Foreword
Texte intégral
1In Shahan Shahnur’s novel Retreat Without Song, the main protagonist Bedros, an Armenian man from Istanbul exiled in Paris in the early 1920s, explains to his lover, a French woman named Nenette, what his former homeland was like. During their conversation, Bedros uses the Turkish term missir bouyda (roasted maize) to address Nenette in an affectionate way. It is “something you eat [...] in Istanbul”, he explains to her, “when they get together during the long, winter evenings, they roast maize on the stove, especially to amuse the children, and they eat it while it's still hot”. Bedros uses neither Armenian nor French to evoke the roasted maize that triggers this particular memory, but a third language, Turkish, which is both foreign and familiar to him. Ultimately, however, he fails to convey what his former homeland was like, and tells Nenette: “No, it isn't the way you know it”, thus revealing the untranslatability of the protagonist’s relationship with the place he once identified as his home.
- 1 Perhaps the vague distinction that is made between home and homeland in the scholarship is due to t (...)
2Home and homeland are never the way we know them. They are highly evocative as concepts, yet difficult to define, and often used in an intertwined, even indistinct way. This volume examines the inherent tensions between the two terms that arise from the dual existence of a home (in exile) in a host society and a distant homeland (imaginary) that is permanently lost. The articles delve into the multiplicity of representations and meanings attached to home and homeland, and highlight the manner in which such places of identification, territories of attachment, and geographies of longing and belonging, are constructed and remembered, but also fantasized and romanticized, and ultimately imagined in past and present-day Turkey. The unconventional spelling, home(land), which we adopt in this volume, is intended to reflect both the indefiniteness of the concept and its many entanglements.1 Home(land) can refer to specific places such as Istanbul, Diyarbakır, or Bitlis, but this topography is more often dreamt about than actually known, more imagined than real, and both familiar and distant all at once.
3The authors use a wide range of archival sources and ethnographic material, borrow methodological insights from the disciplines of History, Anthropology, and Literature, and derive other conceptual tools from neighboring fields such as Nationalism, Migration and Diaspora Studies, each of them bringing a different disciplinary perspective or intellectual sensibility in order to deconstruct home(land) as a concept. The choice of modern Turkey as the setting for this volume is not a coincidence. Its territory has been, and to an extent still is, the home(land) of a large number of national or sub-national groups with different, coinciding, and oftentimes conflicting, definitions of it. Anatolia, Armenia, Asia Minor, Pontos, or Kurdistan might refer to overlapping territories, but they remain fluid and ill-defined most of the time. In addition, the history of modern Turkey has been punctuated by numerous episodes of mass violence and forced exile, whose contemporary resonances also contribute to shaping an imaginary of the home(land).
4Home(land) is not just imaginary, but emotional as well, and this volume demonstrates again and again its affective or sensual qualities. Here, home(land) is less delineated by a border than by a feeling of longing and belonging. Never just a physical place, it is instead an (affective) experience mixed with nostalgia, desire and pain. It generates both feelings of community, belonging and intimacy, as well as alienation, oppression, and expressed or hidden anxieties. This mix of emotions stem from personal experiences, family narrations, and imagination fashioned by broader nationalization processes and communal experiences within the diaspora. Home(land) is also a relational object of affection based on ancestral ties and family memories, which is conjured up from the clues and stories of the past. Much of the volume illustrates how emotional links are woven over time by individuals and communities with their lands of origin, which is often characterized by a historical rupture, and thus acts as a depository for collective memory.
5Many of the articles at hand are about a generation uprooted from its home, whose subsequent generations wish to return. This return to the home(land) involves finding a connection with an ancestral past as the grandparents’ home(land) becomes a destination for the grandchildren. Among other things, returning consists in seeking physical evidence to prove that the home(land) existed. It is a quest to retrieve meaning and reconnect with something lost in the past and is often described through the metaphor of roots as a result. Returning is more than the simple act of visiting (as a tourist let’s say), but requires instead an active engagement with the place. It needs to be performed so that returnees are allowed to make this place of return their own. Home(land) can also be reconstructed through interactions with other people who share the same ties to the place. The return is oftentimes performed as a ritual to confront past horrors, thus becoming more like a religious pilgrimage, a spiritual experience, and a cleansing of sorts.
