Zabel Hovhannessian, born in 1878 in Scutari (a district of Constantinople), recognized Armenian writer, trained in Paris, is a free woman, committed to the act of writing in her name and in the name of her people.
Mélinée Sukumian, born in 1913, orphan at the age of 2, refugee, stateless, exiled in France, entered into resistance very early with other fighters from elsewhere. Naturalized French in 1946, she went to Soviet Armenia to teach French there. Disillusioned, sick, she was repatriated in the early 1960s. She died in 1989, a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In this cross-portrait, we will try to show how these two women have, on an individual scale, each in their own way, in the place they have taken in a turbulent world, have contributed to building commonality. Each refused to submit, even if it means making a mistake. Each has carried its intimate wounds, the wounds of a people. Each drew from it the strength to fight, to testify. Each in their own way spoke. None gave up.
Here are two women from Armenia who have gone down in history under their married names. Zabel Essayan knew her husband, the painter Tigrane (or Dikran) Essayan, in Paris. When he stays there, she leaves, for Constantinople or elsewhere, to see and testify in favor of her people. Mélinée Manouchian has remained indestructibly faithful to the man who gave her her third name, Missak Manouchian. The first will have been the husband of the talented woman writer and tireless spokesperson for the Armenian people. The second, shot with his combat companions in 1944 at Mont-Valérien, will have left an indelible mark on his wife, his identifying name, without which we might not have known what she had accomplished with the comrades of the ME or the Aznavourians, who will hide her when she is sentenced to death. She would have remained, with so many others, in the dustbin of history.
Because history, it is well known, inhabited by men, leaves little room for women and is not fair to everyone. After each period of war, we count its heroes, its martyrs. We want to see the time back. We repress the pain, the shame. We are afraid to speak the truth: would we be heard? We dare to lie: the present would erase exactions, betrayals, denunciations. We want to gather. We become amnesic. Dissensions, ideological antagonisms are silenced. Some acts of bravery are mythologized. We restore coats of arms, not always glorious. After the episodes of extermination, we hide, we hide. We flee, we are fled, pushed into a double exile. The word exile contains banishment, misfortune, torment, a figurative sense, "expelled from his homeland with prohibition to return there". It is both the cause of departure and the place. It is internal and external. It is individual and collective. The history of words has some surprises in store for us when we look for the right word: the expression “to exterminate” meant to go into exile.
In April 1909, when the 1908 revolution seemed to bring hope for a national union, Cilicia was the target of massacres and looting in Adana. Arriving there at the end of June 1909, Zabel Essayan uses the word “aghed” ─ the word genocide does not yet exist. This term concentrates the irreparable of the acts committed, the unspeakable horror experienced, the impossibility of accounting. In 1911, she published In the Ruins, The Massacres of Adana, April 1909, an account of her investigation carried out, in the heart of the chaos, during the three months when she was responsible for bringing aid and assistance to survivors and orphans. How to find the words to say the smoking ruins, the bruises, physical, psychological, material? What words to say that everything is intact on the Turkish side when everything Armenian has just been ransacked? How to help? Women refuse beautiful colored clothes, they would only like new, black rags. How not to be in a state of shock in the face of madness, blood, misery, famine? Zabel Essayan sees, writes. Anything she can. Everything she feels. And all these orphans, hopes to save? She concludes her foreword thus:
"We must, I repeat, look courageously at our country covered in blood. What I have seen and heard could shake the foundations of any state. Theoretically, no one says otherwise. It is this feeling that pushed me to write without reservations - as a free citizen, as a true child of my country, enjoying the same rights and assuming the same obligations as everyone else - these pages which must be considered not both as the fruit of the sensitivity of an Armenian woman and as the spontaneous and sincere impressions of a human being like any other."
Women are just human beings like the others, coming out of their hiding place, of the home in which they are recluse, under the tyranny of a mother, a father, a society. Reading the first part of the retrospective journey that Zabel Essayan undertakes at 57 years old, we understand.
Published in 1935, in Yerevan, in Soviet Armenia where she now lives, Les Jardins de Silhdar evokes the yékir, this place between the country of childhood and the country of dreams. We understand that "the bubble", so named by her uncle, because she is very weak, is a child, rebellious, precocious, very sensitive. She observes, records, discusses ─ which is not done. His father is his privileged interlocutor. It promotes and encourages his intellectual development. At 4 years old, she made her first emancipatory gesture: she learned to read in her father's newspaper, sitting on her knees. “I have seen many countries and all kinds of wonders in my life, but for me the memory of the gardens of Silihdar has remained indelible. These gardens, I took them everywhere with me and I took refuge there each time black clouds darkened my horizon. » For Mélinée, it is different. “These were two beings whose fate had been the same in life. Having drunk to the dregs the salt and the harshness of being orphans and all the privations that were theirs,” Missak noted of their crushed childhood. Their parents were killed during the pogrom of 1915. Mélinée and her sister experienced orphanages and boarding schools before being sent to France, registered by mistake under the name Assadourian, in Marseilles then in Raincy. Mélinée is rebellious. When a teacher shouts at him: “You Bolshevik! », her curiosity is piqued and will lead her to Soviet Armenia. It was at the Relief Committee for Soviet Armenia that she met Missak.
