Mapping Armenian literature in the diaspora

by Talar Chahinian

Published: Saturday September 20, 2008

“It is truly an exciting time for Armenian literature.”. Roubina Margossian

During the past two decades, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain a singular narrative of the literary history of the Armenian diaspora. Armenia's independence and the formation of a state that provides an official home for a national literature, the shifting profile of diasporan communities where the Eastern and Western forms of the language (with their multiple dialects) coexist, and the ever-increasing leverage of English as a "global" language not only shatter any notion of singularity in the diaspora, but raise questions about the possibility of continuity for Armenian-language production outside of Armenia. In other words, it is truly an exciting time for Armenian literature. I do not say this with hints of cynicism or sarcasm, rather with the conviction that periods of ambiguity can be looked upon as productive moments, for they require an introspective gaze. This process of inward-looking and self-critical examination can be realized only through dynamic discourse and dialogue.

In a series of articles to follow, I intend to raise questions about the current state and future of Armenian literature in the diaspora, in hopes of soliciting discussion in circles that extend outside of academia, within which similar debates are often limited. After all, what is literature without its reading public? And conversely, what is a general public without its available modes of representation?

The questions at hand, as complex as they are due to the intricacies of their Armenian specificity, are inextricably tied with much broader trends and shifts in the way our society engages with language. In a recent interview, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc., which brought us the "i-empire," claimed that people don't read anymore. While outright false, the statement of the otherwise brilliant and technologically savvy entrepreneur does bring to light a change that is taking place in the way we read. In fact, Jobs made the statement when answering a question about Amazon.com's electronic book reader, Kindle. Whether it is through new reading mediums such as e-books or our growing attachment to and usage of Internet-based sources and social networks, e-mail, and texting, our reading practices are indeed changing rapidly.

These new, technology-based reading mediums contribute to economic globalization, by carving out new demographics of readership, by favoring large publishing houses, and thus affecting the publication and circulation of a given work. Essentially, the assigning of literary capital to works of literature, and the subsequent changes in reading and distribution practices, also contribute to linguistic globalization, which has an effect on the production and translation of literature written in minority languages. When library archives and academic disciplines still rely on national categories to classify literature, the aforementioned globalizing changes bring about a twofold implication to Armenian literature in the diaspora.

First, how does a minor literature, with barely 5 million speakers of its language, sustain its production and circulation at the dawn of the 21st century? Second, does a minor literature that emerges from different transnational locales need to maintain dialogue with a national center?

The answers lie partly in the Armenian diaspora's existing literary history, which, for decades prior to Armenia's independence, carried a transnational identity that predates the recent discourse of globalization and the related conception of "world" literature. What we consider modern Armenian literature today dates back to the mid-19th century, which saw the initiation of the literary movement towards the standardization of the spoken Armenian vernacular, in both the Western and Eastern forms of the language.

In the second half of the 19th century, Armenian literature experienced a period of revival and witnessed the emergence of an active intellectual class. The Armenian national liberation movement in the Ottoman and Czarist empires, coupled with the incoming waves of European artistic and literary movements, such as Romanticism and Realism, produced an abundance of poetry and prose volumes as well as literary journals. Intellectual communities sprung up in cities such as Constantinople and Tbilisi.

The catastrophic years of 1915-23 brought Western-Armenian intellectual life and literature to a grinding halt. Most Armenian writers living in Constantinople were arrested on the evening of April 24, 1915, imprisoned, and later killed. After a few years of complete rupture in the Western-Armenian literary tradition, a few surviving intellectuals returned to Constantinople or reemerged elsewhere to become the surviving "fathers" of Armenian literature and language to the orphaned generation of future writers, who launched a new chapter in Armenian literature: that of the diaspora.

Of course, what I have been calling "diaspora" refers to communities formed as a result of the post-1915 dispersion and subsequent immigration patterns that expanded those initial communities. Prior to 1915, Armenian literature, in both the Eastern and Western traditions, also had a history of "diaspora," since much of its production was published in cities like Constantinople, Tbilisi, Madras and Calcutta, Venice, or Vienna. Whereas these Armenian intellectual centers comprised communities of merchants and elites, the post-1915 diaspora's production emerges under very different conditions: against the backdrop of loss of land, loss of social networks, experiences of exile, and refugee life.

The extensive dispersion of Armenians, with its patterns of migration and the reconstruction of communities, marks the very terrain of transnational literature, which coincides with current debates of world literature as a world literary system. A world literary system is understood as a reconfigured mode of classification that moves beyond "national" categories and looks at literary intersections through the lens of connected histories unmediated by a concept of a "center."