Trey Ellis would probably call me a ‘cultural mulatto,’ and you’d probably agree; America is not the dream, it’s where you sober up (with a bad hangover) and get (de) familiarized to the color of your skin. But sitting here on Baghramian Ave., squinting my eyes at couples perched at their tables I wonder if they ever think of their next bold move' and if (my) morbidity ever discomforts them....
Installation by L. Bourgeois, 1989 Like two commas that cut a flight of words into halves these, too, are fat and slow guarding the stairwell with their Sphinx eyes wrinkled in stagnation there is no exit for them. But you still can whisk through to the stairs hidden so well behind the screen, first, train your feet and then grow a feather with each step. Note: This poem appeared in The Spoon River Poetry Review, Winter/Spring 2005....
And she answered, Memory is the paper that cannot be erased by erasing.–Diana Der-Hovanessian, from The Riddle, 1994 This is a true story she says stepping up to the lectern slowly each step bearing ninety seven years of weight. The audience (cough) at once black crows signing to each other (cough) (cough) we walked at night we hid at dawn buried (cough) ourselves under the sand not to be found by the gendarmes (cough) she is almost blind behind the thick lens–that night we lost two girls Manush (cough) eleven and (cough) Zabel (cough) their bodies hanging (cough) (cough) each morn(cough)ing above my bed, their ton(cough)gues ripped out, (cough) their hair burn(cough)t....
Cross-stones of Armenia, sprouting from beneath the churches, with arms cut-off dark, mute grooms, that orphaned slouch underneath the sun, in solitude, in ache, in stiffness, in crystal elegy, in stoic calm, as rows of brides with slit throats and broken hymens, desperately crowd the rivers in springtime, impatient to reach the Caspian shore. Stones of Siamanto, each one marrying a bride on the page, relentlessly in wait for a first kiss or a stolen word frozen on her terrible lips....
Why we should read… THE OTHER VOICE Armenian Women’s Poetry Through the Ages Translated by Diana Der-Hovanessian [AIWA Press, 2005, 153 pp., ISBN: 0-9648787-4-7] Many centuries ago, the Armenians used to celebrate the second Saturday of October as Surb targmanchats ton, the Saint Translator’s Day. There would be great festivities, wine and folk music, circle dances and poetry recitals. Ironically, in the modern days we celebrate wars, not language, literature or those who safeguard our culture and pass it on to the coming generations....
I needed fox Badly I needed a vixen for the long time none had come near me. – A. Rich, ‘Fox’ (1998) I AM fox. I come from Silence. My triangulated face has ripened in the dark fields of the Republic. My burnt-yellow eyes have prayed for Midnight Salvage. My lacerated skin has dreamt of a Common Language. I AM vixen. I hunt alone. I sharpen my teeth on Lies....
ANALYZING THE BEAST In my analysis of Kalinoski’s Beast on the Moon, I will reflect upon the treatment of key recurring themes such as the internalization of catastrophe, the inability or unwillingness to grasp the reality of events, and the acting out of the origins of trauma inflicted upon the human psyche. Furthermore, I will draw parallels between the act of Genocide and domestic violence, – the first being harnessed by bureaucratic indifference and hard-line fundamentalist ideology, the other driven by unresolved trauma....
She sent you nine love letters, nine granules, nine seeds from a pomegranate, nine warm teardrops melting in your palm - Unopened, in stamped envelopes they sprouted and grew long hair waiting in patience on your bureau, while you were in Europe, sampling the best schools, mingling with the best minds, the intelligentsia in Leipzig: Dear brother, in your eyes - an impenetrable night, how many dainty images are still imprinted?...
On the other side of the grand building of the National Art Gallery of Armenia, there is a small wooden door on Manukyan Street that leads me to the quiet halls of the Museum of Art and Literature named after Charents. It is hidden from the eyes of the random passer-by, unnoticed the metro station. Its location makes perfect sense - hidden behind the Gallery - it isn’t supposed to be a tourist attraction, it’s a center for research and studies....
They feel safe here, behind these walls as they sit reminiscing, in silence - the seven of them, perched on antique rugs, saved from a Syrian desert. Wrinkles carve memories too atrocious. Have they forgiven? Nobody knows - they are whispering, as if in a secret world telling each other stories of gathering wool in the lost country of dreams and bread.
[in English] Farrar, 1992, 323 pp. One of Andrei Bitov’s compelling travel memoirs, “A Captive of the Caucasus” is divided into Lessons of Armenia: Journey out of Russia, which was written between 1967-69, and Choosing a Location: Georgian Album, written between 1970-73 and 1980-83. Both Lessons of Armenia and Choosing a Location started as travelogue essays focusing respectively on ancient and modern Armenian architecture and contemporary Georgian filmmaking, but eventually evolved into a full length book....
Sev Shoon Arts Center was founded in 1991, in response to the art community’s need for a printmaking studio in Seattle, WA. It is owned and operated by Dionne Haroutunian who came to Seattle from Switzerland in 1985. Since then Haroutunian has become an active member of the Ballard community, organizing and reviving the discipline of visual arts through various projects. Locally known as Ballard ArtsWalk, this monthly celebration of the arts has brought together a dynamic group of artists and craftsmen over the last decade....
