Critics’ Forum
May 22, 2012
Literature
Confronting the Limits of Culture and Identity in Arpine Konyalian Grenier’s The Concession Stand: Exaptation at the Margins
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.
All Rights Reserved: Critics’ Forum, 2012.
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.
You can reach her or any of the other contributors to Critics’ Forum
at [email protected]. This and all other articles published
in this series are available online at To sign
up for a weekly electronic version of new articles, go to
Critics’ Forum is a group created to
discuss issues relating to Armenian art and culture in the Diaspora.
www.criticsforum.org.
www.criticsforum.org/join.