Our society is a cannibal society; we are a people born of that society, and we are breaking a way through towards humanity. Often we see that our claws are a cannibal’s claws: we have not been endowed with compassion. If, by nurturing it within ourselves, we can become kin to this great, bright world, that will truly be life’s victory and our own.
HRANT MATEVOSYAN
— Through all your literature you are restoring our felled, destroyed, eroded forest, with its animals and people, planting the trees again one by one and cherishing them. Today, of course, those trees, shrubs, animals and masters are not in their places: they have taken Rostom’s rifle and gone to defend Armenia’s sacred soil. So for every character you created, you added another Armenian, another soldier to our number, made us stronger. We know these gathered black clouds will unfold their swaddling clothes, give up their sun, and those who left will return to their service, their new everyday lives. Only children will be orphaned again, women widowed, people dragging their one remaining leg will appear in the streets, and many we will never see again. Is that our small reckoning before the great one?
— No! Not a single child should be orphaned.
In place of one unspoken word of justice, look at the monstrous evil writhing there, at how a people is being disfigured. From that small opening through which the light of justice should have shone, what monsters burst out! It could have been entirely bloodless, and the peoples could have coexisted peacefully.
When the Turks broke through the front and alarm spread to Tiflis, because the gates of the Caucasian capital seemed open now, the Armenians formed a delegation to the viceroyalty to see what the ruler of the Caucasus would say. The ruler had already packed his belongings; Countess Vorontsova-Dashkova was beating her knees: “Oh, what will happen? I have grown daughters, the Turks of Borchali are coming!” Let us hope that the Turks of Borchali are knocking at the Union capital’s gates now too, and that the ladies there also have grown and adolescent daughters. Perhaps our pain will reach them that way. All of this is the Centre’s fault, Gorbachev’s fault, a grave fault. They betrayed their nature in their own language before we could understand it: provocateur. A question clearer than clear they provocatively made a show of not understanding, distorted, defiled, dirtied; they summoned supposed authorities to resolve it, then invoked their own offspring, the Azerbaijani factor. Artsakh belongs to its people, yet the rulers spoke of that land and its inhabitants as though they were an ownerless flock or orchard. It is difficult to understand the rulers, more than difficult to fight them. Now the presence here of “the whole guard of bodyguards” is obligatory, otherwise “we drink one another’s blood”. “Artsakhs” must always smoulder “over there in Transcaucasia”, and the Centre’s firefighters must always extinguish and inflame, inflame and extinguish, securing their constant presence as prosecutor.
— You said the Centre and Gorbachev are to blame for our situation. Gorbachev, and his predecessors too, are very small beside what has been done; they have living pedestals beneath their “boots”. Why do we keep seeking leaders to blame, why do we not speak first of the forces that set the puppets in motion?
— Those forces are Russian chauvinism and internal Turkish chauvinism, which, at least where we are concerned, are in profound agreement, one might say an alliance. Are you satisfied? However profound a democrat Gorbachev may be, he will not stand beside us against either of them.
Our hope lies in the manifest certainty of the social evil brought by totalitarianism. It is so real, so heavy and undeniable, so destructive of life itself, that even the most sworn patriots of their homelands, Russian and Turkic-speaking alike, will reject the military-barracks benefits of totalitarianism and are already rejecting them. Azerbaijani nationalists understand this particularly well: tomorrow, when totalitarianism has disintegrated and private ownership has been restored, they will not be able to drive any Armenian from their land. That is where their fever to rid the land of Armenians begins.
— The harmony of the puppets’ movements was not disturbed at all when one of the moving forces, in one of its forms called the Popular Front, touched the Centre’s crystal glass with the tips of its people-strangling fingers: a veritable ringing volley burst from that glass.
— Under slightly different conditions one ought to welcome that mass uprising, supposedly for a new life, and the Centre ought to be the reactionary force. But, as in all multinational countries, the movement stumbled and fell into the abyss of relations between peoples. Anti-Armenianism became their present purpose; the path of least resistance attracted them, and with the animal instinct of their thinking they did not dare direct their attack against other forces. That is how the Baku and Sumgait massacres arose. The Centre, in turn, thought that through the Armenians’ “small” sacrifice it could for now stem the flood of Turkish nationalism and enter into an alliance with it. How promising that compromise is, they know; for now we can plainly see that their social and political movement is a monstrosity. Against that background, what ought to have been reactionary—yesterday’s order, officials, Stalinists—are more positive presences than today’s disfigured, distorted reformers. The Centre’s competence should have meant resolving the day’s question that day and local problems locally, putting the country on the road to peaceful restructuring, giving the different homelands to their peoples and nurturing a confederation of nations.
