Armenian Heritage and Memory Beyond the Borders Armenian Heritage and Memory Beyond the Borders | Page 7

Zabel Yesayan
(1878 Üsküdar,
İstanbul-1942/1943 (?)
In Turkey, Zabel Yesayan
is especially more
recognized rather than
other Western Armenian
feminists but she was
firstly mentioned by
Elif Shafak within the
scope of a symposium
in İstanbul in 2015. She
associated Yesayan
with Halide Edip
Adıvar, a significant Turkish Feminist and writer that nearly lived in
the same time with Yesayan but certainly there were many differences
between them. Hazal Halavut, a feminist academician working on
Zabel Yesayan defies Shafak’s aim to make these two feminists
get closer to one another because of the genocide and Halide Edip
Adıvar’s being Turkish nationalist politician. Halavut highlights Adıvar’s
changing political path through Sırpuhi Markaryan’s letter to Adıvar
after the genocide in Cilica, by stressing that Adıvar wrote a piece called
“Ölenle Öldürenler” (People who are murdered and people who are
murderer) and she expressed her shame and suffering for the genocide
on behalf of Turkish people. In her writing, she says that she is in a
great deal of despair since she is Turkish and being Turkish caused
such a catastrophe. For a reply to her piece, Markaryan wrote a letter
that expressed the pleasure to read such a piece and her feelings of
the solidarity that Adıvar tried to build and she had it published in a
newspaper in which Adıvar wrote her piece. But in contrast to what
Yesayan’s experiences and indecisive death, Adıvar was afterwards
involved in the Turkification and Islamization of Armenian children and in
one of her novel, she used hate speech against Armenian and Christian
people.
Stating “I don’t want to hear the reasons and excuses for presenting
the war as glorifying and something wanted and i also don’t accept
that the war is indispensable and necessary”, Yesayan expressed her
feelings about the genocide in Cilicia as such: