Black Dog of Fate
Black Dog of Fate
Black Dog of Fate
Peter Balakian
Paperback (1998)
New York Times Book Review
June 22, 1997
The Previous Holocaust
In the author's Armenian family, no one mentioned a certain traumatic event
By LORE DICKSTEIN
Eight days before he invaded Poland in 1939, Hitler exhorted his high command
to "send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women and children"
who stood in the way of German Lebensraum. This directive was given with
impunity and had a historical precedent: "Who today," Hitler said, "remembers
the extermination of the Armenians?"
As Christians in a Moslem world, the Armenians had been persecuted and
discriminated against for hundreds of years. And the larger world had indeed
been silent about the cataclysmic events that occurred between April and
October 1915, when some 1.2 million Armenians were deported from their homes by
the Turkish Government and sent on a death march into the Syrian desert with no
food or water.
Silence was also the rule for the Armenian-American family of Peter Balakian,
the author of this fascinating and affecting memoir. Balakian, a poet who has
also written on Theodore Roethke, recalls that as a child he "hadn't even heard
the phrase 'starving Armenians.' " His parents had closed a "stone door" on the
past: the brutal slaughter and deliberate starvation of dozens of relatives was
not considered a subject "suitable for conversation." Balakian was in his
mid-20's before he learned that his beloved maternal grandmother, Nafina
Aroosian, was a survivor of the Armenian genocide; she casts a long, ominous
shadow over this narrative.
Written in sorrow and anger, and with great sensitivity, "Black Dog of Fate" is
at once a family memoir, a history of the extermination of Armenians in Turkey
and the story of a young man's passage into adulthood and his sudden awareness
of his ethnicity. The title of this memoir refers to a parable told to the
author by his grandmother. In this story two sacrificial offerings are made to
the goddess Fate: one is a succulent spring lamb, its body stuffed with
pomegranates and almonds and its eyes set with rubies; the other is a dead
black dog, its mouth stuffed with a wormy apple. Fate rejects the lamb and
accepts the dog. "Appearances are deceiving," Nafina explains to a puzzled
young Peter. "The world is not what you think."
Peter Balakian grew up during the palmy, optimistic years of 1950's and 60's
suburbia. The oldest child of a family physician in Tenafly, N.J., he measured
his days by athletic seasons -- football, basketball and baseball. His memories
of suburbia are loving and nostalgic, a time of childhood innocence infused
with the raucous music of Elvis and Little Richard, the steady whir of power
lawn mowers and the gratifying roar that emanated from the television set as
the bats of the New York Yankees cracked balls into the stands. It would have
been an ordinary, if privileged, American suburban childhood, except that Peter
grew up in a fractured culture; his family had brought their "ancient culture
in a suitcase" to America.
On Sundays, the extended family met for lunch -- an interminable "immovable
feast" of carefully prepared Armenian dishes. "Food for us was a complex
cultural emblem," he writes, "an encoded script that embodied the long history
and collective memory of our Near Eastern culture." The conversation at the
table -- about food, about life in the suburbs (banal and philistine, some
sniffed), about writer friends (Anais Nin, William Saroyan, Carson McCullers)
and artists, about the inferior quality of American goods -- often grew heated.
"The Aroosians, wealthy merchants from the Armenian hinterlands of Diarbekir,
would not be upstaged by the intellectual Balakians of Constantinople."
"Men were scarce in our family," Balakian says. "In lieu of patriarchs we had
aunts," three of whom never married and became surrogate mothers to Peter and
his siblings. One of his aunts, the late Nona Balakian, was a longtime editor
for this publication; another, Anna Balakian, a retired professor of French
literature, is a specialist in French Surrealist poetry and art. Two other
aunts, Gladys and Lucille, businesswomen on Wall Street, lived with his
grandmother. Chafing in his varsity team jacket, the teen-age Peter Balakian
"felt like a misfit" in this hothouse of culture and foreignness.
Not until his junior year at Bucknell, when he gave up football for poetry, did
Peter Balakian begin to piece together his grandmother's fragmented dreams and
stories and make sense of the overheard snatches of whispered, almost
incomprehensible Armenian. Despite initial family opposition, he started to
crack open the stone door of silence.
