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1. If suppression of the memory of the genocide is so destructive, why continue to do so?

2. How is trauma transmitted across generations?

3. How can we avoid despair when it comes to confronting intergenerational trauma? Can trauma ever be transformed into something positive?

4. Why do people know about the Holocaust and not the Armenian Genocide?

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The Ottoman Empire has existed as a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic empire for hundreds of years. In the 19th century, a new vision of [statehood?] arises, asserting equality, universality, citizenship, and homogenizing pressure.

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The Ottoman Empire also found itself struggling to project a positive image in Europe, as stereotypes of barbaric, violent Turks were propagated in the popular press.

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Historical atrocities continue to affect us, often in ways we can't predict or even know. We make a choice of how much to remember about these atrocities, as individuals and as a society. We want to make the best choices about whether and how to remember these events.

It is also important to learn about the Armenian Genocide because historical events that happen outside of Europe are often marginalized in the writing of history. In a History Talk podcast about the politics of scholarship surrounding the Armenian Genocide with scholars of genocide, Dr. Ronald Grigor Suny said regarding why the Armenian Genocide is often forgotten in history books: "it happened far away from Europe. It happened during a time of war, as a kind of communication and knowledge that will eventually be understood during the time of the Holocaust was simply not available."

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Connection to our own experiences / breaking down boundaries between "us" and "them"

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Connection to our own experiences / breaking down boundaries between "us" and "them"

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Angela: I think I really relate to this idea that Balakian mentions in the podcast about how "filaments of trauma" are transmitted over time and across generations, and the telling of a story doesn't just happen in discrete moments. I've also discovered that my family members in China tend to share their personal stories in this way, and their perspectives on their past experiences also shift over time. It's a way of protecting themselves and their narratives but also giving the grace of time to their own memories. But as the "inheritors" or the "recipients" of these memories, we do, as Balakian says, "store them up" over time and they seep into our imagination and our language. I'm always surprised by how much my intellectual interests and personal interests are affected by intergenerational stories, and that space of where my story meets with their stories is often a fraught space of negotiation. The Armenian Genocide also brings up the interesting and important topic of how people physically embody memories and how they are shaped by the struggle to forget rather than the struggle to remember.

Natalie: Just a few days ago I was eating at a Japanese restaurant and saw a Korean food on the menu. I had a surprisingly strong reaction to it, which I attributed to what my grandmother had to go through because of Japan. Working on this project, I noticed the similarity: grandchildren feeling the crimes of a group against their grandparent's people. Thinking about how people remember or silence memories of the Armenian genocide has made me think about what I do and don't know about my grandmother's life, and wonder about how much the things I never explicitly learned still affect me.

Nika: The Balakian’s quote “When the past is behind you, keep it there” resonated with me a lot, as it made me think about how people often believe that if something happened in the past it should be brought up or spoken about today. I believe that a lot of people have a similar approach to historical events as well, as they sometimes tend to deliberately forget about injustices and traumatic events that happened in the past and avoid talking about them as it makes them uncomfortable. I believe that to a certain extent, this is the case with the victims of those unjust events too, as often they don’t want to reopen the old wounds as it is too painful.

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On today's episode of The Literary Life, Mitchell Kaplan is joined by Peter Balakian to discuss his latest poetry collection, , out now from University of Chicago Press.
From the episode:
Peter Balakian: I was a young poet in the middle of the 1970s, in my mid-twenties and just writing poems. This is what you do. You write and write. You stumble and perhaps it's more than stumble because I think it's probably that there's a sense of inevitability about the things you discover. I came to discover the traumatic and bloody history of my family's survivor stories of the Armenian genocide of 1915 that was carried out by the Ottoman Turkish government behind the chaos of the screen of World War I, during which time about a million and a half Armenians were slaughtered and another million plus deported brutally. So by the end of World War I, an ancient civilization-a 2,500 year old civilization-had been wiped out on its historic land and attacked before it was all over. The three major Christian minority cultures of the Ottoman Empire had all been just about exterminated, with the Greek and Assyrian communities as well following off the Armenian massacres.

Well, this history wasn't spoken about in my household very much. This was kept under wraps. This was really a repressed history. My closest grandparent, my maternal grandmother, who's been the great soul guider of my life, was a death march survivor. She lost everyone in her family except her two infant toddler daughters. A prosperous silk merchant and textile merchant family from Diyarbakir in southeast Ottoman Empire. The historic Armenia today. Her story leaked out in small little tidbits that would whirl around in my head as a kid. I didn't know what to make of any of these tidbits. Clearly, I stored them up, and when I was old enough to begin thinking about life and meaning and history and culture and family, these filaments of trauma started leaking back into my imagination and started to affect my language and my poems. I began writing poems in which my grandmother was starting to figure as a kind of persona, a voice, a revenant. And so a couple of these poems appeared in my first book, a 1979 book called Father Fish Eye. And then in 1983, I just spilled into a book-length cycle of poems that made up my second book, Sad Days of Life. So the Armenian Genocide legacy, the transmission of trauma across generations as it came to be called, I didn't have that phrase in my head in my twenties or even thirties, but that idea-that transmission of trauma across generations-came to inform a piece of what I was doing as a poet.

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Subscribe now to The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever else you find your podcasts!

Peter Balakian is the author of Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for Memoir and a New York Times Notable Book, and June-tree: New and Selected Poems 1974-2000. He is the recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. He holds a Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University and teaches at Colgate University, where he is a Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities.

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Peter Balakian on How the Transmission of Trauma Across Generations Informs His Poetry

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On today's episode of The Literary Life, Mitchell Kaplan is joined by Peter Balakian to discuss his latest poetry collection, No Sign, out now from University of Chicago Press. From the episo...

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After the Armenian Genocide in 1915-17, the Ottoman Empire and then Turkey refused to acknowledge that the genocide had occurred.

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"Her story leaked out in small little tidbits that would whirl around in my head as a kid. I didn’t know what to make of any of these tidbits. Clearly, I stored them up, and when I was old enough to begin thinking about life and meaning and history and culture and family, these filaments of trauma started leaking back into my imagination and started to affect my language and my poems. I began writing poems in which my grandmother was starting to figure as a kind of persona, a voice, a revenant." - Peter Balakian

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"the waves of violence spurred by memory, recognition, and denial ever since"

These are deaths after the genocide itself. A death spree that keeps on killing

Armenians kill Talaat and Cemal Pashas, Ottoman leaders during the genocide

"nearly 50 people, many of them Turkish diplomats, killed, and the hundreds more injured, across the globe by the Armenian organization ASALA in the 1970s to protest Turkey’s continuing refusal to recognize the genocide"

death threats against a Turkish author for mentioning the genocide

assassination of Hrant Dink, organizer of a conference on the Armenian genocide

Christine Philliou, "The Armenian Genocide and the Politics Of Knowledge," Public Books, 2015.

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Cultural Erasure, Witness & the Poet: A conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Peter Balakian

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Map of places where Armenian people lived 

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Map of places where Armenian people lived 

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https://www.dw.com/en/dutch-parliament-recognizes-1915-armenian-genocide/a-42702730

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"I never heard her mention the Turks again. It was as if it never happened. We say in Armenian: when the past is behind you, keep it there." (Balakian)

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Link to Recording of Teach-In Presentation + Discussion

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Link to Recording of Teach-In Presentation + Discussion