Peter Balakian wins Pulitzer Prize for Armenian Genocide poetry anthology

April 19, 2016 By administrator

default-award American Armenian Author Peter Balakian won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Ozone Journal, which is about the Armenian Genocide.

The winners and finalists were revealed Monday during a live-streamed broadcast from Columbia University in New York.

“The prize goes to Ozone Journal by Peter Balakian,” announced Mike Pride, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes.

The title poem of Peter Balakian’s Ozone Journal is a sequence of fifty-four short sections, each a poem in itself, recounting the speaker’s memory of excavating the bones of Armenian genocide victims in the Syrian desert with a crew of television journalists in 2009. These memories spark others—the dissolution of his marriage, his life as a young single parent in Manhattan in the nineties, visits and conversations with a cousin dying of AIDS—creating a montage that has the feel of history as lived experience. Bookending this sequence are shorter lyrics that span times and locations, from Nairobi to the Native American villages of New Mexico. In the dynamic, sensual language of these poems, we are reminded that the history of atrocity, trauma, and forgetting is both global and ancient; but we are reminded, too, of the beauty and richness of culture and the resilience of love.

Ozone Journal creates inventive lyrical insight in a global age of danger and uncertainty.

Peter Balakian is the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities at Colgate University, in Madison County, New York. He is the author of seven books of poems and four prose works, including The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, a New York Times best seller, and Black Dog of Fate, a memoir, winner of the PEN/Albrand Prize.

Writer Peter Balakian Discusses Armenian Genocide at Holocaust Museum Houston

March 17, 2015 By administrator

Peter Balakian speaks at the Holocaust Museum Houston

HOUSTON—A crowd gathered at the Holocaust Museum Houston on Saturday, March 14, for an emersion into a fascinating lecture on Raphael Lemkin, the 100th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, and cultural destruction.

Tamara Savage, Director of the Holocaust Museum Houston introduced Balakian, the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities at Colgate University, who has made the genocide a key part of his life’s work as an award-winning writer, poet and genocide expert.

Balakian started by praising the history of Jewish rescue, witness, and intellectual work on the Armenian Genocide. From Ambassador Henry Morgenthau to Raphael Lemkin, to Franz Werfel and into the modern era of Jewish scholars working on and standing up for the Armenian Genocide discourse, Balakian noted that “the role Jews have played in bearing witness to and later defining the Turkish genocide of the Armenians has been profound.”

It was Lemkin who became the father of the U.N. genocide convention of 1948. It was Lemkin who coined the phrase “Armenian genocide” in the 1940s. As a graduate student he challenged his professor after learning about the Turkish massacres of the Armenians: “How can it be that if one man kills another he is charged with murder, but if a whole nation-state kills more than a million people they are allowed to do it without any consequences?” And this moment ended up changing his career path.

Among Lemkin’s many layers of his understanding of genocide as a crime is the concept that the destruction of culture is also a vitally important aspect of the genocidal process. At the core of every group identity is also culture and the cultural institutions that codify group identity.

The official number of dead in the Holocaust, according to the U.S. Holocaust Museum is 5.1 million. In the Armenian case, Lemkin put the death toll at 1.2 million. The epicenter of killing was in 1915 and 1916. About two-thirds of the Armenian population perished.

Balakian discussed some definitions of culture as essential to the identity of any ethnic group. And he analyzed some of the tactics of Turkish assault on Armenian culture in 1915. He discussed the destruction of about 4,500 churches and schools; the killing of culture producers: writers, teachers, editors, clergy, journalists on April 24 and after throughout Turkey; and the forced conversion of Armenians to Islam as a way of eradicating ethnic identity and absorbing Armenians into the Turkish nation.

Balakian discussed the city of Ani among many Churches in eastern Turkey as an example for the politicization of historical monuments and preservation in a post-genocidal context. Ani, which Balakian suggested might be seen as the equivalent of Florence for Italy, was the medieval capital of the Armenian Bagratid kingdom in the 10th and 11th centuries and is today on the Turkish-Armenian boarder was celebrated for the artistry of its churches and other structures. The city was abandoned in the seventeenth century and has since been subjected to earthquakes and destruction that have left it in ruins.

Balakian referred to Grigoris Balakian’s “The Ruins of Ani” to suggest that scholars might now see the erosion and falsification of Ani by the Turkish government today through a post-colonial lens. During his presentation, Balakian emphasized the connection that Armenians have to eastern Turkey but also the experiences of exile and loss because of what he called the ‘lock out syndrome’ which is the result of Ankara’s policy of disallowing even proper identification on the signage of the historic Armenian churches.

