Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Play tells story of Armenian Genocide

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Play tells story of Armenian Genocide

    Play tells story of Armenian Genocide

    By Wayne Grady, Kingston Whig-Standard
    Monday, December 22, 2014 8:14:55 EST PM


    Playwright Devon Jackson, who has written a one-act play about the
    Armenian Genocide. (Akhil Dua)

    A few weeks ago I saw Nameless, a mesmerizing one-act play performed
    at the Rotunda Theatre, on the Queen's University campus. Written by
    Devon Jackson, a fourth-year student at Queen's, it is a recounting,
    in some cases a re-enactment, of the atrocities committed by the
    Ottoman Turks against the Armenians 100 years ago. Nearly 1.5 million
    Armenians were exterminated between 1915 and the end of the First
    World War, a carefully planned and executed massacre that, in 1943,
    inspired Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to coin the word "genocide" to
    describe what had happened.

    Jackson wrote the play, he says, because he hadn't heard of the
    Armenian Genocide until he stumbled upon the music of Zulal, a group
    of Armenian singers, and began reading about their background.

    "Something in the women's songs touched me," he says, "and through
    writing I realized that the stories of the Armenian Genocide were
    human stories, part of our collective history as human beings."

    Few of Jackson's contemporaries at Queen's knew of the genocide,
    either, despite the fact that there are more than 50,000 Armenians
    living in Canada, most of them in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. Some
    of Canada's best-known cultural figures have been Armenian: the
    children's singer Raffi; the photographer Yousef Karsh; filmmaker Atom
    Egoyan. Theatre critic and poet Keith Garebian, who has a PhD from
    Queen's and whose father was Armenian, grew up not speaking Armenian
    and knowing little about his family's history.

    "I was exogenous to Armenia," he writes in his memoir, Pain: Journeys
    Around my Parents, "having grown up ignorant of my father's origins
    and language."

    In Nameless, stories of the genocide are told partly through the
    experiences of the four characters -- like Zulal, all women, since few
    men survived the genocide -- and partly through a kind of nonfiction
    narration of the massacre as an historical event. Tolstoy employs the
    same interplay of fiction and history in War and Peace; so does John
    Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath. Jackson is in good company.

    Our apparent mass amnesia of history is dangerous, symptomatic of what
    Quebec novelist Louis Hamelin calls our obsession with the present at
    the expense of the past. In his new book, Fabrications, Hamelin
    worries that the October Crisis of 1970 will fall victim to the
    current trend towards forgetting or even revising history. The October
    Crisis, he writes, "exists outside of the moment, and is therefore
    threatened by our mania for presentism and the conventional treatment
    of history that reduces significant events to a simple compilation of
    actors and dates."

    Jackson, who for a time was taking a double major in drama and
    history, says that it was the conventional treatment of history that
    made him focus more specifically on drama.

    "Whenever I sat in a history class to be lectured at about the dates
    and details of various battles, I'd find myself wondering what the
    people in those battles had been doing three minutes before. I wanted
    to know their stories."

    As Prime Minister Harper has recently pointed out, we're in the middle
    of a five-year period, 2012 to 2017, that spans several important
    historical events: the War of 1812, the beginning of the First World
    War (1914), the 200th anniversary of the birth of Sir John A.
    Macdonald (Jan. 11, 2015), and the 150th anniversary of Confederation
    (July 1, 2017). No mention of the Armenian Genocide. The danger of
    forgetting or denying historical events is that it opens the door to
    someone rewriting what actually happened to tell a different story.
    It's called revisionist history, and it feeds on our collective
    amnesia.

    In their book about the current government's attempt to rewrite
    Canadian history, Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of
    Anxiety, Kingston writers Ian McKay and Jamie Swift suggest that the
    Harper government is actively downplaying Canada's reputation as a
    peacekeeping nation and rebranding Canada as a fiercely militarist
    force, no doubt to smooth the transition of the role of Canadian
    troops in places like Afghanistan. Two years ago, for example, the War
    of 1812 was depicted in government ads as a "seminal" moment in
    Canadian history, when Canadians repelled an "invasion" by American
    armed forces and "won" the war.

    As McKay and Swift point out, the War of 1812 was not a watershed
    moment in Canadian history: there was no "Canada" in 1812; the war was
    between Britain and America, and some of it just happened to have been
    fought on British soil north of the Great Lakes. Other parts were
    fought on the Russian steppes. And neither side won.

    We'll be seeing similarly air-brushed portraits of Sir John A. in
    2015. Heritage Canada has pumped millions of dollars into
    manufacturing an image of Macdonald and the First World War that will
    determine what many future Canadians will know about their own
    history.

    Fortunately, in all the hoopla over Macdonald's bicentennial, an
    effort is being made to include other voices with longer memories:
    Metis and First Nations peoples, for example, who were shunted aside
    in order to ensure that the railroad, not unlike a certain oil
    pipeline, would snake its undisputed way to the West Coast. Last
    month, Metis artist David Garneau spoke at Queen's University's
    "Critical Reflections on Sir John A. Macdonald" symposium, and on Jan.
    10, Kingston's Macdonald Commission has James Daschuk, author of
    Clearing the Plains, as part of a panel discussion about Sir John A.
    to be held in Kingston Frontenac Public Library's central branch.

    Devon Jackson's play is part of a wider movement to ensure that our
    collective amnesia is corrected. Because when we forget history, we
    aren't merely condemned to relive it, we are condemned to relive
    someone else's version of it. Whether it's a genocide that took place
    in another country a hundred years ago, or a revolution that took
    place in Canada 45 years ago, we should all be concerned about any
    attempt to deny or re-write our past in order to make history appear
    to justify a government's own social or political agenda.

    As Devon puts it, "It's one thing to know that something happened, but
    another to know what happened."

    Wayne Grady is a Kingston writer whose novel Emancipation Day has
    recently appeared in paperback.

    http://www.thewhig.com/2014/12/22/play-tells-story-of-armenian-genocide


    From: Baghdasarian
Working...
X