Massacre and Genocide

I had the illusion of finally beginning to comprehend some­thing important about the Armenians-something that might at least partly explain the peculiarly shrill and wounded quality of the Armenian response to the trauma of the Turkish massacres. For ever since I began my “investigations” of the Armenians / had been perplexed as to why so many of them, even today, still seemed inextricably fixated on the evil times that had befallen their people in Abdul-Hamid’s Turkey, and later, in 1915, at the hands of the Young Turks.

My maternal grandparents, Dr. Aram Der Boghosian (1894-1985) and Zohra Der Boghosian (1910), are both survivors of the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Unlike many victims of tragedies whose pain and fear prompt silence and an unwillingness to discuss the details of their experiences, both of my grandparents seemed to feel a personal, historical, cultural, and emotional need to share their stories with myself, my sister Claire, my brother John, and my four cousins.

We are Armenians from Iran. None of my grandparents or great grandparents were involved in the Genocide. Yet I hardly consider this when I think about the Genocide, since my knowledge of the atrocities has been a force in my life for as long as I can remember. When I was about seven, my mother sat us down on her bed and read to us from The Road From Home. But at that age the tragic story was just a wild adventure whose implications for my own life I could not yet understand.

Upon first reading your request, I was surprised that 20 to 30 year-olds were asked for their responses to the Genocide. Our generation would not have been as heavily and closely impacted by the massacres as our parents' and grandparents' generations. Upon contemplating the prompt for a few days, I decided that I have spent enough time pondering these issues on my own to be able to express my experience in writing.

I began to tell the story of the Genocide to area high school classes as part of a group of Armenian college students intent on teaching our history to the Fresno masses, whose complete ignorance of our culture struck me as a measure of how pitifully fa r we had gone to blend in. I imagined I was taking on the mantle of my grandfathers, and yet they themselves rarely, if ever, talked about the Genocide. Instead, it got told obliquely, through their remoteness, through the ardor of their old-world politics, through verse and sermon.

Even though I was born in Aleppo, I really grew up in Toronto, which was a vastly less coherent Armenian community than the one my parents grew up in. Toronto during that period was a largely immigrant city. Everywhere, particularly in neighborhoods where my family lived, there were refugees and families making new lives for themselves and everyone had a story to tell Macedonians complaining about Greek oppression, Lebanese fleeing an escalating civil war, Jews one genera­tion away from the Holocaust and refugees from various Eastern Bloc nations.

Armenians today are at another moment of passage. Their journey through time and over the globe has gone on for over 2500 years, and as the world turns toward a new millennium, it is not surprising that they look back once again to their most painful memories. A people burdened by so much history cannot but think of the terrible trauma of the present and the dangerous opportunities of the future. Armenians have been through too much to look to the future with fear.

Climbed to the citadel and looked down over Urfa. On every side the hills were brown and parched. It was nearly noon, and beyond the town's limits nothing moved except the shimmering heat waves and, in the distance, a single spiral of wheeling vultures. But the town itself was a riot of greens, reds and oranges: trees and gardens backing onto flat-topped Turkish houses, with the whole vista broken by the vertical punctuation of a hundred minarets.

Whatever the explanation, the fact was that after allowing massacre to go on unchecked for several days, the Vali at last interfered, and while the soldiers had not proved much more kind to the remnants of those Armenian villagers than the wild Kurds, the actual organized murder had ceased. Naturally, the Christian population of the city were in terror.

In the labyrinth of upper-middleclass suburbia, the Balakians always seemed to fit in. We were Christian, professional, apparently white enough. Law-abiding, hard-working, and, yes, American, as far back as 1903, when my grandfather Bedros Aroosian arrived in New Jersey. We weren’t vacationing with the Rockefellers on Fisher’s Island, but we were welcomed into the fold of upper-middleclass America, and our papers seemed to be in order.

My failure to stop the destruction of the Armenians had made Turkey for me a place of horror, and I found intolerable my further daily association with men who, however gracious and accommodating and good-natured they might have been to the American Ambassador, were still reeking with the blood of nearly a million human beings.