THE POETRY OF ATROCITY BY PETER BALAKIAN
The Chronicle of Higher Education
April 13, 2015 Monday
ABSTRACT
The 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide is remembered through
the echoes of language.
FULL TEXT
In the fall of 1915, an 18-year-old poet named Yeghishe Charents
joined an Armenian volunteer battalion in Russia and crossed the
border, traveling a couple of hundred miles through rugged mountainous
terrain to Van, a historic Armenian city, set on a glacial lake at
the Turkish border. Charents, who had grown up in the city of Kars,
then in Russia near the border, was hoping to fight the Ottoman army
and the killing squads that had commenced the massacre and deportation
of the Armenian population of the region, as part of an empire-wide
program to eliminate the Christian Armenian population of Turkey.
The Armenian genocide will be commemorated worldwide on April 24
because on that day in 1915 the government arrested and deported
to prisons in the interior about 250 Armenian intellectuals and
cultural leaders, killing most of them, in the first chapter in the
mass-slaughter program.
Turkey’s extermination of its Armenian population in 1915 marked
a shift in the practice of genocide, and can be seen as the first
instance carried out as part of a modern nationalist program. Behind
the screen of World War I, Turkey’s ruling party – the Committee of
Union and Progress, under the leadership of Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha,
and Djemal Pasha – used extensive government apparatus – bureaucracy,
the military, technology and communications, nationalist ideology –
to demographically target and isolate the unarmed Christian minority
ethnic group. The purpose was to eliminate it in a concentrated period
of time. Between one million and 1.5 million Armenians perished in
the genocide; Raphael Lemkin, the Polish legal scholar who created the
concept of genocide as a crime in international law and coined the term
“Armenian genocide” in the 1940s, put the figure at 1.2 million.
The Turkish government has refused to acknowledge the genocide,
although numerous countries (excluding the United States) have done
so as a redress to Turkey’s campaign of denial.
Before long, Charents and his comrades found themselves in a landscape
of ruins and corpses. Out of that experience came his first important
poem, “Dantesque Legend” – a poem of eight sections, in which the
persona moves between a diarylike intimacy and an unsettling realism.
Not unlike those British public-school boys going off to war on
the Western front during World War I, the Armenian boys “set out,
light headed / with the bright blueness overhead, our souls buoyant,
the fresh / light soul of the happy traveler.” Nature is pastoral,
almost folkloric, with “golden spikes before us in the fields.” But
as they walk on, Charents conveys how they feel their innocence slip
away as “a shout exhaled in sleep.”
As the poet and his comrades climb a barren mountain in the Anatolian
highlands, though, the poem changes, and on a barren precipice,
the syntax tightens, decorative images vanish, language goes stark:
“Nothing animate / but us. Life become something / palpable in each
chest. We / breathed. We existed.”
As he comes upon the first sign of his murdered countrymen, it seems
as if history has split the poem between two centuries, two eras of
the poet’s life: “I looked, stiff-eyed, into the clear / water of
the pail in which also half disintegrated parts of a body / rocked
calmly.” The “stiff-eyed” seeing in the poem owes less to literary
irony than it does to an aesthetic of engaging the horror of the real
without intrusive sentiment or emotion.
In her The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985),
the literary critic Elaine Scarry suggested that pain and torture
undo language. But I would argue that poetry is able to ingest, in
inventive ways, some dimensions of pain, no matter how transmuted or
metaphorized – to embody both the pain of the body and the pain of
the mind that atrocity embeds in consciousness.
When the poet reaches the Dantesque place – the “Dead City,” his trope
for Van – the language becomes even more compressed, and the restraint
in these sections anticipates some of the post-atrocity writing of
Primo Levi’s clinical-like aesthetic in Survival in Auschwitz or The
Drowned and the Saved.
Nothing breathed in the Dead City. The windows of the deserted building
stared darkly like eyes without pupils. No, sockets without eyes. And
we dared not return their stare.
I don’t know why we entered a house. The wide holes of the windows
gaped like sunless, dug-out eyes. At the threshold a cat’s body. Who
would have killed it?
We entered, and saw the broken bed, a woman drenched in blood. Naked.
The blood-stained mouth holding a laugh, open like a hole, smelling
of fear.
The rendering of the dead body is ambiguous, so the mouth and vagina
overlap – evoking rape but leaving the disfigurement an unsettling part
of the descent into an event without rhetoric. The poet then reverts
to more conventional metaphor to try to take in the traumatic shock:
“The lid of my skull disappeared then / as if my brain were not mine
/ and sky and ground danced together. Someone said: Let’s get out
of here.”
