Aram Kouyoumdjian
Eric Bogosian’s new book is not a novel or a script or a volume of
monologues – the genres for which he is best known. In a surprising
departure, Bogosian has written a non-fiction work entitled “Operation
Nemesis,” which is about “the assassination plot that avenged the
Armenian Genocide,” as its subtitle explains. The book, set for
publication on April 21 (*), examines the coordinated Armenian campaign in
the early 1920s to assassinate the leading perpetrators of the Genocide
in Constantinople (Istanbul), in Tbilisi, and in European cities where
they had sought refuge. A significant part of the book is devoted to the
assassination of Talat Pasha – one of the Genocide’s key architects –
in Berlin by a young Armenian named Soghomon Tehlirian and to the
ensuing trial which captured international attention and, stunningly,
resulted in Tehlirian’s acquittal.
The
multi-hyphenated Bogosian is not an academic or historian; rather, he
is a prominent actor, playwright, monologuist, and novelist.
Nevertheless, his study of Nemesis is premised on rigorous scholarly
research, evidenced by nearly 50 pages of endnotes and bibliographic
sources. At the same time, the book is a fast-paced, tension-filled, and
altogether accessible work framed in the three-act structure of a
script. Part I briefly surveys Armenian history up to and including the
Genocide period; Part II tells Tehlirian’s story; and Part III recounts
the remaining Nemesis assassinations and ponders their aftermath. Though
factually driven, “Operation Nemesis” is layered with analyses of
complex geopolitics, including the complicity of Western powers both
with the Genocide and the assassination plot that followed.
We can trace Bogosian’s mastery of narrative to his prior body of
writing – three novels and such plays as “Talk Radio,” which was a
finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a film by Oliver Stone
(starring Bogosian himself), and “subUrbia,” which became a Richard
Linklater film. A preeminent monologuist, Bogosian has also penned – and
performed – such solo works as “Pounding Nails in the Floor with My
Forehead” and “Wake Up and Smell the Coffee.” His acting credits span
film (including Atom Egoyan’s “Ararat”), television (“Law & Order:
Criminal Intent”), and stage – both Broadway and Off-Broadway.
Ahead of his visit to Los Angeles next week for appearances at the
Alex Theatre and at Abril Bookstore, I had the opportunity to speak with
Bogosian about his book, the process of its writing, and, ultimately,
the impact it had on him. Our conversation of April 18 was lengthy, so
the transcript below does not represent its entirety but captures
substantial portions of it.
We began our talk with a discussion of identity – and Bogosian’s auspicious birthdate.
ARAM KOUYOUMDJIAN: Were you really born on April 24?
ERIC BOGOSIAN: Yes. Yeah. I didn’t fully understand
the significance for much of my life. Oddly, I come from an Armenian
family that just didn’t look at things from that perspective. It’s
strange, I’m not even sure now why that was, but nobody seemed to be
aware of the significance of April 24th in my family.
A.K.: When did you develop that awareness or consciousness of identity, and how did it emerge?
E.B.: I had a very clear idea of who I was as an
Armenian from a very young age, because I had a grandfather who had
somehow gotten out of Turkey at around the age of 20, so he was prime to
be grabbed by the authorities in 1915, and he came to the United
States. He used to tell me stories, and he was very clear, basically,
that the Turks were bad people and that bad things had happened over
there. […]
I had a notion that our being Armenian meant the church because I
went to church – I was an altar boy, I went to Sunday school.
“Armenian” meant old people who speak another language, “Armenia” meant
someplace very far away, seemed to be Middle Eastern, but I wasn’t too
sure about that, nobody was ever clear where Armenia was when I was
growing up. The food, the music, the weddings – this was all for me my
Armenian dimension of myself. Included in that was this narrative of the
Genocide, which I understood in the most black-and-white terms. Other
than that, I was pretty much part of, you know, regular old knucklehead
suburban society and acted like that. I mean, I grew up in the ’60s …
In the ’90s, there was a shift for me, and it came from various
directions. One was, very significantly, being in Atom Egoyan’s film
“Ararat,” and being on that set where he replicated the city of Van
during its siege. He had actors in costume, and it was just one of these
odd moments, when I was walking through the set one day, and it just
hit me that this must have been what it was like – and it moved me. At
the same time, in the ’90s, the strife and the ethnic cleansing that was
going on in Serbia and Bosnia was on TV every night, and for some
reason it suddenly hit me that what I was seeing was what had happened
to my own family. And I also read Peter Balakian’s book “Black Dog of
Fate.” All these things started to stir me up, and I was sort of opened
to the idea of doing something that would address my Armenian
experience.
