How a Poet Writes History Without Going Mad

On a recent book tour for The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, I was asked by an eminent Armenian psychiatrist how I was able to write about massacre, deportation, rape, and torture without becoming depressed or even incapacitated. He told me that in his own course on trauma he found it nearly impossible to teach about the Armenian Genocide because it caused him such pain.

My response was not psychological. I would imagine that any writer who writes about the worst things human beings can do to each other has to deal, in a personal way, with the weight of those realities. Working in such domains can be depressing and even traumatic. You can feel as if you are living in an alternate universe. In my own case, many of my ancestors perished in the massacres and death marches carried out by the Ottoman Turkish government in 1915. About 1.5 million Armenians died during the 20th century’s first modern episode of race extermination, and another million were permanently exiled from their homeland of 2,500 years.

In writing The Burning Tigris, I wrote about two histories -- the genocide and the American response to it -- and entwined them. My major discovery was that during the period of America’s ascension to international prominence, at the turn of the 20th century, the U.S. response to Sultan Adbul Hamid II’s massacre and decimation of about 200,000 Armenians in the 1890s, and then to the genocide of 1915, was America’s first human-rights movement. The movement, which helped to define the nation’s emerging identity, spanned more than four decades, from 1894 into the 1930s. Intellectuals, politicians, diplomats, religious leaders, ordinary citizens, and grass-roots organizations came together to try to save the Armenian people. The passionate commitments and commentaries of a remarkable cast of public figures -- including Julia Ward Howe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Clara Barton, Alice Stone Blackwell, Theodore Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller Sr. and Jr., Spencer Trask, and Ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr. -- made a difference. They and other courageous eyewitnesses recorded their accounts of massacre and deportation, and often risked their lives to save men, women, and children in the killing fields of Turkey.

The crisis of the “starving Armenians” became so embedded in American popular culture that, in an age when a loaf of bread cost a nickel, the American people sent more than $100-million ($1.25-billion in today’s economy) in aid through the American Committee on Armenian Atrocities and its successor, Near East Relief.

Given that extraordinary history, it is dismaying that Congress has not been able to pass the most basic commemorative resolution on the Armenian Genocide. There has been intense pressure from America’s NATO ally Turkey, which denies the genocide and is engaged in a propaganda campaign to cover it up. Such is the irony that the United States lacks the moral courage to affirm its own first international-human-rights movement.

What keeps one going through the research and writing about massacre, torture, sexual mutilation, rape? During the Armenian Genocide, the Turks and Kurds performed some of the most hideous acts of violence in recorded history. Often they did so in the name of Allah and with the ideology of jihad as a rationale; teenage girls were raped with crucifixes made from tree branches; clergymen and teachers, professors at Protestant missionary colleges, had their eyes gouged out before they were beheaded. On the deportation marches the mobile killing squads -- the chettes -- and gendarmes often sliced off women’s breasts, or slashed open pregnant women and dashed their babies on the rocks. Thousands of women were raped, abducted, sold into harems. Women committed suicide, often in large numbers, to avoid such fates. As Christians they believed they were going to a better world.

Ambassador Morgenthau, a Jew trying to save this Christian minority, appealed to the Turkish minister of the interior, Talaat Pasha, more than once to stop the massacres. Morgenthau described in his memoir the torture and cruelty, like the practice of bastinado, in which Turkish gendarmes would beat the soles of the feet of an Armenian prisoner until he fainted, revive him, and begin again. Sometimes the victim’s feet later had to be amputated. Sometimes “they would extract his fingernails and toenails; they would apply red-hot irons to his breast, tear off his flesh with red-hot pincers, and pour boiling butter into the wounds. In some cases the gendarmes would nail hands and feet to pieces of wood -- evidently in imitation of the Crucifixion, and while the sufferer writhed in his agony, they would cry: ‘Now let your Christ come help you!’” Morgenthau said.

“One day,” he wrote, “I was discussing these proceedings with a responsible Turkish official, who was describing the tortures inflicted. He made no secret of the fact that the government had instigated them and, like all Turks of the official classes, he enthusiastically approved this treatment of the detested race.”

