Reading Labels: In Lieu of an Exhibition Review

2026-03-11 - 08:15

Listen to the AI generated audio article. Your browser does not support the audio element. Ա Armenian-ness, հայութիւն (hayutyun) in Armenian, is an identity that is constantly evolving. It might include language, descent, religion, and culture, and has different connotations for different people. – Curator’s words Here you are at the British Library, this Noah’s ark of books, where every one of the ten million bricks used for the building is “individually handmade”. Your special date, Britanahay Բրիտանահայ: Armenian and British, the temporary exhibition in The Treasures Gallery. Time is suspended, entry is free. It’s semi-dark so the visitors can better forget the immediate world and quicker imagine those others. You cast your eye over the room. Someone is leaning over Shakespeare’s folio in a glass cabinet. Someone else is reading the lyrics to “Strawberry Fields” in John Lennon’s hand-writing. And an elderly man is ogling the Gutenberg Bible. He’s elegant. You spot a Remembrance poppy on his coat lapel. You start reading the captions to this event: This display will explore the contributions of British-Armenians to culture and society at home and abroad. You figure that this implies that for the tens of thousands of British-Armenians like you, home is assumed to be Britain, while Armenia and elsewhere are abroad. Բ It’s rare for your hayutyun to be seen these days. Where you live in middle England, a woman you once met tried to make conversation. Where are you from? she asked. Armenia? Now, I met a Polish lady the other day, is that the same? You laughed, you aren’t petty. Kind of, you said. You understood that she meant, “the other Europe”. Similarly, when you are asked, Is that in the Middle East? you understand: in a way, it is. Or you may hear: It’s part of Russia, isn’t it? Because though 15 different states have emerged from that particular beast, the Soviet Union still equals Russia to many – including academics, judging by the contents (and indices) of their books that hardly make any mention of the peripheral republics. You’ve heard historian Sheila Fitzpatrick say that, for various reasons, until around 1980 there was no entry for “Soviet Union” in the card catalogue of The Library of Congress; it was catalogued as “Russia 1923 on.” As a constituent part of the Soviet Union, did that label apply to Armenia, the predecessor of today’s Republic? A five-hour direct flight away, if they do recognize it, your British acquaintances associate it with “Mount Ararat”, “big earthquake”, “some sort of war with a neighbor”, “old and Christian”, and “the Genocide”. Which is how you see it sometimes. As in, for ideas and events, rather than a set space that is the present speck of land, saved despite much in-fighting, through bloodshed and sheer doggedness, and fixed over a century ago by the conquering and dividing remnants of empires themselves. The Armenia you’re from, your “abroad”, is a reality post-1991. But you still sounded like an alien when you told your boss: There’s a war back home and I can’t concentrate. You didn’t want to elaborate. You’d just heard that your best friend’s kid was in the trenches where Covid was raging and the skies were raining phosphorus. It was before the blockade and the next assault and the displacement that came later. Shakespeare’s country was unfazed that September 27. But you knew she’d believe you if she saw it on the evening news. Writing in the journal of Armenian studies Bazmavep (Բազմավէպ) about Shakespeare’s one mention of Armenia, in Anthony and Cleopatra, Lisa Hopkins (Sheffield Hallam University) writes: “Here Armenia is lumped together with some other places to give a vague impression that it is somewhere in the east. Shakespeare knew more than that, though. He could have seen Armenia represented on the maps by Ortelius and others, and some elements in Othello suggest that he might have heard of Caterina Cornaro, last queen of Cyprus, whose full title was Queen of Cyprus, Jerusalem and Armenia. Above all, he was certainly familiar with Marlowe’s two-part play Tamburlaine the Great. The Tamburlaine plays... are bookended by references to Armenia, which lay as a buffer zone between the two warring powers [Ottoman-Safavid empires] and whose modern capital Yerevan changed hands fourteen times between 1513 and 1757...” In truth, your homeland’s geolocation is a great inconvenience. Armenia is in-between (in the way). It used to be there as well as here, by turns in that bloc and this. It’s at the crossroads of East and West, some say. AI says “South Caucasus”, which is the “geographical border between Western Asia and Eastern Europe.” Here, then, is the context you’ve been moving in. Here you’ve been, attempting self-definition in a set space at a particular time, which is as urgent a task as it is convoluted. One thing is clear: to you, Armenia is everywhere, central and weblike. It’s your beginning, your A, B, C. Գ You count (collect) these special dates in major establishments on the fingers of one hand մի ձեռքիդ մատների վրա . In this building in 2001, Treasures From the Ark: 1700 Years of Armenian Christian Art was held. Because there’s always a background to these occasions, always a hook, more came in the 2010s, for the centenary of the Catastrophe Աղետ. Venice’s Correr Museum staged Armenia: Imprints of a Civilization in 2012; The Bodleian at Oxford organized Armenia: Masterpieces from an Enduring Culture (2015); the Louvre had Armenia Sacra (2015), and The Met ran Armenia! (2019). You saw most of them and have all the glorious catalogues here at home. You detect a difficulty in naming, in choosing specific titles and themes, in seeing Armenia as a now-place rather than simply old and Christian (is sacred the same as dead?), and in covering the period after the 1700s. In seeing contemporary art or society in Armenia of “Russia 1991 on” period, as it were. You wonder if the cultural obscurity you feel personally is a reflection of a political projection. You wonder if the curators have become too fixated on ideas and events rather than the people. Or is it that the ideas and events have become an inventory of clichés? In a 2022 