How can the reality of war and genocide be effectively expressed? Can human language provide us the means to “say the unspeakable”? A question debated among genocide researchers, this was an issue that arose during a round table hosted by the Armenian delegation at the recent Frankfurt Book Fair.
The publication presented was a graphic essay, also known as comics, titled, Last Night on Earth: War through Women’s Gaze: Stories from Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine, with three stories about war as experienced by women. The first two entries utilized the graphic format in a relatively conventional manner, relating stories in narrative sequence, graphically illustrated.
The Armenian entry, “One Meme Away from War,” diverges radically from this scheme, and in so doing, makes a profound statement about expressing the inexpressible. Written by Ani Asatryan, with editor Mikheil Tsikhelashvili, and illustrated by Astghik Harutyunyan, its subject is the Artsakh wars from 1988 to 2023, which “unfolded under the watch of Russia, Armenia’s so-called ally — whose betrayal allowed these events to occur.”
It opens with a letter dated December 25, addressed to “Dear stranger,” and signed by “Nobody – 070,” who asks the reader, “if you happen upon a dead … body in the park … under a fig tree, free me from the lungs of that lifeless shell.” Perhaps the two will be the only survivors, “sharing the burden of existence.”
In rapid shifts, the scene moves to the Gray Zone, a “place off the maps,” where three groups coexist: Nobodies, Somebodies, and Nomen. It is illustrated in black, with terse phrases in white, a candle, dim figures. A century ago, the Memeoids arrived, creatures who slavishly follow commands of a Scriptwriter. Ordered to eliminate the population because it had sought autonomy, they usher in a century of AUTONOMYCIDE. At that time with death marches, now today, with drones and social engineering, they turn the inhabitants into apathetic beings, Somebodies. Where this tactic fails, the Memeoids in 2023 use a blockade and starvation. The Nobodies, loved ones of the Nomen, live invisibly, to survive. They are memory-keepers, representing the stories and souls of “the other 99.”
The Nobody dressed in black, a ghostwriter who writes exposés and wages a battle for intellectual survival, is tasked with depicting the story of the Gray Zone in a graphic novel, and must interview Nobody-070. The task provokes illness and traumatic memories of the grandparents. En route, the ghostwriter passes through city-dwellers, strolling through shopping arcades and uttering banalities.
