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Dallas Morning News- Texas
March 13 2015
Q&A with author who'll speak at SMU on Armenian genocide
By DIANNE SOLÍS [email protected]
Staff Writer
Published: 13 March 2015 11:10 PM
Updated: 13 March 2015 11:10 PM
When Peter Balakian was a small boy, his grandmother filled him with
stories seeped in magical realism, with mysterious yet baffling lines.
"A long time ago there was and there wasn't," she'd say.
Perhaps his tender grandmother was just nurturing a fellow poet and
soon-to-be historian of one of the great epic traumas opening the 20th
century. She was a survivor of the Armenian genocide 100 years ago in
April 1915.
Her grandson would eventually become her scribe, portraying her in his
award-winning memoir, Black Dog of Fate.
Balakian, now a Colgate University professor, has made the genocide a
key part of his life's work as an award-winning writer, poet and
genocide expert. He will talk about his work at Southern Methodist
University's Dallas Hall at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at an event sponsored
by St. Sarkis Church of Carrollton and SMU's Embrey Human Rights
Program.
He recently discussed his writing and more with The Dallas Morning News.
Tell us about your grandmother, Nafina Aroosian, and her role in
shaping you as a writer and how you unraveled her story.
My grandmother had a penchant for telling folk tales in dreams. ...
They were wild tales that were almost magical realism tales. ... The
richness of her imagination was very important to my own imagination.
... It turned out to be very important to me as a writer and a thinker
of history, and the particular history of the Armenian genocide and
how it came down to me.
Only recently, we have dug up out of the family papers, some of her
writing. She was writing poems. ... They are private poems and they
are poems in which she is trying to deal with the losses of her life.
Everyone in her family was murdered in the first week of April 1915,
except for one half-brother, who was living in New Jersey at the time.
Tell us about Raphael Lemkin, the Holocaust survivor from Poland. Why
is he important?
It was Lemkin who became the father of the U.N. genocide convention of
1948. That is the charter legal document that outlawed genocide as a
crime. It was Lemkin who coined the phrase "Armenian genocide" in the
1940s. ... As a graduate student he challenged his professor, "How can
it be if one man kills another he is charged with murder, but if a
nation-state kills more than a million people they are allowed to do
it without any consequences?" and this moment ended up changing his
career path.
Among Lemkin's many layers of his understanding of genocide as a crime
is the concept that the destruction of culture is also a vitally
important aspect of the genocidal episode. At the core of group
identity is also culture and the cultural institutions that codify
group identity.
How many died and what did that represent as a percentage of the
Armenian population?
The official number of dead in the Holocaust, according to the U.S.
Holocaust Museum is 5.1 million. In the Armenian case, Lemkin put the
death toll at 1.2 million. The epicenter of killing was in 1915 and
1916. About two-thirds of the Armenian population perished.
Do you see links between the massacre of the Armenian Christians a
century ago and the ISIS massacre in Syria?
I hesitate to make any easy analogies. ... The context in the Ottoman
Empire in 1915 is not the same for the explosions going on in the
Middle East right now.
But the role of religious ideology in the Turkish Armenian case was
less important for the ruling political elite. ... They were like the
Nazis and didn't care about religion. They did know how to manipulate
the power of religion to motivate other segments of their population
to do killing.
The ISIS people are extreme fundamentalists who are now militarized.
That is a long way from the practice of 99 percent of Muslims. The
last two genocides on record were committed by Christians: the Serbs
in Srebrenica in 1994, and the Hutus, who are primarily Catholic and
Christian, against the Tutsis in 1994 in Rwanda. ... Any religious value
system is capable of being mobilized by extreme regimes who are hell
bent on mass killings.
With so many spasms of violence now, is the world growing desensitized?
It can be desensitizing, overwhelming, numbing, but it has also
initiated more human rights activism, more human rights culture, more
human rights priorities even in the seats of the State Department and
government in our own country than ever before.
You have a new book coming out, Vise and Shadow, and your lyric prose
is in full bloom. Do you use poetry to sweeten the ingestion of
atrocity?
The poem is a very real confrontation with the harshness of these
histories and their legacies. Some of my poems deal with traumatic
memory and inherited traumatic memory and they are interested in
reclaiming the more psychological issues of historical violence as
they are transmitted across generations. I don't think of my poems as
very sweet, in any way, but I think of them as rich complex language
that can engage readers in the complexity of history in ways that no
other forms of writing can.
