Almost Sisters, Nearly Brothers

Almost Sisters, Nearly Brothers

by Susan Arpajian Jolley

This is a story that is hard for me to write. It is a story of pain and pride, of memoirs and memories. Most of all, perhaps, it is a story of silence and speech, silence born of trauma and pain, and speech that may have the power to heal and transform. For reasons that will become obvious, this story means more to me than to my students. For both of us, however, this is a story that I must tell.

“Look, Mrs. Jolley, this is my city!”

Agyul calls me, her English teacher, over to her computer screen in the library of our high school, obviously pleased and proud. “There’s the Black Sea. And this is where my home was.” Agyul is a shy girl with pretty dark curls and smooth pale skin, a senior about to graduate from this small New Jersey high school. The picture on the screen does look beautiful, and I ask Agyul a few questions about her town, which she and her family left five years ago. But the scene that draws me to that computer also makes me pause. It makes me want to cry.

Of course, I don’t cry; I am in school. I am the teacher. I leave Agyul, and go on to Solomon, who is from Sierra Leone. He’s visiting a web site from his country, too, and shows me how there is relative peace there now after the bloody civil war in which he himself was caught. Solomon has lived through hardships most American teenagers couldn’t even imagine. He is grateful to be here now, but dreams of going back to Sierra Leone some day to help his people.

But my mind stays with Agyul. I think of her city, a small town on the Black Sea. I have heard many times of the beauty of her country. I have been told of the fig trees, the apricot trees, the abundant melons that grow big “like this,” as my grandfather used to say as he extended his arms. I was raised with stories of the ancient rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. I have seen over and over in my mind, in photographs, and on my artist aunt’s canvas, the image of Mount Ararat, snow-capped in a pink and blue haze, where, according to the Bible, Noah’s ark came to rest.

I hold these images in my mind because Agyul’s country and my grandparents’ land are the same. But, Agyul is Turkish, and I am Armenian. If you know the history that many people do not, the story of what has been termed the first genocide of the modern age (Balakian, Tigris 286) , you will understand.

First, though, let me describe my class at the school where I have recently begun teaching after a long career in several other districts. This class is small, consisting in the spring semester of only five students, four of whom are from other countries. My job in this class has been to help students meet the state-mandated graduation requirements in language arts, no easy task for those who have come to the United States during their adolescence, as these students have. We have worked hard in the first semester, and by the end of January, everyone has passed an alternate assessment offered by the state for those students who do not meet the proficiency requirements on the standard test. I am proud and happy that everyone in my class has succeeded.

After meeting the requirements, students have the option of leaving my class, perhaps to take an elective or opt into a study hall the second semester of the year. Ten or so American students take the option: they enroll in cooking class, critical viewing class, or mass media. Some go to study hall. We have lots of options at our school. I have suggested to the English language learners that they stay with me and we work on their English, to prepare, perhaps, for enrollment in community college. They agree, and seem enthusiastic about staying. One American boy, Joe, also decides to stay. He’s new to the school, comfortable in the class, and he figures he can get a good grade to boost his GPA.

So, in this second semester of senior year, we work on grammar, study English idioms, read some young adult fiction, view movies, and write. This class is a luxury for me. I have five attentive students and free reign, granted by my supervisor, to teach them what I believe will be beneficial to them.

Now that it is April of senior year, we are doing some memoir writing. We’ve just finished reading Linda Crew’s young adult novel, Children of the River, a story about a teenage girl who escapes Pol Pot’s killing fields in Cambodia and resettles with her aunt and uncle in Oregon. Sundara, who is the age of my students, must come to terms with the loss of her homeland and adjust to life in a culture foreign to her. I have suggested to my students that they write about leaving their own homes. All five of them, three from Turkey, one from Sierra Leone, and one from Philadelphia, can identify with the shock of relocation. All five have found that adjusting to life in New Jersey has been challenging. All five are more or less considered outsiders by the majority of students in the school. So they will all write about their past lives, how they have had to adapt, how they have struggled with differences in language and culture, and how they feel about their present lives. We spend much time talking, prewriting, studying other people’s writing. All seem excited by the prospect of writing about their experiences.

Solomon will write about his school in Sierra Leone. I think he should write another piece about the war; he is a bit reluctant. Joe will write about how protocol for dating and finding a girlfriend is different in Philadelphia and suburban New Jersey. The Turkish students will write about various aspects of their lives in Turkey, their country.

Their country. Whose country?

Therein lies my problem. For while I love my students and can’t wait to read their stories, I cannot reconcile the idea that Turkey is their country, and that it has a history of which these young people are unaware. It is a history not in Turkish textbooks. It is a history denied today by Turkish scholars who have obtained prestigious chairs at American universities. But it is a history which I know is true, and one with which I am intimately acquainted.

