The Istanbulite Armenian woman as a performative idol

TALİN SUCİYAN

In my previous article, I discussed the historical privileges and supremacism of being an Armenian from Istanbul. In this article, I want to discuss what it means to be an Armenian woman from Istanbul.

My father would always complain about my mother not being hospitable, about our house not being filled with guests and family members like my father's family home, and about the larger family not gathering around the dinner table. He would attribute this to my mother being a working woman and would express the dissatisfaction it caused him at every opportunity. Now that I think about it, my mother, unlike many Armenian women I know, didn’t like organizing special meals on name days, holidays, or special occasions. She didn’t visit neighbors for coffee—except for a couple of attempts near her passing—and didn’t play cards. She would limit her gatherings with friends to once or twice a year. In other words, she didn’t meet any of the expectations my father’s Istanbulite family had in this regard, and she wasn’t bothered by it. During Christmas or Easter, she would choose what she could do from the series of meals that were expected, leaving the rest to her sisters-in-law. My mother was like her own mother.

Her mother was from Erzurum, and during the period I witnessed, my maternal relatives were struggling with existential problems. Unlike the Istanbulites, they had lived through one catastrophe after another, faced illness, poverty, loneliness, and helplessness. My mother had no time to entertain anyone. She had only made it her duty to take care of her closest family members, doing everything she could for them. A childhood friend of mine told me how impressed she was by my mother cooking meals for the entire week on Sundays, her systematic work. Her own mother would cook daily, and what stood out to my friend was that my mother made things easier for herself by planning everything in advance. I clearly remember how much I disliked this weekly cooking routine during my childhood. But my friend was right; as a working woman, my mother had no other choice. Moreover, after feeding us, she would spend her time reading, following all Armenian publications, and occasionally translating. However, these were not the performances expected of her.

Illustrtation: Tamar Gürciyan

The expected performance of an Istanbulite Armenian woman includes setting up tables during name days,  hosting relatives, cooking well, being the one who brings the extended family together, keeping the house constantly clean and organized, and always being well-groomed and stylish. In other words, the Istanbulite Armenian woman must be a type of person beyond perfection! Now that I look at it, I can see that some of these expectations have also stuck to me, that my paternal aunts desperately taught me how to cook, especially the dishes my mother couldn’t make, and that they aimed to raise me to be a version of the working, Istanbulite Armenian woman who wouldn’t tarnish the role of housewife. Of course, you may not think this isn’t a bad thing, but it is certain that the bar of perfection is constantly raised, in other words, the stakes are continuously being increased.

If one side of the coin is the performance within the home, the other side is being active within the community, working in women’s groups, and taking on responsibilities there. To exist in these spaces, the unspoken prerequisite is meeting the above expectations. In other words, all the expectations within the home must be met, and the outside expectations will also have to be fulfilled. If you’re not meeting the performance expectations within the home, then you can’t even think about being part of these groups. Therefore, we can say that the ‘Istanbulite Armenian woman’ is a type of performative idol-creating project. She doesn’t need to think about herself or the circumstances she lives in, doesn’t need to read anything in the newspaper, books, in Armenian or Turkish, and no intellectual activity is expected of her. However, she fulfills the conditions of an unquestioned assumption that all kinds of intellectual and social activities pass through the stomach, and she is a strong, skilled, and active woman in every field...

What’s wrong with all of this? Aside from its unattainability, nothing. The fact that women are constantly faced with a standard of perfection they can never reach, that they are subjected to passive-aggressive violence in the name of this, but since they internalize it, they don’t even realize it, and they keep functioning like a mechanical clockwork without even realizing it, —no harm done, really. The fact that they become incredibly uncomfortable when left to themselves, that they live more for others than for themselves, and that they can’t answer even the simplest question “What do you like to do, what would you like to do?”—what could possibly be wrong? Especially for women coming from families that survived the 1915, who carry the trauma of their entire families, trying to survive in Istanbul while constantly being belittled, and who endure all difficulties without even being aware of it—what could possibly be wrong?