now

I am proud to have been part of a global coalition that drafted, signed and disseminated this statement in support of LGBT rights in Armenia. You can read the full text and the list of signatories below. (And you can watch an interview about the issue that I did via Skype with Civilnet Armenia TV.)       N.K. 

More than two-dozen prominent Armenians in the Diaspora have signed a statement supporting equality and justice for all in Armenia. Among the signatories are poet Diana Der Hovanessian, filmmaker Atom Egoyan, actor and producer Arsinée Khanjian, musician Serge Tankian, and photographer Scout Tufankjian. This array of Armenian artists, intellectuals and professionals felt moved to release this statement in the light of anti-gay legislation that was recently proposed in Yerevan. “This anti-gay legislation is part of a disturbing pattern of intolerance for marginalized people and opposition voices in Armenia,” said publisher Veken Gueyikian. Writer Nancy Agabian said, “People of conscience must not stand by as our LGBT cousins are targeted and demonized.” The statement represents their collective commitment to human rights and to Armenia’s nascent civil society movements.

For more background see:

Armenian Gay and Lesbian Alliance Statement Against Armenian Police Proposal

Amnesty Documents Widespread harassment of Armenia’s LGBT Community

Human Rights Watch Letter to Armenian President Regarding Proposed Anti-LGBT Legislation

Armenian translation here.

STATEMENT

“In response to reports of draft ‘anti-propaganda’ legislation in Armenia, modeled on Russia’s recently passed and widely condemned bill, we, the undersigned members of the global Armenian community, say such attempts to codify anti-gay prejudice into law are contrary to our values. We believe in dignity, equality and the right to self-expression for all people regardless of religion, sexual orientation, gender, or race.”

SIGNATORIES:

Nancy Agabian

Mika Artyan

Arlene Avakian

Peter Balakian

Anthony Barsamian

David Barsamian

Eve Beglarian

Chris Bohjalian

Melissa Boyajian

Diana Der Hovanessian

Atom Egoyan

Dahlia Elsayed

Houry Geudelekian

Veken Gueyikian

Nonny Hogrogian

Aris Janigian

Nina Katchadourian

Nishan Kazazian

Arsinee Khanjian

David Kherdian

Nancy Kricorian

Micheline Aharonian Marcom

Neery Melkonian

Arthur Nersesian

Joan Aghajanian Quinn

Aram Saroyan

Serj Tankian

Scout Tufankjian

Hrag Vartanian

The Renault factories are working for the German Army. The Renault factories were hit.

Last week I presented my ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS slideshow at the Armenian Church of the Holy Ascension in Trumbull, Connecticut. The event was hosted by the Church’s Women’s Guild. Two sisters, Marie and Jean, who are members of the church and had already read the novel, spoke to me before and after my presentation. Jean said, “It meant so much to us that you have written this book. Everything was so familiar, and I have never read before our story.” They had lived in Issy-Les-Moulineaux, a working class suburb of Paris, during the war. Jean, the younger of the two, was born just before the war started and so her memories of the occupation were hazy, but her elder sister Marie told me the story of how her mother and other Armenian women had worked at the nearby Renault factory making nets to cover the tanks and trucks that were being manufactured at that location. Because of the German war work, the Allied bombers targeted the factory. One night, however, the Armenian women, who worked the shift that got out at 11 p.m., were at the factory when the Allied fliers mistakenly dropped bombs on their civilian neighborhood. The sisters’ building was badly damaged, but no one in the family was harmed. Their neighbor fared worse—while she was at work her husband and three children were killed. “You should have talked with us before you wrote the book,” they said. “We have so many stories.”

