now

When I was growing up, my mother, sister and I spent many an afternoon doing craft projects out of magazines such as Ladies Home Journal and Family Circle. My mother also took a cake decorating class, and then shared her knowledge with me. (These skills were much appreciated when my own daughters were in grade school where I was known for Barbie birthday cakes and basketball cupcakes.) Remembering those afternoons, I pulled this poem from the archive.

*

The Artist as the Queen of Peas

It started with the cakes. I bought
tips, a tiny brush to clean them,
small jars of color, and the crisp
paper that twisted into sacks.
I practiced roses, leaves, festoons,
and the scrawl of “Happy Birthday.”
The first cake, a globe-shaped devil’s
food, was a hit at the missionary
conference. I iced it blue, and
smoothed on the continents in green,
sticking tiny flags into the countries
they represented. But it was sad
to see the cake disappear by the
forkful and the plate of crumbs.
I took photos of the others:
a heart-shaped cake for Valentine’s,
a chocolate sea bass for Father’s Day
(with maraschino cherry eyes),
the pineapple-layer turkey for my
vegetarian sister at Thanksgiving.

In the Christmas issue of Women’s
Day, I saw a gingerbread carousel:
there were reindeer instead of ponies.
Of course, you couldn’t eat it
because the icing dried rock hard,
but it looked lovely in the center
of the table, and could be stored
for future use. The next project
was a pasta Christmas tree: macaroni,
shells and bows glued to Styrofoam
and sprayed gold. After the apple-
head dolls, oranges imbedded with
cloves in the closets, star cookies
shellacked and hanging in
constellations, I wanted
something more, something grander.
For weeks I wondered how to create
food that would last, until, pushing
a cart down the grocery aisle, I rolled
past a pyramid of cans. It was easy
after that: I made self-portraits
with cans and jars of vegetables,
fruit and legumes, huge sculptures
of tin, glass and bright labels.
Now every major museum in the country
has a “Self-Portrait with Cling Peaches,”
or “The Artist as the Queen of Peas.”
They’re launching a major retrospective,
accompanied by a short film of my
lecture on “Culinary Art.” And I
owe it all to my mother, who taught
me everything I know about food.

Nancy Kricorian

Originally published in MISSISSIPPI REVIEW, Spring 1991

I’ve been thinking of Leo Hamalian lately. Perhaps it’s because the tenth anniversary of his passing is approaching. Or maybe it’s because as the launch of my third novel nears, I’m remembering my earliest professional publications. Leo was a distinguished and prolific writer, educator and editor. He served as the editor of ARARAT Literary Quarterly from 1972 until 2003. In 2001, I was invited to join a roster of speakers, including Peter Balakian, Diana Der Hovanessian and Peter Sourian, at a celebration of Leo’s career. Below are the words I offered at the time.

~

This is the scene. As I was driving my father’s car up Lincoln Street in Watertown, I, Nancy Kricorian, waved hello to a little neighborhood boy and somehow ran into a parked car. The parked car, it turned out, belonged to Paul Moushigian, who had graduated high school two years ahead of me. When the police officer got out of his cruiser to fill out the accident report he and Paul shook hands. They knew each other. The cop’s name was Eddie Bakarian. It turned out that Eddie Bakarian had gone to high school with my father, Eddie Kricorian. It was an Armenian thing. We’d be able to work it out.

What you might ask, does this anecdote have to do with Leo Hamalian? There is a circuitous connection. Because I grew up in Watertown, Massachusetts in the Armenian community, I had learned from my father that when you needed anything—a fixture installed, a TV repaired, a summer job—you should contact an Armenian. Now, there were instances that this didn’t work out quite the way one hoped. There was the shady Armenian house painter that disappeared with all the money when only half the house had been painted, for example. But to counter this were dozens of happy stories, like the one involving the gracious Paul Moushigian and helpful Eddie Bakarian.

This is where we get to Leo Hamalian. When I was in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia, I decided to start sending my poems to literary magazines. That was the way you launched a literary career as a poet. Following my father’s dictum, the first place I sent my poems was ARARAT Literary Quarterly. I thought, surely, the Armenian journal would take my somewhat Armenian-themed work.

