Meline Toumani

Meline Toumani is an Armenian-American who grew up in New Jersey. The Armenian-American community that she associated with during her childhood devoted a lot of energy to boycotting all things Turkish and working for genocide recognition by the US government. As she gets older, she begins to question this hardline stance against Turkey and the single issue politics of genocide recognition.

When she is an adult, she decides to travel to Turkey as a journalist, to meet with people from various backgrounds and learn more about the country that was taught to hate as a child. She is convinced that if she can report about civil, honest conversations with people from different backgrounds, the two sides will begin to understand each other and they can begin to work towards peace.

After spending time in Turkey, she discovers everything is a lot more complicated than she realized, including her own prejudices. The title of the book, There Was and There Was Not, comes from a traditional start to Turkish and Armenian stories, meant to illustrated the complicated nature of the story. This is not meant to indicate that every story contains equal truth, but rather that every story is imperfect and influenced by perspective and bias.

This book was really well written and very readable. The book was not meant to be completely objective, it is as much a memoir as anything else and Toumani is very honest about her personal reactions to people she meets and situations she encounters. I learned a lot, not so much about the genocide itself, but rather about how reactions to those events are still so prevalent in modern society.… (meer)