The Hye-Phen

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Johnny Goes to War

by | Mar 4, 2024 | Essay

Christopher Atamian is a writer, translator, curator, creative producer and director. He co-produced the OBIE Award–winning play Trouble in Paradise, as well as several MTV music videos and short films which have screened in festivals around the world. Atamian has been awarded two Tölölyan Literary prizes and received a 2023 an Oxford University/IALA Essay Writing prize. He was selected to participate in the 2009 Venice Biennale on the basis of his video Sarafian’s Desire. He continues to contribute critical pieces to publications such as The New York Times Book Review, The Huffington Post, and the LARB, while working on other creative endeavors in film and theater. Atamian has translated six books and a novel, Manhattan Boy, and is currently working on several film and theatrical projects. He received a 2015 Ellis Island Medal of Honor and has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. When he is not writing, he runs Atamian Hovsepian Gallery in New York CIty with his colleague Tamar Hovsepian.
Cover Image: Osheen Harruthoonyan, Black Mirror, 2020″ from Black Garden series

My name is Johnny and I live in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. Actually, my real name is Hovhaness—which means Jonathan in Armenian. Ever since I was a small boy, I’ve worn jeans and a baseball cap wherever I go. I have blue eyes and blond hair and a small round nose, so my friends just call me Johnny, because I remind them of what they think an American teenager looks like. I’m 18 years old and yesterday I was called to the front. I leave in a week. For the past twenty-four hours, my mind has been reeling and my heart filled with fear. I know that I’m supposed to be brave and defend my country, but that all seems abstract in my head, without form. I like to skateboard and play backgammon with my grandfather. I write poetry and listen to heavy metal with my friends. I’m in love with a girl from school called Anahid. I do not want to go war.

I do not want to go war.
I do not want to die.
I go to bed each night in fear and try my best
not to cry.
I just want to live and be a normal bloke
And hang out with my buddies
And smoke a toke.

I can’t tell anyone how I feel. I’m Armenian after all, and I love my country. My grandparents were the only members of their families to survive the Armenian Genocide—they were from Mardin and Van and managed to escape deportation in 1915. They cut my grandmother’s hair so she would look like a little boy and not be raped. They hid her in a basket of wheat that was loaded onto a truck pulled by two donkeys as it slowly made its way up from Anatolia to the Caucasus, ahead of the army. For twenty-four days she remained in the basket and ate dried lavash bread that her mother had sewn into her dress, and drank from a flask of water stashed in a small leather sack. She grew thin and once in Yerevan developed cholera. My grandfather was a fedayi who fought the Turks and the Kurdish gendarmes from village to village until he too made it to Yerevan. My parents were born in the Armenian SSR—short for the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia. In 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, Azerbaijan tried to kill the Armenians in Artsakh. We have been at odds ever since and now war has broken out once again.

So, you see I cannot say no,
I am 18 years old
and have nowhere to go.
I must say yes, ayo, and proudly go to fight.
Silently I go bravely
Into the night.
I must hold my chin high
And never show my fright.

I don’t hate Azeris or Turks. I’ve never met anyone from either of these countries but when I Google them on the internet, they look surprisingly like Armenians. It seems that we eat the same foods, and although they are Muslim and we are Christian, we appear to have similar values as well: we love our families and respect our elders, we work hard and study. We even enjoy the same sports: soccer, wrestling and weightlifting! The only difference is that Armenians are better at chess, and we have a different alphabet and language—these are small differences, I think. All I want is to live in peace, marry the girl I love, and grow old with my children and friends around me. I am sure that if I did meet a Turk or an Azeri, they would want the same things and feel the same way.

We Armenians and Turks have been fighting for centuries
As far back as time goes
It makes little sense; we are not foes.
The poet Nazim Hikmet once wrote
That Turkish mothers love their children too
So, there you go, who is zooming who?

