A Small Kernel of Human Kindness: Some Notes on Solidarity and Resistance

Arshile Gorky, "The Liver is the Cock's Comb," oil on canvas 1944 (courtesy The Arshile Gorky Foundation).

24 MAY 2024 • By Nancy Kricorian
Perhaps refusing to “get used to it” is the secret to maintaining our humanity; perhaps not hardening our hearts against others is a daily discipline. 

 

Nancy Kricorian

 

In 1962, not long after the typescript of his novel Life and Fate had been confiscated — or as he described it to friends “arrested” — by the KGB, Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman traveled to Armenia to work on a translation of an Armenian World War II novel. During the two months that he was there, he wrote a brief, beautiful, and compassionate memoir that was entitled An Armenian Sketchbook in its recent English translation. Grossman was charmed by Armenia and the Armenian people, their churches, their villages, and their folk traditions. At the end of the memoir, he described how he was moved by the warmth and sympathy he was shown at a village wedding:

Never in my life have I bowed to the ground; I have never prostrated myself before anyone. Now, however, I bow to the ground before the Armenian peasants who, during the merriment of a village wedding, spoke publicly about the agony of the Jewish nation under Hitler, about the death camps where Nazis murdered Jewish women and children. I bow to everyone who, sadly, silently, and solemnly, listened to these speeches. (p. 113)

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
Life and Fate is published by New York Review Books.

These Armenians, who had suffered a devastating campaign of mass deportation and slaughter, planned and implemented by the Young Turk government in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, saw in the fate of Europe’s Jews during World War II terrible echoes of their own story of genocide and dispossession. And Grossman saw in their empathy and identification an antidote to the anti-Jewish prejudice and hatred that circulated among Russian nationalists. 

In Grossman’s Life and Fate, his magisterial novel that was finally published in the West in 1980 and in the Soviet Union in 1988 many years after its author’s death, he wrote, “Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness.”

For me, protecting this small kernel of human kindness is a lifelong struggle.

 


The novelist Kurt Vonnegut wrote in 2005, soon after Susan Sontag’s death, that when she had been asked in a television interview what lessons she had gleaned from the Holocaust, Sontag had responded, “10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.” 

Propaganda, lies, and a concerted campaign of dehumanization by government leaders, political parties, demagogues, media outlets, and educational and religious institutions can result in a sort of group hysteria that promotes violence against people who are not like us, who are not our own, and who come to be regarded as less than human. It can even turn us against our own, making pariahs of those who had only recently been considered part of our tribe. This ability to countenance and perpetrate cruelty and mass violence is all too human, as a reading of any history book will attest.

We can be convinced that installing a floating barrier of razor wire in the Rio Grande River to deter people from crossing from Mexico into the United States is reasonable immigration policy. We can be convinced that bombing, starving, and immiserating a trapped civilian population, including hundreds of thousands of infants and children, is a form of self-defense. We can be persuaded to believe that an ancient Armenian monastery was built by Albanian Christians and that those crafty and shiftless Armenians managed to add their inscriptions at a later date. These Armenian letters must certainly be sandblasted off the walls of the monastery so this abuse of history can be righted. 

Given the logic of Sontag’s formulation, most of us are within the 80 percent who can be propelled one way or the other. There might be a few who have evil in their hearts, and a handful whose goodness can always be trusted. But the rest of us will be challenged again and again, as we are being challenged mightily at this highly contested moment.


When I was a child, my Armenian genocide survivor grandmother often sang an old hymn called “This Little Light of Mine.” This song of unknown provenance that first started circulating in the 1920s was repurposed as an anthem of resistance during the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. My grandmother sang it slightly off key in her Armenian accent, clapping her hands in time. The words to the chorus go like this:

This little light of mine,
I’m gonna to let it shine,
This little light of mine,
I’m gonna to let it shine,
This little light of mine,
I’m gonna to let it shine,
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine. 