My grandparents were driven from Eastern Turkey, the ancient Armenian homeland, in the years during and following World War I. Only recently has this event been termed genocide, a word which did not even come into use until World War II. Some could call it ethnic cleansing. Some might say religious persecution. Some may even term it a “relocation.” As I was growing up, it was simply called the Massacre.

I grew up among survivors of that Massacre. I certainly knew of the Turks, but I never actually knew a Turk, a member of that “race” against whom the Armenians I knew raged and railed. They did so fruitlessly, however, because the world, and the Turkish government in particular, refused to acknowledge that the catastrophe even took place. This first genocide of the 20th century is well-documented through testimonies of survivors, through signed documents that order deportation and extermination, through eyewitness accounts of American teachers and missionaries to Turkey, and through the memoirs of British and American ambassadors, most notably the account by United States ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916, Henry Morganthau. Morgenthau’s memoirs are still in print, and in fact his grandson, Henry Morgenthau III, devotes many pages in his own family memoir, Mostly Morgenthaus, to the elder man’s attempts to stop Turkish persecution of the Armenians. Peter Balakian’s recent book, The Burning Tigris, chronicles in great detail the Turkish massacres of the Armenians in the 1890s and the systematic genocide of 1915. To this day, however, the Turkish government denies that this ethnic cleansing, which also targeted Pontic Greeks and Assyrians, took place. One and a half million Armenians died; almost all other Armenians living in Eastern Turkey, including my grandmothers, were deported. Both my grandfathers were lucky; they had immigrated to the United States before 1915, the date of the most massive action against the Armenians. However, they too lost almost their entire families that year. I am a grandchild of my grandparents’ second families, begun in the United States in the aftermath of the tragedy.

Maybe at this point I should say that I have lived an American life. My connections to the Armenian community, at least on the surface, are tenuous at best. I have forgotten much of the language, though I spoke it before I spoke English. I attend Armenian Church infrequently. My husband is not Armenian. I have not used my Armenian background in my teaching career in any obvious way, except occasionally to educate my American students on where Armenia is located.

In my life, however, there are signs of my family’s immigration. I cook the Armenian recipes of my grandmothers. I stay up-to-date on current Armenian affairs. I read the memoirs and literature produced by second-generation American Armenians, works such as Balakian’s memoir Black Dog of Fate and Adam Bagdasarian’s young adult novel Forgotten Fire. I follow American Armenian efforts to hold Turkey accountable for the genocide, to urge the United States Congress to pass a genocide resolution. At gatherings of my extended family, events that occur frequently in Armenian households, Armenian affairs are discussed. My daughter, while she has an Irish last name, has an Armenian first name. So, for someone who lives an American life, the ties to heritage, while maybe not overt, are still strong. Being Armenian is never really far from my mind. Neither is what happened to my grandmothers.

It is with this perspective that I find myself where I am today, teaching in New Jersey. I had known that there was a growing Turkish community in my town. I had seen the arrival of a Turkish market in a strip mall, a Turkish bakery off the highway. I had heard what I knew was Turkish being spoken in the supermarket. I had known from my daughter that yes, there were some Turkish students in her high school. But I barely took note, since it all seemed removed from me and my American life, from my teaching English to American kids.

When I accepted this teaching position, I barely thought of Turks. I certainly didn’t think of my grandparents. But all that changed the day I set foot in my new school.

My grandparents. My grandmothers. My maternal grandmother, Arek, a wife and mother of two small children when the deportations began in 1915. The Turks killed her husband and children. She was driven from her home near Van in Eastern Turkey through the deserts of Syria, eventually rescued and brought to America, but not before suffering the “unspeakable,” as Peter Balakian calls the experiences of the victims of the Massacre (Black Dog 283). We never exactly knew her story. It was too horrific for her to tell.

We knew her entire family was obliterated. The cruelties and unthinkable tortures the victims of the Massacre suffered are well documented. We surmise she saw her children killed. We know there was a period of time when she spoke no Armenian. (Armenian women en route to deportation were often taken in by Kurds.) We believe that she bore other children during that time. Raped? Kept by strangers? Violated in unimaginable ways? My grandmother never learned English. I didn’t want to hear, anyway, even if she had found the tongue to give language to her experience.

