“To be hated unto death” is one way to describe the state of a people that has experienced genocide. How does one reconcile oneself with the knowledge that their race, their people, was so hated that others took action to entirely exterminate them? As an Armenian, the month of April, specifically April 24, is a time during which we remember that it was this motivation that led to the events in 1915.
Today marks the 110th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, a day that every Armenian takes to remember the events that cost the lives of approximately 1.5 million of their brethren. It is also a day that marks the beginning of the world’s first modern genocide.
In a quest to understand more about my own Armenian identity, but also to understand the events that took place in those years, I found myself reading the autobiographical Passage to Ararat by Michael J. Arlen. In the book, he describes his travels to Armenia in hopes of reconciling with the identity that had been stripped from him. Arlen, whose father was a genocide survivor who decided to avoid telling his son anything about their heritage, remains a looming figure in the narrative even after his death. As Arlen learns more about the events that unfolded, he begins to understand how his father’s stern, unbreaking exterior was, in a way, protecting him from the burden of knowing what had happened in those years — the burden of what it means to be a survivor, and what it means to be an Armenian.
Arlen’s initial approach to Armenia was to learn about its old roots. It was the first Christian nation, mentioned in the writings of old philosophers such as Xenophon, and had interacted with basically every ancient civilization one could think of. Arlen fixates on the apparent nobility of the ancient kings of Nairi and the endeavors of Armenians as translators and architects. Yet, when he reaches the history of the genocide he finds it hard to reconcile the two identities — one of powerful ancient warriors and the other of the suffering masses who walked into the desert like pigs for slaughter.
It is understandable that someone who spent most of their life disassociated from their identity would find it hard to think of themselves as a victim of a tragedy they knew so little about. Yet, as Arlen reads more of the stories of what the Ottomans did to the Armenian people (and takes us along for the journey), the gravity of what happened begins to hit him.
His gut-wrenching accounts of torture that many innocent Armenians underwent are barely readable. Those are eye-witness accounts from foreigners that had, for one reason or another, been stationed in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. For me, the most disturbing description was of when a priest was taken, his eyes gouged out, his nose and ears sliced off, his hands nailed to a chair (to resemble crucifixion) and then finally a nail set into his head. It was a way to brand him as a Christian and as an Armenian — someone meant to be exterminated. Reading further, Arlen describes how even as Armenians were deported from their homeland they would be beaten, brutalized, raped and sold off as slaves. If one digs even deeper they will read the stories of neighbors killing neighbors, of children’s bones being found in the desert and of women jumping out of trains along with their infants because they preferred death over whatever would find them at the end of the tracks.
At the start of the book Arlen was able to indifferently stand at the Tsisternakaberd Genocide Memorial. However, upon his return to it at the end, he sheds tears, not just of having learned about the events of the genocide but of having connected them to some sort of past of his own. His wife criticizes him throughout their trip to Armenia for being unfeeling, for not connecting to what happened. She found fault with how he often criticizes the Armenians themselves for their almost childlike hatred of the Turkish people for the suffering they inflicted. And though Arlen does not acquire a hatred for the people that inflicted such suffering on the Armenians, he does acquire an understanding of the collective memory and pain that is held within the pages of history — a memory that carries with it tears and echoing screams of injustice.
Arlen notes that the Armenians are not the only ones to have experienced genocide, but that the Armenian Genocide was the first time that modern technology and communication were used to so quickly and effectively dispose of and cover up the lives of so many people. In the chaos of WWI — the perfect background setting for such events — none of the perpetrators were formally punished. And, in a few decades, the rise of the Nazis marked the next big tragedy: the Holocaust. Could recognizing one modern genocide have prevented the other? Hitler was once quoted in a speech, saying, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” The way in which history forgot and buried the story of the Armenian Genocide should strike a moral chord with everyone, but one cannot help but see the greater context of how the extermination of one people inspired another. The difference, however, lies in the fact that, as Arlen noted, Turkey has never acknowledged the events as a genocide. In fact, it has historically punished people for speaking out about what happened. In the end, history may have forgotten the tragedy of the Armenians. But the people whose ancestors walked through the desert, making sure we would survive as a nation, have not forgotten and will not forget. That is what it means to be an Armenian in April.
Lusine Boyadzhyan is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at lboyadzhyan@cornellsun.com.
