An African Journal: The Translated Stories of Raymond Boghos Kupelian
By Hovig Tchalian
Critics’ Forum
Literature
8.19.2006
The recently published collection of stories by Raymond Boghos
Kupelian, African Symphony (AuthorHouse, 2006), marks a return of
sorts, for both the author and his readers. The volume translates
Kupelian’s second collection of stories of the same name, originally
written three decades ago in Armenian. They also chronicle the thoughts
and experiences of a man who emigrated to West Africa from Lebanon,
where he grew up, leaving yet again twenty years later for Southern
California, where this first English-language volume now appears.
It is significant that Kupelian left Lebanon voluntarily. A recent
article quotes him as saying that "the beauty of the forest, …
nature … everything was different" in Africa than it was in Lebanon
(Glendale News Press, 8/01/06). There is little or no nostalgia
for Lebanon, no longing for the past, in Kupelian’s statement,
but a search for something new. And that same spirit of discovery
is evident in the volume, which seems more concerned with what the
author’s biography refers to as the "immediacy" of its subject.
The tales themselves do not exhibit the structure of the classical
short story-with its dramatic conflict, swift progression and equally
dramatic conclusion. Kupelian’s stories feel more like journal entries
written on a tranquil beach, one sentence at a time, then reworked
months or years later. They invite a reading that shares that same
leisurely spirit.
One of the better known stories in the collection, "Surie Una Man,"
is written in that leisurely spirit. It tells the tale of Surie,
an African servant who takes a younger second wife and jeopardizes
his manhood and his family’s well-being in the process. The story
is perhaps the collection’s least convincingly translated. Certain
passages sound awkward, almost as though they had been translated
verbatim from Armenian, such as in this passage, which describes
Surie’s brief brush with schooling: "Next day, in the evening hours,
for the first time in his life, Surie stepped into school! Sitting
like a bishop in the back of the car, he entered through the gate of
the establishment." (52).
Much better translated is "The Bush in the Man." In it, Bomboli, a
disgraced Minister of Education now awaiting trial in jail, mourns the
loss of his former glory. It begins with a description of Bomboli’s
recurring dream, in which a boy fishing in a boat is attacked by a
crocodile, which turns out to be a man in disguise who takes the boy’s
body deep into the jungle. The rest of the story takes a cue from the
dream, weaving in and out of the minister’s thoughts and telling a
kind of morality tale or fable. Along the way, we find out that the
minister, a former schoolteacher, had a rapid rise to glory and an
equally rapid demise, after being accused by British authorities of
witchcraft and cannibalism. The story succeeds in touching on issues
of culture and colonialism, without being unnecessarily didactic
or preachy.
Less successful is "Despot," a story of a white Englishwoman who falls
in love with an African man who later becomes his (unnamed) country’s
ruler. After his exile and death, she is pressured to publish her
journals, which recount the torrid and well-publicized affair. But
she refuses on principle. Here is where the leisurely spirit of the
book goes awry. The tale seems to tie episodes loosely together,
while balancing an apparent moral at the center of it. All the while,
the narrator’s voice intrudes too often, as in this example, where he
explains the woman’s actions: "It was evident. Hers was an idealized
love for an absolutely great man. She needed to keep it immaculate"
(70).
By far the best story in the collection is "Kookoo Sherif." It is
the wrenching but subtle tale of the African girl referred to in the
title, molested by a Middle Eastern shop-owner, in exchange for a
pair of shoes she has spotted in his store window. The repercussions
of that emblematic, brutal barter at the heart of the story-goods
for people-reverberate until the end. But the tale also allows the
girl’s story to unfold gradually and convincingly.
Kookoo grows into a woman of the streets and eventually falls in love
with a young African revolutionary, who is soon imprisoned for his
ideas. In the end, she manages to turn the tables on her oppressors
by pretending to be the mistress of a high-ranking mulatto official
(mulattos in some cases being the offspring of illegitimate unions
between black Africans and white immigrants).
The scandal the story creates allows her to trick him and her own
past oppressors (the shop-owner chief among them), freeing her lover
from prison in the process. The story develops from conflict to
resolution in sure-handed and compelling fashion, using the tension
of the narrative to tie the various details together. It embodies
better than any other story in the collection the promise fulfilled
more fully in Kupelian’s later works.
The book’s first story and its last tie the collection together and
add the structure and cohesion sometimes missing from other individual
tales. "A Diamond Tale" starts off the collection and is itself perhaps
the best structured in the volume. It recounts a conversation between
the narrator and a local judge, who decries the fact that people have
been killed for the sake of the precious stone in the title. The judge
recounts stories of barbaric acts-such as when a young boy working as
a "sen sen boy" (or "sand boy"), looking through freshly dug dirt for
diamonds, rubs the sweat off of his face, only to be wrongly accused
of swallowing a diamond and murdered. The story ends in a reversal of
sorts, when the narrator announces that the judge has been poisoned
to death, after having invited the narrator to "hear a diamond tale"
by sitting in on the murder hearing at his court the following day.
The tale also includes an interesting look at middle eastern immigrants
in Africa, people the locals refer to collectively as "Syrians" (the
writer among them). They are portrayed as good people occasionally
gone bad, under the glare of the sun and the constant temptation of
riches. With the introduction of the "foreigners" into the African
context, this first story acts as a fitting beginning to the book. The
act is completed in the final story, "Washed by the Waves," which tells
the story of an idealistic black American woman who comes to Africa
looking for peace and leaves disillusioned, never to return. The story
describes her love affair with a local official, a married man. It
also recounts the parallel, and sometimes strangely incongruous,
story of the narrator’s short-lived affair with a Scottish woman. The
tale also sounds the note of universality in the collection, of the
sameness of cultures-their loves, cruelties and disappointments-that
far outweigh their differences.
The volume’s cover art and original illustrations, drawn by Armen
Minassian and the writer’s son, Roger Kupelian, complement the volume
well and represent perhaps its most pleasant surprise. The collection
could have benefited as well from a longer introduction, placing
the stories in the writer’s larger body of work and its original
Armenian-language context. The volume currently includes a good but
brief biography that gets lost at the very back of the book.
All in all, Raymond Boghos Kupelian’s African Symphony is an
interesting look at a different diasporan existence-not the forced
exile of the immigrant but the voluntary travels of a man in search
of something greater.
Additional information about the writer and his works may be found
at
All Rights Reserved: Critics Forum, 2006
Hovig Tchalian holds a PhD in English literature from UCLA. He has
edited several journals and also published articles of his own.