Elyse Semerdjian’s Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide offers a compelling gendered historiography of abducted, enslaved, and mutilated bodies of Armenian women and children, whose experience of sexual violence and forced assimilation into Muslim households during the Armenian genocide has been virtually erased from Ottoman archives. Semerdjian argues that these state-controlled archives under the watchful eye of the Turkish government perpetuates the ethnonationalist genocidal rhetoric that led to the persecution and annihilation of up to 1.2 million Ottoman Armenians on their indigenous lands in the Ottoman Empire. Given the violent bias of traditional Ottoman archives, Semerdjian turns to an analysis of the body politics that informed the Armenian genocide, taking the “fragmentary wreckage” (8) of women’s bodies as a methodological point of departure. She reminds readers that the term “remnants” is used derogatively in the Turkish language to refer to surviving Armenian women and children who were deported, raped, and forcefully Islamized as “remnants of the sword” (8), whereas contemporary Armenians define the term as “incoherent fragmentary wreckage of what once was the Ottoman Armenian community” (8). Remnants reconstructs the embodied history of the Armenian genocide from the material fragments of bodies in the geographic spaces where the genocide occurred, where it was remembered individually and collectively, and where its memory was violently erased when ISIS overran Syria. The book gathers and reassembles the dispersed fragmentary history and ritual memorial practices from the period immediately following the genocide until the very present. Aptly, Semerdjian divides the book into three parts—“Bodies,” “Skin” and “Bones”—to reflect the critical archeology of Armenian bodies and the hi/stories of their physical and symbolic remains.
Inspired by recent work in gender and memory studies, Semerdjian’s innovative archeology draws on Alison Landsberg’s notion of prosthetic memory to capture how individual and collective rituals of remembering the dead help us (re)imagine and fill in the missing gaps of victims’ stories, while at the same time this also allows us to partake in affective transgenerational acts of mourning. Semerdjian’s unearthing of the fragmentary history of Armenian women’s bodies offers a deeply personal perspective, as she not only explores historical texts, photographs, and film fragments, but also incorporates her own family experience by analyzing the material bodily traces they left behind.
In her introduction, Semerdjian shares a family photo of the Chekijians of Aintab and briefly recounts how her great-great-grandfather Hagop and his brothers paradoxically worked as tailors sewing uniforms for the Ottoman military, and it was in those very uniforms that the soldiers would soon deport and kill Armenians throughout the empire. While Semerdjian rejects Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory in favor of prosthetic memory, her own approach in a way enacts that very concept, such as when she inserts an autoethnographic inscription of her family history into her text, which specifically involves the retrospective reimagining of intergenerational affective bonds through surviving family photographs. For instance, the close-up photo of 17-year-old Loutfie Bilemdjian serves as the cover of Semerdjian’s book; as such, it serves as case in point for a postmemorial practice according to which Loutfie directly confronts the reader face-to-face in what Semerdjian interprets as a proud and defiant gaze.
The section on “Bodies” starts out with the 1919 documentation by Zabel Essayan (1878–1943) of habitual Ottoman Turkish practices of abduction, conversion, and sexual slavery with respect to non-Muslim peoples. These practices date back to the fifteenth century and were systematically mobilized during the Armenian genocide, as evidenced by the denuding and sexual shaming of victims and the looting of victims’ clothes. Essayan’s 11-page report, submitted to the Armenian National Delegation, provides evidence of mass rapes of Armenian, Greek, Syrian, and Assyrian women, girls, and children during the genocide and of the unraveling of non-Muslim communities as women and children were targeted for mass deportation, forced assimilation, and sexual violence. Other chapters focus on private (Ruben Herian) and international relief efforts to rescue scattered and displaced Armenian women and children, including Karen Jeppe’s Rescue Home in Aleppo, Syria, and the traumatic experiences of Islamized Armenian children. Semerdjian concludes this section with the harrowing story of Aurora Mardiganian, a teenage survivor of the genocide, whose memoir was turned into the 1919 Hollywood film The Auction of Souls. While the film in which the survivor starred became a hit and fundraising tool for the Near East Relief organization, Aurora’s body was commercially instrumentalized for a Hollywood spectacle at the expense of her re-traumatization.
Semerdjian’s section on “Skin” resituates existing scholarship on tattoos inked on Armenian women’s faces and bodies and provides narrative first-person accounts by tattooed women and boys of their experience in captivity. She places these stories in the larger context of a 1926 debate on tattooing in the press, especially in The Slave Market News and The Manchester Guardian. By focusing on Jeppe’s rescue home, which sought to retrieve tattooed Armenian women from the households into which they had been forcibly incorporated, and specifically on Jeppe’s 1926 debate with Halide Edib and Jeppe’s private journal, Semerdjian significantly expands the recent work of Rebecca Jinks on the limits of humanitarian reclamation efforts of tattooed Armenian women. Semerdjian also closely analyzes Suzanne Khardalian’s powerful documentary Grandma’s Tattoos and provides a wealth of source material on various historical practices of tattooing Armenian women, as well as on efforts to rehabilitate coercively marked Armenian skin by removing tattoos.
