Sergei Parajanov, The Color Of Pomegranates, 1969
SEE IF THEY WILL NOT LIVE AGAIN ARAXIE CASS (AB’22) One hundred years after my family fled the Armenian Genocide, I went to Armenia for the first time on a family vacation. This land of grassy slopes, ancient stone churches, and blazing summer sun was unfamiliar to me, but it drew me in like no other place I had been before. One day, our guide, Hayk, and his dad invited us over for coffee. We talked about painting over tiny cups of coffee, dark and thick with fine grounds. One cup led to another, and a year later I was in Armenia again to help my mom, Anahit, with a photography and writing project documenting stories of nonviolent resistance in two regions of the country under military threat. It was in cups of coffee that I learned the stories of a tiny unrecognized republic called Artsakh1, the border villages of Tavush province in Armenia, and what it means to live a life of resistance in a conflict zone.2 Originally, the project aimed to show the beauty and history of Armenia to the world. But as we traveled through Tavush and Artsakh, people started asking us to tell their stories. Since the Armenian Genocide, one of the weapons used against Armenians is the denial of the facts of our existence.3 In an act of resistance, people invited us to drink coffee and listen. I. Azerbaijan was our home When we first walked into Ruzanna Avagyan’s office, she was finishing a meeting with an older man who sat on the other side of her wooden desk. She wore a businesslike blue dress and spoke in Russian, in a tone that sounded like she was giving him instructions before he left. Saro,4 our translator, guide, and all-purpose friend, introduced us, and Ruzanna asked whether we liked sugar in our coffee. Once we were all seated around the table next to the desk with our tiny white cups, Ruzanna explained to us that her client’s name was Sasha and he had come to her about the loss of his refugee paperwork. We started off asking questions about the refugee organization that she ran. Between statistics and sips of coffee, she began to unravel the story of how she came to Artsakh. “I was nineteen years old when my family left Sumgait,” she told us. “They went to Stepanakert and I went to Yerevan.” As Ruzanna spoke, I looked at her, as if to keep some semblance being included in the conversation.. Her words were unintelligible to me, so I found myself trying to read her half smiles, the lilt of her speech, and the deep, slightly sad look of her brown eyes.5 Then I looked at Saro, who translated, delivering the story edited and annotated for me to better understand. “She didn’t see the bad things I saw,” he said, and his eyes darkened for an almost imperceptible moment, before he returned to his authoritative tone, making sure we had our history straight. “Until 1988, we can say, it 1 Artsakh is the ancient Armenian name for the region. It is also known as Nagorno-Karabakh, an amalgamation of Russian and Azeri words. 2 Folktales have no barriers and can pass through centuries from generation to generation and can live as long as a nation lives. - Hayk Kachatryan, Queens of the Armenians 3 Sometimes it seems almost amusing that the Armenian Genocide is still denied when the evidence is written so clearly in the letter from my mother’s great uncle after he survived the Turkish army (where Armenians were forced to dig their own graves) and in the photographs of our crucified ancestors we saw as children and in the splinters and wounds that still divide my family. I used to find it baffling how all the reliable sources said that the border between Armenia and Artsakh was not there, when I had driven across it. 4 Saro’s full name, Sarasar Saryan, literally translates to “mountain mountain mountain,” and is perhaps the best illustration of Artsakh’s national motto, We Are Our Mountains. 5 Armenians like to say that you can always recognize Armenian eyes (hye achker), because they carry so much sadness. 3
