Trauma and AIDS Metaphor in Peter Balakian’s Ozone Journal

Trauma and AIDS Metaphor in Ozone Journal

In the title poem, there are ten sections writing about the speaker’s cousin who was diagnosed with AIDS, covering one fifth of its length, but the descriptions of it scatter among the poem. Since the 1980s, AIDS became a new epidemic. Due to the specificity of its transmission routes (especially through sex), the AIDS community is stigmatized and marginalized. Balakian began writing when he was a college student. At the same time, Armenian memory began to engage him since the 1970s, specifically, the history related to the genocide and his grandmother’s survivor experience, which awakened his ethnic consciousness. In the poem, the speaker was uncovering the Armenian bones in Syrian, but his memory wandered back to the 1980s, especially during the AIDS pandemic when he visited his cousin David. The marginalized, excluded and stigmatized AIDS patients formed a metaphorical narrative with the persecuted ethnic Armenians. As Sontag (2009: 89) writes, “that AIDS is not a single illness but a syndrome, consisting of a seemingly open-ended list of contributing or ‘presenting’ illnesses which constitute (that is, qualify the patient as having) the disease, makes it more a product of definition or construction than even a very complex, multiform illness like cancer”. In these ten sections, the poet juxtaposes AIDS and the trauma of Armenian genocide, forming a back-and-forth movement in time and space.

Genocide, as Raphael Lemkin (1946: 228) defined in his article “Genocide”, is “the crime of destroying national, racial or religious group”. One year later he added in another article “Genocide as a Crime under International Law” that “there was envisaged the creation of two new international crimes: the crime of barbarity, consisting in the extermination of racial, religious or social collectives, and the crime of vandalism, consisting in the destruction of cultural and artistic works of their groups” (Lemkin, 1947: 146). From the end of January 1915 to 1922, the Ottoman government carried out a systematic genocide of ethnic Armenians: first to massacre the able-bodied male population on a large scale; then to implement death marches from Armenians’ traditional inhibited regions such as Armenia and Anatolia to the deserts of Syria, where most of them died of hunger and thirsty. According to Sagall (2013: 158), “scholars and journalists estimated that the death toll from 1915 to 1922 probably reached a million and a half”. During the Death March, the Ottoman Turkish government made the “Islamization” of Armenians a systematic state policy. Turkish historian Taner Akçam (2012: 316) pointed out that “young Christian boys and girls were taken from their families and raised according to Muslim customs and traditions. They were dispersed to Muslim villages in which there were no Armenians, forced to marry Muslims, or placed in orphanages”. Section 13 of the title poem describes HIV attacking T cells:

13.

I watched David’s Buddhist

gaze as he imagined how—

how the body turned on itself and the virus

spiked its protein into T cells (Balakian, 2015: 35)

The mentioning of “the body turned on itself” symbolizes that the massacre carried out by the Ottoman Turkey was almost compatriot-mutilation because the empire had conquered the Armenian region for a long time. “The virus spiked its protein into T cells” depicts the process by which HIV invades the human body: AIDS is caused by infection with HIV, a virus that attacks the body’s immune system, which takes the CD4T lymphocyte, the most important cell in the body’s immune system, as its main target, destroying that cell in large numbers and causing the body to lose its immune function. Here the poet uses the word “spike”, suggesting an outside force, not a gentle “missionary” but a forcible conversion of the Armenians. According to The Bible, Armenia’s Mount Ararat was the place where Noah’s ark landed after the flood receded: “the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat” (Gen. 8:4). Moreover, in “My Armenia”, Balakian (2018) mentioned that Armenia was “the first nation to make Christianity its state religion, in 301”. Therefore, for the Armenians, just like HIV, the forced conversion to Islam gradually invaded the Christian doctrines they had believed in for a thousand years. Balakian’s depiction of HIV breaking the human immune system is actually a metaphor for the invasion of Islamic culture into Christian culture.

The massacre of ethnic Armenians taught the later Hitler how to finally solve the Jewish problem, when he later slaughtered the Jews with the unconcerned comment, “who now remembers how the Armenians were exterminated?” The Turkish government still denies that this was an officially premeditated massacre, and “genocide” not an accurate word for the crimes. Any country or organization that publicly recognizes the Armenian Genocide will be condemned by the Turkish government. On 24 April 2021, the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, the President of the United States, Joe Biden, officially recognized the massacres of the Armenian race organized and committed by the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century as “genocide” (see CNN), becoming the first U.S. president since Reagan in forty years to publicly recognize the massacre that began in 1915 as a “genocide”. The Turkish authorities immediately expressed their strong condemnation and rejection, and suggested the U.S. president to look at his own country’s history, which undoubtedly put the relationship between the United States and Turkey, a NATO ally, in complete jeopardy. Section 39 of the title poem describes the delegitimization of AIDS:

39.

Syphilis is a punishment God reserved for our Late Ages (Cotton Mather)

or— history is, as Defoe put it: “the fate of

things give a new face to things.”

I plugged that into the ’80s

after Jerry Falwell said, AIDS is God’s judgement for a society that does not live by His Rules— (Balakian, 49)

“AIDS is God’s judgement for a society that does not live by His Rules” in this section echoes “Why Armenia/ didn’t have a covenant with God like the Jews did” (Balakian, 72) in section 8 of the poem titled “Near the Border” in the third part of the collection. According to the Bible, the Jewish covenant is a promise that God made with the Jews. The Jews became the chosen people and they were asked to dedicate themselves to serving God for ever, and to make the world a better and holier place by obeying God’s laws. Armenia was the first nation to make Christianity its state religion, but the genocide had created a crisis of faith among the survivors. “[T]he crisis of faith and morality which became the legacy of the Armenocide had not been addressed forthrightly” (Guroian, 1991: 323–324). The AIDS community is delegitimized, their suffering of the illness being proclaimed as God’s judgement. Similarly, Armenia did not make a covenant with God, and the majority of Turks put their belief in the Islam; therefore, the Armenian’s suffering cannot be “legitimized”, nor can they demand justice and God’s punishment on their perpetrators. Balakian uses the delegitimization of AIDS as a metaphor for the delegitimization of the suffering history of ethnic Armenians.

People who had AIDS are considered to be part of a “high-risk group”, a socially stigmatized group. For example, in section 21 of the title poem, AIDS became “gossip”:

21.

the UV trance taking me back to

T cells floating in the elevator at Saks,

spikes of protein/genome invasion—

between Chernobyl and Bhopal

AIDS became gossip, evasion, denial. (Balakian, 39)

As this section mentioned, the explosion of Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine and India Bhopal gas leak case both occurred in the 1980s and both caused great damage to human beings. However, AIDS became the third disaster: gossip, evasion, denial. This section juxtaposes three cataclysms, all of which occurred in the 1980s, in order to emphasize the ongoing stigmatization of AIDS patients and the fact that the AIDS community has become the “other” in society. As Sontag (2009: 93) pointed out that “with the most up-to-date biomedical testing, it is possible to create a new class of lifetime pariahs, the future ill”. Same as the AIDS group, the ethnic Armenians are also the marginalized and stigmatized group. Through the act of digging his ancestors’ bones, the speaker witnessed the sufferings of the whole ethnic Armenians. In the Ottoman Empire, non-Muslims were given a large degree of autonomy within their own communities under the Islamic “millets” ¹ (Masters, 2001: 61), and Armenians who were Christians enjoyed limited freedoms, such as the right to practice their original religion, but were treated like second-class citizens. As a minority in the Ottoman Empire, the ethnic Armenians had been in an unequal position. Despite resistance, their search for national independence had been exceptionally difficult and their claims had not been properly addressed. The 18th-19th centuries witnessed the weakening of the Ottoman Empire. The living conditions of the Armenians, like those of other minorities in the empire, deteriorated dramatically, and their discontent with the governors grew. The Crimean War of 1853 and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 directly affected the Armenians living on both sides of the Russian-Turkish border. The invasion of Russian troops and military operations in the eastern highlands led to Turkish reprisals against Armenians, and the conflict between Armenians and Turks escalated dramatically. And “in 1893, the situation in eastern Anatolia exploded. . . Rumors spread among the Muslim population as far from the trouble as Aleppo that the Armenians were going to rise in rebellion” (Ágoston and Masters, 2009: 52–53). The Ottoman government blamed the Armenians for the defeat, believing them to be collaborating with Russia. Armenians had become the “other” in the Ottoman Empire. Thus, the poet uses the stigmatization of AIDS as a metaphor for the stigmatization and marginalization of Armenians.

