1954 -- ____

It had been really dead in Yerevan. Snowy, cold, bleak. There were a few days that I woke up between 1 and 3 pm with nothing to do all day. I got caught up on my reading, talked to no one but Arman and bought food at Urartu, the corner market; it was just too cold to go out. Friends invited me to Sisian, but I didn't want to make the six hour trip down there just to stay a day or two. Waiting for time to pass without getting depressed till we went to Tbilisi for a holiday. We would leave on my birthday, January 21st.
The day Hrant Dink was killed, I got the news that night in my Yahoo mailbox. There were two messages, one from Armenia, one from America, both forwarding the BBC announcement, subject heading: Turkish-Armenian Writer Shot Dead. I had a feeling who it was and was shocked and saddened to read the brief news item. Dink was so prominent a figure, I couldn't imagine who would dare kill him, in daylight, outside his office. I found it disheartening, also, that someone who represented Armenians in Turkey, who consistently wanted to open up dialogue on the Genocide, was wiped out. For it seemed that in the last couple of years, minds were changing, people were talking in Turkey. Academic conferences were held, albeit amidst great protest; writers were broaching the subject, but then again, only to be charged in the highest courts for insulting Turkishness. But more significantly, more and more individuals, regular Turkish citizens, were coming forward, discovering and announcing that a grandparent was a genocide survivor, originally an Armenian. They knew that Armenia and Armenians were part of Turkish history, part of Turkish blood, even if a few of their ancestors had been re-named, converted and cleansed.

The next day, Arman and I ran a million errands, then stopped in at his mother's apartment in the evening. His brother had CNN on and I was surprised that Dink's assassination was a leading story. Later, Arman and I went to a concert and a girl showed up with a sticker of Dink on her back. Arman retrieved the guitar he had been lending to the musician who performed, then brought a friend back to our apartment to make a cd for the bassist who was going to join his new band. I ran around trying to get packed, and when Arman and his friend were done, Arman walked him to the metro station and said he'd be back in half an hour. After an hour, I started to get nervous. Arman had gotten a haircut earlier in the day reminiscent of Ziggy Stardust, or as Arman purported, "I look like a Japanese girl." As benign as it seems, such a haircut might get someone in trouble in Yerevan, if you ran into the wrong drunk person. I tried not to worry, and about half an hour later, Arman showed up at the door with a plant with pink flowers. "Happy Birthday," he said.
Snowing was drifting down as we got on the maschrutka at the bus station at nine am, took the last seats in the back of the van. Arman's mother had told us the roads were dangerous, and I found myself gripping his hand as we passed through snowy hills, land and sky the exact same color, endless whiteness. There's a pass that goes through the mountains that seemed pretty bad, but then we got past it and on to Spitak, hard hit by the earthquake of 1988. Somewhere between Spitak and Vanadzor there's a roadside cemetery, memorials built into the bottom edge of a hill, which goes on and on and on; it's very pretty liked a Japanese garden. Would it look less impressive if the graves were all clumped together in a lot rather than accompanying the road? Once we got past the cemetery, I could see that there was no snow on the ground, the sun started to show, and then we made it to the border. Yerevan and the immediate vicinity was separated from the rest of the world by a snow cloud or something, because of the elevation, because of being bowl-shaped, a bubble. I was glad to get out, to wake up, the sun shining on the metal roofs of Georgian village homes.
It was about an hour from the border to Tibilisi, where we found the metro, which looked remarkably like the Yerevan metro, only with more people, and the people were all speaking a different language, and the signs were in a different language, and the people and the language kind of looked Armenian but definitely weren't. Even the fruit on the sidewalk looked similar, little mandarin oranges and wrinkled, roughed-up yellow apples. Borjomi bottled water came from a spring in a village, a tourist site in Georgia, the same way that Jermuk bottled came from a spring in a village, a tourist site in Armenia.
