LILIT DAVTYAN

April 24, is a date that every Armenian would recognize. But there an aspect to it that transcends night and day. One is spent in mourning and grief and the next is a rebirth, an awakening. Petals have become our pages of history, and our pages of poetry. 

 

 

From 2020-2023, the Republic of Artsakh was attacked by Azerbaijani forces and ethnically cleansed of its 100,000 Armenians who had been there since antiquity. I am a first generation Armenian, born in a small neighborhood in Los Angeles called Little Armenia. Most of my neighbors were snarky old Armenian ladies who looked down upon me from their balconies and a walk down the street would lead me to a shop with shelves of lavash (traditional Armenian bread). Like most Armenians, I had grown up aware of the tragedy that plagued our culture the most, the Genocide of 1915. What appeared as a regular school day for most children, April 24, was a day half spent marching down the streets of Hollywood or at home, avoiding the television screen that burned imagery of Armenian corpses into our minds.

I had always thought my mother lived with half of her mind in Armenia, but after the 2020 war, I realized that it was completely there. In 2023, after a 9 month blockade, there was officially no more Armenians left in Artsakh. Did we just live through another genocide? Photos of thousands of cars fleeing Artsakh looked eerily similar to the crowds of women that were forced to march through the deserts in 1915. Suddenly I found my mind in Armenia, joining my mothers, except I wanted to be there physically.

 

In April 2024, 4 days before the 109th anniversary of the Genocide, I arrived in Yerevan, Armenia. Every year on the 24th, everyone in the country visits the Genocide Memorial. Though I had been to Armenia, I had never been there on the day of the genocide. From morning till nightfall, crowds of people were walking miles up to the Genocide Memorial, an abundance of flowers sold along the streets. I decided to wait for the moon to accompany me before I began my walk. It was tradition to avoid a taxi up, the memorial was built on a high peak so that when one walks to it, they experience what our people had to endure when they were displaced. As I got closer, violins began to hum in the distance, there was music to accompany the feeling of loss. Once up top, I had never seen so many flowers in my life, and more and more kept adding to the pile. There were babies, adults, children, and dogs, I swear all of Armenia was there. It was a surreal moment for me, the catharsis knowing everyone around me understood what this all was, there was no need to explain anything to them.

 

The next morning I learned of a tradition I was completely unaware of. I walked back up to the memorial, except now the sun was beaming bright and there was heaps of children. They were circling around the eternal fire, grabbing the bouquets of flowers that had been left the day prior and plucking the petals into piles. I walked around them and crouched low to observe what they were doing at a closer proximity. With a fuji camera around my neck and brows that furrowed up in curiosity, a young girl noticed and approached me. "What is going on?" She explained that every year after April 24, all the flowers were carefully plucked and laid out in the sun to dry. "These petals are then recycled and repurposed. Mainly transformed into pages of a book", a lump formed in my throat. A day that I had always associated with grief, devastation, and an end of a story, had suddenly been questioned and altered, made into a poem.