Black Dog of Fate by Peter Balakian

Today is April 24, Genocide Memorial Day for Armenians worldwide. Here in Armenia it is a day off on which hundreds of thousands of people visit the Genocide Memorial here in Yerevan to lay flowers near the eternal flame.

On April 24 the systematical slaughter of up to one and a half million Armenians during World War I in what is now Turkey (at that time still the Ottoman Empire) is remembered. Up to this moment Turkey is steadfastly denying that this was a genocide, a planned attempt at wiping out the Armenian people. Turkey maintains that the amount of people killed was much lower and that dislocation of hundreds of thousands of Armenians (read: forced marches on foot into the desert without food with plundering, rape and murder on the way) was a necessary security measure.

Tsitsernakaberd (Genocide Memorial), Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online 2006
Picture taken from One World Multimedia Blog

Black Dog of Fate by Peter Balakian is a memoir by the descendant of Genocide survivors who ended up in the US. Black Dog of Fate consists of several storylines, which are not always very sharply separated and partly intertwine. The first half or so of the book consists of Balakian’s memoirs growing up in suburbia in New jersey in the 1950s and 1960s (Balakian was born in 1951). He grew up knowing he was Armenian, but not knowing anything about the history of his people, let alone why and how they ended up in the US. He was in most ways your average all-American boy, playing ball in the park, playing on the high school American football team, making out with girls in the backseat of the car, rebelling against his parents as a teenager.

No matter how much on the outside his parents and his family seemed integrated into the American lifestyle, inside their house some things were very different. The role of food, for example. Where all Peter’s friends were served instant and deep-frozen dinners that were eaten in five minutes, dinner at the Balakian’s was a family affair that took time and consisted of several homemade dishes. And then there were the Sunday gatherings of relatives at the Balakian’s or Peter’s aunts. These gatherings lasted for hours and Armenian food was an important part of them.

Then there was Peter’s grandmother who doted on him, her eldest grandson. From time to time, out of the blue, she would tell Peter a snippet of her memories, a story, things that remained unconnected and that Peter didn’t understood at all throughout his youth.

This first part of the book goes above and beyond being specifically a memoir of an Armenian youth in the US. It can in many ways be read as the history of an immigrant childhood in the US, maneuvering between being American and keeping one’s ethnic heritage.

In his twenties Peter becomes aware of his heritage, of what happened to Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I and of how his own relatives escaped the Genocide and ended up in the US. His family’s history forms the second storyline in the book. The third is a more general history of the Armenian Genocide mixed with Balakian’s raising awareness of it. It also covers Turkish continuous attempts at denying the Genocide.

This was a book that I had wanted to read for years, but couldn’t find anywhere in Dutch bookstores (we are talking pre-Amazon here). So when last year I stumble across a copy in the one decent English language bookstore in Yerevan, I grabbed it. I am glad I did. I loved the book, it is extremely well written, it kept my attention just as much this second time around (I first read it last summer after I bought it).

I highly recommend Black Dog of Fate to anyone interested in Armenia and in immigrant life in the US. Especially for those who don’t know much about the Armenian Genocide, this book makes a very good introduction.

Peter Balakian is now a poet and scholar. He also wrote The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, which is, though obviously more scholarly than his memoirs, still very readable.

You can read the first chapter from Black Dog of Fate here and another excerpt here.