— That road lies beyond seven mountains. Is there another, through a coup?
— I fear a coup. Even if something happened to Raisa Maximovna, that blood would terrify me.
— We have our Christian fear, but it will not advance matters or improve the country’s condition. Perhaps these forces of ours that have reached political consciousness will use their moment of self-awareness.
— I am not all-knowing, but the longer they can keep the country away from revolutions and coups, the more praise they deserve, the better for life and humanity.
— Is that your view as a writer and humanist?
— No, it is not my writer’s view; it is reality. Many, many countries abroad have enjoyed decades, even centuries of peaceful progress because they undergo daily revolutions, daily renewals and restructuring. Explosive situations and explosions are continually prevented there.
I confess that about fifteen years ago an Armenian-American acquaintance, almost a girl, left me in a less than enviable position. She was here to write her college graduation paper. I wanted to impress her with my knowledge of her country, but everything new to me was already very old to her: “Faulkner? He’s dea-ad. Dead! Updike is forty-five already, I think forty-five. He’s dead too.”
Then long live the bud, long live the tremor born and beating every day. One must constantly witness birth, in art and in life. We must constantly shake off the rust hardening on our thoughts and feelings. In many respects people from outside must be our teachers.
— You seem to be tempting the imaginations of those leaving here.
— I cannot curse those who leave: they direct their own lives. Yet I also consider every departure from this besieged citadel a betrayal. But we must see that it was precisely Faulkner, Saroyan and Dalí who brought about this revolution of thought here; Márquez demolished the dictator’s pedestal for us. The outside world rendered us an immense service, had a revolutionary significance: a chance expression, a gesture, a grimace would arrive and expose all our ideological falseness.
— In the language of our reality today, you raise your fist in solidarity with spiritual revolutions and with that same fist reject all political revolutions.
— Perhaps.
— “Unnoticed, like the wing of tender dusk,” Tumanyan passes through your work’s “mountains” and “trees”, gently caressing them. Reading you, we keep seeing Tumanyan looking at Armenia’s “hard” world. You do not evade that gaze; you make it more intent.
— At my most swaggering age I thought I would write Ani, then that fell aside. I came to the decision that I would write Little Mher. At that age you do not look towards tomorrow; you think of rainbow-coloured distances, the nostalgic calls of the past, the beauty of chronicles enchants you. In short, you go towards what is easily overcome. Amid those calls Little Mher was conceived, and alongside it the thought of writing Tumanyan. I made little outlines and suddenly saw that Tumanyan and Mher were absolutely the same: defeat, the cave, death. And I saw that I would not write Tumanyan. In general I oppose writing about personalities already fully realised. Whether through God’s, the people’s or the author’s effort, that person has come into being already. Say, Andrei Bolkonsky, and say, Hovhannes Tumanyan. Raffi, Abovyan, Tiflis, Mariam Tumanyan, Dsegh, Gikor all worked upon Tumanyan, brought him into being. Andrei Bolkonsky came into being through Tolstoy’s effort. Both exist in reality, so I need not repeat them. I think all undertakings about fully realised individuals are doomed from the outset to fail: they are repetition. Once I gave it up, I saw that rather than create such a Tumanyan one day, I would cast a fragment of them into my writing each time, to evoke his luminous figure through a joint effort with the reader, engaging the reader’s imagination too.
— As a reader I must say you succeed: you truly give the people your share of Tumanyan. Things foreign drew our generation; we almost forgot Gikor—he was not a product of our social order, the capitalist order produced them. Yet today many like me come towards Tumanyan through you too. Thank you. That is so. Now, do you not feel you contradict yourself? My sense of beauty smiled brightly at your comparison of Tumanyan and Bolkonsky as fully realised figures. Taking your own comparison, I want to recall Alkho. Alkho was fully realised too, then Aghun appeared beside him, then the Master arrived, heavy and great. They were all “packhorses”. If one had come into being, why did another arrive?
— Well, in 1962 I wrote a work, typed about a hundred pages. There were good things, but it had not come together as a whole. I saw that I had to approach one and the same purpose from different directions, through associations: in one place it would be a horse, in another Aghun…
— Does that not mean you are building a “house”, like Bitov the “true artist”?
— I prefer the image of a forest.
— Let us return to the great man of Lori: what would he do today?
