CONFRONTING THE LIMITS OF CULTURE AND IDENTITY IN ARPINE KONYALIAN GRENIER’S THE CONCESSION STAND: EXAPTATION AT THE MARGINS
Asbarez
May 31st, 2012
The front cover of the book
BY TALAR CHAHINIAN
In her 2011 publication, The Concession Stand: Exaptation at
the Margins, Arpine Konyalian Grenier sets out to puncture
rigid formulations of identity that would classify her as an
Armenian-American poet. As an Armenian born in Lebanon and living and
producing in the United States, Grenier seeks to dismantle reductive
formulations of hyphenated identity.
The Concession Stand consists of eight poetic essays. The collection
develops a technique of ‘over-writing,’ in order to highlight the
under-written – the hidden and [email protected]
– nature of cultural memory and the over-simplified identities it
designates. In Grenier’s case, over-writing means fusing words with
overlapping referents and reformulating phrases as slight variants.
The over-written nature of the collection draws attention to the
unacknowledged elements of cultural memory by critiquing the language
that produces and reproduces it, on two levels: broadly, her essays
problematize language as a system by which we ascribe meaning to the
world around us; more specifically, her use of language problematizes
the possibility of a “mother tongue” in a transnational, post-modern
context. This two-tier critique undermines rigid conceptualizations
of identity in the Armenian diasporic context, particularly ones
built around cultural memory and its primary vehicle and repository,
the Armenian language.
In order to properly acknowledge the foundational role of language in
culture, Grenier’s poetic essays do not simply describe or recount
events; particularly in Part 1 of the Book, her essays comprise a
lyrical event, somehow ‘taking place’ on the page. By pushing her
language toward self-reflexivity – to where the word meets itself –
Grenier attempts to recreate the moment before the word is uttered
and, according to her, destroyed in the utterance. Hinting at this
writing process, Grenier writes:
Words projected unto themselves no longer refer to themselves but to a
sect of meaning and feeling more essential to language. Consequently,
commitments based on the logo-centric and the conventional enslave. So
then, weary of or lacking a conscious desire to attain, one goes
after the unattainable. Cross, chunk, classify, parse, erase, include
and exclude. The poem knows more than I do. At some point, however,
we collide to purge, we change course, adapt. (21)
Grenier rejects the futile attempt to trace in language the
relationship between words and their prescribed meanings in
a supposedly stable and objective world. The attempt enslaves,
because even recognizing the futility of the search paradoxically
drives both poet and reader more powerfully toward it. Grenier’s
poetic experimentations draw attention to just that futile search,
recreating it in its own contorted struggles, enacting a chase that
leads the word back to itself.
As the excerpt above suggests, Grenier also takes pains to distinguish
the poem from the poet, in order to suggest that each works as a
self-directed actor, carrying out the quest for meaning independently
of the other. But rather than metaphorically killing off the author as
a source for meaning in a post-structuralist vein, Grenier reconfigures
the relationship between author and text as multi-directional, endowing
each with the ability to make the other adapt and evolve. Ultimately,
Grenier suggests that language as a system of meaning-making is not
structurally self-sustaining, and the author, as a person constructing
language through the poem, is not a sole proprietor of meaning and
creation. Instead, what we are left with is the simultaneous exchange
between poem and poet, in language, in the form of the lyrical ‘event’
we see on the page.
Writing about the poet’s role in acknowledging the limits of language
and participating in its lyric performance, Grenier suggests, “Syntax
of language breaks at the extremes of experience… Accordingly,
language happens” (30). This juxtaposition of language’s structural
insufficiency, its inability to exist or mean on its own, with its
involuntary performance or production highlights Grenier’s interest
in how what comes before the word is uttered and destroyed by the
confinements its utterance in language imposes on it. Her strategy of
over-writing allows her to free the word from structural or syntactical
demands. By defying the demands of speech, grammar and utterance,
if only momentarily, Grenier’s poetic essays seek to express “a sect
of meaning and feeling more essential to language.”