What I didn’t think to know was that the Armenian-American editor at the Armenian-American journal had a calling and devotion much greater than simply being nice to people with –ian at the end of their names. His calling was to continue and to nurture the highest traditions of Armenian-American literature and culture, and his devotion was to the writers who came to him, often, as I did, little knowing what a huge impact his spirit and intelligence would have on us. He didn’t just publish Armenian-American writers; he grew them. For me, he did so many kind deeds that I am embarrassed to list them. But rather than get all sentimental, I’ll read from two other writers of my generation who have their own saccharine things to say about Leo.

This from Michael Zadoorian, whose fabulous novel SECOND HAND was published to critical acclaim by W.W. Norton: “Leo Hamalian was one of the first people to believe in me as a fiction writer. Even when he had to reject stories that I submitted to ARARAT, Leo always had something kind to say. The fact that Leo treated me like a professional writer helped me to believe it myself.”

And this from Chris Bohjalian, the best-selling author of such excellent novels as the Oprah-anointed MIDWIVES: “One thing I will cherish about Leo is his monumental generosity. There are few human beings on this planet not related to me by marriage or blood who are as relentlessly supportive and encouraging of my work as a writer—and in fact of so very, very many writers.”

Thank you, Leo, from me and from all the other writers whose talents you have cherished and nurtured not because we were neighborhood kids or vaguely your cousins, but because of your commitment to something greater—the collective work you inspired in us all.

Nancy Kricorian

Speech from A Festive Tribute to Leo Hamalian Upon His 30th Anniversary as Editor of ARARAT Literary Quarterly (Sunday, October 28, 2001)

In a used bookstore in Manhattan many years ago, I found a copy of Maria A. West’s 1875 memoir The Romance of Missions: Inside Views of Life and Labor in the Land of Ararat. Maria West was a New England missionary who had gone to the Ottoman Empire to convert the Armenians from their national church to her brand of Protestantism. On page 22 of this book, I came across a reference to an Armenian custom that I had never heard of before. West explained, “When the sons marry, they bring their wives home, and the mother-in-law generally rules them with a rod of iron. They are not allowed to speak in her presence till she grants permission, which is sometimes delayed for many years! In some cases, the mother-in-law dies before lifting the heavy yoke of imposed silence.”

My friend Patricia Constantinian-Voskeridjian did her master’s thesis in anthropology and Armenian Studies at Columbia on the topic of this practice, known as moonch genal (to stay or to stand mute). In some families, the mother-in-law granted permission within weeks or days, and in others, the bride labored in silence for many years. In some regions, the silence was accompanied by a mouth wrap that covered the bottom half of the young woman’s face as an outward indication of her bound speech. In some villages, it was the birth of a son that would win the bride—for the daughter-in-law was called a bride for long after she was married—the right to address her in-laws.

I was fascinated by this old world practice, which had long been in disuse when my French-Canadian mother came to live in her Armenian mother-in-law’s house. But my mother told me a story about how, not long after she and my father had married, my mother had offered her mother-in-law a bit of housekeeping advice. My grandmother had replied indignantly, “What? Should the baby bird now teach the mother bird to fly?” In that response I could hear the echoes of this old country custom. Some months later, I wrote a poem in the voice of a silenced bride.

*

The Bride Has Lost Her Tongue

There sits her mother-in-law, and, according to our custom, she cannot speak in her presence.

~  The Romance of Missions, or Life and Labor in the Land of Ararat (1875)

The day I left my mother’s house
I said, “Break my bowl and
throw it in the garden. Forget
the sound of my voice.”

At night when my husband sleeps,
I whisper words I have wanted
To say during the day into the
wooden box I keep by the bed.

Under the carved roses of its lid
are insults for my mother-in-law,
the aproned witch who keeps me
in silence. When she told me

to fetch some wood, I said nothing.
I said nothing when she commanded
that I comb out her hair. Then
the words began to seep through

the house like the smell of
a dead thing behind the wall.
She says, “Shut the door,” and
I hear, “Shut it yourself, you

braying ass,” as I set the latch.
When I shake out the blankets,
insults and hair balls cloud the air.
The broom mutters my curses.

