The Sounds of Silence: Turkey’s Armenians Speak (ed.) by Ferda Balancar (review)

Oral history in Turkey has made great strides in the last fifteen years, with, for example, a whole host of books being published on the historical and contemporary experiences of minorities (see İskender Özsoy, İki Vatan Yorgunları: Mübadele Acısını Yaşayanlar Anlatıyor [İstanbul: Bağlam Yayıncılık, 2003], Yahya Koçoğlu, Hatırlıyorum: Türkiye’de Gayrimüslim Hayatlar [İstanbul: Siyahbeyaz–Metis Yayınları, 2003], and Yahya Koçoğlu, Azınlık Gençleri Anlatıyor [İstanbul: Siyahbeyaz–Metis Yayınları, 2001]). One such textbook, which very engaged Turkish history teachers designed and wrote and is meant to be used as supplemental teaching material, makes use of oral history interviews with people resettled as part of the Greco-Turkish population exchange in the wake of the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). These interviews describe just how similar were the personal experiences of Greeks and Turks and how much both longed for the country in which they had lived previously and into which they had been born (See Hüseyin Köksal [ed.], Innovative History Education: Exemplary Activities [Ankara: Harf Publishing, 2012]). A recent addition to this important field of oral history in Turkey is Ferda Balancar’s book, which focuses on memories about Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian activist and journalist assassinated in Istanbul in early 2007. Balancar uses the assassination to allow interviewees to construct a narrative history that is simultaneously about Dink’s death and about its broader meaning: the collected stories in Balacar’s book narrate each interviewee’s family history from the 1890s up to 2007, exploring a variety of historical and contemporary issues about Armenians interpretations of their place in Turkey.

While the book neglects, unfortunately, to give an overview of the questions the interviewers asked the interviewees, thus presenting the conducted interviews in a text free of interlocutions, it quickly becomes clear that one of the central questions must have been, “Where were you when Hrant Dink was killed?” The interviewees recount how everything changed for them with that day in early 2007; reactions to, and the significance of, Dink’s death, however, vary widely for Balacar’s interviewees, ranging from anger toward the Armenian community for not having supported Dink enough in the preceding years, to a relatively new acceptance of themselves as citizens of Turkey and no longer simply as displaced Armenians, and a hybridized state of self in which “many people in Turkey feel they are part of a minority as well although they are Turks themselves” (43). Memory, stories, and strategies of identity building and preservation are intrinsically interwoven into these narratives.

The Sounds of Silence, however, goes far beyond exploring the present and recent past of Turkey’s Armenians. Not surprisingly, the Armenian Genocide serves as one of the main foci of remembrance and recollection for each family’s history; in addition to the seminal events of 1915, there are also reminiscences about the so-called Wealth Tax of 1942 (Varlik Vergisi) and the (mainly anti-Greek) September Riots of 1955. While many of the stories resemble other accounts already known and documented about the genocide of 1915–16 and other episodes in Turkish history, what is most interesting about this collection is that it introduces complexity to a history that is often taken to be already known and completely understood, thus creating shades of gray in an otherwise black-and-white historical account. Balancar elicits stories about Turks who helped Armenian families, hiding and protecting them during the genocide, and about Turks and Kurds who exposed Armenians. And there are also descriptions of the approaches people used to cope with genocide, persecution, and discrimination, thus bringing to light various, and almost always divergent, strategies of survival and of identity preservation. Interviewees were apparently also asked whether they would consider it acceptable to marry only an Armenian, or if intermarriage with a Christian or Muslim Turk was also...