“Just keep walking on this street, miss. It will lead you to where you need to go. All these streets will lead you there,” the forty-two year-old bus driver — who had come to Yerevan from Leninakan when he was twenty-one and regretted leaving the moment he had arrived — tells Ruzan Garsevanian as he drops her on the streets of “the great modern city.” Ruzan escapes her hometown, the small mountainous village of Satoyavan by the Bazum Mountains in Armenia, so she can “be reborn” and live the way she had always wanted to live.
When Ruzan, the village fearcatcher Ripsimeh Garsevanian’s dark-skinned foundling daughter, understood that a perpetual state of confusion and fear was the only truth of the human condition — the rest was all lies, “All yarn, all yarn” — and that “God was the one doling out the hurt,” she began to question her schoolteachers’ tales about duty and destiny and the priests’ accounts of heaven and justice.
Fearcatcher, by Naira Kuzmich (University of New Orleans Press, 2025) is no ordinary tale. It is the story of generations of fearcatching families in Armenia trusted with dispelling the fears of their communities. “I ease the fear that God has burdened you with,” Ripsimeh tells the children of Satoyavan. Fearcatching was an age-old tradition in Armenia — still practiced in rural villages — an ancient folk healing ritual to cure both emotional and physical trauma by taking the fear out of the afflicted person.
The novel is full of stories about magical apples, evil stepmothers, the snake on the ground poisoning the apple, all symbolic that there is no running away from destiny. In one mystical story, Ripsimeh tells her daughter, the future fearcatcher, that God had created the demon al who, with an iron axe in his hand, enters homes and snatches all he wants. The village women have their own charms and weapons. Yet, when they beg Christ for mercy and Christ grants it, they “continue to cry, Mariam, Mariam, Mariam.” People will always be afraid in a world where one cannot escape one’s djagadakeer — what is written on one’s forehead, in Armenian. Ruzan comes to understand that her attempt to escape it all was “damned from the very beginning.”
Fearcatcher is, nonetheless, a mythical tale rooted in the realities of the small village of Satoyavan in Soviet Armenia, in the 1970s and 1980s. Kuzmich revives a whole culture where mothers needed their daughters “to defend [them] from their fathers’ heavy hands” — “It was always the woman, it was always Eve who would be thrown first out of heaven. If she did not throw herself out, of course.“ But she also reminds us of “dethroned fathers“ who felt threatened by their women and children. The constant references, on the other hand, to Soviet policies about construction, to commissars who pocketed the resources allocated to cheap buildings that did not stand, evoke the Armenian people’s dream to determine their own course. “The splendour of dictators in Armenian lands was temporary,” writes Kuzmich, commenting on “a tall stone woman wielding a sword” taking the place of “a man named Stalin,” on the pedestal of the Mother Armenia Monument in Yerevan.
It should not be difficult to see the novel as a meditation on life. Kuzmich invites the reader to ponder Ruzan’s feeling of loneliness, “somewhere down deep,” as she wonders why no one was coming to get her out of the hospital where she gave birth to her baby girl, Araxie. Where was her child? Later on, the young mother is tormented by visions of the begging old woman (a fearcatcher herself?) she had befriended on the streets of Yerevan, watching her child for a day when she returns to her hometown. Had she just given her daughter away to the strange old woman? Will she ever go back to Araxie? “Did it even matter?” This questioning — with the burden of fear being the only (terrifying?) certainty — is perhaps the only truth about human life, and Kuzmich captures it masterfully. It is impossible not to be awed by the depths she can reach in her probe into the truths of this existence.
