Teaching Ourselves New Bridges
A deep electric buzzing has filled the lecture room at the Writers’ House on Machabeli. I can’t tell what’s causing it, but it sounds a bit like a bass drone begun, as if the other voices are waiting to join in. A tall young man with hair best described as both long and luxurious has just careened himself to the front of the room through the single-row half-circle of chairs, lugging a clumsy glass-topped side table. He practically throws it down beside the projector to rush to the blank flip-chart easel behind him, where he throws over the previous presentation’s page and scrawls YOU HAVE ONE MIN TO SAVE YOURSELF FROM A FASCIST. It’s right after coffee break, so not all of us are entirely mentally present, but a hesitant bemused silence does come into the room when he spins around, scrawling complete, to expose a rather too-bushy but still distinctly Hitleresque mustache. He slowly extends his right arm up into a sieg heil and then, realizing after about twenty seconds that no-one’s moved to do anything yet to SAVE OURSELVES FROM A FASCIST, slowly lifts his second arm, hand fisted, raising a finger for a different sort of salute.
It isn’t so much shocking as it is a bit weird, especially after a day of academic presentations, and no-one’s exactly sure how to respond. There’s some nervous laughter, and a few hands twitching with the uncertainty of whether or not they ought to be taking notes. Finally the director puts down his pad and grumbles something to the extent of “OK, fine, I’ll do it” – striding forward to heroically pluck the buzzing electric razor off the glass side table, where the long-haired autocrat’s had it prepared for us all along. The mustache is just a bit too bushy, though, so though the tension’s been broken, it’s still another five minutes before the face is sufficiently smooth and anyone feels properly SAVED FROM A FASCIST.
The savior turns around at some point and chuckles apologetically. “It’s not really working too well.”
The man struggling to shear our Upperlip Samson and disempower worldwide ethnocentric hatred is Matthias Klingenberg, regional director of the Institute for International Cooperation of the German Education Association, or the DVV International. As the name suggests, the DVV takes as its focus on adult education worldwide, with the mission interpreted broadly and variably, depending on regional context. The regional office in Tbilisi covers Armenia, Georgia, and Turkey, and in recent years has organized projects working for reconciliation between Abkhazians and Georgians, and Armenians and Turks. Another program under its umbrella is History Bridges, whose rather sexy tagline announces: “confronting the past, acting for the future.” History Bridges acts as a network of research projects, all dealing, as per the tag, with confronting their societies’ pasts, and applying the lessons for the future.
The event last week in the Writer’s House was a gathering of History Bridge participants from around the world, along with a number of invited outsiders and observers. Its full title was “Nationalism, Narrow-Mindedness, Aggression: Does the 20th Century Reoccur?”
Although participants came to present research projects and reconciliation work from as far away as Cambodia, Myanmar, and Irkutsk, the workshop’s center of gravity lay in the old Ottoman Empire. The performance-artist Hitler – Murat Aluçlu, born in Istanbul – has, as part of his project, bicycled from Istanbul carrying a chunk of stone from the house his family lives in now, a house which previously belonged to Armenians. Two young Armenian women, neither of them professional researchers, presented a compelling project to map out the often overlooked sites of Soviet presence in Yerevan, and a last-minute contribution discussed contemporary literature as a force for bridge-building at the Ottomans’ other periphery, in former Yugoslavia.
Certain themes ran through the entire workshop, and not necessarily the themes that were expected. For a conference by name equating “nationalism” uncritically with “narrow-mindedness” and “aggression,” an astounding amount of time found itself devoted to the importance of nationalism’s trappings: ritual, pride in one’s country and tradition, regional stylistics, cultural preservation. One speaker from Cambodia – Long Khet – had only enough time to touch briefly on the reconciliation projects his Youth for Peace (YFP) organization engages in, because they were so many. One is based on a Buddhist “water and community” ceremony, using religious ritual to ‘release the pain’ of the last half-century’s atrocities; another on festive, traditional re-marriage ceremonies for couples who had not only been forced to marry by the regime, but – this being at least the rectifiable fault – had been married the first time without any matrimonial trappings. Through tradition, it seems, a certain healing is found.
Maps abounded. The Armenian project – “The Topography of Red Terror in Yerevan” – made an excellent foil for the Friday morning walking tour of Tbilisi, led by David Jishkariani of Tbilisi-based SovLabs. Though SovLabs generally works to create interactive maps of Tbilisi’s Soviet past, the tour followed an older, less technological inspiration – a 1944 guidebook leading the curious through sites associated with Josef Stalin.
The relative silence of the map might have seemed out of place at an academic workshop, but here silence played an important role, and nowhere as vividly as in Mr. Aluçlu’s project. As he shuffled, a tad awkwardly, following his defolliculization, it appeared for a moment that the stunt was his entire presentation.
“This is what I’m doing because I’m bad at language,” he offered, after a moment. “I’m bad at talking – even in Turkish. So I invented a better language.”
It’s a more than welcome change of pace. The video he shows ends with a long, devastating view of the city of Mardin, Turkish flag slowly waving in the foreground above the remaining minarets and a field of destroyed buildings. The videos from his cycle around Turkey, including some of its most dangerous regions, today subject to an undeclared civil war, speak in a crowd of researchers, not against them but complimenting them, to the importance of sometimes simply being present to witness. A scene of his family, gathered tight into the frame around him and his bike while he reads from an unexplained book, cuts to a wide and empty landscape, the bicycle moving away along a dirt road, towards Ararat in the distance.
Robert Isaf