InternationalMapping Armenian literature in the diaspora
The post–World War II shift and the emergence of Beirut as the new intellectual center
Published: Saturday October 11, 2008
Lebanon. Paul Chaderjian
This is the second of a four-part exploration by Talar Chahinian of issues in modern Armenian literature. The first part appeared in the September 20 edition.
Following World War II, Beirut emerges as the Armenian diaspora's intellectual and literary center. The general move to the Middle East not only marks a new phase in the Western-Armenian literary tradition, but it does so by burying the short-lived explosion of literary production that came out of Paris during the years between the two world wars. The idea of a transnational literary orientation proposed by Menk, one of the most promising literary groups active on the pre-World War II Parisian scene, is abandoned for a nationalist cultural narrative, which constructs itself based on simplified and reduced notions of homeland, diaspora, and community.
In the decades to come, although some of the Menk writers individually survive this shift of locale and ideology, the group itself, or the post-1915 "orphan" generation as a whole, receives scrutiny for failing to record the story of dispersion. Whereas Menk's literature represents precisely the Armenian survivor's experience in exile, from the post-World War II perspective, "recording the story of dispersion" translates into a more singular and politicized meaning: writing about the Genocide. In fact, for the most part, Menk's literature is void of explicit memory of the past trauma, giving way for criticism of the authors: for not writing of their people's recent past and for focusing too heavily on "non-Armenian" elements of their current reality.
Hagop Oshagan, one of the few surviving literary figures from the pre-1915 era (thus the fathers' generation), has summarized Menk's efforts: "As such, we should not see in Menk a reactionary stance, the forging of national identity, or efforts to create Armenian depth and thought, and we should not be taken in by the noise that would inevitably arise around that. Rather, we should view these boys in a truer light. They have ceased to belong to our nation, that nation which they have not known during their most formative years; instead they have known it only through its horrific destruction... What they have given us is the foreign Other." Oshagan's multi-volume work, Panorama of Western-Armenian Literature, with its final volume devoted to "Testimony," attests to his own difficulty in offering an account of the past trauma. Yet he cannot dismiss the Menk writers' fascination with the figure of the Other, and subsequently cannot find justification for incorporating the body of literature that they produce within the Western-Armenian literary tradition, which is bound by the category of "national" rather than "transnational."
Indeed, notwithstanding the efforts of some critics, most notably Krikor Beledian, Menk remains excluded from the modern Armenian literary canon. Here I use the word canon loosely, for I recognize how problematic the assertion that a canon of the diaspora exists is; I'm simply using it to refer to the body of works published, circulated, and referred to by the diaspora's various institutions, meaning works that contribute to the diaspora's cultural narrative. It is precisely the efforts at canon formation that differentiate the post-World War II intellectual center of the Middle East from the post-World War I intellectual activity of Paris. Having refused to be a part of the pre-1915 literary trajectory and having rejected notions of continuity as a premise to their literary production, the orphaned generation of Menk could not participate in processes of canon formation, when the very definition of a literary canon demands an inherent quality of continuity and lineage.
The writers and intellectuals who emerge or re-emerge on the Beirut scene, on the other hand, present themselves as the connecting thread to the pre-1915 literary tradition. As such, their attempts at forging a link to the tradition preceding the 1915 rupture not only efface the contribution of French-Armenian literature produced between the wars, but also result in (1) efforts to provide a historical overview of Western-Armenian literature, and (2) the development of a platform of "preservation."
The establishment of Armenian day schools in the Middle East plays a key role in both expediting and subsequently perpetuating the process of canon formation. Most notable among them is the secondary school Jemaran in Beirut, renamed Nshan Palanjian Jemaran in 1950. Founded by intellectuals and writers of the surviving generation like Levon Shant and Nigol Aghpalian, and emergent writers like Mushegh Ishkhan, the well-reputed institution adds a pedagogical dimension to the conception and production of Armenian literature in the diaspora. In order to teach Armenian language and literature, efforts are made to construct a historical narrative of the Armenian literary tradition that ties the post-World War II present to the decades of fervent literary life preceding World War I.
What follows is the construction of a new form of nationalism that (in its various versions) is to guide the popular imagination of Armenian-diaspora organizations, institutions, and political parties in the years to come. The need to standardize the teaching of language and literature is further aided by the presence of the seat of the Catholicosate of Cilicia, which had relocated to Antelias, Lebanon, in 1930. The proximity of the Catholicosate, as the highest form of institutional authority in the diaspora, validates the category of the "national" as the ideological framework for the diaspora's narrative under construction.
Writer and critic Minas Tololyan's Tar Me Kraganutyun: 1850-1950 (A Century of Literature: 1850-1950), published in Cairo in the mid-1950s, comes forth as one of the most comprehensive efforts of anthology-making, wherein some of the writers of the Paris scene are included as part of the historical trajectory of modern Armenian literature. The names of writers are few and selective, a quality reflecting the limitations of the anthology genre.
