My Blue Peninsula (Linen Press) by Maureen Freely
As Israel escalated its assault on Gaza in October, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan posted on social media describing the Jewish state’s campaign in the strip as “bordering on genocide”. The same week, Turkey contributed troops, aviation equipment and artillery to a joint military exercise with Azerbaijan dubbed “Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 2023” near its border with Armenia – a nation whose ethnic forebears were massacred inside Turkish territory in the prelude to the foundation of the Republic. More than a million died.
Erdoğan still refuses to acknowledge this internationally recognised genocide as such, outlawing any mention of the term “Armenian Genocide”. These developments underscore how readily national histories of bloodshed can be erased or recast to sustain any number of political and ideological narratives.
It is into this world of state violence, corruption and obfuscation that author and translator Maureen Freely draws her readers in her latest novel, My Blue Peninsula. The story unfolds from Istanbul, where Freely (who is American by birth and now lives in England) was raised.
Her protagonist Dora has a more complex identity, being part-Ottoman, part-Armenian and part-American. The novel centres around Dora’s attempts to untangle the fraught strands of her own family history and fortune, extending back over a century and including both perpetrators and victims of the genocide in 1915. It’s structured around a series of “notebooks”, authored by the late-middle-aged Dora and addressed to her two adult daughters, in an apparent attempt at explanation and restitution.
Having grown up in Turkey, Freely witnessed at close hand the repercussions of the Armenian genocide and its censorship. After her friend, the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, was assassinated by nationalists for his campaign for justice in 2007, Freely herself became involved in the translation of oral histories by Turks as they attempted to uncover the truth of their pasts. This work, Freely says, fuelled the writing of My Blue Peninsula.
Opening in present-day Istanbul amid the spectre of Islamist violence, the narrative promptly dives back into Dora’s own youth in the city as she begins to uncover the secrets of her parentage. The notebooks then veer off into the intersecting stories of family members – chiefly her elusive, charismatic mother and bohemian artist grandmother. Some 400 pages later, all (or most) of the dots are joined up and we arrive back in the Turkey of today under President Erdoğan, though he is never explicitly named.
Over the course of this epic family history, Dora documents multiple acts of betrayal, deception and violence – both between individual family members and at the hands of the state and other political actors.
These narratives are centred around her effort to discern the facts behind her own parentage and the veil of deception with which her various family members have shrouded their actions. Among these, we see the removal of children, collusion in murder and the theft of Armenian wealth, alongside the lengths to which people will go to obscure or expose the truth.
At times Freely captures this history with nuance and poignancy, while conveying some of the anger, grief and disorientation that many experienced with the collapse of the Ottoman empire. Yet the complexity of the family tree makes for a difficult read. The density of these details risks obscuring a deeper – and arguably more interesting – insight into the genocide and its aftermath. For example, significant attention is paid to the movement of the bourgeois family’s jewels, while the mass displacement and internment to which certain family members are subject receive little more than a sentence.
Similarly, Freely crafts a vivid picture of mid-20th-century Istanbul with its fading imperial grandeur, decadent and culturally diverse middle-class and vibrant street life. Yet these sometimes slightly hackneyed descriptions appear to come at the cost of a portrait that gives more solid insight into the historical and political developments of the period, with which readers may have limited familiarity.
So too do the rough notebook structure and miscellaneous narrative style – including Dora’s own voice, correspondences between family members and omniscient narrator, third-person style accounts – mean that the book seems to lack stylistic cohesion. The breadth of the cast of characters is impressive, but can sometimes come at the expense of their originality.
There is plenty of rich material in this complicated novel. But unlike the ultimately enlightened Dora, the reader of My Blue Peninsula may be left with more questions on closing the book than they did on first opening it.
This article is from New Humanist's spring 2024 issue. Subscribe now.
