Lorne Shirinian is a writer, filmmaker, and Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario.
Among the earliest texts produced by Armenians after arriving in North America were memoirs and autobiographies. Their creation formed a counterbalance against the beginning of the decline of the Armenian oral tradition that had existed as an integral element of Armenian life up until the Genocide of 1915, and which was a medium for maintaining and passing on both individual and national history. Having lost close to half of their nation and most of their homeland, many Armenians who survived found themselves in a precarious situation in the Diaspora, where they experienced rupturer from their national heritage. Cut off from their past, those who had come to America now had to adjust to being an ethnic group. There has developed in the Diaspora a tradition of Armenian-North American writing which includes both autobiography and memoirs that relate specifically to the catastrophe. This article will consider a particular kind of autobiographical writing-ethno-autobiographical texts. As autobiography, these texts present the development and growth of an individual life over a period of time; moreover; they highlight that part of the writer’s identity that relates to his/her ethnic heritage. In these texts, then, the ethnic heritage is privileged. Specifically, I will be studying selections of prose and poetry of one Armenian-American writer, David Kherdian, to see the significance of his Armenian heritage in his life and work and specifically how the ethnic fact of the life in question affects the writing of the autobiography.
Kherdian was born in Racine, Wisconsin, and is a second generation Armenian-American, the first born in the Armenian Diaspora in America. Given the exile from the western Armenian homeland after the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and the ensuing exile in the Armenian Diaspora in America, the processes of cultural transference and transculturation are key elements to consider when approaching Kherdian’ s writing.
An autobiography, according to Philippe Lejeune, is a “retrospective story in prose that a real person makes of his own existence when he emphasizes his individual life, in particular the history of his personality2” In order for there to be an autobiography, the author must be the narrator who is also the main character. An autobiography, then, is a text of self-scrutiny, self-interpretation, and self-revelation; the events matter less than the truth and the depth of the writer’s experiences. Diachronic in nature, the center of the text is a life, and this identity becomes an organizing principle of the discourse. In an ethno-autobiography, there are two poles which organize the material of the text; the first is the uniqueness of the writer’s individuality; the second is the national ethnic heritage, the fact of belonging to an ethnic community in North America in this case. How these two poles interact is a key feature of these texts. The writer of an Armenian ethno-autobiography, for example, has more than one ethnic and national identity to contend with as he locates himself, as Kherdian has done, within the space of Armenian culture in North America. Kherdian moves from stress on individuality and American identity to a greater sense of his ethnicity. In this way, ethno-autobiography not only focuses on an individual’s life, but also includes elements of collective history as the writer’s identity is also ethnic identity. This perspective controls much of the remembering as elements of memory in this type of text are contained within the specific context of the growth of the ethnic self. As Kherdian writes and rewrites his life, he also rewrites Armenian-North American culture as particular moments are privileged.
Working through selected passages in a chronological manner will allow us to see the key moments and events in Kherdian’s life that relate to this subject as he has noted them and furthermore will offer the additional perspective of seeing the author’s development of his own attitude towards his life in his writing. In his first collection of poetry, On the Death of My Father and Other Poems Kherdian has written two poems which give the reader the first understanding of his family situation in America. In “My Father” after signalling in the first line, “My father came from Adana,” he writes that he, “died in a Milwaukee hospital on my sister’s fifteenth birthday far from home.” The irony of his father’s death and the celebration of his sister’s birthday is heightened by the fact that America could never be his father’s home. In “Sparrow, to my mother” he says of her,
She asks for little
having once lost all
She comes quietly to her
life of transformed sorrow.
Having lost all in the old country because of the Genocide, his mother’s life is now only one of “transformed sorrow.” This is the family atmosphere Kherdian grew up in: one of loss, pain and sorrow. In the poem that gives the collection its title, “On the Death of My Father,” Kherdian places himself squarely before it all; he realizes that acceptance of and comprehension of his heritage is in many respects a choice. In this poem, he writes of his father and of his own choice, “his life my own to lose or live again.” This acceptance of his heritage is intimately linked with his artistic life. In Down at the Santa Fe Depot: 20 Fresno Poet4. Kherdian explains what is essential for him as an artist who is exploring his own life.
