A Wish for Aladdin and the Future of Atonement
By Eric Nazarian on January 19, 2015
The following is the text of the speech given by Eric Nazarian in
Ankara, Turkey, on Jan. 17, 2015, for the conference, ‘1915, Hrant and
Justice.’ Henry Theriault, chair of the Philosophy Department at
Worcester State College, also participated at the conference.
Thank you for being here today and for inviting me. When I was a kid I
loved the Aladdin fairy tale. What child doesn’t want a genie in a
bottle to grant three wishes? I remember my conversations with the
imaginary genie walking home from school. I had a wish list that I
would write down in my secret notebook. My wishes would vary from “I
wish I could grow wings and fly” to, as I got slightly older, kiss
Sophia Loren and sing like Charles Aznavour. Since 2007, my wish to
the genie has remained the same around this time of year: I wish all
of us today were celebrating Hrant’s Nobel Peace Prize with him and
not commemorating the 8th year of his assassination.
Eric Nazarian stands in front of posters for the conference, ‘1915,
Hrant and Justice,’ in Ankara.
A lot has changed since those childhood days under the spell of
Aladdin, Tom Sawyer, and Hovhannes Toumanian. Fairy tales, classic
Hollywood movies, poems, and paintings all came to life on the dinner
table of my parents’ and grandparents’ home in Los Angeles. My parents
were born in Tehran, I was born in Armenia, my brother was born in
Hollywood. As we say in Armenian:Vorteghits vortegh–from where to
where–did we land? That is the eternal story of the Armenians.
Following in my father’s footsteps, I fell in love with the movies and
books of his youth and grew up to become a filmmaker and writer.
Black-and-white images were everywhere in our home. Marlon Brando,
Stanley Kubrick, Simone Signoret, Albert Camus. These legends became
windows into the world away from our working-class apartment, yet at
the same time, they seemed so close and relative. They were inspiring,
beautiful, and “harazat,” which means familial.
One of my earliest memories is of a wall in my family home with
Charlie Chaplin next to a painting of Mount Ararat and Little Ararat.
Laughter and majesty were side by side. The other image I remember
wasn’t a painting or a film; it was one word in a poem by the
magnificent Yeghishe Charents that my relatives would recite. The word
was “arevaham.” Literally translated, it means “taste of the sun,” but
it’s honestly lost in translation. I will never forget that word
because it evoked the taste of sun-dried apricots. That’s what Armenia
was to me–a sun-drenched ancient paradise where we came from. Charents
taught me that poems, like images, could also make us see and feel
things just like in the movies and music. As a child, this word and
the images of my father’s favorite artists, including Martiros Saryan,
Hakop Hakopian, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Federico Fellini, and Hovannes
Aivazovsky, illuminated our daily lives. Before homework, after
dinner, and during coffee and cigarettes, stories of these mythical
artists, pictures, and movies on VHS continued to enrich our little
apartment in Glendale. Art was the world and music was a universal tie
that bound all cultures. These were the lessons I was taught as a
child. To love culture, art, knowledge, creativity and to go beyond
borders as a global citizen.
Then I learned of the Armenian troubadour and ashugh Sayat Nova, who
composed and sang in all the languages of the Caucasus. Kani Vor
Janim, Yar Ki Ghurbanim…
The voice, timbre, lament, and deep soul of those songs always evoked
goose bumps and a teenage melancholia in my heart that I could not
name. There was a warmth in that sadness wrapped inside Sayat Nova and
Komitas’s blanket of music, and the images of the magnificent image
makers that my father taught me about, among them Henri Cartier
Bresson, Ara Guler, and the great photojournalists of the world.
Black and white photographs from the Armenian Genocide lined the
hallways leading to the conference in Ankara. (Photo by Eric Nazarian)
The honeymoon period during my “Arevaham” childhood in America
inevitably came to an end in my teenage years when I discovered a
different kind of image that was far from the well-composed glamour
shots of Elizabeth Taylor, the vibrant oil on canvases of Martiros
Saryan, and the sweet Parisian fragments of Cartier-Bresson. The image
of my teenage years was a faded and scratched black-and-white
photograph of eight beheaded Armenians piled on top of one another.
This was when I learned of the Armenian Genocide and what had happened
on April 24, 1915. This image opened a Pandora’s Box in my
consciousness. Never again would I be able to look at images in the
same way.
The photographer of this image was not Ara Guler or Yousuf Karsh or
Cartier-Bresson. It was an anonymous person who clicked the shutter
and, without realizing it, immortalized one fragment of unimaginable
horror that has traveled 100 years, and will travel well into the
future long after we are gone.
