There Was and There Was Not by Meline Toumani

Author:Meline Toumani
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780805097634
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

13

How to Be a Turk

My friend Ramazan took out a pen and grabbed a napkin. He scrawled a map of Turkey on it, drew a large X at each corner, then slid the napkin across the café table toward me.

“The first thing we learn in school is that we are surrounded by enemies,” he said.

Ramazan was a photographer for a major Turkish newspaper. He had developed a niche for himself traveling to neighboring countries to photograph ethnic conflicts. A pious Muslim, he had a soft spot for religious minorities, such as the Turks living in the Balkans, but he was also broad-minded enough that he had gone to Nagorno-Karabakh and Yerevan to photograph Armenians.

Ramazan didn’t exactly look the part of the swashbuckling photojournalist: he was clean-shaven, petite, and as prim and polite as a suitor meeting the family at an old-fashioned courtship visit. His features were strongly Asian; thus alongside his swarthier compatriots, he looked particularly streamlined and compact. And if there were an ideological father for Ramazan’s work and worldview, it was neither Atatürk nor Attila, but someone closer to Mr. Rogers: he hoped that if he could frame the picture just so, we could all get along and the world would be a better place.

On this level we understood each other; we had met because of his interest in Armenia, and by disposition we were equally unsuited to conflict. On another level, we didn’t understand each other all that well; he didn’t speak English. He was one of several friends with whom I spoke only Turkish. This limitation kept our interactions cushioned by a haze of intuition and goodwill; it infused our relationship with patience. Patience was essential because over time it became clear that we disagreed about many things. I’m convinced that if his English had been better or my Turkish more complete, the full force of expression would have made our friendship impossible.

Our ongoing but always well-mannered argument revolved around the fact that Ramazan wanted badly for me to believe that Turks did not hate Armenians, and I wanted just as badly for him to see that he was wrong. I should confess that by the time we became friends I had been in Turkey long enough that I was doing the very opposite of what I set out to do: not listening but trying to persuade. In a Socratic style, I prodded Ramazan with questions that I hoped would make him change his mind.

The question that occasioned his napkin lesson had to do with a popular saying: “Türk’ün Türk’ten başka dostu yoktur.” The only friend of a Turk is a Turk. What’s that about? I wanted to know. Doesn’t it seem a bit extreme?

Yes, he admitted. But Turkey’s history was a history of betrayals and disappointments. And to understand anything about how Turks viewed 1915, he said, you had to understand this larger story. It went something like this:

Turkish schoolchildren learned that Armenians had lived comfortably alongside Turks throughout the Ottoman Era, because the sultan

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