“NATION AND HERITAGE” ALL-ARMENIAN YOUTH CONFERENCE TO BE HELD IN
NKR IN SEPTEMBER
STEPANAKERT, AUGUST 18, NOYAN TAPAN. The All-Armenian Youth
Conference entitled “Nation and Heritage” which is dedicated to the
15th anniversary of the NKR proclamation will be held in the NKR on
September 25-30. The goal of this initiative of the NKR Ministry
of Education, Culture and Sports is to increase young people’s
public-civil activeness, to guarantee participants’ complete
awareness concerning the Karabakh problem, to present the Artsakh
culture to youth, to raise most modern issues arisen in front of the
youth. 18-35 year old young people, students, representatives of youth
structures will participate in the conference. They will make reports
dedicated the Karabakh conflict, social-economic development, fixing
of national ideas and values in the NKR, patriotic education in the
army and among youth, the Armenian spiritual and material culture,
problems of youth cooperation.

RA GOVERNMENT APPROVES DRAFT TO 2007 PROGRAM ON CHILDREN’S RIGHTS
PROTECTION
YEREVAN, AUGUST 18, NOYAN TAPAN. The draft to the 2007 annual program
on protection of the children’s rights was approved at the August 18
sitting of the RA Government. As Noyan Tapan was informed by the RA
Government’s Information and Public Relations Department, it will
be presented according the fixed order to the National Assembly in
the RA draft law “On 2007 State Budget.” The program was worked out
in correspondence with the RA law “On Children’s Rights.” The annual
program is aimed to improvement of the legislation of the children’s
sphere, to children’s social security, improvement of health care
problems, reforms of the education sphere, organization of rest,
entertainment and cultural life. It was mentioned at the sitting that
the program is consonant with the strategic program on overcoming
poverty adopted by the RA Government and is aimed to the strategy of
reforms on social protection of children in difficult life situations.

On the fringes of the former USSR, entire ‘countries’ exist that pay little
heed to official borders. But what is life really like in these unlikely
relics of Soviet history?
The Independent – United Kingdom; Aug 19, 2006
Jonas Bendiksen
Transdniester
History has moved on without Transdniester, a 1,500-square-mile sliver
of land between the Dniester River, in Moldova, and the border with
Ukraine.
Moldova became an independent country following the collapse of the
Soviet Union.
Consequently, its culture began to reemerge after years of
Russification, and the country inched closer politically to its
neighbour to the west, Romania, whose language is virtually identical
to Moldovan. But the peripheral region of Transdniester, which is
inhabited by a higher percentage of ethnic Russians, refused to be
part of the new order.
Separatists in Transdniester unilaterally declared independence. Then,
in 1992, they won a short, bloody civil war. Since then, the
self-styled republic has quietly staked a claim as eastern Europe’s
newest fully fledged country, with its own constitution, president,
army, flag, passports and currency. Most other countries have not paid
much attention, however’ in fact, no country has officially recognised
Transdniester as an independent state. But that hasn’t stopped it from
acting like one. Why would it, sitting as it does on one of Europe’s
largest stockpiles of weapons and ammunition? Part of Transdniester’s
ability to hold its own lies in the 50,000 weapons and 40,000 tons
of ammunition that the Russians neglected to take home with them. In
fact, Russia still keeps a contingent of its troops there.
Transdniester is founded on a curious blend of Soviet political theory
and dubious business ethics. Its economy is said to be heavily grounded
in its role as a major hub for the smuggling of weapons, drugs, oil,
alcohol, cigarettes, and human beings. Its massive arms stockpile
functions as a depot for illicit arms-smuggling operations around
the globe.
Nostalgia for the USSR runs high among the people and a gloomy feeling
of mildewed stagnation clung to me throughout my stay. I spent one
evening sitting around and taking photographs in a bar called Krasnaya
Zhara, or “Red Heat”.
Soviet decor hung on the walls’ Marx, Engels and Lenin scowled at
the patrons drinking warm beer below them. After only a few clicks
of the shutter the barmaid began to yell at me. “Why are you taking
pictures? We are proud of all this! … To you this means nothing,
but we’re proud of it. Our life was better then.”
