Expanding Students’ Minds: Sex and Armenian Literature

Shahane Martirosyan
shahanem@ucla.edu

Let’s talk about sex. No, let’s not talk about Kim Kardashian’s sex tapes, but about sex as a discourse wildly existent in Armenian literature and reality, yet ironically, subsequently ignored and unrepresented within scholarly discourse or in people’s lives. I have anxiously been wanting to write this particular article for the past four to five months, since the day I witnessed the amazement of a class full of Armenian-American after reading one of Hovhannes Shiraz’s poems. Recently, I was covering a literary evening headlined by Krikor Beledian, where he discussed a sex scene from one of Levon Shant’s masterpieces titled “The Woman”. This is when I was awakened, and given the courage to actually write this piece.

Beledian examines Shant’s Woman:
While the scene from Virgil’s Aeneid where Dido and Aeneas make love in a cave, as the author metaphorically and symbolically illustrates, has become one of the most assessed scenes in Western literature by scholars everywhere, scholars have strayed away from discussing sexual relations vividly present in many Armenian classic literature. Thus, it was a particularly interesting evening at Glendale Public Library on January 31, when Professor Krikor Beledian delivered a lecture about Levon Shant’s The Woman, concentrating on the sexual connotations present in the novelette.

Professor Beledian, who teaches Armenian studies at the Université Catholique de Lyon and the Institut national de langues et civilisations orientales in Paris, is a leading figure in Armenian letters. The lecture was organized by the Hamazkayin Western Region Committee and the Glendale Public Library and was titled, “The Artist and His Model: Analysis of Levon Shant’s Literary Work.” The event brought together Armenian scholars, professors, and literature lovers for a very unusual evening.

The Woman is about a painter living in Munich and a woman he meets at the opera. She agrees to sit for a painting. After the painting is completed, the woman is in the painter’s room - Suren’s room - the author tries to convey that the woman tells the painter that she loves him. In return, Suren tells her that he loves her as a muse. This is when the woman cuts the painting with a knife and leaves him. He goes to look for her in her hometown. He never finds her. He patches the painting back together and presents it as an exhibit titled “The Woman.”

The scene in the book when the woman goes into the painter’s bedroom is symbolic, for it suggests that the painter and the model had made love. In Shant’s illustration, the room has a fire in the background, a fully made table, and a bed. The woman places a wreath on the painter’s head. All of these objects represent marriage and sexual relations between the two characters, Beledian argued.

Beledian reviewed the views of other literary critics about the novelette: the great literary critic Hagop Oshagan, as well as Krikor Shahinian and Nichol Akhbarian.

According to Beledian, Oshagan was not a big fan of Levon Shant’s. Oshagan criticized Shant’s The Woman as little more than a love story between an artist and his lover, in which the protagonists do not complete their love story.

Krikor Shahinian found that a woman cannot be whole on her own; she needs a man to complete her. Nichol Akhbarian, according to Beledian, had a preconceived notion regarding the relations between men and women; for him, men create art and women inspire art. He also believed that the characters in the novelette were not real, but fictitious. Looking at the novel from the painter’s point of view, Akhbarian saw sex as a threat to art.

Beledian maintained that these critics never addressed the woman’s cutting the painting as a sexual act, which just happens to be the climax of the novel.

I take what Beledian said as a note that Levon Shant was more of a realist. It may not even fit in the context, the reality part, but in reality, in the real world that we live in “Romeo & Juliet” ‘till death do us part, I shall honor thee,’ does not often exist. What would be more real is the poem discussed in Anahid Keshishian’s Armenian language class (at UCLA) I had referred to above.

Shiraz and sex:
In one of his untitled poems, Shiraz explicitly writes about impregnating a bunch of virgins (He was a nationalistic man, he wanted to sow his royal oats in order to expand the Armenian race. No really, I’m not making this up, he explicitly states in the poem that he wants to spread his seeds.) After reading this poem out loud in class, the students began, one by one, stating their ideas of what Shiraz meant metaphorically. All agreed that he was not talking about infidelity when he spoke of sex with women other than his wife. In fact, they found that even the notion of sex would be out of question in the piece.

Proceeding the students’ reactions, Keshishian began talking about relations between men and women contemporary to Shiraz, and how they dealt with one another. She mentioned women whose husbands were not faithful, yet the women accepted this. And this was common, and still is common in our society on some level. It is surprising, of course, that our generation finds it controversial.The classroom had two such moments: The first one was when many of the students were furious over Shiraz’s infidelity followed by a disappointing sigh in the room exclaiming the sorrow for the women who had to endure such men. The second surprise of the class was the fact that Shiraz actually wrote about sex. Most of the students thought that he was writing about his love for the country, our nation, our people, etc. When in fact Shiraz did not really stray far from explicitly mentioning sexual relations.

The reason why we are shocked that Shiraz’s writing contained sex is because we refuse even state the word. Sex. There is a diligent notion of shame that comes with the idea of making love because it is practically embedded in many Armenians that discussion of sexual relations is dirty, improper, inappropriate, and so on. Hence, it is understandable why first, we do not discuss it, second, why we are caught off guard at the realization that our literature contains nuances of sexual relations. After all, isn’t Shiraz our literary God? But that’s off topic, sorry.

I want to conclude with just a little suggestion. Let’s open our eyes and let’s embrace our literature and who we are as a whole. Let’s not pick and choose what we want to accept as part of our culture. Literature can be a good place to start, but it’s definitely not the last area to explore.