Abstract
The Armenian Genocide of 1915–early 1920s was among the most tragic events of the twentieth century. Mass killings and forced deportations orchestrated by the Ottoman state cost some 1–1.5 million Armenian lives, created hundreds of thousands of refugees scattered around the world, and erased vibrant Armenian culture and social life from their homeland. This disaster has become the reference point on the Armenian scale of time, dividing history into two distinct periods before and after it happened. After several decades of academic oblivion, the last 30 years saw a growing amount of research addressing the genocide and its consequences for Armenian and Turkish societies from different perspectives, including history, cultural anthropology, psychology, diaspora studies and memory studies. Published in 2022 by Stanford University Press, Carel Bertram’s new book, A House in the Homeland: Armenian Pilgrimages to Places of Ancestral Memory, adds a new and important dimension to this scholarship combining original ethnographic fieldwork with a novel theoretical framework. However, the significance of Bertram’s work extends beyond the academic sphere. As she rightfully observes in the book’s Introduction, ‘as an exploration of memory and place, house and home, loss and wholeness, this Armenian story might well resonate with something that each of us, whatever our history, will recognize in ourselves’ (p. 11).
A House in the Homeland addresses the Armenian loss from the perspective of the genocide survivors and their descendants who visited Turkey in search of their ancestral houses, hometowns or villages and other traces of their family and national past. Although Bertram’s monograph is not the first work on this subject, it is by far the most comprehensive one. A result of some 15 years of research and writing, it builds on the author’s experience of joining Armenians travelling to the lost homeland, engaging in conversations and exchanging letters with them, as well as examining pictures and videos from their journeys and reading their testimonies, poems, articles and books. She walked with them the streets of former Armenian quarters, observed their symbolic gestures and spontaneous rituals in places emerging as portals to the past, and looked into their suitcases filled with faded photographs that they brought with them or with soil and stones they collected in the ancestral land. This vast and rich ethnographic material allows the author to present a powerful selection of individual stories, each preciously unique in its rendering of a very personal but at the same time universal portrait of human experiences and feelings of trauma and resilience, pain and hope, or rage and closure. With the same compassion, sensibility and eye for telling details, Bertram describes her protagonists’ longing for lost attachments and connections, their symbolic agency in the face of oblivion or purposeful destruction and their search for meaning and connectedness.
From the book’s first page, Bertram’s empathy makes a reader feel that she writes about people who are dear and important to her. This approach may result from her experience as a scholar of Ottoman history who only after years of research discovered and became deeply concerned with this history’s missing page – the Armenians (cf. pp. 229–230). Bertram’s earlier work on Imagining the Turkish House: Collective Visions of Home (2008) may also partly explain why she places the notions of home and house in the very heart of the discussion in A House in the Homeland. More importantly, however, her research perspective builds on the fact that most, if not all, Armenians whom she studied ventured to Turkey, propelled by a desire to find their ancestral house or a place where it used and ought to stand. There, they tried to connect with their relatives who perished in the genocide or were marked by the trauma of surviving it, to find essential but thus far missing pieces of their identity and to answer ever-unsettling questions: Why did it happen to us? What would life be like if the genocide did not take place? As a result, a house and its vicinities – which become, in Bertram’s terms, a ‘house-place’ or a ‘house-world’ (pp. 56–59) – emerge as a sacred centre. Consequently, an Armenian who travels to reach them becomes a pilgrim.
Bertram sets as her goal ‘to show how pilgrimage powerfully connects memory and place’ (p. 10). To achieve it, she proposes several concepts scholars in memory studies should also find helpful for research in other contexts. One of them is the notion of ‘memory-story’. She explains it as ‘a type of knowledge which pilgrims combine to form their received and personally accepted understanding of an element of the past’ (p. 30) based on ‘stories they remembered hearing from their relatives in the survivor generation’ (p. 221). Another concept is that of ‘reassembling of memory’. In Bertram’s words, it captures the intervention process [by which] pilgrims become actors in their house’s narrative [as] they make their house, house-place or house-world into a place where they themselves have interacted with their ancestors and reiterated their values, becoming a living part of its story. (p. 224)
She also shows how this reassembling process can be best understood as a kind of poetic creation (pp. 95–100). While this conceptual apparatus serves rather well Bertram’s purpose, it is nevertheless somewhat surprising that she writes about Armenians as pilgrims without referring to the vast academic literature on pilgrimage. She also writes about the notion of home almost without mentioning other works on this topic, and about Armenian post-genocide memory without setting her argument more firmly against the backdrop of earlier studies on inherited trauma. Instead, her key references include a rather eclectic mixture of works by Mircea Eliade, Maurice Halbwachs, Gaston Bachelard and poet Rainer Rilke, among others.