I sat down and finished my beer. The bar slowly came to life, and
I observed the hullabaloo of the middle-aged crowd as it danced to
the tunes of Soviet-era pop crooners. Above the windows shrouded
by curtains, loud red banners proclaimed a proletarian bliss that
never quite arrived. As I got up to leave, I realised that, for the
residents of Transdniester, the break with Moldova was a matter not
just of territory, but of seceding from the present and laying claim
to the past.
Abkhazia
Before the Soviet empire crumbled, Abkhazia ranked as one of the
premier Soviet beach resorts, attracting the most well-connected
apparatchiks and fortunate workers to its waterfronts, spas and
hotels. Located in the north-west corner of the former Soviet republic
of Georgia, it offered a stunning contrast of pristine, snow-topped
mountains and palmlined beaches. Its allure extended to all levels of
society: Josef Stalin and his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, kept dachas,
or villas, of their own here.
Abkhazia is anything but bustling these days. In fact, it has
hardly stirred since 1993, after the end of a 13-month-long war with
neighbouring Georgia.
Ten thousand people died, and two-thirds of the population fled. Today,
in the Abkhaz capital of Sukhum, empty shells of buildings stand
wearily – burned down, bombed out and partially decomposed from heat,
salt and disuse.
The war started just a year after Georgia seceded from the Soviet Union
in 1991. Abkhazia, in turn, sought independence from Georgia. The
Abkhaz, a separate ethnic group with their own language, were still
stinging from the Soviet policy of forcibly moving people from Georgia
proper into Abkhazia. The war, although brief, raged with Chechnya-like
ferocity. In the end, the Abkhaz fighters beat back the Georgians with
help from an odd set of partners: Russia secretly contributed artillery
and air power, and Shamil Basayev, the now infamous Chechen leader, was
part of a ferocious band of volunteer fighters. As the Georgian army
retreated, terrified ethnic Georgians followed, many on foot. Their
departure drained Abkhazia’s cities and left the country half empty.
A UN-monitored embargo keeps it that way. Abkhazia’s only viable
economic hope today is a revival of tourism, and its Black Sea beach
resorts attract a motley crew of holidaying Russians. For two months
a year, the country’s roads brim with red tour buses from the north,
breathing life into its silent cities. Some visitors are drawn
by nostalgia for the place where they spent the summers of their
childhoods. Most, though, are drawn by the bargains that come with
vacationing in a cash-strapped country that doesn’t officially exist,
and turn their tan-lined backs to the ruins of war behind them to
face the warm, cleansing waters of the sea.
The Ferghana Valley
Each time I crossed the 13,000-foot-high mountain passes on my way
into the lush Ferghana Valley, the sudden change from Central Asia’s
standard tan and gray palette jolted my eyes into observance. The
valley’s verdant fields make i t both the most fertile and most
densely populated part of Central Asia. In centuries past, the valley
had been a crucial segment of the great Silk Road, an ancient trade
conduit for precious materials and spices, as well as knowledge and
culture. Today, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, it is a transit
point for much of the enormous quantity of heroin bound for Russia
and Europe from Afghanistan.
Another consequence of the fall of the USSR was the relaxation,
after 70 years, of religious oppression by the government. As a
result, many of the valley’s Muslims emerged from underground to
worship publicly. Others rediscovered their religious heritage and
traditions. Both trends gave local governments pause. Fearing the rise
of a politicised brand of Islamic extremism, leaders of the three newly
independent countries that share the valley – Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan
and Tajikistan – cracked down on what they viewed as fundamentalist
Islam. In the largest and most repressive of the three, Uzbekistan,
all unsanctioned religious expression is brutally repressed. Western
human-rights observers put the number of men imprisoned for religious
activity at 7,000.
Ordinary Muslim behaviour – praying in public, wearing beards, studying
the Koran, or dressing in traditional Islamic clothing – can result
in arrest and criminal charges of extremism. Prison sentences of up
to 18 years are common.