Any biography must be divided into two parts: the years prior to 16, which are unconscious, or consciousness opening, and the years after 16, which are invented …. It is my early life that concerns me, but it is very nearly impossible to talk about this life, except perhaps as art, because that is the dimension it most nearly approximates…. And it is as an artist that I am returning to what was once mine by birthright. I find that in my writing I gain the future by reclaiming and making whole the past. Only poetry can do this for me, because only through poetry can I achieve a working relationship with my unconscious, which gives shapes and forms to periods lived in chaos and ignorance. It takes years to understand an experience, and a lifetime to know who we are. Therefore, in this true sense, all of my writing is autobiographical.
Kherdian laid out his project, therefore, early on in his career. Casting a mature look back on his life, particularly on his youth and adolescence up to the age of sixteen, will be the way the poet hopes to gain the future. This idea of reclaiming and making whole the past is one that Kherdian returns to in other texts. Fifteen years later, in 1985, in an autobiographical article written for the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 2, Kherdian looked back over his writing and placed it in context. He stated that completing his book of poems, Homage to Adana, made it clear that the subject of his writing would be himself. “I had a deep, abiding need to understand my life—and writing, I instinctively knew, was the instrument through which I would conduct my search”. For Kherdian, the early years of a man’s life are the most important to understand, for these determine much of how the individual will develop .”Nearly all of my writing from now on would be concerned with an attempt to do just that”. The autobiographical impulse is very strong and very clear in Kherdian. How he accomplishes this in great part is through an understanding of his Armenian heritage, and this gives rise to Kherdian’s work being considered ethno-autobiographical.
I was beginning to see that my Armenian heritage had been, from the beginning of my life, both a blessing and a curse. What did it mean to be an Armenian? I had rejected the implications as a child, seeing that I did not want to align myself with a dying culture and a forlorn race of people—-but I was Armenian after all. I could not deny my blood simply because it disturbed me—nor even because it attracted me. what was the meaning and purpose of my own life? No one could tell me. I had to find out myself.
It is with Kherdian’s next collection of poetry, Homage to Adana, that the inner journey begins. In the poem, “To My Father,” it is the smells of Racine, Wisconsin, that are linked to his father. “The smells! – endless as remembrance itself, and remembering them I remember you.” Kherdian can associate his father only with life in the Diaspora in America. However, there are layers of meaning and understanding that Kherdian begins to uncover. In “The Middle-Aged Armenian Men” Armenians walk silent streets in the poet’s industrial Midwestern town. In their homes,
… they preach the
language and culture of Armenia
to their children; their unruly
preoccupied children. Each have
become strangers to the other,
erecting barriers, they cannot
pass over.
What is given is the end of Armenian culture in America, at least the end of traditional Armenian culture that those of Kherdian’s parents’ generation knew. Yet, a change is signaled, for years later, these same children who refused Armenian culture now actively search for it.
Years later these grown children
seek out aging old men who knew
their fathers and who carry Armenia
in their fallen faces. Armenia!
Each regards that country now as his home.
In “My Father,” Kherdian states that in the Armenian coffee houses in his city “were contained the suffering and shattered hopes of my orphaned people.” What is important here is that Kherdian has come to an understanding that his life is larger than that of his immediate surroundings in Racine. He is party to layers of memory which he has only come to appreciate later in life as he looks back on his youth. What is striking also is the fact that Kherdian writes “my orphaned people.” This marks his willful acceptance of his heritage.
Having now taken on his Armenian heritage as part of himself, he begins to see elements of his life as a young man differently. In “Dtah Dtah,” he previously looked at nameless old Armenian men in a certain way; however, now his vision has changed and he writes:
Strange how men for whom I held
a secret pity then
were really the guardians
of a way of life
and life itself.
Most importantly, this new appreciation and new vision of his parents, their heritage and himself, reflect on his finally understanding his father’s life. This can be best seen in the poem, “For My Father.”
