Philly.com
Posted on Sun, Jun. 10, 2007

Poems of atrocity, and of joyfully Americanizing
Gregory Djanikian’s verses are informed by his Armenian heritage and by an
exuberant immigrant patriotism.
By Frank Wilson
Inquirer Books Editor

So I Will Till the Ground
By Gregory Djanikian
Carnegie Mellon. 84 pp. $14.95
All the tribes of humankind have had their sorrows, but the Armenians – like
the Jews – seem to have had more than their share. Between 1915 and 1917,
deported and massacred by the Young Turk rulers of the moribund Ottoman Empire,
they became the victims of the 20th century’s first genocide.
The memory of that horrific episode clearly resonated in Gregory Djanikian’s
family – for this book is transparently a memoir in verse – and his portrayal
of it in the first part of the book makes for tough reading, in no small
measure because of the understated, pastoral tone he often employs to detail
atrocity (one of the poems is titled "Armenian Pastoral, 1915").
Consider "Deportation Song": "This one was given a week to get ready . . .
This one hired carts and mules . . . This one hid in the pantry bin . . . This
one carried his son on his back . . . This one was already being led away . . .
This one was butchered . . . and this one was crying for water . . ."
"Children’s Lullaby" begins:

If you’re walking for a long time,
you can’t think about tomorrow.
If you’re walking for a long time,
keep your eyes down and don’t falter.

Here is how it ends:

Never ask where you are going,
the wind might blow your ashes there.
Never ask where you are going,
the wind is blowing everywhere.

Accident of birth spared Djanikian – who heads the creative-writing program
at the University of Pennsylvania – direct experience of the 1915 deportation,
but not a later one, in 1956, after the French, British and Israelis attacked
Suez, when Armenians – including Djanikian’s family – who had found refuge in
Egypt after World War I, were among the nationalities expelled by Gamal Abdel
Nasser’s government. And that is how 8-year-old Gregory Djanikian came to
America:

Outside it was Pennsylvania
heavy with snow, the sidewalks
had disappeared,
streets had become
a mirage of dunes.

He tells "How We Practice Being American":

. . . "Saratoga," we said,
"Oklahoma," making sure the o’s were long, long, long
as long as it took "to form a more perfect union,"
something for all of us if we could just
say it right, find the key for the tongue,
a diphthong into the heart of it
where we could all be indivisible,
eliding easily one into another.

Not surprisingly, one of the later poems in the book is called "Oklahoma."
More surprising is how a collection that begins so gut-wrenchingly can segue so
smoothly into something so celebratory. There’s the poem about Djanikian’s
name: "No one could pronounce it / without mutilating, spindling, tearing . . .
the D was silent easy enough / to say once you got the hang of it but Joe
didn’t . . . " And then

. . . I heard Louisa Richards
suddenly call out DeeJay to me from her porch
in a way that stopped me in my tracks
because nothing had ever sounded so good . . .

"Immigrant Picnic," with its catalog of his mother’s endearing malapropisms,
is both hilarious and touching, as is the account of the card game he has with
her. Before dealing, his mother declares, "Let justice prevail." And so it
does: She wins just about every hand.
It all comes together in the splendid penultimate poem, "Mystery Farm Road,"
where two boys meet in memory and imagination thanks to "a book read one
summer . . . in Alexandria." That boy, Djanikian tells himself, "reading a book /
and mouthing the words huckleberry and harvest // that will cast a spell on him
for years . . . that boy is you." But so is "the boy by the river // baring
his calves under the black willows."
For all its focus upon the lives and customs of Armenians, this book makes
you proud to be an American. And, despite the graphic depiction of the evil that
men can do, it manages somehow to give your faith in humanity a palpable
boost.

Contact books editor Frank Wilson at 215-854-5616 or fwilson@phillynews.com.
Read his recent work at

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress