Splintered Loves, Splintered Selves

Raffi Joe Wartanian reviews Nancy Agabian’s “The Fear of Large and Small Nations.”

By Raffi Joe WartanianAugust 14, 2024

• Fiction

AT THE BUSTLING Vernissage flea market in the heart of Armenia’s capital of Yerevan, artisans offer soaps, rugs, and chess sets. What catches the attention of Na, the protagonist of Nancy Agabian’s autobiographical novel The Fear of Large and Small Nations (2023)—a recent bronze medalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year and a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction—is a stand selling “100 [percent] Armenian Blood.” The merchant showcases vials, brochures, statements of authenticity, and price points. 

The sight of this seller compels Na to consider the blood coursing through her own veins. Na is the 38-year-old granddaughter of survivors of the Armenian Genocide who relocated to the United States, where Na was born and raised. Internally, she feels great pride and connection with her Armenian identity. Yet because she was not raised speaking her native tongue, she is more comfortable with English. Because of the way she speaks Armenian—a reflection of her family’s migratory history—locals in Yerevan question Na’s cultural belonging. Othered by her own, she takes a stab at redemption via the blood stand. Rolling up her sleeve, she prepares to sell her blood as “a memento that tourists can take home with them from Hayastan,” concluding that “at least I’ll know I’m Armenian.” 

Na thus thinks she can finally prove her Armenianness, even if the way she affirms her identity will eclipse her agency in the process. Her blood becoming a market commodity only furthers the notion that identity relies on external validation—in this case, within the performative confines of an extractive market that undervalues the commodities it sells. The consequences of this approach unfold throughout the narrative as Na navigates layers of her past and present to chart a more empathic and empowered future. 

The autobiographical story follows Na (a.k.a. Natalee), an Armenian American writer who receives a Fulbright grant to teach in the Republic of Armenia starting in the fall of 2006. The independent post-Soviet republic should represent a homecoming for her, but the country’s history of violence has hindered such possibilities. Na’s homeland lies in Western Armenia, a vast territory where millions of Indigenous Armenians lived for millennia before the genocide carried out by the Ottoman Turks starting in 1915. To this day, Turkey’s government denies that the genocide ever occurred, and since denial is the final step of genocide, the violence of erasure persists to this day.

As the Armenian Genocide progressed, up to 1.5 million Armenians were murdered, and hundreds of thousands of others fled as refugees. Some migrated south toward the Levant, others west toward Europe and the Americas, and a smaller portion went east toward the present Republic of Armenia. Given this context, the idea that Na’s journey could be a homecoming is complicated by the genocidal history that fragmented her native land.

The lingering presence of this history may account for Na’s struggle to enjoy a sense of belonging in Armenia. “I somehow assumed that in the one place where people know where and what Armenia is, my ethnicity would not be questioned,” she muses. “Instead, I am told that I’m not who I think I am.” This contradiction undermines Na’s sense of belonging in a place that should feel welcoming, and the accompanying alienation—and the impulse to overcome it—drives Na as she navigates an enigmatic inheritance. 

To reflect this sense of a splintered self, Agabian deftly deploys a blended narrative that tells Na’s story across four distinct, interconnected planes: journal entries, blog posts, meta-writing in the first person, and third-person storytelling. These planes shift modality and perspective, allowing Agabian to expand the story’s timeline and Na to speak about the unfolding events from both the present and the future. This disjointed mosaic parallels the fractured and prismatic identity that Na navigates as a woman caught between being an American and being an Armenian, as well as between attraction toward both men and women. The formal layers also reflect the layering of thought with which Agabian enriches her project, approaching the material as an anthropologist, an analyst, a critic, a teacher, and a student. Finally, the novel’s form depicts a fragmentation of self in the face of domestic violence, an issue Na confronts through her relationship with a bisexual punk rocker named Seyran.

With an insatiable appetite for art and chaos, Seyran is a 21-year-old born and raised in Armenia who is avoiding conscription into a military infamous for abusing those who present anything other than the cisgender archetype. A dynamo of exuberance and lust, Seyran becomes Na’s muse, a return to youth imbued with the possibility of an Armenian love. The notion that their relationship might resolve a fraught identity is mutual, as Seyran sees in Na an opportunity to escape Armenia and gain American citizenship through marriage. Their intertwined pursuit of salvation is complicated by the fact that saviors often become entangled in the problems they seek to help others escape.