And with the sighting of this image, a psychological and personal
journey began that lasted more than 20 years until this very day of a
painful and endless education about the immensity of the Armenian
Genocide and its immediate and long-term aftereffects globally. I
learned of the name Armin T. Wegner and the images he secretly
photographed of the deportations in the provinces he witnessed. Each
image told a different fragment of a much bigger story about the
people in them, and we have no way of knowing who they were or what
eventually happened to them.
>From Armin Wegner and the anonymous photographers that remain unknown
until today, we have visual documentations of what happened on these
lands 100 years ago. The deeper I went into photographic research, the
mountain of stories got bigger and I found myself in a labyrinth of
countless narratives. Survivors upon survivors. Orphans upon orphans.
Horror upon horror. Similar narratives told by people on opposite
sides of the earth who had managed to escape the inferno of genocide.
I discovered them in books, in the letters and dispatches of American
and European missionaries, in the wrinkled eyes of survivors and
descendants that spoke volumes with their silence in documentaries.
>From Adana to Beirut to Los Angeles…vorteghits vortegh.
Conference goers walk by photographs depicting the horrors of the
Armenian Genocide. (Photo by Eric Nazarian)
Well into my teenage and university years, my consciousness was very
clearly split in half like akarpuz: On the one hand there were the
celluloid heroes of my childhood and the glamour of Hollywood’s dream
factory where everybody was happy and sexy. On the other hand, the
darkness lingered over the ancient paradises of Historic Armenia where
one and a half million of my people were annihilated in the hills,
valleys, and deserts of the Ottoman Empire.
When the subject of Armenians came up in school, my teachers would
tell me nonchalantly, “When I was a child if I didn’t finish my food,
my grandmother always reminded me of the Starving Armenians.” Those
two words, every time I heard them, erupted a burning feeling of
humiliation I tried to keep buried inside. But I couldn’t.
In school, my American teachers didn’t know about Sayat Nova or
Komitas or the word “arevaham.” Everything they knew about Armenians
was relegated to a pop culture phrase that was seeded in America after
World War 1 and well into the 20th century, continuing to this very
day. When the subject of Armenians came up in school, my teachers
would tell me nonchalantly, “When I was a child if I didn’t finish my
food, my grandmother always reminded me of the Starving Armenians.”
Those two words, every time I heard them, erupted a burning feeling of
humiliation I tried to keep buried inside. But I couldn’t. One time I
remember I ran out of class crying. At home, I would stare at the
dinner table stuffed with Dadeeg’s delicious dolma and saffron rice
and ponder the mountains of bones in the Der Zor desert. Why did the
Turks do this to women and children? Who took the photo of the eight
Armenian heads? The buried apparitions and visions eventually
instilled a need to tell the story of my people and hopefully find
catharsis through cinema.
And here we are in 2015, 100 years after the start of the genocide.
Back then the Armenians were atop Musa Dagh fighting for their lives.
And just a few months ago, the Yezidis were forced up Mount Sinjar
fighting to survive. A lot has changed and a lot has stayed the same,
unfortunately. In this quagmire that the Middle East has become in the
past few years, lately I wonder a lot: What is my role as a
storyteller? Why make images of suffering? Do stories and images even
matter when tens of thousands of people are being uprooted, exiled,
and deported just like the Armenians in 1915? What is the significance
of images and stories during this very critical year that marks the
100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide? What images will come
tomorrow that can hopefully heal and help us to face our pain and
anger of being forgotten?
As an Armenian, we tell our stories and make images not to be
forgotten. We build monuments worldwide to commemorate and immortalize
through stone and mortar the martyrs for the nameless travelers of
tomorrow’s generation. We film stories, put ink to paper, and digitize
faded black-and-white photographs by Armin Wegner hoping that the
preservation and knowledge of the genocide’s past atrocities can lead
to the prevention of future ones. We also seek justice for a
monumental crime against humanity that Hitler used as an example on
the eve of invading Poland in 1939. This very same crime against
humanity was an impetus for a young lawyer named Raphael Lemkin to
coin the word “genocide.”
Empires and kingdoms draw lines on the earth that continue to shift
based on impermanent power structures, but the truth remains rooted
and untouchable, regardless of time, ravage, and injustice. The themes
of justice and healing and the threat of erasure have evolved into
themes central to the Armenian psyche worldwide since the genocide. It
informs our art, music, images, poems, and daily yearnings to find
wholesomeness within the broken root of our homeland that has been
restricted to us. One century or several, the stones in Akhtamar,
Palu, Soradir, Sassoon, Bitlis, Kars, Moush, and Diyarbakir continue
to tell our stories and remain standing as a testament that the past
will never fade and the truth is to be found within that past.
