Balakian Is Founding Member of Writers Movement Against Trump

Balakian commented on the lack of engagement of the US in the Karabakh peace process until recently as a secondary factor that might motivate Armenians. He said, “I feel, and I am sure other Armenian American members of this organization would concur, that parts of the State Department have been gutted by Trump, and US leadership in complex parts of the world has waned.”

WAT in Action

One of the ways WAT is working to achieve its goal is through plenary sessions every other week with swing states for the presidential election, including Texas, Wisconsin, Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. In these online meetings, there is brainstorming on strategies to get out the vote, poll watching and protecting the integrity of the election. Balakian said, “These have been very rich 90-minute sessions. We hope that they are helping propel energy and galvanize ideas.”

Both writers and political figures have participated in the sessions. Among the politicians, the mayor of Durham was involved in the North Carolina session and Assemblyman Steve Doyle from western Wisconsin in the Wisconsin session, while Rick Wilson, one of the founders of the Lincoln Project, a group of former Republicans who state they are working to defend democracy in the US, spoke in the Florida one.

Balakian served as the online host for the Wisconsin session on October 3. As a founding member of WAT, he said he sent out a lot of emails and eventually a group was formed which spoke on the complexity of the situation in Wisconsin. He said, “The idea is that we are here to listen and gather knowledge as well as to provide ideas and impetus.” The group included Assemblyman Doyle; poet and fiction writer Mauricio Kilwein-Guevara, who is the author of five books and a play; activist Iuscely Flores of Milwaukee; John Nichols, a major political writer for The Nation magazine, associate editor of The Capital Times, and author or coauthor of over a dozen books; and poet and graduate student Eric Jefferson.

In addition to the effort to get out the vote, Balakian said there is a plan for a possible election and post-election crisis, in case President Trump loses and attempts to interfere with the results. Part of the plan is to hold a national plenary session on the night of November 5 with major writers which will be conducted by writer and film director Paul Auster. At the moment, three eminent writers, Salman Rushdie, Rebecca Solnit, and former poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey are onboard to discuss the election results and what should happen next.

There will also be a series of local events during the day facilitated by bookstores and their partners.

Balakian speculated about what will happen with the election: “Wouldn’t it be nice if it were just a normal election? Yet there has never been so much heightened tension because of Trump’s persistent efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the American election process. Much will be written about this, no doubt.”

“I think many of us feel,” Balakian said, “that the work of democratic activism will not end with the election. We hope WAT will have a longer life. Our medium is language and there is commitment to the belief that words matters and that ideas and messages can be generated by writers that can have meaning and value in times of crisis. I think we all have a belief in the ethical value of literary culture.” He elaborated that this is a time-honored idea, which the Victorians believed, and that “the present is the moment for literary culture to stand up and get to work. This certainly has been true in the Armenian tradition since the period of the 19^th century Armenian renaissance.”