In this case, Seyran’s salvation becomes Na’s prison. Seyran’s move from Armenia to America only serves to deracinate him, propelling him to unconsciously reenact his childhood experience of abuse, gaslighting, and hypocrisy. Seyran’s dark side emerges when he arrives in New York City and Na becomes the unwitting target of traumas that echo the trials and triumphs of the Armenian nation.

Agabian’s blended narrative parallels, for Armenian Americans, the sense of past and present being in perpetual dialogue. Cultural inheritance morphs through generations of displacement and assimilation in a new setting—the United States, the global empire that, as a Fulbright scholar, Na herself represents. At its best, this representation includes cultural exchange, diplomacy, and the strengthening of democratic norms—though these ideals may cloak the implicit values of a hegemon’s realpolitik. The novel’s time frame moves from 2006 to 2011, during the militarized aftermath of 9/11 as wars were manufactured, reality television blurred boundaries between fact and fiction, and the subprime mortgage crisis collapsed a global economy awash in corporate greed. During this period, the fallacies of American exceptionalism were on full display. 

The doublespeak of American foreign policy lurks over Na’s journey, just as it did over the rollout of Agabian’s novel last year. As the American government trumpeted global democracy’s defense of Ukraine against autocratic Russia, the fascist petrostate in Azerbaijan began a blockade on the Republic of Artsakh (a.k.a. Nagorno-Karabakh) that culminated in the ethnic cleansing of over 100,000 Indigenous Armenians. Since Armenia and Artsakh are democracies, and Russia supported Azerbaijan’s efforts, one would assume that the United States’ vociferous defense of democracy in Europe would lead to some constructive intervention in the crisis. Yet the US stood mostly silent. With the support of Turkey and Israel, Azerbaijan continues its genocidal project, distorting history to justify further military intervention, and creating the conditions to erase the Armenian people. With the land they have captured, Azerbaijan is destroying the ancient architectural and material culture that serves as a testament to the millennia of Armenian presence. A new generation of refugees has been left to process an unfathomable trauma that will resonate for decades.

These problems of the global order manifest at the human level through mass displacement, poverty, and social fragmentation. For Na, her identity as the granddaughter of Armenian Genocide survivors means inheriting the burden of intergenerational trauma and an unreckoned crime. Considering this issue early in the novel, Na writes, “As the granddaughter of a genocide survivor, who knows all the stories of rescue and survival, who has been taught how precious every single Armenian life is, how am I going to build up my American boundaries to turn a young Armenian out?” Agabian demonstrates how, for the descendants of survivors, the legacy of genocide can influence the choices made about what to do, where to live, and whom to love. The survivor’s guilt lingers for decades. Na’s willingness to help Seyran, and to repeatedly forgive his unconscionable, abusive transgressions, are central to this complex. Armenian Genocide survivors and their descendants are confronted by constant dehumanization.

Na’s awareness of such conflicts is a hallmark of her narrative presence throughout the text. Her ability to interrogate her own choices gives the novel a level of insight that is admirable and revelatory. Yet this insight can also generate frustration. Shouldn’t someone so self-aware be able to make more empowering choices? As Agabian skillfully demonstrates, self-awareness does not equal appropriate action. Rather, each step becomes a grueling tangle of internal and external contradictions that force us to face our imperfections. For Na, her fraught relationship with Armenia complicates her ability to distance herself from Seyran, who “is all wrapped up in Armenia for [her], in trying to understand that rough and troubled place.” This probing confession raises the question of whether their relationship could have worked if Na had been from Armenia herself, or Seyran from the United States. Is their strife a function of the realities of war and migration, projected onto the landscape of their bodies? Or is it simply a manifestation of their fundamental incompatibility? Perhaps it’s both, or neither. Na is almost two decades older than Seyran. They come from different worlds, divided by thousands of miles, even if their culture is partially shared. So much screams that this relationship could not possibly work. When they come together, it’s like two tectonic plates butting up against each other and forging a new mountain of meaning to unpack.

Beyond the cultural allegiance into which she was socialized, Na also holds herself accountable for staying with Seyran. After a performance in Milan, she confesses, “As much as I want to end this relationship, it fuels my writing. What would I create if I didn’t endure such destruction?” This self-interrogation demonstrates Na’s tendency to rationalize the cycle of abuse, as well as illustrating the fallacy that great art relies on suffering.

