Dictionary of Broken Armenian

My daughter, a sociologist, sends me articles she comes across on the Armenian genocide and diaspora. I love how she connects our Armenianness in this way. My interest in the writings themselves, however, is complicated by a range of bewilderingly violent emotions. This morning I clench my teeth reading a description of historian Elyse Semerdjian's award-winning book, Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide. This daring work embraces physical and archival remnants, the imprinted negatives of once living bodies, as a space of radical possibility within Armenian prosthetic memory and a necessary way to recognize the absence that remains. I am furious with Semerdjian—with her poetry and the innovation of her language. I'm furious that she reduces what ails and consumes and baffles me into a single coherent sentence. Her poetic language confronts head-on the atrocities I have spent decades and hundreds of written pages attempting to absorb and reconcile. But I'm tr...