Echoes of History
A thought-provoking essay on who is allowed to speak and who is silenced
Çankaya’s bestselling book begins with an awkward conversation with his publisher, De Bezige Bij. A successful media figure and university lecturer, he was commissioned to write about transcending his immigrant background. But driven by anger over the genocide in Gaza, he penned an indictment of Western support for Israel instead. This didn’t go down so well.
According to Çankaya, he touched on what may be the last Western taboo: the Holocaust and how that suffering has been turned into a political tool. As a writer from a Muslim background, his position was even more thorny. Discomfort around the subject wasn’t just limited to his dealings with the publisher, it also played out in talk shows, at university, and in journalism. And on top of it all, due to his ethnicity, he wasn’t ‘allowed’ to be angry. In the end, Çankaya decided to comply with his editor’s wishes, but in doing so he made use of his own back story to map out his disillusionment with the system.
Çankaya explores the mechanisms that bar him from writing about the Palestinian genocide. He explores the links between anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and World War II, and the colonial roots of Zionism. The crux, as he sees it, is that the suffering of the Holocaust is being turned into a political tool, not out of empathy for Jewish victims but because Western complicity during the war still weighs heavily on the conscience.
Echoes of History is an intelligent account of adaptation and integration, code switching and class betrayal. It is about not being able to escape an immigrant legacy and remaining an outsider in the literary and academic worlds. But above all, it about which deaths we remember, and which stories we bury.
Bestselling title: 25,000 copies sold
Hard-hitting topic: what it means for a person of colour to navigate white institutions. Includes a behind-the-scenes account of a fraught editorial process.
Examines the Jewish memorial culture from an culturally Islamic perspective
Sinan Çankaya (b. 1982) is an anthropologist and writer. He obtained his PhD on diversity in the police force (Safer Outside Than In, 2011) and went on to research ethnic profiling (The Control Of Martians And Other Scum, 2012). He wrote monthly columns for De Correspondent. His book Mijn ontelbare identiteiten (My Multiple Identities) was awarded the Jan Hanlo Essay prize, the Sociologische Bril and the E. du Perron Prize. He currently lectures at the Vrije University (VU) in Amsterdam.