Installation by L. Bourgeois, 1999-2000 Trapped in a white dress of crochets I step forward to hold his thick arm. I am offered the blush apple tartness, served on a silver hook. I take a small bite. Juices trickle down my chin onto the bleached lace of my bridal dress stains of blood. Poison seeping through all inside my veins. He gently lays me down into the crystal coffin. Our marriage bed....
Sculpture by L. Bourgeois, 1996 Unhidden from the rest, in the daylight, the black widow sways on her eight spoke-legs unmoving the eye, a spy of some sort, she is weaving her silk net, spraying each thread with a pungent secretion from her moist canals - a sack of venom, using the ejaculate to attract the prey. A trained hunter, this recluse knows how fast her bait can work!
There is a bustle in the air, a rattling, a soft commotion, clouds gossiping in espionage as Yerevan breeds quietly with gray - Could I be a spirit trapped in a statue, white covering my toes? Looking up - the sky is solemn, filled with easy dancing flurries that separate us - they condemn this marriage of fast melting heartbeats, brusque slaps on my naked face that sometimes hurt, especially the ones spinning the eye - like icicles from fairytales, so I ignore the laughing doilies that resist and stay, clinging to my bronze shield as surrogate drapes....
“Penelope was waking to the warm golden-greenish sunrays, which reminded her of a delicious pumpkin hill, usually unloaded onto the hot August asphalt of the heavily trodden Yerevan streets. Carefully, she touched the ray with her finger,” begins Gohar Markosian-Kasper in her autobiographical novel, where the banal is marvelously transformed into intricately stitched patterns forming a quilt of her own. Originally from Yerevan, author of three novels Markosian-Kasper writes about the ordinary life in Armenia during its early independence days of the nineties in a most unordinary style....
I was six weeks old getting comfortable in my mother’s womb warm and welcomed wasn’t sure about my sex – when my father in a council with himself decided to name me Shumavon :: My firstborn is a son no question about it he declared proudly stroking his black moustache. I turned mind disturbed how inconvenient! Then curling my yet-to-be-developed lips into a smile I turned out to be a nonconformist – precisely –...
The leper - is on the loose, wears a mask beneath a mask, has slain the doe, eats away with blood-saliva dripping on the soil feeding on the roots, killing all the roots, the beast - a chimera suckles the flock with heinous milk, diseased with greed and avarice, will to power - the beast is on the loose - who will feed the monster, who will mate and breed with it, who’s gonna bear it in their wombs cancer-like, replicating, multiplying metastasizing into a deadly lock, who’ll stay behind these tombs?...
(This poem is dedicated to my paternal grandfather, whose life has been a source of inspiration for me. He is a true survivor, a builder, a patriot and today he is more beautiful than ever). By Shushan Avagyan This was his first tree planted in 1936, after the Soviets allotted a piece of land in the city, after the collective took over his family’s house in the village, farmland and cattle, after his father was taken away as a kulak - the enemy of people Stalinists called, after his brothers’ exile to Northern Russia: an orphaned youth seeking asylum from the bloody hunt of a system gone wrong....
Selected Works: Shushanik Kurghinian (1876-1927) It was in my sixth grade Armenian literature class that I first read this intriguing poet, who caught my attention because we shared the same name, and also because women writers rarely appeared in my textbooks. Last year I spent many hours leafing through her family album at the Museum of Art and Literature in Yerevan, browsing through her diligently handwritten notebooks and trying to decipher the sophisticated calligraphy....
THE SHE FOX (Sculpture by L. Bourgeois, 1986) resides on a pedestal sleek head at her feet - a decapitated hybrid served as if for sacrifice - her cold marble body attacked repeatedly with a chisel in deliberate stabbing fashion. Technically she has no face and yet she’s watching you through her four swollen teats - organic breathing fierce lonely in her unpredictable cosmos creator and destroyer and extremely soft - soft as the skin of Mother - Satenig....
Noon - the hour of observance - a yellow frenzy spreading over the neighboring hills - zourna bellows wildly in a coarse duet with the dhol, as dancing arms and feet form tightly knotted circles of loud human carousels. Enters the bride, timidly hiding her face in a veil, white and translucent, then successively - the groom - young man with rosy cheeks holding a silver dagger in his hand -...
A broken typewriter two rolls of Tungsten film a newspaper with a photograph of the burning twin towers a City Lights publication of Kaddish & other poems a pair of bright yellow sunglasses in the red Polaroid case which i stole from my mother’s bureau [before i left her house] an old issue of Depi Yerkir and a box of Kotex tampons: all crammed on my brown folding table....
What started with rose petals sprinkled in abundance onto joyful crowds of Armenian ancestry, centuries ago, in celebration of a saint - now, on a hot July afternoon, spread across the turbulent streets of Yerevan, metamorphosing into a wild pagan ritual of water, turned into a mystical ingredient, purified and hidden in tin carafes - waiting in the hands of stealthy adolescents for random startled passers by. Yerevan July 7, 2002...
‘…into a kind of absolute reality’ - Andre Breton, First Manifesto Next door is America, Washington D.C., the Mall is where they chase me down yelling `That one over there, the last of the Armenians! Rape her, crush her in a coffin, bury her alive with the rest of them’ It’s like a cabaret; a plethora of Turks with arched swords, and red fezes sitting awkwardly on top of their heads, attack me....