Meeting in the Middle: Armenian Genocide Thoughts, Part 2
Features — By Liana Aghajanian on April 23, 2010 4:12 pm
Greek and Armenian Refugee Children in the Sea Near Marathon, Greece. 1915
My grandfather died when I was 13. He lived down the street from our house, with my grandmother, among a dozen fruit and flower trees that felt like paradise. If the Garden of Eden did exist, I was sure that it was located in the backyard of my grandparents’ house. He complained of headaches for months, until one day he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and slowly but surely he became a shadow of his former self until the wind swooped him up and carried him away to Armenia.
He flew across the ocean, above Yerevan and went home to Mt. Ararat to rest in peace.
Off to Armenia he went. I know this because my grandfather was a very emotional man. A shoemaker with the most delicate hands you ever laid eyes on, he grew sunflowers and played with prayer beads the color of the Earth. My grandfather, who came to America from Tehran, longed for Armenia. His hazel eyes, shrouded with big framed glasses, would well up every time “Armenia” was mentioned. He could hardly finish telling me a story without being overcome with tears. I don’t think there was a day I saw him without a newspaper, trying to make sense of region that stirred such powerful feelings inside him.
My grandfather cried when you mentioned Armenia, and he cried again for those who lost their lives 95 years ago in the Armenian Genocide.
I cried that I lost him, but I never heard him or my grandmother instill any hatred in me about Turks. In fact, they didn’t speak badly about Turkey, the actually spoke Turkish. Originally from Tabriz, located on the upper most edge of Iran, they lived alongside Armenians, Persians, Azeris, Kurds and most likely Turks.
I never heard the word ‘hate’ from them, nor did I ever hear it from my parents. My paternal grandmother, born in Krasnador, Russia lived among Armenians, Turks, Azeris and Russians.
It wasn’t until I entered the Diasporan Armenian private school system later in my life that I began to see how much hate had been indoctrinated and institutionalized into students’ minds. From walks, to posters to masses to history lessons to videos and lectures and everything else, it was an identity that was being forged almost all the time on 1915. No one ever said “you should hate Turks,” but they didn’t have to. The seeds were already sewn.
I tell you about my grandfather’s story to explain that the heaviness, the pain, the sorrow is not any less in me than it is in an Armenian youth whose nationalism and disdain for Turkey is so strong, that he is blinded by it.
I feel it too.
And while I know that tomorrow, thousands upon thousands of Armenians will invade busy streets in Los Angeles, marching with shirts and signs and anger to the Turkish consulate, there is nothing I would love more than to drive down there myself, part the never ending sea of people with a lot of “pardon me’s” and “excuse me’s” and march right up inside that consulate to sit down and talk with the Turks who work there.
I will not march to demand recognition. I will not now or ever drape my car in red, blue and orange and drive down streets. I will not yell phrases about “dirty Turkey trying to hide the genocide.”
I don’t want a spectacle. I want dialogue.
I am not interested in politics. I’m interested in humans.
And I find it utterly ridiculous to protest so forcefully and so obnoxiously without any real interest in discussions and discovery. I want to ask those protesters, have you ever met a Turk? More importantly, do you have any interest in doing so? The majority would answer, “no.”
And the same question can be asked of Turks. Have you ever met an Armenian? Do you have any interest in doing so? Do you understand the pain, the suffering, the reasons why this continues to torture and haunt Armenians, even 95 years later?
Yesterday a friend alerted me to a column in Today’s Zaman by Orhan Kemal Cengiz that discussed the “pain-body,” a concept developed by Eckhart Tolle.
The more I read about this concept, the more I realized eloquently it expressed the state of the Armenian Diaspora.
“The pain body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you over, “become you,” and live through you. It needs to get its “food” through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence, and even illness.”
Once the pain body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isn’t really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others.”
This is the description I had never been able to put into words, about not only how, in a short period of time, I was made to feel in school, but how the general Armenian Diaspora feels, and still feels today and how this “pain-body” is eating us alive, stopping progress and change. It’s like having an argument with a family member and not speaking to them for 10 years. You live with that pain inside you, it stews in your insides and creeps in your veins and breeds hate. It does no one any good, not you, not your family member, and suddenly you find yourself having wasted and given up 10 years of love and laughter and companionship and trust all because you couldn’t just sit down together and talk about things.
