A Tiny Swallow's Journey Back Home

At this intersection of history where genocide and denial still collide to this day, we look out wide-eyed with shock at the smoldering wreckage of injustice. Every year, for one-hundred-and-one times since 1915, we have felt the same genocidal collision reverberating within the deepest core of our souls.

On this most solemn day of remembrance, I humbly urge all Armenian hearts to beat as one. Hence, join your heart with mine, for our souls will journey to places where eyes don't like to see, nor feet dare to tread, alone.

With a heavy heart, therefore, inward bound I go as I travel back in mind and spirit. A tightly held crucifix in one hand guiding my soul and a flickering candle in the other guiding my eyes. With prayer of “Der Voghormia” on my lips, I tread a tortuous path of one hundred and one night-years in length, taking one and a half million steps towards the foothills of the Armenian Golgotha of 1915.

Suddenly, It was 1915 – again.

The Ottoman Turks were committing the first genocide of the twentieth century with Mongolian zeal. These scimitar-wielding beasts spared no one. They butchered helpless men and women, and raped young girls before their fathers’ eyes, making physical death a welcome choice for any father. They killed innocent children and their half-dead grandparents. An old man in terror clasping a shaky cane in one hand while the other pointing to God in the direction of uncertainty. Not even babies were spared, as these ruthless killers snuffed out even the youngest of souls.

I see torture, mayhem, doom, and bloodshed under my mind's eyelid -- behold! The first Christian nation is being sacrificed like a lamb on its own native land under the watchful eye of heaven, just like the Messiah some nineteen hundred years before. I must confess, I could well believe now the tales told by elders of tortured poets of yesteryear.

For I see the dry inkwells atop the bloodstained desks of Daniel Varoujan and Siamanto, thirsting for words, empty of its poet's breath. Crusts of unspoken words forever lost in the black hole of memories. But suddenly those inkwells swelled with red ink of blood that year. A year in which, the unheard cries and wails of the victims spoke volumes in bursts of blood to a deaf world that would not listen nor could hear. Its ear oozing with thick wax of indifference.

Lord Have Mercy! I pray once more, as I reflect.

On that black Saturday of April 24, 1915, the sad western sun set on our native lands never to rise again from the horizon of despair. The ensuing night was painful and long, casting one hundred and one years of darkness upon our collective soul. Hitherto, Armenians at large have known no peace, no resolution, no restitution, no recognition, and no justice from neither above nor below the firmaments.

Staggering thus under the backbreaking lumber of the genocide cross, this Christian nation’s children have trodden the Via Dolorosa far too long to Calvary of disappointment. The moral arc that has curved over vast tundras of time has not yet bent towards justice. We wait, yet again, for one hundred and first time, for the bell to toll -- justice! Yes, justice, a word which has yet to ring even once in the halls of governments worldwide. For ten decades, the world’s major powers continue to hold a mocking moment of perpetual silence in callous disinterest.

For a century and counting, Armenians have made effort on effort to free themselves from the talons of the genocide curse. We wait for our God, or any lesser god who would listen that day, to show a more kindly face to this nation. How many more than one and a half million innocent people need to be slaughtered to reach the consciousness at large? How far must a river of blood flow to reach the ocean of justice at last?

In deference to the 250 Armenian intellectuals who lost their lives on April 24, 1915, I take poetic license by asking a few ponderous questions on their behalf while expecting no viable answer in return:

What yet unspoken words must we say
To a blank page that doesn't hear?
What yet unpainted words must we brush
On an empty canvas that won't adhere?
How do we come up with a story
In less blood clots than all the ones
That had been told a million and a half times before?

In weal and woe,
The narrative always remains starkly the same,
No matter how briskly or gently
We mix our alphabet or paint.
Such IS the tragedy of our history;
The sore history of our story.

Every inch of road we travel,
Is no different to our tired feet.

In the womb of mother earth lie our forebears, bones crushed to chunks and dust beneath the feet of the enemy who continue to stomp on our holy lands. Blood spilling from our forefathers’ necks have found the hidden cracks beneath the earth, clotting shut the fault lines of history. The new generations of Armenians will, some eventual day, show the world that our fallen victims silently sleep within the innards of our lands awaiting justice. Today, their orphaned spirits still search for the remains of the ancestral lands.

The descendants of the Armenian genocide survivors continue to bear the gruesome weight of grief in their hearts. Eyes downcast, with pondering heads and wandering feet they try in vain to find their way back home. Walking divergent paths on foreign lands farther away each day from where home used to be.

We are like swallows ever flying about and finding no shelter to rest our aching bodies and splintered souls. We long to find the familiar safety and warmth under the eaves of the cattle barns dotting our sweet homeland. I am burning with high desire that someday, that little swallow, our symbol of hope, after one hundred and one night-year journey, will rise again to build its nest within the cracks atop the church belfries of Ararat land, nearer to God, once more.