Our trivial fights over spading
the vegetable patch, painting the
garden fence ochre instead of blue
and my resistance to Armenian food
in preference for everything American,
seemed, in my struggle for identity,
to be the literal issue.Why have I waited until your death
to know the earth you were turning
was Armenia, the color of the fence
your homage to Adana, and your other
complaints over my own complaints were addressed
to your homesickness
brought on by my English.
Kherdian, who was growing up as a young American boy, was not able to understand his father and how he carried the burden of his lost past with him to America and how this affected him terribly. Now he realizes that he himself was a cause of much of his father’s frustration, because in him, his father witnessed the end of his heritage.
Finally, Kherdian is able to articulate the cause of the family’s ills. It is not an easy lesson to learn, but it is one that will affect Kherdian for the rest of his life. In “To My Sister,” he writes:
We were all strangers: all shy, reclusive
and alone. We never found a healing grace,
who couldn’t mate this soil with our lives.
A family is a strange thing when a living
racial embrace has been broken and the
earth or the world are no longer home.
It is a private peace we have made,
each in his own way, though we shared
one home, in this country that would never
be home.
Certainly the breaking of the lines of poetry frustrates a smooth reading of the stanza, approximating the break Kherdian is writing about by creating tension through the halting rhythm. Here he says it all. For Armenians of his father’s generation and for Kherdian’ s as well, America can never be a true home. It can be a haven, but the risk is the end of one’s Armenian identity. Identity is always at stake; we are always aware that Kherdian’ s personal voyage and exploration of his self is his way to claim the future, and that this is done by regaining the past and trying to make it whole.
Memory in the ethno-autobiography often has the affect of collapsing and telescoping vision. In “Seven at Home,” Kherdian looks back on a moment when his family was united, playing cards, while he and the other children played upstairs. After the game, fruit was passed around and stories were told.
And uncle, you would tell again
the story of how when you were three
They placed you every noon on a donkey
to take food to the workers in the field
And then you would weep remembering
your lost people and that unrecaptured life.
In response, the poet says, “I have waited thirty years to understand that story. . . .” In these few lines the remembering passes through three generations: his uncle’s life in the old country, the poet’s remembrance of his family together at home in America, and the distance of all this to the poet in the present, thirty years later. There does not appear to be a single turning point or awakening moment in Kherdian’ s life as he has chronicled it in his poetry; rather, there is a process that has been at work which has allowed the writer to reinterpret his life and to privilege certain moments. One important moment in particular occurs in Kherdian’ s next book, Any Day of Your Life 10, in the poem “Mulberry Trees.”
When
as a small boy
I saw them ripen against
the early summer sun
I stopped alone for an hour and ate until my fingers
took an ancient purple stainuntil something remembered
a small, knotty tree
in a barren, rocky landscape
before an older, quieter sunand I went home a little
sadder, a little gladdened
and standing on the porch
my mother and father
saw their Armenian son.
In this poem, Kherdian connects with his heritage, and from the Diaspora in America, he is suddenly transformed through tapping into the larger collective memory of the Armenian people. The mulberry tree in America reminds him of one in the old country he could never have known except discursively, perhaps through his parents’ stories. As a result, he is both saddened because of its loss, and he is happy because of the experience that seems to have confirmed his identity. At the end of the poem, through a transposition, he places himself in his parents’ point of view and calls himself “their Armenian son.” This third-person transposition is the result of Kherdian’ s reinterpreting his past, trying to make it complete and meaningful. Kherdian, at this point, has arrived at a crucial moment in his life, when he is able to look back and see himself clearly in relation to his parents and their Armenian heritage. In the poem, “Melkon,” from the collection, I Remember Root River 11, he writes to his late father:
Father I have your rug.
I sit on it now – not as you
did, but on a chair before
a table, and write.It is all that is left of
Adana, of us, of what we
share in this life, in
your death.In my nomadic head I carry all
the things of my life,
determined by memory and love.
