Mark Mustian’s The Gendarme is a difficult book to stomach. Its protagonist is an Ottoman gendarme who slaughtered Armenian men and women during the 1915 genocide. Along the way, he also falls in love with one of the Armenian deportees–a love that remains unconsummated and seemingly unrequited over the course of more than 70 years. In a surprising feat, the author turns an outright villain into an almost-sympathetic old man by giving him a battlefield head injury during the war which wipes out most of his memories. It’s only in his 90’s as he discovers that he has a brain tumor that his memory starts to return in graphic dream-seizures. He’s spent the last 70 years knowing in his guts that he committed some manner of horrific crimes but unable to recall what he actually did. Equally haunting him is the memory of Araxie, the Armenian woman that he saved and loved and lost. The novel unfolds as the old man descends into near madness grappling with a past that lies just at the edges of his memory.
Stories of history’s genocides are vitally important to read and remember. While the Turkish government doesn’t acknowledge the deaths of more than a million Armenians as genocide, the US government finally did in President Biden’s April 2021 statement on Armenian Remembrance Day. While he couched his statement by referring to the genocide perpetrators as Ottomans instead of Turks (to be clear–this was factually accurate since Turkey did not become ‘Turkey” until 1923), he was the first President to officially name it (Presidents Reagan and Obama referred to it but never issued an official statement).
Naming evil is important–whether it’s in own’s one country–or elsewhere around the globe. We must not shy away from it because of our own imperfect (often atrocious) history. If anything, our own history makes it even more important to study history broadly, to give a voice to the voiceless, to stand up for the downtrodden, to remember the forgotten. Novels play an important role in this pursuit–they place us firmly in the smells, sights, and sounds of history–they immerse us in past lives and allow us to tread in their footsteps. Novels like “The Gendarme” bring numbers and dates to life, and to paraphrase Tim O’brien, indelibly imprint in us the ghosts and memories and burdens of all the things they carried.
Statement by President Joe Biden on Armenian Remembrance Day | The White House
NPR Article on Biden's Statement
How Genocide is Defined and Why It's Difficult to Prove
Literature review of Armenian Genocide fiction
The kernel that let to "Sandcastle Girls"
Key Quotes:
Page 20
All things must come. Death has always been waiting.
Page 39
They are all so superior, these Armenians, so prone to condescension, boastful of their education, miserly and clannish, worshipping their God in their little round churches. Better than us—I heard one now-dead deportee proclaim the empire’s demise without Armenian bankers, lawyers, merchants, and traders. Yet if the Armenians are so smart and the Turks so stupid, how have we arrived at the current situation? Power will dictate, just as in nature, just as in battle. Just as it will tonight.
Page 47
The Armenians are our enemies, allies of the Russians, who have attacked
Page 47
Though I have played with Armenian children, worn shoes stitched by an Armenian cobbler, even been treated once by an Armenian doctor, I do not trust their race or kind. They are devious, all of them, sneaky and cunning, as prone to knife or swindle or trick you as not. Painful as it might be, separation
Page 94
all one’s life looking forward, until at some point a clock shifts and there is more past than future.
Page 120
citadel, stacked layer upon layer over ancient buildings and cultures, was supposedly large enough to house a garrison of ten thousand, supposedly stormed only once, in 1400, by Tamerlane.
Page 121
Aleppo means “milk” in Arabic, testament to the fabled stopover by Abraham on his way to Canaan, the milking of his cow on the citadel hill—Abraham, father of Isaac, father of Ishmael, grandfather to us all.
Page 204
I look back on life now, in America. Where all things are possible, but not guaranteed.
Page 208
My mother always says that indifference is the greatest cruelty. I try not to be indifferent.”
Page 236
am alone here. Are they not also alone? Alone in our hells with no floor.
Page 261
What if Araxie had been in another caravan? What if Carol had been assigned to a different ward? What if the British had left me, had not mistaken me for one of their own? The things that changed the course of my life—the war, the deportations, the injury—all carrying me with them like a seed in the wind. The deaths. America, working.
Page 281
The point of the story seemed to be that to think is to forget, to filter from the mind the unnecessary. I have told myself this, repeated it to myself. I have called it our gift from God. This headlong, heedless survival.”
Page 281
each time we remember, we change the thing remembered in the smallest of ways.
Page 282
Although their purpose is for seeing, they allowed me only to be seen. In the end, I was not ungrateful for blindness.
Page 282
And for that I ask your forgiveness.” Another silence intrudes. I clear my throat again, shuffle my feet. She asks for forgiveness, when I am the monster.
Page 283
“I’ve always found it interesting that there is no blood test—nothing that I know of—to distinguish Armenians from Turks, Christians from Muslims, saints from sinners, the good from the bad. In the end, who really knows—maybe God? I find it funny that the people at my job called me ‘Turk.’
Page 283
But we were right, Ahmet, about America, about its beauty, its opportunity. Here you can change your name, alter your identity, construct the someone you wanted to be.
Page 287
There is the thrill—the old thrill—of being with her, of freedom.
Page 294
Remembering is living. Forgetting, as Ahmet Khan learns, has its costs.
Page 294
Decades on, even centuries on, our shared history remains vital, the connection, however tenuous, to some tribal sense of before. Time stretches and calms, but still we reach, for we belonged then. We want to know. Sometimes that knowledge is painful, or inconvenient, or even damning. But it is essential. It exposes us for what we have been, and can be.
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