Ece Temelkuran is one of Turkey’s most prominent journalists. A recipient of the Turkish Journalist of the Year and the Pen for Peace awards, she is a persistent foe of right-wing nationalist currents in her country and has suffered death threats over her writings on the Kurds and the Armenians. Her most recent book, Deep Mountain, is a thoughtful reflection on the personal and communal politics of nationalism. Published in Turkish in 2008, and translated into English last year, the book explores ways of bypassing the formal politics of reconciliation between Turkey and Armenia through personal engagement between Turks and Armenians. Its value, in my view, lies primarily in its exposition of the subjective experience of nationalism and the ways in which personal and communal identity can become bound up with political demands.
I met with Ece in London late last year to talk about the book and its reception after publication.
What prompted you to write the book? What were you trying to do with it?
Basically, in the beginning, the idea was to speak to Turks and tell them about Armenians. Because they don’t really know anything about the Armenians. We are told not to learn anything about the Armenians and we are told not to be curious about the Armenians. So the basic idea, and the main goal, was, in the beginning, to talk about Armenians to the Turks.
But during the course of writing it the whole thing became ‘richer’ – it took on another aspect: retelling the stories of Armenians to Armenians themselves. Also, putting myself in the book as ‘the Turk’, ‘the traveller’ was about curing myself, as a Turk. Because I had been indifferent, numb to the whole issue. So I hoped that readers, both Turkish and Armenian, could come along with me and see what it means to be a Turk when it comes to the Armenian issue, and for Turks to see what it means to be Armenian. So while it was only for Turks in the beginning, it became more complicated.
You say that in Turkey people are encouraged to be indifferent to the issue – you write in the book that "a nation can forget en masse". What are the mechanisms by which this takes place?
There is huge propaganda in the schools against Armenians, but it’s not only that. It’s on the street, it’s everywhere. ‘Armenian’ is a curse word in Turkish, still. And when you ask people about Armenians, you get this blank expression. It’s like you’ve entered the wrong password and their brain just stops, and the password is ‘Armenian’. They go blank. Especially in south-east Turkey, when you see an Armenian church and ask about it people will say ‘oh, it’s prehistoric’, although it dates back only to 1915. And when you insist on this question – ‘this is an Armenian church’, ‘where are the Armenians?’, etc. – if they don’t get angry with you they will say, ‘oh, the Armenians are gone. They are gone.’ And if you ask, ‘where did they go?’ ‘They went over the bridge’. And beyond that, it’s blank again. In Istanbul there are many Armenian buildings and you don’t really see them or think about them.
It’s not only about Armenians though. 1923, the year of the establishment of the Republic, is considered to be Year Zero. There was nothing before that. We built up this grandiose republic, which was completely clean and completely young. It’s this quite ambitious attitude that was present through the nation-building process.
I was born in Israel, and there are interesting parallels. On the one hand, because the actual fighting is ongoing and because some Palestinians remain within what is now Israel, people can’t just forget about their existence totally. But if you ask about certain aspects of the history, of 1948, people go blank and say ‘well, they left...’, and so on.
Nations can forget, when it’s more comfortable to forget. The thing is, they don’t really forget. There is a narrative which is written by some ‘ghost writers’ during the nation-building process and memorised by repetition. But even though nations can forget, people don’t – they still whisper to each other about Armenians. When you listen to south-eastern Turkish people they will tell you about Armenians and how their ancestors killed them. But when it comes to national discourse, there is this blankness.
For readers who aren’t familiar with the issue, can you briefly talk about the current political situation between Turkey and Armenia?
Yes, I think there is a market of conflicts in the world. There are ‘hip’ conflicts and not-so-cool conflicts. The other day one young journalist was talking about Kyrgyzstan and how people suffer there, and how nobody gives a fuck about it in Britain. And I said, yes, because it’s not a ‘cool’ conflict like, for instance, Darfur, which everybody around the world wants to be a get involved with, and they fund television advertisements about it, and so on. The Armenian issue is not one of those top-of-the-agenda conflicts – it comes up only every 21st April, the commemoration of 1915. That’s why nobody knows about it – not ‘nobody’, but...
I think the selectivity is at least partly politically driven. So with Darfur, if ‘we’ are at fault it is through omission, through something our governments failed to do, rather than through active wrongdoing, which makes it an easier and more politically useful conflict to focus on.