And so, we don’t know the particulars of what happened to my grandmother Arek. In Trauma and Recovery, Judith Lewis Herman suggests that the normal response of survivors of trauma is to banish the atrocities from their consciousness. Is that what Arek did? I doubt she ever banished them completely, but she certainly found them “too terrible to utter aloud,” as Herman says (1). Herman’s work, a study of many kinds of trauma, ranging from physical and sexual abuse to rape to war atrocities, helps me understand the consequences of what my grandmother must have suffered—multiple traumatic situations, the worst of which may have been witnessing the torture and murder of her loved ones. Although she survived, her wanderings and her suffering lasted for years. She arrived in this country in 1923, eight years after deportation from her home, sent for by a man from her village who was already in America and had heard of her plight. Intending to marry her, he obtained a passport for her to come to America. When he saw the pathetic condition she was in, he had a change of heart. He did, however, find refuge for her in a fellow villager’s home in Philadelphia. There, she was taken in and married to the man who would become my grandfather, a man who had himself lost a wife and five sons in the genocide.

Trauma and Recovery, an outgrowth of Herman’s clinical work with female survivors of violence, surely describes my grandmother in the aftermath of the genocide. The testimony of trauma survivors, a necessary step in the recovery process, is at the heart of her book. Arek’s testimony, in the literal sense of the word, does not exist. The process of recovery for the trauma victim, asserts Herman, centers around the establishment of safety, telling the story “completely, in depth and in detail” (175), and reconnecting to self and community. By this definition, and particularly through her silence, Arek’s recovery remained incomplete.

My paternal grandmother, Artemis, a child of fifteen in 1915, was saved only by the fact that she attended an American missionary school in Bitlis, a predominantly Armenian town left virtually without a trace of Armenians after the massacres and deportations. Her family, except for an aunt who was a teacher in the same school, disappeared. Orphaned, rescued and “selected” by my grandfather, ten years her senior, to be his bride, survivor of a daring escape to Russia, pregnant at fifteen, and in America at sixteen. She was pregnant again at seventeen, and raising two little boys, my father and my uncle, in a strange country by the year 1919.

Was this less unspeakable than Arek’s story? Perhaps so, but not much. Artemis spoke more than Arek, studied, read, learned excellent English, and became a leader in the Armenian community. She was a tiny woman who remained youthful looking until she died in 1984. Having the confidence and aggressiveness to educate herself made her atypical in the male-dominated Armenian culture. At one point she even took a job at a department store, as a protest, my mother tells me, because she was tired of catering to my grandfather’s sister, who was on an extended visit from her home in France. I remember my grandmother Artemis cooking and baking, spending hours in the kitchen to make Armenian delicacies such as cheese boereg (the Turkish word for this savory pastry) and kufta (a filled meatball made with ground lamb and bulgar); but make no mistake, she thought of herself as more than a cook and a keeper of the house. Her library was filled with books, both literary and political, in several languages. She voted for John Anderson in 1980 as a protest vote. She learned to drive, almost unheard of for an Armenian woman her age. But she was oddly child-like at times, occasionally pouting or acting with silly frivolity, maybe because her own childhood was cut short. And she cried, too, when thinking about her homeland and its tragedy. She would never see her home again, never know her family, never inhabit a place where she was not an outsider.

Arek’s sufferings remained more private. Maybe “private” is not the right word. Her sufferings were more silent, yet more visible. You could tell when a child she saw reminded her of her lost children. You could see her head turn away and hear the deep sigh. Yet she made a life in this country, and she and my grandfather, despite early and extreme poverty, raised four successful children, over whom, when they were young, she remained hypervigilant, lest they be taken from her too. She rarely left the house, however. The excuse was often her lame leg, the result of an accident in her youth, but I knew better. The world out there was a dangerous place, she believed, and who could blame her for thinking so? After years of trauma, years of being “reduced to a goal of simple survival,” as Herman writes in describing the experiences of other victims of trauma, she adapted by way of “psychological constriction” (87). She withdrew from the outside world. Her husband and children were complicit in this withdrawal. They translated for her, answered the phone, did all the errands, protecting her from what they knew she could not face: the world.

One memory that has never left me is that she did not attend my grandfather’s funeral; although she grieved, it was accepted by her and by the entire family that she would stay home. Now I understand that her children were trying to protect her from more grieving. As if they could. My brother and I, nine and twelve at the time, stayed with her. People returned to the house to give her their condolences, but she never left.

Arek, like Artemis, spent hours in the kitchen, cooking for her family. We never saw her eat, however. She only served others, expressing the unutterable belief that she deserved no food, had no needs. I remember her looking sad, and often gazing out the window of her Philadelphia row house, waiting, always waiting, for what no one knew. I do know that whatever she was waiting for would never come, for it had been taken from her long ago. For Arek there was no psychotherapy, no healing, no recognition, no empowerment, and no real return to ordinary life. There was occasional laughter, music, gaiety, but only as an interlude to the grieving.

