When silences speak
TDN
Sunday, April 17, 2005
OPINIONS
Opinion by Elif SAFAK
ELIF SAFAK I first heard the word Armenian while eavesdropping on the
conversations of elderly Muslim women. Back when I was a child in
Istanbul, there was a small bakery my grandma would send me to for the
best yufka in the neighborhood. The place was owned by a modest
couple, a short woman who never smiled and her shorter husband who
always did. Coming home from there one day, I found a group of women
in our living room sipping their teas and praising the yufka of this
small bakery as they reached for the pastries. Then I heard one of
them ask, Are these bakers Armenians? My grandma nodded as she said:
But isn’t it obvious? They are such a hard-working couple. One by one
the women shared with each other memories of the Armenians they knew
back in their childhoods in Sivas, Erzurum, Van, Istanbul, etc.
Trying to cross the information I’d just heard with my image of the
bakers in the neighborhood, I had this vision of an insomniac couple
baking all kinds of bread every night in their little shops. The scene
seemed pretty pleasant to me, almost mystical. Eager to learn more
about these people and their ways, I interrupted the chitchat in the
room and asked, who on earth were these Armenians? Since that day, it
is not the answers that remain anchored in my memory but the silence
that followed. I remember the women being somewhat annoyed by my
question, and then, annoyed by my very presence in the room. Although
I had been sitting in front of their eyes for the past half hour, they
had only now taken notice. Suddenly, I had become an outsider.
Recalling that memory, I tend to liken it to a widespread and
deeply-rooted reaction in Turkish daily life concerning the Armenian
question. We can easily converse about the Armenians in the serenity
of our living rooms, we can recall distant memories of a past when we
used to live together with our good old Armenian neighbors, and we can
even be critical of the Turkish state provided there are no outsiders
around. We ourselves, on our own initiative can and do frequently
remember the Armenian neighbors we once had, but we do not like to be
reminded of them. That afternoon in that living room, I couldn’t help
but notice my interruption caused uneasiness and a decline in
enthusiasm among the women to keep talking in the same vein.
There was a nuance that equally remains etched in my memory. Whenever
she uttered the word Armenian, my grandmother lowered her voice
without realizing it — her voice dwindling to an almost confidential
whisper. To this day, Grandma’s intonation changes when she talks
about an Armenian, any Armenian. Clearly, she does not do it
deliberately or malevolently. When I ask her the reason why she cannot
utter this word aloud, she looks back at me in surprise. Does she
lower her voice? Sure she doesn’t.
In the passage of time, I came to realize I was not asking her the
right question. When the word is Armenian, it is not the sound of the
word itself necessarily, but the silence that conveys the uncharted
depths of oral history of elderly Muslim women in Turkey.
I conducted the same test on the women of my mother’s generation and
then the women of mine. The results were somewhat different. Younger
women in Turkey had no real difficulty in pronouncing the word
Armenian aloud, as if it was just any other word for them. They didn’t
have any reason to pause because they didn’t have any particular story
to tell. They didn’t have any particular story to tell because they
had no common experience with Armenians. Somehow, somewhere, a body of
knowledge was lost between generations of women. Thus, those who were
young and didn’t know much were the ones who would speak, but, didn’t
have anything personal to tell. Those who were old and had something
personal to tell were the ones that kept quiet, and as such, their
stories could not be heard. In either case, the Armenian question
remained unspeakable.
History does not only mean written and documented history. History is
also oral history. The elderly women in Turkey remember the things
Turkish nationalist historians cannot possibly bear to hear. In almost
every household in Turkey today, there is a woman of my grandmother’s
generation. The crucial question is: how can we ever bring that
experience out? How can we decode the silence? It is my belief that if
we are to look into the dusk of the past and shed light on the
atrocities we Turks have allegedly committed against the Armenians, we
should not only focus on the archives or written documents, but also
pay attention to the unwritten volumes of women’s oral histories.
We need to listen to the suppressed memories of the Turkish
grandmothers. For, unlike the Turkish nationalists who keep reacting
against every critical voice in civil society by systematically
propagating collective amnesia, these elderly women do remember.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress