Macleans.ca

The haunting tale of an Armenian Genocide survivor

Susan Mohammad
May 15, 2009

Q&A with Peter Balakian, who translated his great great uncle’s memoir
of deportation, massacre and escape

Tags: Armenian genocide, Grigoris Balakian, Peter Balakian

Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918 was
written by Bishop Grigoris Balakian, a survivor of the Armenian
Genocide. Balakian was arrested along with other Armenian
intellectuals and political leaders on April 24, 1915 (now the
Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day), but was able to shepherd a small
group of deportees he fought to keep alive by bribing Turkish
officials during their four-year march toward the desert of Northern
Syria – many of his countrymen didn’t survive the journey, dying of
exposure, starvation, disease while other Armenians has been raped or
killed by Turkish killing squads. After Balakian escaped he wrote
about his agonizing journey chronicling the Armenian Genocide in
painful detail. Decades later, the text was translated into English
over a 10-year span by his great great nephew, author Peter Balakian,
who sat down with Maclean’s to talk about the book.

Q: How did you come to find your great uncle’s diaries on surviving
the genocide?

A: My great uncle was always a mythic figure in the family lore, but
he was only known as a bishop. Nobody ever spoke about him as a
survivor of genocide or a writer of a major memoir. That was very
hushed up which struck me as very odd because I come from a
professional literary family, and thought that my aunts might have
mentioned he wrote these books. But nobody wanted to go there because
it was too traumatic and that past was never talked about openly. So
when I learned about my great great uncle from a French newspaper
article that somebody had sent me, I read about these memoirs he had
written that were quite famous in Armenia. I ordered the two volumes
from Beirut and had friend of mine translate the table of contents.
When I saw just the table of contents I was shattered-overwhelmed, and
from there on it took me and a collaborator a decade to translate all
71 chapters.

Q: It’s a very important historical document, but why did you feel you
should be the one to translate this quite depressing work that took 10
years to complete?

A: I have been writing about the Armenian Genocide for a while, much
of my professional life. And having discovered that this was my
ancestor and having come into the book it seemed almost
inevitable. Like an inevitable responsibility to do this and there
really was no way out.

Q: What kind of an effect did it have on you? There are some pretty
depressing scenes in the book including one where a girl’s chest is
crushed and she’s dismembered for not wanting to convert to Islam
through marriage. And there are mentions of mass killings of women and
children by ordinary villagers, who did the killing under a fatwa?

A: It is a book of relentless atrocities, this is true. But I have to
say as a writer who has written about trauma and atrocity and genocide
for several decades that I think the redeeming dimension here is the
power of truth, of bringing to the world large truth and profound
human experience even though that experience is a dark one. Excavating
truth and profound experience is something that transcends anything
that might seem debilitating about working on this kind of a book.

Q: Which part of your great uncle’s story stands out most?

A: I would perhaps point to several experiences. I think we are
brought so close to the massacre and deportation experience because
his writing is so vivid and precise and clear that one feels like one
is there to some degree. That there is a sense of closeness to the
daily experience of the deportation and death march. Secondly, the
relentless witnessing of atrocity, gruesome as it is, again is
powerful as a documentation of what the Armenian Genocide was and how
well planned it was by the Turkish Government. We see it happening in
village after village, town after town, city after city along my great
uncle’s four-year march and escape. I also think a compelling part of
the story is the witnessing of cultural destruction of churches,
schools and buildings and a ruin of the whole great ancient
civilization of what Armenia was in Anatolia.

Q: Let’s go back to that idea, that genocide is more than mass
killing. It’s also about erasing a culture, a landscape, a group’s
economy. What are the lasting effects of the genocide on the Armenian
populous today?

A: I think the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide has been a bitter
and cruel one, because the Turkish government has remained in a kind
of aggressive denial propaganda campaign to cover up, deny, sanitize,
falsify this history, and so the Armenian population world-wide has
had to live with the denial, and the attempts of the Turkish
government to evade responsibility for the extermination of the
Armenians. So it’s a traumatic experience to have to both inherit
genocide and have to live with the denial of it. Obviously there is
also the issue of the eradication of the civilization, the loss of
place, of all the beautiful and rich things that were made, the loss
of life, irreplaceable loss of versions of the future and of
variations of the future.

Q: If Turkey is trying to get into the EU, in your opinion, why are
they so unrelenting on admitting the genocide?

A: At least on one level, the Turkish government has socialized the
society to have no critical thinking about its past. It’s made all
dark and violent episodes in its history taboo. If you socialize
people to have no critical evaluation of their society you create a
situation where no one can accept the truth and the complexity of the
past. This of course results in a kind of totalitarian way of thinking
of one society. I think the Turkish government is locked in a sick
situation as it continues to punish, torture and jail its
intellectuals and journalists. Until it can achieve a kind of open and
democratic society it’s not going to get into the EU since those are
cornerstones of democracy and the Armenian Genocide issue is at the
very centre of Turkey being on trial as a democracy.

Q: There are a lot of similar problems with the Kurdish population
there today. What is preventing them from learning from the past and
moving on?

A: You cannot learn from the past until you allow and encourage
critical cultural and historical evaluation in your institutions,
especially in your educational and media institutions. So if you are
going to maintain an extreme nationalist repression on intellectual
and educational life you can’t learn. Part of the problem is that
Turkey has been a society that’s disallowed minority rights. There
have been no equal minority rights in Turkey in the modern era. The
Kurdish people are the largest minority in Turkey and have been
subjected to similar kinds of treatment that the Armenians, the Greeks
and the Assyrians, and other major Christian groups were subjected to
in the early part of the 20th century.

