By Meline Toumani

A younger Armenian-American is going to Turkey in a “love thine enemy” scan that turns into a transformative mirrored image on how we use—and abuse—our own histories

Meline Toumani grew up in a close-knit Armenian group in New Jersey the place Turkish eating places have been refrained from and items made in Turkey have been boycotted. The resource of this enmity used to be the Armenian genocide of 1915 by the hands of the Ottoman Turkish executive, and Turkey’s refusal to recognize it. A century onward, Armenian and Turkish lobbies spend enormous quantities of hundreds of thousands of bucks to persuade governments, courts and students in their clashing types of history.

Frustrated by way of her community’s all-consuming campaigns for genocide popularity, Toumani leaves a promising activity at The ny Times and strikes to Istanbul. rather than demonizing Turks, she units out to appreciate them, and in a sequence of remarkable encounters over the process 4 years, she attempts to discuss the Armenian factor, discovering her approach into conversations which are taboo and occasionally unlawful. alongside the way in which, we get a image of Turkish society within the throes of switch, and an intimate portrait of a author coming to phrases with the problems that drove her midway around the world.

In this far-reaching quest, advised with eloquence and tool, Toumani probes common questions: find out how to belong to a neighborhood with out conforming to it, how one can recognize a tragedy with no exploiting it, and most significantly tips to keep in mind a genocide with no perpetuating the type of hatred that gave upward push to it within the first position.

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Extra info for There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond

Sample text

I thought of my own grandmother’s long journey into dementia; there were so many switchbacks along the way, and perhaps yesterday or an hour from now Adrineh’s command of her story would be entirely different. We moved upstairs and crowded into a small dining room that held a square table set for eight or ten. It felt like some kind of tea party in an eerie dream; almost everyone in the room was female, and several of the elderly women were seated at the table smiling expectantly at the visitors squeezed before them.

The men would be called martyrs and heroes, and about this there would be no debate at all. ” We sat in the parlor, waiting. Finally an old woman appeared in the doorway. She wore a polyester dress onto which ivory lace had been added at the wrists, and a pink crocheted shawl covered her shoulders. Using a walker, she lurched across the small room. She tried to smile up at us while also keeping an eye on her feet. When she reached the chair that had been set up for her, two members of the nursing home staff held her arms as she lowered herself into a tentative crouch.

The most attentive Armenian-speaking readers will notice inconsistency in my rendering of the Armenian oo vowel sound. I have rendered it u in some cases and oo in others, depending on my own sense of how a given spelling will be interpreted by an English-speaking reader. PART ONE Diaspora 1 When We Talk About What Happened I had never, not for a moment, imagined Turkey as a physical place. Certainly not a beautiful place. But it was all I could do to get through my first taxi ride from the Istanbul airport into the city—the first of perhaps a hundred on that route, as I came and went and came back again and again over the span of four years before I was finished—without letting the driver see me cry.

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