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Art And Atrocity

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  • Art And Atrocity

    ART AND ATROCITY

    Targeted News Service
    April 24, 2013 Wednesday 2:57 AM EST

    BURLINGTON, Vt.

    The University of Vermont issued the following news:

    Senior George Krikorian has stories, the kind, he says, that don't lose
    their impact with retelling from one generation to the next. At the
    urging of his adviser, Major Jackson, Richard Dennis Green and Gold
    Professor of English and recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship,
    Krikorian has been recording and transcribing hours of oral history
    from his grandmother, a first-generation American whose parents
    survived the Armenian Genocide.

    "It was a brutal slaughtering of people," Krikorian says. "You
    can still feel all of the emotion and pain." Yet, he explains,
    it requires a level of emotional removal to craft the details into
    the kind of poems that won him this year's Benjamin B. Wainwright
    Prize for poetry. "Krikorian's work has a certain level of gravitas,"
    Jackson says. "It is some of the best writing that I have encountered
    since I started teaching here at UVM."

    April 24 commemorates the night in 1915 that ushered in the Armenian
    Genocide by the Turkish government. The following work by Krikorian
    puts the images that live within the lives of families into words:

    Hazel Remembers the Massacres

    1.

    Oh, it was awful I guess.

    Throats cut, sons beheaded--

    Boys were butchered like lambs

    for kebab, the unborn held high on a sword,

    pulled from the belly of the mother.

    That's the easy part though, the rest looms

    like a fever in the cold.

    Women were lined like a slaver's bazaar

    single-file, naked with nothing but coins

    in their uterus. That should have been enough,

    but the Turks needed more,

    they danced them like dervishes

    set wild aflame, or like Araxi to Zorab

    she'd become their whore,

    so long as she was alone in the world.

    2.

    There are a lot of underground places in Armenia

    where the people could speak

    in their native tongue. It was forbidden

    so they hid beneath their homes

    to share secrets

    as though they were still alive.

    Cousin Baidzar, sweet quidg, awoke

    to mordant blindness like she was tied

    in an ungovan blanket. Bodies tumbled

    like a gourd pile all around her, the sun

    a broker of sight on her mother's last embrace.

    She walked away like a whisper of the dead,

    her earlobes cut wet for their gold.

    3.

    Past the Turkish border was a promise

    like the Holy Land that curdled in the stomach

    and browned. Forty years were never so cruel

    as the caravan of lies left drying

    like figs in the Syrian desert.

    They were torn from their mountain like skin from bone,

    ever marching to a place that was nothing

    to end like dogs starving on their own wails.

    After a hundred years, words

    are all that's left.

    By Lee Ann Cox, [email protected]

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