Magda Tagtachian and 30 years of independent Armenia: “The role of the writer who speaks of a cause is to make visible”

Thirty years after its birth as a state, Armenia has someone writing to him. For several books, Magda Tagtachien, granddaughter of survivors of the genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923, tells the life, history, effects, tragedies, loves and wishes of Armenians in the diaspora.

This year adds a new chapter with Rojava, although here it does not particularly focus on the Armenian question, but rather tells the story of the Kurdish rebels in the territory that bears the name of the novel. As a sequel – or spin off – of his previous novel, Alma armenia, in Rojava follow in the footsteps of Nané Parsehyan, a woman brought up under Soviet rule –Armenia was one of the fifteen republics that made up the USSR– and that after a long transformation, she became a freedom fighter of a neighboring nation which faces a present of struggle for independence. With the advance of Islamic extremism, Rojava it is a fiction that also functions as a wake-up call, a wake-up call for many who do not know the political fabric of a still troubled region.

The novel has been around for a few months and along the way, Tagtachian encountered some surprises, like the conversation he had with two internationalist rebels – That is to say: Europeans – from Rojava. Both with their faces covered —They Are Wanted— spoke enthusiastically about the book and invited her to travel to see how they lead life these days.

“A writer, and above all a novelist, makes fiction and fiction is entertainment,” Tagtachian says in a dialogue with Culture Info-. But the role of the writer who speaks of a cause, as in my case, who speaks of the Armenian cause, is to make visible. With Alma armenia and Rojava, and also with Nomeolvides Armenuhi, which is not a fiction but is written like a novel, many people not only found out about the Armenian genocide, but even where Armenia is and what is the current political situation in the Middle East, and how Erdogan, the President of Turkey, has toughened the regime since it began to lose power and still condemns, as in the days of the Ottoman Empire, freedom of expression.

–Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, had to go into exile after discussing the Armenian genocide.

–Today in Turkey, it is punishable by law to refer to the Armenian genocide. Whoever does, goes to jail for insulting the country. For that Cotton live outside; like another writer, Elif shafak, author of Istanbul’s bastard, who cannot raise his voice to speak about the Armenian cause. They can’t do it for the Kurds either. Last week on Turkish TV, a journalist was interviewing a Kurdish woman who started speaking in her language and was interrupted because she could not speak in her language. When I was little, my grandfather – who if I heard him say five sentences in his whole life, it was a lot; he died when I was thirteen – he said: “If I spoke in Armenian, they would cut my tongue out”.

–What is the situation of the Kurds compared to that of the Armenians?

-The difference is that the Kurds are a nation without a state. For this reason, I was interested in taking the history of the Kurdish people and merging it with the history of the Armenian people in my novel. Rojava. Because, moreover, during the Armenian genocide, the Kurds were the mercenaries to go to the front. Today, Kurds and Armenians are united because they continue to resist the Erdoğan regime. As I say: the role of the novelist is to make visible. In my novel by Rojava there is a love story, there is “romantic geopolitics” as I say there. My keyboard is my gun and today many readers thank me because they did not know what is happening today. But I show the common struggle of the Kurdish people and the Armenian people against fundamentalism and against the Erdoğan regime.

–Rojava This is happening in Syria, but there is still a significant presence of Armenians. Can you think of a comparison between Armenia and Israel? I say this in terms of the struggle to support our own territory and with so many migrants in the diaspora.

– Armenia and Israel are countries, they are states. Both peoples suffered genocide and a holocaust. The big difference is that the Armenian genocide was not recognized. Of all the nations of the world, only thirty have done so. Before mentioning Joe biden, who recognized it in a very important political gesture. But when it comes to the Holocaust, no one is shy about condemning the Nazis who perpetrated it. On the other hand, when you talk about the Armenian genocide, the ignorance and mistrust that comes from ignorance gets mixed up a bit.

–Denial?

–When Hitler perpetrated the Holocaust, he wrote: “After all, who remembers the Armenians?. If the Armenian genocide had been condemned, the Holocaust probably would not have existed. At that time, between 1915 and 1923, the Ottoman Empire massacred 1.5 million Armenians. But my grandmother did not speak; no Armenian family did. The violence they suffered has been silenced. They killed 1.5 million Armenians with methods of extermination dating back to Nazism. It was like the school of genocide for Hitler.

–I come back to Rojava and Armenia: what lesson does the Armenian resistance teach the Kurds to get rid of the Soviet weight?

“It’s a tricky question.” It was very difficult for me to understand the “weight” of 70 years of Sovietism in the region. Armenia and Azerbaijan were two of the fifteen Soviet socialist republics. The Soviet footprint is very strong. If I had to talk about teaching, I think Sovietism has left the Armenian and Kurdish peoples with a spirit of resilience, on the one hand, and art, on the other. Of art. It sounds curious, but it is very significant because Kurds and Armenians are lovers of poetry, writing, dancing and food.

–Nané, the protagonist of Rojava, which arose during the times of the USSR, and appeared in Alma armeniaHe also has another second fight, which is against patriarchy.

—Nané Parsehyan grew up in Soviet Armenia, where still today, women must marry virgins. Anyone who turns 30 and is not married is considered old and must stay to take care of the family. These are women who belt themselves to accentuate the curves. They cannot freely decide their sexuality or their body. Patriarchy comes from the Soviet imprint and this is what is being deconstructed in Rojava. I owed it to Nané; she gets married in Alma Armenia and on the wedding night we discover that she is not a virgin, and the next day the husband’s mother cannot go out to distribute red apples among the neighboring crates – which is the symbol of the red spot on the sheet – and bottles of brandy because he had a good Armenian daughter. So here, Nané decides to seek himself and be reborn. I chose Rojava as the stage because it is where women are leading the revolution. Today Rojava is a society based on gender equality, to ecology as a sustainable element — because whoever manipulates natural resources manipulates people — where women are respected and all religions are respected.

–Is there a relationship between the rebellion of the female protection units in Rojava and the concern they themselves have to preserve beauty and sensuality?

-I think so. It’s something I wanted to tell. These are women who have suffered mass violence and abuse. ISIS locked them in cages, displayed them in Mosul, Iraq, and sold them. They tied their hair to the bumpers of cars and dragged it out onto the street. In Rojava, there is a town called Jinwar – “jin” means “woman” in Kurdish – where the women who have been rescued and no longer have families live because women who have been raped are rejected because they are no longer virgins. In this city, there are not only military academies where they are instructed in the handling of weapons, but mothers, grandmothers, sisters, nieces attend, where they learn to deconstruct themselves, to give value to their own life, not to depend on the opinion of the husband. They wear braids that signify the network of women who help each other and they symbolize the three pillars on which they base their struggle: woman life freedom. ISIS regards Yazidi women – with a fanciful manipulation of the Qur’an – as descendants of the devil and believes that if they are killed by a Yazidi woman, they will go to hell. Of course, they can’t show off their hair or put on makeup. This is why they consider sensuality to be a weapon of war.

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