The Armenian Genocide refers to the deliberate and systematic extermination of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire from 1915-1917. It was characterized by massacres and deportations involving  forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of Armenian deaths between one and one-and-a-half million. Despite repeated calls for recognition, Turkey does not take responsibility for the genocide. To date, twenty-one countries have officially recognized the events of the period as genocide, and most scholars and historians accept this view to be true.

I sat in the corner of the stuffy classroom, sandwiched in between another student and the projector. It was the first meeting of a class entitled Riot and Rebellion in Post-Colonial Africa, and the room was packed.

I could barely see the chalkboard past the crowded room of students, so instead of following the first-day introductory spiel, I was thinking of a conversation I’d had a few weeks earlier.

My brother and I had been sitting with our grandparents in their kitchen, piling mounds of pilaf onto our plates between bites of shish kebob. As I put down my fork after finishing my fourth helping, my grandmother, in typical Armenian fashion, had chided me for not eating enough. “Oh, grandma, please!” I said, brushing her off. “Al ga paveh!” Enough.

My grandpa sat through the whole exchange, staring into the distance. For a minute or two, the table was silent. Finally, he turned towards me, and still looking past me, said, “You know, you’re lucky you have a grandmother. I never did.”

“Really?!” I answered, genuinely surprised. I don’t know why I hadn’t realized that before. Theoretically, I knew that almost everyone from that generation had been killed in the genocide, but I had never put two and two together.

I looked over at my grandmother. “What about you?” I asked. She shook her head and looked down at her plate.

Growing up, I lived only a few short blocks from my grandparents, and until I went to college, I saw them several times a week. Being so close to my grandparents, I suppose the idea of never knowing what it’s like to have any shocked me.

My grandpa continued: “My friends and I didn’t have any relatives, so we used to make them up. We used to pretend we were related…just so we had someone.”

Now that I think about it, I suppose I’ve done this too - there are several people I call “Aunt” or “Uncle,” but out of habit or familiarity, not out of a genuine need for family due to a complete lack of the real thing.

My mind snapped back into the present and I looked up at the chalkboard. As a first-day exercise, they were discussing the definitions and connotations of different terms that would come up over the course of the semester – rebellion vs. revolution, citizen vs. subject, civil war, unrest, banditry. “What about genocide?” my professor asked. “How would you define that one?”

My hand shot up and I waited impatiently until my professor called on me. “The mass killing of a group of people for no reason at all.”

Even before the words left my lips, I realized the problems with the definition I had blurted out without careful, or for that matter, any, consideration at all.

But I didn’t need to consider it. I didn’t need to think about anything. I knew what a genocide was.

“Well, that’s how a genocide might appear,” my teacher responded, “but I think we could look for a more detailed definition.”

Another student raised his hand: “Genocide is the killing of a group of people from one state by those of another.”

My hand shot up again but this time I didn’t wait for the professor to call on me: “No, it’s not just based on state, it doesn’t have to be between two different states.” I held back an exclamation point at the end of my sentence. The professor finished my thought: “It could be within an empire?” she asked.

“Yes. Of course.” It was only the first day of class, so I tried to sound collected. But inside I was fuming. Who were they to know what genocide was? Didn’t they know what happened in 1915?

The truth is, most people don’t.

* * * *

After class, I stayed around to ask the professor if I could speak with her, and we walked downstairs to her office. “Do you mind if I close the door?” I asked. “Sure,” she responded, a bit puzzled. I closed the door, sat down across from her and stared at her desk, not knowing how to begin. “So, what’s up?” she asked after a moment.

“Um, well, hmm.” How should I put this. “Well, you see, I wanted to talk to you about something. I really want to take your class, and I’m interested in the subject.” I went off on a tangent on how I didn’t know much about post-colonial Africa, or colonial Africa for that matter, and that I thought it was an important subject to know about. “It’s just, see, I’m Armenian.” I looked up and searched her face for some sign of recognition, but found none.

“I’m Armenian,” I said again more resolutely, “and some of these issues hit kind of close to home.” I explained to her my inner anger during class, and told her that although I knew it was completely irrational, that there was no good reason to get so worked up about things, I couldn’t help it. I was still angry. Before I knew it, bitter tears were running down my cheeks and my professor was handing me a tissue and telling me about how she had spent so much time studying horrific violence that she had become immune to it.

I had heard that story. A year before, when studying Nazi Germany, my professor had said the same thing. But it still hadn’t happened for me.

I’m not sure it ever will. Distancing myself from things, and moreover being indifferent to things I am passionate about, has never been my forte. I left my professor’s office that day feeling ridiculous and confused. But forget about the fact that I was completely embarrassed – I was mentally exhausted. Al ga paveh, enough is enough. Carrying the weight of the hatred all my ancestors felt towards the Turks through every facet of my life was just too much for me to handle.

