BOOK REVIEW: LIKE WATER ON STONE BY DANA WALRATH
Seven Days
Nov 19 2014
By Margot Harrison
When author Dana Walrath was a young girl, she asked her mother about
her grandmother’s childhood in Armenia. The answer had a stark horror
to it: “After her parents were killed, she hid during the day and ran
at night with Uncle Benny and Aunt Alice from their home in Palu to
the orphanage in Aleppo.”
Those words “haunted” her, the Underhill author recalls in a note
attached to her new young-adult novel in verse, Like Water on Stone.
When Walrath was growing up, she adds, her family “didn’t speak about
the genocide” of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in 1915, in which
about a million and a half people died.
That silence is nothing unusual. In his 2012 novel about the Armenian
genocide, The Sandcastle Girls, Lincoln author Chris Bohjalian called
it “The Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing About.” But with the
centenary of those terrible events approaching, both these Vermont
authors demonstrate that stories can and should keep memory alive.
Walrath’s grandmother died before her birth, and the tale she
recounts in Like Water on Stone is “entirely imagined,” she writes
in her author’s note. It’s imagined with verve, vividness and far
more moments of grace and beauty than one would expect from a story
about three children fleeing institutionalized mass murder. In short,
what may sound like a punishing read is actually an absorbing and
inspiring tale, with a verse format that makes it fleet on its feet.
Trained as an anthropologist, Walrath knows something about the power
of storytelling. She holds an MFA in writing from the Vermont College
of Fine Arts, has taught at the University of Vermont College of
Medicine and recently delivered a TEDx talk on the therapeutic power
of comics in treating dementia patients, which landed her in the pages
of Entertainment Weekly. Those insights were grounded in Walrath’s
experience of caring for her aging mother, which she chronicled in
her graphic memoir Aliceheimer’s.
There are no pictures in Like Water on Stone. But it also demonstrates
the healing force of narrative. As anthropologists know, children —
and adults, for that matter — will confront all manner of horrors when
they’re presented in a setting that offers a touch of otherworldly
magic and the promise of a happy ending. So it is that Like Water
on Stone opens like a folktale, with these words spoken by an ardziv
(eagle):
Three young ones,
one black pot,
a single quill,
and a tuft of red wool
are enough to start
a new life
in a new land.
I know this is true
because I saw it.
The “three young ones” are 13-year-old twins Shahen and Sosi Donabedian
and their 5-year-old sister, Mariam. Their harrowing journey from
mountainous Palu to the Syrian desert — and thence to America —
follows that of Walrath’s grandmother and her siblings.
The versifying eagle, who becomes the children’s protector, is the
novel’s only supernatural element and its closest thing to a neutral
narrator. His voice alternates with present-tense narration by each
of the three children (sometimes in dialogue with other characters),
a structure both dramatic and musical. It’s easy to imagine a high
school putting the book onstage, in John Brown’s Body fashion.
Roughly half the novel takes place in the build-up to the massacres,
giving Walrath time to establish both the historical and cultural
context and each speaker’s distinctive style and motivation. While
Sosi feels strong ties to her family’s ancestral mill and vineyard —
and hopes to marry the boy next door — Shahen dreams of emigration,
poring over letters from his uncle in America. He’s also the first
in the family to heed the coming danger, warning his father that
“pogroms / will come again.”
But even as their neighbors flee Armenia, the Donabedians stay put.
Accustomed to living in a multicultural setting, Papa harbors a tragic
faith that reason and humanity will nip ethnic persecution in the bud.
“There is no them, / only single souls,” he tells his family, when
his wife wonders if they can trust the Turks to be reasonable. And
the Muslims he knows personally, like his Turkish musician friend
and his Kurdish son-in-law, “would never harm us. / This is our home.”
It’s an enlightened attitude for which the father will pay with his
life and others’, leaving his son angry and unforgiving as he leads
his sisters from their burning village into the mountains. Walrath
handles that clash of attitudes with great sensitivity, using Papa’s
beloved music — which embodies his dream of diverse elements working
in harmony — as a way to reconcile Shahen to his memory.
Music also links the family to the eagle and his world: Sosi has
retrieved the bird’s fallen quill for her father to use to pluck his
oud. The feather becomes one of three talismans the children carry with
them on their grueling, 63-day journey to relative safety in Aleppo.
Free verse proves a surprisingly apt format for the story. While
long-form verse narratives are almost unknown in today’s adult
literature, they’ve carved out a place in children’s fiction as a
way to lure in reluctant readers (all that white space!). Verse
is particularly apropos here, because, as Walrath argues in her
author’s note, “Everyday language cannot express the scale and
horror of genocide.” Confronted with the full, hideous tableaux,
“we all turn away,” able to absorb them only “in fragments.”
Those “fragments” are the building blocks of a story in which the
unsaid can be as powerful as the said. Walrath uses Mariam’s terse
child’s voice as a counterpoint to her siblings’ more articulate
perspectives. Her sections are more concrete and less lyrical than
theirs, but often more devastating. Take her description of preparing
to cross the Euphrates, which is piled high with reeking corpses:
Down to the river,
to summer.
This summer smells bad.
Rocks scrape my legs.
I hope Mama’s there.
Walrath has already spelled out the ugly details of the children’s
mother’s death for the teen or adult reader (the book carries a
“14-plus” label), yet she persuasively conveys the innocence that
refuses to accept such realities. Together with the eagle’s overarching
perspective — his power of flight gives him a wider lens — the
disparate pieces come together in a picture of rare force. We learn
here not only of the Armenian lives lost in 1915, but also of a way
of life nearly destroyed. Walrath lovingly describes life in Palu:
ripening apricots, beetles crushed to make carpet dye, celebrations
with “the black pot filled with green-pepper dolma.”
That pot, still filled with food crafted by their mother, is
one of the three objects the children carry on their seemingly
impossible journey. Their pilgrimage combines the brutality of fact,
the sophistication of adult literature and the strangeness of a fairy
tale, sucking in readers who might generally avoid “issue” books.
Finding silent music in her stark story, Walrath contributes with her
own eloquence to keeping the past alive — as both elegy and warning
to the present.
Extended Excerpt From Like Water on Stone
Ardziv
As olives turned
from green to black
and warbler’s second brood
hatched and fledged, I watched.
Shahen showed Mariam
new words for her stick.
Each day she scratched
long lines of letters
into the earth,
leading like paths
in rings around the mill.
She wrote his name.
Shahen.
Wave and smile to the side.
Smile, smile, half smile.
Stick, small snake.
Swan down, half smile, stick.
Smile, swan down, smile.
Shahen.
In distant lands
lines of soldiers
moved locust-like
across the earth,
their bodies clad
in identical
greens and browns,
rifles up like antennae.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Speaking
the Unspeakable”
http://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/book-review-like-water-on-stone-by-dana-walrath/Content?oid=2475208