Intellectuals of Armenia and Diaspora: The Quest for a New Paradigm

 Tigran Yegavian

In the 20th century, a large part of Armenian literary production took place outside the borders of Armenia. In the diaspora, the philosopher and editor-in-chief of the GAM Literary Magazine, Marc Nichanian, reminds us of the injustice that the Armenian literary world suffered by the censoring of Western Armenian by the Soviet regime. Access to important literary figures such as Hagop Oshagan, Indra or even the writers of the Paris School (Chahan Chahnour, Nigoghos Sarafian, Zareh Vorpuni, etc.) were limited. This question, which has been relegated to secondary importance in the face of the existential challenges facing the Armenian world, has one merit: It implicitly calls for a new paradigm in the relationship between the literary elite of Armenia and the diaspora.

Panel on Vahé and Hagop Oshagan Held in Lisbon

Taline Voskeritchian

 

Lisbon was recently the site of two important events related to the literature of the Armenian diaspora.

The first was a panel that convened at the International Symposium of the Modern Language Association, the major professional association for scholars and teachers of language and literature, including comparative literature. This year’s theme was Remembering Voices Lost. According to the organizers, the conference, which took place between July 23 and 25 in the Portuguese capital, aimed to “recuperate the ‘lost voices’ of humanity: those that have been buried or forgotten and those that have been marginalized or othered on the grounds of their perceived foreignness.”

Zareh Vorpouni's The Candidate Published in English

Zareh Vorpouni (1902–1980) was a prominent French Armenian writer. He was the author of numerous novels and short story collections, including The Persecuted, a cycle of four novels published between 1929 and 1974: The Attempt (1929), The Candidate (1967), Asphalt (1972), and A Regular Day (1974).

Zareh Vorpouni: The Renegade of Late 20th Century Western Armenian Literature

Jennifer Manoukian

 

Zareh Vorpouni was a lone ranger. In a corpus that spanned genre and era, he embodied the new, the experimental, and the transgressive in Western Armenian fiction in a way that few writers can, or have cared to, rival. Writing most prolifically in the 1960’s and 1970’s when readers and interest in literature were in decline, Vorpouni’s cultural apotheosis in the eyes of the Armenian diaspora never happened in his lifetime, during which he was read and admired only by a small group of Armenian intellectuals mostly concentrated in France—his home from 1922 until his death in 1980.

But Vorpouni’s obscurity is unwarranted, especially in a day and age in which the touchstones of Armenian diaspora culture are growing stale and many are in search of the freshness and the intellectual vigor that Vorpouni epitomized.

Meline Toumani, the Armenian Genocide and the Politics of Appeasement

Christopher Atamian

 

Meline Toumani's puzzling and sometimes maddening first book There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia and Beyond purports to analyze the hatred still separating Armenians and Turks on the eve of the one hundredth commemoration of the Armenian Genocide. The biggest problem with the exposé lies perhaps in Toumani's underlying assumptions, i.e. that Armenians and Turks all hate each other and in equating victim and perpetrator. Toumani is usually a fluid writer, but here she gets lost in an often muddled and contradictory analysis.

Questioning the Unquestionable: Marc Nichanian’s "Mourning Philology"

Karen Jallatyan

 

Have you ever felt that contemporary philosophy is useless? That you do not have the time to think about the intangible and unimportant questions that it asks? This is how I used to feel when I was an undergraduate at UCLA some years ago, studying chemistry and biology, and striving to attend medical school after graduation. But everything changed when I started reading Marc Nichanian. His books and essays did not just restore my faith in the need for philosophy; they made me think about the ways in which I could negotiate between my diasporic life and Armenian heritage, creatively and philosophically.

"Genocide" Does Not Describe The Armenian Experience

Jano Boghosian



The Armenian experience is as common as it is unique. Armenian history is a part of human history, thus the Armenian experience must be remembered as a significant part of the human experience. To fully comprehend the historiography of the Armenian experience requires the examination of the events leading up to 1915, not in a vacuum, but, in the context of world history. This article is meant to analyze the legacies that transcend past the survivors into our collective consciousness.

On the Way to Baykoz

Nigol Bezjian



I was in Istanbul recently as part of a Lebanese production team working on a mobile phone commercial for a third country. Normally this would have taken place in Lebanon, but the politically unstable conditions here are diverting work into Turkish coffers. Interestingly, I was booked in a hotel located only a hundred meters away from the Armenian Agos newspaper, whose founder, Hrant Dink, was assassinated on Jan. 19, 2007. While resting and waiting for time to pass, I recalled my first ever visit to Istanbul where, once again unknowingly, I had booked a hotel just a street away.

In 2009, I was back in the city to film Marc Nichanian for “Milk, Carnation & a Godly Song,” my film about Taniel Varoujan, the Armenia poet who was killed in the genocide.

Un nombre bajo los talones, o lo sublime y lo banal

 Hagop Gulludjián

Sobremesa de una cena en la cocina. Habla sentado en una silla de madera. Las noticias de la televisión en francés interceptan parcialmente sus frases, pero no quiere silenciar el aparato ubicado justo detrás de él. No quiere hablar solo; quizás le teme a su propia voz.
Tiene noventa años, pero es un hombre que sube los ciento cincuenta escalones de Montmartre todas las mañanas con vigor juvenil. Enfrente está una pareja que ha viajado diez mil kilómetros para verlo. Aunque los separan poco menos de seis décadas, uno de ellos es el sobrino. El testigo le habla a la mujer de este último, a quien ni siquiera acerca su mirada.