I missed that yesterday was the international commemoration of the Armenian genocide. I was reminded by a post noting that the United States of America does not officially recognize the organized extermination of a million and a half human beings for the sake of their ethnicity as genocide these days, even though in the 1950's it was held up as one of the archetypal examples and there was plenty of American eyewitness and outcry at the time. I always heard it described as a genocide myself.
The other week I was re-reading Otto Penzler's The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (2010) and found myself really struck by William Campbell Gault's "The Bloody Bokhara" (1948), a tale of antiques and double-crosses set in the oriental rug trade in Milwaukee—narrated not by a detective, a policeman, or even a buyer, but by first-generation Armenian-American Levon "Lee" Kaprelian, being raised in the rug business by his immigrant parents. As far as I can judge, it's good writing-the-other. Instead of exotic local color, Lee's world of pilaf and appraisals and spring dances at the Junior League of the AGBU is the ordinary, working-class one suddenly invaded by a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl with a secret, a four-hundred-year-old carpet potentially woven by a Persian master, and threatening strangers who drag with them ghosts of the old world, the one that Lee's parents and their beloved, competitive cousin fled a decade before Lee was born: their families died there. The story is so matter-of-fact about the Armenian genocide that it shocked me; at one point Lee witnesses a confrontation between his father and his father's cousin and one of the aforementioned strangers that leaves everyone alive but his father trembling with anger and trauma, having had to order out of his shop in safe, free America a man of the age and nationality to have been a perpetrator of the genocide he survived as a young man, who more than two decades later addresses him with the contempt of one. "His mind, I would guess, was back in Sivas, under the Turks." Is it a major piece of the story? No, but it's a major piece of the history of the Armenian diaspora, so it's there and it's acknowledged. Otherwise, when Lee who gets told he looks like Tyrone Power enters an apartment and hears Khatchaturian's "Sabre Dance" on the record player, he feels a little set up. He lives in America.
Anyway, in 1948 an American pulp writer could feel confident that his readership would know about the Armenian genocide; it's weird to me that my country doesn't recognize it, even if the state I live in does. It's not just a nicety of language, it's a form of denial not to name it. How you speak of people's deaths matters. These things feel even more important now.
The other week I was re-reading Otto Penzler's The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (2010) and found myself really struck by William Campbell Gault's "The Bloody Bokhara" (1948), a tale of antiques and double-crosses set in the oriental rug trade in Milwaukee—narrated not by a detective, a policeman, or even a buyer, but by first-generation Armenian-American Levon "Lee" Kaprelian, being raised in the rug business by his immigrant parents. As far as I can judge, it's good writing-the-other. Instead of exotic local color, Lee's world of pilaf and appraisals and spring dances at the Junior League of the AGBU is the ordinary, working-class one suddenly invaded by a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl with a secret, a four-hundred-year-old carpet potentially woven by a Persian master, and threatening strangers who drag with them ghosts of the old world, the one that Lee's parents and their beloved, competitive cousin fled a decade before Lee was born: their families died there. The story is so matter-of-fact about the Armenian genocide that it shocked me; at one point Lee witnesses a confrontation between his father and his father's cousin and one of the aforementioned strangers that leaves everyone alive but his father trembling with anger and trauma, having had to order out of his shop in safe, free America a man of the age and nationality to have been a perpetrator of the genocide he survived as a young man, who more than two decades later addresses him with the contempt of one. "His mind, I would guess, was back in Sivas, under the Turks." Is it a major piece of the story? No, but it's a major piece of the history of the Armenian diaspora, so it's there and it's acknowledged. Otherwise, when Lee who gets told he looks like Tyrone Power enters an apartment and hears Khatchaturian's "Sabre Dance" on the record player, he feels a little set up. He lives in America.
Anyway, in 1948 an American pulp writer could feel confident that his readership would know about the Armenian genocide; it's weird to me that my country doesn't recognize it, even if the state I live in does. It's not just a nicety of language, it's a form of denial not to name it. How you speak of people's deaths matters. These things feel even more important now.
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