Dr. Steven Wexler
English 638
May 8, 2010
Literary Trauma: The Unifying Force for the Armenian Diaspora
The representation of trauma in literature has prompted a great deal of attention and an increasingly wide range of study and scholarship. “To be traumatized,” scholar Cathy Caruth asserts, “is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (4). Trauma can range from witnessing a violent act or being a victim of one. In terms of mass trauma, the Holocaust continues to be a pervasive area of research. The Armenian Genocide of 1915, however, is much less studied. It has “been dubbed the first modern genocide,” yet the research surrounding this horrific moment in history only expanded when interest began to grow in Near Eastern Studies in the past few decades (Bloxham 94). Taking the historical context into consideration, the literary representation of this catastrophic event is significant to the theory of trauma. It is crucial to note that explicit references to the Genocide have become more frequent in Armenian-American literature in the past two decades. Most of the survivors presented in Armenian-American texts, such as the main character in Nancy Kricorian’s Zabelle, are numb to their past. They have repressed their tragic memories somewhere in the unconscious; however, since the effects of the genocide harbor great psychological consequences, their repression is only temporary and eventually returns to haunt their dreams. Freud has termed this delayed effect of a trauma, “latency.”
In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth explains, “in the term ‘latency,’ the period during which the effects of the experience are not apparent, Freud seems to describe the trauma as the successive movement from an event to its repression to its return” (7). Many Genocide survivors illustrate the theory of “latency” in their reaction and response to their past. In her novel, Nancy Kricorian depicts such a character. Zabelle is very young when the Genocide takes place. Though she is one of the few lucky ones who survived due to personal strength and strings of good luck, she was nonetheless exposed to a great deal of physical and emotional trauma. She witnessed the deaths of many family members, including her mother, who slowly died of starvation in front of the young girl’s eyes. Years later, Zabelle’s marriage is arranged to an older Armenian man in America, where she begins a new and very different life. Living under the same roof in an unfamiliar country with her jealous mother-in-law and new husband, Zabelle faces many obstacles as an Armenian woman in a patriarchal culture. Nonetheless, she bravely assumes the role and raises 3 children. Her past does not interfere with her everyday life, and “the effects of the experience are not apparent” (Caruth 8). It is only in her old age that Zabelle’s repressed tragedy unfolds as she hears voices from her past and imagines the Turks coming to harm her. Thus, Zabelle embodies Freud’s analysis of the belated effects of a trauma.
Zabelle is one of many Armenian-American works centered around the themes of loss, memory, and identity. In writing this novel, Kricorian shares more than just the story of one person. The narrative of Zabelle’s experiences transcends the individual realm and acts as a unifying force for the Armenian diaspora spread throughout the world. In many ways, Zabelle is a “trauma novel,” which “refers to a work of fiction that conveys profound loss or intense fear on individual or collective levels (Balaev). In this paper, I will argue that the representation of trauma in Armenian-American literature, such as Kricorian’s portrayal of the Genocide’s enduring psychological impact on Zabelle, serves to coalesce the Armenian Diaspora’s sense of national identity. Therefore, literary depictions of this particular trauma, which has yet to be acknowledged as a Genocide by its perpetrators, serves a greater purpose for a dispersed population. Since the producers, artists, and authors who reference the Genocide are decades removed from the survivors of the tribulation, they have the necessary detachment to explore their ancestors’ past. Because the later generations began to voice their hitherto silent history, I argue that they also exemplify, by extension, Freud’s theory of latency. Almost a century later, the memories of the past are only becoming more frequent. Thus, as Caruth explains, “the traumatized […] carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptoms of a history that they cannot entirely possess” (Caruth 5). To adequately impress upon readers the importance of this history to the current Armenian diaspora, it is necessary to give a brief background of the events that splintered the Armenian nation and its people almost a century ago.