Although Ozone Journal aims to represent the traumatic history of the ethnic Armenians, the speaker nevertheless intersperses it with his own memories of the 1980s, including his cousin suffering from AIDS, the breakup of his marriage and his life as a single father. Trauma damages the brain’s experience of time, self, and the world. As a trauma patient, it was not easy for the speaker to fully focus on the things he was doing right at the moment; he was trapped in the memories of the past. When the speaker saw his ancestor’s bones (the present), he was too astonished to say a word, but he had to keep his narration, so he chose to talk about his cousin who had AIDS (the past). Although he switched the narrative object (from digging bones to AIDS), he kept his core argument, as previous discussion mentioned, about members of a disadvantageous and minor group. Both the AIDS group and the Armenians physically and mentally suffer from great pain. The narrative dysfunction suggests the fragmentation of a trauma patient’s life, for example, the speaker felt as if he was living in two worlds, namely, the past world where traumatic events occur and the current, daily world, and it was difficult to link the two worlds together. The speaker had often lost cognitive ability and was in a state of mental panic and collapse. That is why he came to the hospital to do “a blood test” (Balakian, 48), but the nurse said what he needed was “a psychiatrist” (Balakian, 48). It was his cousin who had AIDS, but why did the speaker fall into this self-doubt? The cause of his mental panic and impaired judgment came from the sufferings of his cousin and the whole AIDS group: an excluded and marginalized existence, of which the speaker is a witness. As Elizabeth Outka (2020, 83–84) writes in Viral Modernism, “it [the virus] could also produce profound psychological damage (as Woolf and her doctors knew well). This damage was not simply from the trauma of the near-death experience (which is largely the trauma Clarissa seems affected by) but from neurological effects ranging from delirium to psychosis”. HIV not only destroys the body’s immune system, but also crushes the mentality of AIDS patients and their families. Similarly, Balakian, as the descendant of the genocide victims and survivors, witnessed his ancestors’ sufferings, and in Ozone Journal, he recorded the long-existing trauma of his community. AIDS in his poem is functioned as a kind of cultural metaphor. Through the juxtaposition of AIDS and the Armenian Genocide, the traumatic history of the Armenians who were marginalized, stigmatized, and excluded is revealed.

Political and Sociological Implications of Ozone Journal

With the implementing of the Armenian Genocide, more and more Armenians were victimized and deported, a large number of survivors fled to the United States, which witnessed a dramatic growth of the Armenian community in the United States. Peter Balakian’s great-grand uncle Grigoris Balakian was a holocaust survivor, and Balakian, as a descendant of survivors, did not discover the Armenian Genocide until he read Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story ² . Shortly afterwards, he learned that his grandmother was also one of the few survivors of the death march. Although “the breadth and intensity of American engagement in the effort to save the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire is an important chapter in American history” (Balakian, 2003: iv), it is significant to notice that the United States did not officially recognize the truth of the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman Empire until the Senate passed a resolution in December of 2019 (see “Roll Call 591”), four years after the publication of Ozone Journal and three years after Balakian’s winning of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. As both the descendants of immigrants and genocide survivors, as well as the minority in the U.S. society, the Armenian American bear their former generations’ trauma witness of the genocide and live in the denial, both in the country they were born and the archcriminal of their ancestors’ suffering for a century and more. There are paradoxes in the poet’s sense of belonging: do they belong to Armenia or the United States? Therefore, Balakian, an American poet, while also an Armenian poet, presented the anxiety of identity in his poem without reservation.

The speaker in this autobiographical collection of poems, an Armenian-American, fell into the anxiety of identity and cultural collision. This culture collision is most evident in the language barrier. Although Peter Balakian himself is not a native Armenian speaker, he has translated Bloody News From My Friend by Armenian poet Siamanto and Armenian Golgotha by his great-grand uncle Grigoris Balakian. But in the collection the persona does not understand Armenian: “my parents spoke another language in another room” (Balakian, 44). Here the speaker uses two “another”, isolating his world from that of his parents’, his is the American culture, the English language, while his parents’ is the Armenian culture, the Armenian language. Apparently, his parents were more familiar with the Armenian culture. Therefore, effective communication is not possible between the two generations, making him an outsider to the Armenian’s suffering history.

