In the following pages I analyze how
American medical doctor Mabel Elliott’s discursive choices in her chronicle Beginning Again at Ararat (1924)
domesticate—i.e., formulate in domestic terms and ideologies—the experience of
the Armenian genocide. I juxtapose her domesticating translation of testimonies
to Ottoman-Armenian novelist Zabel Yesayan’s foreignizing method of verbal
translation in Among the Ruins (1911).
Accounts from the Scutari Rescue Home
Published by the Fleming H. Revell Company in 1924, Elliott’s Beginning Again at Ararat is a first-hand account of the Kemalist
war, the siege of Marash, and Elliott’s exodus with thousands of Ottoman
Armenians to Soviet Armenia in 1921, where she helped set up hospitals and
orphanages. It is an account of a selfless physician who, at the risk of losing
her own life, helped save thousands of lives from destruction and played a
critical role in rebuilding the lives of orphan children. While Beginning Again has been an important
source for understanding the extent of devastation and amount of relief work
involved in saving the victims of the genocide, the account is channeled
through American missionary discourse that constructs a mythical “Orient” and
an equally illusive “America.”
Framed as an Homeric odyssey, Elliott’s
narrative is first introduced by the Commissioner for the American
Red Cross, John H. Finley,
as a “story of wandering and suffering after a world war” (4), in which World War I is compared to the Trojan war, and
the exiles from Asia Minor to Odysseus. Finley makes use of these epic images
in order to introduce something foreign to the reader through familiar textual
signs: the reality of the modern “tragic story” that unfolds in Beginning Again is contrasted against
the fictional “halls of Circe” and the ancient “caves of Calypso.” Despite the
egregious differences between the picaresque
adventures
of Odysseus and the forced marches of the Armenians, the readers are
nonetheless prompted to think in parallel terms, and the real experience is immediately
mapped onto the register of fiction, i.e., a fantastical adventure with
fictional characters happening in an inconceivably distant place. Furthermore,
the introduction (as well as the narrative itself) is replete with references
from another canonical text—the Bible. Using coded language in the wartime
period was by no means unusual, as most correspondences, especially those of
the foreign missionaries stationed in Turkey, were censored by the Turkish
government. To subvert the constraints of censorship, missionaries devised
strategies to improve communication with the outside world. According to Susan
Billington Harper, they utilized “references to past experiences and to
commonly recognized biblical and literary figures in order to pass news of death
to worried friends outside” (225). However once the persecutions became more
systematic and large-scale, cryptic language used in the chaotic days leading
up to the deportation was abandoned. By 1919, as Harper explains, descriptions
of the events “no longer allow much ambiguity as to the genocidal plan and
purpose behind the deportations” (234). So the references employed in Beginning Again were subordinated to a
different kind of ideological “censorship,” one that perhaps was consistent
with the expectations of the American publisher that functioned within the framework
of calculated pragmatism and evangelical propaganda.
Following Finley’s introduction, Grace N. Kimball, then President of the
Medical Women’s National Association, contributed a “Note of Appreciation,” in
which she compares Mabel Elliott
to another celebrated figure, the English nurse and writer Florence
Nightingale, who, like Elliott, wrote the annals of a war—the Crimean war in
Nightingale’s case. Again, the realities of Ottoman Armenians, three-fourths of
whom had been decimated by 1924, were historically and politically different
from the realities of the wounded British soldiers of the Crimean war (1853-56). Elliott’s
mission might have been more aptly compared to the work of her compatriot Clara
Barton, who had traveled to the Ottoman Empire in 1896 as part of the first
American International Red Cross campaign to aid the Armenian survivors of the
Hamidian massacres. This would have been only reasonable, because Kimball
herself had been a missionary physician in the Armenian quarter of Van in
Turkey during the Hamidian massacres and was part of the American relief
network. But oddly, neither Kimball’s work in Van, nor Clara Barton’s campaign
are ever mentioned in Beginning Again.
One of the reasons for this bizarre omission might be that Beginning Again was written at a time when the trials of the
Ittihadist leaders responsible for the Armenian massacres had been abandoned,
the Allied forces, faced with the Kemalist takeover of Turkey, had resigned,
the Mandate for Armenia had failed, and it became politically and economically advantageous
to redirect the focus from the massacres to reconstruction, especially at a
time when the United States was starting a new foreign policy geared to promoting
American business interests in the Eastern Mediterranean region.
