Thursday, May 11, 2006
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MARIA IORDANIDOU
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Ever since I read Lesley’s Blanch’s SABRES OF PARADISE – one of the very few books that I have read three times (the other two being Thomas Mann’s MAGIC MOUNTAIN and Arnold J. Toynbee’s STUDY OF HISTORY(volume xii): RECONSIDERATION), I read everything I can lay my hands on about the Caucasus. Which is why, the only reason I read Maria Iordanidou (an unfamiliar name to me until last week) is that the title of one of her books is HOLIDAYS IN THE CAUCASUS. Immediately after I also read another book by her titled LIKE CRAZY BIRDS.
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Maria Iordanidou may not be a giant in world literature, but unlike most giants, she is incapable of writing a single boring or unreadable line. She writes about her life in Istanbul at the turn of the last century, an extended stay in the Caucasus during World War I and the Russian Revolution, her residence in Alexandria, and final move to Athens on the eve of World War II.
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In A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN, Virginia Woolf writes that since women can’t express themselves fully and authentically, they cannot take a rightful place in a literary tradition which has been shaped by men. Reading Maria Iordanidou is discovering the obvious fact that liberation consists in being oneself, and if one is honest, one’s authenticity and originality will shrine through every sentence one writes.
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Maria Iordanidou doesn’t write as a writer but as a human being. As a result, her humanity speaks louder than any literary tradition you care to mention. And though she writes about Turks, Armenians, Russians, Arabs, and Greeks, she judges no one. Which may suggest that most of our judgments about people are based on hearsay evidence.
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Friday, May 12, 2006
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When Canadian writers speak of survival they mean surviving the influence of the United States. There is even a popular brief history of Canadian literature titled SURVIVAL. When Armenian writers speak of survival they mean it literally — surviving first the sultans and commissars, and after them our own mini-sultans and neo-commissars.
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In his DECLINE OF THE WEST, Spengler tells us only “awake” people make history, the rest exist in subhistory. James Joyce said that history was a nightmare from which he was trying to awake. Whenever we make the Genocide our central concern we betray our unspoken wish to relive the history (or nightmare) that was inflicted on us.
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By saying and repeating that half of Turkey is probably half Armenian, I hope to reduce by half our hatred of Turks. An absurd hope, because we are capable of hating our fellow Armenians as intensely as we hate Turks. I speak from experience, both as provider and consumer of hatred. As for those holier-than-thou phonies who say they hate no one, they only want justice: I challenge them to explain Gostan Zarian’s dictum, “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another.”
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There is an unspoken principle in our post-Genocide literature which goes something like this: “Criticize everyone, including fellow writers, but leave possible sources of income, such as bosses, bishops, and benefactors, alone.” Case in point: In his OLD DREAMS, NEW REALITIES (Beirut, 1982), Antranik Zaroukian analyzes mercilessly the motives of a totally harmless 83-year-old Armenian priest in Moscow who does his utmost to be of assistance to him, but says nothing remotely critical about the Catholicos who allowed Etchmiadzin to be run by KGB agents.
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Saturday, May 13, 2006
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THE NATIVES ARE RESTLESS
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Vassilis Vassilikos: “There is Midas, whose touch turned everything to gold, and there is anti-Midas, whose touch turned everything to crap.”
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If I knew what I know today, I would have chosen to write for a more tolerant bunch, like the Taliban of Afghanistan or the Sunnis in Iraq.
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After being exposed to the venom of my readers, I can’t help thinking: If they can be so nasty towards a harmless scribbler, what are they capable of doing to a defenseless Turk? — (in their selfless search for justice, of course).
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Being honest in a dishonest environment is nothing short of a heroic act. Perhaps one of our greatest misfortunes is that we have produced many more martyrs than heroes, and one party’s hero is another’s…anti-Midas.
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Somewhere Antranik Zaroukian writes that an Armenian hates tyranny but he considers it a privilege to serve a tyrant.
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To the hooligans who insult me I will only say, once upon a time I too was young and foolish and said things that I now regret.
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