Today, I landed in Ankara by way of Los Angeles and Bolis. I first
came to Turkey in 2010 when I was invited to make a film about the
Armenians of Istanbul for an omnibus called Unutma Beni Istanbul (Do
Not Forget Me Istanbul). The title of my film is “Bolis,” the Armenian
word for Istanbul derived from the Greek name “Konstantinopolis.”
Again, as a storyteller I was drawn to themes of memory and not being
forgotten. I wanted to make the film a love letter to Old Bolis, Eski
Bolis, as seen through the eyes of an ambivalent Diaspora Armenian oud
master returning to Kadikoy with only a photo of his grandfather’s oud
shop on a street called Tellalzade.
Just before docking in Istanbul, I experienced a silent panic attack
in the plane above the skies of the Bosphorus. My mind suddenly became
raided by images of Komitas, Daniel Varoujan, Siamanto, and Krikor
Zohrab being arrested in the dark April night and driven to the
interior on trains. I thought of Zabel Yesayan fleeing in the night. I
thought of my American teachers uttering the words “Starving
Armenians.” I thought of the ocean of bones in Der Zor…What the hell
was I doing returning to the epicenter of the genocide?
Just before docking in Istanbul, I experienced a silent panic attack
in the plane above the skies of the Bosphorus. My mind suddenly became
raided by images of Komitas, Daniel Varoujan, Siamanto, and Krikor
Zohrab being arrested in the dark April night and driven to the
interior on trains. I thought of Zabel Yesayan fleeing in the night. I
thought of my American teachers uttering the words “Starving
Armenians.” I thought of the ocean of bones in Der Zor…What the hell
was I doing returning to the epicenter of the genocide?
Hrant Dink
The answer, tragically, was simple and current. Hrant Dink. What he
stood for and what he fell for became the third awakening in my life.
I needed to see the city he loved so much. I needed to breathe in the
air of Istanbul, despite my silent panic upon seeing the city for the
first time from a bird’s eye view. We landed but the dread hung over
me as I roamed the streets of Istanbul with a group of filmmakers who
fast became friends–and helped me realize my cinematic mission to make
a film about the long-term effects of the genocide on a Diaspora
Armenian with an oud and a mission to find his grandfather’s music
store in Kadikoy. He searches to find something that no longer exists
and ultimately finds something he did not expect: a brief moment of
friendship and empathy. Perhaps my film reflected my own journey. I
came here to find the echoes of oldBolis. But I was really looking for
empathy. I was looking for Hrant.
In the film, Armenak, the lead character, is asked by another
character if he likes Istanbul. He replies ambivalently that “the
demons of the past will never let me forget what happened here in
1915.” For us Armenians returning to this ancient city, we see the
majesty of the surface geography, but everywhere we turn we are
haunted first by buried apparitions of faces, places, and histories
that have been erased from the collective consciousness and the
history books.
This is why it is important, now more than ever, in the wake of Hrant,
to continue to tell the stories and live to see the stories told.
Through storytelling, we can rectify the lies that have polluted the
truth of the ravaged and buried histories of this region’s minorities:
Kurds, Greeks, Jews, Assyrians, and Armenians.
And in telling our stories, we nurture the need and hopefully fulfill
the first steps of attaining justice. Telling stories is an act of
civic rebellion as much as a protest.
Refusing to be silenced, refusing to be dehumanized, refusing to be
forgotten, singing louder and clearer and more resolute all the truth
that must be told is where I find the courage in men and women in this
region and worldwide still suffering from the plagues of genocide,
injustice, displacement, exile, and racism.
The broken record player of history has been repeating itself in
strange and ugly ways this past year. I hope that through civil
society groups, open hearts, and a refusal to dilute or distort the
suffering of indigenous minorities, there may be a deeper justice and
a new awakening found. With citizens waking up to the nightmare that
was our history on these lands 100 years ago, may they combat
intolerance and the denial of the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian
Genocides with empathy, open hearts and knowledge that dispels the
lies.
If I could convince myself today that the genie of my childhood would
come alive again on my shoulder and grant another wish for tomorrow, I
would wish for every child in the world to know the story of this
beautiful human being named Hrant Dink, and for his message of peace
and sincerity to be sowed in our hearts to guide us toward a true path
of reconciliation through truth, justice, and empathy. The memories of
the Tigris and the Euphrates are very long and the pen will always be
mightier than the sword.
http://armenianweekly.com/2015/01/19/a-wish-for-aladdin/