I remember being sad, too, for while my grandparents did not say a lot, there was an unmistakable sadness, and often a fear, in the Armenian community in the middle of the twentieth century. Sad music, sad church services, sad, sad recitations of poetry that expressed a longing for lost loved ones and lost homeland. Diatribes against the Turkish government, the Turkish people. Fear of outsiders who might strip you of your identity. Admonitions against marrying non-Armenians. Shame-laden warnings about forgetting the language. A tenacious grip on nationality. But above all, a profound sorrow over the loss of home. There was a superficial recovery in the Armenian community, a moving on with education, jobs, success. But there was no real healing taking place. Wounds remained open, and painfully so.

It is against this backdrop, these memories, these indelible influences, influences that I have always felt so acutely, that I prepare to meet my Turkish students. It is of Arek and Artemis I think when I see the Turkish names on my class list the day before school starts in September.

I truly do not know what to expect, except that I know enough to keep myself from conjuring up brutal images of the murderers of my ancestors. I have heard that Turks, like Armenians and all Middle Eastern nationalities, are known for their generosity and hospitality. I know we must share some food and customs. I also know that this little ethnic minority is not particularly popular among the American students; they keep to themselves, I have heard, and speak Turkish in the halls, pretty much non-participants in the American high school experience. But then again, I too know about ethnic cliques.

It is our first day of school. They come into class and smile at me—two girls and one boy (there are others in the class, but I’m not concerned with them; I have a personal issue at hand), and I smile at them. I go over to them, introduce myself, and ask them where in Turkey they are from. They are surprised, almost shocked, yet obviously pleased by the question. Not many Americans ask them that. I wonder what I am going to say next, but without actually planning it, I say, “My grandparents were from Turkey, too.” I mention Van and Bitlis and Malatya. They are impressed. Then I say, because somehow I must, “They were from Turkey, but they weren’t Turks, they were Armenians. We’re Christians, not Muslims.” This is okay with them, too, and we have a connection. That’s all I say, because, after all, I do have to attend to the rest of the students and get the class underway. But my introduction is done. Some words have been spoken.

But images come to me, welcome and unwelcome. I remember the accents. The broken English of these students sounds like the broken English of my grandparents. The vowels, the rolled “r,” the omission of articles, the inability to make the “th” sound. Other things occur to me, these not so welcome. The face of the boy—in twenty years could it look like the faces of the mustachioed Turkish gendarmes whose fearsome images recur in every survivor interview or memoir? The gendarmes who led Armenian men to their deaths and drove the women and children on death marches? Enough of that. That is no picture to conjure up here. The girls are wearing jeans; they look just like the American girls. I remember that Turks are more secular than most other Muslims from the Middle East. I envision the girls in the charshaf, the traditional Muslim headcovering. That vision is okay; the gendarme one is not. I realize that my preconceived notions about Turks involve images of brutal men, the men who carried out the deportations, rapes, and murders. I had never given much thought to Turkish women. Were they too subjugated by Turkish men?

If you are Armenian, you will understand the import, the emotional resonance, the deeply imbedded images with which I am dealing. If you are not, you probably will not understand. Don’t blacks deal with whites every day, you ask? Don’t Native Americans live uneventfully among those whose ancestors stole their land? Don’t Jews around the world face ethnic conflict and anti-Semitism all the time? Something else is going on here. In contemplating this issue, I turn to a book I first read almost thirty years ago, Passage to Ararat, Michael J. Arlen’s memoir of his search for answers about his Armenian heritage.

Passage to Ararat is an outgrowth of Arlen’s curiosity about the Armenian heritage of his father, novelist Michael Arlen, who died in 1956. The elder Arlen, who was born in Bulgaria in 1896 and lived most of his life in England, rarely acknowledged being Armenian. As his son says, Arlen “wrote about everything except his Armenian background and all his life refused to weep over anything” (186). Knowing that there was much his emotionally distant father was repressing, Arlen, years after his father’s death, embarks on a quest that takes him to Turkey and to what was then Soviet Armenia. He must learn about Armenians, and he must learn what fears drove his father’s life.

Although I wasn’t much concerned with Armenian affairs at the time of my first reading of the memoir in 1975, I remember being amazed that a man like the elder Arlen could live a life devoid of connections or references to Armenians. To most Armenians I knew, being Armenian was a defining fact of their lives. They were quite vocal about it. What I didn’t realize at the time was that Arlen’s disconnection was most certainly his defense against remembering painful elements in his life. In my later reading of the memoir, just this past year, I was struck particularly by the question Arlen raises of why Armenians seem unable to come to terms with their history. Why is it like an open wound for them, even several generations after the genocide?

Writers of Disaster, by Marc Nichanian, sheds some light on this question. Nichanian examines an idea set forth by early twentieth century Armenian writers: that the Armenian experience of genocide goes beyond its political and historical implications; that the experience was, for survivors and witnesses, too far “beyond the limits of human imagination” to be recounted or named (206). The implications about trauma, language, and mourning are many. When the unimaginable cannot be named or uttered, Nichanian writes, language is shattered. When events are so horrific that they are indefinable, survivors and witnesses cannot put events in the past and therefore cannot mourn.