With a son, I will earn my
speech. Someday his wife
like a servant will serve me—
in sweet, melodious silence.

Nancy Kricorian

originally published in RAFT, 1996

When I was in third grade our new teacher was different from any teacher we had ever seen at the Hosmer Elementary School in Watertown. Mrs. DeVoe was young and beautiful, with shoulder-length blond hair that flipped up at its ends. She wore mini-dresses with leather boots, and some days after school her handsome husband picked her up in a red sports car with a convertible top.

Each morning we started the day standing in a circle, holding hands and reciting proverbs. Things such as, “A stitch in time saves nine,” “When the cat’s away the mice will play,” and “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

I loved this activity and tried to find unusual sayings to share. I was particularly proud to offer this one: “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” Most of the other children didn’t know what a gander was.

We never discussed what a proverb was or why this might be a good way to start each morning. We rarely talked about their meanings. But the ritual provided a connection to communal wisdom. There was also something solemn and vaguely religious in it, although God was never mentioned.

A few years later I made a list of synonyms for proverb: adage, aphorism, axiom, dictum, maxim, and saw. Saw was the best one because it was a simple word with an esoteric meaning. There was another synonym—platitude—hinting at the fact that while proverbs might convey moral lessons and general truths, they could also be truisms that should be questioned.

At home we had other sayings. My mother’s favorites were, “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” “If you want something done well, you have to do it yourself,” and “There’s no such thing as an ugly baby.” My grandmother instructed, “Shut the light. Edison is richer than me” so frequently that it became a family mantra. My father was known to say, “That’s about as funny as a submarine with screen doors.” And he frequently quoted my Armenian grandfather’s motto: “I’m not a miser, I’m an economizer.”

This last was said in English, but it follows a pattern and rhyming structure that is common to Armenian proverbs as I later learned from studying them. Over a decade ago, I purchased a copy of Dora Sakayan’s Armenian Proverbs: A Paremiological Study with an Anthology of 2,500 Armenian Folk Sayings Selected and Translated into English, and it has been a source of endless interest and delight. I have since then sought out other sources—a 1932 bilingual anthology by an Armenian priest in Venice, short sections in books about Armenian folk tales and village lore, and of late many online compilations. My rudimentary Armenian language skills are good enough that I can read the original and compare different English translations. With the help of a dictionary I can even do my own.

I used Armenian proverbs as chapter headings in my second novel. I made lists of proverbs to deploy as I was creating a character in my third novel—Garabed Pegorian, a Genocide survivor, cobbler and father who makes sardonic comments about the Nazi Occupation his family suffers through in Paris. I’ve taken to posting Armenian proverbs on my Facebook author page and to Twitter, where they generate much response.

Here are some of my favorites:

You cannot erase what is written on your forehead.

The hungry dream of bread, the thirsty of water. 

A lost rope is always long.

Be neither sweet and swallowed, nor sour and spurned.

Toss your good deeds into the sea and the waves will carry them back to you.

The fool’s tongue is always long.

Literacy is a golden bracelet.

The lid rolled and found its pot.

From heart to heart there is a path. 

A mother-in-law should be blind in one eye and deaf in one ear.

Walk with the devil, but don’t let go of his tail.

In a foreign place, the exile has no face.

Land of Armenians, land of orphans.

Land of Armenians, land of sorrow.

Heaven and hell are in this world.

If they send two baskets of shit to our city, one will come to our house.

It’s better to carry stones with a wise man than to eat pilaf with a fool.

It’s better to go into captivity with the whole village than to go to a wedding alone.

The person who looks for a friend without faults will remain friendless.

Grief for the loss of a child is a burning shirt.

Let’s sit crooked and talk straight.

Let it be one and fine.

What does the donkey know of the almond?

If you buy a donkey for the price of a cucumber, one day you will find it drowned.

