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Mourning the Unmourned: “Those Who Died, and Those Who Killed!”
Abstract
After a series of pogroms that targeted the entire Armenian population living in the Cilicia region (the many provinces and villages of Adana, Mersin, Tarsus, and Iskenderun) and which left thirty thousand Ottoman Armenians dead in April 1909, Halide Edib who was the most prominent woman writer of Ottoman Turks, wrote an article condemning the massacres. The article, entitled “Those Who Died, and Those Who Killed,” was published in Tanin on May 18. Eight days after Edib’s article, an appreciation letter was published in Tanin, written by an Armenian woman and addressed to Halide Edib (May 26). The writer who signed the letter as Madam Srpuhi Makaryân was expressing her gratitude to “this Turkish woman who mourned for and with Armenians.” Meanwhile, the Constantinople Patriarchate assigned a Commission to investigate the aftermath of the massacres and to aid the stricken. Zabel Yesayan, the most celebrated woman writer of the Armenian community journeyed to Adana as part of this commission in June 1909. The three months she spent in Cilicia changed the course of her life as well as her writing completely. When she published her witnessing to the Catastrophe in a book titled Among the Ruins, she was calling on her Turkish and Armenian compatriots, especially women to respond to the massacres, to mourn together. Cilicia Massacre was the second series of large-scale massacres of Armenians to break out in the Ottoman Empire and is often referred to as a “rehearsal” for the 1915 Genocide. Focusing on women’s accounts of the Cilicia Massacre, this paper examines the possibilities and impossibilities of mourning the unmourned that are revealed in Halide Edib’s, Srpuhi Makaryân’s and Zabel Yesayan’s writings seven years before the Genocide. These three women who wrote about the “common Ottoman fatherland,” “equal citizenship,” “reconciliation” in the aftermath of the Cilicia massacre addressed Ottoman women as the source and possibility for collective mourning. While deploying gender strategically in their writings to make a public call for peace, they were also looking for ways to start a dialogue between “those who died, and those who killed.” Could the victim and the perpetrator “mourn together”? What is the historical meaning of this feminist call for collective mourning in the wake of the Cilicia massacre and right before the 1915 Genocide?
Discipline
Other
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
Armenian Studies