The Daily Star, Lebanon
Dec 27 2004
‘The Daydreaming Boy’ is a triumph for the truth of imagination
Novel deals with one man’s personal journey after the Armenian
Genocide
By Arpi Sarafian
Special to The Daily Star
LOS ANGELES: It is hard to think of another novel that represents the
horrors of war and of violence – or, more specifically, the horror of
the atrocities committed against the Armenian population of Turkey in
the 1915 Genocide – with such freshness and creativity, than
Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s debut novel, “Three Apples Fell from
Heaven” (2001).
Marcom’s new book, “The Daydreaming Boy” (2004), is as good but
deviates from more traditional narrative structures and ordinary
discourse to, once again, “history the unhistoried” and say the
“unsaid unsayable things.”
Whereas “Three Apples Fell from Heaven” dealt with the disruption
caused by the brutalities of the Ottoman government to the lives of
innocent Armenians in Kharpert, Turkey, “The Daydreaming Boy” shifts
the setting to Beirut and deals with one man’s personal journey.
It is the story of the Vahe Tcheubjian, a middle-aged survivor of
Turkey’s Armenian massacres who spends the novel contemplating his
brutal past while losing himself in a series of adulterous trysts
that bring him slowly to a realization of the moral compromises he
has made.
Vahe is an orphan – in Marcom’s words, the least historied of the
victims of war – who, along with other children, was “loaded onto the
boxcars at Eregli [Turkey] and unloaded in Lebanon by the sea’s edge”
at The Bird’s Nest orphanage. A survivor who “would have liked to
remain unexisted,” Vahe is now a grown man living with his wife,
Juliana, also of Kharpert, in 1960’s Beirut in an apartment
overlooking the Mediterranean.
Rather than record the details of Vahe’s external life, “The
Daydreaming Boy” takes us to his interior scenery cycling through the
fantasies, the dreams and the memories of a man attempting to come to
terms with an impossible past.
The book moves back and forth between Vahe’s fantasy of making love
to Beatrice, the Palestinian servant girl; his imagining of his dead
mother’s body; weekly visits to the zoological gardens (perhaps to
free the caged beast inside of him); and memories of Vostanig,
another orphan (who later commits suicide) “left outside the walls of
the orphanage … deposited there in the middle of the night, by whom
we were never to know.”
Besides giving expression to the truth buried deep in Vahe’s
consciousness – Marcom’s primary concern – these repeated images
allow us to share the confusion of a man from whom a whole world has
disappeared.
Marcom writes with mellifluous, poetic tone – for instance, using
such clever linking devices as the sea, “the vast blue belt” of the
Mediterranean whose waves Vahe can still hear hitting the gray rocks
outside the orphanage dormitory windows. Vahe, Marcom writes, “only
loved the sea and to bathe in it. The sea was always his “solace, his
haven,” and also possibly a final resting place: “I want the sea
only, in perpetuity, impossibly.”
Vahe half attempts to commit suicide to return to the sea and its
“quiet eternal warmth.” To “unexist” seems to be the only way out of
the “eternal blackness” of living “in this world devoid of color.”
Vahe is a man haunted by his memories – by the torments he both
endured and visited upon weaker fellow orphans in an Armenian
orphanage; of his long-gone family and his pain at his separation
from them, especially his mother; of his infatuation with his maid,
which turns his wife against him and angers her even as he opens out
this narrative as if a confession.
Vahe survives solely through his fantasies. The fantasy of love makes
the daily bearing of the memory of “this stink-hole orphanage”
possible for him, “and of course there is only the bearing of it.”
Nonetheless, Vahe’s fantasies come right out of the collective
experience of a people “distanced from land and language.” The
journey inward thus taps into a clearly recognizable historical
context, the tragedy that befell a nation still “adrift because the
past is always unspoken heavy and ever-present.”
If Marcom uses fiction of the imagination to tell her story, it is
because only fiction can give expression to what is beyond the daily
conveyance of facts. The book picks up where the testimonies of
Armenian genocide victims left off.
What finally makes “The Daydreaming Boy” such a stunning text is
Marcom’s unfaltering commitment to her medium. She bends language to
coin new words and lulls the reader into a trance. At no point,
however, do her stylistic choices seem intrusive. “This notlistens
Vahe,” and “I unexisted them,” or “they must be intolerated” and “he
notspeaks” are perfectly adjusted to the disjointedness of the mind
of “this sad and desperate boy who’s become a sad desperate man.”
In Marcom’s hands, language becomes a powerful tool to shake us into
the significance of the crime, “the death of a race and our tongue,”
still awaiting acknowledgement. The precision of observation of “the
notroads,” “the spectered notflesh,” or “this notfeeling” is
startling.
“The Daydreaming Boy” is available at all good bookshops