Sometimes basic history is not what people want to
hear, it upsets the status quo. But, how does one present the history of
genocide without doing it in accusation form, as if “upsetting” the status quo
should even be a consideration? Fethiye
Cetin manages this challenge in a brief, very personal, and very powerful, book
titled My Grandmother: An
Armenian-Turkish Memoir. She does not restate the horrifying statistics of the genocide itself, but the facts are
just beneath the surface throughout her book, visible to all who care to focus
their eyes. Her goal is to tell the story, and get on with the reality of
today.
The genocide of 1.5 million Armenians in eastern Turkey
during World War I by the fading Ottoman Empire remains a hot topic even today,
and the official response is denial – not that people died, but that it should
be termed a genocide. As a response, it
is an attempt to distinguish between war-related mass murder, and an attempt to
destroy and eliminate a culture. By
detailing not only what happened, but also what came after, Cetin debunks the
denial.
What comes after in the case of her Grandmother, is the memory
of what happened, suppressed by the day-to-day necessity of what came next.
As the Ottoman Empire was under attack on all borders, an
out of control attempt was made to unify the country by making it “pure” –
ironic when one considers that one of the major markers of the Empire's power was its diversity, though not necessarily its equality. Cosmopolitan is the term one could use to describe the Empire, perhaps more so than any time since Alexander. Unlike Alexander however, they didn’t quite
understand the concept of assimilating cultures, they tried to eliminate them
instead.
In the case of the Armenians, some 2 million of them in the
northeastern corner of today’s Turkey, assimilation was not a consideration
even though they were Ottoman citizens.
As Christians they were suspect, potential/likely/probable allies of the
Empire’s many enemies. The result was a
campaign to systematically eliminate them.
At first the able bodied men of Armenian villages were rounded up, and
then mysteriously disappeared. Then the
remaining citizens were to be relocated to present-day Syria. Their property and possessions were seized and
“redistributed.” During the forced long
march across the country, anyone unable to keep up – those in poor health,
seniors, small children -- were left behind and then slaughtered on the roadside
when the main body of marchers were out of sight. Along the way, men who needed a strong woman
as a servant or concubine picked out their preference. When the group arrived, dramatically reduced
in number, those who survived were assigned.
The adult women became servants, the children were adopted, all were
forced to convert Islam. It was cultural
genocide by any definition, though not at all unusual in the annals of
history.
Cetin’s Grandmother was one of those children. She grew up as the adopted child in a then
Ottoman, now Turkish household. She was
raised in the Islamic faith. Everything
before her adopted family life became a distant and very suppressed memory. It was not until she was an adult preparing
to go away to college that Cetin discovered that her Grandmother’s name was not
what she thought it was; and so began her investigation of what happened to her
Grandmother’s extended family. It is a story of discovering a nightmare the world would like to ignore, while looking for a family history.
It is important to note that this book, while presenting the
facts about the final days of the Ottoman Empire, is not an attack on Islam or modern
Turkey. It does however, with commanding
moral authority, recognize that history is what it was, regardless of what
those who deny it might want you to believe.