Q: In the collective-consciousness of the Armenian people, is there
one event of the entire genocide that stands out as the biggest wound?

A: There are slightly more dramatic spots on the genocide map if you
will. One is Der Zor in northern Syria-the desert where close to
450,000 people perished. That was like the Auschwitz of the Armenian
Genocide and is a very sacred spot for Armenians to grieve. The arrest
of the intellectuals and cultural leaders on the night of April 24 in
Constantinople, now Istanbul, is also a sacred moment because it
commemorates the beginning of the process. It shows us the Turkish
government was focused on cutting the head off of the culture,
silencing its voice first and became a model for how Turkey would
target segments of the population in the killing process.

Q: How is it that your great uncle was able to get so many officials
to confide in him and give him special favours to take care of the
deportees he was looking after?

A: As he himself put it and later on in the trial and courtroom when
asked `How did you survive Reverend?’ he said `Backsheesh’ (money) he
was able to keep bribing and paying off officials to keep his little
band of deportees alive another day, another week. And because he was
a clergymen and had a role of leadership and esteem and was seen by
the Turks as a cultural leader of this little group he was
shepherding. He was the negotiator, he was the guy on the front line
talking to the Turkish administrators and Jean d’armes and
occasionally he was able to cull some valuable information from
them. Especially in the case of Captain Shukri in Yozgat. I think
these people opened up to him because they were sure he would be dead
soon. No way they would have opened up to him if they knew he would be
alive, so I think it was circumstance that involved some luck and some
degree of his own leadership role.

Q: There is a scene in the book where your great uncle describes
persuading a group of men not to jump to their death off a cliff by
saying it was their patriotic duty to remain alive and witness the
rebirth of Armenian freedom. Tell me about the power of the notion of
freedom and why these men didn’t commit suicide under more humane
circumstances, if you will, when they were certainly marching towards
a cruel death?

A: I think the vision that there could be an independent Armenia after
WWI was a powerful force for Bishop Balakian throughout this and was
in the minds of other Armenians as well. They thought maybe there is
going to be some redemption after this hard amount of bloodshed, and
we will rise into an independent country. It was a compelling force
and he mentions that more than once, the power of that image. The
irony of the scene you are describing is that not long after these men
were bitterly complaining, saying they wished they killed
themselves. It’s something out of Shakespeare.

Q: Did you see any of yourself in your great uncle as you read his
diaries?

A: Interesting question. I think it was interesting for me to get to
know in a very unusual and unique way a member of my family who is
lost to us. A member from another generation who was a survivor and
had written this extraordinary narrative. To have him come alive added
a great deal of depth and understanding to our family. I am a writer,
my great great uncle is a writer, my aunts were writers so there is
some evolution of this craft and trade-this art that has characterized
my family over the course of generations. So to establish my great
uncle as a kind of progenitor is very interesting and gives us a
deeper understanding of ourselves.

Q: Let’s talk about remorse. Many officers or individual Turks
denounced the killing or confided to your great uncle they couldn’t
sleep because of the number of people they killed and yet they kept
marching people to their death. What do you think this says about
humanity-that you can have such remorse and continue to act this way?

A: There are social and psychological portraits in the history of all
genocides, a lot has been written on this issue in Holocaust
scholarship. How do seemingly ordinary people taking orders from the
regime or government do it? How to they live with themselves and
process what they are doing? I think there are many psychological
theories about this. I like Robert J. Lipton’s notion of doubling,
that is, people sometimes compartmentalize so deeply they actually
create an alter ego or another personality and so one personality and
one self is doing the killing, while another self is doing very
ordinary things. One self may know this is wrong but feel they have no
choice but to follow orders. For much of the population, situation
tends to dictate the behaviour of people rather than an inner moral
compass. It’s not to say some l don’t have very strong values and are
able to articulate them but it tends to be a minority while the
majority tends to follow orders.

Q: Was there one situation that your great uncle wrote that was more
horrific, or inhumane than most, and stayed with you?

A: It’s hard to choose. There are both macro scenes and micro
scenes. Some of the micro scenes that are shattering to read about are
the encounters with the recently Islamicized Armenians who are so
anguished and devastated by having given up their faith and hence
their cultural identity. And when they meet my great uncle they break
down sobbing. There are images of abducted boys who were recently
Islamicized boys who are paraded around towns and circumcision
ceremonies. There are images of the young girl being dismembered and
disemboweled, having her head cut off because she refuses to marry a
Turkish man. There are these smaller acts of violence that stay with
one in a certain way. The mass acts like the mounds and mounds of
loosely buried corpses near Ishla that causes my great uncle to say
`we contemplated committing suicide.’ That’s an image and phrase that
stays with me. Seeing mounds of the corpses of your countrymen and
being driven to the feeling of wanting to kill yourself.

Q: Why is it important to study a work like this today?

A: I think that the work has an eerie contemporariness to it because
genocide is still happening around the planet and you can see in the
morphology of this man’s experience many of the structures that we’ve
come to see in other genocidal events of the late 20th century into
today. I hope readers will see it as a very contemporary book even
though it is set 94 years ago. It shows us a process, it takes us to a
deep place and is written with a literary depth that readers should
find the language and the narrative, I hope, engaging.