JAY PARINI: A SURVIVOR OF THE ARMENIAN MASSACRE TURNS TRAUMA TO TESTAMENT

History News Network

M ay 19 2009

[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….