Right. Well, back to your question about the current situation. Armenia and Turkey – although this conflict is not about ‘Armenia vs. Turkey’, but about Armenians in Armenia, Armenians in the Diaspora, and Turkey – have been engaged recently in a diplomatic process which has its ups and downs. When it is down both countries revert to classical chauvinistic discourse, which yields great dividends for both governments in domestic politics. Lately for instance on the Armenia side, they decided to stop the protocols, as we call them, for a while. The next thing you know the Turkish Prime Minister started threatening poor illegal Armenian workers in Turkey, which, I’m sure, made Armenians in Turkey feel like hostages. And that strategy always works, because normally Armenians are not the most loved community in Turkey.
On top of this the very conflicting relationship between the Armenian Diaspora and the Turkish state pops up every April 21st. Ever year Armenians in the Diaspora, in the United States, push for a resolution in the Congress to mark the date. Sometimes they are successful and somebody in Congress makes a declaration and then the Turkish state goes furious. And such things happen in European countries as well. So it’s not an ongoing discussion, but it’s more lively when it comes to April 21st.
Right now, in Turkey, is the Left a significant actor?
Absolutely not. At least five or so years ago they were present in the consciousness of working class Turkish people. Right now, it’s not even that. Nobody listens to us.
Would the Turkish left agree with you on the Armenian issue?
Yes, they would. Surprisingly the current government, which doesn’t really like me and who I don’t fancy either, would agree with me as well. They wouldn’t be speaking in a completely different manner, anyway.
What is the record of the current government on the Armenian issue?
It has initiated some diplomatic moves, but whenever something goes wrong, when there are downs in this diplomatic process, it immediately retreats to classic chauvinistic discourse, which I think is very dangerous, because each and every time you feed that chauvinistic feelings, when you use that discourse, it means you are keeping that in your pocket – you can talk about ‘Armenians are brothers’ and so on, but whenever you need it you take out that nationalistic gun from your pocket.
The Kurds have their own history of persecution by the Turkish state. Does this translate into solidarity with Armenians?
Well, when it comes to the Armenians the Kurds were also the perpetrators once. Today, politically, they have accepted their responsibility, while the state hasn’t yet. The BDP, a Kurdish party, offered such a declaration, acknowledging that ‘our ancestors did such and such to Armenians, and we apologise for that’. More broadly, for the time being, there is this undercurrent among people in Turkey, and it’s also true for Kurds, where people are looking back to try and discover their roots. And having Armenian roots became kind of ‘hip’. Now and then I hear people saying, ‘you know what? My grandmother had no relatives, so we might be Armenian’, or ‘I remember my grandfather talking in a weird language, so we might be Armenian too’. Especially after the death of Hrant [Dink, a prominent Turkish-Armenian journalist gunned down in 2007 by a Turkish nationalist], becoming Armenian started to be ‘cool’, and I think this represents another role for Turkish people – they don’t want to be the ‘perpetrators’ after Hrant’s death, because that killing touched their hearts, so they want to move to the ‘victim’ side by having Armenian roots.
After Hrant’s death there were huge solidarity demonstrations in the streets. You describe them as a "crack" in this kind of nationalistic discourse. But you go on to describe the subsequent nationalist backlash to those protests. For instance, you recall the school children who slashed their fingers and used the blood to paint a Turkish flag, which was then framed by the armed forces minister. What is the situation like now? Is the nationalist discourse ascendant or is the "crack" widening?
After Hrant’s death the Armenian issue was humanised. They became humans again in the eyes of Turkish people, or nationalist Turkish people. During his funeral, there were banners saying, "We Are All Armenian" and "We Are All Hrant". This is very, very difficult statement to make in Turkey. But the following day some of the newspapers ran the headline "We Are All Turks" – you know, ‘get yourself back together’. So that crack is for those people who are ready to receive the message coming from Hrant and from his death. I don’t think it changed the whole nation into a different country, but there were people who were ready to understand this issue, and who didn’t know anything about it, and who were used to neglecting the issue, and this was for them. Now they are speaking about it and thinking about it, so there is a crack still, but we still have a long way to go. Because as I said, the word ‘Armenian’ is a still used as a curse.
In term of the process of writing the book – what was it like travelling through and speaking with all these Armenian communities? How did your being a Turk affect the experience?
The journey and the writing were different from each other. The journey itself was Hrant’s idea, not mine at all, because I was just back from Kurdistan in Northern Iraq and I’d had enough hate mail already for mentioning the name ‘Kurdistan’. And he said ‘why don’t you go to Armenia and do the same thing for Armenians?’ In Kurdistan I wrote about people’s daily lives, not the high politics of the situation. So I did, and when I came back I was getting this hate mail – ‘how dare you, you make them look like human beings’. Many Turks were angry with me, because I ‘made’ Armenians look like human beings. But throughout, I never thought of myself as ‘Turk’. Turkish intellectuals hesitate to call themselves ‘Turks’ – actually we never do, because it has connotations of that kind of national identity which is seriously problematic. We prefer to describe ourselves as ‘from Turkey’ or even ‘from Istanbul’. But although I’d never thought of myself that way, in Armenia that’s the first thing I was – a ‘Turk’.
