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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 Tur-
key only as an idea: a terrifying idea, a place filled with people I should
despise. Somehow, through years of attending Armenian genocide com-
memorations and lectures about Turkey’s denial of the genocide, of boy-
cotting 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 fift h 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

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 4 • there was and there was not

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? “Th is
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, look-
ing 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 cer-
tainty 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 fray-
ing 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 Arme-
nian 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 Ameri-
can friends to try a Turkish restaurant on the Upper East Side, or to bris-
tle 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 nation-
alism that is not exaggerated?

***

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 When We Talk About What Happened • 5

When we talk about what happened, there are very few stories that,
once sifted through memory, research, philosophy, ideology, and poli-
tics, 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 cer-
tain basic facts of your selfhood extinguished. Your grandmother, who
loved you and soothed you, your grandmother whose existence roots you
in the world, fi xes you somewhere in geography and history. Your grand-
mother feeds your imagination in a way that your mother and father
do not. Imagination is farsighted; it needs distance to discern and defi ne
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 exis-
tence 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,

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 6 • there was and there was not

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 fi nd it pain-
ful to talk about—for me to claim that par ticu lar 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 Otto-
man 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 Tur-
key 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 psy-
chology of Armenians and of Turks, defines their educations, the devel-
opment 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

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 When We Talk About What Happened • 7

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, “rec-
ognition,” 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 state-
ments, 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 acknow-
ledgment 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 Arme-
nians. Recognition means an official shift in terminology by the US pres-
ident 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 incon-
ceivable, 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.

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 8 • there was and there was not

Or was it? At some point I started to wonder. Not about what had
happened, exactly, and not about whether the term genocide was appli-
cable. 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 resis-
tance, 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 Otto-
man 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 recog-
nition 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 geno-
cide recognition was worth its emotional and psychological price. I won-

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 When We Talk About What Happened • 9

dered 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 remem-
ber 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 sim-
plistic) 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 Turk-
ish, Bir varmış bir yokmuş. 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 subordi-
nation 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.

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