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Abstract
In this audio-textual performance woven as an Armenian fairy tale from ethnographic research, poetry, and songs, I employ the performative as part of a feminist aesthetic and pedagogical praxis. Through this feminist performative storytelling I affectively study and mourn the immobilizing effects of the densely interconnected processes of death-making whether it be through colonization, ecological extraction, militarization and war, or sex-selective abortions. Drawing on transnational feminist knowledge, I suture life-sustaining moments of respite and healing, however transient and quick, into this protracted study and mourning to practice living in the wake of ongoing catastrophes and crises.
Acknowledgments
By the time this performative piece meets the reader-listeners' eyes and ears, it will be four years old, having traveled into Armenian and English, and transformed; having traveled to Armenia and various parts of the US, heard and read by many a listener-viewer-reader, and transformed. I have benefited from the insights and affect of many viewer-listener-reviewers in the weaving of this performance. I would like to particularly thank Sertaç Sehlikoglu, Jason Woerner, Tamar Shirinian, Anna Shahnazarian, Shushan Avagyan, Deanna Cachoian-Schanz, Anna Nikoghosyan, Susanna Gyulamiryan, and Veronika Zablotsky for their incisive, deeply engaged, and loving feedback. I am deeply grateful for the feministly loving and uplifting comments of the anonymous reviewers that invited me to be more explicit about my feminist orientation, as well as the creative process. And lastly, I want to thank the editorial team of the journal for their meticulous, patient, and caring work throughout the publishing process of this multimodal and unruly creation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Armenia, in the South Caucasus, and its neighboring Azerbaijan have had military clashes and wars over a one-time autonomous Republic of Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh in Armenian) with majority Armenian population and historically an Armenian province that was annexed to Soviet Azerbaijan by Stalin’s Decree in 1921. Starting in 1988 popular rallies in Nagorno Karabakh called for being reunited with Armenia. The demands over time changed toward claims of sovereignty. In 1991, at the precipice of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Armenian population of Nagorno Karabakh voted through a referendum to proclaim its de facto independence, despite Azerbaijan’s insistence on its de jure control over Nagorno Karabakh. The Nagorno Karabakh rallies heightened inter-ethnic animosity, followed by population displacement in Armenia, Nagorno Karabakh, and Azerbaijan. Azerbaijanis living in Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh, as well as in the surrounding seven districts, were forced to leave for Azerbaijan (and other places) and Armenians living in Azerbaijan were forced to leave for Armenia (and other places). Around one million people were displaced. The situation became increasingly violent and culminated in the first Karabakh war (1991–1994). After the first Karabakh war, amid recently collapsed Soviet Union, rapid and undiscerning privatization, Nagorno Karabakh and the seven districts surrounding it (the Azerbaijani population of which had been displaced), went under the Armenian control. Between 1994 and 2020 there were a number of border skirmishes and escalations, most notably the 4-day war in 2016 and then again in July of 2020, until the full-scale second war (also known as the 44-day war) in the fall of 2020, which claimed several thousand lives. After a Russia-brokered ceasefire of November 9th, 2020, all seven districts surrounding Nagorno Karabakh and two districts of Nagorno Karabakh went under Azerbaijani control, with Russian peacekeepers stationing in the region. After blockading the region since December of 2022, on September 19th of 2023 with a 24-hour “special antiterrorist military operation” akin to Russia’s “denazification of Ukraine,” the Azerbaijani government forced Nagorno Karabakh to surrender. As of the writing of the current manuscript in June of 2024, given the Azerbaijani anti-Armenian policies and not trusting the Azerbaijani government’s promises of “reintegration,” over 100,000 ethnic Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh have been forced to leave the region for Armenia.