The comparative
gestures in the prefatory notes, as innocent as they might seem, construct the
landscape or what Andre Lefevere has called the “conceptual and textual grids”
of the text:
An educated
member of any culture in the West, for instance (as we might describe someone
who has more or less successfully survived the socialization process), will
know that certain texts are supposed to contain certain markers designed to
elicit certain reactions on the reader’s part, and that the success of
communication depends on both the writer and the reader of the text agreeing to
play their assigned parts in connection with those markers. The writer is
supposed to put them in, the reader is supposed to recognize them. (“Composing
the Other” 76)
The
markers that construct the textual grid of Elliott’s narrative are derived from
the Western canon and anything outside of this grid is relegated to the
foreign, which is always constructed in relation to the domestic or the
familiar and, according to Rebecca Saunders, is “outside of proper meaning”
(“Agony and Allegory” 219). Banishing atrocities from the boundaries of the
familiar, Elliott constructs the events and anything connected to those events
as “unfamiliar, uncanny, unnatural, unauthorized, incomprehensible, inappropriate,
improper” (Saunders, “Agony and
Allegory” 218). The conceptual grid, producing the realities of Armenian
survivors after the armistice, further constructs the stage of action as a
foreign place, as suggested by the title of Elliott’s second chapter, “Asia the
Incomprehensible.” The chapter opens with a description of the domes and
minarets of Constantinople “left behind in Europe” and Elliott’s arrival in Scutari, the “large Asiatic suburb of
Constantinople, which nonetheless appears less Asiatic than the city of which
it is a suburb” (20). And yet it was in Scutari, Elliott continues, “in the
antiseptic cleanliness of a modern operating room, that I was given my first glimpse
of Asia, the real Asia, beneath its outward colour” (20). Here, in the Scutari Rescue Home,
Elliott, as Medical Director of the Near East Relief, was to examine and treat
one hundred and fifty Armenian girls rescued from Turkish harems by the British
forces. As she spent hours upon hours listening to the survivors and helping
them verbalize their experiences, Elliott recorded some of the testimonies in
her book, sometimes quoting directly, at other times paraphrasing, and making
observations:
The things that I heard were
unbelievable. A doctor sees more deeply into the abysses of human society than
any other person except a priest, but I know only America. This was Asia, strange, bestial, incomprehensible.
It was my first personal encounter with such things—the things that human
beings can do, carelessly, without rancour, laughing, to other human beings. .
. . We cannot grasp it, for there is no reason in it; the facts those girls
told were like revelations of the mind of
a madman” (my emphasis, 21-22, 24).
My
inquiry here is not about what the survivors told Elliott, as it would be quite
impossible to recover the original (oral) interviews in Elliott’s consultation
room, but rather how Elliott transcribed the testimonies, the kinds of cultural
markers she employed to form the conceptual and textual grids of Beginning Again. In the above passage
and elsewhere, Elliott rather explicitly constructs a discourse that separates the similar from the
dissimilar, the familiar from the foreign, the orderly from the chaotic,
consistently treating foreignness as a deviation needing regulation, a terrain
needing domestication. The conflation of Asia with strangeness, bestiality, and
incomprehensibility affixes a negative marker onto the entire geographic
region, thus designating it as beyond the “proper” Western mind, and at the
same time erases the difference between the victims and their executioners
because they both inhabit the region. In various parts of the narrative,
Western values or worldviews (“the Western world of stenographers’ reports and
way bills seemed to me more romantic”)
are consistently juxtaposed against Eastern ones (“than the East
with its camel caravans and blue bead charms against the Evil Eye” 219). Not only were these stories of the
girls from the Scutari Rescue Home “strange” in their taking “for granted a
mingling of patriarchal laws and anarchy” that were “as foreign to our life as
some story of conditions on Mars” (32), but “these people of Asia Minor” took
for granted “a world of religious and racial hatreds” (33), something that
Elliott claimed was alien to her society: “without thinking of it or
questioning it, we take for granted an orderly organization of society with its
mixing of many races in our cities and on our unguarded farms, arrival of
letters, ringing of the telephone, church services of many creeds on peaceful
Sunday mornings” (33-34). These portrayals of a contented, harmonious American
society were, of course, illusory. They masked both the racial divisions of the
era and functioned as propaganda to solidify a particular vision of both “the
Orient” and “America.” The misleading references to a uniform society effaced
the lived experiences of black Americans, for example, who, during the