Nancy Kricorian

Our dentist, call him Dr. A., was a cheerful man. His smile reminded me of Howdy Doody, and from a certain angle it could look almost sinister. His office was in a Midtown Manhattan commercial building filled with other dental suites as though dentists flocked like birds. The framed art posters on the white walls of his office were tasteful and bland, and the patter we exchanged while I was in the chair was friendly and bland. The receptionist was a chatty woman who kept photos of her grandchildren and a bonsai plant on her desk. The dental hygienist was careful and serious; she had photos of her two children hanging on the wall next to the sink. On the video screen that was suspended over the dental chair, fish floated serenely by, and the music was the kind of classical that demanded no attention. During routine visits Dr. A. gave me sunglasses to wear—“pretend you’re at the beach,” he said. As I had never yet had a cavity, the dental procedures were prophylactic. Finally after a decade in his practice, Dr. A. discovered a small hole in one of my molars, and although the whine of the drill was as unpleasant as a continuous mosquito in the ear, the procedure was surprisingly painless. I attributed this to Dr. A’s skill.

One day Dr. A. introduced me to his new colleague, call him Dr. T., who would be examining my teeth after my cleaning that day, I was told. Dr. T.’s eyes were an alarming blue and his medical coat was a little too small. While he peered into my mouth, Dr. T told me he was a former Marine and that he lived in New Jersey.

The next time I arrived at the office, Dr. A.’s grandmotherly receptionist was gone and in her place was a young, blonde Australian wearing an enormous engagement ring and with breasts so large it took effort not to see them. She reminded me of Jessica Rabbit. A tall older woman named Joan who wore heavy mascara, a long black braid down her back and snakeskin patterned leggings had replaced the regular hygienist. Joan informed me that she was crowned Miss New York State in 1961. There was spittle at the corners of her mouth. Dr. A. was nowhere to be seen, and at the end of the appointment when I asked the receptionist what had happened to him, Jessica, as I will call her, said, “Didn’t he tell you? He sold his practice to Dr. T. He’s not here any more.”

At my subsequent visit, the office had been painted a garish purple, and Jessica was on the phone rather loudly describing the new waterfront condo she and Dr. T. had bought, their wedding plans, and the various options they were considering for a honeymoon trip. As she cleaned my teeth Joan told me tales of the famous people—and she named names—whose mouths she had explored in her younger days. She talked while I sat with my own mouth filled with instruments, able only to occasionally respond with a grunt or a nod. When Dr. T. inspected my teeth after the cleaning, he informed me that my one filling needed to be replaced and that he had discovered a new cavity in another molar. I dutifully scheduled an appointment for the treatments he suggested.

In the middle of the night I woke and couldn’t fall back to sleep. The purple dental office played in my mind’s eye: the muscle-bound former Marine in a white medical coat, his blonde, boob-job girlfriend with a rock the size of a wisdom tooth, and the aging Beauty Queen hygienist with blood-red fingernails. It occurred to me that perhaps there was nothing the matter with my filling and that maybe I didn’t actually have another cavity. My mouth and the mouths of Dr. A.’s other abandoned and unwitting patients were underwriting Dr. T. and Jessica’s new home and upcoming wedding. But it couldn’t be true. Who would do such a thing? Was I naïve? Was I paranoid? I was unable to decide. Nonetheless I called a friend the next morning for a referral.

When I saw Dr. M., a third dentist, for a consultation he told me that my filling was secure and that there was no cavity in my molar. Dr. T. would have pulled out a good filling and put in a new one. Even more appalling—he would have drilled a HOLE in a perfectly healthy tooth.

I thought of calling Dr. A., and went so far as to look up his phone number. It turned out he was still practicing dentistry, but his office was now in the Westchester suburbs near where I assumed he lived. What would I say if I called him? “You sold your dental practice to a criminal and left us at his mercy.”  I thought of reporting Dr. T. to the Better Business Bureau. But I had no concrete evidence, and I imagined all the slippery stories Dr. T. might tell if confronted. So, shirking my responsibility to the other patients, I phoned Jessica to cancel my appointment and asked her to transfer my records to Dr. M.

A few days later Joan called to find out why I had left the practice. I was evasive—I was not going to tell her I believed that Dr. T. was a conniving swindler who was subjecting patients to unnecessary medical procedures for personal gain. But Joan confided, “They’re leaving the practice in droves. I think something fishy is going on here.” I was slightly relieved, but not entirely convinced, that she wasn’t part of the racket.