In the face of such horror, can a writer even suggest there is pleasure and excitement in doing the work, in the act of writing? I came to The Burning Tigris as someone who has spent most of his life writing in the rhythms and image language of the lyric poem and, at the time, was finishing a book of new poems. In the 1990s I wrote a memoir, Black Dog of Fate, about growing up Armenian-American in the suburbs of northern New Jersey in 1950s and ‘60s and gradually awakening to the history of the Armenian Genocide my grandparents had lived through. One of the challenges for me in crossing genre boundaries was to find the ways I could bring along the appropriate aspects of my craft. In writing a memoir, I discovered that the past could be opened up by finding images in memory that, like a thread, could unravel into a once-forgotten experience.

So in writing The Burning Tigris, I had to find a way to allow my own literary process whatever life it could have within the confines of writing history. Otherwise I could not write the book. Writing the history demanded relentless digging in hundreds of documents, hundreds of books, and hours of taped interviews with genocide survivors and others who remember that period. It demanded problematizing history and creating interpretive perspectives. Yet I began my project believing that a good history had to be readable, even pleasurable, no matter how horrible the subject. I was committed to crafting a coherent story, to giving to the mass of facts a shapemeandering or shifting as it needed to be, but a shape. Given the dual history of the book, it would have to be a complex shape. Like a cat’s cradle the story would have to move back and forth across the Atlantic with some elasticity. There would have to be as much texture as possible, a texture of time and place. There had to be scenes etched with vivid images; voices alive and speaking. If I couldn’t create that -- the more joyous dimensions of writing -- I wouldn’t be able to write the book.

There are moments in the shape of the narrative and the drive of the history when opportunities present themselves, when you must resist the expository voice that is first instinct to those trained in purely academic ways. Those opportunities often revolve around a character, or an event that has expansive possibilities, a place connected to that event, a place you can inhabit with images of locale, narrative detail, voice, and dialogue.

In the midst of the massacres and deportations in the autumn of 1915, the American consul Leslie A. Davis was stationed on the eastern plateau of Turkey. Like many other U.S. consuls posted in the Ottoman Empire, Davis was an ordinary American boy. He had grown up in Port Jefferson, a rural town on the north shore of Long Island, attended Cornell University, taken a law degree at George Washington University, worked as a journalist for a while, and then decided to make a dramatic career change. Like many of his colleagues in Turkey -- Edward Nathan in Mersina, Oscar Heizer in Trabzond, George Horton in Smyrna, W. Peter in Samsoun -- Davis had been raised in a peaceful America, in a decade often referred to as the “gay ‘90s,” and had signed up for the Foreign Service with a sense of excitement about seeing the wide world. In 1915 these young American men found themselves in Turkey in the midst of what Davis would call “one of the greatest tragedies in all of history.”

Overnight they and their consular staffs and the missionaries also stationed in Turkey became rescuers of Armenian men, women, and children. They hid them in consulates, churches, and houses; they provided them with food, and saved their movable wealth when possible. The consular staff members also wrote -- they wrote letters and dispatches back to their boss, Ambassador Morgenthau, stationed in Constantinople, and to the Department of State. They wrote, in a manner that discloses how well men in government used language at an earlier time in our history -- clear, vivid, elegant, and in many ways clinically austere prose. They wrote in ways that Ernest Hemingway might have learned from.

After reading hundreds of pages of Davis’s dispatches and reports about the Armenian Genocide, and after reading his particular account of riding by horseback around a remote lake miles from Harput, I decided to devote a chapter to his experience of that journey. His own account of his ride to Lake Göeljük was, I believed, of major importance to understanding something profound about the Armenian Genocide. I called my chapter “Land of Dead.”

In the summer of 1915, the deportations and massacres claimed the vast majority of Armenian lives; the arid Anatolian plain and the Syrian desert were the epicenter of the story. Faced with that unfathomable moment, I decided not to write a chapter in the expository voice of academic synthesis. Rather, I decided to slow time down, to take the reader into the summer of 1915 through the kaleidoscopic perspective of key witnesses who were stationed in various parts of Turkey. That could provide a panoramic view of the meticulously planned process of race extermination that happened all across Turkey. Furthermore, given the Turkish government’s assiduous denial of the facts of this history, it seemed all the more important to pause here and go slowly; to allow the reader to sink into it, section by section; to loop back over deportation routes; to get the feel of geography, weather, the epic haul of death marches. One of my witnesses was Leslie Davis.

