At the Nottingham Senior Living Community (in Jamesville, NY) where I run a writing group for the residents, Professor Peter Balakian (Colgate University) visited us and gave a talk on his memoir _Black Dog of Fate_ (1998), a story of growing up in America and gaining a growing awareness of how the Armenian genocide affected his family. He characterized his memoir as addressing and coming to terms with the transmission of intergenerational trauma. His grandmother was a survivor of a forced death march in Turkey in 1915 (part of the killing of over a million Armenians by the Turkish government). She survived and her two daughters survived, but everyone else in her family perished by murder or starvation. Balakian's story addresses the silences in his family about the massacres and the decoding of meanings that unfolded for him over time. In his twenties, he started to read about the genocide, then he began to write about it later in life, and then to lecture and teach about it.
Dr. Balakian's presentation was extremely powerful: as a historical overview of the genocide, the reasons for it being forgotten or denied, but also as a story of coming to terms with it as a second generation after the survivor generation.
I'm sure we'll be reading Dr. Balakian's memoir in the writing group. We all wanted to run out to purchase it.
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I studied the Armenian genocide in my former life as a history major. I wonder why something of that scale is just ignored, and something like the Holocaust cannot escape the public consciousness. Is it that we can more easily latch on to the evilness of Hitler and the Nazis, and we know neither the names nor the faces of those who marched those thousands upon thousands of Armenians to their death? Is it for the same reasons we can ignore the situation in Darfur today? I wonder if that simple villianization of one person allows us to more easily comprehend that particular genocide.
Sounds like a powerful memoir.
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