Exclusive Extract: Recreating Home in Exile — The Armenian Memory Book as Art, Artefact, and Roadmap

This collaborative ode to the tradition of the Armenian memory book, or houshamadyan – from Wasafiri 120: Armenia(n)s – Elevation – comprises a unique survey of the genre by historian Khatchig Mouradian, an essay and maps by urbanist Garine Boghossian, poetry by Christopher Kazar Janigian, and art by Masha Keryan.

You can read and download the full piece for free until the end of February, or read it in the print issue of Wasafiri 120: Armenia(n)s – Elevation, which is available to purchase now. 

_{A Selection of Memory Books Featured in this Essay. Photo: Khatchig Mouradian.}

Using a map of village households before everyone was deported or killed during the 1915 Armenian genocide, we navigated the streets of Havav (Ekinözu, in Kovancılar, modern-day Turkey), and stopped at a door. A few pairs of worn-out sandals were neatly lined up nearby. The memory map, hand-drawn in New York in 1966, identified the modest house as my friend’s great-grandparents’ home. A third-generation Armenian-American, and the first in the family to set foot in his ancestral village since the Genocide, he froze in front of that humble abode. And wept.

Moments such as this, frequent as they have been during visits to historically Armenian-populated areas that are now within the borders of Turkey, remain etched in my memory. On these research trips and pilgrimages, we are often guided, as we were in Havav, by houshamadyans (literally, memory books) — repositories of the history, geography, and ethnography of ancestral hearths lost to genocide and exile.

This collaboration of four writers and artists is a love letter to the literary genre of the Armenian memory book, framed within the broader context of how displaced communities reimagine and recreate Home. It brings together a historian, an urbanist, a poet, and a painter to produce meditations on the Armenian experience of exile and rebuilding. Conceived under the shadow of the 2023 ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh), as well as wars, genocides, and migrant crises worldwide, it strives to be as reflective as it is urgent, as global in scope as it is ‘Armenian’.

THE BIRTH OF A GENRE

The displaced do not build new homes, they re-enact old ones. The expropriation and deportation of the Armenians from their ancestral homeland in Ottoman Turkey during the First World War, the accompanying massacres and deprivations that killed up to 1.5 million, and the subsequent systematic erasure of thousands of cultural heritage sites had left behind a devastated land and a decimated nation reeling in exile. As the displaced reassembled shattered communities and lives in tatters, the longing for home seeped into their labour — and often defined it.

The literary genre of the memory book was born out of the survivors’ angst to inculcate in the next generation, who had never seen the ‘old country’, the same yearning for those inaccessible geographies tucked behind the borders of the Republic of Turkey. In the introduction to his memory book on Sis (Kozan), Misak Keleshian writes:

       Another decade or two, with the disappearance of the elders who remember our birthplace, narrators of its beauty will no longer exist. And our children and grandchildren, headed in a direction away from homeland and memory, left to the mercy of the wings of fortune, surrendered to the all-consuming floods of foreign shores, would have to prepare for the permanent loss of traditions. … Consumed by the aim of preempting this horrible disaster, we got to work and made an effort to instill among Armenians, and particularly among the people of Sis, the love of their birthplace … (VI)

In her book, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, scholar Marianne Hirsch writes: ‘To grow up with overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth, is to risk having one’s own life displaced, even evacuated, by our ancestors’ (5). Children of Armenian survivors found themselves in a similar predicament as they grew up in Beirut, Paris, and New York, entangled in stories of a bygone life in their ancestral homes and personal accounts of Medz Yeghern, the Great Crime.

Although decidedly an offspring of the 1915 genocide, the memory book draws inspiration from regional histories published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including works about places like Zeytun (Süleymanlı) that captured the imagination of the Armenian nation with their resilience and resistance against centralised Ottoman authority and oppression in the nineteenth century. The genre took shape in the post-genocide exilic life of the 1920s and 1930s, and within a few decades, the Armenian memory book had already ‘become a noticeable phenomenon in the Diaspora’, in the words of the author of one such book on Tomarza published in 1959 (13).

THE LABOUR OF WORLD (RE)MAKING

Published in Cairo in 1937, historian Arshak Alboyadjian’s two-volume, 2,500-page opus Պատմութիւն հայ Կեսարիոյ [History of Armenian Gesaria (Kayseri)] was a genre-defining early houshamadyan that for decades served as a source of envy, inspiration, and emulation. In an effusive 1937 review, the then Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem, himself a prolific and established author and researcher, lauded the work for ‘reviving a dead past and reassembling a scattered present’. He called for publishing such histories of all Armenian-populated towns and villages lost to the Genocide ('Մատենախօսական. Պատմութիւն հայ Կեսարիոյ' [Book Review: History of Armenian Gesaria (Kayseri)], Sion, September 1937, pp. 268–278).

‘We-need-one-of-these-for-our-town’ discussions cascaded across the hundreds of Armenian compatriotic unions in the Diaspora — created by, and for, Armenian exiles from specific villages, towns, or regions. Committees formed, recruiting editors and authors. The genre became an enterprise.

UNTITLED

by Christopher Kazar Janigian

Bearing
The gift for the priest at the time of
The juncture
Blessing of the home
Sickle and scythe, sickle and scythe
Did not have enough eyes
Did not it needs
To excuse it needs to taste buttery, exude
It is a beautiful night
What do you do on a beautiful night

_{Masha Keryan, 'Ascend, Titanium', 2023. Oil on Canvas.}

WHAT IS THE SHAPE OF OUR HOMELAND?

by Garine Boghossian 

Sometime in the winter of 2023, I asked a roomful of Armenian and Armenian-American university students to raise their hands if they knew where their ancestors had been expelled from. Most of them did. Then, I asked them if they knew what those cities and towns looked like. Only a few hands were raised. I expected this, but I wanted us all in the room to acknowledge, collectively, that perhaps one of the unifying features of our diasporic condition is that our ancestral homes have become abstract notions. Our cities and villages have lost shape, colour, smell, and sound. They have ceased to exist in our collective memory and our geographical imagination.

The colonial legacy of state-produced maps continues to shape geographical imaginations worldwide. Cartography, a practice strongly institutionalised by the state, has always been complicit in the history of colonialism and nationalism, used heavily by the military and during wars. It has been, and still is, a weapon to define territory and control people, legitimising the relationship between the occupier/settler and the occupied/indigenous populace. Following the Armenian genocide and throughout its subsequent nation-building process, Turkey produced fully Turkified maps using Turkish toponyms, erasing Armenian, Kurdish, Greek, and other non-Turkic names from collective consciousness. More recently, after the ethnic cleansing of Armenians from Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), the Azerbaijani state cartographers followed suit ...

_{Counter-map of Aintab. Courtesy Garine Boghossian.}

Continue reading the full piece online, free to download for the month of February, or in Wasafiri 120: Armenia(n)s – Elevation.