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There Was and There Was Not, Meline Toumani

Identity is a complex and infinitely divisible monster. (Fight me sometime over the legitimacy of my claim to Southern-girl identity.) In the fascinating first few chapters of There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond, Meline Toumani explores the close bonds among diaspora Armenians, as well as the oodles of ways they have found of distinguishing themselves from each other: speakers of Western Armenian vs. speakers of Eastern Armenian, Armenians from Lebanon vs. from Brazil vs. from Turkey vs. from actual Armenia. What they share in common is a mistrust of Turks and a passionate desire to make the Turks and the world recognize the Armenian genocide.

Hostility toward Turkey came in various forms, but in the American suburbs opportunities for conflict were limited, so it skewed toward the trivial. We . . . steered clear of shops rumored to have Turkish owners, and refused to buy products labeled “Made in Turkey.” My mother once spent weeks trying to buy a new bathrobe, but at store after store, every robe declared its Turkish origins; the Turks had cornered the market on terry cloth. One evening, my mom returned home, exhausted, with a large bag from Sears. “Don’t tell anyone,” she warned me. She clipped the label and then held out her plush, pale yellow purchase.

At some point, the kneejerk hatred of Turks and all things Turkish began to make Toumani uncomfortable. She decided to set off on a journalism project — first articles, eventually this book — that would require her to spend time in Turkey, to learn the Turkish language, and to talk to Turkish people about the Armenian genocide.

The result is a wonderful illustration of my motto, People are more than just one thing. On one hand, the Turks Toumani meets are, as is common in Muslim countries, almost uniformly welcoming and kind: she refers to their “glorious hospitality” as an “enchantment [that] never really broke; it only stretched to accommodate new realizations.”

Because alongside this kindness sits a kind of resistance to historical truth that’s all too familiar if, for instance, you’ve ever participated in a conversation with white Americans about reparations for slavery. Many of the Turks tried to sidestep the conversation about Armenian genocide altogether. Those who did talk about it would tell Toumani of their own ancestral suffering, and then assure her that they did not always harp on the wrongs of the past, they wanted to move forward, and why couldn’t Armenians do the same? Or they would emphasize the commonalities between the Turks and the Armenians, and wonder why the Armenians insisted on being so combative, when really Turks and Armenians are fundamentally the same. It’s a masterpiece of misdirection.

Toumani set out to learn if Turks were the genocide-denying enemy of her upbringing, or if there was good to be found in them. The answer, of course, is that both are true, and the two things sit uncomfortably alongside each other. Toumani can feel the warmth of Turkish hospitality, which is a true thing that exists and a credit to the Turkish character, while also knowing that she is at all times an outsider in this culture, a person whose history the Turks will ferociously deny.

She doesn’t draw any conclusions about what can be done, or what the future holds, for the Turkish-Armenian ideological conflict. Their relationship status remains, for the foreseeable future, “It’s complicated.”