In the Architecture of Bone
Alan Semerdjian
GenPop Books
ISBN-10 Number: 0982359403
ISBN-13 Number: 9780982359402

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft


          Right before the Nazi army invaded Poland in 1939, Adolph Hitler made the following, chilling remark: “Who remembers the Armenians?” He referred not to the people themselves, but to a campaign of deportation, torture, starvation, and extermination carried out against them between 1915 and 1918 (and again between 1920 and 1923) by the Ottoman Empire’s Young Turk government—a campaign that also employed concentration camps. Overall, they murdered an estimated 1.5 million Armenians. At the outbreak of WW I, roughly 2 million Armenians (or perhaps as many as 2.5 million) lived in the Ottoman Empire.

          Appallingly, during and after the war, the United States and Europe’s most powerful nations—then England, Russia, France, Germany, and Austria—made no move to stop the genocide, or even to mandate reparations after 1918; this, despite reports from officials that the Young Turks were carrying out an extermination campaign, and humanitarian efforts to care for the infants and children the genocide made orphans.

          Naturally, Hitler remembered not only these atrocities but also the world’s tepid response in their wake. Indeed, some scholars have argued that he directly based his Final Solution upon the Empire’s campaign and knew he would be successful because of the international community’s cowardice and timidity. At least initially, his theory was accurate.

          Much of the world today, however, lacks Hitler’s memory. For example, the Armenian genocide is not taught in the U.S.’s public schools (indeed, I first learned about it in college, after discovering that I have Armenian heritage and wanting to find out more about my family’s past), and not all nations even recognize that it happened. With the exception of Damad Ferit Pasha’s brief postwar government, no Turkish regime has ever acknowledged the genocide. Indeed, the topic is currently a barrier to Turkey’s bid to enter the European Union.

          I offer this long preamble to my review of Alan Semerdjian’s excellent poetry collection, In the Architecture of Bone, chiefly because of this widespread ignorance and because this book cannot be understood if the reader is unfamiliar, even in passing, with this early modern genocide. Semerdjian’s poetry is, first and foremost, that of the Armenian Diaspora, which still viscerally experiences the aftershocks of this genocide several generations later not only through displacement, but also through the memories that friends, grandparents, and great-grandparents have passed down. (And it is very much a Diaspora: as the quote from Margo True that closes the book states, “Today, more Armenians live outside Armenia than in it.”)

          These are the memories that Semerdjian chronicles painfully, starkly, magnificently in the book’s 110 pages. In “Grandchildren of Genocide,” for example, he calls to mind the images conjured in most U.S. Americans’ minds when we think of the word “genocide” (the death camps and Nazi gas chambers associated with the Holocaust, mainly) and boldly asks us to expand our understanding by examining these images from all sides in much the same way a cubist does. But more on Semerdjian’s indebtedness to cubism later. Note the ingenious use of the word “chambers” not only to mean the gas chambers of concentration camps, but also the limited and limiting mental, linguistic, and imagistic “boxes” into which contemporary people often place the concept of genocide.

We think of chambers when we think of genocide. We think
of people crying. We think of people climbing. We think of
people climbing and crying, crying and climbing. We think of both
people climbing and people crying. We think in chambers.
We think in those horrible chambers when we think of genocide.
Those horrible 20th-Century chambers.

When we think of genocide, we don’t think of mountains and deserts.
We don’t think of bazaars. When we do think of them,
we don’t think of young democratic people and pomegranates.
We don’t think of young democratic people with pomegranates
at bazaars when we think of genocide. We don’t think of them
next to our grandfathers. We don’t think next to them.

          To decode some of this imagery: several of the Armenian genocide’s victims died of starvation and exposure in “relocation” marches through the Syrian desert. The Young Turks were considered, in the terms of the early 20th Century’s political atmosphere, to be politically liberal. The pomegranate is one of Armenia’s culinary staples and also Armenia's national symbol.

          Additionally, several poems in In the Architecture of Bone recount the ways in which the genocide affected Semerdjian’s family and most notably his grandfather (who was, apparently, one of the rescued orphans). In poems such as “Fragments of a Composition with Grandfather,” “Cubism,” and “Three Paintings,” Semerdjian discusses the myriad ways in which the genocide influenced his grandfather’s cubist paintings. Even in poems about the everyday goings-on of an Armenian-American household, such as “The Aerodynamics” and “Dinner Plans,” the shadow of those horrible years hangs like a phantom: “Something/ psychological is missing,” the poet writes. “a recognition/ unattended.”

          In some poems, Semerdjian imagines himself as not only one of the genocide’s survivors, but also one of its victims—in much the same way, I think, as the children and grandchildren of survivors of any atrocity often imagine ourselves in our parents’ and grandparents’ places (it is something, for example, I have done when hearing my Dutch grandparents describe living in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation). In “The Desert of Lasting,” for example, Semerdjian speaks in the voice of an Armenian crossing the Syrian desert:

In this desert of lasting
and whispering storms,
I have lost my voice;
Who will hear my song?