Having read “Passage to Ararat,” having read “Black Dog of Fate,” I
didn’t see the point of me jumping in and telling a similar story
talking about the contrast between growing up in the United States
around a lot of American things and American TV and so forth, while I
have all these very old-fashioned, old-country people around me making
shish kabob in the backyard. I cherish those memories, but I felt [this
terrain] had been covered by others.
A.K.: How did your interest in the Nemesis story originate?
E.B.: When I heard the story of Soghomon Tehlirian,
at first I couldn’t even believe it was true. The notion that a young
Armenian had assassinated the leader of the Turks after World War I was
news to me. It almost seemed like this had to be some sort of Armenian
pipe dream. As I explored it, I found out it was a true story.
Certainly, the assassination, the trial, and the acquittal were true
stories. I felt this would make a movie. In fact, there had been a movie
made about it; at the time I didn’t know that. And so I set about to
write this three-act [script].
When I write features or theater, I’m a structuralist as they say,
and so I needed to know what the acts were. The first act would be in
the desert during the deportation, and Tehlirian seeing his entire
family murdered, and [himself] surviving and escaping, which was the
story he told in court. The second act would be his running across Talat
five years later in Berlin, and shooting him. And the third act would
be the trial. It just all made sense. I sat down to do that – that was
seven years ago.
As soon as I started researching the story further, I immediately
learned about Operation Nemesis. And it was like, What? I mean,
Tehlirian was in fact not a student but a member of a clandestine
assassination squad operating out of the United States, and this squad
had managed to knock off six major Turks after the war. Not only was I
amazed by this story, but as I worked on it up until the very end, I
continued to be amazed by what these men had pulled off.
When I looked at my particular situation at that time, seven years
ago, two things occurred to me. One, if I write this book, it’ll get
some attention just because I’m published already, and people know my
name, but also, I wasn’t sure whether there was some sort of danger in
working on something like this, danger to myself, danger to my children,
danger to my career, or even my means of making a living. I thought,
well, if there’s a matter of personal threat here, I can handle that, as
long as I don’t have to worry about my kids. Well, my kids are in their
20s now, and they can take care of themselves, and my career has sort
of peaked many years ago in terms of Hollywood, so that wasn’t going to
be threatened either. I thought, you know, you’re in a unique situation
to write this book and get it out there.
I wasn’t really thinking about the Centennial at the time because it
was years ago, but I felt, you know, not only can you tell this
incredible story, which everyone should know about, but also have an
opportunity to talk about the Armenian Genocide again. I went on and
researched all of this, and for me it was all news. I mean, so many
aspects of the Armenian Genocide, as well as the story of Operation
Nemesis, were things that I just didn’t know anything about. I didn’t
know anything about Armenian history, I didn’t know anything about
Turkish history, I didn’t know much about the geopolitics of the region,
and I didn’t know any World War I history. So all these things I
learned, and I learned very much, of course, about the Armenian
political scene in the Ottoman Empire leading up to the Genocide and
since then, specifically, the Tashnag [Party] or the Armenian
Revolutionary Federation, who were – they were basically the sponsors of
Operation Nemesis, they were the parent op organization.
A.K.: You had to tackle this project as a writer and
a theater artist, rather than as a historian. In terms of perspective
and preparation, was that an asset for you or a liability?
E.B.: I think every field has sort of a built-in
tendency for the people in that field to become jaded to the field. You
know, after you’ve been around a lot of movie sets or TV sets, the
excitement isn’t really there anymore, it’s a job, it’s what you do for a
living. Because I had never done anything like this, it was exciting
for me all the way through.
