Lost in Conversion: Mourning the Armenian-Turk

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed burgeoning interest in the inter-communal and inter-confessional dimensions of Ottoman subjecthood, leading to historical studies on the phenomenology of inter-communality and its demise. However, the paucity or inadequacy of such works’ archival sources have restricted efforts to explain how Ottoman subjects reacted to or absorbed the crises of differentiation that sundered their inter-communal coexistence. The discussion herein intervenes to redress this dearth by working through the auto-critical and autobiographical narrative of Ottoman-Armenian writer Hagop Oshagan (1883–1948). To that end, it renders a hitherto unattended phenomenology of the apostatic subject; a doubled figure astride laterally practiced socio-cultural synthesis and vertically experienced politico-religious differentiation. Tracing a term of Oshagan's usage, ‘hogekhaṛnut‘iwn’ (meaning, ‘soul-mixture' or ‘psychic disposition’), first posits conversion's centrality in the synthesized self-constitution of the late Ottoman subject. A literary critical interpretation, supported by psychoanalytic close reading, then identifies the loss of such convertibility as a form of doubling, one manifest as an unresolved ambivalence experienced through melancholia. This melancholic disposition appears to be not simply an aberrant form of mourning, but also a means of self-preservation. It provides a measure of anti-historical resistance represented by the apostatic subject, who preserves the consciousness both of imperialized synthesis and the crisis of its inflicted loss in the face of post-genocidal programs of national purification.

Notes

1. Oshagan, Panorama X, 31–33.

2. For a comprehensive study on the history of the Armenian language, see Nichanian, Ages et usages de la langue arménienne.

3. Seyhan, ‘Enduring Grief', 159.

4. Oshagan, Under the Cedar Trees, 117.

5. Ibid.

6. Felman, Testimony, 15 (original emphasis).

7. Felman, Reading and Sexual Difference, 16.

8. Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains, 1.

9. Philliou, Biography of an Empire, xix.

10. Ibid.

11. Rodrigue, ‘Difference and Tolerance', 2.

12. See, for example, Philliou, Biography of an Empire; Greene, A Shared World; Campos, Ottoman Brothers; and Krstic, Contested Conversions to Islam.

13. Doumanis, Before the Nation, 4.

14. Ibid., 61.

15. Ibid., 2.

16. Ibid., 12.

17. Ibid., 13.

18. Felman, Testimony, 15.

19. Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan, 10.

20. Deringil, Conversion and Apostasy, 22.

21. Ibid., 17.

22. Ibid., 3.

23. Ibid., 208.

24. For comprehensive studies of the Committee of Union and Progress, see Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition; and Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution.

25. Doumanis expresses his phenomenological preoccupation when he values the oral history archive for providing ‘[i]nsights into this realm [reconstruction of social or group mentalities] of consciousness' (Before the Nation, 13). Deringil likewise demonstrates a concern with the Ottoman subject's self-consciousness by noting how cases of conversion provide ‘interesting glimpses into the different perceptions of the [Ottoman] self, that of the individual often clashing with the identity the state power wanted to assign to its subjects' (Conversion and Apostasy, 153).

26. See note 17.

27. Doumanis, Before the Nation, 50.

28. Deringil, Conversion and Apostasy, 204–213.

29. Doumanis, Before the Nation, 33.

30. Deringil, Conversion and Apostasy, 202–203.

31. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 8 (original emphasis).

32. Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders', 150.

33. Ibid., 153 (emphasis added).

34. Brummett, Image and Imperialism, 151 (emphasis added).

35. See Philliou, Biography, xviii regarding the political and regional heterogeneity of Ottoman governance.

36. Nichanian, Le Roman, 284.

37. Ibid., 131.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid., 132.

40. Ibid., 133.

41. See Panossian, The Armenians, 160–161.

42. Rodrigue, ‘Difference and Tolerance', 11–12.

43. Ibid.

44. Deringil, ‘There Is No Compulsion', 548.

45. Deringil discusses these various impetuses for conversion throughout his article (see note 44) and his book (see note 20).

46. Rodrigue, ‘Difference and Tolerance', 29.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid.

49. Doumanis, Before the Nation, 17.

50. Ibid., 89.

51. Borrowed from Deringil, the term refers to Sultan Abdülhamid II's self-legitimization as the caliph of the entire Islamic world.

52. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 61.

53. Ibid., 60–62.

54. Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 84 (original emphasis).

55. Foucault, ‘Rituals of Exclusion', 73.

56. Oshagan, Panorama X, 75.

57. Malkhasyants, Explanatory Dictionary of Armenian, s.v. ‘hogekhaṛn, hogekhaṛnel.'

58. Sukiasyan, Dictionary of Armenian Synonyms, s.v. ‘hogekhaṛn.'

59. Aghayan, Dictionary of Modern Armenian, s.v. ‘hogekhaṛnut‘yun.'

60. Oshagan, Panorama X, 27.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid., 39 (original emphasis).

64. Ibid., 36.

65. Ibid., 38.

66. The Armenian Apostolic seminary of Armash was located near the city of Izmit in the Sea of Marmara region.

67. Oshagan, Panorama X, 37.

68. Ibid., 38.

69. Ibid., 41.

70. Ibid., 38.

71. Ibid.

72. Oshagan's vulnerable socio-economic status sensitized him to the crises of intra-communal authority and class conflict. Almost all his writing, but especially his short stories, depict the otherwise unrecorded quotidian travails of Armenian peasants contending with collective self-oppression. His work identifies this strife as the inevitable outcome of inter-communal hierarchization, which evidently propelled frustrated retaliatory impulses against imperial violence inward, toward the heart of Armenian communities. As a result, these communities adapted imperial domination for microcosmic re-enactment upon their own social fabric. Oshagan seems to perceive this as being an even more perverse tragedy: while the systematic dimension of imperial domination could be thwarted through religious conversion, intra-communal subjugation's arbitrariness impeded deliverance through recourse to a similarly stable channel.

73. See note 69.

74. Ibid.

75. Oshagan, Panorama X, 152.

76. Ibid., 153.

77. Ibid., 157 (original emphasis). ‘Turk’, in Oshagan's idiom, signifies a contextually determined polyvalent term. It seems to refer especially to three possible and intersecting variants: a Turkish-speaking Muslim individual; one who claims to be a practicing heir to ostensibly Ottoman-Turkish social, cultural, and religious customs; and a self-identifying Turk who asserts and exercises exclusive socio-political dominance over others she/he identifies as non-Turks.

78. Ibid., 528 (emphasis added).

79. For a discussion of the nationalist movements' influence on Armenian literature and intellectual life, see Kebranian, ‘Beyond “the Armenian”', 117–146.

80. Oshagan, Panorama X, 40.

81. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia', 242.

82. Ibid., 244.

83. Ibid. (emphasis added).

84. Ibid., 248–249.

85. Ibid., 251.

86. Oshagan, Panorama X, 38.

87. Ibid., 35.

88. Ibid.

89. Ibid.

90. Ibid., 136.

91. Oshagan, One Hundred and One Years, 12.

92. Allegiances among bandits of different ethno-religious groups may have been, in part, the outcome of complex center/periphery relations between governing elites and provincial authorities. Independent of such strategically motivated collaborations, Oshagan here refers deliberately to a politically disinterested ‘love’, which, in a world predating polarized nationalities, resulted in ethno-religious cross-fertilization.

93. Oshagan, Panorama X, 36.

94. Ibid.

95. Ibid., 36.

96. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia', 251.

97. Ibid.

98. Oshagan, Panorama X, 36.

99. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia', 251.

100. Ibid.

101. Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 133 (original emphasis).

102. Ibid., 133–134 (original emphasis).

103. Ibid., 183.

104. Ibid (emphases added).

105. Ibid., 187 (emphasis added).

106. Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back, 34.

107. Tachjian, ‘L'Arménien de Cilicie,' 98.

108. Ibid.

109. Tachjian, ‘Gender, Nationalism, Exclusion', 64–67.

110. Tachjian, ‘L'Arménien de Cilicie', 101.

111. Tachjian, ‘Gender, Nationalism, Exclusion', 67.

112. Tachjian, ‘L'Arménien de Cilicie', 99.

113. Oshagan, ‘Image of the Turk', 206.

114. Ibid.