Like the Jewish population was targeted in the Holocaust, the Armenians faced mass slaughters, deportations, and exterminations by the Turkish government in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. Under the cover of World War One, the Ottomans systematically expunged thousands and thousands of Armenians from their ancestral lands “as the world watched almost in silence” (Kurkchiyan and Herzig 7). Approximately 1.5 million Armenians were slaughtered within a few months. This horrific moment left an indelible mark on Armenian history and consciousness and laid the foundations for the radical shift that the Armenian national identity was to undergo during the twentieth century. Many survivors immigrated to foreign lands where they began new lives and, eventually, assimilated into these host cultures. In their struggles to fit into their new surroundings, to raise healthy children, and to maintain somewhat of their Armenianness, many of these survivors did not speak of their tragic past and often repressed it completely in their unconscious. However, witnessing and experiencing such unthinkable horrors left a dark shadow in their hearts, and haunted them for the rest of their lives, even in their dreams. In one of the first personal accounts of the Genocide, Arshaluys (Aurora) Mardiganian, a young girl who miraculously survived through countless brutal acts, says, “When I see [the Turks and Kurds who raped and tortured young girls] in my dreams now I scream, so even though I am safe in America, my nights are not peaceful” (Slide 125).
Kricorian’s novel begins with a description of the massacre’s belated effects on the now elderly, Zabelle, who has repressed the horrors she witnessed as a child throughout her entire adult life. These memories have not disappeared, but, in her old age, begin to resurface in the form of nightmares. At night, “long shadows and disembodied voices, speaking Armenian and Turkish, circled Zabelle’s bed. She heard fragments of long-forgotten songs. The faces of her mother, father, brother, grandparents, aunts and uncles come swimming up at her like fish surfacing from the bottom of a pond” (Kricorian 6). For most of her life, Zabelle has kept these memories to herself, hiding them in order to live a normal life, but “despite the human capacity to survive and adapt, traumatic experiences can alter people’s psychological, biological, and social equilibrium…” (van der Kolk and McFarlane 488). Zabelle seems to be suffering from posttraumatic syndrome, which “is the result of a failure of time to heal all wounds” (491). Since time cannot mitigate such deeply embedded torment, repression is replaced by latency, and a response to the event eventually materializes.
Zabelle, along with many other genocide survivors, does not speak about her past even with her close family members. She says, “That was how it was with us. We never spoke about those times, but they were like rotting animals behind the walls of our home” (Kricorian 223-4). This theme of “silent survivor” runs through various other works by Armenian-American authors. In David Kherdian’s novel, The Road from Home, for instance, the main character, another genocide survivor, claims, “we never talked about the massacres. It was as if we had forgotten about our past troubles, but often they would resurface in different ways” (130). The narrator admits that although they did not explicitly discuss their tragic experiences, they were nonetheless a part of their lives.
These repressed memories often manifest in the form of traumatic dreams. Such dreams, however, differ from most of Freud’s dream analyses, which usually focus on repressed desires. While studying his patients, “Freud realized that the unconscious often expresses itself in the form of dreams, since at night, during sleep, the vigilance of the repressive ego in regard to unconscious desire is stilled” (Rivkin and Ryan 390). Cathy Caruth explains that “the returning traumatic dream startles Freud because it cannot be understood in terms of any wish or unconscious meaning, but is, purely and inexplicably, the literal return of the event against the will of the one it inhabits” (5). In their article, “The Black Hole of Trauma,” Bessel A. van der Kolk and Alexander C. McFarlane state that “many survivors seem to be able to transcend their trauma temporarily and harness their pain in acts of sublimated creation; for example, the writers and Holocaust survivors Jerzy Kosinski and Primo Levi seem to have done this, only to succumb to the despair of their memories in the end” (487). Hence, repression is temporary since, as the aforementioned statement illustrates, survivors ultimately submit to their grief, despite any efforts to do otherwise.
In his memoir, Black Dog of Fate, Peter Balakian comes to see his “grandmother’s numbed response to the Armenian Genocide as a necessary way of survival” (Balakian 299). Theorist Michelle Balaev reminds us, however, that “the ‘unspeakability’ of trauma claimed by so many literary critics today can be understood less as an epistemological conundrum or neurobiological fact, but more as an outcome of cultural values and ideologies.” This observation applies to the Armenian culture since the “silent survivor” is such a common phenomenon in post-genocide communities, and so frequently depicted in contemporary Armenian-American “trauma novels.” In another novel by Nancy Kricorian, Dreams of Bread and Fire, the main character, Ani, explains that the genocide was a “forbidden topic” in her house, and goes on to say that she always “had the idea that [talking about it] would kill [her] grandmother” (146-7). Even though the massacres had never been explained to Ani, she “knew from bits of conversation she wasn’t supposed to have heard between her mother and grandfather and occasional vague references from her grandmother that in the old country the Turks had murdered lots of Armenians and forced even more to leave their homes. But no one was supposed to talk about the Deportations, especially not in front of [Ani’s] Grandma” (148).