— What he did in a very similar situation: placed his son on the front line and sacrificed him, placed his brother on the front line and sacrificed him; his illness, dragging on for years, became inconsolable grief and choked him. He would do what each of us does today, suffer with his people. Today, when our people have been left alone in black darkness, it also brings good things: spiritual autonomy, spiritual independence, knowledge of the world, knowledge of ourselves. Perhaps in today’s generation those men will emerge who, across seventy years of lost identity, enter into a dialogue with their ancestor, who, with fifty or five hundred horsemen behind him, imposed his white flag, peace, upon the enemy. That was no delegation of supplicants at the enemy’s feet; he truly imposed his peace.
— Reading your interviews in foreign journals, or those given recently to Literaturnaya Gazeta, we see that nothing like them exists in Armenian life. You have not yet given us your interview. Why?
— I will make to you now the observation I made to the head of Voice of America’s Armenian service: you have not asked for such an interview, and when you did, you could not draw out the best of my abilities. You are one way when approaching a foreign public figure, another when approaching us Armenian intellectuals. I would wish your responsibility to yourselves were greater when speaking to us, because it is the responsibility of us few to the Armenian language, Armenian culture, Armenian political thought. That Litgazeta interviewer of yours spent about half a year on each interview with me; another came from Moscow to Yerevan two or three times to clear corrections to the finished piece with me. Just imagine the inconvenience of travel and an unfamiliar place. Before you came, I was looking through Aztag’s special issue. Look at those young men’s journalistic culture, what a splendid generation! That is true national pride. In his uncensored Beirut newspaper he can curse the Turk as much as he pleases; he does not, does not soil himself. It is a wonderful human quality, looking at the world like a father, which finds expression also and first of all in our Armenian writer and journalist. May I contradict myself with a fresh example? Vahabzadeh has cursed my Armenian people on Radio Liberty, my women, my old and young, my girls. Shall I curse him too? I will not. His people are far more my people than his.
— You see, we do not curse. Sitting on the lofty chair of humanity, we are constantly destroyed. Because of our compassion, Armenia has become a line on the map with a broken back. You and I have not been believers, but from birth, in our genes, we are Christians; we too are fully realised, yet our lands are gone!
— Hatred and cruelty will not triumph. Never! There must be no doubt: we are going forward and civilisation is coming to meet us. Today’s dark, heavy, cloudy weather, those disturbing reports from outside, must not drive us off course. We came from civilisation and are going towards civilisation.
— But we go with enormous losses; how few of us remain! Will the moment not come when only a handful travel the road of civilisation?
— We suffered losses, immense ones, when we did not speak in our own voice, do our own work, when we danced to another’s pipe. On the moral front today we suffer enormous losses too, like all Soviet peoples. But I must say again: this must not soil us, because the unsullied inherit paradise on earth, not in heaven. In every case my fallen man, my commander, my beheader—Andranik did cut off one head after all—my tainted and untainted are greater people than their counterparts elsewhere. Even in their fall, my people always preserve some point of contact with morality.
You surely remember Dantean Legend. Our Armenian genocide is there, yet there is no mention of a Turk or Kurd. That is what my people are: my poet, my commander, my ordinary soldier, my nationalist, all of them. Our enemy seems not to be particular figures of a particular nationality, but some evil beyond society and humanity that we wish to judge and remove.
A commander is someone revered not only in your army but in the enemy’s too. History may play a game and make your commander theirs: he must be sung of in the enemy’s army too. If he is the god of your army and the executioner of the other, the human being and humanity have disappeared. My Andranik was a commander of those high virtues; my Chavush was sung of by Kurds and by Turks themselves. They may glorify Enver in their secret cellars, but that effeminate man is my people’s executioner. If you have such a killer, even while assigning him a role in your history, you do not bring him before an assembly or present him in Europe or Armenia as a model of humanity.
— You bow ashamed before America, fall to your knees, implore: it did not happen, believe it, it did not happen, say it did not! And while you plead on your knees, your bloody knife pokes out of your pocket.
— Yes, a person can sink to the depths of inhumanity. But when the time comes for awareness and judgement, when he rises from the moment of a speechless beast to the time of a speaking human being, he does not want to see the raped and slaughtered whom he himself harmed. In a sober moment he does not want to see himself as a beast: no, it did not happen!
— For centuries they cannot become civilised, seem to be born—shall I say Judas, a devil-cannibal? Must there be someone for them to devour? Do we hand them our body of Christ to save the world’s civilisation? We seem to be approaching the idea that it is better to die than to kill.