I have a few ideas about what this last one means, but I’ll leave that to the reader’s interpretation.

Nancy Kricorian

Ras al-Ain, a town on the Syrian side of the Syrian-Turkish border has been in the news lately as the bloody civil war has spread from Damascus and Aleppo to other parts of the country. The fighting has been fierce, the town has been bombed from the air, and hundreds if not thousands of civilians have fled over the border to Turkey. It isn’t a town that is well known in America; I had never seen it referenced in the newspaper until quite recently. But now, each time the town is mentioned, I feel a little shock of recognition and hear a voice saying, “The name of this place is Ras al-Ain.”

When I was researching my first novel, I interviewed my grandmother’s friend, Alice Kharibian, who had been in the Syrian desert with my grandmother during what they called The Deportations (now known to most as the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1921). My grandmother had told me what had happened to her family when they were forced to leave their home in Mersin, Cilicia, and after my grandmother died I went so see Mrs. Kharibian. She told a similar tale, but she added a detail that my grandmother had not. Mrs. Kharibian remembered the name of the town that was near the concentration camp where she and my grandmother had found each other among 8,000 Armenian orphans who had survived the death marches. She also told me of how they had walked into town to find something to eat—begging for bread, picking barley kernels out of horse droppings, and cutting bits of flesh off a dead camel by the side of the road. I used all these details in the first chapter of my novel Zabelle.

In 2007, a team of forensic anthropologists conducted fieldwork in Ras al-Ain in the first application of that discipline to supporting historical accounts of the Armenian Genocide. They unearthed a mass grave, or what I have elsewhere called “a garden of bones.”

Below is an excerpt from Zabelle (published in 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Press)

We followed the ones ahead of us and were followed by those behind us, all the Armenians walking together. It was cold at night; sometimes it poured down rain, and we sat holding a blanket over our heads. The donkey died, so we took what we could carry. To keep us moving, Turkish soldiers beats stragglers with whips. Local Kurds traded food for our last coins and my mother’s ruby earrings.

The sun rose and fell like a gold coin. Light and shadow leaped from fires at night. Grown-ups talked in a language that I knew but said things I couldn’t understand. My grandmother whispered to me, “Hush, hush now. Go to sleep.”

My grandfather trailed behind us, hobbling along with a cane. My mother called back to him, “We’ll see you at the resting place.” He would arrive after dark and fall down to sleep without even eating. One morning he didn’t wake up. My grandmother slapped her face and called out to God in a loud voice. She sat in the dust and wouldn’t get up until my mother pulled her to her feet. The next day Grandmother sat down in the dirt by the side of the road and begged us to leave her. She said she couldn’t take another step. My mother kissed my grandmother’s hands and said a prayer. Then she wrapped a scarf over my head so I couldn’t look back.

One morning as we were walking, a rumor passed down the line that the men of Hadjin had been shot on the outskirts of town and buried in a big pit. The women screamed like a flock of starved birds. I put my hands over my ears and hid my face in my mother’s shoulder. She didn’t make a sound. After that, my mother walked like someone asleep, holding the baby tightly and pushing me ahead of her.

There were bodies everywhere I looked. Some were old, some were babies, some were bleeding from the mouth, some were half-alive. The smell was terrible, the flies, the maggots, the animals chewing on an arm or leg while the eyes rolled up, staring at the sky. But we kept walking. Where are we going? I asked my mother. She didn’t know. But we kept walking.

My mother sold the pots, the bowls, the spoons, the knife, even her headscarf, for food. All we had left was a tin cup on a frayed string
around my neck.

We came to a place in the desert where we were told the stay. The baby Krikor died there. At night, under the light of the moon, my mother dug a pit using my cup. She couldn’t dig very deep, but she wanted to hide his body from the birds that followed us. She wrapped him in her shawl and put the bundle in the hole. We closed up the place with sand, and then we said a prayer for his soul. The soul of our baby was a small as a breath. It joined the other dead souls in the night wind and blew across desert sands.