Nancy Kricorian

young poet

Our first shared apartment was on Amsterdam Avenue at 94th Street. It was a rundown walk-up tenement. We had cockroaches in the kitchen, ratty pigeons on the fire escape, and on Fridays the smell of the downstairs neighbors’ fish head soup filling our rooms. Several days a month we would be without heat and hot water until the landlord paid the overdue oil bill. 

The landlady was an elderly Greek woman named Evelyn who sat in front of the building in her beat-up aqua blue Pinto for hours each day. She could barely walk, but she drove in from New Jersey to keep watch on her property. She told the Korean grocers on the ground floor that I was her niece. I thought this was because I was Armenian and as a Greek she felt some affinity, but I discovered that the Koreans had been lobbying for the apartment that she rented to us and she needed an excuse. We learned from THE VILLAGE VOICE list of New York City’s “Ten Worst Landlords” that her son Tony was known as the “Devil Landlord” because of the terrible condition of the apartment buildings he owned in Harlem. He had once brandished a gun at a city housing inspector. 

I recently came across a photo James took of me at the time in my tiny study. Behind me are my poetry and theory books, as well as framed family photos. It reminded me of a poem I wrote during first days together in that apartment. 

The Apartment

We thought we were alone at last,
escaping housemates and their cats:
fresh paint, unscratched floors, empty cabinets,
a new mattress with no one else’s stains.

Until my mother showed up in her housecoat
and bare feet. She scrubbed the stove,
disinfected the garbage pail. If you want it done
well, she said, you have to do it yourself.

The next morning I heard splashing
from the bathroom. My father left puddles,
bits of hair and shaving cream in the sink.
My sister did grand pliés in the hall.

Next came Grandma and Uncle Leo,
then the in-laws. Old lovers waited
in line for the shower, comparing stories
about me, elbowing each other in delight.

My piano teacher blocked the stairway.
Cocoa the cat was on the fire escape.
I thought it couldn’t get any worse
and then the shrink moved in.

It’s like a circus, all jostle and roar.
The spotlights are hot, the props in place.
They throw peanuts, we jump the hoops.
We bow when they applaud.

Nancy Kricorian

Dressed as a Pink Peace Officer (2007)

I wrote this piece in 2005 during my tenure as the New York City coordinator of CODEPINK Women for Peace, and presented it as a talk at a number of panels and conferences. It posted to the CODEPINK web site soon thereafter, and a version of it was subsequently published in Women’s Studies Quarterly in the Spring of 2006. (This is a slightly updated version from 2007.)

CODEPINK Women for Peace is a grassroots peace and social justice movement working to end the war in Iraq, stop new wars, and redirect our resources into healthcare, education and other life-affirming activities. CODEPINK was founded in November 2002 as a women’s peace vigil outside the White House. The name CODEPINK was chosen as a response to the Department of Homeland Security’s color-coded advisory system.  The government says Code Yellow for High Risk of Terrorist Attack and we say CODEPINK for Peace. In the past four years CODEPINK has grown to a national organization with over 100 local chapters.

CODEPINK employs a variety of tools and techniques for working towards positive social change, but we are known for our use of direct action and street theater.

First to define the terms:

Direct action is a political tactic of confrontation and sometimes-illegal disruption intended to attract and arouse public awareness and action. The Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 was an example of direct action that was successful in ending seating segregation on the public buses.

Street theater, sometimes called Guerilla Theater, involves the acting out of a social issue in a public space—that could be in a park, on the street or in a subway car. It is a form of direct action. There are a number of street theater groups here in New York, among them CODEPINK, the Billionaires for Bush, Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. The Reverend Billy, for example, has performed exorcisms of cash registers in Starbucks stores to show his dislike of the corporate take-over of American life. After an exorcism in Los Angeles Starbucks obtained a restraining order against the Reverend Billy so he is not allowed within 250 yards of any Starbucks in the state of California.

Civil disobedience, which is another form of direct action, involves the nonviolent act of breaking the law to call attention to a particular law or set of laws that some people think are immoral or questionable. An example of civil disobedience from the Civil Rights Movement was the “sit-in” campaign by African-American students in the south. The students would sit at Whites Only lunch counters, trying to show that it was wrong to have a law enforcing that kind of segregated seating. They would remain in their seats, in effect breaking the law, until the police were called in to drag them out.

