Armenian News Network / Groong
‘The Gardens of Silihdar’
an autobiography by Zabel Yessaian
Armenian News Network / Groong
June 29, 2022
By Eddie Arnavoudian
LONDON, UK
‘The Gardens
of Silihdar’ by Zabel Yessaian
Zabel
Yessaian (1878-1943) was one of the outstanding
Armenian writers of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. Possessed of literary ambitions, when but 12 years old, confident and audacious without prior arrangement she
knocked at the door of well-established woman novelist Srbouhi
Dussap. During what was to be a warm encounter Dussap warned that ‘the male writer can succeed even when
mediocre, the woman cannot.’ Yessaian was not
discouraged. She had both talent and a stubborn will and against all odds she
secured a prominent place in the annals of Armenian literature.
Amidst
Yessaian’s substantial output is the autobiographical
‘The Gardens of Silihdar’. Recalling her first 12
years it was the first part of an intended series that was never to be completed.
Yessayan fell victim to the Stalinist purges of the
1930s. Nevertheless, though slim, ‘The
Gardens of Silihdar’ is remarkable on many levels. In
versatile, often poetic prose the narrative unfolds to skilfully
render graspable those almost intangible processes of individual emotional, psychological and intellectual formation and development.
Against a background of oppression and restraint Yessaian
and her generation experienced, her reminiscences tell of those intricate
stages of a child blooming into a free-spirited, daring, adventurous young
woman preparing to resist and fight to live an emancipated life.
The
social and national context of Zabel Yessaian’s early
years was Istanbul’s substantial Armenian community where she was born. Here
‘The Gardens of Silihdar’ becomes simultaneously a
critical reconstruction of Armenian-Istanbul prior to the 1915 genocide.
Damning descriptions lay bare ugly truths of the community’s iniquitous class
structure, of its arrogant and haughty elites, of its oppressive social and
domestic life, and centrally of the subjugated position of women.
One
recoils when reading of the Church establishment’s savagery as it buried
recalcitrant individuals in dark underground dungeons. In a remarkable moment
describing the appalling reality of schools in a community riven and corrupted
by class inequality and humiliating poverty, Yessaian
writes that ‘at the age of 12 I already knew the external world from within the
world of school’. The accounts that follow are horrific and shocking. One recognises here the same world of Yeroukhan's
short stories, and those too of Dikran Gamsaragan, Levon Pashalian and others that together are indictments of the
rotten core of Istanbul’s Armenian community in which the immense majority
suffered at the hands both of the Ottoman state and the Armenian elites.
But the reader is also exhilarated by tales of
Zabel’s father and of her uncles and aunts who in one way or another defied and
resisted both Ottoman oppression and social and class injustice. The young and
impressionable Zabel is told stories of men rebelling against injustice and
fleeing to the mountains to become freedom fighters. She absorbed accounts of
plebeian smugglers opposing the Ottoman state’s granting of tobacco monopolies
to French firms, a measure that destroyed the livelihood of local producers
(p204-205). Images of contempt for the exploited poor run together with
inspiring recollections of Zabel and her aunt receiving collective solidarity
and generosity from the ‘lower’ classes, solidarity and generosity never
extended by the better off (p257). All this no doubt fell on the fertile soil
of Zabel Yessaian’s rebellious and generous
personality.
Yessaian’s recollections of the plight and subjugation of women in her family and
her neighborhood community are particularly commanding. Her mother was forced
to marry at 14, in part to escape the attention of the savage Ottoman yenicheri soldiers. Yessaian
still remembered times when Armenian women were almost prisoners in their home
and not even allowed to go to Church. Against the restrictions she suffered and
moved by her own radical dispositions, like many young women in similar
circumstances Yessaian dreamt of ‘being a boy, a
bandit, taking refuge in the mountains…fighting for justice (p235).
Here
and throughout, she shows herself uncompromising in demands for women’s rights
and in hatred for poverty, class exploitation and national oppression. And as
she recounts incidents, feelings, 
and reactions she offers a universal radical and
democratic feminism, one that fixes the aspiration for women's emancipation as
part of the collective ambition of all oppressed nations and classes for
emancipation from all injustice.
Growing
up at the fluid intersection of different social classes Zabel Yessaian imbibed a remarkable range of early childhood
impressions. Her family and upbringing brought together men and women from
across the Armenian community’s class spectrum. The detail of these
recollections reveals something of the symbiotic, dialectical relationship
between the formation of individual personality and the 'spirit of the times',
between the outlooks and ideas, the visions and hopes of an age and the stamp
of individual personality, character, and ambition.
In
beautiful clear prose rich with defining detail, one sees how the ‘spirit of
the age’ is passed on and develops through a complex web of personal relations
across families, extended families, and local communities, as well as relations
between Armenian and Turkish communities. It is indeed part of the power of
this volume that progressive or reactionary outlooks and attitudes, indeed the
entirety of the socio-political realities of the day that it so brilliantly
reproduces, emerge sharply as moments of intimate and emotional personal,
individual experience.
Our
times a century on are lit by little hope. But as
Naguib Mahfouz reminds us ‘to despair is to insult the future’, that is to
insult our children and our grandchildren. Yessaian’s
literary legacy can help combat despair, can help us stand firm and have faith
in a future that has been so rampantly endangered by the elites of today who
are the offspring and of a type with the elites criticized in ‘The Gardens of Silihdar’.
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Eddie Arnavoudian
holds degrees in history and politics from Manchester, England, and is ANN/Groong's commentator-in-residence on Armenian literature.
His works on literary and political issues have also appeared in Harach in Paris, Nairi in Beirut and Open Letter in Los Angeles. |
