Black Dog Creating a World

Black Dog

Creating a World View from the Black Dog of Fate by Peter Balakian (1998)

Freedom is not simply about doing whatever one chooses. It is about taking responsibility for learning about the condition of the world and what happened to one's ancestors. It is also about using one's freedom and prosperity to help other people during their time of need, even if they live far away, in respect for what one's ancestors have suffered.

In 1915, even before the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust, the Turkish government slaughtered more than a million Armenians. Every time when such an atrocity has become worldwide knowledge, the powers that be shake their heads and say never again. However, much like Peter Balakian, before reading The Black Dog of Fate, a book that chronicles his personal response to the tragedy, people like myself, of my age and demographic, forget such seismic historical events. Then, every time the world witnesses another genocide, in Turkey, in Germany and Eastern Europe, in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in the Sudan, only after it is too late does the world say, never again, again and again -- and again.

Balakian is an Armenian-American. However, while he was growing up, his parents preferred to shut a door on what they considered a shameful memory of the past, rather than explore and explain why such events occurred. After reading The Black Dog of Fate, some of the reasons for this collective desire to forget become clear. Being a victim creates a sense of shame on the part of the sufferers. What did I do to bring this upon me asks a victim, whether the victim of an ordinary, violent street crime, or a mass tragedy? Balakian's relatives did not want to be seen as starving Armenians, any more than modern Chinese or African people might wish to be associated with the mythical 'starving people in China or Africa' that whining preschoolers are told would be happy to eat their rejected greens at the dinner table. But while wishing to be strong is noble, forgetting the past leads to others repeating mistakes of the past in different contexts -- genocides continue to reoccur.

It is this that has proved the most significant lesson of Balakian's work regarding my perception of the world. I will never look at the signs to 'Save Darfur' the same way, after reading The Black Dog of Fate. Like myself, Balakian grew up at a table groaning with plenty, where his relative's past seemed very far away from Tenafly, New Jersey. In America, even after September 11th, it is easy to feel as though old, ethnic tribal memories and conflicts are very far away, when one is living one's daily existence and is obsessed with the day-to-day demands of one's personal life. Balakian came to learn about his family's history, not in some great, single revelation, like might happen in a made-for-TV movie, but slowly, in fits and starts, when he began to piece together some of his grandmother's remarks and began to better understand his relative's native Armenian. Partly motivated by what he learned in college about justice, he asked his family uncomfortable questions about the Armenian Genocide.