"Black Dog of Fate" includes large chunks of researched, undigested Armenian
history that are not fully integrated into the Balakian family story but are
relevant nonetheless. The most startling are excerpts from another memoir
(published in 1919) by America's Ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, who
had diplomatic access to the Young Turks who instigated the 1915 Armenian
massacre. In an attempt to solve the "Armenian problem," and create a "Turkey
for the Turks," Morgenthau observed, the Armenians were demonized as
"infidels," "swine" and "vermin." This hauntingly familiar language seems to
have been lifted intact and transposed several decades later to another country
and another people as rationale for another genocide.
But the most searing documentation that Balakian presents by far is the claim
his grandmother Nafina made in 1920 against the Turkish Government. This
seemingly dry legal document, reproduced here with all its linguistic arcana,
circumlocutions and official seals, summarizes in a few restrained but
horrifying pages the death of Nafina's first husband, an Armenian-born American
citizen, whose existence was never mentioned in the Balakian family, and that
of her aunts, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews on the forced death march.
Nafina itemized the plundered goods of family businesses, the jewelry and gold
stolen from the dead. She stated the reason for her claim: "Because I am a
human being and under the support of international law." The Turkish Government
never responded; there was "no justice," "no reparation," "nothing but
silence." Balakian draws the connection between public silence and his family's
reticence: "There was no one then to listen," he writes, because "there was no
social movement or political context in which she and other survivors could be
heard."
Balakian concludes his book with an angry indictment of United States policy
toward Turkey, a cold war ally and NATO partner. He charges that the presence
of United States military bases -- and the lucrative defense contracts they
provided -- softened America's stance. In addition, he asserts that a
"political agenda" motivates Turkish Government funding of Turkish studies at
major American universities; Princeton and the University of California, Los
Angeles, are specifically cited. This has created, according to the author, a
sinister revisionist history, a "paper trail of denial" that gives a false
legitimacy to Turkey's continual insistence that the Armenian genocide never
occurred.
In calling for a formal acknowledgment of, and apology for, the Armenian
massacre by the Turkish Government, Balakian wants both closure for the victims
and the possibility of forgiveness for the perpetrators. But some crimes are
beyond redemption and cannot -- should not -- be either forgotten or forgiven.
_
Lore Dickstein, a writer and critic, is working on a family memoir.
Poet Knits Together Memories of
Armenian Horrors
By DINITIA SMITH, New York Times, Aug 19, 1997
Growing up in Tenafly, N.J., during the "strange sweetness of a
privileged childhood," the poet Peter Balakian could feel beneath the
membrane of suburban life the intimations of his family's ancient and
exotic Armenian culture and a dark and terrifying past.
On Sundays, there were the incense-filled, 1,500-year-old
rituals of the Armenian church. There were oriental rugs on the floors of
his family's house, while other children's houses had shag. There was
Balakian's beloved grandmother, Nafina, who baked choereg, Armenian
shortbread, and told him strange parables and fragments of her violent
dreams.
But mostly Balakian lived the blithe existence of a suburban
child, his life marked by the sports seasons, basketball, baseball,
football, largely unaware of his family's past and of the historical
moment that has come to define it forever.
Then, when Balakian was 23, he discovered "Ambassador
Morgenthau's Story," a memoir written by Henry Morgenthau, U.S. ambassador
to Turkey from 1913 to 1916. His hands sweating, he read of the massacre
of over a million Armenians by the Turkish government. Suddenly all the
scattered memories of his childhood coalesced like the shards of a broken
mirror.
A year later came another stunning moment, when an aunt revealed
to him the full story of his grandmother, whose first husband, parents,
aunts, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews were slaughtered by the
Turks. His grandmother, her first husband and their infant daughters were
sent into the Syrian desert without food or water, to die. They were among
the few who survived the death march, though her husband was later killed.
