Minority in Multi Ethnic Cities Part 1
Throughout history, were born with a lot of multi-ethnic cities. Their fates have developed differently, as the fate of citizens. What will be the future of the current multi-cultural metropolises, the future of minorities, diasporas? In connection with the 20-th anniversary of the genocidal acts against the Armenian population of Baku there is a need to return to the topic and address these issues to be considered in the context of general laws.
Over the past 20 years, a lot of material was contributed to the development and prosperity of Armenians in the city of Tbilisi and Baku. As usual, these materials are very emotional, even if you attract a lot of meticulously gathered facts. For all the justified feelings, it is important to look at things and other more rational views, because we must not only pay tribute to the memory, but to draw conclusions for the future. Speaking about the whole spectrum of phenomena – from discrimination and the appropriation of Armenian heritage to the pogroms and massacres – it is important to understand the rule. In the life of human communities it is the norm – it is not a moral ideal, copied from the personal, it is necessary and inevitable features of reality. Putting an end to idealize the usual state of affairs, we are not devaluing the scale of crimes.
Speaking of genocide and genocidal acts in human history, including the events in Sumgait, Kirovabad, Baku, should distinguish them as a crime not on the false standards of “friendship of peoples”, their “peaceful and happy co-existence”, which existed only in our minds of naive and the norm of permanent rivalry, conflict, struggle, which, at least, do not turn into open persecution, plunder, across-the physical destruction. All that we know the history of mankind – a continuous, obvious or hidden conflict communities in the fight for all sorts of resources. Not always, but often it is a struggle of ethnic groups, peoples, nations. Due to various circumstances, the Armenian’s heart craved, and still yearns deceived foreign idyll “international” in Tbilisi, or even some courtyards, where they are all closer to each other than relatives, Baku, or even some of the boulevards, where the carefree stroll “children of different nations . No wonder that the Armenians had so ardently proclaimed by the Bolsheviks internationalism. But all we had to sometimes include the head and realize that for anyone, the most peaceful and colorful building an underlying struggle of communities for tangible and intangible resources continues every hour and every minute. This struggle is an eternal instinct of any ethnic community, like instinct, manager ants in the nest, the bees in the hive, locusts in the sky. This is a necessary feature that creates community and supports its integrity, and not the presence of talented people able to write poetry, paint with oil, to play music or play movies. Extinction of this collective instinct means an extreme degree of senility, falling into a lethargic sleep, which often ends in death, than a new awakening for an active life.
Exit out of the fight, the refusal of her mean surrender to someone else’s mercy and merciful, this “mercy” does not exist. For international idyllic courtyards and seaside boulevard Armenians in the Soviet cities as Baku, Tbilisi and others, by themselves, and felt no discomfort from the quiet and constant reallocation of resources to cover the community, yet another particular episode did not affect the person or someone from his relatives. This is a sign of collective lethargy – a loss of sensitivity to external influences.
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Armenian Poetry Part 1
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Red Pomegranate $197.90 This controversial 1969 film directed by rebellious Russian filmmaker Sergei Paradzhanov (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors) chronicles the life of the 18th-century poet Sayat Nova, but in a most unconventional way. Paradzhanov seeks to portray the poet by different actors at various stages of his long life, from a poor childhood working on farms through early celebration as a poet to his self-impose… |
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Vilkas $0.99 Vidas Mykolas’ parents came to America as World War II refugees from Lithuania. The poems in Vilkas are about street prostitutes in St. Petersburg Russia, the Armenian Holocaust and stickball, reviving dead brothers, Caligula eating pearls, mythical wolves in the primeval forests of the Baltic, dumpster diving, White Nights, ravaged family cemeteries, Disneyworld in the despair and hope of Eastern… |
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Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir $4.88 The author of four volumes of verse, Peter Balakian writes with the precision of a poet and the lyricism of a privileged suburban child in 1950s New Jersey. He is shadowed by his relatives’ carefully guarded memories of past trauma: the brutal Turkish extermination in 1915 of more than a million Armenians, including most of his maternal grandmother’s family. Balakian seamlessly interweaves p… |
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The Armenian Watchmaker $15.00 Poetry. “In this collection of deeply felt poems–fine-tuned and beautifully rendered–Carroll Kearley constructs watches of great intricacy and accuracy whose hands point to the temper of the tragic times we call the twentieth century…. At the beginning of TTHE ARMENIAN WATCHMAKER the poet promises to set no more fires. He spends the rest of the book setting fires. His fires leave no ashes, onl… |