Mélinée, pupil at the Tebrotzassere school in Raincy, 1928/1929 (unknown author, school archives). "He loved me as one loves the moment to live in its extreme richness, like a sculpture that one caresses, like a poem that one reads aloud, he had for me a love bordering on unreason, total and entire. » “I had such admiration for him that I never in my life had the like for anyone. I loved him as one loves the future into which one projects oneself with all its joy. I loved him with all the ideal one carries within oneself with all the fervor of the spirit. He was like the crystal, like the cut diamond. » Neither Zabel Essayan nor Mélinée Manouchian are historians. They are crossed by events which, when they live them, are not yet recorded in history. They are crossed by emotions, anger. They are committed to making the world a better place. "Chance wanted that, wherever I went, the Armenian people found themselves at the height of their anxieties, their revolts, their struggles..." This sentence of Zabel Essayan condenses what his life will have been. She will never stop collecting testimonies from survivors, gathering evidence and making the truth heard wherever she can. Her determination, her courage, her skill saved her from being rounded up by Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople. The only woman on the list, she arrived in Baku in September 1915. Until then, the writer had carved out her author's voice, creating life with words. Confronted with evils, she vacillates between writing about herself, from herself and writing others, a “we” tossed about on the waves of history and dispersed.
In 1922, when she published My soul in exile (Hokis aksoryal), her communist companionship began. Or the utopia of a new community to be created. Zabel Essayan will not escape the Stalinist purges. She was arrested on June 26, 1937, considered "enemy of the people" and "spy". She died in the gulag in 1943, the year she was also wanted in Occupied Paris. Zabel Essayan will be rehabilitated in 1957. Mélinée Manouchian, deeply attached to French culture and the ideal it carries, will engage against Nazism, the Vichy collaboration. Within the ME, she will be secretary, will bear arms, will take risks. The idea that war is a man's affair prevails. One cannot recognize in women enough pugnacity to fight. This is what will make their action more effective, if not recognized. Olga Bancic could not be executed with her brothers in arms. She is sent to Stuttgart. Second conviction. Decapitation. “Missak and I were two orphans of the genocide. We weren't being chased by the Nazis. We could have remained hidden, but we could not remain insensitive to all these murders, to all these deportations of Jews by Germans, because I saw the hand of these same Germans who had surrounded the Turkish army during the Armenian genocide. »
She will be his biographer. She will be the untroubled guardian of this memory of troubled, disturbing facts, in this troubled period. She will testify in Mosco Boucault's film, Retired Terrorists, whose title deliberately takes up the term used by Nazi propaganda for the Red Poster. His clear and piercing look assures him: "There are days when I can't help thinking that, maybe, if the Nazis hadn't made this red poster, nobody would have talked about Manouchian. , Bozcov, Rayman, Alfonso and all the other fighters. They would have been buried and forgotten. Look at the survivors, what has become of them? » Watching this film in 2021, far from the controversies still active in 1985, is a moving experience: we discover men who have lost and given so much without recognition in return. Their lives seem to have frozen in those years of war. The documentary filmmaker gives them the look they deserve, powerful and deeply human. Uncovering unpleasant truths on all sides has been slow.
Parisian cemetery of Ivry-sur-Seine (94).
At the heart of their lives, for both of them: yekir, commitment, literature, love, impossible bereavements, hope for the best for their people. Their life at the heart of history: genocide, exile, fascism, Collaboration, political illusions, suffering, threats, abuses, deportation. Shadow and light. Silence and speech. They took to heart the transmission of the memory of the sweet and the memory of the worst and the hope of better to come. Spokespersons of a story, they are carriers of memory in the fabric of history. It is good to revive their memory: what they call us not to forget is not yet recognized as collective, common and shared memory without discussion.
On April 24, 2021, US President Joe Biden said, “We honor the victims of Meds Yeghern [“The Great Evil”] so that the horrors of what happened will never be lost to history. And we remember this to remain ever vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms. (…)”, after saying: “Every year, on this day, we remember all those who died during the Armenian Genocide (…)”. It would be better to say "genocide of the Armenians", but let us know how to appreciate this step taken on the road to recognition, 106 years after the terrible events, 77 years after the creation in English of this legal concept developed by Lemkin, a Polish jurist who became an American. , to designate these nameless crimes, mass murder aimed at the extermination of all members of a nation. In 1944, it was necessary to add a word to the list of possible crimes to designate the will to exterminate, to eradicate a people in the name of religion, ideological and economic principles, and qualify them as crimes against humanity. This word has been used and is still used.
What would Zabel Essayan and Mélinée Manouchian think?
Article written by Solange Noyé