6Returning to the home(land) might help to rebuild a family’s past. The descendants might wish to retrieve something of their ancestors during their return. Home(land)s can be remembered or recreated through other means, but they can never be fully recovered. This longing for the home(land) is rarely satisfied because it is predicated on an idea of what it must have been like in the past. The realization that the place is no longer what it must have been sinks in at some point, and this can be accompanied by disappointment or rather a feeling of alienation. What the returnees come across are the erased traces of their ancestors, which are composed of pulverized gravestones, desecrated churches, unintelligible inscriptions, or ruined houses. Paradoxically, this material evidence of the home(land) can add to the sacredness of a place. In all cases, it is this emotional attachment and attribution of sacredness to a certain territory that is central in the construction of the home(land).
*
7In the opening article of the volume, “L’écriture unioniste perpétuée en Turquie. Comment les mémoires d’unionistes délimitent l’Anatolie par l’absence des Arméniens”, Duygu Taşalp examines the memoirs of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) leaders, written between 1919 and 1923, at a time when international peace treaties carving out the Middle East are being negotiated. The writings of Talât Pasha and Cemal Pasha, for example, already present an entire mythology around Anatolia – a loosely defined and constantly mutating geographic term – at a time when the borders of the Turkish nation-state are yet to be defined. Taşalp explains how these memoirs represent Anatolia as a place of refuge for Turks whose borders need to be secured at all cost. This national sanctuary, or home(land), excludes all non-Sunni, non-Turkish ethno-religious minorities. More specifically, the idea of Anatolia itself is defined by the absence of Armenians, and its construction closely linked to the genocide. Taşalp makes another important observation in her article. The memoirs reveal more than the CUP’s vision of Turkey at the time of their writing. Reprinted regularly since 1921, they are also, according to her, an attempt to strengthen Anatolia in times of crisis, a public reminder of Turkey’s historic greatness, a wish to reinforce the nationalist historical narrative, and an attempt to consolidate the consensus that Anatolia equals Turkey and that Turkey is for Turks. These reprints, Taşalp adds, often come at time when issues related to mass violence during World War I come to public attention, or when the Armenian Genocide is being discussed or commemorated internationally, in other words whenever Turkish identity as a whole is being questioned or thought to be jeopardized.
8What follows Taşalp’s contribution are three ethnographies. First, Ayşenur Korkmaz relates her travels in 2018 and 2019 with two groups of Armenian “roots tourists” to Eastern Turkey. She explains how “roots tourists” try to make sense of their family histories and (re)connect emotionally with their ancestral home(land) during these trips, oftentimes doing the work of remembering for their grandparents who were never able to do so. This connection to the home(land) is largely imagined but not completely fabricated since it relies on actual places. “Roots tourists”, Korkmaz adds, can also be in possession of material (a photograph) and immaterial (a memory) proofs of the past. They seek additional evidence, however, in the landscape, or supplementary meaning in a ruined church, an abandoned cemetery or an empty plot of land. In the end, Armenian “roots tourists” long for any sensation emanating from the lost home(land) in the hope of making the feeble connections they have with it that much stronger. They seek traces of authenticity while positioning themselves as natives, both through discursive and ritual practices. Many of them, urbanites from Yerevan, are taken by their guides to a (Turkish or Kurdish) village so that they may experience the rural lives of their grandparents and catch a glimpse of the way their ancestors lived, cooked, or dressed. Visiting Eastern Turkey, in other words, is travelling physically to a now extinct place in order to experience what life must have been more than 100 years ago by staying with the villagers who populate their former home(land) today. Noteworthy here is the class divide between urban and rural that ultimately provides the evidential fodder for one’s imagination to close what is essentially a temporal gap.
9In the following article, Leigh Stuckey also embarks on several trips not with Armenian “roots tourists”, but with the descendants of the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange as they visit their ancestral home(land) in Turkey or Greece. Most exchangees had been reluctant, oftentimes afraid, to return to a place they were forced to abandon. Today, however, their descendants cross, more or less easily, the Greek-Turkish border, in an effort to learn more about their past. These second- or third-generations, Stuckey explains, have become distant enough emotionally to embark upon such visits to places they had only heard about before in their families but never seen or experienced. Even though Stuckey’s multi-sited ethnography is grounded in specific places in both Turkey and Greece, she defines home(land) not so much as a physical location, but more as a personal experience. It is the sum of interactions between hosts and guests, she argues, as well as the revival by their grandchildren of neighborly exchanges similar to the ones their grandparents might have known more than 100 years ago, which make up the homeland now. Homeland, she adds, is also what lives on after these Greek and Turkish “roots tourists” return home but manage to keep in touch with their hosts. Mixed with a strong sense of nostalgia, it is this affective connection produced by people’s face-to-face interactions, as well as their gift-giving and hospitality practices, that make these trips to the home(land) meaningful.
