Women of the Armenian Genocide: From Eyewitness Accounts To Literary Echoes

Women suffered the major burden of the consequences of the Armenian Genocide, such as lost family, lost homeland and beginning their life in a completely foreign place that today is called the Armenian Diaspora. In many cases they stayed alive only after passing through indescribable tortures and violence during the deportation. However, these women not only bravely made sacrifices to protect their children, but with persistence preserved the memories of their land, stories, objects, books and photographs. As Daniel Sherman observes: “Sight is the only sense powerful enough to bridge the gap between those who hold a memory rooted in bodily experience and those who, lacking such experience, nonetheless seek to share the memory.” The present research aims to provide a study of the crucial role performed by women of the victimized group by examining historical narrative, both memoir and fiction, with a particular focus on the Armenian Genocide. The chapter has at its center the following objectives: 1. To investigate the impact of culturally defined roles of women – simultaneously both victim and hero – during and after the Genocide, to whom the world mainly owes the saving of memories through intergenerational transmission; 2. to examine the different treatment of the perpetrators towards women; 3. to provide a more nuanced understanding of the reactions of women of the victimized group in light of the fact that their men were brutally murdered at the onset of the atrocities; 4. to determine how long it took the women survivors to overcome the emotional circumstances of experiencing genocide in order to transmit their suppressed memories to a collective memory. Was it an immediate reaction after the Genocide, or was some distance of time required to remove psychological blocks in order to share the story of their survival with their children and in many cases with their grandchildren? This interdisciplinary approach connects history to literature, as well as to Diaspora and gender studies.