CODEPINK has used direct action on numerous occasions to make our opposition to the war in Iraq known—during the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in 2004, during press conferences in Baghdad, outside Armed Forces Recruiting Centers here in Manhattan and during recent fundraisers for New York’s Senator Hillary Clinton, who was a consistent supporter of the war even as she criticized the way it was being managed.

Starting in late 2005 CODEPINK bird-dogged Hillary at her appearances in New York,; held vigils outside her Manhattan office; and showed up inside and outside of her speeches and fundraisers in cities around the country, including Washington, D.C., Chicago, Denver, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Our LISTEN HILLARY campaign has had an impact on the Senator’s rhetoric on the war as well as her recent votes against war funding in the Senate.

CODEPINK women have been popping up all over the place with our pro-peace message—and you’ll often see us on the evening news.

Why direct action?

You know the old expression, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease?” Using direct action is a way of being a very squeaky wheel.

Huge media conglomerates control most of the information we see and hear about the world. Corporate-owned television outlets show us for the most part the version of reality that the current government wants us to know. For example, the Bush administration doesn’t want us to see the dead bodies of Iraqi women and children who are killed in U.S. military campaigns. They don’t want us to see the bodies of dead U.S. servicemen. These kinds of images are part of what turned public opinion against the Vietnam War and if we actually saw the devastation being caused with our tax dollars—and billions of our tax dollars—we might have something to say about it. By controlling the images we see they hope they can control our perceptions of and often feelings about the war in Iraq.

Direct action and street theater are ways to try to break through this control and have our anti-war message covered by the mainstream media. We believe that direct action works. A recent study on environmental activism by sociologist Jon Agnone showed that chaining yourself to a bulldozer is more likely to influence environmental policy than lobbying on Capitol Hill. And beyond having a direct influence on legislation, we believe that our street actions have an impact in our communities. It’s about educating people. It’s about making an alternative version of reality visible on the streets and on the news. We’re angry about what’s going on; we’re standing up for our beliefs and principles, and we’re strengthening our movement and ourselves by working together. And often we’re also having a great time.

Nancy Kricorian

Published in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Spring 2006

It’s September, and the summer hiatus from peddling books has come to a close. I’m about to start doing public events (see schedule here) and some private gigs (a book club meeting in NYC and a political science seminar at Vassar, for example). I’m especially looking forward to an evening at the Robbins Library in Arlington, Mass. on October 3^rd. Librarian Jenny Arch wrote a lovely blog post about the upcoming event. If you want to invite me to a public or private venue near you (and me) or to a Skype chat convenient for all, let me know. You are also invited to join my 9/25 online book chat via Togather and Spreecast. You can also check out an interview I did last month with Book Case TV (starts at 15:23 and runs to 21:17).

In August there were a number of articles about the state of literary fiction that I thought might be of interest: a funny piece in Flavorwire about why bestselling novelist Jonathan Franzen annoys so many people; a piece in Salon discussing the dubious distinctions between “Chick Lit” and “Literary Fiction” by women; and a related piece from the Fashion & Style Section of the New York Times in which the author of this summer’s hot debut novel waxes eloquent on life in the literary borough of Brooklyn. If you’re still confused about how to separate literary fiction from genre fiction (chick lit, historical fiction, mysteries, etc.), you can read this piece, which probably won’t clear things up. And finally, in yesterday’s New York Times Style section, in honor of New York Fashion Week, there was an article entitled “The Rising Value of Land in Book Titles” about a hot trend in book publishing this fall. As Oscar Wilde said, “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”

Nancy Kricorian

 From the archive, a poem originally published in THE GRAHAM HOUSE REVIEW in Spring 1988.

My Father Said That’s the Devil’s Work

What I passed the Underwood Devilled Ham factory
on our street, he pointed his pitchfork at me.

Satan’s fingers grazed my heels as I stormed
up the cellar stairs, his steamy breath behind.

He was down the bathtub drain ready to wrap
his weedy arms around my legs. I wedged the plug

into the gateway to Hell. He crouched at the foot
of my bed, and I slept pressed into the headboard

away from his flickering tongue. He whispered
swear words into my ear while I dreamed.

