Myth of Arrival

"yerevan by fire light" ZJC (2010)

Photos of the nightscape of Yerevan, the capital city of Armenia, taken today are strikingly different than the city I knew back in 1995. For one thing, the city was pitch black at night. The brilliant wash of neon and white light that marks urban nighttime was absent. Here and there were isolated pockets illuminating a shop or a home, someone with illegal “left line” electricity, someone with access to a generator, but by and large it was the unspoiled night I found myself in, the type that makes stargazing so fun, regardless if you were sitting in a major city surrounded by thousands and thousands of others quietly passing the night away.

My time that summer was marked with linguistic frustrations. When I finally went to Gyumri to start my work I felt I was a complete failure at my ability to speak and retain “Hyerin,” as the locals call their tongue. Sitting in the dark of my bedroom, studying grammar by candlelight, did not help. Bella had given up with my attempts to communicate with her, finishing my faltering sentences and barking out questions at a rate of speed I could not follow. At the time it felt overwhelming but, over a decade later, I find certain words and phrases have not left me. Indeed, even though it is rare for me to get a chance to talk to another Armenian (West Michigan has few) I can communicate better now than I could when I lived in Hyestan. I keep finding certain words and phrases wanting to live in my poetry.

Draft 1

G'na. Go. Leave with your steam-headed needs;
I am weak, needy, lovely in my greed.
G'na. I received your love. Go. It bleeds
me dry. I believed in you. I hurried
to you. More the fool I. Call me simple.
Call me naïve, thief. You stole my frenzied
tongue, all that makes music. Every loyal
note. I grieve for what you took, hid, buried
beyond my sight. Get up. G'na. Go. Dog.
Fruit from hell. Stone of woe. I have emptied
more spite than you will ever know. I flog
your name with soot and ruins and wormseed.
Receive. Perceive. Conceive. Believe. Naive.
Deceive. Grieve. Thieve. And now you bastard, leave.

* * *

Draft 2

Get up. G'na. Go. Leave your steam-burnt needs.
I have been weak and lovely in my greed;
no more. Get up. G'na. Go. The lark bleeds
me dry. When it cries, I cry. I'm wearied
from tears; rosewater, rosewater, never
salt. Call me naive; you stole my frenzied
tongue, all that makes music, every vulgar
note. But I won't grieve for lark songs buried
beyond my grasp. Get up. G'na. Go. Dog.
Fruit from hell. Stone of woe. I have emptied
more spite than you will ever know. I flog
your name with soot and ruins and wormseed.
Deceive? Thieve? Grieve? No more. The lark's sorrow
is not my sorrow. Get up. G'na. Go.

The Armenian word for “Go” is G'na. I had been working on a story about the 1915 Armenian Genocide at the time I wrote those sonnets, a story told by a young girl. The voice of Armenian women is one that, more often than not, remains missing from that time period. Or, to put it slightly differently, they are present only in the background. They are the long lines of wretched figures being marched away by Ottoman soldiers out into the Der Zor desert in much the same way World War II movies show Jews as only long lines of wretched figures being loaded into box cars. They are simultaneously present but silent, a visual cue to remind the audience that barbarous things are taking place, but it is not their story we are listening to. That happens off-stage. Sadly, because this is not my personal story, I soon found I was drawing far too heavily on the source material I was using. The Knock at the Door by Margaret Ahnert and Skylark Farm by Antonia Arslan are both far more superior to my efforts and do not need to be retold. That is not to say I do not have other stories. There are whole hosts of witnesses I do not want to forget that lived with me in Armenia in 1995. The beer garden monkeys, for example.

One night, after we'd been in training for nearly two months, a small group of us went by Metro to a beer garden one of the host-fathers raved about, urging us to, “See the monkey! See the monkey!”

I often speak of Yerevan being under a black-out, where the average home saw a couple hours of electricity a day. That shouldn't imply there wasn't any in the city, it was just being used for other things. The Yerevan subway was spotlessly clean and ran with an effectiveness that must have marked the city's progress at some earlier time. Later during my tour I'd spend hours riding it, partly because I was homeless when I visited Yerevan, and partly because just because it was one of the few things that ran on-time back then.

We sat at the beer garden that night and enjoyed something frothy and homemade that came to us in large, chipped mugs from the tap. The bar was south of the Republic Square, hidden away on a little street corner. The space appeared to have been where a building of some sort once stood, having then collapsed and the debris carted away. Now we sat in a rubble-strewn alleyway between two towering apartment blocks. Compared to the brilliance of the lighted Metro, sitting under the stars at the tall pub tables, drinking beer and avoiding the copious sunflower husks spat out by every local man at the bar, made one feel like they were out in the country, not a block or so from the heart of the city.

As the evening wore on it became evident that some form of entertainment was taking place off in a dark corner. Men stood around and pointed and laughed continuously. Looking over a shoulder I saw a large cage and inside sat two emaciated monkeys making gurgling-shaking noises throughout the night. They were about three feet long with dingy fur coming out in patches. They'd run from one end of the cage, drinking from offered beer mugs that many of the men pressed between the bars. After a few sips from a mug, the monkey would turn to screech and run towards the opposite side of the cage to another mug.

That is the whole story. We didn't demand the release of the monkeys or give a stern lecture on animal rights or even raise our voices. We simply drank our beer and went home. Later that week John said he went back and the monkeys were gone. Cruelty toward small things. Death of small things. These were the metaphors I witnessed that ran through my time spent in Gyumri. To talk of these things is to talk of failure, of an inability to save anything, even oneself. Perhaps it was why I wanted to write about “Mets Yeghern,” the Great Calamity as the Armenians call the 1915 Genocide. Not from the point of view of the male defenders historians now focus on who fought back at cities and villages of Van and Musa Dagh, but the stories of the women and children who were captured in blurry photographs, miles and miles of them being marched away, names I will never know. I have no photos of those monkeys. I doubt they live in anyone else's memory. And yet, despite all that, they still live. I still remember how, at one point, one of the creatures fell to the floor and lay quite still for a period of several minutes. The men laughed even more at this. Many threw lit cigarettes at the prone monkey, some of which landed on its flank.