Critics’ Forum
Literature
A Shared History of 1915: Fethiye Çetin’s My Grandmother and the
Turkish Memoir Trend

By Talar Chahinian

Over the last decade, there has been an increased interest in the
unraveling stories of an older generation of women with hidden
Armenian identities living in Turkey. This interest has been
augmented by the growing trend of memoirs, which recount the stories
of these women framed within the autobiographical narrative of the
grandchild.

Generally referred to as "cryptic" or "hidden" Armenians, these women
belong to the generation of genocide survivors who, at a very young
age, were saved, bought, or stolen by Turkish men during the
Catastrophe, the years immediately following the genocide.
Forcefully Turkified and converted to Islam, these women have only a
vague recollection of their Armenian past, which they have outwardly
suppressed for the sake of survival. The recent translation into
English of Fethiye Çetin’s My Grandmother, first published in 2004 as
Anneannem, offers a glimpse at these "lost" stories to the English-
speaking reading public.

In the immediate aftermath of the 1915 genocide and its deportations,
the Armenian daily newspapers that emerged from large refugee-center
towns quickly took on the role of institutions, actively
participating in and facilitating the reconstruction of social
networks. Amidst advertisements and public announcements crowding
the back page of the Parisian Harach and Abaka or Boston’s Hayrenik,
it is not uncommon to find a "Search" column, weighing heavily on the
page and serving as a reminder of the dark reality of refugee life.
With this column, the newspapers provided a forum for their readers
to search for missing relatives.

Indeed, stories of miraculous reunions with lost family members are
almost intrinsic to the post-Catastrophe diaspora’s narrative of
dispersion. While oral histories of survivors often highlight
moments of reunion, they just as often memorialize family members not
found because assumed dead. Over the years, what diaspora’s
narrative has found difficult to take into account is the case of
Armenians who survived as Turks. The encounter with the stories of
these "cryptic" Armenians can now be facilitated by a growing trend
in Turkey – the publication of memoirs that reveal the part-Armenian
background of their authors and, thus, complicate the notion of a
homogeneous Turkish identity propagated by the Turkish state since
the start of the 20th century.

Fethiye Çetin’s My Grandmother, translated into English by Maureen
Freely (Verso 2008), is exemplary of Turkey’s growing memoir trend.
As the title suggests, it presents the story of the author’s
grandmother, born to an Armenian family in Habab as Heranuº and taken
by an Ottoman gendarme in 1915 to the nearby town of Çermik, to be
raised as Seher. It is as Seher, a Turk of Muslim faith, that
Heranuº lives her life externally, while secretly longing for a
chance to reunite with her surviving relatives living in America.

Although ostensibly a story about family secrets, the memoir actually
reveals Çetin’s grandmother’s Armenian identity from the very
beginning. What unfolds in its place is a story of reconstruction
that oscillates between the grandmother’s funeral, Çetin’s childhood,
and various moments of the grandmother’s young life. Çetin
accordingly refers to her grandmother alternately as "my grandmother"
or as "Heranuº," often switching from a first person to a third
person narrative voice to emphasize the shift in perspective.

This shifting perspective belies the author’s own complex view of her
grandmother’s story and its circumstances. The sections where Çetin
recounts her childhood memories read like long dedications to her
grandmother, in admiration of her strength, her outspokenness, her
compassion, and her protectiveness of her grandchildren and their
ambitions. Aside from her role as the matriarch within the familial
household, Çetin presents her grandmother as a respected figure –
guide, mentor, and mother for the larger community within the
neighborhood. The sense of confidence and command with which the
grandmother carries herself seems to contradict the vision of a woman
carrying a silenced, hidden past that the already apprised reader
expects to find.

Similarly, the author finds it difficult to reconcile the powerful
and loving character of her grandmother with the story of a past full
of suffering and loss. When her grandmother begins to tell her the
story of her past as Heranuº, although Çetin relishes the act as a
sign of her grandmother’s trust, calling their new relationship "a
special and very secret alliance" (62), she also finds the weight of
the story agonizing. During one of the grandmother’s storytelling
sessions, she finds the interruption of houseguests relieving:

The doorbell rang; there were people coming. My grandmother stopped
her story there. And anyway, I did not have the strength to hear
much more. It was hard to keep myself from running out into the
street to cry and scream. I would never have believed any of this,
unless it was my grandmother telling me. (65)

Here, Çetin reveals the burden of the listener on the receiving end
of a traumatic testimonial. As a listener, she is aware of the vital
role she plays in her grandmother’s process of giving testimony of
her true life story and of the catastrophic events she has born
witness to. She cannot run into the street and cry, for she must
present herself as strong enough to receive the story.

