Reading Balakian's Memoirs

"No, it wasn't a world where people went public about such things."

Peter Balakian. The Black Fate of Dog, p.185

As I commute half an hour to work, I used to envy those who can read a book or a paper on the way since I could not. A while ago I discovered that I am able to read on my mobile phone. Somehow reading on the screen does not cause the same motion sickness. So I started enjoying reading on the move and my first book was Peter Balakian's The Black Dog of Fate, winner of PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for Memoir and was a New York Times Notable Book.

At the beginning I was touched by some common words with Turkish and then noticed common food he mentioned. My family left Erzurum when I was only an 18-months-old toddler and I didn't see Erzurum until I was 21 again when I paid a short visit. Balakian was not even born on his ancestors' land. But there is something which comes from the family. I enjoy local food special to Erzurum in a different way. I see that the Balakians maintained Armenian cuisine over in the States. I thought maybe many Armenian Americans' and Turkish Americans' lifestyles are in fact quite similar in some ways to each other, because their roots are in the same soil.

 Cahit Sıtkı Tarancı Museum, Diyarbakır

However his approach to Turks and Turkey made reading rather difficult for me as I proceeded. First I was startled with the expression of "Diarbekir, an ancient Armenian city". Diyarbakir is a very ancient city going back 9.000 years. It has been capital for empires such as the Sumerians, and the city had been ruled by the Hurri-Mithani, Hittites, the Assyrians and many others including Armenians for a short while until Turks settled in Anatolia at the beginning of 1000's when Selçuki period started. It changed hands among Muslim states until it became a part of the Ottoman Empire on September 15, 1515 [1]. It is a province of Turkey today. In early 20th century the ratio of Armenians within the population was 10 % in Diyarbakir. Kurds also assert that it is a Kurdish city. I think in multicultural places nobody should make such claims. All born there surely must have a say. Recent car burning in Cizre in the same region, because the owner didn't know Kurdish demonstrate the dangers of appropriative approaches [2].

Sanasarian College

Balakian's father comes from a family who left İstanbul in the first decade of 1900s before the wars. However his grandmother is from Diyarbakir and she faced difficulties of relocation severely. His great-uncle Grigoris Balakian [3] was among the group of 235 Armenian leaders who were arrested on April 24, 1915 in Istanbul. They are mentioned as intellectual, leading figures of the Armenian community, but their political leadership is never mentioned by genocide allegers. Grigoris Balakian graduated from the Sanasarian College [4] in Erzurum and later studied architecture in Germany for two years and got a degree in civil engineering, but became a high-ranking priest and a community leader. The Sanasarian College was one of the colleges founded in Eastern Anatolia in 1880s, financed by Mkrtich Sanasarian, an Armenian Russian businessman. The College had three notable graduates. The readers of this blog are familiar with one of them: Armen Garo (Karekin Pastermajian). The other one, Vartkes Serengülian [5] was also a member of Ottoman Parliament like Karekin. He organized demonstrations in Erzurum and was arrested. After he was released in 1892 he stayed in Istanbul for a while and then went to Bulgaria and Russian Empire where he was active as a revolutionary. Well documented role of clergymen in development and spread of revolutionary nationalistic ideas among Armenians leaves little space for doubts about the third notable graduate Grigoris Balakian's involvement in the revolutionary movement. Therefore it would be rather naive to think that he was wrongly arrested. Yet respectable Armenian American poet Balakian does not mention political dealings of Armenian revolutionaries at all. Reading through the book one can think that the Ottoman government suddenly decided to arrest and relocate Armenians for no reason!

Balakian's biography [6] available at Poetry Foundation web page reads as follows: ".. As a child he heard scraps of his grandmother Nafina’s past—Balakian credits his love of writing to her storytelling and imagery—but he didn’t discover the Armenian genocide of the early 20th century until he read Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, the memoir of the U.S. ambassador to Turkey during that period. Shortly thereafter, Balakian learned that his grandmother had been one of the few survivors of a death march in the Syrian Desert." Balakian is a scholar at the same time and one would expect him to query why all these tragic events took place.

If he had read Heath W. Lowry's The Story Behind Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (ISIS / Gorgias, 2011) after reading Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (Cosimo, 2007), perhaps he would have had a different view of the tragic events. If he had read Papazian [7] or Katchaznouni [8] he would have someone else to blame for all the sufferings. He could have read Niles and Sutherland report [9] which highlighted that Armenians and other Christians were not Anatolia’s only innocent victims of the war. Muslim Turks and Kurds had suffered too on a massive scale. But Balakian seems to have chosen to take over from his great-uncle, and this memoir which does not reflect Balakian's poetry and scholarship, but just covers how he has become a person who has dedicated himself to a struggle to persuade people that the tragic events of 1915 count to a genocide. Buenos [10] reports that "Facing History and ourselves, which is self-described as "an international educational and professional development organization," was founded in 1976 in Brookline, Massachusetts, and claims to reach over 1.5 million middle and high school students through more than 19,000 educators in the U.S. and Switzerland. This organization's teachings, in consultation with Armenian-American scholars Richard Hovannisian and Peter Balakian, construct a narrative that politicizes world history and is markedly Armenian-centered."

New Yorker's comment on the back cover of the book reads "Richly imagined and carefully documented." I completely agree. However, drawing from the quotation on top of this page which reads "No, it wasn't a world where people went public about such things", I say, so richly imaginative that he has made a whole nation murderer without single testimony, and so carefully documented that hides all documents which manifest the role of the Western world in Turco-Armenian controversy and singles out events out of the context in such a way that groundless accusations become persuasive.

