Th e Unsp o k e n a s H er i tage

Harry Harootunian
Th e
Unspoken
as
H e r i ta g e
The Armenian Genocide and

Its Unaccounted Lives

Duke University Press Durham and London 2019

 © 2019 Duke University Press. All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ∞
Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker
Typeset in Warnock Pro by Copperline Book Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Harootunian, Harry D., [date] author.
Title: The unspoken as heritage : the Armenian genocide and its
unaccounted lives / Harry Harootunian.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2019. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2019006360 (print) | lccn 2019012084 (ebook)
isbn 9781478007029 (ebook)
isbn 9781478005100 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 9781478006282 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: lcsh: Harootunian, Harry D., [date] — Family — Biography. |
Armenian Americans — United States — Biography. | Armenian
massacres survivors — United States — Biography. | Armenian
massacres, 1915 – 1923
Classification: lcc e184.a7 (ebook) | lcc e184.a7 h376 2019 (print) |
ddc 956.6/20154 — dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006360

Cover art : Harootunian family members, late 1920s.

Courtesy of the author.
For the memory of Sena Harootunian
and to Victoria Pedersen
This page intentionally left blank
 C onten ts

Acknowledgments ix

one. The Unrealized Everyday 1

By Way of an Introduction

two. Unnoticed Lives/Unanswered Questions 17

three. Traces of a Vanished Everyday 37

four. History ’ s Interruption 87

Dispossession and Genocide

five. House of Strangers/Diminished Lives 114

Epilogue. Returning to Ani 149

Notes 161 Bibliography 171 Index 175

A gallery appears following page 86.

This page intentionally left blank
 A c k n owl ed g men ts

I owe great thanks to an army of friends who read various drafts and ver-
sions. I would like to mention Kristin Ross, who read the first draft and en-
couraged me in this project and throughout its completion; Nancy Arm-
strong, who introduced the idea of turning to a form of life writing and
who read an earlier version; and Leonard Tennenhouse, who participated
in the discussions we had on life writing and also read an earlier draft. I
want to acknowledge Anne Allison, who read an earlier version and offered
consistent encouragement, as well as Rey Chow, Larry Fuchser, Tanya Fer-
nando, Helen M. Kearney, Carol Gluck, Kim Brandt, Marilyn Ivy, Jonathan
Strong, Adrian Rifkin, Denis Echard, Michael Dutton, Michèle Longino,
Laura Neitzel, Holly Hudak, John Hudak, Claudia Karagianis (especially
for help with the photos), Chris Nelson, Ken Kawashima, Andrea Arai, and
my two sisters, Sena Harootunian and Victoria Pedersen, to whom I have
dedicated this book. Sena died before the book was published but had read
and corrected an earlier draft. I want to thank Anne, Charlie Piot, and
others who arranged for me to discuss a draft of the manuscript at Duke
University in 2017, where I learned a lot of what I should be doing, and a
number of anonymous readers who made extremely valuable suggestions
and comments, which they will recognize in the text. Thank you to my
editor, Ken Wissoker, for sticking with this; to Susan Albury, project edi-
tor; and to Joshua Tranen, editorial associate.
This page intentionally left blank
All of us, without suspecting it, are the carriers of an immense embryo-
logical experiment: for even the process of remembering, crowned with
the victory of memory’s effort, is amazingly the phenomenon of growth.
In one as well as the other, there is a sprout, an embryo, the rudiment of a
face, half a character, half a sound, the ending of a name; something labial
or palatal, sweet legume on the tongue, that doesn’t develop out of itself
but only responds to an invitation, only stretches out toward, justifying
one’s expectation.

An Armenian fairy tale from the ancient city of Ashtarak: “Three apples
fell from heaven: the first for the one who told the tale, the second for the
one who listened, and the third for the one who understood.”

—Osip Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia

This page intentionally left blank
 o n e. Th e Un r e al i z ed E ve ryday
By Way of an Introduction

When I was younger I read and heard stories about the ancient Armenian
city of Ani and even dreamed I walked among its discarded ruins. Ani was
the capital of the Bagratid kingdom in eastern Anatolia (“Higher Arme-
nia”) that had been a powerful fortress as early as the third century but by
the ninth century was the center of a large kingdom that covered a good
part of the region of eastern Anatolia. Known for its architectural and
artistic brilliance and as the city of 1,001 churches inhabited by a popula-
tion estimated at 100,000 and even higher, larger than any medieval Eu-
ropean city at the time, it stood at the strategic crossroads of several trade
routes between east and west. In the thirteenth century it was overrun
and sacked by the Mongols. A century later it was completely destroyed by
an earthquake, reduced to the rubbles of ruin, where a small village that
eventually disappeared was erected on the site. I never realized my youth-
ful desire to visit Ani’s ruins, but years later it occurred to me that the im-
age of the city’s remaining stone wreckage retreating back into the nature
from which it was cut and pried loose captured the moment of the fateful
and sorrowful destiny of the Armenians’ struggle between the unyielding
grasp of both nature and history, indelibly inscribed in the ruins of Ani.
Perhaps more fabled and subject to romantic fantasy once it was released
from history, Ani’s particular fate seemed a fitting reminder to Arme-
nians whose successive history often came perilously close to repeating
its disappearance of a lived actuality. The Turkish genocide’s determined
attempt in the early twentieth century to make the Armenians as extinct
as Ani was a continuing episode in this sad narrative. Yet the ruins still
offered the trace of a historical existence, a shattered silhouette of what it
had once been and thus the prospect of a pathway for returning to home
and a new start.
The Armenian genocide of 1915– 16 was planned, implemented, and ex-
ecuted by the dominant political group in Turkey’s Ottoman Empire, the
Committee of Union and Progress (cup, Ittihadist Party), or simply
the Unionists or Young Turks. It was neither surprising nor coincidental
that in 1915 the Young Turks were an elite party, most of whose members
were born and educated in Europe, principally the Balkans, the Aegean
Littoral, and Constantinople. Despite its enthusiastic embrace of the tradi-
tion of the European Enlightenment or because of it, it was this cohort that
committed the resources of an empire to the total destruction of the Ar-
menian population and, paradoxically, of itself. As the German military at-
taché in Constantinople pronounced in 1918: “the (Turkish) government . . .
wishes to destroy all Armenians, not solely in Turkey but also outside
of Turkey.”1 The massive program of destruction aimed at Armenians
and other Christian minorities in Anatolia like the Greeks and Chaldo-­
Assyrians used the occasion of World War I and Turkey’s alliance with the
Central Powers as both the moment to inaugurate the grim labor of mass
murder and the masquerade to make what clearly was a genocidal inten-
tion appear as merely collateral damage and even a sideshow to the Great
War. While the genocide constitutes the inducement for this memoir of
my parents and their perilous escape from Anatolia and eventual migra-
tion to the United States, I am not concerned with writing another nar-
rative of the history of the event for a number of reasons explained later
in the text.
Not long ago I began to think about how my parents separately survived
the Armenian genocides of the early twentieth century and how once they
were able to find their way to the United States, they encountered the un-
welcome prospect of facing another challenge of survival. This had not
been a question that occurred to me when I was younger and growing up
with my two older sisters in Highland Park, an industrialized autonomous
enclave within the precincts of the city of Detroit, at the time the home of
an early and one of the larger Ford assembly plants. For me, those years
were marked by a kind of voluntary indifference to anything related to Ar-
menian life, which increasingly appeared irrelevant and would have pre-
cluded asking questions of our parents’ survival when growing up; these

2 Chapter One
questions now need to be explained. A contributing explanation might
have been the force of the Americanizing process to which we were sub-
jected in the schools and in daily life, the effort to make us all look like
Americans or some version of wasp America but not quite. This process
of disidentification required breaking down whatever identity we had and
aimed at making us eager to look like Americans; it also seemed to over-
ride any consideration to retain the thinning threads of an ethnic identity.
Paradoxically, the appeal to whiteness today is precisely the template of
Americanness in which my generation of immigrant children had been
socialized into a national and nationalist identity. But the necessity to ask
such questions we neglected as children has gradually come back like an
unscheduled revenant demanding compelling urgency, especially in the
years I was growing older and beginning to recognize in the migrant life
we lived not the glowing image so often portrayed in histories and circu-
lated in public schools of a land of plenty and infinite opportunity, as rep-
resented in school history texts and civics classes designed to make the
children of immigrant families into Americans. Instead I began to see the
United States as a place that grudgingly accepted large numbers of immi-
grants from the late nineteenth century on but only as reservoirs of cheap,
unskilled labor, and more often than not badly treated, to staff the grow-
ing industrialization that marked those years immediately before and after
World War I. For most immigrants, living in their own enclaves, America
was an oversized “mean streets,” a vast configuration streaked with mul-
tiple forms of unevenness and deeply engraved precincts of permanent
inequality, traversed by boundless combinations embracing the capitalist
new with diverse cultural practices brought by different ethnic groups as
a way of navigating the new terrain. There was little in the country’s early
history that pointed in the direction of what it would become. In fact, that
early history showed it was moving the other way.
When the question arose of actually trying to investigate and account
for my parents’ survival and subsequent struggle to stay afloat in a new
environment, it gradually pressed upon me and became an imperative in
late adulthood. I rejected the idea of taking the familiar route of writing
another historical account or narrative of the large-­scale event of Turkey’s
involvement in World War I, retracing the complex historiographical con-
troversies over the origins of the genocide, and continuing arguments over
whether it qualified to be named as a genocide and the long decline of the
Ottoman Empire the genocidal event it was designed to stem. There was
already a mountain of scholarly literature dedicated to elucidating these

The Unrealized Everyday 3

themes, and I could add nothing new to the diverse controversies. I was
not trained as a specialist in Ottoman or Middle East history, could not
read either Armenian or Turkish as starters, and did not have the incli-
nation to approach the genocide from a historical perspective that would
always end in the call for more evidence and documentary precision to
definitively determine the cause, which would happen only in the last in-
stance; and I knew that history, as such, could not address questions of
memory and experience the victims lived through. The appeal to memory
expanded experience and experience in turn, as hinted by Mandelstam,
enlarges memory’s compass, through growth and “stretch[ing]” outward
“toward . . . expectation.”2 As a supplement to Mandelstam’s earlier in-
sight, Antonio Gramsci once described this kind of phenomenal operation
as an “inventory of traces” and explained that “the starting point of criti-
cal elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing
thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited
in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.”3 Later on in the
same passage, Edward Said reminded us that Gramsci emphasized the vi-
tal importance “at the outset to compile such an inventory.”4 Said reports
that the latter portion of this passage was not translated in the Hoare and
Smith translation and appears in the Italian version.5 What I have thus
tried to do in this memoir is to follow the pathways offered by these two
perspectives and compile my own inventory of memory traces as they’ve
grown and expanded.
I have never been convinced that the question of the Armenian geno-
cide or any comparable instance of mass murder is reducible to mobilizing
more historical evidence to support one or another interpretation. What
the endless gathering of more historical documentation produces is defer-
ment that often overlooks the fact that a large number of people were bru-
tally killed in the effort of another group to eliminate them. Scholarship, it
seemed to me, was not the answer but perhaps the problem since the more
historical information amassed, the less the prospect of achieving some
sort of resolution. The process of ceaselessly accumulating additional ma-
terial and evidence appeared more as some sort of delaying tactic that
would permanently displace the necessity of reaching a final conclusion or
a minimal consensus yet fulfill some kind of symbolic role among the con-
testing parties that progress toward a resolution was being made. I have
always been convinced that the history of the event that continues to de-
mand representation is not the same as those memories of survivors who
became the diaspora and who were said to have “experienced the event”

4 Chapter One
by later historians, even though they would not have known it at the time
as historical. Yet it is the weaving of countless stories of unnoticed lives
of the perished and survivors concerning what had befallen them and the
questions they have raised but must remain unanswered that stubbornly
comprise the subject not of a history, as such, but rather a recomposition
of when such unanswered questions appeared in the interstices of the daily
lives of survivors as they made their way to safety and a new afterlife. It is
hard to know what they would have been thinking apart from how to get
out. The appearance of such unanswerability at certain moments raises
the question of what is prompting them, which is as unanswerable as the
answers they offer. But it must say something about why these questions
are asked throughout our lives. What I am concerned with is my parents’
efforts to escape the threat of imminent death and a past that showed itself
as an exhausted endgame that led to the moment of being forced to rein-
vent themselves in a new present and environment. In this journey they
sought to repress through silence what probably refused to go away. My
sisters, Sena and Victoria, and I inherited this repressed silence, which, I
believe, was imprinted on our subsequent formation into adulthood. Just
as I am not interested in recycling the history of the genocide as a subject
of historical inquiry, I have no interest or competence to provide a psy-
chological accounting of how the return of the repressed in our parents
affected our individual formations.6 I have found in constructing this re-
composition the habitual barriers of expectation that inevitably seek to
turn this retelling into the groove of the genocide’s history, as if there is no
other story and no other way to tell it. Because of this constant collision
with habitual barriers, I believe it is important for me to pursue the ques-
tion of why the experience of surviving became the subject of our parents’
collective silence and our inheritance.
My decision to undertake this project thus originated not from the lure
of historical scholarship but rather from an intensely personal concern
in the long and multigenerational afterlife of the genocidal moment that
has remained at the heart of the Armenian diasporas. For Armenians of
successive generations like mine, this concern has itself become a form of
heritage that obliges each, in its own way, to find adequate form to express
this continuing testimony as a necessary condition of preventing the de-
fining memory of the experience from falling into permanent indifference
and forgetfulness.
In the world of immigrant studies and diaspora, making it to the shores
of the United States or elsewhere meant realizing success in surviving

The Unrealized Everyday 5

whatever people were running away from but also receiving their ticket
to mobility and a secure life. This seemed once to be the established story
line. But I suspect that in most cases, like the first generation of Armenian
diaspora, immigrants to the U.S. confronted challenges of survival often
as great as the ones that drove them out of their natal habitat and into the
land of golden opportunity. In this regard, the Armenian experience could
claim no exception and was no different from what countless other immi-
grants endured. Where they may have differed from those migrants who
came for a better economic life was posed by the problem of genocide it-
self, which inducted them into a life course of determined silence to never
speak of the calamity and loss that befell them and from which they barely
and often accidentally escaped.
What undertaking this project has provoked was the growing convic-
tion that my sisters and I knew little or nothing of the individual experi-
ences of our parents—Ohannes der Harootunian and Vehanush Kupalian—
escaping the terror of Turkish massacres. While we knew some objective
facts about where our parents came from and something of the tempos of
such village lives in premodern Anatolia, we never knew or heard them
articulate the actual experience of living through and escaping genocide,
what they thought, felt, or believed would happen to them. We were de-
prived access to any experiential knowledge or even the recollection of
crucial memories of that moment. All we could recall were the uncer-
tainties they met as they made their way through the depression years
of the new American environment, because we lived it with them. Once
embarked on this writing project, lacking any clear-­cut direction or even
sense of purpose, I increasingly felt how difficult it had become. But the
difficulty was also compounded by the sudden realization that I really did
not know my parents, much less myself. What this practice taught me was
the need to find some mode of communicating a relationship between the
two registers of history and the everyday of their lives, between the con-
ceived and the lived, as Kristin Ross has put it, and the difficulty in doing
so, given the privilege accorded to the former as a natural national narra-
tive and the transient unreliability of the latter.7
The problem I have had to confront is that both parents remained con-
sistently silent on their respective experiences, rarely showing any will-
ingness to share their memories with us and, apart from glimpses gleaned
from anecdotes, never directly speaking about them to my two sisters and
me. In response to the absence of extensive correspondence between each
and their relatives, no family archive of photographs from that time, and a

6 Chapter One
general reluctance to impart the experience of this episode in their lives, I
have had to resort to a recomposing of what they might have gone through
on the basis of what the three of us were able to recall or thought they had
endured from the afterlives of the genocidal moment. This recomposition
often resembled an archaeological exposition, sifting through fragmen-
tary traces in order to get a clear idea of how to imagine the totality of
a life-­form from the remaining, incomplete pieces. While the memoir is
concerned with what they must have encountered, felt or imagined, and
thought, the account can make no claim to historical authority, as such,
since it is about the fragmented memories of an experience of survival,
reflected in their split lives, that stayed with them and us throughout the
rest of their lives and ours. In this sense, the act of memoration is also one
of imagination. Even though my parents rarely spoke of those earlier years
when we were growing up, it is evident that the experience of genocide,
loss, and escape shadowed their efforts to rebuild their lives in a new and
often unwelcome environment and posed a second challenge of survival
made even more difficult when they confronted the world depression. Yet,
as I have tried to look back on those years, the shape or negative imprint
of the earlier experience always remained present in their struggle to navi-
gate through the times of economic and social uncertainty.
The essential point of the memoir is an “encounter with the void,” in the
sense of political destruction and postdestruction survival. It is driven by
the “persistence of unanswered questions lasting from childhood,” as well
as “imaginings that have tried to satisfy them,” about our parents’ pasts,
what they endured, feared, and even repressed; and it is trailed by an irony
of how “genocide becomes reproduced on the everyday level in the form of
the victims’ silence.” We confront the namelessness of relatives we never
knew since the past was not allowed to be spoken of, and yet we recognize
that “the power to name something animates it into existence.” Above
all else, the memoir is about the lasting effects of destruction in the lives
of my parents that inadvertently became an inheritance passed on to us
(my sisters and me) through their practiced silence: “the unspeakable as
a heritage.”8 What was destroyed were memories of family relationships
of relatives we never knew or experienced and the figure of their everyday
lives in Anatolia, which I can only try to reimagine. Yet what was unspeak-
able, demanding a daily regime of muteness, raised a host of questions
that would be repetitively asked the rest of our lives but never answered.
What I have tried to do is to organize when and where these unanswered
questions appeared, which was in the various phases of everyday life my

The Unrealized Everyday 7

parents lived from village life in Anatolia, turning inside out into its un-
imaginable negative; to an everyday filled with the terror of death marches
to a desert inferno where those who survived the unscheduled daily ma-
rauding and ambushes would surely perish; and finally to the everyday
life of permanent exile in new lands for those who managed to escape the
Turkish exterminations.
When Sena died in 2017 and I attended a service for her, with my chil-
dren and grandchildren, it struck me how little I knew of her. I felt like a
stranger to even the place I had come to and wondered who was this per-
son who returned to this far-­flung suburb of Detroit, which when we were
children would have seemed as remote as China, to pay a last respect. I
had not seen much of Sena over the years, even though I had managed to
visit her with my oldest daughter and her husband a year or so earlier to
tap her memory of our parents. But Sena appeared to me as a mystery,
like our lives, perhaps even more so than Victoria, who in the intervening
years I had seen even less. The reason for this was that when I was a child
I had seen and spent more time with Victoria, who had been involuntarily
assigned to take me to the movies and watch over me. (On one occasion,
she actually saved my life.) In later years, I saw as little of Victoria as I had
of Sena. It occurred to me that the lack of contact between Sena, Victoria,
and me might have reflected the work of our unwanted legacy, perhaps
even stemming from it. Our years as a family unit were quite short, as I
recall them, though Sena continued to live with Vehanush and Ohannes
after Victoria and I left, caring for them as they aged. How the legacy of
void worked was in its capacity to forgo intimacy and even the periodic
warmth family relationships are said to engender and inculcate. Our par-
ents were cruelly torn from their own families and deprived of the lasting
effects of the quality that cements family life in affect and warmth. This, it
seemed to me, is what genocide obliterated as definitively as it did of both
of their families and a collective history. The absence of affect and warmth
became part of the heritage handed down to the three of us, where, I sus-
pect, it ended. My own children, I have noticed, were better parents than
I had been to them. But this should not be taken as a last-­moment confes-
sion or appeal to apology. We do not choose our legacies and heritages;
they choose us, and, like history, they are always the unwanted and unin-
vited presence shaping our lives, without our knowing it until it is too late
to do more than recognize this inheritance. What our parents were forced
to forfeit in return for their survival was bequeathed to us to make our way
in a land they never understood once they had seen their way to raising us.

8 Chapter One
Our lives, in this way, bore the mark of a genocide we never experienced
and rarely knew or heard about when growing up. Yet, I am convinced, the
event and its immense interruptions were always there, accompanying the
three of us, as it still is: lives formed on the basis of a void of the silence of
unanswered questions.
What I have written is a memoir of mixed forms, not a history. The
result is a recomposed account relying on memory and experience, occa-
sionally punctuated by swatches of historical narrative to place the where-
abouts of my parents. In this imagined landscape, I have tried to grasp the
lived experience of unnoticed lives eclipsed by the larger narratives and
how it has shaped us, its inheritors. It is for this reason that I have had to
resort to the form of a construction, rather than a reconstruction, which
explains my decision to engage in what must be both an act of coaxing
memory from its concealment into the light of our time and a commemo-
ration of the heroism displayed by our parents’ unaccounted and unno-
ticed lives in overcoming the immense cultural cleft and economic de-
mands of the almost impossible transition from a premodern traditional
order steeped in the reproduction of a natural economy with kin social
relationships and unimaginable political oppression to a modernized so-
ciety dedicated to capitalist production and “possessive individualism.”
I use the category of transition very loosely, since it invariably implies a
distinct linear narrative and is far from the change in environment and
everyday life-­forms my parents experienced as they moved out of Ana-
tolia and into the United States. Their “narrative” of transition was more
like a photo montage or collage composed of different moments thrown
together without suggesting any overriding causal linkage. As I now look
back upon the trajectory of their lives, I cannot help but think it was frozen
into an unrealized transition constituted of unconnected temporalized
episodes. It is for this reason that the form of this construction should re-
semble a montage, whereby episodes and experiences are strung together,
implying no single causal relationship but rather reflecting their broken
connectedness and the offer of plural interpretative possibilities. In tak-
ing this route I have departed from the familiar narrative that predict-
ably progresses on schedule to arrive at its foretold destination. But I will
want to try to maintain the tensions of unevenness between the everyday
I have imagined lived in different places by my parents and a more distant
world history that eventually encroached upon it, loosely resembling the
theme of Satyajit Ray’s wonderful film Distant Thunder (1944), a history
pre­occupied with remote large-­scale events like war and genocide, and the

The Unrealized Everyday 9

way they finally reach down to alter and lastingly change the village expe-
rience of everyday lives forever. The other alternative implied by history is
simply to discount this register as too subjective and unverifiable, messy
and irrelevant. Yet it is precisely the unverifiable family history unsteadily
caught within the orbit of convulsive world historical changes that re-
veals the inventory of unanswered questions demanding a solution to the
adequate form to tell this story. What such a compiling of what Antonio
Gramsci has identified as a necessary “inventory of traces” has produced is
a series of unconnected tableaux of unspoken scenes, where the principal
actors have remained silent.
Reflecting on the theorization of the everyday, the French literary the-
orist Maurice Blanchot observed that “the everyday escapes. This is its
definition. . . . The everyday is always unrealized in its very actualization,”
which no event, however important or significant, can ever produce. In
fact, the everyday, for him, was “difficult to discover,” initially unperceived,
“what is never seen for the first time,” and always unfinished and capable
of escaping closure. In many ways the everyday is the event’s other. If we
miss its presence, it is because “it belongs to a region where there is still
nothing to know . . . not yet information.”9 The everyday rarely produces
events — unlike history, where events are its principal staple and every-
thing happens. In the everyday there is only namelessness, anonymity. For
the poet Fernando Pessoa it is the office, the street, cafés, homes, churches
and town squares.10 We must remember that we are speaking about a pre-
modern or precapitalist society still retaining an uneven combination of
the new and old, where people lead lives remote from their conquerors
but never are permitted to forget that they had been conquered. By the
same measure, if there is a subject of the everyday, it is undoubtedly the
village as a whole that speaks. For me, it is everyone who inhabits the vil-
lage precinct. Nothing ever happens in the everyday, Henri Lefebvre once
reported, except “everything changes.”11 In the Anatolia of the Ottoman
Empire, it must be asked: For whom was nothing happening? Who are we
talking about? Interaction between Armenians and Turkish folk would be
limited, unless one was living in a large urban area. In this environment,
minorities like Armenians spoke both Armenian and Turkish and com-
munication was grounded in rumor, conveyed by the village grapevine;
everything was said and heard endlessly without ever being confirmed. In
the eyes of the Turkish authorities, the everyday of the Armenian was seen
to be safely under the jurisdiction of the priest, who led the millet system,
which supposedly was to make sure that nothing would be permitted to

10 Chapter One
happen. In this world empire, the minority communities like the Arme-
nians were, for stretches of time, self-­enclosed enclaves, centered on the
church, until confronted by unscheduled administrative intrusions de-
manding revenue and pogroms by neighboring Islamic Kurds or Circas-
sians aiming to settle land disputes by force.
Blanchot, especially, reminds us that as inhabitants or occupants of
the everyday, we have “no more access to its confines” than to any mo-
ment in history “that could be historical.”12 If this observation allows us
to loop back to the absence of eventfulness in the everyday — driven by a
sense, particularly in precapitalist societies, that such precincts have no
beginning or end, unless its inhabitants are obliterated — we know that no
event, however great, can produce the actualization of the everyday. Yet
events, as signified by a moving “distant thunder,” can gradually overtake
the precincts of everydayness. In this regard, the everyday stands apart
from history, outside its eventfulness, yet strangely institutes it without
knowing it has. By the same measure, history has been lifted to stand
above the parochial rootedness of the everyday as its noisy eventfulness
points to the spreading drama of world historical movement and meaning,
where things of importance happen and begin to spill over into everyday-
ness. Once occupying this register, history denies its relationship to the
everyday and becomes a kind of “blind spot,” which opens the pathway to
overcoming by a process of forceful elimination. In this regard, a French
observer of the Armenian genocide, Etienne Copeaux, was probably close
to the truth when he proposed that the mass murders were similar to cut-
ting off legs and limbs.13 My difference with this is that what seemed to
hold my attention is not the figure of imperial dismemberment the geno-
cide most surely carried out but rather the wish to show that the event did
not necessarily end one hundred years ago and has continued to persist as
an afterlife in every present since the inaugural moment. For me, the is-
sue was how to say something about everyday lives that no longer existed.
In this regard, this desire derives from my own failure to raise certain ques-
tions with my parents while they were still alive. The heritage I wanted to
unveil is the image of ordinary everyday life lived by Armenians until they
were uprooted through mass acts of murder and destruction. It was this
experience, not of the eventful history as such, that the diaspora has tried
to recuperate in countless places the survivors have found refuge. This
prior Anatolian everyday life has remained somewhat invisible down to
the present, apart from its anecdotal existence recounted in Armenian
households of the diaspora. In most cases, it was crowded out of the his-

The Unrealized Everyday 11

torical accounts that concentrated on the larger narrative of World War I,
Turkey’s involvement in it, and the collapsing fortunes of a dysfunctional
empire. In this world historical narrative of eventfulness, there was no
room for any consideration of the everydayness lived by countless Arme-
nians or indeed other oppressed minorities of the empire. There was no
fund of ethnographic reports, and few contemporary descriptions of the
lives led in Anatolia. There was little subsequent attempt to rescue this
everyday life that had virtually disappeared, and most intellectual energy
was, and still is, poured into providing historical evidence of Turkey’s di-
rect initiative and involvement in the massacre as a product of the circum-
stances of World War I.
Not too many years ago, on a trip to Istanbul, I met and spoke with a
number of Turkish anthropologists who asked where I came from, as if
I were the man who fell to Earth. What they wanted to know was how
my parents managed to escape and what their lives were like. I had the
sense that none seemed to have much interest or ethnographic knowl-
edge of Anatolia’s murdered minorities: the Armenians, Greeks, Assyro-­
Chaldeans. At the time, I felt that it was almost as if they were persuaded
that Armenians were an invention of diasporas, that the migration ex-
perience conferred upon them their identity, which originated elsewhere
but not in Anatolia. I may have been too quick in refusing to take a trip to
explore the possibility that documents related to my father’s family still
existed in Harput, but I still should have taken the offer to see the region
in which he lived his early life.
In the end, finding a way to construct this cloaked everyday life, whose
pale and often abstracted contour appeared in diaspora life, left little
choice other than to reimagine it. Through the exercise of an imaginary
recomposing of the memory of our parents’ lives, not by means of em-
pathic entry presuming the possibility of standing in one’s place, or shoes,
as hermeneutics believed conceivable, I thought it might be feasible to con-
struct and memorialize at the same time. It is probable that this pathway
of imagined recomposing is also accessible through an act of Socratic an-
amnesis, the rediscovery of a knowledge of the past that is within us. This
would entail a form of self-­excavation, digging out what we might know
or has been embedded there all the time, without actually knowing it. The
Dutch psychoanalyst and historian Eelco Runia suggests a similar per-
spective for performing a personal archaeological procedure when he ad-
vises digging into the present for the presence of the past, which coexists
but remains unseen like Poe’s “purloined letter,” or hidden, perhaps closer

12 Chapter One
to the psychoanalytic model than the Socratic method.14 But this book’s
epigraph from the poet Osip Mandelstam suggests memory is about the
slightest hint of recognition and growth.
The difficulty of a form of life writing that attempts to account for how
my parents managed to evade a genocide and make their way to a new
land was especially made evident even before I decided to undertake this
project. I knew there simply was not enough material to work with, given
the absence of the most basic facts they may have made known to us in
daily life as we were growing up. But there were other reasons for my re-
luctance. It was not a subject I had ever thought about researching and
writing on. As a historian, I had made a prior decision to specialize in an-
other region of history. I had no ambition to try writing another history of
the collapsing Ottoman Empire and the genocide. Apart from lacking the
necessary qualifications such an undertaking requires, I was convinced
that such histories reveal very little about the lives of the victims, apart
from discounting them. Their existence was already outside the narrative
histories and their deaths erased as instances of collateral damage result-
ing from World War I.
In terms of genres, I had never been an enthusiastic reader of biography,
which I always saw as a fictional form that moved according to the coor-
dinates of an orderly linear trajectory, as if anybody’s life were organized
so conveniently.15 How could precapitalist Anatolian peasants be grasped
within a culturally specific and temporally bound framework steeped in
the formation of a specific subjectivity? Worse still, biography was usually
a favored form among historians, especially, to get at the microscopic di-
mension of the larger history. Most biographies invariably try to address
a larger subject or event or temporal referent as if the individual life will,
in some metonymically magical way rarely explained, illuminate it. The
usual result is to displace the very event the biography supposedly illus-
trates. Acts of biographical enshrinement are often misrecognized as pre-
scient illuminations. The perspective that seeks in a biography the key to
the larger contours of historical events and currents attempts to account
for the relationship between the world historical level of eventfulness and
a missing mundane everyday, marked by repetitive routine events, with-
out actually articulating the connection. While Pierre Bourdieu dismissed
biography as ideologizing a life, Jean-­Paul Sartre discounted the genre as
a genetic fallacy, but this was before he wrote his interminable account of
Gustave Flaubert.16
Hence, all that seemed reasonably promising was an effort to record

The Unrealized Everyday 13

those lived aspects of our parents’ lives that we (my sisters and me) were
still able to recall, long after the catastrophic event brought them eventu-
ally to the U.S., carrying unwanted memories and experiences they had
decided not to share with their children. Such an approach would require
moving backward from I what had experienced and seen, without fully un-
derstanding, to imagine the negative imprint of a memory of their earlier
life and experience — its presence in the present time. Under such circum-
stances, it was necessary for me to assume the fictive figure of an uninvited
intruder in their thoughts and try to probe and pry them loose from their
silent confinement, or imagine what they might have been, where they had
been deposited for so long. This tactic comes close to Antonio Gramsci’s
observation that sediments and traces of a historical process are deposited
in each individual, without leaving a fixed inventory. Such an approach,
lacking an account of the stock, would have to look for the fragmentary
signs in the thick displacements employed to conceal tracks to locate
where some residue might have been left. The things remembered relate
to our parents’ survival in the U.S. (not the genocide), a struggle involving
my sisters and me that represented, in its own way, perhaps as great a chal-
lenge to staying alive as what they faced in the midst of massacre. It seems
likely to assume that the earlier experience and fears the genocide engen-
dered were always close to them in the new environment, as if it had be-
come a form of second nature now serving a new function. In other words,
the vague figure of the genocide was always present in and shadowing the
new struggle to make a secure life in the U.S., not necessarily the burden
of collective guilt for having been among the survivors. It never seemed
to any of us that either our mother or our father was weighted down with
unrelieved guilt, even though my father’s loss of an entire extended family
and home were inestimable. And, in reality, I never knew what he actually
felt, what memories he cherished of his lost family and vigilantly watched
over and how he managed to negotiate or navigate through depths of de-
spair to continue living. I never asked these questions, or even knew how
to ask them, much less envision how they might be answered. But these
unasked and unanswered questions would provide the negative print of
the silence both parents had embraced. Just as we were never persuaded
that our parents internalized some form of collective trauma that inhib-
ited them from speaking of the horror the rest of their lives, even though it
might have been the case for individuals who had been in positions to pro-
vide direct testimony — people such as the priest Grigoris Balakian, who
nonetheless recorded what he saw on his death march. Balakian himself

14 Chapter One
did not appear to be afflicted by trauma-­induced paralysis but rather was
driven by the necessity of staying alive, as if to provide later witness and
testimony to the existence of what he knew would be denied again and
again throughout the decades following the event. But it is undeniably true
that the relationship of expressions of silence and a willingness to speak of
trauma are not always clear-­cut. Silence need not simply signify the pres-
ence of trauma, and the speech of a witness like Grigoris Balakian need not
denote the absence of trauma. The gravity of our parents finding their way
in American life would have taxed their collective energies and subsumed
whatever guilt for surviving they may have harbored, and it assisted them
to overcome whatever despair they must have experienced and endured.
What they experienced separately when young seemed to have no place in
a later life in an entirely different environment led together with children.
While the memoir’s chapters seek to return and recompose experi-
ences and memories of my parents at certain moments, in the manner of
a photomontage without presuming causal relations, chapter 4, “History’s
Interruption: Dispossession and Genocide,” is an attempt to show the di-
rect relationship between massive theft and murder, what Karl Marx vari-
ously called “so-­called primitive accumulation” or “original accumulation”
(ursprüngliche Akkumulation) of capital. For Marx, primitive or original
accumulation referred not to the moment of the movement of the actual
process of the accumulation of capital as such, with the existence in place
of the whole system of capitalist production, but rather “an accumulation
which is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point
of departure.” The duration of such an accumulating process did not lead
to the transition of a completed capitalism, as once believed by an older
Marxism; instead, this process inaugurated the necessary presuppositions
and conditions for the installation of a capitalist production program dedi-
cated to the accumulation of surplus value. Marx saw such a time filled
with “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, mass rape, in short, force
play(ing) the greatest part.” Not a blissful time but “from the beginning .
. . the sole means of enrichment, the methods of primitive accumulation
are anything but idyllic.”17 Thus, in Marx, primitive accumulation made
visible the history of violence, bloodshed, and massive displacement of
the population from its means of subsistence that ultimately accounted
for capital’s appearance. In Grundrisse, he referred to this event as the
moment of separation and divorce of the producer from the means of pro-
duction and subsistence. But primitive or original accumulation is not a
one-­time big-­bang event but rather a process that is repetitive, tempo-

The Unrealized Everyday 15

rally mixed in its different directions, and continuing in diverse times and
places down to our own present. In fact, it is because “primitive accumula-
tion” will occur repeatedly that there can be no singular transition as a lin-
ear trajectory leading directly to the outcome of a developed capitalism. In
this way, it conforms only to a temporal moment, instead of a designated
stage in the putative “transition” to capitalism. Transition, according to
one historian, permits us to envision a “prolonged process of change” in
societies in which capital accumulation coexists with received economic
practices from prior modes of production and “political formations not
yet . . . capitalist.”18 We are rightly warned that to see transition as a stage
leading directly to capitalism assumes that the social process moves along
a linear developmental path. Moreover, such a perspective encourages his-
torians to emphasize socioeconomic forces that structured the develop-
ment of capital but overlooks the actual consequences of the social process
and what happens to the reproduction of society. In our case, this refers
to the complete destruction of Armenian everyday life in Anatolia. What
distinguishes the implementation of a genocidal impulse serving the inter-
ests of large-­scale expropriation of wealth from others and theft facilitated
by mass murder is the process that aims to eradicate the everyday lived by
those targeted for elimination. I shall return to this theme of genocide and
its relationship to its fateful social process and its transition to mass death.

16 Chapter One
 t wo . Unnoti c ed Li v e s /Un a n swe re d Q ue stions

My father found job security only with the outset of World War II, which
brought an end to the economic depression of the thirties. Growing up
in such a “landscape,” as the British historian Carolyn Steedman has de-
scribed the environment of her youth,1 we learned early that in an allegedly
“classless” America, one of the great destructive myths of American social
life, class was everywhere and everything — in the schools, everyday social
encounters, the workforce, consumption, and so on — enforcing its dis-
tances and exclusions. Ethnicity was, as I look back at the communities it
authorized, a necessity and the best defense against those class-­driven dis-
tances and exclusions. What is interesting about class in the United States
is not that it was allegedly absent but rather the way it was disavowed by
those who represented its upper orders. Ethnicity then, and apparently
even now, was used to masquerade class and displace its force through
appeals of assmilationism, even though the promise of assimilation could
fortify the very structure of ethnicity it hoped to remove.. It did so by an
act of distancing those who were identified or marked as belonging to a
different minority ethnic group. But there are ethnicities and ethnicities.
In the United States, the size of the community and its capacity to gener-
ate wealth mattered and constituted assistance to successful assimilation.
Size also counted for political reasons; the larger ethnic groups, like the
Irish and Italians, would represent important constituencies especially in
urban areas, where their appeals could be heard. Armenians in the United
States were and continue to be a numerically small group, the largest wave
coming in the wake of the Turkish massacres at the time of World War
I and after World War II when Armenian “displaced people” throughout
Europe found their way here, usually to California. California — especially
Fresno and communities in the Central Valley, and Los Angeles — was al-
ready home to a sizeable Armenian American population, and seemed to
be a magnet drawing new immigrants. By this time, in the years immedi-
ately after World War II, there were ethnically based social service agen-
cies in place to assist the new wave from abroad. And, according to my fa-
ther, weather played a major role in attracting this generation of Armenian
migrants to the West Coast.
As an ethnic group, the earlier wave of Armenian migrants invari-
ably carried their minority status in the Ottoman Empire to the shores
of American democracy, wearing the emblem of the unwanted, which
thus permitted the continuation of how they had been considered for so
long. Yet it is difficult to know whether the life of the diaspora created
an Armenian identity or simply reinforced it more intensely from their
history in Anatolia under Ottoman domination and the effects of geno-
cide. Members of the earlier diaspora were usually on their own, with-
out the assistance of social service agencies and momentarily described
as the “starving Armenians,” an abstract cliché and a genuine insensitive
and thoughtless identification of the tragic plight of a people’s contempo-
rary fate used by American parents to elicit sympathy for their genocidal
plight by trying to persuade their children to finish eating the food on their
plate. Whether or not the cliché succeeded in its new assignment to in-
duce American children to clean off their plates, it branded the Armenian
into a figure of permanent helplessness and negativity. Nobody, in effect,
knew who Armenians were, unless one happened to be a Greek, a Syrian,
or an Assyrian. I always encountered people, as I still do, who would feel
obliged to comment on my name, how “unusual” it seemed, and ask where
“it comes from.” When I finally identified its ethnic origin, the response
usually faded into the phrase an interesting name or some such concluding
banality. Growing up as a second-­generation offspring of migrant parents,
I soon learned that American racism was not reducible to the binary of
black and white (the binary in American life has always seemed a favorite
and convenient way of categorizing things and may have been an unac-
knowledged inheritance from slavery) but to the plurality of gradations of
color and unpronounceable names that produce a more complex configu-
ration of racial discrimination, which makes the generally accepted domi-
nant racial duality look like a practically expedient but dangerous simpli-
fication. Before the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, groups from the

18 Chapter Two
Middle East, like Armenians, were all classified under the general category
of Orientals along with ethnicities farther east. In national surveys carried
out in the 1920s and after, designed to gauge national characteristics and
how Americans felt about living among diverse ethnic groups, Armenians,
like others from the same regions, were identified with Turks, who were
classified low on most scales and seen as cruel, treacherous, sensual, igno-
rant, physically dirty, and so forth. These surveys sought to show a rela-
tionship between stereotypes and the formation of public opinion. Stereo-
typical national traits appeared as unsteady and unstable opinions subject
to the whims of change. According to Helen McCready Kearney’s valuable
study of American images of the Middle East, Armenians in the nineteenth
century were considered “benighted,” “avaricious, “cunning,” and usually
not much different from Turks. But the “temporary phenomenon” of Chris-
tians being massacred brought a change in attitudes: they became “intel-
ligent,” “industrious,” “prudent,” and “temperate,” now seen in the light of
empathy for coreligionists. Once the genocide had ended and passed into
collective forgetfulness, the positive images disappeared, leaving only the
plaint of the “starving Armenians” as an inducement to American children
to clean off their dinner plates.2 I remember hearing reverberations of this
plea a decade later. The plight of the “starving Armenians” was resituated
in Depression Detroit, and perhaps elsewhere, as a metaphorical admoni-
tion reminding people of the necessity to waste nothing, resulting in the
disappearance of the figure of the Armenian that had inspired it.
But these were not lessons children easily learned, as they began to mix
with others who, as Steedman writes, had more of the things we would have
liked to have had, social relations that disclosed to us what we lacked, and
the image of a future that belonged to others by right of a historic inheri-
tance. It should be said that linking ethnicity to class in this way actually
worked to overdetermine both social and political exclusions and distances
lived by most immigrants. If America, as preached by earlier generations
of sociologists, economists, and historians, had no class, it was the excess
of ethnicities and the racial marking that displaced the category to keep
people in their place through enforced racial distance. Social science in the
time of the Great Depression sought to counter the possibility of conflict
by resorting to a conceptualization of an exceptionalist social formation,
free from class divisions, now replaced by diverse ethnicities constituting a
plural and solidary unity of difference. The desired absence of class, espe-
cially, meant that society was supposedly equipped with a safety valve that
would re-­equilibrate the social system when confronted by the instance

Unnoticed Lives/Unanswered Questions 19

disorder. From the standpoint of political leadership, ethnicity had the ad-
vantage over class inasmuch as its own sense of exclusion and inclusions
kept groups separated and apart, whereas class had the propensity to bring
people of different ethnic groups together into a constituency of solidarity,
capable of unifying support for demands based on shared interests that, if
not met, could lead to mobilized conflict. Class, rather than ethnicity, was
particularly important to ethnic groups, like Armenians, who were numeri-
cally small and had no effective lever as a political constituency.
What was even worse than the unfulfilled desire to have the materiality
of those who appeared far better off than us was the awful sense that they
possessed something we would never have. Most of my male contempo-
raries from migrant families were destined for factory work in Detroit’s
many auto factories reproducing the lives of our first-­generation immi-
grant fathers, while females had open to them the even narrower world of
stenographic jobs and early marriage and homekeeping.
I am still not sure why our parental silence did not induce more curios-
ity in us; part of it may have derived from a continuing uncertainty con-
cerning who we were, which referred to knowing we had been born and
lived in the U.S., but the nature of our lives and its principal relationships
came from the community of the diaspora. There is no question that this
sense of uncertainty was reinforced by the identification of our birthplace
and that this life, in all its immediacy, seemed to take precedence over any
inquiry as to where our parents came from and what they were forced to
endure. In not trying to break the wall of silence separating us, we were, in-
advertently, complicit in their conspiracy and the confused conviction that
all our lives began in the U.S. I think it is as if their lives started with ours;
nothing else preexisted it. Our mother would have probably gone along
with this origin story, as an enthusiastic modernizer before her time. It is
not clear that this is a more familiar story about American immigrant life
than the “inspiring” patriotic tales of what a great melting pot this place
is, one that supposedly eliminated class and dissolved different identities
to forge a new alloyed and unified social solidarity in the foundries and
factories of industrialism that welcomed the new army of migrant work-
ers. In fact, this unfortunately misguided but persisting mythic metaphor
was finally reset in its proper place by Theodor Adorno in the 1940s when
he acutely observed that “the melting pot was introduced by industrial
capitalism. The thought of being cast into it conjures up martyrdom, not
democracy.”3 I was only able to scratch together vague vignettes of the
lives they had led before coming to the U.S., pieced together out of ran-

