One thing that I found interesting in Balakian's book was how long he took getting into the story of the Armenian genocide. While I liked learning his personal history, I was confused at first at how leisurely the book seemed to be moving, when suddenly we were 100, then 150 pages in without concrete exploration of this crime.
But now I wonder if maybe that was the most effective method in bearing witness to an event that is still disputed or unrecognized (even by the US as of the video we watched last week). If he had simply given us a history lesson, it would've felt relegated to the page; numbers but not lives that were lost. By taking the time to create characters (even though they were based on real people), we're drawn in much deeper to he and his family's personal history as it relates to this event. It reminded me a lot of the idea that one death is a tragedy, but a thousand deaths are a statistic. As a people, we haven't had exposure to the images or history of the Armenian genocide the way that we have with the Holocaust or other episodes of genocide/ethinic cleansing (Rwanda, Cambodia, etc.). So in order to make us fellow witnesses, Balakian had to not just show us numbers and figures and pictures, but tell us a real story so that we felt the blows of the past. Obviously the power of words/writing was a big theme in the book, and I thought the fact that Balakian used that power so well was a great way to show how even after such a long time (1915 until now) words can still help illuminate a muddied/disfigured past.
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