Book Review: Rejection, Forgiveness, Understanding and Pain: A Dazzling Polyphony in Genocide Fiction

The night after Vahide’s funeral, Nur abruptly appears at his bedside and presents him with Vahide’s jade dagger, demanding that he avenge her. Here, too, it remains unclear what crime is to be repaid. In post-genocide family novels, such heirlooms play a major role, such as a golden bangle in Laura Cwiertnia’s novel or an Armenian family Bible that Katerina Poladjan’s protagonist comes across during her internship in Yerevan. The Armenian father in Cwiertnia’s family novel advises the protagonist against taking up her Armenian heritage: “Much too heavy to carry!”

Kaan, on the other hand, reaches for the dagger, albeit decades after his grandmother’s death. He is now a scholarship holder in the villa of the German Academy in Tarabya (Istanbul), where he befriends the supposed gardener in the neighboring property. It is the property of the Turkish president’s official villa. Kaan discusses music and art with the old gardener and talks himself into a mad frenzy. His remarks are anti-capitalist-anti-Western or anti-American and culminate in the demand for an indiscriminate art for all people, for a music that does not divide but unites.

The Dede accuses him of being a “fascist of the past,” a person who lives in the past and believes in “the moral superiority of the losers. Free yourself from pain (…)! It means great injustice to future generations if we build our identity on the aberrations and injuries of past decades and centuries.” (144) At the iftar celebration in the presidential garden, Kaan wants to pounce on the president as an avenger with his dagger, but the president turns out to be the nice gardener next door and invites Kaan to contribute music. In his second song, Kaan refers to the Turkish version of the Song of the Nibelungs, namely the eighth of twelve stories from the collection Heroic Tales by Dede Korkut (mid-15th century): A shepherd of the Turkic people of the Oghuz, the Central Asian ancestors of today’s Turks and Azeris, rapes a nymph in a sacred place. She gives birth to a polyp-like child and curses the Oghuz invaders, for whom the one-eyed revenge monster quickly becomes a threat. At first, they drive him into the solitude of the steppe. In the end, the outcast is killed by his “milk brother” Basat.

Marc Sinan dealt with this theme years ago, which he interprets as an inner-Turkish fratricide. His “Docufictional Music Theater for Orchestra, Voice, Movement and Video Installation” was performed in 2014 at the Gorki Theater in Berlin. However, the ambassadors of Turkey and Azerbaijan, who had been invited to attend, did not attend and thus the challenging interpretation by the Turkish writer Sema Kaygusuz, who presented the figure of Tepegöz as the exemplary Other, who is excluded in order to make people forget their own guilt.

The crucial question is, of course, whether the Tepegöz material is suitable for symbolizing the intergenerational Armenian trauma and deriving future prospects for Turkish-Armenian relations from it. Kaan’s song says: “But we are brothers, your dede is my dede. My forgiveness is your salvation. Your salvation is my salvation.” The convictions of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who was murdered for this in early 2007, resonate here.

In fact, however, Armenian-Turkish relations were never about a fratricidal war, but about centuries of subjugation and legal and social discrimination against indigenous Ottoman Christians, including Armenians, and their extermination in the course of Turkish nation-building. The novel’s constructed antithesis of retribution and forgiveness is a bogus alternative, for retribution four or more generations post factum is as absurd as forgiveness is impossible in the face of ongoing official Turkish denial and threat.

Sinan seems to have recognized this himself by having his grandmother Vahide appeal to Kaan to look for a third way between forgiveness and retribution: “(…) don’t be a Basat, don’t be a Tepegöz. Only if you are not both, can you create a balance in the world, can you solve what happened to my Mayrik, what happened to me. Choose a path other than that of cruelty.” (186) His Dede recommends therapeutic writing: “Finally write down the story, Kaan. Write so that you can forget it. For only in forgetting is there a chance to survive (…).”

Even Kaan must realize that his hope of triggering a nationwide revolution and thus a lasting improvement in the treatment of minorities by assassinating the Turkish president must fail, because “the paranoia is too strong.” To overcome mistrust, fear and prejudice, it would take another thousand years. Sinan hints that Armenians could also currently become the victims of Turkish exterminationism, with a song at the presidential iftar celebration in 2023 (236), a song that praises the Young Turkish War Minister Enver and the “martyrs of the great Islamic army” and threatens the “Armenian fascists.”

Sinan’s dystopian outlook on the near future in November 2023 matches this grim summary: An imagined tanker accident finally destroys the piano of Komitas, the Armenian clergyman and composer that sank in the Bosphorus in September 1913, through a mishap of the young Hüseyin Umut. Komitas saved him from punishment at the time, and when Hüseyin meets Komitas again in 1915, the Armenian deportee recognizes him and blesses him for Hüseyin’s benevolence when the latter hands him water. Thus, a lasting bond is formed between the two.

Sinan’s novel does not follow any chronology, but spans a plot time of one hundred years with frequent, unmediated changes of place and time. Not only the narrative styles — personal perspective, experienced character speech, inner monologue and auctorial narrator — change in rapid succession, but also the perspectives and evaluations, which lends the content statements an often irritating, dazzling ambiguity. At the beginning of the novel, there is a monstrous crime, which was characteristic for the Black Sea region and especially Trabzon: 15-year-old Hüseyin is hired by soldiers to row a boat with 14 children into the open sea, where they are pushed into the water one after the other. Hüseyin is surprised that the children do not scream: “Armenians, that’s all.”(26)

Dede Hüseyin is not only a relatively empathy-free eyewitness to this crime, but also a profiteer from the genocide and his marriage to an Armenian heiress. How does one live as an heir to a family of victims and perpetrators? By drawing characters that are ambiguous and contradictory, neither really good nor bad? By interpreting the same events differently, even contradictorily, like the economic ruin and the death of Hüseyin Umut? Marc Sinan has attempted his literary liberation from the trauma of the genocide of his Armenian ancestors by means of his primary art – music – in which simultaneity, contrariety and polyphony are possible. His debut novel is a largely successful translation of polyphonic rules into literary forms. However, this design approach also explains some weaknesses in composition and content.

(Marc Sinan: Gleißendes Licht; Roman. Bremen: Rowohlt, 2023. 273 S. ISBN: 978-3-498-00314-2)

(Tessa Hofmann is a scholar of Armenian studies and sociology, PhD, research scholar at the Free University of Berlin.)