THE RENAISSANCE OF AN OTTOMAN ARMENIAN FEMINIST

Hurriyet Daily news, Turkey
Feb 12 2015

William Armstrong – william.armstrong@hdn.com.tr

‘The Gardens of Silihdar’ by Zabel Yessayan (AIWA Press, 163 pages)

The late 19th century witnessed an extraordinary flourishing of
Ottoman Armenian culture that has since been described as an “Armenian
renaissance.” The rapid growth of schools, social organizations,
periodicals and European trends led to a transformation in the
language and intellectual landscape of the Ottoman Armenian community –
similar to elsewhere in the empire.

Along with this cultural ferment was a new emphasis on the advancement
of women in Armenian society, and a number of women intellectuals
reached positions of prominence previously unheard of in a rigidly
hierarchical community. Although her name was almost forgotten in the
decades after her death in the 1940s, Zabel Yessayan is currently
experiencing something of a mini-renaissance of her own thanks to
a couple of new translations of her work by Jennifer Manoukian,
commissioned by the Armenian International Women’s Association.

Yessayan’s pioneering proto-feminism and her descriptions of the
social details of a fascinating period make “The Gardens of Silihdar,”
her memoir of growing up in late 19th century Ottoman Istanbul,
a fascinating artefact.

Born in the Silihdar neighborhood of Uskudar, on the Asian side of
Istanbul, Yessayan provides a vivid portrait of an introverted, deeply
conservative Armenian community and its characters. What starts as a
fairly unremarkable memoir develops into a more sophisticated portrait
of the artist as a young woman, describing her coming of age from a
restless and tempestuous child to a melancholy, talented young woman.

French and American schools were proliferating at the time, and new
fashions and ideas were shaking traditional life in metropolitan areas
across the Ottoman Empire. Yessayan’s father was himself influenced,
keen not to create obstacles for his daughter, open-minded and
encouraging Zabel to develop her interests and get a sound education.

Her portrait of him is as sympathetic as anyone in the book (there
aren’t many sympathetic portraits), although his spendthriftiness
meant that the household was wracked by financial instability. “The
days my father needed to repay his debts did not just arrive; they
exploded like bombs,” Yessayan writes.

As for communal relations, she draws a familiar picture of a guarded
tolerance being gradually, inexorably overtaken by political tension.

At one point her family temporarily moves to a Turkish village a few
miles away for her mother’s health, and she reflects: “A few years
later, it would have been impossible for an Armenian family to live
safely in an entirely Turkish village, but in those days there were
still no traces of ethnic tension between Armenians and Turks, and the
two peoples treated each other with a calm sense of shared humanity.”

Yessayan was born in 1878, and came of age at a troubled time. A
cultural renaissance may have been going on, but it was also
an era of accelerating social turmoil, and there are plenty of
references in this book to the plight of suffering Armenians in
Anatolia. Her growing up was simultaneously a process of awakening
and disillusionment. Reflecting on her time at one of the Armenian
high schools, she gloomily describes it as “just a miniature version
of the adult world that I would come to know, complete with its dirty
dealings, narcissism, hypocrisy, lies and selfishness.” It was, she
writes, “as if there were a courtroom in my mind where the people
I encountered and the things I experienced were subject to harsh,
endless judgment.”

Yessayan’s developing feminism was sharpened by the stultifying
conservatism of the community. “Those young women could not leave the
house by themselves,” she writes angrily, “some were even forced to
marry men they despised. They were not free to dress as they pleased
or behave as they saw fit. Essentially, they were deprived of their
most basic freedoms and feared that, sooner or later, they would be
constrained by motherhood – a fate they wished to escape in order to
create the lives they had envisioned for themselves.” Dismissive of
these tendencies, she had no time as a writer for the “sentimental
romanticism” that was the literary fashion of the day, and her own
memoir formally remains quite straightforward and undemonstrative.

Years after the events described in “The Gardens of Silihdar,”
Yessayan was included as the only woman on the list of Istanbul
Armenian intellectuals targeted for arrest and deportation by the
Young Turk regime on April 24, 1915. She managed to flee the empire
and almost two decades later ended up in Soviet Armenia, where this
book was published in 1935. Despite Yessayan’s prominence in late
Ottoman Istanbul, her work was essentially ignored after her death in a
Siberian labor camp, as a victim of Stalin’s Great Purge. Hopefully it
is now beginning to attract the attention that it deserves once again.

February/12/2015