Torture is rampant.
Not surprisingly, this repression has forced Islam underground and
into the hands of organisations like Hizb-ut-Tahrir, which calls
for the creation of a Muslim caliphate, governed by Shariah law. One
balmy evening in 2002, I attended prayers in an underground mosque
in Margilan, one of the valley’s main Uzbek cities. My guide knocked
on an unmarked door identical to dozens of others nearby. Inside,
the courtyard looked like countless others I had seen, with children
playing and young women preparing supper. But here, in one corner,
about two dozen men and boys removed their slippers and entered one
of the dwellings. I joined the crowd, and sat down on a silk pillow.
My eyes slowly adjusted to the dim interior of the
living-room-cum-mosque, as the group recited verses from the Koran,
teaching their sons the suras and speaking to one another in hushed
voices. In this secret room, the government’s persecution seemed far
away, and the dream of an Islamic state in the Ferghana Valley seemed
as real as the carpet upon which we were sitting. Nobody spoke of
violent overthrow, or civil war, but the sound of each verse felt
like a blow against the godless and violent men who dominated the
worshippers.
Birobidzhan
In 1928, two decades before the creation of Israel, Josef Stalin
established the Jewish Autonomous Region as the first modern homeland
for the Jews.
Occupying an area the size of Belgium, the region is located in
far eastern Siberia on Russia’s border with northern China. Before
Stalin came along, the region had nothing whatsoever to do with Jews,
or Judaism.
Having a “Zion” on the USSR’s eastern flank offered several advantages
to Soviet authorities in the 1920s. For one, the Zionist movement
was gaining momentum worldwide, creating a potentially dangerous
intellectual ferment among the Soviet Union’s 2.5 million Jews. What
better way to deflate the movement than to lure activists 5,000 miles
away to a vast, largely uninhabited swampland? Communist leaders
were also looking to populate the long, vulnerable border with China,
an area damned by harsh Siberian winters and hot, mosquito-infested
summers.
Fleeing persecution and famine in western Russia and Ukraine, many of
the region’s first settlers needed little convincing to go. Between
1928 and 1938, more than 40,000 Jews made the journey. They arrived
with few supplies and little preparation for the extreme cold and
severe isolation.
Despite the harsh realities they encountered, by the mid-1930s,
for a short period, the Jewish Autonomous Region’s capital city of
Birobidzhan thrived: a Yiddish theatre flourished, and local writers
produced Yiddish literature and newspapers. The region even attracted
foreign Jews from as far away as the United States, Argentina and
France. However, this was all doomed. In 1936, Stalin unleashed the
Great Terror nationwide, the first of a series of nightmarish purges
that effectively eliminated Jewish culture in the region. By 1948,
all Jewish institutions were shut down, and most of the local Jewish
leaders had been killed.
By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, the Jews of Birobidzhan
had faced decades of isolation, economic hardship, and religious
persecution. The result was the highest rate of Jewish exodus in
post-Soviet Russia. During just one month during my stay in 1998,
six charter jets full of emigrating Jews departed for Israel. The
resettlements were sponsored by the Jewish Agency, an Israeli
organisation, and were open to anyone – along with a spouse and
children – who could prove they had a Jewish grandparent.
Thus, barely half a century after their parents had built their Soviet
“promised land”, most members of the next generation departed in
search of a better place. By the end of the 1990s, the vast majority
of Birobidzhani Jews had traded in the Siberian winter for the heat
of the Middle East.
The region even attracted foreign Jews from as far away as France,
the US and Argentina
Nagorno-Karabakh
Nagorno-Karabakh is the site of one of the bloodiest wars to follow
the collapse of the Soviet Union. The fertile, mountainous land
is inhabited largely by ethnic Armenians, yet situated within the
borders of Azerbaijan. Armenians and Azeris battled over Nagorno-
Karabakh from 1990 to 1994, another episode in the long, complex
history of a place that looms large in the identities of both ethnic
groups: Armenians view it as the cradle of their Christian culture,
the home of medieval monasteries and churches’ Azeris, too, view it as
the native soil of their ancient culture, yet as an outpost for Islam.