20 Chapter Two
dom shards of conversations I heard over time. But because they withheld
so much about their lives, my account was destined to remain unresolv-
able, unfinished, a narrative without an expected plausible end or even a
beginning.
Our only relatives were a few distant cousins on my father’s side, and we
had no archival album of sepia-­toned photographs of members of either
our mother’s or father’s families in Anatolia. Yet what few photographs we
had impressed upon me the idea that sepia with the proper shade of color-
ing and opacity was the best way to describe the tint of those years. A few
photos exist of our parents when younger, one of my father with his second
cousin Avedis (see photo gallery) that must have been taken in Anatolia
by the look of their age and the way they were dressed, the one holding
the hand of the other; years later in Detroit this close relationship seemed
more remote when we visited with Avedis and his family. There is another
photograph of my oldest sister, Sena, as an infant, and a few of my father
posing with her at that age. There was no fund of knick-­knack remainders
from the “old country,” the kind of tchotchkes Svetlana Boym lovingly de-
scribes in her family’s cramped apartment in Soviet Russia,4 not even the
expected Oriental rug hanging on the wall indexing a historical moment
of desperate flight. The flight meant traveling light. They came with noth-
ing and not surprisingly left with little. I glimpsed flashes of their unspeak-
able experience from fragments of stories overheard among their adult
friends but rarely, if ever, directly from them. My father, Ohannes, was
more loquacious, a born storyteller, than my mother, who apparently had
no stories to tell or that she felt worth repeating. She appeared more de-
liberately reflective, taciturn, and reluctant to express her own witness to
the prospect of unimaginable desert death marches designed to eliminate
the Armenian population. She would have been younger than Ohannes
at that time, and this may have been one of the conditions of her silence.
But in Marash, where she was from, she would have known about the
marches, as the deportees filed through the streets of the town to their
final destination, and she may have even caught glimpses of them being
pushed by indifferent but barking Turkish armed guards. Despite the low-­
level technology involved in resettling large numbers of a population in
an environmental inferno where nothing grew, the resulting mass deaths
by starvation and dehydration, and murder and widespread rape along the
route, reflected a deliberately planned and truly cruel form of humiliation
that made the actual killing fields look almost benign. I shall say more of
the Turkish decision leading to not only mass murder but also the appar-

Unnoticed Lives/Unanswered Questions 21

ent enjoyment and rewards it offered in the need to humiliate that accom-
panied it. The deportation order was actually conceived as an instrument
that provided the tactical opportunity to pursue murder, rape, mutilation,
and looting along the way.
My mother, Vehanush, was a student enrolled in a German missionary
school and orphanage in Marash, a city that was only one of the depor-
tation routes to Der Zor and desert death. She acquired the status of or-
phan because she had been given up by her mother in order to receive an
education and some guarantee of safety, as her brother was given up to a
Jesuit school. The stories my father told, as I now recall them, related to
what he remembered of his early years before the inauguration of the ma-
jor massacres of 1915, growing up in southeastern Anatolia and village life
not far from the contemporary city of Harput. At one level he portrayed
an agricultural village like others throughout Anatolia, where everybody
knew each other or was related to each, and the principal means of travel
and transport was the mule. In fact, it was a world that measured space
and time according to the “mule’s way.” At another level he knew that this
rural scene had already been raked over by earlier incidents in the 1890s
engineered by the regime of Sultan Abdülhamid II. Unlike later historians,
my father had no trouble linking these incidents to a continuing chain of
similar episodes culminating in the systematic murders of 1915, contrary
to “scholarly” opinion that privileged the primary causal relationship of
Turkey’s involvement in World War I as providing the occasion for geno-
cidal eruption. My mother had no stories of her childhood that identified
some kind of village life. In fact, it was hard to imagine she had a childhood
until she entered the missionary school; it is even harder to imagine what
constituted this preschool time of her life. Her life began with entry into
the mission school and even this environment provided few retrospective
glimpses she would share with us. Her later life in the U.S. repeated the
same pattern of her earlier disidentification from Anatolian village life.
It struck me that the experience of our parents’ survival of the genocide
might provide some kind of guide for enduring in the new environment
by remaining a powerful but shadowed presence for both that never left
them, despite their habitual reluctance to talk about it in front of us or to
raise it in such ways as to induce in us further questions. What these two
moments shared, in spite of their spatial and even temporal remoteness,
was capital’s force: its relentless elimination of lived cultures of reference
and brutal destabilization of whole populations. It is not at all evident that
our parents would have seen the relationship between the two episodes

22 Chapter Two
in this way. But I know they would have grasped the family resemblances
between the two sequences, inasmuch as they would have recognized the
similar challenge presented to their capacity for survival and how the ex-
perience of the genocide might have prepared them as a prefiguration for
their new ordeal.
If the Turkish massacres of the Armenians instantiated the moment
when people were robbed of their means of subsistence, which ultimately
would explode in a frenzied “slaughter of the innocents,” diaspora and
migrant life in the United States was no more stable or secure for those
who, for one reason or another, had fled their natal homes and found mo-
mentary refuge in an alien land that bore no resemblance to what they
had been forced to leave. The question was how to account for the lives
of my parents before they migrated to the U.S. to join the unaccounted. I
would have liked to know if they saw what was coming on the horizon, if
they sensed it, like a distant storm, whose tuned announcement was still
barely audible. It was also related to the silence we experienced, about us
and unanswerable. My father would have been old enough to make such
a judgment or hear it from his elders. I believe he was politicized early in
the politics of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (arf), which stayed
with him until he died, but its politics had been replaced by the sociality
it subsequently was still capable of offering in the new environment. How
and under what circumstances he was recruited into its fold he never di-
vulged. My mother was probably too young, but even in the time spent in
the missionary school before 1915, she would have been filled with appre-
hension fueled by rumor and hearsay. Moreover, it is difficult to believe
that living in such a society, as a conquered and oppressed minority sen-
sitized to their difference from a dominant population, had not involun-
tarily socialized people at the earliest age to the certainty of unscheduled
depredations and death. When I was older I felt that that this portion of
their lives had simply vanished, enclosed in some forgotten memory bank
they refused to release and that would have to be imagined from what I
knew of their lives in the U.S.
What seemed important was trying to grasp an everyday for which no
real or reliable record existed. It might be asked for whom such an absent
everyday is to be grasped. My initial answer would have been for my sis-
ters and myself; I would not have determined this when I was child since
it would not have meant anything to me and I would not have been able to
imagine it. But as I grew older and became more aware or conscious that
their early lives were a mystery to me, I wanted to solve or at least fill in

Unnoticed Lives/Unanswered Questions 23

those blank years with their lived history. As time passed, it came to me
that if what I discovered about the relationship of everyday life and geno-
cide and what Turkey gained from it was useful to others, so much the
better. My initial purpose was to look for traces or marks in the stories my
father told, for some testimony of the experience and possibility of entry
into it. Vehanush was more disciplined, guarded, it seemed to me, to make
sure she would not involuntarily reveal anything about what she might
have seen and experienced in those years. Ohannes probably had more to
say from what he saw and lost; Vehanush had to live with the memory of
a child who whose mother had abandoned her and would not return. But
my primary concern was to provide our parents with some sort of living
history before they came to the United States. Why did that strike me as
important? Was it because I believed that their Anatolian past would, in
some way, explain their lives more fully? What concerned me most was
the question that if they shared the same kind of everyday life of Arme-
nians in Anatolia, what allowed them separately to get out? How did they
avoid perishing in the killing fields or forced deportation marches to the
Syrian Desert? Diversity among victims of genocide would reflect only an
expression of the narcissism of small differences. In fact, I thought that
one of the major problems hindering our understanding of the genocide
is the way it has been separated or deliberately bracketed from the horrors
of everyday life lived by those who were caught in the programs’ deadly
annihilating machine. What I mean by this is that the genocide signified
a world historical event inaugurated by the Ottoman state precisely at the
moment it entered World War I as an ally of the Central Powers. It was
thus the event of the war itself that conferred upon it historical status,
whereas the lived everyday, the actual staging ground of the genocidal
event and the scene of its killing fields, where it was played out through-
out Armenian villages in Anatolia, was seen merely as a reflection of the
war’s terrible destructive power — as a secondary effect or even collateral
damage. Its scale and seeming suddenness would have been unimaginable
to most at the time and certainly incomprehensible but never forgettable.
It seems that it is enough to find a conceptual term like genocide to gen-
erally cover the event of mass murder; however, this does not account for
the calamitous destruction inflicted on the everyday lives of its victims
apart from providing quantitative representation of the numbers killed
and nothing more. Equally important is the incalculable problem of try-
ing to imagine how the unnoticed survivors were able to pick up their lives

24 Chapter Two
and reconstruct the semblance of some everyday life in distant and alien
environments.
What has thus prevailed and even persisted is the narrative of an other’s
history, which Armenians had been trying to get out of, to once more en-
case them within its inescapable determining logic. In this way, the every-
day was only the insubstantial shadow of history, the temporary index of
a negative imprint, sometimes elongated, at other times truncated, often
even shapeless, but never distinct or disconnected from history, however
removed it appeared, always poised at a point of disappearing yet hav-
ing an autonomous presence. The separation clearly entailed a division
between history (an event that happened, presumably based on facts ca-
pable of verification and measurement, that is, dating or chronology, and
grounded in the “authority” of documents), and the everyday (as the do-
main of subjective experience and memory, neither reliably datable nor
empirically certifiable, located in history’s shadows). Yet the repository of
affect and emotion was absent in historical narratives. This vast, shape-
less shadowland, nevertheless, was the scene that produced the oversized
storehouse of unanswerable questions for those who managed to survive
the destruction of their everyday, which, like the scattered ruins of Ani,
would remain a continuing mystery dedicated to disturbing successive
generations, never able, like the randomly strewn and scattered rocks of
the great medieval city, to reconstitute the wholeness that had been shat-
tered. By contrast, historical narratives bring to light “objectively” and
distinctively verifiable components of a story line usually illustrating the
figure of the nation. There is no mystery here nor place for the unanswer-
able. By bringing to the surface measures relating to events, such as their
dating and further forms of verifying their existence in time, the form of
the narrative has already shaped and prefigured what will be included to
constitute a national experience and what will be excluded. Left out are
the remainders, the messier experiences and memories of individual lives,
the repetition of ordinary lives of the nameless, which remain faded reflec-
tions clinging for identification to the national experience, like the form
of their everydayness, which is presumed to be only an extension of the
nation-­form, the result of a trickle-­down effect. Yet national history in this
regard is really the site of national ideology principally because its primary
object of narrative begins and ends with the nation-­form. What seeps into
the everyday to contain it is its ideology. For the Armenians of Anatolia,
there was no national history, as such, only the more remote episodes that

Unnoticed Lives/Unanswered Questions 25

momentarily culminated in the achievement of Ani and the long years of
shaded visibility in empire’s history.
The philosopher Paul Ricoeur once asked whether history actually was
the remedy to the subjective and experiential excesses of memory or its
poison.5 What he seemed concerned with was the separation of the two
forms of retention and the order of their relationship. If history was a rem-
edy, it could act as a necessary supplement, taming by mediating memory’s
experiential self-­indulgence; if it was its poison, it would bring an end to its
claims to rescue the past. But what Ricoeur failed to consider perhaps is
that a little poison might be the cure. Ricoeur recognized that history, as
a domain of knowledge, had, since Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, freed
itself from memory, not by rejecting it out of hand but by putting itself at
a distance from it. He knew that any attempt to short-­circuit the relation-
ship and forcibly bring them together could produce serious consequences
for history by contaminating its own vocation committed to securing a
verifiable knowledge and quantifying commensurables.6 But the threat of
such contamination of history and historiography by the spectacle of un-
wanted incommensurables and the insistence of memory lay not so much
in its capacity to compel history in its aptitude to privilege the profoundly
subjective, by making selections that often disregarded the “chronologi-
cal scansions,” but in its indifference to the reconstructions of a group and
to identifying the global rationalizations that might ultimately explain an
event or occurrence.7 The real problem implied but not stated by Ricoeur
is precisely the appearance of those unscheduled moments when an oc-
currence exceeds historical expectation and spills over, when history and
memory are involuntarily thrown together and their differences blurred
and diminished. The Turkish genocide, in spite of its earlier preparation,
was such an event that swept away so many hundreds of thousands of
lives and left only the rubble, residues, and ruins of a once lived everyday,
bringing to the surface a long and lamentable history inaugurated by the
disappearance of Ani. The genocide’s fragmented afterlife conveyed by
the testimonies of witnesses has consistently shown how this involuntary
encounter of history and memory, and the violent collision of history and
the everyday produced unanswered questions in the lives of surviving vic-
tims but also prompted their search for new ways of testimony to assert
the truth of what they were able to recall and what they refused to remem-
ber. It is in such circumstances that we are forced to rely on the scraps of
memory in our search to verify the unanswerable.

26 Chapter Two
 Ricoeur, perhaps inadvertently, also hinted at the existence of two dif-
ferent modes of cognition in history’s reliance on narrative and the every-
day as the domain of memory and experience. He did not go further than
suggesting the possible toxic dangers of subjective experiences awaiting
the historical reconstruction and the need for watchfulness of its exces-
sive demands. But by considering the relationship between history and
memory, he raised the question of how they might be put together in a way
they are both permitted to speak their separate truths without endanger-
ing each other’s respective vocational claims. I have always felt that social
history was an attempt to bring historical narrative together with the sin-
gularity and specificity of everyday memory and experience. It tried to join
together the two cognitive modalities only by subordinating and assimi-
lating the subjective residues of everydayness to social history’s own form
of narrative reconstruction and privileging of data and chronology over
experience. For our purposes, it is necessary to find a way to give both cog-
nitive forms equal time and voice. In fact, it is important to consider them
in relationship to each other because they embodied different paces and
forms of time and its passage rather than constitute the components of a
full story. I have found that the form that best embodies this capacity is the
photomontage or collage, the juxtaposing of narrative to memory without
implying a singularly linear causal chain in order to show how they may
or not leak into each other.8 Broken lives hinted at by partial memories
cannot be made whole by resituating them in the context of a coherent
history. But the collage captures more modestly fractured memory traces
and makes no effort to connect them to a structuring story line. They ex-
ist along side each other.
What the storytelling accounts reveal is an intimate relationship be-
tween memory formation based on recalling momentary experiences and
their immediate contexts in the everyday. But it should be qualified that
referring to memory’s capability does not mean that everything will be re-
membered. Selection will always prevail and some things will always re-
main unsaid. The appeal to stories implies a separation of the lived present
at the level of the everyday from a nation’s (empire’s) own repetitious at-
tempt to reorder the present according to the narrative templates of the na-
tional or imperial past’s history or what it has been conceived to be. In this
regard, the separation shows how the everyday meets the task of construct-
ing a different political time that combines the past, through the memory
and experience of what is near at hand, with the new demands of the pres-

Unnoticed Lives/Unanswered Questions 27

ent, which enables the writing of its own (the everyday), different kind of
history. The way into everydayness and out of the historical as we have
come to understand it was to enter the domain of experience and memory,
a terrain of different forms of patterning, as the basis of putting together
some kind of record. Such an accounting would increasingly become an
imagined figuration, in my parents’ case, even hopefully a form of personal
commemoration, since the experience and memories I needed to employ
were absent and unavailable. Growing up in an Armenian household with
two parents who had escaped genocide and found refuge in the United
States gave me no privileged perspective or supply of memories on which I
could draw. Even the organization of a ghetto-­like existence of migrants of
a diasporic flight proved to be fictional representations of village life left be-
hind, another kind of imagined community, the imitations of a lost life now
strained to be remembered, and a homogenized averaging of the immea-
surable heterogeneity of regions and locales comprised by the survivors. I
have often felt that the imaging of diaspora life was based more on gener-
alized attempts to reconstruct prior village life as represented in memory.
In any event, historical narratives that record and seek to explain the
genocide have not been very helpful, apart from providing frameworks of
chronology that allow tracking the movements of my parents. Involun-
tary slippage into the historical mode has been of little use in trying to
get at the experiences of people at the level of their everyday encounters,
when they have left little information to even get a glimpse of this life
or no testimony at all. For people who have been drawn into the vortex
of genocidal events, both those who have been murdered and those who
have managed to escape, I have the sense that the event, as such, no lon-
ger exists. For the murdered dead, it is nonexistent, but for the living sur-
vivors it represents either something invisible or a jumble of fragmented
and chaotic memories. With personal experiences of such magnitude and
disorder, only the singularizing of its immediate experience offers a viable
glance. We must remember that the loss experienced was total. The Ar-
menians and other minorities targeted for expulsion and mass murder lost
everything — home, churches, fields, relatives, friends, and environments
in which they had been embedded for centuries — while the Turks, who
complained that the dissolution of empire resulted in a loss of territory,
faced losing local craftsmen, shopkeepers, and possibly friends. It should
be noted that Grigoris Balakian asserts, in his record of what he had seen
and heard in the time he marched with one of the deportation columns to
the Syrian Desert, that “within Turkish society the artisans were mainly

28 Chapter Two
Christians. The Turks and other Islamic peoples, generally speaking, were
peasants, soldiers, clergymen, or government employees. Sometimes they
were grocers, vegetable vendors, halvah sellers [helvaji], or chickpea sell-
ers, but 90 percent of the Turkish people were engaged in farming, un-
der primitive and strenuous conditions.”9 In Adana alone, Armenian ar-
tisans retained by the Turkish military authorities functioned as tailors,
shoemakers, blacksmiths, coach makers, carpenters, ironsmiths, weavers,
saddle makers, tinsmiths, and workers in factories that produced military
necessities. Balakian was convinced that the “entire commercial life of
Turkey’s interior provinces was in the hands of the Armenians, and with
the Greeks they shared in the foreign trade of the harbors.”10 Whatever the
case, what seems certain is that Armenians, in rural Anatolia, constituted
both the classes of agricultural laborers and petty bourgeois artisans and
other skilled tradesmen as well as specialized professions. It is clear that in
addition to ethnic and religious divisions between Armenians and Turks,
there was a significant class difference that usually is overlooked in his-
torical accounts preoccupied with ethnic and religious differences. At the
same time, this does not ignore the deep divisions within the Armenian
communities in cities like Istanbul and the countryside. According to the
historian Gerard J. Libaridian, newly formed Armenian political parties
reinforced sensitivity toward class divisions, especially between rich and
poor, urban and peasant. Before that time, conflict among Armenians of-
ten came down between those in the provinces who were content to live
under arrangements provided by the millet system and those who had
larger aspirations of nationhood rooted in urban centers and “controlled
the millet institutions.”11
During moments when the state inflicted murderous pogroms on Chris-
tians, the acts were usually justified as “retribution for Christian monopo-
lies in the Turkish economy, particularly domestic and foreign commerce,
retail trade, and shipping.” For this reason the “Christians were charac-
terized as ferocious leeches that were sucking the blood of the poor Turk-
ish people, getting rich at their expense.”12 This kind of information was
later grossly exaggerated in gossip and rumor, whereby the Unionists (the
Young Turks) employed countrywide communication through the “grape-
vine,” circulating it throughout the interior provinces as a means of mobi-
lizing Turkish peasants into complicit murderous mobs against Armenian
and other Christian peasants to make of the genocide a mass movement.
In the stories I remember, I do not believe my father ever mentioned Turk-
ish friends or even Turkish and Kurdish artisans even though narratives

Unnoticed Lives/Unanswered Questions 29

centered on Istanbul usually dramatized a cosmopolitan environment
where Armenian bourgeoisie mingled with Turks and Europeans. This is
the world of Gabriel Bagradian, Franz Werfel’s protagonist portrayed early
in the novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which he must eventually leave
for the countryside of his childhood home and the defense of the villages
of Musa Dagh. This division between urban cosmopolite and rural peas-
antry probably derived from the administrative separation established by
the millet system, which worked to differentiate and segregate minority
populations from Muslims. It was also encouraged by the large-­scale pop-
ulation resettlements initiated by Abdülhamid II of Kurds and Circassians,
especially, into agricultural regions long and densely occupied by Arme-
nians, driven by the intention to privilege these Muslim ethnic groups as
a way of forcing Armenians to migrate to the larger cities.13 These poli-
cies would lead to interethnic conflict and to the subsequent pogroms of
the 1890s instigated by Abdülhamid II. But it is evident that my father saw
what Balakian later reported. His associations were with other Armenians
and principally with relatives, since he came from a large family and by
implication a larger extended group. But the stories do not add up to a co-
herent picture of life in the years before the planned genocide. The Turkish
loss amounted to an unacknowledged manifestation of “collateral dam-
age,” a “sideshow,” by-­product of World War I, which simply diminishes
the scale of the devastation and corresponding theft by naming it an ac-
cident. We know that totalizing expropriations extracted from expulsion
and extermination made available more than offset whatever loss Turkey
claimed it suffered. For some more recent accounts there is the suggestion
that Turks lost part of themselves by branding these minorities as their
enemies and Other: “Only too late came the realization that this Other
was a part of oneself and his loss was like an amputation.”14 Perhaps this
expression of goodwill and amity after one hundred years may be seen as a
sincere gesture, but it still does not account for the violent nature of the ex-
terminations and the willing participation of large segments of the Turk-
ish Muslim populations to not only murder as a means of “amputating” a
part of the alleged Ottoman social body but also resort to grotesque muti-
lations, which must symptomize another kind of morbidity and pathology.
Disavowal is not simply a denial of an event but an attempt to permanently
proscribe the existence of a word and its plural connotations, a silencing
of an entire history, which, for Turkey, carries an indelible and unwanted
association of inhuman defacement and disfigurement.
It is conceivable that the responsive reflex taken by our parents was

30 Chapter Two
already informed by this sense of indescribable loss. Guilt for those who
had lived when so many of their relatives, friends, and compatriots per-
ished may have played a role in this silencing, but not entirely. Our parents
may have considered the event as another unscheduled interruption in
their respective everyday lives, and the decision to remain silent may have
been part of the effort to imagine the nature of the loss in order to retrieve
some semblance of what had vanished and the necessity of its continua-
tion. Continuity was inseparable from everydayness, even under circum-
stances that forced a new start in an alien and undecipherable world. What
they brought to this challenge is what they had left. Yet it is interesting to
note that our parents would not have been married to each other had it not
been for the genocide; they would not have been brought together by the
people who brokered their apparently arranged marriage and the three of
us would not have existed. I have often wondered if they saw their coming
together as a contingent effect of genocide and whether they continued to
see the bonding of their relationship in this light, and how they thought
about a relationship thrown together out of the random chaos of genocidal
destruction that literally wiped out their collective cultures of reference
and histories that cemented their everyday lives.
There have been writers about the Jewish Holocaust who argue, ten-
dentiously, I believe, that the victims or survivors of world historical ca-
lamities undergo a change of status in their relation to history.15 In other
accounts this victimization conferred by genocidal catastrophe qualifies
one to enter history, when before they would have remained unnoticed in
an equally unseen everyday life. Steedman is concerned with the question
of who owns history. On the face it, it would seem that the answer is the
historian who writes up the historical account. She quotes the historian
Leora Auslander, who has “discuss(ed) the power of historians and archi-
vists of post-­Shoah memory to make immortal ordinary people whose
stories of suffering are a passport to the historical record in a way their
everyday life would not have been. Being victim or survivor of ‘a world
historical cataclysm changed (their) relation to history; it both gener-
ated far more detailed documentary traces than would otherwise have
existed, and made people, who would have otherwise have [sic] gone un-
noticed, noticeable.’ ”16 Perhaps this has been the case of the Judeocide,
which undoubtedly has produced mountains of documentary testimony.
But such accumulation of the accounts of suffering are not always avail-
able in other historical genocides, and does not necessarily apply to es-
pecially those examples like the Armenian massacres which represented

Unnoticed Lives/Unanswered Questions 31

a community caught between a precapitalist imperial order and the first
murmurs of capitalist primitive accumulation with all of its destructive
horrors.
But this is an archivist’s and, perhaps, a social historian’s fantasy and
does not explain what happens when the world historical event leaves no
telling traces but marks only disappearances, denials, and repressed mem-
ories unwilling to surface. More important, it keeps history at the forefront
and the everyday merely reflecting the dim light it keeps cast by world
historical events. It is an attempt to find a place for the everyday within
the storyline of a world historical event, as if it were a natural coupling.
Whether it is or not, it still remains to be demonstrated, even though a
number of philosophers concerned with this problem have not been able
to persuasively secure this bonding. Both the dead and the living who have
no documents to offer to confirm their historical importance, as Steed-
man approvingly paraphrases Auslander’s analysis quoted above, fail to
win entry into history because they have no “stories of suffering (which)
are a passport to the historical record in a way their everyday life would
not have been,” remain entombed in silence.17 Despite my admiration for
the writings of both Steedman and Auslander, and it is entirely possible
I’ve misread the intended meanings of both historians, I find this to be a
strange and even troubling, if not unacceptable criterion affirming the
achievement of historical identity. The Jewish holocaust continues to pro-
vide the criteria for all genocides, past and present.
For the nameless, who can never be admitted into history because they
leave behind no stories of their suffering and loss and their namelessness,
is it necessary to secure a “passport,” or a ticket to gain entry into the
historical record, paid for by being obliterated by genocide? Is this key to
being rewarded the prize of immortality? History becomes an exclusive
graveyard whose borders require proper credentials of identification. If
the victims remain nameless and without stories to tell, then their entry
is acquired through some sort of quantitative measure — they will still be
(bureaucratically) validated, not as individuals who once lived but because
now they are counted among the multiple dead of a genocidal event. They
remain nameless. We know that Walter Benjamin saw in the nameless
the necessity of constructing a history not yet written.18 Quantifying the
numbers of dead, like those African populations who died en route or
survived the horrendous voyages across the Atlantic to spend the rest of
their lives as slave laborers, may be important to grasp the scale of an event
but it also works as an abstraction to undermine the individual experi-

32 Chapter Two
ence of nameless lives, their differing subjectivities, designated as fodder —
mere data — to constitute the statistic. In the absence of names, ordinary
individuals are denied the extraordinary status of being recognized and
thus immortalized by history. If, as ordinary individuals, they fail to be
included in a quantitative measure, they are simply forgotten, the home-
less dead, wandering endlessly outside a historical paradise housing the
counted who had gained a passport for recognition, resembling the unre-
quited spirits of the Buddhist or Shinto dead who must be attended to and
brought home to their everyday. It is precisely the domination of quantita-
tive measure that will lead to such meaningless conclusions that propose
that one death is not as great as countless deaths. By the same token we
are faced with the obverse proposition that history is now the exclusive
pantheon of the immortalized victims of genocides who had the proper
credentials for entry. Whom do these abstractions console? Not the dead
who became part of some gross statistic and for whom history no lon-
ger matters. The living? They always remain imperceptible since the faint
light of world historicality never reaches them. What did it do for them?
Or for those who lived but remained outside the historical record? It is
interesting to note that the statistical figure invariably becomes the basis
of claims and counterclaims, denials and disavowals bent on reducing the
numbers involved and those killed in order to diminish the significance
of its eventfulness, or to satisfy some arbitrary definition, whose measure
is now indistinguishable from quantity. What does it mean? If there is no
archival authentication, do the dead remain wandering in an endless and
indeterminate zone between a visible history and and a hidden everyday-
ness? What do the dead gain by securing membership to the “historical
record”? Whose record? The state’s?
Yet there is a striking ironic symmetry or even asymmetry between the
obsessive Turkish persistence to deny giving the mass murders the name
of genocide and the namelessness of the dead who disappeared in the kill-
ing fields, the deportation marches, and the final destination of a desert
inferno. In this parallelism, are we to assume that the refusal to name the
event and the namelessness of the victims share a conviction that seeks to
reject their claim to enter history as an effort to remove the historical al-
together, as if it never happened? I believe this is an important dimension
of survivor’s experience, as I will try to show; these survivors rarely, if ever,
mentioned the names of their dead in an act of disavowal that matched
the Turkish denial of the event itself. But the silence regarding the act of
namelessness and the denial of genocidal responsibility are really two dif-

Unnoticed Lives/Unanswered Questions 33

ferent orders of muteness: while the former honors the dead, the latter
makes mockery of both their lives, which never existed, and their deaths,
which could not have occurred.
The importance of ordinary people who have been murdered on the
occasion of or by a world historical cataclysm requires no authentication
or official archival recognition from history; their ordinariness and their
sudden collective disappearance should be the condition of their qualifi-
cation for historical identity and enough to grant them the claim of histo-
ricity. Too often the apparent extraordinariness attributed to the histori-
cal trumps the mere ordinariness of the anonymous of everyday life; even
Benjamin tried to reverse this particular catalog. Counting the nameless
derives from the historian’s imperative to collect ‘objective’ evidence that
the event occurred, as a necessary exercise in verification. But when such
large numbers seem to disappear virtually in a short span of time from a
particular place, why is it not assumed that this qualifies as proper evi-
dence? Where did they all go? Mars? It was precisely this ordinariness and
their everyday lives that mass murder aimed to eradicate for what it could
yield in theft and expropriation. Religious and ethnic differences, and the
threat they are often seen to pose to a dominant group, have always been
transparent alibis. Removing ordinariness from the historical account, de-
nying its claims to qualitative consideration, leads to merely throwing the
ordinary into categories of quantification. What is being suggested is that
by gathering the nameless into numbered quantities, historical practice
denied their claim to qualitative subjective agency. The act alone implies
that historical practice still appears in thrall to the great men or person-
ages who represent the extraordinary in history, the real makers of history,
rather than the nameless rest and numbered masses who merely follow. It
is surprising how older perspectives manage to capture new leases on life
through the discovery of new interpretative methods and strategies an-
nouncing new vistas promising to look at historical practice and its world
in an entirely new way.
Mass murder of an ethnic group confers on the act its world historical
status, its new status of genocide. It was not the event that won world his-
torical status of war but the unaccounted elimination of a whole popula-
tion of individual ordinary people and their everyday. What I mean is that
an immense number of ordinary people who were simply wiped out with-
out credible explanation and acceptance of responsibility was absorbed
into the world historical event of World War I, which meant that the enor-
mity of erasing one and a half million people was diminished and perma-

34 Chapter Two
nently eclipsed as collateral damage. In genocidal episodes it is never, if
rarely, the case that the dead are left with their possessions and property
intact. What impelled Turkey to desperately efface such ordinariness from
their world or the Germans or the Rwandans or any ethnic group bent on
removing from its midst another, usually a minority (but not always, as
Cambodia demonstrated), whose presence appeared to be so unbearable
and intolerable that only complete annihilation would offer the chance for
release or relief? The intense mutilation of Armenians by Turkish mobs
in the countryside and their Kurdish and Circassian supporters seemed
to supply overdetermined reassurance that the dead really are dead, this
time. What drives such frenzy and why it is repeated is the problem that
escapes historical reason and certainly the abstract figuration of a statis-
tical count. In many ways, genocides point to the regularity of historical
repetition as one of the commanding rhythmologies of historical time. It
is possible that the ordinariness of Armenian everydayness was the of-
fense agitating Turks, who then sought to demonstrate its opposite, the
extraordinary hidden in the ordinary and the discovery of its capacity for
violent destruction, at risk of momentarily leaving or being separated from
the human community by their willingness to act in senselessly inhumane
ways by effacing the everyday that is the basis of human existence. At an
earlier time, the Armenians in the empire were considered as “faithful”
subjects, undoubtedly reflecting the important positions they acquired in
business and trade, artisanal professions (i.e., architecture), and scientific,
literary, and educational spheres. Yet this reputation for fidelity was in-
verted into ressentiment and hatred to fuel the widely shared conviction
circulated by the Young Turks leadership that what they enjoyed derived
from theft and deception. Perhaps this resentment toward the empire’s
Christian minorities was more deeply seated, embedded in a Muslim po-
litical unconscious. But the Young Turks instigating of the genocide were
modernizers who saw in a backward peasant majority the roadblock to
Turkey’s capitalist modernization and in the attainments of minorities
like Armenians a worrying hindrance to their aspiration for Turkish na-
tional renewal spearheaded by a policy of “Turkification.” Expropriation,
dispossession, theft, murder, and expulsion offered to resolve the back-
wardness of Turkey’s population and opened the way to Turkish capital-
ist modernization by removing the Armenians and appropriating their
material wealth: an early expression of the “dialectic of enlightenment”?19
But because history is a narrative, a conceived construct rather than
the account of a lived experience, it is never able to tell us how life was re-

Unnoticed Lives/Unanswered Questions 35

ally carried out. And for this reason, this event would, like all genocides,
exceed history. It would constitute a tear in historical time, one so com-
plete that its restoration would never remove the terror of the caesura, its
blankness; it would never bring back the prospect of what it was like be-
fore and what might have been. A history that fails to work out a mode of
articulation with everydayness is fated to simple repetition of its narrative
exemplars.

36 Chapter Two
 THREE . Tr a c e s of a Va n i she d E ve ryday

Just as I never knew my parents, I never really grasped the enormity of their
ordeal of survival and endurance when I was growing up. This project was
in some ways a belated attempt to know parents I had taken for granted
while growing up in their household, never questioning them about their
early lives, and never even thinking of what kind of lives they had led that
brought them to the United States or inquiring about close relatives like
grandparents, uncles, and aunts whom others grew up with. Our father,
Ohannes (John), was the warmer of our parents, at least I thought so, and
in possession of a bigger sense of humor of the two, but he was around less
often and did not spend as much time with us as our mother, Vehanush.
He seemed more accessible than Vehanush, who always struck me as more
distant, self-­enclosed, almost enigmatic (if I knew what that word meant
when I was a kid), and whose cheerlessness added to the mystery. She was
not always easy to like or, at times, be understood, at least for me. While
Ohannes made his way through the ups and downs of the labor market,
from one factory or foundry to another until he was able to land a secure
and lasting job, Vehanush was the homemaker. Yet I could not help think-
ing that coming to the U.S. had become a learning experience for her, a
work in progress. It was here she learned to cook Armenian dishes but also
how to speak and read English, on her own. She became an avid reader and
an extremely well informed person in time, intelligent and sensitive to the
rhythms of American society, interested and interesting. In this regard,
America was a continuation of the education she first received in the Ger-
man mission school in Marash.
 Considerations of history and memory were of no consequence to
my parents. There was no reason for them to raise questions, especially
while they were in the midst of getting out. This interpretative perspective
comes too late, after the event has spent its ferocity. It is evident that one
of the most difficult problems to confront is to imagine and thus construct
what their everyday lives must have been like. How did each of our parents
live before they were forcibly uprooted? It is hard not to conclude that they
saw their everyday as a routinized and repetitive present that the geno-
cidal events simply interrupted forever. But at the time, it was not clear to
me that they thought their daily life was at its end. What appears certain
is that Armenian everyday life remained anchored in a historical home-
land that had weathered waves of invading conquests from the east and
whose people lived as a colonized minority under Ottoman hegemony
for more than five hundred years. This everyday began to experience
challenging changes in the later half of the nineteenth century with the
“wholesale destruction of home industries due to increased imports from
an industrializing Europe,” the penetration of money economy into the
countryside and the monetization of taxes, growing disorder and lawless-
ness, and struggles and conflict over landholding claims among different
ethnic groups in areas inhabited by Armenians, increasingly agitated by
the influx of Turkish refugees from wars in Russia and the Balkans to cre-
ate a continuing crisis.1 Armenians were thus forced to forfeit a settled ev-
erydayness they had known for centuries for flight to new environments
like France, the United States, and elsewhere and directly confront the
spectacle of capitalist modernity when before they had only come to rec-
ognize its appearance in the introduction of new economic practices.
Yet the first experience of flight for so many was long homelessness,
separations from close relatives and friends that would take long durations
of time to reconnect or never, which must have imprinted a mental scar
in their subsequent conscious and unconscious lives, as manifest in my
parents’ anxieties. My father was from the southeast, my mother from the
mountains in Cilicia. He was from a large family, presumably secure in a
number of ways owing to the priestly vocations of his father and grand­
father. Many of these villages were predominantly inhabited by Arme-
nians and administered by clergy of the local church. This did not exclude
the presence of a mixture of other Islamic ethnic groups: Turks, Kurds,
possibly Arabs in the south (according to Franz Werfel), Assyrians, and
others.2 Werfel provides us with an appreciation of the everyday lives of
the villages in the south at the Syrian border before the siege of Musa

38 Chapter Three
Dagh. The novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh was written after Werfel’s
1929 trip to Damascus, where he first observed the wretched conditions
endured by young Armenian orphans working in a carpet factory who had
miraculously survived the death marches to the desert, which led him to
investigating the plight of the seven villages of Musa Dagh and their tragi-
cally heroic defense against a numerically overwhelming and German-­
equipped Turkish military that lasted forty days until the remaining de-
fenders were rescued by French naval ships.3
The impression gleaned from Werfel’s novel of Armenian villages is not
necessarily a sunny, serene, idyllic daily life (even though Grigoris Bala-
kian romanticizes Cilicia as a natural paradise). The constant interaction
of different ethnicities was always explosive and conflict producing, espe-
cially among the empire’s minorities. It was surely at the same time one
suffused with continuing traditions, stretching back centuries to a time
even before the Ottoman conquest and routines relating to agricultural
cultivation and cooperation, centered on family, kin, and religion. Under
the Ottoman Turks, life could not have been idyllic. (Perhaps comparable
to the Irish, whose colonized burden under the British lasted as long.) Ar-
menian rural families and clans were largely patriarchal and exogamous,
inasmuch as marriages were made with prospective partners outside the
village, establishing clans composed of mixtures from various villages that
widened the community and probably reinforced the prospect of greater
social solidarity. Yet it would be difficult to distinguish Armenian and
Greek rural life in Anatolia from Turkish in the domains of food, folklore,
agricultural production, architecture, customs, and superstitious practices
like the evil eye (which I remember I was warned against by my mother)
and reading the leavings of the grounds in a cup of Turkish coffee as a
guide to the future of one’s daily life.
In the Ottoman Empire these village communities were relatively au-
tonomous, essentially administered by priests who, in theory, represented
village interests to regional officials. Despite Werfel’s sympathetic por-
trayal of a strong and selfless village priest in Musa Dagh, I think many
of them were not always in sync with the communities’ interests. These
communities, like most, were centered on the church, the religious calen-
dar punctuated by seasonal work, and the temporal cycles of production
and reproduction. We tend to forget that temporal accountancy differed
from the more disciplined and routinized form of measuring working time
in capitalist societies and how this would have shaped its inhabitants. By
the same measure, it would be wrong to underestimate the problem of

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 39

adjustment immigrants encountered once they left the village for mod-
ern America and the working day in capitalism and the effects this would
have in altering the character of traditional family life formed in precapi-
talist villages.
In these communities, the religious prevailed, while time spent in work
followed seasonal patterns. But it is important to note that there was noth-
ing like a working day with its fixed hours. Ohannes rarely spoke of the
work he was required to do while growing up in his village, and it is not
clear to me if he did any regular work in those years (he probably tended
fruit trees). It is not surprising that when he was old enough, he signed up
for contract work in the U.S. (working on the Great Northern Railway),
which he disliked because the company seemed to feed its workers only
beans. Nevertheless, after a brief return home, he signed up a second time
for work in the United States. There are thus two possible reasons prompt-
ing this desire to emigrate: either the insufficiency of land at home, which
would probably go to older brothers; or the policy of resettling Kurds, Cir-
cassians, and refugees from the Balkans on lands occupied by Christian
minorities. But regardless, our father joined the first, large wave of im-
migrant workers before World War I to migrate to the U.S. to eventually
become a member of the generation that a decade or so later confronted
the Great Depression.
I think daily life was often organized around certain foods and dishes,
or foods and meals constituted the particular event rather than the re-
verse, especially its preparation, notably baked breads and rolls at Easter
that signified something of the nature of village daily life and its yearly
repetitive cycle by investing specific meaning to it according to the im-
portance of the religious observance. The whole drama of the yearly cycle
culminating in the Easter resurrection was embodied in the making of
certain breads that were, after forty days of eating unleavened flat bread,
permitted to rise (with the help of yeast). As a child I began to associate the
appearance of certain dishes with certain holidays. Even in the diaspora,
the older Julian calendar was still observed, especially religious holidays
and feast days. Easter was by far the most important observance in the re-
ligious year, with Epiphany after it — Christmas appearing as a more mod-
ern and Euro-­American holiday. There were dishes that usually involved
a large group of women, organized as an informal kitchen assembly line;
this was particularly true of the making of lahmajun and sweets like bak-
lava. I mention this form of cooperative activity since it probably reflected
practices in village life, carried over and retained for special occasions in

40 Chapter Three
the new land. But Armenian dishes, especially, momentarily reminded the
inhabitants of the diaspora of home and village, its smells and tastes and
affective relationships.
Unanswerable questions reached back to village life, which lingered
as an unnoticed and usually unspoken puzzle whose parts were missing.
What regularities and rhythms were interrupted and lost forever? It seems
that Armenian village societies were organized on the basis of a calen-
dar constituting the special days of the religious year. This would mean
feast days, days commemorating martyred saints, and other occasions im-
portant to the Christian calendar. We can get a modified version of how
dense this religious year appears by looking at the days of observance still
recognized in European Roman Catholic countries. Since the Armenian
Apostolic Church was the principal religious and political institution in
Armenian communities during the Ottoman period, its presence virtu-
ally saturated daily life, exercising both religious and political authority,
which often were indistinguishable from each other. The church regulated
the spiritual and political lives of village community through the millet
system. Whatever one’s personal belief, it was probably difficult to escape
the constraints imposed by the church on village communities. Once the
dispersed diasporas were formed and settled in foreign lands, much of this
religious domination of the calendar over the village community disap-
peared with the destruction of village everyday life. In these new migrant
settlements, the diaspora had to submit to the primacy of other institu-
tions, as in the U.S., that were mainly secular, civic, and public. While the
church followed the diaspora to new lands, it lost its privileged position
as the central binding force of the village community and its religious and
political hold over its members. What bound diaspora solidarity was po-
litical affiliation, then language, custom, and memory of an indefinite past.
My mother’s rejection of that place and past and the apparent absence
of any shred of sentiment or nostalgia toward what had been lost was what
I remember most about her. In a sense, what she had to lose occurred while
she was still a child and the toll was climaxed by her mother’s abandon-
ment of her and her brother. Unlike my father, she apparently had not been
raised within the Armenian Apostolic Church and seemed often to hold it
responsible for its commitment to backwardness. In later years, I think this
different orientation explains the difference in outlooks and adaptation
between Vehanush and Ohannes toward life in the United States. Some-
times, it seemed to me that she almost looked upon the genocide as the oc-
casion to transport her out of Anatolia. But it is true that this past-­present

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 41

was locked in some secret mental vault, never to be spoken of or recalled.
If this appears somewhat unfair, it partly explains why I was always struck
by how readily she acquired an enthusiasm for life in modern America by
contrast to what she had been forced to leave behind. Unimaginable terror
of the experience as a young girl would explain why she might be eager to
simply get out of that place. But migrating to a modern society imposed
serious alterations in the division of labor and organized the household
around the primacy of the working day employed by industrial factories. In
this respect I thought she had probably made a quicker adjustment to the
socially normative time of capitalist society than my father, even though
he was the one who had to submit to the discipline of a working day once
he found a job. Frequently, it appeared she was convinced that Anatolia —
what both she and Ohannes called the “old country” — was simply a place,
and empty and timeless space, she had been forced to pass through at an
early age, and that her family, mother, father, brother, and relatives were
somewhere else, where she also once lived. Getting out must have seemed
like a release or perhaps even a reprieve.
When old enough, I began to think she had always been in this place, in
Highland Park, Michigan, because she remained obdurately silent on what
came before it. My father was perhaps more of a romantic and could spin
stories of days in the village; he described a geography dominated by mule
travel and transport, which actually exaggerated the distance to be cov-
ered, but rarely much about his siblings, parents, and grandparents or how
he spent his days. It seemed that his reluctance to speak about his family
might have affected how we envisioned our own family unit, cut off from
extended relationships, trying to navigate its way in a new life without the
emotional support and guidance of the larger familial group. It certainly
must have persuaded us to not inquire too closely on the fate of relatives
he rarely spoke of. He might mention how one of his grandfathers (prob-
ably paternal) had lived to a grand old age that would have continued had
it not been for the massacres. I suggested that since he, my father, had no
accurate proof of his own date of birth, it was probably true that ages were
inflated, either overcounted or its reverse.
These accounts might have been an effort to portray a life that may
never have existed as he recalled it, a motionless image stranded in an in-
determinate timelessness, and that he may well have dreamed up or em-
bellished out of grief for what he had lost— I do not know— but, like my
mother, there was no apparent desire in him to return and no expression
of permanent nostalgia for the disappearance of an everyday he would

42 Chapter Three
never know again. If there was, he kept it hidden to himself. Nostalgia for
place was rarely an option for Armenians who survived the genocide since
it was still inhabited by Turks and Kurds, and the idea of returning to the
scene of a cataclysmic crime would dampen any enthusiasm encouraged
by impulses of longing and homesickness. He once reported to my oldest
daughter upon a brief return to his village as a fighter with the Armenian
Revolutionary Federation (arf) brigades, to find nothing left of his large,
extended family. They had all either been killed on the site or forced to join
one of the many deportation columns. He never said and perhaps did not
know. But on his return entry to his village, he did remark, “Even the fruit
trees had died.” I cannot help believing that this image of dead fruit trees
served as a trope capable of standing in for the totality of destruction and
death that remained with him until he died. Here, Ohannes confronted
the most unanswerable question of his life, which was how and where his
family vanished, murdered. This question would undoubtedly remain with
him the rest of his life and was comparable to Vehanush’s childhood desire
to know why her mother never came back for her. Unanswerability turned
them into witnesses of silence, which they bequeathed to three of us.
I have often thought about why so little attention was paid to the count-
less lives that perished at the end of the deportation convoys, whether
any systematic effort was ever made to account for the nameless piles of
bones once embodied in living individuals, strewn and entombed in the
desert. I always questioned if he — Ohannes — knew or had had a feeling of
where and how his parents, grandparents, and siblings died. I have tried
to imagine the scene of his return and entry into his village. Other mem-
bers of his brigade must have accompanied him. I have been particularly
concerned with how he must have reacted upon observing the quiet, dead
silence of a familiar site where he heard no voices and observed on entry
empty homes, many destroyed, and, of course, dying fruit trees. What were
his thoughts at that moment and how did he incorporate the shock of rec-
ognition without falling apart, what had he anticipated, and when did he
realize that his family had disappeared forever? And at what point did his
acknowledgment of the aimlessness of the act pass into the formation of
grief? His time in the dead village of his former life must have eventually
forced upon him his decision to permanently leave the region and perhaps
Anatolia once the war ended. It must have been in this circumstance that
he began to formulate thoughts of returning to the U.S. The scene imposes
limits on my capacity to imagine what he must have gone through, felt, and
decided. To move beyond the obvious questions that ask themselves would