This was to be our home—a stretch of desert. With a large cloth she had taken from a dead woman by the road and some sticks she found, my mother made us a tent. There was just enough room for us to sit up or lie down side by side on a piece of blanket, with our feet sticking out. I heard someone say, “The name of this place is Ras Al-Ain.”

Nancy Kricorian

When I was a graduate student, I worked as Susan Sontag’s personal assistant for one year. I went to her apartment on East 17^th Street on Friday mornings to run errands, take dictation, type letters, and retype essays. (My typing skills were not what she expected so I quickly signed up for a class at a secretarial school near Penn Station that enabled me to pick up speed and keep the job.) I was thrilled to be in proximity to so prominent a writer, and she gave me books and tickets to performances. But she had a tendency to make harsh comments that were likely motivated more by obliviousness than by actual malice. One time in particular she said something so disdainful that I felt as though the breath had been knocked out of me. But I’ll keep that anecdote for another time, when I write the narrative of our odd, attenuated relationship over the years.

I went back in my journals and found entries from the summer when I helped her pack her 8,000 books so she could move from a duplex in a large brownstone on 17^th Street to a smaller apartment on King Street. Below is an excerpt from one of those entries.

22 August 1985

I’ve learned a lot about S.S. in the past days packing books with her. Today I came across a photo of Susan as a young girl with her grandfather and her sister Judith. I didn’t even know she HAD a sister—I thought she was an only child. So I asked her about it as we headed out of the house for lunch in Chinatown. She told me that she thought of herself as an only child. She and Judith were three years apart in age, but six years apart in school. The only thing that she remembers about Judith is that she played with paper dolls and she liked jacks. They shared a bedroom until Susan was thirteen years old. Susan felt like she had nothing in common with her family.

Mother: Did you buy the bread?

Stepfather: What bread?

Mother: The bread I asked you to buy this morning!

Stepfather: You asked me to buy bread?

Mother: Yes, I did.

Stepfather: What kind of bread did you ask me to buy?

Mother: I don’t remember. I think it was….

Susan said it was like water torture with this inane conversation dropping on her head. She also commented that she had been very bright, but no one encouraged her, she did it all on her own and who knows what she might have been with more environmental stimulation…She said she had read a lot. She said reading was a wonderful way to travel and to meet interesting people. I suggested, from my own similar experience with reading, that it was also a form of escapism and a way to feel in control, but she does not seem generally interested in the psychological underpinnings of behavior.

Nancy Kricorian

Our family attended the Armenian Brethren (Evangelical) Church on Arlington Street, in Watertown, Massachusetts. My grandfather, Levon (Leo) Kricorian, was one of the founders of the church. Its congregation was made up of survivors—and the children and grandchildren of survivors—of what was called at the time “the Massacres,” “the Deportations” or “the Catastrophe.” Later this tragic chapter in Armenian history became known as The Genocide (1915-1921).

The Genocide was only occasionally openly addressed in our community, but vague allusions and scraps of stories floated around me without my ever gathering them into a coherent narrative. One of these fragments was a line that my grandmother said in passing about one of her close friends, Mrs. Mary Amiralian. In reference to Mrs. Amiralian’s grown progeny, one of whom was my Sunday school teacher when I was in grade school, my grandmother said, “Those are her American children. The first ones died in the desert.”

Years later, after my grandmother and Mrs. Amiralian had died, when I was researching my novel Zabelle and reading voluminously about the Armenian Genocide, this bit of conversation came back to haunt me. In response I wrote the poem “Ghost Children.”

Ghost Children

At lunchtime I stand
at the stove spooning soup
into three white bowls.
My children eat bread
at the table. They laugh
at the milk moustaches that
I wipe from their faces.

On the pantry floor I see
the narrow shadows of the
other children, the ones
whose bones I left in the
desert in a garden of bones.
The sand is still in my hair;
their high voices in my ears.

My American children can’t
see their unlucky brother and
sister who follow close by
my skirt. Mairig, the ghosts
complain, we are hungry. Mairig,
give us something to eat.

