Critics’ Forum
Literature
Myth and Memoir in Black Dog of Fate
By Hovig Tchalian
The winter of 2009 saw the publication of the 10th anniversary edition
of Peter Balakian’s award-winning 1997 Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir
(Basic Books, NY: 2009). The book bears, on its cover, the additional
subtitle, An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past.
The description aptly encompasses not only this volume but Balakian’s
broader stance vis-à-vis his Armenian identity – he has
consistently cast himself as the outsider looking in or, perhaps more
accurately, inward. The metaphor in the additional subtitle is not,
significantly, that of discovering but rather of uncovering. The
former suggests a narrative and an identity of accident and distance
(signaled in part by the prefix "dis," suggesting separation). The
Italian explorer Columbus, we say, "discovered" America on an
expedition to the New World. That particular discovery even includes
an explicit element of accident – legend says that, thinking he had
landed in Asia, Columbus called the natives he encountered "Indians."
The central trope of discovery is the outsider’s chance encounter.
Uncovering the past, as in Balakian’s phrasing, has an entirely
different valence. As the speaker of his memoir, Balakian uncovers –
in effect, unveils – his Armenian heritage. The sense is of something
already there that needs to be identified or revealed. The analogy,
in this case, is not of an expedition but of a recognition. Balakian
is "born" Armenian. But in the course of living his suburban New
Jersey life, as the memoir tells it, he makes the requisite effort to
find out about his Armenian heritage. Unlike the role of discovering,
that of uncovering demands the presence of the quintessential insider
– the Armenian born into American life, the child growing up in a
world at once familiar and unfamiliar, one whose contours conceal the
shape of a yet deeper experience. The metaphor of geographical
distance is replaced by that of psychological depth, of plumbing one’s
"true" self. Gone as well is the element of accident that animates
the narrative of discovering. Uncovering one’s heritage becomes, as
in Balakian’s memoir, a narrative not of chance but inevitability.
The act of discovering and that of uncovering define what we might
think of as the two limits of a wider range of experience. At one
end, defined by the act of uncovering, lies what we identified as the
narrative of depth and inevitability. Here lies the domain of memoir,
which uncovers or reveals the speaker’s true, "authentic" self. At
the other end, defined by the act of discovering, lies what we
identified as the narrative of chance and accident. We might think of
this domain (admittedly, somewhat reductively) as that of myth or
poetry, employing the element of surprise – of unlikely juxtapositions
and unexpected finds.
Balakian has himself long been working in this domain. In fact, he
started out writing poetry, his first volume, Father Fisheye, having
appeared 30 years ago now, in 1979. Memoirs, such as Black Dog, came
later. Historical ones, such as The Burning Tigris: The Armenian
Genocide and America’s Response (2003), came even later. This third
genre is what we might, in line with the previous discussion, refer to
as the narrative of recovery, defined in both its psychological and
historical meanings. Psychologically, the term encompasses recovery
from an often traumatic experience, such as killing or genocide.
Historically, it envisions the motivated act of rehabilitation, of
rescue. In this case, significantly, the "distance" that must be
overcome is neither that of space nor depth, but of time. As such,
recovery is characterized by a narrative of witness and testimony, of
loss and redemption. The act of recovering therefore falls somewhere
between those of discovering and uncovering, of myth and memoir.
Balakian’s Black Dog, then, is not a memoir, in perhaps the truest
sense. A memoir tells a life story from the perspective of the
teller. And Balakian’s certainly does. But while uncovering his
Armenian identity, Balakian also attempts to recover the experience of
his grandmother Nafina’s past. Nafina – whose name is Armenian for
Athena, Balakian informs us (3) – is a genocide survivor who finds
herself in Aleppo, Syria with her two daughters and eventually rejoins
Balakian’s family in New Jersey. In that sense, Black Dog occupies a
peculiar position: vis-à-vis its author, it is indeed a memoir; but
in relation to Nafina, the survivor of genocide whose tale the book
also tells, it is closer to a history, more akin to Burning Tigris.
The tension between memoir and history, survivor narrative and witness
account, permeates Balakian’s Black Dog of Fate. The effect is
somewhat akin to reading the account in The Diary of Anne Frank
recounted through her grandson’s experience. Throughout the book, the
reader is aware of a subtle tension between Balakian’s experience,
that of witness, and his grandmother’s, that of survivor. Her
presence near the family and Balakian’s close relationship with her
helps him discover his true identity. Along with that experience,
however, comes her own, that of a brutal, genocidal past. In Black
Dog, Balakian’s own experience comes to stand in, ironically,
tragically, for her loss.
Numerous moments in Balakian’s narrative try to take account of this
distance separating witness and survivor. Interestingly, Balakian
initiates his quest to uncover his own past by way of a historical
account. As a young boy, he picks up a copy of Ambassador
Morgenthau’s Story, originally published in 1919. The book is an
eyewitness account of the previous decade written while Morgenthau
served as U.S. Ambassador to Turkey. Balakian describes reading it
while riding a bus to work, in New York: "By the time the bus came
rattling over the potholes of Knickerbocker Road, I was lost in my
father’s birthplace. Ships moored the Bosphorus. The water, green,
tepid, caique-flecked, the glitter of silver. Terraced clumps of fig
and olive trees. The dome of Hagia Sophia, golden, with minarets
jutting up. Men in fezzes. Smells of shashlik and sewage in the
streets" (155). The only discordant note in this initial description
is the closing mention of sewage. Having just begun reading the
account, Balakian is not yet immersed in its intricacies. He is, as
he suggests, "lost" in a world that seems at once fantastic and
imaginary. Describing neither his experience nor his grandmother’s,
his prose is staid and confident, with the "accidental" air of the
explorer, the nonchalance of a tourist.
