged from pretending I hadn’t said anything at all to saying something sort of blunt and harsh.
On where relations between Turks and Armenians stand today
It was a few years ago already that I left Turkey. And in the time since then, there have been some big changes. For example, on April 24, 2014 — which was the 99th-year commemoration of the Armenian genocide — in Istanbul you had several events commemorating the genocide openly and without any kind of the contorted language that you might have had in the past.
Also [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan made a statement that was very much falling short but at the same time really breaking new ground in acknowledging that something tragic had happened to the Armenians. And although he, you know, was very careful not to call it a genocide and to say everyone suffered and to use a lot of the same rhetoric that he has always used, I consider it a major step.
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Meline Toumani: Genocide and Narrative Ambiguity
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Born in Iran and ethnically Armenian, Meline Toumani grew up in a close-knit Armenian community in New Jersey, where the genocide of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turkish government in 1915 and hatred of the Turks were defining facts of life. In 2005, Toumani did the unthinkable and moved to Istanbul on a quest to understand how to remember a genocide without being crippled by it.
You went to Turkey because you “could no longer live with idea that I was supposed to hate, fear and fight against an entire nation and people.” Could you describe the process that led you to that position?
Coming from a family that was not directly involved in the genocide and that had a very strong sense of Iranian-Armenian ethnicity gave me a little bit of space to question and look from the outside. At home our identity was many things, but it wasn’t really about hating Turkey or being obsessed with the genocide. But when I participated in community activities, which was all the time, it came to me that this was a dominant part of our identity as a community. Since I didn’t have that direct experience and I didn’t have a grandmother who had told me some horrific story about what she had suffered, I had one foot in and one foot out.
So, without questioning the reality of the genocide, you began to wonder whether focusing on genocide recognition was helpful for your community?
I definitely wasn’t questioning what happened. When you’ve been immersed in something like that for your entire life, it’s a part of you. But it began to feel to me that the community was not psychologically well.
A lot of that manifested for me in looking at creativity and expression within the community. The [genocide] narrative was holding us hostage. As an Armenian, whatever you do has to serve that in some way–through your volunteer work or as a playwright or a musician or whatever. You’re not just addressing the history or the culture. You’re addressing this political impasse. A piece of writing that sets out with a political agenda is going to be limited from the beginning. You can’t explore its emotional and psychological dimensions freely.
Early on in my work I tried to frame it in a political way: “genocide recognition campaigns are bad for Armenia because it’s creating a climate in which diplomatic relations can’t be established.” I was trying to establish a geopolitical argument for why genocide recognition was problematic, but it’s more about an existential condition than it is about a political argument.
At one point you use the phrase “soft recognition”: the idea that you can make changes one person at a time. Is that where you started when you got to Turkey? I don’t think it’s where you ended.
I’m very glad that you understood that. That is where I started and that’s not where I ended. I had this vision that if there were just a certain way to portray the Turks to the Armenians and a certain way to portray the Armenians to the Turks, and if I could behave in a certain way as an Armenian among Turks, I could open up some speech where people would realize that the other side wasn’t so bad.
Then [Armenian journalist] Hrant Dink was assassinated. He was the ultimate case of someone really trying to connect and he was murdered because of it. Not in spite of it but exactly because of it. That moment had a huge impact on me. I was well into the project, and it really threw me for a loop as to what was I really doing here. Especially when I went back to Turkey and experienced discrimination and intolerance for Armenians every single day in so many ways large and small, spoken and unspoken. My intention was to be diplomatic and tactful and pleasant in talking to people and not offend anyone and not be too belligerent with Turks because I wanted to open up the pathway to communicate.
After two and a half years–this comes toward the end of the book–I realized I had to get out of there because I’d completely lost track of what I believe in. That led to a lot of self-questioning about what set me off into this project in this first place. The way I ended the book is that it really wasn’t about Turkey or Armenia or the genocide, but about how to find a way to individuate yourself.
Your title, There Was and There Was Not, has such a fairy-tale quality.
I’ve been waiting a long time to tell somebody about the title!
When I first started, the working title was “Silence and Madness.” The idea was that you have this overwhelming silence on the subject on the part of Turkey and this growing madness in the Armenian diaspora and these two things play off of each other. As I got further and further into the work, I realized silence wasn’t relevant any more in Turkey. Hrant Dink was murdered and suddenly there wasn’t silence anymore.
Then I was sitting with my parents at a café in Yerevan [Armenia]. We had been shopping in the outdoor market and my mom had bought a bunch of books. She opened one and started reading from it in Armenian: “There was and there also was not.” I heard that a million times growing up in stories. The previous week in Istanbul, in a Turkish class, we had been reading a story that started, “There was and there also was not.” I suddenly was struck that we started the stories in exactly the same way. I told my parents about having read that in my Turkish workbook. My dad said, “That’s your title!” We looked at each other–you can’t say that because that’s like you’re saying there was a genocide and there wasn’t a genocide. Then I realized it captured exactly what I was trying to do with the book in all sorts of ways.
I felt at first hamstrung by the fact that I’m an Armenian telling the story and [thus] expected to be an unreliable narrator. I was really attached to the narrative ambiguity of what happens when someone tells you a story and they tell you at the outset that there was and there was not. The storyteller puts that on you from the beginning and you have to sit with it the entire time.
