Beirut, Genocide and trauma
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Review by Paul Chaderjian
The Daydreaming Boy
By Micheline Aharonian Marcom
Riverhead Books, Penguin Group
Literature crosses into uncharted boundaries with Micheline Aharonian Marcom's genius introspection of the psychology of an Armenian Genocide survivor five decades after the great catastrophe.
More than a just another book, more than just another survivor story, more than scenes and dialogue, "The Daydreaming Boy" is a like prayer, an homage, a poetic mantra of images, thoughts, sounds and feelings. It's a hymn that flows like music, like a waterfall or like a desperate jump into an uncharted ocean of emotions.
"The Daydreaming Boy" sways and lullabies, informs and challenges, races into the past and to the future. It invites the reader into a dream state, where capturing a reader's attention is no longer the object and empathy is not just a longing but a reality. This literary daydream is a collective trance state where art transcends into the transference that takes place on a therapists' couch.
Aharonian Marcom picks up where she left off with her avante guarde "Three Apples," focusing this time on one character, on one place. That place is Beirut in the 60s, a multi-cultural vacation destination full of coastal cafes, bountiful shops, haute couture, economic prosperity and nightlife – all for the taking, a place the reader can revisit or experience for the first time through time travel or the gifted prose of a wordsmith.
Like many of his peers, Aharonian Marcom's character Vahe Tcheubjian has all his physiological needs met – plenty of food, a mid-rise middle class apartment with maid service, abundance of work, a pretty and attentive wife, dinners at restaurants, long strolls along the Mediterranean, fancy desserts and friends.
Missing, however, is Vahe's comfort of mind. Missing is what leaves this middle-aged Armenian a psychological and philosophical cripple, dressed in a fashionable suit and tie but unable to address a violent and traumatic past.
Conceived when his mother is raped by a Turk, Tcheubjian is among those toddlers packed like wild animals into train cars and unleashed into the deprived and inhumane environment of the infamous Bird's Nest refugee orphanage.
The hunger, the cold, the prayers, the savage and brutal traumas inflicted by the orphans on weaker ones, the painful carnal punishments at the hands of teachers, the molestations by those molested all come back to haunt Aharonian Marcom's anti-hero as he reflects on his passage from orphan to businessman, from malnourished to affluent.
Invading Vahe's psyche on a hot and reflective afternoon are his attentive wife, his neighbor's Palestinian servant, his phallic fantasies of domination and sexual triumph, his nightmares of a boy he tormented at the orphanage, thoughts that his ethnicity may have truly died regardless of those who survived to talk about it and a cigarette-smoking chimpanzee Vahe visits on Sundays instead of church.
Reading "The Daydreaming Boy" is surveying with great gratification the remnants and cultural codes of a dehumanizing past that was not quenched by the bounty Beirut offered to a working class in the 60s. Reading this dream is living the good life like Vahe and his wife, trying to make peace with the past and understanding Vahe's unquenchable thirst for validation and healing, a thirst and hunger that may only be satiated through literature like Aharonian Marcom's.
The Daydreaming Boy
By Micheline Aharonian Marcom
Riverhead Books, Penguin Group
Literature crosses into uncharted boundaries with Micheline Aharonian Marcom's genius introspection of the psychology of an Armenian Genocide survivor five decades after the great catastrophe.
More than a just another book, more than just another survivor story, more than scenes and dialogue, "The Daydreaming Boy" is a like prayer, an homage, a poetic mantra of images, thoughts, sounds and feelings. It's a hymn that flows like music, like a waterfall or like a desperate jump into an uncharted ocean of emotions.
"The Daydreaming Boy" sways and lullabies, informs and challenges, races into the past and to the future. It invites the reader into a dream state, where capturing a reader's attention is no longer the object and empathy is not just a longing but a reality. This literary daydream is a collective trance state where art transcends into the transference that takes place on a therapists' couch.
Aharonian Marcom picks up where she left off with her avante guarde "Three Apples," focusing this time on one character, on one place. That place is Beirut in the 60s, a multi-cultural vacation destination full of coastal cafes, bountiful shops, haute couture, economic prosperity and nightlife – all for the taking, a place the reader can revisit or experience for the first time through time travel or the gifted prose of a wordsmith.
Like many of his peers, Aharonian Marcom's character Vahe Tcheubjian has all his physiological needs met – plenty of food, a mid-rise middle class apartment with maid service, abundance of work, a pretty and attentive wife, dinners at restaurants, long strolls along the Mediterranean, fancy desserts and friends.
Missing, however, is Vahe's comfort of mind. Missing is what leaves this middle-aged Armenian a psychological and philosophical cripple, dressed in a fashionable suit and tie but unable to address a violent and traumatic past.
Conceived when his mother is raped by a Turk, Tcheubjian is among those toddlers packed like wild animals into train cars and unleashed into the deprived and inhumane environment of the infamous Bird's Nest refugee orphanage.
The hunger, the cold, the prayers, the savage and brutal traumas inflicted by the orphans on weaker ones, the painful carnal punishments at the hands of teachers, the molestations by those molested all come back to haunt Aharonian Marcom's anti-hero as he reflects on his passage from orphan to businessman, from malnourished to affluent.
Invading Vahe's psyche on a hot and reflective afternoon are his attentive wife, his neighbor's Palestinian servant, his phallic fantasies of domination and sexual triumph, his nightmares of a boy he tormented at the orphanage, thoughts that his ethnicity may have truly died regardless of those who survived to talk about it and a cigarette-smoking chimpanzee Vahe visits on Sundays instead of church.
Reading "The Daydreaming Boy" is surveying with great gratification the remnants and cultural codes of a dehumanizing past that was not quenched by the bounty Beirut offered to a working class in the 60s. Reading this dream is living the good life like Vahe and his wife, trying to make peace with the past and understanding Vahe's unquenchable thirst for validation and healing, a thirst and hunger that may only be satiated through literature like Aharonian Marcom's.