As a poet born and raised in America, Balakian’s literary creation was influenced by the giants of American literature. Balakian admitted in his interview that “as a young poet, [he] came out of an American poetic tradition that was defined—in different ways—by Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Lowell” (Barsoumian, 2016). The poem at the very end of this collection is titled “Home”, which Balakian called his “personal Armenian Diasporan vision” (Barsoumian, 2016), evoking Whitmanian—long sentences and free verse. Sections 49 to 51 in “Ozone Journal” are cast in Dickinson’s typical form—short lines and frequent use of dashes. Section 22 of “Ozone Journal” is an intertextuality of “I Taste A Liquor Never Brewed” by one of the greats of the Armenian sublime Emily Dickinson: “a liquor never brewed;/ I could keep saying it, even if the lines/were from the greats of the American sublime” (Balakian, 40). More evidently, in section 36 of “Ozone Journal”, the speaker listed three identities: “the Jew, the Armenian, the horn-rimmed kid” (Balakian, 47), but without mentioning his American identity. The speaker’s not mentioning not only means he had difficulty to assimilate into the mainstream values of the America society, but also indicates the poet’s responsibility to speak up for the whole ethnic Armenians who are unable to have their own voice.

Balakian did feel the responsibility for recording the history of his own people, especially after the eradication of the very people who could write about it and in the face of a persistent campaign that denies the truth of its happening. And Balakian indeed has made significant contribution to the process of the recognition of the Armenian Genocide, for which he was awarded Armenia’s 2015 Presidential Award: “Peter Balakian with his dual identity—Armenian and American—has revealed in English the power of the artistic manifestation of that pain” (see The Armenian Weekly). The Armenian Genocide, just as the President of Armenia said, “is not an Armenian issue exclusively but a great pain for the people of good will all over the world, regardless of their nationality or religion” (see The Armenian Weekly). Therefore, the process of recognizing such historical atrocity as committed calls for people all over the world.

Instead of directly mentioning “genocide” or “massacre”, Balakian makes the speaker move repeatedly between the past and the present, between reality and imagination, and writes a fifth of the second part about his cousin’s suffering from AIDS, which forms a kind of metaphor for the ethnic Armenians. The poem collection was titled Ozone Journal, but throughout the entire collection, there are only two sections mentioning “ozone”, which are section 17 and 19 in the title poem:

19.

before I woke to hammered silver air over the river—

fish-eye sun—irascible, hardtack, scarred, and varnished,

ozone: major factor in making life on earth possible;

O3—allotropic, oxidizing, disinfectant, poisonous;

pale blue gas, sharp, irritating—ignited by UV rays. (Balakian, 38)

What’s his purpose of writing in a way that seems like to be deviated from the core theme? As he said in one of his interviews that he has “always wanted to open the poem to everything possible in the realm of knowledge, ideas, experience, etc.. . .Ozone Journal is engaged with various dimensions of science, from physics and the archeology of artifacts to AIDS and the erosion of the ozone in our age of climate change and ecological disaster” (Riccio, 2015). Here in the above section, the “fish-eye sun” which is “irascible, hardtack, scarred, and varnished” shines mercilessly on the earth, while the ozone is the “major factor in making life on earth possible”. The ozone layer can prevent the damaging of the ultraviolet light from reaching the Earth’s surface and have the ability to purify the air; however, “a one-hour exposure to light that is similar/ to the sun under the ozone hole is enough to completely stop all/ photosynthetic activity of the plankton” (Balakian, 38). As mentioned in section 19, ozone, trioxygen, is an allotrope of oxygen. It can be used as disinfectant but it is also poisonous when it is in excessive amount. Chlorine ions are artificially released into the atmosphere, thus destroying ozone molecules, which is one of the causes of the ozone layer hole. The poet here uses the destruction of the natural ecology by mankind as a metaphor for the fact that the Armenian Genocide is in fact also the destruction of the social ecology by mankind, in the same way as the AIDS metaphor works. Therefore, with the title “Ozone Journal”, Balakian distills a symbolic, racial connotation into the scientific image.

