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Critics' Forum
Literature
Genocide and the Historical Imagination
By Hovig Tchalian
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
It is difficult in the month of April to escape the temptation, the
seeming inevitability, of writing on a topic dealing with the
Genocide. The necessity of that exercise in this "cruelest month"
perhaps renders the famous opening lines of T. S. Eliot's epic poem,
The Wasteland, now become cliché, nonetheless an apt epigraph to this
article.
The occasion that prompted the article is another look back - this
time to the recent publication of the new edition (2007) of a book by
Samantha Power and one by Peter Balakian that appeared a year after
the first publication of Power's book.
The year 2002 saw the original publication of Samantha Power's
moving, brutal, Pulitzer Prize-winning account of America's failure
to halt the perpetration of genocide in the twentieth century, "A
Problem from Hell:" America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Harper
Collins, 2002), the first chapter of which concerns the Armenian
Genocide. A year later, Peter Balakian published his own well-known
and award-winning account, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide
and America's Response (New York: Harper Collins, 2003).
Balakian himself looks back to Power, noting in his Preface that she
and other historians affirm that the Genocide comprises "the template
for most of the genocide[s] that followed in the twentieth century"
(Burning Tigris, xiv). Here, Balakian follows the well-trodden path
of many Genocide advocates before him in arguing that recognizing
past genocides helps prevent future ones. His statement is
qualitatively no different, in fact, than what Power also mentions -
herself echoing countless others before her - that Hitler justified
the Jewish Holocaust based at least in part on history's feeble
response to the Armenian Genocide ("A Problem from Hell," 23).
But Balakian's explicit purpose in The Burning Tigris is also much
larger than what this statement alone would suggest - it is to
reinstate the Genocide as a central, perhaps the central, human
rights calamity in American history. As Balakian puts it (Burning
Tigris, xiii):
The U.S. response to the Armenian crisis, which began in the 1890's
and continued into the 1920's, was the first international human
rights movement in American history and helped define the nation's
emerging global identity. It seems that no other international human
rights issue has ever preoccupied the United States for such a
duration. . . . The breadth and intensity of the American
engagement in the effort to save the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire
is an important chapter in American history, and one that has been
lost. It is also one from which Americans today can learn a great
deal.
Balakian proposes a historical perspective that would help explain
America to itself by pointing to a crime that coincides with a
seminal moment in American nationhood and identity, akin to the
widespread displacement and killing of Native Americans in the
expansion of the U.S. across the American continent in the 18th and
19th centuries. In this case, however, the crime is not that of the
perpetrator but of the historical witness and advocate turned
bystander and accomplice.
Balakian's argument in effect encompasses a second historical
tragedy, one akin to Genocide denial, which, as Balakian later points
out (quoting Emory University's Deborah Lipstadt), stands as
the "`final stage of genocide,' because it `strives to reshape human
history in order to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the
perpetrators'" (xix). The crime here is an even more subtle one -
the American nation betrays the Armenian victims of the crime by
first betraying itself, by forgetting or ignoring the advocacy of
many prominent Americans in its own past who called for recognition
and response. Among them were the likes of industrialist John D.
Rockefeller, feminist social critic Charlotte Perkins Gilman, writer
Stephen Crane, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau, Sr.,
former President Theodore Roosevelt, and poet Ezra Pound, who was
also, ironically, instrumental in the final edits to Eliot's
Wasteland, published in 1922, when debates about the proper response
to "the Armenian Question" still raged.
Balakian's argument casts him in the quintessential role of the
immigrant's son, speaking at once for his Armenian past and his
American present. His approach accomplishes a complex objective -
providing the hope and promise of restoring a lost fragment of
America's own past through the transformative, redemptive act of
restoring to Armenians a measure of social and historical justice
already embedded in American political history. In essence, the well-
worn path of Balakian's argument about Genocide prevention comes
across a sideways path into the American psyche; by retracing the arc
of the victim's (and his own national) history - that of obsessively
revisiting the past - Balakian ends up recasting it in terms of the
eyewitness's personal and national narrative. Balakian's Armenian-
American identity allows entrée into the American psyche. And from
that perspective, at least, the personal precedes the historical;
self-betrayal precedes the betrayal of the victims.
