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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
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