William Armstrong - william.armstrong@hdn.com.tr
The late 19th century witnessed an extraordinary flourishing
of Ottoman Armenian culture that has since been described as an “Armenian
renaissance.” The rapid growth of schools, social organizations, periodicals
and European trends led to a transformation in the language and intellectual landscape
of the Ottoman Armenian community - similar to elsewhere in the empire.‘The Gardens of Silihdar’ by Zabel Yessayan (AIWA Press, 163 pages, $20).
Along with this cultural ferment was a new emphasis on the
advancement of women in Armenian society, and a number of women intellectuals
reached positions of prominence previously unheard of in a rigidly hierarchical
community. Although her name was almost forgotten in the decades after her
death in the 1940s, Zabel Yessayan is currently experiencing something of a
mini-renaissance of her own thanks to a couple of new translations of her work
by Jennifer Manoukian, commissioned by the Armenian International Women’s
Association. Yessayan’s pioneering proto-feminism and her descriptions of the
social details of a fascinating period make “The Gardens of Silihdar,” her
memoir of growing up in late 19th century Ottoman Istanbul, a fascinating
artefact.
HDN Born in the Silihdar neighborhood of Üsküdar, on the
Asian side of Istanbul, Yessayan provides a vivid portrait of an introverted,
deeply conservative Armenian community and its characters. What starts as a
fairly unremarkable memoir develops into a more sophisticated portrait of the
artist as a young woman, describing her coming of age from a restless and
tempestuous child to a melancholy, talented young woman. French and American schools
were proliferating at the time, and new fashions and ideas were shaking
traditional life in metropolitan areas across the Ottoman Empire. Yessayan’s
father was himself influenced, keen not to create obstacles for his daughter,
open-minded and encouraging Zabel to develop her interests and get a sound
education. Her portrait of him is as sympathetic as anyone in the book (there
aren’t many sympathetic portraits), although his spendthriftiness meant that
the household was wracked by financial instability. “The days my father needed
to repay his debts did not just arrive; they exploded like bombs,” Yessayan
writes.
As for communal relations, she draws a familiar picture of a
guarded tolerance being gradually, inexorably overtaken by political tension. At
one point her family temporarily moves to a Turkish village a few miles away
for her mother’s health, and she reflects: “A few years later, it would have
been impossible for an Armenian family to live safely in an entirely Turkish
village, but in those days there were still no traces of ethnic tension between
Armenians and Turks, and the two peoples treated each other with a calm sense
of shared humanity.”
Yessayan was born in 1878, and came of age at a troubled
time. A cultural renaissance may have been going on, but it was also an era of
accelerating social turmoil, and there are plenty of references in this book to
the plight of suffering Armenians in Anatolia. Her growing up was
simultaneously a process of awakening and disillusionment. Reflecting on her
time at one of the Armenian high schools, she gloomily describes it as “just a
miniature version of the adult world that I would come to know, complete with
its dirty dealings, narcissism, hypocrisy, lies and selfishness.” It was, she
writes, “as if there were a courtroom in my mind where the people I encountered
and the things I experienced were subject to harsh, endless judgment.”
Yessayan’s developing feminism was sharpened by the
stultifying conservatism of the community. “Those young women could not leave
the house by themselves,” she writes angrily, “some were even forced to marry
men they despised. They were not free to dress as they pleased or behave as
they saw fit. Essentially, they were deprived of their most basic freedoms and
feared that, sooner or later, they would be constrained by motherhood - a fate
they wished to escape in order to create the lives they had envisioned for
themselves.” Dismissive of these tendencies, she had no time as a writer for
the “sentimental romanticism” that was the literary fashion of the day, and her
own memoir formally remains quite straightforward and undemonstrative.
Years after the events described in “The Gardens of
Silihdar,” Yessayan was included as the only woman on the list of Istanbul
Armenian intellectuals targeted for arrest and deportation by the Young Turk
regime on April 24, 1915. She managed to flee the empire and almost two decades
later ended up in Soviet Armenia, where this book was published in 1935.
Despite Yessayan’s prominence in late Ottoman Istanbul, her work was
essentially ignored after her death in a Siberian labor camp, as a victim of
Stalin’s Great Purge. Hopefully it is now beginning to attract the attention
that it deserves once again.
February/12/2015
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