searching for mariam
I have been working on my tale of Mariam for almost a year. I am not Armenian and yet the tale starts like many Armenian tales do, “Linum e, chi linum; There was and there was not.” Except I have only glimpses of what I am suppose to say. It is a frustrating process. When I write a sonnet, 14 lines, I go into it not knowing what will happen. Simply allowing the juices to run can take me anywhere. I don't need to worry about the nuts and bolts since the first 8 lines are flights of fancy, the last 6 lines are the reflection, bring it all together, making it sing.
Writing fiction, in contrast, is as plodding as concrete rings around my fingers. In the first six months I wrote hundreds of pages of … stream of conscious, first person descriptions of life in the caravans heading toward the Der Zor desert. And that's as far as I could get them. In that story arc everyone dies. I couldn't get beyond the niece, Narine, crying over the body of her mother, Anahit, Mariam's sister, leaving us nothing but ghosts in the wilderness:
These are the words I must say. These are the words I used as we huddled, as the wind screamed around us, rose around us, rose out of my throat. I had no choice. I was screaming over her body like a thing, not a beast, not a girl, a thing; ripped-lungs on my hands and knees throwing dirt on her face, my hair whirling about my head … Spitting. Screaming. Nowhere to go. Nothing to return to. Rising up – O heart, O heart, O risky, risky heart. I had no choice.
But that wasn't Mariam's story.
Mariam and her companion, Ebru, are at the fall of Van, the victory at Sardarabad. Graphic witnesses to history, the Armenians achieving incredible victory at their darkest hour. Mariam was originally based on Mariam Khatisian, a teacher and author murdered by the Ottomans in the beginning of the 1915. Except for me she does not die, she and her companion, a Muslim girl, a former student, Ebru, escape from the killing fields of Tbilisi and form the Hayuhyats' Enkerut'iun, The Patriotic Armenian Women's Association, and a small guerrilla war breaks out and … I discovered I was very much a product of my era. My Armenian women were generals and strategists, epic partisans pitting everything they had against the relentless, faceless enemy that was the Ottoman empire.
The problem was, as far as I knew, these women did not exist outside my writing. I knew what Mariam looked like, it was Arsinée Khanjian's face I have been seeing as I wrote. She is, after all, the quintessential Armenian movie actress. Married to Atom Egoyan, any role that demands a self-assured, independent Armenian is her forte. Dress her in period costume, stick her in the Caucasus mountains and Enver Pasha better watch out.
Ebru, however, was distant in my imagination. She would be the balance in a Western world that still hates Muslim women. I write this at a time when France is seeking to ban the burqa, worn by more traditional Muslim women. Both in the French press and here in America anti-Muslim sentiment is high. “The Terrorist” has replaced “The Commie” as the source of all evil for many and it amazes me how quickly we give away other people's civil rights under the guise of “protecting our own.” We still live in world where honor-killing is deemed acceptable if a father or husband or brother feels a woman's virtue has been questioned. Considering that France's anti-burqa law is aimed at only Muslims, I wonder how many French women will have to die before it slowly dawns on people that it isn't a flimsy piece of fabric that needs changing, its the attitudes of men on both sides of the equation.
Ebru needs to exist for my story. If my history books record the names of only a few courageous female Armenians during the Genocide there are no Ottoman women I can find who stood up against tyranny even if it cost them their lives. I am sure they existed, since our history books prides themselves on hiding certain groups of people in the shadows. I just don't have access to their names. So there is Mariam and Ebru, two very different witnesses of history bound together. And then one day, Awat, the Kurdish word for desire and hope, showed up.
The Kurds, during the Armenian Genocide, played a very dark and sinister role. In every recorded account I've read of the caravans of Armenian women and children being marched into the desert there are descriptions again and again of the Kurdish horsemen raiding and killing and raping at will. The Kurds, too, are in the news with Turkey, fighting for independence. In the summer of 1996, as I was finishing up my Peace Corps training in Yerevan, we noted there was smoke around the base of Mt. Ararat for weeks and were told it was from the Turkish army burning Kurdish villages. Like the Armenians, the Kurds are an ancient people, nomadic and fragmented and in this story I am telling they are used by a larger government as their muscle to do very dirty work.
And yet, hampered as I am with the little information I can gather about these three diverse groups of people, I have heard about villages up in the Caucasus mountains, far away from major cities, where Kurds and Turks and Armenians lived, if not harmoniously, at least nonviolently for a while. That is where I want to begin the tale of Mariam and Ebru and Awat, three friends who everyone will say shouldn't be friends, could never have been friends, impossible. But isn't that how all tales begin? With making the impossible possible? “Linum e, chi linum, There was and there was not a village once high in the mountains. My grandmother told me this so it must be true …”