Literature and Engagement: Vahé Oshagan’s Novel Odzum

No wonder also that Vahé Oshagan wanted to attack the taboo of sexuality, which, in the eyes of Jacques, the commander of the commandos, does not rhyme with fulfillment in the case of the Armenians. The men suffer from permanent insecurity; the women are afraid of opening old wounds, instead repressing all heat. Pleasure is absent. Within these young comrades animated by the same project, there is a rigid discipline: just shake hands, there is no way to fall in love.

“It is all around the mouth and at the tip of the finger that sexuality nestles — first the kiss, then the words, the tumult, the song, and then the silence that is also built around the mouth … the language that searches, the mouth with its secret content, closed with extreme intimacy … the center of Armenianness is the mouth” (p. 72), Oshagan makes Jacques’s character say.

In this lost world, suffering is beyond the body, the flesh, enjoyment, far beyond, and much stronger than sex. And because Armenians are weak and vulnerable in this “sexual zone,” you have to strike where it hurts. “They will wake up well, free themselves from the old fear of the old taboo.” There is something grand about breaking a centuries-old spell, breaking the bonds of the moral obligation that unites and disunites Armenians in the diaspora, opening wide the prisons where all this frustration was contained. To do this, what could be more obvious than to act in an Armenian church in the middle of the celebration of the Eucharist?

A Need for Sacredness

With Oshagan, there is no requirement to believe in the presence of God. But we cannot ignore the sacred. Here, the priest’s body is the object of the act of desecration. After hugging in public and letting notes of jazz music at full volume escape from a transistor, the young people go to undress Der Avedis during mass, to tear his ornaments with a knife, “all the pieces of his useless tinsel, ridiculous celebrant, to throw them away, until all that remains is his panties, his shitty panties” (p. 64). Provocative gesture? Terrorist act or revolutionary agit-prop for this generation of militants? It’s up to the reader to decide.

Let us remember here that the defilement of the holy place did not take place. The purpose of the commando was to violate what was most sacred among the Armenians; understand the level of vitality of the Armenian soul which is not defined in the text. A soul pure enough to care for these self-satisfied, sick, “falsely happy, falsely pious” bodies. Instead we discover a nationalized God, a Christianity subordinate to tradition, a kind of national religion confined to the Armenian faithful only. Father Avedis’ god is a nationalized god. The diasporic Church does not live; it is a shell emptied of its essence, where the faithful go astray in folkloric formalin. A varnish on the surface. Confiding one day to the philosopher and philologist Marc Nichanian, the need for a metaphasic of the diaspora, Oshagan aspired for a moment to make the diaspora a kind of “spiritual homeland.” This quest lived in him throughout his eclectic work (theater, essay, novel, short story).

Limits of a Revolutionary Project

One of the limits of Oshagan’s attempt was to want to combine moralizing discourse, a familiar register strewn with rude words (“cock” … etc.), and stuttering of the language between Armenian, English and sometimes French. But authenticity is not always there; the border between the Armenian and foreign worlds, more airtight than ever, lends itself to a dangerous slide towards emotionality, patriotic lyricism, and thesis novel … incompatible with the modernizing and liberating project to which Vahé Oshagan aspired. What can literature do then? Relate reality in its most glaring truth, tear down the masks, relate the urgency. “There is a palpable urgency that was not unrelated to his fear of death,” Anahide Ter Minassian told us. Vahé Oshagan, suffering from heart problems, was terrified that death would abruptly interrupt his work as a writer. Hence, no doubt, this radical, transgressive writing, bearing fetishes and myths to be demolished by regenerative terrorism, at most a therapeutic shock. A literature powerful enough to confiscate our present.

Two Mythological Characters

Let’s be clear, this book has two heroes, the author and the translator. Vahé Oshagan, intellectual figure, son of the great Hagop Oshagan, torn by his own contradictions as a member loyal to the partisan discipline of Dashnagtsutiun and the iconoclasm boiling and bubbling in his heart. Ter Minassian said of him, “He was a handsome man, charming and with an ironic smile.”

She remembered not without emotion these “literary encounters” in the modest apartment of Digin Chakérian [Shakerian], the wife of the godfather of Vahé Oshagan, a stone’s throw from the Place des Fêtes, in the popular and poverty-stricken Paris of those years where one was poor, dignified and proud at the same time. There were evenings where the still fresh memory of the great Armenian literary figures of Constantinople was evoked, and where the young Vahé looked like a “rabbit in clover,” if one believes the testimony of Anahide.

Our future historian had become friends with him and she became his confidante, as he multiplied his female conquests to better feed his poetic inspiration. But why did she choose to translate Odzum [Unction] rather than another text? Admittedly, there was also a short story translated with the editor Houry Varjabedian and published in the beautiful collection Nos terres d’enfance [Our Childhood Lands]. The homeland took the form of old shoes that are painted.

It’s hard to believe in chance. Anahide Ter Minassian lived through these years of political turmoil and engagement with a fiery and militant commitment that was never denied until her last breath. Probably it was due to this longing that is present in her for total liberation, coupled with an ideological affinity with her friend. And a freedom to reconsider the work of her friend with a gaze relieved of the weight of complexes. “Vahé considered that the worst calamity caused by the Genocide was to have destroyed the Armenian novel,” reported Anahide. The imprint of the Catastrophe gave them the strength to accomplish a perfectly complementary work, inhabited by a common passion to transmit and awaken an invigorated national conscience among young people. A kind of self-conquest.