Once again about Balakian’s The Black Dog of Fate

By Hovhannes Yeranian

Yerkir/arm
October 29, 2004

This is the forth article Yerkir publishes about Peter Balakian’s
wonderful novel. However, it is impossible to capture the literary and
aesthetic value of the book even through a series of articles. What we
are most concerned with in this article is the starting point of the
novel.

Balakian’s book on the Armenian Genocide, which is the best piece on
genocide I have ever read, is based on his childhood memories. The
strangest and the most important thing to note here is that during his
childhood the author knew nothing about the greatest tragedy of his
nation. His family escaping from the Genocide settled in USA and did
their best to protect the child from any knowledge of the terrible
tragedy so that it would not poison his life.

I was born and grew up in the former region of Masis which was
populated with Azeri Turks. There was a small river that divided our
village. It was the border river of our childhood, our Araks beyond
which the Turks lived. I spent my childhood fighting them. We used to
cross the river, defeat the Turk boys on the other side and set up our
flag with red pioneer neckties.

At night the Turk boys used to destroy our flags and tear our
neckties, so the next day our fights would start anew. That was when I
understood that we needed border guards to guard at night what we had
conquered during the day.

Of course, sometimes we had to escape, sometimes we lost our
fights. The enemy outnumbered us as it has always happened throughout
centuries. Some of my friends were injured in those fights. But it
wasn’t these losses that mattered. What mattered was the losses that
were growing in our hearts.

Balakian spent his childhood playing baseball and listening to
rockâ=80=99n’roll. How could such a childhood inspire the best book
on the Armenian Genocide? At first sight there seems to be a mystery
here. There was a family secret, the buried pain that was destined to
cause a revolution in the poet’s worldview.

His childhood was not humiliated by the pain of incurable wound as was
my childhood. This is why the best film and the best book on the
greatest painof our nation were created on the other side of the
ocean. These are the night guards of our daytime victories.

These examples suggest a very important conclusion – we have to be
very careful when we inevitably introduce our children for the first
time to thetragedy of our nation.

This is a very difficult task because none of the answers I suggest to
my son’ s question why they managed to do this with our nation seem to
be convincing and logical to him. Peter Balakian came to ease this
task for us. You can give The Black Dog of Fate to your children to
read without worrying about the answers you might have to find once he
reads it.