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Repression, Its Return, and the Textual Unconscious: Turkish Fiction on the Armenian Genocide
Abstract
Until the 1950’s, the Armenian Genocide was either overlooked or discursively denied in Turkish literature. And in the 50’s, as the rise of socialist realist literature opened up a space for writers to distance themselves from the official narratives of the Turkish state and the deportation of Ottoman Armenians entered the discursive world of novels, the event became one of the many other disastrous events such as war and famine that the oppressed classes were subjected to throughout history. The singularity of the Armenian Genocide as a Catastrophe began to be mentioned in Turkish literature only after the 1990’s, coinciding with the emergence of public and political discussions on the concepts of identity and recognition. However, while trying to find a way to break the silence around what has been publicly called the “Armenian issue,” the first literary narratives on the subject were unable to go beyond a discursive recognition of the suffering of the Ottoman Armenians. The few novels that were written about the issue in the 2000’s linked that suffering to the present day by bringing the concept of confrontation into the literary world. All the same, those literary texts that were written with the intention to bear witness to the Catastrophe of the Armenians failed to ask the essential question at the heart of the event while building their narratives around the suffering of Armenian characters: What is it that Turkish literature can witness regarding the Armenian Genocide? Literature as a site of loss, trauma and mourning has been one of the main areas of interest for literary critics and scholars since the second half of the 20th century. Specialized fields such as trauma literature or literature of mourning have grown out of the need and desire to understand the world-shattering experience of loss that the survivors of events such as war, genocide, political oppression were going through in the aftermath of those calamities. And yet, we find almost nothing written on the perpetrator’s experience on this extensive body of trauma literature. By looking at the traces and symptoms of the Armenian Genocide in Turkish fiction this paper examines the nature of genocidal repression, its return and the textual unconscious in the literature of the perpetrator.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
Cultural Studies