Quand la langue du bourreau est aussi celle du père

Janine Altounian gives an intimate and poignant account of her first trip to Turkey, to Bursa, the city of her ancestors, survivors of the Armenian genocide. She recounts and questions the confused and contradictory feelings aroused by the prospect of this trip, its anxious preparation, the sight of the ruined neighbourhood in which her grandmother had lived, and above all the sounds, the rhythm and the words of the Turkish language. In the course of this account, Janine Altounian refers to Freud, whose work she has translated into French for the Presses Universitaires de France, and in particular to his thesis on the “narcissism of small differences”, in an attempt to understand the pleasure and the fear that the Turkish language caused her.