The Second Endless Crossings: Reflections on Armenian Art and Culture: Arpi Sarafian’s Critical Tour de Force

Sarafian is also explicitly concerned with the place of Armenians in the American literary canon, or their lack thereof. Anyone who takes even a cursory look at current college curricula, even those purporting to represent “minority literature,” will notice a preponderance of Anglo-Saxon writers and a corresponding lack of Armenians, from Leon Surmelian down to our many brilliant contemporary poets and fiction writers: “Exclusion is the name of the game here. The majority/minority mentality in the United States has led to minority groups being repressed by the so-called dominant culture. Even at a time — roughly in the early 1970s to the 1990s — when celebrating diversity and multiculturalism was the politically correct thing to do, the works of minority (i.e. ethnic) writers were pretty much excluded from the list of ‘accepted’ texts on English booklists.”

Sarafian includes a layered discussion of that best-known of all Armenian writers: “The case of William Saroyan is a little more complex. Why would we stop teaching a writer whose works enjoyed enormous popularity when they were first published? Saroyan’s obvious celebration of our diversity may be a factor in excluding him from a literary canon that privileges Anglo-Saxon writers.”

But here as elsewhere, Sarafian goes deeper in her analysis and beyond the more obvious reasons for Saroyan’s exclusion from the canon: “I also think that the autobiographical strand in much of Saroyan’s writing places him outsides the academic mainstream which for decades following the ’30s when Saroyan’s works were being published, was dominated by the New Criticism, a critical approach that privileges texts that separate the work form its content and that lend themselves more readily to close textual analysis.” Ditto — this had always been my contention as well, namely that Saroyan’s work has been met with this double critical whammy from which it is only now beginning to recover thanks to the efforts of people like Aris Janigian and Mark Arax to re-assert his importance. In a sense, Sarafian justly asserts, the fluidity and conversational tone of Saroyan’s stories was simply not experimental enough for mid to late-century academic tastes.

Sarafian’s criticism is also unique for its breadth and scope. She reviews children’s literature for example and puts it on equal footing with its “grown-up” counterparts. The same is true for translation, an often overlooked artform. Sarafian discusses both books translated into Armenian, such as Vahe-Vahian’s pristine translation of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet (Markaren in Armenian) —  which she deems as perhaps superior even to the original — as well as classical works such as Nigoghos Sarafian’s The Bois de Vincennes, translated from Armenian and Denis Donikian’s Trashland, translated from French but which takes place in contemporary Armenia. She also provides a delightful analysis of Shushan Avagyan’s A Book, Untitled, which recounts an imaginary meeting between two important early 20th century Armenian feminists, Zabel Yesayan and Shushanik Kurghinian.

A former professor at Cal State and a graduate of AUB who holds a PhD in English Literature from USC, Sarafian also knows when to offer qualified criticism, as when she suggests for example that a text by the talented Kamée Abrahamian might be stronger if not published handwritten or when she takes the outspoken Kardash Onnig to task for perhaps too often changing his opinions. Yet she is always fair. Sarafian also has a eye for covering both established authors like Micheline Aharonian Marcom whose distinctly lyrical deconstructed style may have encountered resistance among more conservative Armenian readers — here she glowing accounts of both a brief history of A Brief History of Yes and The New American, to writers like the sublime poet Alan Semerdjian and the powerfully gritty Aida Zilelian. Sarafian also has her hand on the pulse of latest developments, as in the three pieces that she devotes to the singular group known as the Armenian Creatives under the separate entry “We Resist.” This group of young writers is almost single-handedly revamping Western Armenian with new vocabulary, slang and modes of writing previously ignored by a language which has of late been passed down mainly through outdated textbooks and such. At first Sarafian is somewhat puzzled by the collective’s work, but by her third review she has been won over — and is proud to say so!