We might say, in this regard, that while the explicit argument of
Balakian's text is to hold up a mirror to the American conscience,
its implicit one is grappling with the difficult task of historical
reconstruction - that of belatedness, or the difficulty in the
distanced present of rehabilitating an event now lost to it. The
American tragedy simply reenacts history's more primal betrayal - of
itself.
What makes Balakian's rendering especially effective, however, is its
ability to personalize the historical, to make its belatedness matter
to the eyewitness (almost) as much as it does to the victim. In this
recapitulation, what appears as another tragic, hopeless attempt at
recovery simply reinforces the personal commitment - to recognition,
to a clear and unambiguous response - required to make it real; the
historical argument solidifies into the simple need to act.
America's tragic failure to be true to itself and its own past unites
Balakian's book with Power's. A single, complex question haunts both
texts: "What is the role of the most powerful nation in the world
when the ultimate crime is being perpetrated in plain view? . . .
Why is U.S. policy evasive, sluggish, resistant to action . . . and
often tinged with denial?" (xiii-xiv).
Both texts argue that, when viewed from the personal as well as the
historical perspective, resistance becomes denial, complacency shades
into complicity. In doing so, they follow individual but parallel
paths that render them mirror images of each other. Balakian speaks
as the American-born son of Armenian immigrants, carrying that
experience with him into the American historical landscape. Power
instead takes her (non-Armenian) readers along for a journey into the
Armenian (and Jewish and Cambodian ...) psyche. Both render the
position of neutrality an impossible one to inhabit by compelling
their audiences to re-examine the role of the historical eyewitness,
balanced uneasily between the two poles of victim and perpetrator.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Balakian emphasizes the
importance of "survivor accounts," which, he argues rightly, "are a
profound part of history and allow us into regions we would not
otherwise come to know" (xviii). Without the benefit of that
perspective, Power instead begins her narrative several years later.
Her first chapter, "Race Murder," opens interestingly in 1921 Berlin,
where Soghomon Tehlirian assassinated Mehmet Talaat, Turkey's former
Interior Minister and one of the masterminds behind the Genocide.
Power thus begins not with the historical question, but as the
instincts of any good reporter or novelist might suggest, with the
historical actor. In fact, she begins with the exact moment of the
assassination, repeating in the course of her description the words
Tehlirian reportedly spoke as he pulled the trigger: "This is to
avenge the death of my family" ("A Problem from Hell," 1). By
beginning with the pathos of Tehlirian's act of vengeance, Power has
the reader immediately occupy a position other than his own, one with
its own peculiar and compelling complexities. Tehlirian is at once a
self-appointed avenger and a victim of Genocide - Power soon reminds
us that Tehlirian was himself dragged to Der-el-Zor and clubbed on
the head, awaking to find himself in the midst of carnage, the lone
survivor among his village and family.
Power's dramatization of Tehlirian's assassination plot addresses
Balakian's implicit argument of "belatedness" introduced above - of
Armenians pressing for recognition and Americans struggling with
response. Tehlirian has both suffered the crime and looks back to
its commission six years later, embodying at once the dual and
contradictory roles of victim and latecomer.
In a sense, the scene Power depicts dramatizes the moment of
redemption offered by Balakian. Her version of Tehlirian's act re-
imagines the near-tragedy of American complicity through complacency
as a moment of high conviction. In the person of Tehlirian, Power
introduces the vagaries of the latecomer only to dissolve them in a
moment of action; as a survivor - in essence, a near-victim -
Tehlirian has lived to tell about it and, more importantly, to act on
his experience and knowledge. Balakian's retracing of the Armenian
psyche into the American finds its parallel in Power's substitution
of Tehlirian's action for America's own. Without romanticizing the
assassination itself, Power uses it as a clear and unmistakable call
for response.
