InternationalMapping Armenian literature of the diaspora
Questions of language, hyphenated identities, and politics representation in Armenian-North American literature
Published: Friday November 07, 2008
Michael Arlen born Dikran Kuyumjian on the cover of TIME magazine.
This is the third of a four-part exploration by Talar Chahinian of issues in modern Armenian literature. The previous parts appeared in the September 20 and October 11 editions.
As we cross the Atlantic in our project to map Armenian literature of the diaspora, we find ourselves unable to continue tracing literary production through the notion of urban centers that serve as the nucleus for an entire region or for a distinct cultural narrative. Particularly in North America, the history of Armenian literature not only evades geographic fixations, but urges us to extend our cartographic project to both linguistic and thematic realms. As such, in tracing Armenian literature of North America produced in the Armenian and English languages, and by focusing on the latter's emphasis on the theme of genocide, we will be confronted with the question of what constitutes Armenian literature in the diaspora. Within this larger inquiry, a subsequent, and a more specific, question befits the scope of the article more appropriately: When does literature as a mode of representation or resistance cease from being art?
A large number of Armenians came to the Americas from the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The pattern of immigration and settlement consisted of two main waves: first, following the Hamidian massacres of the mid-1890s, and, second, following the 1915 massacres and mass deportations. Aside from these two major influxes, in the in-between years, the immigration movement continued to grow annually, as Armenians left Turkey due to continuing political persecutions. According to historian Robert Mirak, 67,000 Armenians had migrated to the United States and Canada by the outbreak of World War I, with another 23,000 arriving by 1924's U.S. Immigration Act, which imposed a quota system. Most of the Armenian immigrants in the United States settled in northeastern states like New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey, with another significant portion settling on the farmlands of the West Coast, in Fresno County, California.
In many of these states, an active immigrant press emerged to aid in the process of community-building, alongside religious and political institutions. Among the various periodicals of the time were Hayrenik, the political and literary journal that began publication in Boston in 1922, and the literary journal Nor Kir, which began publication in New York, in 1936. Both of these monthlies gathered around their respective publications groups of prominent writers from both the surviving and orphaned generations. Although many writers from the Middle East or Europe contributed writings to the journals, Hayrenik and Nor Kir showcased also new voices emerging in North America. This first generation of Armenians in America, which included Hamasdegh, Penyamin Nourigian, Aram Haigaz, and Vahe Haig, wrote their prose in the Armenian language, often recounting stories of childhood memories, of pastoral life set in their native Armenian villages.
In time, there emerged a new generation of writers for whom English had become the language of choice for literary expression. Although they wrote and published in English due to their limited access to training in the Armenian language, they often drew from their families' immigrant experience for the content of their prose and poetry. Consequently, they developed a claim to a hyphenated identity, the duality of which lent itself nicely to the growing discourse of an ethnically pluralistic American society. The prototypical example of this generation is the Pulitzer Prize-winning William Saroyan, who is soon followed by the likes of Peter Sourian, Richard Hagopian, Agop Hacikyan, and Peter Najarian.
It is not uncommon to find a translated work of Saroyan, whose works are incorporated into the American literary canon and taught in high schools across the nation, as well as featured in Armenian literature textbooks and taught in language and literature classes in private Armenian middle and high schools of the diaspora. Then, one might ask, to which literary tradition does Saroyan belong? To frame the question as such will undoubtedly produce a futile and reductionistic answer. In fact, the cross-cultural quality of his work increases its significance and readability. Nevertheless, within the Armenian diasporic context, the issue of language-choice vs. content, inherent in the question of belonging, becomes detrimental to conceiving any notion of literary history. Lorne Shirinian, a poet and a scholar of Armenian-North American literature, disagrees with French-Armenian writer and critic Krikor Beledian on this issue. Whereas Beledian believes that the Armenian language is the only site of Armenian presence in the world, Shirinian is reluctant to discount content and a writer's ethnic identity as markers of an Armenian dimension in a work. He argues on behalf of Armenian writers who cannot speak the language but see themselves as Armenian.
As valid and accepted as this latter viewpoint is, especially within the discourse of ethnic-American studies, it can be dangerous to Armenian diasporic culture, if either privileged as the preferred mode of self-expression or seen as the future Armenian literature of the diaspora. The Western form of the Armenian language, of course, will be particularly at stake.
The increasingly preferential status given to English-language works written by Armenian authors derives in part from the question of audience. In the last few decades, second- or third-generation Armenian-Americans have contributed to the burgeoning publication trend of memoirs by writing autobiographical narratives on the theme of the Armenian Genocide. Under the shadow of Turkey's denial and the United States' refusal to officially recognize the events of 1915 as "genocide," English-language works written on this theme are welcomed by Armenians for serving a pedagogical function and thus aiding the cause for recognition.