I ended up at the University of Michigan with the Armenian Studies
Program there, and I worked with those scholars . . . [Also,]
fortunately for me, I had become friends with Aram Arkun many years ago,
when he was at UCLA, and Aram is one of the most established historians
in this field, and he gave me great assistance in learning, because I
had to learn at a very accelerated rate . . . Then it turned out that I
had other people I had gone to school with who were top translators in
their field. I had befriended a French-Armenian filmmaker named Eddy
Vicken, who was living in Paris, and he introduced me to [the historian]
Raymond Kevorkian, so piece by piece, all the pieces came and fell into
place. I actually taught myself how to access archives, which is a lot
easier now than it used to be. I have friends in different countries, so
I would get in touch with somebody, let’s say in London, and I’d say,
can you find me a graduate student who can go into the British Archives
and look for this, this, and this on these dates, or somebody in Rome,
and so forth. And in a kind of a way, I don’t know, awkward, clumsy way,
I put it all together. What was going in my favor was that I had the
time to do it, and I was going to keep doing it until it was done. […]
I was just talking with one of the historians last night from the
University of Michigan, and she said that when she read the book what
was refreshing for her was that I wasn’t just making an argument and
then proving it, which is the way [of] most historians. This is more a
representation of my own curious mind in saying I’m basically going to
get everything in the book that I think you’re going to want to know
about.
A.K.: When you were deciding on a genre and opted
for a research-based non-fiction book, did you consider the reach it
would have – as opposed to the reach a screenplay would have?
E.B.: […] The reason that I felt I had to do it this
way was because the subject matter was just too complex, and I know
that movies simplify and distort history, so I just thought it was too
important to get it right at least once. […] I actually hope that this
book will inspire perhaps a really serious scholar – somebody who wants
to put 20 or 30 years into it – to really look at what was going on with
Operation Nemesis because there are still more archives to get into,
and the connections to British intelligence, which I was only able to
touch on with my research, are just too fascinating, and I explain why
in the book.
I mean, there are characters here in the background who really need
to be looked at more carefully because they were obviously playing some
very complicated games. Often in history Armenians get stuck between
players who have other agendas, not necessarily the agendas that the
Armenians are looking for, so in the case of the assassination of these
Turkish leaders, the Armenians are avenging the Genocide, but there are
other people around at this time who have other agendas that maybe are
promoted by removing these leaders and replacing them with other
leaders, and in fact, inadvertently that’s what the Armenians did by
knocking out Talat Pasha and Jemal Pasha (and also Enver Pasha being
killed [by Russian forces] around the same time). This is how Kemal
Ataturk was able to take over the country with nothing stopping him – I
mean, these were all guys who would’ve vied with him for the leadership
of Turkey. And the way Ataturk went about things – I don’t know if
people knew that to be the case at the time – but he was a real
pragmatist. The history we live with today is that Turkey became a
strong ally of the West, and that was established early on. […]
A.K.: Are there any lingering issues that you did
not have an opportunity to research, or are there any areas of inquiry
in which scholarship is still lacking?
E.B.: We went pretty far into the British side of
things, but the modern British intelligence system was always grounded
in a lot of secrecy. And it’s very hard to get at what’s really going on
in certain circumstances. I explain it very clearly in the book – the
dynamics of Aubrey Herbert and others who were involved with this
assassination, which I clearly believe they had something to do with it.
The archives that I didn’t touch were Russian archives. I think there’s
stuff in Russia. Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about Vatican
archives just as far as the Armenian Genocide goes, but the Russian
archives would be amazing things to get into, and there are archives in
the United States that need to be opened, particularly the Tashnag
archives in Massachusetts. […]
A.K.: As I read the book, your three-act structure
was readily apparent, but I kept debating as to whether the book had a
central character – and whether that was Tehlirian, the Nemesis
campaign, or the Genocide itself, which you refer to at one point as
“the core of what this book is really about.” Is there a central
character in the book?
E.B.: The structure of this book went back and forth
many times in the time that I wrote it. I had a lot of information I
wanted to get out there, and how was I going to do that. I mean, you
could imagine different ways this book could work. There was one time
when I started with the trial. There were other times when I started
with the killing of Talat.
The notion I always had was that there would be this spine which
would be the story of Nemesis and how they were put together and how
they did what they did, and then any time I got to a certain point,
let’s say I mentioned Armenian Christianity, I would take a detour for a
while and I would talk about why the Armenians are Christians and how
that all began, so that the reader could keep being informed. When I
finally came down to the final edit with my editor David Sobel, we found
that this structure was very confusing for the reader because I was
skipping back and forth in time, and the reader couldn’t understand
where we were. Are we in 401 A.D., or are we in 1921, or where are we?