Balakian's Burning Tigris and Power's "A Problem from Hell" share an
acute sense of personal identity and responsibility. It is that
sensibility that allows the two authors to re-imagine the respective
roles of the historical witness and the originary victim from within
the context of personal and national commitment, a daunting feat
normally accomplished in the best fiction.
And yet perhaps this is not entirely surprising - many great works of
historical writing also share with literature a profound sense of the
power of the historical imagination. By pointing the way to personal
and national advocacy, action and response, the two authors also
highlight the hazards of the historical imagination, which expresses
itself in the struggle over evidence and the interminable polemic
about points of view.
Powers reminds us that this "debate" started with the historical
actors themselves. She recounts an encounter between Ambassador
Morgenthau and Mehmet Talaat in which the latter is said to have
offered these chilling words about his government's responsibility
(arguably more chilling than Hitler's later proclamation about this
same instance, now in the past), "`We don't give a rap for the
future!' he exclaimed. `We live only in the present,'" later adding
to a German reporter, "`we have been reproached for making no
distinction between the innocent Armenians and the
guilty.' . . . `But that was utterly impossible, in view of the fact
that those who were innocent today might be guilty tomorrow'" (8).
The words represent a sinister version of the collective guilt and
expiation of the American nation imagined by Balakian and Power,
which has here already been cast as the inevitable collective "guilt"
of the entire Armenian race. In moments such as these, Burning
Tigris and "A Problem from Hell" remind us that it is perhaps the
cruelest of April's ironies that the historical imagination itself is
what can most easily betray us.
All Rights Reserved: Critics Forum, 2008. Exclusive to the Armenian
Reporter.
Hovig Tchalian holds a PhD in English literature from UCLA. He has
edited several journals and also published articles of his own.
You can reach him or any of the other contributors to Critics' Forum
at [email protected]. This and all other articles published
in this series are available online at www.criticsforum.org. To sign
up for a weekly electronic version of new articles, go to
www.criticsforum.org/join. Critics' Forum is a group created to
discuss issues relating to Armenian art and culture in the Diaspora.
Literature
Genocide and the Historical Imagination
By Hovig Tchalian
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
It is difficult in the month of April to escape the temptation, the
seeming inevitability, of writing on a topic dealing with the
Genocide. The necessity of that exercise in this "cruelest month"
perhaps renders the famous opening lines of T. S. Eliot's epic poem,
The Wasteland, now become cliché, nonetheless an apt epigraph to this
article.
The occasion that prompted the article is another look back - this
time to the recent publication of the new edition (2007) of a book by
Samantha Power and one by Peter Balakian that appeared a year after
the first publication of Power's book.
The year 2002 saw the original publication of Samantha Power's
moving, brutal, Pulitzer Prize-winning account of America's failure
to halt the perpetration of genocide in the twentieth century, "A
Problem from Hell:" America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Harper
Collins, 2002), the first chapter of which concerns the Armenian
Genocide. A year later, Peter Balakian published his own well-known
and award-winning account, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide
and America's Response (New York: Harper Collins, 2003).
Balakian himself looks back to Power, noting in his Preface that she
and other historians affirm that the Genocide comprises "the template
for most of the genocide[s] that followed in the twentieth century"
(Burning Tigris, xiv). Here, Balakian follows the well-trodden path
of many Genocide advocates before him in arguing that recognizing
past genocides helps prevent future ones. His statement is
qualitatively no different, in fact, than what Power also mentions -
herself echoing countless others before her - that Hitler justified
the Jewish Holocaust based at least in part on history's feeble
response to the Armenian Genocide ("A Problem from Hell," 23).
But Balakian's explicit purpose in The Burning Tigris is also much
larger than what this statement alone would suggest - it is to
reinstate the Genocide as a central, perhaps the central, human
rights calamity in American history. As Balakian puts it (Burning
Tigris, xiii):
The U.S. response to the Armenian crisis, which began in the 1890's
and continued into the 1920's, was the first international human
rights movement in American history and helped define the nation's
emerging global identity. It seems that no other international human
rights issue has ever preoccupied the United States for such a
duration. . . . The breadth and intensity of the American
engagement in the effort to save the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire
is an important chapter in American history, and one that has been
lost. It is also one from which Americans today can learn a great
deal.