Progressive Era, especially after the passage of Jim Crow laws and the
emergence of the second Klan in 1915, had been systematically suffering
racially motivated persecutions and, as a result, migrating en masse to the North only to encounter
unimaginable tensions with European immigrants. While showing the absolute
madness provoked by the “Armenian policy” of the Ittihadist regime, Elliott’s
comparison below further marks anything associated with “butchery” as opposed
to “our minds”:
We read of
wholesale massacre ordered by a government, and whatever our horror, our minds
picture something like an orderly butchery. But there was no organization, no
orderliness, in Turkey; all the passions and policies and hatreds of millions
of human beings were turned loose, unrestrained. (24)
Even
so, Elliott goes on to tell the story of one of her patients, whose eye had
been surgically mutilated by a Turkish doctor in order to punish and subdue
her. The account, which Elliott repeats in shock, not only contradicts her
construction of a “disorderly” butchery, but in fact testifies to the
meticulousness and modernity of these atrocities. Elliott obviously condemns
the Turkish “barbarities,” but she draws on the familiar and widely accepted
discourse on “the Orient” as the place of the “unrestrained” and symptomatically
depicts American society as ordered, dispassionate, restrained, and immune to
“butchery.” Apparently Elliott’s familiarity with segregation and racially
motivated crimes in the United States had become so naturalized that her
perception of racism at home had lost its palpability. “As for me,” Elliott
writes, “I could hear their stories only objectively; I had not yet seen
massacre or slavery, and I could not remember to take for granted, as these
girls did, that slavery and massacre are part of the normal scheme of things, like thunderstorms” (emphasis mine, 31).
And yet none of these experiences were
“normal” or “natural” for the girls at the Scutari Home, because as Elliott’s
records make clear, the trauma of the girls was manifested in erratic, dissociative,
apparently “mad” behavior, as “for the first time their reticence was
disturbed, necessarily, by professional questions, and when they had begun to
speak it was as though they could not stop” (21). Describing the “temperament”
of the girls as they testified to the terrors they had gone through, Elliott
notes how “[s]ome sat quietly, with folded hands, talking on and on in a low
voice, growing whiter and whiter until there was no blood in their lips,” while
“[o]thers became excited, little by little lost their self-control, and ended
screaming and sobbing” (22). Clearly, in their testimonies, the girls from the
Scutari Home were reliving the traumatic events in
the act of retelling and were possessed by the past, which according to LaCapra
is the most difficult part of testimony for the survivor, the interviewer, and
the audience of testimonies (97). The
ethnographic language, however, that Elliott employs to record and also speak for her patients transmits an
objectively controlled voice, which in its attempt to represent traumatic
experience disciplines and, to an extent, erases the “madness” of the
occurrences. Elliott’s translation of the catastrophe enlisted the catastrophe
to maintain the familiar textual and conceptual grids of the target-language
culture, and as a result, largely lost the meaning of the new and unrestrained
terror lurking in both the original trauma and the testimonies of those who
experienced it.
The Ellipsis in Zabel Yesayan
Writing approximately a decade before
Elliott, Ottoman-Armenian writer Zabel Yesayan, who, incidentally, was born in
Scutari, produced perhaps one of the most compelling narratives on the Armenian
massacres in Cilicia before the eruption of World War I, which she titled Averagnerun mech [Among the Ruins, 1911].
In June 1909, Yesayan traveled to Cilicia as a member of a delegation sent by
the Armenian Patriarchate in Constantinople to bear witness to the destruction,
assess the losses, and provide immediate material aid to the survivors. As
Rubina Peroomian notes in Literary Responses to Catastrophe, the literature of catastrophe produced
by Yesayan was far removed from her earlier works, which were predominantly
works of fiction. Like Elliot’s Beginning
Again, Yesayan’s Among the Ruins
is a first-person account that incorporates survivor testimony taken in the
form of interviews, and provides the reader with comments and observations.
However, as the title suggests, the tone of Yesayan’s narrative is somber, yet
charged with emotion, echoing back as if from the ruins of Armenian homes and
churches and the human remnants that she encounters in Cilicia in the aftermath
of the massacres. Yesayan too invokes the concept of foreignness, but here it
functions as an estrangement from herself and, in a larger sense—a humanity
that has become bereft of its own humanity, a citizenry bereft of empathy. She
writes in the preface: “My task then is to let all our people, as well as our
[Turkish] compatriots, who have remained strangers to our intuition and our
pain, partake in [haghordakits ēnel] the infinite suffering through which I lived during these
three dark months” (8).