I am sure that this loss of mourning was compounded for the Armenian survivors by Turkish denial. Armenians remained powerless and speechless in the face of the denial of such a catastrophe by perpetrators who refused to admit, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence, that genocide was ordered and actually took place. Herman suggests that when there is “no hope of justice, the helpless rage of victimized groups can fester,” regardless of how much time passes (242). Is this why, as Arlen notes, twentieth- century Armenian rhetoric has a different, ironically more mournful quality than rhetoric from the survivors of other genocides, even more recent ones?

Loss of mourning. Loss of recognition. I, even though not a direct survivor, know the feeling.

The year is 1969. I am a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. I have written a paper for an introductory political science course on the political climate that led to the Turkish massacres of the Armenians in 1915. I go to the teaching assistant’s office for a conference on the paper. He looks at me. He’s young, with red hair and red moustache, and I can tell he hopes one day to be a true scholar, to have a real position at a place like the University of Pennsylvania. He says, “This paper is OK, but who cares about this situation, I mean this so-called massacre?” I am too amazed, and more importantly, not bold enough, to say anything. Silence and a feeling of shame are my only responses. I lower my eyes to mask the tears that are filling them. I defer to his opinion and leave his office. I’m used to feeling this way. I silently vow to get over it, this Armenian thing. Who needs nationalism anyway?

It is 1970. My roommate, who is Jewish, says, “I never heard of an Armenian. But now I remember my mother used to say, ‘Eat your food. You could be a starving Harmenian’.” At this time, I have never heard such a phrase, but I quickly figure out that it is a parental exhortation to children to clean their plates. I tell my roommate that my grandparents were those “starving Armenians” about whom the cliché originated.

It is 2003, my classroom. By this time, I have told my students that my grandparents were forced to leave Turkey. I do say that Armenians and Turks were enemies, but I don’t tell them details; there would be no point, I don’t want to hurt their feelings. What good would it do for them to know about my family’s misfortune in their country? One day Koray, remembering parts of what I have said, asks me what year my father was born. I answer 1919. He looks happy, triumphant. "Then maybe your father knew Ataturk!" He shows me a piece of Turkish currency with Ataturk’s picture.

How do I respond? I know that by 1923 Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, though not involved in the 1915 genocide, had purged Turkey of most remaining Christians, including Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians, and had caused the nullification of the Treaty of Sevres, a 1920 agreement between the Allied Powers and Turkey that had granted autonomous territories to the Armenians, Greeks and Kurds. I know that Ataturk had finished the ethnic cleansing that the Young Turks had begun years earlier. But I also know that Ataturk is Turkey’s national hero, the one Turks believe brought them into the Modern Age, the one who preserved their crumbling state.

It’s time for me to answer, so I say, “I know Ataturk is a hero to the Turks, but he was not a friend to the Armenians.”

“No, wait,” he says, “let me tell you what Ataturk did. He was great hero.”

We go back and forth a few times. I feel my face flushing. I know what Ataturk did. I want to tell what happened to the Armenians, but I can’t, not the way I want to. One of the girls, Berna, always sensitive to what’s going on, trying to be the peacemaker, says, “That was long time ago,” and the situation is defused. It is defused, but not to anyone’s satisfaction, since the student and I are both left frustrated; he, because I don’t acknowledge Ataturk’s greatness, and I, because once again no one acknowledges the truth of my family’s experience. Loss of mourning. Denial of the Massacre. A genocide that never happened.

I go home and cry, for my grandparents, for the million and a half who are forgotten, for the wounded feeling I get again because no one understands, and no one knows.

But why can’t I speak? Why can’t I tell my students the story of my grandparents? Is it simply that I don’t want to hurt their feelings? Or is it my feelings I’m afraid to hurt? Of course I don’t realize it until later, until I begin to write this story, that the risk is too great for me. Saying the story aloud will just be too hard; it will hurt too much. Will it bring forth a spate of anger? Or a flood of tears that will never end? Only as I write months later does it become clear to me that Arek’s silence, passed through the generations, has silenced me, constricted me, too.

My desire to tell my story, coupled with Arek’s example of silence, has created for me a risky situation, one, I realize, that is similar to the situations Jeffrey Berman discusses in Risky Writing: Self-Disclosure and Self-Transformation in the Classroom. Although this book is about student writing, about the transformative power of personal writing in the college classroom, it speaks to my situation as teacher and writer.