The war ultimately claimed the lives of at least 25,000 people and
created some 600,000 refugees. Nagorno-Karabakh was emptied of its
entire population of Azeris, who either fled or were killed. The
Karabakh Armenians then attempted to establish an independent country
with indissoluble ties to Armenia, albeit fully encircled by Azeri
territory. More than a decade after the ceasefire, Nagorno-Karabakh
remains at the centre of an unresolved dispute that continues to
bring ethnic and economic blight to the south Caucasus.
I arrived in Stepanakert, the sleepy capital of the self-styled
republic a few days after Christmas. While I was registering at the
foreign ministry, the deputy minister invited me to travel wherever I
wanted, with one exception: the eastern frontier, near the border with
Azerbaijan. “What about Aghdam?”- the town once inhabited by 50,000
Azeris and only 15 miles from Stepanakert – I asked. “No, you can’t go
there. It’s impossible, forbidden,” he replied curtly. I understood
that I risked the loss of his goodwill if I enquired further. So I
did as I was told, and went sightseeing.
Still, I was equally curious to learn the Azeri story. As I navigated
the small territory, I asked my various drivers if they would take
me to see Aghdam.
My question was not well received’ most were quick to change the
subject. At last I befriended a policeman-turned-taxi driver who
had fought in the Aghdam area. Mellowed by a decade of wary peace,
he agreed to take me.
We sped eastward down the empty road. Only later would I understand
that he had taken me there so that I could see what would have happened
to the Armenians if they had lost the war. After about 20 minutes we
reached Aghdam – or, more precisely, what was left of it. We drove past
the skeletons of thousands of concrete houses and I saw the towering
minarets of the city’s mosque, which appeared to be the only building
still standing. In a curiously awkward hearts-and-minds operation,
this one mosque had been left largely intact by the Armenians in
order to show some degree of respect for their Muslim enemy.
We stopped, and I went inside. I clambered up a spiral staircase to
the top of one of the minarets, and gazed over the desolation. It was
then that I realised that I had seen pieces of Aghdam countless times
during my stay. After the Armenians captured the town, they carted
away its bricks, windows, wiring, plumbing, floor tiles and roofs
for use in the reconstruction of Stepanakert, and elsewhere. Now,
all that was left of Aghdam was a mini- Hiroshima of a landscape,
the starkest war memorial I had ever seen.
‘Satellites: Photographs from the Fringes of the Former Soviet Union’,
by Jonas Bendiksen, is published by Aperture, pounds 19.50.To order
the book at a special price (with free p&p) call Independent Books
Direct on 08700 798897

Azeri leader calls for better fight against Armenian lobby
Azartac news agency, Baku
18 Aug 06
18 August: President Ilham Aliyev said at the second gathering of
the heads of Azerbaijan’s diplomatic missions abroad that powerful
Armenian lobby organizations are carrying out a smear campaign against
our republic abroad every day. The Armenian lobby is also behind some
biased foreign media reports about Azerbaijan, Aliyev said.
The president stressed that we should strengthen our policies and
struggle in this area. He said Azerbaijan’s diplomatic missions
should be very active on this issue. They have to maintain close ties
not only with the state agencies of the countries where they work,
but also with members of parliament, non-governmental organizations,
the media and the public in order to inform them of the truth about
Azerbaijan, the president said. Aliyev said Azerbaijan has opened
embassies in 21 countries over the past two years.
[Passage omitted: Aliyev said Azerbaijan needs more embassies abroad
to strengthen its international standing]

Armenia sells major rubber plant to British company
Arminfo
18 Aug 06
Yerevan, 18 August: The Armenian government today decided to sell 90
per cent of the shares of the state-owned closed-typed stock company
the Nairit factory – the only producer of polychloroprene rubber in
the Commonwealth of Independent States – to the British-Irish company
Rhinoville Property Limited for 40m dollars, the government said in
a press release.
The press release said the British-Irish company had applied to buy
the plant and said it could invest in the plant to upgrade it.
