Abstract
The rise of memory narratives such as oral histories, familial memories, testimonies, memoirs and witnessing accounts as opposing narratives against official historiographies coincide with the multicultural politics in Turkey. Investigating two distinguished Turkish-Armenian autobiographers, Migirdic Margosyan (1938-) and Takuhi Tovmasyan (1952-), in contemporary Turkish-Armenian literature with an emphasis on autobiographical writing during the last decade of twentieth century in Turkey show that their literary works are symptomatic of the epistemological shift in Turkey concerning how minorities, particularly Armenians, are finding their voices in public space since the dawn of 1990s within the politics of multiculturalism that has been experienced in Turkey since 1983. They both explore autobiographical writing as a medium to communicate minority and identity issues in Turkey and both write in the Turkish language for an intended Turkish audience. In order to find a medium with the Turkish audience they both explore the themes of memory, nostalgia, and loss within the politics of multiculturalism current in Turkey. It is arguable that Margosyan and Tovmasyan reflect these themes, which have been emerging gradually in modern Turkish literature, in their own works from an Armenian/minority point of view by appropriating and self-censoring their language in order to reach the Turkish audience without alienating that same audience with accusations of genocide. My objective is to explore Margosyan’s and Tovmasyan’s usage of these themes in their autobiographical writings by raising certain questions: Why are these two authors having an important impact on the Turkish audience not only within the realm of Armenian discourse but also in contemporary Turkish Armenian literature?; Why does their usage of memory, nostalgia and loss stand out as a reoccurring theme in their literary works instead of the commonly discussed views found in current genocide debates? My interest in Margosyan and Tovmasyan is in how their writing effects and exemplifies these shifts and also how their writing both resists the official homogenous Turkish national identity and shapes the current multiculturalist discourse in Turkey and Turkish literature. Unlike the political and historical approach to Armenian discourse currently in Turkey which circulates around the notion of “genocide,” Armenian authors seem to avoid the conceptualization of the word “genocide” and place more focus on the loss of the Armenian people in Anatolia, which becomes the central theme of their narrative strategies in order to point out the loss of diversity in geographical space and nostalgia for a so-called harmonious multicultural past.
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