Bertram’s work is divided into 21 relatively short chapters that form together four main parts of the book: The House in the Homeland, Rituals in the Realm of the Sacred, Homeland: A Repertoire of Feelings and The Future of What Remains. The Introduction and Conclusion preceding and following these four parts establish the notions of home and house as guiding concepts and the primary analytical categories of the study – as places that are remembered and places where memories can be evoked, sensed and worked through. Part One starts by examining different encounters pilgrims have with their houses and ‘house-places’ – from those who are lucky enough to find actual buildings still standing and even receive keys to their doors, to those who must face the fact that all traces of their ancestors’ dwellings have been wiped out. Next, Bertram goes back to the 1950s and the earliest examples of diaspora Armenians visiting their native places in Turkey. She distinguishes these ‘native pilgrims’ (returning to places where they had lived until the genocide) from ‘descendant pilgrims’ (going to places they heard about from the survivors), who are the book’s main protagonists. Finally, the author discusses how music and songs serve as a means to preserve the memory of the lost home and homeland.
Part Two examines various rituals in which Armenian pilgrims engage in places they deem sacred. Bertram analyses here ‘formal or conventional rituals’ such as uttering prayers or lighting candles (these rituals usually come from the Armenian Orthodox Christian tradition), as well as ‘emergent rituals’ created and enacted by pilgrims when they reach their ‘house-places’ (pp. 65–68). Among the latter, the author distinguishes ‘invocations, collecting relics, experiencing communion, offering votives and ex-votos, making shrines, and asking for blessing’ (p. 68). Chapters Six to Eight and Ten to Fourteen discuss these different rituals, from collecting soil and stones to addressing ancestors, to installing in ‘house-places’ family pictures or other objects once belonging to the survivors. Chapter Nine, in turn, offers a general conceptualization of these rituals as a kind of poetry and presents pilgrims as poets who experience ‘a timeless but place-specific spiritual return, movingly felt as a distilled whole’ (p. 97).
In Part Three, Bertram returns to the role of music in preserving and evoking the memory of the Armenian loss, as well as in connecting different times and places. She elaborates here on how playing Armenian music as a part of a pilgrimage to the lost homeland links performers and listeners not only with the Armenian world as it existed before the genocide but also with individuals who played these tunes in the United States, with local Armenian communities there, and with the American Armenian diaspora in general. In a similar vein, the author shows how specific discursive strategies employed during pilgrimage help to conflate ‘homeland with the affective and even spatial communities it spawned in the host-land [thus subverting] the trauma-scape with an overlay of vitality and durability’ (p. 180).
Finally, Part Four turns readers’ attention to local people with whom Armenian pilgrims interact in the places they visit. First, there are a few remaining Armenians who stayed in eastern Turkey and preserved their Armenian identity against all odds. Second, there are the locals whom pilgrims suspect to be the descendants of the ‘remnants of the sword’ – the Armenians, who survived the genocide at the price of forced Islamization and incorporation into Kurdish or Turkish families. Finally, there are Kurds who acknowledge both the genocide and the Kurdish complicity in it, offer their apologies and gesture towards Armenian-Kurdish reconciliation. Meeting these people profoundly impacts pilgrims’ ‘reassembled memories’ and their experience of the lost homeland.
A House in the Homeland is a remarkable book that offers a unique insight into the thoughts, feelings and deeds of the Armenian genocide survivors and their descendants – the people who have lived their lives in the shade of tragic events that more than a century ago changed the course of Armenian history. Bertram tells a passionate story that engages a reader emotionally as well as intellectually. Skillfully written, her work is highly informative but, at the same time, leaves a reader wanting more – more precious stories of human courage, perseverance, search for meaning and the power of memory. A House in the Homeland should be on a reading list not only of anyone interested in Armenian history and culture but also of students of memory, particularly those inquiring about its transgenerational transmission and cultural phenomena emerging at the intersection of memory, mobility and materiality.