Interestingly, except for AIDS pandemic, Balakian also mentioned London Bubonic plague in 1665: “on the A Train I was reading/ Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year:/. . ./ scribbled in my Penguin edition:/ ‘dangerous times/ see clearly’” (Balakian, 51–52)”. Journal of the Plague Year describes London under the Great Plague of 1665. In this book, Defoe describes the plague in specific neighborhoods, streets, and even specific rooms, achieving an extremely realistic effect. Defoe wrote a journal of “the plague year” to record the Great Plague of 1665; and it is no coincidence that Balakian also wrote a journal of “ozone” to record the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s. From the 17th century, when the plague was prevalent in England, to the 1980s, when AIDS became a new deathly infectious disease, to the current reality of the global COVID-19 epidemic; from David’s suffering in the 1980s to the uncovering of the remains of genocide victims, to the change of the world brought by COVID-19, all are warnings that no matter what era we are in, we still are in a “dangerous time” so that we must “see clearly”, and that mankind’s suffering from historical atrocities is cyclical.

Balakian in another interview made a comment on his own work that he saw “Ozone Journal as a very transnational work. [His] imagination moves across borders and continents, from the slums of Nairobi to the Turkish Armenian border, to the Syrian Desert, to the Native American southwest, to the urban ruin of a great American city like Detroit” (Barsoumian, 2016). Traces of all these places he mentioned can be found in the collection: three poems titled “Pueblo” in part one describing Indian village of central Colorado, “Joe Louis’s Fist” in part one indicating the struggle of African Americans, and “Slum Drummers, Nairobi” in part three recording life in the slum of Kenya, to list just a few. This presents a global perspective and a universal human concern, just like the global AIDS epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic. Sontag (2009: 92) points out that “testing positive for HIV (which usually means having being tested for the presence not of the virus but of antibodies of the virus) is increasingly equated with being ill. Infected means ill, from that forward”. Similarly, in addition to the recession of economy led by the global COVID-19, racial issues come into sharper focus during the epidemic period: “the pandemic is racialised. Asians are being scapegoated and attacked, for spreading the virus” (Matthewman and Huppatz, 2020: 678). During the COVID-19 epidemic, news about anti-Asian attacks is rampant. For example, “the only Asian American lawmaker in the Kansas legislature says he was physically threatened in a bar by a patron who accused him of carrying the coronavirus” (see BBC). However, the reality is that the process of globalization is accelerating and irreversible in the world nowadays, and no country can remain well alone. AIDS has long been a global epidemic, so has the new coronavirus epidemic. Viruses respect no national borders, and no country is immune from it. Therefore, when in face of a global, human-wide catastrophe, human beings need to put aside disputes and prejudices, and work together to fight against it.

Conclusions

This poem collection is full of contradiction: between love and hate, inner war and outer peace. According to the Pulitzer board (2016), Balakian’s Ozone Journal “bear witness to the old losses and tragedies that undergird a global age of danger and uncertainty”. This hints that Balakian has a particular responsibility for his ancestors: to tell the trauma of his people, and to arouse more attention to the suffering of the Armenians, for its memory can never be eradicated no matter how hard the Turkish government tries to. Though many survivors came to America and formed the large size of the Armenian community, as immigrants, the poet and his collectivity are the minority ethnic group in the United States, and they find it uneasy to assimilate into the mainstream values of America. Peter Balakian’s Ozone Journal takes AIDS as a metaphor, representing the national suffering and historical trauma of the ethnic Armenians. It provides a powerful contemporary warning and cultural reflection on the racial persecution that still exists today, especially intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. The reason that Balakian winning the Pulitzer Prize for poetry lies in that it is a literary work not just with aesthetic value, but with political and sociological significance. In fact, Balakian was the second Armenian-American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize in Literature, following William Saroyan ³ (1908–1981). Balakian’s award will not only give a major boost to Armenian literature, but will also help bring more attention to minority literature in the United States. From the dimensions of minority survival and literary writing, literary writing and cultural reflection on race in the United States, it is worthy of further in-depth exploration and research.