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 Khloé
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.
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.
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?
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 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.”
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