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 43

be to fictionalize and violate a scene that has set its own limits of a private
hell for him alone. He never spoke of or described the scene to my sisters
or me, only talking to my oldest daughter about the tragedy when she
was a child; her delayed recall of the conversation came years later. I have
repeatedly asked myself, as I still do, why he never reported this episode
to me or to my sisters. I am certain he never recovered from it, yet I have
wondered whether he chose his granddaughter to momentarily release a
lifetime of pent-­up remorse and repression, condensed in a metaphor re-
calling dead fruit trees.
I keep returning to one of the few photos I have of him. Photos have
been effectively used to fill in what has not been recorded in writing or
in remembered conversations. The few photos we have of our parents
match my own meager talents to use them as substitutes for absent let-
ters and documents. In the end, they represent indices of particular his-
torical moments in their material lives — how they looked, dressed, what
kind of lives they were living. It is hard to visualize that they would elu-
cidate or reveal the silences they had both embraced. In one photo, he is
dressed for combat, with two comrades, bullet belt strung over one shoul-
der, standing at ease with a long, primitive-­looking rifle, against a fake
background supplied by the photographer (see figure g.3). Where was the
photo taken? Was it in Eastern Armenia, Van, Kars, Erzerum, Bitlis, Tif­
lis (Tbilisi), somewhere along the battle line between Turkey and Rus-
sia? How old was he? Late teens, early twenties? Who were the other two
comrades —friends, relatives? — and what happened to them, all nameless?
The back of the photograph was inscribed in Armenian script: “This photo
I present as a gift [knvirim] to Avetis Petrosian in memory of our unfor-
gettable love. Hovaness T Harutynian, 1915, July 13.” I do not know who
Avetis Petrosian was, or ever remember meeting someone with that name,
and I am not sure if he was a close relative, a friend he grew up with, a for-
mer comrade. The expression conveying the “memory of our unforgettable
love” is an even greater puzzle. It may be that he was also a member of the
arf brigades who eventually was killed or died, men like himself, to be
honored. In any case, Ohannes eventually left the brigades and war zone
along the eastern front and got out of Anatolia for what would be the last
time. He would never return. He had some stories about this episode in his
life, that he had been in Persia and in Eastern Armenia, Van, Kars, Arda-
han, and Georgia, and he claimed even to have seen the ruins at Ani. What
has interested me about his complex itinerary is explaining his thinking,
that after spending time in the U.S. on two different occasions, he came

44 Chapter Three
back to Anatolia as a recruit in the arf brigades and was sent to the east-
ern front to fight with the Russian forces against the Turks. There are a
host of question concerning how he was able to get to the eastern front and
where he was trained and equipped that will have to remain unanswered.
The Armenian Revolutionary Federation was organized in 1890 and
became the principal Armenian political organization dedicated to the
realization of an independent Armenian nation-­state and continued its
existence after the genocide as the leading political group in the Armenian
diaspora. Whatever prompted Ohannes to make this herculean journey
from the U.S. to the eastern reaches of Anatolia to fight with Russians
against the Turks? While he must have joined the arf as a young man,
and remained faithful to its goals most of his life, his decision to return
must have been driven by a singular conviction. It is conceivable that he,
like so many of his contemporaries, saw in this struggle the spark capable
of igniting the final liberation of the Armenian people from centuries of
Ottoman oppression. He must have believed it was his moral duty to fight
for this cause and its realization and that with its achievement Armenians
would have had an independent homeland after the war, a nation-­state to
house its village communities without the incessant and imminent threat
of state extortion, or the violence of marauders and murder. This meant
that he probably intended to stay, like so many others of his generation,
but ultimately changed his mind or events changed it for him. The deci-
sion must have been made in the inaugural wake of the genocidal fury that
overcame his whole family and village and his own sense of the conduct of
the war in the east. He had nothing to go back to even if Armenians won
independence. But he may have also reasoned that the tide of battle was
increasingly less encouraging and it was best to return to the United States
to join the American Expeditionary Forces (aef), which would have given
him citizenship. Yet I do not want to exclude the possibility that he was
still persuaded that joining the aef promised a possible victory over the
Central Powers, a definitive end of the Ottoman Empire, and the prospect
of an independent Armenian state. What would it have meant to him to
return when there was nothing left to a life he had once known?
There was a short-­lived Armenian State after the signing of the Ver-
sailles Treaty (1919) that was dissolved by the refusal of England and France
to see through the terms of the Treaty of Sevres, in order to check the ad-
vance of the Kemalist forces that were continuing the killing of Armenians
and Greeks in 1920 and as late as 1955 in Istanbul, and beginning in 1930 to
target the Kurds. By 1920 Ohannes, who had been injured in a gas attack

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 45

spent the remaining war year in a field hospital in St. Aignan, France, had
been discharged from the aef, given U.S. citizenship, married in France,
and was trying to get our mother into the United States. Ohannes’s flight
from eastern Anatolia took him through Russia. He most likely took a
northern route, where he could have caught a ship to England and then
to the U.S. But it should be noted that he probably traveled through Rus-
sia in late 1916, perhaps early 1917, and passed through a country that was
quickly disintegrating into political and social revolution that took it out
of the war. If he chose a northern route, he would have gone through Mos-
cow and St. Petersburg and witnessed signs of the unfolding revolutionary
breakdown of Czarist society. He might also have stopped en route in sev-
eral places. Yet I have no testimony other than his remarking that he went
through Russia. It is possible he went through a Black Sea port and then
to England, in which case he would not have seen much. It seems plausible
that he, with other comrades, withdrew with the Russians and received
some sort of safe passage. The northern route is more feasible. As a for-
mer member of the arf brigades, fighting with the Russians, it would have
been less dangerous than traveling through the Black Sea and the straits.
In any case, his stories resembled a jumbled archive testifying to the
wreckages of folk village life and the splintered shards of his own per-
sonal fragmentation but never any expression depicting the coherence and
wholeness of rural life or a desire to return to it. This might have been in-
hibited later by the struggle to make a living in the land of permanent un-
certainty and golden opportunity. It also derived from knowing there was
nothing left to return to. But I cannot help thinking that the failed promise
of an independent Armenian state (and he never explicitly considered the
Soviet version as independent), and I suspect that until early years of the
World Depression he had mixed feelings about Soviet Armenia, claiming
he had distant relatives who had made it to Yerevan. Still, the loss of his en-
tire family meant a different kind of future in the U.S. that, in many ways,
was not the one he would have wanted. He would continue to wage war in
the U.S. through his dedication to the arf, whatever that came to mean.
The circumstances of Vehanush’s early life were significantly different.
She also came from Cilicia, but not the small village life filled with fam-
ily and relatives my father had known. All I know is that she came from
Marash or close by and was “orphaned early,” with her brother, by their
mother, who put both in religious mission schools. By the time of the mas-
sacres of 1915, and in Marash, there had already been massive earlier mas-
sacres in the 1890s; it was common practice that parents would put up

46 Chapter Three
their children for adoption in the orphanages, as adoptees for safekeeping
until a parent would come back for them. Few parents ever returned. Her
mother was no exception. In the case of Vehanush’s mother, who made
this decision, she ended up in Beirut, which suggests that she and her sec-
ond husband got out in time. How and when this occurred I have no idea.
It must have been before the beginning of the massacres and deportations
and somewhat after she placed her daughter in the school.
When younger, I knew little about our mother’s early past, virtually
nothing since she was even more closemouthed about it than my father. By
the same token, what would I have understood if she did recount her his-
tory to me? What I did manage to learn in those early years came by way
of isolated events I heard. But much of it never really registered with me
until years later. When I was four or five I learned that her mother lived in
Beirut, even though I had no idea where it was. What compelled this im-
pulse in her to close off any information concerning her formative years? I
knew this because it was at the time my mother received a letter informing
her of her mother’s death.
It was only when I was a teenager that I began to fill in some blank
pages of Vehanush’s life by conjuring, in a process no longer explainable,
imagined scenarios of how she had escaped. The blank periods in her life
became the occasion or supplied me the opportunity to simply make up
stories about her. In fact, the appeal to the device of imagined scenarios
and staged sets became the principal form of my youthful desire to fill in
the empty spaces produced by unanswered and unanswerable questions.
Why did I think she escaped? I really do not know and cannot remem-
ber where these stories came from. It is possible she may have said some
things I completely misunderstood or deliberately misconstrued that
I then cobbled together into an explanatory story. All of this may have
been the product not of actual interest in her life, as such, but to make her
into a recognizable figure, even a heroic one, to give her a “history” that
would make her look like the mothers of my friends, as well as something
she clearly was not. The most enduring among these imagined scenes was
a heroically romantic tale of flight, with her mother, into the Syrian Des-
ert, where they were rescued by Bedouins and made their way to Beirut.
In this story, her brother did not accompany them. I am not sure I knew
she even had a brother at that time in my life. It was another plotline out
of The Arabian Nights, a pure fantasy made up on the basis of things heard
or misheard, put together from my imaginings to become an actual and
believable account. But it was wrong and well off the mark. Yet it seemed at

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 47

the time as a satisfying narrative that actually worked against any further
or even later attempts to inquire into her early history. This was especially
true of my adulthood, when I still seemed content with fables of her life I
had constructed as a child that had no basis in fact. After all, I never had
the inclination to ask about her years in Marash and her early family life.
I am still not sure why. But to construct imaginary scenes, in the absence
of an explanation, must have been a personally satisfying way to fill the
void of silence with meaning, however wildly off the mark it was. It seemed
like a paradox: just as she never spoke of that time to us, I never was in-
duced to inquire further. A further paradox or contradiction is that while
I showed no interest in trying to ascertain a reliable account of her early
years out of some sort of disinterest and even indifference, I nevertheless
made up stories about her that I relentlessly held on to until I learned they
were simply fabrications dreamed up by the exaggerated imagination of a
child. I could have just asked her. Why I failed to do so is still a mystery.
But resorting to imagined heroic scenes out of Hollywood movies seemed
like a viable substitution. Truth be told, it was never, or rarely, possible to
picture her anywhere else but in Detroit, the now-­time we shared when
growing up. In fact, the present was her time and tense.
She came to us without any history, or interest in history, as such, or a
recognizable curiosity about the past, unlike Ohannes, whose anecdotes
at least testified to an index of documentary historical traces from an in-
determinate time. Vehanush seemed to be a person who accepted things
as they were or as she found them, which may have been a reason why
we were never encouraged to ask questions about her early life. On her
part, she controlled that subject of conversation by rarely calling attention
to her early years. She survived because of the school, which saved hun-
dreds of children like her. It is difficult to know when she left the school
in Marash, but it is certain she left with some teachers and other students
and, according to my sister Victoria, ended up in Greece. How they got
through and what port they left from is unknown, though it is conceivable
they went south to the port of Alexandretta (Iskenderum, as it was then
called). The problem of time is also unknown. It could have been in 1915
or even before or, more likely, in 1918 and after the Armistice. Even in 1918,
Turks were still killing Armenians and Greeks in some areas and Marash
was not a safe place. A year later some of those Armenians who miracu-
lously survived the forced march to the Syrian Desert tried to come back
to their homes in Anatolia to reclaim their land and were massacred. If
the later date was correct, and I believe it is, the school would have been a

48 Chapter Three
refuge protecting the children under the sanction of the mission and the
German government. She must have spent a certain amount of time in
Greece, but none of us know how long or where. From Greece, she must
have ultimately left for Marseilles, again by what means and with whom I
have no idea — probably by ship. It is clear that the teachers who accompa-
nied these girls (there may have been boys, as well) were Armenians who
taught in the school. One of them, with whom she apparently was close,
was named Bedrosian, whose name Vehanush eventually took, dropping
her biological family name of Kupalian. This woman and others probably
accompanied her on the trip to Marseille, which would have been a termi-
nus for the Armenian flight from the Ottoman Genocide. It is a credible
long shot that the Petrosian to whom Ohannes inscribed his photo might
actually have been the husband of the teacher whose name Vehanush ad-
opted. They are the same name and mean “son of Peter” (Peterson), and
only the orthography differs since the p is often pronounced as a soft b.
The transcription from p to b depends on how it is heard, regional dialect
mediating it. I never knew his first name.
I do know that the woman Bedrosian, whom I met and even knew when
I was a child, settled outside Detroit with her husband. (I have a photo of
her taken with her husband in their Inkster Road farmhouse.) My sister
Sena reported that the Bedrosians were actually our “godparents.” What
I did not know was that she had been both my mother’s teacher who ac-
companied the girls out of Marash and possibly the go-­between in the
marriage that brought my mother and father together in Marseilles, where
they were married in 1920. Ohannes was twenty-­seven when he married
and Vehanush may have been around seventeen or a little older. It is not
known how Ohannes was contacted for the marriage and by whom, how
the negotiation was carried out, or the circumstances in which he made
this decision and the channels of communication and contracting he em-
ployed, but apparently it was accomplished by somebody who knew him
and the Bedrosians. According to Sena, Vehanush always claimed the
marriage had not been arranged and that she had received several previ-
ous offers because of the scarcity of marriageable Armenian girls at that
time who had been able to escape the genocidal horror of systematic rape
and murder. But it seems likely that it was arranged, inasmuch as Ohannes
and Vehanush had not met until they wedded in Marseilles and the Bedro-
sians must have been the agents of their coming together. For a putatively
arranged marriage, it was remarkably modern since there were no fami-
lies on either side to satisfy and no demand for bride dowry. This coming

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 49

together also remained a subject they never discussed. It could have been
because it was an arranged marriage, which would have been fairly com-
mon among immigrant groups in the U.S. at that time; inhibiting discus-
sion on the nature of the marriage may have been encouraged by the fear
that it would have branded them as old-fashioned, unmodern in modern
America. Or it simply could have been more commonplace than I have
thought. Both could have also seen the marriage as a contractual arrange-
ment, which in reality it was, that would develop into something else once
children appeared. The practice of arranged marriages strangely contin-
ued and I remember hearing in my late teens and early twenties instances
of families arranging marriages with ethnic Armenians raised in Lebanon,
Palestine, and even Istanbul.
My parents used to take us to the Bedrosian farm off Inkster Road, not
far from the Detroit Metropolitan Airport today. But I had no idea of their
history with our parents and did not learn of it until I began asking my
sisters about Vehanush’s itinerary out of Turkey. The last time I saw the
Bedrosians was when I was about ten or eleven and we stayed overnight
since my father was painting their house. My sister Sena has a picture of
him on a ladder, with a do-­rag wrapped around his head, looking down at
the camera, where I was standing, pretending to hold it. The camera must
have belonged to the Bedrosians since I do not recall our having one at that
time. I had a sense that our father was repaying some sort of debt. I vaguely
remember spending other times out there with our parents but nothing
else, apart from a fruit tree I usually climbed for refuge.
According to Sena, the school was formative for our mother. She ap-
parently loved it, even though she rarely spoke about this experience. For
it was there that she began a lifelong habit of reading novels and undoubt-
edly acquired her Germanic work discipline. This makes a good deal of
sense since it was an environment in which she developed over a period of
several years, one that seems to have contributed to repressing or displac-
ing what she might have remembered or experienced in the years before
entering the school. That portion of her life remains a void, apart from the
death of her biological father when she was still a toddler of two years and
would not have remembered and understandably about whom she never
spoke. Yet there was a story about his death that circulated over time that
Sena recently confirmed; it explains he died of rabies, that once bitten by
a rabid dog, he was thrown into a lake. She must have heard her mother
speak of him as she became older or spoken about him with her brother,

50 Chapter Three
who was probably older than her. But, unsurprisingly, she never referred
to her mother’s second husband as a stepfather or as a figure in her life.
Some combination of Vehanush’s youthful age and experience colluded
in such a way that those early years were all consigned to forgetfulness.
Whatever else it was, it must have been difficult and unforgettable only
in the worst way, which would qualify it for permanent omission. But it
does not necessarily explain what in those early years with her biological
family accounts for her silence about them. It could have been an unpleas-
ant household dominated by her mother’s second husband. Because she
never referred to him, it seems clear that she felt no affection toward him
or received any from him. By the same measure, her love of the school ex-
plains a form of liberation from the household and the experience of an
aborted family that offered the possibility of a new life. Evidently, the or-
phanage school was anchored in a group of children who came from simi-
lar experiences of being put there for adoption and offered her an unprec-
edented feeling of belonging to an affective community that dramatically
contrasted with what she had left (see figure g.4). In Vehanush’s case, we
know that her mother worked in the school for a time before she left for
Beirut. At the same time, it is difficult to know whether she recognized in
the school a refuge against the certainty of elimination or understood the
precariousness of the position she shared with her classmates. Perhaps
the older children had an intuition of the peril that lurked on the outside.
Nobody could have lived in that world at the time of World War I or even
before who would not have been daily haunted by premonitions of worst
things to come to their ethnic communities and villages. For my mother,
being installed in the orphanage/school must have seemed like the safety
of a walled fortress, where inside it she and her classmates might have had
the possibility of routinizing and normalizing their everyday lives with
regularly predictable rhythms of play, study, and work while on the out-
side the world was falling apart and people were simply disappearing. One
wonders what these children knew of the world outside the school’s pre-
cinct of safety, what they thought about and discussed among themselves
and what kind of gossip was produced within its confines and circulated
and spread throughout like dry brush fire. In a strangely remote way, it
reminded me of the nonconnectedness (muen) and security of free unfet-
tered play offered by and identified with Buddhist playgrounds in Japan’s
late middle ages.
I have suggested that Marash was on one of the routes of the large de-

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 51

portation convoys that would pass through the town, and I have wondered
if she and her friends had an inkling of them or even were able to catch
glimpses of them as they made their fateful journey through the city. The
deportations, as I show later, were themselves a moving killing field, and
it was estimated that only 20 percent of the hundreds of thousands driven
on these forcible marches made it to their final destination, which would
be an even worse ending, as Chris Bohjalian’s novel The Sandcastle Girls
graphically portrays.
As suggested earlier, the Marash region was already marked by the
memory of massive murders inaugurated by Abdülhamid II in the 1890s,
and by some counts the number of people killed has reached as high as
300,000. It was my sister Sena who emphasized that our mother’s mother
(why is it so difficult to call her grandmother, a woman for us who was
nothing more than a nameless abstraction? I have never been able to an-
swer that question and never observed either Victoria or Sena referring
to this disembodied relative as “grandmother”) worked in the school/
orphanage for a time before she left and she must have heard things from
the outside world she conveyed to Vehanush that would have made her
anxious and put her in a state of permanent fear and panic. But her mother
would have also made her way out of Marash to the safety of Beirut before
or by 1915 and the beginning of the genocide. None of us knew anything
about her life at this time, much less her name, about her resourcefulness
in getting out, or whether her reaching Beirut was the end of a long pro-
cess of escape or simply a direct arrival. She apparently lost her second
husband and remarried a third time in Beirut. I do remember the years in
the late Depression in Detroit and our mother’s anxieties about economic
security since my father worked sporadically on Works Progress Admin-
istration (wpa) road projects, when he worked. This sense of worry car-
ried her through the war and into postwar American life, when my father
had a secure job and they were eventually able to buy a small house on
the southwest side of Detroit, off Five Mile Road. Conceivably, she trans-
ferred the intensely real insecurities and anxieties produced by the spec-
ter of impending genocidal murder outside the school and her mother’s
disappearance over to the fear of permanent economic uncertainty in the
United States.
Vehanush died reasonably young in 1967 (in her early sixties) from a
heart attack, and as she lay in a hospital bed she was worrying about the
consequences of Charles de Gaulle’s threat announcing that he was go-
ing to corner the world’s supply of gold. In a certain sense, her early years

52 Chapter Three
in the German mission school created a template of imminent fear that
never left her, and that could flexibly change its content, whether it was
Turks bent on murdering Armenians or unemployment and economic in-
security, which was the leitmotif of my parents’ life in Detroit until after
the war.
School also offered her the prospect of a future and a project dedicated
to learning she would not have had the opportunity to acquire if she had
remained in a village. It was in school that she learned how to write Ar-
menian, and speak and read Turkish and German, even though she did
not use these skills once she was in the U.S. But it must have enabled her
to learn English on her own more rapidly than others I know of, many of
whom never really learned the language after decades of living in Amer-
ica. It is unclear what she would have done if her mother returned for her
and took her back to Beirut. But it is evident that the separation from her
mother must have been met with severe uncertainty, ambiguity, incom-
prehension, and fear driven by a sense of being abandoned and left alone.
Her brother was orphaned elsewhere, and she apparently had no relation-
ship to her mother’s second husband. Just as Ohannes’s confrontation with
the devastating recognition that the destruction of his home and village
and the disappearance of his entire family is impossible to envision, Ve-
hanush’s separation from her mother (as well as from her brother) and the
ways it must have defined her are impossible to envisage. Any attempt to
conjure up the circumstances of a little girl who can understand the words
that are being said to her by her mother as she left but would have little
capacity to assess what they consequentially meant in such indeterminate
surroundings is an impossibility that no claim to empathy can grasp. It
must have resembled the terrors of a living death. Initially, it is reasonable
to consider that her response would have been to depict the awful spec-
tacle of a vacant future. Even though her mother assured her she would
return for her, the promise depended on the unstated conditional qualifi-
cation of whether or not she lived. Vehanush would have known about the
conditions that might result in her not coming back for her or her brother.
But would she mull over the possibility that her mother would not vol-
untarily return? While parents who put their children in the safekeeping
of mission schools in Anatolia often never returned because of untimely
deaths, many were also convinced that they were doing the right thing by
making orphans of their children since they had no intention of return-
ing for them. In Vehanush’s case, I’m persuaded by the thought that her
mother had decided to not come back for her and her brother.

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 53

 Once the immediate shock of fear and panic wore off, it is imaginable
that Vehanush had already developed a distrust of the explanation; driven
by anger, she was convinced her mother would never return. This thought
must have accompanied her for the rest of her life and it is not unthink-
able to question whether she ever forgave her mother or actually expressed
gratitude to her once she learned she was alive in Beirut. The experience
resulted in a lifelong conviction she held that only the worst could hap-
pen when confronted by dire situations, what years later I saw as a general
characteristic in other Armenians, which has also passed on to me as what
I have named “Armo thought.”
The additional problem Vehanush must have faced is how and when she
learned her mother, who never came back for her, was still alive in Beirut,
and what she subsequently thought of her when she never returned. Her
mother’s desire to return could have been delayed or interrupted if Ve-
hanush did not leave the school until after war’s end; if it was before the
actual massacres early in 1915, she might have believed that she would see
her mother again once war ended. Whatever the chronological options,
Vehanush would have been told by Mrs. Bedrosian, her teacher, who prob-
ably was in contact with her mother, that her mother was not coming back.
In this splintered narrative, she must have thought about her brother and
his prospects. How and when did she learn he had been killed or died and
would she link his death to her mother’s decision to remain in Beirut?
Why had she never spoken about him to us? But it seems clear, as a friend
suggested, that it was Vehanush, perhaps more than Ohannes, who suf-
fered from this episode that must have combined the experience of early
abandonment — being alone as a child — and the uncertain future she was
forced to confront dominated by the Ottoman determination to eradicate
all Armenians. This experience became the possible foundation on which
she actually “rebuilt her life,” in order to claim some purchase on a life for
herself and the life of her as-­yet-­unborn children. In this regard, the edu-
cation might have worked as a form of “cauterization effect” that allowed
her to move on to re-­create life anew.4 Despite functioning as a persuasive
narrative explanation I really have no way of knowing. As for the reasons
her mother decided to never return, there are no clear justifications. She
remarried, as suggested, a third time, and it is entirely possible she and her
new husband started their own family in Beirut. While this may have per-
suaded her from coming back for Vehanush, it would not have accounted
for the reasons that induced her not to bring her to Beirut once the war
in Turkey ended.

54 Chapter Three
 It was not a story worth recounting to her children years later, perhaps,
but one she was actually obliged to divulge because her survival also in-
volved the mobilization of a psychological attitude and stamina to with-
stand the debilitating knowledge that had been inflicted on her for the rest
of her life — that as a child she had been abandoned and thus orphaned by
her entire family, thrown into a world she scarcely understood yet forced
to make her way on her own in it. What I have been able to piece together
from disparate fragments of information and hearsay is not, by any means,
her complete story and is at best an outline. For this reason alone, it must
stand as much as a recomposed narrative as a verifiable account. This was
her contribution to the heritage of the genocide, unquestionably experi-
enced by numerous children whose lives had been almost permanently
interrupted and damaged and who would have to embody this disruptive
experience for the rest of their lives as they made their way into an entirely
different world. The imprint of this experience in later years surfaced in
Vehanush’s hesitant but consistent skepticism toward things said to her,
too often a reluctance to take things at face value, and an expression of
a rather fierce autonomy that refused to rely on people. Where she dif-
fered from our father was her conviction, certainly relayed to me, that you
do not ask anything of people or rely on them, while our father believed
that “blood was thicker than water,” which meant that you could count
on other Armenians but on no one else, despite his own experiences to
the contrary. Yet the real difference was Vehanush’s early separation from
family life and the experience of relying on it, which, I believe, resulted
in her reluctance to have expectations of people, perhaps the world itself,
whereas Ohannes’s upbringing embedded him in a thick web of famil-
ial relationships. In her relationship with me, she was often right to dis-
trust what I might have said by way of an explanation concerning why I
came home late or where I had been or where I had acquired unaccounted
money. She was, I believe, suspicious to a fault and in our daily dealings. I
cannot honestly say I ever knew what she was thinking and too regularly
felt that I burdened her with endless disappointment. Frequently, her ex-
cessive suspicion exceeded reasonable assessments of what was being said
or an understanding of situations. But she always showed, at least in my
memory, a certain uneasiness in her relationship to the world around her,
a remoteness that kept it at arm’s length, and an unbending reliance on her
own counsel. It is important to emphasize that a certain sense of affection
was a luxury that had been taken from both Vehanush and Ohannes. And
while they acted as caring parents trying to provide us with what they be-

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 55

lieved were the necessities of life in America, they sacrificed more than
they could acknowledge or even know. But the absence of affection was
indelibly stamped on all three of us, as if it refused to be erased or even
speak its own truth, an unwanted sign, stamped but unseen, always pres-
ent, marking the continuation of what our parents had been so cruelly de-
prived of ever knowing.
As a child, I cannot remember Vehanush ever reading to me, or any of
us, even though by that time she had a good command of English. Ohannes
told us children’s stories from an Armenian folkic storehouse, but I do
not remember them now since they comprise only a jumble of unrelated
phrases in Armenian. Perhaps this was an expectation that came from
the future of an American society where parents were supposed to take
a proactive role in virtually everything their child did, especially in their
educational formation. My sister Victoria often complained how our par-
ents favored Sena and even me. She may have been right, but when we were
growing up I believe we were treated equally when it came to the object of
distributing resources like what little affection either could actually give.
Later in life, it was evident that Sena, who lived with them, was treated
differently from Victoria and me, undoubtedly owing to the fact that they
had increasingly become dependent on her in a number of ways. This loss
or absence of affection among survivors of genocides must be calculated
as one of its greatest consequences, resembling an emotional emptying
out and, perhaps, the principal condition of surviving its inhuman excess
that demands unyielding silence. For those, like us, who came after, this
inheritance became inexpressible rage.
One thing that seems clear to me is that school provided Vehanush
with an environment that had little to do with the precapitalist village life
she may have come out of, as had my father. The mission school was a con-
densed microcosm and preview of modern society that actually prepared
her and her classmates for a future life they could not have conceived at
that time. It made the later transition to modern America much easier
since she had already begun to disconnect from traditional village life in
the empire and it is not likely she would have returned to it on her own had
she stayed in Anatolia. Whatever else she remembered of that moment of
life was put behind her, just as she disposed of her Anatolian past as unus-
able, stored away in some unapproachable place. She was already familiar
with modern time and the image of societies that were on some sort of
linear conveyer belt moving endlessly toward progress. Village life for her,
if it had any residual meaning, belonged to a past — indeed it was the defi-

56 Chapter Three
nition of the past — that had brought only uncertainty, scarcity, anxiety,
and pain and to which it was even pointless to think of returning. Or at
least she had no desire to return to it. I recall a dinner table conversation
after World War II on the topic of Soviet repatriation of ethnic minori-
ties and her response to my father’s report that he knew of several fami-
lies in Detroit who had decided to return to Soviet Armenia. My father,
who had no real interest in returning, nevertheless defended the decision
as possibly beneficial for some people, insofar as he understood the feel-
ings that might have prompted the impulse to leave. Vehanush registered
disbelief when she asked what there was to go back to and why anybody
would want to leave the U.S. after living here for decades. This was not a
prescient Cold War political anticommunist reflex but a conviction that
probably originated in her experience in the missionary school and grew
throughout the decades she lived in Detroit. In such moments, Vehanush
often appeared as someone who had made a willful effort to discredit and
discount virtually everything associated with Armenian life in Anatolia
as she had known it. If she had any politics, it was nothing more than that.
It is easy to imagine that she, like her classmates, already embodied the
ability to make the successful transition to a life she had partially experi-
enced and read about but had not yet confronted in its fullness. Yet this
particular involvement in a mission school was undoubtedly replicated ev-
erywhere Protestant missionaries, especially, established their programs.
In Japan, for example, some of the most progressive intellectuals and poli-
ticians came out of the missionary experience, which, if it did not always
succeed in implanting the Bible and the word in these precapitalist societ-
ies, it certainly accelerated the process of modernization. Apart from this
valuable socialization in modernity, whose value Vahanush could not have
known at the time, she probably expected her mother to return for her. But
in many ways, perhaps not known to her, she was preparing for a life in
which her mother would not be returning or playing a role.
It was in school that she also learned how to crochet and make lace
with one sewing needle and regular thread, distinctively Armenian and
different from the established practice. She also made crochet items with
heavier thread and a crochet needle (thicker at one end with a hook). This
work was genuine art, drawn from artisanal skills, that few people were
able to make; it was in demand by many who knew her work and were con-
vinced, as I am, that what she produced was frankly masterful and beauti-
ful. The needlework was, I believe, her one concession to preserving and
identifying with something of a collective past of an artisanal material

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 57

culture that was in fact destroyed by the genocide. Her creations consti-
tuted a reminder of who she was and where she had come from, marking
an Anatolia that remained absent in her speech. She never saw herself
as a professional artisan who went into the business of selling her work;
instead, she saw in the needlework a link to another form of life she had
forcibly abandoned but still embodied during her youth. In her capacity to
reproduce older forms and intricate designs whose retrieval could only be
remembered, not learned or preserved in books, she was, in her own way,
able to keep alive the vitality of a traditional material culture. Because she
had trachoma when young and a continuing inventory of eye ailments as
she grew older, her capacity to produce the intricate designs on her doilies
became severely hampered.
I do not know how many years she spent in the mission school, but she
must have been there until her midteens. It is impossible to know what her
thoughts might have been during these years, or her pleasures, complaints,
and expectations for the future. I often wondered if she ever thought about
the whereabouts and fate of her brother. Did she ever visit him with her
mother in the vicinity before 1915, speak with him, or even exchange let-
ters with him? What had been her experience when living with her brother
in the family unit? What was his name? Why had she persisted to hold
back his name from us? In all the years we lived together, and even after
in adulthood, I never heard her mention her brother or even refer to him
in conversation. Did she actually know him, share childhood experiences
together, or were they really young when separated? Did she keep his name
to herself, like my father did of siblings and parents, because they had
been killed? Worse, as an adult it never occurred to me to make up for the
deficit of my youthful incuriosity concerning the lives of our parents and
force the question on them. I cannot explain this continuing silence but
guess that it might have stemmed from long years of successfully keeping
the episodes of their earlier lives unsaid and explains my acceptance and
satisfaction with fantasy explanations I had conjured.
Vehanush’s mother, I have already described, had made her way to Bei-
rut and lived there until about 1934 or 1935, when she died. I have a photo
of her that must have been taken in Beirut, sitting beside a standing man
wearing a fez (see figure g.9). His name does not appear or sound Arme-
nian; I wondered if he were Arab or some other Middle Eastern ethnic-
ity, or merely an Armenian who changed his name. Vehanush apparently
communicated with her mother, who must have known of Vehanush’s
whereabouts, and Sena reports that Vehanush’s mother actually sent her

58 Chapter Three
a “handmade” gift when she was young or an infant. I have wondered
whether she kept up the correspondence, but if she had, the letters have
never surfaced. In Vehanush’s mind, the past consisted of her original
family, a father who died when she was an infant, a mother, a brother, a
stepfather for a time, and herself (she would never have known the third
husband of her mother) —three of its members definitively gone, vanished,
never, it seemed, to be a part of her world of the missionary school and
then the United States. She never mentioned her mother, much less ut-
tered her name to me; she never referred to my “grandmother” or spoke
the names of her father, stepfather, or brother. In fact, she never spoke of
the dead brother as somebody who once had been a living presence. My
childhood fables gave her a family with histories, even though the stories
would have been unrecognizable to her. In her world, the nameless were
the dead. She also seemed to be completely without relatives, another sub-
ject she never discussed or even raised; if she had any, they must have per-
ished among the nameless masses denied entry into the historical record.
It was not enough for their identity to have once lived and to have been
part of some contemporary historical experience. I even constructed an
account for myself in which her brother became a Jesuit priest living in Je-
rusalem. This was another family fantasy I came to believe to be true until
I learned a few years ago he had died young in Turkey. The circumstances
surrounding his death are unclear. Because our mother never seemed to
have any relatives, I may have wanted to invent one, even an untrue one,
for her and us. Yet it seems odder to me than even before that she remained
so guardedly tight-­lipped about her own family — so much so that it seems
as if she were either trying to hide something from us so terrible that she
would have no way of divulging it or that, more realistically, she had given
up on them because she was convinced she would never see them again.
How much time she actually spent with her brother and even her mother is
unknown, but it could not have been either very long or intensely intimate.
Her life looked as if it started in earnest with the school, even though the
details of that experience were held back from us. Clearly, she must have
had reasons but never provided even hints of what they might have been.
In the case of Ohannes, it is unknown what and how much he knew about
her youth or if he merely accepted her as he met her, without interrogat-
ing too closely. He would have learned something about her from Mrs.
Bedrosian, who would have described her to him as part of the marriage
arrangement. In any case, he never said anything that I can recall about
her youth or her family, which he never knew.

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 59

 It seems obvious now that she was more right than wrong to look upon
that part of her past as a void. Nothing was left of it worth keeping. School
represented a real start and the making of a different past from what she
had known in her youthful years at home, but even that remained lodged
behind walled-off memories impossible to ascend. She had a good friend
in Detroit named Mary, who always called her Vehan, who was a sister of
a woman who was part of the same school group that left Marash with Ve-
hanush. I suspect she would speak about that experience with her friend,
who had a stake in it, but not with us. Her silence was not unusual among
survivors. I do not believe some wave of trauma inexorably swept over
Vehanush and Ohannes that may have dragged them under and perma-
nently anchored our parents in a paralysis of silence by holding them in
its thrall for a lifetime. Because there was nothing left, apart from repeti-
tiously reflecting on the staggering numbers who were killed and disap-
peared, there was nothing left to talk about. The survivors scattered to
different parts of the world were compelled to carry out the titanic task of
starting all over again, bringing nothing but themselves in most cases, and
their names (even though Vehanush had no trouble changing her name),
and immediately forced into finding places to live, jobs, negotiating daily
with people who did not speak their language, struggling interminably
with communication, and, for some, the endless search for members of
their families, relatives, kinsfolk. Among survivors like my mother, espe-
cially, remembering a world that so wantonly was destroyed when she was
so young would raise problems of understanding that would return to her
as she grew older and perhaps reappear in forms of unwanted flashing
revenants reminding her of people she knew who had been murdered. It
was not a world to get nostalgic about and to bring back in words. But how
else to bring it back? I cannot help thinking that these were years of peril
for her. I have tried working through what she may have thought about,
how she looked upon an indefinite future, and whether she ever believed
she would have one — how in fact she and others with her were able to
hold themselves together and function on a daily basis, constantly under
the uncertain prospect of an imminent death sentence. What ambitions,
dreams, and desires accompanied her, or were all these sentiments sim-
ply bracketed or indefinitely deferred until she understood her circum-
stances and had an idea of what she might expect, what she might be able
to realize? What thoughts would she have of her mother and dead father
and brother and what role did their ghostly figures continue to occupy in
Vehanush’s undescribed dreams or secret ruminations? To ask such ques-

60 Chapter Three
tions and know beforehand that they would only elicit other unanswerable
questions but never bring us closer to some sort of explanatory responses
made of our parents’ lives a blank tableau and turned ours into a life with
strangers.
Until fairly recently, I had never been aware that the Armenian com-
munity with which we were involved when growing up was actually a com-
munity composed virtually of survivors. When thinking about it, you are
struck by the odd fact that every adult you know and have some sort of
contact with had come there for the same reasons and at the same time:
their presence attested to their surviving. The mark of the genocide was
permanently embossed on the diaspora’s social body to signify what held
the group together. And this fact must have been a powerful mediating
force in its composition and how it looked upon the larger world of Ameri-
can life and its relationship to it. There were always people who believed
they might one day return to Anatolia and, once abandoning that dream,
to at least the eastern Armenian state in the Soviet Federation, who be-
lieved that they were only in the U.S. as temporary residents. But this
proved to be a necessary illusion that contributed to their resolve to find-
ing their way in the new society. For most, though not my mother, this
attitude lasted until they died. At the same time I looked upon the peo-
ple with whom we interacted through the lens of an American kid, des-
perate to be more American than ever, disliking many of them as weird
and unintelligible and failing to understand all of them and the survivor
effect that must have been a principal dimension shaping their makeup.
The irony here is that Armenians always referred to non-­Armenians as
other — odar — which I used to describe Armenians.
The problem with the rhetoric of diaspora communities like this one,
as I understood it, is that it made too much of the world before the geno-
cide. It subsisted more in a past that had not yet passed into a present, if it
was ever likely to do so, than a present no longer bound by the demands
of a catastrophic past that could envision a future. My mother’s silence
notwithstanding, as a child I was subjected to a good deal of chatter and
conversation among older folks about the “old country” and their preoc-
cupations with particular villages and what seemed to me at the time an
endless celebration of time and place. The village remained their world,
even as they adapted to the complex and wider world of American soci-
ety. I did not know where these places were, had only the most indefinite
sense of the time frame of their discussions, and found them repetitious
in their invariable return to social and kin relationships and food. Rarely

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 61

did conversations turn to Turkish or Kurdish neighbors who lived in the
vicinity or were friends. Occasionally, my father, in despairing tones, re-
ferred to the presence of “whirling dervishes,” and what he considered to
be a spectacle of religious insanity that served as a blanket judgment cov-
ering the Islamic majority. I only learned later that he was referring to Sufi
Muslims who embodied a mystical tradition not really any more irrational
than the desert saints of early Christianity and the diverse hallucinates of
late medieval Europe. Yet Armenians, Greeks, Assyro-­Chaldeans, Jews,
and other minorities who had inhabited Anatolia long before the coming
of the Ottoman Turks lived under unbending constraints and in constant
nervous apprehension and fear of arbitrary killings that have carried over
into modern Turkish society. Premodern empires, which today have made
something of a comeback among some historians because they suppos-
edly exemplified multiethnicity and heterogeneity, unlike the nation-­state,
were actually prison houses for minority populations. If these ethnic mi-
norities were not always invisible, like slaves and women, their visibility
invariably called attention to their exemplification of a heterogeneity that
signified only the scandal of different otherness and the necessity to keep
them segregated and under surveillance and ultimately to eliminate them.
Even after the Kemalist takeover, massacres of Greeks and Armenians
continued into the 1950s, with the addition of Kurds down to our present.
Despite the appearance of ethnic heterogeneity, such empires as the
Ottoman, the Czarist, and even the Hapsburg resembled spaces dedicated
to permanent hunting seasons against minorities as well as reservoirs of
violent expropriation, that is, theft and dispossession, sanctioned in the
Ottoman case by Islamic customary law. We tend to forget this history
these days and especially attitudes as expressed in the following declara-
tion that circulated throughout the Anatolian countryside and provinces
in 1915: “God has created the Armenian for sacrifice [kourban].”5 What this
obviously meant was that Armenians were put on Earth to be exploited by
the true believers and destroyed. There is nothing equivocal in the senti-
ment. In the Ottoman Empire, the received religious anti-­Armenian rac-
ism was always expressed in the form of hatred within Anatolian Muslim
communities, large numbers of which would eventually participate in the
massacre. The genocide was merely the last attempt and the most com-
prehensive of these unscheduled pogroms and the most ambitious episode
in a long history that suggests a final plan determined according to the
task it was supposed to resolve: save the empire by removing troublesome
minorities — erasing the stain of heterogeneity — who were said to com-

62 Chapter Three
mand considerable wealth and a storehouse of skills that could have been
productively used when Turkey decided to become a modern nation-­state
but rather was presented as the means by which minorities would domi-
nate and enslave the Turks. Instead, the Young Turks resorted to the po-
litical appeal of national renewal, based on “Turkism,” which simply was
another name for non-­Europeans, both Christian and Islamic. In the end
the genocide brought the empire down.
In the Armenian diaspora community of the U.S., when the past came
into conversation, it was usually an embroidered, romantic image em-
ployed to contrast it with an unfavorable contemporary life in an alien
land. I can recall how my mother called these made-­up stories flights
of nonsense. But they were stories that nevertheless moored people to a
strange land and offered the future prospect of return, even though it was
delusionary. Vehanush could be harshest with our father, who would fre-
quently slip into the groove of an almost involuntary and unyielding but
momentary nostalgia. Vehanush never showed a hint of nostalgia for the
world she forcibly left. These differences appeared to show the impor-
tance of their experiential backgrounds: Ohannes, raised to adulthood in
a very traditional, virtually clan-­dominated religious village environment;
and Vehanush, whose formation began in a foreign Protestant missionary
school and who became a woman who seemingly forgot nothing but who
revealed even less. In these discussions Vehanush always reflected the po-
sition of someone who simply could not understand the romantic hold of
traditional life, even though she knew the reasons prompting these flights.
After all, one of her favorite movies was Gone with the Wind (1939).
I keep returning to the troubling problem of names and that both
Ohannes and Vehanush never uttered them, at least before us. I have felt
that this decision might have been part of a strategy to close off discus-
sions on things they did not want to speak of; it effectively worked to fore-
close any questions from us since it is difficult to speak of nameless people
we would never know and see. But it seems strange now, as already ac-
knowledged, that none of us ever sought to open discussion concerning
their early years. Was it because we were here, not there, which, for us,
was nowhere, filled with questions never asked and answers deferred for
a lifetime and for our parents only part of an aborted past that was cut
short and taken from them? Whatever their intention, silence seemed to
discourage further questioning and set up a permanent barrier against ex-
pressions of curiosity. I have never really managed to successfully explain
the reasons for this absence of curiosity to others or to myself. My father

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 63

mentioned only one of his many sisters by name, Catherine, apparently
his favorite, who, significantly, died of pneumonia before the massacres,
while the rest of the large family was murdered and their names never
mentioned, if I recall correctly. I have often thought about the reasons why
the names of the dead or those who have disappeared were never invoked,
and speculated on whether there had been some deeply entrenched tra-
ditional practice that demanded the removal of such names in everyday
conversation.
Some writers have seen this absence as evidence of a broader “psycho-
logical trauma,” a theorization that gained greater acceptance after World
War II.6 In the interwar years after the genocide, apparently people were
not encouraged to recount their experiences. It is not clear to me why such
experiences were induced to remain untold. Thomas De Waal quotes from
the published account recording the horror of Leon Surmelian’s childhood
and the loss of his parents: “Neither my brother nor sisters spoke about
their most painful inner experiences, which, like myself, could not be told.
In fact I could not tell them anything about myself, nor did they question
me. By a sort of silent agreement we took care not to mention our parents,
and other relatives whom we dearly loved. Their names, or anything to re-
mind us directly of them, were barred from conversation.”7 While it is not
conclusive that anything like some sort of “communal fate” or collective
mass trauma explains this silence, it still must have been a widely observed
individual disposition. In Surmelian’s account, there is a similarity to our
own later experience, a generation removed, when our parents remained
silent on their relatives and names and we were thus barred from further
questioning. If it is said to mark the behavior of survivors of different geno-
cidal episodes, and I am not at all sure it does, are silences a reflection of
a commonly shared reason that points to the unbearable pain of speaking
the names of beloved relatives who have perished in a cataclysm? Striking
out the names of the dead relatives and loved ones means they no longer
inhabit the everyday, as we do. In fact, the everyday for them longer ex-
ists. But it also implies they are only remembered in silence and that their
presence has been removed from the record of public memory as if they
never existed. This may, in part, explain the consistent practice of never
uttering the names of those who have perished, as if it were a way of quar-
antining the lived from the dead. By contrast, the historical was all about
names, usually names of the dead, who apparently still have stories to tell,
fueled by it, attesting to the power of subjectivity to survive beyond death,
preserving the names of the dead who apparently still have their stories

