Conversations with Heranouche

Growing up, I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandmother, Heranouche, an Armenian woman from Istanbul who grew up in Turkey when the country was undergoing a sweeping transformation.

Ataturk had come to power and was modernizing (aka Westernizing) Turkey. My grandmother was born on Valentine's Day in 1914, the same year WWI started, and a few months before the Armenian Genocide broke out in Turkey.?

She would tell me about atrocities of a massacre that most people continue to be ignorant about.

A genocide that Turkey continues to deny despite overwhelming evidence documenting the coordinated marches and murder of 1.5 million Armenians.

My great-grandmother, Hayganoush, had lost her entire family: her mother, sisters, and cousins. Only she and her father survived because they were in the right place at the right time, in the city where the government did not order massacres because of pressure from foreign eyeballs.

My grandmother told me that in later years, her mother would look for her sister in Aleppo, Syria since many young Christian Armenians were often coerced to Turkish or Muslim soldiers to save their lives. Women who were forced to convert to Islam and lead lives under new names with closet identities. My grandmother said her mother never gave up hope, but she never encountered anyone who knew her sister's fate.

My great-grandmother Sateneeg would hold gatherings for these women. My mom remembers being a little girl, peeking into the salon, and witnessing grown women wail and collapse. Mom dubbed it the crying room, a modern equivalent of group talk therapy.?

It's hard to explain to Americans the history of violence that preceded us; it's hard to explain why we went to Armenian schools in New York and New Jersey. Or why the children of the Diaspora recited two Pledges of Allegiance. Or, Why we knew the intimate details of the Kingdom of Ar but few of the Mayflower. It's hard to peel back the roof and let people see into lives marred by generational trauma.?

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