We are under an eternal inquisition. Under inquisition when imprisoned, and under inquisition in the moment of our free flight. Our faith is examined when we are Armenian or Kurdish, Party members or sectarians, Christian or Muslim. After our death, our work remains under eternal examination. Our inquisitor is Shakespeare or Tumanyan, and we are their inquisitors: we reject them cruelly or consign them forgivingly to oblivion, never pardon them, never “take the circumstances into account”. This is so because that prisoner, that Siberian exile, that Armenian labourer in post-genocide Turkey, that fighter for an idea constrained by a fascist army uniform or the rules of Islam, that prince barricaded from us, his flock and community, by a lord’s civil rights, undertook from the beginning to say about us what we know but cannot say, because we do not know it well enough. He undertook, across languages, religions, times and countries, to know me better than I know myself. I know myself enough to confirm his words about me, but not enough to say those words myself. His reading of my fate is a matter connected with creation, or is creation itself; and the penalty for failure is likewise divinely merciless. The one who fails is not there, has never been, leaves no trace. Something, at least, remains of the silent workers of the soil and mines; of him, nothing. It has been said:
You are an unknown Poet, never seen until today;
Without words you pour out songs through radiant glances,
And I, let us say, am a wondrous, fortunate Reader,
Who reads those songs so easily and so deeply.
The capitalised You—God—here is, of course, the silent life of languages and peoples. “Reading the wordless song” is wresting the people’s words from the people’s mouth. And poets tear pages from God’s book, or, what amounts to the same thing, wrest words from the people’s mouth for the great book of the world. Fortunate are those to whom this text of God comes at once and easily; fortunate are Tumanyan himself, Shakespeare, Pushkin… The pitiable are many, almost all of us. But most tragic are the lives of those who, from the foreheads of peoples—they are obliged, compelled, cannot, are powerless to do otherwise—decipher tyrants’ writing as God’s writing, receive tyrants’ words as God’s words. Sadly, a people and its language are not incorruptible either. Sadly, the tyrants’ will fills the entire space between heaven and earth, enters every home and lineage, draws into every dream and soul, replaces all reality with itself. And both the people and its deeds, both fate and speech, become falsehood. It has also been said: violence is a barren monster; violence leaves no literature behind.
The obligatory examination of our ancestor’s work, which puts us in the uncomfortable position of the mythical Ham, makes us ask: what then? Has the age of cannibalism truly left only a black desert? Was that age of violence woven by my ancestor’s willing effort, or is his work merely a captive’s contribution to his time? Does he break through his time and emerge? Does he speak to me? Does he know me? Do I know him? Does he stir only compassionate pity in me, his descendant, or also admiration, because even in chains he remains the same great free person, the same unbowed man, the poet under different conditions?
Among us, violence was not somebody’s whim or arbitrariness. Violence knew what it was suppressing and what releasing, what breaking and what building, what abolishing and what establishing. Violence was a worldview put into action. If what was to be built was uncertain, because it would emerge along the way, what was to be broken, suppressed and abolished was certain. Violence also possessed weighty historical experience: the Armenian genocide, which had denied the possibility of Armenian existence and affirmed the possibility of Turkish existence. The suffering of what was broken and would be broken, suppressed and would be suppressed, could not be denied. But one could find solace, surrender to the heavens like an eagle, and soothe oneself in the sky of future dreams.
Yet despite all this, violence, as rulers put it, rendered poets a small service: unerringly, with a falcon’s gaze, it identified precisely what it would tear apart and the poet must defend. Without tyranny and tyrants, poets might not have been so unerring in seeking those to defend; might not have spread their wings so widely over all lives; might not have been so persistent in their fight. They might even have become God’s administrators on this sinful earth, making their prophetic delirium material. Yes, violence rendered this small service too: it shook our revolutionary ambitions off us, gathered those ambitions together, appropriated them and grew to monstrous proportions. Now one could only recoil in horror, as though it were not our own delirium weighing above our heads.
For Hamo Sahyan, at least, our age of totalitarianism took on that meaning.
It aspired to erect its temple upon our ruins; the poet, meanwhile, barricaded the poor ancestral home.
Violence erected eternal bronze statues to its idols; in his ancestral domain the poet set a patriarch and labourer to keep watch—a grandfather covered in earth and chaff.
It summoned everyone out of home, family and country, stripped everyone and each individual of property and face, kneaded millions of faces and voices into a mass of one will and one voice, and sent them down broad, open avenues to worship in its temples. The poet, meanwhile, showed a poor little path leading into a stony, rock-strewn world of silent sweat and honest bread. True, there was no abundance of bread and bodily love, but neither did people worship foreign idols for the sake of bread. It was a world of proud, undemanding, silent people. There even the animals were human, had become human; even the beetles, the large-headed ants, the flower and bush, the breeze that had barely escaped a harsh captivity, the fading scent, the rustle, the shiver… They were human because in the opposing world even a person was not human, but raw material for some higher construction.
From restrained forms, muted colours and scents, silent sighs, quiet joys, humble effort and suffering, the poet defined his world, and at its boundary set his coat of arms: an ox encircled by ears of grain. That world is unlike the young Armenia of fresh colours, ringing voices and clear gazes that was Saryan’s country, or, say, Charents’s. Sahyan’s conversation with his time became neither a duet nor a verbal duel, as Sevak’s did—a duel that would name one man executioner and the other victim. Sahyan’s conduct was much more a self-expulsion from the public square, an exile. So it was during the war, so afterwards, so now. The war has already been forgotten, yet the poems that ought to have been, were obliged to be, information “from the scene”, and were not, still exist, still throb.
Perhaps there is a parable of brothers who, when home—the public square, the market, the temple—was all ruin and confusion, remembered that they had an expelled, departed, sectarian brother and said: “Perhaps we aren’t so destitute after all, eh? Let’s go and find our brother, see what he has gathered for our winter all these years.”
Our brother has placed on our table of spiritual bread something that, after the times of loss and plunder, does not throw us into the back ranks of the destitute, and raises him into the company of the chosen of the world and our people, those who read whole pages from God’s all-encompassing book.