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Chapter 5: Memorization of the Armenian Genocide in Cultural Narratives1 UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Faces of genocide: Violence, identity and memory An anthropological study on the Armenian genocide Holslag, A. Publication date 2020 Document Version Other version License Other Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Holslag, A. (2020). Faces of genocide: Violence, identity and memory: An anthropological study on the Armenian genocide. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:29 Sep 2021 111 Chapter 5: Memorization of the Armenian Genocide in Cultural Narratives1 Introduction “Have you ever heard of Gorky’s curse?” Nouritza Matossian asked me on 20 March 2003.2 We were at her home in Hampstead (London). I had already been conducting research for two months, and since my time in London was brief I had filled my days with as many interviews as possible. I had already spoken with the Armenian ambassador, an Armenian artist and an Armenian minister. I was too exhausted to satisfactorily conduct another interview. Yet her story caught my attention and would eventually be one of those narratives that turned my research approach upside down. Nouritza continued: There is a rumour going round the galleries of New York that Gorky’s paintings are cursed. The painting The Orators has been damaged in a fire in 1957. Another painting - The Calendars - has been completely destroyed. Then there are rumours of paintings falling from walls and of a black-haired ghost in a blue overcoat that visits Gorky’s old house in Sherman, Connecticut .... I did not really know who Gorky was ... I mean, I had heard of him, and I had read something about his abstract art, but I had never seen any of his works. I thought he was a Russian artist ... He did not carry an Armenian surname.3 Only much later I discovered that his real name was Vosdanig Manoug Adoian. I remember how I walked into Tate Gallery and how I affixed when I saw her face on the wall. The painting was called The Artist and His Mother, and I recognized it. There was something about those eyes. I don’t remember exactly what, neither can I explain it, but they were so familiar that I cried. Looking back I recognized something in all of his paintings - even the abstract ones. The Armenianness in his art was so obvious. 1 This article has previously been published in: Demerdijan, A. (Ed.), The Armenian Genocide Legacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2016). Pp. 255-272. 2 Nouritza Matossian is the author of the book Black Angel: A Life of Arshile Gorky (London: Pimlico. 2001), and I first met her in February 2003 during a symposium at the Armenian embassy in London. Nouritza gave me permission to use her first and last name. All other names in my research are pseudonyms. 3 Most Armenian surnames end with '-ian', which means “daughter/son of father”. 112 I had heard other informants speak about Gorky in similar ways. One of them, known as Sushan, went a step further: “He symbolizes everything we lost, Anthonie.” This was another comment I had heard before and they gave me an insight into what Geertz considered as the webs of meaning: [M]an is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take cultures to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.4 The implication is that “culture”, as we often presume in day-to-day dialogue, is not something fixed beyond the boundaries of our sphere of influence, but is fluid. We construct culture over and over again, through dialogue, through narratives, through interpretations that we confirm; we thereby solidify the world around us. My informants’ narratives were ridden with comments about “loss” and “identity”, but also “strength”. How could these be placed within the cultural narratives they constructed about themselves and their past? And how could these narratives be connected to the collective experience of the Armenian Catastrophe? In this chapter I explore how descendants of survivors of the Armenian Genocide in the Netherlands and London give meaning to their collective history, examining how they encapsulate the genocidal violence in their narratives, what cultural meaning they derive from the violence and how internalized this violence remains in their sense of “identity”. Adopting a dual approach, I first discuss the nature of genocidal violence as a symbolic construct of genocidal intent and argue that genocidal violence has specific cultural expression and meaning. Secondly, I use ethnographic data I have compiled to analyze how the meaning of violence can be internalized and can be used as “empowerment” by the victimized group in question. This chapter is concerned with explorations of meaning and not facts, and fits within Kidron’s search for “narrative truths”.5 It is therefore not a closed• off research field, but contains what van de Port labels “cracks”: “I favour stories with cracks ... texts where you can still find the remains, the greasy edges of crumbs of other, untold stories, other possible 4 Geertz, C. The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books. 1973.) 5. 5 Kidron, C. A. “Towards an Ethnography of Silence: The Lived Presence of the Past in the Everyday Life of Holocaust Trauma Survivors and their Descendants in Israel”. Current Anthropology, Vol. 50 (1). (2009). 113 kinds of arrangement, other possible claims.”6 These are my arrangements, my claims on how my Armenian informants construct their history. An anthropological approach to genocide In this section I will explore genocide not only as a physical act, but also as a cultural narrative and a symbolic act through which the Ottomans tried to construct a new national “Self” by destroying an “Other”. As Appadurai puts it: “[perpetrators] establish the parameters of this otherness, taking the body apart, so to speak, [is] to divine the enemy within.”7 In this sense, killing is the ultimate power: it solidifies the existence of the dominant culture group. By killing they show their supreme dominance over the social, national, geographical (the nation state) and even the historical body. The mechanisms of “Othering” and Staub’s “self-concept” are instructive in this respect.8 Othering and selfing and the protection of the self-concept Genocide occurs when the self-concept of the dominant culture group is imagined to be in danger. It is in these instances, during a political or a financial crisis, where the dominant culture group will try to formulate the boundaries of their identity, or in some instances, create a new identity through the process of Othering.9 Genocide is therefore a highly symbolic form of warfare. The intent behind it aims not at conquering a country, gaining access to resources, repressing a population or meeting specific political or militaristic goals. Genocide is first and foremost the destruction of an identity.10 To grasp this, it is necessary to describe the perpetrators’ mindset11 based on 6 Van de Port, M. Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild: Civilisation and its Discontents in a Serbian Town (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 1998). 27. 7 Appadurai, A. “Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization”, Public Culture, Vol. 10(2). (1998). 233-234 [emphasis added]. 8 For the importance of the self-concept see Staub, E. The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1989). 15. 9 Hinton claims: “Genocides are distinguished by a process of “othering” in which the boundaries of an imagined community are reshaped in such a manner that a previously “included" group” (albeit often included only tangentially) is ideologically recast (almost always in dehumanizing rhetoric) as being outside the community, as a threatening and dangerous “other” - whether racial, political, ethnic, religious, economic, and so on - that must be annihilated.” “The Dark Side of Modernity: Toward an Anthropology of Genocide”. In: Hinton, A. L. Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press. 2002). 6. 10 See also regarding cultural genocide in: Kebranian, N. “Cultural Heritage and the Denial of Genocide Law”. In: Demirdjian, A. (ed.) The Armenian Legacy. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2016). 243-254. 11 See on genocidal intent, Robertson, G. “Armenia and the G-word” and Travis, H. “Counterinsurgency as Genocidal Intent: From the Ottoman Christians to the Bosnian Muslims”. In: Demirdjian, A. (ed.) The Armenian Legacy. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2016). 114 concepts of “identity”, “purity” and “safety”.12 The destructiveness of genocide lies in the sociale imaginaire:13 a complex network of ideas, imagery, values and symbols. Or as Semelin puts it: “Identity supplies the framework within which the process of violence will take shape.”14 When the self-concept is imagined to be in danger, the dominant cultural group will act to safeguard it.
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