Hyphenated Lives: Native Diasporas

Description

A striking young man in his late twenties, Toros lives with his mother Meriam and younger sister Silva in south-west Turkey. It is the spring of 1956, and other than the haunting memories of autumn, there has been little to evoke the pains of their past lives. None, in fact, until one fateful call forces Toros to confront the looming shadows of his childhood. Assured of his magnificent triumph over his cruel father, he embarks on the most defining journey of his life, oblivious to the twists and turns that are about to unfold.

A novel in verse, Hyphenated Lives/Native Diasporas, interweaves a constellation of family stories with diplomatic dispatches, international relief reports, testimonies, archival photographs and newspaper clippings, to hold a mirror onto the obscured realities, contradicting demands and multifarious guises of survival under the hegemony of the perpetrator ideology. This tale is as much a study of remembering as of forgetting, though it centres on the unravelling saga of the Mermerdji family: a union composed of a Greek mother, Maria/Meriam, an Armenian father, Sevan/Selim and their ‘Turkish’ children, Toros and Silva. In the wake of WWI, pogroms targeting the indigenous Armenian, Assyrian and Greek communities of the Ottoman Empire took a genocidal turn to create a “Turkey for the Turks’. As the collapsed empire rose from its ashes as the Republic of Turkey, those victims who were not slaughtered, starved to death, or sold (in the case of girls and women, most often as concubines or sex slaves), were forcibly assimilated. Amputated from their authentic selfhoods, survivors of the periphery were banned from using their mother tongues, practicing their religions, or displaying any form of ‘foreignness’ -including their names- outside of their domestic environments.

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Endorsements

‘TK Sebastian shows a great generosity of spirit in this heart-wrenching, beautiful book. To have relived the horrors that rise up through these fragmented memories and shattered lives, and to forge from them the bitter beauty of poetry.  To record the betrayals and compromises that continue to pass from generation to generation, but still to have the clarity, the heart, and the strength of conscience to remember those who dared to speak truth to authoritarian power.  As the world is again poisoned by the venom of populism, it has never been more important to revisit its past ravages, for only here can we truly understand how important for each and every one of us to join those heroes and let our consciences speak.  This is, indeed, a book for our times.’

—Maureen Freely, novelist, academic and translator, author of My Blue Peninsula