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/park-cities/headlines/20150313-qa-with-author-wholl-speak-at-smu-on-armenian-genocide.ece
March 13 2015
Q&A with author who'll speak at SMU on Armenian genocide
By DIANNE SOLÍS [email protected]
Staff Writer
Published: 13 March 2015 11:10 PM
Updated: 13 March 2015 11:10 PM
When Peter Balakian was a small boy, his grandmother filled him with
stories seeped in magical realism, with mysterious yet baffling lines.
"A long time ago there was and there wasn't," she'd say.
Perhaps his tender grandmother was just nurturing a fellow poet and
soon-to-be historian of one of the great epic traumas opening the 20th
century. She was a survivor of the Armenian genocide 100 years ago in
April 1915.
Her grandson would eventually become her scribe, portraying her in his
award-winning memoir, Black Dog of Fate.
Balakian, now a Colgate University professor, has made the genocide a
key part of his life's work as an award-winning writer, poet and
genocide expert. He will talk about his work at Southern Methodist
University's Dallas Hall at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at an event sponsored
by St. Sarkis Church of Carrollton and SMU's Embrey Human Rights
Program.
He recently discussed his writing and more with The Dallas Morning News.
Tell us about your grandmother, Nafina Aroosian, and her role in
shaping you as a writer and how you unraveled her story.
My grandmother had a penchant for telling folk tales in dreams. ...
They were wild tales that were almost magical realism tales. ... The
richness of her imagination was very important to my own imagination.
... It turned out to be very important to me as a writer and a thinker
of history, and the particular history of the Armenian genocide and
how it came down to me.
Only recently, we have dug up out of the family papers, some of her
writing. She was writing poems. ... They are private poems and they
are poems in which she is trying to deal with the losses of her life.
Everyone in her family was murdered in the first week of April 1915,
except for one half-brother, who was living in New Jersey at the time.
Tell us about Raphael Lemkin, the Holocaust survivor from Poland. Why
is he important?
It was Lemkin who became the father of the U.N. genocide convention of
1948. That is the charter legal document that outlawed genocide as a
crime. It was Lemkin who coined the phrase "Armenian genocide" in the
1940s. ... As a graduate student he challenged his professor, "How can
it be if one man kills another he is charged with murder, but if a
nation-state kills more than a million people they are allowed to do
it without any consequences?" and this moment ended up changing his
career path.
Among Lemkin's many layers of his understanding of genocide as a crime
is the concept that the destruction of culture is also a vitally
important aspect of the genocidal episode. At the core of group
identity is also culture and the cultural institutions that codify
group identity.
How many died and what did that represent as a percentage of the
Armenian population?
The official number of dead in the Holocaust, according to the U.S.
Holocaust Museum is 5.1 million. In the Armenian case, Lemkin put the
death toll at 1.2 million. The epicenter of killing was in 1915 and
1916. About two-thirds of the Armenian population perished.
Do you see links between the massacre of the Armenian Christians a
century ago and the ISIS massacre in Syria?
I hesitate to make any easy analogies. ... The context in the Ottoman
Empire in 1915 is not the same for the explosions going on in the
Middle East right now.
But the role of religious ideology in the Turkish Armenian case was
less important for the ruling political elite. ... They were like the
Nazis and didn't care about religion. They did know how to manipulate
the power of religion to motivate other segments of their population
to do killing.
The ISIS people are extreme fundamentalists who are now militarized.
That is a long way from the practice of 99 percent of Muslims. The
last two genocides on record were committed by Christians: the Serbs
in Srebrenica in 1994, and the Hutus, who are primarily Catholic and
Christian, against the Tutsis in 1994 in Rwanda. ... Any religious value
system is capable of being mobilized by extreme regimes who are hell
bent on mass killings.
With so many spasms of violence now, is the world growing desensitized?
It can be desensitizing, overwhelming, numbing, but it has also
initiated more human rights activism, more human rights culture, more
human rights priorities even in the seats of the State Department and
government in our own country than ever before.
You have a new book coming out, Vise and Shadow, and your lyric prose
is in full bloom. Do you use poetry to sweeten the ingestion of
atrocity?
The poem is a very real confrontation with the harshness of these
histories and their legacies. Some of my poems deal with traumatic
memory and inherited traumatic memory and they are interested in
reclaiming the more psychological issues of historical violence as
they are transmitted across generations. I don't think of my poems as
very sweet, in any way, but I think of them as rich complex language
that can engage readers in the complexity of history in ways that no
other forms of writing can.
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/park-cities/headlines/20150313-qa-with-author-wholl-speak-at-smu-on-armenian-genocide.ece