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Pinar Selek

Author of La casa sul Bosforo

14 Works 31 Members 3 Reviews

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This is a moving story of a young Turkish intellectual and activist’s growing awareness of the treatment of Armenians in Turkey. Already firmly on the left, her ideas and political consciousness evolved as she came to understand the Armenian genocide in 1915 and the subsequent history of Armenians in Turkey. (She notes both the discriminatory taxation during World War II which reduced many Armenian and other minority families to destitution and the pogroms of 1955 against minorities which resulted in more than a dozen deaths and the destruction of houses, stores and churches in Istanbul.) This book is a product of her decision that, having learned about the extermination of the Armenians, she must speak up.

Pinar Selek is a Turkish sociologist, feminist and political activist born in Istanbul. She attended a French lycée in Istanbul where she was involved in political causes at an early age. When she was 13, her father was put into prison. She herself was arrested and tortured in 1998 and spent two and a half years in prison. Political persecution forced her into exile in 2009. (She was falsely accused of terrorist activity and despite findings of innocence was tried no less than three times.)

She first became aware of non-Muslim minorities from her mother’s pharmacy shop. Her mother would address her Armenian customers as “Madame” by contrast to Muslim customers who were addressed as “Hanim.” At school she was curious as to why Armenian girls stuck to themselves and would not partake freely in the activities of the other students such as hitchhiking home from school. When pressed as to why they would not hitchhike, one of the girls said it was because she was Armenian. Nor were they active in political activities. The schools had been required since 1972 to adopt as their motto Ataturk’s slogan “Happy is he who calls himself Turk.” (In October 2013, Tayyip Erdogan suppressed the requirement. Since the publication of this book in 2014, however, Erdogan and his government have shifted to an extreme Turkish nationalist position.) She became sensitive to the fact that that this motto excluded minorities like Armenians. As she got older, she realized that this kind of thinking also infected the Turkish left, which demonstrated its forward thinking by being secular and anti-nationalist but was unwilling to address or even recognize the persecution of Armenians and other minorities. One of the questions Selek asks in the book is “Where are the Armenians?” The answer is a stark one: most of the Armenians had been destroyed in the massacres. Only very recently did the recognition of the rights of Armenians, Kurds and other minorities become a public issue in Turkey.

A major turning point in Selek’s engagement with Armenian people and their causes came upon meeting Hrant Dink after she was released from prison. He was the first Armenian she had ever met who refused to stay hidden and was confident and optimistic. (An elderly Armenian had befriended her while she was in prison, but he stayed away from her after she was released because, he said, being with an Armenian could get her into trouble with the authorities.) Hrant Dink’s work and example resulted in other Armenians taking the risk to become more visible. Selek sees Dink as being an example of Hannah Arendt’s statement that the miracle of liberty consists in being able to begin a new chain of political activity. In her experience with Dink, Selek became aware of how the struggle for liberty can unite individuals from different trajectories, including differences of sex, class, ethnic background and sexual orientation.

Selek became very active in the journal Agos, which Dink had founded. Dink was prosecuted for articles appearing in Agos and in July 2006 was condemned to six months in prison for “insulting Turkish identity.” Hrant Dink’s assassination on January 19, 2007 (by a Turkish nationalist in the street but with the connivance of government officials) weighed heavily on her, and she lost the “insolent” attitude she had been able to maintain throughout her youth and about which he always teased her. The irony of Dink’s assassination was that 300,000 Turks came to his funeral, the first time in history that a large number of Turks gathered together for an Armenian. And for the first time since the genocide younger Armenians integrated courageously in a movement to break a century of silence. The last chapter of the book “Between Hope and Despair” asks whether political activity and liberty can survive in a society subject to violence and oppression. She does not give up hope, although her youthful optimism has long since tempered. The move of Erdogan’s regime to the right since the book was published in 2014 has dashed at least for now hopes for improvements in the treatment of minorities in Turkey. One must assume Selek is more pessimistic today.

An underlying theme of the book is the relationship between the identity of Turkey and the Armenian genocide. One of the reasons for the extermination of Armenians was to establish a clear national Turkish identity. Children were taught that Armenians were “monsters” that had just “disappeared,“ since Turks would never hurt a fly. The 60,000 surviving Armenians became “invisible.” Armenian and Greek names of streets in Istanbul disappeared. Selek roamed the streets looking for traces of the Armenian presence and the dramas that had taken place. Later efforts in Turkey to raise the issue of the treatment of the Armenians called into question the Turkish narrative of the basis for Turkish identity. The mythic basis for this identity is demonstrated by the ethnic background of contemporary Turks. Because many Armenian women and children were assimilated into Muslim families during the massacres, many Turks today have one or more Armenian ancestors. Moreover, there are other minorities that undercut the “purity” of Turkish identity. Pinar Selek herself had a great grandmother of Greek origin, and another great grandmother was Oubek, a Muslim minority that has basically disappeared, having been assimilated in the Turkish melting pot.
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Works
14
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Rating
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ISBNs
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