In other words, she is suggesting here that reconciliation between Armenians
and Turks can take place only through the recognition of the trauma caused by
what she calls “the catastrophe” and through a joint effort at mourning.
However, she signals in the preface and throughout the book that mourning seems
impossible as she bears witness to and is confronted with “the perverse gaze of
the criminals who remain unpunished” (7). This is the criminal gaze that
refutes trauma and retards the processes of mourning through nonrecognition of
grief. As according to Herman, “[a]fter every atrocity one can expect to hear
the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim
exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to
forget the past and move on” (8). Ironically, Yesayan was only writing of the Cilician massacres, the
atrocities of which would repeat after the publication of her book on a much
larger scale and more methodically between 1915 and 1923, and which Elliot
would record. The proximity and modernity of the place of catastrophe in
Yesayan are in sharp contrast to the conceptually remote and historically
antiquated “Asia” in Elliott. While Beginning
Again keeps the reader at a comfortable distance, Among the Ruins moves the reader closer to the foreignness of the
occurrences and trauma itself. Employing a “foreignizing” method of translation,
Yesayan abstains from familiar references or practices, starting with the very
genre of the text. She abandons fiction in order to explore a new terrain that
is foreign to her—the realm of nonfiction.
The first
chapter, titled “To Cilicia,” opens with a description of the night before the
delegation’s arrival at Mersin: “The more we approached the threshold of
catastrophe, the more reality escaped my perception and I earnestly couldn’t
believe that tomorrow morning we would arrive in Mersin. Adana . . . Cilicia .
. . ! For weeks those names had been lodged in a corner of our mind—there was
an open wound and when you touched it, your whole being shuddered with a
throbbing pain” (10). Besides being the literal translation of the Greek word τραῦμα, the trope of the
wound invokes Freud’s conception of psychical trauma as a Kränkung, an injury, mortification—“a foreign body” within one’s
mind. The opening in Yesayan’s testimony is suggestive of an arrival, which
strangely resembles a flight from a
traumatic landscape, a desire to postpone the witnessing of the catastrophe,
and hence a deferment of the encounter with catastrophe itself. For the
descriptions that follow this statement are nothing if not uncanny in the
Freudian sense—Yesayan is filled both with an “impatience” (11) to see and
witness the ruins after the catastrophe and a foreboding horror, which she
paradoxically anticipates, as though it were something already familiar. For
her, Cilicia, former home to many Armenians, has now acquired a new quality of
unhomeliness: in the literal sense—their homes have been destroyed, their
families have been murdered, and figuratively—the name Cilicia is now
metonymically associated with trauma. Yesayan’s ambivalent anticipation of her
encounter with the survivors, who had suffered unspeakable atrocities, is also
conditioned by a presentiment of the inevitability, indeed, impossibility of
escaping from the catastrophe that would engulf all of Anatolia in 1915.
One of the most
striking features of Yesayan’s text is
how it is marked and repetitively interrupted by ellipses, especially in parts
where the subject matter becomes too overwhelming to translate into language.
Structurally, the ellipses function on three levels: first, they reproduce the
linguistic paralysis of the interviewees, whose accounts Yesayan quotes
directly: “We laid his little body on this very table . . . it was completely
unrecognizable from the injuries, but the mother recognized it . . . gazing,
perplexed and bewildered, at her child . . .” (49). Second, they are employed
by Yesayan the narrator to describe the emotions of others: “She fell silent
for a moment and her lips twisted in a peculiar grimace . . . indescribable
memories were passing through her mind . . .” (49). And finally, they are used
by Yesayan the witness to express her own overwhelming emotion: “And feeling
shame when thinking of those who are loved and happy in the world, as if
blaming myself for the sorrow of this child, I wept, gripped by an inconsolable
pain . . .” (67). Page after page the ellipses repeat, afflicting and
disrupting the sentences with omissions, deficient utterances, caesuras, in other words, testifying to the
inadequacy of language to translate affect and to reconstruct the experience of
trauma.
From time to time Yesayan returns to the
pervasive gaze of shamelessness of those who had committed the crimes and the
shame of the survivors who were called to testify to their own dehumanization.
