Mnemonic Intersections: Renegotiating Turkey’s Contested Past through Familial Memory in Fethiye Çetin’s My Grandmother
Abstract
The Turkish state's denialist framework, which enforces national homogeneity under the veil of Turkification, sustains a dichotomy that positions Armenians as external threats and Turks as the rightful inheritors of the nation. Within this mnemonic binarities, Fethiye Çetin's My Grandmother disrupts the fixed categories of victim and perpetrator through exposing the entanglement of history and memory. The revelation of the grandmother's concealed Armenian identity fractures the epistemic structures of state-sanctioned narratives, exposing how assimilated subjects within the construct of Turkishness bear the traces of their repressed past. Rejecting the zero-sum paradigm of competitive memory, the memoir illustrates the entanglement of belonging, where national identity is not static but rather shaped by erasure and enforced oblivion. By documenting the lived experiences of those who occupy a liminal space between survivor and assimilated subject, the memoir resists the hegemonic mnemonic order, refracting Turkish history through familial memory. Turkish society is marked by its social polarisation, and Çetin's memoir advocates a mode of working through difficult pasts that fosters a dialogic space where histories do not emerge as mutually exclusive but as entangled narratives in perpetual negotiation. The study adheres to a qualitative mode of inquiry, drawing on Michael Rothberg's 'Multidirectional Memory' and Astrid Erll’s 'Locating Family in Cultural Memory'. It reveals how My Grandmother reconfigures memory as a relational entity, advancing a reconciliatory framework that reimagines transitional justice within Turkey's historical consciousness. This inquiry contributes to Turkish scholarship by conceptualising familial memory as a site of negotiation, where institutional interventions remain insufficient.
Keywords: entangled histories; family narrative; intergenerational memory; oblivion; reconciliation
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