Below is the introduction to a 20 page talk given at an AYF oral history training session in the late 1970’s. When the Armenian Youth Federation was considering starting an oral history effort, the AYF invited as guest speaker Marash Girl, then Chairperson of the Armenian Oral History Project sponsored and supported by the Armenian Library and Museum of America, Watertown, MA. The following text is the introduction to her presentation.
For years my father had been encouraging me to record, as did Saroyan, all the stories and tales that riddled our lives day in and day out -- brought into our home by many Armenian men (the women rarely told their stories in public) -- overheard by me in Turkish, or Armenian, or broken English, or all three, as I tried to fall asleep on a noisy Sunday evening -- stories of their own lives and others, or stories that had been handed down to them generation after generation. But I was not a story teller, or reteller, as my father was. I had the training, he had the natural talent. He was continuing the oral tradition, but wanted me to record on paper. I could not. For one, the tales of woe, I did not want to hear. And although my heart could understand the throb of the tales of a many-languaged people, my people, the Armenian people, I could not translate these in my language to the Americans, or American-Armenians of the 1960's and 1970's. Later my brother James must have been inundated with a similar urgency on the part of my father for my brother, liking writing more than I, set himself to the task of putting to paper such characters as Pambook Jack (who told us all that his stomach grew slarge because he had swallowed a watermelon seed long ago) and Khosrov the Barber who never stopped reading French novels, even while clipping hair. But these were stories my father told; my brother James had missed, because of the ravages of time and death, the stories told by the men themselves. And then the one man in my father's entourage of friends (and he had many) -- the one man who dared to tell his story, who had been to Der Zor and lived to tell the tale -- my brother would write his story; it was indeed worthy of preserving, so horrible yet true a tale it was. My brother must hear it for himself. So one evening, my father and mother, uncle and aunt, and my brother went to the C....ian household lugging a 50 pounds reel to reel tape recorder and an empty reel of tape. Mr C...ian, surrounded by this group, faced by a microphone, with his wife sitting by his side, began the long story of his life which culminated for the evening with a sobbing old man, surrounded by six others sobbing at the story of this very man, then a boy, watching his parents stripped naked and shot to death. Mr C.....ian never finished his story that night; Mr. C.....ian never finished his story for this audience for no one had the courage, or hardness of heart, or whatever it takes, to go back for the sake of a young man's writing a story to appear in whatever slick magazine or broadside that it might. Times changed, my brother went on to other things, the tape recorder was sold, and the tape? We're still looking for it. All of that was the beginning for me. And then I got older, married, had children. All of my grandparents were now dead. Many of the old men and women that were so much a part of my childhood and my growing years were dead. Their stories were gone. Their feelings, their ideas, their Armenianness, their living experience with history -- all gone. How were my children to even begin to sense what I had absorbed almost through osmosis all day long, and into the subconscious of my sleeping hours on those Saturday nights? Perhaps they never would. Oral histories, unfortunately, cannot bring back the dead or the past. But they can record, for my children, for myself, for your children, for the world, an experience, an individual Armenian experience, the Armenian experience, on tape. How the oral histories will be used, and by whom, when they will be used and how, can only be known in the future.
I know now why Harry M... never married. It was not the reason dad gave me when I was in high school, when Harry used to visit us regularly, for a meal, comradeship, and the surrogate family filched from him from the school room of the 'slaughter house province'. Harry was an intellectual. He was uncomfortable outside the life of the mind. The mind, however, cannot live properly outside the life of the heart. His body always had that ungainly response to any request. His spirit was willing, but his body was not. On the memory of it, now, his body was what was willing, but his spirit was not.
