Unspoken Family Histories

I want to further continue in the area of the thoughts put forth by David and Michaela a little earlier, as what I found most fascinating about Black Dog of Fate is the structure that Balakian employs to explore his life before and after being exposed to the history of his family. By keeping the reader in the dark about what his grandmother experienced (along with her first husband and family) he recreates in readers the same sensation that he felt as a child. As a writer, the choice to keep us uninformed about his family’s history allows it to keep a certain sense of mystery, though not exactly the same that he must have experienced. Since we know going into the book that this will be a text about Balakian uncovering his family’s connection to the Armenian Genocide, there is a sense of dramatic irony hanging over the opening sections of Black Dog of Fate. This was no more apparent than early in the text when he recounts the evening with Rose Germain in the back of the station wagon after seeing The Graduate and the memory of him being sick as a child with his grandmother telling him about souls and to “Know the evil eye” (33). As we read about his grandmother recounting in a dreamlike state the time in the desert, we are aware of what she is talking about, even if at the time young Peter is not. It’s fascinating that he doesn’t break the current moment he is writing in, that of being young, to tell us what the meaning is. Instead, by leaving us uninformed, he allows this section (and the rest of the sections that take place during his youth) embody of the kind of memory that he talks about that are “connected to something larger than [his] life” (30) and allowing us to connect with him when he says that those moments were like “history knocking on the door of the heart, and when she came knocking, her message often was opaque, symbolic, evocative. I was left to make of it what I could, but I could not escape the intrusion” (31). Nor can we, as readers.

The structure employed, with the first two hundred or so pages of the book, those leading up to Balakian’s reading of his grandmother’s legal document, letting us settle in to this unspoken family history that we know a little of because of our knowledge of the book’s subject matter, is marvelous. When we get to the document, the inclusion of another genre for us to explore as readers, we are shaken as much as Balakian is. Whereas Graves was a first-person witness to the events of the First World War, we are at the same distance as Balakian when it comes to observing what happened to his grandmother. He continues the method that he employed so well in the first part of the book: keep us where he is, let us know what he knows, and thus allow us to experience the events in the same way he did. It’s a stunning move for a memoir, and I, like others have mentioned, was completely enthralled by this text.

Though I must admit, while the story that Balakian is telling us is interesting, reading this book struck me on another level. The concept of unspoken family history is something that has hung over myself for three decades, with only snippets of the history of my father’s family being spoken about in our household. While the history does not necessarily carry the weight of what Balakian uncovered, when he spoke to his aunt directly after reading the legal document, and says that knowing these things would have helped him understand his family, her reply of “You only understand things in life when you are ready to understand them” (214) struck a chord (I've been hearing from relatives for the past week about my uncle Walker Hancock, a sculptor and member of the Monuments Men [John Goodman plays a version of him in the film, with a name change], which is something I wouldn't have appreciated at a younger age, but the familial pride that's there when I accidentally ran into some of his works at the MFA a few weekends back makes up for that youthful ignorance of art). Balakian does a marvelous job here in the relating to us the methods and feelings of uncovering the unspoken past that laid dormant for too long.