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The Ottoman Perpetrators: Our Infection, Contagion, and Genocide
By Nayri Carman
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Rivers clotted like your arteries with my olive scarlet limbs, Wells littered with limbs make water for your favorite cocktail for your April 24th happy hour. You infected my people, blood bleeding from the hearts and ribs peeking through the skin Of my great-great-grandchildren and grandparents’ children, Tattoos written in ink of ownership or the ink of the porcelain once-crimson scars.
There were no jewels in my pregnant belly but the one jewel of life but your sword sliced through my child like bread, where I left my life with my blisters in the scorching sand with the dust in my stomach and the ghee in my shoes and my G-d steadfast in my heart.
I wasn’t there but you were. I wasn’t there but my G-d was. I wasn’t there but my soul was.
She became dark before the light of life could even touch her. Then I was born.
“The Ottoman Perpetrators: Our Infection, Contagion, and Genocide” is an account of the intergenerational trauma carried by Armenians and a recollection of some of the horrors of the genocide, to which our ancestors and souls bore witness. April 24th, 1915 is acknowledged as the first day of the Armenian Genocide, when the systematic extermination of my people began with the community leaders: teachers, politicians, wealthy merchants, poets, even priests. It is now Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.
