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I WISH TO DIE SINGING
VOICES FROM THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
Neil McPherson
I WISH TO DIE SINGING
VOICES FROM THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
OBERON BOOKS
LONDON
First published in 2015 by Oberon Books Ltd
521 Caledonian Road, London N7 9RH
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Copyright © Neil McPherson, 2015
Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir by Peter Balakian, copyright © 2009. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group.
The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Viscount Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, copyright © 1916
My Grandmother – An Armenian-Turkish Memoir, copyright © 2012 Verso Books
Excerpts from The History of Armenia [7 l.], The Claim [9 l.] from June-Tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000 by Peter Balakian. Copyright © 2001 by Peter Balakian. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Excerpt from Displaced Person © 1989 Barry Fogden. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
Excerpts from Grief, Bloody News From My Friend, by Siamanto, translated by Peter Balakian and Nevart Yaghlian, intro. by Balakian (Detroit: Wayne State U Press, 1986).
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
Neil McPherson is hereby identified as author of this play in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The author has asserted his moral rights.
All rights whatsoever in this play are strictly reserved and application for performance etc. should be made before commencement of rehearsal to c/o Oberon Books. No performance may be given unless a licence has been obtained, and no alterations may be made in the title or the text of the play without the author’s prior written consent.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
PB ISBN: 9781783193059
EPUB ISBN: 9781783193066
Printed, bound and converted by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY.
Contents
‘And you tell, on clean and shiny sheets of paper, the pain of a nation
For the power of a nation is in its poetry.
A gift to our future generations and to the sadness and grief of our past,
I am an orphan and I am obstinate, be well,
For I shall go searching for my loss…
Sing me a song from your songs, a song, for I wish to die singing…’
– ‘Siamanto’ (Atom Yarjanian) (1878-1915)
Preface
Yes Hay chem.
I am not Armenian.
I was born in London. My dad is Scottish, my mum is a Londoner. My only link to Armenia is that one of my best friends at school happened to be Armenian – in the same way that other friends at school might wear glasses or have ginger hair. We certainly never discussed the Genocide back at school.
The only connection that I have to Turkey and the Ottoman Empire is through the Gallipoli campaign – the Allied invasion of Turkey on 25th April 1915, the day after the start of the Armenian Genocide. Two distant cousins from my dad’s side of the family, Eric Young and Archibald Templeton, were both killed in action on the same day. On my mum’s side, my great uncle Bernard went ashore on ‘V’ Beach on the first day of the landings, and was killed in action six weeks later. He was twenty-five years old. For years afterwards, my granny – already an orphan when her big brother was killed – cried for him every Remembrance Sunday.
Grasping at straws, my great-granddad was a Scottish Gaelic speaker. Perhaps a Jungian might argue that I have some residual folk memory of the aftermath of Culloden or the Highland Clearances, but that would be both tenuous and pretentious. The simple truth is that I have no connection with the events of this Genocide or any other. It wasn’t a surprise, then, that so many people wanted to know the reason why I chose to write this play. If it had been any other historical event, I would have been chary about appropriating someone else’s story, but the Armenian Genocide is different. As it has consistently been denied by the Turkish government for years, it made sense to attempt to tell the story of the Genocide and its aftermath as someone who was not Armenian – as someone with no vested interest of any kind. I received nothing but support from the Armenian community, both in the UK and abroad.
As far as I remember, the first time I ever heard about the Genocide was when I was eighteen and read Tim Cross’ The Lost Voices of World War One which included the work of three leading Armenian poets, all deported from Constantinople on April 24th 1915.
Seventeen years later, as Artistic Director at the Finborough Theatre in London, I was programming the theatre for the 2005 season. As usual, I researched the anniversaries that fell in that year as they can sometimes be a useful marketing hook for a production. When I learned that 2005 was the 90th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, I decided to search for a play that we could produce to commemorate it. All of the plays I could find were by Armenian-Americans. Most were very short (Aram Kouyoumdjian’s short play Protest became the closing section of the first incarnation of I Wish To Die Singing), and focused on the experience of the Armenian diaspora in the United States. They all assumed that their audiences already possessed a good working knowledge of the Genocide.
But I quickly learnt that the Armenian Genocide was very far from common knowledge. Most people I spoke to had never heard of it. A very few had, but only vaguely, and then solely in relation to the Holocaust, rather than as an event in its own right. It was then that I started to learn about Turkey’s ongoing denial of the Genocide. I soon found myself reading all the evidence I could find to see if there was any merit in what the Turkish government insist on calling ‘the other side of the story’, so that I could make up my mind for myself.
In the end, it wasn’t the horror of the Genocide itself which forced me to try and tell this story, but Turkey’s denial of it – the lies in the face of incontrovertible