AC: That’s right. Despite the fact that my family has been here in America for so many generations, for over 100 years, there were still people in the villages who remembered my great-grandparents.
LA: Everyone wants to know about people’s families, right? I feel like I have a pretty decent grasp on my mother’s side. My mother’s British, uh, my dad’s Turkish, and that’s always held so much more of an allure to me. And it’s not like it’s, anything’s been shrouded in secrecy, I just think it’s further away and it’s not the country I grew up in, and so it’s gonna require me a lot more work to dive into that side of my family and truly get an understanding of it. Like I have, you know, I know that there’s like a great-great-aunt who used to get the train every weekend from southern Turkey to Damascus to go shopping. Like, I wanna know everything, but, like, where do you start?
AC: The best time, I found, was, the best way to engage in conversations, was through their personal items. So my grandmother had her photo albums, and so I would just ask her questions about who the people in the photo albums were. The other, um, tip I would give any, um, would-be, you know, um, aspiring genealogists, uh, family historian, is to start asking people questions at family gatherings. Um, whether it’s a- it’s, it’s, whether that’s, like, weddings, maybe even funerals, you know, the meal that you have after a funeral, um, it’s just people open up more when they’re around their peers and over food.
LA: It sounds like you, it’s s- there’s a sort of full-circleness to this book coming out, but I have to ask whether y- you feel like you had closure, or if there are still puzzles to solve and holes to fill?
AC: Yeah, I will say that, um, you know, if, if we wanna just touch base and talk about my father for a second, there are ways in which that I was certainly disappointed. There were, there were ways that I really wanted a relationship to be different. But, you know, I don’t, I don’t know any, any daughter or son who doesn’t feel that way.
LA: And I imagine that you weren’t writing the book for him, you were writing the book for yourself, right?
AC: Absolutely. Um, and I was thinking about, you know, my daughter as well. The great thing about this book is that working on it really put me in touch with the community, my own heritage, my own self, sense of where I came from, you know, where we came from. And these are stories of love and resilience and survival that I can now pass down to my daughter and future generations.
LA: Next week, I talk to actor Gabrielle Union about taking her extended family and many friends on a trip to Zanzibar, Ghana, Namibia, and South Africa in honor of her 50th birthday, as part of a new docuseries on BET+. I’m Lale Arikoglu, and you can find me on Instagram @lalehannah. Our engineers are Jake Lummus and Gabe Quiroga. The show’s mixed by Amar Lal. Jude Kampfner, from Corporation for Independent Media, is our producer. Well, thank you for writing the book and allowing not just your daughter to read about this history. I will be doing digging into your mysterious relative that was at Conde Nast Traveler.
LA: We still have a few people on staff who were here from the start, so they’ll, actually they’ll know her.
AC: Mm, I’m sure they will.
LA: [laughs]