As the poem proceeds, Charents has winnowed his persona down to a
diarylike self that is recording details of atrocity. In a nightmare,
he probes the traumatized self, and in a kind of insomniac delirium,
he sees the dead in a dance of body parts. For a moment, the shattered
self loses its own sense of being:
Their dead bodies with blue legs, yellow breasts, swollen and blood-
splattered buttocks, danced, staggering before my terror-filled eyes
in the grave-pit dark.
They sang, moaned, cackled, almost as if in joy. Mixed with weeping,
in cold and horrible hollow tones that gnawed at my hearing and in my
agitated brain their song seemed to be transformed into a sad knowledge
that I too did not exist that I was part of some hot, distant dream
in which my soul was being borne away with no will to resist.
Charents’s effort to probe the psychological, to get to the traumatic,
is tied to the tropes of dream and delirium throughout the poem. The
poet is a witness at the scene of the crime, but he also brings
the hallucination that is often part of the delayed experience of
survivors, a version of post-traumatic stress disorder, into the
poem’s texture. If “to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed
by an image or event,” as the literary scholar Cathy Caruth put it in
Trauma: Explorations in Memory, then “Dantesque Legend” is a poem that
emerges from traumatized witness and, through the poet’s ingenuity,
finds a form in lyric language.
Charents’s poem reminds us that poetry is capable, somewhere in
its complex and layered structure, of registering the tremors of
the violent event. It can embody some of what Lawrence L. Langer,
a scholar of Holocaust literature, calls in Holocaust Testimonies:
The Ruins of Memory, “anguished memory” and “humiliated memory”
in the cambium of the mind’s groping after threads and shreds and
filaments of the event. Of this kind of traumatic memory, Langer notes:
“If anguished memory may be seen as discontent in search of a form,
humiliated memory recalls an utter distress that shatters all molds
designed to contain a unified and irreproachable image of the self.”
Poems that ingest violence are often shaped by this kind of interior
movement; they are propelled by a restless search for adequate or
inadequate new ways to embody the event.
The poet possessed by some dimension of trauma thinks in images and
is thus possessed by them as well. Caruth notes that post-traumatic
stress disorder “is not so much a symptom of the unconscious as it
is a symptom of history,” and I think this idea intersects with
the reach of poetry. “The traumatized,” she continues, “carry an
impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom
of a history that they cannot entirely possess.” Whether that is true
for all traumatized people, for the poet it seems more fully to the
point that imagination is a manifestation of both history and the
unconscious, and, of course, the conscious manipulation of language
under pressure in either formal or more open forms.
At commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide,
the power of the poetic imagination will remain an enduring force.
Caruth and others have noted that traumatic memory returns in images,
dreams, hallucinations, and fragmentary moments. That, too, is organic
to poetic imagination, although I don’t want to make any simplistic
correlations between the traumatized individual and the poet at work
in his or her strange web of linguistic inventions. Nevertheless: The
poem that witnesses, the poem that ingests violence, can move along
the frequencies of traumatized memory in the skin of its own craft
and make new and arresting waves of language – bald, graphic, plain,
clear, encoded, elliptical, symbolic. There are no formulaic, co-opting
forms or strategies for witnessing collective traumatic events.
The poem, in its severe reach, provides us with a form that captures
something of the traumatic event that has passed. But it catches the
event in its own music, in its peculiar qualities of rhythm, in the
web of language-sound that syntax creates, so that its language might
get stuck in our ear, spun in our heads. In the lyric memory that
poetry can provide, the speech-tongue-voice of the poem leaves its
imprint on us, so that the mind is sobered with an indelible imprint,
opening the way to deeper knowledge.
At commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide,
the power of the poetic imagination will remain an enduring force that
allows us to see more deeply into this atrocity that inaugurated the
modern age of genocide. In May, at the PEN World Voices festival in
New York City, a special session of international writers and scholars
will honor the 82 writers killed in the Armenian genocide. At Armenian
commemorative events worldwide this year, Armenians will read poems
by Siamanto and Daniel Varoujan, who were killed by the Ottoman
government in 1915, and by other poets who survived like Charents
and Vahan Tekeyan – bringing shards of the event back into that echo
chamber of lyric language.
Peter Balakian is a professor of English and director of creative
writing at Colgate University. His books include The Burning Tigris:
The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (HarperCollins, 2003)
and Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir (Basic Books, 1997). Two new books,
Ozone Journal and Vise and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination,
Poetry, Art, and Culture, will be published by the University of
Chicago Press this month.
GRAPHIC: Yeghishe Charents