Visiting one post-Soviet state, you can then recognize it in all others – the similar patterns of urban planning and the identical buildings, structures, roads, pipes, wires, tiles, etc. However, an outsider delving inside under the extreme familiarity of the material environment finds an extreme “strangeness” of social interactions and practices. The “Outside In” series is about emplaced paradoxes and nuances. It spotlights the mundane in Armenia’s peripheral locations, where the seemingly unspectacular encounters with people and things allowing us to capture the unique features of the territory.
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Outside In
Essay 6
On the morning of March 13, while lazily scrolling through Instagram, I discovered from a post by the London-based Armenian Institute that it was the birthday of Yeghishe Charents, one of the most renowned Armenian poets of the 20th century. According to scholars of Armenian literature, unlike Hovhannes Tumanyan’s grounded classical poetry of the 19th century, Yeghishe Charents, along with Vahan Terian, employed a more romantic, symbolic language filled with colorful and auditory imagery.
The practice of perceiving and describing the world through color is a practice close to my heart and forms the basis of my interactions, be it with people or places. To me, kisses have colors, ranging from a green, friendly peck of greeting, to a slow and passionate burgundy kiss with a lover. Experiencing a place, be it a landscape or cityscape, not just visually but also through smell, taste and touch, resembles a kiss that imprints the place in memory.
In commemoration of Yeghishe Charents, I decided to delve into his colorful universe and see how it resonates with my own, especially in terms of describing Armenia’s landscape and territory.
Dear admirers of Armenian poetry, have you ever wondered what the cornerstone color in Charents’ poetry is? The right answer is blue. Literature scholar Burastan Zulumyan points out that the word “blue” [կապույտ] appears in Charents’ poems 119 times, compared to just 9 and 12 times in Tumanyan’s and Terian’s works respectively. This is quite remarkable.
Upon examining the texts, one finds that Charents uses blue to describe both emotions –– such as sadness, nostalgia, longing –– and natural phenomena like the sky, lakes, rivers. There are even several poems with this color in their titles, including “Blue” and “My Blue-Eyed Homeland”. The latter piece especially piqued my interest. First, because of its portrayal of Armenian spatiality, and second, because the pairing of “blue-eyed” with “Armenia(ns)” struck me as oxymoronic. While reading and translating the poem, I found myself immersed in a deep blue melancholy, where the fluid Homeland is compared to an elusive, lost lover:
Օ՜ հեռավո՜ր, կապուտաչյա՜ սիրուհիս… [Oh my distant blue-eyed lover]
…
Աղջի՞կ ես դու, թե այն տնակն ու այգին [Are you a girl or a hut and a garden?]
Charents writes of solitude and longing, of desire to be unseen and silence, weaving them through references to rivers, winding streams, valleys, and gardens. As I muddled my way through Charents’ original Armenian text line by line, I imagined the Debed River flowing through the gorges of Lori province, hugging the gentle green slopes. Shepherds drive out their cattle in the morning fog, while the wind rustles the leaves of fruit trees. The solemn saints in Kobayr monastery’s frescoes guard their secrets in the redeeming shade and coolness. Lori could be the setting of Charents’ poem, but this picturesque, green-blue landscape doesn’t entirely define Armenia. At least, not for me.
My quintessential image is the arid semi-desert of the Ararat valley, the country’s most densely populated area. Here, sienna dominates, not blue. The landscape is characterized by bare, rocky soil, scorched grass, and thorny shrubs; dusty pink, orange, or beige tufa buildings, rusty fences and structures. The aggressive sun is more of an adversary than a friend. Only for a brief spring period do these landscapes burst into bloom with yellow dandelions, red poppies, and purple lupins, before quickly giving way to summer’s dried flowers.
If you visit the Sardarapat monument in Armavir region, or the gorgeous Noravank monastery and the cliffside Surb Astvatsatsin Church overlooking the village of Areni in Vayots Dzor region, you’ll see this sienna-imbued landscape for most of the year. Similar colors welcome you in Meghri, along the Araks River border with Iran. Here, is the pale sienna hues of a nonfunctioning train station, with deserted locomotives on tracks leading nowhere and a damaged Soviet propaganda statue of a one-armed, anonymous woman. Her once bright white paint is slowly being overtaken by yellowish lichen making the rubble of the architectural ensemble an integral part of the natural environment.
Just a few kilometers away, the most southern bastion of bygone socialism in Armenia, an abandoned Soviet border checkpoint, is beige with rusty smudges. Its faded, dirty red hammer and sickle flag still hangs on the wall among the outdated maps and unrecognizable debris of discarded goods, crockery, documents, and bits of ammunition.
Charents’ Armenia is steeped in blues, in every sense of the word. The Armenia that I found is filled with shades of red, yellow, and brown. Yet, it is not the fiery red of Charents’ revolutionary poetry or the golden-yellow of Terian’s lyrical odes to autumn. Getting to know 20th century Armenian history, these colors come to represent something quite different. It is the blood flowing over sharp stones from the wretched feet that walked hundreds of kilometers escaping massacres and torture. It is the Soviet purges of the 1930s under the red flag that took the lives of Charents himself and many more. Sienna is the barren soil that needed endless efforts to yield crops. Brownish is the rust that remained from the post-socialist restructuring of industries and welfare. These colors are harsh and blunt. Armenia’s semi-desert, prickly, and arid landscapes testify to the resilience of those who persevered and made the land habitable, who traversed these terrains until they (re)constructed the soothing comfort of home. The home that is personified by Yeghishe Charents as a delicate blue-eyed creature, in part reality, in part a nostalgic dream.
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