Notes on Armenia. Sex selection, aliens and Parajanov

I want to write about my time in Armenia and show you some of my snaps

simply because I keep thinking about it. This is prompted by two things I think 1) every time I hear use “assigned sex at birth” I wonder if people who say that have ever left their rooms, been in a maternity ward, had a scan, or begin to understand in any shape or form what is going in many parts of the world where many female foetuses are aborted.

2)Armenia has a hold on me.

I went to there to do a story on pre-natal sex selection. Everyone thinks this is big issue in China and Pakistan but parts of Armenia come second only to China in this practice. This is a problem rarely spoken about but it is an issue for the entire area. It is also happening in Azerbaijan so sex selection is not tied to one religion or culture. The UN population fund who are pioneers in this field say that as fertility rates decline as they are, this practice accelerates. 

In 1990 Amartya Sen wrote about the “missing women” in a now famous essay. Technology in the form of foetal scans has enabled this to happen. 

I can tell you all about it if you want to know. Just ask me. That is a whole other piece. Here a beautiful woman who I met who had this little girl a few hours before I met her. Armenian women are stunning.

The article I wrote was widely translated and discussed in Armenia.  It is one of the pieces that I have written that I am most proud of as it helped to shift things. Of course, a report like this never gets the attention of a column but as I always say there would be no columns without reporting. 

What I wanted to tell you about is what it’s like to do such a story because there are so many parts of it that never go in the official version. Also, I want to share my love for Armenia, a place that challenged every pre-conception I held. At a time when we can’t travel, I miss more and more that experience. Not of holidays which will come back but of going to new worlds which make you think anew. 

This is not a summary of the complex geo-politics of the region or a piece that tells you which are best hotels.  You can find that if you want to. This is a place to talk about what never goes into the published story.  

The weirdness and intensity of these experiences remains on the edge of reporting.  Getting there involved a hugely long wait in Moscow Airport people watching and perusing the Putin tat that is for sale everywhere.  Finally, I got the Aeroflot flight to Yerevan (think Ryan Air without the lux.)  It felt more akin to being on some mad bus ride in Mexico and or India. I expected chickens and goats to be in the hand luggage which did not conform to anything resembling “hand luggage”. The plane stank of cigarettes. They refused to serve alcohol on that flight. When I asked a scary woman for some, she said everybody was already “too drunk”. This was possibly the case so I sat stiff as a board as I was sitting along from a man who was 9ft or more. He had to bow his head in the cabin.

 Being English I pretended not to notice this though all the Armenians and the air crew had selfies with him. That must be his life and he was good natured about it but if I was uncomfortable on that flight, god knows what it must have been like for him

As soon as I got there I was whisked into a flurry of meetings with the UN people, politicians, doctors, priests, psychologists, all of it. Such trips are concentrated information gathering exercises…some of the people you meet will part of the story, some won’t. A macho tendency in reporting too often presents the reporter as a lone wolf.

Sure a few people do operate like this but actually most of us depend utterly on local fixers and translators. As I was going to be interviewing women who had maybe two children and 10 abortions by the age of 30 in order to get a boy child, in rural Armenia I was absolutely dependent on a good translator. The nuance here was that we had to talk about these terminations as being for “vascular” illness when we all knew what the real reason was. 

My translator was incredibly professional, fluent in serval languages and very hard working but as the UN guys kept saying telling me “a character”. I had to spend a good few days and long journeys with her. You have to get on. The alien talk started quite soon. The reason she didn’t have children she told me was because “the greys” had appeared at the end of her bed when she was young and had stolen her eggs. It was also a known fact that Princess Diana was Armenian and that the queen had gone to Canada to drink the blood of children. Why Canada?

I listened to hours of this from this incredibly educated woman who like many Armenians was proud of her country’s independence but had a wistfulness for the Soviet system that has educated her. 

We would be stuck in the mountains on really rough roads with fog coming down and a dodgy driver while we talked about UFOs. On the other side of me was a neurotic photographer who helpfully kept saying things like “I know what to do if we get kidnapped” . Kick the lights out when they lock in you in the boot if you want to know. There didn’t seem to be a risk of kidnap but snappers are a type. Adrenalin junkies always looking for the one shot.

The trip was both fraught and amazing. Hanging out with orthodox priests in a seminary and tough female politicians blew up any idea of what I thought it would be like before I went.  As a post-Soviet society there is probably better female public representation – women politicians engineers, doctors - than we have and yet this need to have boys and decimate girls before they were born was happening. It is changing. In speaking about it, change happens. 

In between trying to understand the ways in which the value of girls might be emphasised, that is what the UN is trying to do, so many glimpses of the place that stay with me. 

Lavash, flatbreads with bundles of fresh herbs and cheese that you roll up on the table, the fruit vodkas, the fountain where they say Kanye proposed to Kim Kardashian. A square named after Charles Aznavour. This country always in conflict, its diaspora boasts much success. Hello Cher. 

There was only one afternoon where I was not working and I did not want to go to the genocide museum. I went to the Sergei Parajanov’s museum as his masterpiece The Colour of Pomegranates ,Sayat Nova is one of my favourite films. It is based on the life of an 18th century poet but it is a dreamlike vision of bleeding pomegranates, skulls, religious icons. The poet is played by a woman. Parajanov was bisexual. Scorcese called the film “a timeless cinematic experience”. It is as far as you can get from socialist realism.  For this he was punished. Instead of realism he is peaking to the work Tarkovsky and Pasolini and he making a new language of film. 

(My Grandmother’ s Walnut Jam Parajanov)

He was put in a labour camp in Siberia for years for “subversion” and homosexuality. There he made many of the fantastic collages that are in the museum in Yerevan. I was blown away by that place.

Below is a picture of Parajanov with his mother who read a letter detailing his father’s affairs. He has torn up his fathers photograph and put himself in the picture. Oedipal much?

As I was leaving I bought a poster that is above my bed and spent ages talking to the young film students that work there. They said they wished I could write about Parajanov but I knew I was not there to do that. 

So here I am finally doing what they asked me that and wondering how to tell the many stories I want to share . I went to Armenia for one story but I came back full of wonder for the tales that I could not tell. 

I must go back. 

I will leave you one of his images called The Future of Eastern Womanhood