Hyphenated Lives

A novel in verse, Hyphenated Lives/Native Diasporas, interweaves a constellation of family stories with diplomatic dispatches, international relief reports, testimonies, archival photographs and newspaper clippings, to hold a mirror onto the obscured realities, contradicting demands and multifarious guises of survival under the hegemony of the perpetrator ideology. This tale is as much a study of remembering as of forgetting, though it centres on the unravelling saga of the Mermerdji family: a union composed of a Greek mother, Maria/Meriam, an Armenian father, Sevan/Selim and their 'Turkish' children, Toros and Silva. A striking man in his late twenties, Toros lives with his mother, Meriam, and younger sister, Silva, with no other relations. It is the spring of 1956 in Turkey and other than the haunting memories of the previous fall, it has been a relatively peaceful year, without a single incident to evoke the pains of their past lives. None in fact, until that fateful call which confronts him with the reverberations of his father's abandonment and rejection almost two decades earlier. After battling with a tsunami of conflicting devotions and dilemmas, he embarks on the most challenging journey of his life; assured of his magnificent victory over his cruel father, oblivious to the twists and turns that are about to unfold. In the wake of WWI, pogroms targeting the indigenous Armenian, Assyrian and Greek communities of the Ottoman Empire took a genocidal turn to create a "Turkey for the Turks'. As the collapsed empire rose from its ashes as the Republic of Turkey, those victims who were not slaughtered, starved to death, or sold (in the case of girls and women, most often as concubines or sex slaves), were forcibly assimilated. Amputated from their authentic selfhoods, survivors of the periphery were banned from using their mother tongues, practicing their religions, or displaying any form of 'foreignness' -including their names- outside of their domestic environments.