ABSTRACT
My work aims to explore intergenerational life stories of Armenian women who, as a direct consequence of the 1915 genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Turkish Empire against its Armenian subjects, were absorbed into Turkish, Kurdish and Arab Bedouin households and led “hidden” double lives in many cases throughout their lifetimes. Their stories have been buried deep into folds of personal memories through decades of silences burdened by secrets, stigma, and shame. Written on the boundaries of women’s bodies, these stories offer an opportunity to critically explore hybridized spaces of identity along a very sensitive divide between perpetrator and victim, executioner and survivor, “pure” and “impure” national identities.
My interest in this topic stems from several years ago, when I was in the thick of my doctoral research—a self-study exploring family stories and memories of inherited exile, dispossession, trauma, and healing. At the time, I positioned my autobiographical inquiry around the two poles of the compelling narratives of my two great aunts, Anush and Azniv in my writing. It was only long after I had written my dissertation and gained a certain detachment from it that I was able to look more closely at how I attempted to retell their stories. Both these narratives embody tales of loss and survival, silences and secrets sometimes written out literally on the bodies of the women. Anush and Azniv were both lost and refound in the aftermath of genocide. Their life stories took very different paths, however. The word for fate in Armenian is ճակատագիր [jagadakir] which translates as “the writing on the forehead.” Like many others who shared a similar fate and spent years among Bedouin tribes, my great aunts carried tattoos on their foreheads. Their fate had branded them for life, with that lone word of “jagadakir” encapsulating the actual territorialization and appropriation of their bodies in equal measure.
258 I tell my maternal great aunt Anush’s story in the beginning of my dissertation. To spare her life from the certain death that awaited the family, in a desperate act she was given away by her father to a Turkish gendarme who pretended to adopt her. Years later she surfaced in Northern Iraq, as a Bedouin Arab woman, with traditional tattoo marks on her face and garbed in traditional black robes. The joy of finding her was short lived. In the midst of trying to secure her return to her original family, she disappeared never to be found again. My paternal great aunt Azniv’s story told towards the end of my writing is similar in some instances, very different in others. Around the same age as Anush and about roughly the same timeframe, she was rescued by desert Bedouins from under a pile of corpses. She lived with them in the Der Zor 2 region for around 15 years until she was miraculously found by my grandparents. She too carried the traditional tattoos on her face. I met Azniv when I was roughly the same age Azniv and Anush had been when they went through the horrors. I saw and touched Azniv’s scar on her forearm, her faint tattoo marks on her forehead. I can only imagine Anush.
Juxtaposed with her Bedouin tattoos, inside her left arm, right above the wrist, near the veins leading straight to her heart, Azniv had a clearly marked tattoo of a cross with a date underneath. That was the traditional blue cross all Armenian pilgrims to Jerusalem had. I had seen it on the wrists of all four of my survivor grandparents. Did the new vivid tattoo purge the hellish memories that came with the fading ones? What of Anush, who never had this chance of expurgation no matter how perfunctory?
The reader in me questions my writer self whether it was totally an unconscious decision to situate the Anush and Azniv narratives towards the beginning and ending of the bigger story of my dissertation. Certainly they feel like inverted mirror images of one another. In pondering my connection to these women and the hidden folds of their stories I find I am driven by an urge to understand the lost and found in their lives, their memories, their secrets. It is this new introspection that made me realize the only details I think I know about Anush and Azniv are the scant and fragmented episodes hinging around their actual survival, but nothing about their lives in between. How did they live? How did they survive beyond that survival? How did they put their lives together in their everyday life? What did it mean being and knowing that you were Armenian but not being able to live it openly? How did they negotiate their womanhood in their daily life, while making sense of the decimation that they lived, the schism they felt? When the moment of reunification with family came, how did they experience that? How did my maternal grandfather in his attempt to save and reunite with his sister, think of her life “before” and “after”? Or did he? In Anush’s case that must have weighed very heavily on her and was also most probably the reason why she disappeared again 259 and this time forever. Interestingly, I have never questioned my mother or anyone else in her family about their attitudes on this. Azniv came back to my father’s family as a young woman probably in her early twenties. She never married. And nothing was transmitted, or at least I have no recollection of it, that has to do with her life among the Bedouins.
Finally, what about me? These stories and fragmented memories have stared me in the face for so long, yet I am only rediscovering them in this light now. What does this say about so many other untold stories and lives still languishing in the desert sands? It is with all these questions in mind that I now embark on my research into the stories of women who share a similar fate with my great aunts.