Berman’s third chapter, entitled “The Dark Side of Diversity,” strikes me the most. Berman details how he elicits incredibly honest writing from his students on their feelings about prejudice and racism, and in fact on their own prejudices and racist sentiments. For several reasons, Berman contends, such writing is the riskiest kind of writing to share with others: the writer may expose his or her “darker” or prejudiced side to others, and the writer may fear offending others when the work is made public. The chapter includes examples of student writing that is candid and direct on matters of race, nationality, and sexual orientation. Berman’s students take risks in disclosing their experiences and feelings concerning diversity.

Do these risks apply to me? I think so, for haven’t I already viewed my Turkish students with bias? Haven’t I been both afraid of and drawn to them? I have even refused to enter the Turkish market in town, despite the fact that it is a convenient source for the ingredients I use in my cooking. Most importantly, haven’t I been afraid to disclose fully my history and its impact on me? I know, as Berman writes in his introduction to Risky Writing, that “conflicted emotional issues are rarely resolved through silence” (10). So I decide that if I can’t take the risk in actual speech, I must take it in writing. I must tell this story, just as I expect my students to tell theirs. Memoirs must be written, both theirs and mine.

Berman vigorously defends risk-taking in personal writing; the student essays in his book model such writing. So do the works of writer, professor and literary biographer Louise DeSalvo, whose many memoirs offer models of self-disclosure. In her memoir Vertigo, as well as in other books, DeSalvo writes about herself as a victim of abuse, about her conflicted feelings about her mother, about her sister’s suicide, her husband’s adultery, and her own illnesses. I turn to DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing to give me courage. This book offers a close analysis of the process involved in many kinds of writing. DeSalvo examines the emergence and development of her own personal writing. She also examines the way in which noted memoirists, biographers, and fiction writers view their own writing, I can certainly try to follow her lead and disclose the story of my family, my students, and me.

DeSalvo writes about the stages we pass through as we write. What she terms the “germination stage” (110), in which the writer begins to think and gather fragments of ideas, has begun for me. I reread Passage to Ararat and Black Dog of Fate. I do some research on Turkey. I question my parents and my aunt about our family’s history. I find out from my brother if what he remembers is the same as what I remember. I also listen to what my brother says about Armenian history. He knows a great deal. I cook Armenian food, thinking all the time of my grandmothers. (I still don’t set foot in the Turkish market.) I listen very closely to what my Turkish students have to say. I notice their pride in their heritage; it mirrors mine. I also notice, as I talk to them, what they don’t seem to know about their country’s history. I begin to think of ways I can interweave their stories with mine. The ways aren’t clear to me yet, but I know they will be once I start to write.

I must say first, however, that over the course of the year, I have grown to love my Turkish students, despite our histories. They are wonderful and kind, eager to learn. They shyly ask me for help in their other classes. I help them. They tell me about their jobs, mostly in diners. We often talk about food. They bring the class Turkish cookies and baklava. They make their baklava with hazelnuts, a nut they grew in their hometown near the Black Sea. I bring them my own Armenian baklava (we call it pakhlava). I make it with walnuts. I can tell they like theirs better; I like mine better. They bring me a cake on my birthday. I truly feel that I am their friend. Most of the time I cannot imagine that their ancestors may have killed mine.

I am very happy that they are writing their memoirs. We discuss their lives in Turkey, Solomon tells us about Sierra Leone, and Joe says he misses Philadelphia and visits every weekend. The others are jealous. There is only very infrequent visiting for them, and none at all for Solomon. While I am glad they feel comfortable in my class, I am especially pleased with the interaction that has developed between these young people of different cultures.

It is time to write, and our memoir project begins with more discussion of Children of the River. The girls identify with the Cambodian girl Sundara’s shock at the lack of modesty of American girls. In Turkey, girls are supposed to remain virgins until they marry. I recognize that conservative philosophy from my own upbringing. Solomon identifies with Sundara’s difficulties adjusting to a new climate. It is just too cold here. Some Far Eastern ideas, though, such as the belief that the soul resides in the head, are foreign to them. In all, everyone is thinking and talking about differences between cultures, and everyone seems anxious to write.

And while I know that I must write, that I will write eventually, that my ideas are germinating, my main concern now is what will drive my students to write, especially as they struggle to express themselves in an unfamiliar and difficult language. I begin to see that it is precisely because they are struggling with English that they want to write. It is because they are on the fringe of a school population, not really belonging, that they must give voice to their experiences. Not many people in school ask them about their homes, or their homesickness. They do not participate in school activities except to attend class. Their lives outside of school are busy, as they hold jobs and handle many household matters for their parents, most of whom do not know English.

In some ways, my students are like the college students Edvige Giunta describes in her article “Teaching Memoir at New Jersey City University.” Many of Giunta’s students belong to immigrant families; some are women who are returning to school later in life or are working mothers who must make great sacrifices to go to school. Many struggle to succeed in school and earn their degrees, just as my students do. Giunta’s success in eliciting powerful writing from the students in her memoir writing classes has shown the importance of personal writing for those who have been marginalized in our society. As she says, “appropriating memory is a crucial step for all marginalized groups, whether they have been marginalized because of their gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, or class” (p.2 in manuscript).

