Art And Atrocity

ART AND ATROCITY

Targeted News Service
April 24, 2013 Wednesday 2:57 AM EST

BURLINGTON, Vt.

The University of Vermont issued the following news:

Senior George Krikorian has stories, the kind, he says, that don’t lose
their impact with retelling from one generation to the next. At the
urging of his adviser, Major Jackson, Richard Dennis Green and Gold
Professor of English and recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship,
Krikorian has been recording and transcribing hours of oral history
from his grandmother, a first-generation American whose parents
survived the Armenian Genocide.

“It was a brutal slaughtering of people,” Krikorian says. “You
can still feel all of the emotion and pain.” Yet, he explains,
it requires a level of emotional removal to craft the details into
the kind of poems that won him this year’s Benjamin B. Wainwright
Prize for poetry. “Krikorian’s work has a certain level of gravitas,”
Jackson says. “It is some of the best writing that I have encountered
since I started teaching here at UVM.”

April 24 commemorates the night in 1915 that ushered in the Armenian
Genocide by the Turkish government. The following work by Krikorian
puts the images that live within the lives of families into words:

Hazel Remembers the Massacres

1.

Oh, it was awful I guess.

Throats cut, sons beheaded–

Boys were butchered like lambs

for kebab, the unborn held high on a sword,

pulled from the belly of the mother.

That’s the easy part though, the rest looms

like a fever in the cold.

Women were lined like a slaver’s bazaar

single-file, naked with nothing but coins

in their uterus. That should have been enough,

but the Turks needed more,

they danced them like dervishes

set wild aflame, or like Araxi to Zorab

she’d become their whore,

so long as she was alone in the world.

2.

There are a lot of underground places in Armenia

where the people could speak

in their native tongue. It was forbidden

so they hid beneath their homes

to share secrets

as though they were still alive.

Cousin Baidzar, sweet quidg, awoke

to mordant blindness like she was tied

in an ungovan blanket. Bodies tumbled

like a gourd pile all around her, the sun

a broker of sight on her mother’s last embrace.

She walked away like a whisper of the dead,

her earlobes cut wet for their gold.

3.

Past the Turkish border was a promise

like the Holy Land that curdled in the stomach

and browned. Forty years were never so cruel

as the caravan of lies left drying

like figs in the Syrian desert.

They were torn from their mountain like skin from bone,

ever marching to a place that was nothing

to end like dogs starving on their own wails.

After a hundred years, words

are all that’s left.

By Lee Ann Cox, [email protected]