Peter Balakian: Writing About the Armenian Massacre

Peter Balakian, professor of English and the humanities at Colgate University, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (May 4, 2004):

On a recent book tour for The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, I was asked by an eminent Armenian psychiatrist how I was able to write about massacre, deportation, rape, and torture without becoming depressed or even incapacitated. He told me that in his own course on trauma he found it nearly impossible to teach about the Armenian Genocide because it caused him such pain.

My response was not psychological. I would imagine that any writer who writes about the worst things human beings can do to each other has to deal, in a personal way, with the weight of those realities. Working in such domains can be depressing and even traumatic. You can feel as if you are living in an alternate universe. In my own case, many of my ancestors perished in the massacres and death marches carried out by the Ottoman Turkish government in 1915. About 1.5 million Armenians died during the 20th century's first modern episode of race extermination, and another million were permanently exiled from their homeland of 2,500 years.

In writing The Burning Tigris, I wrote about two histories -- the genocide and the American response to it -- and entwined them. My major discovery was that during the period of America's ascension to international prominence, at the turn of the 20th century, the U.S. response to Sultan Adbul Hamid II's massacre and decimation of about 200,000 Armenians in the 1890s, and then to the genocide of 1915, was America's first human-rights movement. The movement, which helped to define the nation's emerging identity, spanned more than four decades, from 1894 into the 1930s. Intellectuals, politicians, diplomats, religious leaders, ordinary citizens, and grass-roots organizations came together to try to save the Armenian people. The passionate commitments and commentaries of a remarkable cast of public figures -- including Julia Ward Howe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Clara Barton, Alice Stone Blackwell, Theodore Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller Sr. and Jr., Spencer Trask, and Ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr. -- made a difference. They and other courageous eyewitnesses recorded their accounts of massacre and deportation, and often risked their lives to save men, women, and children in the killing fields of Turkey.

The crisis of the"starving Armenians" became so embedded in American popular culture that, in an age when a loaf of bread cost a nickel, the American people sent more than $100-million ($1.25-billion in today's economy) in aid through the American Committee on Armenian Atrocities and its successor, Near East Relief.

Given that extraordinary history, it is dismaying that Congress has not been able to pass the most basic commemorative resolution on the Armenian Genocide. There has been intense pressure from America's NATO ally Turkey, which denies the genocide and is engaged in a propaganda campaign to cover it up. Such is the irony that the United States lacks the moral courage to affirm its own first international-human-rights movement.

What keeps one going through the research and writing about massacre, torture, sexual mutilation, rape? During the Armenian Genocide, the Turks and Kurds performed some of the most hideous acts of violence in recorded history. Often they did so in the name of Allah and with the ideology of jihad as a rationale; teenage girls were raped with crucifixes made from tree branches; clergymen and teachers, professors at Protestant missionary colleges, had their eyes gouged out before they were beheaded. On the deportation marches the mobile killing squads -- the chettes -- and gendarmes often sliced off women's breasts, or slashed open pregnant women and dashed their babies on the rocks. Thousands of women were raped, abducted, sold into harems. Women committed suicide, often in large numbers, to avoid such fates. As Christians they believed they were going to a better world.

Ambassador Morgenthau, a Jew trying to save this Christian minority, appealed to the Turkish minister of the interior, Talaat Pasha, more than once to stop the massacres. Morgenthau described in his memoir the torture and cruelty, like the practice of bastinado, in which Turkish gendarmes would beat the soles of the feet of an Armenian prisoner until he fainted, revive him, and begin again. Sometimes the victim's feet later had to be amputated. Sometimes"they would extract his fingernails and toenails; they would apply red-hot irons to his breast, tear off his flesh with red-hot pincers, and pour boiling butter into the wounds. In some cases the gendarmes would nail hands and feet to pieces of wood -- evidently in imitation of the Crucifixion, and while the sufferer writhed in his agony, they would cry: 'Now let your Christ come help you!'" Morgenthau said.

"One day," he wrote,"I was discussing these proceedings with a responsible Turkish official, who was describing the tortures inflicted. He made no secret of the fact that the government had instigated them and, like all Turks of the official classes, he enthusiastically approved this treatment of the detested race."

In the face of such horror, can a writer even suggest there is pleasure and excitement in doing the work, in the act of writing?