Since survivors suppressed their pain rather than vocalize the memories they were tormented by, contemporary trauma novels serve as a medium in which their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren can finally foreground their nation’s traumatic past. Such novels also provide survivors’ descendents, especially those whose families fled from Ottoman Armenia, a chance to explore their ethnic origins and current “hyphenated” identities. Most third and fourth generation Diasporan Armenians learned about their past through the references to the Genocide in various cultural productions, such as literature. Third-generation Armenian-American author and poet, Peter Balakian, suggests that such references help those who are far removed from the events of 1915 orient Armenia's tragic history within their own lives today. He writes, “The journey into history, into the Armenian Genocide, was for me inseparable from poetry. Poetry was part of the journey and the excavation” (146). In “Trends in Literary Trauma Theory,” Michelle Balaev writes, “A central claim of contemporary literary trauma theory asserts that trauma creates a speechless fright that divides or destroys identity. This serves as the basis for a larger argument that suggests identity is formed by the intergenerational transmission of trauma.” Balaev argues that when stories of one generation are transmitted to another through various texts, private trauma may become “transhistorical trauma” and thus “define contemporary individual identity, as well as racial or cultural identity.” Transhistorical trauma makes the relationship between an individual and the group parallel, and “indicates that a massive trauma experienced by a group in the historical past can be experienced by an individual living centuries later who shares a similar attribute of the historical group, such as sharing the same race, religion, nationality, or gender due to the timeless, repetitious, and infectious characteristics of traumatic experience and memory” (Balaev). As such, genocide survivors’ painful experiences that are presented in works by Kricorian and other Armenian-American authors transcend the personal realm of these individuals and become a shared experience. Today, many Armenian-Americans use artistic mediums to learn about the trauma experienced by the genocide victims and, as a result, experience the history themselves.
There are many factors that contribute to the continued references and subsequent themes of loss, grief, sorrow, and trauma in Armenian-American literature. One of the most significant of these is the Turkish Government’s continued denial that a Genocide ever took place. Gerard Libaridian writes, “The Genocide, its exploitation, and its denial by Turkey paralyzed the collective psyche of the Armenian people” (2). The paralyzing horrors that most victims faced rendered them incapable of speaking about their experiences. Instead, they stored their memories deep within themselves, making it invisible to the external world. Consequently, their repression silenced the collective community for years. Still, the effects of the trauma did not disappear. Inevitably, the victims’ descendents, after learning more about their history, felt the unique responsibility to revive a lost segment of their national past. In Children of Armenia, Michael Bobelian writes, “having inherited a sound economic and communal foundation from the survivors who spent their lives rebuilding, [the younger generation] had the luxury to mount a political campaign. The experience of the Genocide manifested differently in these younger generations” (139). Repression was one of the most frequent psychological defenses used to unconsciously conceal the indelible pain that such death and devastation inflicted on victims; however, their offspring, who did not witness the horrors firsthand, “had the necessary detachment to re-awaken this forgotten episode of history (139). Thus, “the psychological scars of the genocide endured” in subsequent generations (139). Since the effects of the trauma are manifested and exhibited after a long period of silence, this, too, is a form of latency.
Most grandchildren of survivors, upon learning about their history in various forms of discourse, somehow felt as if they themselves experienced the horrors. In “The Response of Women to Crisis: From Mourning to Personal Identity,” Shaké Topalian writes that the “children and grandchildren of survivors have carried [their] parents’ unprocessed projection of trauma” (48). Consequently, most of them express their reactions to the event in multiple ways and different forms. For some, like Nancy Kricorian, this occurs in the act of writing a novel based on her cultural and historical past, using the Armenian Genocide as a symbol for a diasporic community. Kricorian, like many of her fellow Armenian-American novelists, plays a role in the unconscious unification of a fragmented identity. As Balaev states, “The author who situates traumatic experience in relation to a particular place indicates that trauma is understood as a culturally specific event, in which its meaning remains contingent on factors such as a historically specific moment.” The Armenian Genocide has indeed “become a collective symbol and reorganizes the discourse pertinent to Armenian collective identity” (Shirinian 20).
Since “the story of the Genocide has now become deeply entrenched in Armenian collective memory,” it is undeniably a cohesive force in the lives of many diasporans (Miller 161). Because they are “divided by geography and assimilation, Armenians [rely] upon their common tragic past” to bring them together (Bobelian 232). This remembrance of the genocide stands as a unifying theme of continued identification with the Armenian nation among the diaspora. In his essay titled “Denial and Free Speech: The Case of the Armenian Genocide,” Henry C. Theriault maintains, “Certainly, Armenian identity depends on much more than the genocide and its continuing aftermath, but the genocide is […] a central part of modern Armenian history and as such an essential part of contemporary Armenian identity” (247). References to the Genocide in literature and other mediums of expression stand "as a monument to the Armenian aspiration of revived nationhood” as they link history to various forms of public discourse (Peroomian 177). This places “the Armenian Genocide within the ongoing saga of a living people” to try to reconcile the tragedy and “ensure national survival and evolution” (177-8).
Novels like Nancy Kricorian’s Zabelle, function to unify a scattered people by referencing their common past, even if this may not be the authors’ primary intent. In telling Zabelle’s story of repression and eventual confrontation with tragedy, Kricorian highlights the belated effects of a trauma. Furthermore, the fact that she has written Zabelle decades after the actual event, while giving voice to the victims after years of silence, also validates the notion of latency in the Armenian-American diasporic community. Cathy Caruth insists that “the historical power of the trauma is […] that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all. And it is this inherent latency of the event that paradoxically explains the peculiar, temporal structure, the belatedness of historical experience. [If] the traumatic event is not experienced as it occurs, [then] it is fully evident only in connection with another place, and in another time” (8). Thus, repression, in trauma, is replaced by latency. For the current Armenian Diaspora, the contemporary responses to a historical tragedy stand a monument for the figurative unification of a fragmented people.
Works Cited
Balaev, Michelle. “Trends in Literary Trauma Theory.” Mosaic 41.2 (June 2008): 149-66. ProQuest. Web. 12 February 2010.
Balakian, Peter. Black Dog of Fate. New York: Basic Books, 2009. Print.
Bloxham, Donald. “Determinants of the Armenian Genocide.” Looking Backward, Moving Forward. Ed. Richard G. Hovannisian. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2003. 23-50.Print.
Bobelian, Michael. Children of Armenia: A Forgotten Genocide and the Century-Long Struggle for Justice. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009. Print.
Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 1995. Print.
Kherdian, David. The Road from Home. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1979. Print.
Kricorian, Nancy. Dreams of Bread and Fire. New York: Grove Press, 2003. Print.
---. Zabelle. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. Print.
Kurkchiyan, Marina and Edmund Herzig, eds. “Introduction: Armenia and the Armenians.” The Armenians A Handbook (Caucasus World. Peoples of the Caucasus). New York: Routledge Curzon, 2005: 1-22. Print.
Libaridian, Gerard J. Armenia at the Crossroads: Democracy and Nationhood in the Post-Soviet Era. Massachusetts: Blue Crane Books, 1991. Print.
Miller, Donald E., and Lorna Touryan Miller. Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide. Berkely: University of California Press, 1993. Print.
Peroomian, Rubina. “New Directions in Literary Responses to the Armenian Genocide.”
Looking Backward, Moving Forward. Ed. Richard G. Hovannisian. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2003. 157-180. Print.
Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Introduction. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 389-97. Print.
Shirinian, Lorne. Armenian-North American Literature: A Critical Introduction Genocide, Diaspora, and Symbols. New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990. Print.
Slide, Anthony, ed. Ravished Armenia and the Story of Aurora Mardiganian. Maryland:Scarecrow Press, Inc, 1997. Print.
Theriault, Henry C. “Denial and Free Speech: The Case of the Armenian Genocide.” Looking Backward, Moving Forward. Ed. Richard G. Hovannisian. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2003. 231-62. Print.
Topalian, Shaké. “The Response of Women to Crisis: From Collective Mourning to Personal Identity.” Voices of Armenian Women. Ed. Barbara Mergeuria and Joy Renjilian-Burgy.Belmont, Massachusetts: AIWA Press, 2000. 37-48. Print.