64 Chapter Three
for the living. One thing appears obvious: the extreme suppressing of the
names of loved ones who perished is determined by the nature of the event
that took their lives. If they did not die like Ohannes’s sister Catherine,
who died of an illness, and whose name lived on in utterances, the names
of those who were inhumanly and obscenely murdered are erased.
For us, there is the additional question that asks for an explanation of
the circumstances that prompted the three of us to agree to a compact of
silence, as if there were no question to our acceptance that nothing ever
really happened. Is it the same for those who experience an overwhelming
natural disaster and have lost members of their families? What has inter-
ested me is the behavior of parents who refused to refer to their parents
and children by name and its effect on us: the refusal worked to prevent
us from further inquiry. We were denied even the memory of belonging to
a kin group of departed relatives. I have already reported that our mother
mentioned none of the names of her smaller family, not even her mother,
who survived in another country, much less friendships made in school
and cemented by the journey to Greece. It came to me that perhaps her life
with them was too brief, not worth recalling it through their names. Nor
did my father mention his family’s names, with the one exception. Here
was a paradox: not only did historians define the nameless by omitting
from history the large numbers who sacrificed their lives to make history,
but the survivors, who were part of this historic cohort of nameless people,
redefined the category in order to also exclude their dead.
In many ways the silence of survivors like our mother is condensed
in the act of namelessness, as if cutting out that portion of the past that
no longer exists requires repressing names of people who once inhabited
your world but who actually disappeared with it. This whitening out of a
portion of the past is, I suspect, a kind of preparation for a new life in a
different place, or no life at all. It was strangely in keeping with America’s
own habitual allergy to history and forgetting the immediate past as if it
never happened, and it was dramatized by Vehanush’s speed in adapting
herself to modern American life. Vehanush’s release from genocidal Ana-
tolia seemed to relieve her of the burden of history. She had been assisted
by exposure to a modern life encouraged by German Protestant mission-
aries who, like other Protestant missionaries in Anatolia, could juxtapose
a figure of modernity in contrast to the Armenian Apostolic Church or-
ganized in the fourth century CE. The trace of our mother’s training was
manifest in her adaptability and decision to not affiliate with any religious
institution once settled in the U.S. It is as if a Protestant missionary school

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 65

inculcated in her a sense of secularism as a vital dimension of a modern-
izing society and the necessary requirement to live in it. That decision
could also have induced a disapproving response to the religious discipline
imposed on the young students of the school. Hollywood continued her
education into modern life. She had no trouble dropping her family name
for the name of a woman who had a lot to do with saving her life. (In actu-
ality, the Bedrosians sponsored her entry into the U.S., which resulted in
taking on their name as their “daughter” and keeping it.) In all this, the real
difficulty I have encountered derives principally from my recognition that
my parents’ complicity was necessary in shielding us from this sorrow-
ful history, the kind of social relationships provided by a community of
survivors whose members were just like our parents, and how few remi-
niscences I could actually (if not reliably) call forth of their willingness or
unwillingness to speak about their experience to me and my sisters. Some-
times, I felt we were all passing strangers to each other.
An additional problem was my education. Second-­generation children
of immigrants who, like myself, were the first to have attended college
discovered that one of the unintended consequences is that you lose and
eventually are cut off from your earlier life and associations. When I went
to graduate school, I left Detroit, never really to return, except on infre-
quent occasions to visit my parents and Sena. Victoria married young and
moved to another state, while Sena remained living with our parents and
developed a better sense of them than I possessed. And they, as they aged,
depended more on Sena since Victoria and I were no longer around. But
this decision also gestured toward a kind of mimetic reversal of our own
mother’s experience of having been separated and ultimately abandoned
by her mother. In fact, the respectively different trajectories of my sisters
and me suggests a significant disclosure of what our family was about or
like and, perhaps, something larger concerning the dynamic of migrant
American family life in the interwar period. But there does not appear to
be anything in Sena’s longer experience with my parents that sheds fur-
ther light on their earlier years. What I have found especially disquiet-
ing by our parents’ decision to remain silent about their early lives is that
coming to America represented a new start that seemed to have canceled
out their other pasts in order to begin again. They continued to live with
these traces of that past all around them in their everyday, which remained
there, in their present, in one form or another as permanent revenants no
longer bound by unscheduled appearances.
While our mother was a booster of American life and Americanization,

66 Chapter Three
a modernizer “before the letter,” she maintained a set of associations with
Armenian groups like the Armenian Red Cross, the Armenian General
Benevolent Union, and my father’s arf or Dashnak associates, as much for
the sociability they offered as anything else. She loved movies and prob-
ably learned a great deal concerning the materiality of American life from
them, as did other late-developing capitalist societies. My father seems
to have had deeper roots in Armenian village life. He never described the
physical conditions of home or even the village, apart from some vague
remarks that it was near a “sea” or probably a lake or pond I could never
locate on any map of the region. As he and my children grew older, he
seemed obsessed with providing them with money for shoes, suggesting,
perhaps, the recovered memory of their absence in his childhood.
In spite of his own religious agnosticism, even though he came from a
priestly family or because of it, Ohannes, not my mother, insisted on my
being baptized by the Armenian Church. Hence, my connection with the
Armenian Church began and ended with the momentary trauma of bap-
tism by a black-bearded, deep-­voiced priest, which entailed being dumped
into a large washing tub filled with water and crying my head off, as much
out of fear of the imposing black-­bearded priest, draped and hooded en-
tirely in black, as from the actual immersion itself. Regardless of this dis-
agreeable experience, throughout my life the church remained imprinted
on me and on my real name, which was Harutun der Harootunian, a re-
dundancy, to be sure, but filled with my father’s hopefulness since it meant
“Resurrection, son of the Resurrection.” I have thought that, despite his
break from the Armenian Church and religion in general, the decision to
provide me with a redundant name evoking the significance of resurrec-
tion and new life must have been prompted by his desire to indelibly stamp
or imprint on me my Armenian identity, which the church had historically
assumed. But its overdetermination also suggests the possibility of some
sort of rebirth, renewal, or conviction that hope springs eternal out of
both the ruins of Ani and the ever present threat of historical extinction
permanently closing off the future, interrupting Armenian dreams of an
expectant and fulfilled future. Needless to say, that futureless void was ac-
tualized by the most recent killing fields of Anatolia that nearly succeeded
in turning dreams into a final nightmare. It is hard to know what my father
had in mind since he rarely, if ever, referred to me by the given name, and
my mother never did. But my mother had no use whatsoever for the Arme-
nian Church, looking upon its priests as freeloaders and the reservoir of all
backwardness, probably because of her exposure to Protestant Christian-

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 67

ity in the orphanage. She never maintained an affiliation with any church
but led, according to my sisters, an exemplary Christian life.
I did not learn about the massacres from my parents. It was gradual,
and always tempered by what I overheard and could understand, which
usually was calibrated to how old I was. In this way I learned about its
existence in fragments gleaned from incomplete conversations overheard
between my parents and Armenian friends, who had undergone similar
experiences. These amounted to fragments and unconnected accounts
that accumulated into an unstructured collage of statements, hearsay, half-­
remembered stories that could only be randomly thrown together to form
a large pool open to demand plural readings and interpretations, without
any coherent story line. The collage-like components could be used or se-
lected to tell whatever story one wanted to recount. Yet, in retrospect, the
fragmented conversations I had overheard as a child conveyed what proved
to be the proper form of grasping the genocide and its afterlife, an episode
that was itself experienced in unrelated fragments and whose survivors
lived its fractured afterlife of existences in diasporas that strove to realize
the lost coherence but rarely succeeded.
What I was able to gather came especially from those large-­scale gath-
erings organized by the local arf-­Dashnak chapter, either in a building
they owned in Delray (southeastern Detroit, not far from the Michigan
Central Station) or at the Azadamard (Freemen’s) Club closer to where we
lived. In the summers there were outings (khunjoogs) in parks, large-­scale
picnics with varieties of Armenian dishes, and music and dancing; and in
autumn there were expeditions into the countryside, searching for “er-
rant” grape leaves growing alongside roads from nearby farm fields to be
picked, pickled, and bottled for sarma. As I was growing up, I began to no-
tice people inevitably returning to the same themes discussed in previous
socials, exchanging experiences and their own memories and those they
had heard. Often, I saw a woman or even a man break down in tears and I
watched attempts on the part of the interlocutors to console them. It was
from these discussions I heard that I began to learn that something really
awful had befallen these people and resulted in the loss of people they were
close to. But these disjointed conversations never supplied encouragement
to interrogate either of my parents; nor were they ever prompted to explain
such episodes to us. Why did I suppose that my parents, who had come to
the U.S. for the same reasons and at the same time as these people, were
exempt from such experiences? It was only in my early teens, I now recall,
that my father began to relate his wartime experiences in Anatolia, fight-

68 Chapter Three
ing with the Russians under Dashnak command along the eastern border.
These were anecdotal reminiscences concerning places he had visited. But
I did not know where or when he signed up to join an arf brigade and
where he was trained. In the early years when he lived off and on in the
U.S., he was clearly involved in arf politics, an Armenian version of a
bund, for which I have a few photos, taken in and around the time of World
War I. One of the group photos reveals a young man in the front row in
a nicely cut three-­piece suit, with a watch on a chain hanging in the up-
per pocket of his jacket (figure g.5). (In precapitalist societies moving into
capitalist modernity, the gold pocket watch was often seen as a sign of the
modern.) This modern man — confident, self-­assured — had a swaggering
look, stylish air, and interesting face topped by thick, black wavy hair, and
appeared relaxed and in possession of a serious countenance as many of
the others in the photo, all dressed in three-­piece suits. They were posing
for a photo that must have been of some local chapter of the arf. Two of
the men in the front row are holding hands, a pose I have noticed in other
photos of Armenians from that era. Was this a sign of camaraderie? What
I remember of him when I was young is that the swagger and confidence
had left him as he aged; the uncertainties of job security and sporadic wel-
fare work in the U.S. had begun to imprint deep lines in his face. And years
later, when I returned to that photo, I thought that his youth and his es-
cape from a premodern village to the modern world of America must have
energized him with the promise of a hope and possibility that dissipated
with time and experience. In the photo, he looked like any young modern
man. But it was clear that as he aged, the trappings of modernity merely
concealed deeper habits and reflexes belonging to another culture from a
different time. Unlike our mother, who never expressed any desire to re-
turn to Anatolia, it seemed that Ohannes in his later years had embraced
an aspiration of his youth, which was the conviction that life in America
was a temporary adventure and he would return home. By the time of the
depression and the certainty of insecurity, all youthful energy had aban-
doned him — he was now in an unwanted history belonging to somebody
else, still looking for steady work to feed his family, which a broader fam-
ily in the vanished world of kin and clan might have taken care of in an-
other place. At the end of his life, he went to Fresno. But in all these years
I never once heard him utter any of the delusionary offers associated with
the equally classic ideological promise of the “American Dream” that still
continues to lure people with its false hopes. What he did often say is that
people in the United States worked harder than workers in any other place.

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 69

 But it is interesting to reflect on how ungenerous Armenians of the
diaspora appeared to me, as if the experience of getting out with little or
nothing had frozen them into the figure of Shylocks and hoarders dedi-
cated to constantly watching over their money and possessions before they
were taken away, sacrificed. I remember an Armenian family who lived
in one of the upstairs flats of our building: the head — Boghoz — was seen
by everybody who encountered him as a model miser and classic cheap-
skate; his wife, always dressed in black, was no better and incessantly poor-
mouthing their situation; and their son, Vartkes, became an untalented
petty thief. (Our parents thought otherwise and were convinced they were
sitting on a large hoard of cash.) I generalized this image of Armenian life
in the U.S., concluding they were a people of small ambitions and were
petty, niggardly hoarders. I felt that whatever solidarity and resilience un-
der Ottoman oppression imposed, the rural community was no longer
operationally embodied in the diaspora, only its form remaining empty. I
would learn later, and perhaps better, that they were not all like that and
that it was wrong to view them from a contemporary American perspec-
tive of expectations to recognize that the experience of living in Anatolia
and leaving without anything had been force-fed into migrants and shaped
their personality. Most of them reached the U.S. with few resources, if any.
Many made up the deficit caused by loss, whatever it may have been. Still,
it should also be remembered that most Armenians who managed to get
to the U.S. were from peasant families, who had already been socialized
in an imperial regime devoted to ceaseless expropriation and theft. With
our parents, they had little or no real resources once they returned to the
U.S. from France, and it is not even clear how long they spent there be-
fore making their way to Detroit. But they never suffered from the afflic-
tion of niggardliness or succumbing to the expectations generated by false
hope.
This observation of niggardliness may also have stemmed from con-
ditions peculiar to the diaspora, which was made up of survivors who
were all Armenians yet coming from different regions, towns, and villages,
where the bonds of solidarity no longer operated. What had once been a
regionally heterogeneous society had become homogenized in the U.S.;
paradoxically, this homogenization seemed to alienate people into divi-
siveness who were still trying to retain their sense of a different regional
or village affiliation from each other in a place where these local attach-
ments no longer existed. This sense of division was especially intensified

70 Chapter Three
by the competition over scarce resources. It may have also been the case
that the survivors carried with them older habitual patterns of behavior
formed under Ottoman oppression, such as taking care of themselves in
this uncertain environment by hoarding for the future. Clearly, the subse-
quent dispossession and theft encouraged and enabled by genocide exac-
erbated these older reflexes and impulses. It is also true that the church,
which had been so deeply embedded in village life, and the millet system,
which provided the fiction of semiautonomy, were no longer a force in di-
aspora life: the church was usually distant from its parishioners and had
lost its political function, and the millet system disappeared with the em-
pire. Where the appeal of regionalism persisted was in ways it was used
to discount people from, say, such and such village, as if they had always
been known in Anatolia as backward bumpkins, wretches, or whatever.
This practice may well have been devised by and in the diaspora, for all I
know. But it must also be recognized that empires and their spatially dis-
tant administrations create the conditions of semiautonomy or, at least, its
function as a necessary illusion in spatially far-­flung regions.
Into this unwelcome history of migrant life in the U.S. that excluded
large numbers of people, my father and mother were actually without his-
torical identity. To be discounted in this way led to living a diminished life,
which I will return to. Diasporic migration meant leaving one’s history be-
hind because it was or is in the process of being destroyed. Arrival in a for-
eign and alien environment demanded involuntarily entering somebody
else’s history without knowing the coordinates of this new space-­time. As-
sembling in ghettoes with coethnics is the response and leads to living the
double or comparative life mentioned above. The settlements of the Arme-
nian diaspora throughout the world were attempts to remain connected to
that lost history — however imagined, abridged, and symbolized by Ani’s
once greatness—in the midst of a larger urban configuration that belonged
to others. But the history these settlements embodied was a congealed
montage representing now combined regions of Anatolia constructed out
of recalled everyday lives that had ended with the genocide and flight.
The diaspora became the unanticipated instrument of homogenizing the
heterogeneity of Armenian life. This homogenization of Armenian life
was powerfully reinforced by the genocide itself, which made no obser-
vance of regional differentiation. I recall that at social events, people would
proudly appeal to the preparation of certain dishes as a sign of retrieving
regional identities that had been lost in the forcible homogenization. Ap-

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 71

parently, there was nothing like the kufta (a baked, stuffed meatball, made
of ground lamb, bulghar, onions, and walnuts), which any number of vil-
lages claimed to having produced the best.
Over the years I have returned to that group photo in which my father
appeared with his comrades and wondered about it: he was unmarried
at that time and it may have been taken before the U.S. entered the war;
how early is not clear, nor where it was taken, or where he lived, perhaps
in Chicago. Who were the others and what happened to them? I am not
able to recognize any familiar face from the friends of our father I met
and knew while growing up. What happened to the men gathered in the
photo? Did they join up with Ohannes to fight in the arf brigades? But I
may be wrong about the dating since in the photo of him and two com-
rades during his time in the arf brigades, dressed for combat and armed,
he appears to look younger, and that photo must have been taken in and
around 1915 or even a bit earlier. My son still resembles my father when
that photo was taken.
In those early years, how did Ohannes spend his spare time when not
working? I know he made his first trip to the U.S. with a cousin, when they
actually lived in Canada for a while, who eventually lived near us when we
were in Highland Park. But by that time we never saw him and his family
because of an earlier quarrel. My mother claimed he had cheated our fa-
ther out of money or a small business venture in which they were partners.
The incident put the lie to my father’s favorite phrase, “blood is thicker
than water.” He rarely spoke of his cousin, who surprisingly physically re-
sembled my father and who, economically, was far better off than we. In
his early trips to the U.S., Ohannes must have communicated with mem-
bers of his family in Anatolia — his parents, grandparents, brothers, and
sisters. Why is there no record of this time or even a body of recollections
he could have relayed? Where are the exchanged letters? What did he do
and did he send money back? What did he aspire to? Hope for? What did
America mean to him at the time he was a contract laborer? The absence
of letters between my parents in the U.S. and their relatives and parents
in Anatolia, exchanged in different times, is baffling, and I have no expla-
nation concerning their disappearance, if they had actually existed. But
it is evident that this kind of documentary material could have told us a
good deal about how they felt and thought, what problems they encoun-
tered, what expectations they brought with them, and their observations
of America, as well as reports concerning the current situation in Anatolia.
The few photos we possess fail to fill in these blanks. It is not at all clear

72 Chapter Three
if such material was deliberately destroyed or lost in one of their moves
or simply seen as not worth saving. Our mother was not known to either
save or collect things. Is it that the pattern of working as contract labor
in the U.S. and returning home and coming back suggested that Ohannes
eventually intended to settle permanently in Anatolia? Spending time in
big American cities would either gradually diminish the attractiveness of
rural life in a precapitalist village society dominated by Turks and admin-
istered by Armenian priests at the local level or contribute to romanticiz-
ing it. It is interesting to speculate on whether his American experience
would have induced him to migrate to Istanbul, away from village life to an
urban complex already committed to forms of modernization and the ac-
tualization of modern life. That question was definitively answered when
he left the arf brigade and returned to the U.S. in late 1916 or early 1917.
The growing crisis leading up to World War I and the worsening condi-
tions in Anatolia, especially for its minority populations, would have been
worrying to Ohannes and his friends and comrades, who knew the his-
tory of the region. Maintaining steady communication with their families
in Turkey must have become a subject of anxious concern, as well as what
lay in store for Armenians, especially, since the community was already
expressing and acting on the aspiration for independence.
Ohannes had scattered relatives, distant cousins in the U.S. who had
managed to escape the genocide. I had always felt that he tried to main-
tain some connection with this dispersed group of distant relatives, as if
frantically clasping the branches of a dying family tree to prevent falling
alone onto an unfamiliar ground. These cousins and more distant rela-
tives once constituted for him a larger and more solidary kin group in
Anatolia. But now they only represented the remaining slivers that had
already set their different trajectories and lives after survival that he was
desperately trying to pull together. In this endeavor, Vehanush was an
involuntary participant who happily accompanied him on these expedi-
tions but always armed with the perspective of a skeptic who, having no
relatives to speak of, brought no corresponding experience of living in
an extended kin group to my father’s attempt. Her perspective was often
insightful and I found her judgments more unerring than not. Some of
Ohannes’s relatives were in Waukegan, Cleveland, and Detroit. I think
he felt closest to the Waukegan branch, whose head of the family — my
father’s first cousin — ran a liquor store later inherited by his oldest son,
Ashod. Ashod was probably a second cousin who would visit our father
from time to time, and he had an obvious affection and respect for him

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 73

that, I always felt, was not extended to the rest of us. He was not high on
my list. My favorite was Nvart, another of my father’s first cousins, and her
husband, Garabed, in Cleveland, whom I looked upon as aunt and uncle
when I was a child. They had two sons; the younger was hit by a car at age
four or five and died. The oldest son, Richard, became a lawyer with whom
my sister Sena and I lost contact after his parents died. And there were
more distant cousins in Detroit we visited regularly, two brothers who
ran a corner grocery store. In this cohort the only one I really liked was a
third or fourth cousin, Berjui, who was about my age, and quite beautiful
with green eyes that matched my father’s. She was one of two daughters
of the eldest brother, Hagop. Our mother had little use for our father’s
relatives and especially this branch. I often wondered about the source of
this animus and thought it might have derived from the envy of one who
had no relatives. I think this also may have been the case regarding Nvart,
who, as a first cousin, was close to my father — they had literally grown
up together. Nvart frequently referred to my mother as her “sister,” which
evidently rankled Vehanush. But Vehanush was wrong about Nvart and
right about the Detroit branch, the Aznavourians. She believed they had
treated my father badly, in some instances perhaps exploited him, and had
never done anything for him when he was in need of help during the de-
pression. I do not believe he ever asked for help. But I came to feel that the
issue was related more to pretensions of social class and hierarchy within
the Armenian community and possibly the zero-­sum game inhabitants
of the diaspora had made into a life principle. I distinctly remember that
the Detroit relatives never visited us. Perhaps it was because we lived in
a rather cramped four-­family flat at the edge of Highland Park where it
bordered Detroit. It was a working-­class neighborhood of mixed ethnic
groups and contrasted with their single-­standing house in a middle-­class
area of Detroit. But I suspect that our mother had it right when she com-
plained that they had social airs in addition to their single-­standing house.
The brothers Hagop and Khosrov were probably from the same village or
nearby where my father came from. In other words, they were peasants.
As grocers, they were upwardly aspiring petit bourgeois merchants in De-
troit — probably less affected by the depression than most. As it appeared
to me, the problem was Hagop’s wife, Anahid, and her mother, who lived
with them. Apparently, both were from Istanbul and were already social-
ized into the Armenian bourgeoisie of that large urban center. Anahid
and her mother seemed to claim the status of inheritors of Istanbul’s ur-
ban and developed cosmopolitan culture that must have trickled down

74 Chapter Three
among bourgeois Greeks, Jews, and Armenians. I found her mother (Na-
zanik), especially, an unknowing bore; she spoke of nothing but how good
life had been in Istanbul, and I often wondered why she had left. Years later
it occurred to me she spoke of the glories of Istanbul as if the genocide had
not taken place or was simply a distant, barely audible echo of a past event.
Yet, the genocide actually did reach the Armenian community in Istanbul,
where the first round up and execution of professional men was carried out.
Some scholars of the genocide have proposed that middle-­class Armenians
in Istanbul had become more assimilated to urban Turkish life than village
peasants of eastern and western Anatolia.8 This would have grated on my
mother’s nerves, as she literally came from nothing and understandably
would have had great difficulty in believing the repetitious descriptions of
the good life in Istanbul. My father was treated like a poor country cousin
whom they suffered from time to time but with whom they made no effort
to establish a closer relationship. In fact, they had different associations
within Detroit’s Armenian community and I never saw this particular set
of relatives at any of the larger social functions we were made to attend
with our parents, which suggests a class differentiation that often aligned
with specific political groups within the diaspora. The prevailing atmo-
sphere of these moments was shot through with thick condescension and
patronization. I also think that our father’s Armenian politics, his earlier
involvement in the volunteer brigades, and his continuing affiliation with
the Dashnaks might have contributed to widening the distance between
him and the two Aznavourian brothers, whose politics seemed oriented to-
ward a more bourgeois party, called Ramgavar (Liberal Democratic Party).
By the time I reached my early teens, I stopped accompanying my par-
ents on such visits since I could not tolerate the repetition of stories about
an imagined world the older woman had fantasized and felt entitled to
regale us with and about which I had no desire to learn more. I also was
able to liberate myself from Anahid’s insistence on singing Armenian
songs (or whatever they were; they sounded Armenian) before us, often
sounding like a crow in deep distress. It is entirely possible that my per-
spective on accompanying my parents on such visits I really did not want
to make, spending a whole day among older people speaking of the old
country — a place I had no knowledge of or interest in — as if it were some
sort of prelapsarian golden age, reflected the unintended impatience of a
bored kid. But I recall sensing similar displeasure in my mother’s attitude
toward them, which may have reinforced my own indifference. I do recall
that I rarely, if ever, saw these people once I entered my teens, with the ex-

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 75

ception of Berjui, who died young, and have no idea of what happened to
the rest even though Sena maintained some contact with them after our
parents died.
I mention these relatives because I never felt that we were actually re-
lated to these people who either rarely (if ever) showed up periodically or
who we only occasionally visited. With few exceptions they were not close,
excepting Nvart, nor particularly friendly when we visited with them.
They always acted as distant acquaintances of my father, especially, and
showed little affection in any way one would associate with close relatives.
Unlike relatives who would have been part of our lives as we were growing
up, they were distant, rarely in evidence: people who may have had some
sort of blood tie to our father and prior associations but had no meaning
for us. Not only were we deprived of close relations with grandparents,
aunts and uncles, and cousins, sharing with them the intimacies of our
lives or theirs, these distant cousins of our father seemed to treat him and
us as outliers, intruders whom they felt obliged to tolerate on the few occa-
sions we showed up. I have often thought that what reinforced this experi-
ence of distance and strangeness, if not exactly estrangement, surrounding
these alleged “relatives” was the form of the occasional visit itself we made
to see them. As I look back on those times, the visits appeared more like a
pilgrimage whose ritualistic purpose and meaning remained a mystery to
me but an unexplained necessity for Ohannes.
I have been convinced that our experience among Armenians was
not particularly exceptional and that growing up and living without rela-
tives had its own drawbacks on the formation and development of one’s
affective facilities. What bothered me has been the knowledge of a grand-
mother with whom we had no contact or even the faintest idea of her
existence until she died. In this respect, the three of us reproduced the
emotional world of our mother. The principal lesson learned from expe-
riencing regular contact with estranged relatives of my father is the rapid
uprootedness that occurs among people who were both closely related
to each other and shared a solidarity of intimacy when they inhabited a
premodern village society, which the move to a modern capitalist urban
society thoroughly diluted. I suspect my father understood the effects of
this momentous spatial (geographic) and temporal (capitalism’s socially
normative) time and tried to overcome the widening gulf between himself
and his relatives through our periodic ritualistic visitations. My mother
accepted the displacement as a deliverance and had no need for visits to
Ohannes’s increasingly remote relatives, which she saw as a waste of a

76 Chapter Three
good Sunday’s time and another missed movie. Apart from the suppressed
antagonism such visits produced, and the distinct impression I had that we
were not welcome when we did show up, it occurred to me when recalling
those moments that the encounters represented a projection of the micro-
cosm of the city/countryside division in Turkey, with its entailing conceits,
which would have played a much greater role in the time of the genocide,
if for no other reason than the city folks had greater opportunities and re-
sources with which to get out.
In the presence or absence of a large family group is reflected the rela-
tive intensity of affect and especially what might be called an affective di-
vision of labor. In this structure of thick relations, aunts, uncles, grandpar-
ents, and cousins all play specific roles not necessarily carried out by the
immediate parents. This was entirely missing in our experience and per-
haps explains why Sena sought out a broader group of Armenian friends as
if they constituted a surrogate extended family, when Victoria and I took
different routes. It also explains Vehanush’s own indifference to the few
tattered threads of relatives our father tried to pull together as a substitute,
which she imparted to us. In this respect, the three of us replicated her
own experience, not my father’s. I also think that when catastrophes oc-
cur and remove all those other people, many of whom were relatives, they
are no longer there to do what they might have had they lived, as relatives,
to fulfill their various roles in the structure of an affective division of la-
bor. But they also missed out as much as those who would have been the
objects of their affective and emotional investments. Is this what happens
to Pierre Bourdieu’s incisive proposition concerning the reproduction of
a habitat when there is no longer a larger unit to enforce a traditionally
unquestioned requirement that “anything goes without saying words” in
order to carry out its reproductive imperatives?9 None of us benefited from
the wisdom and love of that vanished world, and I believe that while our
parents did what they could, there was always that missing piece in our
upbringing. I saw it also reflected in the way my parents related to my own
kids — especially in my mother’s remoteness.
As for Ohannes’s military training, it must have been somewhere in
the eastern provinces or in the Russian Caucasus. In this respect, he spoke
of having spent time in Tbilisi, Georgia, but I do not really know why he
was there and for how long. As I explained earlier, I have a photo of him
and two comrades armed for combat that might have been taken there.
He often spoke of an Armenian general named Antranik (a favorite name
given to Armenian sons), known for his heroic leadership on the eastern

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 77

front and under whose command my father and his comrades must have
fought. I do not know which battles he experienced in the east, where he
was posted, fought, and retreated, or even how he was able to momentarily
get to his village, which was at a distance to the west from the eastern front
in the vicinity of Harput, to discover its destruction and the disappearance
of his family. Once there, did he speak to anybody, if there were still sur-
vivors? Or did he learn of the village’s destruction through reports passed
on by others? If he made a trip to his village, he must have made his way
back to the east because he finally left the region, traveling through Russia,
where he caught a ship to England and ultimately the United States. What
prompted him to leave the struggle — some sort of settlement between the
Turks and Russians under whom the Armenian brigades were fighting?
When did he leave? The Treaty of Brest-­Litovsk in 1918 brought an end to
the Russian involvement in the Allied cause and its withdrawal into a civil
war between the Bolsheviks and their White adversaries. But Ohannes
must have been induced to leave Anatolia and the war in the east by what
he saw and felt when he returned to his village. He knew that his family
had perished. What he did not know was whether they were murdered on
location or driven into one of the deportation marches, which surely would
have had the same effect. There was nothing left there and he knew that
his entire family was gone. He must have left the region before 1918 and re-
turned to the U.S., where he joined the aef, apparently briefly trained, and
was sent to France in 1917. He probably made this decision sometime in
late 1915 or 1916. There is a photo of him in a rather large group of Ameri-
can soldiers, taken at some hospital for the wounded in France and dated
1918. The chronology of his movements is really skewed and at times con-
tradictory in light of what is known of his trajectory. If he discovered the
destruction of his home and family while still in the Armenian brigades,
as I am convinced he did, he must have decided to permanently leave the
region. The occasion was also provided by the course of military events
in the east; it must have been late 1915 or early 1916, during the Russian
victories and a momentary hiatus in hostilities, that Ohannes was able
to make his way to his village and his parents’ home to see what had oc-
curred there in his absence and made his decision. A ceasefire prevailed
throughout 1917 but by the end of the year, it was ratified by an armistice
in December that brought an official end to combat between Russia and
Ottoman Turkey. As a result, the remaining Russian forces withdrew, leav-
ing approximately one thousand Armenian volunteers to face the 3rd Ot-

78 Chapter Three
toman Army. Under such conditions, it is imaginable that my father might
have left with the Russians.
As for my mother, she might have eventually left the orphanage/school
she attended and lived in and where, I believe, her mother worked for a
time. Her disciplined silence on all things relating to her family, as well as
her years in the school, have been increasingly unsettling as I began the
effort to unravel its secrecy and the reasons for it. What was she shielding
us from by not referring to her brother, father, or mother by their names?
Why did she choose to say nothing about them? What on earth did she
have in mind? And for whom? Was she protecting someone? Her father
had died earlier and well before the massacres. If her mother put her chil-
dren into the safekeeping of mission schools or simply because she was no
longer in a position to take care of them, it is difficult to know if she herself
thought she would return in the future to collect them or had planned to
abandon them. Perhaps she thought that this was as much as she could do
for them under the circumstances. But when and what actually motivated
her are not clear. Vehanush’s mother remarried twice after the death of
her first husband and ultimately found her way to Beirut, where she died
sometime in the early 1930s.
I know she was in communication with Vehanush during the years of
their separation, but I have no idea of its extent or regularity. Someone in
Beirut who knew about the separation and the addresses of mother and
daughter informed Vehanush by letter that her mother had died. At the
time she received the news of her mother’s death, we were living in a base-
ment of a building owned by an Armenian name Calouste, an energetic
and generous small businessman with a strangely twisted ear, who lived
upstairs with his wife, daughter, and son. My guess is that little rent was
being paid; our father had a good relationship with Calouste, liked him,
and might have done some work for him. I do recall they regularly made
raki in a washtub basin. This place was a block from where we lived when
I was born, and it is really the first place I can remember. I was about four
or five when Vehanush heard about her mother’s death, which means that
we had not been there too long and her mother must have known of the
change of address. I remember when she received the letter, while both of
us were in the front yard, and where she began to cry. This is really one of
the few bits of evidence available concerning the question of communica-
tion between mother and daughter. What is not at all clear is when this
communication would have started, its mode of regularity, and whether

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 79

it was actually between Vehanush’s mother and the teacher Bedrosian or
whether she knew of the name change. It is not too plausible to assume
that Vehanush continued to communicate with her mother once enrolled
in the school, given the external circumstances of the mother’s flight
to Beirut. She certainly knew of the marriage to Ohannes and the birth
of Sena.
But the motives of Vehanush’s mother remain unclear. My best guess
is that she had no intention of returning, even though Vehanush and her
brother, given their ages, probably initially believed she would come back
for them and were reassured by their mother. She must have believed they
were better off where they were and/or she was better off without them.
But what about the brother/son? Her response to that would depend on
the time she learned when and how he died. Somewhere in this indistinct
history, Vehanush must have concluded that she had been abandoned by
her or she had perished, which explains why she retained the name of the
Bedrosians. When and how did she learn of the death of her brother? Why
did she retain Bedrosian as her maiden name even after she discovered
her mother was still alive in Beirut? In some manner, Vehanush must have
known that her mother was not killed or disappeared. Almost fifteen years
had passed between the time Vehanush married Ohannes and the date of
her mother’s death, and an even longer period of time elapsed in which
she never saw her mother. I have wondered what kind of contact mother
and daughter managed to maintain in this rather long duration. Was it
sporadic with long intervals of no communication? What did Vehanush
think and how did she respond upon learning that her mother, who never
returned for her, was alive in Beirut? How would her mother explain to her
the decision to remain in Beirut? Did Vehanush leave the school with her
classmates before she knew her mother was still alive and not returning for
her, or was there no reason for the mother to return because her daughter
was no longer in Marash? While the teacher was initially the communi-
cant to the mother and conveyed information to Vehanush, in time Veha-
nush established direct contact with her biological mother. But it has been
impossible to envision the terrors that must have invaded her thoughts,
the fears that seized her throughout the years of the separation, and how
she was able to come to terms with the knowledge of abandonment. How
did her feelings change after she learned her mother was still alive? Was
the experience of this episode at the heart of the stubborn silence on all
matters relating to her early childhood, her parents, and her brother? Was
it driven by unforgiving anger or did she simply pass over it and put it aside

80 Chapter Three
with the past she had already cut off from herself? As for her mother, our
putative “grandmother,” she remains an ambiguous abstraction. For Veha-
nush, a young life already filled to the brim with unanswerable questions,
some of whose answers she must have known but kept all to herself, made
of her mother the abstraction we were obliged to construct that could not
offer any meaning or understanding.
The U.S. must have seemed like a second start. But that was a conclu-
sion derived from the perspective of those of a later generation. For our
parents, coming to the U.S. was simply a continuation of lives lived else-
where after being forced to leave or die because of the genocidal inter-
ruption. They knew they would never return to the Anatolian abattoir of
murderous frenzy and were now required to resume the unfinished busi-
ness of making a living, which demanded the labor of persevering in an
entirely new and alien environment where they could not even negotiate
the language. My father had some command over English since he worked
in the U.S. for several years on two different occasions and served in the
army for a few more. The enormity of how he was able to navigate several
times through the labyrinthine matrix of this alien environment, with lim-
ited resources and only a cursory grasp of English, still remains a puzzle
of missing pieces to me: traveling from one place to another, contracting
for work, and dealing with the requirements of a different daily life neces-
sitating urgent responses. This suggests that his English was serviceable—
I knew he could read, slowly but well enough to understand what was be-
ing communicated. But I never saw him read a book in English. He could
understand spoken English better than speak it, even though his spoken
English was comprehensible but somewhat broken. But that was in the
early 1920s and my observations of his English competence derives from
the late 1930s and early 1940s. At home, we spoke Armenian, but that
changed as all of us got older and more deeply committed to the ambience
of American life and school. Then we would switch on and off between
Armenian and English, even as both parents continued to address us in
Armenian. In those circumstances, both parents heard a good deal of En-
glish. Yet I cannot help thinking that language acquisition constituted an
enormous challenge, if not crushing obstacle, one lived daily by countless
migrants when they first came to this country. In those days, there were
no programs in English as a Second Language, and communication was in
English. Ohannes read as much as he could, in Armenian, given the long
work hours he put in, added to the staggering amount of time spent on
public transportation to the workplace and back.

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 81

 If the safety of the U.S. comprised a marked departure from what our
parents had experienced and knew of Anatolia, the new environment was
still a struggle for survival in a different register. While they no longer
lived with the constant fear of unscheduled raids and murders by ma-
rauding gangs, economic and material security was undoubtedly as great
a problem for them as it was in the villages of Anatolia. There would have
been a difference in the forms of economic livelihood and uncertainty be-
tween village Anatolia and urban America. Ohannes’s earlier decision to
find work in the U.S. and what he learned from this complex set of navi-
gation and negotiation gave him an edge when he settled in Detroit after
the war. It also provided him with independence and a fund of experience
relating to the workplace and labor market. My own experience of life
from the late 1930s on taught me that what sustained them was the ethnic
community. I understood the importance of these enclaves and neighbor-
hoods, which tried to recuperate the binds of social solidarity they had
known elsewhere and that would eventually dissipate and disperse the
diaspora in the second generation.
But we should not romanticize these ghetto-­like communities: they
were usually in run-­down areas captive to usurious and extortionist land-
lords; unsanitary, often rat-­infested homes; isolated locations; and places
whose inhabitants were always at the edge of deprivation and poverty, es-
pecially in moments like the Great Depression. Yet they brought to Ameri-
can life something that is still distrusted and discounted: different histo-
ries and their importance in the present. I mention this because American
life from the beginning was always oriented to a permanent present, or
free of the past, everybody’s past, always presuming an end of history in
the new land and its dedication to endless progress. In part, this pres­
entism reflected what looked like the promise of endless movement in the
drive across the continent; in time it may well have been continued by the
confrontation of too many different pasts.
In these ethnic enclaves, the history people brought embodied a differ-
ent sense of time. The presence of the past always accompanied the pres-
ent and actively intermingled with it. Urban America had no history, as it
still demonstrates in its countless ways of forgetting and in the unrelent-
ing tense of presentism that dominates daily life. In fact, history is only in-
dexed in such places when the infrastructure has been so run down that it
requires immediate rehabilitation. In the Armenian community in which
I was raised (and I did not speak English until I went to a public school),
we literally lived in a present-­past, negotiating between different cultural

82 Chapter Three
forms and at least two different registers of time as we were obliged to
move from one social milieu to another. This is what comprised everyday
life and the multiple times that traversed it. History, as a national narra-
tive and experience, really played no role in these lives. I remember think-
ing, when in school, that the history — the past — being taught belonged
to somebody else and had no recognizable affiliation with the life we led.
It was impossible for me in grade school to relate and identify with very
“white” Anglo-­Saxon “founding fathers” of the eighteenth-­century colo-
nies, who owned land and often slaves, an absurdity still, in part, reverber-
ating in constitutional law and the fantasy of an interpretative “Original-
ism.” The constant interaction and play of past(s) and present often made
it difficult to distinguish between these two time tenses. Time was both
reversible and irreversible — not linear, progressive, and irreversible. My
father and his generation simply did not think historically — where would
this consciousness come from in the world of Anatolian villages and Ot-
toman Empire? What time awareness may have existed would have been
the identification of a moment before the conquest. Anecdotes and stories
performed the labor of “history,” which centered on an indeterminate time
of daily life. Experience of those moments and memory were the means to
retrieve the everyday in its singularity and specificity but they were pure
constructions; perhaps they were allegories whose repetition reinforced
meanings, or vaunted historical reconstructions testifying not to the truth
of history but to a natural history. This was particularly pronounced, as
it still must be, at moments of commemoration, when the celebration or
observance reverts to a different calendar.
Historians who once performed as cheerleaders of immigrant history
and the success of the melting pot valorized the rapid socialization of such
migrant groups into American life and what they considered as their suc-
cessful assimilation into it. Upon later reflection, my experience of grow-
ing up in an industrial environment taught me that they had not looked
closely enough in their investigations and simply enhanced an expedient
image of America that still persists, even as it is disclosed daily as an ideo-
logical fiction. This was of course the principal function of public schools
during the years I was growing up; we spent compulsory time learning
how to be Americans, which involved a panoply of practices from how to
wash your hands after relieving yourself to learning how to properly set a
table for dinner, without considering the content of the meals themselves,
whether they they were ethnic or American. There were the inevitable and
mandatory civic courses that taught myths as living unimpeachable truths

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 83

of the exceptional uniqueness of American political society applicable to
all. Behind this socialization process was a pervasive racism, which, as stu-
dents, was immediately recognizable and now seems to have persevered
from a distant past down to the present. In my case, I was assimilated
to contribute to the process of reproducing an immigrant labor force, as
were others from different ethnicities, including African Americans. Liv-
ing in the U.S. at the time under the conditions differentiating and mark-
ing some as migrants represented, at least for my parents, a continuation
of the struggle for a secure life that had forced them to leave Anatolia.
If Anatolia promised certain death, the U.S. signified permanent uncer-
tainty. Socialization into American life displaced the problem of economic
security (and claims of ideological equality) or passed over it with con-
fident declarations of the inexhaustible opportunities the country made
available. For many, the socialization was supposed to work as a hedge
against the future production of conflict generated by class divisions and
permanent inequalities. But I never experienced full socialization, like so
many of my contemporaries from migrant families; it simply never took in
some instances, and I have always felt different and would remain as the
child of migrants who were never able to comfortably situate themselves
on the “city on the hill.”
What is worrying are the reasons our parents chose to remain silent in
this new environment on the central historical event of their lives, shel-
tering us from what they believed they were sparing us. Perhaps this was
a received way of remembering the dead, who can no longer remember. If
so, who must remember them? For us, it involved people we never knew,
names we never heard. Undoubtedly, the knowledge of that silence and
what it has come to mean in our lives has fortified this distance of differ-
ence. For Armenians — already a minority ethnicity in the U.S., strangely
replicating an earlier status in an empire — the experience of the genocide
and having survived it is what brought people to America, and the magni-
tude of loss they endured has to be considered in preventing the commu-
nity as a whole from achieving a more effective assimilation or at least one
that comes close to some imagined ideal. It is conceivable that the Depres-
sion and its demands for survival were overwhelming, hoisting up its road-
blocks to successful assimilation and replacing the horrors of the past with
the new ones of the present. But the lives of our parents did not loosen up
until years later, when my father found a secure job and the quality of our
material lives improved. I had concluded that perhaps the silence was not
as important to them as it seemed to others. Yet it was their heritage and

84 Chapter Three
ours, whether they recognized it or not. Silence may have been our moth-
er’s way of relieving us from what she considered a debilitating heritage. It
was better if we knew nothing of it that might interfere with our becoming
modern and American. Benjamin observed that in “all mourning, there
is a tendency to silence,”10 and this is infinitely more so than the inability
or reluctance to communicate. Mournfulness makes the mourner mute.
It must have been from my mother that I inherited the conviction that
what she had abandoned was an other world, a form of alterity that she be-
lieved conflicted with modern life. In actuality that world of the past had
abandoned her. In her mind, there was nothing left of that world worth
preserving as a heritage. For Ohannes, this may also have been a factor in
his decision to hold it back from us, with the exception of a few anecdotes
and stories that he sprinkled us with, usually of a humorous nature to
remind us something of that world and perhaps its immense difference.
The stories he told featured the mule as the dominant figure in his world,
symbolizing both time and space in its capacity to cover great distances
and the time it takes to do so, which was completely absent in ours. But it
is important to suggest that Ohannes differed from Vehanush in this re-
spect: he clung to his memories of that other world, cherishing those of
his childhood and his relations, set in his ways but still belonging to him.
In time they morphed into his private natural history, but not for us, since
they were now part of a past he had lived without us that had vanished.
The difference came out in his reluctance to share it with us. While Veha-
nush had little to share, her memories could only remind her of homeless-
ness. But Ohannes had some things he could have related about himself.
His memories were about home and belonging. It seems that between our
parents there may have been the divergence between a lived experience
wiped away and its absence, one that never existed in the first place or was
not worth remembering. In both cases, it became evident that something
was being concealed, and it could have been because we were growing up
as Americans and could never be part of his world that had become ex-
tinct. I am now convinced that I had stumbled into the realm of mourning
and did not understand its imperative demand for silence.
In those days it became apparent that my desire to be only an American
was constantly challenged every time I was asked to pronounce my last
name and explain where the name came from and what nationality it rep-
resented. And in school, despite the regular socialization to which we were
all subjected into becoming American, I was made to feel I was not quite
the same as those who were not from immigrant families, whose names

Traces of a Vanished Everyday 85

were usually unpronounceable, made worse by the orthographic damage
inflicted at Ellis Island, where names changed with the blink of an eye and
a bad ear for foreign sounds. This particular episode of confronting mis-
pronunciations and misspellings of one’s name became a metonymy of mi-
grant life in America, as it still is. The inevitable question of asking where
you came from seemed to stem from some exotic expectation (or maybe
not) that was invariably disappointed with notations of the complexion of
one’s skin coloration. But you learn early in school that for your nonimmi-
grant schoolmates, skin color and the pronunciation of name were never
brought up to elicit the question of origins and nationality. I came to the
realization that like our names that are more often than not incorrectly
transcribed, the children of immigrants are rarely ever thoroughly Ameri-
canized. At the time I couldn’t figure out why they were exempt from this
kind of interrogation. In later years, it became evident that they never saw,
or were made to see, that they also derived from an immigration experi-
ence several generations earlier that time had safely concealed. For many
of us, and I include myself, our assimilation into American life was never
complete, indeed could never be completed, as the failure of completion
strengthened both our further experience of exclusion and our outsider
status. Parents and children experienced living half lives, incomplete lives,
hybrids spent negotiating interactions in different registers that rarely, if
ever, came together to make a whole.

