Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir

This chapter jumps to college (Bucknell University), where Peter still plays football and now writes to his father about his classes, political theory, and current events. One day Gerard sends along an article about the Soviet Armenian Republic and Armenia’s tragic but proud history of survival against all odds, a topic which, his father says, “time and circumstance have not allowed [him] to talk about” (122).

The abrupt reappearance of Armenia in Peter’s immediate world jars him and he once again feels angry about the cloud of secrecy that had always surrounded this topic, suddenly lifted without warning or explanation. Peter doesn’t answer the letter and doesn’t speak to his father about it.

The incident makes Peter recall a moment from a father-son cross-country vacation in which his father approached an American Indian dressed in regalia in South Dakota and strike up a conversation about homelands and forced expulsion, which mystified Peter. He reflects that afterwards, “Nothing was said about the Sioux chief, about homelands, about what Armenians and Indians had in common” (124). This was yet another moment in which Peter got only the briefest glimpse of what it meant to be Armenian but received no elaboration whatsoever. These tallied moments of confusion in Peter’s childhood lead him to have his angry reaction to his father’s overdue statement about Armenian history. The two had never developed a rapport regarding Armenia in which they could truly exchange information and questions. Though the letter represents a first attempt at such a conversation, Peter does not know how to confront it. 

By Peter’s junior year at Bucknell, “poetry [has] replaced football in [his] life” (127) and he begins pursuing his passion for words in earnest.

He invites the poet Allen Ginsberg to speak at his University. Ginsberg comes and strikes up a friendship with Arax, who visits her alma mater to impress the poet and bring dinner for her son and his friends. Ginsberg’s recitations and musical performance mirror the free love and forceful protest of the larger Vietnam War era. The audience thins as hours of vulgar language and gestures go by, but just when Peter is near the breaking point of shame and embarrassment (particularly because his mother is sitting in the remaining audience), Ginsberg reads “Kaddish,” a sad poem about the poet’s mother that makes Peter weep.

Ginsberg’s visit continues back at Peter’s apartment. Arax insults Peter’s girlfriend, Charlene, but he does not retort. He expected this condemnation, because Charlene, though smart and kind, is not Armenian and does not behave in particular ways that a strict Armenian mother would deem appropriate for her eldest son.

Peter quietly exits the apartment to spend the night at Charlene’s and gives his room to the visiting poet and his male friend. In the morning, Mrs. Balakian walks into her son’s room and finds the two men in bed and Peter nowhere in the house. Though she screams, flees the apartment, and immediately drives home, she calls her son later to rave about the whole event, insists that Peter invite the poet to dinner in New Jersey, and requests that he bring home several copies of “Kaddish.” She tells her son, “In some ways it’s about Armenia, too” (133). The author recognizes the significance of the sentiment, recognizes that he and his mother shared an emotional reaction to that poem, but he is too mad about her harsh judgement of Charlene to acknowledge these thoughts out loud. He says, “That’s good […] See you at graduation” (133), and hangs up the phone.

This short chapter ruminates on Peter’s Auntie Anna Balakian. She speaks about surrealism in a lecture at Bucknell and talks regularly with Peter about his poetry as he begins publishing in literary magazines and teaching at a local high school.

The two appreciate different literary traditions in poetry. Peter had long known of his aunt’s affinity for the French surrealists and her disdain for the trappings of modern American life (symbolized by the suburbs). That disdain extends to American poets, who she views as narrators instead of deep thinkers. She touts the work of her friend, Anaïs Nin, as “the heir to the Surrealist tradition” (135), but Peter finds the work “un-ironic and self-indulgent” (136). He appreciates the American tradition that engages with “the harsh realities of the century” (135).

Auntie Anna calls Nin a “‘princess in Byzantium’” by virtue of her surrealist vision, but Peter reflects on Auntie Anna as a true woman of Byzantium, born the year that the Turkish government launched a genocide against Armenians. He suspects that “when it came to poetry, she hadn’t really come to America, and that her exiled soul was part of the historical trauma of the Armenian diaspora” (137). Peter flags that he will eventually unfold “something of the bigger picture” (137), but for the time being, still wrestles with these divisions of Armenian and American, ancient and modern. Since he still does not understand his family’s history, he cannot reconcile the various faces of his relatives that he experiences.

Peter meets the renowned Armenian-American novelist/poet William Saroyan at his Aunt Nona’s place in Manhattan. Peter describes Saroyan as “a flamboyant autodidact […] Armenian peasant as American iconoclast,” and also says he is “not sure whether Saroyan is an old kook or a prophet” (140). Saroyan advises Peter to buy an old-fashioned typewriter because they have a magical energy built into them. Peter buys one, hates it, and throws it away.

They all assemble at Aunt Nona’s again a few years later, when she forces Peter to read one of his poems. He does so after midnight and several glasses of wine. Saroyan is complementary but quickly redirects the conversation following the reading to be about his own career, which Peter describes as both “frenetic” and “sad” (142). It is clear that the two poets cannot truly relate to one another.

The rest of the chapter is about Aunt Nona herself. She regularly hosts dinner parties with famous authors because she is a literary critic with a lifelong love of books. Hunched and petite from an illness-induced spinal disfigurement, she learned through homeschooling until she attended prep school, college, and graduate school in New York City in the 1930s and 40s. When her good friend Saroyan dies, she dreams that they are chatting about figs and apples and America when he transforms into “a big owl-like bird with a great white walrus mustache,” just like the one he had in life (145). She compares all displaced Armenians to owls, “flying in the dark” and imagining new open spaces and possibilities for themselves (145). 

In this chapter, Peter directly addresses his pursuit of the history of the Armenian Genocide in his young adulthood. One morning before he leaves for his teaching job, his mother calls him to invite him to a memorial service for the 10th anniversary of Nafina’s death. He refuses to go because he has weekend plans with his girlfriend, who Arax angrily calls a “stranger” who “means nothing” to anyone in the family (146).

After skipping the service and spending the weekend in Boston, Peter writes a poem called “Words for my Grandmother.” It comes out of him “like a quiet rush of something pent up” (149). It is in this lonely, guilty moment that his “grandmother [comes] back to [him] for the first time in years” (149). Peter is surprised to see certain images in his own writing, images that had sprung to his mind before he processed them: a “half-confessed past,” “the arid Turkish plain” (149). These images bring him closer than ever to the details of his family’s past, a story that he still does not know in much detail, and one to which he still has not conceptualized his own relationship. This poem represents a gateway to Peter’s exploration of that story as a 23-year-old.