Once in a while, you come across a piece of writing that deeply resonates with what lives inside you, in words you did not have yet. That happened to me, on a sleepless night. I fell in a YouTube rabbit hole and ended up at a recording of Adrienne Rich’ ‘Diving Into the Wreck’, a feminist poem from 1973.
For living on this planet, I pay “rent” – I contribute to the world with my music, my research, my arts+crafts, my love & friendship, and my writing. Although my name literally means “Little Warrior”, due to my autism, I cannot join my friends on the barricades. Therefore, I raise my voice through my own – soft & quiet – forms of resistance, to empower the misfits. On my blog and for BiWomenQuarterly, I write academic essays, auti-ethnographies and various forms of poetry, such as #biku . This piece tells more about the traditions of poetry in which I place myself, to conclude with a short poem about the current situation in Poland – where the Prides meet many prejudices, and where dehumanizing language is dehumanizing us.
The first track of my solo album is about the story of Achtamar, which I learned in Armenia. Using the familiar trope of of star-cross’d lovers, the story of Achtamar is about a young woman named Tamar and the young man who loves her. They meet in secret on an island, until Tamar’s father discovers their trysts and sets a trap for the youth. He manages to escape, but he is mortally wounded and cannot swim across the lake. As he dies, his last action is to whisper her name across the water: ‘Ach, Tamar!’. With the help of my friend Ofelia Melikyan, I translated the famous poem by Hovhannes Tumanyan about this story. And with the help of John Vandenberg, I rewrote it into a poem of …