And on certain distant nights,
I take them one by one
and count.
And place them on your rug.
The Armenian heritage, represented by the cultural artifact of the father’s rug has been passed on to Kherdian, the poet-son, and is now associated with the act of writing. In this symbolic transfer, the poet takes this remnant of Armenian culture and now adds to it in his own way in the new world. The rug is the symbolic link between two worlds. The concern for the transfer of culture continues in Kherdian’s poem “Histories” from Place of Birth 12. He asks:
What do we gain from our parents
that was never ours
but in being theirs was ours.
He understands now that he cannot deny what his parents have left him and that his life is an exploration of its meaning. In this poem, Kherdian writes of one image that will always be his alone.
my father at an Armenian picnic, dancing,
round and round and round,
his whirling arms in a speech I could not
understand
with a knife tightly clenched in his teeth
held fast forever
in his bald and spinning head.
The image is rich and very suggestive. His father dances to commemorate his loss and to celebrate his life, but it is the knife that is most intriguing. The knife is a polyvalent image in that it is a weapon to defend his Armenian heritage which he celebrates; however, it is also an offensive weapon with which to lash out at the cause of all his frustrations, his inability to adapt to America, and his bitterness at losing his homeland. Kherdian understands well the inherent dual nature of life when one is a member of an ethnic community in America. In the next two books, Root River Return 3 and A Song for Uncle Harry.4 Kherdian explore his youth through autobiographical, prose reminiscences. Confusion of identity is marked at the very beginning of Root River Run as Kherdian asks, “Who were the Americans? Who were the Armenians? Why were they different?”). In this world of uncertain identity, language becomes crucial and often is a sore point between Kherdian and his father. “I couldn’t believe that others understood his English, which embarrassed me. It was a relief to be talking again in our language”. Here his father is comprehensible and not an embarrassment when he remains within his Armenian identity. Young Kherdian is able to live more fully in both cultures; however, he seems to feel suffocated by his Armenian heritage here represented by an Armenian grocery store.
Mr. Boranian’s grocery store was full of old Armenian. . . . The store smelled like our kitchens, only more so. It was always a shock to walk into Mr. Boranian’s store because it smelled so differently from anything outside. In a way I felt as if I were home, but after five minutes I wanted to get out and smell the air of the streets again.
The pressure of being different permeates all aspects of their family life in America. Kherdian comments on Armenian houses with their oriental rugs. “I wish we’d get rid of our Orientals and put some American rugs down,’ I said. ‘People can see we’re foreigners as soon as they walk into our house’ “. Armenian life in America after the Genocide does not have a context, and everything Armenians do only embarrasses and frustrates the young Kherdian, whose American identity appears to be incompatible with his Armenian identity.
One important element of Kherdian’ s family life that is marked and repeated in almost all of his writing is the Armenian Genocide. In A Song for Uncle Harry, Kherdian complains that his father never seemed to notice him very much, then rationalizes it. “I think it was because he was usually thinking about the Old Country, and all the members of his family that were lost in the Massacres”). This motif appears regularly throughout this text, showing up unexpectedly in different contexts. At one point, Uncle Harry is talking about fishing; then suddenly, “Uncle Harry looked off into space, and I wondered if he was thinking about the massacres again”. This feeling of being in another world that so troubles Kherdian is made clear by his Uncle Jack who explains to him in Root River Run, “Yes, that is our sorrow, Tavit [David]. We are not on our own land, and our land has been lost. The soul can be nourished only when it has its own soil”.
The motivation for his autobiographical writing is again spelled out at the end of Root River Run. There is a debt owed to his parents because of all they had gone through He feels that he is obliged to work out what his own life will be. “The Old Country men had done all they could with their lives; now I had to do all that I could with mine”.