My students, marginalized by their immigrant status, stand to gain so much by writing their stories. At the very least, their command of English will improve. It is my great hope, however, that with this project will come a sense of empowerment that they have longed for but lacked in this new land. While I am quite certain that these students don’t necessarily view themselves as disempowered, I know that they do acutely feel their “outsider” status. Claiming “a space for their voices and their memory,” as Giunta writes (p. 17 in manuscript), will do much, at least in their minds, to change that status.

One by one, the students share ideas for their memoirs. School is so different in this country, they say. No one gets hit, and you are actually allowed to contradict the teacher. Classes are small here. American students get to know their teachers in ways that don’t happen in other countries. No one laughs or jokes with the teacher in Sierra Leone, Solomon says. Then, Koray tells us about an incident that happened in his small-town Turkish school in which a bad boy and his gang wait for a particular teacher to emerge from the school at the end of the day. This teacher had verbally humiliated the bad boy and hit him with a stick in front of the class earlier in the day. As revenge, the boy and his gang beat the teacher up after school, sending him to the hospital for two weeks. Koray, who liked that particular teacher, wants to write about this incident, and even has a title for his piece—“The School Gangsters”—before he begins to write.

Berna will write about her family’s decision to leave Turkey for better jobs and education in the United States. However, when the family finally does come, Berna and her sister don’t attend school and don’t learn any English at all for a full year; only the son in the family is sent to school. She wants to describe what it felt like, when she finally did attend school, to spend another full year not understanding anything. She says the teachers felt sorry for her and passed her because they knew she understood no English. The pain of her outsider status comes across in her words.

Solomon finally agrees to write about his escape from Foday Sankoh’s brutal rebels in Sierra Leone. Separated from his family the day of one particularly horrific attack, he has to crawl through the streets of Freetown, amid the blood and dead bodies, avoiding gunshots. I recognize that Solomon and my ancestors have something in common. And Joe, of course, will write about the cultural differences he encountered when he moved across the river from Pennsylvania to New Jersey.

Agyul, who so proudly showed me her city on the computer, begins with a sentence that expresses her sadness when she recalls her childhood in Turkey, her longing for the life she led there. Her words are heart-wrenching. She remembers her friends and their families, a social life and camaraderie, particularly with female friends and their mothers, that is missing from her life in America. She eventually ends her narrative with a description of the Black Sea, its overwhelming beauty, especially on a clear day, as seen from her city.

Agyul’s words evoke for me descriptions I’ve read in memoirs of Armenians and Greeks who lost their homeland in Turkey. I remember the final line in Thea Halo’s memoir about her Pontic Greek mother, also driven from Eastern Turkey in a death march. After mother and daughter revisit Turkey in the late 1980s, Halo notes: “My mother looked out through the shade of the pines to the Black Sea. It sparkled like diamonds” (321). I have read countless images of the beauty of Turkey from people who are no longer there. I can add my student Agyul’s to their number, and I’m so proud.

We write and rewrite. It’s a tedious process, given the difficulties in language. Each night, I take the latest drafts home and make corrections. The next day in the computer lab, I go over the corrections with each student. Berna, who has struggled with her English, writes four pages at home in one night. She shocks herself by the ease with which she is able to write. She is not as sad as Agyul, but she has relished this opportunity. Writing is both healing and empowering for her, a way for her to make a bridge, to understand this new life she is leading. Solomon does write about the war in Sierra Leone. He wouldn’t talk about it, but he writes. His story is powerful. As the rebel soldiers command his family to leave their house immediately, each adult thinks another adult has carried out Solomon’s baby sister. Solomon’s aunt, crawling on the ground to avoid gunfire, rushes back to rescue the baby.

Meanwhile, I have not begun to write yet. I know that education theories insist that teachers of writing must write. This is so obviously true, since a teacher needs firsthand experience in order to guide others through the process and the struggles involved in writing. Somehow, however, I need a separate time to write—the summer perhaps—and more time to reflect on the experience I’m in. I keep thinking, observing, jotting down notes, but I save the harder work for later.

Despite the struggles my students are having with writing, the rewards do come. They eventually publish their memoirs in a booklet entitled “Our Stories: from Turkey, Sierra Leone, and Philly.” We bind the booklets with colorful ribbons. With some awe, Solomon says, “It’s a real book!” The students proudly but shyly give copies to their favorite teachers. I give a copy to our principal, who shows it to the superintendent, who in turn requests more copies to distribute to members of the school board. The president of the school board personally thanks me, and at a faculty breakfast expresses the sentiment that all our American students should read these stories. The superintendent sends a letter to each of the five students, congratulating them on creating this beautiful, moving booklet that he could not put down until he read every word.