The novel’s detailed exploration of interiority is matched by its nuanced descriptions of the social world, with Agabian using Na as a lens to reveal the absurdities of contemporary America and Armenia. In the US, we encounter housing insecurities, political extremism, and the marginalization of immigrants, while in Armenia, corruption runs rampant, minorities are repressed, and colonizers vie for influence. Agabian shows that Armenians are more than victims: against our very own, we have perpetrated unspeakable crimes—murdering members of the LGBTQ+ community, abusing soldiers, rigging elections, degrading the environment, pilfering precious resources. It seems we have difficulty managing the freedoms we gained in 1991 after 71 years of Soviet rule, and after the peaceful, democratic Velvet Revolution of 2018, the momentum of which was squelched by the bungled handling of the pandemic and the tragic Second Nagorno-Karabakh War of 2020.

These internal flaws heightened the existential stakes for Armenia in the region. Emerging from decades of oppression under the Ottoman and Soviet empires, the Republic of Armenia has struggled in a hostile region to defend its borders and manage its own freedom. Perhaps freedom does not mean independence from greater powers leveraging resources, protection, or support in the name of obedience. Could this mean that freedom for Armenians is a performance of obedience to Machiavellian overlords in Moscow, Brussels, and Washington, DC? In such a framework, how much of a national consciousness is authentic as opposed to performative? Have Armenians internalized a sense of subjugation to please problematic power brokers? 

One response to such questions might be found in Glendale, California, home to one of the most concentrated communities of Armenians in the world. An uptick in hateful rhetoric and crimes against Armenians, Jews, and members of the LGBTQ+ community has followed a nationwide effort to shame such groups and pit them against one another at school board and city council meetings. Watching Armenians turn on one another over matters of sexual and gender identity appears to satisfy the machinations of far-right interlopers, culture-war extremists, and autocrats in Azerbaijan and Hungary.

The irony is that these projects of discrimination, othering, and marginalization perpetuate the exact dynamics that, for millennia, have oppressed Armenians because of their ethnicity. The common thread is a lack of understanding, and so Agabian’s project—which she presented in Glendale in July 2023—is critical to building bridges that offer a fuller, more accurate, and more historically informed approach to queer Armenian literature. Challenging the imposed and internalized limits of Armenian identity, Agabian is situated in a lineage of Armenian artists that includes Armen Ohanian, Sergei Parajanov, and Arlene Voski Avakian, as well as echoing the work of American thinkers—such as Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Judith Butler—who transcend reductive renderings of sexuality and identity. Today there are many contemporary voices and projects that, alongside Agabian, have helped to amplify and create tolerance for these LGBTQ+ voices and their narratives, revealing their complex humanity. Nevertheless, it cannot be overstated that doing so comes at great risk. 

Of course, it is similarly problematic to suggest that a global nation fragmented by generations of genocide, colonization, and oligarchy could possess an ideological uniformity. Infighting among a giant international family that has been formed by a disparate diaspora outnumbering the Republic’s population is only natural, and Agabian illuminates the collective, interpersonal, and internal struggles that are foundational to the Armenian experience. 

Those struggles manifest in the novel’s central relationship. Na is too American for Seyran, while Seyran is too Armenian for Na. Identity becomes a performance rather than a reflection of individual authenticity, and the performances appear to manifest permission structures that enable a cycle of abuse. However, Na manages to confront this toxic dynamic through her own practice of reading, writing, and analyzing. 

This cathartic capacity emerges for Na in the novel’s final scene. She has finally separated from Seyran, established boundaries, and built a peaceable home, save for the presence of a bothersome cockroach. “The bug represents self-loathing in my body, a test if I can let this persistent pest go. Even as I do, I know that it will always return. The question is how to live with it, to change, instead of trying to escape it.” Agabian’s insight here affirms that our most pestering vexations may be overcome only after they have been fully embraced. It is a fitting realization for an ambitious project that grapples with the limits and affordances of countless binaries—Armenian and American, love and hate, straight and queer, peace and violence, inclusion and exclusion.

Seyran’s truth emerges similarly at the novel’s end, as he realizes that, “because of his parents, he [had] learned to express love negatively, and this was why he was messed up.” Na concludes, for her part:

I don’t think I can ever accept Seyran’s abuse. And I don’t think I can ever forgive him, since he never apologized or atoned for the pain he had caused me—as a narcissist, he likely wasn’t capable. More importantly, I forgive myself and the many dynamics beyond my control that created our situation. For now, after all these years, I can be kind to myself.

Redemption emerges here not from forgiving a perpetrator who is unwilling to acknowledge his violations but from the affected individual granting themselves the love and forgiveness that was missing.