Still prefaced in many commentaries as a taboo, the topic of the genocide in Turkey has ironically become a talking point de rigueur for anyone who is visible in the public sphere and who lays claims to an identity as an intellectual. “Anyone,” then, will momentarily serve as the working definition of the intellectual, for all intents and purposes, in this inquiry into the grammar among Turkish and Armenian intellectuals both within and outside Turkey. The litany of self-proclaimed firsts in addressing the topic of genocide in any given genre in Turkey is better understood in the light of Barthes' notion of the “inflexion” in myth. Such vocabulary of self-advertisement, of being a historic “first,” creates a curious hierarchy when it comes to the all-important topic of a foundational and denied genocide: it is not that the intellectual brings herself to the service of the topic, but that the topic serves up to the rejuvenation of the intellectual's prominence and controversial value in the public sphere. The emphasis is not on the quality, characteristics, or commitments of the works in question, but on the fact of the intellectual being a “first,” and thus, implicitly, a mythical figure above critical inquiry.

Inasmuch as the public outrage and rally in protest of the 2007 assassination of Hrant Dink, an Armenian-Turkish journalist, constituted a momentous event, it was far outpaced by its glorification in the public sphere as a mythical turning point in social transformation and minority issues. This dictum is too pervasive to quote singularly, and is often pronounced with no specificity as to what in particular shifted in any lasting way (public awareness, changing views regarding the genocide, causal relation to quantifiable increase in sustained public discussion). More than anything, this mass protest provided for other events and works the absolutist vocabulary of the mythical ground zero.

The tendency to laud every action in the name of “breaking the silence” for its own sake, irrespective of ideological, textual, or social implications, can be said to predate the event (the auto/biographical account My Armenian Grandmother by Fethiye Çetin; the “genocide” conference at Bilgi University; the novel The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Şafak),Footnote ¹ but by now this tendency has become a permanent fixture of such efforts and publications: the apology campaign of 2008, despite its myriad political, deliberative, and textual problems as identified by the other contributors here, has since been systematically appropriated by its own text-writers as a “first” public statement against state denialism, after which, again, “everything has changed.” Among other self-proclaimed or self-advertised ground-breaking firsts by Turkish contributors are a journalistic book on what Armenians of Armenia and of the diaspora are like (Deep Mountain by Ece Temelkuran), the largely citational first-person account by a leading perpetrator's descendant (1915: Armenian Genocide by Hasan Cemal), and most recently a film (The Cut by Fatih Akın).Footnote ² Arguably, in the making of all of the above-mentioned works, as well as in the debates surrounding them, the questions of generic quality and representational ideology were largely overshadowed by the loudly avowed courage of the public figure in broaching this subject in the first place. These works either already incorporate, or were launched with, discourses preemptively dismissing any potential criticism as a nationalistic or a partisan attack.

This outsized mythologization of present-day efforts at facing the past voids any pretense to equality in the grammar among Turkish and Armenian intellectuals. The historic disproportionality and fateful relationship between unique (Turkish) public figures and the (bygone Armenian) masses is thus always already perpetuated. This is perhaps another dimension of the “language robbery” effected by myth; as a “second-order semiological system,” myth turns meaning into form, and through repetition, divests articulated language of the power of resistance.Footnote ³ In this particular context, myth-making also encompasses such elements as highly sentimentalized “recognition” (of the past, of one's part-Armenian ancestry) and “reversal,” in which the history of denial is symbolically upended in the miniature drama of the self's enlightenment. Invariably, the figure of the unimpeachable Armenian is summoned to assuage the ordeal of facing the past. But this figure is found only among the dead—in the person of Dink; in Turkish history; in one's own lineage. By contrast, encounters with living Armenians in Armenia (in the form of “travels to the Orient”) or with those living in the (capitalist) “diaspora” are overdetermined by both recycled prejudice and cliché stories of prejudice overcome. Stereotypes abound: the Armenian as one who looks, talks, sings, and eats like the Turk; as the Europeanized, enlightened, musical, artistic, tasteful, hard-working perfectionist; as the fanatical, hawkish, well-heeled money-grubber; as the obsessive paranoiac painfully hung up on a falsified past. The Turkish dramatis personae also are subjected to (self-)orientalizing and classist epithets. Oft repeated is the cliché that all peoples include elements of “good and evil.” This language of commonality has sought to mitigate the disturbing difference between the historic position of the perpetrator and that of the victim, as can be seen in a more recent commemoration theme, “Our Common Pain,” and a reconciliation petition, “Our Common Dream.”Footnote ⁴

To be fair, the perennial costs and benefits of littérature engagée must be weighed. For instance, did popular, sentimental abolitionist literature do more good (by raising social awareness, empathy, and activism) than harm (by simultaneously perpetuating many racist-supremacist assumptions)?Footnote ⁵ But in the present context, such a question has to take stock of a century-long denial: the questions here are, more squarely: after one hundred years, are prominent figures really pushing against social boundaries or precisely meeting and thriving in current demands (for fantasies of social transformation and for an anachronistic deluge of collective sentimentality)? Can we take at face value the one-dimensional performative claim “I am thus breaking the silence?”

