Rubina Peroomian

UCLA, Genocide Studies, USA

Rubina Peroomian, Ph.D is a lecturer of Armenian language and literature, is currently a Research Associate at UCLA. She is the author of several books, textbooks, chapters in books, and research articles in scholarly journals on Armenian Question and the Armenian Genocide.

Her major publications include Literary Responses to Catastrophe: A Comparison of the Armenian and the Jewish Experience (1993), Armenia in the Sphere of Relations between the Armenian Revolutionary Federation and the Bolsheviks, 1917-1921 (1997) in the Armenian language (translated and published in Russian), The Armenian Question, a series of textbooks in Armenian for grades 10-12 (1990-1999), and a comprehensive textbook of the History of the Armenian Question for high schools in Armenia (2000).

She has lectured widely, participated in international symposia. She has received Lifetime Achievement Award by the Armenian Educational Foundation and the Mesrob Mashtots Medal with an encyclical by His Holiness Aram I Catholicos of Cilicia.

Survivor Memoirs – A Multi-faceted Source, A Less-employed Field of Inquiry

for Genocide Studies

For many decades now, since the study of the Armenian Genocide found its way in academia, the domain was mainly and to some extent solely limited to the study of archival materials— documents, statistics, reports, and eyewitness accounts. Artistic representations of the Genocide were appreciated as a poetic response to the catastrophe but pushed aside as a source in historiography.

Regarding memoirs of survivors, there was a total rejection of the notion that these accounts can introduce an effective and valid field of inquiry beyond that “scientific” domain. Historians argued that the memoirist, especially writing years after the event adopts an individualistic approach, presents the imagined truth, and writes down what his or her “fading” memory can serve. This author belongs to the band of scholars who argued for the validity of this bulk of literature, otherwise disdained by mainstream historians, and made a dent in pertaining field of study.

This presentation will expound upon the contribution of memoirs to genocide studies and dwell upon their importance as records of everlasting and indelible iconic images in survivor’s mind, as Charles M. Anderson and Marian M. MacCurdy maintain, that if recorded can fill a niche in the huge landscape of the history of the Armenian Genocide. These memoirs are living history with a power, more than documents and statistics, to touch people, to transmit knowledge (education) and information, the greatest tools, as Thomas Hammarberg has it, to promote empathy and break down intolerance, prejudice, and hatred.

A byproduct of this argument is the importance of memoirs as educational tools and as carriers of historical memory to inculcate the Armenian identity. Jewish Holocaust scholarship has long acknowledged the effectiveness of memoirs in the study of Shoah and the role they can play in the Jewish collective consciousness. In another part of the world, in response to another genocide, which was euphemistically called Stalinist purges, the “Memorial” movement was launched to collect and register fervently, as much as possible the memoirs of Stalin’s Gulag, as the only source or document of social life in the USSR to counter Soviet State historiography.

With the continuing outpour of denialist argumentations against the Armenian Genocide, and the disappearing of survivors as witnesses of the great horror, the survivors’ memoirs and one might add as well as recorded oral testimonies carry the burden of proclaiming the truth. As Bertha Nakashian Ketchian maintains in her memoir, her fight against denialism, “I was there…I was a witness.”