86 Chapter Three
Vehanush, Ohannes, Sena (left), and Victoria (right), late 1920s.
Vehanush in her mid-teens, probably taken in Marash.
Ohannes (center) with two unidentified comrades of the Armenian brigades in
Eastern Anatolia or, possibly, Georgia.
Students of the German Missionary School in Marash. Vehanush is in the front
row, second from left.

Dashnak group photo, possibly taken in Chicago (1915). Ohannes is in the front
row, fourth from right.
Vehanush with oldest daughter, Sena, Detroit, late 1920s.
Ohannes (left) and unidentified friend, probably a member of the arf, date and
location unknown.
Ohannes (right), with cousin Avedis, probably taken in Anatolia, date un-
known but possibly around 1910–13.
Vehanush’s mother (name unknown), with second or third husband, taken in
either Marash before the genocide or Beirut in late 1920s, date unknown.
 f o ur . H i story ’ s I n terrup tion
Dispossession and Genocide

As pointed out earlier, the experience of the Armenian genocide resembles

what Marx has named “so-­called primitive accumulation” or “original ac-
cumulation” and whose effects he describes as a violent history of expro-
priation written in blood and fire.1 He is referring to those moments in
history that always come down to igniting explosive forms of frenzied loot-
ing resulting in large-­scale theft, dispossession, and genocidal murder of
a group, inaugurating the twin origins of both capital and the nation-­state
form. My argument is that the quest for accumulating precapitalist wealth
to underwrite the formation of capitalism is invariably accompanied by
what can only be described as a formula combining genocidal murder and
massive theft, sanctioned accumulation and directed by some form of po-
litical authority, whether an emergent state or failing empire. Specifically,
the number of people killed by the Turkish military and general population,
who willingly cooperated, was paralleled by the extent of theft of Armenian
material wealth they were able to carry off. In both cases the totals were ex-
traordinarily large. Mass murder meant mass acquisitions, and looting was
carried as far as mutilating and picking over individual bodies and their
parts in the pursuit of money and jewelry that may or not have been swal-
lowed by the victims. The Armenian genocide, like all such events, was an
exercise in the massive accumulation of money wealth, which in large part
had been acquired before capitalism and would be transmuted into capital
to serve the subsequent modernization of Turkish society. Whatever else
the attempted murder of an entire race of people represents, its principal
purpose is to carry out the forcible expropriation, theft, and dispossession
of what belongs to somebody else. In this narrative, too often finessed by
easy appeals to religious differences and traditional hatreds, seizure and
violence remain at the throbbing heart of the genocidal adventure and
cannot be separated from it. It was for this reason Marx directly linked
what he saw as the necessary slaughter of the innocents to the massive
theft of property and labor belonging to others that would become the
basis of a process to pursuing the creation of value and its reproduction.
Dispossession of a mass of people of their means of subsistence, through
enclosures, expropriation and theft, murder, or all, leads to genocide, as a
necessary instrument of carrying out the process of capitalism’s primitive
accumulation.2
While the conventional Marxian narrative has sought to bind the epi-
sode of “original accumulation” to a narrative of transition leading from
the political form of feudalism to the formation of a capitalist order, this
is an overstatement based on the example of England employed by Marx
in Capital and described as only a “sketch” to exemplify how massive
forms of expropriation — inaugurated by state violence, leading to what
was called enclosures and the releasing of large numbers of people from
their means of subsistence — brought about the eventual establishment of
a new economic system (capitalism) aligned with the nation-­state form,
but not as a result of linear transition trajectory. Once in the hands of suc-
cessive Marxian theorists and activists, this narrative of transition became
an orthodox explanation of the process of capitalism that appeared from
the contradictions of feudalism. It is evident that the narrative’s purpose
sought to supply a model for charting the transition yet to come to social-
ism. In time, Marxists would become preoccupied not so much with the
question of the narrative story line itself but rather trying to reach some
sort of agreement on the crucial conditions and circumstances that might
more persuasively account for the move from feudalism to capitalism that
would be repeated in the future transition to socialism. It is important to
notice that the vulgate version of the transition narrative precluded the
possibility of envisioning other routes to the development of capitalism in
other times and places, since the appearance of capitalism could only fol-
low the linear example of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies. By the nineteenth century the imperialism and colonialism Marx
had noted in Capital that sent capitalism overseas beyond Europe and
maturation of the world market regulating the economic interactions of

88 Chapter Four
nations combined to open new and different paths to the establishment of
capitalism that did not have to rely on imitating the model of sixteenth-
century England.
So powerful was this model that it was replicated in historiographical
controversies in China and Japan in the 1930s, and elsewhere when signs of
capital accumulation began to appear. The transition narrative mandated
a gradual, linear historical development, one stage replacing another, that
displaced considerations of the nature of the social process and its violent,
epical consequences.3 Yet such an alleged transition was not gradual, lin-
ear, or capable of explaining the specific nature of the changes that “paved
the way to the advent of capitalism” and the diverse and aggressive “forces
that shaped them.”4 In most cases there was no such transition, a fantasy
as such, but instead long, temporal processes characterized by intense ex-
propriation and seizure, theft, enslavement, and mass murder that accom-
panied coexisting forms of capitalist and noncapitalist economic practices
alongside political formations, like Turkey’s Ottoman Empire, that were
not yet capitalistic.5 In Capital Marx proposed that “the nature of capital
remains the same in its developed as it is in its undeveloped forms.”6 In
Marx’s reckoning of history, pasts always lay behind presents, or on top of
each other, like geological strata, often in relations of coexistence and co-
extension, even though the figure of the past was not always immediately
visible or recognizable. For Armenians caught in the Turkish vise of “origi-
nal accumulation” and its enabling genocide, the only hope for transition
was escape to another country willing to offer refuge.
It should be repeated that Marx, in later writings, warned that his ac-
count of “original accumulation” in Capital was nothing more than a “his-
torical sketch” limited to Western Europe that offered little more than an
illustration of its principal purpose to separate workers from their means
of production and subsistence and make them into wage earners.7 More-
over, it is not a stage of capitalism “associated with the transition from
feudalism” but “a process that continues to this day.”8 In other words, origi-
nal accumulation was constituted as a form, not as a one-­time event, as
implied in earlier interpretations, but as a “constantly concurrent combi-
nation” of the “three moments and temporalities of origin, development
and crisis,” as well “as an always-­present method of extortion of surplus
labor.”9 Original accumulation is thus repetitively produced by capitalism
itself, avoiding a singular history of capital and its origins for the produc-
tion of plural histories of capitalism in different times and places. Under
the Nazi regime, the German theft of Jewish material wealth, the seizures

History’s Interruption 89
of property and widespread expropriations of all forms of value, but espe-
cially forced slaved labor, must count as an instance of how primitive ac-
cumulation is repeated in putatively advanced industrial states.
What is important to grasp of the Armenian genocide of 1915 – 16 was
the degree to which it shared this genealogy as the jump-start of a capital-
ist sociopolitical strategy that failed to save the empire but laid the foun-
dation for a successive Turkish nation-­state. Undoubtedly, the episode be-
came a template for subsequent genocidal programs, utilizing differing
forms of exploitations and mass murder, depending on historical time and
place. Rosa Luxemburg saw in the Turkish Empire not capitalist mod-
ernization but combined different forms of “European capital and Asiatic
peasant economy,” with the empire “reduced to its role, that of a political
machinery of all Oriental states in the period of capitalist imperialism.”10
According to her analysis, what destroyed the empire’s economy was the
introduction of a money economy, a large portion of which was undoubt-
edly in the hands of minorities like the Greeks and Armenians.
What this massive transformation managed to carry off with its termi-
nating machine is the lived everyday of Armenians in Anatolia. In many
ways, colonization, as Marx had foreseen, announced the inaugural mo-
ment of primitive accumulation. Colonized for more than five hundred
years by Ottoman Turks, the Armenians in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries were targeted for elimination to make available the
total confiscation of their wealth by any means. The massive theft of land
and other forms of wealth betrayed the religious appeal to jihad employed
to mask it. In this regard, the historic destruction of Ani, first by Mongol
conquest and then by earthquake, was something of a prefiguration of the
cataclysmic violence of the genocide and its determination to finally rid
Anatolia of an Armenian everydayness. The only difference between the
distant episode of Mongol looting and later Ottoman theft and expropria-
tion is that the former did not serve as a form of primitive accumulation
of capital.11 This contrast reflected the difference between a society based
on communal proprietorship and one already shot through with slivers of
private land owning, symptomizing capital’s aptitude for inducing perma-
nent unevenness. It should also be said that the destruction committed by
the Mongols was no match for the Ottoman decision to eliminate an entire
ethnic group. Ani vanished as a living history into rock and rubble that
had once given it life, testifying to both its moment of greatness and its
permanent disappearance. But in its deathly moment of historical extinc-
tion, the ruin aspired to become an allegory filled with multiple meanings.

90 Chapter Four
 Since then it became the scene of a vacated history. Yet the loss of its
thriving everyday life must have taken on a new role of an unwanted and
untimely revenant that would continue to make unscheduled appearances
in Armenian communities in times of trouble. A ghostly reminder of de-
struction, death, and disappearance, this equation pointing to a final end-
ing must have prevailed in the midst of the genocide and its determined
drive to empty the Armenian everydayness and return its remainders back
to nature. It was the ending of Ani’s everydayness, not the present’s inexo-
rable movement of world historical capitalism, that showed Armenians
the image of their lost future. What other kind of thought would be pro-
voked by the knowledge that another group is trying to make your ethnic
group extinct when history already provides the answer?
Eliminating minorities like the Armenians and Greeks in Anatolia by
murder and mutilation was actually unnecessary since the quest for capi-
talist modernization would have been more easily carried out with their
involvement and cooperation. But harnessing this goal to an ideology of
Turkism or Turkification made such an arrangement impossible by its in-
capacity to displace and conceal its real desire. What is interesting but
unsurprising is that the Young Turks who planned its implementation left
a large part of its execution to peasant Turks, Kurds, Circassians, Chech-
ens, and a variety of other miscreants released from prisons specifically to
carry out the labor of death and destruction.
There seems to be an inescapable logic to all planned genocides, which
the Armenian episode early dramatized: the helplessness of the minor-
ity earmarked for ethnic cleansing and the duplicity of local officials. The
other side of this logic is the willing complicity of larger powers, actually
their indifference, to step in and stop the massacres before it is too late.
We have seen the repetition of this pattern too many times in recent his-
tory in Rwanda, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, and Indonesia. One of
the consistent themes of my father’s discourse on the genocide was the
hypocrisy of Western powers like Great Britain and France and their fail-
ure to intervene in the genocidal carnage and bring it to an end — what he
described as a form of complicit cooperation designed to serve their own
national interest. The Germans, of course, were not excused since they
were directly implicated in the implementation. What this means is that
Armenians have had a long history of having been persecuted and sub-
jected to periodic and often unscheduled pogroms.
It often seems that the price of being a minority in an empire or nation-­
state dominated by a majority ethnic group is, in addition to suffering from

History’s Interruption 91
unfair economic exactions, to serve as the object of regularized arbitrary
attacks by official and unofficial groups, resulting in looting and murder.
This chronic experience is probably elevated to acute status when empires
or regions seek to turn into nation-­states as a response to the imperative
of capitalist modernization, and are persuaded to base their claim of so-
cial solidarity by falling back on religious or ethnic purity; minorities are
thus seen as pollutants and contaminants to the national body, corrupting
their history and fouling the idea of racial purity and religious homogene-
ity that requires some form of drastic act of removal. The Armenians in
the Ottoman Empire had five hundred years of this experience, as did Jews
under Czarist Russia and in some of the “new” nation-­states of Eastern
and Central Europe. One of the lessons learned from such a long, repeti-
tive, and painful experience is that sometimes the wiser course is not to
raise resistance against the marauders, which can often invite even greater
measures of destruction.
There are accounts that suggest that Armenians were faced, as many
such groups, by a dilemma: resist or acquiesce, neither of which necessar-
ily guarantees a good outcome. But the same dilemma exists for outside
powers without the surety of such a dire forecast. Hence, the Armenians,
it is said, made no effort to put up some sort of resistance (which is un-
true) and in the end chose a strategy informed by “blind submission.” It is
also said that they had no foresight into what was going to be a policy of
total destruction of the race. But one wonders how this would be the case
since they had always, and especially in recent memory from the days of
Abdülhamid II, been confronted by unanticipated massacres in places like
Adana and Sassoun — massacres that surely represented a dress rehearsal
for the main act to come. There were too many signs indicating the direc-
tion of the Young Turks policy and what the occasion of a broader world-
wide conflict was capable of supplying in terms of cover and opportunity.
The Young Turks policy was also known by the European powers, which
since the nineteenth century had acted as protectors of Christian minori-
ties in the Ottoman Empire. These states were constantly warned by their
own people in the field of the looming troubles between the Turkish gov-
ernment and their minorities, and the best they could come up with once
the murders and rapes began on a grand scale was to declare that the
guilty parties would be tried and held responsible for having committed
“crimes against humanity.” They did nothing in the end, despite earlier
promises, like contemporary states when confronted by the prospect of yet

92 Chapter Four
another genocidal episode. Little wonder my father constantly excoriated
the roles played by the English and the French.
The same could not be said of Germany, Turkey’s principal ally in
World War I. They did too much to encourage and sanction the murders
and too little in dissuading Turkey from embarking on this course.12 Had
he at the time known, my father could have made a better case against the
Germans, whose enthusiastic complicity in the massacres seems to have
drawn a pass in the scholarly literature until recently. It was far from ac-
cidental that some of the principal planners of the genocide fled to Ger-
many after the war, in hope of finding a safe haven, which apparently did
not dissuade Armenian assassins from their appointed mission to rid the
world of officials who were responsible for the commission of genocide. If
the promises of the allies dissolved in the postwar negotiations into the
promotion of national self-­interest, the German role in the massacres, as
Turkey’s principal ally in the war, seems safely to have disappeared in the
punitive politics that drove Weimar Germany into unsustainable inflation
and fascism. What is extraordinary is how few, if any — perhaps excepting
Adolf Hitler himself — saw the direct relationship (or willingness to pub-
licly acknowledge it) between the extermination of the Armenians and
the yet-­to-­come eradication of European Jewry. Hitler early on recognized
that large numbers of people could be exterminated and nothing would
be done about it. In fact, it would be soon forgotten.13 The real question of
the genocide is whether Turkey’s extermination policy was subsumed in
the country’s involvement in World War I.
What appears puzzling is why the Armenian elites, especially the po-
litical classes, had failed to analyze the current situation and grasp the
import of conduct of their Young Turks contemporaries, with whom they
had on occasion collaborated in bringing to realization a constitutional
government. Even at the end, when Turks began disarming Armenians
and organizing men into labor battalions, ostensibly for the war effort
(but really for absolute slave labor), there was indication of the possibil-
ity of worse things to come, even though some writers have insisted that
genocide was not linked to this policy of disarming. And yet Werfel’s de-
scription of how the Musa Dagh villages managed to hide weapons in an-
ticipation of a Turkish assault could have been done on a much wider scale
in Anatolia.14 Perhaps this is an unfair expectation and simply shows the
extent to which the larger narratives concerning the war and genocide
have eclipsed the true nature of the kind of society that existed at that

History’s Interruption 93
time, which was principally still a precapitalist formation. After all, it was
an empire at its end, precisely because it was mired in a form of Hegelian
“standstill” that Marx and Friedrich Engels later loosely named the Asiatic
Mode of Production. Societies like Ottoman Turkey, Persia, and perhaps
India were closer to the more familiar image associated with the “Ori-
ent” than China, Japan, or the states of Southeast Asia. Regardless of this
particular Marxian figuration, Ottoman Turkey had not fared well in the
nineteenth century, even though it was technically part of Europe. It was
not accidental that it was increasingly described as the sick man of Europe.
Its economic and political unevenness was in fact a sign of this “sickness,”
and the Young Turks (also called the Committee of Union and Progress)
represented themselves as deliverers of modernization and rationality.
But the various narratives have given too much credence to the complexi-
ties and intricacies of their plans to transform an empire entering the last
move of its endgame into a somewhat reduced territorial nation-­state. The
principal plan was to finally rid Turkey of its unwanted ethnic minorities,
and the imminence of a world war converged with this program to pro-
vide the justification and cover required by so radical a transformation.
In fact, ethnic purification was linked to an ideological fantasy calling for
Pan-­Turkish expansion into central Asia, an idea revived recently by an
equally delusionary President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a new incarnation
called “neo-­Ottomanism.”
What too many historical narratives overlook in this account of the
formation of a modern Turkish nation-­state is the intimate and interactive
relation between the nation-­state and capital accumulation. The modern
form of nation-­state required, and was necessitated by, the availability of
capital and of capital accumulation; neither could exist without the other,
just as in time the nation came to serve as the placeholder for capitalism
and capital, which, in turn, was seen as the basis of the nation’s “natural
political economy.” Turkey certainly had grievances with the West, es-
pecially as the new nationalism, assisted by European powers, enabled
the sprouting of independence movements in southeastern Europe that
finally forced the Turks to withdraw from their European imperial ter-
ritories back to Anatolia. The failures in the Balkans and the deportation
of a population of nearly half a million Turkish residents back to Anatolia
made one set of problems relating to resettlement, but this complexity was
reduced to a form of integral nationalism, whereby the political nation-­
state form was to become ethnically homogeneous (or religiously homo-
geneous) and would, at the time, solve the equally complicated problem

94 Chapter Four
of economic modernization by dispossessing the minorities of property
and wealth that would be transferred to Turkish coffers. Augmenting a
process of capital accumulation necessitated the active dispossession and
expropriation of the wealth of minority ethnicities and deprivation of their
forms of production and subsistence. Original accumulation invariably
brought the execution of policies of enclosure through coercion and vio-
lence that subsumed what was outside — the everyday lived by Armenians
in Anatolia — to the demands of an inside.
As for a perspective capable of moving below (and I would say beyond)
the national narrative, Franz Werfel offers a comparable model in The
Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a book whose importance lies in starting from
an everyday present in a specific locale and proceeding to show how the
“Great Catastrophe” eventually arrived to force the villagers to abandon
their time-­tested rhythms and routines in order to defend themselves and
survive. Most Armenian families urged their children to read Werfel’s
novel (or claimed to do so) and impressed upon them its value as a por-
trayal of the bravery of a fighting spirit of resistance rather than its absence
in the midst of massive and systematic murders and forced deportations
into the desert. Werfel was not on our reading list, and I am persuaded that
our experience was atypical among Armenians, even though I know my
mother read the novel. The novel became, I believe, a kind of national epic
for the Armenians. (There is a statue of Werfel in Yerevan.) I had heard
that it was to be made into a movie by mgm before the war, with Clark
Gable playing the role of Gabriel Bagradian, but the project was stopped
by the Turkish government exerting pressure on Washington. It is still un-
clear to me what pressure Turkey could have applied at that time before its
membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato).
Werfel’s narrative strategy begins with the everydayness of Armenian
villages and shows they were converted into the everyday of death marches
constituting the deportation convoys. By contrast to a perspective based
on fragmentary memories and the form of collage, Werfel’s approach of
the account of everydayness is constrained within the form of the novel,
which, like historical narrative, imposes the structure of a story line with
beginning and end. It follows a different trajectory from the form of a
montage or even collage, which are composed of splintered events and
episodes comprised of partial lives that are put together with no discern-
ible causal relationship between the time of a before and an after presented
only as a construct of juxtapositions capable of opening up to any number
of possible readings. Werfel clearly saw as his task not simply reconstruct-

History’s Interruption 95
ing lived accounts but rather recording what was seen and heard and pro-
posing and recomposing a construction out of it. (His sources were starv-
ing refugee survivors of the death march to the desert whom he apparently
interviewed in Syria.) Where he was able to fictionalize the drawing of full
portraits of the characters of his novel, the evidence based on memories,
by contrast, is limited to negative glimpses that do not add up to full por-
trayals. Because he resorted to a novelistic form, the account seemed to
fuse the outline of reconstruction with imaginative fiction, possibly ap-
proaching the means employed in envisaging a historical novel. Today, a
reading of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh resembles the form of a histori-
cal novel more than any other genre, even though it probably was not in-
tended to do so.
This approach informs Werfel’s epic novel and, in part, exemplifies the
articulation of how the relationship of history and everydayness might
proceed. It provides a different pathway guiding us to a confrontation be-
tween the relationship of the historical narrative detailing the Turkish in-
volvement in the war and the occasion it supplied to inaugurate the mas-
sive genocidal removal of Armenians and extinguishing of Armenian daily
life in Anatolia and how it was then transfigured into an everyday hell of
deportation convoys to the desert. Despite the different routes taken by the
novel and collage, they converge at the same point: genocide opened the
way not only for telling the story of executing mass murder of the popu-
lation but also its corollary narrative of the systematic implementation of
massive appropriation, dispossession, and theft that reverses the everyday
into its negative, a living hell of a necropolitics.
This observation means beginning the narrative not with the “Arme-
nian Question,” as such, which would have required starting with the Ot-
toman state and implying that it was one of the emergent problems the
empire had to resolve, in order to prevent further diminution. Solving the
Armenian Question promised to remove what was ailing the empire. In
this regard it prefigured the later “Jewish Question” in Germany. In other
words, the question was posed by Turks, not Armenians, just as later it was
posed by Germans, not Jews.
World War I was simply the principal genocidal event in a sequence
that had begun in continents like Africa decades before, where white Eu-
ropean imperial powers decimated populations by the millions and went
on to reduce their populations on a comparable scale. These imperializ-
ing spaces provided the ground for unlimited expropriation and theft and
unaccountable violence in the act of accumulation. All forms of colonial

96 Chapter Four
and imperial expropriation are nothing more than extractions amount-
ing to acts of original accumulation. In the Ottoman Empire, imperial
depredations subsequently fused with Turkish efforts, assisted by Ger-
man complicity, to eliminate the entirety of a population. The war itself
was a form of mutual suicidal genocide. To situate the Armenian massa-
cres within the explanatory context of World War I is merely another way
of explaining it away as an effect of a pointless conflict between nation-­
states or as a form of collateral damage. But the question is, Collateral to
what? And what kind of commentary did the so-­called sideshow produce
to illuminate the main act of war? In this regard, it recalls Turkey’s suc-
cessful socialization of several generations who do not have the faint-
est idea of what happened to a million and a half Armenians and other
Christians (Greeks, Assyro-­Chaldeans, etc.) within Anatolia, or insist on
claiming so.
Reading Grigoris Balakian’s long account of his escape from deporta-
tion and what he lived through and saw, and witnessed and heard from
others along the route, is very difficult to sustain in long sittings. Yet this
personal memoir of the genocidal years detailing the everydayness of de-
portation convoys and his own escape is still our best eyewitness. The
indescribable savagery of each reported episode seems to compete with
the next in a grotesque Grand-­Guignol contest to determine which group
of Turkish, Kurdish, and Circassian marauders managed to carry out the
worst program of atrocities. In a recent article on the “undeclared” war
against the Kurds in Diyarbakir, the reporter was apparently stunned by
reports of destroyed Kurdish buildings and the discovery of nude women’s
bodies that showed the breasts had been cut off. Yet this outrage was a
daily occurrence for thousands of Armenian women and girls in 1915 and
1916, when obscene crimes were committed by Kurdish security battal-
ions and convicts put up to do precisely this job. What some Kurds got for
performing this service was the right to seize empty houses and whatever
else left by murdered and deported Armenians, and they received neither
precious little land nor a nation-­state.
Mikael Nichanian is one of the few historians who has directly con-
sidered the role played by “primitive accumulation.” But even in his study,
published in French and one of the very best in the current literature,
Nichanian gets to the economic importance of theft as a demonstration
of primitive accumulation only late in his account: “The destruction of the
Armenian populations (and Greeks) and the confiscation of their goods
were a determinate influence on the economic development of modern

History’s Interruption 97
Turkey after the war, notably by the primitive accumulation of capital, a
necessary condition of the industrial revolution.”15 Attention to the subject
late in the book suggests its importance but not necessarily the vital rela-
tionship between the decision to inaugurate the genocide and the mate-
rial returns and benefits it offered. In fairness, Nichanian supplies a brief
accounting, based on solid secondary works by Turkish scholars who have
specifically examined the uncountable confiscation of wealth and prop-
erty and the accompanying destruction of Armenian village sites.
An interesting contrast is provided by anecdotal accounts throughout
Balakian’s memoir of theft at the lowest levels, the mutilation of dead bod-
ies to see if any jewelry has been consumed, the theft of clothes, the oc-
cupation of homes deserted by deportees, the murders, and extortion by
the guards along the deportation routes. It is important to notice a num-
ber of things about violent theft, dispossession, and expropriation. Re-
member that in Marx’s reading, primitive or original accumulation was
not a one-­time event but would continue to be carried out by developed,
mature nation-­states.16 By the same token, there was the large quotient of
the wealth of goods and property stolen from confiscating Armenian and
Greek companies, many of which functioned in the capitalist sector, which
would thus have represented the accumulation of capital. I would add to
this the land and relics held by countless Armenian churches, whose
ruined remains are today used in picturesque travel brochures advertising
Turkey’s long, multicultural heritage: tourism of the cultural ruins created
by genocide as a new form of original accumulation since the churches and
the relics were produced long before the onset of modern capitalism. What
Turkey’s extermination policy signified was eliminating the holders of dif-
ferent forms of wealth, capitalist and non-­or precapitalist, “primitive,” and
what might be called originary accumulation. In other words, as a histori-
cal process, accumulation is rarely completely primitive, as might be ex-
emplified in the “classic” English model, and more often mixed, pointing
to the capacity of precapitalist and capitalist forms of accumulation to
coexist under the command of a capitalist production agenda, and sug-
gesting a continuation of earlier precapital modes of accumulating and
exploitation, whereby noncapital is put to use in the capitalist process.
However, it was not merely theft and expropriation of Armenian goods
and property. What invariably gets left out of the picture is the amount of
slave labor Armenians were forced to perform. The disarmament of Ar-
menian and Greek soldiers serving in the Ottoman army prefigured their
forcible conversion into slave laborers. Disarming these troops was a fun-

98 Chapter Four
damental condition of the ethnic cleansing that was to come. Even if the
disarming was not directly linked to a genocidal politics, which is a doubt-
ful assumption, the reorganization of these disarmed soldiers pressed into
labor battalions provided the Ottomans with a large reservoir of labor
power at little expense, especially in road repair and transport services.
The concern for a link between the disarming of Armenian troops who
were put to work as slave laborers and the genocide is a casuistic exer-
cise: most of these slave laborers were killed. The same was true of those
large numbers of men and women who were able to secure some immu-
nity from the certain death promised by deportation convoys by escaping
and securing employment as laborers in the German, Swiss, and Austrian
companies contracted to construct the Constantinople/Baghdad Railway.
This was particularly evident in the areas of the south, in the mountain-
ous Taurus and Amanos regions of the line’s tunnel construction, as viv-
idly reported by Balakian, whose own escape from a convoy was enabled
by Swiss and German engineers and employment in railroad construction.
The tradeoff was obviously work for low wages, if any, and the prospect
of surviving (which, apparently, was successful for a fairly large number).
And, of course, there is the inestimable number of women and children
either adopted by Muslim families or sold into slavery, which would still
encompass an absolute appropriation of labor power and worse. Finally,
there are unaccounted numbers of women, especially, who chose to con-
vert to Islam in order to save their children, as Arlene Voski Avakian re-
ported of her grandmother in her memoir of growing up in an Armenian
American family in New York City and northern New Jersey.17 Although
Avakian confesses that when she was young she did not want to hear her
grandmother’s story of survival, it later became a constituent factor in her
transition from wanting to be merely an American to evolving into an Ar-
menian American identity.
Expropriation, theft, and dispossession must be first grasped as an ide-
ological fantasy. The processes of deportation and the subsequent mas-
sacres included an economic dimension that had always been identified
by all the parties, insofar as it represented a shared belief among Turkey’s
population that Armenians were rich. In the popular mythology of em-
pire, even if small peasant landholders constituted three-­quarters of the
Armenian population, much of the wealth held by Armenians and Greeks
was anchored in Constantinople, not in the countryside. But regardless
of this concentration, the wealth generated by the various devised forms
of violent primitive and original accumulation was enough to permit the

History’s Interruption 99
state to underwrite the processes of deportation and even the extermina-
tions. Moreover, monies recuperated by the state served the war effort by
paying off a large portion of the Ottoman debt to the Germans, and even
“dumping three tons of gold at the Reichsbank of Berlin, which probably
represented a small fraction of gains obtained by the confiscation of Ar-
menian goods.”18
Whatever else the Ottoman Young Turks claimed they derived from
a policy of ethnic cleansing, it all originated from the principal formula
that sanctioned theft, the massive transfer of wealth — accumulation — in
its different forms, and the necessary separation of Armenians and Greeks
from what they owned through a policy of extermination that removed
barriers to seizure of land and property. Theft and dispossession severed
the Armenian population permanently and irretrievably from the one in-
strument that had provided it with a modicum of power and protection
in an empire devoted to constantly squeezing its minorities by taxing ex-
propriations. Ottoman Turkey was motivated by the will to remove Ar-
menians and Greeks from the only footing on which they were still able
to position themselves within the uncertain environment of empire, “the
economic tools considered the basis of their supposed power.”19 It was the
illusion of wealth that presupposed an imagined ratio of power they simply
did not have. In this regard, it was easy to mobilize the population to par-
ticipate in the criminal act of voluntarily exterminating Armenians for the
promise of enriching themselves. The last segment of the equation was,
in addition to lining the pockets of the elite few, its capacity to empower
the ascendance of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), who was nothing more than
a poorly disguised avatar of the discredited Young Turks like Ismail Enver
(Pasa), Mehmet Talaat (Pasa), and others.
The reason for this neglect in overlooking the quantity of theft as a
principal generative factor accompanying the genocide at this time and
not earlier during the nineteenth century, when there were still pogroms,
may have resulted from the conviction that the confiscation of wealth did
not necessarily fit into the larger narrative occupied by World War I and
Turkey’s involvement. There is little doubt that the scale of death, destruc-
tion, and outright senseless slaughter of hundreds of thousands in World
War I in Europe eclipsed all other considerations during the duration of
the conflict. What seems clearer to me is that such concerns did not dis-
suade Turkey under cover of war from undertaking the massive accumula-
tion carried out in 1915 and 1916, compared to the pillaging pogroms in the
nineteenth century, which may well have already reflected the changes in

100 Chapter Four

global capitalism and how it was inflected in the errant empire. My father
had no trouble in reporting the traces he witnessed during his time in the
Armenian brigades of the massive dispossession of Armenian property
and personal belongings and the ruination of whole villages, including his
own, literally wiped out, leaving only the most mournful traces to signify
its skeleton for the totality of calamitous destruction. Both Werfel and
Balakian provide additional evidence. It is almost another mystery of the
genocide why so many of the historical accounts have simply bypassed
the magnitude and significance of expropriated wealth connected to the
mass murder. While Armenian survivors in the genocide’s aftermath stub-
bornly sought to press personal claims for their losses, without any suc-
cess, Turkey’s stance was supported by the reluctance of large European
states and the United States to do more than look the other way. Nobody
was listening. The question that still needs to be answered is, why not?
In the post – World War II years, the apparent downplaying of the rela-
tionship of genocide to massive dispossession and murder may have had
something to do with the lingering Cold War view that Turkey’s member-
ship in nato, along with the U.S., and the establishment of American
air bases along the Turkish – Soviet frontier made the country a trusted
and valued ally. The attitude of the larger Western states was repeated
during genocide years and now was probably reinforced by the desire to
discourage the opening of a Pandora’s box filled with Armenian demands
for compensation for the material wealth they had lost. Peter Balakian’s
important memoir Black Dog of Fate (1997) reports how his grandmother
relentlessly sought through legal means to secure compensatory restitu-
tion from the Turkish government for her family’s losses.20 While there
have undoubtedly been several such attempts to legally compel the Turk-
ish government to make good on what they have stolen, confiscated, and
expropriated, without any success, it is evident how sensitive an issue the
pursuit of reparations entails since any sign of relaxing policy by the Turk-
ish government would automatically result in a clear acknowledgment of
what it has always disavowed since 1916. I can recall my father speaking,
late in life, not only of the disappearance of his large family but also of the
material loss incurred with their vanishing. He never knew what had hap-
pened to them but guessed that the men like his father, grandfather, broth-
ers, and cousins had been murdered, while the women were sent on the
deportation death march. He was from a rural priestly family; though they
were not wealthy, his family did own land and other property. This expe-
rience must have been replicated innumerable times and does not even

History’s Interruption 101

include the moveable wealth taken in acts of murder and mutilation. As
I grew older, this topic of conversation testifying to personal loss turned
to become more prominent at Armenian-­related social gatherings, which
means I began to understand conversations that inevitably were concerned
with death and material forfeiture.
Whatever else may have resulted from this seismic destruction of lives,
wealth, and property was clearly reflected in the tight relationship be-
tween Turkey’s World War I aims and the policy of extermination, and
how each worked against the other, and especially how the latter actually
contributed to undermining the conduct of the Ottoman military effort
and campaigns. In addition, the expropriations would provide the nec-
essary foundation for the forthcoming modern Turkish Republic, whose
capitalism would still rely on squeezing its minorities and more recently
employing tactical exercises of extortion of “allies” like the United States
and the states of the eu that wish to rid themselves of Syrian and other
ethnically marked refugees. The genocide of Armenians, Greeks, Assyro-­
Chaldeans, and other minorities was simply indistinguishable from a
hunting “open season” that invited the Muslim population to participate
in endless pillage, looting, murder, rape, and unspeakable mutilation in re-
turn for a delusionary offer of rewarding enrichment. We know the major
proportions of theft went to government officials and functionaries, while
those who actually carried out theft and murder received small handouts
and tidbits.21 Anatolia during World War I was nothing less than an im-
mense killing field dedicated to ethnic purification and dispossession of
Armenians as preparation for a new or putatively modern Turkish order,
born out of defeat and the final destruction of the remnants of empire. In
this regard, it might be said that the modern Turkish state was probably a
mistake or an accident of history. It originated in the extermination of the
Armenians with the untended or “collateral” effect of dismembering the
empire the murders and theft were supposed to rescue.
Yet the role of original accumulation introduces the important conse-
quences of capitalism as it penetrated and spread throughout Anatolia in
the nineteenth century. While some scholarly accounts include discus-
sions of the importance of capitalism in Anatolia in the complex politics of
empire’s end, few that I know of have emphasized the centrality of its role
in the genocide as reflected in the process of actively promoting original
accumulation. Accounts of primitive accumulation and the development
of capitalism are not always the same thing. Both Ronald Grigor Suny, in
his recently published and authoritative book on the genocide, “They Can

102 Chapter Four

Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide,
and Taner Akçam, in A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the
Question of Turkish Responsibility, briefly appeal to “primitive accumula-
tion,” even though Akçam describes the confiscations and expropriations
without naming them as such in the making of the genocidal event.22 Yet
the role of original accumulation introduces the important figure of capi-
talism as it seeped into and spread throughout Anatolia in the nineteenth
century, demanding its insertion and integration into the expansion of
capital in the region and the larger context of historical circumstances
constituting Armenian – Turkish relations.23 Suny proposes that “the ex-
termination of the Armenians had a catastrophic effect on the whole of
Anatolian society and economy” and “while some Muslims benefited from
the seizure of property and goods of Armenians — a most ‘primitive ac-
cumulation of capital’ — many others suffered from the removal of pro-
ductive farmers and craftsmen, pharmacists, doctors, and merchants.”24
For his part, Akçam appeals to the more familiar explanation of the pal-
pable wealth of Armenians. “Adana’s Armenians,” he writes, had openly
supported earlier programs of modernization, eliciting attacks from the
Muslim community for embracing economic and politically new ideas and
projects. He explains, quoting from a few others along the way, “There was
also an important economic factor. Local Armenians ‘were the richest and
most prosperous class in the region. In every field, they were ahead of the
Turks.’ ”25 Turkish policy toward the Greeks resulted in massive massa-
cres (never, strangely, named as a genocide) and dispossession of property
and goods, which set the terms of theft and robbery once the Armenian
genocide began. A German military officer, assigned to the Special Orga-
nization, the body of former convicts and other miscreants released from
prisons to prey on and pillage Armenian villages, observed that their main
objective was dedicated to looting and committing criminal acts for the
purpose of “‘self-­enrichment.’”26 But “self-­enrichment” was merely the lure
to facilitating recruitment.
Suny is sensitive to capital’s larger need to plow under existing social
relations and its capacity to assimilate or even remove all impediments to
its pursuit of surplus value. He is also correct to see in the development
of capital the production of vast asymmetries of economic unevenness,
between city and countryside, region and region, and, especially, between
Muslim and non-­Muslim constituencies. It is true that minorities like the
Armenians, Greeks, and Jews (who greatly benefited from the expropria-
tion of Armenian properties and goods)27 inhabiting urban centers had

History’s Interruption 103

seized the initiative of moving into economic areas of capitalist practice.
Much of this was possible because of a long history of experience in mer-
chant and commercial affairs and the strong links minority-­operated busi-
nesses had been able to form with foreign traders. This is not to say that
Turkey had no interest in traditional forms of commerce or even capitalist
practices but only to suggest the advantage seized and possessed by mi-
nority houses. In large part, Turkey, like any number of Asian societies,
remained officially committed to the idea of an agrarian-­based “natural
economy,” the kind Vladimir Lenin described in his struggle with narod-
niks who, in the nineteenth century, embraced ancient Russian principles
in their opposition to capitalist change as an uninvited Western export.
The same conditions existed in Imperial China, feudal Japan, and Mughal
India until the British showed up in the eighteenth century.
As Akçam proposed, the plan was to destroy a considerable and well-­
endowed Armenian middle class and replace it with a Turkish Muslim
middle class. In this connection, it might be noted that interpreters like
Michael Mann, in his well-­researched book The Dark Side of Democ-
racy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, puts forth the additional argument
that organic nationalism was the principal impulse behind the genocide,
even though economic rationality was an important factor.28 But organic
nationalism is merely the political means to achieve primitive accumula-
tion and is not incompatible with the promotion of economic interests.
To support this argument, Mann cites stray remarks by Interior Minister
Mehmet Talaat who presumably recognized that despite the economic
losses to Turkey incurred by destroying an Armenian middle class, the
policy of deportation was worth it. A plan specifically designed to elimi-
nate a whole population would of course be acknowledged to be worth the
effort and sacrifice. Why do it if it was not? But it is difficult to take Talaat’s
disavowal of economic motives seriously, and it is always a more appealing
explanation for the undertaking of extreme measures to employ the fulfill-
ment of higher religious or political reasons. To acknowledge that Turkey
was particularly interested in exterminating its minorities to seize land
and property would have been an embarrassment for “enlightened” mod-
ernizers like Talaat. What Talaat was not reported to have said is that de-
stroying an entire middle class is still not the same thing as expropriating
its wealth and whatever else that could be extracted from the rest of the
Armenian and Greek populations as Turkish troops and local inhabitants
raked them over in the process of extinguishing their ethnic presence for-
ever. Mann does not report U.S. ambassador Henry Morganthau’s discus-

104 Chapter Four

sion with Talaat and his refusal to honor Talaat’s request for assistance in
securing from American insurance companies the benefits and payouts of
Armenian policyholders now that they were dead.29 Also overlooked is that
the acquisition of this treasure was the accrued compensatory wealth ac-
cumulated through direct theft and dispossession that ultimately enabled
the making of a Turkish Muslim middle class. More important, Mann,
like many others, attributes primal agency to a form of organic national-
ism in bringing about the genocide and neglects the possibility of con-
sidering the costs, privileging a political cause that seems to bracket the
immense economic price and benefits that accompanied the event. It was
mentioned earlier that Turkey forfeited classes of skilled artisans and tech-
nicians who, especially in the countryside, provided invaluable services to
both Turkish and minority populations, from the most basic goods like the
making of shoes to the most advanced forms related to increasing agricul-
tural production, medicine, and other services. The failure derives from
ignoring the crucial historical relationship between capital accumulation
and the formation of the nation-­state. Moreover, it makes the decision
to embark on an expensive extermination policy without considering the
economic benefits and costs accompanying it look like either a momentary
act of sheer madness or the impulse to commit national suicide.
Franz Werfel provides a portrait of an Armenian merchant house that
reflected a capitalist orientation through the character of his principal
protagonist, Gabriel Bagradian (whose name unsurprisingly recalls the
Bagratid Dynasty of medieval Armenia and Ani). Bagradian, along with
his brother, runs a successful capitalist enterprise and is assimilated into
Western life and culture, having been educated in France and married
into a French family; he also speaks better French than Armenian. It is
interesting to observe how Bagradian’s experience in organizing villages
in the defense of Musa Dagh gradually returns him to the culture of na-
tive ethnicity as his assimilated Western (French) demeanor slowly peels
off and he becomes increasingly estranged from his French wife. Just as
there was an immense distance between the lives of Armenian business
and financial classes, who inhabited the Europeanized sector of Istanbul,
and the peasants of Anatolia, this cleft was even wider between Arme-
nians and Turks and their Kurdish coreligionists. Whatever advantage
Armenians accumulated in business and finance, they shared with other
peasant non-­Muslim minorities the disadvantages of occupying the same
status in the eyes of Islamic law: they remained subordinated and sub-
ject to the arbitrary conduct exercised by Muslims toward any minor-

History’s Interruption 105

ity group. This would have enormous consequences in Eastern Anatolia,
where the competition for arable land between Armenians and Kurds and
Turks was sharpened by recent migrations from the Balkans and became
a fiercely contested flashpoint usually ending in violence and forced ex-
propriations. In his yearlong journey as a deportee, the priest Balakian
took notice of how villages and homes vacated by the genocide were be-
ing occupied by Turkish refugees from Europe and land once worked by
Armenians had now fallen into the hands of Turkish cultivators. But one
wonders how successful these new settler transplants were. My father’s ex-
perience during his years with the Armenian brigades differs. The chronic
conflict over the acquisition of land between Armenians and Turks and
especially Kurds, the forcible seizure of it, and the law’s constant privileg-
ing of Muslim over non-­Muslim in the settlement of disputes fueled the
antagonism between groups over strictly economic problems. Sparked by
the gradual commercialization of agriculture, the conflict was translated
into the idiom of ethnoreligious rivalry that inevitably worked against the
Armenians since privatization by large landowners affected both Mus-
lim and non-­Muslim peasants. Moreover, the role played by officials in
adjudicating disputes that favored Muslims was seen as a refraction of
Ottoman policy directed at undermining the Christian populations. De-
spite putative reforms implemented by Sultan Abdülhamid II and later the
Young Turks, presumably aimed at correcting or removing the more obvi-
ous sources of ressentiment — often in response to Armenian demands for
fairer treatment, greater equality under the law, and the abrogation of the
more oppressive practices and institutions founded on the inequality of
non-­Muslim peoples in the empire — such changes were seen by Turkish
political leaders as weakening and undermining the traditional hierarchi-
cal relationships between Muslim and non-­Muslim. It is thus interesting
that the intention of such reforms leading to modernizing measures would
have enhanced not simply minorities but also the development of capital-
ism. Yet they were seen as impediments to further progress, which meant
eliminating minorities like the Armenians and Greeks rather than incor-
porating them into a new political and social edifice. Instead, the claims of
the natural economic order always took precedence, which prompted Rosa
Luxemburg to observe that the reforms lacked any discernable modern
(capitalist) component and made Turkey look more medieval and “Orien-
tal” than before.30 Its proximity to Europe and the flourishing of the capi-
talist mode of production made the comparison even more extreme than it
might have been and the prospect for successful capitalist modernization

106 Chapter Four

in the empire more urgent and impossible to conceive of under the exist-
ing ethnoreligious constraints. What lay at the heart of this traditional
hierarchical social and political order was still the persistence of the fic-
tional natural economy and the arbitrary use of state violence — reflected
in heavy taxation and coercion — pledged to keeping those who occupied
an inferior status in their rightful place. In the struggle, Armenians who
lost out in their effort to acquire land drifted to the cities for work and
even emigrated abroad. Real emigration to countries like the U.S. began
in earnest in the early twentieth century, with Armenians signing up for
contract labor and sending monies back to their families — manifesting
another form of original accumulation. My father was among this army of
emigrants who left their villages, possibly because of the loss of land — in
his case, it may have been prompted as well by the desire for independence
and adventure or because he was one of the younger sons of a priestly fam-
ily and did not stand to inherit family lands. Emigration saved him from
the fate suffered by his family.
The principal thrust of Balakian’s long narrative of survival and escape
is to show how normal village everydayness was inverted into and domi-
nated by a “deportee” everyday, composed of those forcibly embarked on
a journey punctuated at every step by looting, pillage, rape, and murder.
Balakian, it should be pointed out, expressed no illusions concerning the
nature of the everyday lived by Armenians, representing it as some sort of
golden age. Above all else, he was an urbanized intellectual who had stud-
ied abroad but appeared aware of both the solidarity of Armenian rural
communities and the difficulties they faced daily, owing to their status as
Christians and as a minority. In the replacement of that rhythm with an
everyday dominated by the arrhythmic necropolitics of the deportations,
there was no apparent transition. It is along the paths of deportation to a
desert destination and death that the fusion of primitive accumulation and
the daily “slaughter of the innocents” became the principal guiding logic
of what Balakian renamed the “Armenian Golgotha.” Rounding up first
deportees meant forfeiting everything; the journey would do the rest. The
transformation seemed to occur virtually overnight.
What attended this everyday terror of imminent death was the antici-
pation that it would occur at the next bend of the road or bridge cross-
ing. If this sense of dread captures the psychology of a lived dailyness, it
was made even worse by the incessant preoccupation with securing water,
food, and rest. But the recurring intuition that violence would strike the
deportees at any moment must have been a form of torture unparalleled

