Armenian Revival: (Re-)Introducing the Critics’ Forum
By Hovig Tchalian
The article below first appeared in late 2005. It has been updated
and is being reprinted in the Armenian Reporter in order to set the
stage for the monthly publication of our articles in those pages. It
is also meant to introduce those readers unfamiliar with Critics’
Forum to the group’s approach and purpose.
We are fortunate in the Diaspora, and particularly in the United
States, to be at the center of a thriving community of Armenian art
and culture. Not a week goes by, it seems, without the papers
announcing a theatrical production, art exhibition, poetry reading or
concert in Boston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and
elsewhere. As a result, there is now a thriving group of writers,
poets, playwrights, and artists living and working in Armenian
communities in the United States. Despite the abundance of cultural
events in our communities, however, the time has come to cast a more
critical eye at the body of work we are collectively producing.
Our instincts for self-preservation may very well tell us that more
is always better. But considering the steady stream of Armenian
cultural events and performances available to us these days, we would
do well to reconsider that argument. The Armenian population in
Southern California, in particular, has grown and matured immensely
over the last several decades, having become one of the largest and
most affluent such communities in the world. The growth of our
collective appetite for cultural events reflects that development and
the larger economic and social forces driving it. As such, we can
now safely turn our attention from moral and material support of the
arts to their improvement, which amounts to admitting that we no
longer need more works but better ones.
The time is especially right for those of us living in Southern
California – to return once more to my own primary point of
reference – because there is something of a cultural revival taking
place in our community. Events such as the annual UCLA Graduate
Student Colloquium, for instance, have always attracted a good deal
of attention, and rightly so. But these events have been around for
quite some time. And they generally attract a small gathering of
people, mostly academics and those who attend other, similar cultural
events on a regular basis.
The revival I am talking about is taking place in a broader context,
one which is redefining the boundaries of the Armenian community
itself. For instance, a group of young people in Los Angeles has
been organizing theater evenings for the past several years. The
group comes together one evening every month to attend a play. And
although the attendees are almost all Armenian, the plays are
decidedly not. They have included the works of American, English and
South American playwrights. Another group has plans to fund an
ambitious Armenian Academy with a rigorous curriculum aimed at better
preparing Armenian high school students for college. The Armenian
Center for the Arts (ACA) represents another ambitious endeavor, this
time to create a cultural and performing arts venue in Southern
California, for both Armenian and non-Armenian audiences. And the
large number of Armenian candidates on the ballot for city elections
over the past several years, particularly in Glendale, has spawned
its own group of events and functions, many of a cultural or artistic
nature.
There has been a critical mass of these events taking place over the
last few years. But sheer numbers alone do not tell the story.
After all, the rise in numbers is due in part to programs
commemorating the Genocide, and as I said earlier, the numbers have
been rising more generally for some time now. I am calling this
series of events a "revival" for an entirely different reason: the
events have all begun changing how we define our community, because
almost all are taking place in part outside it – whether the plays
the theater group attends, the educational goals of the Armenian
Academy, the mixed audience of the ACA, or the public offices the
Armenian candidates have so successfully filled. In fact, I would go
so far as to say that this revival could only have taken place in the
process of extending the boundaries of the Armenian community as we
know it, providing a perfect opportunity to reassess the quality of
the cultural and artistic works created in the various corners of the
Armenian Diaspora, and particularly English-language ones.
Of course, it is more than a coincidence that Genocide commemoration
should play such a central role in the cultural events, and not just
in the early part of every year. So many of the greatest Armenian
writers of the past century – Varoujan, Shant, Sevag, Oshagan,
Gaboudigian – have produced their finest works in the shadow of the
Genocide, and often in commemoration of it. The same cannot be said,
however, of Armenians writing in English. In the years since the
writing of Morgenthau’s letters, there have been countless and
poignant attempts in both English and other non-Armenian languages to
understand the historical significance of the Genocide. Ironically,
the most subtle and effective of these have been produced outside or
at the very fringes of the Armenian community. Some are of a more
historical nature and have come from non-Armenians following in
Morgenthau’s footsteps. Other, more strictly artistic, pieces have
been produced independently and on related subjects, such as Werfel’s
Forty Days. But few of the more compelling artistic works can be
said to have originated squarely in the Armenian Diaspora, and
certainly not in Southern California.
A good example is the much-lauded play, "Beast on the Moon," a
professional production of which debuted a few years ago on the New
York stage and later made its way to the west coast. The play tells
the story of an Armenian couple, Genocide survivors living in the
American Midwest in the 1920’s. Their personal struggles gently
illuminate the significance of the Genocide in its more personal,
psychological aspects. The play was written by Richard Kalinoski, a
Wisconsin-born playwright whose wife is Armenian. Ninety years after
its occurrence – and perhaps now closer than ever to being accepted
as historical fact, with the introduction of the latest US
congressional resolution – the Armenian Genocide maintains its hold
on our collective imagination. But though we in the Diaspora have
commemorated it unfailingly for nearly a century, we remain as a
community understandably too close to the tragedy to be able to
represent it with any sense of emotional detachment or objectivity.
