Remembering April 24: A Personal Odyssey

As I listened to the various speakers during the 10 day Literary Ark seminar, I wondered if the Young Turk dictators of 1915 had projected that virtually none of the elderly and orphaned Armenians would survive. No doubt, the Turkish triumvirate arrogantly believed that the elderly Armenians would surely soon perish and the orphans would rapidly disappear through assimilation. History, however, can unfold in complex and ironic ways. Many Diaspora Armenians, often from mixed marriages, who in their youth might have wished to assimilate and “fit in” to their new society, have in their later years sought to seek out and explore their Armenian identity.

Thus, on the eve of and during the centennial year of 2015, we have witnessed a renaissance of Armenian writings, particularly on genocide-related themes. For example, we can read historical novels by Chris Bohjalian, Sandcastle Girls, 2012 and Dana Walrath, Like Water Like Stone, 2014. We also note the following journalistic and academic volumes by Meline Toumani, There Was and There Was Not, 2014; Eric Bogossian, Operation Nemesis, 2015; Vicken Cheterian, Open Wounds: Armenians, Turks and a Century of Genocide, 2015; Mathew Karanian, Historic Armenia After 100 Years, 2015; Mariam Mesrobian MacCurdy, Sacred Justice: The Voices and Legacy of Operation Nemesis, 2015; Armen T. Marsoobian, Fragments of a Lost Homeland: Remembering Armenia, 2015; Rubina Peroomian, The Armenian Genocide in Literature: The Second Generation Responds, 2015; Ronald Suny, ‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else’: A History of the Armenian Genocide, 2015; and Alan Whitehorn, ed., The Armenian Genocide: The Essential Reference Guide, 2015. The Diaspora literary and academic voices are very much alive and growing.

From Academic to Poet and Back Again

In teaching university courses on comparative studies of genocide, it is crucial to be able to explore and develop advanced analytical and theoretical frameworks. After several weeks of teaching such diverse models, inevitably the senior students ask for a summary. After one very long evening class, I tried to pen a one page synopsis. The already compacted and dense draft page was a complex piece of prose, but the early contours of a poem could be seen. As I went into heavy editing, I stripped down the text to its essence. In a minimalist fashion, all unnecessary descriptors and connectives were pruned. What remained was a stark, minimalist poem — one word per line – but which in only a few key words captured the essence of the various phases of genocide. The poem was composed of a series of malevolent verbs. A university course on genocide had given birth to a new poem, the “Verbs of Genocide”. It has been several years now since the poem was published in Return to Armenia/Veradardz depi Hayastan and elsewhere. It has also been read at Armenian community gatherings and even recorded on You Tube by Armenian Canadian students.

About a year ago, one of my translators told me that a German editor/publisher, who had done significant outreach work on genocide with young students, had used my “Verbs of Genocide” poem in some of his workshops. Jurgen Jankovsky had not only used the poem as a key introductory overview piece in a collection of children’s accounts about genocide, but he had chosen to use the poem’s two closing lines “Verleuegnet…Vergessen?” [Denied…Forgotten?] as the title of the newly edited German volume.

April 24 and Armenian Families Mourning and Remembering