But over the next twenty four hours or so, I would decide that Tbilisi was much bigger, diverse and cosmopolitan than Yerevan. The people didn't wear all the same clothes, the buildings weren't made of all the same stone. There was no smog, fog, and you could see beautiful views across the river, over bridges, sheer rock walls and more ancient churches (and mosques and temples) than you could count. Old homes had been maintained, latticework balconies sprawling at streetlamp level, homemade layer cakes.
The ride to Tbilisi was less than six hours, and would have been even less if we hadn't stopped for lunch nor at the border for customs. I tried to think of American cities that were this close. L.A. and San Francisco are more like eight hours. Boston and New York might be a good comparison in distance, though not in city scale. Maybe Chicago and Iowa City, for both are traditional towns, but Tbilisi has the feel of a big city, the influence and influx of various people and cultures. We wandered the streets the five days we were there, and encountered Chinese stores everywhere, which Arman was obsessed with. There were items in the grocery store from all over Europe, much cheaper and much more selection than in Yerevan, there was a street with an international array of restaurants -- Irish pubs, Sushi joints, Indian, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Turkish -- and the satellite tv at the bed and breakfast showed channels from all over Europe and Russia.
I also noticed that unlike Yerevan, Tbilisi signs and posters are mostly only in the native language, hardly any in English and absolutely nothing printed in Russian. I thought it had to do with South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two regions that have wanted to break away from Georgia and have been enlisting the help of Russia over the years, Abkhazia a more bloody situation similar to Karbakh, thousands of Georgians forced out of the region. I also recalled that in the fall a bunch of Russians had to leave Georgia, but I couldn't remember why.
It wasn't until I read a newspaper that I realized that the two nations had been cut off from each other for a few months. Apparently, Georgians had arrested four Russians for espionage at the end of September, so Putin decided to impose transport and postal sanctions. The Russian ambassador was just now coming back to Tbilisi, but there were no flights, trains, or buses to Russia, no way to get a visa to Russia, no way to send anything to Russia. Tbilisi was in its own sort of bubble.
As we walked, we periodically came across armed soldiers near bridges and at major intersections. When we were near the Russian baths, at the intersection of the Metekhi bridge, Arman asked one of them a question in Russian, which made me rather nervous as I took a gander at his machine gun. The man was wearing grey combat fatigues and a blue beret, and his big chin had one of those Dudley DoRight dimples. When Arman asked advice for crossing the busy intersection the guy smiled and told him to get across any way we could but to be careful. This was a contrast to Armenian police, who walk around glaring at people and have been known to just walk away if you ask them a question. The Armenian police are engaged in a hierarchical system of bribery; they must pay bribes to get into the academy, and then, they must pay bribes to their superiors. So they often request bribes of civilians. At the border, Arman had to cough up 3000 dram to the customs agent, who was giving him a hard time for leaving the country at mandatory army service age without proof of being a student. I was informed that similar corruption abounded among Tbilisi police, but when the new President came in after the Rose Revolution, he fired all 7000 policemen, then realized he had 7000 angry criminals on the street, so he re-hired them as guards, undercover agents and various questionable roles; some police seem legit but others wear cobbled-together police uniforms and drive cars with the word "police" scrawled on the side; security guards in stores shadow you to make sure you don't pocket anything or plant a bomb, quite unnerving.
The more Arman spoke to people in Russian, the more I worried what they thought of us, especially the people under thirty who can't speak it. Did we happen to look like Abkhazians or South Ossetians? At times, I spoke in English to people, but this led to less discussion than if Arman spoke Russian. People picked up something in his accent and asked where he was from. The lady at the overpriced hotel in Old Town, the women at the funny mirror house at the decrepit amusement park, the man selling sneakers at the market near the train station: they all turned out to be Armenian. I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised. About half a million Armenians live in Georgia, around 100,000 of them in Tbilisi. I had read that during the 19th century, more Russians and Armenians lived in Tbilisi than Georgians. There are at least two beautiful ancient churches there, and we came across a couple of Armenian neighborhoods during our stay.