What do you hope readers will take away from your book?
My biggest fear, to the extent that I want to reach Armenian and Turkish readers and have an impact on the conversation between the communities, is that the people who read only the first two chapters will completely misunderstand. Armenians who read the first chapters will think I’m some kind of traitor and hate me for it. And the Turks who only read the first two chapters will think, “Oh great, Armenians are just as crazy as we thought.”
You answered in terms of Armenian and Turkish readers. What about other readers?
Often the immigrant experience comes to us in a cute package, like My Big Fat Greek Wedding. “Oh look at the funny old grandmother in her black widow costume and the aunt who’s trying to feed you.” That’s a very real part of the immigrant experience in America in a lot of ethnic groups, but it underplays the extreme existential crisis that comes from having that kind of bifurcation in your life. This is not a cute clichéd thing about bringing egg rolls to school when all the other kids have sandwiches. There is crisis in a lot of different parts of your life and your psyche when you have that experience. Perhaps I darken it a bit? –Pamela Toler
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There Was and There Was Not
by Meline Toumani
In 2005, Armenian-American journalist Meline Toumani traveled to Turkey–a place she had previously known only as “a terrifying idea”–with the intention of studying Armenia-Turkey relations for a month or two, three at the most. She stayed for two years, with the help of regular “visa runs” over the border. The result of her immersion in a culture she had been trained to “hate, fear and fight” is There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia and Beyond, an engaging and deeply personal exploration of ethnicity, nationalism, history and identity.
The conflicting Armenian and Turkish narratives regarding the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 defined the Armenian diaspora community of Toumani’s childhood. On the one hand, Turkey has historically denied that the massacre existed, or minimized the scale of the deaths. On the other hand, the Armenian community focuses substantial energy on campaigns designed to pressure the Turkish government to recognize the massacre as genocide. Toumani had reached the point where the dominance of the genocide narrative felt like an artistic and emotional chokehold. She set out to Turkey in an attempt to answer two questions: How could she honor her history without being suffocated by it, and why do Turks cling to their version of the events of 1915?
Toumani brings the reader along on a voyage of discovery that begins with her growing doubts about the emotional, psychological and political costs of the Armenian diaspora’s focus on Turkish recognition of the genocide; it ends with Toumani defying rules about neutrality in the press box by screaming her support of Armenia at a World Cup match between Armenia and Turkey in Istanbul. In between, she tells a story riddled with unreliable narrators, unreliable listeners, lost memories, lost history, false assumptions and real places transformed by the imagination. She establishes the constantly shifting ground of her experience at the beginning when her plane lands in Istanbul and she realizes she has never imagined Turkey as a physical place. She is stunned by the country’s beauty and charmed by what she describes as the “particular sweetness of Turkish manners”; she actively enjoys learning the Turkish language. (The contrast between Toumani’s phobia about speaking Armenian and her delight in learning Turkish is typical of her skilled use of irony and reversal to enrich her narrative.) At the same time, she is repeatedly dismayed and occasionally enraged by the ways in which Turkey erases traces of the Armenian past: the opening ceremony of a newly renovated Armenian church as a UNESCO world heritage site that makes no reference to Armenians; a museum visit in which she discovers that hundreds of years of Armenian civilization in Anatolia don’t appear on the time line or the map; brochures and travel guides that describe Armenian artifacts in southeastern Turkey but never identify them as Armenian.
Moving between Turkey and the Republic of Armenia, Toumani shares her experiences of events as important as the assassination of Turkish-born Armenian journalist and civil rights activist Hrant Dink and as small as the street vendors calling their wares on the street outside her apartment. She finds friends and allies among the Turkish activists, journalists, scholars and lawyers who have taken up the Armenian issue, often at the risk of prison or worse. She speaks to millionaires, dentists and cab drivers; Turkish scholars dedicated to cooperating across ethnic lines and Turkey’s official historian; Turkish-Armenians and Armenians from the former Soviet republic; Kurds, Turkish nationalists and an ethnic Turk who refuses to identify himself as Turkish. She encounters Turks who are uncomfortable with the fact that she is Armenian and Turks who struggle to find a point of connection (described by Toumani as the “narcissism of small similarities”).
Over the course of the book, the clear-cut oppositions with which Toumani begins her project become more nuanced. Even the unity of the Armenian community itself becomes more complex as she examines the different concerns of the diaspora; Turkish-Armenians (described by members of the diaspora community as Bolsahay–a term that avoids describing them as Turkish) and citizens of the Republic of Armenia; those whose families survived the genocide and those whose families were not directly involved; and the ideological divide between those who support the activist Dashnak Party of the Republic and those who do not.
There Was and There Was Not is neither a history of the genocide nor an examination of its political ramifications for the modern world. It is the story of one woman’s attempt to understand her community, its fundamental assumptions, and herself. Written in a conversational style that is by turns heart-wrenching and unexpectedly funny, There Was and There Was Not will appeal not only to those interested in questions of the Armenian genocide but to readers interested in the larger questions of how individuals define themselves within communities and how communities define themselves. –Pamela Toler