When Silences Speak

[DominO123]

That's the most emotional one I've read so far.

 

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When silences speak

 

OPINIONS

 

Turkish Daily News

Sunday, April 17, 2005

 

Opinion by Elif Safak

 

I first heard the word Armenian while eavesdropping on the

conversations of elderly Muslim women. Back when I was a child in

Istanbul, there was a small bakery my grandma would send me to for

the best yufka in the neighborhood. The place was owned by a modest

couple, a short woman who never smiled and her shorter husband who

always did. Coming home from there one day, I found a group of women

in our living room sipping their teas and praising the yufka of this

small bakery as they reached for the pastries. Then I heard one of

them ask, Are these bakers Armenians? My grandma nodded as she said:

But isn't it obvious? They are such a hard-working couple. One by one

the women shared with each other memories of the Armenians they knew

back in their childhoods in Sivas, Erzurum, Van, Istanbul, etc.

 

Trying to cross the information I'd just heard with my image of the

bakers in the neighborhood, I had this vision of an insomniac couple

baking all kinds of bread every night in their little shops. The scene

seemed pretty pleasant to me, almost mystical. Eager to learn more

about these people and their ways, I interrupted the chitchat in the

room and asked, who on earth were these Armenians? Since that day, it

is not the answers that remain anchored in my memory but the silence

that followed. I remember the women being somewhat annoyed by my

question, and then, annoyed by my very presence in the room. Although

I had been sitting in front of their eyes for the past half hour,

they had only now taken notice. Suddenly, I had become an outsider.

 

Recalling that memory, I tend to liken it to a widespread and

deeply-rooted reaction in Turkish daily life concerning the Armenian

question. We can easily converse about the Armenians in the serenity

of our living rooms, we can recall distant memories of a past when

we used to live together with our good old Armenian neighbors, and

we can even be critical of the Turkish state provided there are no

outsiders around. We ourselves, on our own initiative can and do

frequently remember the Armenian neighbors we once had, but we do

not like to be reminded of them. That afternoon in that living room,

I couldn't help but notice my interruption caused uneasiness and a

decline in enthusiasm among the women to keep talking in the same vein.

 

There was a nuance that equally remains etched in my memory. Whenever

she uttered the word Armenian, my grandmother lowered her voice

without realizing it -- her voice dwindling to an almost confidential

whisper. To this day, Grandma's intonation changes when she talks about

an Armenian, any Armenian. Clearly, she does not do it deliberately

or malevolently. When I ask her the reason why she cannot utter this

word aloud, she looks back at me in surprise. Does she lower her

voice? Sure she doesn't.

 

In the passage of time, I came to realize I was not asking her the

right question. When the word is Armenian, it is not the sound of the

word itself necessarily, but the silence that conveys the uncharted

depths of oral history of elderly Muslim women in Turkey.

 

I conducted the same test on the women of my mother's generation and

then the women of mine. The results were somewhat different. Younger

women in Turkey had no real difficulty in pronouncing the word Armenian

aloud, as if it was just any other word for them. They didn't have

any reason to pause because they didn't have any particular story

to tell. They didn't have any particular story to tell because they

had no common experience with Armenians. Somehow, somewhere, a body

of knowledge was lost between generations of women. Thus, those

who were young and didn't know much were the ones who would speak,

but, didn't have anything personal to tell. Those who were old and

had something personal to tell were the ones that kept quiet, and as

such, their stories could not be heard. In either case, the Armenian

question remained unspeakable.

 

History does not only mean written and documented history. History

is also oral history. The elderly women in Turkey remember the things

Turkish nationalist historians cannot possibly bear to hear. In almost

every household in Turkey today, there is a woman of my grandmother's

generation. The crucial question is: how can we ever bring that

experience out? How can we decode the silence? It is my belief that

if we are to look into the dusk of the past and shed light on the

atrocities we Turks have allegedly committed against the Armenians,

we should not only focus on the archives or written documents, but

also pay attention to the unwritten volumes of women's oral histories.

 

We need to listen to the suppressed memories of the Turkish

grandmothers. For, unlike the Turkish nationalists who keep reacting

against every critical voice in civil society by systematically

propagating collective amnesia, these elderly women do remember.

[Med]

It's hard to believe but that woman is the daughter of a Turkish diplomat. On top of that she is a very accomplished author. She makes very incisive observations and her books deal about human interactions and overlapping identities. I'm quite taken by them.