But the most surprising response to Arman's accent came from the guy at the Russian sulphur baths. Arman had just lain down, stomach first, butt up, on a ceramic table type of thing, and the guy, a large man with dark hair and olive skin in bathing trunks, dumped a bucket of water over him and asked if he were Azeri. Arman told him no, that he was Armenian, and the man told him in Armenian that he was Azeri, then proceeded to have a conversation with him in Armenian. (Naturally, he spoke better Armenian than me.) He told Arman that he learned the language from his Armenian friends in the neighborhood. We were in a place in Tbilisi, he told Arman, where Armenians, Azeris, Turks and even Kurds historically lived together. And they were all friends with each other. It seemed impossible, but it was true. (The Scottish guy we befriended in the bed and breakfast told us that he spent New Year's Eve in the very same neighborhood with an Azeri family and their Armenian friends who lived up the street.) I surmised that their families had been living together before the troubles in Nagorno Karabakh, maybe even before the Genocide. Who knows what their relationships were like over the years, with the switches and changes in history. What mattered was that they all got along now, in the present. Perhaps in a city where they were all outsiders, where the Georgian/Russian troubles affected their daily lives more than land and history disputes across other borders, they could be friends.
It was the day after Dink had been buried, and this man rubbed my naked body with a scrubbing mitt. After a few days of trying to shower with low water pressure and little hot water, walking around the filthiest parts of Tbilisi, my skin was rubbing off, gray and black. It was a bit embarrassing, but the Azeri man didn't seem to care. He had scrubbed lots of bodies, it was clear. He tapped me when he wanted me to flip over, when he wanted me to sit up. He washed my shoulder, arms, hands, my chest, breasts, legs, butt and back. He filled up what looked like a pillowcase with soap and air, then squished it down onto my body, making clouds of soft suds. I giggled when he rubbed the underside of my feet and was only slightly bothered when his mitt brushed my clit. The Azeri man rinsed me off and shook my hand. I felt relaxed, renewed. A different form of ethnic cleansing.
Afterwards, some of the Azeri man's buddies from the hood stopped by and took our picture. They joked with us. "He told you he's Armenian! He's Turkish!" (insert photo here)

A couple of days later, on the maschrutka back to Yerevan, I marveled at the beautiful sight of the Caucasus mountains in the distance, traces of snow in the distance like latticework. When we got over the border to encounter other mountains, I found myself comparing the view to the one back in Georgia, then realized there was no point; we all shared this land over eons of time, and no one owned it or belonged to it more than anyone else.
It's hard to reconcile this point of view with nationalists who want to prove Karabakh has always been Armenian or has always been Azeri. The fact of the matter is the two peoples were both living on that land and having trouble sharing it in their present, and they tried to solve the problems by murder and force, by war and massacre.

Arman picked up a photocopied picture of Hrant Dink, torn on the ground, as we marched into the square with our backpacks. Under his countenance was his date of birth but his date of death left blank -- "1954 -- _____".
"What does it mean?" he asked.
"I don't know. That they don't think he's really dead?" I imagined conspiracy theories abounding.
When we got back home, I checked Armenia Now for news and learned there had been a massive demonstration in Yerevan the same day as the one in Istanbul for Dink's funeral. I'd received a lot of emails from friends in the states, while we were away, mentioning the assassination and the demonstrations. For some reason, his death made huge international news, a picture of the Istanbul demonstration on the cover of the New York Times.
What was particularly surprising (and heartening) to me though, was the response of the Turkish media. Many columnists and journalists were outraged. Headlines read "The Murderer Is a Traitor" (Hürriyet), "It Was Turkey That Was Shot Dead" (Milliyet), "Nothing could harm Turkey more than this" (Vatan) and "They Killed Our Brother" (BirGün). The sentiment was echoed in the protest signs: We are all Armenian, We are all Hrant.