Years later, I finally met him in Paris.
He smoked Greek cigarettes called Santé.

In a hotel room in the Marais, he pulled me
to the floor. We kept the shutters closed all week.

Nancy Kricorian

Bourj Hammoud, Lebanon

When I was in college, I studied with a poet and short story writer who gave me an instruction that still echoes in my head: “Respect your process.” But my “process” has always been a changing one. When I was a young poet, I wrote a poem by hand, then typed it, made corrections on the typed copy, rewrote it long hand, then typed it again. This process was often repeated up to twenty times.

After graduate school, when I started writing fiction, the technology had changed. I was no longer working on my Olivetti Lettera 100 portable typewriter, nor on the IBM Selectric machines I had access to in my administrative assistant jobs on campus. I was now using a computer, which made the drafting process at once easier and yet harder to keep track of.

The idea of writing a novel was daunting so I thought of it as producing interconnected short stories. Going from writing a one- to two-page poem to a ten- to twelve-page short story was tough, but it didn’t seem impossible, and my first novel Zabelle grew out of this endeavor. Having done it once, the thought of a second novel seemed manageable. My first two books required some research, but they were based in family and personal history so the worlds I described were not so difficult for me to imagine and create.

With my third novel, I was no longer writing about family experience, and it took place in a foreign country and in a time before I was born, so the research process was long and extensive, although fully engrossing. I set out to learn everything I could about Paris during the Nazi Occupation, and as much as possible about the Armenian community in France. Slowly, as I read my way through over one hundred books and talked with dozens of people, my characters’ world became a place I went to in my head each day as I wrote. It was as vivid as the world that I myself inhabited. But after ten years living with the Pegorian family in Paris’s Belleville neighborhood, All The Light There Was went to the copy editor and it was time to move on to my next novel, which would tell the story of Armenians in Lebanon during the Civil War.

Last summer I visited Beirut for the first time. I had read a tall stack of books including novels, histories and guidebooks in preparation, but my process works best with immersion and so I went. Knowing no one in Lebanon, I was armed with a list of the names and contact information of friends of friends. They were mostly Armenians, and they without exception welcomed me as though I were a long-lost cousin. I stayed in Dbayah for the first few days to be close to a friend’s sister, and then moved to a hotel near Hamra for the rest of the visit. I spent five afternoons wandering around the streets of Bourj Hammoud with a new friend who had lived his whole life there and who introduced me to shopkeepers, actors, musicians, jewelers, bankers, and array of other local people. Another new friend took me on a walking tour of the East Beirut neighborhoods of Sanayeh, Zokak el Blat, and Watwat. An acquaintance drove me to Ashrafieh for an hour just so I could have sense where the Armenian churches were in that quarter, and what the houses looked like. I took photos and made copious notes.

Since that trip, I have continued researching, and I have started informally interviewing people about their experiences. As I read novels set in Beirut during the Civil War—such as Rawi Hage’s DeNiro’s Game, Ghada Samman’s Beirut Nightmares, Zeina Abirached’s A Game for Swallows, and Mischa Hiller’s Sabra Zoo—I feel as though I am visiting a familiar landscape. Beirut is slowly becoming a place I go to in my head. I have begun sketching out my characters and choosing names for them. The plot is slowly emerging. As I’m working on my fourth novel, I recognize that my current process will require some additional months of research, more thinking, and internal building. But when I hear the voice of Vera Serinossian for the first time, I’ll know it’s time to start writing.

Nancy Kricorian

In Time Magazine Lev Grossman covered the literary drama of the summer: J.K. Rowling was revealed to be the author of a mystery novel entitled The Cuckoo’s Calling, penned under the name of James Galbraith. The book, which was published in April, had sold approximately 1000 copies in the U.K. and the U.S. before the story broke. Predictably enough, once it was known that Rowling was the author, the book shot to the top of bestseller lists. As Grossman put it, “If nothing else. l’affaire Galbraith is an object lesson in how hard it is to get attention for even a well-received first book. Its slim sales notwithstanding, the reviews of The Cuckoo’s Calling had been almost universally good. The book was widely ignored by the mainstream critics, but the trade magazines, which cover most new releases, loved it.” Once the J.K. Rowling “brand” was made known, sales skyrocketed, and there was some suspicion about the timing of the reveal, but then the law firm that represents her apologized for being the source of the inadvertent leak.