So David insisted, Let’s just straighten out this very kinky string, and
make everything that happens happen in line temporally. And that ended
up solving the book.
Ultimately, the book, as a piece of writing, is kind of Byzantine.
It’s the way that I write, it’s the way that I think, and the trick was
to try to keep the reader interested, which I think I pulled off, while
worming around all these different nooks and crannies that I just
thought were too good to not talk about. I mean, the whole part about
oil and Calouste Gulbenkian – I just thought this is important, I have
to tell the story. The story of what’s a sultan, what are harems, what
are janissaries, I just felt, how can you talk about Turks and not
really know [who] a Turk is, I have to get this in there. […]
To get back to your question about is there a protagonist, I don’t
think there is. I do follow Tehlirian for a long period of the book,
because we know more about him than anybody else, there’s more
information, and the story of the trial, being told here in a different
way, is fascinating in and of itself. So, no, there really isn’t.
A.K.: As an Armenian-American writing this book, you
are critical of Western atrocities throughout history, whether they be
in the form of colonialism in Africa or the eradication of native
populations in the Americas. How do you characterize the refusal of U.S.
administrations to use the word “genocide”? When does silence become
denial – or turn into aiding and abetting?
E.B.: […] I have been radicalized while I’ve been
working on this project. I have shifted just recently from looking at
the American government position as – I think I would have characterized
it a year or so ago as pragmatic, understandable because Turkey is so
strategic and the people who run the government are politicians, and I
sort of felt, well, they didn’t have a choice, this is what they have to
do. But I don’t believe that today. I think it’s cowardice, and I think
it’s absurd because the United States is just too powerful to do things
this way. This is the way bureaucracies act, they act weakly because
they are run by cowards, and they don’t understand that the best way to
deal with a bully is to punch him in the face. It’s absurd because
Turkey can’t exist without us. Turkey needs the endless amount of aid
that we give them and the support we give them. It is not a viable
nation without support from the West. […]
As Robert Fisk was saying yesterday when we were talking about it,
it’s ridiculous, it’s just ridiculous. They just have to – say what you
need to say: It’s a genocide. And by not saying it, by perpetuating the
denial, this is the last stage of genocide … Otherwise, we become
complicit, we do become complicit, I agree with that.
A.K.: You mentioned that you’ve become radicalized,
so aside from the obvious fact that writing this book has endowed you
with a tremendous amount of historical and geopolitical knowledge, how
has it changed you?
E.B.: Well, anybody who does the type of research
that I’ve done will quickly realize how malleable history is, and once
you realize how plastic history is, then all of reality starts to become
suspect. […] I think the way I’ve changed is that I was always very
certain that I knew things because I read a lot, and I thought I
understood history or I understood political situations. Today, I’m not
so sure about things, and in that way I’ve changed.
For example, when the Pope made a statement last weekend, on the
surface of it, it seems that the Pope is a man of great spine and
morality, and he just felt that he had to say what he said. Okay, but
there’s also a political context for why he’s saying what he’s saying,
and that has to do with what’s going on in the Middle East today with
ISIS and so forth. So today I don’t just look at the thing as it sits
right in front of me but look at the context, why is he saying it, why
is he choosing today to say these things.
Likewise, yesterday the New York Times decided to suddenly, out of
the blue, put a big piece right on the front page about Turkey and
denial. And, you know, for a lot of us who watch the New York Times very
carefully, this was surprising because only a few days before, they had
kind of buried the Pope’s statement on page 7. It didn’t make the front
page of the paper. How come they changed? Well, I think that they
changed because there’s a sort of behind-the-scenes push-pull going on.
The Pope said what he said, and then Turkey came back and lashed out
with some very strong statements bordering on insults about Argentina,
about the West, and then people are getting fired and thrown away [Etyen
Mahcupyan, chief adviser to Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was
“retired” after referencing the Genocide], and I think the Pope’s moral
spine inspired the New York Times to have some spine and say, If we just
keep giving in to them all the time, if the Turks are going to get
angry if we run this article, then where does this all lead? What is the
point of even saying stuff about the [Genocide], if you’re just going
to keep bending over every time this sort of position is taken, so I
think there was more to it than just an article about Turkey on the
front page yesterday.
So that’s how I’ve changed.
"Asbarez," April 23, 2015
(*) Already published ("Armeniaca").
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