A hot day in July 1962. Eleven-year-old Peter Balakian languished in his bed in suburban New Jersey, rereading "Roger Maris at Bat" and waiting for the measles to hit full force.
As the boy drifted in and out of fevered sleep, his beloved grandmother sat guard. Nafina Aroosian was a woman who left a wake of rich impressions: thick chestnut hair braided in a bun, oddly blotched hands smelling of lemon rinds, heavily accented accounts of strange and prophetic dreams. Even the folk tales she told were impossible to forget: the roasted lamb with rubies in its eye sockets, the elk that feasted upon the livers of pregnant women.
But this particular day when Peter woke, Gran was talking to herself.
"There were maggots on the slits of their backs," she was saying. "We were on the ground. Four of us ... I felt Alice in the sling on my back asleep. The gendarmes began slapping me. One of them used the whip. The blood and milk oozed. Alice was crying.
"The Turk had an ax and a short knife with a mother-of-pearl handle. The blood was warm, then cold. I recognized him from the souk in Diarbekir. He was like a dead animal on me. I watched the dead feathers fly up into a blue sky where my box kite flew at Easter ..."
Peter listened in surprise: Was Gran telling dreams again? Or was she merely dreaming out loud? He was afraid to ask.
Years later, long after Nafina Aroosian had died and her grandson was launched as a poet, Peter Balakian was to discover the truth behind that arresting moment. As he relates in his book "Black Dog of Fate" (BasicBooks, 1997), his grandmother was caught in a flashback, not a dream. She was caught in a memory of one of the century's most heinous crimes.
Balakian was a graduate student when he read his first account of the Armenian genocide. He was horrified to discover that in 1915, the Turkish government had massacred more than 1 million Armenians, including his grandmother's first husband, parents, siblings and other relatives. Aroosian, then 25, had been sent on a death march into the desert with her two infant girls.
Members of Balakian's paternal family also were killed or scattered. But these tragedies were never discussed with the baby boom children living the good life in Tenafly, N.J. Like many Armenians who resettled in America, the Aroosians and Balakians chose to protect their children by raising them without knowledge of the past.
Balakian felt compelled to learn more. He interviewed relatives, reviewed documents, studied accounts of the time in an effort to reconcile the fragmented past with the present.
Balancing past with present
It took seven years to write the dramatic, poignant story of his quest to link the world of Frosted Flakes and Hoss Cartwright to "something ancient, something connected to earth and words and blood and sky."
His critically acclaimed book, now out in paperback, won the 1998 PEN/Albrand prize for memoir. And it has strengthened Peter Balakian's growing reputation as an advocate for recognition of the Armenian genocide and its legacy. Next week, the writer will speak on the moral act of memory at Western Maryland College in Westminster and Bibelot at Woodholme Center.
"I'm talking about the transmission of trauma across the generations," he says. "The history of the Armenian genocide is a history that a lot of people are learning for the first time -- and it means a lot for me to be able to be a voice for that."
An English professor and creative writing teacher at Colgate University, the 47-year-old author also has written four books of poetry and a biography of poet Theodore Roethke. He serves as director of the university's new Center of Ethics and World Societies.
In addition, Balakian helps instruct an interdisciplinary honors course on modern genocide that explores international relations, ethics and witness literature. It uses the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust as paradigms to study genocidal killings taking place in such places as the Balkans and Rwanda.
Located in the eastern provinces of what became Turkey, Armenia was settled more than 3,000 years ago. The first Near Eastern culture to become Christian -- it adopted the religion in A.D. 301 -- that population eventually became a minority in a majority Muslim country. Over the centuries, Armenians endured waves of persecution.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Armenia has struggled with the aftermath of a devastating earthquake, border fights and economic blockades. But nothing can touch the grimness of the Armenian massacres, which began in 1894 and culminated in 1915.
With the waning of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, the Turkish government decided that Armenians were a threat. As many as two-thirds of the population were killed, deported or sent into the desert to starve, events widely reported in U.S. newspapers at the time.
Since then, however, Turkey has denied the charge of genocide, a fact that has prevented the tragedy from being widely commemorated in contemporary times. Denial has also robbed Armenians of the chance to resolve their history and move forward, Balakian says.
"[Holocaust survivor and writer] Elie Wiesel says, 'Denial is a double killing.' What the Turks are doing now -- robbing the Armenians of their memory -- is horrifying," Balakian says. "Denial is the final genocide because it demonizes the victims and says that this demands no more accountability."
Genocide scholar Neil Kressel, author of "Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror," says Turkish recalcitrance continues to generate intense anger among Armenians.
"In contrast, there is not much residual anger which Jews bear toward the contemporary Germans. And no willingness to act on anger that exists."
Part of the reason the Armenian genocide has not commanded much scholarly attention in America, Kressel says, is due to the more recent horrors of the Holocaust. And many who developed the field of genocide studies were Jewish.
No one left to tell
"Most of the Armenian intellectuals were killed during the genocide," says scholar Vahakn Dadrian, who spent 30 years researching "History of the Armenian Genocide." "Those that survived were semi-literate peasants ... and were involved in the struggle of life."
The United States has the largest concentration of people from the Armenian diaspora, roughly 800,000 to 1 million, Dadrian says. After World War I, Watertown, Mass., became the major Armenian center in America. Now, as many as 400,000 Armenian-Americans live in southern California.
Meanwhile, a growing number of the immigrants' descendants -- including Carol Edgarian, Nancy Kricorian, Leslie Ayvazian, Richard Kalinoski, David Kherdian and Mark Arax -- are writing novels, plays and memoirs about what it means to be Armenian.
Balakian points out that the word "genocide" did not exist until 1943, and that the United Nations did not recognize genocide as a crime against humanity until 1948.
"What did it mean to be a survivor in an era before the Holocaust and the civil rights movement gave rise to a human rights movement in the United States? What was it like to be a survivor before there was a popular culture of psychology and therapy, whose goal was to help victims achieve a voice and the courage to affirm the moral significance of their wound and trauma?" he asks.
"In a cultural climate that did not recognize or articulate the moral significance of genocide, my grandmother was forced to turn inward, like those shell-shocked soldiers of World War I who came home, bit their tongues -- or bit them off -- and went on with their lives."
Seeking support
Balakian hopes to build an international movement to force Turkey to acknowledge responsibility for the genocide. He is heartened by Japan's recent official apology to South Korea for atrocities committed while Japan occupied Korea before and during World War II.
"Peter is an amazing speaker and polemicist. He gets people fired up and gives them ideas about things they can do to organize around the issue of Armenian genocide recognition," says Kricorian, author of "Zabelle," a novel about genocide survivors.
In the end, "Black Dog of Fate" is a book that remains intensely personal. As Balakian was writing it, complicated memories of Nafina Aroosian hovered over him like a shadow, like "history knocking on the door of the heart."
"I accept the fact that the past will always have huge holes in it -- and that the legacy of genocide is a legacy of fragments and absences from which one seeks to make as much meaning as possible," he says. "I often fantasize what it would be like if I could just have one hour with my grandmother, one hour to ask questions."
Sharing his past
Book signing: Peter Balakian, author of "Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past," will discuss and sign his book at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Bibelot in Woodholme Center, 1819 Reistertown Road. Call 410-653-6933.
Lecture: Balakian also will deliver the 1998 Holloway Lecture, "The Moral Act of Memory" at 8 p.m. Wednesday in McDaniel Lounge at Western Maryland College, Westminster. For directions call 410-857-2290 before 5 p.m.
Pub Date: 10/24/98