History’s Interruption 107

in the historical annals of collective fear; knowing at the same time that
they were being forced to march to their deaths in the desert created an
underlying temporal arrhythmia disrupting any possibility for establish-
ing a routinized pace. Balakian’s memoir, especially, provides excruciating
detail of the ceaseless psychological distress among survivors that defined
the deportation as it moved toward its desert destiny. In many instances,
mass deaths occurred long before reaching the fateful destination. The
marching deportees often encountered the remains of bodies from prior
ambushes along the route. The plundering of wealth of Armenians des-
ignated for deportation made it impossible to bring much, if anything, of
necessities: little more than whatever money they might carry for bribes
and bread. It is impossible to imagine this brutally abrupt refiguration of
the everyday into its darkened negative of terror charged with uncertainty
and expectancy. This was particularly true as the temporality of the de-
portation lengthened from days into weeks into months, only to arrive
at a place where the certainty of death could no longer be deferred. The
everyday became the space-­time site of a fearful, unrelenting daily labor
of murder and mutilation. I have tried to grasp the particular psychology
implicated in genocidal decisions and what enduring the daily fear of im-
minent death must have been like, and I explain to myself the motivating
encouragement that drove its perpetrators to employ the cruelest forms
of sadism to adorn a policy already committed to exterminating an ethnic
group. I cannot improve on Balakian’s witness, apart from saying I heard
fragments of comparable accounts, not from my parents but from older
folks at Armenian socials who often broke down in involuntary spasms of
tears, reporting what they had heard and seen.
If there may be ways to explain certain forms of violent behavior sanc-
tioned by crudely articulated practices of protofascism, the mass mur-
derers among Turkish and Kurdish populaces, and convicts and other
opportunists, resist easy reduction to such explanations based on given
conceptions of a modern modal social and political personality. Anato-
lia was still more a precapitalist social order than modern, despite the
shards of capital unevenly manifest in economic life and its social effects
that were beginning to appear in Istanbul and other urban areas. While
I have no doubt that participants in mutilation and murder enjoyed what
they were doing, it derived not from the experience of modern warfare
but from historical grievances stoked and animated over centuries. It was
religiously and racially articulated and motivated by origins in a long his-
tory of oppressing minority populations in the empire whose expendabil-

108 Chapter Four

ity would have finally removed any claim to the territory made by those
who had been settled in Anatolia long before the arrival of the Ottoman
Turks and whose presence was a constant reminder of such a scandal. It
took the Ottomans nearly five hundred years to devise a final solution and
only after they had lost their possessions in southern Europe and seen the
deportation of their own population back to Anatolia.
This return to Anatolia, which probably counted as a return to Asia for
the Turks, undoubtedly contributed to finding a way to rid the territory of
undesirable minorities who were, what is more, Christian, as if they be-
longed someplace else. However, the deportation of Armenians was not
conceived to send them back to their ancestral home, as had been the case
of the Turks in southeastern Europe, but to a desert inferno. The Arme-
nians already occupied their historic homeland and had done so for cen-
turies, long before the Turkic migrations out of the steppe.
The labor of killing was done largely by the military, ordinary peasants,
convicts, and opportunists, often assisted by local villagers in vicinities the
deportations were moving through; and this meant that it was not sim-
ply limited to males but frequently involved women and children as well.
Moreover, Turks and Kurds were killing people with whom they had been
in close contact for a long time, people whose lives were interwoven with
theirs as peasants. Balakian provides ample evidence of how he and mem-
bers in his convoy were constantly fearful of such attacks by local villagers
and reports the aftermath of numerous such raids along the route; in some
instances, when he had money, he would use it for bribing guards to secure
advance knowledge of waiting ambushes and even protection. According
to him, it was clear that guards watching over the convoy would in fact in-
form villages or gangs of marauding convicts of their arrival. But we have
no sure way of penetrating the psychology of people inhabiting precapital-
ist and premodern social formations to explain their behavior and can only
offer a guess at the socialization processes. My father was never at ease
when referring to the Turkish and Kurdish populace, more often than not
at a loss for words when unequivocally dismissing them as “barbarians”
and “savages,” suggesting some form of preliterate socialization. I do not
know if he ever had Turkish or Kurdish friends; if he did, he never men-
tioned them. He undoubtedly had neighbors with whom he must have had
some interaction but he never mentioned such instances and would have
included them in his general denunciation. But what we know of “barbar-
ians” as a type does not adequately describe the inhuman nature of such
behavior. As willing agents of the executions, they must have also under-

History’s Interruption 109

gone some sort of profound transformation. Certainly the act of arbitrary
killing and murder must have been individually transforming. Or perhaps
it was simply the resentment of those at the economic bottom of a highly
structured social hierarchy of status rungs, a resentment fueled by recog-
nizing that members of a Christian minority seemed to enjoy a better life
than they, who were members of the Islamic majority, what Slavoj Žižek
years ago explained as an expression of “surplus enjoyment” and “pleasure
theft” or enjoyment by the other.31 We know that the Unionist attempt to
recruit popular support for its policy wisely called attention to exaggerated
accounts of Armenian wealth and the promise of rewards that came with
active participation in the processes of dispossession and extermination,
to take back what the other had been enjoying.
Grigoris Balakian’s firsthand account of his experience in the deporta-
tion march and subsequent escape provides a virtual inventory of the petty
theft and its relationship to murder committed at the lowest local level on
individuals, dead and alive. He seems to have possessed total recall and
forgot nothing. In one episode he recounts that he encountered a tent with
three men lying on rags. He discovers one of them is a wealthy Armenian
Catholic from Ankara and inquires into the details of what had happened
to him, since he knew that Catholics had been granted exemption from the
deportations: “His story was the same heart-­wrenching one I had seen and
heard a thousand times. After his goats, houses, vineyards, stores, wagons,
and horses—worth tens of thousands of gold pounds—were seized, he had
been sent on foot on the road from Ankara, together with his fellow Arme-
nian Catholics.”32 He escaped and found refuge along the route of a railway
construction, after bribing the officials holding him captive and ultimately
rescued by the director of the railroad. Throughout his account there is a
steady identification of murder, mutilation, and theft, as if it were a natural
mantra that Turkish and Kurdish raiders were obliged to satisfy and put
into practice every time they encountered Armenians. In some instances,
there seemed to be a competition between officials and local scavengers
who, after murdering Armenian victims, set about to pick over the mu-
tilated bodies. “Meanwhile hundreds of greedy Turkish officials,”Grigoris
Balakian reports, “like hungry wolves set upon (the) abandoned goods.
High-­level officials came to the site of plunder with carriages, carts, and
porters to cart away the valuables by the trunk load. More than the civil-
ians, it was the military that engaged in the looting. They left the crumbs
of these rich spoils to the poor Muslim people as their rightful share.”33
What is important about such reports is that they occurred all the time

110 Chapter Four

and the amount of wealth that had been stolen must not only have been
considerable but its scale virtually incalculable because it included every-
thing but the bones of the dead.
Historians such as Mikael Nichanian have asked, “The Armenian geno-
cide, like Shoah, thus poses a singular question to the historian: at what
moment did total hatred tip toward genocidal hatred and what are the
factors that favored the passage into the act?”34 The question is pertinent
since Armenians in the empire, like Jews in Central Europe, were already
socialized to observing the laws, language, and culture of their respective
oppressors. They were not like outside enemies. Yet it is also possible to
propose that recurrent racial hatred is always “tipped” toward violence. It
has its own dynamic driving it to spill over into acts of aggression, as con-
temporary white animosity toward African Americans and immigrants in
contemporary America shows daily. Nichanian’s interpretation is persua-
sive, inasmuch as he seeks to attribute irrationality to the general outburst,
ignited by conjuring a phantasmagoric enemy that had to be destroyed at
the risk of being destroyed by it. Europe was resolved to destroy the em-
pire but went about it in a simple and unsatisfactory and incomplete way.
In this script, it was assumed that Armenians, owing to their Christian-
ity, were closely allied with European powers and served as their surrogate
agents in Anatolia, an advance guard working to undermine Ottomanism.
The myth of the Armenian menace was thus superimposed on another
“founding” myth, which was the conviction that Europe was determined
to destroy the Ottoman Empire. It is difficult to ascertain whether this lat-
ter myth was credible, but even if it possessed a shred of truth, it would not
have led to using Armenians as an advance guard of agent provocateurs
bent on undermining the Ottoman Empire for Europeans. What is certain
is that it was overdetermined.
The problem of the empire, as with most imperial structures, was an
unreflexive self-­satisfaction of empire itself, an archaic system from a re-
mote time of conquest, indeed a conquest empire dedicated to the time-
less eternality of conquered space, now trying to adjust itself to new his-
torical circumstances and increasingly reassigning its place to the zone of
stagnant anachrony. Turkish tribes that left the steppe centuries earlier
had finally settled in Anatolia and Southern Europe for the past five hun-
dred years to remain suspended in the spatial figure of a conquest em-
pire devoted only to military subjugation and occupation on the basis of a
“natural economy” committed to agricultural cultivation and expropria-
tion, structurally hierarchic, employing Islam’s concept of holy war in the

History’s Interruption 111

form of jihad to provide the religious sanction for murder, mutilation, and
theft.35 In this respect, Turkish ambitions were probably closer to the as-
piration of Christian crusades of earlier centuries and their appeal to self-­
righteous pieties to justify conquest and dispossession. But the similarity
ends here since the two instances of dispossession and theft served two
different economic systems.
The Ottoman Empire became hostage to its own spatial history and
incapable of adapting to the demands of capitalist modernization — much
like other empires such as the Qing in China or Mughals of India — a task
left to its republican successor. In a striking way, the duration of the Ot-
tomans seemed only to delay what appeared as the fateful repetition of all
conquering dynasties that swept out of the steppe and subsequently dis-
appeared. In this regard, there may have been a parallelism between the
figure of this fearful historical destiny at the core of the Turkish political
unconscious and the vanishing of Ani that would agitate the worst dreams
of Armenians. But it is important to keep in mind the other side of the
symmetry that Turkey, by having resolved the Armenian Question, had
nothing left to remember, whereas Armenians were left with only unan-
swered questions that could never be forgotten.
Early in 2016 we (my spouse and I) took a trip down to the Mille Vaches
region of France and stopped over for a few days in a small town named
Eymoutier. The surprise was the town’s museum, basically dedicated to
housing and exhibiting the work of a locally born artist, Paul Rebeyrolle.36
It seems that Rebeyrolle’s wife had been a model for Henri Matisse and was
of Armenian descent. In tribute to his wife and her mother, who appar-
ently had escaped the genocide, the artist composed a number of paintings
dramatizing this episode in her life. The theme that caught me appeared
in a few large paintings of a series: “Le Sac de Madame Tellikdjian” [The
purse of Madame Tellikdjian], portraying the theft of the purse; “Au pied
du barrage” [At the foot of the dam], the attempt to retain the purse; and
“Le Voleur” [The thief], the purse carried away. Both the first and second
paintings portrayed a woman losing her purse, the theft of it in one paint-
ing and her desperate attempt at the foot of a dam to grab it, before it was
carried off by a torrent of water in the third painting. The theme is clear
enough: Madame Telikdjian, Rebeyrolle’s mother-­in-­law, had lost every-
thing in her effort to escape and survive the massacres but her purse, con-
taining all her belongings, tenaciously clutching it because it was her life.
In a sense, it was her life, all she had, the price of survival, which was her
history. In “The Thief,” the painting distilled for me the massive theft car-

112 Chapter Four

ried out by a mobilized Turkish populace bent on destroying Armenians
in Anatolia but not before ransacking their homes and bodies for what
they could take; in the second painting I saw the frenzied effort to hold
on to one last thing when everything else and everybody have been swept
away in a surging tsunami. Madame Telikdjian, Rebeyrolle’s mother-­in-­
law, like most Armenians, had lost everything in the vortex of genocidal
fury in her effort to escape and survive the massacres but her purse, which
constituted all her belongings and represented her history as an Arme-
nian. In effect, the paintings struck a forceful resonance that reminded
me of what my parents had lost, everything but a fragile grasp of history
and their frantic attempt to hang on to it in the diminished life of the di-
aspora before that too was taken from them or carried off, stolen or swept
away in a great surge of water. It was evident that Rebeyrolle had captured
in condensed form the crucial and fundamental meaning of the genocide
and its relationship to “primitive accumulation.” Surviving signified saving
the heritage of Armenian history or what the survivors thought it was for
them, like the contents of a purse — it was all any of the victims who were
able to escape had left to them. I would like to think that Vehanush valued
the history, that it was worth hanging on to as a guarantee against com-
plete diminishment, as Rebeyrolle’s paintings dramatize, but I am not at
all sure she did. Ohannes certainly did. He fought and risked his life for it.

History’s Interruption 113

 fi ve. H ouse of Str a n ger s/D i minishe d L i ve s

After World War II, it became apparent that the basic difference between
our mother and father was that Ohannes appeared more drawn out than
Vehanush to speaking about Anatolian life, as if he delighted in breaking
an agreement dedicated to silence. He especially liked telling stories, as
suggested earlier, from and about the “old country,” as he often put it, and
his years of adolescence, but not beyond. Perhaps this loquacity was en-
couraged by the fact that we were all getting older and were in a position
to understand or that he in turn was aging and involuntarily returning to
more distant memories of childhood. They were usually tales, sometimes
repetitions, many he may have made up, or older ones told to him that he
reconfigured and were often funny but also provided a concrete texture of
peasant life in a premodern setting. He often referred to one of his favorite
Armenian adages of “a man who could fool a dog.” In time it became obvi-
ous to me that he was that man, even though we had no dog. He had a sense
of humor, and liked having a good time and an occasional drink, an activity
usually limited to the weekends and consigned to the basement, unless it
was a special occasion with guests. But this restraint may have been the
result of the earlier period of economic depression when apparently he
drank to excess.
Our mother was mostly humorless. What few things I recall when she
spoke of her days in the missionary orphanage/school referred to pleasur-
able moments, but she was not a woman who seemed to have ever had
much fun when growing up or even after, apart from going to the movies.
And she seemed to be on guard against levity surfacing in the household. I
remember her once singing the Christmas carol “Christmas Tree” in Ger-
man, and she apparently had reported something of her time in Greece to
my sisters. I think her pleasures were limited to the movies twice a week;
a few favorite radio programs such as “One Man’s Family,” “Fibber McGee
and Molly,” and some quiz shows; a reward of a sweet to herself after the
week’s schedule had been realized; and time with a few women friends. I
also recall that she was enthusiastic about Christmas, which must have
been a product of the missionary school since Armenians were tradition-
ally prone to celebrate Epiphany in January rather than Christmas in De-
cember. But the Christmas she celebrated was increasingly Americanized
and became, for her, a sign of being an American. I was never convinced
that being around small children brought her much joy, and she reminded
me on more than one occasion that she would not be interested in taking
care of mine. In a sense I admired her for redefining the role of grand-
mother, perhaps recuperating the role played by her mother toward us.
Vehanush’s chronology has proved to be more difficult to determine
than my father’s. In his accounting there were verifiable episodes that were
datable, such as his story of traveling from Russia to Liverpool, where sup-
posedly he was slated to board the Lusitania but apparently missed it and
traveled to the U.S. on the Mauritania. In any event, the Mauritania was
just as susceptible to German U-­boats as the Lusitania. The story itself
may have been untrue, for all I know, but it gives an idea of where he was
and when. Vehanush’s early life seemed shorn of verifiable, datable mark-
ers. I have not been able to nail down dates or times of any of the signifi-
cant moments in her life in Anatolia and subsequent voyage to France. In
fact, her marriage to Ohannes is the first datable event in her life I have
and that was 1920.
Our parents were involved in not simply a second start. Even more so,
a new beginning was brutally forced upon them that resulted from an
abruptly interrupted youth, bending them in ways they could never have
explained or even anticipated. We might wonder what their lives might
have become had they not been dislocated so suddenly by the threat of cat-
aclysmic events. The diaspora’s existence was the price paid for continu-
ing to lead what seemed like diminished lives, where tremendous energies
were expended to secure the sparest results. Our father, unlike Vehanush,
embroidered moments of his past as a boy and teenager, a fantasy he must
have in large part conjured and that he relayed to his children, who would
envision a society filled with the daily contacts and conflicts with broth-
ers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents situated in a larger

House of Strangers/Diminished Lives 115

community composed of kin and friends; that is, its principal theme was
normalcy. Some of that was true. But Vehanush was deprived of a compa-
rable experience during her early childhood. Arlene Voski Avakian’s mem-
oir of family life in an Armenian American household presented details
dramatically different from what we had known, experienced, and remem-
bered. Her early family life was filled with relatives who came and left, a
grandmother who had survived the genocide, and parents who had made
their way to the United States but still had relatives in Persia (Iran). And,
by comparison, her family was economically far better off than ours since
her father and his brothers ran an Oriental carpet business.1 But, like her,
I felt the same ambition to become an American, only in my case it was
more of a vocation since I really had no other aspiration when growing up.
There seemed to be no compelling imperative to retain a sense of Armeni-
anness since my associations, apart from life in our family, were with non-­
Armenians. This may have derived from an inflected stage of self-­loathing
I suspect many children of first-generation migrants pass through. But
even the family environment changed when the three of us entered public
schools and our culture of reference gradually shifted to a world outside
the household. In those days, I began to think about a society and its edu-
cational institutions that virtually implanted through programmatic so-
cialization such a singular goal informed by an ahistorical model into its
second-­generation migrant sons and daughters, insisting they pour their
energies into becoming something they were not and could never be, com-
pletely displacing the pursuit of other possibilities, discouraging both bi-
linguality and bicultural life. Years later, it still occurred to me that the
apparent alchemical magic devised by public schools to transmogrify the
children of plural ethnicities into the singular figure of an Americanness
was an experiment that had not only failed but inflicted unforeseen con-
sequences on its subjects or victims.
Armenian everyday life embodied a conception of the social held to-
gether by religion and extended families or clans. The diaspora lives of the
survivors were an imperfect or incomplete replication of the traditional
model. Owing to the circumstances demanded by the necessity to run for
one’s life and the massive elimination of relatives and friends who could
not get out in time, the reconstitution of the diasporic social was more
of a bricolage than a reproduction. And, as I have suggested, the role of
the church was diminished in the new environment. Avakian presents a
picture of social reproduction that is closer to the traditional model, es-
pecially in her description of how relatives seemed to be always coming

116 Chapter Five

and going. But it is her grandmother who had experienced and survived
the genocide by consenting to convert to Islam in order to save her chil-
dren. It is her story told to Avakian when she was young that she did not
want to hear; this story is retrieved in adulthood to reinforce her identity
as a woman and an Armenian. “Why would I,” she writes, “want to know
about people who were unknown to most of the world, who were hated
so much when they were recognized that they were forced to leave their
homes and to give up their religion, who were even killed. . . . I was sorry
that I had asked her [grandmother] to tell it to me. I didn’t want to know
it. It was bad enough to be unknown, strange, and different from everyone
else, but it was unbearable to be despised. I would forget it.”2 When I was
her age I cannot claim to have acquired such insightful understanding
of what it meant to be an Armenian, the diminished status accorded to
unknown people who were remembered largely for the reminder of their
starving children used to induce American kids to clean off their dinner
plates. But I understand what she means when she refers to how differ-
ent I was often made to feel from my wasp classmates or even neighbor-
hood Irish Catholic kids, who belonged to the same working class as us,
were just as unknowing and uncaring. Avakian is right to propose that the
story simply worked to make her more “determined to deny my difference
from everyone else.”3 Unlike Avakian, I had neither the imagination nor
inclination to change our customary ways of living and found most of my
energy poured into the futile exercise of trying to become the American I
observed in school and the movies.
Avakian provides a translation of the transcript taken from her grand-
mother that conveys both the fierceness and the bravery of her struggle
to retrieve one of her sons from a Turkish official in a language that ac-
curately captures the larger historicity of the genocidal event and time. I
was reminded of what I had missed and lost in not raising questions when
I had the opportunity to have done so. What such testimonials as Ava-
kian’s grandmother’s and Balakian’s provide is, in fact, that everyday life
during the genocide years converted into the repetition of terror and the
fear that each day might be your last. For my generation, who never ex-
perienced the genocide’s redefinition of the everyday as a repetitive death
sentence, the testimonies allow us to momentarily reimagine the ways
our own relatives — in my case, grandparents, great-­grandparents, uncles,
aunts, and so on — perished, providing a brief glimpse of how they may
have confronted their executioners and thinking the thoughts that must
have passed through them in their last moments. Both of these texts not

House of Strangers/Diminished Lives 117

only supply the forbidding factual details of what was taking place in the
killing fields of Anatolia, personalizing the mass quantity of nameless
deaths that would soon be forgotten and could not be tallied until the end,
but also make of us, who came after, their witnesses.4 As suggested ear-
lier, the statistical data is all we have of such murderous episodes, but the
surviving witnesses provide us with the valuable knowledge of how those
whose names we never knew and relatives whose presence would forever
remain unapproachably absent and beyond our experience were still our
kin who had led lives of individual quality and died as unknown numbers
with their names and personal histories.
In the U.S. we had none of this kind of contact with relatives (apart
from exaggerated tales about the good life in Istanbul), though our par-
ents did their best to accomplish some measure of normalcy while we
were growing up in the late years of the Depression. But what kind of
normalcy is possible when so much has been lost and there is so much to
learn in a new environment, when you have to make your way by trial and
error and the margin of error can be disastrously narrow? Their idea of
normalcy was simply to shut out any reference to their early pasts, unlike
Avakian’s grandmother, who insisted on recounting the story of her sur-
vival to her granddaughter since she must have believed it was as much of
who she would become as it was of herself. But bracketing their pasts to
achieve some sort of normalcy to shield their children contributed to the
diminishment of both their lives and ours. I often thought, when I was
older, that we were a house of strangers rather than a family, and as I look
back on those years I am not persuaded that I was completely wrong. Our
mother lived with somebody else’s name that I did not know until I began
writing this memoir. My sister Victoria left the family after she graduated
from high school and married young; I left a few years later never really to
return, apart from short visits; and only my sister Sena continued to live
with Vehanush and Ohannes until they passed away. There seemed to be
an absence of any lasting bond of solidarity to our family unit, nothing to
hold it together but the void we all were made to occupy and live out. The
question that seemed to ask itself was who was Vehanush when she was a
Kupalian and whom did she become when she adopted the name Bedro-
sian? And did Kupalian remain in the recesses of Bedrosian’s memories or
were they banished?
The thought of leading diminished lives has bothered me since youth.
Part of the reason for this preoccupation with diminishment was the
youthful experience of living through episodes of exclusion for reasons I

118 Chapter Five

only began to understand as I moved into my teens; small instances and
incidents gradually aggregated under the sign of exclusion, being left out.
Perhaps this was more the case for migrants who came with the first wave
of workers to the U.S. For me, “diminish” refers to what immigrants, such
as my parents, had to settle for by coming to the U.S. at that time and by
extension what we had to carry with us for having different skin tones and
unpronounceable names and for failing to look like some figure modeled
by the Hollywood dream machine. I am explicitly referring to the experi-
ence of the genocide that robbed them of whatever future they might have
normally expected in Anatolia and then lives mediated by the diaspora ex-
istence, which merged with the economic depression in Detroit to inflict
on them a second form of diminishment. I am not suggesting that their life
in Anatolia would have been better off but only that they would have had
there an already defined place for themselves; they would have belonged
and have had the facility to make of it what they could have. I had earlier
expressed the belief that our parents clearly recognized they had no future
in the U.S. but only the prospect of the sparest existence in an unending
present. In some respects, this sense of a diminished life affected us (my
sisters and me) as well, not simply as a family but as children who entered
the wider society provided by public schools. My own early experience in
schools made me daily aware of my immigrant status that separated us
from those who were not the children of immigrant families. It also began
to pull me away from the difference I was forced to live as an Armenian, or
at least away from the prospect of remaining connected to it. I remember
an incident in grade school when I was recruited to be a special friend and
helper of a German Jewish immigrant boy whose family had just arrived in
America. On afterthought it occurred to me that I was designated to help
him make his way because it was supposed I had the requisite experience.
Years later, in my teens, I was told by the father of a friend of mine that
“they didn’t want my kind in the neighborhood.” It was a coercive moment,
tinged with threat and violence. The problem was that I did not know what
kind I was supposed to represent since I had already been socialized to in-
ternalize the abstract figure of the good American, whatever that meant.
The incident was useful in one regard: it showed the bankruptcy of the im-
age of the modular American peddled in civics classes and how in society
different people had their own idea of what it meant to be a real American.
But I did recognize I was not allowed to be like him or his daughter and
that a racial divide permanently separated us. In graduate school, I worked
as a dishwasher in a boarding house; the woman who ran it regularly had

House of Strangers/Diminished Lives 119

trouble with my name and repetitively wanted to know when I came to this
country. She was usually drunk by that time of the day when the dinner
meal was served and cleanup began. My doctoral advisor never had any-
thing substantive to say about my dissertation, apart from expressing an
anxious concern that I should fix the “split infinitives” in the manuscript,
which from the beginning defined our non-­relationship and which seemed
to be his principal and only preoccupation. In the course of time, I began
to think that this response inflected his own distrust that I had not yet
acquired a full command of native English because of my foreignness. I
knew he had never encountered an Armenian or entertained the idea of
one. This curious absence of offering substantive criticism and comment
also reflected his own incapacity to actually think critically, which appar-
ently he was never trained to do in the Ivy League institution that granted
him his doctoral degree. In those days, critical thinking did not appear to
be a necessity in the training of young men and women in those institu-
tions. Why learn the necessity of thinking critically when you’re made to
believe you’re at the center of the world? I always had the feeling that most
of my graduate instructors had trouble seeing me as simply another stu-
dent, like others, through their wasp-­like prism. I think the roadblock or
psychological astigmatism was caused by the name.
But beyond that, most of us from migrant families were simply targeted
for vocational education programs. Even though I was older than Arlene
Voski Avakian, her experience in the public schools corresponds uncan-
nily close to sentiments I would have expressed in my own inarticulate
feelings in high school, and especially resembles what she was made to
endure when her family moved from Manhattan to a “white bread” com-
munity in north New Jersey and attended Ridgewood High School: “I felt
like an outcast . . . , not only around students but teachers as well. . . . I
felt as if my teachers expected very little from me.”5 While Detroit was no
white-­bread community, Ann Arbor was, as was the university the town
housed. In high school Avakian’s teacher believed she “was part of the
very small group of students who would not go on to college.”6 In the high
school I attended (Highland Park) there was a larger quotient of migrant
girls and boys and African Americans (whose parents worked in local fac-
tories) that formed a categorical group that simply was not slated to go to
college, as if it was a law of nature (excepting the class valedictorian, who
was an Armenian). In this environment, I learned that there was a very
narrow definition of what being an American meant that did not always
fully include people like us. What I was able to glean early from the ex-

120 Chapter Five

perience, without having the capacity to quite express it, taught me that
I was not simply average but less than average, that I had no idea whatso-
ever what I would do if I graduated, and that the only friends I had came
from the same migrant pool. That is to say, I learned how race was used to
reinforce and even disguise class and presumptions of ethnic superiority
that substituted for class advantage, lessons that were missing in our civ-
ics class where the work of ideological socialization was carried out. The
early years were thus marked by exclusions because of my difference, and
it is interesting to see how in a generation’s time, difference itself became
the primary principle of inclusion. It was almost as if it was the working
through of a law of historical repetition, with difference.
There is, of course, a contrast between those who specifically migrate
to this country for a better life, who come because the U.S. is mythologized
as the future, and those caught between the prospect of imminent death
and imminent poverty to feel lucky to be alive and who have either found
their future in the immediate present or have indefinitely deferred it. Yet
in America people were not supposed to be simply alive. Being simply
alive in an endless present is a form of diminishment. It lessens what one
is, one’s importance, outlook, and hope without a future to look toward,
and reduces the notation of one’s difference to smallness and unworthi-
ness. Moreover, it represents a diminishing of prospects not only because
the status runs counter to expectations offered by the ideological promise
associated with American life (even though people like our parents did not
come for that) but because one’s own experience in this country resulted
in finding no real place in it — as I said, living somebody else’s history but
not really being of it. Raised in a meager environment, it was for this rea-
son we were taught to expect no more than what we had.
Vehanush’s move to the West, as I have suggested, is more difficult to
nail down than Ohannes’s trajectory. I do not know if she was accom-
panied by the other girls or whether the group had been broken up and
dispersed—another question that went unanswered in an already crowded
inventory of unanswered questions signifying only the negative lapses of
an uncompleted life. It is possible she and the school group left Marash
later than the time I have imagined and remained in Turkey throughout
the genocidal period, under the protection of the German missionaries.
They then could have left later, under the general amnesty ending the
war in 1918, which means three years or more of voluntary internment in
the orphanage’s precincts within the crucible of massacre. This experi-
ence would likely explain her later silence and complete rejection of the

House of Strangers/Diminished Lives 121

“old country.” She must have heard and seen things she did not want to
remember.
Starting over again for my parents did not mean that their prior lives
would remain fixed and comfortably dormant in a distant past that even-
tually would be interred in a sealed but forgotten memory. Rather, I felt
that the iron discipline of silence, their refusal to really share their ear-
lier experiences and talk about their respective lives and survivals, would
continue to trouble them in their new beginning. Beginning a family in a
new and alienating environment was a little like a work in progress: Ve-
hanush brought little experience of family life to this challenge; Ohannes
was, perhaps, hobbled by too much experience that was no longer useful
or adaptable to the demands of not only a new and different environment
but a vastly different kind of society that historically, politically, economi-
cally, and culturally resembled nothing of what both had once known.
What could they teach us of American life, which they were in the process
of trying to understand? Learning it through another language risks los-
ing something in translation. I still find myself expressing certain things I
learned when younger in Armenian words. My mother substituted her lack
of a deep experience of living in a family with the discipline she learned
from German missionaries. She organized the week on the basis of daily
chores that had to be done on that day alone, between Monday and Friday,
without deviation. These were chores she assigned to herself, but every-
body else in the household had to observe them as well: Monday washday,
Tuesday ironing, Wednesday and/or Thursday house cleaning, and Friday
grocery shopping, with little allowable room for play or divergence. On
Fridays, as mentioned earlier, she sometimes set aside time to reward her-
self with a sweet, usually ice cream or something like that — a compensa-
tory gesture signaling youthful deprivations? Cooking dinners was also
her task and quite late in life, as I noted earlier, she learned how to pre-
pare Armenian dishes. She would go to the movies (where she eventually
learned English) twice a week, on “dish night,” to add to her collection,
when she dragged either one of my sisters or me, and again on Sunday. In
those days just before World War II and immediately after, neighborhood
movie houses had two changes a week and a double bill on weeknights,
which invariably were classified as B movies, apparently of lesser quality
and inexpensively produced, now many ranked as classic film noirs; on the
weekends were top-­rated feature films. In almost every way, she left her
imprint on the household.
My father spent most of the weekdays at work, but Vehanush made sure

122 Chapter Five

dinner was ready by 5:30 p.m. Evenings were spent listening to radio pro-
grams (until tv arrived and discovered Groucho Marx); both parents went
to bed comparatively early since my father usually had to get up early for
day shifts in some car plant, especially when he landed a secure job at the
outset of the war, and my mother would have his lunch prepared as well as
his breakfast. She never slept past 5:00 a.m., a habit undoubtedly acquired
in the missionary school. When Ohannes was home on the weekends, it
was time for visiting friends or attending some Armenian function. Both
would regularly go to an Armenian grocery on Woodrow Wilson Avenue,
within walking distance of our flat, run by a tall man who was also their
friend and whom everybody called Haji (some people mistranslated it into
Archie) but whose real name was Hovaness. Only later I discovered that it
was some sort of Turkish term of respect and signified people who made
a trip to a holy city, which in this case was a Christian site like Jerusalem
or Bethlehem, indicated by a tattooed cross on one’s hand. The last time
I saw Haji was on his one hundredth birthday or close enough to it, still
erect, in command of clear thinking and expression. I should add that it
was usual practice in the Armenian community to use services run by Ar-
menians like groceries, cleaners, medical doctors, dentists, cleaners, and
others. When we were smaller, I remember our father taking us to a lo-
cal park on the weekends during the summer. But as we all grew older,
he would spend Saturdays and sometimes Sunday afternoons at the Aza-
damard Club, where he played pinochle and backgammon and talked of
current politics within the larger Armenian diaspora community. I was
never privy to these conversations but I suspect that in time they morphed
into stories quite remote from the way things had been. He was a regular
subscriber to an Armenian newspaper (Hairenik), reading it from cover to
cover and often singing the praises of the written language, distantly echo-
ing the Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam’s own discovery of Armenian and
his confident observation of “the stone like hardness of articulate speech”
whose “boots are stone,” preserved in this ancient language. The news­
paper came out of Boston until 1970 and reflected the political views of the
arf or Dashnaks. For such a small community, the Armenians seemed
to be riven with far too many political factions, many of them inflect-
ing political positions of certain church dioceses. This meant that if you
were sympathetic to the arf, you would go to the church associated with
that political ideology and participate in its social functions; if you were
involved in an opposing political view, you would choose another. What
appeared noticeable to me was that these political lines were like borders

House of Strangers/Diminished Lives 123

that rarely were, if ever, crossed. The problem of politics and religion in
the Armenian community was complicated and the close identification
with religion often spilled over into political acts of violence. It is likely
that diaspora, itself a condensation of the heterology of Anatolian life, re-
inforced the sharpening of religiopolitical commitments that would have
been once more diffuse and now bolstered greater antagonisms exploding
into violence. I was never sure of how Vehanush felt about these diverse
political factions, since she clearly had no or little affiliation with the Ar-
menian Apostolic Church when she was a child and her encounter with
German Protestantism in the missionary school must have contributed to
separating her further from the older church. But I had the feeling that she
was somewhat indifferent, if not dismissive toward their various political
positions, primarily seeing in some of the auxiliary organizations the offer
of the sociality of women. Part of this antipathy for the politics embraced
by the Armenian Church derived from her profound disaffection from
the Armenian Apostolic Church, which, she knew, was usually at the core
of most of the political conflict within the community. It was also greatly
strengthened by what she must have learned in the mission school, which
inevitably identified the native churches with backwardness and a barrier
to progress. With Ohannes it was a lifelong commitment, even though his
ardor began to wane the older he became. His enthusiasm for the pros-
pect of an independent Armenia, what he and his age cohort had fought
for, was vanishing. I remember a conversation we had a few years before
he went to Fresno. We discussed an incident related to an elder Armenian
gentleman who, I believe, lived in Fresno and who persuaded a Turkish of-
ficial from the consulate in San Francisco to come down on the promise
to show him a rare Oriental rug. There may have been the suggestion of
a donation. I am not sure. When the official showed up, the elder Arme-
nian shot and killed him. My father’s response to this was to approve of
it, declaring that he would have done the same thing. He might have done
so when he was younger but not any longer at his age at the time. Yet I do
not think that this announcement was merely the empty bravado of an old
man but rather was consistent with the political program of the Dashnaks
after World War I that Ohannes had always extolled and their determined
mission to send agents wherever Young Turks officials had fled, especially
to Germany, to assassinate those responsible for the genocide. I always had
the feeling that his sympathies for this activity betrayed a more personal
commitment to its program. But at the same time he remained adamantly
silent on any concrete information concerning his Dashnak affiliations,

124 Chapter Five

apart from his time in the brigades and his membership. But his unwaver-
ing approval exceeded the satisfaction of revenge for having lost his whole
family and the nature of his commitment to the cause.
Part of the complication of politics and religion is explainable by the
particular nature of the church itself. It was called the Armenian Apos-
tolic Church and represented, along with the Coptic Church, perhaps
the earliest schism within Christendom. Organized in the fourth cen-
tury, it drew authority presumably from a claimed relation to one of the
Apostles, and was from the very beginning a national or better yet eth-
nically based Christian Church. Its rites and rituals resemble those be-
longing to the Greek Orthodox faith, inasmuch as the liturgy was in the
native tongue, not Latin; it also differed in its theology as a result of par-
ticipating in numerous historic synods in the early history of Christian-
ity, especially those that tried to fix the nature of the trinity and resolve
what were Christological controversies that usually ended up splintering
other groups along ethnic lines like the Nestorians.7 With Armenians of
my father’s generation there was the additional problem of the location
of the church’s supreme authority figure, the Catholicos, whose seat —
Etchmiadzin — was located in Soviet Armenia. For the arf, there was no
possibility of reconciliation, and if memory serves me correctly, I believe
Dashnak agents in New York City assassinated an archbishop of the church
in 1933 for having been a vocal supporter of the Soviet regime in Armenia.
Such were the politics of the diaspora. Third-­generation Armenians, prin-
cipally from France, continued this program after World War II.
While Ohannes expressed support of such acts, he was no longer a fol-
lower of the faith, despite his own family’s priestly heritage. Vehanush,
as I mentioned earlier, had no religious affiliation, as such, nor interest in
the Armenian Church. The world she created in the household reflected
what she had learned in the missionary school and how to order the ev-
eryday into routines consisting of worthwhile tasks and pursuits. In many
ways, this quality probably goes a long way toward explaining her capac-
ity to survive in both environments. But it resulted in some significant ab-
sences. In my memory, there were few expressions of affection and there
was no atmosphere of excessive warmth in our household. This is not to
say that our parents were indifferent to the three of us. But they tended to
our needs as part of the contract; we were always fed regularly, had clean
clothes and were cared for, but as if we were part of the regular routines
of the domestic political economy. In a sense, this conforms to the view
of my sister Victoria, who observed that our parents were not necessar-

House of Strangers/Diminished Lives 125

ily a compatible couple. And I observed something of this incompatibility
as they grew older but am willing to attribute it to aging as another prob-
able explanation. Ohannes would often acknowledge to me how he was
lost after Vehanush died. This probably had to do with the structured life
she had put into place in the household and its disappearance after she
died. My response to Victoria was to agree with her and think that this
must have reflected the general condition of arranged marriages, which
did not necessarily develop into affective or deeply emotional relationships
but rather resembled more the fulfilling of long-­standing terms of a con-
tract. It explains the nature of our relationships with both parents. It may
have been different with my sisters, but I think Victoria’s evaluation really
speaks to the experience of all three of us. Sena would not have agreed.
I am not accusing our parents of depriving us of a loving environment,
marked by warmth and affection — they gave what they could. Escaping
to the United States saved their lives but forced them to face yet another
challenge of survival that would take a severe and immense toll on lives
already irreparably damaged and disabled. In a sense, they, like most first-­
generation immigrants, paid a price by indemnifying their lives in such a
way as to ensure that their offspring might have not simply a better future
but rather a future itself.
Genocide survivors, like Armenians, who were able to flee to a new
shore to save their lives were initially less preoccupied with the enormous
task of making a living that awaited them, since the journey was lived on
a day-­to-­day basis, even though the question of finding economic security
would loom as a principal fixation. For those who migrate for economic
reasons, they appear to be fixed on little else since it is precisely this prob-
lem and how to go about resolving it that has commanded their attention.
In the equation between the two kinds of migrants, the former explains a
progressively diminished existence while the latter points to the possibil-
ity of realizing a new and better kind of life from the one that had been
left behind. In this regard, it is important to observe how the meaning of
diaspora has changed: when before it was usually associated with people
running for their lives, now it is principally identified with people look-
ing for a better quality of life, even though there are still instances, as the
recent Syrian migrations have shown, of people running from the certain
promise of death and destruction. Sometimes it can be both at the same
time, which has been more characteristic of our post – World War II pres-
ent. I always thought that our parents knew they would face a futureless
life in this land once they reached it. Their prospect of a future had van-

126 Chapter Five

ished with the countless victims of the genocide. What actually was eradi-
cated was a history that might have been, one permanently interrupted,
which would have disclosed the future present they might have lived and
shared. But under such circumstances they probably would not have met
each other. All that seemed left was the blank seriality of unfulfilled empty
time, of getting through an everyday marked by the expectation of chronic
economic insecurity and permanent disappointment. The ordeal they
withstood and the burden that weighed on them all their lives perhaps
explains why parents like ours remained silent on what had befallen so
many and speaks directly to their unexplainable sense of unspoken guilt
for not having perished, as they should have. It was not that the genocide
or indeed any genocidal event is capable of defying our capacity for repre-
sentation, as Adorno once proposed with regard to the production of po-
etry itself.8 It was, I believe, the conviction that the massacres and attend-
ing obligatory mutilation constituted an obscene and senseless offense to
human memory and experience, an indecent interruption unworthy of any
effort to represent its evident rage and depravity, even though it was always
representable. It has even destroyed the names of those who were a part of
us. What good is it to remember or, worse, quibble over whether there is
enough evidence to authenticate its reality? While I respect more recent
efforts of Armenian historians and others to uncover documentary mate-
rials attesting to the incidence of massacres in specific and diverse regions
of Anatolia, such as Van, the problem of genocide is never reducible to the
identification of adequate documentation, which plays to the interests of
deniers and is invariably as indeterminate an exercise as trying to calcu-
late how many swallows make a summer. The only question that needs be
asked of any genocide is, Where did all those people go? Genocidal events
are never a matter of historical judgment but rather a matter for the dead.
The nameless tell us what happened and that is all the evidence we need.
Let historians argue over what happens to the future when there is no
more history being made, instead of counting documents as if a magical
quantity will light up the sky, like the lucky winning numbers of a lottery.
Why dignify Turkish silence, whose entire modern history has been spent
in disavowing complicity in committing such an obscenity imprinted on
its origin? Who would admit to it? At the same time, there is the struggle
of migrant life, the threadbare remains of a whole way of life and its people,
which, in its own way, proved to consume time and energy throughout a
lifetime that daily appeared permanent and demanding by contrast to the
shorter duration of the genocidal moment receding into the background

House of Strangers/Diminished Lives 127

of the new life. This may well contribute to explaining the decision to con-
tinue a determined silence on the past when the present required the ex-
penditure of such supreme effort.
Perhaps any year is as good as 2015, the one hundredth anniversary of
the genocide, when I actually made the effort to compose this memoir,
to praise all those nameless victims — men and women — who perished in
the century’s inaugural genocidal episode, which would become a voca-
tion successively leading to even greater systematic massacres of whole
populations to become the twentieth century’s principal signature and
brand trademark. The importance of the Turkish genocidal rage against
Armenians is manifest also in what it represents in the register of world
history. While the genocide’s program of dispossession — theft — and ex-
propriation began earlier, it became policy by 1915 and continued in dif-
ferent forms after the massacres and deportations and well into modern
Turkey’s history. Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek churches were systemat-
ically confiscated well into the decades between the two wars and even af-
ter; Grigoris Balakian reports that in his journey to the desert, he observed
Armenian churches in irreparable ruin, wrecked by cannon shells while
others were being used to house animals and military barracks — ironi-
cally the same churches that now appear in glossy and colored contem-
porary travel guides and posters designed to advertise the rich traces of
diverse but nameless civilizations in Anatolia. Anatolia is filled with these
ruined churches, emptied of their relics and now often abandoned after
they had been abused to house soldiers and animals. As already noted,
the ones selected for travel brochures attesting to Turkey’s collection of
diverse cultures comprise a shameless displacement from the tradition of
ruin inaugurated by Ani, still signifying the continuing Turkish impulse to
expropriate the property of its minorities for capital accumulation.
Moreover, it is important to recognize that these minority populations
were excessively taxed on all fixed assets and wealth and required to make
payments by a deadline, which resulted in destroying the remaining non-­
Muslim merchant class. Those who were unable to pay the tax were sent
to labor camps, resulting in unaccounted deaths. If the earlier massacres
in the nineteenth century under Abdülhamid II aimed to reduce agitation
from minority populations, the later genocide was a technique harnessed
to the modernizing makeover of the Young Turks. In both instances, the
purpose amounted to primitive accumulation, and the only difference be-
tween the two episodes is that the earlier massacres were unsystematic.
The deportations of Armenians in 1915 into the Syrian Desert were clearly

128 Chapter Five

devised to eliminate a whole population and suggest an interesting ana-
logue to the later Nazi death camps and their reliance on more advanced
technology to accelerate the killing of a whole population. The difference
between bullets, swords, knives, other household and farm implements,
and an uninhabitable desert as weapons of murder employed by a mobi-
lized peasantry and gas chambers is really the difference between a pre-
capitalist society and capitalist modernization. One hundred years later,
the priest Grigoris Balakian’s great-­nephew Peter Balakian revisited the
desert site recorded in his book of poetry, Ozone Journal.