This attempt to exceed the self-imposed bounds of language and
expression helps Grenier’s writing cross commonly prescribed
categories. It thus breaks the barriers between prose and verse,
moves back and forth across languages – infusing English speech with
French, Turkish, Arabic, Armenian, and Latin words or phrases – blends
dicta and meditations, mingles textual references and autobiographical
memories, and most cleverly, creates countless instances of word play.
The overabundance of allusions and cross-references overwhelms and
exposes the reader’s futile desire for interpretive closure. But in the
process, the reader also gains authority as a third actor alongside
author and text, another meaning-maker in the lyric event that is
Grenier’s poetry. By placing us, the readers, at the intersection
of language and meaning, Grenier’s over-writing makes us profoundly
aware of both the limits and the fluidity of language.
By contrast, the essays in the second half of the book are more
concretely autobiographical, focusing on themes of exile, genocide,
witnessing, mourning, and the Armenian Diaspora’s use of identity
discourse. Ironically, it is precisely through such ‘subtractions’
that Grenier brings the under-written nature of Armenian diasporic
cultural memory into even sharper focus. For instance, she refers
to herself at one point as the “messed up offspring of a messed up
offspring of a messed up survivor” (51). Even in the apparently more
conventional narratives in the second half of the volume, therefore,
Grenier traces the trans-generational transference of trauma and
her family’s exilic past to suggest the impossibility of locating a
pure form of cultural identity, defined by rigid markers such as a
mother tongue or a singular narrative that ignores cultural contact
and exchange. She writes:
I have no mother tongue as my mother tongue has lost me. I implode
within this loss, seeking the chaos sustaining the world of languages
with a voice that has the body and place of an absent body, after a
derivative of the past whereby the new would occur, time and history
abolished because of what escapes or survives the disintegration of
experience. (43)
Grenier describes her lack of a mother tongue as a “loss,”
ascribing her search for a speaking voice with the remnant of a
lost and disintegrated experience. As a third-generation survivor,
she casts her loss as one without origin, an originary traumatic
experience that has disintegrated over the years. As a result,
Grenier experiences all attempts to locate her sense of self as
more than a cultural loss but as a profound, a more fundamental,
absence. In another stark contrast, Grenier juxtaposes this vague
sense of absence with the culturally rigid sense of loss, suggesting
that cultural experiences and constructions are a product of dynamic
exchange rather than isolated construction.
Grenier’s personal quest to embrace a more dynamic cultural identity
leads her, in the second half of the book, to Turkey. Not surprisingly,
the land is marked for Grenier by its contradictory identity as both
the land of her ancestors and the country Armenian cultural memory
vilifies. In her most linearly narrated essay, “A Place in the Sun,
Malgre Sangre,” Grenier recounts her experience traveling to Turkey and
finding proximity and a history of exchange and borrowings between
the two cultures, Armenian and Turkish. She concludes the essay
by declaring, “I developed, moving from unknowingly being Armenian
Turkishly to knowingly becoming American, Armenianly” (68). In coming
face to face with Turkish culture, she’s able to embrace its influence
over her understanding of Armenian culture. That recognition of
Armenian culture as historically multi-faceted and dynamic in turn
allows her to configure her current American cultural coordinates
under the influence of her Armenian heritage.
It is through this both personal and lyrical journey that Grenier
resists the pressures of a different assimilation, reducing her
cultural identity to presumptive formulations; through the experimental
writings and explorations in The Concession Stand, Arpine Konyalian
Grenier rejects an under-written, hyphenated existence, embracing
instead an over-written, multiple identity.
Talar Chahinian holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA
and lectures in the Department of Comparative World Literature at Cal
State Long Beach. She or or any of the other contributors to Critics’
Forum may be reached at [email protected]. This and all other
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in the Diaspora.