The verse that has stayed with me all these years, asks, “Hide it under a bushel, no, I’m gonna to let it shine.” What good would this light be under an overturned wooden bucket, hidden from sight, snuffed out by lack of air? For me, this little light is akin to Grossman’s small kernel of human kindness — it needs to be kindled and protected in dark times. And when I think of Sontag’s merciful 10 percent, I imagine these people are carriers of this light. They are fueled not only by compassion, but also by stubbornness. Who else but the oppositional will refuse to accede to the propaganda and received ideas that circulate around us in the air that we breathe? 

Stubborn soul that I am, I would hope to find myself among the merciful, but then another childhood memory surfaces. On our block on Lincoln Street in Watertown, there were twelve houses and seven Armenian families. When I was about eight, a group of mostly Armenian girls led by an eleven-year-old decided that we should shun our new neighbor Anahid, a girl whose family had recently relocated from Beirut. Anahid wore her hair pulled up into an unattractive fountain on her head, her clothes were decidedly unfashionable, and apparently shunning was not severe enough a punishment. The ringleader of our group, also named Nancy, marched us to Anahid’s house, lined us up by height on the sidewalk in front of it, and led us in singing a version of a popular number from the musical Bye, Bye Birdie. We chorused, “We hate you Anahid, oh yes we do, we don’t hate anyone as much as you…” Anahid stared at us from inside her front door, and when her mother appeared at her side, Nancy instructed us to switch to “We love you Anahid,” convincing exactly no one. I felt a bone deep shame when I saw the hurt on Anahid’s face and the dismay on her mother’s. I still feel a deep sense of shame thinking of that moment when I did something I knew was wrong simply because I wanted to be part of the group. This memory serves me as a kind of talisman when I am faced with taking an unpopular position or when I must make a choice about who I am going to stand alongside. And I know, that under the right circumstances, or perhaps the wrong circumstances, I might again be swayed to join the ruthless.


In 2010, I participated in the Palestine Festival of Literature. PalFest, which was founded in 2008, brings international writers to Palestine for a series of literary and cultural events with their Palestinian counterparts. Because of restrictions on the movement of Palestinians, PalFest is a road show that has visited major educational and cultural institutions throughout the West Bank, Jerusalem, within the borders of 1948 Israel, and one year in Gaza when that was briefly possible. In 2010, our group traveled to East Jerusalem, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus, and Hebron, using potholed Palestinian roads, going through dystopian checkpoints, and being given a reality tour of the occupation in the hopes that we would write about what we had seen when we returned home. 

One evening Geoff Dyer, Adam Foulds, Mahmoud Shuqair, May Jayussi, and I spoke in the garden of the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah. Weeks earlier, I had selected an excerpt from my first novel, Zabelle, a fictionalized account of my grandmother’s experience as a genocide survivor, to read that night. It was a part of a chapter about young Zabelle being driven with her family from their home in Hadjin, forced to make a long trek that ended in the Syrian desert. After the deaths of her parents and siblings, Zabelle found herself an orphan among 8,000 other orphans in a tent camp outside Ras al Ain. This story of dispossession and suffering, details of which had been lived by my own grandmother, carried an even deeper resonance that evening in Ramallah. I was still jetlagged, exhausted by our long days, and overwhelmed by what we had seen in Hebron that morning, so as I read, I struggled to hold back tears.

At a dinner after the event, I was approached by New York Times journalist Ethan Bronner, who wanted to chat about my emotional reading. When I told him that I was horrified by what I had seen so far in the West Bank, he asked me exactly what had upset me. I mentioned the rabid settlers in Hebron who threw trash and feces from above on the Palestinians below, and the nightmarish “Lambs to the Slaughter” checkpoint in Bethlehem, both of which seemed among the worst scenes the occupation had to offer. He commented dryly, “You get used to it.”

Perhaps not getting used to it is the secret to remaining humane. Perhaps refusing to harden our hearts against others is a daily discipline.


