Three Apples: New language to explain our history
pples-new-language-to-explain-our-history/
By Paul Chaderjian on Sep 25th
Once there was and there was not …
Etched somewhere in your memories of childhood must surely be a
moment, an image, a fleeting impression, or a moment of you in your
yesteryear buying a book or borrowing one from the library.
Etched inexplicably in my memory is this one moment at a bookshop in
Damascus, Syria -Cleopatra’s wedding present. This Twilight Zone-ish
moment is one of my dad buying three books in English for me, of the
polluted stench of spent fuels in the air, the dozens of whizzing
scooters feet away, traffic horns, jets flying above, and the buzzing
of construction drills above the noises of hawkers and street
peddlers.
In that moment and since my earliest memories, there was something
special about books. Perhaps it’s a cultural or generational thing,
but books were cherished, handled carefully, and were more important
than our Matchbox cars and other toys.
The printed word, hardbound, softbound – covered with transparent
plastic jackets or with brown grocery bags like we did in Fresno –
were more than belongings to schlep around in backpacks in high school
or college. They were magic. They held secrets that an author would
pass on only to you, the reader. They were the key to intimacies never
experienced before… or after. They were full of new worlds and
experiences that television and movies could never wholly create.
Flash forward to me taking the elevator down to my apartment
building’s management office with that childlike anticipation of
what’s locked up behind the cover of a new book I’ve ordered.
When literary translator Shushan Avagyan from Illinois State
University e-mailed me her review of this new book, my day stopped
. Shushan’s e-mail was pregnant with news that my favorite
Armenian-American writer – genius, guru, poetess, novelist, wordsmith,
creator of a new English, creator of a new Armenian-ness, my Grand
Poobah of soul and mind – had released a new book. I read Shushan’s
e-mail and clicked directly to the great cybermall of books to order
my own copy of Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s new work of art.
Preface
Since youth, I’ve heard the same cliché verbiage about my
ethnicity, about being Armenian, about Armenia being the first
Christian nation, Armenians coming from the mythical place where the
Bible says Noah’s Arc landed after the Great Flood, Hayk and Bel,
Komitas, Sayat Nova, revolutionaries, independence, and repatriation.
Seems our story and the language with which we or others tell our
story are limited to prescribed notions, a narrow lexicon of
sentences, train of thoughts passed down through revolutionary songs,
and rephrased time and again in print and in person. Whenever we talk
or write about things Armenian, when we speak at a rally, at church,
at a seminar, or at the reunion, we seems to use the same sequence of
thoughts, the same logic, same adjectives, adverbs, nouns, pronouns,
metaphors, same syntax, same, same, same-ness.
Then suddenly, like an unexpected thunderous strike of lightening,
like an unexpected sneeze, goose bumps or chills, came this small book
called Three Apples Fell from the Heaven. It was a Genocide novel, and
it was penned in the most novel way. It was art because it moved its
reader mentally, emotionally, and physical. Scratchings of ink on
paper had the power to get you right between the shoulder blades.
Micheline’s language, its cadence, the microscopic accuracy with which
it allowed me to time travel were a shock to my mind. Three Apples
Fell from the Heaven was unlike any other work of art I had read to
date. Its author quickly replaced Ayn Rand, Bret Easton Ellis, my USC
writing professor TC Boyle, John Steinbeck, and David Foster Wallace
from the top of my list of most favorite writers.
Unprecedented writing
The year was 2002 or 2003, and I was ecstatic. Not since Nancy
Kricorian’s Zabelle in 1998 had I been excited about a work of
fiction. Not since Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero had I found
something related to my existential angst. I must’ve bought a dozen
copies of Three Apples and handed it out as if it was the new
Encyclopedia of things Armenian. People I knew got it for birthdays,
baptisms, house-warmings, and anniversaries.
`In her distinctive voice that brilliantly captures the bleak and
hallucinatory world of her exilic characters, Marcom narrates the
`unhistories’ of humanity imbued with echoes of cultural ambivalence,
melancholy, and fractured subjectivity,’ writes
Shushan. `Stylistically Marcom’s prose reenacts trauma through
non-linearity, compulsive repetition and negation:
This is an essay against Progress (it is not a progressive story),
this essay does not do it, but like the maze of days of thoughts of
memories and notmemories, like the phrases which tumbled willy-nilly
from a mother’s mouth, or an invocation, a song; – repeat themselves
endlessly, without form or with it?
– from Draining the Sea
Our personal unhistories and histories, our GENOCIDE, this huge word,
this foreign, inexplicable experience have finally been told in new
light thanks to Micheline. Genocide for me has finally been given a
face, a voice, a soul – many voices, many faces, many souls, some even
lost. Born through Micheline are characters that I would have never
imagined existing, would have never met, would have never been blessed
to know.
As if she was there
Channeled through Micheline’s pen were these humans, these people, my
people, these characters – fact or fiction – who had come to be in my
mind and in my soul. Their collective of ghosts were finally able to
give this thing called Genocide some depth and breadth.
The Armenian Genocide had finally become tangible and digestible to me
through art. The three apples that had fallen from heaven had brought
me emotions and first hand accounts of this mysterious chapter in my
history that no one book, fact or fiction, had been able to breathe
life into. Through Micheline’s pen, the vignettes and voices, the
choir of souls that had come to life had brought me closer to my
ancestors than ever before.
It was inexplicable fondness I came to have for this book. It was more
dear to me that the Bible itself, for it was my story. It wasn’t about
the Arc or the end of days. It wasn’t about the meaningless of life as
put forth by Ecclesiastes.
