Of all the tomes written about the Armenian Genocide, none has had such a profound effect on me than this newest volume by Elyse Semerdjian, Remnants, published in 2023 on Stanford University Press.
Semerdjian is the Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair of Armenian Genocide Studies at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University.
The reasons for her book’s impact are multiple. The first simply that I have never been a great fan of traditional dry date-and-place historical accounts, which is what populates much of the field of Armenian Genocide studies. This was of course necessary at first as virtually no descriptions of the Aghed existed until the late Richard Hovannisian came around, followed by other remarkable historians such as Vahakn Dadrian. The tone and tenor of what was researched and how it was presented began to change only in the last few decades with the novel work of a new generation of theorists and historians like Marc Nichanian, Raymond Kevorkian and Denis Donikian — and now Elyse Semerdjian — who analyze the Armenian Genocide through the lens of literature, gender, sexuality, narratology and literary theory. As a result, these scholars arrive at a more nuanced and rich account of how the Medz Yeghern was actually carried out. Using the body as a physical human archive, Semerdjian stretches the boundaries of traditional archival research.
Semerdjian’s book is divided into three parts, appropriately titled “Bodies,” “Skin” and “Bones.” Each chapter within these parts is supplemented by a short, fascinating supplementary entry titled a “remnant,” as in “remnant 1” or “remnant 2.” The latter are as varied as a poster of Genocide-survivor-turned-Hollywood-star from the 1920s Aurora Mardiganian; or Siamanto’s heart-rending poem, “The Dance;” or pictures-cum-analysis of tattoos from different Arab and Bedouin tribes.
“Part I: Bodies” includes at least three fascinating chapters. “Chapter 1: Zabel’s pen: Gender, Body Snatching” uses the work of the Constantinopolitan writer Zabel Yessayan, who had already been sent by the Armenian Patriarch to Adana after the 1909 massacres, to account for the many killed during that precursor to 1915. Yessayan spent time after the Armenian Genocide in Tbilisi writing down the testimonies of survivor after survivor, then repatriated to Soviet Armenia where she was murdered by the local KGB. “Chapter 2: Weaponizing Shame: Dis-Memberment the Armenian Collective Body,” analyzes how Talaat pasha and the other architects of the Armenian Genocide almost literally dismembered the Armenian polity, starting from its “head” during the roundup of intellectuals in 1915, down to the women (and men) who were raped and tortured so that the community would all apart and be unable to reproduce itself, metaphorically and literally. The medical vocabulary that the Turks used when talking about the carnage is itself instructive. Finally, “Chapter 5: ‘Changlings’ and ‘Halflings’” Finding the Armenian Body inside Islamized Child” examines the use of conversion to further destroy the Ottoman Armenian communities. Some may previously know the particularly insidious Ottoman nationalist writer and educator Halide Edib Adivar who placed thousands of Armenian children in Turkish orphanages under the guise of “rescuing” them. Many were forever lost to Turkish families who successfully assimilated them. Of particular interest to many given the recent documentary film “Aurora’s Sunrise,” will be “Chapter 6: Aurora’s Body, Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Suffering.” Aurora Mardiganian, was a beautiful young survivor who was “discovered” by Hollywood and then forced under sometimes insufferable conditions to finish a film titled “The Auction of Souls.” The documentary recreation of her experience during the Armenian Genocide helped the Near East Foundation raise the equivalent of billions of dollars in today’s money and save a generation of Armenian orphans, but Mardiganian died in obscurity and poverty.
Without going into detail about Semerdjian’s thesis, for fear of turning the current review into a long synopsis, I would only comment that I too have always been fascinated by the will to shock through the use of still or moving images. This includes the release of Holocaust footage of emaciated Jews on the death’s doorstep after WWII or recently of some of the more disturbing images of Palestinian deaths in Gaza, as if repeating to display them would somehow make viewers more sensitive to human tragedy. Quite to the contrary, as Susan Sontag convincingly argues in “On Photography,” the repetition of war photography has acted as a kind of vaccination against the horrors being shown, perhaps one might think as a form of defense mechanism. When combined with the scopophilic and sexualized pleasure derived from looking at a person or object, used by feminist scholars such as Laura Mulvey to describe the male gaze in Hollywood cinema in objectifying the female body, one gets an approximate idea of what the sometimes lurid images of naked crucified Armenian women in “Auction of the Soul’s” actually achieved, in tandem with sensitizing American audiences to the horrors of 1915.