The world is wide, but what use is it if my heart is narrow?
—Armenian proverb 

In a scene from my forthcoming novel The Burning Heart of the World, about Armenians in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War, ten-year-old Vera Serinossian, looks on with her family as a driver in the car ahead of them is pulled from his vehicle, beaten, and dragged away by Lebanese militiamen. In response to Vera’s sobs, her mother says, “Stop it, you don’t know that man, and you can’t cry for the whole world.” Vera says nothing, but thinks to herself that it is indeed possible to cry for the whole world. 

Given the limits of human awareness and compassion, it is perhaps more accurate to say that it is possible to care about and grieve for distant places and foreign people that you have made your own across bridges of learning and experience. Empathy is a humane trait, but empathy alone is not enough in the face of systems of oppression that relegate some people to suffering and premature death, those who are sacrificed to the gods of war and profit, those whose labor, lands, and resources are coveted and stolen. Empathy must be equipped with knowledge and forged into collective action. And we must gird ourselves against the human impulse to follow the crowd, lest we find ourselves standing on the sidewalk in front of Anahid’s house chorusing a hateful song.

 

Notes:
Vassily Grossman, An Armenian Sketchbook, New York Review of Books, 2013.
Sontag quotation is in this article by Kurt Vonnegut: “Susan Sontag and Arthur Miller.”
Ethan Bronner’s piece in The New York Times.

Nancy Kricorian

Nancy Kricorian Nancy Kricorian is the author of the novels Zabelle, Dreams of Bread and Fire, and All The Light There Was, focused on post-genocide Armenian diaspora life. Her new novel, The Burning Heart of the World, about Armenians in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War will be published in April 2025.

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13 MARCH 2023 • By Amal Ghandour
In Search of Fathers: Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Memoir
Centerpiece

Broken Home: Britain in the Time of Migration

5 MARCH 2023 • By Malu Halasa
Broken Home: Britain in the Time of Migration
Essays

More Photographs Taken From The Pocket of a Dead Arab

5 MARCH 2023 • By Saeed Taji Farouky
More Photographs Taken From The Pocket of a Dead Arab
Essays

Home Under Siege: a Palestine Photo Essay

5 MARCH 2023 • By Anam Raheem
Home Under Siege: a Palestine Photo Essay
Columns

Sudden Journeys: Deluge at Wadi Feynan

6 FEBRUARY 2023 • By Jenine Abboushi
Sudden Journeys: Deluge at Wadi Feynan
TV Review

Palestinian Territories Under Siege But Season 4 of Fauda Goes to Brussels and Beirut Instead

6 FEBRUARY 2023 • By Brett Kline
Palestinian Territories Under Siege But Season 4 of <em>Fauda</em> Goes to Brussels and Beirut Instead
Art

The Creative Resistance in Palestinian Art

26 DECEMBER 2022 • By Malu Halasa
The Creative Resistance in Palestinian Art
Art

Art World Picks: Albraehe, Kerem Yavuz, Zeghidour, Amer & Tatah

12 DECEMBER 2022 • By TMR
Art

Museums in Exile—MO.CO’s show for Chile, Sarajevo & Palestine

12 DECEMBER 2022 • By Jordan Elgrably
Museums in Exile—MO.CO’s show for Chile, Sarajevo & Palestine
Art

Where is the Palestinian National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art?

12 DECEMBER 2022 • By Nora Ounnas Leroy
Where is the Palestinian National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art?
Columns

