In There Was and There Was Not, Meline Toumani expresses her cognitive dissonance towards the subject of the Armenian genocide buy using the concept of paradoxes throughout the story. When Toumani first enters Turkey, she has a sense of fear. She is constantly on edge because she believes that everyone can tell she is Armenian and will judge her based on that. Toumani starts to hide her heritage in the hopes that she can still learn more about Turkey without people creating a bias based on her ethnicity. In chapter ten, Toumani comes to the realization that her original thoughts about being in Turkey are quite paradoxical: “I was not the one with the most as stake. I could leave at any time, whereas my Turkish friends had to live out the
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They were told that their feelings towards Turkey should be negative because of the way it affected their ancestors. In chapter five a professor who appears to be Turkish makes a negative comment to the Armenian genocide holiday. The Armenian college students want to press charges towards this professor because they believe he is Turkish and his comment was offensive. They later find out that the professor was an Englishman. The college students were so focused on punishing the teacher based on a theory that he was Turkish. Toumani’s thoughts on Turkey shift in a way she never thought possible: “...this inaccuracy had been curing in my mind for ten years, only fortifying my contempt for Turkey, I saw that the entire mess was even more toxic that I had feared. How easily certainty took shape. How hard it was to dismantle.” (58-59). A paradox can be defined as a statement that at first seemed false but once more research is done the statement is true. This makes Toumani’s ideas and thoughts about Turkish people paradoxical because for the first time Toumani realizes that what she learned as a child may not be true. This is the point that causes her to look into the Turkish perspectives on the genocide. In the end she discovers that their thoughts are also true. Both viewpoints can coexist at the same
They were told that their feelings towards Turkey should be negative because of the way it affected their ancestors. In chapter five a professor who appears to be Turkish makes a negative comment to the Armenian genocide holiday. The Armenian college students want to press charges towards this professor because they believe he is Turkish and his comment was offensive. They later find out that the professor was an Englishman. The college students were so focused on punishing the teacher based on a theory that he was Turkish. Toumani’s thoughts on Turkey shift in a way she never thought possible: “...this inaccuracy had been curing in my mind for ten years, only fortifying my contempt for Turkey, I saw that the entire mess was even more toxic that I had feared. How easily certainty took shape. How hard it was to dismantle.” (58-59). A paradox can be defined as a statement that at first seemed false but once more research is done the statement is true. This makes Toumani’s ideas and thoughts about Turkish people paradoxical because for the first time Toumani realizes that what she learned as a child may not be true. This is the point that causes her to look into the Turkish perspectives on the genocide. In the end she discovers that their thoughts are also true. Both viewpoints can coexist at the same