In France or in the US, during the journey, I never saw myself as being contaminated by nationalism. But in realising my own numbness to the Armenian issue, I understood that I was contaminated as well. And nobody is immune to this in Turkey – or it’s not easy to be immune, let’s put it that way. So the journey was for me an inner journey as well.
Writing the book was intellectually challenging as well, because there was this ontological security issue. Although I don’t represent anyone but me, I was coming from the ‘side’ of the perpetrator, and I was telling the story of the oppressed. So do I have the right to do that? How should I do that? During my time in Oxford Bernhard Schlink, the writer of The Reader – he’s a German jurist and an author – was there giving seminars on collective memory and collective guilt, and I joined one of them. He was talking about his guilt, and his generation’s guilt, over the Holocaust. After a while, following the speech, a Palestinian Oxford student asked him what he thought about the ‘Holocaust industry’, and he said ‘there is no such thing’. I asked a question, ‘what do you think about the fact that a nation is building up its hostile foreign policy on your feeling of guilt?’ He said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ – no, he said ‘I cannot talk about it, because I am German.’ So that was a great example of this phenomenon where if you’re coming from the perpetrator’s side you’re obliged to shut up and not talk about it. And I don’t think that’s correct – we should talk about it.
During my stay in Oxford I also understood, thinking back through all these interviews, that while we should talk as Turks about how we feel, more important is that we should listen to Armenians. So during the writing process I wanted to explain the story of me listening to Armenians. When the book was published in English that was the first time that I talked to Armenians who’d read the book. They read their own stories through me. I met them in London and the United States, where I gave talks at Harvard, Tufts, Michigan, etc., and it seemed that listening to their stories related by a Turk, and reading how this Turk tried to understand their story, made them feel, as far as I observed, quite relieved.
The Armenian reaction was positive?
Yes, especially the people who came to the speeches, and who wrote to me. But there is one rather interesting thing about the reaction. There is an email chain called ‘WATS’. It’s mostly intellectuals – or semi-intellectuals – who are extremely engaged in this issue, and I’m told that there are people on it who hate this book, sometimes without reading it. Apparently there is this weird discussion going on about the book: somebody is defending it – this is among Armenians – and some people are hating it because it is written by a Turk, and so on and so forth. But I wrote the book for common people, not really for the intellectuals who are already engaged in this and who already know all the factual details. The book can be helpful to those academics, but I targeted it at common people because it’s common people who will be solving this problem – or at least, if it’s solved on a diplomatic scale, they should be ready to embrace this solution.
In the book you don’t really take a position yourself on whether to call what Turkey did to the Armenians in 1915 a genocide – when you use the word, it’s in quotation marks. Obviously that was an unavoidable decision you faced when you decided to write about the topic – how to refer to what happened in 1915. What was behind your decision?
Normally terminology is used to make conversation easier. But in this case it’s not making conversation easier, it’s making it impossible. Terminology becomes an obstacle between two parties. That’s why I wanted to go beyond it and talk about the stories behind it – the whole purpose of the book was to go beyond the terminology. So if you ask me why, I would show you the book again.
But there is something which really touched me. During all these speeches, none of the Armenians asked me that question. How about that? I think they are very mature people, at least the ones I know. I was expecting this question, but they didn’t ask it. All those talks were a kind of experiment, for them and for me, and there were Turkish people as well as Armenians in the audiences. They tried to speak to each other in a different manner, and that’s why every speech was quite lengthy, because both sides were eager to tell their stories to each other. And all of a sudden they were starting to speak to each other – which I was very happy to watch. And they never asked each other that question and they never asked me that question.
You describe how in some ways it is easier to fall back into the standard formal political way of talking, which would for example make a big deal of this terminology issue, and argue that it can be harder to look beyond it and talk directly to people as people. As you put it, "stripping politics of a human face obstructs dialogue". I’m not on this WATS email list, but I imagine that this is what some people might object to. They might feel that in your attempt to restore the personal to the political, you are escaping from the political altogether.
