In a foreign place, the exile has no face.
You wake up in the morning and forget where you are. The smell of coffee from the kitchen. The sound of slippers across the linoleum floor. It could be any country.
When you look in the mirror you see the eyes of your grandfather. He expects something from you, but he won’t tell you what.
Better to go into captivity with the whole village than to go to a wedding alone.
The fabric was torn. With scraps you have made a tent, you have fashioned a kite, you have sewn a dress, you have wrapped yourself in a flag.
They have separated you with gun, grenade, barbed wire, wall, prison, passport. They have underestimated your will.
The hungry dream of bread, the thirsty of water.
Passing from one village to the next, without obstacle, without document, without your heart thumping up near your throat.
Turning the key in the lock, you enter through a door you have never passed through before except in your grandmother’s stories and in your dreams.
Nancy Kricorian
First published in Clockhouse Review, Volume 2, 2014.
I read this piece at the PEN World Voices Festival Armenian Genocide panel on 6 May 2015, as reported in The Guardian.
May 7, 2015