Reflecting upon Wasafiri's 'Armenia(n)s: Elevation' - Language and Culture

ARAZ KOJAYAN

The world-renowned literary magazine Wasafiri took a striking step by featuring Armenian literature for the first time in its final issue of 2024. This special edition, titled “Armenia(n)s: Elevation” (), focused on writers producing in Western Armenian, Eastern Armenian, and other languages. Alongside globally recognized Armenian authors like Nancy Kricorian and Krikor Beledian from the U.S. and France, the issue also included voices from Lebanon and Istanbul. The fact that it gave space to writers from our own geography sparked particular curiosity and excitement for us. 

As Parrhesia Collective, our ongoing engagement with culture and history—through Kavar reading sessions and Kov-Kovi gatherings—has always opened up alternative ways of thinking and new perspectives. Recurring questions around language, belonging, and temporality resurfaced in the wide range of texts featured in this issue and ultimately led us to write this reflection.

Language is undoubtedly a fundamental element that sustains the cohesion of any society. It serves as a means of communication, a vessel for cultural and historical transmission, and a way to forge intergenerational bonds and express individual identity. However, when it comes to the Armenian language, particularly Western Armenian, its endangered status and uncertain future make it impossible to avoid difficult questions. While Western and Eastern Armenian are not officially recognized as separate languages, the internalized differences between them—and the challenges around using Western Armenian in the diaspora—continue to raise long-standing, unresolved issues.

Wasafiri approached this as one of the central themes of its issue. One of the most striking texts was the lead feature titled “Two Armenians Conversing in Two Armenians” by Tamar Marie Boyadjian and Hrach Martirosyan, translated into English by Maral Aktokmakyan. The conversation opens with an editorial note acknowledging the division of the Armenian language into two variants—close enough to be mutually intelligible, yet distant enough to create alienation. In this dialogue, Boyadjian and Martirosyan, each speaking one of the two variants, find common ground in their shared love for the language and its literary heritage.

Focusing on Western Armenian, Tamar Boyadjian—an award-winning author, editor, and translator, whose family migrated from Lebanon to the United States—reflects on how her generation’s relationship with the language is shaped more by intergenerational memory and trauma than by daily use. She explains that even though twentieth-century Armenian literature was taught in Armenian schools, this sense of distance remained. As a writer, she approaches the language with a deconstructive lens. Rebuilding her relationship with Armenian in a space where she can use it freely, without the pressure of perfection or fear of being corrected, liberates it from being merely a tool of survival.

Boyadjian finds it problematic when Western Armenian is reduced solely to a survival mechanism. She sees this as a trauma response to the uprooting of the language from its historical geographies: Western Armenia and Cilicia. If language is, above all, a medium for communication, then the lack of patience and generosity among some speakers of Western Armenian becomes all the more noticeable. Boyadjian emphasizes the importance of cultivating kindness and patience, particularly in diaspora settings, when passing on the language.

Her insights deeply resonate with experiences in Istanbul and Beirut. During our youth, whether engaging with Armenian literature or simply speaking the language within community spaces, the sense of hesitation and fear of being wrong often silenced us. Nevertheless, it is encouraging to witness the emergence of new and alternative spaces today—places where we can express ourselves creatively in our mother tongue. These spaces provide safe ground for finding our voices.
Still, we continue to grapple with the fear of making mistakes. Years ago, when I made a spelling error in a public post, Talin Suciyan reminded me to acknowledge and correct it without guilt. “The obligation of not making any mistakes is a colonialist ideology,” she said, emphasizing the need to challenge this mindset.

And yet, we are left with a pressing question: Why is there such a strong tendency to blur the distinctions between Western and Eastern Armenian—or to insist that they are the same language? Their structural and historical differences are clear. So why the reluctance to acknowledge them? After all, Armenia is a land shaped by a multitude of cultural influences. Discussing the differences between Western and Eastern Armenian should not fuel an “us versus them” binary. Engaging with the issues across the two ends of the Armenian world must not come at the cost of ignoring the rich and unique potential each language holds. 

Another theme that stood out across the texts was temporality. Sylvia Alajaji’s piece, “Evenings in Diaspora,” approached this theme deeply evocatively. She positions herself between her everyday life in the United States and the lives her family was forced to leave behind in historical Armenia and Lebanon. As a musicologist, she frames this experience through Gomidas’s composition of the iconic song Groong (crane). The crane soars from the villages of Armenia, now devoid of the descendants of those who once sang the song, passes through the ruins of Ghazanchetsots Cathedral in Shushi in 2020 by Sevak Avanesyan’s cello, and reaches Lebanon and the United States.

This journey takes many forms—a lament, a legacy, a phone call, a news report—all carrying the question: “Is there any news from our homeland?” Alajaji reminds us that such songs can also be spaces “from which a future could emerge and a language could be built.”

The notion of “non-contemporaneous contemporaries,” a concept we frequently revisit in our Kavar sessions, finds clear expression in Alajaji’s narrative. Colonized peoples must navigate temporalities imposed by the colonizer. Through the flight of Groong, diaspora Armenians also encounter the same non-contemporaneous contemporaries in their attempt to reconnect with the places where their ancestors once lived or continue to live today.

This theme also surfaced in Kov-Kovi. One of the recurring themes in these discussions was the legacy of our grandmothers and the ways in which their lives shaped our sense of identity. A moment in Alajaji’s text, when she wonders why her grandmother isn’t smiling in a photograph, powerfully echoed the stories we had shared—making visible the generational burdens and silences we carry. 

While this text focuses primarily on language, we intend to continue our reflections by exploring the intersections between language and literature in the next part of this series.