Dictionary of Broken Armenian

On Tuesday, July 10, 1894, at 12:24 pm, I know exactly what my grandmother was doing. She weighed only four ounces, yet her facial features had already formed. She had eyelashes and fingernails, and beneath her translucent skin was a beating heart. Inside her mother's womb, before she had any concept of self or time, at a time before memory, I know she felt the tremor and kicked at the darkness. I am as certain as if I had been there myself. There were three shocks over a period of 18 seconds. The earthquake's epicenter was in the Sea of Marmara, causing a tsunami and and widespread damage. By today's standards, the earthquake's magnitude is estimated to have been 7.0. In Adabazar, where my grandmother was born, many lives were lost and hundreds of homes were leveled. Every single inhabitant of the town was affected. Most of the men were out working in the fields and would have been spared, but Takouhi, my great grandmother, was probably indoors spinning wool and caring...

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...