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Confronting The Limits Of Culture And Identity In Arpine Konyalian G

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  • Confronting The Limits Of Culture And Identity In Arpine Konyalian G

    CONFRONTING THE LIMITS OF CULTURE AND IDENTITY IN ARPINE KONYALIAN GRENIER'S THE CONCESSION STAND: EXAPTATION AT THE MARGINS

    Asbarez
    May 31st, 2012

    The front cover of the book
    BY TALAR CHAHINIAN

    In her 2011 publication, The Concession Stand: Exaptation at
    the Margins, Arpine Konyalian Grenier sets out to puncture
    rigid formulations of identity that would classify her as an
    Armenian-American poet. As an Armenian born in Lebanon and living and
    producing in the United States, Grenier seeks to dismantle reductive
    formulations of hyphenated identity.

    The Concession Stand consists of eight poetic essays. The collection
    develops a technique of 'over-writing,' in order to highlight the
    under-written - the hidden and [email protected]
    - nature of cultural memory and the over-simplified identities it
    designates. In Grenier's case, over-writing means fusing words with
    overlapping referents and reformulating phrases as slight variants.

    The over-written nature of the collection draws attention to the
    unacknowledged elements of cultural memory by critiquing the language
    that produces and reproduces it, on two levels: broadly, her essays
    problematize language as a system by which we ascribe meaning to the
    world around us; more specifically, her use of language problematizes
    the possibility of a "mother tongue" in a transnational, post-modern
    context. This two-tier critique undermines rigid conceptualizations
    of identity in the Armenian diasporic context, particularly ones
    built around cultural memory and its primary vehicle and repository,
    the Armenian language.

    In order to properly acknowledge the foundational role of language in
    culture, Grenier's poetic essays do not simply describe or recount
    events; particularly in Part 1 of the Book, her essays comprise a
    lyrical event, somehow 'taking place' on the page. By pushing her
    language toward self-reflexivity - to where the word meets itself -
    Grenier attempts to recreate the moment before the word is uttered
    and, according to her, destroyed in the utterance. Hinting at this
    writing process, Grenier writes:

    Words projected unto themselves no longer refer to themselves but to a
    sect of meaning and feeling more essential to language. Consequently,
    commitments based on the logo-centric and the conventional enslave. So
    then, weary of or lacking a conscious desire to attain, one goes
    after the unattainable. Cross, chunk, classify, parse, erase, include
    and exclude. The poem knows more than I do. At some point, however,
    we collide to purge, we change course, adapt. (21)

    Grenier rejects the futile attempt to trace in language the
    relationship between words and their prescribed meanings in
    a supposedly stable and objective world. The attempt enslaves,
    because even recognizing the futility of the search paradoxically
    drives both poet and reader more powerfully toward it. Grenier's
    poetic experimentations draw attention to just that futile search,
    recreating it in its own contorted struggles, enacting a chase that
    leads the word back to itself.

    As the excerpt above suggests, Grenier also takes pains to distinguish
    the poem from the poet, in order to suggest that each works as a
    self-directed actor, carrying out the quest for meaning independently
    of the other. But rather than metaphorically killing off the author as
    a source for meaning in a post-structuralist vein, Grenier reconfigures
    the relationship between author and text as multi-directional, endowing
    each with the ability to make the other adapt and evolve. Ultimately,
    Grenier suggests that language as a system of meaning-making is not
    structurally self-sustaining, and the author, as a person constructing
    language through the poem, is not a sole proprietor of meaning and
    creation. Instead, what we are left with is the simultaneous exchange
    between poem and poet, in language, in the form of the lyrical 'event'
    we see on the page.

    Writing about the poet's role in acknowledging the limits of language
    and participating in its lyric performance, Grenier suggests, "Syntax
    of language breaks at the extremes of experience... Accordingly,
    language happens" (30). This juxtaposition of language's structural
    insufficiency, its inability to exist or mean on its own, with its
    involuntary performance or production highlights Grenier's interest
    in how what comes before the word is uttered and destroyed by the
    confinements its utterance in language imposes on it. Her strategy of
    over-writing allows her to free the word from structural or syntactical
    demands. By defying the demands of speech, grammar and utterance,
    if only momentarily, Grenier's poetic essays seek to express "a sect
    of meaning and feeling more essential to language."