— Let us not cherish that thought: we have never been either so unarmed or so cruel to ourselves.
— But when the moment comes, which creed do you choose, that of the dying or the killing?
— The living! Only the living. My grandchild must have a grandfather. His grandfather will bring him an emerald ring from the Istanbul bazaar and dance at his wedding.
On the other hand, what is Nietzsche’s thought? The beggar must be destroyed, because if you toss him a penny, you have of course corrupted him, but first of all you have corrupted yourself, cultivated a lord, a master, a ruler within yourself. Why? Who am I to cultivate the thought of being put to death, being killed, condemn myself to grazing like an animal and appoint him director of human destinies?
Live, only live, as equals, with respect. Does he exist? Let him exist for himself, but he must not trample my boundary. Let him grow strong, but never at my expense; let him sharpen his sword on his own bone, not mine.
In that sense perhaps one should wish Nishanov and Ligachev to see their mother, wife or sister in the condition of our beaten and tormented people. Perhaps the pain would then reach its destination. Though they are such dead beings that even their sister’s pain will not reach them.
— God does not grant pain to those who do not understand it, do not share another’s pain. In any case we are Christians, and there is no curse in our Christianity. Besides, helplessness brings curses: let us not become helpless!
— Yes, let us not. We have two great men, two lofty men, Tumanyan and Charents. Let us forget for a moment Saryan, Saroyan, Khachaturian and the many other unforgettable ones. Geniuses in whose work material positively dripping with curses draws out no curse, but spreads a proud sorrow, the sorrow of a ruler, a master:
With a silent gaze we buried each other,
Entered a grave within each other’s soul…
— Let no sacrifice be asked for except mine,
Let no other feet approach the gallows.
And so the question has ripened. We know you regard the Bible as the greatest monument of human culture. Did you feel, did you know, that such times would come, when almost the whole Armenian people, “burdened and weary”, would turn towards their beginning, their share of heaven, expecting purity and salvation? Are you a believer?
— I believe in a country of bright houses, clean gardens, healthy children, skilled workers, knowledgeable doctors, untainted poets. Let us do our human work as faultlessly as we can, and only then mention salvation and the saviour.
— What if you had been born in a society where people did not swallow pills of communism, remained servants of faith and Armenian-speaking, unlike our compatriots in the neighbouring republic?
— But “abroad” there is another side to the question: if you leave your shell, which god’s robes will you enter? Living as strangers, people do not want to abandon their ancestral home, their religion and language. In the future we will not abandon them here either. This anti-Armenianism in Azerbaijan and the Union drives us and our compatriots towards only one thing: by making this entire immense country “foreign” to us, it returns us to our national shell. Changes in our social system and the change of the system itself benefit our future: our communities will flourish again throughout the Union. We will have “Americans”, “Persians”, “Beirut Armenians” within the Union itself.
Had I been given religion’s alphabet from the beginning, I would be ready to meet your spiritual conversation or not meet it. As it is, this is a conversation of the uninformed. Do you consider it accidental that our generation was incapable of receiving Narekatsi? I would wish my children to be free of that, to know the whole alphabet of our culture.
— When you were “not forty and not twenty-five, but exactly your age, thirty”, you boldly rejected Antonioni and cried: no, a person is not alone in this dormitory-country! Then, when you were neither forty nor thirty but precisely forty-five, you wrote The Master and said, “My brother had not one helper, my brother, the people’s support…”
Rostom said with deep pain, “We say we want, my dear, to be General Andranik, but we have neither a people following behind nor a Turkish enemy ahead.” It seems you went somewhat astray in The Master: today Rostom-Andranik has both a people following him and a Turkish enemy before him. What does he do and think now?
— Little Mher came up in our conversation. You know, I have always thought, and it is so, that David’s task is easier than Mher’s struggle. Instead of the monstrous, immense but material and real Melik, the enemy took a new form before Mher: immaterial and elusive, striking but not struck, pursuing but not pursued.
The Turk is the Turk, and the Turk has filled our whole sky from past to future. But we would be as honourably naive as some fedayi if we did not at least try to discern the elusive thing that makes the Turk the Armenian’s enemy and the Armenian the Turk’s.
Our misfortune is that the chaos of inhuman hatred is kneaded and writhes within us each time, taking the Turk’s form, leaving its other, more convincing forms to writers, philosophers and thinkers of other peoples.
