And on very bad nights, the angels would come.
Looking back, I eventually realized the seed of this particular vision was probably planted during my actual visits to the Planetarium, either during summer—since Mom made it known she wouldn’t object to anything that took me out of the house, no matter how far downtown I had to travel—or around Christmas, when we’d often attend their annual show about the Star of Bethlehem, which never entirely succeeded in reconciling biblical canon with scientific theory. This might explain why “my” angels always seemed Byzantine in design, long-faced and claw-fingered, with tiny, stern mouths and distant eyes; cruel parodies of the far rounder, kinder figures routinely stencilled on Christmas ornaments rather than along the edges of illuminated manuscripts, managing to evoke two thousand years of Christmases Past in one simple silhouette.
One way or the other, they would take shape as the darkness peeled away around them, lightening to a scal
ed or studded curtain of gold, uniform yet infinite: so massive they blocked out everything, even the projector. Their presence remade the Planetarium’s dome into a globe, a self-contained pocket universe, with no easy way of knowing which way was up or down, left or right. And from the moment they took shape, it seemed to go on forever, halo-glare-lit and shrouded in a double-cloak of feathers, half-spread wings hanging poised but shadowless between two useless horizons.
Be not afraid, they told me, uselessly, even as I shivered in terror, wanting to vomit myself hollow. For unto you I bring great good news, forever and ever, Amen. Forever, and ever, and ever.
I’d never quite been able to convey all this—not to Mom, only imperfectly and occasionally to friends, and certainly not to Simon, who’d only nod in sympathy but no real empathy. But reading Safie’s thesis was the kind of wonderful gobsmack that happens all too rarely: the instant realization that somebody else just gets it; that you’re not alone in your dislocation. That you’ve finally, finally found somebody else you can talk to without having to explain to.
For all the practical and mundane reasons I had to turn to Safie Hewsen for help, that shared and secret terror was the thing that really made the choice for me.
As you may have gathered, in the normal course of events I wouldn’t willingly hang around with most of my former students, let alone invite any of them onto something as important as filling in Mrs. Whitcomb’s background. This was, in large part, a reflection on the whole Fac process: the place essentially ran on selling OSAP grants to people who, for one reason or another, either couldn’t get into or weren’t willing to invest their time and money in “real” colleges, which meant we got a pretty amazing spread of candidates. Sometimes it was technically adept but academically weak people who wanted to get into the industry and saw the Fac as a jump-start; sometimes it was people coming straight out of high school, often with various learning disabilities, whose educational experience thus far had consisted of being warehoused and talked down to, people to whom “teacher” was a synonym for “person who thinks it’s their job to make me feel stupid.” In the latter case, reframing the Fac as a service industry gave them the impression that because they were supposedly paying my salary, I’d let them treat me like a waiter. Not so much, really, but we could usually come to some sort of working agreement—a position of mutual respect—at least long enough for me to make sure they graduated.
“You’re always acting like you know something I don’t!” one kid complained, to which I replied: “That’s because I do. I’m the teacher.”
The older ones were always more difficult. I taught people—guys, mostly—who were twice my age, who’d already had a long-term job or even owned a business only to see it fail from underneath them, forcing them into a midlife career change they weren’t ready for; they tended to have odd ideas about exactly what making movies entailed, especially on a practical level. I remember once giving my normal lecture on the difference between Hollywood and Canada, pointing out that in Hollywood a movie budgeted at less than six million dollars was considered “below the line of visibility,” unable even to budget for self-promotion, and how this explained why so many English-speaking Canadian movies came and went without a trace—their average budget was five million and under (more like two point five to three, at the time). One fifty-plus dude at the back immediately raised his hand and said: “Wait, three million dollars isn’t enough to make a movie?”
“Not usually, no. Not in Hollywood terms.”
“Well, what do they usually cost?”
“Twenty million and up.”
“Twenty million! That can’t be right. What do they spend it all on?!”
The best students I ever had were either immigrants who came from cultures where teachers were automatically accorded respect (though even then, because the Fac never vetted applicants properly, I often found myself dealing with more than a few per term who desperately needed an ESL course or two, or the occasional autodidact with a true artistic drive—people who would have been writing, shooting, and editing visual narratives no matter where they ended up. The real deal, in other words. The kind of obsessives even the Fac couldn’t discourage.
It was this last category that Safie Hewsen fell into, embodying it so beautifully that even after she was long gone, I continued to refer to it in my head as “the Safie slot.”
Seven Angels But No Devil was partly documentary, built around interview footage Safie had shot with her great-grandfather before he died, which she augmented with some truly gorgeous and (yes) experimental animation achieved through a process of still photography, rotoscoped digital footage, and video step printing—sort of Chris Marker meets Richard Linklater meets Wong Kar-wai. It was incredibly ambitious, especially considering that much of it, even the clips she came in with, had been recorded on a Fisher-Price PXL-2000 she picked up when she was fourteen, a toy camera released the year after she was born that records video and audio onto a standard audio cassette tape. A flop on the market, this odd piece of stillborn technology was pulled from the shelves because of the low resolution, inherently slow-motion black-and-white images it creates—the same grainy, dreamlike visual shorthand which later led to its revival as a popular format for hipster video artists like Sadie Benning and Michael Almereyda. Now considered highly endangered cult items, PixelVision cameras routinely fetch up to $600 on eBay, which tells you a little about Safie’s family background, above and beyond the whole diasporic Armenian Yezidi thing . . . she’s a very nice girl, but much like Wrob, she didn’t exactly grow up hurting for cash.
