Early Memories of Phylogeny and Genocidal Terminology

When reading of the phrases that froze in Balakian's mind as signals of a world outside his childhood home (turkish jew, armenia, der vorghormya) I tried to remember what phrases have had that effect on me. Part of it was learning the first names of my grand- and great-grandparents. Sylvia, Ida, Abraham, Sheldon on my Jewish side. Dolores, Mary, Nini, Cora, Palma on my Italian-Catholic side. A more solid set of memories relates to my 6th grade social studies class, where we learned for the first time about global politics. The names Helmut Kohl, Gerhard Schröder, Jacques Chirac, and Tony Blair have stayed with me as odd amalgams of the old-world and the late-90's and weird-new-early-2000's. Whatever I didn't understand about global relations, which was everything, I didn't trust those men to understand either, with names so far from "Bill Clinton." But the two big ones were Slobodon Milošević, long-reigning President of Serbia and then Yugoslavia, and Vojislav Koštunica, the politician who replaced Milošević in a contested and, to some degree, democratic election. I remember watching on TV the NATO bombing (which would've included American and Turkish support) of Yugoslavia, learning in class about Milošević's indictment for crimes against humanity and war crimes. As I recall, most of the to-do was about defining his crimes as mere "war crimes" from the Yugoslav Wars or the "genocide"of hundred of thousands of Albanians who were killed or deported.  Milošević represented himself at his trial in the Hague. He was his own witness trying to define his intentions and scales as a murderer. Like some Turks, he insisted that in the climate of war he was acting in, everybody suffered. He died about four years into his trial and was never sentenced. Many Albanians felt cheated that they never got the lawful "voice" of a verdict against Milošević. The trial happened after I was out of that 6th grade social studies class, so I don't remember it as well; it wasn't kept track of. Later I would only hear the names Milošević and Koštunica on re-runs of SNL sketches from the 2000 election cycle sketches. In that region where the names of nations change so often, it is still hard for me to research back and be sure that I understood what happened to whom. But those names still signal to me how fast things change and change back.

In the interest of drawing connections between near-east genocides and symptoms of silence, here are a few short poems by an Albanian poet named Ferdinand Laholli. I believe they date from the early-mid 90's after the author had moved to Germany.



WE ARE SHADOWS

We are shadows
dragged
over ignorance.

Perhaps we once were people
now replaced
by shadows.



THE SAVRA INTERNMENT CAMP
[where Mr Lakolli languished for his first 30 years]

Here you are afraid to speak,
afraid to be silent.
Here you are afraid to smile,
afraid to be sad.
Here you are afraid
not to be afraid.



HERE

Here the law
is the eye of death
encompassing
all Albania.
Here the people
cringe more and more cravenly
lest they are ever noticed.