We are in eternal trial. we are under inquisition when we are arrested, and we are under inquisition when we soar freely; our faith is examined when we are Armenian or Kurdish, party or sectarian, Christian or Muslim. after our death our work is under eternal scrutiny. Our inquisitor is Shakespeare or Tumanyan, and we are their inquisitor. we cruelly reject or forget with forgiveness, we never forgive, we never "take the circumstances into account". It is so, because that prisoner, that Siberian, that Armenian saint of post-Egernian Turkey, that warrior of an idea constrained by the dress of the fascist army or the rule of Islam, that prince, barricaded from us, his flock and community by the civil rights of a gentleman, has from the beginning undertaken to say about us what we know, but we cannot say, because we do not know well. Committed to knowing me beyond languages, religions, times and countries. I know myself enough to confirm what he says about me, but I don't know enough to say it myself. His reading of my fate is a problem related to creation or is creation itself, and the punishment of failure is also divinely merciless - the failed is not there, never was, there is no trace, something remains of the silent cultivators of the soil and mine, but not of him. It is said:
You are an unknown Poet, overlooked until today.
Without words you sing a song with bright eyes,
I am also lucky to be an amazing reader.
That I read those songs so easily and so deeply.
Great God, here is of course the silent life of languages and peoples, the "reading of a speechless song", taking the words of the people from the mouths of the people, and here the poets are taking pages from the book of God or, which is the same, they are taking words from the mouths of the people for the great book of the world. The lucky ones are those who are given that text of God immediately and easily, the lucky ones are Tumanyan, Shakespeare, Pushkin... there are many and almost all of us who are unfortunate, but the most tragic is the life of those who, from the fronts of the people - they are obliged, forced, unable, unable to do otherwise - decipher the writing of the dictators as the writing of God, perceive the speech of the dictators as the word of God. Unfortunately, the people and their language are also not infallible, unfortunately, the will of the tyrants fills the entire medium from heaven to earth with itself, enters every house and clan, drags every dream and soul, replaces the whole reality with itself, and both the people and their work, as well as destiny and speech, become false. It is said again. violence is an inexhaustible cry, violence does not leave literature after itself.
The obligatory examination of the work of our ancestor, which assigns us the unfortunate condition of the mythical Wind, asks: So what, the time of cannibalism really left only a black desert after him, was that time of violence woven by my ancestor's voluntary effort, or is his work only a captive's contribution to that time, his time he breaks through and comes out, does he talk to me, does he know me, do I know him? he is the same great free, the same indomitable, the poet under different conditions.
Violence was not the whim and arbitrariness of anyone among us. violence knew what suppresses and what releases, what breaks and what builds, what eliminates and what affirms; violence was a worldview called into action. If the building was inaccurate, because it would be revealed in the process, then what was to be crushed, oppressed, eliminated was accurate. The violence also had a weighty historical experience: the Armenian uprising, which denied the possibility of being Armenian and confirmed the possibility of being a Turk. It was impossible to deny the suffering of the broken and to be broken, the oppressed and the oppressed, but one could be propitiated, one could give himself to the heavens and be propitiated in the sky of future dreams.
But violence, with all this, as the rulers express themselves, provided a small service to the poets. unmistakably, with a hawk's eye, he pointed out exactly what he had to defend and the poet had to defend. With the absence of tyranny and dictators, perhaps the poets would not be so unerring in their search for protectors, perhaps they would not spread their wings so widely over all lives, perhaps they would not be so stubborn in their fight, and perhaps they would even become the orderers of God on this sinful earth and the materializers of their delirium as a prophet. Violence also had this little service, yes. the revolutionary shook us from our ambitions, brought those ambitions together, appropriated them, took on enormous proportions, from which we now had only to recoil in horror, as if our own delirium had not weighed on our heads.
At least in the case of Hamo Sahyan, our time of totalitarianism took on that meaning.
He claimed to build his temple on our ruins - the poet barricaded the poor farmer's house.
Violence erected eternal bronze statues to his idols - in his dynastic domain, the poet set a patriarch and a cultivator under control, an earthy, sullen grandfather.
He called everyone out of the house, family and country, dispossessed, deprived everyone and everyone, unitedly dispersed a crowd of multi-faced and multi-voiced millions and spread wide and open avenues to worship in his temples - the poet showed such a poor man that he took out a stony world of silent sweat and righteous bread, where, it is true, fullness of bread and carnal love. it was not, but they did not worship before foreign idols for the sake of bread either. it was the world of proud, low-ranking, silent people; there, even the animals, even the beetles, the big-headed ants, the flower and the bush, the shepherd who freed his head from a difficult captivity, the dying scent, the spray, the shiver... were human, because in the opposite world, man was not a human being, he was the raw material of some superstructure.
From restrained forms, marble colors and aromas, silent sighs, silent joys, humble effort and suffering, the poet defined his world and hit his coat of arms, an ox full of spikes, on the border. That world is not like the baby Armenia of fresh colors, shrill voices, and clear views, like the country of Saryan or, let's say, Charents. Sahyan's conversation with his time became neither a duet nor an argument, like Sevakin, an argument that would make one the executioner and the other the victim. Sahyan's behavior was much more self-exile from the square, exile. It was like that during the war, it was like that after, it is like that now. The war has already been forgotten, and the poems, which were supposed to be information from the "scene of the incident" and were not, are trodden on.
Perhaps it is a parable of how the brothers, when the house (in the square, in the market, in the temple) was in chaos and confusion, remembered that they had an exiled, departed, sectarian brother, they said: "Perhaps we are not so deprived, eh? Let's go find our brother, let's see what he has collected for our winter in all these years."
Our brother has put it on our table of spiritual bread, that after the times of loss and robbery, he does not throw us behind the ranks of the poor and takes himself out of the class of the world's and our people's chosen ones, who read whole pages from God's all-pervasive book.