I don’t want this.
I want to move forward. I want to be at peace.
I do not want a Genocide to define me.
I do not want a “pain-body” to breed fear and hatred in the minds of young boys and girls. I do not want this “pain-body” to encapsulate someone’s mind so entirely, that they feel lost without it.
I want to simply, meet in the middle, because Hrant Dink is gone and there has to be some lesson we have to learn from his death. There has to be some way we can keep building the bridge that he started and not let his exit from this world go in vain.
Armenian Carpet Weavers in Istanbul, 1910
Another friend, an amazing woman named Nigar from Istanbul told me about commemorations in Turkey happening today. A candlelight vigil will be held in Taksim Square and a documentary called “What Happened in 1915?” will be shown.
The black and gray website announcing the event, with signatures, is simple in its message.
“This is OUR pain,” it reads. “This is a mourning for ALL OF US.”
It talks about Armenians who lived in Turkey – the grocer, the goldsmith, the friends and companions.
On April 24th, 1915 they were “rounded up”. We lost them. They are not here anymore. A great majority of them do not exist anymore. Nor do their graveyards. There EXISTS the overwhelming “Great Pain” that was laid upon the qualms of our conscience by the “Great Catastrophe”. It’s getting deeper and deeper for the last 95 years.
We call upon all peoples of Turkey who share this heartfelt pain to commemorate and pay tribute to the victims of 1915. In black, in silence. With candles and flowers…
Are Diaspora Armenians aware of this? Are they able to see a Turk as a human, capable of understanding, willing to converse, and full of empathy? Or is the “Genocide Tunnel Vision” impairing any sort of break in the cycle?
In the essay, “Waiting for Tables,” published in the Brooklyn Rail, author Nancy Agabian touches on this subject. “Perhaps we have become so defined by our loss that we cannot imagine ourselves without it,” she writes. “Getting over this psychic disconnect is comparable to what Turks will have to go through, as a nation, when they admit the genocide and realize the whole of their history so differently. It will cause a great shift in the way that they understand themselves. So we have more in common than we realize: the impossible imagination.”
Yes, perhaps we more in common than we realize, so let’s meet in the middle and talk instead of shout.
Tags: armenian genocide, dialogue, peace, turkey, turks, turks and armenians
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8 Comments
Thank you Liana. Wise words.
My family was subjected to the Genocide. My Grandpa lost his first wife. His only son survived. Later Grandpa remarried in Alexandria, Egypt. If he hadn’t we would not be here now. My mother being the first daughter + 3 others. I am the 1st grandchild and only male. So Grandpa told me many a story about life in Kayseri. How in 1895 (Grandpa was 5 y/o?) the Turks came and took his older brother away. This brother was a tailor working out of the house. Yes Home business was alive then too.
Recently I had a younger Turkish man buy the property next door. I was apprehensive, but we became friends. I wasn’t sure how it could be, that after 100 yrs., when my grandparents lived with Turkish neighbours in Kayseri…I would now have a Turkish neighbour in Canada? so far away from Western Armenia. I did some work on the 2 houses he built on the lot next door. He has sold the 2 houses and moved on in the last several months.
We remain good friends. He (Ozgur) says “Gary we are friends forever!”
Thanks Liana for your compassionate writing!
G
Dear L,
Remembering the past does not always mean you carry along a “pain body” with you wherever you go. You can remember with a cool mind. You can remember because you like laws and justice. You remember so that you do not fall into the same traps. You seek dialogue. We all seek dialogue, but we don’t want to end up like Hrant Dink. We must remember so that at least the Armenians who are still in Turkey are not molested by “patriotic” shills. We must remember so that we keep reminding the United States to take on moral issues and confront them for the edification of America. We want to remember in order to erase the fake history that has been drilled into every Turkish student, amongst them Armenian ones who are taught that Armenians are back-stabbing traitors…
We also remember because this ethnic cleansing was different in intensity. Unheard of orgiastic crualties were perpetrated in the name of God…
Energy can never disappear in the univesre, Similarly, information can never disappear from the universe. This is a scientific fact. So whether I remember it or not, I know that the universe remembers everything and divine justice asserts no matter what.
You don’t have to be inflicted with Genociditis. I can smile yet remember.
