Speaking to One Another - The International Raoul Wallenberg ...

“Wish they hadn’t left”:The Burden of Armenian Memory in TurkeyOne of our Turkish interviewees, in speaking about Armenians, made the statement quoted above:“Wish they hadn’t left.” This phrase is significant as it signals a nostalgic view of the past, whereby alost society of harmonious relations between Muslims and Christians is (re)imagined. This discourse,which romanticizes the past, also conveniently elides the tricky question of agency by implying that thesizeable population of Christians of this land “left” of their own accord.Nevertheless, this discourse of nostalgia, which emerged in the 1990s, may be viewed as a hesitant attemptto speak of a past suppressed in the public sphere for decades. Despite the public and official silence,our research demonstrates that individuals did transmit their experiences from generation togeneration, and that personal and local memory of Armenians is alive and well in Turkey. At the sametime, we choose to remember the past in terms of its significance for the present. Thus, in addition towhat it might tell us about the historical experience of previous generations, the burden of Armenianmemory, which continues to weigh upon the peoples of Turkey, can be regarded as a metaphor for oursociety’s yet unresolved and schizoid relationship with the recent past, with modernity, and with nationalidentity.Established in 1923, the aim of the Turkish Republic was to build a new, modern nation. The discourse ofmodernity was extremely successful in a society largely made up of immigrants who hoped to improvethe lives of their progeny. The Republic constituted a new beginning, and the generation of “Atatürk’schildren” was taught to focus on the future. Yet Turkish national identity also necessitated a new history.This history, as narrated in textbooks, focused not on the recent past, associated with defeats, violence,and trauma, but on the origins of Turks in Central Asia. Being Turkish implied speaking the Turkishlanguage, being of Sunni Muslim origin, and identifying with Turkish ethnicity. Given the multilingual,multiethnic, and multireligious character of Ottoman society, the insistence on a singular nationalidentity required many to either deny their differences altogether or to maintain a divide between theirpublic and private selves. This was the case for Muslim communities that didn’t quite fit the mold, suchas the Kurds and the Alevis. On the other hand, Christians (and Jews), who constituted an integral partof Ottoman society, were excluded. History textbooks made little reference to them, except as “others”who posed a potential threat to the Turkish nation.The degree to which individuals internalized national history through the educational system and themedia depended on their access to these as well as to other, alternate sources of knowledge about thepast. While the attempt to create a new, modern Turkish identity did produce a powerful middle-class15