Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir

An Armenian group invites Peter to read his poetry in a 75th anniversary commemoration of the genocide taking place in Times Square. Before he speaks, he sees protestors of Turkish descent handing out pamphlets about the Armenian Genocide being a hoax—they suggest that it was all propaganda created by Armenian nationalists to demonize Ottoman Turkey. Peter notes that this was not a fringe effort. The Turkish government, and groups in Turkish and American cities had a long history of policing the dissemination of historical information out of Turkey and denying the genocide all over the globe through protests and threats.

Peter voices rage over these denials and abuses as he expounds them:

It has become clear to me that Turkey not only is a culture of severe human rights abuses but a place devoid of any mechanisms of critical self-evaluation […] In Turkish schools everyone is taught that in 1915, Armenians were traitors who attacked and killed Turks and deserved everything they got […] A Turkish writer for the Encyclopedia Britannica had been sent to prison for letting the word Armenia appear on a map of ancient Anatolia (281).

His rage spills over when he makes an impromptu speech following his reading in Times Square. He implores “good and decent American citizens to say no to Turkish attempts to cover up the Armenian Genocide” (282).

The rest of the chapter provides more examples of Turkish-backed denial of the Armenian Genocide across social, political, legal, and academic channels outside of Turkey. Peter drafted a petition in 1995 against Turkish funding of certain programs and scholars at major American universities that helped police narratives of the history of the Near East in modernity. This is a new type of activism for Peter, and one that continues to connect him to the Armenian past and foster his voice as an authority on Armenian issues.

Peter reflects on the Nagorno-Karabagh crisis, a territorial conflict between Armenia and neighboring Azerbaijan that erupted in 1988. It came shortly after a devastating earthquake in Northern Armenia. Turkey and Azerbaijan launched a blockade of essential supplies into a suffering Armenia that further devastated the nation. Peter says, “I look on from America. I send money, clothes—whatever I can—to Armenia” (289). He recognizes in the politics the “ongoing assault against Armenians” and wonders, “Are Armenians forever to be stalked by the perpetrator government?” (289).

Again, Peter “return[s] to the Genocide and its long aftermath” (289), charting the ways that systematic denial and victim-blaming carried out by powerful state entities result in ongoing conflict and pain. He reasons that “commemoration is an essential process for the bereaved and for the inheritors of the legacy of violence” (291). Armenians and modern Turks have therefore systematically been unable to make any sense of the conflict, converse about it, and repent and heal where needed. 

Peter thinks about Nafina’s lawsuit that he described in a previous chapter. Based on the systems and cultures in place at the time, there was no hope that she would be successful in this suit, but as Peter notes, it was an act of courage that lent a voice to a personal microcosm of the mass murder—“she had given her testimony for another age to heed” (294).

Peter again muses over American suburbia, this time with specific concern for its racial and ethnic dimensions and ideologies. His family was “white enough” to voluntarily assimilate into American culture and, for the most part, feel accepted (296). The family belonged to a country club, however, that denied entry to Jews and blacks. The Balakians did not condone this ideology, but they also did not outwardly or publicly protest it.

Suburbia was a safe haven for Peter’s family, and their homes “stood against a backdrop of genocidal destruction, deportation, and exile” (300). In retrospect, Peter is better able to contextualize the silence about Armenia that he grew up in. For his grandmother, silence was a coping mechanism. She started her life in the United States before the word “genocide” existed, even before social movements emphasized human and civil rights. There was no public space in which she could grieve or collectively process her history with likeminded peers or fellow survivors. She could, however, immerse herself in a new American life, enjoy American popular culture, trade stocks, and look forward to the possibilities of the future.

For his parents, “their second-generation silence” represented “a place of safety” (299). They could raise children unburdened by the incomprehensible weight and pain of genocide. Being and acting American shielded the family from confronting the fact that their elders had become exiled, nationless, and tortured in the eastern hemisphere.

Peter is of a generation that can access the history without breaking apart from personal pain. As a product of the Armenian diaspora, he grew up in “a shadow that cast its own darkness” (300), because even if unacknowledged, the events of the past were facts that shaped their lives. With the distance that each enduring generation had from the genocide came new space to resurrect the history and demand attention and awareness, if not justice.