Jay Parini: A survivor of the Armenian massacre turns trauma to testament
[Jay Parini is a novelist, poet, and professor of English at Middlebury College. His latest book, Why Poetry Matters, was published last year by Yale University Press.]
... Peter Balakian, a poet and professor of English at Colgate University, has written movingly about the Armenian genocide in Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir (Basic Books, 1997) and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response (HarperCollins, 2003). In the latter, he focused on the genocide itself, offering a good deal of fresh archival research (including interviews with survivors) revealing the origins and inhumanity of efforts to erase the population of Armenian Christians within the Ottoman Empire. It was a conflict that had simmered for two decades, although its roots lay deep in the Middle Ages, when Turks invaded what was the Armenian homeland, in Asia Minor. By 1915, Armenian Christians imagined themselves an integral part of the Turkish state. They served largely as merchants and middlemen, and their part in the economy perhaps gave them a false sense of their own position. Certainly the idea of "ethnic cleansing" was beyond their imagination.
Grigoris Balakian, the great-uncle of Peter Balakian, was a priest (later bishop) in the Armenian Apostolic Church. He was among the key intellectuals of his time and place, and he was one of the Armenian leaders arrested in 1915 and deported to the interior. In 1918 he wrote a shocking and brilliant memoir of the genocide, an eyewitness account of a high order. Now, at last, it has been translated (by his nephew, with Aris Sevag) in Armenian Golgotha (Knopf). It's a memoir that will fit well on a shelf beside the poems of Anna Akhmatova and the memoirs of Vasily Grossman, Primo Levi, and Elie Wiesel. And it defines what we have come to think of as "Holocaust memoirs."
It seems strangely ironic that, a couple of years back, the Anti-Defamation League, headed by Abraham Foxman, actually backed the Turkish government in its efforts to suppress historical truth by dissuading Congress from recognizing the Armenian genocide. Foxman, apparently under pressure, later changed his mind on that. Those who commit genocide bank on the fact that the future has a weak memory, or so it would seem. There is a natural instinct at work in the human mind, which tries to erase the memory of pain.
Pain suffuses this book by Father Balakian, his own and that of others. He recalls a conversation with a young Armenian woman who said to him, "Oh, Reverend Father. There's no pain that we haven't suffered; there's no misfortune that hasn't befallen us." Going on to lament that even bowing to pressure to convert to Islam did not save her people, she asks in anguish, "Oh, where is the God proclaimed by us? Doesn't he see the infinite suffering we have endured?"
In scene after scene, the unspeakable is spoken. The priest describes one ghastly massacre outside of Sungurlu that occurred on August 20, 1915. More than 70 carriages conveyed a cluster of Armenian women, girls, and small boys to a lonely valley by a bridge an hour and half from the town. When the caravan reached the appointed area, police officers and soldiers joined a wayward gang of Turkish slaughterers, setting to work with a vengeance that is scarcely believable. "Just as spring trees are cut down with bill-hooked hedge knives," writes Balakian, "the bloodthirsty mob attacked this group of more than four hundred with axes, hatches, shovels, and pitchforks, hacking off their appendages: noses, ears, legs, arms, fingers, shoulders. ... They dashed the little children against the rocks before the eyes of their mothers while shouting 'Allah, Allah.'"
The situation of the Armenians was often so dire, he wrote, that "in exchange for a piece of bread, Armenian mothers, known for their maternal devotion, sold their beloved sons or daughters to the first comer, Christian or Muslim." That wasn't cruelty or indifference; given the fact of certain death, there was at least a chance that the child could survive in other hands. There was also the fact of starvation, which was how so many came to grief in those terrible years, while the world turned a blind eye....
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Ed
... Peter Balakian, a poet and professor of English at Colgate University, has written movingly about the Armenian genocide in Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir (Basic Books, 1997) and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response (HarperCollins, 2003). In the latter, he focused on the genocide itself, offering a good deal of fresh archival research (including interviews with survivors) revealing the origins and inhumanity of efforts to erase the population of Armenian Christians within the Ottoman Empire. It was a conflict that had simmered for two decades, although its roots lay deep in the Middle Ages, when Turks invaded what was the Armenian homeland, in Asia Minor. By 1915, Armenian Christians imagined themselves an integral part of the Turkish state. They served largely as merchants and middlemen, and their part in the economy perhaps gave them a false sense of their own position. Certainly the idea of "ethnic cleansing" was beyond their imagination.
Grigoris Balakian, the great-uncle of Peter Balakian, was a priest (later bishop) in the Armenian Apostolic Church. He was among the key intellectuals of his time and place, and he was one of the Armenian leaders arrested in 1915 and deported to the interior. In 1918 he wrote a shocking and brilliant memoir of the genocide, an eyewitness account of a high order. Now, at last, it has been translated (by his nephew, with Aris Sevag) in Armenian Golgotha (Knopf). It's a memoir that will fit well on a shelf beside the poems of Anna Akhmatova and the memoirs of Vasily Grossman, Primo Levi, and Elie Wiesel. And it defines what we have come to think of as "Holocaust memoirs."
It seems strangely ironic that, a couple of years back, the Anti-Defamation League, headed by Abraham Foxman, actually backed the Turkish government in its efforts to suppress historical truth by dissuading Congress from recognizing the Armenian genocide. Foxman, apparently under pressure, later changed his mind on that. Those who commit genocide bank on the fact that the future has a weak memory, or so it would seem. There is a natural instinct at work in the human mind, which tries to erase the memory of pain.
Pain suffuses this book by Father Balakian, his own and that of others. He recalls a conversation with a young Armenian woman who said to him, "Oh, Reverend Father. There's no pain that we haven't suffered; there's no misfortune that hasn't befallen us." Going on to lament that even bowing to pressure to convert to Islam did not save her people, she asks in anguish, "Oh, where is the God proclaimed by us? Doesn't he see the infinite suffering we have endured?"
In scene after scene, the unspeakable is spoken. The priest describes one ghastly massacre outside of Sungurlu that occurred on August 20, 1915. More than 70 carriages conveyed a cluster of Armenian women, girls, and small boys to a lonely valley by a bridge an hour and half from the town. When the caravan reached the appointed area, police officers and soldiers joined a wayward gang of Turkish slaughterers, setting to work with a vengeance that is scarcely believable. "Just as spring trees are cut down with bill-hooked hedge knives," writes Balakian, "the bloodthirsty mob attacked this group of more than four hundred with axes, hatches, shovels, and pitchforks, hacking off their appendages: noses, ears, legs, arms, fingers, shoulders. ... They dashed the little children against the rocks before the eyes of their mothers while shouting 'Allah, Allah.'"
The situation of the Armenians was often so dire, he wrote, that "in exchange for a piece of bread, Armenian mothers, known for their maternal devotion, sold their beloved sons or daughters to the first comer, Christian or Muslim." That wasn't cruelty or indifference; given the fact of certain death, there was at least a chance that the child could survive in other hands. There was also the fact of starvation, which was how so many came to grief in those terrible years, while the world turned a blind eye....