There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond

by Meline Toumani

Overview

A young Armenian-American goes to Turkey in a "love thine enemy" experiment that becomes a transformative reflection on how we use—and abuse—our personal histories

Meline Toumani grew up in a close-knit Armenian community in New Jersey where Turkish restaurants were shunned and products made in Turkey were boycotted. The source of this enmity was the Armenian genocide of 1915 at the hands of the Ottoman Turkish government, and Turkey's refusal to acknowledge it. A century onward, Armenian and Turkish lobbies spend hundreds of millions of dollars to convince governments, courts and scholars of their clashing versions of history.

Frustrated by her community's all-consuming campaigns for genocide recognition, Toumani leaves a promising job at The New York Times and moves to Istanbul. Instead of demonizing Turks, she sets out to understand them, and in a series of extraordinary encounters over the course of four years, she tries to talk about the Armenian issue, finding her way into conversations that are taboo and sometimes illegal. Along the way, we get a snapshot of Turkish society in the throes of change, and an intimate portrait of a writer coming to terms with the issues that drove her halfway across the world.
In this far-reaching quest, told with eloquence and power, Toumani probes universal questions: how to belong to a community without conforming to it, how to acknowledge a tragedy without exploiting it, and most importantly how to remember a genocide without perpetuating the kind of hatred that gave rise to it in the first place.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780805097634
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/26/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	725,407
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Meline Toumani has written extensively for The New York Times on Turkey and Armenia as well as on music, dance, and film. Her work has also appeared in n+1, The Nation, Salon, and The Boston Globe. She has been a journalism fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, and coordinator of the Russian-American Journalism Institute in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. Born in Iran and ethnically Armenian, she grew up in New Jersey and California and now lives in New York City.

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Table of Contents

Part One: Diaspora
1. When We Talk About What Happened
2. Summer Camp, Franklin, Massachusetts, 1989
3. "How Did They Kill Your Grandparents?"
4. A Real Armenian
5. False Assumptions
6. "With This Madness, What Art Could There Be?"

Part Two: Alternate Realities
7. "So You Are a Bit Mixed Up Now"
8. "Armenians Are Killers of Children"
9. January 19, 2007

Part Three: Turkey
10. Paradoxes
11. Language
12. Knowing and Not Knowing
13. How to Be a Turk
14. Official History

Part Four: Armenia
15. Country on Maps
16. Hello, Homeland!
17. Reunions

Part Five: Power
18. The Narcissism of Small Similarities
19. Excess Baggage
20. Soccer Diplomacy
21. Terms

Editorial Reviews

A remarkable memoir... A moving examination of the complex forces of ethnicity, nationality and history that shape one's sense of self and foster, threaten or fray the fragile tapestry of community.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“In this courageous and candid memoir, Meline Toumani reflects on what it really means—and does not mean—to come into the inheritance of a tragic past; on the complex feelings involved in confronting a historical enemy and Other; and on what we owe—and do not owe—to our collective identities, and what to ourselves. Writing with precise insight and wit, Toumani addresses issues that weave through traumatic histories everywhere, and that continue to concern us all.” —Eva Hoffman, author of After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust

“Meline Toumani has written an unusual book: courageous, intriguing, and at moments, despite its subject, unexpectedly funny. And her determination to understand and put behind her a century of hatred has echoes for more peoples than just Turks and Armenians.” —Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918

“I read Meline Toumani's original and audacious book with admiration, first for the grainy pleasures of her narrative—the raw energy of true encounters—and perhaps even more for her nerve and seriousness in trying, as an Armenian-American woman, to find a path between the often-self-defeating absolutism of her own Armenian community and the Orwellian evasions of most contemporary Turks when asked to acknowledge the plain act of long-ago genocide in plain language.” —Michael J. Arlen, author of Passage to Ararat

“Meline Toumani's inspiring book cuts through the fog of politics surrounding the Armenian genocide with honesty, intelligence, and humanity. I was very impressed by the charm, humor, and bravery she displays in her relationships with Turks from all sides of the political spectrum, as well as her willingness to examine the assumptions of her fellow diaspora Armenians.” —Ruth Franklin, author of A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction

“Meline Toumani's beautifully rendered memoir is a powerful reminder of how family histories can constrain as much as they enhance our understanding of the world. This is a remarkable, vital, and perhaps above all courageous investigation into history, culture, and the human heart.” —Dinaw Mengestu, author of All Our Names

“This is a brave book, deeply intelligent and elegantly readable, providing a much needed fresh point of view. Anyone genuinely interested in the relations between Armenians and Turks, a subject that continues to be clouded by politics, must read it. In a meticulous, clarifying, and highly informed accounting, Toumani gives a personal perspective on the hate-filled relationship that persists between those Armenians who insist that the genocide be recognized and those Turks who adamantly deny the historical truth of the genocide. I could not put it down.” —Eric Bogosian, author of Operation Nemesis

“This deft combination of political and personal narrative is an attempt to cross one of the modern world's most sensitive divides. With warmth and feeling, it shows why so many people and nations are imprisoned by the past, and what can happen when they set themselves free.” —Stephen Kinzer, author of Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds

From the Publisher

This deft combination of political and personal narrative is an attempt to cross one of the modern world's most sensitive divides. With warmth and feeling, it shows why so many people and nations are imprisoned by the past, and what can happen when they set themselves free.

author of Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Tw Stephen Kinzer

Meline Toumani's inspiring book cuts through the fog of politics surrounding the Armenian genocide with honesty, intelligence, and humanity. I was very impressed by the charm, humor, and bravery she displays in her relationships with Turks from all sides of the political spectrum, as well as her willingness to examine the assumptions of her fellow diaspora Armenians.

author of A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Trut Ruth Franklin

★ 2014-09-04
A young Armenian-American journalist examines her identity and personal history. New York Times contributor Toumani grew up hating Turkey. She knew that between 1915 and 1923, nearly 1 million Armenians were massacred and another 1 million deported from the Ottoman Empire, a surge of violence that punctuated generations of oppression. She also knew that the Armenian diaspora was obsessed with world recognition of the conflict as genocide, a term that Turkey vehemently rejected. Even 100 years later, many Armenians are still ferocious in their abhorrence of all things Turkish. But for Toumani, that hatred had come "to feel like a chokehold, a call to conformity," and she wanted "to understand how history, identity, my clan and my feeling of obligation to it, had defined me." That search took her to Turkey, where she lived for more than two years, interviewing writers, historians, students, professors and activists about the fraught relationship of Turks to ethnic minorities. Cautious about admitting that she was Armenian, Toumani discovered that once she did, "the distance from ‘Nice to meet you' to the words ‘so-called genocide' was sometimes less than two minutes long." Many Turks claimed to have Armenian friends, but stereotypes were deeply entrenched: Armenians were greedy, shifty and duplicitous. The murder of an outspoken journalist who worked to find common ground between Turks and Armenians brought political hatreds into stark view. Arriving with the idea that "soft reconciliation was important and valuable—that simply getting Turks and Armenians to interact as human beings seemed like a major step," Toumani felt increasingly frustrated with the intolerance she encountered and with her own prejudices, which "seemed stronger than ever." She came to believe that the term "genocide" is no more than a clinical label that dilutes the visceral reality of the past. This remarkable memoir serves as a moving examination of the complex forces of ethnicity, nationality and history that shape one's sense of self and foster, threaten or fray the fragile tapestry of community.

Kirkus Reviews