Watching the Kars Border Television archive videotape of the evening’s performance, I was struck by the silence in the hall; it was as if the audience had left behind the struggles that defined them—the tussle of fathers and sons, the skirmishes between the guilty and the powerful—to sink into a collective terror; and I was not immune to the power of that shimmering fiction that any citizen of an oppressive and aggressively nationalistic country will understand only too well: the magical unity conjured by the word we. In Sunay’s eyes, it was as if there were not a single outsider in the hall:
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