This apparent calm is broken in a number of places in the narrative,
soon after Balakian delves more deeply into Morgenthau’s account. A
statement near the end of Balakian’s book, in which he tries to come
to terms with the stories his grandmother has begun telling him,
encapsulates the change: "When I think of the stories she slipped to
me in the odd moments of her daily routines, or the dreams, folktales,
and half-repressed images I was privy to during the last six years of
her life, it seems clear now that they were part of a truncated
narrative about what she had gone through as a young woman" (301).
And again a bit further on: "In odd, isolated moments – moments that
seemed to be out of time – I had been privy to some of her intense
sensory images, to her telescopic memory, to Genocide flashbacks.
This was how she told me about her past. The Armenian invocation,
djamangeen gar oo chagar – there was and there wasn’t – was like the
intrusive past, which seemed to appear out of time, like lyric memory
that had been activated" (301). In fact, the easy "lyricism" of the
earlier passage, describing the haunts of Balakian’s father’s
childhood, is replaced by a somewhat circular prose, marked by
sometimes tortured metaphors, and repeatedly interrupted by references
to time. The passages here both describe and enact the difficulty of
circumscribing the survivor account within the coming of age story
turned witness narrative.
The most explicit instances of this tension between recovering and
uncovering, between the positions of witness and survivor,
respectively, can be found in the two new chapters added to the 10th
anniversary edition of Black Dog of Fate. In them, Balakian tells of
his 2005 trip to Aleppo and Der Zor. In Aleppo, Balakian discovers,
housed in an Armenian cathedral, records of his grandmother’s arrival
in the city, the nearest he can get to a diary of her now remote
experiences. Later, he is led to the place where she lived in 1915.
The narrative begins, once again, quite accidentally. The search
initially leads to several miscues and cases of mistaken identity, as
directions provided by locals lead Balakian and his guide through
similar-looking streets and alleys. The search ends, somewhat
anti-climactically, in another ordinary-looking street: "In a couple
of minutes," Balakian recounts, "we were standing on a street not much
different than many of the streets we had walked down in the past
hour" (327)..
When he finally locates the house itself, Balakian describes the scene
in much the same terms: "And then I walked farther down the street,
until I found myself in front of 45 Ghuri Street. My grandmother’s
home in 1915. A place never spoken of, never mentioned in her next
life in New Jersey, the life in which I knew her. I looked up at an
ordinary, ocher-stone two-story building that still seemed to be a
residence. . . . Who lived there now? Who had lived there in the past
90 years? What did it matter? It was a plain house with an archway
and a black door and a couple of windows with closed shutters…"
(328). Balakian’s impossible search for recovery leads him to an
ordinary house in an ordinary part of town in Aleppo, no closer to his
grandmother’s experience than "in her next life in New Jersey," in
which Balakian "knew her."
The attempt to recover the past as it really was, to bear witness in
full, is at the heart of Balakian’s Black Dog of Fate. It is a topic
that has fascinated, even obsessed, the poet and author, in his memoir
as well as his more historical work and his poetry. In a poetically
charged moment near the middle of the present book, Balakian tries to
convey the difficulty of the task, by way of a historical reference to
the building of Armenian churches: "I pictured those wind-bitten stone
churches built out of the Armenian highlands of Anatolia, with their
wooden belfries preferred by Ottoman law so that no bell could be
heard. I could hear those wooden clappers making a thump like a
muffled throat" (162). The passage is reminiscent of a line in
T. S. Eliot’s "Wasteland" that describes the Greek mythical character
Philomela, whose tongue was cut off to prevent her from revealing the
identity of her rapist, singing "’jug jug’ to dirty ears." The
passage is equally reminiscent of a line in one of Balakian’s own
poems, "Oriental Rug," in which the purple dyes in the tapestry break
apart and "gurgle" their "passion in my ear." Like the garbled,
inaudible voices in those poems, the muffled "thump" of the clappers
conveys in poetic form the difficulty of the inescapably historical
task of righting the past.
Midway through Black Dog, Balakian explicitly mentions, in fact, that
he tried to capture his grandmother’s experience in one of his poems,
"History of Armenia." "The poem," Balakian explains, "can be a
headstone in a world of unmarked graves. . . . There, I could bring
the two of us together again and create what she had in her encoded
way told me. I realized that she was my beloved witness, and I the
receiver of her story" (195). It is difficult not to see in
Balakian’s act of imagination both an admirable gesture and a tragic
reversal of sorts. While the historical act of recovery would place
both Balakian and his grandmother in close proximity to each other –
he as the receiver (and re-teller) of a brutal past, and she as its
conveyer, what Balakian now calls its "witness" – and unite them in
the joint effort at historical recovery, as the "originary" teller of
her own story, she is at once witness and survivor. It is in moments
such as these that we are reminded that the struggle to mend the past,
to recover it across the distance of history, may hinge precisely on
the fine distinction, the subtle separation, between myth and memoir.
All Rights Reserved: Critics Forum, 2009. Exclusive to the Armenian
Reporter.
Hovig Tchalian holds a PhD in English literature from UCLA. He has
edited several journals and also published articles of his own.
You can reach him or any of the other contributors to Critics’ Forum
at [email protected]. This and all other articles published
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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
