Reflections on Wasafiri’s Armenia(n)s: Elevation Issue II: Realizing We Have a Living Literature

MERİ TEK DEMİR

Last week, Araz Kojayan discussed the “Armenia(n)s: Elevation” issue of Wasafiri Magazine, edited by Tatevik Ayvazyan and Naneh V. Hovhannisyan, through the lens of language and culture. This week, we continue our exploration of the same issue from a literary perspective. While writing this piece, especially upon reading the editors’ introductory essay—as well as the texts I’ll soon refer to—I was once again reminded that the current outlook on Western Armenian literature still largely remains framed within a mainstream narrative.

As Ayvazyan and Hovhannisyan emphasize in their introduction, even in their daily lives, Armenians often experience an ever-present sense of disappearance, which inevitably finds its way into their cultural and literary production. The truth is, although Western Armenian faced a major break in the early 20th century, Armenian literature—whether in Western or Eastern Armenian—has yielded significant works, translated into many languages, and has long held a firmly rooted literary tradition, both in the past and in the present.

Yet today, Western Armenian literature is often approached with a limiting perspective, one that centers on the life stories of Istanbul-based Armenian writers like Zabel Yesayan and Krikor Zohrab, while rendering their literary texts secondary. This narrow lens neither allows for renewed interpretations that might uncover the literary subtleties within their works, nor does it open up space for wider readership of provincial writers such as Tlgadintsi or Hamasdegh. By focusing on the lives of prominent literary figures and reinforcing an Istanbul-centered perspective, this recurring narrative practice turns into a kind of mainstream literary historiography in itself.

Chris Bohjalian’s piece, titled “When I Became an Armenian-American Writer,” stands out in the magazine for the way it engages with the problematic view that Western Armenian is a language solely tied to trauma and the past, as well as with the theme of belonging. The author, born to a Swedish mother and an Armenian-American father, sees literature as a way of carrying the past into the present. However, the deeply nostalgic lens through which he does this is open to debate.

Bohjalian emphasizes that the significance of being an Armenian writer lies in giving voice and life once again to stories that had fallen silent or rootless in his family history. He describes fiction as a medium through which the unspoken and avoided can reach the reader. His self-definition not just as an American, but as an Armenian-American writer, is rooted in a personal journey of discovery into Anatolia and his ancestral past—and the profound effect this journey has had on him.

Previously, Araz Kojayan had referred to Tamar Boyadjian’s interview, where Boyadjian questioned the tendency to frame the connection with Western Armenian solely in terms of memory and trauma. This brings us to a question: Is the Armenian language and literature doomed to remain merely nostalgic, bound to the past? Can the contemporary literary representation of Western Armenian not move beyond silence and trauma? Or does the value of Western Armenian and its roots only emerge through rediscovery from the West—and isn’t that, in itself, a kind of orientalism?

Building on this question, I would like to refer to Maral Aktokmakyan’s article titled “Western Armenian: The Curious Story of a Surviving Language and its Literature,” which outlines the general contours and historical development of the Western Armenian literary tradition. Without a doubt, Aktokmakyan’s meticulously written article is a valuable resource on Ottoman-era Armenian literature and its reflections in the diaspora. However, it is concerning for the development of the literature that research on Western Armenian literature today remains largely centered on Istanbul-based Armenian writers from the Ottoman and post-Ottoman periods, with the writers themselves often prioritized over their works. 

Of course, in modern Armenian literature, it is impossible to overlook the traumas experienced by writers and poets, their sense of displacement, or the traces of their personal histories within their works. And yet, the fact that classical and modern Western Armenian works are still examined primarily through the lens of author biographies, whether in Istanbul or elsewhere, prevents the literature itself from receiving the recognition it deserves. In this way, a deep-rooted and rich literary tradition is reduced, in the Western gaze, to a mere struggle for visibility. What’s more troubling is that this perspective is not only held in the West but is also increasingly internalized within today’s Istanbul Armenian community.

This entrenched outlook leads us back to the same questions again and again, never moving us beyond the fear of disappearance. Certainly, studying a nation’s literature is important, and understanding the literary history of Armenians scattered across the world is valuable in contextualizing the works they have produced. Yet, what is disheartening when it comes to Western Armenian specifically is the fact that even our literary history is written solely from an Istanbul-based perspective. In this dominant literary historiography, not only are literary works pushed to the background, but today’s readers and aspiring writers are also deprived of the opportunity to discover other genres—such as provincial literature. When we extend the same attention we give to the history of Armenian literature to the literary texts themselves and move beyond familiar modes of reading, we will finally recognize that what we have is, in fact, a living literature.