InternationalOf political violence and lost love
Published: Saturday March 22, 2008
Micheline Aharonian Marcom.
Micheline Aharonian Marcom is the award-winning author of Three Apples Fell from Heaven and The Daydreaming Boy. Her third novel, Draining the Sea, has just been released. In this interview with the Reporter's Atina Hartunian, Ms. Marcom discusses her new book, her bittersweet travels in Western Armenia and Guatemala, and the transformative powers of memory.
Armenian Reporter: How did your writing career begin?
Marcom: I never thought I'd become a writer, and I certainly never thought I'd be writing about the Armenian Genocide. But I started writing in my early 20s, a relationship ended-that's what heartache does, I suppose, pushed me, in any case, to express in language what I was experiencing internally. I started by mostly writing poetry. Then I made an intentional shift to writing prose a few years later, when I was unemployed for several months. Years after that, I ended up taking classes at Mills College (where I sill work, but in a different capacity; at the time I was the assistant director of an education program for high school kids) with one of the professors in the Creative Writing MFA program - her family is also from Lebanon. Eventually, I enrolled in the MFA program. I was 29 when I started the program, and by then I had come around to realize that I wanted to write the story of my grandmother and about the Genocide.
AR: What was that moment of realization like?
Marcom: When I started writing I didn't write about anything Armenian per se. My short stories were mostly set in the U.S. One day, I remember particularly, I was hanging out with a group of creative-writing peers, and I wrote a piece, two or three pages long, and it was about my grandmother, whom I didn't know that much about, in terms of her experiences during the genocide. And I knew that I had stumbled onto the novel I wanted to write-that the few pages I had written was the kernel for a longer piece. It took me years to realize that the stories that I needed to be writing were much closer to home, right up against the bone. This was the story I had inherited, the four or five sentences about my grandmother and her siblings. And although it's obvious in hindsight, the stories that obsess you are the stories you need to tell.
AR: I understand that Three Apples Fell from Heaven is going to be made into a movie.
Marcom: Yes, José Rivera, the Oscar-nominated writer of The Motorcycle Diaries, wrote the screenplay.
AR: Have you worked with him on the screenplay?
Marcom: Not directly. It's been an interesting collaboration in spirit. He's a friend of mine, however, and he's married to a dear friend of mine, she's Armenian, and we've traveled together to a lot of places, including Harput [Kharpert], which is where Three Apples takes place. But he wrote the screenplay on his own, and once he wrote it (he'd done a lot of research), he showed it to me. Right now, they're shopping the script around to directors. He optioned the novel officially a few months back.
AR: What do you think of the topic of the Armenian Genocide in the arts?
Marcom: Well, in terms of literature, when I began writing Three Apples, there was very little out there. There was [Carol Edgarian's] Rise the Euphrates, and then [Nancy Kricorian's] Zabelle, a little before mine came out. Those were the only two books in English-language literature that I knew of. And that's not very much. I think, for Armenians, the topic of Genocide can be tiresome ("OK, lets move on"). In terms of literary output, I think that there's room for much more. I think that some of that is happening now by younger writers, which is great.
AR: When you traveled to Western Armenia, what were some of the revelations you had there? Did something mystical happen?
Marcom: It kind of did, yes. I didn't necessarily expect to feel something when I traveled to Anatolia. I wanted to see it. And at that point I was writing the third book in the "genocide" trilogy: Draining the Sea. There are pieces in the book that are directly taken from experiences during my travels. The scene with the bone boy, for example, where he shows bones found in the desert in Der Zor, that was true. I made the trip to Syria the year before I went to Turkey. I went to Syria, to the Der Zor desert, because the journalist, Robert Fisk, had written an article saying that he went there and he found bones in Der Zor, and I wanted to go see if that was true. It was. We met this Arab caretaker and his son - on whom the bone boy in Draining the Sea is based. The father took care of a monument to honor the Armenian dead. Then, the following year, I went to Turkey. I went to Van. I went to Kars and then ended up in Harput, which is where my Grandparents lived.
AR: Did you meet any Armenians there?
Marcom: No, I didn't. But once I started talking to people there in private, I would hear stories. Many people talked of their "Armenian grandmother" and how they would hear prayers in Armenian, etc. So, even though Armenians are not there as we once were - and of course it's a very taboo subject in Turkey, the "Armenian question" as it is referred to - once you actually start talking to people, they acknowledge, individually, that Armenians were there, and also that, for some people, there were Armenian members in their families. There are traces everywhere of the Armenian world.
AR: So there was a sense of an Armenian presence there?
Marcom: Yes, in a way. As my friends and I were walking around Harput, for example, a merchant started befriended us, and later, as we got to know him over tea and cookies, as one does in the Middle East, he said to me and my Sona, José's wife, "I knew you both were Armenian." The merchant wasn't Armenian, he was Kurdish, but he recognized us, despite our American appearance and clothing. It was amazing to go back there. And very sad also.