On page 345, Balakian says, "This was a death trap for anyone who had managed to survive the torture and starvation, the marches on which the Turks had driven them. For miles and miles, I was looking at an open graveyard. A vast desolation that the Turkish government had so skillfully used to kill hundreds of thousands of people, just as they had skillfully used to severe and rocky terrain of Anatolia with its cliffs, ravines, canyons and gorges to kill hundreds of thousands of people." He probably does not know about the report of Patriarchate available in the US Archives, which states that 644.900 Armenians returned home in 1918. If they all died who were those that came back? Open graveyards are all around Balkans, Anatolia, Caucasus and Crimea filled by Muslim people. Justin McCarthy has identified that while the losses among Armenians who were relocateds in the South was 20 percent, it was  40  percent among Muslims who fled home from Eastern Anatolia, and 50 among Armenians who chose to go to Russia or Iran on their own will, as mentioned in another post earlier on this blog. Neither he seems to know that "the judicial authorities of the Ottoman Government prosecuted already in 1916, the crimes committed by some Ottoman officials and citizens during the relocation of a part of the Ottoman Armenians. As a result of the judgments were made according to Ottoman laws, Ottoman officials and citizens whose crimes were determined, were convicted. 1673 people brought to court, 524 were imprisoned, 67 people were executed and 68 people were punished with shovels, exile, etc. Of those brought to court, 528 consisted of soldiers, police, and members of the Special Police Organization (Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa), 107 consisted of aid man, cash collectors, district governor, mayor or Director of (Emval-i Metruke) Abandoned Property Administration. [11]"

M. Hakan Yavuz's article titled "Contours of Scholarship on Armenian-Turkish Relations"[12] which maps out the existing scholarship between the diametrically opposing frameworks, and suggests to start a conversation to at least humanize the relations is opened with the following quotation from eminent American philosopher John Dewey:

The situation in Turkey with respect to Turks, Armenians and Greeks alike meets all the terms of the classic definition of tragedy, the tragedy of fate. A curse has been laid upon all populations and all have moved forward blindly to suffer their doom. It is a tragedy with only victims, not heroes, no matter how heroic individuals may have been.

...

[T]he fate of the Greeks and Armenians, the tools of nationalistic and imperialistic ambitions of foreign powers, makes one realize how accursed has been the minority population that had the protection of a Christian foreign power.

As knowledge becomes more open and people can learn about what has happened from alternative sources, genocide allegers will not be able to make people believe in their lopsided, incomplete narratives for long. Readers today probably have more means to access to information to learn more different points of views if they are inquisitive and explorative by nature. I think it is a serious decision to take place by the side of some people who accuses others. There may be another story, maybe unknown, maybe untold, behind what is told.

Sources

1. Diyarbakır. Wikipedia. Accessed on 22.10.2014 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diyarbak%C4%B1r

2. Kürtçe bilmiyorum dedi, aracını yaktılar! [He said that he doesn't know Kurdish, they burnt his car!" Milliyet. Accessed on 22.10.2014 at http://www.milliyet.com.tr/kurtce-bilmiyorum-dedi-aracini-gundem-1958229/

3. Grigoris Balakian. Wikipedia. Accessed on 22.10.2014 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigoris_Balakian.

4. Sanasarian College. Wikipedia. Accessed on 22.10.2014 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanasarian_College.

5. Vartkes Serengülian Wikipedia. Accessed on 22.10.2014 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vartkes_Sereng%C3%BClian

6. Peter Balakian. Accessed on 20.10.2014 at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/peter-balakian

7. Papazian, Kapriel Serope, 1887-: Patriotism perverted : a discussion of the deeds and the misdeeds of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, the so-called Dashnagtzoutune / by K. S. Papazian.(Boston : Baikar Press, 1934) (page images at HathiTrust). http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015068636516;view=1up;seq=1

8. Katchaznouni, Hovhannes. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnagtzoutiun) has nothing to do any more:The Manifesto of Hovhannes Katchaznouni, First Prime Minister of the Independent Armenian Republic. Translated from the Original by Matthew A. Callender. Edited by John Roy Carlson (Arthur A. Derounian). Published by the Armenian Information Service, 1955.

Buenos, T. (2013, May 18).15 characteristics of the Armenian narrative. Sunday's Zaman. Accessed on 20.10.2014 at http://www.todayszaman.com/op-ed_15-characteristics-of-the-armenian-narrativeby-tal-buenos-_314870.html

9. Johnson, B. Americans Investigating Anatolia: The 1919 Field Notes of Emory Niles and Arthur Sutherland. p.19. http://courses.washington.edu/otap/archive/data/arch_20c/niles_suthr/Americans_Investigating_Anatolia_Final_to_OTAP_rev_1.pdf (A print version was previously published in The Journal of Turkish Studies, 34/2 (2010), 129–147.)

10. Buenos, T. (2014, Sept 11). Many Genocides of Raphael Lemkin. Daily Sabah. Accessed on 13.09.2014 at http://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/2014/09/11/many-genocides-of-raphael-lemkin

11. Tacar, P. (2010) "An Invitation To Truth, Transparency And Accountability: Towards “Responsible Dialogue” On The Armenian Issue", Review of Armenian Studies, 22, 135-170. Accessed on 26.10.2014 at http://www.avim.org.tr/uploads/dergiler/Review-of-Armenian-Studies-22-pdf.pdf.

12. Yavuz, M. Hakan. (2011).  Contours of Scholarship on Armenian-Turkish Relations,

Middle East Critique, 20:3, 231-251. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2011.619761