Verse

Verse Coming to IstanbulFootnote

“Coming to Istanbul” was published in the poetry collection No Sign (University of Chicago Press 2022) and dedicated to Taner Akçam.

Follow the gaze of Athena down a cistern where water glows. Follow silver snakes along Marmara and Golden Horn. Walk over the black plaque for Hrant Dink smack in the street in Shishli. Follow the ferry-waves to Üsküdar— where your father was born, where your uncle returned incognito from prison— Drink the split bourbon voice of Ray Charles in the café in Taxsim under the red flags of star and moon guns to the head, wild prayer— streets banging with pots and pans— rage at the dictator. Walk by in oblivion and terror an American, an Armenian, black shirt under the olive-trellised restaurant hotel rooftop light-rinsed Bosphorus hot raki fumes in the throat under the wind-umbrellas and boutique-glass facades of Beyoglu galleries of blue mosaics, magenta carpets— the Ottoman historian pours you tahn and wine into the sunset. Follow the lights on the bridge into the chandelier of the sky trompe l’oeil of Gray Wolves voices of Turkish friends in the stone. Follow ghost signs midnight cab smashed café windows night-sea journey of beloveds Byzantine dirt smoke roads past Tobacco Regie and sultana crates— Haydarpasha of Armenian-soul death hour. Lost family come greet me in your city. for Taner Akçam

Istanbul, My Bridge

I first met Taner Akçam about twenty years ago at the University of Minnesota, where I was doing a reading for my just-published book The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response. After my reading, a group of Turkish students who had come out to my talk with pamphlets to protest me were milling around, upset and trying to figure out how to intrude on the question and answer session. I was watching them from the corner of my eye while answering questions and getting ready for another encounter with miseducated Turks who had been shaped by their nation’s propaganda to reject the factual history of the Armenian Genocide of 1915.

Then, I saw a man in a sport jacket with short cropped hair and black framed glasses, come over to the students and engage them in conversation. In a minute the students were huddled in a corner listening to this man, who was speaking to them in their native tongue. The man, of course, was Taner Akçam, whose work on the Armenian Genocide was becoming a hot topic because he was, as far as we all knew, the first Turkish scholar to be researching and writing about the Armenian Genocide from Turkish and Ottoman sources. He was writing in riveting and clear ways that were also nuanced and contextualized. I have no idea what the students were thinking, and I’m guessing that they were disturbed and probably uncomfortable by what Taner was explaining to them.

After the reading Taner and I shook hands and went for dinner with Professors Steven Feinstein and Eric Weitz, who were hosting me. That evening was the beginning of a friendship that helped me cross the border into Turkey, and for the first time, feel the pulse of progressive Turkish intellectuals and scholars who were doing what scholars do: critiquing their national history, standing up to government propaganda, writing with complexity and ethical honesty about difficult histories. They were brave and dedicated, and they were often risking their lives—given the brutal repression in their country. In the ensuing years, I would come to know and have rich conversations with other Turkish scholars and writers, including Müge Göçek, Elif Shafak, and Ragip Zarakolu, who would become my Turkish publisher. Taner and I would commence a dialogue that deepened my understanding of the Turkish plan to exterminate the Armenians and the other Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire during the first quarter of the twentieth century. We spent time together at Colgate, where I invited him to speak a couple times, at my friend Robert Jay Lifton’s Seminar for the Study of Mass Violence, then held at Harvard, and at Clark University, where Taner would hold the Kaloosdian Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies.

When I was planning to go to Istanbul in 2013, after much hesitation and with much ambivalence coupled with my anger and fear, it was Taner’s assurance that convinced me. Both sides of my family had been mass murdered or exiled from their homes and lands of centuries. In the larger sense, Historic Armenia throughout Turkey and especially in central and eastern Turkey had been destroyed and thousands of ancient churches and monasteries along with schools had been burned and ruined. More than a million Armenians were massacred, another million and a half marched out of the country—all their wealth confiscated. And, as a writer of books about the Armenian Genocide and a spokesperson in the media, I knew I was not invisible to the Turkish authorities.

But, Taner said. “Don’t worry. It’s a good time to go. I’ll help connect you with some wonderful people. You’ll see another Turkey through their eyes.” And so, when I landed with Donna Frieze, intrepid scholar of genocide and human rights, in late June of 2013, I found myself in the city of my father’s birth, the city of my grandparents’ early lives, the city of the Balakians and Panosyans who lived well in the Scutari (now Üsküdar) section of the city. The Panosyans were wealthy coal merchants, my grandfather Diran Balakian, a physician, his cousin, my great uncle Krikoris Balakian, a vardapet (later a Bishop), who was in 1913 a clerical diplomat at the Armenian Patriarchate in Istanbul. They were among the ascending generation of Ottoman Armenians who were hopeful for a new age of equality in the Ottoman Empire after the 1908 Revolution.

There I was in Taxism Square as Taner greeted me and Donna on a hot summer day, showing us the controversial Gezi Park, where citizens had been congregating that summer in protest of a capricious urban development plan, and where old Armenian tombstones had been dug up in the recent excavations. We walked down Istikal Street gazing at the boutiques and restaurants amidst the bustling crowds. It was beyond my expectations. That morning, Taner introduced me to the director of Dur De (Stop Racism) Foundation in Beyoğlu, which was, among other things, devoted to the civic remembrance of the Armenian Genocide. I learned from the Turkish director how Dur De had created the first public commemoration of April 24 (Armenian Genocide commemoration day) in Istanbul several years ago. In the coming days, Taner arranged for me to meet with the staff of the Armenian publishing house Aras in their beautiful offices. I had a festive meeting with the editors and staff of staff of Agos—the Armenian newspaper that was then the largest newspaper of an ethnic minority in Turkey and the congruent Hrank Dink Foundation that had been founded in the wake of the assassination of the brave Armenian human rights activist and journalist Hrant Dink, who was killed by Turkish nationalists in broad daylight in January 2007. Taner took me to meet Osman Kavala at his elegant building and foundation Anadolu Kultur—where at the moment a seminar on LGBT rights was going on. Through Osman and his work for democracy, I would gain a view of a whole other Turkey where multicultural life was vital and inclusive in ways that I couldn’t have imagined. Taner arranged dinners and lunches with scholars and activists and I discovered that, as taboo as the study and representation of the Armenian Genocide might be in Turkey, intellectuals were researching and teaching it in the ways they could.

I left Turkey after a week—feeling a strange kind of liberation. I had come to the land of my ancestors, the land of the great crime against the Armenians. I had walked the streets of the legendary city of Byzantium, where several Armenian emperors had once sat on the throne, the city of Constantinople, where the Armenian architects—the Balians—had built many of the city’s great buildings and monuments. I had come to the nation that was steeped in corruption and lies and exported propaganda about its great crime against the Armenians. I had—if ever so briefly—seen and felt and smelled and heard the place. I had talked with others. It was real. I was realer for it. I would go to Turkey three more times in the coming two years, and do readings in public from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul to a vegan café in Diyarbakir. I would walk the ruins of Ani, the desolate streets of Elizag, the bustling streets of Kurdish Diyarbakir. I owe my first journey over that big bridge to Taner. His intrepid voice continues. May it always.