At the caves,
M. is obsessed with light flickering down —
affect of the punctum:
while remaining a detail, the space fills up the whole picture.

M. Were thousands of Armenians stuffed in here?

B. Fisk called them primitive gas chambers.

M. drops the boom mic into darkness; sand floats through

light-­chipped space.

If you try to imagine death here, the detail is not the whole —
the whole disappears.
The cave is a black gullet swallowing itself — 9

For his part, the priest, who was among the deportees heading for the
desert but managed to escape, saw this wasteland as a vast, open-­air grave
without tombstones, whose bones and skulls were covered by the sands
of Mesopotamia, waiting to be consecrated as the sacred place of martyr-
dom. Today it is the site of an interminable struggle. Conceivably, it would
have been this vision that was transmitted to the survivors to accompany
them on their frantic journeys to new lands promising safe refuge that be-
came the silent principle binding diasporic life.
This relationship of Turkish and German styles of mass murder was
more than analogic since German scholarship in recent years has acknowl-
edged the German role in the earlier mass murders, a role that had been
consistently denied despite Germany’s wartime alliance with the Otto-
mans. Since Ambassador Morgenthau published his diary, in which the
last chapter is devoted to detailing German complicity, the German role
in the Armenian genocide has been an open secret and a long symphony
of denial, laying the blame on World War I. But among important German

House of Strangers/Diminished Lives 129

policy makers and military officials, those who opposed the genocide are
far outnumbered by those who supported it. We know from Franz Wer-
fel’s prescient novel, banned in Nazi Germany, that German missionaries
in Istanbul and elsewhere pleaded with Turkish and German diplomatic
officials to stop the policy. Missionaries, especially, provided testimony
that attested to the broad influence the German military genuinely com-
manded over the shaping of Ottoman policy and that they could easily
have intervened in the mass murders before they began. Grigoris Balakian
is unequivocal in his conviction that Germans, and especially the military,
were directly involved in augmenting and providing continuing support
to Turkey’s deportation policy, knowing that deportation meant murder.10
While supplying ample evidence of German complicity, Balakian, like
others, also proposed that German anti-­Semitism was easily mobilized
to include the Armenians as reviled targets of elimination.11 Recently un-
earthed evidence of more direct German involvement clearly suggests a
form of dress rehearsal for the later genocidal event. This willful complic-
ity was particularly active among German military officials during World
War I and there is abundant testimony showing how high-­ranking officials
expressed contempt for the Armenians and actually compared them to
the Jews, as “a deracinated parasite sucking the marrow of countries that
have received them.”12 In this regard, the writer and poet Aimé Césaire was
only partially correct when he attributed the highest heap of corpses to
European depredations in Africa.13 Turkey was a way station on the direct
route of genocide to Europe and Germany, which harnessed technology to
this deadly vocation. Between Africa and Anatolia, the genealogy of later
genocidal acts in Europe was already in place. Behind it was capital’s im-
perial impulse, for acquisitions or the preservation of imperial space for
capital.
In more recent contemporary reports, Germany has been reported to
have provided the Ottoman Empire with modern weapons to carry out the
mass murders. Another account has declared that German officers were
deeply implicated in formulating the “ideological foundations” informing
the genocidal scenario. But the material assistance was undoubtedly more
important than mere ideology, which the Young Turks perpetrators had
already devised. German manufacturers like Mausser (or Mauser), maker
of small arms, furnished the Ottoman army with millions of rifles and
handguns that were directly put to use in carrying out the genocidal mur-
ders, with the active cooperation of German officers. The Turkish army
was also supplied with hundreds of cannons produced by Krupp that were

130 Chapter Five

used to bomb civilian homes in Urfa (October 1915), killing those inside
and others who tried to escape the bombardment by fleeing to the church.
According to this report, German officers actually took part in the mur-
ders by firing on civilian Armenians in the Urfa region.14
As earlier suggested, it is not the Armenian Question that explains the
historical event but rather the Turkish Question, an uncontrolled explo-
sion of an unnamed irrational impulse demanding mutilation that made
the crime scene a human abattoir. If the persistence of genocidal memory
has been consistently kept alive by generations of diasporic Armenians, to
suggest the grip of one kind of obsessive commemoration of a collectivity,
surely its opposite manifestly appears in the unrelenting denial qualifying
as another form of a persisting cultural consciousness that has preoccu-
pied Turkey since the defining event and with which it has had to live with-
out understanding or knowing why. That it is a recognition they cannot
face or articulate makes it their question since, in many ways, Armenians
can talk about it and, sometimes, nothing else. The formation of modern
Turkey has been a historical fiction, weighted down by what can only be
described as genocidal seizure, the price of shirking off the atrophied husk
of a dying empire for the realization of a modern nation-­state and society
through ethnic cleansing. To imagine that modern states required ethnic
purification, as a form of a rite of passage on their way to realizing nation-
hood, was itself an immense misrecognition bordering on mass delusion.
One of the more indecent expressions of this pathological denial has
been the concealment of the identities of those Armenian children who
were rescued and saved by Kurdish and Turkish families and who only dis-
covered what they were years later in adulthood or well into succeeding
generations. In some instances, this was linked to the ongoing abuse of Ar-
menians who survived in Turkey and stayed on not simply as second-­class
citizens, a status enjoyed by immigrants in the U.S., but as genuine sub-
humans, even though the intended result is the concealment of a child’s
true identity. In contemporary Turkey, the genre of captivity narratives has
begun to surface with increasing regularity. What this makes manifest is
the sign of the uninterrupted desire of Turkey to show the world that it
had actually saved children from the worst of the genocide’s determined
depredations, signaling acts of human kindness. What has not been said
is how many of them had been exploited for their labor. Regardless of their
subsequent fate in Turkish households, these children had the birthright
to be told who they were and how and where they came from, as well as
what had happened to their parents. At the same time this declaration of

House of Strangers/Diminished Lives 131

acts disclosing the kindness of strangers must be balanced against another
unintended admission pointing to how the rescue mission of Armenian
children testifies to an indirect acknowledgment that the massacres did
take place, which works to undermine the official genocidal denial. While
they have been criticized and even maligned for mistreating these captive
children, modern Turkish society has managed to turn around the rela-
tionship between victimizer and victim to achieve a classic example of
how the former seeks to reconfigure itself into the latter.
Moreover, the year 2015 was also as good a time as any to praise not
only the nameless victims but the nameless survivors whose many in-
dividual stories of escape, survival, and endurance of ordeals caused by
the upheavals and disruption of diaspora residency in foreign lands are
still as unknown as their identities. In the final analysis, the problem is
further compounded by the Genocide Convention, which has sought to
provide a legal basis for determining whether mass murder qualifies as
“genocide” and has ultimately concluded that the qualifying criterion is
the intention to accomplish complete extermination, a view that reflects
the German determination to eliminate Europe’s Jewish population. Such
a judgment seems to claim precedence over the principle of primitive ac-
cumulation and contributes to showing how fascist ideology was made to
finesse the realities of economic desire and policy. The irony of placing
primary emphasis on the declared intention of a fascist ideology that for-
mulated the program dedicated to exterminating a whole ethnic group is
that it gradually opened the way for the refashioning of a counterideology
of victimhood, whereby the survivors now reinforce the rarity granted to
the event to supply its privilege with entitlement and exclusive exception-
ality. This paradoxical convergence is capable of fostering the formation
of views dedicated to discounting and rejecting the claims of others who
experienced mass murder, the imminent threat of ethnic extinction, and
the denial of entry into a pantheon reserved for candidates meriting geno-
cidal recognition capable of fulfilling what, after all, is the outcome of an
arbitrary definition. The problem appears to be the privilege accorded to
conceptions of culture and civilization as criteria for constructing such
a classification system that in the nineteenth century was first put into
place to justify and explain imperialism and colonialism. In this regard,
the Holocaust unfortunately is too often made to be the stand-­in for all
mass murders and its continuing memory machinery has inadvertently
contributed to the myth of Europe’s exceptionalism — a kind of return of
the repressed of the West’s unity and its familiar racial associations. In

132 Chapter Five

fact, consideration of how the present must reckon with its past has too
often singularly relied on the Holocaust as the basic template with which
to grasp an understanding of all genocides. A cursory look at the killings
in Africa or Anatolia immediately suggests important differences despite
the shared common ground of mass murder. What this intimates is that
the respective killing fields of Europe thus look as if they trump all other
claimants, even though what started on its periphery by Europeans — in
the empires and among their oppressed captive peoples — made its way
to the center. (This is an interesting negative reversal of Hegel’s “history
of freedom,” moving, more or less, in the same direction.) What lies at
the heart of this murderous impulse is the makeover demanded by capi-
talist modernization — that is, the attention it requires to understand its
history or the meaning of its historicity. One of the principal ironies of
Turkey’s quest for modernization is the way the very terms of the histori-
cal experience enabling it were obliterated with the Armenians, who ap-
parently were seen to stand in its way. But this particular consequence is
how capitalism everywhere behaves to remove or disguise its historical
antecedents, what lies behind it, or to disclose its capacious talent for re-
figuring historical time according to its own necessity of establishing an
eternal present. Just as capitalism has effectively “forgotten” the horrors of
a process of primitive accumulation that has accounted for its origins and
subsequent success, so nations remove the embarrassing stigmas of their
more immediate origins for a new narrative that projects the idea that the
nation has always existed, since time immemorial — a presumed “fact,” on
which slick travel brochures constantly remind us.
In this way, the Kemalist Revolution presents itself as a bourgeois revo-
lution that removed its origins in the more recent past, resituating it in a
more remote and indeterminate duration of time that left the custodian-
ship of its real history to the diaspora survivors as memory anchoring their
new and uncertain lives. Establishing a commission to determine what
constitutes a “real” genocide is not only a useless verbal exercise but in
fact contributes to displacing what can thus be named as such by making
its real history invisible. This takes us back to Steedman’s numbers and
quantities authorizing Auslander’s “passport” to enter history.
My father rarely talked about the journey that first took him to the U.S.
several times before World War I. It is astonishing, as I look back now, how
I developed a disciplined lack of curiosity that bordered on indifference.
Here, I would agree with Avakian’s question that asks, Why bother with
people who are seen as different and despised and that nobody knows or

House of Strangers/Diminished Lives 133

cares for? It never occurred to me that Ohannes’s journey involved great
distances and complex negotiations. My own indifference must have been
encouraged by his unyielding silence; in my case it was also hastened by
a desire to become American, like everybody else, I thought at the time.
Over the years, I learned that people like us in the U.S. could not be ex-
actly like everybody else, even if it was an imaginable achievement. If, as
Avakian proposed, being an Armenian was difficult, becoming an Ameri-
can was almost impossible. As I suggested, my generation of immigrant
children was cast into playing the unsought role of hybridity, but not the
romanticized version dreamed up by postcolonial theorists, which would
skillfully enable the subaltern to navigate his or her way through “negotia-
tion,” thus proving the viability and presumed equal status of one’s own
subject position to one’s colonial masters. The hybridity we were con-
signed to live worked to veil differences that would never disappear in the
blending promised by melting pot assimilation into American life. If de-
colonization brought relief to the colonized oppressed, our lives, while not
subjected to colonial oppression, as such, resulted in a kind of colonized
subjugation of the mind or personality leading to permanent inequality
demanded by the status of second-­class citizenship. All of this was made
achievable by civics programs directed at socializing the young but acting
more effectively as body snatchers and molding them into what we are to-
day. If this imperative to be like everyone else was fueled by entering the
broader society provided by public schools, it was, I believe, fortified by my
mother’s own desire to see her children adapt to the new environment, as
she would, and find a permanent place in it. (She was no Parent Teacher
Association enthusiast, nor Avakian’s Episcopalian, a familiar path taken
by most migrant parents, for obvious reasons.) Years later this called to
mind a recognition that, as she was convinced, this was the best parents
could do for their children. As for themselves, their lives were committed
to ensuring our collective survival in a harsh land filled with the constant
threat of uncertainty produced by the world depression. My father’s wave
of immigrant workers was, as I earlier said, the generation scheduled for
entering the Depression to reveal to those who came to the United States
as a refuge that America was an immensely imperfect society. It is hard to
exaggerate the fears cast by this experience of surviving. It was only World
War II that rescued our family from an everyday driven by the struggle to
find work, usually through the agency of the wpa, and secure some per-
manence in the auto factories promised by the formation of unionization
and its violent struggle with both management and the state to acquire a

134 Chapter Five

foothold in capitalism’s constrained system of income distribution and
habit of enriching the rich. My father was active in this struggle, especially
the effort to unionize the Ford River Rouge plant. I was just old enough to
see and remember to this day his return home one evening with a blood-
ied face.
In the end, I was convinced that Ohannes, as a result of his experience
with Armenian brigades in eastern Anatolia, was persuaded that the cause
of independence had failed, perhaps for the time being, and that the best
course was for him to return to the United States and join up with the
American army to secure citizenship. Upon joining, he apparently was
sent quickly to France in the last years of the Great War, as part of an army
of immigrants granted citizenship if they survived the horrors of trench
warfare, a frontline phalanx used as cannon fodder, not much different
from those armies of Chinese laborers brought to France to dig trenches.
His time there was short. He survived a gas attack that disabled him and
sent him back to a hospital behind the lines, where he was eventually dis-
charged in 1919. His chronology of the immediate postwar years is less
clear to my sisters and me. He must have returned to the U.S., where he
did work in East Pullman. My mother and father finally found a way to the
United States from France, after a brief duration in Marseilles, and in time
settled in Detroit, where he found employment in automobile factories and
sweatshops, joining another frontline phalanx that served as an industrial
reserve army sacrificed to the Depression. Here, the life he lived was driven
by fractured memories and some nostalgia, leavened by recollecting what
once had been and had been brutally taken from him and a nameless gen-
eration of Armenian men and women who were needlessly erased along
with their history and forgotten, to be forfeited to the birth of a modern
Turkish state and its capitalist aspirations. But I did promise him I would
take him to Armenia (then the Soviet Republic) once he retired. Vehanush
would not have accepted the offer. But before making this trip, my mother
died, and Ohannes wanted to resettle in Fresno, where he met up with old
friends he had not seen in more than fifty years and where the climate and
landscape reminded him of his youthful home. In this regard, Fresno be-
came a momentary surrogate of what he had lost decades earlier. He died
before we could make the trip to Armenia.
Ohannes always wanted to visit California and specifically Fresno. I
thought it might have the attraction of an elephant graveyard for aging
Armenians but only in the sense that its topography provided a facsimile
of Anatolia. To get a sense of the world he and my mother came from in

House of Strangers/Diminished Lives 135

the effort to visualize it, without ethnographic corroboration, Fresno and
its environs in the central valley provided an oblique glimpse. Or so he
thought. I knew a lot of Armenians had settled there and it was where the
writer William Saroyan (1908 – 1981) came from. Somebody once told me
that pop singer and actress Cher was also from there. Saroyan wrote of the
life of migrant Armenians in Fresno and second-­generation descendants
like himself, recording what it was like growing up in an ethnic commu-
nity. He was always a little too optimistic and upbeat for me. I remember,
when younger, reading My Name Is Aram (first published in 1937), his col-
lection of interrelated short stories about Armenians in Fresno. But my
favorite was especially “The Theological Student,” where he defined what
distinguished a number of ethnic groups and then the Armenians.

“Well, I’ll give you the answer, to save him the trouble. You are go-
ing to ask him what he means by getting into complications of all
sorts every other Friday, and I will answer from him that he doesn’t
mean anything at all by it. . . . A few . . . like myself and this boy, my
nephew Aram Garoghlanian come in to this world asleep, and then
one fair Friday wake up and look around and notice what we are.”
“What are we?” the Old Man asked politely.
“Armenians,” my uncle Khosrove said quickly. “Could anything
be more ridiculous? The Englishman has an empire to govern. The
Frenchman has art to guide and measure. The German has an army
to train and test. The Russian has a revolution to start. The Swiss
have hotels to manage, the Mexicans mandolins to play, the Span-
iards bulls to fight, the Austrians waltzes to dance, and so on and so
forth, but what have we?”
“Loud mouths to shut up?” the Old Man suggested.
“And the Irish,” my uncle Khosrove went on. “The Irish have a
whole island in which to be poverty-­stricken; the Arabs a thousand
tribes to bring together in the desert; the Jews child prodigies to send
on concert tours; the Gypsies wagons and fortune-­telling cards; the
Americans chronic nervousness which they call free-
dom, but what have the Armenians?”
“Since you insist, tell me,” said the Old Man. “What have the
Armenians?
“Manners,” my uncle Khosrove said.
“Are you mad?” the Old Man said. “nothing is so unnatu-
ral as a polite armenian.”

136 Chapter Five

 “I did not say good manners,” my uncle Khosrove said. “I said
manners. The good or bad of it I leave to others. Manners is what we
have, and very little of anything else. You are going to ask this boy
what he means by getting into complications of all sorts every other
Friday. Your asking is manners. Well, go ahead and ask him. I’m go-
ing to the Arax Coffee House for a couple of hours of tavli (backgam-
mon). My going is more manners.”15

Ohannes had heard of the existence of a residential hotel, apparently

run by Armenians, where he could stay on a long-­term residential basis
and even take his meals, which were prepared by an Armenian chef. His
reports back were always filled with satisfaction and a happiness bordering
on a longing for the world from which he was forcibly separated. The rea-
son for this was because of his identification of the region around Fresno
and its climate with his natal village. He loved the hot and even humid
weather of the Central Valley, apparently similar to what he remembered
of his village and its environs, and confessed that the mountains in the
distance (the Sierras) reminded him of the rugged topography of his south-
eastern Anatolia. He reconnected with people he had not seen in a lifetime
and renewed acquaintances with some that in his last days strengthened
his impression that he had been momentarily transported back in an act
of reversible time to his youthful village years. One of the people with
whom he formed a close relationship owned a vineyard, where he spent a
good deal of his time helping out and recovering a moment of the agrar-
ian rootedness that never quite left him, despite all those years he spent
working in Detroit’s airless automobile factories. When he and his friends
were not trading stories and embellishing their personal memories, he
regularly played pinochle. It occurred to me that the playing of pinochle,
which he enjoyed (my mother played on occasion but drew no pleasure
from it, as I remember), consisted of moments, as well, to repetitively go
over the old ground of experience and memory, either of the places people
came from (the regionalism in these precapitalist societies resembles an
ontological grounding) or those lost to the genocidal murders and memo-
ries of the flight. It became clear that it was in such situations that men
and even women spoke about their lives and experiences and exchanged
their stories. It bonded them closer together, wherever Armenians met
one another, even if they had met for the first time. All that was necessary
was to ask whether the person was an Armenian and spoke the language.
By the same measure, it appeared as a kind of secret code that validated

House of Strangers/Diminished Lives 137

their membership in a society, which we would never acquire. These were
stories rarely, if ever, shared by our parents with us.
The decision to not share these memories and experiences with the
children is still a mystery. It could have been the enormity of experiences,
its virtual unbelievability, a negative fable from the Tales of the Arabian
Nights, putting into question the credibility of occurrences that exceeded
the capability of children and anything they might be able to grasp. This
is a problem of all great natural and historical catastrophic events. The
exchanging of stories and memories of the genocidal years and before
was a way of sharing a sense of sociality and solidarity with people one
might not know — all you needed to know is that they were Armenian and
spoke the language. That these stories remained mainly repressed yet at
the heart of the Armenian diaspora communities in the United States to
comprise the cement that held them together is not surprising. What is
surprising is that most Americans would never know of these stories and
experiences but only hear of the genocide as a distantly remote event that
took place in some indeterminate and indefinite time and place, echoed
in the hackneyed phrase used to admonish children to eat everything on
their plates because of the “starving Armenians.”
My father died in Fresno in his sleep and missed an appointment for
a game of pinochle — his “Armenian manner,” scheduled the morning
after— which is how his friends discovered he had passed away. It may well
have been the way he would have chosen to leave the scene — missing an
appointment to play cards. I do not know what he thought about in the
time he lived in Fresno, apart from sharing his observations that he felt,
at times, that he was reminded of his “home.” I wondered if he thought
about his children and his departed wife. After Vehanush died, he rarely
mentioned her, not out of indifference, nor the fact that he would have
known she would not have wanted to accompany him to Fresno had she
lived. When he mentioned her, he would always confess how lost he felt.
I think the phrase had several meanings that did not always refer to Ve-
hanush. He once told me that he had an opportunity for work in Oakland
but Vehanush did not want to leave Detroit for California, even though
she must have known how much Ohannes would have liked to make the
change of place. What appeared as an interesting symmetry is that while
in Fresno he was no longer with our mother, a place that resembled his
youthful home, and when he was reminded of his home, it was both a
time and a place before he actually knew and married her. When she died,

138 Chapter Five

and was being interred, I remember him solemnly but audibly wishing
her good luck.
Our parents thus joined a new nameless generation of immigrants who
had found their way to the U.S. to become the base of a reserve industrial
working class but who had no access to political or historical visibility in
the representations of America’s history, other than playing the unwanted
role of willing participants in the foolishly mythic and dangerous ideology
of becoming part of a great “melting pot.” Ironically, the price paid for es-
caping the horrors of genocide and nameless deaths was to become name-
less, dead labor among the living, unnoticed and diminished lives in a land
that valorized recognition above all else. It was a melting pot that appar-
ently sought to dissolve both class and ethnicity yet used both to maintain
a political and economic hierarchy controlled by others with prior claims.
It is laughable now to recall a moment in American history when immi-
gration was exalted as an experience, literally offering the prospect of a
new life when for most migrants it demanded unspeakable deprivation
and endless insecurity. And of course it was the condition of creating a
society where its diversities were presumably melted into a solidary unity.
What was overlooked was the ideology that actually concealed the count-
less ways American society preserved and even reproduced ethnic and
class differentiation, sometimes perilously bordering on caste, in order to
maintain a particular social division of labor, whereby historical scholar-
ship willingly committed its resources to certifying a foolishly cruel and
tragic hoax. We are now witness to the historical swing from exclusion to
inclusion — and as hybrids we are forced to live both.
With my father, the political choice was the turn to union formation in
the interwar period and diaspora politics supporting the arf, which in ex-
ile became less committed to socialism and more dedicated to the politics
of ethnic exceptionalism, as it struggled to win over adherents to its cause
in the increasingly fractious political environment of the Armenian immi-
grant community in the U.S. I could not help thinking that for my father,
the Dashnaks in diaspora, dreaming of a return to an independent nation-­
state, had become hostage to a revolution that never happened. For him,
his few distant relatives and friends and comrades supplied a sociality for
its failed politics. I remember a particular incident when still in my teens.
As a member of the Armenian Youth Federation (ayf), I wrote an article
in an ongoing debate in the ayf newspaper arguing that there was no way
to tell the difference between Armenian or Turkish music at festive gath-

House of Strangers/Diminished Lives 139

erings, apart from the language it was sung in, or differences in food, apart
from slightly different names and pronunciations. (I was probably wrong
on the former assertion but less so on the latter.) What the episode taught
me was that the Armenian community always got around to emphasizing
the difference between Armenians and Turks and the capacious central-
ity of the genocide to define the distinctiveness of Armenian everyday life
everywhere there was a diaspora community. The article and comments
about it made their way to the local arf headquarters, where my father
usually played cards, whereupon he was pointedly asked if he was related
to the author of the article. He told me later that he denied we were related
but I knew he was joking. I left the organization soon after and virtually
turned away from the activities of the Armenian community and its frozen
political vocation. My time in the ayf was neither long nor intense. It was
a brief moment in my late teens when I had turned back to trying to figure
out the nature of my Armenian heritage, as my father, but not my mother,
repetitively encouraged me to pursue and make its meaning part of some
lived reality. Membership in the ayf involved meetings, attending social
gatherings and conferences, connecting and associating with Armenians
in my age cohort, making a stab at learning how to read and write Arme-
nian, and dating Armenian girls. In the end, none of this activity took or
seemed to have much meaning once I collided with the diaspora ideol-
ogy, which, I believed, discouraged the prospect of criticism bordering on
censorship and prompted the decision to leave the organization. Looking
back, I probably overreacted and exaggerated my thoughtless response as
a cover of a more basic impulse pulling me in an opposite direction, de-
manded by having been formed by a hybrid structure.
My father once asked why I did not utilize the languages I knew and
specialize in a historical experience closer to home or more accessible, and
I answered that I did not want to get caught in the ethnic box, especially
one that would have required spending a lifetime curating an aborted na-
tional history that would make me into a patriot of a nation that did not
exist. I did not want the genocide to define my life, even though it had
already done so without my clearly recognizing it until much later. I also
knew I could not forget the unspoken memories never directly experi-
enced but would be daily reminded of them if only through the silence
of our parents. It gradually became apparent that whatever else I did, the
genocide would remain imprinted as an adverse but unseen stigma, per-
manently part of our collective heritage. What remained unrecognizable

140 Chapter Five

then was that any choice made would have led to the same end and per-
haps it was better to be a patriot of a history closer to home, however un-
realized, than one that belonged to others. At the time it was hard to see
a separation between the study of Armenian history or its broader place-
ment in the Middle East and the narrow political concerns of the diaspora
community. It was difficult as well to imagine a career devoted to criti-
cism of a community’s pieties and desires when I knew they derived from
a traumatic experience of jarring national loss in which its painful past
ended by yielding no future but to keeping the aspirations of survivors on
the run in an endless present.
In a New York Times article, Meline Toumani reported how she was at-
tacked by Armenian groups and denounced as a “self-­hating Armenian”
even before her book, There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through
Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond, was issued.16 Her
critical perspective no more expresses Armenian self-­hatred than my de-
cision to disallow the genocide to define my life. In fact, it was precisely
this kind of unknowing and mindless secondhand patriotism nurtured
by a politically diminished arf I was trying to avoid when I explained to
my father the reasons why I chose a different career path. But since his-
tory is bonded to the nation-­state and thus preoccupied with filling in
details of an official national narrative, the choice of any country invari-
ably leads historians into the narrow path of becoming involuntary patri-
ots of countries other than their own; I felt then, as I do today, that it is
pointless to redefine the vocation of a whole ethnic group to indefinitely
and solely dedicate itself to the immanent presence of the genocide to
the exclusion of other considerations. This is still far from advising some
sort of effort at reconciliation or optimistic life affirmation, even though
it seems to be moving in this direction. But such understanding is an all-­
too-­common reflex leading simply to forgetting or to impulses to bury the
injustices of the past. Dedication to centering genocide reflects a fear that
the slightest disciplinary laxness will risk permanent forgetfulness. In this
respect, there is an unwanted symmetry between the Armenian obses-
sion to never forget and the Turkish endeavor to never remember. I think
all these genocidal experiences invariably lead to this kind of repetitive
memoration, which offers no promise of reconciliation but only endless
remembering of what we already know. Unintentionally, the symmetry
between Armenians and Turks appears in the following way: if Armenians
are squeezed in the embrace of a repetitive memory of virtually total ex-

House of Strangers/Diminished Lives 141

tinction, Turks are imprisoned in collective forgetfulness. For both, each
day is like Groundhog Day. What is worse? The former remembers too
much, while the latter forgets everything.
The real question is how the scale of human destruction can be forgot-
ten. But, along the way, do we require sacrificing the way future genera-
tions devote their lives to its remembrance? In this regard, the Armenians
are no different from the Jews, inasmuch as both are committed to end-
less remembering. The difference comes from the German willingness
to acknowledge everything and constantly remind us of their guilt and
remorse — not all Germans but certainly those raised in the Western sec-
tor. Yet must we go as far as Toumani to suggest the possibility of some
sort of reunion with Turkey? As for myself, probably not. The problem, as
it appears today, is that the event has produced two claims to victimhood:
the Armenians of Anatolia who lost two-­thirds of their brothers and sis-
ters in the most savagely systematic effort to obliterate a whole population
until Hitler exceeded the Turkish record, and the Turkish perpetrators
who since that time have embraced an overdetermined forgetfulness to
spare them of worldly embarrassment of making a full accounting of what
they did and a willingness to assume responsibility for it.
When both sides of any conflict claim victimization, there is no chance
of a possible reconciliation. In this ongoing scenario, both sides are closely
identified with the status of victim and abandonment of this position after
nearly a century’s commitment to it would mean sacrifice, the loss of iden-
tity, and admission of some sort of responsibility. Of course, this narrative
really adds up to an absurdity: the Armenians lost nearly everything while
Turkey gained a new nation-­state, land, and treasure. Under these condi-
tions, it is hardly convincing to sympathize with Turkish claims of victim-
ization, and any expectation to elicit support on such grounds can only
attest to the collective pathology that apparently has gripped the Turkish
population in its embrace since the time of the event. In fact, it is precisely
this social and psychological pathology that fuels Turkish nationalism to
periodically explode in wanton acts of senseless murder, as in the assas-
sination on January 19, 2007, of Hrant Dink, the courageous editor who
had devoted his life to speaking for the Armenians in Turkey and finding
a way out of the long-­standing historical dilemma. Despite the outpour-
ing of sympathy, nothing has been gained by the call declaring “we are all
Hrant Dink.” If, as Toumani asserts, citing the Soviet writer Vasily Gross-
man (1962), Armenians lack any self-­confidence, owing to constant vigil
dictated by the genocide demanding its complete embodiment and living

142 Chapter Five

in an indeterminate space-­time zone indefinitely prolonged by the failure
to win recognition of responsibility from Turkey, Turkey, by the same mea-
sure, suffers equally from a form of self-­loathing bereft of self-­confidence
in its incapacity to contemplate such a move, without fearing the worst
psychological consequences and threat of the whole population rising
up in anger against both its leaders and its minorities who have deceived
and betrayed its people for so long.17 I have often wondered about the ef-
fects the murders and mutilations had on those who committed them.
But Grossman should have first consulted his countryman Osip Mandel-
stam’s Journey to Armenia (1930) before making his easy dismissal of Ar-
menian self-­confidence. Armenia fortified Mandelstam and brought him
back from a hiatus to compose poetry: “I have cultivated a sixth sense,”
an “ ‘Ararat’ sense: the sense of attraction. Now, no matter where I might
be carried, it is already speculative and will abide with me.”18 And in one
of his poems, he writes, “How dear to me in its strenuous life, / Reckon-
ing as a century a year, / This breeding, sleeping, brawling, / Earth-­rooted
people.”19 Armenia, for Mandelstam, was thus “a State of bawling stones,”
“summoning the hoarse hills to arms,” first in the defense of Christian-
ity and then the repetitious and rapacious invading waves of Tatar hordes
from the East: “Muffling your mouth, like a moist rose, / Holding in your
hands the eight-­sided honeycombs, / All the morning of the days on the
borders of the world / You stayed, swallowing tears. / And turned away in
shame and grief / from the bearded cities of the East.”20 This is not lacking
confidence but rather signifies a long, exhausting lament over the struggle
waged against a history that eventually threatened to finally overcome and
make the Armenians extinct, into an archaeological trace to be excavated
like the ancient city of Ani, dusted off and put in a museum’s glass case or
losing its historical identity in allegory that refers only to itself.
What interests me is the psychological state of obsessional behavior
concentrated on the Armenian. For the Turks whose elimination of the
Armenians would resolve everything, from the collapsing imperial struc-
ture of a bankrupt political, social, and economic order (the true meaning
of the apt title “the chaos of empire”) and its territorial shrinkage, to the
unsuccessful promotion of an illusory Pan-­Turkish (a transformation of
an older Pan-­Turanist) movement that would unify Muslims throughout
Central and South Asia against Russia and revivify the caliphate to resolv-
ing problems inherited from a distant past in a present that has actually
created them. This overdetermination of divergent causes and grievances
was momentarily unified by the figure of the Armenian, who was made

House of Strangers/Diminished Lives 143

to embody and personify the source of everything ailing Turkey. As one
of the three principal Unionist leaders Ahmed Cemel (pasa) explained,
Turkey’s woes could be ameliorated by “rescu[ing] the homeland from the
blemish of this accursed nation (i.e., the Armenians)” and “wash[ing] our
hands of the responsibility for this stain that has been smeared across
Ottoman history.”21 The “stain,” a reverse but negative rune, marked the
moment the oppressed became the oppressor in a spectacular role re-
versal. In this statement, the inversion is complete and the victimizer is
converted into victim; the dominant majority must finally free itself from
those whom it had dominated before it is itself extinguished. This is also
the logic of the irrational, a strange whining concession of self-­defeat and
self-­loathing. Even though its main purpose is to enhance an ideology di-
recting the population to take up arms against the hated minorities, there
is a strange, involuntary confession of victimization, whereby Hegel’s slave
now rules the master.
Taner Akçam has thus proposed that when defeat in the war seemed
inevitable, the Armenian presence had to be immediately resolved and
mass deportation was the answer. But when did this occur? In 1915? It
seems like an early moment to already decide the war will be lost. Rather,
it appears likely that panic and hysteria and the fear among the leader-
ship of failure meant they had to link their fate to the elimination of the
Armenians, the continuation of their rule to the disappearance of the Ar-
menians. The strategy may have looked to them as a win-­win plan. This
program was neither rational nor grounded in any discernable strategy,
other than hallucinatory anxiety and the promise of a quick fix. In other
words, the psychological pathology of the leadership, which subsequently
became the basis of a socializing ideological campaign to reeducate the
republic’s population, lay behind the decision and planning of the geno-
cide. How else to explain the implementation of mass deportations of such
a large population so quickly, or to understand the releasing from prisons
of a murderous and psychologically unstable criminal population, which
was subsequently organized as gangs assigned to attack Armenian vil-
lages, rape women and children, kill its male inhabitants, and pillage what
was left as payment? Is it any wonder that Turkish leaders and the popu-
lation want to forget and deny their complicity? Denial is a necessity to
conceal the cracks of a premodern ferocity that the sheen of moderniza-
tion still has trouble suppressing. Is it any puzzle that Turkey’s “modern-
izing” would want to refuse acknowledging such a descent into depravity?
Only a fool would accept such a fairy tale.22 Subsequent Turkish writers

144 Chapter Five

and politicians have valorized the foresight of these instigators of mass
murder for having saved the “future of the homeland,” which, it seems,
was reason enough to hereafter forget about the event itself. Save it from
what? Behind the occasion supplied by war was the opportunity to dis-
possess and expropriate the vast properties of the Greeks in the West and
Armenians in the East. The whole campaign for Turkification, as it was
called, was a thinly veiled explanation for theft and murder, primitive ac-
cumulation, that would transform the Turks overnight into a bourgeoi-
sie, the cup into a bourgeois rulership, and Armenians into the forgotten
rubble of everyday Ani. What happened to the criminal thugs and Kurds
who became the advance guard of this carnage is never reported, but it is
hard not to think at least that some form of criminality became the basis
of modern Turkish leadership. We have no reluctance to refer to German
leadership in the war as criminal and the Nazi state as an example of what
Franz Neumann described as dedicated to racketeering, colossal systemic
corruption, and shakedown.23 In the end, Kurds won nothing in the long
run and were subject to large-­scale military action and deaths in the in-
terwar period down to our present. The problem is the corrosive control
exerted by the memory machine, which seemingly relies on repetition to
maintain its demanding domination. As for the Turks, the more compel-
ling question was the absence of any concern for history, as such, and what
lay behind this indifference. Moreover, what kind of history instruction
did people receive after the language reforms? If it is the fear of arousing
a whole population into rising up against their leaders in the event of an
actual acknowledgment of genocide as a historical occurrence, we have a
clue to the kind of history lessons that were taught to the general popula-
tion once it was made literate. Akçam supplies an all-­too-­brief but impor-
tant explanation: “In general, Turkish society is disinclined to consider its
past. In the prevailing culture, not only the Armenian genocide but much
of Turkey’s recent history is consigned to silence, the Kurdish question
and the role of the military being but two examples. The Alphabet Re-
form of 1928, which changed Turkish script from Arabic to Latin letters,
served to compound the problem. With the stroke of a pen, the Turkish
people lost their connection to written history.”24 Akçam continues by
reminding us that in Turkey people cannot read their own newspapers,
letters, and diaries if written before 1928. The pre-­1928 past thus appears
as a historically blank sheet and the production of history seems to have
fallen into the hands of the state, which defines its form and content. But
this loss of an “honest history” apparently stems also from the “trauma” of

House of Strangers/Diminished Lives 145

the political leadership in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
and from the shrinking and collapse of the empire.25 The problem with
this account is that Akçam, at one level, is describing the familiar histori-
cal phenomenon of transition, experienced by many other societies — the
immense consequences of the transformations of precapitalist political
orders into the world of capitalism. Such transformations have invariably
been accompanied by consequentially violent breaks from long-­standing
pasts anchored in traditional social relationships and principles of a natu-
ral economy. Turkey, in this respect, was no exception, and we know from
the experiences of societies like Japan, China, and India that while lan-
guages are changed and standardized to meet the demands of mass societ-
ies, access to the past is not forfeited in its entirety since components from
prior practices inevitably are retained in new political and economic con-
figurations through the process of uneven and combined developments.
The question not asked or answered is, What happened to the reservoir
consisting of memories of the hordes of people who actually participated
in the implementation of the massacres and the military whose active role
is well authenticated?
I did not know these things or even think about them when I was grow-
ing up, and I make no claims to having possessed any sign of youthful pre-
science. My life in Detroit was ordinary and often relentlessly American
and completely aimless. My high school educational performance earned
me the nickname tutuom khaluckh — “pumpkin head” — from both par-
ents. This may have been the lot of immigrant children who were rig-
idly classified and socialized into the pious principles of the melting pot
through courses on civics, shop, home economics, and personal sanita-
tion, while at the same time becoming the major occupants of vocational
tracks designed to make of them useful worker-­citizens and in their proper
place rather than attending the coveted “college preparatory” track to pro-
fessional careers. I always felt that the socialization we were submitted
to led only to a provisional assimilation into American life, never com-
pleted — the route to an unwanted hybridity — which meant orderly and
useful but not fully integrated into the fabric of normative American so-
ciety. Even at that time, I was subjected, together with others from similar
backgrounds, to exposure to the message of a process of Americanization
whose content seemed distant from lived experience, as if it came from
another planet. To be exposed to a mythic and ideologically constructed
history and persuaded to identify with an archaic eighteenth-­century sys-
tem and constitution envisioned in a wilderness surrounded by an agrar-

146 Chapter Five

ian order that had made no room for the vast diversity and deeply classed
and ethnic society of urban America that would characterize the twenti-
eth century could have been the product of the most misguided or cynical.
Imagine what it meant when confronted by references to “our founding fa-
thers,” transplanted white, Anglo-­Saxon Englishmen, many of whom were
landowners and slaveholders who had made their fortunes in a colonial en-
vironment and for whom “freedom” signified greater access to the wealth
the land offered, without sharing it with a distant home country and its
ruling class or indeed anyone else. This was the unstated history behind
the content of civic courses, designed to implant some sense of lasting
national allegiance in us, children of migrant families who could see no
further than the streets of our crowded neighborhoods, or measure time
beyond the moments of our everyday lives.
Perhaps this was one of the saving graces of America’s imperfection. In
fact, it seemed like a technique to systematically hold back large numbers
of immigrants from and out of the spectrum of rewards allegedly offered
by the “American Dream” machine. For most of us, the options were not
great: we could go to the car factories, like our fathers before us; or enter
a trade, if one was lucky enough to have the connections of a sponsor; or
join up with the military since the United States had enthusiastically em-
barked upon a new national vocation of waging continuous warfare to con-
tinue the economic boost inadvertently provided by World War II (to end
the Depression). Or we could prolong the agony of defining our uncertain
life direction by attending the local junior college (now called community
college), which was free. This is the pathway I chose, with the urging of
my father (who presented the flawless logical argument, “Why work like a
jackass the rest of your life?” Regardless, I ended up working like the pro-
verbial jackass) and Sena, and much to my surprise, it worked by giving me
a course to follow. I have often wondered, more today than earlier, whether
this represented some sort of cosmic gift of compensation for the enormity
of my parents’ loss or other women and men like them. If it did, the offer
bypassed my sisters, and the compensatory value of the gift could never
come close to making up for the extent of the loss they incurred. But Sena
was probably more right than wrong when she said I was lucky, without ex-
plaining that it was because I was a male and I came later and because pub-
lic education in the U.S. was still free. Even though I worked through both
undergraduate and graduate years, none of this would have been possible
had not the schools been free or tuition affordable. My sisters were both
incredibly good students (one a salutatorian in a large high school class)

House of Strangers/Diminished Lives 147

and should have gone to college, but at that time the opportunities for girls
from immigrant families were limited to either some sort of stenographic
work or early marriage. I was simply the beneficiary of our parents’ second
struggle to survive the terror of uneasily trying to live in somebody else’s
history and only narrowly evaded the purpose of reproducing a socializa-
tion designated to keep us in our place.

