BOOK REVIEW: "REBEL LAND-UNRAVELING THE RIDDLE OF HISTORY IN A TURKISH TOWN"

2010/03 /03 | 11:39

media

The March 2 New York Times featured the following review of Christopher
de Bellaigue’s new book "REBEL LAND – Unraveling the Riddle of History
in a Turkish Town".

"A Look at the Snarled Past of Armenians and Turks" by Dwight Garner

Christopher de Bellaigue’s new book begins with the story of a
journalistic blunder, the author’s own. In 2001 Mr. de Bellaigue wrote
a long essay for The New York Review of Books about Turkey’s tangled
history. It was a topic he thought he knew something about. At the
time he was living in Istanbul and working as a foreign correspondent
for The Economist.

His essay had barely arrived on newsstands, though, before complaints
began to pour in. It turns out that Mr. de Bellaigue, while describing
the age-old ethnic conflict between Turks and Armenians, declared
that "some half a million" Armenians "died during the deportations
and massacres of 1915." Unknowingly, he had stumbled into bitterly
contested territory.

James Russell, a professor of Armenian studies at Harvard, was among
those who wrote to rebuke him. Three times that many Armenians "were
murdered," Mr. Russell replied, "in a premeditated genocide." Mr.

Russell’s letter to The New York Review of Books continued: "If
a reviewer wrote that only a third of the actual number of Jewish
victims of the Holocaust had died, or that their deaths came about
because they had rioted, or elected to make war against the German
government, would you print it?"

Mr. de Bellaigue was appalled at the tone of Mr. Russell’s letter, he
writes, and at the possibility that he had made serious mistakes. He
was shattered when Robert Silvers, the venerable editor of The New
York Review of Books, scolded him over the telephone for appearing
to be an apologist for the Turks.

Chastened, Mr. de Bellaigue – a talented British journalist and the
author of "In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran" (2005)
– set out to discover the truth about what happened nearly a century
ago between the Turks and the Armenians. The result of that quest is
"Rebel Land: Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town,"
a deeply unconventional book that is as much memoir as proper history.

It’s a murky and uneven book, too, one that Mr. de Bellaigue’s twitchy
intellect and acid prose can’t quite rescue.

Mr. de Bellaigue lets us know early on that "Rebel Land" is not going
to be, at bottom, a research project. "I would not pore over books in
libraries and faculties," he declares, nor will he "solicit help from
the Kurdish and Armenian lobbies." He decides to "go to the back of
the vessel and mix it in steerage with the forgotten peoples. From
them I would get the story, gritty and unfiltered, of their loves,
their losses and their sins."

What this jaunty bit of cultural condescension (mix it in steerage?)
means in practice is that Mr. de Bellaigue begins to spend a lot of
time in a small town in southeastern Turkey named Varto, in a district
(also named Varto) that was caught up in the turmoil of 1915.

Thousands of Armenians once lived there, and the ruins of their
churches linger still.

This place is a far cry from the cosmopolitan Turkey that Mr. de
Bellaigue knew and loved in Istanbul. Speaking of that urban Turkey,
the one that mostly prefers to deny its complicated past, he writes,
"I would now go behind its back and betray it."

So Mr. de Bellaigue goes to Varto and begins to poke around. Because
he is a keen observer and a natural satirist – I would like to
read a novel by him – the parts of "Rebel Land" that are akin to
travel writing are shrewd. He is good on people, observing one man’s
"flowery nose" and "grenadine complexion," another’s "white parabola"
of a mustache, yet another’s "precarious nail-bitten superiority."

Mr. de Bellaigue is a mordant sensualist, noting how a river flows
into "curvaceous oxbows" and how boots "sucked and popped" through
mud. He is particularly attentive to his meals, enjoying "mezes of
superlative quality," "a delicious apricot cake" and noting how one
local man enjoys deep-fried local trout with rocket and radishes. He
describes Varto itself as "this curious place with a name like a
cleaning detergent."

There is Kafkaesque humor, too, in the way the local authorities
trail him, and in the way he tries (and usually fails) to get the
locals to trust and to talk to him.

Mr. de Bellaigue’s peppery asides rub up awkwardly, however, against
the main story he is trying to tell in "Rebel Land," one that doesn’t
lend itself to pithy apercus. The arc of his narrative becomes lost
amid the place names and rumors and dimly remembered family stories.

He complains that he "might be told three or four versions" of every
event, and the reader begins to feel his pain.

This is a book that has a two-page dramatis personae at the front,
of the kind that makes your heart sink. Mr. de Bellaigue does not do
enough to separate all these living and historical people, to make
them distinctive, and they become a jumble on the page.

As his book progresses, Mr. de Bellaigue begins to limit his focus to
the crucial questions, notably this one: what happened to the Armenians
of Varto? His book becomes a kind of intellectual, emotional and
forensic detective story. He delivers, piece by piece, a summary of the
Armenians’ case against the Turks and he blasts the Turkish historians
who, he feels, have whitewashed a portion of their country’s history.

Ultimately, he writes, "the big historical question is not whether
very large numbers of Anatolian Armenians met with a violent end in
the spring and summer of 1915, but whether or not the killings took
place by fiat." In other words, was it genocide or merely the actions
of a few bad men? Mr. de Bellaigue worries that "a genocide fixation"
has blinded both sides to all shades of gray.

"What is needed is a vaguer designation for the events of 1915,
avoiding the G-word but clearly connoting criminal acts of slaughter,
to which reasonable scholars can subscribe and which a child might be
taught," he suggests. "By raising knowledge about this great wrong,
a way might be opened to a cultural and historical meeting between
today’s Turks, Kurds and Armenians, for they were not alive in 1915,
and need not live in its shadow."

The gimlet-eyed and sensible Mr. de Bellaigue proposes all this,
and then immediately realizes his cosmic folly. "But no; this is the
prattle of a naïf," he writes, "laughable, unemployable."