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.
I've come to see our assimilation as inseparable from how seamlessly, most of the time, my family transformed Armenian culture into manageable codes and stable, civilizing rituals that dovetailed quite well with Protestant, middleclass virtues. Being Armenian informed a sense of ritual and decorum inside our house, on Sundays at church, or with extended family, and regardless of how those codes were connected to the Genocide, the fact remained that the brutalities of the political catastrophe that lay only a historical membrane from my parents' life had been rendered largely invisible.
Except for those infrequent and awkward moments when my father made some kind of gesture that was directed at the meaning of the Genocide, no one in my family considered the events of Armenia's recent nightmare a reality suitable for conversation or knowledge. The scalding facts of the Genocide had been buried, consigned to a deeper layer of consciousness, only to erupt in certain odd moments, as when my grandmother told me a story or a dream. What my parents did, often in unconscious and instinctual ways, was to make sure that my brother and sisters and I were Americans first. Free. Unhampered, unhanded, unscarred by the unspeakable cruelties of Armenian history. Perhaps that was how it should have been. Perhaps that was a gift my parents gave us. A gift that enabled me to discover the past for myself from the secure vantage of my upper-middle- class American life, where in some sense, too, the small bit of Armenianness I understood gave me a feeling of having a slightly more substantial sense of identity than many of my peers.
If my parents were so capable of freeing us from the past, it seemed to me that they were able to do that because their parents had done their best to close the stone door on their own pasts. My grandmother Nafina Aroosian had witnessed mass murder and endured a death march into the desert with her two babies, the death of her first husband, and the disease-filled refugee quarter of Aleppo. At the age of twenty-five she lost her nation, her home, her family. And my grandfather Diran Balakian had tended the massacred and the dead in Adana, witnessing "one of the most savage bloodbaths of human history" My paternal grandparents had seen their friends disappear at the hands of Turkish executioners in April 1915. They had watched from Constantinople as Armenia was destroyed, and then became nationless refugees.
How did they all survive such catastrophe without some form of confession, release, therapeutic unburdening? Psychologists, psychiatrists, and those who study trauma agree about the importance of coming to terms with loss and grief in order to regain health; did each of my grandparents live close to disintegration, collapse, and breakdown? Outwardly, they carried out productive, humanly engaged lives. They enjoyed their work, raised families with gusto, and found life in America good.
In the case of my grandmother, Nafina, I'll never know of her inner life in the years following the Genocide. Perhaps no one did. After the Genocide, she was silent for more than two decades until the dam broke and she had a breakdown in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The U.S. entry into World War II triggered genocide flashbacks. But after the electroshock treatment worked, she returned to silence. Her friends and family concur that she was quite a pragmatic, level-headed woman, interested in people, popular culture, the stock market, the family business, always focused on the potential of the future. Was there a space behind the space from which she saw you, a space where no one was permitted? Did she ever go there? If my grandmother did not often go to that inner place of the deep wound, it may have been in good part because she lived in a state of numbness. Numbing, Robert Lifton suggests, is a process by which the self-distances itself from traumatic experience. It is not repression, which excludes and denies the past, because in numbing one still has the potential for insight and some reclamation of the nightmarish past.
I've come to see my grandmother's numbed response to the Armenian Genocide as a necessary way of survival. What did it mean to be a survivor in an era before the Holocaust and the civil rights movement gave rise to a human rights movement in the United States? What was it like to be a survivor before there was a popular culture of psychology and therapy, whose goal was to help victims achieve a voice and the courage to affirm the moral significance of their wound and trauma? Without social and political movements there can be no public meaning. The word genocide didn't exist until Raphael Lemkin coined it in 1943 and the UN made it a crime against humanity in 1948. In the 1920s,'30s, and '40s, if you were Armenian, you had been torn from your home and land and plunked down in some country in which you landed. Most likely you came home to an Armenian family in which there was a common understanding of the unspeakable secret. But for the most part you came home to silence. From there you started life over again.