Sudden Journeys: Israel’s Intimate Separations—Part 3

5 DECEMBER 2022 • By Jenine Abboushi
Sudden Journeys: Israel’s Intimate Separations—Part 3
Book Reviews

Fida Jiryis on Palestine in Stranger in My Own Land

28 NOVEMBER 2022 • By Diana Buttu
Fida Jiryis on Palestine in <em>Stranger in My Own Land</em>
Fiction

“Eleazar”—a short story by Karim Kattan

15 NOVEMBER 2022 • By Karim Kattan
“Eleazar”—a short story by Karim Kattan
Columns

Sudden Journeys: Israel’s Intimate Separations—Part 2

31 OCTOBER 2022 • By Jenine Abboushi
Sudden Journeys: Israel’s Intimate Separations—Part 2
Opinion

Fragile Freedom, Fragile States in the Muslim World

24 OCTOBER 2022 • By I. Rida Mahmood
Fragile Freedom, Fragile States in the Muslim World
Interviews

Interview with Ahed Tamimi, an Icon of the Palestinian Resistance

15 OCTOBER 2022 • By Nora Lester Murad
Interview with Ahed Tamimi, an Icon of the Palestinian Resistance
Book Reviews

Zoulikha, Forgotten Freedom Fighter of the Algerian War

15 OCTOBER 2022 • By Fouad Mami
Zoulikha, Forgotten Freedom Fighter of the Algerian War
Columns

Sudden Journeys: Israel’s Intimate Separations—Part 1

26 SEPTEMBER 2022 • By Jenine Abboushi
Sudden Journeys: Israel’s Intimate Separations—Part 1
Columns

Phoneless in Filthy Berlin

15 SEPTEMBER 2022 • By Maisan Hamdan, Rana Asfour
Phoneless in Filthy Berlin
Art & Photography

Photographer Mohamed Badarne (Palestine) and his U48 Project

15 SEPTEMBER 2022 • By Viola Shafik
Photographer Mohamed Badarne (Palestine) and his U48 Project
Music Reviews

Hot Summer Playlist: “Diaspora Dreams” Drops

8 AUGUST 2022 • By Mischa Geracoulis
Hot Summer Playlist: “Diaspora Dreams” Drops
Editorial

Editorial: Is the World Driving Us Mad?

15 JULY 2022 • By TMR
Editorial: Is the World Driving Us Mad?
Art & Photography

Featured Artist: Steve Sabella, Beyond Palestine

15 JUNE 2022 • By TMR
Featured Artist: Steve Sabella, Beyond Palestine
Essays

Sulafa Zidani: “Three Buses and the Rhythm of Remembering”

15 JUNE 2022 • By Sulafa Zidani
Sulafa Zidani: “Three Buses and the Rhythm of Remembering”
Film

Saeed Taji Farouky: “Strange Cities Are Familiar”

15 JUNE 2022 • By Saeed Taji Farouky
Saeed Taji Farouky: “Strange Cities Are Familiar”
Fiction

Selma Dabbagh: “Trash”

15 JUNE 2022 • By Selma Dabbagh
Selma Dabbagh: “Trash”
Fiction

“Buenos Aires of Her Eyes”—a story by Alireza Iranmehr

15 JUNE 2022 • By Alireza Iranmehr, Salar Abdoh
“Buenos Aires of Her Eyes”—a story by Alireza Iranmehr
Film

Art Film Depicts the Landlocked Drama of Nagorno-Karabakh

2 MAY 2022 • By Taline Voskeritchian
Art Film Depicts the Landlocked Drama of Nagorno-Karabakh
Opinion

Palestinians and Israelis Will Commemorate the Nakba Together

25 APRIL 2022 • By Rana Salman, Yonatan Gher
Palestinians and Israelis Will Commemorate the Nakba Together
Book Reviews

Joumana Haddad’s The Book of Queens: a Review

18 APRIL 2022 • By Laila Halaby
Joumana Haddad’s <em>The Book of Queens</em>: a Review
Columns

Green Almonds in Ramallah

15 APRIL 2022 • By Wafa Shami
Green Almonds in Ramallah
Columns

Libyan, Palestinian and Syrian Family Dinners in London

15 APRIL 2022 • By Layla Maghribi
Libyan, Palestinian and Syrian Family Dinners in London
Art & Photography

Ghosts of Beirut: a Review of “displaced”

