The Armenian Genocide

Originally published in the Ketchikan Daily News, April 2015; written by Lisa Pearson.

There has been a great deal of discussion in the news lately about the Armenian Genocide, as April 24th was considered the 100th anniversary of the start of the genocide. This is an unfamiliar part of World War I for many Americans, but at the Ketchikan Public Library we have both nonfiction books and novels that explore this troubling event in European history.

“Armenian Golgotha: a memoir of the Armenian genocide, 1915-1918” is a first-person account by Armenian priest Grigoris Balakian, originally published in 1922 and translated in this edition by author Peter Balakian (who is also his great-nephew) and Aris Sevag. Father Grigoris was arrested in Constantinople on April 24th, 1915 along with 250 other Armenian intellectuals. They were forced to march hundreds of miles towards the Syrian border, to concentration camps that had been established there for the exiled Armenian population. Along with his own experiences, Father Grigoris talked to other exiles he encountered along the way and collected their stories. This is not an objective account by an historian years after the fact; this is a memoir by an actual survivor. The language and phrasing, in keeping with the writing style of the time, is a little bit stilted and overblown, but the images he creates are memorable.

“There was and there was not: a journey through hate and possibility in Turkey, Armenia and beyond” is a new book by Meline Toumani. The children of Armenian immigrants, Toumani was raised in an Armenian enclave in New Jersey where she was taught to hate all things Turkish, and her community felt that nothing was more important than receiving official recognition of the genocide. As she grew older, however, she began to question this refusal to move beyond the past. In her words, “I wondered whether our obsession with genocide recognition was worth its emotional and psychological price”. To that end, she moved to Istanbul and spent 4 years there having many guarded, delicate conversations with the Turks she met in her daily life about their attitudes towards Armenians. As the book progresses, she examines not only the feelings of the Turks but also of her own family and herself towards the idea of a “soft reconciliation”. Toumani’s account is a really interesting way of looking at the idea of acknowledgment and forgiveness.

We also have a couple of novels by well-known authors of Armenian descent in which the events of 1915 play a significant part of the story. “The Sandcastle Girls” by Chris Bohjalian follows the story of Elizabeth, a wealthy young college graduate who has volunteered to deliver relief supplies to the Armenian refugees. She falls in love with an Armenian engineer who has just lost his family. The story is told in flashbacks through the research of their granddaughter - a novelist who had never thought much about her Armenian heritage, let alone what her grandparents had witnessed the terrible summer they met.

“The Gendarme” by Mark Mustian explores the ideas of memory, forgiveness and regrets by focusing on Emmett Conn, a World War I veteran who - at the age of 92 - is slowly dying of a brain tumor that is triggering his long-suppressed memories of the past. Badly wounded at Gallipoli and mistaken for a British soldier, Conn was actually born Ahmet Khan in Turkey. He is beginning to remember his earlier life as a ‘gendarme’ in troubling flashbacks, including his illicit love for one of the Armenian refugees he is herding into exile in the Syrian Desert. He becomes fixated on filling in the holes in his memory - and discovering the fate of the young Armenian girl he loved - before he dies with his apologies unsaid.

While I would hardly describe these books as “pleasure reading”, the events of 1915 are an important period in modern history and obviously - from all the recent press coverage - these events are still impacting global relations to this day.