2 Since the early years of Soviet collapse, because of indiscriminate, short-sighted privatization and ecological extraction in Armenia, the post-Soviet Armenian governments have continuously granted mining permits to corporations with little oversight and benefit, contributing to desertification and deforestation. Lydian, a company with no prior mining experience, acquired a permit to extract gold from Amulsar mountain in 2000s (Suleymanyan 2017). Jermuk, a resort town attracting tourists for its mineral waters, is located within five kilometers (about three miles) of Amulsar, with Lydian's cyanide leach heap pad a mere kilometer (point six miles) from the village of Gndevaz. After years of Western support (US, Canada, UK, Sweden, International Financial Corporation, and European Bank of Reconstruction and Development), purchase of orchards, removal of said orchards, Lydian has contributed to the desertification of the region, as well as polluted water and air, adversely affecting the quality of life within the local ecosystem that is home to major river systems on which Armenia and its neighbors depend. Despite the active struggle of residents and environmental activists against the operation of the mine since June of 2018 (Suleymanyan Citation2017), in February of 2023, Lydian signed a memorandum of understanding with the Armenian government and the Eurasian Development Bank, in which Russia's stake constitutes 44% (Rowley and Dowsett Citation2023).
3 “There once was and there once wasn’t” is the typical way fairy tales start in Armenian. I keep the English translation literal as a way of gesturing to the allegorical to which it points, namely that knowing and not knowing, existing and not existing are not in binary opposition but are entangled and co-constitutive. I also use a word in Armenian թաղված (taghvas), which literally means “buried,” but the metaphorical meaning I am evoking in my translation (not-good-for-the-day-of-light) is the way Armenian women would use the word as a curse, an indication of personal-political frustration.
4 Papa Greedo stands in for the extractive collusion of capitalism and patriarchy.
5 Caucasian leopard, an endangered species, was spotted in Armenia in 2019, 19 years after it was last spotted there. One of the migratory corridors that the leopard uses includes Amulsar mountain in the south of Armenia threatened to become a gold mine. Conservation and animal rights advocates, and environmentalists insist that Amulsar remain a mountain given that it is an important part of the local ecosystem and biodiversity, including Caucasian leopard’s habitat, among other species.
6 In 2018, the head of the Environmental and Mining Inspection Body of Armenia, Artur Grigoryan sent a directive to Lydian that endangered species – a plant species called Acantholimon caryophyllaceum Boiss and a butterfly called Parnassius apollo – have been located on the Amulsar gold mine site as a basis for requesting the termination of the mining activities. However, according to Lydian, the study that the Ministry of Nature Protection commissioned, did not confirm the sightings of these species (Creamer Media Reporter Citation2018).
7 Please note that here, too, I take a poetic license to interpret “buried place” slightly differently than in the first instance explained in note 3.
8 During the Soviet years, Shushanik Kurghinyan’s only poems that were promoted were those dedicated to the working-class rights. In post-Soviet years, through the work of Queering Yerevan Collective, a feminist artist collective, and feminists, in general, Kurghinyan has come to also be recognized for her feminist politics and writings on women’s rights.
9 I use the word “historyculture” to indicate how what comes to be understood as “culture” is historically produced and what comes to be understood as “history” is produced by socio-culture.
10 Avery Gordon (Citation2008) reminds us that we need to “look for lessons about haunting when there are thousands of ghosts; when entire societies become haunted by terrible deeds that are systematically occurring and are simultaneously denied by every public organ of governance and communication” (64).
11 In the article “All the Relatives Turned Away. Tomorrow we will Bury the Woman who was Killed,” Samvel Balasanyan (Citation2020) discusses the murder of a single mother in her forties in her own house by a male companion in one of Armenia’s towns. No family member or relative claimed her body to bury her or expressed a desire to be caretakers of her children. In the text, I point to this article indirectly as a way of keeping score of the deeply seated devaluation of women in the Armenian society: not only is there lack of care while living, when a woman or feminized people can expect gender-based violence against themselves, but even after death no one exhibits care by way of burying them.
12 I have bolded some phrases in each line and italicized others so that one can read the text both horizontally, as well as vertically. If you read the bold text vertically, you read “don’t soil your new shoes, they are expensive” as a reflection on materialist concerns guiding decisions that come at a cost of dispossession of multitudes. If you read the italicized text vertically, you read “feel your bulging pockets, enjoy!” as a reflective note on capitalist self-interest driving so much unthinking dispossession.
13 A day after I wrote the above, Arundhati Roy (Citation2020) published an article, discussing how the pandemic is a portal.