In a cultural climate that did not recognize or articulate the moral significance of genocide, my grandmother was forced to turn inward, like those shell-shocked soldiers of World War I who came home, bit their tongues, or bit them off, and went on with their lives. In such a world, my grandmother must have felt that emotional economy was a necessity. She seems not to have dwelled on the past, but became, as the more fortunate survivors do, socially anchored. I think of my grandmother's fastidious kitchen, her vigorous walks to the store every day in rain or snow, her rituals of choereg baking, her devotion to the stock market and baseball.
Can one repress such a past truly? The past did intrude, for trauma is perceived not as it occurs but in the aftermath, often after a long latency period. In my grandmother's case, my boyhood had intersected with her aftermath. I had been the listener, the audience for my grandmother's remembrance and mourning in the stories, dreams, flashbacks she told to me.
When I think of my parents and their second-generation silence, 1 think of a place of safety. I think of Teaneck, New Jersey. 1950. My parents buying their first house in a quiet suburb. Buying couches and chairs and beds and dressers and one Kashan twelve by sixteen, with fine wool, intricate floral designs, and subtle rich colors. Then 1960: Crabtree Lane, Tenafly, New Jersey, with its new-age appliances and green lawns. 1 see those houses not as symbols of American material comfort or upward mobility, but as emblems of peace and refuge from a world of horror and death. It would have been impossible for me as a child to have understood that. It was impossible for my parents to tell me, and they may not have acknowledged it to themselves, but those houses stood against a backdrop of genocidal destruction, deportation, and exile. The Balakian house in Constantinople laced with kerosene and burned down by Turks. The Shekerlemedjian house in Diarbekir—from which my grandmother's family was taken and murdered-pillaged and taken over by Turks.
Safety and numbing were inseparable in my family's pathology. The United States was a free place, that is, a place where Armenians with their ancient culture in a suitcase were free from bodily harm. Free to worship, practice business, raise families, make art. Free to hide from a past that was-in those decades immediately following the Genocide unutterable. My mother and father in different ways were amnesiac about the past, caught in some twilight of half acknowledgments. At some place in their minds my parents must have found the real issues of being Armenian too hard, too painful, too absurd. As my aunt Gladys had put it, "It was a pill too bitter to swallow, a pain too bad to feel" In affirming the American present, my parents had done their best to put an end to exile. In the suburbs of New Jersey, they found rootedness, home, belonging. Yet, the past was a shadow that cast its own darkness on us all. The old country. I realize now that it was an encoded phrase, not meant for children. Spoken by numbed Armenians of the silent generation. It meant lost world, a place left to smolder in its ashes.
But the old mind would not smolder in ashes. Once on safe ground, the old mind would reemerge with new vitality. The old mind would reclaim the facts and circumstances of its civilization of three millennia. And now Armenian Americans might even see the old world in ways that would be dynamic and ground-breaking, in the ways that Arshile Gorky, William Saroyan, Alan Heaviness, Marjorie House pian Dobkin, Michael Arlen, Ruben Nakian, and many other artists in the diaspora already had and in ways that would astonish their oppressors, who may have believed that after 1915 no one would hear from Armenians again.
How did my grandmother give credence to the old mind of the old world?
When I think of the stories she slipped to me in the odd moments of her daily routines, or the dreams, folktales, and half repressed images I was privy to during the last six years of her life, it seems clear now that they were part of a truncated narrative about what she had gone through as a young woman. I was her companion, her captive audience, her beloved witness. Her bits of memory and encoded stories were tips of ice spiles from the frozen sea within, a sea that thawed a bit at the end of her life. In odd, isolated moments that seemed to be out of time I had been privy to some of her intense sensory images, to her telescopic memory, to genocide flashbacks. This was how she told me about her past. The Armenian invocation, Djamangeen gar oo chagar there was and there wasn't was like the intrusive past which seemed to appear out of time, like lyric memory that had been activated. I'm not sure it was calculated to have a great effect on me. I think it was the only way she knew to speak to me about something she wanted to say, but couldn't say in any other language to a young boy, her eldest grandson.