The discovery of his family's past impelled Balakian, who is now
46 and a professor of English at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., to
learn more about Armenian culture and history, and the events of 1915 to
1917. The results of his quest are chronicled in his memoir, "Black Dog of
Fate," published in May.
Balakian, the author of five books of poetry and a critical
study of Theodore Roethke, is part of a group of third-generation
Armenians who have brought to the surface once again the facts of
Armenia's tragic history, events that have been overshadowed by the huge
numbers killed during the Nazis' slaughter of the Jews three decades
later.
Carol Edgarian, in her 1994 novel "Rise of the Euphrates," a
multigenerational saga, takes as her starting point the Turkish
atrocities. Mark Arax, in his memoir about his father's murder, "In My
Father's Name," traces his family's violent history back to the massacres.
The playwright Leslie Ayvazian, in "Nine Armenians," produced
last year at the Manhattan Theater Club, tells the story of a young woman
whose family has always repressed memories of the genocide and who travels
back to the newly independent Republic of Armenia as a relief worker. The
Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, in his widely praised 1993 film
"Calendar," tells the story of a young Armenian photographer's return to
Armenia to take pictures of old churches for a church calendar, for many
Armenians one of their few links to the culture.
At the heart of their work is a search for justice
andacknowledgment. "I needed to tell a family story that came to haunt me
as an adult," Balakian said of his memoir, "to chart the affirmative,
powerful and beautiful parts of my growing up and -- " referring to the
1915 massacre -- "this enormous, major moral event of the 20th century."
It has taken nearly 75 years, said Balakian, for the Armenian
community to reckon fully with its past. And it is because of studies of
the Holocaust, he said, that it is "firmly cemented in American culture,
and Armenians have been able to gather their voice, and their texts."
The Armenian culture has roots in Anatolia and the Caucasus
stretching back 2,500 years. The Armenians were a cosmopolitan people with
strong ties to the Hellenic world, and as traders they traversed the world
>from Shanghai to Amsterdam to India. They were the Ottomans' architects,
famous for the sensuous carvings of their churches as well as for their
tiles, their rugs and their lace.
Along with Greeks and Jews, Armenians constituted a large part
of the intellectual and financial infrastructure of the Ottoman empire.
They were often resented by the Turks because they were Christians, better
educated, wealthier and Westernized. Like Jews, Armenians were in many
places forbidden to own property, so they frequently became bankers and
money lenders, and like Jews they were despised. During successive waves
of persecution they dispersed throughout the world, and today the Armenian
disapora extends from Australia to Jerusalem. Armenians settled on the
farms and vineyards of California, and more recently many poorer
immigrants from the former Soviet Union have settled in Los Angeles.
With the outbreak of World War I, the Turkish government that
had replaced the old theocracy saw the Armenians as a security threat and
collaborators with the Russians. As part of a systematic plan of
extermination, the Armenians say, two-thirds of the Armenian people were
killed, deported or sent into the desert to starve.
FROM TURKEY, ANOTHER VERSION
The Armenian massacre was widely chronicled in the press. In The
New York Times of Feb. 6, 1916, a headline said, "Babies Thrown Into
Rivers." The next day, a headline told of a "Great Plain Black With
Refugees." Another headline, on the following Aug. 21, read, "500,000
Massacred." Still another, on the same page, read, "Begged to be Buried
Alive."
To this day, the Turkish government disputes that genocide took
place. "Armenians are afraid of knowing more about historic events,"
said a spokesman for the Turkish Embassy in Washington who asked not to be
identified. "We admit there was a tragedy at the end of World War I, but
it was a wartime period."
The Turkish position has been, and continues to be, that the
Armenian community was in revolt against the central Ottoman
administration and siding with Russia invaders. "The Turkish government
was compelled to take measures to insure the security of the eastern
provinces of the Empire," the spokesman said.
Today, there are about 30,000 Armenians remaining in Istanbul
and Eastern Anatolia, and about three million in what remains of Armenia
itself, 10 percent of the original homeland, a small, landlocked country
in the southwestern Caucasus, still devastated by a 1988 earthquake,
surrounded by Muslim nations and engaged in a territorial war with Turkic
Azerbaijan. In the United States there are some one million people of
Armenian descent, and an additional 80,000 live in Canada.
