Lory Bedikian’s “Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body”

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Lory Bedikian has composed some of the finest poetry of her generation, from intimate meditations on relationships (“Proposal”) to reflections on identity and belonging (“On the Way to Oshagan”). Her newest volume: Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body serves as a more complex look at topics that have always been present in her work: the family, immigrant trauma and anger, the legacy of a difficult heritage, and growing old. Bedikian pulls no punches—she rages with and against death, whether in the form of a dead tooth or a dead parent. And everything recalls the admonition from the book of the Common Prayer that all things eventually dissolve into nothingness: “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

Jagadakeer, which literally means “the writing on your forehead” or fate in Armenian, is divided into three main sections, each one with a transliterated Armenian title, and each one self-explanatory: Section I, titled “Hiereeg” [means father in Armenian]; Section II “Miereeg” [means mother in Armenian]; Section III “Yehs” [means I in Armenian], followed by two epilogues (“In Lieu of an Epilogue” and “Jagadakeer: In Remission”). Although the entire book clocks in at about one hundred pages, each section feels like its own independent book and is weighty enough to stand on its own. Jagadakeer begins with a preamble of sorts which I think addresses the other overarching theme of the book, namely exile: “As if the sky which darkened on that monumental day, the day Lebanon/ would be left behind for you both, the day all relations, kin,/ unshaven onlookers/grit their teeth or the kyughatsees, village women began the ritual of tears/ handkerchiefs tied to the trees, the sheep slaughtered for the last feast.” 

Here, I would make an unlikely pairing, namely Michael Arlen’s memoir of his own parents, titled simply Exiles. But while Arlen masterfully deals with the sense of alienation he felt as a Greek-Armenian boy in Anglo institutions, he approaches the icy, lonely exile of his parents from a distance. Bedikian meanwhile digs deep into the lives and bodies of both parents, to reveal the inner workings of their beings as she sees and interprets them. In “Ode to Their Leaving,” which opens the book, Bedikian goes a step beyond personification, so great is the attachment that her family—and many Armenians—felt for what I like to term “a second Armenia.” The sheep slaughtered for the last feast (or madagh) is as poignant an image that I have ever read to mark the exodus of Lebanese Armenians, once again forced by tragedy to leave their homes and friends behind. And later Bedikian writes: “And mother did you tell him what was coming or did you decide to follow?/Is it a daughter’s greatest sin to ask?/But look how quiet I am./I watch the world cry itself to sleep/I pinch the spices into their bowls as you did the day you were married,/as you did on the unbelievable days you died. [italics mine]” On the unbelievable days you died: as if her death happened over and over again in the daughter’s mind. Simply beautiful. In “Meditation on Fractured Vertebrae” stone columns and human vertebrae stand in for each other like metonyms: “When you bend that way you are headed straight for the ground. Stand straight as the columns of Baalbek,/heads bow down, eyes lower when your devotional has begun, everyone at the call of benediction, you looking straight ahead.” In “Father Dreams of Gibran,” Bedikian references the great 20th century Lebanese mystic poet Khalil Gibran before mixing and matching the terrible and the sublime, the everyday and the frightening: “…the stubborn cedar trees,/the impossible bond of the sparrow and the bulbul/in the midst of shrapnel and ouzo despite the oncoming decades/as unpredictable as the letters they don’t dare to open and read.” 

I find Bedikian’s visceral attachment to Lebanon truly touching in the etymological sense of the word: it is something that I too have always felt, and almost felt guilty for, as if as an Armenian my first attachment should always be to the Republic of Armenia. Impossible to explain one’s almost tactile attachment to Cilicia and the New Cilicia that was founded on the shores of the Mediterranean a few hundred kilometers to the south: the taste of fresh olive oil spread on mezze, the smell of za’atar, of the ocean wind, the beautiful melody of makour arevmuhdahayeren, the sense of family and belonging: it is all here in Bedikian’s mourning for what has been lost.

And then there are the truly difficult poems in Jagadakeer, the ones where you smell the hospital beds and dressings through Bedikian’s verse, along with the suffering that accompanies patients on their way towards their final days. In “Psychosomatic Disorder” the poet writes: “You contemplate grandmother’s burning feet, father’s skull of pain, mother’s hysteric/laugh married to a cry, brothers who arm wrestle to win the next diagnosis,/sure you suffer from a slight case/of everything as you refuse to buy items/in twos, because what’s the point. It will all be over soon enough.”

What else is there to admire in this anthology? There is the love of language and of Armenian words, as in the poem “Zevart, Ode to Joy: Introduction to Her Demise,” a love song to her mother: “Zevart of my birth, a name I will not simplify for them. Let them say it./Zevart. Zevart of rose petal jam & calluses, your mother, a desert walk, her mother hovering above sheep’s brain stew.” How splendid, how primal, how utterly unique to mix callouses, rose petal jam, sheep’s brain stew and your mother’s name in one same descriptive! More on Zevart: “The name Zevart in the Armenian language means happy or joyous…/When you lose a mother you lose the source. When you lose an Armenian mother you lose a seed far from its fruit./Maybe there isn’t anything more than what you remember at the end.”

Bedikian’s pen also describes a love of objects picked at random that recall Neruda’s “Ode To Common Things.” One poem, a miraculous ode to an everyday vegetable: “Broccoli is sympathy. It says that despite all the poison preordained, consume me. Bite this green belief, better than a leaf of lettuce, better than bread,/grind it between the teeth that should have bitten hands of those who served it to you, the nerve /to want to make things better; although the house is gone, your husband has joined your dark starlight, you walk the halls thinking I don’t want this cane, this is not the way I wanted to go.” The wonderfully idiosyncratic line that starts at “broccoli” to end in death once more…

And then there is the powerful title poem “Apology to the Body,” where Bedikian addresses the body itself, asking for forgiveness in that most human of ways, as if we were somehow responsible for the inevitable deterioration that comes with age, which we accelerate with the environmental pollution that we have created: “Sorry for mercury strewn in veins of fish,/for traces of carbon monoxide loose in the air, for radiation that circles and enters the aura/before you were born. Believe me that we began together and I will mend each sheath of myelin, reverse the dark that grows behind my eyes.” Elsewhere she writes, raw: “I make love to my lesions.”

Finally there is the wondrous meditation on Armenian itself: “Impression: with contrast.” Here Bedikian shows true mastery of her craft, using metaphor and substitution to perfectly describe the sounds and associations that Armenian mean to her, a language which elsewhere she has referred to as having been “ironed to her tongue” since she was a child: “The sounds of Armenian, made of walnut, apricot, cuneiform to monk./ My father held morphology, syntax over a glass table,/telling me not to shatter anything until I knew sounds./ Mother knew only syntax/of birth and bread, expected nothing further except on her deathbed. I can’t find/a cure speaking an ancient tongue that isn’t mine.” To my mind this may be the single most poetic description of the language that I have yet to read.

Given the recent events in Artsakh, Lebanon and Palestine, and the death of parents and friends that we each must deal with as we continue to grow older, Bedikian’s Jagadakeer serves as a bellwether. It announces and denounces our fears and some of our most innermost pain with prescient beauty and rare honesty. The poet can rest now, she has delivered to us a true incantation.

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