11 APRIL 2022 • By Karén Jallatyan
Ghosts of Beirut: a Review of “displaced”
Film Reviews

Palestine in Pieces: Hany Abu-Assad’s Huda’s Salon

21 MARCH 2022 • By Jordan Elgrably
Palestine in Pieces: Hany Abu-Assad’s <em>Huda’s Salon</em>
Opinion

U.S. Sanctions Russia for its Invasion of Ukraine; Now Sanction Israel for its Occupation of Palestine

21 MARCH 2022 • By Yossi Khen, Jeff Warner
U.S. Sanctions Russia for its Invasion of Ukraine; Now Sanction Israel for its Occupation of Palestine
Columns

“There’s Nothing Worse Than War”

24 FEBRUARY 2022 • By Jordan Elgrably
“There’s Nothing Worse Than War”
Film

“The Translator” Brings the Syrian Dilemma to the Big Screen

7 FEBRUARY 2022 • By Jordan Elgrably
“The Translator” Brings the Syrian Dilemma to the Big Screen
Fiction

Three Levantine Tales

15 DECEMBER 2021 • By Nouha Homad
Three Levantine Tales
Beirut

Sudden Journeys: The Villa Salameh Bequest

29 NOVEMBER 2021 • By Jenine Abboushi
Sudden Journeys: The Villa Salameh Bequest
Centerpiece

The Untold Story of Zakaria Zubeidi

15 OCTOBER 2021 • By Ramzy Baroud
The Untold Story of Zakaria Zubeidi
Film Reviews

Will Love Triumph in the Midst of Gaza’s 14-Year Siege?

11 OCTOBER 2021 • By Jordan Elgrably
Will Love Triumph in the Midst of Gaza’s 14-Year Siege?
Art & Photography

Displaced: From Beirut to Los Angeles to Beirut

15 SEPTEMBER 2021 • By Ara Oshagan
Displaced: From Beirut to Los Angeles to Beirut
Essays

Gaza, You and Me

14 JULY 2021 • By Abdallah Salha
Gaza, You and Me
Book Reviews

The Triumph of Love and the Palestinian Revolution

16 MAY 2021 • By Fouad Mami
Essays

Is Tel Aviv’s Neve Tzedek, Too, Occupied Territory?

14 MAY 2021 • By Taylor Miller, TMR
Is Tel Aviv’s Neve Tzedek, Too, Occupied Territory?
Essays

Between Thorns and Thistles in Bil’in

14 MAY 2021 • By Francisco Letelier
Between Thorns and Thistles in Bil’in
Weekly

“I Advance in Defeat”, the Poems of Najwan Darwish

28 MARCH 2021 • By Patrick James Dunagan
“I Advance in Defeat”, the Poems of Najwan Darwish
TMR 7 • Truth?

Poetry Against the State

14 MARCH 2021 • By Gil Anidjar
Poetry Against the State
Poetry

A visual poem from Hala Alyan: Gaza

14 MARCH 2021 • By TMR
A visual poem from Hala Alyan: Gaza
Book Reviews

The Howling of the Dog: Adania Shibli’s “Minor Detail”

30 DECEMBER 2020 • By Layla AlAmmar
The Howling of the Dog: Adania Shibli’s “Minor Detail”
TMR 4 • Small & Indie Presses

Trembling Landscapes: Between Reality and Fiction: Eleven Artists from the Middle East*

14 DECEMBER 2020 • By Nat Muller
Trembling Landscapes: Between Reality and Fiction: Eleven Artists from the Middle East*
TMR 4 • Small & Indie Presses

Children of the Ghetto, My Name Is Adam

14 DECEMBER 2020 • By Elias Khoury
Children of the Ghetto, My Name Is Adam
Centerpiece

The Road to Jerusalem, Then and Now

15 NOVEMBER 2020 • By Raja Shehadeh
The Road to Jerusalem, Then and Now
World Picks

Interlink Proposes 4 New Arab Novels

22 SEPTEMBER 2020 • By TMR
Interlink Proposes 4 New Arab Novels

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