Safie’s great-grandfather, Aslan Husseniglian, was born and raised in the Kurdish village of Sipan in the Aragats District of Armenia’s Aragatsotn Province. Back in the 1900s—the man lived to be over a hundred—he fell in love with a girl named Gayane Hovsepian and chose to marry her, even though she was Christian and he knew it’d make him an outcast; it was a big deal, because he was Yezidi, and the Yezidi used to think everybody else in Armenia—the world, really—was mistaken at best, and wilfully evil at worst. Then again, a lot of Armenian Christians still think the Yezidi straight-up worship the Devil, so I guess it sort of went both ways.
Without community support they were forced to immigrate, avoiding the genocide of 1915 to 1918. Eventually settling in the Don Valley Village, Aslan and Gayane let their name be “Canadianized” to Hewsen and had seven children, one of whom would be Safie’s grandfather Petrak, who called himself Peter. Aslan started off working construction, then built up a home improvement business that mostly catered to Armenians, and was a great success. By the 1960s, the same time Safie’s father was born, Peter cashed out his share of the company and started up a suburban real estate development venture, moving out to Mississauga, where it cost surprisingly little to buy into, build, and occupy a two-block “neighbourhood” inside a gated community that’s still known as Hewsen Estates. That they also happened to be right next to a newly developed GO Transit line made the area popular with upwardly mobile immigrant families from all ethnic backgrounds throughout the 1980s.
Peter’s son, however, had come far enough from his assimilationist origins not to feel as though he was shooting himself in the foot socially by calling himself Barsegh instead of Blake, nor did he have any qualms about marrying a non-Yezidi girl—Safie’s mother, Domenica, an Italian-Canadian. In 1986, Safie was born. “Perfect suburban childhood, ridiculously well off, all that,” she told me, during an early chat between classes. “We spoke English at school, Kurdish and Armenian at home, and I guess we were pretty insular, but it wasn’t like I could tell.”
“Did you always want to make films?”
She nodded. “Ever since I got my first video camera. I used to play like I was a reporter for CITY TV, trying to interview everybody I came across. Dédé Aslan was pretty much the only one who’d put up with it.”
“And were you raised Yezidi?”
“Not really, no. Mom’s Catholic, Dad’s . . . nothing, I guess. Now that Dédé’s dead, I think Granddad and Grandma probably drop in at the Anglican church down the road every once in a while, but I don’t exactly ask.”
“He was your one link to the faith, then.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” She paused. “Everybody in the family’s one link to it, and there just aren’t a lot of other Armenian Yezidi in Toronto, period. So he wasn’t totally one of a kind, but he was definitely something special.”
Most non-Yezidi tend to interpret the figure of Malak Tâwus—the “Peacock Angel” who was, according to myth, the leader of the angelic task force assigned by God to create the world and look after humankind—as analogous to the Judeo-Christian Devil, or the Islamic Shaytan. Seven Angels But No Devil was written as a direct refutation of this idea, and begins with a close-up of Aslan quoting the truism that “today all Yezidis are Kurds, but there was a time when most Kurds were Yezidis, and Yezidis are still considered the living memory and conscience of the Kurds.” As the film continues, various sequences “interpret” the imagery of Aslan’s religion literally, yet with a haunting sort of sketchiness—Malak Tâwus, and the other six angels to which he gave birth, are translated as different species of birds: the dropped Cosmic Egg of Xwedê (“The One who created Himself”, or Yezidic Universal Spirit) as an artificial pearl cooked until it starts to crack; and the five cardinal elements of Fire, Sun, Earth, Water, and Air are all represented by their most immediate domestic and natural examples: a lit match, a window-kindled reflection, flowerpot dirt, melting snow, trash devils blown across an intersection. When finally completed, Seven Angels turned out to be a painstaking, intensely personal work that took Safie on a film festival circuit tour, winning her awards from coast to coast. The film was solitary and a bit oblique, but I enjoyed it a lot.
“I get tired of people calling my relatives witches,” Safie tells the camera, near the end of the film. “Yezidi were massacred and denounced under the Ottoman caliphates for hundreds of years, and continue to be treated as pariahs even today. But the truth is, they practise equal rights, ecology, and consider honesty, pacifism, and tolerance of other religions the highest moral principles. Yezidi don’t even believe in a personification of Evil, because to them, both Good and Evil coexist under God’s control. So we should always be held responsible for our own actions—not God, and definitely not the Devil?
??because we were all created with the ability to think and decide for ourselves, whatever the consequences.”
Since then, I’d kept in touch-but-not-really, tracking Safie’s sad lack of professional progress mainly through Facebook posts, plus the occasional IM exchange. Those latter would have been the quickest way to reach her again, but an old-fashioned face-to-face sell session was what I really wanted—ideally, one where I didn’t have to try to explain things in IM or Facebook message boxes.