The Other Side of Ararat

PanARMENIAN.Net - Yerevan gives the impression of a typical Soviet city, with its wide pedestrian ways, parks and architecture; while on the other hand, she is as lively as a Mediterranean coastal town, perhaps due to the summer. Yerevan dwellers listen to jazz; they like gathering in the Republican Square in the evenings to watch the “singing fountains”, accompanied by classical music. If an analogy is necessary, Yerevan resembles to Izmir regarding the appearance and life style of her people.

Until this visit, I was thinking that the Armenians of Anatolian origin lived mostly as Diaspora communities in a number of countries of Europe, North America and the Middle East. What I learnt in Yerevan is that around 40% of the present population of Armenia consists of people of East Anatolian (with its “inconvenient” name, Western Armenian) and Adana (Cilicia, with its “inconvenient” name) origin. Besides, the present day Armenia received migration from European and American Diaspora since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the constitutive significance of “Medz Yeghern” for the Armenian identity is not limited to this component of Anatolian origin. I learnt that being Armenian means, regardless of geographical origin, carrying the memory traces of this collective trauma.

I went to Yerevan to participate in a seminar program of society, politics and media. My presentations aimed to inform a group of Armenian journalists on the social and political structure of Turkey. But from the moment of my arrival at Yerevan airport as a “Turkey expert”, I realised that the matters were not limited with these aims. As they began to interview my colleague Dr. Behlul Ozkan, a Turkish foreign affairs expert, and myself, it became apparent that these journalists were not there only to be informed but also to produce news. And they were taking us very seriously. So much so that following my visit to the Genocide Museum, I even appeared side by side with Gerard Depardieu in the press, who had visited the museum the same day before me.

The questions directed to Dr. Özkan were mainly on Karabakh/Azerbaijan problem and the recent improvements in Turkey-Armenia relations. The questions directed to me, on the other hand, usually began with the word “genocide”, setting sail to the “inconvenient” open waters of recent history. Obviously, the purpose was to engage in a debate on certain issues with Turkish State and society in our personalities. As I faced these questions, I felt obliged to remind that I was there to represent neither the state nor society; but to avoid this discussion was not possible.

I realised the significance of this debate as I saw us hitting headlines in the press and appearing in the main news bulletins of TV channels. But the headlines and contents of the reports had important misquotes. For instance, while a headline quoted me as saying, “Ankara should admit the truth of genocide”, another news piece quoted me as saying, “the minorities in Turkey have enough rights; they do not need any more rights”. In fact, at the outset of our visit, we had agreed upon not uttering the word “genocide”, which we coded as the “g-word”. Moreover, I never felt the authority to invite Ankara from Yerevan to do anything whatsoever. While this sensitivity on my side, I had to suffer from a schizophrenic split in order to think that “the minorities in Turkey should not be given any rights”.

The most frequently asked question was, “what does Turkish society think about relations with Armenia and the Armenian genocide?” Instead of responding to this question with classical nationalist reflexes, such as “the ‘so called’ genocide cannot be talked about”, I chose to talk on shifting mentalities in Turkey at civil society level. I marked the reactions against Hrant Dink assassination, including the demonstration of around one hundred thousand people in Dink’s funeral, chanting “We are all Armenians”, as a dramatic turning point. I also talked about “We apologize” campaign, and the fact that for the first time on 24 April this year, a demonstration to commemorate the anniversary of the “deportation order” held. A reporter asked if I participated in these protests and if I signed the “we apologize” petition, and I responded with a simple “yes”. The next day, the headline read something like, “Turkish professor: ‘I beg Armenians to forgive us’”. While it was nice to be taken as a significant person, being perceived and reported with significant slips of meaning was demoralising. In the wake of each day, I passed my comments to the participating journalists on their reports and headlines but this did not help very much.

But perhaps these ‘slips of the pen’ could have been the unconscious response of the other side of Ararat to almost a century long silence and ‘slips of the tongue’ on this side of Ararat regarding the same historical tragedy.

I spent most of my time on the other side of Ararat by recalling the characters from Atom Egoyan’s movie Ararat. One is Ali, the Turkish actor, who plays the Turkish pasha in the movie inside the movie and who acts as if he is really the grandson of that brutal pasha in his real life, and the other is Ani, an art scholar specialized in the life and work of painter Arshile Gorki, who had experienced the “deportation” as a child. Both characters, although from opposite sides, had been shaped under the weight of the same traumatic heritage. But perhaps, most of the people that I met were similar to the two step siblings in the movie, Celia and Rafi, the representatives of the third generation.

In a scene of Ararat Ali says to Rafi: “Let’s forget whatever has happened in the past and look to the future”. On this side of Ararat millions of Alis are being brought up by learning to systematically deny a collective tragedy of the past. That repressed, disavowed and annihilated word, “Armenian”, can only return to the language in jokes and swearwords, that is, symptomatic returns of the repressed. Ali invites Rafi to look to the future but in every attempt to take a step forward the weight of this collective spectacle on his shoulders will continue to drag him backwards.

By contrast, on the other side of Ararat, people, like Egoyan’s young Rafi and Celia, ground their identity on extensive enunciation of the scars of a past trauma. Older generations, who had been collectively scarred, cannot repress, that is, they cannot simply ignore it, try to forget it. On the contrary, they ‘speak it’ to the younger generations in order to cope with it, and thus shape the latters. So much so that the trauma itself becomes a major plaster that unite the Armenian communities together. The memory traces of ‘Medz Yeghern’ probably constitute the major bond of Armenian social identity. On the other side of Ararat, so many Anis continue to transmit the suffering of so many Gorkies to so many Celias and Rafis. Celia’s attack on “Gorki and his mother” painting can be read, both as an attack on her own mother and a manifestation of the hopelessness under the weight of this traumatic heritage. Celia’s solution, attacking historical heritage in an attempt to quilt over a trauma by a trauma, is certainly no solution; just like Ali’s desire to forget the past without ever recognizing it in the first place.

The people of this side of Ararat have been haunted by the symptoms of silence and disavowal, while the people of the other side of Ararat are constantly surrounded by the weight of a social identity grounded upon extensive references to an historical trauma. I had derived the following conclusion from the story of the movie Ararat: Ali, on the one side, and Celia and Rafi, on the other, cannot and will not able to overcome the weight of the dead generations by unilateral attempts. It seems so that these two people need to get together and look at each other face to face. The precondition of this gaze is certainly not forgetting their identity, but to be able to move beyond the level of perceiving and defining their self existence solely with reference to given collective identities.

During my days in Yerevan, I permanently felt the truth of Marx’s assertion that “the tradition of past generations collapse on the living like a nightmare”. What I observed in contrast to our side’s silence, however, is the Armenians’ will to wake up from this nightmare, by speaking to our conscience and showing their collective scar to us, which they believe that our past generations inflicted on their souls. And, how about us? For how long more will we be able to maintain our silence; keep our eyes blind and the gates of our conscience shut to this call? For how long more will the suffix ‘so called’ help us to live with the ‘Ağrı’ of Ararat on our shoulders?