'I wrote about Turkey,' I said.
My father stared at me, and silence hung over the table. 'What?' His voice cracked as he lingered on the t. 'You were supposed to write about––'
'I know," I cut in, 'but I couldn't find anything.'
He was shouting now. 'Don't you know what the Turks did to us?'
'Of course,"'I said, but I was too hurt and confused to admit I didn't know what the Turks did to us. Although I recalled the word massacres coming up in conversations every once in a while, when children were not supposed to be around, no one ever attached the word to a meaning." (100)
In the passage above, Peter Balakian recalls a memory of a report he wrote on Turkey, that had enraged his father, even though he had received an A. As Peter researched for his paper, originally about Armenia, by trying to go through books about Turkey, "[he] found that [he] had read several books on Turkey without ever once coming across a reference to Armenia." (99) Soon after the founding of the Turkish Nationalist government, the government adopted a policy of denying the Armenian Genocide and took many measures to suppress any discussion of the genocide in international and public forums. (Armenian National Instititute) In addition to such an international coverup by the Turks, Balakian's family never discussed the events of the Armenian Genocide in front of the children, probably to shield them from the horrors done to their ancestors. Balakian's father's outrage and hurt seems to be rooted in his Armenian pride and a general misunderstanding between him and his son. At this point in his teenage life, Balakian has no idea about these massacres, but somehow, his father expects him to already have knowledge of these mass killings because of his research. So between the lack of information in Balakian's research and the lack of conversation about his family history, Balakian is still in the dark about his Armenian past.