ReplyDeleteHarry was average height for an Armenian male. He was about five feet, seven inches tall. Unlike the average male from eastern Anatolia, he could read German, and did so daily. I would observe him, often, crossing one of those narrow streets in Harvard square, on his way to a book store to buy a german newspaper, which he would carry to Hayes Bickford, on Massachusetts Avenue, fronting Wigglesworth dormitory, the one built in the nineteenth century, and now reserved for the freshman class, Harvard's idea of a hazing joke, as Wigglesworth was replete with history, but empty of the comforts of home. You remember Hayes Bickford, it was the cafeteria built in the thirties, home to the 'beat' intellectual of the fifties, and lost in the world of the seventies. Hayes was the place one could pick up on the 'friday night fights' of the Eisenhower t.v. years, that was banned in the peace generation of Vietnam, and recaptured at 2 a.m. on a Saturday morning as the shadows of peoples' lives staggering forth.
ReplyDeleteHarry would arrive there, when the reflection of the light on the faces of the people still beheld the willing undergraduate, yearning for 'experience' and understanding of a world he could only argue about, and imagine. Harry kept his silence, always. He listened to those undergraduates while he read, as background music, as a classical f.m. radio station. He always kept his silence, until that one day, when he shed the patina of his peace, and confessed to his best friend in the whole world, me, an eighteen year old boy, a secret he had hidden from everybody else.
I was Harry's best friend from at least my fifth birthday. I know this because I received a birthday card from him on that day, the only one from somebody outside of my family. It was signed, 'your friend, Harry'. For weeks, I referred to Harry as my best friend in the whole world, and pranced around my home, knighted with a friendship that did not come from the kiln of blood. His friendship for me, was a friendship born of love, love for a life created outside the valley of the shadow of death. Harry could not be the best friend of my dad, although he was a frequent visitor of great respect. There were too many differences.
I learned the depth of our friendship on the day of Harry's confession to me. When I was old enough, conversations with Harry made me realize that, for the Turks, we Armenians were the residue of their coffee. We lived at the bottom of their cup, undrinkable, yet cause for the superb flavor of their after dinner drink. We, like the coffee residue, became the grinds thrown away and buried in their soil.
ReplyDeleteHarry was fifteen years old when the killing began, for the second time in twenty years. This was a killing that was undertaken in earnest and had the mark of a planned redemption for the Turkish people. It was the fruit, no doubt, of their alliance with the Germans during ww1. It was one of the ironies of Harry's life. He had great respect, like most Armenians, for the Germans. To the Armenian, they were a people of erudition, and ministration. It was always to a German doctor, that an armenian referred, when in medical need. The German doctor had achieved mythic status in the pantheon of Armenian heroes. For an educated Armenian, the German language was a requirement, more so than English.
But, the orderliness of the genocide of the Armenian people in 1915, unlike the local, haphazard one of 1895, had all the earmarks of German 'Order'. Of course, the Armenians were blinded to this, because of the status that educated Germans had reached in the mind of the Armenian. Harry was no exception.
His nocturnal excursions with Die Zeit, the left leaning newspaper of choice for German intellectuals, at Hayes Bickford, were duly recorded by me, on those occasions, when I, a sometime pedestrian, in my late teens, was returning from a late sojourn in one of the flesh pots of the coffee houses of Harvard Square.
When I would see him cross the street, it was always discomfiting, like a slight cough, as I knew I was watching a waif of armenian history, one not easily recognized, because he was a grown man.
On one of those evenings, I joined him at Hayes Bickford. As expected, he welcomed me with the light of his eyes. The overhead lighting at Hayes Bickford was fluorescent and at 10 p.m. held at bay the darkness that was outside the doors.
It was then, during one of Harry's usual arguments for the liberal cause, that I asked him if he had any rancor in his heart for the Turk. I asked him if he desired vengeance. I expected him to say no, that he had forgiven all, as my father had said to me. Harry had a heart for the oppressed, a heart of empathy, that was ever coming to the fore in discussion of politics. My father always argued the pure economic line. Harry was for those who were not of economic agility, the great masses of people.
He looked me straight in the eye, voice even, as if by force, and said, if all he had to do was to pull a light switch and that would be an end to the whole Turkish race, he would not hesitate to reach for that lightswitch, and pull down on it.
It was then I realized what more the Turks had done. They had impaled the hearts of children, too small to protect their hearts from the invasion, with the spear of hatred. When Harry was 15 years old, the Turks took his life, but left him his existence, like the coffee grinds at the bottom of the cup.