          In “Survivor: Dream for Two Voices” (a poem I doubt I will ever be able to forget), Semerdijan details a poignant conversation between his grandfather and himself, past and present, the Armenian genocide’s survivors and their descendents. To fully appreciate this poem, read the unaltered lines as the first voice and the italicized lines as the second voice (poem reproduced in full).

For my grandfather the word genocide tastes like copper

            everything is elliptical this morning

the alkaline of a battery on the tongue he says

             everything sounds like thunder outside the closed window

likes to reinvent itself but never really goes away

             air in a room sealed shut

where the silence is a vicious blade of memories

             when I listen to his story where I’m

rearing the fabric of the air I’m sitting next to him

             watching it It circles around me

he’s on a sofa in a tapestry outside a dead end in his daughter’s home

             I think I’m crazy I tell my mother I need to see someone

the voices grow louder unimaginable swell the head

             about the voices in my head

but she doesn’t want to believe me either

          Perhaps due to his grandfather’s cubist influence, Semerdjian’s own work is heavily characterized by cubist sensibilities, not only in the desire to look at every image from a number of sides simultaneously (as in the aforementioned “Grandchildren of Genocide”) but also in the tendency to manipulate language to the same effect. The best example of this is the daring poem “Son, Net,” in which the poet discusses how his mother and grandfather perceive his writing in a poem the shape of which is reminiscent not only of a painting’s gilded frame but also the woof and warp of a net. It is impossible to reproduce the poem here because its format requires the reader to turn the book in a square, but it is a most challenging and adventuresome piece, the likes of which I have not seen in even the most experimental collections I have read.

          As one can well imagine, there is often no love lost between Armenians and Turkish people, even in Armenian and Turkish communities outside of Eurasia. While it would be easy and even understandable for an Armenian poet to vilify the people whose ancestors caused so much suffering, in much the same way my own father held an animosity towards Germans until his dying day, Semerdjian bravely tackles this animosity head on—and just as bravely hopes for a way forward. In “History Lesson,” he writes of two lovers, one Turkish and one Armenian, and the linguistic and cultural differences between them in terms both touching and awkward. And poignantly in “How Turkish Coffee Got Its Name,” the poet wishes to bring a pot of a particular drink (called soorj in Armenian) to a Turkish gas station attendant in order to read his fortune in the grounds. In his interactions with the gas station owners, the speaker describes how he speaks more Turkish than they speak Armenian (a fact that is not a courtesy but a survival skill), and a discussion about a book of Turkish poetry the speaker carries leads quickly to references to various places, politics, and aesthetics he and the Turkish owners have in common.

I am also carrying a book of Nazim Hikmet’s
jail poem. After getting out of prison, he wrote,
“This Armenian citizen won’t forgive/his father’s
slaughter in the Kurdish mountains./But he likes
you,/ because you can’t forgive/ those who
blackened the Turkish people’s name.” He wrote
many beautiful poems about many different sub-
jects. He is a famous Turkish poet.

          Although the speaker and the owners share a moment of recognition and perhaps hesitant friendship over Hikmet’s words, it is, of course, not enough to mend the past.

I want to bring coffee here and spend a lot
of time going over the shapes, what will be
inside. Time is an animal afraid of change.
Poetry a circle. A shell. A turtle. An hourglass
on its side. Static folios of sand, a mountain.
I want to bring coffee here, but I’m not sure
what to call it.

          But perhaps this moment is something more substantial than a bandage. It has revealed to the speaker (and maybe the owners as well) that while time fears change and cultural, linguistic, and historical barriers still persist, a future does indeed exist. And, for now, it is unwritten and unscried and as unknown as the speaker’s word for coffee. Therefore, it holds just as much promise as it does doom—after all, the speaker does not say that there is no name for coffee that can be shared between him and the gas station workers, just that he is “not sure” what that name is.

          Semerdjian’s poetry is not only strong in image, line, and form, it is also about an urgent, but customarily unaddressed, issue that affects millions of people daily and which needs attention and careful study in order for any true learning about the prevention of genocide to be achieved. It is a collection that made me tremble and weep not only for the millions of dead, but for my own (so far) unknown ancestors who may be part of that number. Naturally, it is a book that a great deal of Armenian and Armenian-American readers will want to pick up, but I would go one step further. I would recommend that everyone reading this review avail himself or herself of a copy in much the same way that I think Blood to Remember, Charles Fishman’s anthology of American Holocaust Poetry, is a book that all English-speaking readers should study. For until we hear about the effects of genocide from those who have survived it directly or indirectly, we simply cannot understand or work towards redress.