In December 2021, we were able to conduct this interview with Ian Manook a few months after the publication of his biographical novel, The Blue Bird of Erzeroum.
Photo : Françoise Manoukian
Ian Manook has published several novels since 2013, categorized as thrillers. Traveler writer or travel writer, his novels take us to Mongolia, Brazil, Iceland, far from tourist clichés. We discover from the inside and with depth, landscapes, characters, political, moral and human issues. The literary talent of Ian Manook keeps us in suspense and gives us food for thought. His talent is recognized by the success of his novels and numerous literary prizes.
With The Blue Bird of Erzeroum, he invites us on a completely different journey. The place is Turkish Armenia, the country of his paternal grandparents. 1915, a dark new year for the Armenians: massacres, deportations, famines, spoliations, decreed, planned and executed by the Unity and Progress Committee (CUP), better known as the Young Turks. In his "black notebook," Interior Minister Talaat Pasha noted that 370,000 Armenians remained of the number estimated in 1914, or 1,617,200. Two-thirds of the Armenian population had been decimated. We are not yet talking about genocide, the word will be created after the Second World War. This is indeed a crime against humanity.
Araxie and Haïgaz Manoukian survived, took a boat, went into exile in France. Ian Manook pays tribute to them. His novel is precious for grasping the reality of the facts. It brings back to our memory the horrors endured. It is our duty to read this first part of this memory journey carefully.
We warmly thank Ian Manook for this exchange.
What elements of your biography could you give us to introduce yourself?
I was born in the first part of the last century of the previous millennium, that is to say if I lived! Armenian family by my father, Italian-Belgian by my mother. Originally proletarian and poor: my father worked for forty years at Renault and I spent my first seven years together in the same room. Fine studies of the son of a proletarian, first in class between Sorbonne and Pantheon: public law, Sciences Po, law of the European Communities and French Press Institute. Then a twenty-seven month trip that changed me and decided everything...
How did this fictionalized biography project dedicated to your paternal grandmother come about? How long have you been carrying out this project? I think I have always carried this project in me. At least since I started writing, when I was fifteen. However, various elements have delayed this project. Travels, a professional and family life, other novels, including a dozen noir novels. But come to think of it, I think that subconsciously, I waited for my parents and my grandparents to disappear. For more freedom of writing perhaps, but in fact not to mortgage the rest of their life. A kind of modesty, not for me, but for them. The recognition of their right to live their life and their past without seeing them reinterpreted by someone else.
What documents did you work from? How did you supplement the precious testimony of your grandparents ? The trigger is this little blue tattoo on my grandmother's hand, to which we gave the shape of a bird, and which marked her belonging as a slave to a master. Then, there are thirty years of confidences between her and me. For historical and geographical facts, I documented myself like a journalist, from a few "scholarly" books, but especially testimonial books. For the missing links, I worked like a novelist by imagining plausible events according to the characters and the time.
Photo : Françoise Manoukian
How does this novel fit into all of your work, made up of thrillers? What similarities between these two genres? Between your work as an author of thrillers and that of this family and historical story? Originally, this novel was to be one of my very first. I had imagined a huge block starting with the biographical part of my grandmother, then a fictionalized ramification on three continents and four generations, and, last but not least, an end in the form of political fiction which took place in 2015 at the occasion of the centenary of the genocide of the Armenians by Turkey. It was therefore imperative that the book be released in 2014 to preserve this desire for political fiction. But at the time, I hadn't published anything yet and the publisher to whom I proposed the project preferred to publish a detective novel that I had on loan. It was Yeruldelgger, my " Mongolian thriller ", whose success led to the publication of five other thrillers before I could relaunch the Blue Bird of Erzeroum project. On the other hand, I did not feel any fundamental difference between the writing of fictionalized biography and thrillers. In both cases, I write without any plan, with as little documentary compilation as possible, and in one go, without ever going back. I just leave words in red in the text to mark the places where I think I should intervene on the first proofreading, either to improve the style, or to specify or verify a place, a date or a name.
You seem to share this inextinguishable will to testify with Zabel Essayan. Her testimonial story, In the Ruins of Adana, which she wrote almost at the time of the massacres, was to warn, to inform the world. What message do you want to convey ? I believe that communities who have been victims of genocide have rights. Right to recognition, right to reparations (especially cultural), right to speak, but I also think that they have an absolute duty to testify to prevent it from happening again. The Jewish community, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, learned the lessons of the Armenian genocide. In the punishment of the culprits, drawing inspiration from the Nemesis operation of the Armenians, and especially in the fact of having the survivors testify as soon as possible. We didn't have that opportunity. The conflict in this region of the world continued until the mid-twenties, and ten years later, it was the Second World War. Our survivors have not had the chance to testify in front of the whole world. I think that Zabel Essayan, like me, we participate in this same desire to have survivors testify through our books.
To write the unspeakable, the unimaginable, the unnamable, is to take the risk of rushing the reader... with words. We forget that words do what they can to show a reality that we cannot invent. We forget that the horror lies in the reality of the decisions taken against a people. How do you understand this reluctance to say, to describe, although the years pass?
I did not ask myself this question. From the start of the project, I warned my editor that the first sixty pages would be hard because I did not want to "overfly" the genocide with a watered-down summary. My grandmother told me about her misfortunes and it turned out that each day, which seemed to have reached the height of horror, was followed by an even worse day, and this for two months. That's genocide, it's long, cruel, planned, bloody, brutal. To write it otherwise would be a betrayal. It reminds me of a young woman who challenges me about a rape scene in my thriller Yeruldelgger, when I receive the Prix Quai du Polar in Lyon. She believes me to be complacent with sexual violence against women, and I defend myself by explaining how this scene fits into the construction of the plot and that there is no complacency on my part. At the end of her arguments, she is indignant at the raw and violent words, "disgusting" she says, that I used for this scene. And I'm flabbergasted, because that meant that with less harsh, less violent, less "disgusting" words, this same rape would have seemed more "acceptable" to him. This is the risk of "literally correct", it ends up watering down the horror and making it more acceptable.
The blue bird of Erzeroum appeared on April 24, 2021, a symbolic date. Will it be the same for volume 2 ? The date of the first was intended as a symbol, of course, but the date of the second volume will be more subject to the economic and marketing imperatives of the publisher. Probably April for the paperback release of the first volume, and October for the paperback release of the second.
What testimonials do you receive during your meetings with readers? Of course, a moving testimony from the community, since the ancestors of each family lived and told about the same things. But the return that strikes me the most and which is very frequent, is that of readers who tell me " I had heard of the genocide, but I would never have thought it had been so horrible ". But what did they believe? What is a genocide? By definition, it is the cruel and barbaric organization by a state power of the total extermination of a population and its culture. Another reason never to fall into literary correctness. Although, at the request of the editor, I removed the two most horrible scenes. Because after all the others, they added nothing to the demonstration.
Many thanks to Françoise Manoukian for allowing us to use her photos.
Interview made by Solange Noyé