WE ARMENIANS SHOULDN’T LET GENOCIDE DEFINE US
New York Times
April 17 2015
By MELINE TOUMANI
APRIL 17, 2015
ON April 9, Armenia’s prime minister, Hovik Abrahamyan, welcomed an
unusual visitor to his office. His guest might have blended in with
the locals were it not for the film crew and bodyguards around her.
But she was not just any Armenian, she was the world’s most famous
person of Armenian origin: Kim Kardashian.
Ms. Kardashian, the reality-television star, flanked by her sister
Khloe and two cousins, managed to look demure and even deferential,
peering up at the prime minister and his colleagues across a conference
table. Afterward, Mr. Abrahamyan hailed the Kardashian family’s
contribution to international recognition of the Armenian genocide
of 1915, a tragedy in which two-thirds of the Armenian population of
Ottoman Turkey was deported or massacred by the Ottoman government.
The head of the Armenian lobby in Washington, Aram Hamparian,
approvingly told Yahoo that the Kardashians “were welcomed home as
heroes.” The head of Armenia’s Parliament, Galust Sahakyan, told
reporters, “We should be proud.”
The Kardashian grand tour, which will be featured in a coming episode
of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” came just two weeks before with
the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, which is commemorated
on April 24, the date in 1915 when the ethnic cleansing began.
The visit has already gotten Armenia more attention in the
international press than it has had in many years. But the Kardashians
were not always so beloved by their compatriots; when they first
entered the public eye, Armenians around the world expressed feelings
ranging from shame to horror. Armenian culture is deeply conservative,
even prudish, so there could be no less likely hero for this tiny
nation and its diaspora than a woman who is perhaps best known for her
outlandish personal life and erotically charged public image. But now,
with the genocide centennial approaching, as an Armenian friend of mine
succinctly explained it on Facebook this week, “Nothing else matters.”
I am an Armenian-American born in Iran. Watching the dubious
intersection of celebrity worship and genocide commemoration, I
couldn’t help but reflect on some of the less obvious things Armenians
have lost since 1915: not just people and property, but a kind of
existential confidence. The genocide recognition campaign itself,
in the name of restoring Armenia’s losses, has been so all-consuming
as to stand in the way of other kinds of development — in Armenia
and in the diaspora.
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Growing up in New Jersey, I learned from a young age that the Turks
were our enemies, that a chunk of Eastern Turkey was ours to take back,
and that convincing governments (especially America’s) to label 1915
as a genocide (as opposed to a massacre, a catastrophe or a crime
against humanity) was our highest calling.
I recently published a memoir about how, as an adult, I came to
question those orthodoxies, which came from the Armenian summer
camps, youth groups and other community activities I was immersed
in. I described how such views sometimes seemed inextricable from
racism against Turks; and that when it came to intellectual life,
we had lost the freedom to ask questions and pursue ideas that were
not framed by the political project of genocide recognition.
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Although there is no shortage of artistic production by Armenians,
much of it has at its core a drive to guarantee that the audience,
in the end, understands that those people suffered a genocide; that
Turkey’s version of the story is untrue. Beneath this limiting agenda
is something even simpler and more banal: the desire to prove, as the
poet Paruyr Sevak wrote in a line Armenians cling to like a pep-rally
cry, “We exist and we shall live on.”
Eventually, I moved to Turkey — both to challenge the dehumanized
view of Turks I knew I held within me and also to understand how Turks
could cling so relentlessly to a false version of history. I was fed
up with the intractable dynamics of the conflict. In addition to its
psychological and emotional consequences, it had real geopolitical
stakes for the Republic of Armenia, whose border with Turkey remains
closed — depriving it of much-needed trade opportunities.
But even before my book was published, the attacks against it — and
me — began. Surprisingly, those attacks came not from Turks but from
Armenians. Two of the largest Armenian diaspora newspapers, Asbarez
and The Armenian Weekly, published hatchet jobs. One columnist called
for a boycott of my book, while proudly declaring that he had not read
a page of it. In comment threads, people questioned who had funded my
two-year stay in Turkey: Was it the Turkish government? Maybe Israel?