10The next contribution by Erol Sağlam examines how the discreet preservation of Romeyka (or Rumca in Turkish), an archaic form of the Greek language, produces in the Of Valley of the Black Sea region in Eastern Turkey “a mark simultaneously both of intimacy and alienation, of familiarity and distance, of feelings of being-at-home and unheimlichkeit, and of remembering and forgetting”. Sağlam's informants do not identify as Greeks, but as conservative, nationalist Turkish Muslims most of the time. They claim, on the one hand, that their ancestors came from Central Asia, but also tell family stories of Greek grandparents forced to convert to Islam, on the other. Their use of Romeyka allows them to map out the valley, to experience the home(land), and to reinforce their identity as Turkish by distinguishing where they come from in the country. They retain their socio-cultural distinctions, Sağlam adds, by keeping, albeit discreetly or even secretly, the use of this almost extinct language that is both foreign and familiar. In the end, far from undermining a local nationalism, it is the use and preservation of this archaic form of Greek that configures a landscape into a home(land).
*
11The next group of articles focuses on literature in dismantling the concept of home(land). Arakel Minassian first examines a short story by Anna Davtyan, a poet, translator and photographer from Yerevan, who has always identified (post-Soviet) Armenia as her home(land) and never felt a strong emotional connection to the territories of present-day Eastern Turkey. She decides nonetheless with her friend Sona to travel to Diyarbakır, Turkey's largest Kurdish city today but once home to a thriving Armenian population. Their anxiety about the trip, Davtyan explains, turns into fear as they land at the airport. Minassian, in his article, takes the two women's travels to illustrate the complexities of Armenians “returning” to their homeland. The two women, he writes, experience a fractured connection to the city. On the one hand, Anna feels that Diyarbakır is Armenian when, for instance, visiting the city’s fortress. On the other hand, she feels “removed, distant, shattered, in two halves” and not fully able to connect with her past as expected. Anna and her friend do establish a strong relationship with the city through a Kurdish family that invites them to their house and even welcomes them as their own daughters. The divisions the two Armenian women expect to see in Diyarbakır – the separation or even animosity between victims and perpetrators of the past – are not the ones they encounter once they reach the city. Instead of ethnic or religious barriers, they face gender and class ones. Empathy with the problems of the “other” and solidarity based on gender has replaced, Minassian demonstrates, a past that is based on a shared ethnicity. By selecting this short story, the article challenges any clear-cut division between victim and perpetrator in the Armenian and Turkish/Kurdish contexts and presents instead a nuanced understanding of the lived realities of their descendants. In the end, he emphasizes, like other pieces in this volume, how fractured and multi-faceted (Armenian in this case) relations are to the home(land), and displays all of the different nuances that constitute a “return” to any kind of historic home(land), real or imagined.
12In the following article, Maral Aktokmakyan offers an alternative reading of Shahan Shahnur’s 1929 Retreat Without Song. Shahnur (1903-1974), like other exiled Armenian writers in Paris at the time, distances himself from the false (nationalist) promise of a return home, focusing instead in his writings on the realities of life in the Armenian dispersion. Retreat Without Song, his first novel, does not overlook trauma induced by the genocide, but manages to stay away from what Aktokmakyan calls a “pumped-up rhetoric” by focalizing instead on the possibility (or impossibility) for exiles to create new home(lands) for themselves. The novel tells the story of Bedros who leaves Istanbul in the early 1920s to settle in Paris, thus mirroring Shahnur’s own life, capturing not only this experience of retreat, but also the loss of one’s identity to a sense of otherness. Shahan Shahnur, as Aktokmakyan explains in her article, reveals another part of himself in the novel, foregrounding his uncanny coexistence in between home(lands) as well as in between languages. Translated in Turkish as Sessiz Ricat (Silent Retreat), Retreat Without Song is paradoxically full of songs, sounds and music (such as this recurring violin playing an old melody). Each element in this hidden acoustic map, Aktokmakyan explains, points to a specific ambiance, while other sounds play key roles in the way Bedros remakes himself and his home(land) in the novel. For instance, Retreat Without Song is scattered with Turkish expressions, interjections, and terms of endearment, left untranslated in the text. Aktokmakyan dwells on these many “untranslatables” because, she argues, they best capture the protagonist’s experience of deterritorialization. Here, Turkish plays an ambivalent role. As the language of the perpetrator, it is reminiscent of the exile’s past and points to the loss of homeland, while simultaneously conveying this untranslatable feeling of home for the victim. It is this “haunting presence” of Turkish, this mixture of familiar yet foreign words, which in the end, Aktokmakyan argues, best describes homelessness as Bedros’ only possible home.