I dream sometimes that our borders will open and that we all became friends. If it weren’t for Anahid, I might even marry a Turkish girl, or an older woman from Baku. What would the harm be in that, I wonder? But I have no choice. Our leaders all lie and steal to get rich and stay in power. They profess to love their countries and God, but they are neither patriots nor people of God. Godly people and patriots wish for peace and don’t start wars. Jesus said that we should be our brothers’ keepers. Who is crazier, I ask you? Putin, Erdogan or Aliyev? Is bombing Artsakh any better or worse than bombing Ukraine? I can hear my mother crying in the kitchen now. She is rolling my favorite meat into lavash bread. She comes into the room and hugs me.

“Take these sandwiches,” she tells me, “They are your favorite, and here, take this also, please.” She removes the cross that her grandmother gave her mother, and that her mother, in turn, gave to her, and hangs it around my neck, “and this too, please.” She slips an achk or evil eye into the palm of my hand and squeezes it shut. She thinks that these will protect me, or perhaps she realizes how silly these trinkets really are and gives them to me anyway. My father stands in a corner silent – he is a doctor; I am his favorite. He can’t utter a word, but he hugs me and says simply: “My son.” There are tears in his eyes. He does not wipe them away.

Who are these men who still start wars and plunder?
Why do we let them, I wonder?
Do they not have sons and daughters?
Do they not suffer when they see others in pain?
Or do they think their sins will be washed away in the rain?

I try hard to understand what’s happening to me. Sometimes at night in my bed or during the day, I close my eyes as tightly as I can until I squeeze all the light out and all I see is one shiny star in the dark. I think of all the wars that we studied in school, the meaningless dates and names of people and countries that we memorized. The Romans, the Byzantines, the Ottomans, the American Civil War, the Third Reich, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, The Vietnam War, The Lebanese Civil War… It goes on and on like some type of endless madness that grips the human mind. Who are these butchers who send young boys and girls to war? And yes, they are always men it seems… I don’t know how to fight. I don’t want to fight. The Turks are not my enemy, the Azeris are not my enemy, my fellow Armenians are not my
enemy. Man is my enemy. The entire human race. My mother is crying now in the other room. She has finally broken down. My sister Maro is studying in Europe, at Oxford, and they haven’t told her yet that I’m going off to fight. I would like to go to school and study as well. If I didn’t enjoy studying so much and didn’t love Anahid, I’d become a priest perhaps, and enter the seminary at Etchmiadzin. Or maybe I’d escape Armenia altogether and board a train for Konya and become a whirling dervish, and spin and spin again and again, round and round, one hand inward toward my heart, the other outward toward God, forever and ever spinning like the Earth on its axis, until I finally found Him. But there is no time for that now. My father comes into the room “Patrast es tghas?” Are you ready my son? I look up and smile through my tears.

“Ayo, Hayrik,” Yes father. I grab my uniform, my hat and my gun. I kiss my father on the forehead and hug my mother tightly, perhaps for the last time. What is this insanity? Will someone intercede—a friend, a neighbor, a foe—please God—and save me from my fate? My name is Hovhaness, but they call me Johnny. I am 18 years old and I don’t want to die.

Christopher Atamian
Christopher Atamian is a writer, translator, curator, creative producer and director. He co-produced the OBIE Award–winning play Trouble in Paradise, as well as several MTV music videos and short films which have screened in festivals around the world. Atamian has been awarded two Tölölyan Literary prizes and received a 2023 an Oxford University/IALA Essay Writing prize. He was selected to participate in the 2009 Venice Biennale on the basis of his video Sarafian’s Desire. He continues to contribute critical pieces to publications such as The New York Times Book Review, The Huffington Post, and the LARB, while working on other creative endeavors in film and theater. Atamian has translated six books and a novel, Manhattan Boy, and is currently working on several film and theatrical projects. He received a 2015 Ellis Island Medal of Honor and has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. When he is not writing, he runs Atamian Hovsepian Gallery in New York CIty with his colleague Tamar Hovsepian.