I pushed open the door of the building, walked outside and headed back to my room. I searched for my cell phone in my bag and called my grandpa.

“Hello?” he answered.

“Hi, grandpa, it’s Livi.”

“Who?”

“It’s Olivia, your granddaughter.”

By the time he realized who I was, I had reached my dorm. I was balancing the phone with my shoulder, holding my bag in one hand and books in the other, getting my keys from my bag with my books hand and trying to swipe my ID card to open the door. Something was going to fall.

“What?!” my grandpa said again. “I SAID I JUST FINISHED CLASS!” I threw open the door in frustration and winced as the bottom metal corner of the door sliced into my toe. “What?!” my grandpa asked again.

I didn’t want to get angry at my grandpa for not being able to hear. But my books were about to fall, my toe was bleeding, and two of my friends were approaching me with quizzical looks. “Look, grandpa, I’ll just call you back, okay?”

“No no, that’s okay sweetheart.” He didn’t realize I wanted to talk to him about something serious.“No,” I said sternly. “I’m going to call you later – I want to talk to you.”

Ten minutes later, I had made it back to my room. I sat in front of my computer with one leg up on my desk, trying to stop the blood from running out of my toe.

I rested my head on my hand and pondered the state of things. I didn’t want to be bitter my whole life. I couldn’t be bitter my whole life. I understood completely why my grandparents and even my dad were bitter, and nothing could ever change that. But for how many generations would the hatred continue?

I knew I had a choice to make, to either hold on to the feelings of bitterness and loathing forever and eventually pass them on to my children, or at least make an attempt at forgiveness. In general, it’s difficult to forgive someone when they’re not asking for your forgiveness. But forget asking for forgiveness, the Turks have never even taken responsibility for the genocide. In fact, they actively deny it. The question of moral responsibility, or any responsibility at all for that matter, cannot even begin to be raised if the bare minimum of factual recognition does not exist. And without either of those, forgiveness is so far fetched that it seems to be only an unreal notion in a distant, utopian land.

No matter what I choose to do, the hatred the Armenians feel towards the Turks will continue because it’s not a question of when the hatred will stop – it’s a question of how it will stop, and at least in this situation, there’s absolutely no such thing as a one-sided reconciliation.

I looked at my phone and knew what I had to do, but dreaded the inevitable conversation. I dialed the number and waited for the phone to ring.

“Hey, it’s me again. It’s Livi,” I said slowly. He knew who it was.

“What’s wrong, sweetheart? What’s on your mind?” my grandpa asked.

“Well, I’m taking this class on riot and rebellion and genocide in Africa and….well, it’s interesting.” I didn’t know how to broach the subject.

“Yes, well, the tribes are getting killed. In that one country, they’re murdering different tribes,” he answered.

“Yeah, sort of,” I said. As my grandpa aged, his mind moved farther and farther away from me, but I knew somewhere in his head he knew what he was talking about. “My teacher asked how you define genocide.”

“Design it?” he replied, confused.

“No, de-fine it. Define it,” I said.

“Well, you go out and you kill people. The Armenian Genocide, the Turks went around and first took the young men and took them out in the field and shot them, and then they took the older men and shot them, and then they took the women and the children and made them walk and walk and walk. And that’s what the genocide was for the Armenians.”

“Grandpa, I know all that. You’ve told me a hundred times.”

“So what do you want to know?” he asked in a sweet, simple tone, genuinely curious.

“I just, I just…” I took a deep breath. “I want to be able to discuss it.”

“In class today,” I continued, “we were going over the technical U.N. definition of genocide, and I couldn’t even talk about it. I got so angry.”

“I don’t care what the UN says, I care what they did to the Armenians. The Americans, you know, there was talk about it, but that’s all they did was talk. They didn’t want to upset the Turks.”

“I don’t like talking about it,” I said again.

“I don’t like talking about it either.”

“I know you don’t like talking about it, that’s why I don’t like talking about it!” I said, frustrated as hell.

“Are you going to cry?” he asked.

“No, I’m not going to cry!” I said, happy that our tele-communication hid the tears I was fighting back.

“Are you sure? ‘Cause you sound like it…”

“Grandpa, I’m not going to cry,” I reasserted as I angrily wiped my hand across my cheek.

“Okay. I won’t cry either.”

“You have to understand what the Turks did to us,” he continued, “and they killed us all. And if was up to me I would go over there and kill every Turk around. I have nothing else to say.”

I sighed, accepting the fact that he wasn’t going to tell me whatever it was I needed to hear. I wanted to belt out that that was it, I couldn’t do it anymore. But nothing I could say would make him understand. I didn’t judge him for his hatred; not even for a second. But it wasn’t for me. Somewhere I knew that.

But I also knew that my great-grandmother, taken from her home and made to walk through the desert for days at gunpoint with no food or water, was forced to leave her newborn baby on the side of the road when it died of starvation in her arms.

She had no milk. She couldn’t feed him.