“Come hither, poor and gentle folk, / Lend an ear and listen well. / A wandering bard from distant parts, / A wondrous tale will I tell.” — The Capture of the Fortress of Tmuk, Hovhannes Tumanyan

“The Shakespeare of Armenia”: This is how Hovhannes Tumanyan was first described to me by an Armenian bookseller. She held in her hand a slim white book — a collection of his stories and poems — and convinced me to buy it. I was not disappointed.

Like a child, Tumanyan regaled me with stories of heroes like David of Sassoun, of fallen kingdoms, pharaohs, village fools and buffoons. He wrote of talking fish and peasant boys named Kikor or Neso. He has a whimsical streak in his prose (“We were a group of village children — all friends. There was no school, no lessons, no education. Left as we were entirely to our own devices we did nothing but play together all the time. How we played!” he writes in one short story called “My Friend Neso”). As Levon Hakhverdian writes in the preface of the book (“Hovhannes Toumanian: A Selection of Stories, Lyrics, And Epic Poems”), Tumanyan belongs to all ages, “from early childhood to venerable old age.”

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“The Armenian reader finds it as difficult to recollect his first meeting with [Tumanyan] as his early infancy,” Hakhverdian writes. “He first heard him on his mother’s knee, then as soon as he had learned his ABC[’s], read them himself and gradually entered [Tumanyan’s] poetic world.”

And it is this that most grabbed me about Tumanyan: his poetic world. It is suffused with feeling, the type of poetry that would accompany you into adulthood. In the way that poets like June Jordan or Audre Lorde take the complicated histories of Black Americans into understandable, tender prose, Tumanyan does that for the Armenian people. 

One poem in particular stood out to me in the wake of Nagorno-Karabakh’s fall (which led to the scattering of thousands of Armenian refugees). In “In The Armenian Mountains,” he writes: “The way was heavy and the night was dark, / And yet we survived / Both sorrow and gloom. / Through the ages we go and gaze at the stark / Steep heights of our land – / The Armenian Highlands.” 

How would Armenians fleeing the fall hear this poem? Would it ring true to their loss? 

For those who are not Armenian (like me), the history of Armenia seems dauntingly large. A quick search online will show that before Nagorno-Karabakh’s fall, a long history of imperial domination dotted by pogroms and genocide plagued Armenians under Turkish and Russian rule respectively. Nagorno’s fall is a new chapter in their history. 

In the blurriness of war and grief, a certain clarity can be sought not in the expert or pundit with their facts and debates, but in the artist, who acts as a “spiritual historian.” As James Baldwin puts it, the spiritual historian’s role “is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like to be alive.” 

I am not Armenian, but to a certain extent, I can translate their pain into terms I understand. Because I see the fall, and I remember, disturbingly, the story of the Bud Dajo massacre in 1906, when American soldiers murdered more than a thousand of my people, Moros from Maranao, near the crater of the volcano. Only six survived, a 99% casualty rate, comparable to massacres at Wounded Knee or My Lai. 

I am not Armenian, but I can understand the tender feelings one gets in the chest upon being confronted by the murders of their people. I understand the numbing of the heart, the dissociation of the head and how listless your tongue can feel in the face of tragedy. I understand anger, and it is this pain that Tumanyan touches, the same pain that compels Americans to burn their country in the face of injustice. Sometimes there is no way to go but down. 

“Who knows the place where we’ve landed, / For how many days are we stranded? / When our hearts are empty, when love is gone, / ‘Tis in a fire we’ve landed.” This is one of Tumanyan’s many unnamed quatrains that he wrote in 1917. This is two years after the start of the 1915 Armenian Genocide, one of the most devastating in human history, with the Ottoman Empire killing between 600,000 to 1,500,000 Armenians before the end of World War I. You can’t fathom numbers like that. But you can understand the cry of Kikor’s mother in one of Tumanyan’s stories, who begs her husband, Hambo, to keep their child safe: “‘I don’t want to throw my innocent child into that unjust world,’ she wept. But Hambo would not heed her.”

How many of Kikor’s mothers have we ignored? How many Hambos will we heed? We turn to poets to understand tragedies because they can turn pain into grief in the same way life turns air into breath. We can only understand the grief of others if we ourselves are willing to succumb to it, and there is no gentler way than poetry and art to succumb and understand. Even when it’s painful, poetry nourishes. This is what Tumanyan reminds us to do, from childhood to adulthood: to feel, and if needed, to grieve.

Shane Dimapanat is a junior writing about not-talked-about-enough, obscure media that should be culturally accessible. Their column, “Uncultured,” runs once a month on Thursdays.