This does not mean at all that in moments of crisis we should turn away from that unmistakable Turkish face and fix our gaze on some higher, abstract enemies. We cannot, it is impossible, obligatory as fate. My Rostom today would perhaps speak our words, and we his: “Enough now! Grandson of Talaat, we’ll drown you in the water you’ve dammed. Humanity cannot be learned, but you must get used to human beings.”
— Your scripts and the films made from them form part of your existence. To me it resembles a well with a bucket lowered into it but no one to raise it. Has the water frozen, so no one takes responsibility, or do the hands lifting the bucket lack strength?
— The novel Dead Light was written, some hundred and fifty pages, and left unfinished. I said I would prepare myself better and began writing The Master by chance. From The Master the film novella of the same name emerged. Sheer financial need pushed me towards that adventure. I do not like “film people”, especially ours: they are incomplete people. I say especially ours because they were given a greater national mission than we writers, an opportunity to address directly an all-Soviet audience of two hundred and fifty million. Given the opportunity, they did not address it. Today the image of the industrious, fair-minded, knowledgeable, forgiving, patient, suffering yet still generous, humane and optimistic Armenian is absent from the Soviet and world cinema arena. Naturally, it was easy for central television’s provocateurs to throw their invented Armenian onto such an empty stage.
And how much wonderful “material” they have ruined: virtually all Armenian literature, past and present. My own “film work” bore no fruit either, nor my passionate wish to do something good for us through cinema.
— I agree with you. I love your literature, but to give my honest personal opinion, your literature walks more confidently and clearly than your screenwriting “work”. What was so beautiful in Bakunts, The Pheasant and This Green, Red World, seems to have escaped your pen. Bakunts locked away beauty, the soul’s secret, using the reader’s imagination. You exposed our reader’s secret to view. Why?
— After writing it, I cherished the idea for a long time that if the script reached a decent person, I would add this and that. I did not add them, but even the existing outline could have made a good film. Bakunts had taken it onto another plane: in a closed Armenian village a ray of light strikes for an instant. Imagine the ascetic restraint of his times, when a closed-off Armenian woman opens up once, like a protest. In our shameless, cynical world today, I did the exact opposite.
— After the fine film We Are Our Mountains came Autumn Sun, then The Master. In its preface, in the magazine version, like Hambo before Bazaz Artem, you ask, plead, urgently wish that this too should not be ruined. How do you accept such distortions? Though I have heard you are delighted with the stage production of Autumn Sun.
— No, I am not delighted. I have witnesses too.
— Why do you not oversee that work beforehand? You could at least go to the set, look, pat shoulders, offer suggestions, and if necessary take offence and give offence on the spot.
— Offending people is not easy. At one meeting I was asked what I considered my shortcoming. I said forgiveness. Yes, I should have taken offence and given offence. I did not, and each time it came back to hurt me. On the other hand, it is impossible. “Why don’t you watch your Czech translation?” “Why don’t you watch your Russian?” “Why don’t you stand over your film?” Ultimately it is their work, the director’s, the translator’s, the work’s new masters.
If you undertake a task, do it.
— Platonov, Pasternak, Dudintsev, Aitmatov… The finest thought among readers and critics is occupied with them. I see that you are scarcely remembered. Speaking for my nationalist contemporaries, I say we love and greatly value your kind of prose. How do you regard such neglect across the Union?
— The all-Union arena knows how to consign someone to undeserved oblivion and then exalt them just as undeservedly. Nevertheless, my situation in the Union’s literary family is not so bad. What is dismal is the situation of all Armenian literature. If we could still have reservations about the undoubtedly valuable work of Sahyan, Davoyan, Aghasi Ayvazyan and a few others, we have one or two indisputable great figures absent from your arena: Charents, Bakunts. That means there is no such thing as the “all-Union arena”. There is an arena of Russian-language literature whose rightful masters are the authors you listed. My vanity would certainly be flattered if my name were mentioned equally with their own; I would assume the airs of some nonexistent, supranational, supra-Armenian classic. But I hope I would never forget that this is a sign of the slogan “Great Rus has united us for ever” being realised.
— “Hunger rules the world,” Solzhenitsyn says. Throughout our conversation the fact that your generation was hungry, in every sense, has shown itself and never vanished even when unseen. We, our generation, are so well fed.