The government instructed the energy minister to allow the Armgazprom
joint-stock company to sell 90 per cent of the shares of the Nairit
factory to the foreign investor for 40m dollars.
[Passage omitted: details]
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

An African Journal: The Translated Stories of Raymond Boghos Kupelian
By Hovig Tchalian
Critics’ Forum
Literature
8.19.2006
The recently published collection of stories by Raymond Boghos
Kupelian, African Symphony (AuthorHouse, 2006), marks a return of
sorts, for both the author and his readers. The volume translates
Kupelian’s second collection of stories of the same name, originally
written three decades ago in Armenian. They also chronicle the thoughts
and experiences of a man who emigrated to West Africa from Lebanon,
where he grew up, leaving yet again twenty years later for Southern
California, where this first English-language volume now appears.
It is significant that Kupelian left Lebanon voluntarily. A recent
article quotes him as saying that “the beauty of the forest, …
nature … everything was different” in Africa than it was in Lebanon
(Glendale News Press, 8/01/06). There is little or no nostalgia
for Lebanon, no longing for the past, in Kupelian’s statement,
but a search for something new. And that same spirit of discovery
is evident in the volume, which seems more concerned with what the
author’s biography refers to as the “immediacy” of its subject.
The tales themselves do not exhibit the structure of the classical
short story-with its dramatic conflict, swift progression and equally
dramatic conclusion. Kupelian’s stories feel more like journal entries
written on a tranquil beach, one sentence at a time, then reworked
months or years later. They invite a reading that shares that same
leisurely spirit.
One of the better known stories in the collection, “Surie Una Man,”
is written in that leisurely spirit. It tells the tale of Surie,
an African servant who takes a younger second wife and jeopardizes
his manhood and his family’s well-being in the process. The story
is perhaps the collection’s least convincingly translated. Certain
passages sound awkward, almost as though they had been translated
verbatim from Armenian, such as in this passage, which describes
Surie’s brief brush with schooling: “Next day, in the evening hours,
for the first time in his life, Surie stepped into school! Sitting
like a bishop in the back of the car, he entered through the gate of
the establishment.” (52).
Much better translated is “The Bush in the Man.” In it, Bomboli, a
disgraced Minister of Education now awaiting trial in jail, mourns the
loss of his former glory. It begins with a description of Bomboli’s
recurring dream, in which a boy fishing in a boat is attacked by a
crocodile, which turns out to be a man in disguise who takes the boy’s
body deep into the jungle. The rest of the story takes a cue from the
dream, weaving in and out of the minister’s thoughts and telling a
kind of morality tale or fable. Along the way, we find out that the
minister, a former schoolteacher, had a rapid rise to glory and an
equally rapid demise, after being accused by British authorities of
witchcraft and cannibalism. The story succeeds in touching on issues
of culture and colonialism, without being unnecessarily didactic
or preachy.
Less successful is “Despot,” a story of a white Englishwoman who falls
in love with an African man who later becomes his (unnamed) country’s
ruler. After his exile and death, she is pressured to publish her
journals, which recount the torrid and well-publicized affair. But
she refuses on principle. Here is where the leisurely spirit of the
book goes awry. The tale seems to tie episodes loosely together,
while balancing an apparent moral at the center of it. All the while,
the narrator’s voice intrudes too often, as in this example, where he
explains the woman’s actions: “It was evident. Hers was an idealized
love for an absolutely great man. She needed to keep it immaculate”
(70).
By far the best story in the collection is “Kookoo Sherif.” It is
the wrenching but subtle tale of the African girl referred to in the
title, molested by a Middle Eastern shop-owner, in exchange for a
pair of shoes she has spotted in his store window. The repercussions
of that emblematic, brutal barter at the heart of the story-goods
for people-reverberate until the end. But the tale also allows the
girl’s story to unfold gradually and convincingly.
Kookoo grows into a woman of the streets and eventually falls in love
with a young African revolutionary, who is soon imprisoned for his
ideas. In the end, she manages to turn the tables on her oppressors
by pretending to be the mistress of a high-ranking mulatto official
(mulattos in some cases being the offspring of illegitimate unions
between black Africans and white immigrants).