148 Chapter Five

 E pi l o g ue. R etur n i n g to Ani

It should be recalled that when the first news of the massacres reached the
West and Russia in May 1915, the joint declaration of protest, signed by
Great Britain, France, and Russia, charged the Ottoman government with
sole responsibility for committing a “crime against humanity and civiliza-
tion.” This meant nothing since it displaced the necessity for some sort
of concerted action that was never forthcoming. The grim labor of kill-
ing Armenians was carried out by a large portion of Kurds, who appar-
ently believed they would inherit the lands of the emptied-­out provinces in
southeastern Anatolia, only to later realize that their reward came in being
selected to replace the eliminated Armenians as a roadblock to Turkey’s
modernist aspirations. The subsequent leader of the new Turkish repub-
lic General Mustafa Kemal’s (Ataturk) conception of a modern Turkish
nation-­state was premised on the conviction that the country was ethni-
cally homogenous, something that mandated the convenience of suppress-
ing the multiethnic heritage of the Ottoman Empire. It should be pointed
out that Kemal was both responsible for the Greek and Armenian mas-
sacres in Smyrna (Izmir) after World War I (1922) and the founder of and
first president of the nation and author of the official narrative of modern
Turkey’s origin, which excluded reference to both the fate of the Arme-
nians and the role played by the Kurds. If it was secular, it was the reserved
habitat for non-­Muslim Turks. In a sense this deliberate policy of historical
amnesia undoubtedly signified the combined trauma of losing the war and
territory and nearly eliminated its largest minority population. The erased
historicity of the empire’s plural ethnic groups also meant peoples who had
inhabited the region long before the invasion of the Ottomans reflected
in theory a broader program of secularization predicated on separating
religion from state.
In Ataturk’s jumbled conception of modernization, strangely emula-
tive of Japan’s prior progress and the force attributed to a single ethnic
identity, the modern nation form required a commitment to a nationalism
founded on the presumption of racial purity and homogeneity. Yet it was
immensely convenient since it separated the “new” present from a baneful
and destructive immediate past, skipping over it for an indeterminately
long duration reaching back to the formation of human communities in
Anatolia. The Kemalist Republic was always misrecognized in the West
as “democratic,” just as the current regime of Erdogan has continued to be
seen as its successor, a hopeful democratic order given entry to nato. The
sleight of hand enabled by this form of banishment of the more recent past
opened the pathway to collective forgetting as the foundation of the new
nation’s ideology of Turkishness that functioned to sustain the realization
of claims to modern rationality and the achievement of civilization. It was
a rather delayed implementation of the enlightened ideals said to have
nourished the Young Turks but still clinging to the contradictory recur-
rence of a mythic dream of an archaic imperial imaginary calling for the
Turkic unification of Central Asia.
Although the problem of denial still remains for the Turks at the level of
history and the apparent need to acquire supporting evidence in the face
of a surplus of facticity, the exercise is both endless and purposeless. A few
of the leading Young Turks were tried; some, like Talaat, fled to Europe, es-
pecially to Germany, where he was assassinated; others were tracked down
in the Caucuses region and killed, while most of them secured a new lease
on life in the new Kemalist Republic. The Turkish response to the question
of genocide has been to repetitively call for joint historical commissions
to further study the problem, paradoxically repeating a faith in history it
has steadfastly disavowed, even though it is never clear how history will
resolve itself into a satisfactory consensus or induce the Turks to finally
accept the authority of history. The constant search for and the unearth-
ing of documents that purportedly reveal the “smoking gun” demonstrate
only that those who believe history will solve the problem share a kinship
with the active deniers.
Here, it seems, Turkey’s leaders shared a common ground with those
deniers of the Holocaust who claim that there are no eyewitnesses to the
actual extermination of Jews in gas chambers, even though there is no way

150 Epilogue
to account for the piles of bodies that have been found nor for the disap-
pearance of millions of people. Unfortunately for Turkey, there were too
many eyewitnesses and of course there were the dispersed diaspora sur-
vivors, who embodied the memory of the event and transmitted it to suc-
ceeding generations. Turkey’s most cooperative ally, the Germans, left a
long paper trail, complete with photographs that would easily incriminate
Turkey and at the same time serve as a sure guide to Germany’s future ob-
jective to implement an even greater genocide to eradicate the Jews. And
then there were the bones of deportees found in the Syrian Desert, wait-
ing to be dug up, still anticipating Grigoris Balakian’s hope for some form
of consecration to remind the future of the meaning of their presence.
According to Taner Akçam, not only was there expressed systematic in-
tent, but the scale of operation, like the magnitude later implemented by
Germany against the Jews, is itself monumental evidence that attests to
the complicity involving the Ottoman government at its highest levels of
policy making. Acknowledging a planned intention to carry out the an-
nihilation of a whole population would open the door to claims for com-
pensation for expropriated property and financial settlements for other
material losses.1 The obduracy of insistent denial among the “founders of
the republic” has effectively closed all discussion. But I think this problem
of historical amnesia is connected to the greater anxiety over the risk of
recognizing “some of Turkey’s founders as war criminals,” which would
result in the additional effect of “call[ing] into question the state’s very
identity.”2 In this light and perhaps more significant is that the articulation
of any accusation of barbaric behavior inevitably ends up acknowledging
that the founders are all murderers and thieves. Even more important, the
“Unionists” (Young Turks who planned and executed the mass murders)
were in fact the same people who subsequently brought down the empire
and opened the way to establishing the Turkish Republic. Like Germans
implicated in the Nazi movement and Japan’s war criminals, they ended
up in positions of responsibility in the postwar, post-­empire states after
World Wars I and II.
The real question of history lies in the obvious fact that the republic’s
origins derived from the policy conceived and directed at the annihilation
of the Armenians; the perpetrators of the great catastrophe, as Armenians
have called it, are the same people who were valorized as founders and
heroes of the new republic. Any admission of the genocide would run the
gamble of unraveling the shaky foundations of the republic and probably
lead to dissolving the thin screen of civilized modernity that sought to

Epilogue: Returning to Ani 151

conceal the horrors of such an ambitious undertaking to eliminate a whole
ethnic population in order to achieve homogenization. It could have been
said that these heroic founders, down to the current president, Erdogan,
are all liars as well, or self-­deluding fascistic fantasists. We have here the
leitmotif of the narrative of denial, underlying all the declarations of repu-
diation, demands for historical evidence, and expressions of the anxious
fears risking charges and accusations of having committed uncivilized and
less-­than-­human behavior: the recurring dread that any expression of of-
ficial acknowledgment will automatically invite insistent requests for repa-
rations to compensate for the vast amounts of land expropriated, property
stolen, and lives extinguished before their time.
In the trip I took to Istanbul a few years ago, it was pointed out to me,
as if it were an indoor sport for amusement of tourists, the grand homes
lining the Bosphorus once owned and occupied by Armenians and now
inhabited by Turks.3 The Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, in his novel Snow,
has his protagonist travel to Erzerum, in eastern Anatolia (Kars), where he
sees the darkened and vacated houses of Armenian merchants, standing
erect, mourning the absence of any other recognition.4 Yet Pamuk could
also have imagined, in the trip to the east, a countryside littered with ru-
ined Armenian churches dating back one thousand years or more, and the
ghostly intimation of hundreds of villages once occupied by their peasant
parishioners that no longer exist. Even in his sentimental tribute to grow-
ing up in Istanbul, Pamuk seems to have overlooked that he was contem-
porary to killings that took place in his city in the 1950s!5 In any case, it
is difficult to know what the reference to empty homes once owned by
Armenians means to him, other than recalling a dead past and setting a
mood for the reader, who in some instances would not have known its real
meaning was found in the rapidity with which the Ottoman state sought
to shift property vacated by Armenians sent on the death marches to Mus-
lims before survivors returned to claim ownership.
April 24 is now designated as the day to commemorate the 1915 geno-
cide. The choice of date, undoubtedly agreed upon by multiple Armenian
groups, refers to the first incident that would disclose the broader plan
of genocidal extermination, which was when approximately two hundred
Armenian professional men, intellectuals, and educators were rounded up
in Istanbul, imprisoned, and executed. Since 2015 was the one hundredth
anniversary, the day undoubtedly yielded more than expected of the usual
commemorative activities. But for Armenians every day is April 24, a day
of commemoration. The anniversary was met by announcements from

152 Epilogue
the Barack Obama White House that the president believes a genocide
had taken place but he was reluctant to call it by its name, even though he
had no qualms in acknowledging the genocidal dimensions of the event
when he was running for president during the earlier campaign and was
virtually aggressive about his desire to side with the Armenians. Now,
of course, he would, like his predecessors and dubious successor, oppose
any official congressional action on recognizing the status of genocide,
in order to avoid bruising Turkish feelings. All this seems transparently
purposeless. Turkey, after all, is a member of nato. Now Turkey, under
Erdogan, has reconstituted itself into a fascism, which raises the question
of its membership in nato, for which one of the principal qualifications
of membership is supposedly a democratic social order.
I have never cared for official commemorations, which are often no
more than empty pursuits in search of the traumas of memory. It is pos-
sible that the idea of commemoratives prompted me in the first place to
take up this improbable project. I had a little help from a billboard in New
Jersey, close to the turnpike, announcing to passing drivers that one and a
half million Armenians were killed. Commemoratives inevitably remove
the necessity of commemoration as a living remembrance in the conduct
of everyday life. Genocides like the Armenian catastrophe are of such a na-
ture that for those of us who have lived its fractured memory, there is the
obligation to commemorate every day — a day has not passed when I have
not thought about it, or tried to envision its enormous impact on each of
my parents as they must have thought and felt and how they escaped Turk-
ish and Kurdish death squads and lived the rest of their lives involuntarily
recalling to themselves what they and we had lost. America is an environ-
ment that banished memory and, in its own way, was as harsh and relent-
lessly uncertain and insecure (in an economic and social sense) as what
they had faced in Anatolia. I would think it has been no different now for
Jews, or indeed any ethnic group that has had the misfortune of experi-
encing near extinction at the hands of another. Nothing is gained by citing
April 24 as a special day of remembrance and observance. The Armenian
massacres in modern times began in the nineteenth century under the
Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II and were periodically reenacted until the
beginning of World War I. Turkish alibis point to the war as the enabling
circumstances in which both sides killed the other’s subjects, when in fact
killing Armenians and other minorities had become a habitually repeti-
tive routine by World War I. After all the charge must take into consider-
ation that the Turks disarmed the Armenians, not the other way around.

Epilogue: Returning to Ani 153

The large numbers of Armenians murdered before the events of 1915 were
neither inconsiderable nor separate from the main event and led up to its
scorching epicenter in deportations that represented the Turkish equiva-
lent of the “Final Solution.”
Perhaps we have grown numb to the scale of more recent genocidal
events after the German annihilation of the Jews: the Indian and Pakistani
massacres at the time of partition (1946), the Cambodian Khmer Rouge
destruction of a large percentage of its population (1975 – 79), Indonesian
massacres of Chinese (1965 – 66), and the ravages in Rwanda (1994). And
let us not forget the Belgians in Central Africa in the late nineteenth cen-
tury. History, like laughing gas, manages to temporarily anesthetize us to
the actual horror of its pain. Then it kills us. But the real issue is the scale
of the operation and the kind of planning and state coordination it would
necessitate, in most cases, to carry out such an undertaking, the actual
labor of genocide. In this regard, genocides are already world historical
events even before the staging of the killing fields. I have often wondered
about historians seized by the compulsion to arbitrarily divide time in
order, I suppose, to enforce a sense of different causation but more im-
portant to show, in this instance, that there was no relationship between
the eventfulness of earlier massacres and the main event. Can time actu-
ally be divided, cut up, sliced? Is the slicing capable of yielding more than
a before and an after? This kind of historian’s game is played too often
with chronology, often resembling musical chairs, which allows them to
maintain one story line without going through the trouble of finding an-
other or even others. Actually it stamps the fear of totalizing. But what it
really accomplishes is the fulfillment of a presupposition that proposes
that while the present always evolves from its immediate past, the present
is free from the past’s lingering traces. What an event like the Armenian
genocide shows is the reverse — that the lines differentiating pasts from
presents are always indefinite and blurred and that presents, whatever else
distinguishes their temporal accent, are invariably filled with residues of
pasts demanding recognition. Any attempt to suggest that life was better
for Armenians in the nineteenth century is merely a historical delusion
based on what came later, even though these people had been constrained
to already live a prefigured ending.
I cannot say, as did Mandelstam, that I had found my sixth “Ararat
sense” that accounts for my decision to write this memoir. Nor have the var-
ious days announcing the times of commemoration and remembrance —
chronological markers in an official history — prompted me in doing so. I

154 Epilogue
would like to think that the construction of this memoir discloses an index
of both my historical moment and my identification with one of the Ar-
menian generations whose parents survived the genocidal death sentence
to secure their future, however stunted and blocked, which made possible
ours. My placement was in an unexceptional second generation, which, as
I have tried to explain, was composed of hybrids compelled to negotiate a
difficult comparative terrain in what increasingly became evident, in con-
trast to the images we were taught, was a distant and imperfect America.
It was not a place for hybrids, even though to this day it has prided itself
as such a place. Most of my contemporaries I grew up with went into fac-
tories, low-­level jobs, the military and early death, and even prison, and a
few benefited from the postwar largesse of expanded educational oppor-
tunities in free public colleges and universities filled with returning veter-
ans from military conflict who were given a gi Bill that enabled them to
pursue careers they would not have had the opportunity to achieve before
the war. This was what my sister meant when she said I was lucky. It was
also the American recognition of its own imperfection and the attempt to
make up for it.
At the same time I realized that by not inquiring into our parents’ lives,
I really did not know much about myself. This may have been my principal
purpose. There are, it seems to me, a few factors that might explain what
I have done, without necessarily clarifying what it is I have done. I think
in part the impulse to try writing a memoir of parents I did not know was
related to the kind of work I have done most of my professional career as
a historian. I have spent most of my life actually writing about another
people’s history, and I believe that the desire to write an account of par-
ents who escaped a cataclysmic genocide only to endure the economic and
social uncertainties in a new environment was a compelling reason that
actually brought me closer to a history that I partially lived. There has
been an interesting irony in this switchover of the object of inquiry from
another’s history to one closer to home: while the former has always been
accompanied by an abundance of sources and materials, the latter has
been based on trying to make sense of silences. An unfamiliar history that
has been remote from my personal experience has become more familiar
to me owing to the availability of historical sources, while the apparently
familiar one has been made more inaccessible by the silence of my par-
ents. If the absences of even the most unreadable shred of documentary
accounts aspire to contributing to some sort of reconstruction, memoirs
are constrained to rely on experience and memory that classify them as

Epilogue: Returning to Ani 155

unreliable constructions. But that difference is crucial since the form of a
construction has allowed me to draw from my experiences and memories
that a reconstruction of other people’s history would neither permit nor
find relevant.
In my work, I have long been interested in how the past continually
reappears in and constantly impinges on the present, to suggest that it
really does not go away. Frantz Fanon named this process the “zone of
occult instability,” and entry into its dangerous ground entails a difficult
journey since we confront an entangled labyrinth of mixed temporalities.
Fanon observed that the contest is invariably between a normative social
time produced by capitalism and those distinct expressions embedded in
the lived experience of particular everydays they have entered. Hence, the
“zone of instability” meant not simply “getting back to the people in the
past out of which they have already emerged,” rescuing archaic forms in
the present, but rather “join[ing] them in that fluctuating movement which
they are just giving shape to, and which . . . will be the signal for everything
to be called into question.”6 This has been true of events like genocide,
which do not pass into pasts but remain within each present as constituent
components. An outgrowth of this particular interest has been to identify
the various ways older political discourses and experiences manage to ap-
pear in different presents from which they originated and often in altered
and reconfigured forms to press their demands in a different historical
time. Sometimes this leads to sentiments of nostalgia and at other times
to extreme political seizures of power like fascism that seek to reinstate the
lost, pure ideas of a society’s tradition. In both instances, these appeals to
the primacy of pasts and their attempted recovery comprise what the Rus-
sian writer Svetlana Alexievich has named “secondhand time.”7 It is pre-
cisely the articulation of these fraudulent old values as timeless and their
temporal recall in the present, though in reality secondhand, that informs
the political refiguration of American political society and its reliance on a
form of organic nationalism that is currently being reenacted.
Despite the uneasiness immigrants felt in finding their way into Ameri-
can society, and the resulting experience of diminishment, these migrants
were still allowed entry. But the contemporary closing down of immigra-
tion and of specific ethnic and religious exclusions strangely recalls Japan’s
seventeenth-­century seclusion policies, which barred foreigners and for-
eign missionaries entry into Japan on pain of death and prohibited Japa-
nese from entering the world at large. While the Japanese seclusion policy
was based on the fear of foreign invasion (as of this writing Trump seems

156 Epilogue
to believe the U.S. is about to be invaded by migrants from Mexico), it was
simply a strategy that bolstered the authority of the leading feudal domain.
The logic of these forms of exclusion was inevitably positioned to lead to
genocide, as dramatically exemplified by Andrew Jackson’s implementa-
tion of the removal of Native Americans in the 1830s, such as the Chero-
kee, and what came to be called the “Trail of Tears” in order to expropriate
lands wanted by white settlers for cotton production. In this regard, it was
the United States as it moved west that provided the model for the equa-
tion of expropriation and dispossession, a form of internal colonization,
resulting in deportation marches and ultimately genocide in the service
of primitive accumulation. Subsequent efforts to push Native Americans
from their lands, to the reaches of less hospitable regions and ultimately
into reservations, and the coercive violence used to carry out these sei-
zures of land brought the relationship between theft and dispossession
and primitive accumulation closer to home. Genocide is never far from
the occurrence of primitive accumulation.
It is likely I will never revisit Anatolia or return to what had once been
Armenia. It has never been a place I fantasized or could even envision,
apart from my errant youthful dreams of an Ani I never saw. Ani will re-
main what it has been, a pile of ruins long emptied of its history. Mandel-
stam’s great Journey to Armenia and his enthusiastic description of what
he saw ended a long time ago but will have to serve in its place. But the
Armenia he visited in 1930, whose ambience reenergized his poetic voca-
tion, was not the land in which my parents had lived and fled. Mandel­
stam’s Armenia was the land dominated by the presence of Mount Ararat,
the postage-­stamp-­size former Soviet republic cobbled together from the
bad faith resulting from the remains and residues of the genocide, and a
disappointed history of European and American deception and indiffer-
ence that ultimately failed to make good on its promise to create an inde-
pendent territorial state of eastern Armenia and some of the provinces of
western Anatolia. Although the Soviet Republic of Armenia embodied the
“heritage” of genocide and was dedicated to remembering it in the place
that had been at the core of the people’s long history and civilization, it
was not the Armenia of my parents, the killing fields whose memories re-
side in the soil, trees, and abandoned empty churches, lying in ruins after
serving villagers for so many centuries. Not even Ararat and Ani remain in
Armenia but are now on the Turkish side of the border. Armenia’s empty
stone churches and their relics, remnants, and rubble have become like
Georg Simmel’s “ruin,” not even a rune of another life, no longer in the

Epilogue: Returning to Ani 157

foreground but moved into the background, engaged in their slow passage
of reincorporation back into nature.8 “I was blind-­sided by the sign — 30
kilometers ani,” Peter Balakian spotted in Ozone Journal,

where the border slid into Turkey and the open plain was
bleached —
a few boulders, some cattle, and beyond the tenth-­century city
of Ani
was a mislabeled ruin cordoned off by barbed wire, a river, and
Turkish guards.9

In Balakian’s poem, Ani never manages to fulfill the aspiration of even

becoming an allegory. Once it has lost its historical identity, all that is left
is a “mislabeled ruin” that has become the faint trace of an archaic pres-
ence now cohabiting a space with rocks, cattle, barbed wire, and Turk-
ish soldiers.10 Underlying the heap of strewn rocks constituting the vague
silhouette of former forms appears what Benjamin named the “bleak
confusion of Golgotha.” But the condition of becoming an allegory is its
“secularization,” the moment its historical existence disappears, when it
becomes a ruin and history passes into the surrounding landscape. In the
ruin, nature and history fuse into a single figure.11 The historical events
associated with Ani have “shriveled up,” absorbed in narratives. History
now assumes the countenance of “irresistible decay” and the allegory ap-
pears in the shape of a “fragment” and a “remnant,” eliciting an ambiguous
mix of polarized opposites simultaneously sanctioning imminence and
transcendence that defy resolution and resist unity of meaning.12 Under
such circumstances, as Benjamin noted of the profane’s dominium, “it is
characterized as a world in which the detail is of no great importance.”
While allegory has the power to “sanctify” profane things, it can also “de-
value” them.13 It is only in this double sense that both Ani and the geno-
cidal “Great Catastrophe” share a common fate in the form of a ruin, now
a fragment or a residue, that belongs neither to history nor nature but
ambiguously to both and to the untimely revenants who appear from “the
realm of mourning.”14
For Mandelstam, the trip to Armenia was a reawakening of what in him
had lain dormant for so long. And it was a discovery: “The Armenians’
fullness of life, their rough tenderness, their noble inclination for hard
work, their inexplicable aversion to any kind of metaphysics, and their
splendid intimacy with the world of real things — all this said to me: you’re
awake, don’t be afraid of your own time, don’t be sly.”15 It was thus the place

158 Epilogue
that exemplified for him poetry’s vocation of performing the labor of “the
plow that turns up time so that deep layers of time, the black soil, appear
on top.”16 Upon his arrival to an island in Lake Sevan and throughout his
stay in the new Soviet Republic of Armenia, Mandelstam was constantly
attracted to the copresence of remainders from the remote past and signs
of the new, a “Young Armenia” surrounded by thick reminders of differ-
ent pasts. “Wasn’t this, “ he asks, “because I found myself among people,
renowned for their teeming activity, who nevertheless told time not by
the railroad station or the office clock, but by the sundial, such as the one
I saw among the ruins of Zvartnots in the form of a zodiac or of a rose in-
scribed in the stone?”17 The persisting and unmoving untimeliness of the
past and the present’s distracted but time-­bound “teeming activity” com-
bine to form the lasting emblems of the modern. If this was not the Ar-
menia of my parents, it was still a fleeting glance of what might have been
a future they had been forced to forfeit.
When I was in Istanbul, a few Turkish anthropologists volunteered to
take me to the region my father came from to see if we could locate any
documentary records pertaining to his family. I thought it was improbable
such records would still be extant much less exist for people who disap-
peared one hundred years ago. I kept this thought to myself, but I did re-
spond by asking them what such documentation would tell me. I may have
been wrong about not making such a trip. But my reason for not wanting
to visit the regions of my parents is because neither they nor the land they
occupied any longer exist; they are the empty spaces of their memories.
These were the scenes of killing fields traversed by the deportation con-
voys of countless numbers to their death in a blazing desert mausoleum,
if they managed to survive until that last instance, now hallowed and con-
secrated in the blood of those who perished, giving all they had to a land
that gave nothing in return, neither momentary remorse nor apology, only
disavowal and the blank nothingness of historical amnesia. The homeland
of our parents had long ago moved to the realm of mourning and silence.
After all these years, I still grieve their passing but now for the lives they
might have had. Mandelstam said it best when he asked: “What tense do
you live in? ‘I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle,’
in the what ought to be.”18

Epilogue: Returning to Ani 159

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 Note s

One. The Unrealized Everyday

1. Mikael Nichanian, Détruire les Arméniens: Histoire d’un génocide (Paris:

Presses Universitaires de France, 2015), 7. All translations are mine unless other-
wise noted.
2. Osip Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia, translated by Sidney Monas (Lon-
don: Notting Hill Editions, 2011), 71.
3. The phrase inventory of traces is from Antonio Gramsci, Selections from
the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell
Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 324. See also Aijaz Ahmad, In
Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1994), 162; Edward Said,
Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 25.
4. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 26, 353 – 54.
5. The full passage appears in Said, Orientalism, 354n16. Quaderni del Car-
cere, vol. 2, ed. Valentino Gerrtana (Turin: Einaudi Editore, 1975), 1363.
6. I have found useful J. M. Coetzee’s own views on this problem, even though
it occurred to me that psychotherapist and novelist were talking past each other.
See J. M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fic-
tion and Psychotherapy (New York: Penguin, 2015). My thanks to Nancy Arm-
strong for alerting me to this study.
7. Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Com-
mune (London: Verso, 2015), 1 – 9.
8. The observations in this paragraph are from Professor Rey Chow, personal
correspondence, June 15, 2017.
9. Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” translated by Susan Hanson, in “Ev-
eryday Life,” ed. Alice J. Kaplan and Kristin Ross, special issue, Yale French Stud-
ies, no. 73 (1987): 12 – 15.
 10. Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquietude, trans. Richard Zenith
(Riverdale-­on-­Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 1996), 9 – 20.
11. Henri Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness,”in “Everyday Life,” ed.
Alice Kaplan and Kristin Ross, Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 10; see also Henri
Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday,
vol. 2, trans. by John Moore (London: Verso, 2002), 41 – 63.
12. Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” 19 – 20, in “The Everyday,” ed. Kaplan and
Ross, Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 19 – 20.
13. Etienne Copeaux, “Turkish Nationalism and the Invention of History,”
Part 2, in Repair: Armeno-­Turkish Platform (October 2016), http://repairfuture
.net/index.php/en/contact, no pagination.
14. Eelco Runia, Moved by the Past: Discontinuity and Historical Mutation
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
15. See Pierre Bourdieu, “The Biographical Illusion,” trans. Yves Winkin and
Wendy Leeds-­Hurwitz, in Identity: A Reader, ed. Paul du Gay, Jessica Evans, and
Peter Redman (London: sage, 2004), 297 – 303; as well as Jean-­Paul Sartre, The
Search for a Method, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Vintage, 1960), where Sar-
tre puts into question biography as an instance of the “genetic fallacy.”
16. Sartre, The Search for a Method, 140 – 66.
17. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990),
873 – 74.
18. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive
Accumulation (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2009), 62.

Two. Unnoticed Lives/Unanswered Questions

1. Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
2. Helen McCready Kearney, “American Images of the Middle East, 1824 –
1924: A Century of Apathy” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 1975), 1 – 30.
3. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans.
E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 103.
4. Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
5. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and Da-
vid Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 141 – 45.
6. Enzo Traverso, Le passé, modes d’emploi: Histoire, mémoire, politique
(Paris: La Fabrique, 2005), 21.
7. Traverso, Le passé, 21.
8. Marie-­Aude Baronian has also seen representations of the Armenian
genocide in the figure of the photomontage form. See Marie-­Aude Baronian,
Mémoire et image: Regards sur la catastrophe arménienne (Lausanne: L’Âge
d’Homme, 2013).

162 Notes to Chapter One

 9. Grigoris Balakian, Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian
Genocide, 1915 – 1918, trans. Peter Balakian with Aris Sevag (New York: Vintage,
2010), 352.
10. Balakian, Armenian Golgotha, 352.
11. Gerard J. Libaridian, “What Was Revolutionary about Armenian Revolu-
tionary Parties in the Ottoman Empire?,” in A Question of Genocide: Armenians
and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma
Müge Goçek, and Norman M. Naimark (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), 94.
12. Balakian, Armenian Golgotha, 353.
13. Stephen H. Astourian, “The Silence of the Land: Agrarian Relations, Eth-
nicity, and Power,” in A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End
of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Goçek, and Nor-
man M. Naimark (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 51 – 81.
14. Etienne Copeaux, “Turkish Nationalism and the Invention of History —
Part 2,” Repair: Armeno-­Turkish Platform (October 2016), https://repairfuture
.net/index.php/en/identity-­other-­standpoint/turkish-­nationalism-­and-­the
-­invention-­of-­history-­part-­2.
15. Carolyn Steedman, An Everyday Life of the English Working Class (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Kindle version, preface.
16. Steedman, “Prologue,” in An Everyday Life of the English Working Class,
fn11, Kindle version.
17. Steedman, “Prologue,” in An Everyday Life of the English Working Class,
fn11, Kindle version.
18. For Walter Benjamin on the nameless, see his “Paralipomena to ‘On the
Concept of History,’ ” in Selected Writings, 1938 – 1940, vol. 4, trans. Edmund
Jephcott and others, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 406 – 7; for Ernst Bloch’s input, which
Benjamin equated with “awakening,” see Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project,
trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, prepared on the basis of the Ger-
man volume edited by Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999), 389.
19. The term dialectic of enlightenment was popularized by the great book of
the 1940s, authored by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of En-
lightenment, ed. Gunzelin Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stan-
ford University Press, 2002.

Three. Traces of a Vanished Everyday

1. Libaridian, “What Was Revolutionary,” 94.

2. Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, trans. Geoffrey Dunlop and
James Reidel (New York: Penguin, 2017). The opening scene of Chris Bohjalian’s
novel The Sandcastle Girls (New York: Vintage, 2012) provides a grimly memo-

Notes to Chapter Three 163

rable and heartbreaking description of emaciated women survivors of the depor-
tations, often unclothed, who had reached Aleppo in Syria on their way to the
desert and declared themselves as the “unkillable.” Bohjalian, The Sandcastle
Girls, 17.
3. Werfel’s books were burned in Nazi Germany and the remaining copies
of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh were confiscated and destroyed by the Na-
zis in 1934, a year after the novel was published. Werfel apparently equated his
fate with the Armenians and the Young Turks with Nazis. He is said to have re-
marked at the time that he now stood in his own ruins.
4. Denis Echard, private correspondence, January 21, 2017.
5. Nichanian, Détruire les Arméniens, 253.
6. Thomas De Waal, Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow
of Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 92.
7. De Waal, Great Catastrophe, 93.
8. Ronald Grigor Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A
History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2015), 363.
9. Pierre Bourdieu, An Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 18, 80, 167.
10. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Os-
borne (London: New Left Books, 1977), 224.

Four. History’s Interruption

1. Marx, Capital, 1:873 – 940, 875.

2. The idea of dispossession has been recently popularized in David Har-
vey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 137 – 44. The
actual idea goes back to Rosa Luxemburg and ultimately Marx himself. What
Harvey accomplishes is an updating of Marx’s concept of original accumulation
and Luxemburg’s proposal that the accumulation is “organically” linked to an
outside of capitalism, its methods starting with colonial policy and war: “Force,
fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed without any attempt at conceal-
ment.” Harvey approvingly quotes from Luxemburg (137) and renames the event
“accumulation by dispossession” (144). See Rosa Luxemburg, “The Accumulation
of Capital,” in The Complete Works, vol. 2, ed. Peter Hudis and Paul LeBlanc,
trans. Nicholas Gray and George Shriver, 265 – 305 (London: Verso, 2015).
3. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 61 – 131.
4. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 62.
5. See Harry Harootunian, Marx after Marx: History and Time in the Ex-
pansion of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), especially
21 – 72, for a critique of stagist Marxism of the vulgate version and an explana-
tion of how Marx actually conceived of prolonged temporal processes — a virtual

164 Notes to Chapter Three

mode of production — in which capitalism and noncapitalism coexisted, whereby
the latter reinforced the former in the new political economy.
6. Marx, Capital, 1:400, n19. Marx was referring to Mexico in this note but
expressing precisely the same idea in his discussions on formal subsumption,
which he saw as a rule of all capitalist development and which pointed to the ap-
propriation of prior practices by capitalism.
7. See Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political
Economy and the Secret History of Accumulation (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2000), 27.
8. Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism, 37.
9. Massimiliano Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities, trans. Peter D. Thomas and
Sara R. Farris (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 67.
10. Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, 424.
11. Some writers, such as Alexander Anieves and Kerman Nisancioglue in
How the West Came to Rule (London: Pluto Books, 2015), have seen the Mongol
invasion as a prefiguration of accumulation exemplifying nomadic societies and
their formation into world historical empires. In this regard, they propose that
the “expansion of the Mongolian empire was a crucial ‘vector’ of uneven and
combined development which contributed to the making of capitalist modernity
over the long duree” (66).
12. One exception was the German missionary Dr. Johannes Lepsius. For a
dramatic account of his attempted intervention, see Werfel, The Forty Days of
Musa Dagh, 129 – 56.
13. On Hitler and Armenians, see the informative article by Margaret Liv-
inia Anderson, “Who Still Talked about the Extermination of the Armenians?
German Talk and German Silences,” in A Question of Genocide: Armenians
and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma
Müge Goçek, and Norman M. Naimark (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011),
199 – 217.
14. Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, 177 – 79.
15. Nichanian, Détruire les Arméniens, 173.
16. Marx, Capital, 1:921.
17. Arlene Voski Avakian, Lion Woman’s Legacy: An Armenian-­American
Memoir (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1991),
30 – 32.
18. Nichanian, Détruire les Arméniens, 172.
19. Nichanian, Détruire les Arméniens, 172.
20. Peter Balakian, a prize-­winning poet and translator and author of a num-
ber of books on the genocide and Armenian-­related subjects, is also the great
nephew of the priest Grigoris Balakian, whose memoir of a year in the deporta-
tion Armenian Golgotha I have extensively consulted.
21. Nichanian, Détruire les Arméniens, 172 – 73.

Notes to Chapter Four 165

 22. Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question
of Turkish Responsibility, trans. Paul Bessemer (New York: Metropolitan Books,
2006), 10.
23. Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”; Akçam, A Shame-
ful Act.
24. Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else,” 316 – 17.
25. Akçam, A Shameful Act, 69. See Stephan H. Astourian, “The Silence of
the Land: Agrarian Relations, Ethnicity and Power” (who quotes from a Turkish
memoir of Damar Ankoglu), in A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks
at the End of the Ottoman Empire, edited by Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge
Göçek, and Norman M. Naimark, 77–78 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
26. Akçam, A Shameful Act, 138. Akçam also supplies evidence to show how
dispossession of Armenian property and goods was supposedly to be used to
underwrite the deportations (184 – 93). But since the deportees received nothing
from the Turkish authorities, and were themselves the constant target of loot-
ing and murder by marauding gangs associated with the Special Organization,
one wonders why Akçam clings so tightly to the official documents that he ap-
pears to be diverted from going beyond considering the extent to which and how
this money was used, apart from reproducing official documents attesting to
the intention to reimburse Armenians and underwriting the deportations. The
former was never realized while the latter is difficult to accept because the dis-
bursements are never specified. Despite his best impulses, Akçam is principally
engaged in providing documentation for the political origins, which makes his
account appear authoritative in the literature until it is recognized that he rarely
strays beyond this narrow preoccupation and is unable to move past his own
bracketing of the larger processes and its consequences.
27. Akçam, A Shameful Act, 274: “One foreign consular report notes that ‘not
only have members of the committee [of Union and Progress] and Jews become
rich by purchasing properties left behind by the Armenians at ridiculously low
prices but state institutions [are also] taking material advantage from the mass
deportation of the Armenians.’ As a result, ‘with the Armenian properties ac-
quired for a song, a group of nouveau riche have now sprung up, while those who
had been wealthy before were able to increase their assets.’ ”
28. Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 155.
29. The episode is recounted from Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgen-
thau’s Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1918), 335, 339, in Peter Balakian,
The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (New York:
HarperCollins, 2003), 260 – 61.
30. Rosa Luxemburg, “Social Democracy and the National Struggles in Tur-
key,” Revolutionary History 8, no. 3, The Balkan Socialist Tradition and the Bal-
kan Federation, 1871 – 1915 (2003): 37 – 46, cited in Neil Davidson, How Revolu-
tionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 292.

166 Notes to Chapter Four

 31. On “surplus enjoyment,” see Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They
Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), especially 229 – 73.
See also Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989),
11 – 53.
32. G. Balakian, Armenian Golgotha, 274.
33. G. Balakian, Armenian Golgotha, 333.
34. Nichanian, Détruire les Arméniens, 10.
35. G. Balakian, Armenian Golgotha, 283.
36. The works of Paul Rebeyrolle (1926 – 2005) are displayed in Espace Paul
Rebeyrolle, a museum devoted to his art in Eymoutier, thirty miles east of
Limoges.

Five. House of Strangers/Diminished Lives

1. Avakian, Lion Woman’s Legacy, 1 – 45.

2. Avakian, Lion Woman’s Legacy, 32.
3. Avakian, Lion Woman’s Legacy, 33.
4. Avakian, Lion Woman’s Legacy, 265 – 80. This transcript stands as an im-
portant general reflection of how the event was daily lived by surviving wit-
nesses, its imminent power to destroy, and the resulting sadness of loss. It par-
allels Grigoris Balakian’s graphic descriptions of episodes he witnessed on the
deportation march.
5. Avakian, Lion Woman’s Legacy, 43.
6. Avakian, Lion Woman’s Legacy, 43.
7. These early church synods preoccupied with questions of theological
meaning used the form of Christological discourse and controversy to resolve
political differences that invariably and predictably led to the breaking away
from a unitary Catholic or universal church and the establishment of proto­
national churches like the Armenians, Nestorians, Copts, and even the Greeks
centered on the importance of reciting the liturgy in a native language other
than Latin. It seems necessary to mention this bit of history here to emphasize
the way the relationship between politics and religion was articulated to become
a principal tradition in the present.
8. Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Sam-
uel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1981), 34.
9. Peter Balakian, Ozone Journal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015),
50 – 51.
10. G. Balakian, Armenian Golgotha, 290.
11. G. Balakian, Armenian Golgotha, 281.
12. Nichanian, Détruire les Arméniens, 256.
13. Aimé Césaire, Colonialism, trans. by Joan Pinkham, new introduction by
Robin D. G. Kelley, 44 – 45 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002).
14. Ben Knight, “New Report Details Germany’s Role in Armenian Geno-

Notes to Chapter Five 167

cide,” Deutsche Welle, May 4, 2018, https://www.dw.com/en/new-­report-­details
-­germanys-­role-­in-­armenian-­genocide/a-­43268266.
15. William Saroyan, My Name Is Saroyan, ed. James H. Tashjian (San Diego:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984).
16. Meline Toumani, “Armenians Shouldn’t Let Genocide Define Us,” New
York Times, April 19, 2015, op-­ed, sr6.
17. Vasily Grossman, An Armenian Sketchbook, ed. and trans. by Robert
Chandler (New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2013).
18. Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia, 91.
19. Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia, 15.
20. Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia, 15.
21. Quoted in Akçam, A Shameful Act, 129.
22. For such a fairy tale and the scholars who compose them, see Dankwart
A. Rustow and Robert E. Ward, Modernization in Japan and Turkey (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964). There is no mention of the Armenian
genocide in this book.
23. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National So-
cialism, 1933 – 1944 (New York: Octagon, 1963).
24. Akçam, A Shameful Act, 10.
25. Akçam, A Shameful Act, 11.

Epilogue. Returning to Ani

1. Akçam, A Shameful Act, 10.

2. Akçam, A Shameful Act, 11.
3. See Yigit Akin, When the War Came Home: The Ottomans’ Great War and
the Devastation of an Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018),
178, for an account of the redistribution of Armenian homes in the aftermath of
the genocide.
4. Orhan Pamuk, Snow, trans. Maureen Freely (London: Faber and Faber,
2004).
5. Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City, trans. Maureen Freely
(New York: Knopf, 2006).
6. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington,
preface by Jean-­Paul Sartre (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 227.
7. Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time, trans. Bela Shayevich (New York:
Random House, 2013).
8. Georg Simmel, “The Ruin,” in Georg Simmel, 1858 – 1918: Essays on Sociol-
ogy, Philosophy and Aesthetics, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Harper and Row,
1965), 259 – 66.
9. P. Balakian, Ozone Journal, 71.
10. See Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 176 – 78.
11. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 177.

168 Notes to Chapter Five

 12. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 179.
13. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 175.
14. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 193.
15. Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia, 53.
16. Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia, 36.
17. Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia, 54. Zvartnots was a seventh-­century
cathedral, near the present-­day capital of Yerevan, that collapsed in the tenth
century. A copy was constructed in Ani and the original ruin was excavated in
the early twentieth century.
18. Mandelstam, Journey to Armenia, 94.

Notes to Epilogue 169

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Adana, 29, 92 117, 126 – 30, 132, 137, 140 – 41, 145,
Adorno, Theodore, 20, 127 151 – 54, 157; affect, 8; experience of,
Akçam, Taner, 102, 103, 104, 144–56, 151 6 – 7; flight from, 49; historical repeti-
Alexievich, Svetlana, 156 tion of, 34; marriage of, 31; world his-
American Expeditionary Forces (aef), 45 torical event, 34
Anatolia, 1 – 9, 12, 22, 27, 38, 61 – 62, 65, Armenian identity, 17 – 18; “starving
68, 70 – 73, 75, 81 – 84, 90 – 91, 93 – 94, Armenians,” image of, 18 – 19, 138
96 – 97, 102 – 3, 105, 108 – 9, 111, 113, 117, Armenian Question, 96, 112
119, 127 – 28, 130, 133, 135, 137, 142, 153, Armenian Revolutionary Federation
157; eastern, 44, 48, 56 – 57; south­ (arf): Brigades, 44 – 46, 72, 75, 78,
western, 42 – 43; village, 24 – 25 123 – 25, 135; Dashnak, 23, 43, 68 – 69,
Ani, 44, 71, 90 – 91, 105, 112, 125 – 26, 145, 139, 141
157 Armenian Youth Federation (ayf),
Antranik Ozanyan (or Andranik) 139 – 40
(Armenian general), 77 Asiatic mode of production, 94
Arabs, 38 assimilation, 17, 84
Armenia, state of, 45 – 46; Soviet Arme- Assyrian, 18
nia, 57, 61, 157, 159 Auslander, Leora, 31 – 32, 133
Armenian Apostolic Church, 41, 65, 67, Avakian, Arlene Voski, 99, 111 – 18,
124 – 25 133 – 34
Armenian bourgeoisie, 30 Azadamard Club (Freeman’s Club), 66
Armenian clans: village yearly cycle, 39
Armenian diaspora, 5 – 6
Bagratid, 105; kingdom, 105
Armenian General Benevolent Union, 67
Balakian, Grigoris, 14 – 15, 28 – 29, 39,
Armenian genocide, 1 – 4, 9, 24, 26 – 27,
97 – 99, 101, 106 – 10, 117, 128, 130, 151
Balakian, Peter, 101, 129, 158 diaspora, 4, 23, 40 – 41, 61, 63, 70 – 71, 73,
Balkans, 40; wars, 38 115 – 16, 123, 128, 138 – 40
Bedrosian, 49 – 50, 54, 59, 80; farm, 50 Dink, Hrant, 142
Beirut, 47, 51 – 54, 58, 79 – 80
Benjamin, Walter, 32 – 33, 85, 158
Easter, 40
Blanchot, Maurice, 10 – 11
Engels, Friedrich, 94
Bohjalian, Chris (The Sandcastle Girls),
England, 45 – 46, 78, 88 – 89. See also
51
Great Britain
Bourdieu, Pierre, 13, 77
Erdogan, Recep Tayyip, 94, 152 – 53
Boym, Svetlana, 21
ethnicity, 17 – 19, 20, 34 – 35, 62, 84, 91
Brest-­Litovsk, Treaty of, 78
everyday, 9 – 12, 16, 26, 38, 90 – 91, 96, 116;
lives, 7
California, state of (Central Valley), 18
Cambodia, 91
Fanon, Frantz, 156
capital, 88, 89
Ford auto plants, 2; River Rouge, 135
capitalism, 87 – 89, 91, 102 – 4
France, 45 – 46, 70, 78, 91, 112, 125, 135,
capitalist mode of production, 15
149
Cemel, Ahmed (pasa), 144
Fresno, CA, 69, 124, 135 – 38
Central Powers, 2, 24
Césaire, Aimé, 130
Chaldo-­A ssyrian, 2 Genocide Convention, 132
Circassian, 11, 30, 35; resettlement of Georgia, nation of, 44
refugees, 40. See also Turkey: Muslim Germany, 91, 93, 96, 100, 129, 131 – 32,
minorities 142, 150 – 51; military, 2; missionary,
class (U.S.), 17, 19, 20 89; Nazis, 130; school, 22, 37, 53, 65,
“collateral damage” (also “sideshow”), 121 – 22
13, 30 Gramsci, Antonio, 4, 10, 14
colonization (Irish), 39, 90 Great Britain, 91, 95, 158; “Great Catas-
Committee of Union and Progress (cup, trophe” (Medz Yeghern), 149. See also
Ittihadist Party), 2. See also Young Armenian genocide; deportations
Turks Great Depression, 19, 82, 84
Constantinople, 99 Greece, 48 – 49, 65, 90, 103, 115; Greeks, 2,
Copeaux, Étienne, 11 12, 18, 74, 99 – 100, 145
Grossman, Vasily, 142
Grundrisse, 15
De Gaulle, President Charles, 52
deportations, 39, 48, 51 – 52, 95, 97,
107 – 8 Harootunian, Ohannes, 6, 8, 21, 24, 37,
Der Zor (Desert Death March), 22. See 40 – 43, 45 – 46, 48 – 50, 53 – 56, 60,
also deportations; Syrian Desert 63, 65, 69, 72 – 73, 76 – 78, 80 – 82, 85,
Detroit, 2, 8, 19, 20, 21, 48 – 49, 52 – 53, 113 – 15, 118, 122 – 25, 133, 135, 137; Sena,
57, 60, 66, 68, 70, 73 – 75, 119 – 20, 135, 4, 8, 21, 49 – 50, 52, 56, 58, 76, 80, 118,
138, 146 126, 147; Vehanush, 6, 8, 22, 24, 37, 41,
De Waal, Thomas, 64 43, 46 – 49; as Bedrosian, 51 – 60, 63,

176 Index
 65, 73, 76 – 77, 79 – 81, 113, 115 – 16, 118, melting pot, 20
121 – 22, 124 – 25, 135, 138 memory, 4, 26, 27
Harput, city of, 12, 22, 77 Middle East, 18 – 19
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 26, millet system, 10, 21, 29, 30, 41
133, 144 Mongols, 1, 90
Highland Park, city of, 2, 42, 74, 120 Morganthau, Henry, 104, 129
Hitler, Adolph, 93, 142
Hoare and Smith, 4
nameless, 7, 32, 63 – 65
Holocaust, 31 – 32, 137, 150
names, 7, 85 – 86
nato, 95, 153
Indonesia, 91 neo-­Orientalism, 94
Ismail, Enver (pasa), 100 Nestorians, 125
Istanbul, 12, 45, 74 – 75, 108, 152, 159 Neumann, Franz, 145, 168n23
Nichanian, Mikael, 97 – 98, 111

Japan, 51, 150 – 51, 156

Jewish Question, 96 Obama, Barack, 153
Jews, 62, 74, 89, 93, 103, 111, 130, 132, “Orientals,” 18
150 – 51 Ottoman Empire, 2 – 3, 10, 13, 18, 39, 45,
Jihad, 90 83, 89, 92, 111 – 12, 130, 149; state, 24
Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, 18
Julian Calendar, 40
Pamuk, Orhan, 152
Pedersen, Victoria, 4, 8, 48, 52, 56, 76,
Kearney, Helen McCready, 19 118, 126 – 27
Kemal (pasa), Mustafa (Ataturk), 62, 100, Persia (Iran), 44
133, 149 Pessoa, Fernando, 10
Kurds, 11, 26, 30, 35, 40, 45. See also Petrosian, 49
Turkey: Muslim minorities precapitalist, 108 – 9. See also premodern
premodern, 9 – 10
primitive (or original) accumulation, 32,
Lefebvre, Henri, 10
87 – 90, 95 – 98, 102, 113, 145, 157
Lenin, Vladmir Illyich, 104
Libaridian, Gerald J., 29
Luxemburg, Rosa, 90, 106 railway, Constantinople–Baghdad, 99
Ray, Satyajit: Distant Thunder, 9
Rebeyrolle, Paul, 112 – 13
Mandelstam, Osip (Journey to Armenia),
recomposition, 7, 9
xi, 4, 13, 123, 143, 154, 157 – 59
Ricoeur, Paul, 26 – 27
Mann, Michael (Dark of Democracy),
Ross, Kristin, 6
104 – 5
Runia, Eelco, 12
Marash (Maraş), 21 – 22, 46 – 49, 51 – 52,
Russia, 46, 78, 92, 115, 149; Soviet Rus-
60, 80
sia, 21
Marseille, 45, 48
Rwanda, 91
Marx, Karl, 15, 87, 94, 97

Index 177
Said, Edward, 4 Versailles, Treaty of (1919), 45
Saroyan, William, 13
Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 13
Washington, DC, 95
Sassoun (Sasun), 92
Werfel, Franz, 2, 30, 38 – 39, 95 – 96, 101,
Sèvres, Treaty of (1920), 45
105, 130
Simmel, Georg, 157
Works Progress Administration (wpa),
Smyrna (Izmir), 149
52, 134
Socratic (anamnesis), 12
World Depression, 40, 46
Soviet Federation, 61
World War I (Great War), 2 – 3, 24, 30,
Steedman, Carolyn, 17, 30, 32, 133
34, 40, 93, 96, 100, 102, 122, 129, 130,
Suny, Ronald Grigor, 102 – 3
149, 151, 153; Turkey’s Involvement,
Surmelian, Leon, 64
12, 22
Syrian Desert, 24, 28, 48. See also depor-
World War II, 125 – 26, 134; displaced
tations; Der Zor
peoples, 17 – 18

Talaat, Mehmet (paşa), 100, 103 – 5, 150

Yerevan, 46, 95
Tbilisi, 44, 77
Young Turks, 2, 9, 29, 35, 63, 91 – 94, 100,
Toumani, Meline, 141, 168n16
106, 124, 128, 130, 150, 151. See also
Trail of Tears, 157
Committee of Union and Progress
Turkey: artisans, 29; capitalist modern-
Yugoslavia, 91
ization, 36; military, 20; Muslim
minorities, 29, 30, 38, 40, 91, 97
Turkification, 91 Žižek, Slavoj, 110
Turkish Republic, 102 Z’vartnots, 159
Turkism, 63, 91

unevenness: and combinations, 148;

forms of, 3; tensions of, 9
Urfa, 131

178 Index
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