Yet the burden of the listener is not only limited by the
transference of pain. It also consists of the imperative to act upon
receiving the story. As much as the survivor is compelled to tell,
the listener is compelled to act. In Çetin’s case, this imperative
is mandated by her grandmother’s specific request to be reunited with
her Armenian family members living in America.

Heranuº’s family members’ story of survival and settling in New York
follows the all too familiar pattern of dispersion by way of Syria,
experienced by most survivors. Her remembrances of the destruction of
villages and death marches contain images often told in similar oral
histories, or memoirs written by second- or third-generation
Armenians. Yet the grandmother’s own story of adoption by a Turkish
gendarme who could not have children of his own also offers a
different, "lost" perspective. After serving in her new Turkish
family’s household, she marries and starts a family of her own.
Establishing contact with her brother during their youth, she becomes
aware of her mother’s survival and relocation to the States. During
her lifetime, she misses two opportunities to visit her parents,
having been prevented to do so by her husband and his family.
Towards the end of her life, she pleads with her granddaughter,
Fethiye Çetin, to find her ancestral family and re-establish
contact. In return, she offers Çetin her story.

And Çetin, in turn, offers us the memoir. Whereas the revelation of
her grandmother’s past is presented as a climactic point in the
development of their relationship, her grandmother’s hidden Armenian
identity is not used as a tool for suspense in the memoir. If her
grandmother’s cryptic past is not the center of the story, we might
be prompted to ask what, then, does Çetin seek to highlight? During
the first half of the memoir, having convinced her readers that her
grandmother’s funeral scene is the present-now of the narrative,
Çetin then pushes her story forward, toward the end of the novel, to
a time beyond her grandmother’s ninety-five years of life.

Çetin announces her grandmother’s death in the Armenian-language
newspaper of Istanbul, Agos, an announcement that she reproduces in
the novel as well. Decades after the initial post-Catastrophe
dispersion, a community newspaper once again becomes the site for a
search. It is through a proclamation of death, a chilling semblance
to the calls made by survivors in the 1920s, that the announcement
makes a call to lost family members. Soon after, Çetin is contacted
by her grandmother’s sister, born to their parents in America. In
the final pages of the memoir, the grandmother is reunited with the
remaining members of the family she longed to see but never had the
chance to meet in person: her sister Margaret and her children. It
is a beautiful, if perverse, homecoming scene: an Armenian family
long settled in America, following their exile from Anatolia by
Ottoman Turks, welcomes the arrival of a young Turkish woman to the
United States and to their home as the missing link finally undoing
their family’s loss.

In this triumphant final scene, Fethiye Çetin’s My Grandmother
invokes a notion of shared history of genocide, which is otherwise
narrated through the set categories of Armenian/victim or
Turkish/perpetrator. On the day of her grandmother’s funeral, her
aunt’s sister-in-law reveals that her own mother-in-law was Armenian,
taken from the death march by a Muslim family. Criticizing her
husband’s family’s obsession with cultural purity, she claims, "In
the place where we come from, it’s hard to find anyone
without `impure’ blood – there’s no one with any other kind" (84).

What Çetin’s memoir succeeds in conveying above all is the abundance
of hybrid identities that Turkish society is made of. It offers the
reader a story of women, grandmothers of the author’s contemporaries,
derogatorily referred to as "leftovers of the sword," but remembered
lovingly by their family members as mothers and grandmothers or as
active participants of Turkish community (102). This is precisely
the revelation that Çetin delays: Turkish society’s private
acknowledgement of the past, which explicitly opposes the public,
state-sponsored narrative of denial.

All Rights Reserved: Critics’ Forum, 2008. Exclusive to the Armenian
Reporter.

Talar Chahinian is a Lecturer in the Department of Comparative
Literature at UCLA, where she recently received her Ph.D.

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