WOMAN FILMMAKER REVEALS SECRET SLAVERY OF ARMENIAN WOMEN
Women News Network
March 5 2012
Lisa A. Phillips – WNN Reviews
(WNN) Stockholm, SWEDEN: Armenian filmmaker Suzanne Khardalian has done
much to reveal the horrors of the Armenian genocide under the Ottoman
government’s systematic decimination of Armenian citizens that began
before World War I and lasted until the fall of the Ottoman Empire
in 1923.
Originally stretching across a large region that now includes 38
separate countries from Sudan to Israel, Jordan to Russia, the Ottoman
Empire saw the rise of extremism in the political party called the
Committee of Unity and Progress (CUP) lead by what was known as the
‘Young Turks’ in 1913. Party members sided against Russia with Germany
during World War I. During this time a systematic program to ‘rid’
the region of Christian Armenians as well as ethnic Muslim Armenians
ensued. Part of the crimes against humanity aimed to destroy Armenians
who sided with Russia during World War I.
It is estimated by Armenians around the world today that over one
and a half million people perished during the years in the Ottoman
Empire that spanned 1915 to 1923. This figure is still not recognized
though by the Republic of Turkey who continues to be at bureaucratic
odds with any global stories linking the mention of genocide to Turkey.
They also state a ‘more accurate’ death toll is closer to 300,000. In
1913 those known as the ‘Young Turks’ took over the region now
known as Turkey via a government coup-de-tat, From 1919-1920 they
were charged with crimes that linked them directly to propaganda,
mass murder and atrocity.
“…Everybody thinks that the way to deal with it is just to forget it.
If you forget it it will go away, and of course it doesn’t go away,”
said Khardalian during a January 2011 interview with the independent
Armenian publication Ianyan mag. The irony of Khardalian’s efforts
to document the Armenian genocide is that she didn’t realize until
quite recently, close to home, her own grandmother was one of the
genocide’s personal victims.
In mapping a subject that has been taboo among many Armenian families,
Khardalian’s new film documentary, “Grandma’s Tattoos,” turns the
camera on herself, her extended family and her late grandmother whose
face and fingers were marked with mysterious blue Turkish tattoos.
Khardalian’s 1988 documentary “Back to Ararat” was the first feature
length documentary on the subject. Several subsequent films have
peered into the lives of survivors in Gaza.
“Grandma Khanoum,” as the family called her, was a grim woman whose
only pleasure in life was listening to the 1940s Arab pop star and
music celebrity Farid al-Atrash, as he sang his romantic songs on
the radio. Her husband, Grandma Khanoum had married in her attempt
in part to escape exploitation by Turkish men, hated her infatuation
with the singer. “We never understood that this was grandma’s way of
looking for love and affection,” Khardalian realizes as she begins
to wonder about her grandmother’s past.
Living today in Sweden and but raised in Beirut, filmmaker Suzanne
Khardalian admits that as a girl she did not like Grandma Khanoum.
With her “suffocating presence” she paced hauntingly up and down the
stairs of their apartment building in the Armenian quarter of Beirut.
One worrisome trait of Grandma Khanoum was that she was not
affectionate and didn’t like to be touched, shares Khardalian.
The subject of the Armenian genocide is an important global one but the
driving question of the film focuses with determination on its women:
What happened to Grandma Khanoum? What is her secret? As Khardalian
seeks to find answers, her grandmother’s story becomes emblematic of
a much larger and insidious silence.
As in so many historical accounts of war, terror and genocide, the
stories of women and girls who lived through the Armenian genocide
have remained largely untold. Thousands were abducted, raped and
forced to become prostitutes and concubines.
Khardalian discovers that the blue tattoos were not, as she had
thought as a girl, “devilish signs,” but marks of Islamic tribal
culture: dots, crescents, and small x’s. The tattoos were believed
to provide protection, strength and fertility. But in the case of
the marked Armenian women the tattoos were a mark of their subjugation.
Gradually Khardalian puts together the pieces of her grandmother’s
story. At first no one will give her details. Her mother is vague
about what she knows. Her grandmother’s 98-year-old sister, her great
Aunt Lucia who lives in Los Angeles, insists the tattoos are something
that the young girls wanted to have.
http://womennewsnetwork.net/2012/03/05/woman-filmmaker-slavery-armenian-women/