Over the years, Armenian groups have accused the Turkish
government of trying to suppress knowledge of the killings and the United
States of capitulating to pressure because of strategic interests in
Turkey. In 1935, the Armenian groups contend, the Turkish government
succeeded in stopping production on the MGM movie "The 40 Days of Musa
Dagh," based on a novel by Franz Werfel about the massacre. Decades
later, many Armenians contend, the Turkish government successfully lobbied
the Reagan and Bush administrations to prevent congressional resolutions
commemorating the Armenian massacre. In many ways, Balakian's memoir
describes a trajectory that is typical of Armenian immigrants, who often
kept the Turkish atrocities hidden from their children.
Many Armenians were prosperous, educated and easily assimilated
the Armenian hinterland. To this day, Balakian said, his mother's family
has an obsession with fine clothes and decorating.
Nafina Aroosian immigrated to the United States with her two
infant daughters in 1920. Her second husband, Bedros, whose family was
also involved in the silk trade, worked in the silk mills of Paterson,
N.J., and then became a dry cleaner and a tailor.
On Balakian's father's side, the Balakians of Constantinople
included physicians, a bishop and literary scholars. One of Balakian's
aunts, Nona, was a critic and staff editor of The New York Times Book
Review.
Another aunt, Anna, who died this month in Long Island, was a
renowned scholar of the French Surrealists. It was Balakian's aunts who
introduced him to the Armenian writer William Saroyan.
From early childhood, Balakian's maternal grandmother was a
crucial figure in his life. "Eench, eench?" she would ask him, Armenian
for "what," "what's the matter?" She was a grandmother who smoked a pipe
and liked nothing better than to watch Yankee games on television with her
grandson.
SOURCE OF A LOVE OF LANGUAGE
When he was 11, Balakian came down with the flu and his
grandmother nursed him. Later, he remembered, as if hallucinating,
fragments of the story she told him while he lay feverish in bed: "There
were maggots on the slits of their backs. We lay on the ground. Four of
us."
It was through his grandmother's sonorous voice and her
bristling imagery, Balakian said, that he acquired his love of language.
Ten years after she died, he found himself writing a poem about her:
"When you took my head
in your arms
and kissed my hair
I stared as always
at the skin of your hands
still discolored by
the arid Turkish plain."
Later, Balakian, who got a Ph.D. in American civilization from
Brown University, translated the work of the Armenian poet Siamanto, who
wrote "Bloody News From My Friend," a cycle of poems inspired by the
letters of Balakian's paternal grandfather, Diran Balakian, a doctor who
helped treat the victims of a mass killing in 1909:
"This thing I'm telling you about,
I saw with my own eyes.
From my window of hell
I clenched my teeth
and watched the town of Bardez turn
into a heap of ashes."
Today, Balakian lives in Hamilton with his wife, Helen, a grants
officer for Colgate who is one-quarter Armenian. They have two children,
Sophia and James. Their 19th-century house was once a station for black
slaves in the Underground Railroad, and behind the wall of Balakian's
study, the slaves' quarters are still intact.
"I work with my desk against that wall," he said. "It means a
lot."
A year ago, Balakian helped organize, with the Holocaust scholar
Robert J. Lifton, a petition to protest the hiring of a professor at
Princeton University for a chair financed by the Turkish government. The
professor is Heath W. Lowry, the author of a pamphlet published in
Istanbul that seeks to repudiate Morgenthau's account of the World War I
massacre.
Balakian and others have accused Lowry of acting as an apologist
for the Turkish government and of trying to suppress the Armenian story.
Lowry, who has denied the charge, did not respond to requests for comment.
"The Armenian holocaust deserves to take its rightful moral
place in history," said Balakian. "For a generation for whom there could
be no justice, the pain is compounded by the evil of denial. There is
always a period of delay after a trauma. But now we are at a moment of
threshold."
Source: gregan@ids.net
Source: R.H. Lola Koundakjian
This page added 20 June, 1997