Before I could get Consul Davis on his horse with his guides -- one trip was taken with a Turkish guide and another with an Armenian survivor -- I wanted the reader to feel the uniqueness of place, the rocky highlands of Harput, a place I have been to only in my mind. In digging deeper to find out about the geography and flora and fauna of the region, I felt I could connect the reader with the scene, the moment in history more fully. Using Davis’s account as my basis, I opened this way:

Having created a sense of place, I wanted to let Davis tell as much of his story as my narrative could allow. He had a good eye and a clean, clipped sense of syntax, owing perhaps to his brief career as a journalist. When he reached the first destroyed Armenian village on the way to Lake Göeljük, his descriptions were arresting in their understatement and minimalism. In the village of Bozmashen, the houses were destroyed -- doors and windows smashed, walls crumbling into the streets. Davis noted that they saw “no other living creatures in this once prosperous village ... except a few hungry looking cats.” He conveyed a sense of absence that embodied the horror of the race extermination to which he was bearing witness.

As he went on in his report to the State Department, he noted the names of the dozens of villages he visited -- villages that were decimated; Armenian villages turned into ghost towns in a matter of weeks in the summer of 1915. A decade later, Hemingway’s protagonist Frederic Henry would say in A Farewell to Arms, as he defected from World War Ifeeling betrayed by the war, its atrocities, and hollow rhetoricthat only the names of towns had meaning: “There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers.” Davis felt, in some intuitive way, the same. He understood the stark dignity of listing the villages that were now destroyed and emptied of Armenians. Huseinik, Morenik, Harput Serai, Upper Mezre, Kessrik, Yegheki, Sursury, Sursury Monastery, Tadem, Hooyloo, Shentelle, Garmeri, Keghvenk, Kayloo, Vartatil, Perchendj, Yertmenik, Morey, Komk, Hoghe, Haboosi, Hintzor, Hinakrak, Tcherkeny, Visian, Korpe, Hagop, Mezre, Dzaroug, Harsek, Mollahkeuy, Pertag. “All of the purely Armenian villages were in ruins and deserted,” he noted. In those with mixed populations, “the Armenian homes were empty.” The names carried the texture of place and culture: the guttural sounds, the piling of certain consonants, the k’s, the z’s, the y’s. Some names Turkish, some Armenian.

With each paragraph of his report, his voice accrued more richness and authority. “Everywhere it was a scene of desolation and destruction,” Davis wrote, “the houses were crumbling to pieces and even the Christian churches, which had been erected at great expense and with much sacrifice, had been pulled down.” In their “fanaticism,” he said, the Turks and Kurds “seemed determined not only to exterminate the Christian population but to remove all traces of their religion and even to destroy the products of civilization.” At the time Davis didn’t know that he was writing about the template for modern genocide.

His voice kept taking me to the place. Where was this lake, why was it an epicenter of killing, a repository for corpses? There was an Auschwitz sense about it. A remote place, a beautiful pastoral setting, where humans would do the worst things imaginable.

Lake Göeljük was some five hours to the southeast of Davis’s consulate by horseback, and he went there on this particular trip with a Turkish guide. Within miles of leaving Harput they began to see dead bodies strewn all over the road. “They had been covered with a few shovelfuls of dirt,” Davis wrote, “as the gendarmes found it easier to do this than to dig holes for them. The result was that in almost every case one could see the arms or legs or even the heads sticking out of the ground. Most of them had been partially eaten by dogs.”

At the village of Mollahkeuy they moved onto the plain, where they found several hundred bodies scattered over the dry ground, nearly all of them women and children. As they surveyed the landscape, they saw that some of the bodies had been burned. “I thought at first this had been done as a sanitary measure,” Davis wrote, but his Turkish friend explained that the gendarmes and the Kurds would burn the bodies in search of gold pieces that many Armenians swallowed for safekeeping.