The representation of trauma in literature has prompted a great deal of attention and an increasingly wide range of study and scholarship. “To be traumatized,” scholar Cathy Caruth asserts, “is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (4). Trauma can range from witnessing a violent act or being a victim of one. In terms of mass trauma, the Holocaust continues to be a pervasive area of research. The Armenian Genocide of 1915, however, is much less studied. It has “been dubbed the first modern genocide,” yet the research surrounding this horrific moment in history only expanded when interest began to grow in Near Eastern Studies in the past few decades (Bloxham 94). Taking the historical context into consideration, the literary representation of this catastrophic event is significant to the theory of trauma. It is crucial to note that explicit references to the Genocide have become more frequent in Armenian-American literature in the past two decades. Most of the survivors presented in Armenian-American texts, such as the main character in Nancy Kricorian’s Zabelle, are numb to their past. They have repressed their tragic memories somewhere in the unconscious; however, since the effects of the genocide harbor great psychological consequences, their repression is only temporary and eventually returns to haunt their dreams. Freud has termed this delayed effect of a trauma, “latency.”
In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth explains, “in the term ‘latency,’ the period during which the effects of the experience are not apparent, Freud seems to describe the trauma as the successive movement from an event to its repression to its return” (7). Many Genocide survivors illustrate the theory of “latency” in their reaction and response to their past. In her novel, Nancy Kricorian depicts such a character. Zabelle is very young when the Genocide takes place. Though she is one of the few lucky ones who survived due to personal strength and strings of good luck, she was nonetheless exposed to a great deal of physical and emotional trauma. She witnessed the deaths of many family members, including her mother, who slowly died of starvation in front of the young girl’s eyes. Years later, Zabelle’s marriage is arranged to an older Armenian man in America, where she begins a new and very different life. Living under the same roof in an unfamiliar country with her jealous mother-in-law and new husband, Zabelle faces many obstacles as an Armenian woman in a patriarchal culture. Nonetheless, she bravely assumes the role and raises 3 children. Her past does not interfere with her everyday life, and “the effects of the experience are not apparent” (Caruth 8). It is only in her old age that Zabelle’s repressed tragedy unfolds as she hears voices from her past and imagines the Turks coming to harm her. Thus, Zabelle embodies Freud’s analysis of the belated effects of a trauma.
Zabelle is one of many Armenian-American works centered around the themes of loss, memory, and identity. In writing this novel, Kricorian shares more than just the story of one person. The narrative of Zabelle’s experiences transcends the individual realm and acts as a unifying force for the Armenian diaspora spread throughout the world. In many ways, Zabelle is a “trauma novel,” which “refers to a work of fiction that conveys profound loss or intense fear on individual or collective levels (Balaev). In this paper, I will argue that the representation of trauma in Armenian-American literature, such as Kricorian’s portrayal of the Genocide’s enduring psychological impact on Zabelle, serves to coalesce the Armenian Diaspora’s sense of national identity. Therefore, literary depictions of this particular trauma, which has yet to be acknowledged as a Genocide by its perpetrators, serves a greater purpose for a dispersed population. Since the producers, artists, and authors who reference the Genocide are decades removed from the survivors of the tribulation, they have the necessary detachment to explore their ancestors’ past. Because the later generations began to voice their hitherto silent history, I argue that they also exemplify, by extension, Freud’s theory of latency. Almost a century later, the memories of the past are only becoming more frequent. Thus, as Caruth explains, “the traumatized […] carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptoms of a history that they cannot entirely possess” (Caruth 5). To adequately impress upon readers the importance of this history to the current Armenian diaspora, it is necessary to give a brief background of the events that splintered the Armenian nation and its people almost a century ago.
Like the Jewish population was targeted in the Holocaust, the Armenians faced mass slaughters, deportations, and exterminations by the Turkish government in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. Under the cover of World War One, the Ottomans systematically expunged thousands and thousands of Armenians from their ancestral lands “as the world watched almost in silence” (Kurkchiyan and Herzig 7). Approximately 1.5 million Armenians were slaughtered within a few months. This horrific moment left an indelible mark on Armenian history and consciousness and laid the foundations for the radical shift that the Armenian national identity was to undergo during the twentieth century. Many survivors immigrated to foreign lands where they began new lives and, eventually, assimilated into these host cultures. In their struggles to fit into their new surroundings, to raise healthy children, and to maintain somewhat of their Armenianness, many of these survivors did not speak of their tragic past and often repressed it completely in their unconscious. However, witnessing and experiencing such unthinkable horrors left a dark shadow in their hearts, and haunted them for the rest of their lives, even in their dreams. In one of the first personal accounts of the Genocide, Arshaluys (Aurora) Mardiganian, a young girl who miraculously survived through countless brutal acts, says, “When I see [the Turks and Kurds who raped and tortured young girls] in my dreams now I scream, so even though I am safe in America, my nights are not peaceful” (Slide 125).