Published in ARARAT Literary Quarterly (Spring 1995)
Recording of the author reading “Ghost Children” via The Armenian Poetry Project

* Mairig means Mommy in Armenian

Nancy Kricorian

When I was growing up, my Armenian grandmother hemmed my dresses. And for many years, I would wear only dresses. (Being forced by my mother to wear snow pants when I was in the first grade caused me paroxysms of grief.) I stood on the footstool in my grandmother’s bedroom while she pulled straight pins from a red pincushion and slid them through the fabric folded to the chosen length. Appropriate length was a subject of much discussion between us.

“How long?” she asked.

I pointed to a spot mid-way up my thigh, which was at the time the fashionable length but a little shorter than was comfortable for me. I had learned from experience that no matter what length I indicated, and no matter what length we agreed upon, the finished product would be at least two inches longer. So I asked for too short, knowing she would make her own adjustments for the sake of modesty.

“What?” she asked. “You want the whole world to see your vardik?”

“No one will be able to see my underwear. It’s not that short.”

She shook her head. “These are the last days. Everyone is walking around showing their vodik and everything else.”

This last bit of dialogue about panties, Biblical end times and public display of private parts was repeated each time I stood on the footstool for a dress fitting. Sometimes my grandmother digressed into a discussion of bikinis, which she considered to be a true sign that Christ’s Second Coming was at hand.

I finally outgrew my hatred of slacks when I was about twelve years old, and my grandmother and I moved on to a new frontier in hemming. By some logic that I never quite understood, my grandmother believed that while skirts should be long, pants should be short. It took several pairs of slacks that bared my ankles before I recognized the system and asked for them to be at least two inches longer than I actually wanted.

Nancy Kricorian

When my grandmother first arrived in the United States as an immigrant bride, she worked sewing buttons on shirts for a local manufacturer. In the bottom drawer of her bureau there was a dented cookie tin filled with buttons. Some of them dated from her time at the shirt factory, and the rest she had saved slowly over the years. When a shirt was torn beyond repair or frayed beyond wearing, she snipped off the buttons and added them to the tin. I spent hours playing with the buttons, sorting them by color and arranging them into patterns and shapes.

In my third novel, ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS, Maral Pegorian’s mother is a vest maker who does piecework at home. Like my grandmother, Azniv Pegorian has an old cookie tin filled with buttons. When Maral wants to entertain a little girl she’s babysitting one afternoon, she pulls out the tin. She says, “There were buttons with two holes and those with four, plus metal and leather shank buttons. The colors were varied: shiny gold, red ones, all shades of white and brown, and thin disks made from shimmering mother-of-pearl.” This is a description of my grandmother’s buttons.

My favorite in my grandmother’s collection was a dark brown shank button that had come from an old cloth coat. The button was made of plastic, decorated with silver filigree, and had a green rhinestone in its center. After my grandmother died, I used a safety pin to attach this button to the lapel of a vintage black gabardine jacket that I wore all the time.

Nancy Kricorian

For he had been dedicated to the cult of the plane trees at Aramaneak in Aramvir. The murmuring of their foliage and the direction of their movement at the gentler or stronger blowing of the wind were used for divination in the land of the Armenians, and that for a long time.

Moses Khorenatsi, History of the Armenians  (5^th century A.D.)

According to historian Moses of Khoren, Anushavan Sosanver, grandson of the legendary Armenian king Ara the Beautiful, was dedicated to the cult of the plane trees at the sacred grove in Aramvir.

Sos is the Armenian word for plane tree, and the word for rustling is sosapiun. Anushavan’s name—Sosanver—means “dedicated to the plane tree” and also evokes the rustling of the tree’s leaves. Plane trees were planted in churchyards until the 10^th-13^th centuries. Christian religious authorities discredited the plane trees because of their relationship to pagan practices, but people still designated specific trees near holy sites as sacred.

To this day, near many ancient churchyards and small roadside chapels, you can see a tree that is festooned with rags. Armenians go to tie a piece of cloth on these “wishing trees”; each rag represents a wish or a prayer that the supplicant hopes will be granted by God.

Nancy Kricorian