The Chronicle of Higher Education
May 22, 2009 Friday

A Witness to Genocide

by JAY PARINI
THE CHRONICLE REVIEW; Pg. 11 Vol. 55 No. 37

Toward the end of World War II, Winston Churchill memorably observed
that what had happened in the concentration camps of Germany defied
language itself. It was an unspeakable crime, quite literally. Raphael
Lemkin was a Polish-born adviser to the U.S. government at the time,
and he coined the word "genocide" in his remarkable study, Axis Rule
in Occupied Europe (1944), yoking a Greek root (genos) with a Latin
suffix (cide). The term was meant to describe something beyond simple
murder: the planned and systematic extermination of an entire group.

War is always immoral. Mass murder, however, doesn’t quite get to the
deep structural cruelty involved in the killing of large numbers of
people because they belong to a particular segment of a population. So
genocide isn’t just a "war crime." It occupies a realm of horror all
to itself.

Lemkin’s theorizing attracted widespread attention, leading to the
United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
Crime of Genocide, in 1948, in which genocide was carefully defined
and set apart from war crimes. It was, of course, hoped that the
Holocaust itself would mark the end of genocide, but that has hardly
been the case, as we’ve seen in the Balkans, Cambodia, Darfur, Rwanda,
and other instances. Lemkin himself singled out the Armenian genocide
— which took place from 1915 to 1918, although most historians date
it from 1915 to 1916, when the bulk of the atrocities occurred — as a
template of sorts, a bleak blueprint for destruction that proved
eerily useful for genocidal maniacs like Hitler and Stalin.

The massacre, which took place in Turkey, got under way in the spring
of 1915, when the Ottoman government seized a group of some 250
Armenian cultural leaders in Constantinople. They were "deported" to
the interior. (The notion of getting rid of a particular culture’s
intelligentsia was clever; the Armenians were left without
leadership.) Within a year or so, more than a million Armenians had
been murdered, although to this day Turkish authorities spend a good
deal of time and money trying to deny that the genocide ever took
place.

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.

For Grigoris Balakian, what persists after the human devastation is
always nature itself, and one of the few consolations of this book is
the refuge the author takes in the world around him, the shimmering
fields and streams, the high mountains and fruitful plains. Even when
imprisoned on a train taking him into exile, the author writes about
the "beautiful gulf" of the Sea of Marmara, "with its wavy ripples."
He extols "the beautiful verdant and fertile fields … the glimmering
lake of Sabanja … orchards in spring flower." Nature, with its
endless fertility, stands in contrast to destruction and degradation.

The natural world seems essential to those who seek to survive
genocide or the cruelties of war. I often recall Akhmatova’s poem
about her neighbor, a small boy in Leningrad, who begged for bread:

Bring me a twig from the maple tree,

Or just some blades of green grass

As you did last spring.

Bring me in your tiny cupped hand

Some clear, cool water from our Neva,

And with my own hands I’ll wipe clean

The blood from your little golden head.

It’s almost as if physical nature is able to compete with the
heartlessness of human nature. It can provide a solace that signals a
way out of the worst of times.

But survivors also need to remember — vividly, in concrete detail —
what happened to them. In Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir Night (first
published in 1960), he writes, "Never shall I forget that night, the
first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night,
seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that
smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose
bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue
sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith
forever."

Grigoris Balakian had such memories, and the power to evoke them in
detail. He also had the determination — seen in Wiesel and others —
to persist. When the full extent of the genocide dawned on him, he
resolved to keep going, telling a friend that "at whatever cost I had
decided not to die." Looking beyond the appalling misery of the
moment, he was able to envision the "dawn of a reborn Armenia."

As we know from the research on trauma by psychologists and from the
accounts of those who experience trauma, survival is also — perhaps
crucially — related to the capacity to bear witness, to describe what
happened, to create a narrative equal to the pain itself. "Don’t
listen," Akhmatova warns the sensitive reader in "So the Dark Souls
Fly Off." "Let me rant on deliriously."

In that vein, Balakian’s healthy instinct was, almost from the outset,
to remove himself from the site of trauma and write about what he had
seen and heard. "I withdrew to an orchard and busied myself with
literary work," he tells us. Throughout the years of his ordeal, he
kept detailed notes and worked on his memoir, determined to survive by
bearing witness. It was a way, he says, to endure "the climb up the
thorny and bloody Golgotha of the Armenian people."

There has been a good deal of writing about literature in the context
of trauma, as in the English professor Lawrence L. Langer’s
groundbreaking work, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (Yale
University Press, 1975). One also thinks of the essays in Testimony:
Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History
(Routledge, 1991), edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, or Kali
Tal’s vivid study of the effects of trauma on women in Worlds of Hurt:
Reading the Literatures of Trauma (Cambridge University Press,
1996). What we learn from such books and essays is that witnessing is
a complex act, one that involves "fiction making," or shaping of
details. Moral complexities abound — as we see in The Limits of
Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Cornell University Press, 2000),
a luminous study by Leigh Gilmore, a professor of gender and women’s
studies. The storyteller attempts to locate not only what is true, but
also what feels true. Experience is necessarily subjective.

Among more recent volumes that deal with the project of testimony as
it relates to a wide variety of fields is Teaching the Representation
of the Holocaust (Modern Language Association of America, 2004),
edited by the comparative-literature scholars Marianne Hirsch and
Irene Kacandes. In general, the writers in that volume talk about the
rhetorical effects conveyed by memoirs, and how such confrontations
with sites of atrocity can transform students who read and discuss the
memoirs. Teaching such potent material becomes a fierce and rewarding
process, wherein readers confront their own preconceptions, in effect
refining their consciences in the process of reading. That is the
height of active teaching.

Armenian Golgotha was a book that challenged me deeply. I found it
awkward to read, over and again, about babies, women and children,
innocent young men, tortured and murdered. Grigoris Balakian is such a
visually active writer that I could not ignore any scene. His book
unfolds coolly, inexorably: a nightmare itself, so exquisitely
rendered that it seeped into my unconscious as I read. Night after
night, I found myself dreaming about the scenes described, and my
outrage built. Why do people behave in such ways, hacking apart other
human beings for political reasons? Is there no bedrock of conscience
that we can depend upon in period of extreme crisis? Why did the
Turkish troops follow orders?

Of course the same questions arise in all genocidal situations. Why
did the German people allow the Gestapo to continue? Did they not know
about Auschwitz, Buna, Buchenwald, or Gleiwitz? How could Joseph
Stalin have erased so many millions of people under the noses of the
average Russian citizen? How could so many countries have stood on the
sidelines while the horrors of Rwanda occurred? Questions like that
multiply, and the answers — the real answers — are never easy. They
take us deep into the realms of philosophy, even theology.

As a priest, Balakian had a firm moral center, and one can always feel
his toughness, his clarity. This book has the feel of a classic about
it, and I suspect that future writers on historical trauma and its
representation will turn eagerly to Armenian Golgotha. It’s a
massively important contribution to this field.

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.