WITNESS TO HISTORY: KAY MOURADIAN TRACKS THE DEATH OF A PEOPLE THROUGH THE LIFE OF HER MOTHER IN ‘MY MOTHER’S VOICE’
Pasadena Weekly
April 4 2013
By Christina Schweighofer 04/04/2013
Ask Kay Mouradian what keeps her young, and she’ll smile. Her large,
green eyes focused and alert, she’ll say something like, “I have erased
the word ‘age’ from my vocabulary.” Or she’ll mention the routines
she has acquired over the past five or six decades, including tennis
three times a week, skiing, yoga and ameditation. Healtahy habits are
part of the equation, but there is something else, too: Mouradian,
who last year completed a documentary film, still wants to learn,
and she certainly isn’t done teaching. At 79, she is on a quest.
Mouradian likes to say that she spent her younger years having a
good time. Born to Armenian parents and raised in Watertown, Mass.,
she studied at Boston University, then at UCLA. She learned yoga
and meditation, traveled to India and spent two years in Germany,
working as a civilian for the US Army. Mouradian taught health and
physical education at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College for 25 years
while earning a doctorate degree in education from Nova Southeastern
University in Florida. She has published articles and a book about
yoga and meditation, a topic she plans on returning to soon.
The quest began when Mouradian was about 50 and her ailing mother,
Flora, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, told her, “You will
write a book about my life.” Mouradian obliged. Her book, a novel
titled “A Gift in the Sunlight,” was published in 2006. Last year,
the South Pasadena resident followed up with the documentary “My
Mother’s Voice.” The film – the directorial debut of sound designer
Mark Friedman – won honorable mention at the Pomegranate Film Festival
in Toronto in October. It was also an official selection for the ARPA
Film Festival in LA in November.
The story of Mouradian’s mother is that of countless Armenians during
that time, at least in its outlines: Flora was 14 when gendarmes in
Hadjin, Turkey, ordered her and her family to leave their home in
May 1915 and forced them to walk hundreds of miles toward Deir al-Zor
in the Syrian Desert. The young girl saw her grandmother and dozens
of other Armenians die on the trek because they were too hungry,
tired and exhausted to march on. She witnessed Turkish soldiers rape
women and girls. An estimated 1.5 million Armenians died during the
Genocide. Flora’s parents and four brothers were among them, but the
young girl survived, thanks to the kindness of strangers. After the
war, Flora came to the United States as a kind of mail-order bride.
She married an Armenian American she hadn’t met before.
Mouradian spent 25 years researching her family’s history and the
Armenian Genocide, and learning how to write a novel. She attended
writers’ conferences and studied books on the art of turning facts
into fiction. Overwhelmed by the cruelty the Turks had used against
the Armenians, she visited the ruins of her ancestors’ hometown,
Hadjin. She retraced her family’s footsteps along the deportation
route and immersed herself in accounts of the time. Again and again,
she asked herself one question: “What is it in us that allows us to
do something so terrible?”
Those who meet Mouradian are inevitably impressed by how high this
senior’s energy level is. Said film director Friedman: “Kay is
tenacious. She keeps at it until she is finished. You’d never guess
her age from the amount of energy she puts into this.”
Mouradian admits that part of what informed her passion was a feeling
of shame because she knew very little about the Armenian Genocide until
her mother’s health began to decline in the mid 1980s. Over the years,
Flora had repeatedly tried to share her memories with her daughter,
but Mouradian had refused to listen because Flora always sounded so
angry when she was talking about the Turks.
“It went in one ear and out the other,” Mouradian explained. “I used
to say, ‘Oh, Mom, there was a war going on. Terrible things happen
during wars.'” When Flora was nearing death, her tone softened and
Mouradian’s ears finally opened. Now guilt had become her teacher. She
felt a responsibility to history to tell her mother’s story.
The story is now out in print and on film, but Mouradian isn’t quite
finished yet. She would like to see her documentary being used
as teaching material for high school students in California. The
10th-grade curriculum provides that human rights violations and
genocide should be taught in the context of Word War I, and the
Armenian Genocide is specifically mentioned. “We need to make sure
that history doesn’t die,” Mouradian said.
Kay Mouradian’s documentary, “My Mother’s Voice,” will be screened
at 6 p.m. Sunday at the AGBU Manoukian Center, 2495 E. Mountain St.,
Pasadena. Mouradian, director Mark Friedman, as well as USC Professor
Donald Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, authors of two books on the
Armenian Genocide, will be present to answer questions.
Christina Schweighofer is a freelance writer in Pasadena. Visit her
Web site, christinaschweighofer.com.
From: A. Papazian
http://www.pasadenaweekly.com/cms/story/detail/witness_to_history/12019/