I read that Hrant Dink's mission with his newspaper Agos was to be a voice for Turkish Armenians within Turkey, but also to the diaspora. When I went to Istanbul in 1998, I was shocked to learn there was a sizable Armenian community there. Because of the lessons I had learned about the genocide in Armenian school, I had just assumed there were no Armenians left in Turkey. And yet I encountered them throughout my trip to the Anatolian countryside. Part of the issue was the magnitude of the crime perpetrated against survivors. My grandmother had absolutely no interest in going back to the land where her family and their way of life were decimated. She was Armenian and Turks were Turks: there was no combining the identity, even though her Armenian speech was peppered with Turkish words, even though the dishes she made were both Armenian and Turkish. She also learned Arabic in the home of the family who saved her in Syria, learned their dishes and their folk tales. She was actually a combination of cultures, not just Armenian. But the crime closed off a part of her life, never to be opened again, until I went to find her village in 1998.
Hrant Dink considered himself both Turkish and Armenian. He was against both Turkish nationalism and Armenian nationalism, especially the kind he saw in the rest of the diaspora. He personally felt that he had gotten over the Armenian rage against Turks and wanted to keep dialogue open between the two peoples, his newspaper a mouthpiece.
After I wrote my book about my grandmother's experience in the genocide, and how it affected my family, it seemed I had also knocked over such rage against Turks. New York is a good place for two outsiders, separated from time and borders, to work out their differences, so I tried over the last few years to visit Turkish establishments, sometimes running into them accidentally. At one fabric store, I asked the young woman selling me pillowcases where she was from and she told me Turkey. I smiled at her and asked where she was from in Turkey and she said Istanbul.
"My great grandparents were from there."
"You're Turkish?"
"No, I'm Armenian."
"Oh, usually Armenian people don't want to talk to me," she said.
"Do you know about the Genocide?" I asked her.
"Yes," she nodded. "It happened a long time ago."
"Yes," I said, not knowing how to tell a stranger that unhealed pain is preserved in bodies and passed on through families, "but many Armenians were killed by Turks, and it has been denied a lot, and that's why some Armenians may have trouble talking to you. But it's not really fair to who you are," I told her.
"Yes," she said again. "I wasn't there."
I could tell I was making her nervous, that she didn't really want to go into it with me. I was shaking as I walked out of the store, down the street to the subway. When I got home, I noticed that she had forgotten to charge me for a couple of items. Did she realize it later, and think that I had been trying to distract her from her job with my questions and comments? I hoped not, but I never went back to the store.
Perhaps my first effort at Turkish-Armenian cross communication was not too successful, but it served me well when I met Dilek, a Turkish writer at a women's writing salon. Our ethnic identities were revealed as we were being introduced in a group, and I mentioned that I had just completed a book about my grandmother, and she was asked what kind of name she had. I decided not to question or educate; if she was open, she would approach me. And she did. She told me that she had written articles about the genocide, and made it clear that she knew the history, was dismayed by her government on several counts, one reason she was living in New York. She was older than me, with spiky white hair, very striking; she had confessed she had spent a few days wearing the same clothes, just writing, trapped in her own world, and I sympathized. We exchanged emails and invited each other to events; she came to Gartal and I went to her book party at her Soho loft. We haven't truly connected as colleagues or friends, not yet anyway, but there was a quiet yet supportive way we entered each others' spheres, and I was increasingly happy for her presence whenever I saw her. Our smiles indicated a mutual kind of witnessing, atonement, acknowledgment.
And then there is Beldan, a writer and graphic artist who I wrote about in my second post: we met when she was visiting New York and again when I flew through Amsterdam. Both times, we shared stories: about being Turkish in Europe, about my grandmother's survival of the genocide. We also swapped stories of our family's reactions to our queerness, the technicalities of how out we have been over the years. I think these talks, across borders and time, helped me to become even more open to speak with not just Turks, but to everyone, for you never know what complex treasure you will find. Beldan is a bright personality, she smiles upward and outward and she is softspoken and smart. I like her very much; she is more than Turkish to me, but a star, a kindred soul, starving artist with a strong story, trying to get it out into the world.