The scandal the story creates allows her to trick him and her own
past oppressors (the shop-owner chief among them), freeing her lover
from prison in the process. The story develops from conflict to
resolution in sure-handed and compelling fashion, using the tension
of the narrative to tie the various details together. It embodies
better than any other story in the collection the promise fulfilled
more fully in Kupelian’s later works.
The book’s first story and its last tie the collection together and
add the structure and cohesion sometimes missing from other individual
tales. “A Diamond Tale” starts off the collection and is itself perhaps
the best structured in the volume. It recounts a conversation between
the narrator and a local judge, who decries the fact that people have
been killed for the sake of the precious stone in the title. The judge
recounts stories of barbaric acts-such as when a young boy working as
a “sen sen boy” (or “sand boy”), looking through freshly dug dirt for
diamonds, rubs the sweat off of his face, only to be wrongly accused
of swallowing a diamond and murdered. The story ends in a reversal of
sorts, when the narrator announces that the judge has been poisoned
to death, after having invited the narrator to “hear a diamond tale”
by sitting in on the murder hearing at his court the following day.
The tale also includes an interesting look at middle eastern immigrants
in Africa, people the locals refer to collectively as “Syrians” (the
writer among them). They are portrayed as good people occasionally
gone bad, under the glare of the sun and the constant temptation of
riches. With the introduction of the “foreigners” into the African
context, this first story acts as a fitting beginning to the book. The
act is completed in the final story, “Washed by the Waves,” which tells
the story of an idealistic black American woman who comes to Africa
looking for peace and leaves disillusioned, never to return. The story
describes her love affair with a local official, a married man. It
also recounts the parallel, and sometimes strangely incongruous,
story of the narrator’s short-lived affair with a Scottish woman. The
tale also sounds the note of universality in the collection, of the
sameness of cultures-their loves, cruelties and disappointments-that
far outweigh their differences.
The volume’s cover art and original illustrations, drawn by Armen
Minassian and the writer’s son, Roger Kupelian, complement the volume
well and represent perhaps its most pleasant surprise. The collection
could have benefited as well from a longer introduction, placing
the stories in the writer’s larger body of work and its original
Armenian-language context. The volume currently includes a good but
brief biography that gets lost at the very back of the book.
All in all, Raymond Boghos Kupelian’s African Symphony is an
interesting look at a different diasporan existence-not the forced
exile of the immigrant but the voluntary travels of a man in search
of something greater.
Additional information about the writer and his works may be found
at
All Rights Reserved: Critics Forum, 2006
Hovig Tchalian holds a PhD in English literature from UCLA. He has
edited several journals and also published articles of his own.

‘Bonnie and Clyde’ held for spate of jewellery thefts
Kuwait Times, Kuwait
Aug. 20, 2006
KUWAIT: A source revealed that an Armenian expatriate and a Kuwaiti
woman embarked on a series of jewellery thefts. The expat and the woman
would go to jewellery shops and ask the salesman to look at chains and
bracelets. They would then put some of them in their pockets while the
salesman wasn’t looking. They would buy one item from the shop but
steal others. They stole from four shops but when they came back to
the first store, the salesman called the police. During interrogation,
they confessed that they committed a number of thefts.

US STATE DEPARTMENT DECLINED REQUEST OF ARMENIANS
[August 19, 2006, 15:20:09]
AzerTag, Azerbaijan
Aug. 19, 2006
The State Department of the United States of America has rejected the
letter of the Armenian lobby sent to President Georges Bush with the
purpose to prevent participation of Turkish soldier in peace-making
forces of the United Nations in Lebanon.
The assistant to the press secretary of the State Department Tom Keisy
has informed in this connection, that the letter signed by chairman
of National Committee of the American Armenians by Ken Khachikian,
President Bush did not read at all.