In his recent prose work, on a Spaceship with Beelzebub 15 Kherdian perhaps best articulates the motivation for the understanding of his ethnic self. He writes that his work, particularly Homage to Adana, was an homage “to the men and women who had transplanted old values in this new land, and had placed my heritage in front of me as a boy, that I had inherited at my birth, but that I was only now beginning to come to terms with”. Armenians and his place among them had always been a puzzle to him because “their suffering had occurred elsewhere, in another world and time, that they could not forget but that I did not want to learn about”. Kherdian realizes that the early immigrants of his parents’ generation “had kept the race alive by transplanting it to a new land”. In an important affirmation he states, “I had assumed the burden of their sacrifice … ” . Accepting this burden gave the poet a particular motivation which has a direct bearing on our understanding of Kherdian’ s writing as ethno-autobiography. He writes, “I had to recover my life before I could inherit it. This was the burden of my writing”.
As a consequence, of his search, Kherdian’ s writing exhibits the characteristics of ethno-autobiography in that it encompasses all tenses: past, present and future. “It seemed that whenever my writing went back it also went forward. By correcting the past, I both earned and inherited the present. Gurdjieff had said, ‘Repair the past, prepare the future’ “). The history of his ancestors had disappeared in the Genocide, “had blown like sand across the vast desert that was once our home”. He did not even possess photos of his grandparents or their village; all that was left to him was his hometown, “which was all the history that fate had allowed me” . He had to return, then, to his home in Racine, not only in person, but also through memory.
Ethno-autobiography in great part is a quest through which the writer attempts to solve the mystery of his identity. Kherdian’s texts have shown us that before this is possible for him, he must first discover his parents’ identity. This knowledge forms part of the framework or horizon within which the writer situates himself and from where he is able to answer for himself. Within this framework, he is able to know where he stands and can then determine what meaning things have for him. Kherdian feels, then, the necessity to locate himself within the space of Armenian culture in America. “I saw in all these hidden fragments of memory: each tiny jewel, each aspect, as my essence, that lay there, [in Racine] hidden and waiting to grow”.
Like all autobiography, ethno-autobiography develops through a process of disclosure that is selective in nature. What the reader discovers in this subgenre is that Armenians like other ethnic groups have more than one national and ethnic identity that forms layers in their texts. The writer’s identity is formed through juxtaposition, that is, an “inter-reference, between two or more cultural traditions,” which in this case are Armenian, Armenian-American and American. Ethno-autobiography is an attempt to find a voice that does not omit any of the various components of one’s identity. This process of returning to or reconnecting with one’s past, thereby gaining intercultural knowledge is the author’s search for coherence in his life. As Kherdian’s writing has shown, what he takes from his past serves as a preparation for the future; in this way, ethno-autobiography ultimately looks towards the future, not the past. Armenian ethno-autobiography focuses on the sense of difference within a shared cultural context. In the precarious world of the Armenian Diaspora, ethno-autobiography is one of the primary mediums through which to preserve tradition and knowledge. In this way, ethno-autobiography has an historical dimension to it that pertains to the collective history of the Armenian people. It is a cultural history, not only of individuals, but also of communities. As we have seen, at times Kherdian is in a purely American context, and at other times, he participates solely in an Armenian milieu, then at other times, in both at the same time. Therefore, ethno-autobiographical writing constantly shifts the reader through various registers and temporalities.
Armenian ethno-autobiographical discourse is an attempt to constitute a community that does appear able to account for the writer’s life. With the Armenian Genocide always in the background, the autobiographical impulse to document one’s life is very strong, for as the Genocide showed, one’s presence, history and culture can never be taken for granted. Ultimately, writing ethno-autobiography is a way to combat the alienation that comes with being a member of a minority ethnic community in America.
Kherdian’s search through his roots is, in effect, a re-interpretation and re-invention of his Armenian ethnicity. His sense of his Armenianness is certainly different than that of his parents. Ethno-autobiographical writing, then, can be understood as a representation of the transference of his heritage.” For the first generation of Armenians born in the Diaspora, this kind of text confirms that being Armenian in America is not the same as being an Armenian-American and that the hybrid cultures which develop from the meeting of two or more cultures develop their own dynamics and forms of representation. Ethno-autobiographical writing is such a form through which one begins to earn and inherit one’s past as a force for the future.