Well, high politics, not ‘political’ per se. I don’t want to be misunderstood in that sense, because I’m a deeply politicised and political person. I write columns, and books, and they’re all politics – and this book is very political as well, in my view. But having only that discourse, I cannot take seriously. For instance, some Armenians claim some Turks are trying to distance themselves from the whole conflict and push away the whole issue. But in using the completely politicised discourse, they’re doing the same thing – they’re putting the whole story out there, but they are distant from it. So I want to personalise the story on both sides. I know that might be hard for Armenians, because it’s like meeting your torturer. Pirelian in Paris talked about this. Every Armenian is afraid of meeting a Turk – it’s not that they’re afraid of the Turk, it’s that they’re afraid of what they’re going to feel. So making it personal might be hard for Armenians, as it is for Turks. But we should do it, because once we do it will all become easier. And the personal is completely political, anyway.
You write a lot about the power of ‘stories’ to shape people’s identities and conceptions of themselves. Why do you think some stories gain greater purchase with people than others? There are always alternative ‘narratives’, so why do you think, say, the hardline nationalist one has gained so much purchase in Armenia?
Not only in Armenia – it’s always like that, because people find it easier to be angry than to be sad. Anger makes you stand up, it’s galvanising. So that’s why nationalist narrative, which most of the time depends on anger, has a stronger impact on people. Also, in this conflict people who are ready to speak about their sorrow, or about their concerns, or about their contradictions, and so on, are always smothered with a blanket of national narrative, on both sides. That’s why I wanted to go back to the personal stories, where the real memory lives.
The picture you paint of Armenia is of a country in transition from the Soviet system. You describe the older generations in particular as a bit lost and confused by the pace of change. Do you think in these circumstances nationalism, and more specifically the genocide issue, represents a kind of security blanket? Do you think, in other words, that the transition to capitalism has strengthened the appeal of nationalism? Because on the other hand, you also talk about "the reality of poverty trumping the abstraction of betrayal".
About this transition: even if the regime is fascism, when the regime collapses, the most tragic thing is to watch people trying to adjust. I think this has always been the same, e.g. in Germany or in the Soviet Union, it’s so tragic when heroes of the country and of the regime and of the public one day become the enemies of humanity the next. Armenia is going through a similar process at the moment, and I think these changes create really tragic stories.
But coming to your question: yes, I think you’re right. Nationalism and the ‘genocide issue’ have this stabilising function during the transition. But I really don’t want to exaggerate this, because there is a widely used propaganda trope in Turkey saying that ‘oh Armenians, they are poor and that’s why they don’t talk about genocide, so you see, if poverty can wipe off that narrative of genocide it’s obviously not really correct’. Or else the propaganda goes like this: ‘Armenians in Armenia, they don’t talk about genocide, you see? It’s just those troublemakers in the Diaspora who are doing it just to hurt the interests of Turkey or to block Turkey’s accession to the EU. So you see? It’s the Bad Armenians in the Diaspora who talk about genocide, not the Good Armenians here in Armenia or in Istanbul.’ I don’t want to feed this propaganda. But yes, there is some truth there – this country is landlocked, it’s going through painful transition. Moreover I think, being so close to Turkey, there is an unspoken connection. Although the border is closed – well, it’s not actually closed, I flew to Yerevan, everybody comes and goes, but officially it’s closed – having such connections makes it difficult for Armenians to talk as passionately as they might about the ‘g-word’.
Do you think that the Armenian-Turkish issue can be looked at in isolation from wider issues of economic security, social justice, etc.?
You mean like identity politics, or...?
In a sense – so, would it be possible to, for example, moderate the more extreme versions of identity politics absent some broader socioeconomic change?
I have always been bored by identity politics. There was some devil somewhere who created this huge trouble of identity politics, and it’s now all over the world with people killing each other over it. I miss those Good Old Days where class struggle was the main issue. But the left must create a new discourse to overcome this adolescent politics, so I’m trying to contribute to that as a ‘democratic socialist’. This is my personal challenge – I’m trying to put something into that, and because I’m a leftist it’s a leftist discourse, it’s personal, it’s feminist, and it’s universalist.
You identify yourself in the book as a "democratic socialist" and an "internationalist" but you nonetheless describe how "you are compelled to love your country". Do you think it’s possible to have a kind of progressive patriotism?
Great question. Nobody knows the answer I suppose. The nationalism of emerging nations or peoples are considered to be legitimate whereas the nationalism of already-existing nations is not. But ‘patriotism’ is a narrow word. I think a love of people, loving the people in general, must have a universal approach to it. But again, there is this narrative, or story, that binds you with people – my mother and father were both leftists and they were speaking about the ‘people’ in a quite abstract context, but they were speaking about people, so I was taught to love people and to care about them and to have concerns about them. So it’s rather a way of being brought up, I guess – I cannot get rid of it, loving my ‘own people’, even if it’s not legitimate. Although they kind of hate me.
Well, you talked at the end of the book about how in foreign translations of books some words remain italicised and in the original language, because the concept is so distinct to the original culture that no translation could be found. So it’s kind a shared understanding that comes from growing up together.