13In the volume’s final article, Aram Ghoogasian examines the works of William Saroyan (1908-1981), born in Fresno, California, the son of Armenian migrants from Bitlis in present-day Eastern Turkey. He offers a different reading of an oeuvre too often narrowed down to a one-dimensional representation of diasporic life and the celebration of the unbreakable Armenian spirit. Less recognized, however, is the fact that Saroyan struggled with the potential and limits of diaspora as a concept, Ghoogasian explains. His characters, neither Armenian nor American but both at the same time, can never return to a past way of life. They dwell dislocated and disoriented in a liminal space instead, trying to integrate but continuously longing at the same time. They can neither reclaim their old home nor fully integrate their new one, just like in The Pomegranate Tree, a story written by Saroyan about two Armenian farmers who successfully grow pomegranate trees in California, but whose fruits are ultimately rejected by consumers who consider them too foreign. For William Saroyan, becoming American is impossible and remaining Armenian is extremely difficult. Born in California, Saroyan first travels to his parents’ home(land), the town of Bitlis, in 1964 and writes the play Bitlis based on this return soon after. Very much like Korkmaz’s “roots tourists”, its main character (Bill, short for William), neither a local nor a tourist, seeks some kind of emotional connection to a place that has been rendered unintelligible over the years. He searches for the way his ancestors once lived, but very much aware that he will never be able to live how they once did. Bill realizes that a return to the homeland will never be possible and that he will also never be able to feel at home anywhere in the world as a member of the diaspora. By selecting a few of William Saroyan’s works, Ghoogasian, in the end, illustrates all of the contradictions that arise from being at home without necessarily possessing a home(land).
*
14Last but not least, the research articles of this volume are complemented by an interview with Vahe Tachjian, chief editor of the illustrious Houshamadyan project (www.houshamadyan.org), which aims to reconstruct and preserve the memory of Armenian life in the Ottoman Empire through different research initiatives. Tachjian explains the role played by his childhood memories about the lost homeland and its constant imaginations by the older generation in the launching of the project. He draws attention to one of the major themes of this volume, namely the tension between locality and the new nation away from the homeland, what he describes as the pressure between, on the one hand, “the creation of a culturally homogeneous community, and on the other, the refugees’ cultural diversity”. Moreover, as the Houshamadyan project relies on the digital preservation and presentation of the texts, pictures, and recordings which “depict all the diversity of local daily life”, it contributes to the reimagining of the home(land) through images with punctums often leading the viewers to question their knowledge about and relationship to their home(land). Finally, Tachjian also highlights the difficulty in maintaining an academic and objective stance while preserving the emotions deeply rooted in the memories of the descendants of Ottoman Armenians of their home(land).
Note de fin
1 Perhaps the vague distinction that is made between home and homeland in the scholarship is due to the fact that the intimate sense of belonging to one’s home, at the smallest of scale, is almost always intermingled with a broader homeland. Khachig Tölölyan, “Diaspora Studies: Past, Present and Promise”, Oxford Diaspora Program, International Migration Institute Working Papers Series, no. 55, 2012.
Haut de pagePour citer cet article
Référence papier
Yaşar Tolga Cora et Laurent Dissard, « Foreword », Études arméniennes contemporaines, 13 | 2021, 5-13.
Référence électronique
Yaşar Tolga Cora et Laurent Dissard, « Foreword », Études arméniennes contemporaines [En ligne], 13 | 2021, mis en ligne le 01 septembre 2021, consulté le 18 novembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/eac/2374 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/eac.2374
Haut de pageDroits d’auteur
Le texte et les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés), sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Haut de page


