Plaudits for Multi-talented Keith Garebian

By Jirair Tutunjian

 

A Disciplined Passion is a sterling collection of 24 essays by critics, scholars, journalists, and artists about Keith Garebian, teacher, poet, critic, biographer, memoirist, polymath, and winner of numerous literary awards.

The anthology focuses on the major themes and preoccupations of Garebian: theatre, musical theatre, the deracinated life, (his father wasArmenian and his mother Anglo-Indian), poetry, great Canadian actor William Hutt, cancer, sexual identity, Armenians, the Armenian Genocide and how the genocide had marked his father who was a 5-year-old orphan when the Turkish government murdered 1.5 million Armenians and deported the rest into the Syrian desert.

While Garebian is the “star” of the book, the second “star” is David Bateman, the co-editor of the book and the contributor of three probing essays.

The collection begins with the warm reminisces of Tessa Paucha who writes about her long ago days at a Montreal high school where Garebian taught English. Paucha, whose article’s title is the origin of the anthology’s title, commends Garebian for his commitment to his students and for delivering university-level lectures.

Film director Atom Egoyan is another contributor. He says Garebian’sinsightful poem (Pain) about Garebian Sr. made him acutely aware of his responsibility to his own departed parents.

Brian Bartlett’s “Strangers from a Vanished Land” is about Garebian’sawareness of his father’s lifelong pain as a genocide victim, an exile. Garebian Sr. was born in Dikranagerd in 1910 and died in Canada in 1995. Bartlett quotes one of the many evocative words which Garebianhas deployed to imagine the genocide: “Blood becoming rivers/ souls of the dead that never saw me…”

Bartlett describes the work as “father-son-poetry.” He says through his poetry Garebian is trying to understand his “difficult,” “Impenetrable,” and morose father. Imagining the Armenian Genocide, which GarebianSr. had witnessed at the age of five, the son has written:

“Blood becoming rivers

Souls of the dead

That never saw me

My father comes from that deluge…”

Keith Garebian: an Appreciation by Rose and David Scollard talk about their discovery of Garebian’s Children of Ararat and call it relentless and powerful.

In “William Hutt: Soldier Actor,’” reviewer and anthologist David Bateman hails Hutt as having one of the most compelling  performing arts careers of the 20th century. He also congratulates Garebian for his thorough, two-volume opus.

In addition to writing biographies, reviewing plays, excavating his relationship with his father, and analyzing the impact of his father’s early experiences on their relationship, Garebian has written half-a-dozen “How to…” books about the making of “West Side Story,” “Guys and Dolls,” “Cabaret,” “My Fair Lady,” and “Gypsy.”

In various styles and interests, the contributors have limned a credible and congratulatory portrait of multi-talented Garebian who has said his true home is literature.

The book has more than a half-a-dozen further perceptive articles (Poetry as Tribute and Interrogation, Witness of the Past: Garebianagainst Forgetting; SCAN Cancer Poems: Pieces of My Self; Voyeur or Witness?) but the piece de resistance of the anthology is by co-editorElana Wolff’s scintillating 37-page interview with Garebian. It bookends the anthology.

Guernica Editions, $21.95 USD, $25 CAD.