The central theme was that I was a self-hating Armenian.
The accusation of self-hatred has long been used by Jews against
other Jews; those critical of Israel’s policies are often branded
with the label. And Armenians and Jews have much in common: small
nations with long memories of past glory; centuries of living as
minorities among Muslims; modern-day homelands that serve as beacons
for dispersed peoples. The poet Osip Mandelstam once called Armenians
“the younger sister to the Jewish nation.” But the tendency to accuse
their own members of self-hatred is a toxic habit that both groups
would do well to let go of altogether.
The self-hating label has been deployed by blacks, Mexicans, Indians
and Asians too. The idea is that you are embarrassed by your true
nature — your ethnic nature — and so you mock it or speak out
against it. The label is used not to engage in meaningful criticism,
but to dismiss such criticism by chalking it up to shame. And yet the
behavior labeled self-hating often reflects the opposite of shame;
it reflects confidence.
This is a kind of confidence that, sadly, dispersed nations and
minority groups generally have in short supply. Diasporas are, by
definition, unstable, even when they seem like tight-knit, cohesive
groups. Over time, their members intermarry, their children stop
speaking the ancestral language, and eventually the markers of a
distinct identity fade.
Those who take up the cause of keeping that identity alive tend to do
so by insisting on a unity of purpose. For Jews, this has been Israel.
For the Armenians, it has been genocide recognition. The common phrase,
“Is it good for the Jews?” is implicitly present, too, for Armenians:
but what does it mean to be “good” for the Armenians, if survival means
blocking out uncomfortable ideas and clinging to simplistic symbols?
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
A Russian Jewish writer, Vasily Grossman, pondered this question in
1962, when he spent two months living in Soviet Armenia. He wrote
about Armenian intellectuals “who insisted on the absolute superiority
of Armenians in every realm of human creativity, be it architecture,
science or poetry.”
“What is sadly apparent from these claims,” he argued, “is that poetry,
architecture, science and history no longer mean anything to these
people. They matter only insofar as they testify to the superiority of
the Armenian nation. Poetry itself does not matter; all that matters
is to prove that Armenia’s national poet is greater than, say, the
French or the Russian national poet.” Mr. Grossman acknowledged that
“this excessive sense of self-importance” could be blamed largely on
those who “had trampled on Armenian dignity” and “the Turkish murderers
who had shed innocent Armenian blood.” Still, he concluded, “Without
realizing it, these people are impoverishing their hearts and souls by
ceasing to take any real enjoyment in poetry, architecture and science,
seeing in them only a way of establishing their national supremacy.”
For Armenians, the centennial of the genocide is an occasion filled
with anxiety and enormous expectations. It marks the culmination of
decades of efforts to convince governments, universities, newspapers
and other institutions to use the word genocide. One hundred years
after the start of the Ottoman government’s annihilation of its
Armenian population, the Turkish government needs to make a full,
public reckoning with that crime — for the sake of both Armenians
and Turks. This will require an overhaul of Turkey’s policies
toward minorities and freedom of expression, its school curriculum
and museums.
But even as Turkey must be the true agent of change in this conflict,
the Armenians have much to
But even as Turkey must be the true agent of change in this conflict,
the Armenians have much to gain by embracing change themselves. Too
much of the last century was spent countering Turkey’s elaborate
machinery of denial. “Whether” was the dominant question; “what now?”
got scant attention.
The next century ought to be one of harder, riskier questions — not
about whether the events of 1915 fit the legal and political definition
of genocide, for that question has been answered many times over. But
the question of what healing looks like beyond the use of a single
word; of how children can be taught about their histories in a way
that does not leave them hating the descendants of their ancestors’
killers. Of how a country can grow in meaningful ways so that there
won’t be a Kardashian-size gap in its national confidence.
Taking positions that don’t track with your ethnic group’s orthodoxies,
or indeed living your life in a way that is not defined by clan
commitment, are not signs of self-hatred but rather an indication of
learning to value oneself. And this is at the heart of what it means
to be not erased but fully alive.
Meline Toumani is the author of “There Was and There Was Not: A
Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond.”
From: Baghdasarian