Fedor reflects about his ‘Armenian Genocide: A History Forgotten’ project, which is now available on the See Yourself on the Shelf webpage. Its accompanying exhibition is located in the University of York’s JB Morrel library, to the right of the entry-way help desk.
When I began the curation, I had no clue about the way the university library was organised, and I was hoping to maybe order a few new books, specifically ones that I could not find when writing that one essay a year ago – what made me think about applying for this internship in the first place. Now, several months later and coming out of the internship, I know not only how the process of ordering books works, but I learned some HTML coding (something I feared, something I never even touched before). Not only have I had the opportunity to expand the library collections and set up an exhibition of my own, but I now know so much about what goes on behind the scenes of the reading lists that all (humanities, at least) students know and love.
In the beginning of the curation, I had a relatively vague idea of what to add into the collections – as a history student, and as is evident from my history-heavy introduction, I started with locating books that provided a wide overview of the history of the Armenian Genocide, but as the project develped, my research took several tangents.
On one hand, I kept the guide I created with history in mind, and modelled the reading list structure off some of the reading lists that I encountered throughout my Bachelors and Masters history degrees. On the other hand, I did not shy away from including creations of culture that surround the theme of Genocide, and, towards the end of the curation, I incorporated materials that tie the events of 1915-1923 to today, culturally, politically, physically.
I have included works that invoke the role of the Genocide in modern day politics and international relations between Turkey and Armenia, both on state levels, and on personal levels, for the citizens of both states. Particularly interesting I found the topic of Crypto-Armenians, a phenomenon that is not too widely known in the western world – the descendants of those Armenians, who survived the genocide by assimilating into Turkey, sacrificing their names and identities. A book of testimonies of modern crypto-Armenians, who research their family histories and find inconsistencies with the lives that they lived in and discovering the dramatic truth of their real ancestry, finally realising why their grandparents had no cousins or brothers is an important centrepiece of my exhibition, highlighting events of over a century ago impact the lives of those alive today.
Amplifying the voices of the witnesses of the Genocide, whether of armenian descent or witnesses of other nations was one of the key goals of the curation, and I am very happy with the results. I managed to locate and order several books that have never been published in the UK before, and several books that have only been translated to English in recent years, like Karnig Panian’s “Goodbye Antoura,”a harrowing account of the survival of an Armenian orphan. Quite notably, one of the first autobiographical sources on the Genocide, Aurora Mardiganian’s “Auction of Souls” was already available in the library collections, and so it took its rightful place next to the newly published voices.
When assembling the LibGuide for the curation, I faced several challenges stemming from the sensitivity of the topic. Because I was working with a genocide, a lot, if not most, sources contained metions of unspeakable violence and brutality, including sexual, and including women, men and children. As such, a simple trigger warning at the top of the guide was not enough, and some of the entries in the reading list had to be equipped with further warnings. Same was true about the use of photographs. While most photographic evidence available from the Armenian Genocide have long been public domain, so copyright was not really an issue to me, the contents of the photographs presented an ethical challenge. When using pre-Genocide photographs of Armenian families and their peaceful life in the Ottoman empire, I had to bear in mind, that the majority of people from these images met a grizzly end. While I refrained from using pictures of dead bodies in my LibGuide directly, to make it slightly less distressing, some of the links that I have included lead to the collections of photographs that include photos of human remains and executions. While I think that using images of violence for shock value is not a good tone, these photographs are relevant historical testimonies.
Another challenge came during the discussion of the denial of the Armenian Genocide, that is still a state policy in some countries in the world. Addressing this theme, I included academic works by Turkish and Armenian academics alike, including a work on the denial of the Genocide by the State of Israel, a truly fascinating read. In the LibGuide itself I chose to add a document created by the Turkish Ministry of Foreign affairs that denies the genocide, instead presenting a different interpretations of the events of 1915, invoking the violence of Armenian population against the Turkish population, and calling the numbers of victims “doctored.” While platforming a source that denies the genocide may be a controversial idea, I think that the viewers of the LibGuide and anyone who stumbles across it need an example of what the denial can look like, and make up their mind about it themselves.
If I had to work on a similar project again, I would probably spend more time working on obtaining more physical books and utilising the budget. Given the limited funding of the project and the relative expensiveness of the books that are available on the topic of the Genocide, I feel like I had to make very difficult choices at times, selecting several books instead of one that would be very relevant and needed, but would not fit into the budget.
Overall, I think my work has been a success, enriching the library collections with many books, fictional and non-fictional, academic and eyewitness accounts, and making sure that the history of the Armenian Genocide does become forgotten, at least in the University of York.
By Fedor Topulev-Soludnov