Micheline’s people, these voices, these emotions, were what I was born
from and why I was living as me in the 21st century. And to try to
describe to you the importance of this book and this writer, even now,
renders me speechless.
`I must stop writing, for this book says it all and better’ writes
poetess Armine Iknadossian about Micheline’s Three Apples Fell from
Heaven. `I thought it had all been said and done, about the Armenian
question, that is. What else could be said about the atrocities that
hasn’t been painted or composed? The art of suffering is so difficult
to express in words without being too polemic or sentimental.’
The face gifting us language
In 2005, I had a chance to meet Micheline face-to-face on the set of
my television talk show in Yerevan. She had come to attend the 90th
anniversary symposium hosted by then-Foreign Minster Vartan Oskanian
titled `Ultimate Crime, Ultimate Challenge.’
My memory of her is of a soft-spoken woman whose words were carefully
crafted, whose voice was magically channeling the Armenian souls that
were interrupted, deranged, displaced, rerouted with emotional scars,
and even aborted through genocide.
I can’t recall our interview but remember being in awe of this
wordsmith that was able to bring a new set of words, new sentences,
new ideas, fresh ideas to my Armenian world. I was in awe of a writer
who had created a new language with which I would know the Armenian
Genocide. She had brought the great catastrophe to life for me unlike
anyone had been able to.
Seconds and third helpings
Micheline’s second book was another godsend for the world of
literature and from the world of literature. Through The Daydreaming
Boy, I realized why there was no end to the Armenian Genocide, how the
resolution of this story was so far-reaching, how our case and cause
were eternal, a curse, a blessing, and a way of life.
This second novel was about the second Genocide that we had to endure
as we made rapid exits out of the worlds we had found refuge in after
Der Zor. I will let you discover it on your own, because saying any
more will take away from the gifts, the insight, the emotion, and
entertainment the book offers.
Then came Micheline’s third book, Draining the Sea, last year, and I
sat up and realized this woman was more than what I had thought. She
was not just a mere scribe, a novelist, intelligentsia, or philosopher
camouflaged as author. Her books must be studied and handled careful,
with wisdom. Do not cast them aside after reading a hundred words. Do
not dismiss them for they are the new greats from American and World
literature.
I realize now that Micheline is the one writer who `got it,’ the one
who `gets it.’ I don’t know what that `it’ is, whether it’s a
perspective, a viewpoint, a belief system, or a way to capture our
times; but Micheline has the gift to capture my 21st Century America,
pin its ills to paper, capture its modus operandi, and capture a
living history through literature that future generations will look
for to understand us in the here and now.
According to Shushan, Micheline’s books are the present-day
equivalents to work William Faulkner and Toni Morrison would create –
they might seem difficult, but that’s because they have the potential
of transforming your worldview.
Introspection Fed-Ex’d
Thus arrived to my apartment in North Hollywood this week my copy of
The Mirror in the Well via Amazon, and again I devoured her words and
realized that the truth she tells may be too truthful for us, for
those, who as she writes, `are the inhabitants, masked and tight and
living behind the faces behind the limits behind the I am fines Yous?’
This fourth book from Micheline is about a woman’s sexuality, and it
appropriate for adult audiences only. Yet, what some would say is
pornographic language seems like the only way for a writer to bridge
the physical to the existential. One would find it otherwise
impossible to bridge the very human issues like need, desire, and want
without using a taboo subject like sex… and all the shame and
repression that comes with it.
What haunts my mind in the aftermath of Micheline’s third and fourth
works of art are the themes of modern man’s un-fulfillment, his or her
inability to quench that ethereal wholeness and wholesomeness. No
other books I have read in modern literature are able to capture that
modern existential angst Camus and Sartre penned and others have
imitated since.
Perhaps this experience of loneliness, alienation, and a mechanized
race for fulfillment through riches and notoriety, fame and position,
are strictly American, Western, capitalist, but they are told in a
new, clearer light, by a woman born from one of the greatest
catastrophes of the modern era, the `Medz Yeghern.’
As Aznavour has been able to use music to tell the most moving
stories, as Egoyan has been able to use the art of film like never
before, Micheline uses literature and language to create a new world,
a new use of an old language, of staid sentences, of repeated
mechanisms, or aging and outdated uses of words and language.
`Language is deliberately broken down, it often doesn’t make any
sense,’ says Shushan. `Words that become inadequate are reformulated
in new negative forms:’
These the books we unwrite unread: unthought books, a prewritten kind
of text: the interstitial books: the sort of narrative that makes
loops in the mind, like ribbons and flood rivers that leave only a
trace of the before.
– from Draining the Sea
`The essaying of such sordid things is difficult,’ says Shushan, `yet
Marcom’s books are articulate and relentless in their search for
optimism and beauty.’
I’m not the chronicler of the English language, the studied professor
of English literature, or the historian who has surveyed the cannon of
Genocide literature. What I am is a reader, an Armenian reader who
believes Micheline’s first two books are the new language with which
we can understand the reality of our collective past.
These books are the HD (high definition) versions of the old tellings
of our story. Micheline is the new voice of our collective experience
that must be shared. Her books should be not just on the shelves of
each Armenian household, but they should be on our coffee tables, on
our breakfast tables, in places where we pass them, pick them up,
picking random graphs from these voiceless souls that have come to our
realities thanks to a talented writer.
And it is in Micheline’s honor that I have named this column following
a great Armenian tradition in storytelling, a tradition that Micheline
brought back into fashion.
And three apples fell from heaven: one for the storyteller, one for
him who made him tell it, and one for you the reader.