We need only think of examples other than Kalinoski’s play to judge
the accuracy of what I am claiming – that most of the outstanding
examples of Armenian Diasporan art of the last two decades or more,
and particularly in the English language, have been created outside
the immediate confines of the community itself. Peter Balakian’s
novel, Black Dog of Fate, was written after the New Jersey-born
author rediscovered his Armenian heritage. Atom Egoyan’s often
extraordinary films are those of an Armenian born in Egypt and raised
as a Canadian, directing as much for the audience at Cannes as those
in Armenia or the Diaspora. Egoyan’s two films on overtly Armenian
subjects, Calendar (1993) and the more recent Ararat (2002), despite
their many strengths and merits, are arguably too hampered by the
weight of history and the burden of their message. The Sweet
Hereafter (1997), the film that garnered Egoyan the greatest critical
acclaim and is easily his best work to date, succeeds precisely
because of a certain detachment from its subject. It tells of the
devastating effect a school bus crash has on the residents of a small
town. The depth and subtlety of the film’s psychological portrayals
allow it to rise above the particular tale it tells to the level of
human tragedy, much like Kalinoski’s play.
Admittedly, the detachment required to produce art rather than
polemic may be difficult if not impossible to achieve. We feel
compelled as a community to measure even our artistic achievements
with the yardstick of history. As such, many of the English-language
works created in the Diaspora are anchored to the Genocide – either
the tragedy of the event itself or of its aftermath, the immigrant
experience. Unfortunately for us, by anchoring ourselves to the
past, we have also compromised the quality of the art we produce.
And more importantly, we have compromised its ability to transcend
its own historical circumstances, not only those of the Genocide but
of its own maturation process. The effect is art whose real and
imagined audience is none other than the community of Genocide
survivors and immigrants who collectively make up the Armenian
Diaspora. Even if we hoped to create nothing more than effective
polemic, we must admit that no new converts to the Armenian cause can
be had by preaching to the converted.
If we compare this state of affairs to that in the Jewish community,
whose history is similar in a number of ways to ours, we notice some
interesting differences. There, a standout film about the Holocaust
such as The Pianist (2002), which won acclaim at the Oscars, was
based on the biography of a Jewish musician growing up in Poland
during World War II. The story it told, however, had universal
appeal. The earlier and critically acclaimed box-office hit,
Schindler’s List (1993), though spearheaded by a director of Jewish
heritage, Steven Spielberg, was conceived with a decidedly
international audience in mind. And I mention only two examples from
several dozen possibilities, whether films or other works. The Diary
of Anne Frank (1947), for instance, eclipses both of the films
mentioned in popularity, having long become an international
phenomenon as well as a cultural and literary classic. It is said to
be one of the most widely read books in the world.
No doubt this comparison between the responses of the Armenian and
the Jewish communities to historical tragedy is itself marred by
history – the international community has recognized the Holocaust
while continuing by and large to either deny or ignore the Armenian
Genocide. This well-known fact also suggests a larger truth: if the
Jewish community is still coming to terms with the devastating
effects of the Holocaust some sixty years after its recognition, then
how much greater must the need for a coping mechanism be in the
Armenian community during the ninety-year struggle for recognition.
But by the same token, the cultural works mentioned here are in large
part worthy of general critical acclaim, regardless of their subject
matter. If we are confident that Genocide recognition will indeed
occur, then we must also acknowledge the need to do a better job of
preparing ourselves and the rest of the world for it. And raising
the bar on Armenian Diasporan art includes paying more attention to
what we define as "art," regardless of its message. It also means
better defining the role and character of the Diasporan "artist."
There are many talented artists living and working in Armenian
communities all over the United States and the Diaspora more
generally. And some of them may very well be the Egoyans and
Balakians of tomorrow. But the process of getting there requires a
genuine dialogue between them and their audience as well as their
potential critics. By critics in this case, I refer not to those who
might undermine or discredit the art they see, hear or read. I refer
instead to those willing to "critique" or constructively analyze it,
often from the more "detached" perspective we discussed earlier.
The most difficult truth we face may indeed prove to be that today we
have too many artists and not nearly enough critics in the
community. Some of those critics attend events such as the UCLA
Graduate colloquium I mentioned at the start. But they generally
convene among themselves, apart from the community of Armenian
artists at large. The genuine and necessary work of critique must be
carried out in open dialogue with artists and for the benefit of the
entire Armenian community, but with a much more cosmopolitan audience
in mind. What we need at this particular moment, then, is not so
much an artistic revival as a genuinely critical response to the art
already being produced in such great abundance. The success of any
cultural revival and the fate of the Armenian Diasporan communities
that created it demand nothing less.
A monthly column called Critics’ Forum represents a first effort in
this direction. The Critics’ Forum is composed of writers, artists
and critics whose works you may have read in these pages or
elsewhere, including Ramela Abbamontian, Sam Ekizian, Aram
Kouyoumdjian, Adriana Tchalian, Hovig Tchalian, and Lori Yeghiayan,
among others.
The articles in the series will appear in the pages of the Armenian
Reporter, as well as being reprinted elsewhere. Each article will
highlight an event, a work, or a set of issues in one of four areas:
– Literature;
– Theater;
– Visual Arts;
– Film and Music.
This effort is supported by several others, including a website
(), which will archive the articles and provide
an additional forum for response, discussion and participation.
Look for our articles in the Armenian Reporter starting next month.
We also invite you to visit our website and read from a complete
archive of past articles or join our mailing list (by clicking
on "Join" at the top of the homepage), in order to receive electronic
copies of the articles each month. In the meantime, please feel free
to send comments, suggestions or submissions for review to:
criticsforum@sbcglobal.net.
With your help, we hope to start a conversation about where the art
we produce has been and where it’s going.
All Rights Reserved: Critics Forum, 2007
Hovig Tchalian holds a PhD in English literature from UCLA. He has
edited several journals and also published articles of his own.