Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide

by Elyse Semerdjian

A groundbreaking and profoundly moving exploration of the Armenian genocide, told through the traces left in the memories and on the bodies of its women survivors. Foremost among the images of the Armenian Genocide is the specter of tattooed Islamized Armenian women. Blue tribal tattoos that covered face and body signified assimilation into Muslim Bedouin and Kurdish households. Among Armenians, the tattooed survivor was seen as a living ethnomartyr or, alternatively, a national stain, and the bodies of women and children figured centrally within the Armenian communal memory and humanitarian imaginary. In Remnants , these tattooed and scar-bearing bodies reveal a larger history, as the lived trauma of genocide is understood through bodies, skin, and—in what remains of those lives a century afterward—bones. With this book, Elyse Semerdjian offers a feminist reading of the Armenian Genocide. She explores how the Ottoman Armenian communal body was dis-membered, disfigured, and later re-membered by the survivor community. Gathering individual memories and archival fragments, she writes a deeply personal history, and issues a call to break open the archival record in order to embrace affect and memory. Traces of women and children rescued during and after the war are reconstructed to center the quietest voices in the historical record. This daring work embraces physical and archival remnants, the imprinted negatives of once living bodies, as a space of radical possibility within Armenian prosthetic memory and a necessary way to recognize the absence that remains.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

400 pages, Hardcover

Published August 15, 2023

Reviews

[Josiah L · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly, one of the most difficult books I have ever had to read. Was genuinely moved to tears by many chapters, which is a testament to how necessary this book is. There is a lot for me to reflect upon, especially regarding Part 3: Bones. This book becomes a necessary link in learning about the stories, people, and history that I have been born with the privilege of never being able to truly understand.

[Hazal Ozvaris · Rating 5 out of 5]

The last chapter of the book is a marvel. Semerdjian creates the concept of “bone memory” following her pilgrimage to the desert of Deir Zor, a century after the genocide. She generates a powerful perspective for approaching the unburied human bones of past atrocities committed & denied by perpetrator states. Along with the Armenian genocide, the concept also urges a rethinking of the 300+ unopened mass graves of Kurds that lie on the remnants of Armenians in southeastern Turkey.

[Liam Li · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hauntingly moving and erudite. A beautiful piece of work of survival, resilience, prosthetic memory work in the presence of absence, against all odds of erasure.

I’ll be thinking about this book for many moons to come.

“Live bodies comingle with the dead to constitute a living/dead community of Armenians that enfolds past and present to the extent that, in oral interviews, pilgrims describe seeing the events that happened in the past before their own eyes within its affective necrogeography. This power of prosthetic memory compels the living to interact with the remnants of the dead, to enact Nancy's "community-in-being," a counterpoint to the genocidal violence that stripped bodies of clothing, dignity, and ultimately identities prior to killing Prosthetic memory and by extension material rituals that I call bone memory are an attempt to find a vocabulary for loss and a space for radical possibility within the conditions of genocidal erasure.”

[Meredith · Rating 5 out of 5]

echoing others sentiments that this is one of the most difficult books I have ever read. But, one of the best, most thoroughly written books. Was able to express the entanglement of gender, identity, displacement, and grief in all of its complexities. I appreciated the model of writing, telling the story of the Armenian genocide through archival vignettes. The attention to detail was notable, not bound through time, and moreover a rejection of it demonstrating the way that lived experiences of harm continue to transcend and affect land and body.

as an aspiring archivist myself, this is a must read for the field. The author brought so many ideas that will stick with me to the table, exploring how historical writing and research needs to deviate from our archival fever because of the ways that archives are bound with state-power, authority.

“It is the call for a kind of history that allows us to attend to the silences within the archive and honor the living memory of the Armenian Genocide that lives within all who, like you, reader, sit with the subject long enough.”

this book was additionally difficult in context with the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and how the survivors, and that land will bare the memory in ways that an archive never will.

This is a review written just after finishing the book, but I am sure my thoughts will continue to develop, and the memories held within the books will never leave me.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Remnants" is an interdisciplinary reconsideration of the Armenian Genocide. In some ways history, but in many ways much more, Elyse Semerdjian's project incorporates feminist theory, genocide studies, and psychology to think about the physical manifestations of the genocide--how women were targeted for acts of rape to symbolize rape of the nation, how women were seen as the essence of remaking Armenia, tattooing of women in Arab or Kurdish tribes (sometimes to force assimilation upon them, other times chosen by the women themselves), and the most horribly notable sites of memorial, including the frequency of bone collecting there. While Elyse Semerdjian's book is not an easily accessible read for the undergraduate, and it certainly pulls no punches in its introduction (leaning heavily on theory), the book builds as it goes, leading the reader to see the ways in which a historical event (here, this genocide) can be read outside of archives frequently policed by governments with specific political views. This is a book that I will find it hard to forget, frankly, and I thank the publishers and Edelweiss for the chance to review an ARC of it.

[Maddie]

Read for comps

[Zak Bowyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spectacular. So challenging and yet so inspiring. A book about incredible people putting together the shattered pieces of a past some wish would stay in fragments. The combination of almost biographical tales of those who represent and collect the 'remnants' of the genocide alongside Semerdjian's own journey of discovery makes for compelling and emotional reading. A history that also weaves these stories with the power of place, films and plays, memories, bones and tattoos, to name just a few.