Armenian Prosthetic Memory

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 trapped in a conundrum of my own making: closure is the twin of forgetting, and my job is to bear witness. I resent Semerdjian's full-bloodedness; it gives her an authenticity I can never claim because my father was an odar, a nonArmenian. And I resent her youth—she must be young and self-assured and less in the thrall of her own mortality to write like that. And I want to howl at her supernatural ability to not be shredded to pieces and rendered inarticulate by her subject matter.

I was raised by two Armenian mothers: my mother, whose first language was Armenian, who was born in the Bronx in the 1920s to Armenian refugees; and my grandmother, who fled the genocide of Armenians in Turkey a few years before my mother's birth.

In our 20 years together, my grandmother told me close to nothing about her life in Turkey, and I rarely asked. What color was her house, the name of her street, the name of her cat? What did she bring over with her? How much did she see, how much did she suffer? Was her silence enforced to protect me or herself? How was it for her to bear a secret life for 66 years and take it to her grave?

Semerdjian's poetic phrase that offends me most is Armenian prosthetic memory. Those words single me out for the odar and fraud that I am. I know almost nothing about my grandmother's experience of the genocide, so how can I presume to bear witness for her? What right have I?

To clarify Semerdjian's definition of 'Armenian prosthetic memory,' I find a review of Remnants online in Armenian Weekly ("A Conversation with Elyse Semerdjian," by Lily Torosyan, June 12, 2024).

Gathering the photographs together, the human form becomes a clock where "memory is an embodied practice." This is prosthetic memory, describes Semerdjian—the inheritance of unseen, but felt, limbs and lines, re-admitted into the record.

This soothes me, is validating, but just for a moment. I am my grandmother's proxy; it has been clear to me since my mother's death, more than 10 years ago, that my life depends on bearing witness for my grandmother. There is nothing unique about my compulsion. This need to raise the dead is common among the descendants of genocide survivors. But each of us bears this burden alone, as a matter of life and death. Mathematically and metaphysically, I am more than myself, and also less.