I have a friend who started a dialogue community between Armenians and Turks several years ago called Opening the Mountain. Yesterday (Apr 22), KPFK’s Radio Intifada program featured a discussion on Armenian Genocide denial, for which she was invited to discuss the role of dialogue. If you’d like to listen to the program, visit http://archive.kpfk.org/parchive/
Scroll down to Radio Intifada’s “April 22nd” show and click play.
Great article! I completely agree with you. While I think it’s important that Turkey recognizes the Armenian genocide, I don’t think it’s necessary to dwell in the past. The two countries need to reconcile their differences and move forward. The Turkey of today is not Ottoman Turkey. I’ve met Turks – I spent a month on a 300-year old farm in Germany living and working alongside two Turks, one of whom took care of me when I became ill with the flu. The subject of genocide never came up because it wouldn’t have solved anything.
My father, born in the Armenian S.S.R., moved to the Ukraine and married my mom. His hatred for Turks and all other Muslims was seldom discussed, but in the past few years, as I’ve began to identify more with my Armenian side, we’ve had several heated debates over the issue. We’ll never see eye-to-eye. Maybe it’s because my father made sure to give me a Western upbringing, while quietly clinging on to some Eastern ideas. The best thing I can do is to pass on my acceptance of all people, regardless of race or religion, to my future children – who will be a quarter Armenian.
The Genocide has shaped our identity and is an important part of it, for some perhaps the only part that identifies them as Armenians. Not sure about the “pain-body”, but yes, it worried me as well – WHAT IF one day Turkey does everything we would wish them to do, what is going to happen to us then? Will we be able to “digest” that? Would our system be able to absorb that shock? Won’t this lead with time to total assimilation of those Armenians, who were born in Diaspora and never learned neither Armenian language nor had interest in the culture, and only thing that ever touched them is the cause they are born with – the Genocide? What will worry us then? What will connect us to being Armenian? What will bring us together?
Yes, it will be as difficult, as for many honorable Turks to grasp and accept that possibly they are grandchildren of some brutal animals…
I don’t keep anything against people of Turkey. I am sure there were and still are as many good Turks, as many bads. My family was saved by their Turkish servant. But how can we move forward, when the current Turkey actually identifies itself with Ottoman regime, by denying that crime? How can you forgive a criminal when he is not showing even a sign of remorse? But again, the criminal here is Turkey, and not the Turks in general.
And yes, creating a dialog with Turkish people might do a lot.
Reading this article was very refreshing. I have often thought about the pain body as it relates to Armenian National identity. What I didn’t know was that there are others who might also think this way. Thank you for making me feel less alone in the world.
There are too many generalizations to respond to in this article. The truth is that as with all people, Armenians have a spectrum of responses to reflection on their relations to Turks.
No sane Armenian can blame Turks alive today for the Genocide.
No sane Armenian should ignore the Genocide either.
To enable us to forgive, it is the beneficiaries of the killings that MUST make the first move, not us.
And finally, where did all your “dialog” lead you? Where did it lead Dink?
Having grown up in Canada immigrating here 40 years ago at age 2, I never had a negative upbringing of any human for race, religion, politics or other. My parents worked hard and did not bring me up to hate. My mom was a factory worker sewing garments, with a few Armenian – Turks. I say Turks because that is where they were from.they associated with Turkey their home where they immigrated from. They were my mom friends, they were older than her, but always treated her as a friend. Never a discussion of anything negative. They invited us and we invited them. When we bought our first house , Karanfil ( Armenian lady) painted a beautiful painting of a Mosque in Ortakoy Istanbul as a present, it still hangs in my patents house today.
I only started to feel the wrath of the diaspora as a kid in school when massive protests were going on by both Armenians & Greeks , it was 1976 I was 7. I never understood why these kids all of a sudden hated me. Why? What did I do? I kept dealing with this issue and one day I met a guy while at a bar and when discussing topics we came to the conclusion he was Armenian. He said ” You are my enemy” I said that strange I just met you and don’t been know you how is this possible? I bought him a bear and said, don’t judge people based on what you’ve been told to believe. Research your own history.
I could go on , but you get the point. I have never hated Armenians, I feel they, Greeks, and others that feels so negative towards me are really my brothers and sisters, we just have some growing up to do and learn how to live in this world together. Peace at home, peace in the world.
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