perceptions

[Guest arabaliozian]

ARMENIAN ATTITUDES******************************Among Armenians every certified moron feels fully qualified to criticize a writer on the assumption that only a lesser moron would adopt Armenian literature as a career.*Name a single living Armenian writer who has made as many headlines in our own press as, say, Cher or Andre Aghassi.*Entertainment and patriotic mumbo jumbo: that’s what we look for in literature. Everything else is viewed with Ottomanized or Stalinized eyes.*To please all Armenians, in effect, to create unanimity among them: has anyone ever succeeded in accomplishing that Utopian enterprise or realized that impossible dream?*Writers like Abovian and Zarian believed in their ability to change things – or rather, in the power of words and ideas to change our perception of reality. Today’s writers and scholars (mostly medievalists and massacrists) believe in one thing only: taking care of number one.*For our bosses and bishops, literature has only one purpose: to cover up their lies, and to misrepresent their blunders as triumphs of statesmanship.ARMENIAN ATTITUDES (ii)*****************************************"I am become a stranger unto my brothers, and a stranger unto mymother’s children." PSALM LXIX****************************************During the last seven centuries we were the subjects of two brutal imperial regimes. Our intellectual tradition was not only stunted by censorship but also systematically mutilated first by the Ottoman Turks in 1915, second by successive waves of Stalinist purges, and third by our own political, religious, and so-called cultural institutions in the Diaspora.Let’s not kid ourselves: the purge of intellectuals in the Diaspora may not have been as brutal as in the Ottoman Empire and the Soviet Union but it was no less systematic. So much so that, one of our greatest writers (Gostan Zarian) was forced to return to Soviet Armenia (and this in the 1960s) where even his application for membership in the Writers’ Union was rejected and where he was buried alive. As far as I know, this is the only instance of a major intellectual emigrating from a democracy (USA) to a police state (USSR) in the hope that he will get better treatment there.The main purpose of this brief essay, however, is not to expose the anti-intellectual bias of our authoritarian power structures but to expose those among us who, after reading a couple of poems by Charents and Sevak, pretend to be experts on Armenian literature on the grounds that the overwhelming majority of Armenian-Americans have not read even a single line of Armenian poetry, and the handful who have, know better, and may thus be in a position to contradict them, are so underpaid, apathetic, and alienated that they no longer care enough to get involved in senseless controversies and vicious arguments stirred up by loud-mouth charlatans whose ignorance is matched only by their arrogance.Saturday, August 03, 2002*********************************The past is another country with its own complexities. Not our complexities but its own. And someone else’s. That’s one reason why no two historians agree on it. *The Greeks call Hercules Iraklis and the Turks Hergele. Hergele in Turkish also means hoodlum. From hero to zero.*To contemporary historians, Christ was a non-person and Nero a god.*One man’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist. The past is a foreign country. So is the present. Reality is an extension of values. One man’s hero is another’s zero. *Can a hoodlum be a hero? If you want an answer to this question, don't ask the hoodlum.*We have been on the wrong track. Instead of documenting facts we should be analyzing values. A massacre is not just an occurrence or a collection of facts but a statement of values. That’s why it is like the smile of a Cheshire cat: alternately visible and invisible.____