    This attempt to exceed the self-imposed bounds of language and
    expression helps Grenier's writing cross commonly prescribed
    categories. It thus breaks the barriers between prose and verse,
    moves back and forth across languages - infusing English speech with
    French, Turkish, Arabic, Armenian, and Latin words or phrases - blends
    dicta and meditations, mingles textual references and autobiographical
    memories, and most cleverly, creates countless instances of word play.

    The overabundance of allusions and cross-references overwhelms and
    exposes the reader's futile desire for interpretive closure. But in the
    process, the reader also gains authority as a third actor alongside
    author and text, another meaning-maker in the lyric event that is
    Grenier's poetry. By placing us, the readers, at the intersection
    of language and meaning, Grenier's over-writing makes us profoundly
    aware of both the limits and the fluidity of language.

    By contrast, the essays in the second half of the book are more
    concretely autobiographical, focusing on themes of exile, genocide,
    witnessing, mourning, and the Armenian Diaspora's use of identity
    discourse. Ironically, it is precisely through such 'subtractions'
    that Grenier brings the under-written nature of Armenian diasporic
    cultural memory into even sharper focus. For instance, she refers
    to herself at one point as the "messed up offspring of a messed up
    offspring of a messed up survivor" (51). Even in the apparently more
    conventional narratives in the second half of the volume, therefore,
    Grenier traces the trans-generational transference of trauma and
    her family's exilic past to suggest the impossibility of locating a
    pure form of cultural identity, defined by rigid markers such as a
    mother tongue or a singular narrative that ignores cultural contact
    and exchange. She writes:

    I have no mother tongue as my mother tongue has lost me. I implode
    within this loss, seeking the chaos sustaining the world of languages
    with a voice that has the body and place of an absent body, after a
    derivative of the past whereby the new would occur, time and history
    abolished because of what escapes or survives the disintegration of
    experience. (43)

    Grenier describes her lack of a mother tongue as a "loss,"
    ascribing her search for a speaking voice with the remnant of a
    lost and disintegrated experience. As a third-generation survivor,
    she casts her loss as one without origin, an originary traumatic
    experience that has disintegrated over the years. As a result,
    Grenier experiences all attempts to locate her sense of self as
    more than a cultural loss but as a profound, a more fundamental,
    absence. In another stark contrast, Grenier juxtaposes this vague
    sense of absence with the culturally rigid sense of loss, suggesting
    that cultural experiences and constructions are a product of dynamic
    exchange rather than isolated construction.

    Grenier's personal quest to embrace a more dynamic cultural identity
    leads her, in the second half of the book, to Turkey. Not surprisingly,
    the land is marked for Grenier by its contradictory identity as both
    the land of her ancestors and the country Armenian cultural memory
    vilifies. In her most linearly narrated essay, "A Place in the Sun,
    Malgre Sangre," Grenier recounts her experience traveling to Turkey and
    finding proximity and a history of exchange and borrowings between
    the two cultures, Armenian and Turkish. She concludes the essay
    by declaring, "I developed, moving from unknowingly being Armenian
    Turkishly to knowingly becoming American, Armenianly" (68). In coming
    face to face with Turkish culture, she's able to embrace its influence
    over her understanding of Armenian culture. That recognition of
    Armenian culture as historically multi-faceted and dynamic in turn
    allows her to configure her current American cultural coordinates
    under the influence of her Armenian heritage.

    It is through this both personal and lyrical journey that Grenier
    resists the pressures of a different assimilation, reducing her
    cultural identity to presumptive formulations; through the experimental
    writings and explorations in The Concession Stand, Arpine Konyalian
    Grenier rejects an under-written, hyphenated existence, embracing
    instead an over-written, multiple identity.

    Talar Chahinian holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA
    and lectures in the Department of Comparative World Literature at Cal
    State Long Beach. She or or any of the other contributors to Critics'
    Forum may be reached at [email protected]. This and all other
    articles published in this series are available online. Sign up for
    a weekly electronic version of new articles . Critics' Forum is a
    group created to discuss issues relating to Armenian art and culture
    in the Diaspora.

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