I don't think I would have been able to have this connection if it hadn't been for my grandmother, for her strong presence in my life, for all the Turkish stories she held, the most painful Armenian-Turkish story of all. How could I have not been compelled to learn more about her, and how could this have not lead to mourning?
There is the girl I was before I started writing my grandmother's story, the one who became enraged if anyone said anything good about Turks and Turkey without mentioning they were vicious killers in 1915, to the woman who, with the culmination of effort over time, now just feels a tinge of anger, but not so great that it will prevent her from walking openly toward someone who is Turkish, to see what will happen, to see who they are. There are many Armenians who have done so much more than this in terms of Armenian-Turkish dialogue, and they have been developing over the years, over time, as more and more of us find ways to mourn, to step away from nationalism and a self-defensive pose, armor down.
Hrant Dink must have been the most open Armenian there was.

Which leads me to the Armenian mourning of his death. As I read on about the demonstrations in Armenia, I noticed the use of the slogan. Although its chanting can be seen as an act of solidarity with the protesters in Istanbul, who were Armenian, Turkish and Kurdish,"We are all Armenian, we are all Hrant" has quite a different meaning here. Because obviously, we're all Armenian in Armenia. Almost stiflingly so. And to all be Hrant? What does it mean? We're all victims of a crazed killer? We're all being targeted for being Armenian and speaking up about the genocide?
Another sign read "1,500,000 + 1", referring to the number of Armenians killed in the genocide, plus Hrant. Was such a statement identifying that the same kind of hatred that caused the genocide also motivated his death? It seemed so. Though he was made a target by "ultra-nationalists" because he allegedly violated article 301 of the Turkish Penal code for insulting Turkishness, Hrant Dink was not a credible threat to the Turkish nation, but rather, one who helped it; his paper and his existence were not preventing Turkey from progressing for he was a proponent of Turkey getting into the European Union. Thus one reason for so many in Turkey to feel that with his death, the whole nation was attacked.
I wondered some more about that "1,500,000 + 1" sign, though. Was it also being used for the genocide recognition cause, a fundamentally political campaign? Or was Dink's death an event that called up the pain of the genocide, necessary to be mourned again?
Lara, one of the directors of Batz Drner (Open Doors, the Women's Center), who had organized a couple of smaller, grass roots demonstrations on the days before the huge government-supported rally on Tuesday, told me that on Wednesday, marchers went up to the genocide memorial at Tsitsernakaberd and placed flowers at the wall where the word Malatya was etched. It seemed both an act of politics and mourning, the two conflated. Yes, Dink was born in Malatya, but he claimed Istanbul as his home. Again he was being equated with a victim of the genocide, a term that he recognized as being political as well as historical.
But when I asked one of my students about the demonstration and march, she said it was a waste of time. That the Armenian government was just using the opportunity to get attention for the genocide, but that it would never work. I asked her if anyone she knew went to the demonstrations and she said no, in the most 'of course not' kind of way.
Another friend, Viken, had a more measured response. "No, I did not go to the demonstrations. Because there is a man that they have jailed for saying something against the government here." He was referring to Jhirayr Sefilian, a Karabakh war veteran. He was against certain areas in the buffer zone around Karabakh to be returned to Azerbaijan and said so, referring to those in power as "illegal authorities" at a meeting of the Unification of Armenian Volunteers organization in Yerevan. The comments were later published in a local paper in early December, and soon after, Sefilian and eight other members of his opposition group were taken into custody, their homes searched. Viken was saying it was hypocritical to call out Turkey, when the Armenian government isn't any better, arresting people simply for their words.
