Books
One tragedy of many
Published 04 September 2008
My Grandmother: a Memoir
Fethiye Çetin, translated and introduced by Maureen Freely
Verso, 144pp, £12.99
Fethiye Çetin's granny: a modern Mother Courage
My Grandmother is an innocent little book, easy to overlook, except for the tiny headscarved woman whose eyes burn with accusation on the cover: an oriental Mother Courage. Its hundred-odd pages are to be read at one sitting - and, once read, never to be forgotten. Brevity and shape add to its authority. But who is this author, whom most people have never heard of in Europe?
Fethiye Çetin has herself become a Mother Courage in the Turkish legal system. She is the lawyer prosecuting the murderers of Hrant Dink, the Armenian Turkish editor gunned down in broad daylight outside his office last year. She also defended Dink when he was alive against the preposterous Article 301, for "insulting Turkish identity". Dink published an ad for her lost relatives in his paper Agos that brought back an answer from the US, and so her perilous journey began.
In her memoir, Fethiye grows up a fully integrated Turkish Muslim schoolgirl, reciting nationalistic poems at the top of her voice and never doubting her origins. On Fethiye's father's early death, Grandmother Seher takes her widowed daughter and three grandchildren under her wing. The illiterate grandmother expertly manages the extended family and a feckless husband, and sensitises Fethiye deeply with her kindness, industry and sense of rightness.
As she nears death, it is to Fethiye that she confesses her lifelong secret. She belongs to a people who are supposed not to exist in Turkey. They have no voice, no name, no history. Close to two million have been uprooted, driven from their homes and lands, forced to march across wasteland, tortured, raped and killed. The sheer numbers of their corpses thrown in rivers changed the course of the waters, which ran red with blood. In one, Grandmother saw children's heads bobbing out of the water only to be pushed under to drown by their own mother, to prevent them from suffering an agonising death. She herself is plucked from her mother's arms by a Turkish soldier, adopted and later married off to a Turk, Fethiye's grandfather.
In 1915, the Ottoman government and the Young Turks enforced the state policy of total extermination. Yet, 90 years later, this mass murder could not be mentioned without attracting the risk of punishment by law, hence the delay in producing studies, memoirs and novels on the subject of the Armenian genocide. The Jewish Holocaust, two decades later, far outstripped it in commanding world attention with lawsuits, a huge literature bearing out Hitler's gibe: "Who today remembers the Armenians?"
As Maureen Freely, the gifted translator of this narrative, writes in her introduction, Atatürk applied his cauterised official history to hide historical crimes. A triumphalist nationalist myth poisoned generations of schoolchildren with a distorted history and ignorance of their own neighbours - the Armenians, whose lands and property had been stolen. They were callously taught that it was Armenians who had massacred Turks, therefore "Armenian" must be the arch-enemy, a dirty word. So, these people remained nameless, that is to say, the survivors were given Turkish names and the Muslim religion, and brutally assimilated as "leftovers from the sword".
This book answers a question I have often pondered: "What happened to the young women, children and babies who were left behind in a Muslim society that could not tolerate their religion?" I, too, had a great-aunt who was abducted on the death march and years later was seen with blue tattoos on her face in an Aleppo market. Çetin intercuts her own childhood and adult quest with her grandmother's words spoken on her deathbed. She has a keen eye for tragedy and humour. Her family's provincial life has robust simplicity, charm and a blood-curdling coolness. Courageously she tackles the greatest taboo in Turkey. There are no accusations, no generalisations, yet she registers her inner turmoil. Finally, at the Muslim funeral rites, she yells out her grandmother's real Armenian name, Gadaryan, to the astonished mourners.
Most harrowing is how the old woman's pent-up craving for her lost Armenian family, which she knows to be alive, a craving cruelly sabotaged by the Turkish family she selflessly nurtured, bursts out of her at the last. How amazed she would be to see her own picture on the cover of a bestselling book.
Jews, Kurds, Laz, Alevis - today's Turkey is filled with people of mixed race who rediscover themselves in Çetin's Mother Courage and hurry to her to confess behind closed doors. Dink once said to me, "Who do you think is buying all these hundreds of books? We have over two million hidden Armenians here." As the funeral placards paraded by more than 100,000 Turks read, "We are all Hrant Dink. We are all Armenian." Turkey's disenfranchised people are awakening the conscience of the country to face the truth.
Nouritza Matossian is the author of "Black Angel: a Life of Arshile Gorky" (Chatto & Windus) and director of the documentary "Heart of Two Nations: Hrant Dink"
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