I really enjoyed reading Black Dog of Fate. I liked how it was the story of a man retracing his roots and excavating the remains of a lost culture and generation. The fact that this book about Armenian genocide was written by a man who had the quintessential American childhood in the suburbs helped me to relate to and connect with Balakian, which made his journey into his family's dark and hidden past even more compelling. As a reader, I felt like I was with Balakian each step of the way as he slowly unlocked the doors to his family's past, Armenia's tragic history and the world's shameful cover-up of a World War I genocide.
Since Balakian allowed readers into his innermost thoughts and doubts throughout his childhood into his early adulthood, I found myself better able to understand the complexity of his confusion with regard to cultural identity. There are many layers and dimensions, but I found it easiest to break his confusion down into two levels. On the first level, Balakian had his grandmother, who served as his first link to his Armenian heritage. Because his parents rarely ever talked about "the homeland"and because he was never taught anything about Armenia in school, Balakian's only connection to this far off land and culture was his grandmother. His grandmother was Armenia to him. She was the one who taught him the word "eench," which, in his mind, embodied the various conflicting feelings and emotions inherent in Armenia's history of persecution and suffering. So, when his grandmother died, he lost his only sense of the intangible "Armenia." On a second level, he was taught by his parents to identify himself first and foremost as an American, not an Armenian American. His parents fought so hard to assimilate into American culture and to shield him and his siblings from Armenia's brutal and bloody past that Balakian found himself yearning to be Jewish as a kid, so he could both fit in with the children from his first neighborhood and be part of a wider subculture, an opportunity he felt he was denied. Without these windows into Balakian's mind and development, I wouldn't have been able to truly understand just how eye opening it was for him on a personal level to learn about Armenian history.
Finally, what moved me the most and stayed with me long after I finished the book a few nights ago was the revelation that Armenians are not allowed to publicly commemorate the men, women and children who perished in World War I's version of Auschwitz. Before reading this book, I couldn't have fathomed a valued American and NATO ally being able to keep a genocide, one so horrific that it inspired Hitler, a secret for almost a hundred years. Now I know that Turkey has been able to keep its annihilation of Armenians a secret by leveraging its influence over the U.S., the most powerful country in the world. In other words, Turkey has spent decades hushing up and denying the atrocities it committed against Armenians and, by not demanding that Turkey own up to its past and make reparations, the United States has helped to spread the lie. As disgusting as it is that Turkey still refuses to admit to such a horrible crime, the most heartbreaking thing is that people of Armenian ancestry have no means of laying the dead to rest and grieving properly. According to Balakian, the ability to publicly commemorate the victims of the Armenian genocide is essential to healing because "the burden of bereavement can be alleviated if shared and witnessed by a larger community" (291). Until the Armenians' grief is legitimized by global recognition, Armenians will forever be haunted by
the atrocities committed against them during World War I.
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