They climbed a steep mountain and descended into a valley that led to Lake Göeljük -- a spot that Davis recalled having been a favorite summer camping ground for the American missionaries and Foreign Service officers. A large and beautiful lake, Göeljük was the only significant body of water in the region, a source of the Tigris River. Its name, meaning “little lake,” is a Turkish translation of the Armenian Dzovuk. The banks were high and steep, with deep ravines. The men rode around the lake, looking down at “hundreds of bodies and many bones in the water below.” It was rumored that the Armenians had been pushed over the cliffs by the gendarmes -- a rumor “that was fully confirmed,” Davis wrote, “by what we saw.”

He perceptively realized how cleverly the Turks had exploited the chasms in the rocky and remote topography in order to carry out the mass killings. Around Lake Göeljük, he noted, the ravines were “triangular in shape and shut in on two sides by high precipitous banks which the people when attacked were not able to climb. Two or three gendarmes stationed on each side could prevent a multitude from escaping that way.” At the bottom, of course, there was nothing but water; as Davis put it, “a row of 15 or 20 gendarmes” could keep the Armenians from escaping into the water along the narrow paths around the lake.

The consul’s descriptions can bring us close up in a way that witnessing with precise language can:

The ghoulish images seemed endless. As they approached the next ravine, they saw “a row of 20 or 30 heads sticking out of the sand at the edge of the water.” Just the heads. Davis wrote that “the gendarmes with characteristic Turkish negligence had buried the bodies in sand at the edge of the lake because it was easier to dig and the sand had washed off and been blown away, leaving the heads exposed.” Everywhere he looked there were corpses: corpses piled up on the rocks at the foot of the cliffs; corpses in the water and on the sand around the lake; corpses filling up the huge ravines. As they passed a clump of trees covered with vines and bushes in the middle of a ravine, Davis’s Turkish guide told him to look in, and he saw “about 15 or 20 bodies under the trees, some of them sitting upright as they had died.” In one ravine Davis estimated that there were about a thousand corpses, in another about fifteen hundred. “The stench from them was so great” that he rode as high up on the ravine as he could, but he couldn’t escape it.

Davis learned that because the Muslims considered “the clothes taken from a dead body” to be “defiled,” all of the Armenians were forced to strip before being killed, and he described “gaping bayonet wounds on most of the bodies.” Because bullets were so precious, it was “cheaper to kill with bayonets and knives.” The bodies, he learned, were of Armenians who had been marched from distant places. In other parts of Turkey the same methods of massacre by butchery were occurring because the Turks didn’t want to waste ammunition. In Ankara and its surroundings, only a couple of hundred miles east of Constantinople, the killing was done with “axes, cleavers, shovels, and pitchforks,” the priest Krikoris Balakian wrote. The carnage around Ankara was so horrible that Talaat Pasha, the interior minister, ordered more than 40,000 corpses to be quickly buried in mass graves. Still, the stench of death and the mounds of bodies overwhelmed the landscape.

South of Harput, Davis and his companion left the lake, traveling through the village of Keghvenk, and again the stench of rotting corpses overwhelmed them. As they rode from Keghvenk back to Mezre, they saw thousands of corpses half-buried, and later they learned that many of them were men who had been imprisoned before the deportation. Within 10 miles of Mezre the travelers saw the remains of Armenian camps where thousands had been held before they were massacred. Arriving home at about 9 o’clock in the evening, Davis wrote: “I felt that I understood better than ever what the ‘deportation’ of the Armenians really meant.”

I don’t wish to suggest that all of my book is like this chapter. Nor am I making an argument for writing something that might be called exclusively narrative history. As a scholar I’m trained to create analytical lenses to evaluate political and social conflict and historical change, and I am trained to use hard documents and enjoy the depth and authenticity of those records. Reading hundreds of pages of U.S. State Department documents and British Foreign Office records, as well as German, Austrian, French, and Turkish official records in translation, I found the voices of history alive in human ways. They were more than bureaucratic; they were the drama of history in motion. And this one moment, when Leslie Davis described his journey around a lake, was a fabulous opportunity for me, as a literary writer, to seize a deeper way into what the Armenian Genocide was.

The artistic challenges of locating the events, the characters, and their voices in sensory, human time was an energizing force that kept me writing when the darkness of the subject could have shut me down.

Peter Balakian is a professor of English and the humanities at Colgate University. He is the author of five books of poetry and of The Black Dog of Fate (Basic Books, 1997) and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (HarperCollins, 2003).

http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 35, Page B10