Writing their memoirs has brought my students, outcasts in the school community, a degree of recognition. Though their writing lacks sophistication and polish, they have begun to develop their voices in English: their images became vivid, their narratives moved forward, and most of all, they were able to express in clear terms how they feel about the events in their lives. Most importantly, my students graduate from high school in the United States knowing that their stories have been heard. All who have read their stories have responded positively, giving my students a measure of confidence they may not have had before in this new land. That confidence will take them forward on the path of assimilation.

I begin to write my memoir, too, of what happened in my class. Writing is not easy for me either. I recall Berman’s statement that in personal writing, ”a certain degree of discomfort, even pain, seems inevitable” (60), but I take inspiration from my students. Whether or not I could ever share my story with my students is another matter. If they were to happen upon it, I would not be embarrassed, but I will not go out of my way to show it to them. I am not ready to take the ultimate risk that Berman writes about in the third chapter of his book, in which he discusses the difficulties in conveying feelings that might disturb others (118). My students are proud of their Turkish heritage; I do not want to offend them through my story.

It occurs to me also that by writing I can give a voice to my two grandmothers by telling a story they could never tell. Only now do I realize how disempowered they themselves were—by their ethnicity, first, but also by their gender. Armenian men were often tortured and then killed outright. Armenian women who were deported were at the mercy of male soldiers; they were raped, tortured and degraded, but many survived. They were mothers who saw their children killed, or who perhaps killed their own children to keep them out of the hands of the Turkish soldiers. Who knows what else they had to do to survive? Finally, and ironically, their survival led to more disempowerment: their inability to tell their stories.

So I write. The irony is remarkable to me. An Armenian inspired by Turks to tell her family’s story. A mingling of voices: my grandmothers’, mine, and my Turkish students’.

There are more ironies in this situation, not the least of which is that in my Armenian community, Turks are a reviled enemy, but in my school community there is no one to whom I am closer in heritage. We share a violent past, about which we are essentially silent, but we have grown together through the work in our class, through the relationships we have built, and through the writing we have done.

One cannot change the fact that Armenians and Turks, though historic enemies, lived side by side for centuries, mutually dependent and coexisting uneasily but somewhat peacefully. Michael J. Arlen speculates that this brotherhood, though uneasy, may account for the Armenians’ continuing psychological devastation in the aftermath of the Massacre (199). He also speculates that Armenians are rendered powerless by Turkish denial (248), for while the Germans, for instance, have accepted the guilt of their war crimes toward the Jews, the Turks have never acknowledged that their crime ever took place. Brother killing brother. Biblical, even in the denial of guilt.

Of course, the term “brotherhood” was once adequate to describe such relationships. Years ago it seemed an appropriate term to apply to the male-dominated cultures of both the Armenians and the Turks; not so anymore. Many stories of the plight of Armenians center around women. So, as I ponder the word “brotherhood,” I think of my grandmothers and other Armenian women, sisters in suffering, and perhaps sisters to women all over the world, even Turkish women.

I feel that sisterhood with my Turkish students. After taking, and passing, her final examination, Berna tells me, “Mrs. Jolley, you are the best teacher for teaching foreign students.” To me, Berna was the best student I could hope for. And Koray, my male Turkish student, tells me sometime near the end of the school year, “Mrs. Jolley, I almost feel that you are Turk.” I knew what he meant, and I knew that he meant this as a great compliment. However, my Armenian history did not allow me to reciprocate this statement fully. Almost, but not quite. I could, though, receive the sentiment gratefully.

If the word “brotherhood” speaks to a past time, the word “almost” speaks very much to the present: Koray “almost” feels that I am a Turk. But he had no preconceived notions about Armenians; before he knew me, he didn’t know that his homeland was once Armenian homeland. I don’t believe he knows of Armenians’ hatred of his people. Would Koray feel the same way if he knew the full truth about Armenian-Turkish history, the truth I only partially disclosed to him and the others? Is it even my job, as his English teacher, to speak to him of such matters that are so personal to me?

As for me, “almost” represents a new perspective, one that has moved me forward. I think more now about the similarities between me and my Turkish students, and consequently about the similarities between all groups who consider themselves enemies. I wonder also if someday I will go beyond “almost” telling my students about my family and feel comfortable disclosing the full story. Other parts of my experience did exceed “almost,” however. In a complete way, I was their teacher and they were wonderful students. In a complete way we all succeeded in our class. This teaching and learning experience brought us together to have an experience that never would have happened otherwise, and we’re all better for it. My new perspective will not solve any political problems between our two nationalities, but, at least on a personal level, it is a step.