— I must not lose my sense of hunger. Solzhenitsyn goes on to say that hunger rules all the hungry unless a hungry person consciously resolves to die. In this treacherous world, at any moment they can close your air hose as though you were a diver underwater, choking you without letting you die, keeping you grateful, a faithful dog tied to their foot, so they can mould your substance into what they want and force you into the company marching in their chosen direction. You must therefore be that many-skilled person standing on this land, that human state my grandfather was. I will choose that sinewy figure. This earthquake, this constant Tatar aggression, have placed our weak, spineless successors before a grave problem today. Armenia, my homeland, gave me ninety-nine of the hundred good days I have lived. Now the world’s hostile or suspicious attitude pushes my heirs back towards that homeland, and each will live many good days on their native soil too.
— Your literature seems to have blocked the path of our generation’s worthy young men. You took flight and left a great threshold of flight to your successors. When you feel it is hard for them to create after you, what do you do? Do you love the new generation?
— I do not understand your question. Why should creating be hard for those who came after me? If I am a bad writer, they have “landed in a village without dogs; let them walk without a stick”. If I am a good writer… Was writing after Teryan, Bakunts, Charents and Sahyan easy or hard for me? Only easy. We are born of our predecessors as much as of life itself.
About appreciation and love: the girls and boys of Teryan’s age appreciated him, and Tumanyan too. If a writer’s contemporaries appreciate him and tenderly pass him to the next generation, true value has been found. It would be just for a new generation’s talent to be assessed by that generation’s own critics and readers.
— But look: our young people, Teryan among them, went to Tumanyan’s door; Charents went to Isahakyan and said, well, here I am.
— But did Tumanyan identify Teryan’s charm? Is Teryan’s greatness measured by Tumanyan’s measure? Tumanyan simply did not obstruct Teryan’s ascent. With eyes and ears open I search for an Aghasi Ayvazyan in the new generation, but you must point him out.
— A purely feminine question. I am not saying it, others are: Aghun is our Aghun, meaning the strongest female character in Armenian literature; long life to Aghun and her creator. But looking a little farther, we see Sona in the bean field in Simon’s arms, Mariam with Andro, that daughter-in-law of Murad’s family in the cave beside Rostom, the quarrelsome Shushan… The images recur: God’s commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery” is broken before our eyes, yet your accustomed compassion flows from your pen. Aghun, our other women read it and first say “it happens”, then “perhaps”, then “oh!” How do you regard and create these characters?
— I chronicle my time, my mother’s time. “They reaped, pulled a yoke beside the ox, stood behind their sons in their fathers’ place, like brothers.” Sometimes they stole their own share of love; sometimes I bestow a human gift on them in the bean fields, in the August heat. I would wish all my work to be a blind pilgrimage to their sinful, innocent feet. We have created David, Narek, Komitas, Tumanyan, but Armenian history’s greatest creation is the Armenian woman: the little girl, the grandmother on the road of exile, the mistresses of their splendid houses… It would be fitting today to have a collection, Our Mothers, selected Armenian prose about Armenian women. Yes, I have created a few characters and will create a few more…
— We could talk endlessly about literature, but today beckons to us, demanding a fatherly attitude towards tomorrow. Must we constantly see an enemy in the Azerbaijani people? Do you remember in Solzhenitsyn: the law of their grandfathers and mountains, keeping them strong, brings the Chechens out of their predicament.
The Centre can never resolve our question. Guided by the wisdom of our two peoples’ mountains and grandfathers, we must be able to resolve it ourselves.
— Yes. Bold people will go from among us into the future. We must see a Caucasian federation; tomorrow’s city of Europolis, let it be neither blasphemy nor blindness to this reality, we shall see in our Julfa of yesterday. A casino there too, and our well-fed, curly-haired, nervous types, Armenian, Turk and Persian, sit playing poker. We must live together. At Niagara, on the border of America and Canada, stands a statue of a Canadian commander who defeated the American army; today you will find no countries friendlier than America and Canada.
But for us all that is tomorrow. Now it is night, and until our sun rises, there is the hyena’s yelping of “bir-iki, Kavkaz bizimki”, the Tatar march saying the Caucasus is theirs and the Armenian the enemy. Devouring Armenians, betrayal of the elementary rule of human coexistence. All of it hurried, Tatar-style, everywhere and every day: when the sun rises, at least in the Caucasus we must no longer exist. From herdsman to political scientist they suffer the agony of domination, we the human hope of physical survival; they want us not to be. We must endure and stand firm. If a hand of friendship or neighbourliness is ever extended, they will extend it. But I see no one among us capable of taking that hand. Because that hand often, very often, invades my Armenian future; even if in that future, in my ancestor’s and successor’s house, it cannot destroy much, it still soils and muddies so much, muddies and soils.
Interview by Carmen DAVTYAN
Avangard, 16 March 1990.