Kricorian’s novel begins with a description of the massacre’s belated effects on the now elderly, Zabelle, who has repressed the horrors she witnessed as a child throughout her entire adult life. These memories have not disappeared, but, in her old age, begin to resurface in the form of nightmares. At night, “long shadows and disembodied voices, speaking Armenian and Turkish, circled Zabelle’s bed. She heard fragments of long-forgotten songs. The faces of her mother, father, brother, grandparents, aunts and uncles come swimming up at her like fish surfacing from the bottom of a pond” (Kricorian 6). For most of her life, Zabelle has kept these memories to herself, hiding them in order to live a normal life, but “despite the human capacity to survive and adapt, traumatic experiences can alter people’s psychological, biological, and social equilibrium…” (van der Kolk and McFarlane 488). Zabelle seems to be suffering from posttraumatic syndrome, which “is the result of a failure of time to heal all wounds” (491). Since time cannot mitigate such deeply embedded torment, repression is replaced by latency, and a response to the event eventually materializes.
Zabelle, along with many other genocide survivors, does not speak about her past even with her close family members. She says, “That was how it was with us. We never spoke about those times, but they were like rotting animals behind the walls of our home” (Kricorian 223-4). This theme of “silent survivor” runs through various other works by Armenian-American authors. In David Kherdian’s novel, The Road from Home, for instance, the main character, another genocide survivor, claims, “we never talked about the massacres. It was as if we had forgotten about our past troubles, but often they would resurface in different ways” (130). The narrator admits that although they did not explicitly discuss their tragic experiences, they were nonetheless a part of their lives.
These repressed memories often manifest in the form of traumatic dreams. Such dreams, however, differ from most of Freud’s dream analyses, which usually focus on repressed desires. While studying his patients, “Freud realized that the unconscious often expresses itself in the form of dreams, since at night, during sleep, the vigilance of the repressive ego in regard to unconscious desire is stilled” (Rivkin and Ryan 390). Cathy Caruth explains that “the returning traumatic dream startles Freud because it cannot be understood in terms of any wish or unconscious meaning, but is, purely and inexplicably, the literal return of the event against the will of the one it inhabits” (5). In their article, “The Black Hole of Trauma,” Bessel A. van der Kolk and Alexander C. McFarlane state that “many survivors seem to be able to transcend their trauma temporarily and harness their pain in acts of sublimated creation; for example, the writers and Holocaust survivors Jerzy Kosinski and Primo Levi seem to have done this, only to succumb to the despair of their memories in the end” (487). Hence, repression is temporary since, as the aforementioned statement illustrates, survivors ultimately submit to their grief, despite any efforts to do otherwise.
In his memoir, Black Dog of Fate, Peter Balakian comes to see his “grandmother’s numbed response to the Armenian Genocide as a necessary way of survival” (Balakian 299). Theorist Michelle Balaev reminds us, however, that “the ‘unspeakability’ of trauma claimed by so many literary critics today can be understood less as an epistemological conundrum or neurobiological fact, but more as an outcome of cultural values and ideologies.” This observation applies to the Armenian culture since the “silent survivor” is such a common phenomenon in post-genocide communities, and so frequently depicted in contemporary Armenian-American “trauma novels.” In another novel by Nancy Kricorian, Dreams of Bread and Fire, the main character, Ani, explains that the genocide was a “forbidden topic” in her house, and goes on to say that she always “had the idea that [talking about it] would kill [her] grandmother” (146-7). Even though the massacres had never been explained to Ani, she “knew from bits of conversation she wasn’t supposed to have heard between her mother and grandfather and occasional vague references from her grandmother that in the old country the Turks had murdered lots of Armenians and forced even more to leave their homes. But no one was supposed to talk about the Deportations, especially not in front of [Ani’s] Grandma” (148).
