Three Apples: The Relic
Once there was and there was not … that place 100 years ago that my ancestors survived, where teenaged boys were dressed as girls, young women married off to foreigners and infants given up to Kurds so that they would all be spared. Those handful of survivors, who wanted to live at any cost, did just that so that I could be here, typing on a Mac, having you as my audiences, living in a clean, well-lit room and enjoying a front row seat to world history. When those survivors lost their parents, siblings, homes, mental health and happiness, they found themselves in orphanages in Aleppo or Karantina, the quarantined garbage dump in Beirut. They found themselves with no belongings, no sense of place or self, and with no closure for the crimes they witnessed. But they marched ahead, rebuilt their lives and made us promise to be ‘Armenian.’ My grandparents didn’t have anything to show for their lives before the death marches. They had no photographs, no gold crosses, no physical, tactil...