Revisioning Gendered Reality in
Armenian Women’s Life Writing of the Post-Genocidal Era:
Zaruhi Kalemkearian’s From the Path of My Life
Maral Aktokmakyan
6.2
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Zaruhi Kalemkearian (1874-1971), poet, writer, feminist, activist and public worker, was an Armenian intellectual who left her country for New York in 1921 for fear that Kemalist forces would enact further massacres (Ekmekcioglu 50). Presiding over various charitable institutions, including the Armenian Red Cross and Patriotic Armenian Women’s Society, Kalemkearian was one of the figures in her community who gained political agency via her participation in the task of recovering a nation and her social and political visibility was not limited to the active role she played in her society. She had reason to fear repercussions. With her autobiographical work, she also contributed to the emergence of a discursive terrain of Armenian women’s life-writing (diaries, letters, memoirs and autobiographies). Click here to continue reading.
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Regimes of Reality:
Of Contemporary Indian Nonfiction and its Free Men
Manisha Basu
6.2
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What is important is not just that A Free Man is the story of two men rather than one, but that it is the story of two men from opposite ends of the spectrum of opportunity in Delhi. These “ends,” marked as they are by positions of advantage and relative powerlessness, ostensibly moved further apart from each other as the spectrum was stretched almost to breaking point by economic, political, and socio-cultural changes. Given their progressively polarized locations in such a context, it goes without saying that Mohammad Ashraf and the journalist Sethi-persona of A Free Man inhabit and navigate entirely different realities and Sethi’s work undoubtedly makes these schismatic realities clear. However, the strength of the text lies not simply in its awareness that the turn of the century Indian context is pockmarked by myriad perceptions of what counts as real, all crisscrossed by asymmetrical accesses to power. Instead the remarkable potency of Sethi’s work unfolds when the distinct realities of Ashraf and Sethi brush up against one another, push into another, and wrap around one another, and in doing so destabilize established power differentials. Such destabilization brings up questions, the likes of which we have encountered before: which of these two men is authorized to speak on behalf of reality and by whom? What institutions of knowing enable them to cognize different realities? Are they empowered to understand reality as an artifice? How are their constructions of reality sustained and/changed when the technologies for recording what counts as real transformatively shape the very experiences they are committed to represent? Click here to continue reading.
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Telling Tales: Bearing Witness in Jennifer Fox’s The Tale
Stefanie El Madawi
6.2
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As the keystone of the creative process of self-witness, the essay is the autobiographical artifact that galvanized Fox’s testimonial enquiry, as indicated by the title-card at the film’s end, which reads: “Based on ‘The Tale’ written by Jenny Fox, age 13” (1:49:03). Though ‘The Tale’ was written as a scholastic creative writing assignment, the first-person narrative retains the essayistic posture of introspection, articulating first-hand experience within a progressive and evaluative framework. The essay’s totemic presence within the film serves as a reminder to the viewer that the film is the product of real-world self-witness, further underscored by Fox’s retention of her own name for the central character (Laura Dern)—a deliberate decision intended to authenticate the testimonial pedigree of the film. On the film’s official website, Fox attests, “By leaving the Jennifer character’s name as mine, I am there to tell [naysayers], ‘no, this really happened. And yes, I did really feel ‘love’ for these people as they robbed me of my trust and betrayed and hurt me’”. Fox’s use of her name is a prophetic gesture that inscribes autobiographical intent, but also serves to counter the pervasive cultural doubt that beleaguers the disclosure of sexual violence. In her book Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives, life-writing scholar Leigh Gilmore contends that in contemporary culture, the inherent truth claim of female testimony is often questioned, as a consequence of pervasive patriarchal discourses of power within testimonial settings. Though not completely exempt from this cultural bias, Gilmore argues that “Autobiography is more flexible than legal testimony” as it allows women to exploit “its literary elasticity to assert legitimacy” (9). By positing an autobiographical document at the center of the cinematic discourse, and designating a nominal avatar as representative of the autobiographical “I”, Fox is able to command the contractual invitation of autobiography to reinforce The Tale’s testimonial efficacy. Click here to continue reading.
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Narrative, Nonfiction, and the Nuclear Other:
Western Representations of Chernobyl in the Works of
Adam Higginbotham, Serhii Plokhy, and Kate Brown
Inna Sukhenko and Anastasia Ulanowicz
6.2
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The purpose of this essay, then, is to demonstrate how three recent works of non-fiction authored by Western journalists and scholars—Adam Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl (2019), Plokhy’s Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe (2018), and Kate Brown’s Manual For Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (2019)—resist “great man” modes of historiography in order to expose the underlying structural causes and consequences of the Chernobyl disaster. Insofar as they do so, these texts also posit Chernobyl as an event—a literal and figurative historical flashpoint—that was at once an effect of the Cold War and a cause of its conclusion. And yet, although the three studies uphold the central thesis that the massive and unwieldy “Soviet system itself” was largely responsible for the Chernobyl event and in turn the unravelling of the Cold War, they nevertheless arrive at this conclusion through discrete narratives and notably different methodologies. Journalist Higginbotham’s largely omniscient and chronological account of the catastrophe focuses primarily on the consequences of post-1970’s era Soviet “gigantomania” and the subsequent influences of Western “hard” and “soft” diplomacy in mitigating the disaster; Ukrainian-American scholar Plokhy’s history of the event, explicitly framed by the perspective of a [post-] Soviet emigré, calls attention to how “eco-nationalist” movements that emerged within the post-Chernobyl Soviet Union contributed to its implosion; and environmental historian Kate Brown’s own narrative places into relief her immediate position as an American scholar-traveler in order to expose the relationship between a socio-geographically localized event and Cold War-era nuclear policies that at once were contained by and transgressed geo-political borders. Read together, these three Western works of non-fiction offer a prismatic image of Chernobyl’s spatio-temporal role in the proceedings of and ultimate conclusion to the Cold War. Moreover, and just as crucially, these texts also progressively unsettle overdetermined, triumphalist Western narratives of the Cold War that dwell exclusively on the failures of Soviet nuclear ventures and thus posit the USSR as the West’s “nuclear Other.” Click here to continue reading.
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