In The Historiographic Perversion,
Marc Nichanian analyzes testimony as the confession of shame, proposing that
“shame itself is its own testimony” (118). Here too one is confronted with
strangeness, a strange emotion, when one is asked to reveal a wound, to show it
in public: “One can try to say of what one is ashamed, but shame itself, how
could one say it, communicate it verbally? It can come to the surface in the
form of a blushing, a terror. It can invade me, seize me, no longer leave me”
(Nichanian 118). Yesayan describes such a scene in her fourth chapter on the
orphans, in which she narrates her encounter with an eight-year old girl who
had undergone a "monstrous" experience. Feeling utterly “bewildered and shamed,” Yesayan holds the
child’s hand “without asking any questions” (41). Asking the girl for a
testimony for Yesayan is “something as monstrous as complicity in the crime”
(41). The discourse of testimony, as Nichanian argues, is the discourse of the
executioner defying the victim to prove her trauma, over and over again, only
to refute it. The witness in Yesayan declares that we cannot exclude her from
humanity and from truth if she cannot produce words to testify; there is no
need to repeat the details, one only need to look into the eyes of the child to
see her trauma:
Oh, the slight, pain stricken . . . forsaken
creature! Where in that little body had the terrible sorrow made its nest? How
her muscles were still throbbing, nerve by nerve, with revolt at the abuse that
she had suffered . . .
A stupefying heat surged into my brain.
—Mother
. . ! Mother . . !
Was it her, who enunciated that supreme
call, like the other orphans, who often sought their mothers when they were in
pain or homesick? Or was it my voice uttering those words? I do not know. I
took her in my arms, rocking her weightless body on my knees, so that in my
frantic sorrow, she might at least momentarily forget her own, forget herself .
. . (43-44)
The
testimony of the girl is literally inaudible and illegible here. Yesayan breaks
the boundaries between self and other in order to step outside of herself and
to show unconditional empathy in an instance of what Kaja Silverman, following
Max Scheler, has called “heteropathic identification” (The
Threshold of the Visible World
Silverman 22). In this
shared moment of solemnity, Yesayan offers her own voice to mourn for the
girl’s loss, so “she might at least momentarily forget” that which is
impossible to describe or transcribe. Yesayan, in other words, testifies to the
impossibility of testifying in language. She does not attempt to bridge the gap
between the experience and language, and in fact reinforces or signals that gap
by the excess of ellipses—the nonverbal manifestations of trauma that impede
the flow of the narrative. This excess betrays the difficulty or impossibility
of verbal translation, marking a limit that has been reached in language.
Perhaps it is due to this “inappropriateness” of excess that the ellipses have
mostly been removed in Geoffrey M. Goshgarian’s English translation of the three chapters that
appear in Nichanian’s Writers of Disaster.
The eighteen ellipses in Chapter 2, “Among the Ruins,” have been reduced to a
mere six; the thirty-five ellipses in Chapter 3, “The Church Service,” are cut
down to a mere five; while out of a hundred and sixty ellipses in Chapter 4,
“The Orphans,” a mere thirty-eight remain.
The
ellipses in Yesayan act as the brittle line between the moment and its
deferral, the rational and nonrational, human and nonhuman, living and nonliving,
crossed and re-crossed by those who perpetrated the crimes and those who
suffered them. The mad frenzy of the uniformed and disciplined Turkish soldiers
who used their bayonets to mutilate the bodies of the dead is juxtaposed
against the madness of mothers who murdered their own children to save them
from the bayonets. The bestiality of the executioners is juxtaposed against the
reduction of victims to the state of animals. The life granted to a group of
orphans under the care of foreign missionaries is juxtaposed against the
deathliness of those very same children. By marking this line, Yesayan
articulates the madness brought by the “Armenian policy”—the policy to
exterminate members of a group regardless of their age, gender, or political
affiliation. This madness is total, it invades, it cannot be contained or
quarantined, it affects the victim and witness alike, as in the case of
Yesayan’s experience in the presence of the eight-year-old survivor.
The discourse
of madness is consistently present in all testimonies, if only as something
nonliteral, nonverbal, and always improper as Yesayan’s ellipses that thwart
the linear progression and continuity of the narrative. In her translation of
the catastrophe, Yesayan catalyzes her own foreignness in the language that she
writes by the very choice of a genre that is not her own and she foreignizes
expository language by the use of the ellipsis as a main trope—the image of the
unspeakable.
