UCLA’s Armenian Language Professor Hagop Kouloujian’s Diverse Background Gives Students a Unique Perspective on Learning

Christine Kojayan
gaboodig21@yahoo.com

“If you are going to ask me what do I consider myself, whether an Armenian, a Lebanese, an Argentinean, or even an American, I’ll tell you that besides those, I have mainly found solace and refuge in the identity of being an odar, a foreigner.”- Hagop Kouloujian.

That’s where history has taken us, diasporas, and I don’t mean it as a sad or a gloomy place to be. Sometimes even quite the opposite, especially when the noise of racism and arrogant ignorance in the Armenian community gets loose.”

After living in Beirut for 15 years, Hagop Kouloujian moved to Argentina, where his world view was shaped. He completed his undergraduate and graduate studies in Economy and then in Literature.

Books have been his first love since childhood. “The only escape that I have found from books is in periodicals. I’m a voracious consumer of any kind of printed news.

UCLA Western Armenian lecturer Kouloujian has been teaching here since 2004. He claims it to be a very different experience compared to the courses that he taught in Argentina.

Most of his students now are heritage speakers, with different levels of knowledge, “which is a challenge, but also very rewarding” when he realizes that he can ultimately motivate them.

Kouloujian loves the Armenian language & Armenian literature. Although he loves good literature in any language but deeply enjoys Armenian the most.

“Not everything in Armenian literature is enjoyable,” however, he says, and “much of what we loosely define as the canon in Armenian literature is just a little more than nationalistic rapture, propaganda, or both. And when it is not, Armenian literary criticism tends to dress it that way nonetheless. Those who have no nationalistic references, like Aharon, Sarafian, Beledian, and others, are completely ignored, or, in the case of Narekatsi, confined mostly to the religious sphere.”

He wants his students to come out of his classes having accomplished critical thinking skills. He admits that if you can observe critically the texts offered to you, you will be able to seize that which suggests universal significance. It is then that the Armenian language “will give you the ability to connect yourself to humanity’s issues,” and, he says, “it will cease being closed-door family language and will become a place where you can go to enrich yourself.”

When asked about what he takes pride in, he first talks about students who fearlessly venture into speaking on very abstract ideas using their still faulty Armenian, or who come to him for advice, or even credit him for their decisions to change careers. And last but not least, “When I can include in a course reader poems written in my class by former students. How couldn’t you be proud of it?”

Among his favorite Armenian writers are Grigor Narekatsi, Daniel Varujan, Charents, Nigoghos Sarafian, and Krikor Beledian.

When asked about his hopes for the Armenian Diaspora, he wishes that it finally graduates from the “Preservation ideology” (hayapahpanum), and jumps out of the preserve can into creative life. “We have to enhance and enrich culture, instead of endlessly regurgitating one that is one hundred years old,” he says.

Professor Kouloujian is currently involved in Medieval Armenian poetry (Narekatsi, basically); Armenian parallels to Old English epic; Armenian historical narrative; interactions between virtuality, culture, and diasporas; and modern to postmodern Armenian literature in the Diaspora.