Hamlet after genocide: the haunting of Soghomon Tehlirian and empirical fabulation
Date
2023-01-20
Authors
Parla, Ayşe
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
Parla A. Hamlet after Genocide: The Haunting of Soghomon Tehlirian and Empirical Fabulation. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2023;65(2):446-470. doi:10.1017/S0010417522000573
Abstract
Soghomon Tehlirian was acquitted in Berlin in 1921 for the killing of Talat Paşa, Ottoman minister and architect of the Armenian Genocide. Complicating clear-cut distinctions between truth and fabulation, and personal revenge and legal justice, this paper examines the 1921 trial in light of Tehlirian’s 1953 memoir, to show the legal, moral, and epistemological work done by the ghost of Tehlirian’s mother. I move beyond the usual designations of Tehlirian as mere political assassin or self-evident moral witness and consider him instead as an “empirical fabulist.” My coinage of the term empirical fabulation is animated by Saidiya Hartman’s (2008) call for “critical fabulation,” and my reading of Tehlirian as an empirical fabulist recognizes him as a genocide survivor who aspired for collective justice, a son haunted by his mother’s ghost, and a historical actor who gave a fabricated testimony that was nonetheless based on the empirical facts of genocide. This paper is an invitation to explore the political and ethical potential, and perhaps even the necessity, of fabulation in recounting acts of genocidal violence that strain or defy straightforward representation, especially in cases when the existing rule of law does not rise to the demands for justice.
Description
License
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work. This article has been published under a Read & Publish Transformative Open Access (OA) Agreement with CUP.