Balakian proposes a historical perspective that would help explain
America to itself by pointing to a crime that coincides with a
seminal moment in American nationhood and identity, akin to the
widespread displacement and killing of Native Americans in the
expansion of the U.S. across the American continent in the 18th and
19th centuries. In this case, however, the crime is not that of the
perpetrator but of the historical witness and advocate turned
bystander and accomplice.
Balakian's argument in effect encompasses a second historical
tragedy, one akin to Genocide denial, which, as Balakian later points
out (quoting Emory University's Deborah Lipstadt), stands as
the "`final stage of genocide,' because it `strives to reshape human
history in order to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the
perpetrators'" (xix). The crime here is an even more subtle one -
the American nation betrays the Armenian victims of the crime by
first betraying itself, by forgetting or ignoring the advocacy of
many prominent Americans in its own past who called for recognition
and response. Among them were the likes of industrialist John D.
Rockefeller, feminist social critic Charlotte Perkins Gilman, writer
Stephen Crane, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau, Sr.,
former President Theodore Roosevelt, and poet Ezra Pound, who was
also, ironically, instrumental in the final edits to Eliot's
Wasteland, published in 1922, when debates about the proper response
to "the Armenian Question" still raged.
Balakian's argument casts him in the quintessential role of the
immigrant's son, speaking at once for his Armenian past and his
American present. His approach accomplishes a complex objective -
providing the hope and promise of restoring a lost fragment of
America's own past through the transformative, redemptive act of
restoring to Armenians a measure of social and historical justice
already embedded in American political history. In essence, the well-
worn path of Balakian's argument about Genocide prevention comes
across a sideways path into the American psyche; by retracing the arc
of the victim's (and his own national) history - that of obsessively
revisiting the past - Balakian ends up recasting it in terms of the
eyewitness's personal and national narrative. Balakian's Armenian-
American identity allows entrée into the American psyche. And from
that perspective, at least, the personal precedes the historical;
self-betrayal precedes the betrayal of the victims.
We might say, in this regard, that while the explicit argument of
Balakian's text is to hold up a mirror to the American conscience,
its implicit one is grappling with the difficult task of historical
reconstruction - that of belatedness, or the difficulty in the
distanced present of rehabilitating an event now lost to it. The
American tragedy simply reenacts history's more primal betrayal - of
itself.
What makes Balakian's rendering especially effective, however, is its
ability to personalize the historical, to make its belatedness matter
to the eyewitness (almost) as much as it does to the victim. In this
recapitulation, what appears as another tragic, hopeless attempt at
recovery simply reinforces the personal commitment - to recognition,
to a clear and unambiguous response - required to make it real; the
historical argument solidifies into the simple need to act.
America's tragic failure to be true to itself and its own past unites
Balakian's book with Power's. A single, complex question haunts both
texts: "What is the role of the most powerful nation in the world
when the ultimate crime is being perpetrated in plain view? . . .
Why is U.S. policy evasive, sluggish, resistant to action . . . and
often tinged with denial?" (xiii-xiv).
Both texts argue that, when viewed from the personal as well as the
historical perspective, resistance becomes denial, complacency shades
into complicity. In doing so, they follow individual but parallel
paths that render them mirror images of each other. Balakian speaks
as the American-born son of Armenian immigrants, carrying that
experience with him into the American historical landscape. Power
instead takes her (non-Armenian) readers along for a journey into the
Armenian (and Jewish and Cambodian ...) psyche. Both render the
position of neutrality an impossible one to inhabit by compelling
their audiences to re-examine the role of the historical eyewitness,
balanced uneasily between the two poles of victim and perpetrator.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Balakian emphasizes the
importance of "survivor accounts," which, he argues rightly, "are a
profound part of history and allow us into regions we would not
otherwise come to know" (xviii). Without the benefit of that
perspective, Power instead begins her narrative several years later.
Her first chapter, "Race Murder," opens interestingly in 1921 Berlin,
where Soghomon Tehlirian assassinated Mehmet Talaat, Turkey's former
Interior Minister and one of the masterminds behind the Genocide.
Power thus begins not with the historical question, but as the
instincts of any good reporter or novelist might suggest, with the
historical actor. In fact, she begins with the exact moment of the
assassination, repeating in the course of her description the words
Tehlirian reportedly spoke as he pulled the trigger: "This is to
avenge the death of my family" ("A Problem from Hell," 1). By
beginning with the pathos of Tehlirian's act of vengeance, Power has
the reader immediately occupy a position other than his own, one with
its own peculiar and compelling complexities. Tehlirian is at once a
self-appointed avenger and a victim of Genocide - Power soon reminds
us that Tehlirian was himself dragged to Der-el-Zor and clubbed on
the head, awaking to find himself in the midst of carnage, the lone
survivor among his village and family.
Power's dramatization of Tehlirian's assassination plot addresses
Balakian's implicit argument of "belatedness" introduced above - of
Armenians pressing for recognition and Americans struggling with
response. Tehlirian has both suffered the crime and looks back to
its commission six years later, embodying at once the dual and
contradictory roles of victim and latecomer.
In a sense, the scene Power depicts dramatizes the moment of
redemption offered by Balakian. Her version of Tehlirian's act re-
imagines the near-tragedy of American complicity through complacency
as a moment of high conviction. In the person of Tehlirian, Power
introduces the vagaries of the latecomer only to dissolve them in a
moment of action; as a survivor - in essence, a near-victim -
Tehlirian has lived to tell about it and, more importantly, to act on
his experience and knowledge. Balakian's retracing of the Armenian
psyche into the American finds its parallel in Power's substitution
of Tehlirian's action for America's own. Without romanticizing the
assassination itself, Power uses it as a clear and unmistakable call
for response.
Balakian's Burning Tigris and Power's "A Problem from Hell" share an
acute sense of personal identity and responsibility. It is that
sensibility that allows the two authors to re-imagine the respective
roles of the historical witness and the originary victim from within
the context of personal and national commitment, a daunting feat
normally accomplished in the best fiction.
And yet perhaps this is not entirely surprising - many great works of
historical writing also share with literature a profound sense of the
power of the historical imagination. By pointing the way to personal
and national advocacy, action and response, the two authors also
highlight the hazards of the historical imagination, which expresses
itself in the struggle over evidence and the interminable polemic
about points of view.
Powers reminds us that this "debate" started with the historical
actors themselves. She recounts an encounter between Ambassador
Morgenthau and Mehmet Talaat in which the latter is said to have
offered these chilling words about his government's responsibility
(arguably more chilling than Hitler's later proclamation about this
same instance, now in the past), "`We don't give a rap for the
future!' he exclaimed. `We live only in the present,'" later adding
to a German reporter, "`we have been reproached for making no
distinction between the innocent Armenians and the
guilty.' . . . `But that was utterly impossible, in view of the fact
that those who were innocent today might be guilty tomorrow'" (8).
The words represent a sinister version of the collective guilt and
expiation of the American nation imagined by Balakian and Power,
which has here already been cast as the inevitable collective "guilt"
of the entire Armenian race. In moments such as these, Burning
Tigris and "A Problem from Hell" remind us that it is perhaps the
cruelest of April's ironies that the historical imagination itself is
what can most easily betray us.
All Rights Reserved: Critics Forum, 2008. Exclusive to the Armenian
Reporter.
Hovig Tchalian holds a PhD in English literature from UCLA. He has
edited several journals and also published articles of his own.
You can reach him or any of the other contributors to Critics' Forum
at [email protected]. This and all other articles published
in this series are available online at www.criticsforum.org. To sign
up for a weekly electronic version of new articles, go to
www.criticsforum.org/join. Critics' Forum is a group created to
discuss issues relating to Armenian art and culture in the Diaspora.