Courtesy of the artist and Durham Press. On my first morning in Yerevan I do what all visitors to this city do on their first dayβI go find a public space. In Yerevan, as in other cities where geography and history have conspired to make daily life very difficult, public space is an antidote.
While home is often small and crowded, public space is the realm of the imagination and possibility. As I negotiate the obstacles of the roadβhuge potholes, pieces of vicious wire jutting out of the ground, sudden steps which appear without warning, huge pipes running parallel to the pavementsβI have this sense that, at any minute, something unanticipated, perhaps even unknown, will appear out of nowhere. The urbanism of the city makes this almost inevitable. If you can find a good map of Yerevan, the thing that strikes you first about the city is its circularity.
The city is always around you, enveloping you in its amniotic grid, keeping a kind of liquid watch over you. Long, straight streets stretch across the entire circle, connecting flat surfaces to steep ascents. Add to this the preponderance of large open spacesβ parks and gardens and stadiums and squaresβand you have the makings of a city where the human impulse for display has found its natural stage and audience. I am in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, to teach two five-week courses at the American University of Armenia, one on writing pedagogy to English teachers at institutions of higher learning and the other on business writing to young, aspiring professionals.
It is a curious combination, but one which will bring me in contact with the two poles of a nation in transition. The teachers of English are mostly women from established families of the Soviet era; the business and management professionals are much younger in age, less attached to the past, and more preoccupied.
Armenia is a small, landlocked republic in the heart of the Caucasus, where the the first glasnost demonstrations erupted in February, For months, millions of people gathered in the city, demanding the unification of the contested region of Nagorno Karabagh in Azerbaijan with Armenia. Ten months after these demonstrations, in December, , the country was hit by a powerful earthquake in the north.