I agreed, somewhat, with these responses. The same Armenian nationalists who didn't like some of Dink's positions on genocide acknowledgment (he was against the bill in France that made it a crime to deny it for it limited free speech, he was against many of the diasporan campaigns to seek resolutions from Western governments) now were protesting his death, simply because he was an Armenian assassinated by Turks. There is a line between being reasonably proud of your ethnicity, but not so proud that you aren't interested in anything else. How do we understand our identity in a way that makes sense, that involves supporting and taking care of each other, without leading to exclusion and harm? Why for example, when Armenians discuss how many were killed in the genocide, they only use the figure 1.5 million Armenians, when there were Assyrians and Greeks and Jews who were killed and forced out too? Why can't we also talk about the innocent Turkish lives lost as well? It is some form of neglect, some form of censorship: only the Armenian lost lives matter to us. And it seems parallel to the blind kind of Turkish nationalism Dink was working against.
So I can understand avoiding the huge government demonstration here. But why not go to the smaller demonstrations? Why let your politics prevent you from showing up for a man who worked for so much good, who was against nationalism in both countries, who was pretty much in line with your own politics? It seemed to be going too far in the other anti-Armenian-nationalistic direction, too out of sight of the main point. There is another line, and it is quite clear, etched between being realistically critical of Armenian nationalism and having a simple kneejerk reaction to everything that might be connected to it.

Lara also told me that on Sunday, all the churches rang their bells at the same time to honor the memory of Dink, so that no matter where you were, you heard their call. She said, "We all felt really bad that week. No one wanted to do anything, we were all so depressed."
It sounded like national collective mourning to me. Or, perhaps, the unnecessary internalization of victimization, the kind that makes us think nothing we do can ever matters, our lives snuffed out prematurely by evil, by the Turks.
I couldn't really know for sure, because I had missed the whole thing. There was nothing going on for Dink in Tbilisi, caught in its own bubble. I missed the Armenians coming together and all the things they felt and said. While I'd been in Tbilisi, I had felt relieved of the burden of finding a purpose, of the pressure I put on myself here to be doing the right thing, speaking to the right people, during this precious amount of time that I have. I was on holiday; it was my birthday; I was experiencing Tbilisi for the first time with my boyfriend who had never been outside of Armenia before.
And yet, when I came back, I discovered I'd missed the big, and perhaps only, event that would be of interest to Americans. My audience?
I tried desperately to get caught up, reading all the articles on Dink's life I could find on the internet in preparation to write this post. From what I read, it seemed that more Armenians and Turks would understand his message because of the shock of his death. The largest peaceful protest in Turkey's history was held; the outraged response of Turkish society lead to the huge international attention of the issues between Turks and Armenians. Already, many Turks were calling for the repeal of the anti-Turkishness code, and the Armenian Deputy Foreign Minister said he was ready to negotiate opening the border between the two countries.
Still, I woke up the next morning completely depressed. I couldn't move, I didn't want to get up, I was testy with Arman, I didn't want to write, I didn't want to try calling Vartan and Viken with whom I had tentative plans. I didn't want to go out, I didn't want to do anything. What was the point? I had a severe case of feeling sorry for myself; no one had been calling me upon my return to the city the way that Arman's friends and family were all calling him. I didn't really matter here.
At some point, by the end of the day, when the depression had cleared, I realized it had to do with all the stories I'd read about Dink. Why did they upset me so? Here was a man who was working so hard, who had found his life's work in one area of the world. And yet his cause made more impact when he was murdered than when he was alive. And I guess I must have identified with him somehow, as I work in one little area of the world. In a bubble of progressive Armenianism. And I constantly battle with myself, in a way that I think is probably so counterproductive (and boring to read about), with whether it is worth it, whether anyone cares.
Of course the truth is that Dink's work is lasting; it does matter. There is a story here about the ways we make and understand our worlds, forming a bubble of identity, nationality and ethnicity that is manageable, but also how we must come to understand ourselves as a composite of truths. Though Hrant Dink worked in one area of the world, he wasn't encased in a bubble, I don't think, for his vision had a worldliness to it, an understanding of something larger. Our bubbles are connected, like clouds of suds on a naked body, clearing away the detritus that keeps us from each other.