This week there was also a funny piece on Book Riot by Jennifer Miller, a first-time novelist who decided to try to break the world record for the most book club visits by an author in one month. The gimmick got her a fair amount of media coverage, but also drew the attention of another writer who claimed to hold a record for book club visits that would be hard for Miller to beat.

Speaking of book clubs, I’ve accepted an invitation from the Carleton College New York City Alumni Book Group to join a September discussion of ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS. I am also trying out a new online platform called Togather that allows writers to connect with readers and reading groups by setting up real-world events and online meetings. I have scheduled a book discussion to be held on September 25^th at 7:30 p.m. via Spreecast, another new online service that allows for group video chats. If you are interested in joining the September 25th discussion of my book, you can register here. If you are in a book club that would like to read ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS, let me know. If it’s within reasonable commuting distance from New York City, I may be able to visit in person, or we can set up an online event.

The Peniche Anako, a cultural center housed on a canal barge in Paris

When I was in Paris in May, my friend Virginia Pattie Kerovpyan invited me to join her on the Peniche Anako for a jazz concert one evening. The Peniche Anako is a canal barge docked on the West Bank of the La Villette Basin in the 19^th arrondissement. The Basin, which is the largest artificial lake in Paris, was filled with water in December 1808 and is part of the 130-kilometer (80.7 mile) Parisian Canal Network that is operated by the municipality. Canal barges have access to about 22 kilometers of the network.

Peniche Anako opened its doors in the fall of 2008 under the direction of Patrick Bernard, an ethnologist whose work focused on the oral traditions of indigenous peoples. In January of 2009, the barge was purchased by the Armenian Red Cross Association (in French le Comité de secours de la Croix Rouge Arménienne, C.S.R.A.), which is an organization founded in the 1920’s by doctors, lawyers and other professionals to provide aid to Armenian Genocide survivors and refugees. In purchasing the boat, the C.S.R.A. intended to continue with multicultural programming, while creating a space where Armenian culture could also be showcased.

Virginia Pattie Kerovpyan took over as Director of Creative Programming starting in 2010, and a close-knit circle of friends and family keeps the project running. When I visited the boat on my recent trip to Paris, her husband Aram was working behind the bar, a friend was collecting tickets at the door, her son was handling the soundboard, and her daughter’s boyfriend was the chef for the evening. The excellent jazz trio concert that night, billed as “Anne Pacéo a Carte Blanche,” was performed by the aforementioned Anne Pacéo on percussion, along with Maxime Bender on bass and Olivier Lutz on saxophone. The space is not large—the bar area can comfortably accommodate around 20 people, and the performance space has a capacity of 100—which adds to the intimacy and warmth of the atmosphere.

In addition to the musical performances, ranging from classical, to folk, to jazz, Kerovpyan also schedules visits by artists and storytellers, as well as film screenings, lectures, and dramatic readings. Each month the programming is focused on a different theme: for example this past spring March was devoted to the cultures of Spain and Portugal; in April the theme was Solidarity Encounters and France; The Near East and the Fertile Crescent were the focus in May; and World Diasporas in June. Annually the month of October is dedicated to Armenian culture, with a broad array of events featuring Armenian musicians, artists, photographers and lecturers. Local school children have twice been invited onto the barge for activities—once for an Armenian calligraphy workshop, and the second time for a lesson in Armenian song and dance.

Kerovpyan says, “The Peniche is a space where we aim to provide a warm welcome to all people. We also hope that Armenians from around the world who are passing through Paris will think of this as a home away from home.”

La Peniche Anako (http://penicheanako.info)

Bassin de la Villette

Across from 61, quai de la Seine

75019 PARIS 
Métro: Riquet, Stalingrad ou Jaurès

This piece originally appeared via The Armenian Weekly.

Nancy Kricorian