Every so often, someone announces a hunger strike in Armenia for one reason or another - illegitimate sentencing, illegitimate appropriation of property, illegitimate elections, most often for the same reason, the illegitimate regime. And the measure of last resort is usually the same; self-deprivation of things that come naturally - movement, eating, life...because they’ve already been deprived of other equally essential things: rights choices, freedoms...

I just watched another sit-in start. “Maybe it will be a hunger strike, maybe it will be indefinite,” the men announced to one of the two reporters that were there. Two words come to mind “A Hunger Artist,” a short story by Franz Kafka I had read as a teenager. 

I’m not sure when exactly I replaced the hunger artist with a political activist in my head, maybe even before I had read the story, but I just read it again and remain resolute that they represent the same desolate character against the backdrop of an increasingly indifferent public.   

1989: My mother had just picked me up from my piano lesson. We stopped by Opera Square to get the updates, to see what is happening. I remember standing squeezed between adults, watching the men separated from the crowd by a thin, almost imaginary rope and wondering if they were being publicly punished this way for something they had done wrong while eating a waffle that was supposed to keep me fed until we got home. A woman with a beehive hairdo reprimands my mother, “Lady, take your child elsewhere, the boys have not eaten in days, you are tempting them.” My mom snatched the waffle out of my hands and we left the Square like traitors, like people unworthy of patriotism, unworthy of the people’s Movement.

So I’ve seen the hunger artist in his glory, many in Armenia must still recall the public admiration for his self-deprivation. There was a time when hundreds stood guard so that he could execute his will even if it meant death, or taking a waffle out of a child’s mouth.

But the public is no longer impressed or even amused with these men: 

We no longer bear to look at him because if we did, we would see that deprivation has emaciated us all, not only him. We might start counting our losses instead of our privileges because we would realize that our privileges are the privileges of an ostrich with its head in the sand, still unaware that it is being devoured. If we dared to look, we would see the crippling of our society limb by limb.

Or perhaps we don’t look because he is now the victim, not the hero. He is the middle-aged man whose achievements in life have added up to nothing and we only like the “winners,” those with wealth and an entourage, those stronger than us. Remember the students who protested the law that took away their right to a continuous education? They were young and able but we treated them like Don Quixotes fighting windmills, all the while knowing ourselves that the giants are real. 

M. Vardanyan, "The Beginning" 125 photos, Yerevan 1988.