14 An excerpt from a song titled “Sareri Kami” (Mountain Wind) by Rouben Hakhverdyan.
15 An excerpt from a song titled “Hov Arek” (Bring Me Some Breeze) by Komitas Citation1993b.
16 An excerpt from a song titled “Sareri Hovin Mernem” (I love the Cool of the Mountains) by Hobvannes Badalyan (Citation1993).
17 An excerpt from a song titled “Sareri Kami” (Mountain Wind) by Ruben Hakhverdyan (Citation2012).
18 The UK Foreign Office supported Lydian International, the international corporation (now dissolved) that had undertaken the Amulsar mine project (Rowley Citation2019).
19 This is a reference to the fact that the political regimes in the region (in Armenia and Azerbaijan) have long manipulated the image of a “barbaric other,” and “enemy” to gain and/or maintain power. In Armenia this was done at strategic moments (elections, increasing military budget, distraction by talking heads from issues of immediate socioeconomic concern). In Azerbaijan, however, due to losing Karabakh war in 1994, this had been carried out as a state ideology, with kindergarten teachers teaching Azerbaijani children where on the map “the enemy” (Armenians) lives before the second Karabakh war to having a victory park with a wall of helmets taken from killed Armenian service men and recreating war scenes with wax mannequins of Armenian service men (dressed in fatigues taken off of killed Armenian service men) in degrading moments of being captured or dying, where families with young children would take pictures (Hauer Citation2021).
20 I use Marleen Barr’s (Citation1992) definition of feminist fabulation, who drawing on Robert Scholes’s definition of fabulation, suggests that feminist fabulation includes a variety of genres (speculative fiction, feminist utopian texts, fantasy, science fiction, and so on) imagining a “world clearly and radically discontinuous from the patriarchal one we know, yet returns to confront that known patriarchal world in some feminist cognitive way” (10).
21 “Exercise,” by Shushan Avagyan (Citation2020), translated from the Armenian by Deanna Cachoian-Schanz.
22 Here, I am drawing on Walter Benjamin’s discussion of “profane illumination” (see Cohen Citation1993).
23 Million (Citation2013). According to Million (Citation2013) “the struggle to feel” is key to regenerating Indigenous individuals and communities from the disintegration caused by colonial trauma as the felt knowledge in accordance with which an Indigenous self must live locates their worth in relations forming families and communities, and cannot be isolated, defined, or framed as per western colonist epistemology (66).
24 When one is killed by fellow Armenian servicemen their death is typically classified as a suicide or death due to careless handling of firearms. When one is killed by servicemen of the neighboring Azerbaijan, their death is classified as sacrifice for their country and they are classified as a hero.
25 An excerpt from a song titled “Arshaluys er, nor er batsvel” (“At the Crack of Dawn” Citation1982) from the Soviet Armenian movie The Song of the Days Past.
26 An excerpt from a song titled “Ororotsayin” (“Lullaby”) by Barsegh Kanachyan and Rafael Patkanyan (Citation1993).
27 This is a nod to Robin Wall Kimmerer (Citation2013) and her idea of reciprocal thriving in Braiding Sweetgrass.
28 M. Beth L. Dempster (Citation1998, v) on sympoiesis. I draw on Dempster’s term sympoiesis to imagine a densely interconnected relationality that is open-ended and life-sustaining, supportive of individual and collective autonomy and agency.
29 “Three apples fell from heaven” is a traditional ending for Armenian folk tales.
30 An excerpt from a song titled “Yes Saren Kougai” (“I was Coming from the Mountain”) by Komitas Citation1993a.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Nelli Sargsyan
Nelli Sargsyan is an Associate Professor at the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College in Boston. She situates herself at the disciplinary intersections of political anthropology, queer studies, and critical race studies, among others. In her scholarly-poetic work and teaching Sargsyan is interested in stretching disciplinary and genre boundaries to explore the multi-sensory possibilities of feminist world-making. Sargsyan's most recent research focuses on reproductive justice in conditions of militarization and life-sustaining relationships across borders of states and species. Sargsyan's work has appeared in academic journals such as Feminist Anthropology, Transforming Anthropology, Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies (JSAS), and Anthropology Now, as well as on online platforms such as ARTMargins, Ms. Magazine, and Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB).