Business Standard, India
March 17 2007
V V: Pamuk & after
BOOKMARK
V V / New Delhi March 17, 2007
Who can confront the lies and silences that lie at the heart of
everyone’s lives?
Turkish writers and intellectuals have been incarcerated ever since
Orhan Pamuk made his comments about Armenian-Turkish history to a
Swiss reporter last November, and although he was `let off’ (because
of his Nobel) others have been hounded by a resurgence of xenophobic
nationalism. Under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which makes
`insulting Turkishness’ a criminal offence, a slew of cases have been
launched against them. Maybe nothing may come from them (because of
EU pressure) but with the threat of retaliation always present,
writers have been gagged or at least taken to self-censorship. (A
Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor was shot in broad daylight in
January in Istanbul for `insulting Turkishness’.) Some writers have
stood up, like Elif Shafak, whose novel The Bastard of Istanbul
(Viking, $25) talks about `genocidal survivors who lost their
relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915′. Like Pamuk,
Shafak was eventually acquitted after the court agreed that she could
not be convicted on the basis of comments made by a fictional
character.
The Bastard of Istanbul is a political novel. It is spun around a
tale of two families – one Armenian-American (part of the Armenian
diaspora in San Francisco) and the other Turkish, living in Istanbul.
Both are burdened by dark secrets and historical tragedies rooted in
a common Istanbul past. The heroine is Asya, a rebel born out of
wedlock (hence the title) and an anarchist and a rebel. She shares an
old Ottoman mansion with an extended family: her mother, three aunts,
a grandmother, a step-great-grandmother and a cat, each more
eccentric than the other.
Asya’s counterpart is Armanousch, whose interest in her history is
woken up by a series of late-night exchanges with fellow diasporans.
Fired by her desire to explore her past, she travels secretly to
Istanbul and lives with Asya’s family. There she discovers that
despite historical differences Armenians and Turks have more in
common than not.
But there is one difference that separates them: the interpretation
of what happened in history. Specifically, what happened between the
two peoples since the massacres and deportations suffered by the
Armenians at the hands of the Turks in 1915. This was perhaps the
first example of what can be called ethnic cleansing or genocide – two
out of three Armenians were done to death under the Ottoman rule. How
did they react?
Asya explains that Armenians clung to history because `your crusade
for remembrance makes you part of a group where there is a great
feeling of solidarity’. But `Turks, like me, cannot be
past-orientated, not because I don’t care but because I don’t know
anything about it’. In other words, the past has been wiped out or
whitewashed. Instead of telling Turkish children that their Ottoman
forebears had killed one million Armenians, the facts were turned
upside down: it was the Armenians who had slaughtered the Turks in
far greater numbers.
Shafak tries to set the record straight. Armanousch’s
great-grandfather was a poet who was among the hundreds of Armenian
intellectuals rounded up by the Ottoman army on April 24, 1915, in
order `to get rid of the brains’. The recurring theme throughout the
novel is the need for the present to come to terms with the past
trauma, the longing for a firm identity amidst the rage and silences
that constantly hover in the background.
Who, among us, can confront the lies and silences that lie at the
heart of everyone’s lives, including our own? We need to do that if
only to come to terms with ourselves. We are all made up of different
selves like a broomstick that needs to be tethered to be of any use.
On a different plane the novel raises a much larger question: the
role of nationalist historians who see all history in terms of
victories, defeats, triumphs, humiliations, their own side on the
upgrade and some hated rival on the downgrade. And they do this
without batting an eye-lid, without being conscious of dishonesty.
Sadly, political commentators can survive almost any mistake, like
astrologers, because their devoted followers don’t look for an
appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalist
loyalties. This is what has happened in Turkey as it would elsewhere
where nationalists take over. To paraphrase Joyce, `history is a
nightmare from which we are trying to awake’.
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