'Forgotten' genocide looms
large for survivors, descendants
Comparisons between the Holocaust and the 1915 Armenian genocide are
almost automatic. But the 20th century's first genocide, in which a million
Armenian citizens of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire died in mass deportations
and massacres, has in a sense not ended, said Walter Kalaidjian, Emory professor
of 20th century American literature and a recipient of a University Research
Committee grant to study the ongoing trauma of the Armenian experience.
Imagine the consequences to Jews if Germany had never acknowledged it
had carried out the Holocaust. "The question is, where does that trauma
go?" Kalaidjian asked. "The psychic impact of the unlistened-to
story is as devastating to the survivor as the event itself," Kalaidjian
said. More than eight decades later, the Turkish government does not acknowledge
the genocide took place and, Kalaidjian said, "has gone out of its
way to undermine scholarship" on this well-documented event.
The link between Kalaidjian's role as an English professor and the Armenian
genocide is his research into what he calls "literature of extreme
experience." He is interested in trauma the genocide caused, how that
trauma was transmitted from generation to generation and, finally, how it
is reflected in the literature of third-generation Armenian-Americans.
"Part of the effect is not only the transmission of trauma but the
missed encounter with one's culture in the diaspora through the pressure
of assimilation," Kalaidjian said. He cited Peter Balakian's memoir,
Black Dog of Fate, which contrasts the extreme experience of the genocide
and the trauma of the near universal denial of the event with the pressure
to assimilate into suburban American life.
"Without the kind of commemoration rituals and memorial sites that
you have with the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide has persisted as a disruptive
memory-one that is incommensurable with everyday life in the United States,"
he said, adding, "The inability to mourn a trauma in the public sphere
gets acted out symptomatically in other forms. It's that repetition of the
unknown that I explore in a literary context."
With the URC grant, Kalaidjian reviewed videotaped testimonies of survivors
of the genocide last year. He selected 80 tapes for acquisition that will
become part of Woodruff Library Special Collections. The tapes will arrive
at Emory later this spring. A few already have, and Kalaidjian has used
them to supplement readings for lectures he gave Violence Studies students
and a graduate-level seminar on genocide.
Most of the eyewitnesses interviewed in the late 1980s were children
when the genocide occurred. The clarity of their testimonies surprised Kalaidjian.
"The most vivid accounts came from those who were between the ages
of 5 and 10," he said. The stories survivors tell give access to truths
that the bare facts of genocide do not. "Some of the stories are rooted
in cultural contexts that are otherwise hard to imagine without the testimony,"
Kalaidjian said.
One Armenian family was saved when the matriarch of a Turkish family
hid them because her husband was the "milk brother" of the Armenian
family-his mother had been a wet nurse to the father of the Armenian family.
In addition to the atmosphere of indifference and denial, survivors of
the Armenian genocide were hampered by the lack of a vocabulary with which
to tell their stories. This comes through in the videos, Kalaidjian said,
pointing out that the word "genocide" wasn't even coined until
the 1940s, and until then there was no public discourse on the phenomenon
of state-sponsored mass murder.
The Armenian genocide was the first in a century of mass murders that
took tens of millions of lives. That remains the disturbing paradox of the
20th century, which saw more people living better than at any time in history,
Kalaidjian said. "Genocide is not a phenomenon that belongs to the
distant past. It's an event that only emerges with the new forces of social
modernism, systems of technology and a rapid information exchange that are
prerequisites for organizing industrial mass murder," he said.
"The paradox is, it accompanies these sophisticated advances that
are the source of our optimism," Kalaidjian said. "Genocide is
the unthought-of underside of the so-called progress we've witnessed in
the 20th century."
-David Holzel
Editor's note: This month marks the 83rd year since the Armenian deportations
began.
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