There was and there was not

Abstract

Meline Toumani’s There Was and There Was Not was published in 2014 and was acknowledged as one of the remarkable books of the year. In this book, Armenian American author Meline Toumani, who grew up in the US, reflects on Turkish and Armenian approaches to the events of 1915. She also questions the attitudes of the Armenian diaspora in five chapters. Toumani emphasizes that what motivated her to write this book was to obtain rational reasons that would enable her to accuse Turkey for the 1915 events (since she considers the 1915 events to be a genocide) and also surpass the perspective of the Armenian diaspora.