In response to a question from the audience about the US government’s refusal to go on official record about the Armenian genocide, Balakian noted that the State Department remains afraid of standing up to Turkish coercion and pressure, and this seems to be a failure of ethical courage. Twenty-two countries have passed a resolution of recognition of the Armenian Genocide including Poland, Sweden, France, Greece, and Switzerland.

Vreij Kolandjian thanked Professor Balakian for his lecture which underlines the importance of Genocide as a chain of never ending violence and destruction and thanked the Holocaust Museum Houston for emphasizing the importance of the Armenian Genocide by hosting two lectures and one exhibition on the topic three months in a row.

Q&A with author who’ll speak at SMU on Armenian genocide

March 14, 2015 By administrator

By DIANNE SOLÍS

Peter Balakian, author of Black Dog of Fate, learned that his grandmother’s family was slain in one day in 1915. File/The New York Times

When Peter Balakian was a small boy, his grandmother filled him with stories seeped in magical realism, with mysterious yet baffling lines.

“A long time ago there was and there wasn’t,” she’d say.

Perhaps his tender grandmother was just nurturing a fellow poet and soon-to-be historian of one of the great epic traumas opening the 20th century. She was a survivor of the Armenian genocide 100 years ago in April 1915.

Her grandson would eventually become her scribe, portraying her in his award-winning memoir, Black Dog of Fate.

Balakian, now a Colgate University professor, has made the genocide a key part of his life’s work as an award-winning writer, poet and genocide expert. He will talk about his work at Southern Methodist University’s Dallas Hall at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at an event sponsored by St. Sarkis Church of Carrollton and SMU’s Embrey Human Rights Program.

He recently discussed his writing and more with The Dallas Morning News.

Tell us about your grandmother, Nafina Aroosian, and her role in shaping you as a writer and how you unraveled her story.

My grandmother had a penchant for telling folk tales in dreams. … They were wild tales that were almost magical realism tales. … The richness of her imagination was very important to my own imagination. … It turned out to be very important to me as a writer and a thinker of history, and the particular history of the Armenian genocide and how it came down to me.

Only recently, we have dug up out of the family papers, some of her writing. She was writing poems. … They are private poems and they are poems in which she is trying to deal with the losses of her life. Everyone in her family was murdered in the first week of April 1915, except for one half-brother, who was living in New Jersey at the time.

Tell us about Raphael Lemkin, the Holocaust survivor from Poland. Why is he important?

It was Lemkin who became the father of the U.N. genocide convention of 1948. That is the charter legal document that outlawed genocide as a crime. It was Lemkin who coined the phrase “Armenian genocide” in the 1940s. … As a graduate student he challenged his professor, “How can it be if one man kills another he is charged with murder, but if a nation-state kills more than a million people they are allowed to do it without any consequences?” and this moment ended up changing his career path.

Among Lemkin’s many layers of his understanding of genocide as a crime is the concept that the destruction of culture is also a vitally important aspect of the genocidal episode. At the core of group identity is also culture and the cultural institutions that codify group identity.

How many died and what did that represent as a percentage of the Armenian population?

Do you see links between the massacre of the Armenian Christians a century ago and the ISIS massacre in Syria?

I hesitate to make any easy analogies. … The context in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 is not the same for the explosions going on in the Middle East right now.

But the role of religious ideology in the Turkish Armenian case was less important for the ruling political elite. … They were like the Nazis and didn’t care about religion. They did know how to manipulate the power of religion to motivate other segments of their population to do killing.

The ISIS people are extreme fundamentalists who are now militarized. That is a long way from the practice of 99 percent of Muslims. The last two genocides on record were committed by Christians: the Serbs in Srebrenica in 1994, and the Hutus, who are primarily Catholic and Christian, against the Tutsis in 1994 in Rwanda. … Any religious value system is capable of being mobilized by extreme regimes who are hell bent on mass killings.

With so many spasms of violence now, is the world growing desensitized?

It can be desensitizing, overwhelming, numbing, but it has also initiated more human rights activism, more human rights culture, more human rights priorities even in the seats of the State Department and government in our own country than ever before.

You have a new book coming out, Vise and Shadow, and your lyric prose is in full bloom. Do you use poetry to sweeten the ingestion of atrocity?

The poem is a very real confrontation with the harshness of these histories and their legacies. Some of my poems deal with traumatic memory and inherited traumatic memory and they are interested in reclaiming the more psychological issues of historical violence as they are transmitted across generations. I don’t think of my poems as very sweet, in any way, but I think of them as rich complex language that can engage readers in the complexity of history in ways that no other forms of writing can.