Since survivors suppressed their pain rather than vocalize the memories they were tormented by, contemporary trauma novels serve as a medium in which their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren can finally foreground their nation’s traumatic past. Such novels also provide survivors’ descendents, especially those whose families fled from Ottoman Armenia, a chance to explore their ethnic origins and current “hyphenated” identities. Most third and fourth generation Diasporan Armenians learned about their past through the references to the Genocide in various cultural productions, such as literature. Third-generation Armenian-American author and poet, Peter Balakian, suggests that such references help those who are far removed from the events of 1915 orient Armenia's tragic history within their own lives today. He writes, “The journey into history, into the Armenian Genocide, was for me inseparable from poetry. Poetry was part of the journey and the excavation” (146). In “Trends in Literary Trauma Theory,” Michelle Balaev writes, “A central claim of contemporary literary trauma theory asserts that trauma creates a speechless fright that divides or destroys identity. This serves as the basis for a larger argument that suggests identity is formed by the intergenerational transmission of trauma.” Balaev argues that when stories of one generation are transmitted to another through various texts, private trauma may become “transhistorical trauma” and thus “define contemporary individual identity, as well as racial or cultural identity.” Transhistorical trauma makes the relationship between an individual and the group parallel, and “indicates that a massive trauma experienced by a group in the historical past can be experienced by an individual living centuries later who shares a similar attribute of the historical group, such as sharing the same race, religion, nationality, or gender due to the timeless, repetitious, and infectious characteristics of traumatic experience and memory” (Balaev). As such, genocide survivors’ painful experiences that are presented in works by Kricorian and other Armenian-American authors transcend the personal realm of these individuals and become a shared experience. Today, many Armenian-Americans use artistic mediums to learn about the trauma experienced by the genocide victims and, as a result, experience the history themselves.
There are many factors that contribute to the continued references and subsequent themes of loss, grief, sorrow, and trauma in Armenian-American literature. One of the most significant of these is the Turkish Government’s continued denial that a Genocide ever took place. Gerard Libaridian writes, “The Genocide, its exploitation, and its denial by Turkey paralyzed the collective psyche of the Armenian people” (2). The paralyzing horrors that most victims faced rendered them incapable of speaking about their experiences. Instead, they stored their memories deep within themselves, making it invisible to the external world. Consequently, their repression silenced the collective community for years. Still, the effects of the trauma did not disappear. Inevitably, the victims’ descendents, after learning more about their history, felt the unique responsibility to revive a lost segment of their national past. In Children of Armenia, Michael Bobelian writes, “having inherited a sound economic and communal foundation from the survivors who spent their lives rebuilding, [the younger generation] had the luxury to mount a political campaign. The experience of the Genocide manifested differently in these younger generations” (139). Repression was one of the most frequent psychological defenses used to unconsciously conceal the indelible pain that such death and devastation inflicted on victims; however, their offspring, who did not witness the horrors firsthand, “had the necessary detachment to re-awaken this forgotten episode of history (139). Thus, “the psychological scars of the genocide endured” in subsequent generations (139). Since the effects of the trauma are manifested and exhibited after a long period of silence, this, too, is a form of latency.
Most grandchildren of survivors, upon learning about their history in various forms of discourse, somehow felt as if they themselves experienced the horrors. In “The Response of Women to Crisis: From Mourning to Personal Identity,” Shaké Topalian writes that the “children and grandchildren of survivors have carried [their] parents’ unprocessed projection of trauma” (48). Consequently, most of them express their reactions to the event in multiple ways and different forms. For some, like Nancy Kricorian, this occurs in the act of writing a novel based on her cultural and historical past, using the Armenian Genocide as a symbol for a diasporic community. Kricorian, like many of her fellow Armenian-American novelists, plays a role in the unconscious unification of a fragmented identity. As Balaev states, “The author who situates traumatic experience in relation to a particular place indicates that trauma is understood as a culturally specific event, in which its meaning remains contingent on factors such as a historically specific moment.” The Armenian Genocide has indeed “become a collective symbol and reorganizes the discourse pertinent to Armenian collective identity” (Shirinian 20).
Since “the story of the Genocide has now become deeply entrenched in Armenian collective memory,” it is undeniably a cohesive force in the lives of many diasporans (Miller 161). Because they are “divided by geography and assimilation, Armenians [rely] upon their common tragic past” to bring them together (Bobelian 232). This remembrance of the genocide stands as a unifying theme of continued identification with the Armenian nation among the diaspora. In his essay titled “Denial and Free Speech: The Case of the Armenian Genocide,” Henry C. Theriault maintains, “Certainly, Armenian identity depends on much more than the genocide and its continuing aftermath, but the genocide is […] a central part of modern Armenian history and as such an essential part of contemporary Armenian identity” (247). References to the Genocide in literature and other mediums of expression stand "as a monument to the Armenian aspiration of revived nationhood” as they link history to various forms of public discourse (Peroomian 177). This places “the Armenian Genocide within the ongoing saga of a living people” to try to reconcile the tragedy and “ensure national survival and evolution” (177-8).
