Leo Chaloukian: All the way to Tinseltown - Armenian Reporter

Harutyun Frenkian, Vostanig, Kevork
Kegharkuni, Nigoghos Sarafian, Puzant
Topalian, Paylag Mikaelian, Arsham Daderian,
Zareh Vorpuni, Shahan Shahnur,
Vazken Shushanian, and Shavarsh Nartuni.
Menk’s group identity was formed
around a series of deliberate negations
that sought to jolt conventions and to
present a new kind of literature, one
that embodied the group’s exilic condition.
The writers of Menk gathered to
launch a movement that neither recognized
itself as such nor declared a
manifesto. They gathered to make a collective
contribution to Western-Armenian
literature yet called for a break in
the continuum of that very same literary
tradition. They denounced the earlier
generation of writers, proclaimed a
change in the transmission of literary
customs, announced a separation from
the past, and embraced the “newness”
of their experience as a people scattered
around the world and living in the shadow
of a traumatic loss. It was out of this
idea of “newness,” which transpires out
of a “rootedness” in the present, that
the French-Armenian writers gave birth
to the first wave of diasporan Armenian
literature.
Although the national narrative of the
Armenian diaspora that we have come
to know today relies heavily on ideas
of continuity, transference, and tradition,
for the orphaned Armenian youth
of the 1920s the post-Genocide years
represent an in-between space that is
removed from the continuum of time.
More generally, in the years following
the Catastrophe, Armenians in the diaspora
inhabit a liminal space that seems
to be suspended in time, awaiting the
establishment of a new relationship
with the past. In order to claim themselves
as writers of Armenian literature,
the Menk writers attempt to name this
relationship between the present and
the past by proposing a literary theory
that calls for the end of the Western-Armenian
literary tradition and the birth
of a “new” literature that is yet to be
defined.
While the Menk writers remained
reluctant to explicitly define the “new”
literature, the content of their literary
and journalistic publications drew the
greater parameters of the issues that
concerned them as writers living in the
Parisian metropolis yet operating on the
margins of the majority culture: in other
words, as writers who are forced to continuously
negotiate the terms of their
scattered existence between old and
new, Armenian and the Other, East and
West, and national and transnational.
First and foremost, they contend
themselves by attempting to fulfill the
“The crisis of
immigrant identity
becomes one of the
central concerns that
contributes to the
grouping of Menk
and translates into
its literary theory as
the need for a new
literature.”
task of forging a collective. The announcement
found on the first page of
the journal does not present itself as a
manifesto, which was common to literary
and artistic movements of the time.
Regardless of the absence of this label,
the announcement’s appearance as the
first piece of writing in the publication
and its presentation of the signatories
allow us to read it as a document that
highlights the objectives of the group.
Using the first-person pronoun “we,”
the announcement lists a number of
reasons for Menk’s grouping and declares
future goals that the group will
strive to achieve. The signatories write,
“By our very solidarity and cooperation,
which will never infringe on the development
of each of our individuality, to
form a cohesion among young writers
spread to all corners of the world, and
by such, to facilitate the free development
and flourishing of a new Armenian
literature.” This proclamation presents
objectives for both a near and a distant
future. It identifies group solidarity as
an immediate objective, one which will
serve to develop the latter objectives:
the formation of an international community
of writers and the establishment
of a new Armenian literature. Here a
new literature is proposed as a means
for repairing dispersion and the damaged
sense of “wholeness,” which serves
as an obstacle to the process of collective
conceptualization of the Catastrophe.
The trauma of the Catastrophe, which
tears apart a community’s social networks
and destroys the connections that
hold a society in place, also eradicates
its collectivity. Although many of the
pre-war institutions transfer their work
to accommodate the new conditions of
the present, the idea of “wholeness” remains
damaged. In addressing their acknowledgement
of the loss of collectivity,
the co-signers of Menk state in their
announcement, “By searching in each
person inspirations, concerns, and common
traits of children belonging to the
same people, to open the path, to search,
and, in time, to give shape to a general
manifesto, which, while giving freedom
to each individual, corresponds to the
needs of Armenian culture.” Therefore,
the forging of a collectivity is considered
the primary objective of Menk. So, we
might ask, around what exactly is this
idea of a “collective” going to be formed?
Menk will suggest that it will be formed
around a new memory constructed
through literature, a collective memory
of the aftermath experience – therefore
an immigrant’s memory.
The crisis of immigrant identity becomes
one of the central concerns that
contributes to the grouping of Menk and
translates into its literary theory as the
need for a new literature. In explaining
one of the reasons for the coming
together of the writers, Nigoghos Sarafian
writes, “With Menk, we will work
to explain ourselves. We are gathered
first and foremost to find the internal
tie that runs deep through all of us,
which undoubtedly exists regardless of
our external differences and the shifting
conditions of each community. After
finding it, we will approach and address
various issues.” Here Sarafian refers to
the desire to contextualize, limit, and
define the terms of the writers’ dispersion
as a condition that brings forth the
need for explanation (self-explanation).
He places no distinction between the
writers that actually comprise Menk and
the general community of exiles, giving
the group representative authority.
As an exile, the French-Armenian immigrant,
particularly the French-Armenian
intellectual, faces a number of existential
questions. What does it mean
to survive the Catastrophe? What does
it mean to exist as a survivor, as an Ar-
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Armenian Reporter Arts & Culture September 20, 2008
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