By linking individual survivor testimony and photographic portraits with the historical contextualization of Arab, Kurdish, Bedouin, and Roma practices of tattooing Armenian women and boys, Semerdjian’s case studies provide a powerful account of the long-term, injurious aftereffects suffered by women whose bodies had been inked. Her unique contribution to the scholarly debate on tattoos lies in the extensive iconography of the various symbols used to tattoo Armenian faces, hands, and other body parts by the different ethnicities into which the women had been absorbed. Furthermore, Semerdjian’s move to reframe Arab, Kurdish, Bedouin, and Roma practices of tattooing within what she calls “counter-narratives” reconfigures dominant notions of how the Islamized bodies of tattooed Armenian women have been interpreted. Drawing on survivor testimony, she argues that the tattoos that inscribed Armenian women into their new ethnic communities and signified their new status of belonging also protected these women from Ottoman Turkish soldiers who were trying to locate and kill any surviving Armenian women.
Undoubtedly, Semerdjian makes an important point in demonstrating that Islamic and tribal tattoos enabled Armenian women to pass as non-Armenian—and thereby, to survive. However, to argue that tattooing thus constitutes a practice that could be interpreted as restoring a sense of agency to these women is too optimistic, since they were still considered commodities that had been bought on slave markets, traded, or simply taken by force. In other words, the systemic violence and abuse they experienced in their “adoptive” households did not cease with the practice of tattooing—which is evidenced by the survivors’ testimony Semerdjian shares—though it may have saved some of their lives. And yet, once we dial back a bit of Semerdjian’s insistence on the power of counter-narratives as restorers of women’s agency, some of that power remains. Her excellent descriptions of the placement of the tattooed symbols on women’s bodies draws attention to the secret practice of modifying and revaluing Islamic symbols as they are applied to Armenian bodies. Semerdjian’s 2008 interview with Zahaya from Shaddadi, Syria, shows that the symbols that were applied by her mother took the form of a cross. In this way, the Islamic symbols are reorganized under the auspices of symbolic Christianity, and therefore what they mean has been surreptitiously re-signified. Semerdjian’s analysis thus sheds new light on the way tattoos are used, invested with meaning(s), organized on the body, and secretly invested with counter-narratives that, indeed, can lead the way to return agency to those from whom it was stripped.
The last section on “Bones” starts out with the lamentation “In the Deserts of Dayr al-Zur,” and includes a powerful 1930 photograph by Norwegian missionary Katherine Bodil Biørn. The picture shows the physician and revolutionary Vahan Papazian (1876–1973) in silhouette looking at the protruding bones of killed Armenians during his pilgrimage to the Syrian desert around Dayr al-Zur. The section focuses on post-genocide pilgrimages to the killing sites (Dayr Al-Zur, Margada, and Shaddadi), the deportation routes which have now become pilgrimage paths, the task of collecting bones and giving them a dignified burial, as well as individual and collective rituals of mourning and remembrance at these sites. Semerdjian’s immersion of readers into the post-genocide apocalyptic landscape of death—which she calls an “affective necrogeography”—has a visceral effect on readers, making them feel the barren desert landscape that, to the present day, exposes to our view the unburied bones of a people taken there and annihilated. Semerdjian recounts early Armenian pilgrimages to Dayr al-Zur and literary efforts by writers such as Armenian essayist Hampartzoum Gelenian (Hamasdegh) to reanimate the bones of individual survivors, as shown in his essay “With a Skull.” Semerdjian recounts the history of the first formal expedition in 1938, initiated by the Armenian Catholicosate of Sis to retrieve bones from Dayr al-Zur, and then goes on to describe the subsequent construction of the Holy Martyrs’ Church, a second chapel at the mass grave site in Margade Surp Haroutiun (“the holy resurrection”), as well as the memorials at Dayr al-Zur and Antelias, Lebanon, the latter of which is the seat of the Catholicosate. She shares her own 2007 photograph of the glass ossuary at the Memorial Chapel of the Catholicosate of Sis, Antelias, which shows her own reflection. She poignantly comments on this moment: “[T]he bones and I were one” (239). Semerdjian’s occasional inscription of her identity as an Aleppan-Armenian, especially while describing her own visit to the killing site of Shaddadi, turns her book partially into a powerful auto-ethnography that illustrates the intertwined collective and individual histories of the Armenian genocide. Her discussion of bone fragments collected in Dayr al-Zur and stored in the Nubarian Library in Paris raises important questions about the ways in which bone fragments can expand traditional concepts of text and image-based archives.
Elyse Semerdjian’s powerful book is bound to reframe debates in the fields of Armenian studies and genocide studies and spark new areas of interdisciplinary research. Her innovative approach takes the history and memory of the Armenian genocide and extends it to the very present. She reminds us how the memory of the Armenian genocide has yet again been erased in the wake of ISIS’s attempt to construct a caliphate. This resulted in the 2014 destruction of the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Dayr al-Zur by an Islamic State bomb during the Syrian War and the displacement of Islamized Armenian genocide victims. In the face of continuing efforts to erase and deny the history and memory of the Armenian genocide, Semerdjian’s book establishes an important record that speaks to the importance of reclaiming Armenian embodied history by mobilizing the concept of remnants as a site of resistance. She thus reanimates—in Walter Benjamin’s sense—untold individual and collective stories of intergenerational kinship and descendants’ embodied experience to break new ground for a gendered history of the Armenian genocide.