In this affective economy, the only concrete gain is the global academic and media attention lavished on public figures, which otherwise would not be forthcoming. Hasan Cemal's 1915: Armenian Genocide is a prime example of such accounts of reversal; it is a “suspense” narrative capitalizing on an artifice: Will he, as a perpetrator–descendant, finally go to the Genocide Memorial in Yerevan? Will he, at long last, call the events a genocide?Footnote ⁶ This particular public figure contrived to ceremoniously reinvent and internationally publicize his identity through the performance and narration of one such plot. Not surprisingly, the account is remarkably solipsistic, save for the fact that more than a quarter (more than 50 out of 200 pages, excluding the appendices) consists of entire newspaper columns by Cemal himself and by Hrant Dink, among others. Cemal in fact qualifies Dink's assassination as the “cost” of peace and democracyFootnote ⁷; he frequently equates the “pain” of Turks and Armenians, and usually prefaces discussions of the genocide with competing mentions of the assassinations by the Armenian Secret Army of the Liberation of Armenia. Despite positioning himself against “nationalism,” Cemal makes the case that apologizing for “crimes against humanity” will serve to make Turkey stronger.Footnote ⁸ There is no question that he delights in exploiting his dramatic autobiographical value as a prominent perpetrator-descendant, expressly placing himself in the company of a strange royalty of foil “descendants,” such as Pamela Steiner (descendant of Henry Morgenthau, the genocide witness) and Armen Gevorgyan (descendant of a conspirator in the assassination of Cemal's grandfather).Footnote ⁹ Even Wikipedia in English now recognizes this public figure first and foremost for this elaborate saga.

In such internationally publicized accounts, Anatolian roots are supposed to vouch for a compensatory brotherhood or sisterhood between Turks and Armenians, but what we find in reality is a ritualistic dialectic of volatile bonding and hostile bondage. Framed thus, denialism can be considered a particular subcategory, not only of nationalism, but also of imperial sovereignty in the present. Records on live encounters in the past decade between Turkish and Armenian intellectuals, whether from Turkey or outside, testify to the assumption on the part of Turkish intellectuals that they will continue to dictate the terms, timing, and style of debate, even as their own terms vary unaccountably over time and space.

Chief examples of such encounters include conferences, confidential listserv interactions, book launches, etc. The interest in such encounters, of course, is not in how collegiality, solidarity, and friendship can be forged, which they certainly can, but the specific terms through which tokenism and discord transpire. The dictum that Armenians and Turks should participate in a dialogue even if they disagree on its terms posits dialogue as an empty absolute, as can be seen in the misnomer “the Armenian taboo” in Dialogue sur le tabou arménien (by Ahmet Insel, a professor and coauthor of the apology text, and Michel Marian).Footnote ¹⁰ An encounter between Halil Berktay and Henry Theriault in 2006 at a conference on the theme “Armenians and the Left” demonstrates that the fiercer resistance of many Turkish intellectuals is not to the use of the term “genocide” per se but to the idea that they be made to use it by their Armenian interlocutors.Footnote ¹¹ In the ensuing publication, Berktay devotes much space to his many political and intellectual transformations, indulges in unabashed self-adulation, and antagonizes Theriault in disparaging terms; having cleared the field, he provides his own account of the events of 1915, finally relenting that it must be called genocide. Theriault, by contrast, explains how the very event of Berktay's interventions and interjections itself exemplifies “post-genocide imperial domination,” which simply rejects the possibility of the other's position as a “moral and intellectual equal.”Footnote ¹² Cengiz Aktar's launch of his brief book on the public apology, L'Appel au pardon, in the French Institute of Istanbul, featured Marc Nichanian as a respondent and culminated in an altercation that, along with other such misappropriations of his thought, prompted Nichanian to clarify in Edebiyat ve Felaket that he never intended the use of aghed, or catastrophe, as a political substitute—or even an alternative—for “genocide.”Footnote ¹³

An exuberant participant in similar discursive monopolization and misappropriation, Baskin Oran, also a professor and a vocal coauthor of the public apology, demonstrated the formidable preemptive and prohibitive measures intellectuals can take to (re)frame and exclude Armenian intellectuals. Oran did not hesitate in periodically misrepresenting in his own regular newspaper column the exchanges on a private, restricted scholarly listserv, in order to caricature fellow members and dramatize their alleged “transformations.”Footnote ¹⁴ But perhaps more shockingly, in preemptive protest against an academic panel on “The Role and Discourses of Turkish Intellectuals,” Oran sent a prohibitive email to at least thirty-nine scholars and journalists in order to point the finger at an erstwhile critic of Hrant Dink and accuse the members of the upcoming panel of longstanding “hate speech” against Dink and “his friends.” Oran wrote, “You may not give [them] the pulpit in a conference named after ‘Hrant Dink.’ This is ayıp [reprehensible/ indecorous/ shameful].”Footnote ¹⁵ The three scholars on that panel are contributors to this roundtable.

All of these encounters demonstrate that as dominant figures of the public sphere, Turkish intellectuals typically come to the field with stage directions in mind. It is their expectation to control the narrative, guide the dynamics of the interaction, determine and time the terms, and guard discursive boundaries. The mythologization of the attempts at facing the past and relinquishing historic sovereignty has the power to overtake any momentous political recognition. If this state of affairs is at least somewhat challenged by now, this may be due in part to a growing discord between prominent figures and their target social segments both inside and outside Turkey, and to the worldwide exposure of their discourses—which vary over time and, perhaps more importantly, over space.