Novels like Nancy Kricorian’s Zabelle, function to unify a scattered people by referencing their common past, even if this may not be the authors’ primary intent. In telling Zabelle’s story of repression and eventual confrontation with tragedy, Kricorian highlights the belated effects of a trauma. Furthermore, the fact that she has written Zabelle decades after the actual event, while giving voice to the victims after years of silence, also validates the notion of latency in the Armenian-American diasporic community. Cathy Caruth insists that “the historical power of the trauma is […] that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all. And it is this inherent latency of the event that paradoxically explains the peculiar, temporal structure, the belatedness of historical experience. [If] the traumatic event is not experienced as it occurs, [then] it is fully evident only in connection with another place, and in another time” (8). Thus, repression, in trauma, is replaced by latency. For the current Armenian Diaspora, the contemporary responses to a historical tragedy stand a monument for the figurative unification of a fragmented people.
Works Cited
Balaev, Michelle. “Trends in Literary Trauma Theory.” Mosaic 41.2 (June 2008): 149-66. ProQuest. Web. 12 February 2010.
Balakian, Peter. Black Dog of Fate. New York: Basic Books, 2009. Print.
Bloxham, Donald. “Determinants of the Armenian Genocide.” Looking Backward, Moving Forward. Ed. Richard G. Hovannisian. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2003. 23-50.Print.
Bobelian, Michael. Children of Armenia: A Forgotten Genocide and the Century-Long Struggle for Justice. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009. Print.
Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 1995. Print.
Kherdian, David. The Road from Home. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1979. Print.
Kricorian, Nancy. Dreams of Bread and Fire. New York: Grove Press, 2003. Print.
---. Zabelle. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. Print.
Kurkchiyan, Marina and Edmund Herzig, eds. “Introduction: Armenia and the Armenians.” The Armenians A Handbook (Caucasus World. Peoples of the Caucasus). New York: Routledge Curzon, 2005: 1-22. Print.
Libaridian, Gerard J. Armenia at the Crossroads: Democracy and Nationhood in the Post-Soviet Era. Massachusetts: Blue Crane Books, 1991. Print.
Miller, Donald E., and Lorna Touryan Miller. Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide. Berkely: University of California Press, 1993. Print.
Peroomian, Rubina. “New Directions in Literary Responses to the Armenian Genocide.”
Looking Backward, Moving Forward. Ed. Richard G. Hovannisian. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2003. 157-180. Print.
Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Introduction. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 389-97. Print.
Shirinian, Lorne. Armenian-North American Literature: A Critical Introduction Genocide, Diaspora, and Symbols. New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990. Print.
Slide, Anthony, ed. Ravished Armenia and the Story of Aurora Mardiganian. Maryland:Scarecrow Press, Inc, 1997. Print.
Theriault, Henry C. “Denial and Free Speech: The Case of the Armenian Genocide.” Looking Backward, Moving Forward. Ed. Richard G. Hovannisian. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2003. 231-62. Print.
Topalian, Shaké. “The Response of Women to Crisis: From Collective Mourning to Personal Identity.” Voices of Armenian Women. Ed. Barbara Mergeuria and Joy Renjilian-Burgy.Belmont, Massachusetts: AIWA Press, 2000. 37-48. Print.
van der Kolk, Bessel A. and Alexander C. McFarlane. “The Black Hole of Trauma.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 487-505. Print.
3 comments:
Thank you so much for your kind words, Christian. I appreciate you taking the time to read my blog.
Thank you,
Angela
I loved your writing. First, it interested me because of its topic. Armenian Diaspora (I have an Armenian friend :) And i enjoyed so much your insightful analysis on traumatic history and its function bridging generations. Really interesting interpretation of trauma as a medium for unification of Armenians!!! Thank you.
I loved your writing. First, it interested me because of its topic. Armenian Diaspora (I have an Armenian friend :) And i enjoyed so much your insightful analysis on traumatic history and its function bridging generations. Really interesting interpretation of trauma as a medium for unification of Armenians!!! Thank you.
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