Yes, and it’s from being part of the same story, so you don’t have to itemise all the funny words, and so on.
A big theme in the book is shared suffering as the basis of communal identity. You discovered this in the Armenian community, where the genocide provides a strong common point of reference, but not only there. So for instance, after Hrant was killed, you and a friend "embraced through Hrant". And when you talk about Anatolia, you wrote that there was a gulf between you and other people from Anatolia on the one hand, and the rich Armenian lobbyists in DC on the other, because you had gone through "privation and pain". So you talk about the unhealthy effects of basing self- and group-identity so heavily on suffering, but do you think it’s inevitable?
Yes, I did the same thing. But what I tried to understand throughout the book was specifically the construction of identity based on a pain you didn’t experience. When your friend is dead, and when you see him lying on the ground, it’s you who has been through that and you want to share it with someone, and it has an impact on your mind, obviously, and on the lives of people who you know and who he knew. But the transmission of pain, and the construction of a narrative over it, is what I was looking at it in the book. Putting the coming generations into the experience although they didn’t experience the pain directly – that’s the interesting part of the story. And up to a certain degree I understand it. There is a choice for an Armenian parent in the U.S., for instance: you can tell your children about this thing, about genocide, and you make him or her a part of the community, a part of your people, and you see them suffer because of it. This is one choice. The other choice is: you don’t want your children to suffer, and you don’t want to transmit the pain, but when you do that you lose your child, your child is out of the community, out of the narrative. And when you’re out of the narrative in such communities, that means you’re completely alone. That kind of loneliness might be as painful as being a part of a painful story. So this is the choice, and I don’t know what my decision would be if I was an Armenian mother.
In terms of a, if not solution then at least some steps towards a solution – in the book you call for increased personal engagement between people on either ‘side’, but you also seem very wary of simply calling for ‘dialogue’.
I hate the word ‘dialogue’. It’s almost rotten. These words – ‘reconciliation’, ‘dialogue’ – they’ve been repeated so much, there has almost become an industry surrounding them. Moreover I don’t think people feel anything with the word ‘dialogue’ – the word ‘dialogue’ wouldn’t touch a person’s heart, and wouldn’t convince him or her to talk or listen to someone. It doesn’t sound very humane – it sounds more like the name of an international corporation.
So what’s your alternative?
Telling stories. That’s why I’m so much into these stories. I’ve been doing journalism since I was 19 & my main concern was to listen to the stories and write them for other people in such a way that they don’t lose their original essence. So I’m trying to inform both parties that each has a very interesting story to tell about the other. That’s why I personalise the whole book – because I want readers to personalise the whole issue. One, because I’m trying to cure the indifference among Turks, and two, because if someone doesn’t treat the issue personally they won’t be part of the solution – or even ‘steps towards’ a solution.
But do you think that’s really a workable approach on a national scale? I mean, I could understand that an individual might need stories to become personally invested in the issue and to humanise the other side, but in terms of a national political solution, do you see that as emerging from this kind of individual process?
I’m not really interested in high politics when it comes to this issue, because it’s rather fragile and inconsistent. I’m all about the ordinary people side to it – so yeah, I’m all about ordinary people telling each other their stories.
You argue that external pressure by other countries on Turkey to recognise the Armenian genocide has the effect of causing ordinary people to retreat further into a defensive posture. But is there anything we can do, do you think?
Some people think that pressure from outside helps. I don’t think so. Government-wise and state-wise, I don’t think there’s something to be done there. But people might like to know the story to help understand the very basics of conflict between two peoples, because it’s always the same human drama – there are aspects to it that can be generalised beyond just Turkey-Armenia. Peter Preston made this point in a piece about the book in the Guardian – that it should be read for its lessons about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
You’re a well-known journalist in Turkey. How reflective of wider opinion in Turkey are you?
Well, this book has become a bestseller in Turkey – amazing, but true. I thought nobody would read it, but it has sold officially more than 60,000 copies and unofficially more than 100,000 in Turkey, which is surprising for such a book. So I am ‘popular’ in that sense – I have a TV show, etc. But that doesn’t mean much – the Turkish media, and psyche in general, is not very consistent. It could change tomorrow. But there is some support, yes, and I’m happy for that.
Finally, are you optimistic about the future for Turkish-Armenian relations?
I don’t believe in the words ‘optimism’ or ‘pessimism’. Even ‘hope’ is a slippery word. I believe in ‘stubbornness’, even if there’s no hope.
'Deep Mountain' by Ece Temelkuran is published by Verso.
Originally published at New Left Project