One Country, One Book — Armenia

Despite a return to obscure book territory, there were a number of available books under the label “Armenian literature in translation”. There appears to be a foundation that promotes translation, and perhaps this is why so many Armenian books are available.

Raffi, aka Hakob Melik Hakobian, was a late 19th century author who has had many books translated into English posthumously. I read this biographical detail about him when researching which book to choose, but I kept thinking of him as an author from a much earlier time period. I could easily have believed that he was writing about Medieval events. Many of the books on this list so far have contained accounts of foreign cultures and foreign wars, but this was more like a particularly brutal fairy tale.

Raffi is one of the few authors thus far who did not have a foreign college education. He taught language and history but only had a secondary education. He traveled all throughout Armenia and became alarmed at how passive the Armenians were against Turkish and Kurdish violence. He wrote Jalaleddin to encourage them to defend themselves. His concerns proved prophetic, and the Armenian genocide started 37 years after this book was written.

As a story, Jalaleddin is very short with broadly drawn characters. A decade ago, I might have considered the Muslim sheikh over the top, a Disney villain, but his rhetoric might be admired by ISIS. “The Lord loves the flowing blood of the holy faith’s enemies,” he says in a speech encouraging his followers to war. However, Raffi later makes a point of mentioning that there were also “many kind and decent Kurds” and creates a Kurdish character who tries to convince a group of Armenians to arm and defend themselves, as well as a Yazidi Kurd who is a longtime friend of the protagonist. There is no happy resolution, as the Armenians refuse to fight, and it’s evident that past the story’s ending that the sheikh will continue to kill them.

This falls squarely into the category of native author writing for native audience, but the story is strikingly unsubtle. Despite telling a fictional story, it’s not exactly a novel. Out of all the countries so far, Armenia’s culture is the hardest to imagine based on its book. Some cultures portrayed in their country’s literature feel very foreign, but imaginable (albeit probably in a fantastical and inaccurate way). I have no idea what anything in Armenia is like. I read a comment recently that American Christians aren’t overly concerned with Christians in Armenia and similar parts of the world because they follow a sect that’s so foreign to Americans that it might as well be another religion altogether. Armenia has recently been in the news for a flare-up of violence with Azerbaijan, another country that I know little about (but is coming up soon, as it also starts with ‘A’). According to Wikipedia, they have good international relations with Russia and Iran. This project has been a success so far in at least making me more aware of countries I had previously known little about.