interview, philosopher Ashot Voskanyan considered [ethnic] identity in two ways. Firstly, identity as the path of the Armenian people, “shaped along the way, with all the fat and lean days, with everything it has given us and has taken from us” – a reflective, critical and selective process. Secondly, identity as an undertaking. That is, “identity is something which I say, this is how I am. I declare this is me, ...the way I want to be and so I request to view me as such. This doesn’t mean that right [now] I am already as I state to be, but that is my objective.” Voskanyan was talking to philanthropist and politician Ruben Vardanyan. Դ When you first came to Blair’s Britain, you were you, no hardcore Armenian. Your task, not how to be a British-Armenian but to live as yourself in England. Where it often began with a guessing game about how you got here. Are you Italian? French? Greek? Which? an Englishman says. When you answer, you’re corrected to “double-check”: Romanian? Albanian? Seldom is it a give-and-take, a chat, but an exercise in label-reading. They never ask about Armenia’s painters or musicians, film-makers, astrophysicists, or chess players. They’ve no time, nor should they, for your other worlds, beyond the immediate surroundings. The “placing” exercise is a reflex for making the world familiar, theirs. More a diagram than a dialogue, since the questioner is assumed to be of this soil, air and water հողից, օդից ու ջրից. What could you possibly question about their how-they-got-here? At this aching distance from the actual things familiar, you began hunter-gathering their reflections—conjuring Armenia in English, studying its impressions. You became an identitist—if that’s a word. Quote upon a story upon study upon reference, collected like beach stones found on foreign shores. You sought out mentions of Armenia in the contents (and indices) of books under “orient”, “medieval”, “Cold War” and “Communism”. Photographed any words that provoked memory: Army/Armagnac/Aran/America. Read up on Yousuf Karsh, Van Leo, and others who dominated photography in Istanbul, Egypt and Palestine. Psychoanalysts would have a field day with the Armenians’ “proclivity towards the craft”. Following Armenian footprints, you who is planets away from secret services researched the teenage spy who saved Churchill’s life. You never shared this with your British friends, you’re not ridiculous. That pride is an aspect of hayutyun you dislike. And you speculate, standing here today, what would happen if exhibitions like this examined a quote by one of your favorite Englishmen of letters. In his 1933 memoir, “Down and Out in Paris and London”, presuming the origins of the doorman that he dislikes, George Orwell says: “He called himself a Greek, but in reality he was an Armenian. After knowing him I saw the force of the proverb ‘Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don’t trust an Armenian.’” You’ve found a most amusing story of Armeno-British relations, told through an ancient object. It dates back to the 9th century BC and is kept in Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears’ home. In the summer of 1956, the composer and his partner stayed at the Armenian Composers’ Union in Dilijan with their friends, soprano Galina Vishnevskaya and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. He returned to Aldeburgh from that trip with a present: an Urartian amphora excavated from the area, gifted by Dilijan’s mayor at a lunch in their honor. From Peter Pears’ Travel Diaries: “[T]he mayor announced that he wished to give us a souvenir of ... our visit... and forthwith from under the table, the Museum Curator produced what must have been their museum’s chief treasure... This, of course, left us quite speechless...” This kind of link is rare and vital. It restores continuity in views of Armenia. Because Dilijan is still there, and you can visit it. As pleasing as it sounds, the blurb on the event’s website link announcing that this exhibition explores “over 800 years of British-Armenian communities and interactions,” is not backed up by evidence. The Armenian Community Council of the UK mirrors what other sources say, which is that the British Armenian community dates back to the 18th century. As for interactions, if meant at inter-state level, their history is necessarily choppy: only since 1992 in the most recent phase. Despite its support for the first independent Armenian republic, Britain only granted it de facto recognition, and only in 1920, mere months before it fell to the Bolsheviks. Ե “A diasporic people with an independent homeland (the Republic of Armenia), Armenians have had a profound impact on global culture and history. Some names are well known: Cher, the Kardashians, Aram Khachadurian, Charles Aznavour, Andy Serkis. – Curator’s words You knew that before setting foot here in Britain. In the “History of the Diaspora” lectures at Yerevan State University, you kept hearing about “our compatriots” who had made good outside Armenia, from Los Angeles, Paris and Moscow. Full or part-Armenians, they punched above their weight as pioneers in Hollywood, or in Europe’s café culture, or as French Resistance fighters. Did this counting of percentages of Armenianness, weighing up DNA like chemists make the world familiar, ours? They told you about Arshile Gorky, Michael Arlen, and William Saroyan who refused a Pulitzer and used his Oscar as a doorstop. About Hovsep Emin who lobbied London’s elite circles for Armenian liberation, or his ground-breaking book, published here in England, archived in this library. Often, they were referred to as “our greats” մեր մեծերը. Years later, scarcely any of the names were familiar to your British circle. Those who knew Aznavour didn’t like his music. These days you hate claiming their gifts and achievements. As though they lived for a collective. All of that superficial info massaging our egos, now used as a hook for foreigners, a cognitive aid that makes us culturally significant. Equal? As though they owed anything to us strangers, yes, other Armenians. As though they were citizens of Armenia. Զ When Cher visited Armenia in 1993, you were hardly aware, deep in reviewing for university. It being