Noting that the question connected with peace-making forces which will
be directed to Lebanon, has been discussed in New York, in headquarters
of the United Nations, Mr. Tom Keisy said the government of the USA
stands for participation in these discussions of all countries which
wish to be in staff of peacemakers, including Turkey.
To note, in the letter of Armenians, it was stated that sending of
Turkish armies to Lebanon contradicts interests of the United States.

Man set to be tried abroad
Daily News
Los Angeles Daily News
Aug. 19, 2006
A Glendale man who fled to Armenia when he came under suspicion of
strangling his 23-year-old girlfriend is scheduled to be tried next
week for murder.
If convicted in an Armenian court, Artur Khanzadyan, 25, could serve
up to 12 years in jail. He was arrested there in November, just two
months after investigators found the body of his girlfriend, Odet
Tsaturyan, in the trunk of his car.
Glendale police and U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Pasadena, have asked local
authorities to return Khanzadyan to the United States for trial, where
he could face up to life in prison if convicted, but Armenian officials
refused. The two nations do not have a formal extradition treaty.
Tsaturyan’s father Shagen Tsaturyan, who insisted Khanzadyan be
brought back, will be attending the hearing with two Glendale police
officers. Hrachooe Tsaturyan, his wife, said he wanted to ensure
Khanzadyan is convicted, despite being tried overseas.
The Glendale Police Officer’s Association and St. Peter’s Armenian
Church paid for Tsaturyan’s $1,500 airfare.

National Post (Canada)
August 19, 2006 Saturday
Toronto Edition
A dream within a dream; Istanbul’s reality, fantasy: Fiction
by Michael Greenstein, Weekend Post
THE BLACK BOOK
By Orhan Pamuk
Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely
Vintage
480 pp., $21
– – –
Istanbul ranks high among the most interesting cities in the world,
its fascination attributable to its geographic location: a meeting
point between East and West, Asia and Europe, an imperial crossover
as Byzantium and Constantinople and a Mediterranean threshold among
the Bosphorus, Marmora and Black seas. Heaping detail upon detail in
the same way Dickens chronicled London or Joyce Dublin, Orhan Pamuk
puts Istanbul on the map. A Balzac (and Borges) of the Bosphorus,
with several novels to his name, Pamuk has become a cause celebre in
Turkey and abroad because of his outspokenness on the Armenian
genocide.
First published in 1990 and translated into English in 1995, The
Black Book now appears in a new translation by Maureen Freely, who in
her afterword discusses the complexities of the Turkish language,
with its “cascading clauses.” Her meticulous translation captures the
Byzantine musicality of Pamuk’s prose in his multi-layered novel, a
metaphysical detective story that is a quest for meaning and identity
on personal, literary and political levels.
Like the city he writes about, Pamuk straddles modernity and
tradition, interweaving his chapters with allusions to and from many
sources. The epilogue is taken from The Encyclopedia of Islam (though
it could as easily be Pamuk’s postmodernist sleight of hand): “Ibn’
Arabi writes of a friend and dervish saint, who, after his soul was
elevated to the heavens, arrived on Mount Kaf, the magic mountain
that encircles the world; gazing around him, he saw that the mountain
itself was encircled by a serpent. Now, it is a well-known fact that
no such mountain encircles the world, nor is there a serpent.”
The Black Book repeatedly calls into question what is real and what
is imagined, so that characters and readers often enter into a
dervish-like trance in the tug-of-war between centrifugal and
centripetal forces, cascading through lengthy narrative passages. If
the circular magic mountain undercuts itself, so, too, does the
epigraph to the opening chapter: “Never use epigraphs — they kill
the mystery in the work!” The author never ceases to pull the Turkish
rug from under his readers’ feet.
>>From the outset, the three major, incestuous characters are
introduced: Galip (a lawyer) watches his wife (and cousin), Ruya,
while thinking about another relative, Celal, a famous journalist
whose columns appear in every second chapter, in counterpoint to the
main narrative. The opening sentence seems innocent enough, but on
second reading the deceptions begin to appear: “Ruya was lying
facedown on the bed, lost to the sweet warm darkness beneath the
billowing folds of the blue-checked quilt.” Only if we know that her
name means “dream” do we become aware that The Black Book is a dream
within a dream in which Istanbul is both realized and fantasized.
In contrast to Ruya’s warm, dreamlike world, the cold January morning
in 1980 invades the interior. “The first sounds of a winter morning
seeped in from outside: the rumble of a passing car, the clatter of
an old bus, the rattle of the copper kettles that the salep maker
shared with the pastry cook, the whistle of the parking attendant at
the dolmus stop.” The narrator captures the sights and sounds of
Istanbul that play in Ruya’s mind, even as Galip remembers Celal’s
words that “memory is a garden.” These early phrases are merely a
prelude to the lengthy lists the narrator accumulates from the
external world as well as from psychological realms.
The plot is fairly straightforward: Ruya and Celal disappear, Galip
searches for them for several days before they end up being murdered.
Skeletal as this detective summary appears, the novel dwells on so
many other matters that the reader loses sight of the plot. At what
point does one enter Istanbul’s labyrinth and when does one emerge
from its intricacies?
Paradox and contradiction abound in this hall of mirrors. Celal’s
first column begins with an epigraph: “Nothing can ever be as
shocking as life. Except writing.” Which leads to: “Did you know that
the Bosphorus is drying up? I don’t think so.” Celal’s apocalyptic
vision haunts the pages of The Black Book where life and art imitate
each other to an extreme degree. Celal’s next column, “Alaadin’s
Shop,” begins with an epigraph from Byron Pasha: “If I have any fault
it is digression.” If Pamuk’s prose seems digressive, rest assured
that everything he writes is to the point (as long as the reader
patiently awaits the point).
His “passion for the epic” takes the form of an urban odyssey, a
Joycean Ulysses, a picaresque tour of Istanbul. If Ruya is an avid
reader of detective fiction, Galip sleuths her and that fiction.
Pamuk is obsessed with the influence of Western cinema, which tends
to undermine traditional Turkish life. Turkish identity dominates The
Black Book. “Yes, it was because of those damn films — brought in
from the West canister by canister to play in our theatres for hours
on end — that the gestures our people used in the street began to
lose their innocence. They were discarding their old ways, faster
than the eye could see; they’d embraced a whole new set of gestures
— each and every thing they did was an imitation.”
So what The Black Book boils down to is a quest for authenticity, for
the true self, but that goal remains elusive. Galip and Celal become
almost interchangeable, and all the stories about stories — the
search to end all searches, word games, surface versions and hidden
versions, dreams belonging to others — all of these, and others too
numerous to mention, add up to Istanbul’s labyrinth.
Dostoevskian doubles pervade the narrative, multiplying identities.
At once omniscient and ignorant, the narrator calls knowledge into
question. “We also knew that the Khazars were really Turks who had
converted to Judaism. But what we did not know was that the Turks
were as Jewish as Jews were Turkish. And wasn’t it amazing to watch
these two peoples travel through the 20th century swaying to the
rhythm of the same secret music, never meeting, always at a tangent,
but forever linked, however condemned, like a pair of helpless
twins.” This tangential linkage lies at the core of this novel and
the country that oscillates between Ataturk and Muhammad. To
complicate matters further, The Black Book explores alphabetical
letters in the shapes of faces, a system derived from the
15th-century Sufi sect of Hurufism.
After the murders, Pamuk offers an anti-climactic twist: “Reader,
dear reader, throughout the writing of this book I have tried … to
keep its narrator separate from its hero, its columns separate from
the pages that advance its story … but please allow me to intervene
just once before I send these pages off to the typesetter.” His human
intervention explains the black dream and black pages that form his
black book. Readers accustomed to black print on white pages should
adjust their focus to imagine floating letters without a white
background: low profile and high visibility. In 2003, Pamuk’s novel
My Name Is Red won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Can the Nobel
Prize be far behind?
GRAPHIC:
Colour Photo: BOOK COVER: The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk; Black &
White
Photo: Staton R. Winter, AFP, File; Pamuk straddles modernity and
tradition in The Black Book, which has received a new translation.