Critics’ Forum
Literature
Voghb yev Garod, Lament and Longing: Lori Bedikian’s The Book of Lamenting
By Tamar Boyadjian
“…nothing that runs can stay the same.”
As I think about this closing line of Lori Bedikian’s poem, “The Book
of Lamenting,” -bearing the same title as her first book of poems,
winner of the 2010 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and due to be
released on October 30, 2011 by Anhinga Press – I think about the many
ways in which her collection of poetry is a voghb, or lament for life,
family, and country.
For each of us, these terms may mean different things. As Armenians,
they sometimes all seem to mean the same thing. Bedikian’s poetry
reminds us of the very complicated relationship of these categories
and the ways in which as immigrants and human beings, we are
constantly dealing with various forms of loss and change.
In poems such as “Levon,” “Letter from Beirut,” “Night in Lebanon,”
and “Prayer for my Immigrant Relatives,” the narrator touches upon the
harsh realities of living in a time of war: “For years we have known /
the language of bombs,” says the poem “Letter from Beirut,” addressed
to the title character, “Cousin” (6-7). Through various juxtapositions
– calm and chaos, light and dark, stillness and movement – and
multiple enjambments within the lines of verse, poems such as these
become reminders of the unstable and unsettling moments of the past
and the difficulty of calling a place a home: “When peoples’ words
resemble the buzz / of beehives, help them to hear the music / of
home…” (“Prayer for my Immigrant Relatives,” 6-8).
But what exactly is the place the narrator calls “home?” From Beirut
to Armenia to the United States, many of these genuine and intimate
stories allow us to share in moments of self-discovery, where we
observe the narrator’s attempts to reconcile her place historically,
geographically, and temporally: “The year 1997 rose like a spiral
staircase / into a ceiling of darkness” (“Crossing Out the Date,”
1-2). The narrator’s journey becomes a shared voyage through space,
time, and place, recounting deep-rooted memories, where family,
history, and culture intersect. Each poem communicates instances in
time when these very moments are experienced, questioned, and
scrutinized.
In poems such as “The Fisherman,” “Father Picking Grapes, Armenia,
1997,” “Washing of the Feet, Lake Sevan, 1997,” and “On the way to
Oshagan,” the narrator’s experience evokes themes of homeland lost,
remembered, or imagined. Darkness and ambiguity dominate these poems’
descriptions of land and country, interspersed with an internal
dialogue where nostalgia meets reality, such as in the poem, “On the
way to Oshagan”:
…After all
having an ancestral name, firm family tree, the language
ironed to my tongue since the day I was born
how could I be just another Amerigatzi? I say
this to myself, though I’m the one with the walking
shoes, the camera, the plaid-patterned pants. (24-28)
Throughout the poems, the familiar moments confront unforeseen
experiences. The narrator’s confident assertions of difficult
circumstances are tinged with doubt and despair, such as the
description in the poem, “At my Mother’s Dresser”:
As she swirls lipstick towards her mouth,
one hand smoothes the color on,
as the other dabs the crying
that’s begun. She does this without a change
of face. She does this as if it’s part
of dressing, of carrying on. (40-46)
These recollections of childhood experiences and relationships with
family and friends hit close to home for many immigrants, displaced
seldom by choice, often by circumstance. These stories also function
metonymically – they stand as symbols of an Armenian heritage whose
voice carries within it the glory as wells as the despair of its own
past: “On the back of every tongue in my family, / there is a dove
that lives and dies…and it will chirp the ugliness or the pitted /
truth, of how we choke on what we hide” (“Beyond the Mouth,” 1-2).
The personal and cultural tensions inherent in Bedikian’s poems are
also paired with various types of progress – growth, maturation,
awakening – inhibited by the shadows of family and cultural history,
as expressed in the poem, “Levon”:
…I don’t even think of poetry.
Instead I wonder where the ghosts are now,
if the scent is stronger at dawn or dusk,
if they know how far we’ve come,
if they can hear the rumbling of our wheels. (26-30)
In the “The Book of Lamenting,” melancholy is a residue of the
inherent tension between a mournful past and an uncertain future,
carrying with it an implicit anxiety, suggested by its closing lines:
“…nothing that runs can stay the same.”
For the narrator, these difficult experiences devolve into moments of
reconciliation and of reckoning powerfully recreated and interrogated
within the short span of a few lines of verse. As the twenty-first
line of the poem “The Book of Lamenting” puts it, “This is where I am
when the world has closed its ears.” For Bedikian, this moment
encapsulates the act and the consolation of writing poetry, the silent
recognition that the world can shut out her stories and yet hear them
loud and clear.
All Rights Reserved: Critics’ Forum, 2011.
Tamar Boyadjian is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at UCLA, where she recently
received her PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature.
You can reach her or any of the other contributors to Critics’ Forum
at [email protected]. This and all other articles published
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From: A. Papazian