BOSTON, Mass.—Intellectuals who survived the Armenian Genocide struggled to come to grips with the enormity of their nation’s loss and find a way to reflect this predicament in their creative work. The writer Zabel Yessayan experimented with several different approaches in her post-genocide writing.
A well-recognized author, Yessayan had been the only woman on the Turkish government’s list of intellectuals to be arrested and sent to exile and death on April 24, 1915, but she managed to evade the police and escape abroad. The 1920’s found her living in Paris and publishing various fiction and non-fiction books and articles.
In a talk at the Armenian Cultural Foundation (ACF) on Sun., Nov. 17, Columbia University Professor Nanor Kebranian will examine the topic “The Survival of Empathy: Zabel Yessayan and Post-Genocide Armenian Literature.”
Kebranian cites words of journalist Hrant Dink that “echo the wisdom of numerous Armenian intellectuals who survived the Young Turk’s genocidal campaign during the First World War” and “signal a veritable crisis of empathy understood in its psychoanalytic sense.” Yessayan recognized “both the perils and promises of Armenian-Turkish empathy, of positioning oneself as the other,” Kebranian points out. Her talk will explore the implications of this recognition as evidenced in some of Yessayan’s post-war writing, especially in terms of survival.
Nanor Kebranian is assistant professor at Columbia University in the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies. She received her doctorate from the University of Oxford with generous graduate fellowships from both the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and the Clarendon Fund (Oxford). Her specializations encompass, but are not limited to, late Ottoman social, political, and cultural history, and literary studies. Current projects include a book monograph on late Ottoman prison narratives and a study of “diaspora” as an anti-communal ethic.
The program is sponsored by the Armenian International Women’s Association (AIWA) as part of a current project that focuses on translating into English the works of pioneering Armenian women writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Yessayan is a major figure of the period, and AIWA plans to release two volumes of translations into English by the end of the year: one, the complete edition of Yessayan’s memoir of her childhood and early education in Istanbul, The Gardens of Silihdar; and the other, Yessayan’s multi-layered novel My Soul in Exile, along with other short works.
Co-sponsors of Kebranian’s talk are the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) and the Armenian Cultural Foundation.
The event is free and open to the public, and begins at 2 p.m. at the ACF, 441 Mystic St., Arlington, Mass. A discussion period and reception will follow the program. For more information, contact AIWA by calling (617) 026-0171, e-mailing aiwainc@aol.com, or visiting www.aiwainternational.org.
Guest Contributor
I was privileged to be able to take three separate courses under Ms. Kebranian at Columbia: two on masterpieces of Western literature, one on diaspora literature. She is a brilliant scholar and teacher. I highly suggest that anyone in the Massachusetts area attend her lecture.