WILL WE REMEMBER?
Yale Daily News
April 24 2013
By John Aroutiounian, Guest Columnist
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
My grandmother once observed that my birthday, April 23rd, is wedged
every year between two rather unfortunate dates — Vladimir Lenin’s
birthday, and today, Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. For me,
the latter has made for a sobering change of tone each year from the
happy day that came before it, but — like a death in the family —
it doesn’t hit you right away.
Of course, every year I’d sign petitions demanding that the President
issue a statement joining a wide swath of nations and 43 American
states in recognizing the Armenian Genocide. At home, we’d watch an
old PBS documentary about the genocide. But how does one wrap his
head around 1.5 million people having been murdered? What kind of
a framework can a person — a child, no less — apply to make sense
of it?
How can a kid realize that, were he alive in what is now eastern Turkey
in 1917, he’d likely be an orphan, his mother raped and murdered?
It is not very different from trying, in vain, to make sense of the
Holocaust. Theodore Adorno might have put it best when he remarked
that to try “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” How can
one live after the Shoah? How can one make sense of existence?
But I am, perhaps frightfully, beginning to comprehend what it was.
This year, when I attended a commemoration ceremony at an Armenian
church in Trumbull, Conn., I heard a rendition of poet Paruyr Sevak’s
“The Unsilenceable Belfry.” Wheelbarrows became caskets, he wrote. In
the evening, I heard an old Armenian church hymn for the first time:
“Mother, where are you?” The beautiful, haunting chorus sang of Christ
pleading for his mother during the crucifixion. That Sunday night,
for the first time, I could cry about the genocide.
When German statesman Willy Brandt went to Warsaw in 1970, he visited
a memorial marking the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to lay a wreath. Then,
suddenly, he knelt. He didn’t have to, but he did, and the entire
world saw.
Here, the Armenian Genocide is different, because no Turkish head
of state has ever knelt at a monument of the genocide. The Turkish
government denies that an event amounting to anything close to genocide
took place. Anti-Armenian sentiment extends to the present day, as
well. Documentary clips about the Armenian Genocide on YouTube are
often followed by all kinds of comments with ethnic slurs.
Obviously, these sentiments don’t express the sentiments of nearly
all Turkish people. But a strong, anti-Armenian cultural strain,
buttressed by resurgent Turkish nationalism, definitely thrives in
modern Turkey. And it makes days like today all the more painful,
because it begs the question of how to heal an open wound that will
not close. How do we remember the dead when few others will — in
fact, when some will actually falsify history, directly opposing
most historians of the period, to claim that the names of the dead
are mere fiction. But the primary source documents are all there for
people to see.
The late ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr. called the Armenian Genocide a
“campaign of race extermination.” In justifying the beginning of the
Holocaust, Hitler asked a group of Nazis whether anyone remembered
the Armenians.
But in the end, this is much more than a historical dispute —
because it’s not really a dispute at all, except for those on the
radical fringe. It’s a cultural struggle to forgive the crimes of
those who didn’t acknowledge (and whose descendants still don’t)
that they have anything for which to be forgiven.
The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr DIV 1914 once published a book called
“The Irony of American History,” but the book is really littered with
ironies of every kind. One particularly poignant one is that of Christ
himself — that a man utterly mocked, condemned and crucified next to
two lowly prisoners is resurrected, and that in doing so he pays for
the mistakes of a world that doesn’t even acknowledge its sin. For the
past hundred years, the Armenian people have been living this irony:
trying to look the unrepentant in the eye and forgive. But it is hard,
and the wound is not nearly closed.
Whether we will remember is an open question. I will, haunted by
the faces of the genocides of the twentieth century. And tonight,
I’ll accompany my friends to the Women’s Table, where we’ll remember
together. We will forget politics, and we will remember the child
marched into the desert by the Ottomans, stripped of a family and a
home, crying out for his mother. And we will try — we will try our
very hardest — to forgive.
John Aroutiounian is a sophomore in Jonathan Edwards College. Contact
him at [email protected]â~@~I.