COLUMBIA ARMENIAN CENTER HONORS BALAKIAN
By Florence Avakian
ia-armenian-center-honors-balakian/
May 8, 2009
NEW YORK-"He has lifted memory to an art," said Hamid Dabashi,
the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative
Literature at Columbia University, in his tribute to noted author,
poet, and teacher Peter Balakian.
Balakian’s Black Dog of Fate recently saw its 10th anniversary
publication, 12 years after the original publication and 24
printings. The latest publication includes two new chapters about
Aleppo and Der Zor. It was during a U.S. State Department book tour
to Syria that Balakian took a trip to Der Zor and made the chilling
discovery of the exposed bones of victims of the Armenian Genocide.
The program, sponsored by Columbia University’s Armenian Center,
was opened by Armenian Center executive board member Aram Arkun,
who welcomed the more than one hundred in attendance, following a
mezze reception replete with Armenian delicacies.
One of the two keynote speakers for the event, Jay Winter- the
acclaimed Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale University,
a specialist on World War I and its impact on the 20th century,
and the author of America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915-opened
his philosophical thesis entitled "Thinking About Silence" by
relating that Balakian has recognized and acknowledged people
who have suffered. "Memory is everywhere today, but no one knows
what it is. Books like our grown children take on a life of their
own." Balakian, he related, has "inserted a third term between memory
and dialogue, and that word is silence."
Explaining that the silence he was focusing on was not the absence
of sound, but rather the "absence of conventional verbal exchanges,"
Winter added that silence is a "socially constructed space in which
subjects and words normally used in everyday life are not spoken."
In the context of war and violence, he continued, "the primary
impulses underlying the social construction of silence are first
‘liturgical silences,’ the eternal themes of loss, mourning, sacrifice,
and redemption;
secondly, they are ‘political or strategic silences’ with the hope
that the passage of time can lower the temperature of the disputes
or even heal the wounds they cause; and thirdly, it is the concept
of who has the right to speak about the violent past." He supplied
numerous examples involving these three constructs.
Silences, the Yale University scholar pointed out, "do not mean
forgetting. Silences can be deafening," he declared. Balakian’s book
is about the "unsayable," and his letter to his grandmother "is a
meditation on silence. The portrait of the grandmother is someone
who could not choose to speak other than through her silence."
Speaking Through Silence
Silence is many things, and "all occupy and frame the landscape of
remembrance," he said in conclusion.
Quoting the French writer Maurice Blanchot who wrote in 1952,
"To be silent is still to speak," he said, "to speak of silence as
a social phenomenon is to speak of the many ways in which we all
observe silences, and thereby agree to deal with moral ambiguities,
to live with and through contradictions, by both remembering and
forgetting the past."
Walter Kalaydjian, a professor of English at Emory University and a
literary critic who has examined the poetry of the Armenian Genocide,
emphasized that "documenting the historical record of genocide is a
crucial task in the struggle to prevent crimes against humanity. But
proving the case of the Armenian Genocide does not in itself offer
sufficient testimony to the catastrophe of its traumatic imprint,
not just on the survivors, but on the second, third, and even fourth
generation," he noted, and quoted Terence Des Pres who called these
succeeding generations "secondary witnesses."
He referred to the new chapter in Black Dog of Fate where Balakian
tells of uncovering the exposed bones at Der Zor and smuggling
some back to the United States. "At Margadeh, Syria, the anonymous
remains of the dead overflow the sanctioned crypt of Der Zor’s Holy
Martyrs Armenian Church as the silent evidence of genocide’s modern
biopolitic-a corporeal excess denied the communal rites of mourning and
proper burial belonging to ordinary death," Kalaydjian said poetically.
U.S. Geopolitics Involved
This grim evidence of exposed bones was the result of oil exploration
by the United States, "its oil economy, its ongoing war in Iraq,
and its strategic policy of maintaining tacit complicity with the
Turkish state policy on genocide denial," he related. This new chapter
in Black Dog of Fate "marks a turn away from the somewhat privileged
status of ‘American son’ inscribed in the memoir’s original subtitle,
and now toward a collective and decidedly internationalist, social
identity rooted in the Armenian Diaspora and its campaign for human
rights beyond genocide."
Peter Balakian, a professor of humanities and English at Colgate
University, whose book The Burning Tigris was a New York Times
bestseller, said that he was grateful that he grew up in a family
"with silence." A good portion of Black Dog of Fate involved "hunting
down my grandmother’s story," Balakian revealed.
Surviving the death march with her first husband and two infant
daughters, his grandmother arrived in Aleppo in 1915, and lived
there for five years. She later moved to New Jersey, where she had
two more daughters.
"Then emerged a series of absences and presences," he said,
reading sections of the new chapter that describe his search for his
grandmother’s address and life in Aleppo. And from the archives of
the Armenian Prelacy, he saw photos of his aunts, as well as those
of the 5,000 emaciated women and children from Sivas.
During the lengthy question and answer period where many questions
were posed on the right of return, memory, trauma, and the recognition
of the genocide, Kalaydjian commented that his students felt angry
that they may not have known of their own family history. And Winter
pointed out that Armenians or any other victims of genocide should
not rely on governments to recognize their tragedies. "We must escape
from civil rights to the domain of human rights. The response to human
rights emerges from below, not from a government. It’s not President
Obama’s business, but ours," he stated with emphasis.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
