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

who came to Istanbul as a boy. These were silenced parts of the family’s history. Mete expresses his angertowards his father: “We watch the news; didn’t you ever say ‘We are Kurds too. Not all are ugly, savages,terrorists’ – using his terms. ‘They might be human too.’ The sense of inferiority of my father’sside. They raised themselves up by crushing their Kurdishness, by stepping on those at the bottom.” YetMete also acknowledges his family’s desire to protect their children: “I started to challenge my father butrealized that he also wants to protect me. Sometimes I become rebellious and want to hurt him.” Ultimately,it is the irony in the contrast between the performance of masculinity and the palpable fear thatis the basis of Mete’s challenge: “You cannot imagine how a man who is so masculine, fearless, sure ofhimself can have so much fear of openness and honesty. I am trying to reach his core, but he resists.”The biggest secret and source of fear in Mete’s family is connected to Armenian identity. He discoversthe debate on 1915 in Turkey as a high school student: “When I first heard about it, I thought, ‘Couldsomething like this happen?’ What genocide? The Nazis did it. They try to associate this with the Holocaustbecause we all know the Nazis and nothing else.”The color of her eyes was navy blue, violetWhile working on his project, Mete realized that the silencing of the fact that his mother’s paternalgrandmother was Armenian provided a key to understanding his family. By speaking to his grandmother,he learned more about Silva, who was renamed Şükran after her marriage to his great grandfather.His grandmother recounts in mythic fashion the context in which Silva was orphaned in Siirt: “Theprayer leader was preaching in the mosque: ‘We received news from the state, these infidels will kill us.We must kill them before they kill us.’ They spread this rumor. The Muslims started the massacre on Fridayas soon as they left the mosque.” Zabel, Silva’s mother, was a married woman whose husband andbrothers were killed. She was left with only one daughter. Mete’s mother’s grandfather was married toan Arab woman but had no sons. While his family claimed that this man took in Zabel and her daughterSilva as an act of charity, Mete questions the integrity of his motives as he soon married the daughter: “Istarted to think that Silva’s mother Zabel might have had an affair with Silva’s husband. For the womanwas very young. They rave about my great grandmother’s beauty. The color of her eyes was unique, navyblue, violet. There is always a reference to the infidel’s beauty in the family.”The discussion of Armenianness in Mete’s narrative is fraught with gender issues. Mete claims that oneof the main reasons the story of Silva can still be told is because Zabel repeatedly recounted her story toMete’s grandmother. Mete contrasts this with the cowardly silence of men: “My mother’s grandmother’smother constantly told my grandmother, ‘They did this and this to us, they murdered my brothers,they destroyed us.’ The women sit and talk and it remains there, maybe the kids listen in. But my motherdoesn’t recall her father saying anything about these things. Having an Armenian mother makes himthe child of a victim, but he never identified with the role of the victim. Men stay silent. It is this that Iam trying to break.” Yet having heard these stories does not necessarily make the women in the family33