2023-04-23 06:25:01
A 1920s New Year greeting postcard published in the United States by Near East Relief shows a black and white photo of the Alexandropol Orphanage. The administration of the Near East Commettee, an organization that had its headquarters in New York and was founded in 1915, had as its goal humanitarian relief for the Armenians and Assyrians expelled from the Ottoman Empire. The town of Alexandropol currently corresponds to the city of Gyumrí, Armenia. The postcard shows the orphanage building whose roof reads “Near East Relief” and a large courtyard where uniformed orphan children line up to form the phrase “America We Thank You.” Below the photo is a caption: “An American contribution to world peace – hundreds of happy, healthy children, future leaders of the hated Middle East. Two thousand five hundred children in the Orphan City of the twelve thousand in Alexandropol express their gratitude for the American help. Stamped over the black and white photo, the red letters say: Happy New Year”.
In Armenian, to be grateful is shnorhagalellal, thanks is shnorhagalutiun which derives from the word shnorh don, favor.
The word forgive comes from late Latin and is derived from donate, give. I will forgive, give totally, give someone his debt, cancel all debts.
Don. Donation, María Moliner, in her Dictionary of the use of Spanish tells us that it is one made by a superior being, particularly by God, it is also used in stories and legends (when gifts are granted). But also, in its first meaning, it alludes to the Latin dominus as a treatment that comes before the proper name.
We said reciprocity; debt, the ontology of debt requires reestablishing the correlation. In the greatest debt, the crime, forgiveness acts as the suspension of the time of the crime. In the original crime, after the murder, the story goes, the criminal was marked and pardoned. A sign, so that no one forgets the crime. Evil for evil’s sake extends from the Code of Hammurabi to the Greek Tragedies. Talionic marks find their border in clemency and in the law. The law determines a table of equivalences: once the punishment has been fulfilled, no more will be demanded. Forgiveness coexists with the curse. Whoever cannot take revenge (according to classical rites) or who does not obtain justice from him (according to the law) usually asks for it above; he curses.
The curse demands a rhythm, demands precise words. It is not enough to remove hate, words are necessary.
God cursed Cain; the curse believes in the prodigious efficacy of the word. A memory of words, the curse has an operational character among the Greeks and ends when the notion of responsibility appears.
Forgiveness assumes that the debt will not be claimed.
Can the wronged forgive?
If you have summoned Justice, she takes charge and acts. Because forgiveness is not fair, it belongs to a different order from the commutative world of Justice. Forgiving is not fair, writes Amelia Valcárcel, it is something else.
The Christian West has been repeating for centuries “forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors” or when it says: “Father, forgive them because they don’t know what they are doing”. And he asks the father, because ultimately, who is a condemned person to forgive?
And the question returns: can the offended forgive?
There was a rhetorical time of a divine power of revenge, followed by another, secularized one, where the Hegelian rod of reason and its law set the price for the debt. Today, when provident trust has succumbed, a new language will have to be invented to reclaim the pay.
Thank you, the orphans write on the postcard with their bodies.
They are the bodies that speak, still. How is it read and who? On a card written in English, to be distributed among Americans, the photograph of the future leaders of the hated Middle East. How could those children be thankful for being the future leaders of a site that belongs to them and is described as hated, how will they see themselves writing a thank you that they don’t even understand?
Jankelevich is clear, you can’t forgive what you can’t punish.
Oh love, lay your hands on me again./Some of the fruits ripen and are gathered and are delicious./Some fall and are a delight to the ants./Some hide under the snow and hungry deer can be saved. [Mary Oliver, El pájaro rojo].
In what language could the Armenian genocide be forgiven? Perhaps in English, in an Armenian already dead, in a Turk whose alphabet after the advent of the Republic ceased to be the same as that of the perpetrators?
If the right of grace is the power of the State to renounce the effective exercise of the iuspuniendi, that is, if it is an exception to the right; And if that right is intimately damaged in its constitution for having legitimized the unusual violence of the State, who can give that gift, that grace?
They, the Americans constituted in the English language, take a photo of twenty-five hundred children forming the phrase “America We Thank You.”
Between the victim and the perpetrator, from the moment a third party appears, there may be a conviction, an amnesty, a reconciliation or a reparation.
Between the victim and the perpetrator, when there is no third party, a language that curses or what today can be called hate narratives is written, further assembling that perverse couple. Being besieged just as a city can be subjected to its siege. Every culture aspires to the glorious stigmata of its own wounds. And that is the danger, that the victim settles in the glory of her place and lives on her own rubble.
To impose rubble on the vanquished is to prohibit its ruins, to break the time of its myth. In one of the rooms of the Museum of the Armenian Genocide in Yerevan, a series of marble pedestals support glass urns that house bundles of land from Erzerum, Van, Bitlis, Sivas, Kharpert and Diarbekir, territories belonging to historical Armenia whose population was exterminated between 1915 and 1923. The pedestals are on the sides of a marble tree whose branches symbolize the rebirth of the town. Some urns where bundles of earth are buried. Not a body. Not a found and recovered item. Earth in urns as reliquaries.
A land that can only be remembered with a name inscribed on a stone. Buried earth for the cult of remembrance. The demolition of a geography, in ballot boxes.
Shnorhagalutiun is thank you in Armenian.
The one who follows the survivor does not thank for not having died. He would say thank you for the creation of a language.
That is the gift. Forgiveness is constituted at the moment of speaking a new language. A language that is not that paternal legal grammar that sacrificed the son. The survivor’s gratitude will be expressed in a language that gives rise to the father, a mother tongue that does not give way to the son.
Who is the creditor of this debt? Who is the creditor part of the speech, as a speech of a sinister law, when there are only remnants of words that sentence a recognition among waste? Will it be treated, as defined by Pierre Legendre, to make the clinical function of law present again, in that framework of victim, accused and judge?
Two thousand five hundred orphans form the word thank you with their bodies, two thousand five hundred orphans who do not speak English put their bodies to form the word thank you in English.
In the filigree of forgiveness, when there is no judge to separate the murderer from his crime, it is a question of preserving the desirable future of those children. The biblical account writes that he must be born of a father to enter the language. A father who agrees, who agrees, who legislates suspending the time of the crime.
In the case of the Armenian genocide, the law is stained with blood and there is no sentence. We only have one postcard where orphaned children pose.
*Writer. Excerpts from the book War is a verb.
Mothers for so many orphans
A.A.
Giving the gift of meaning beyond the contradiction and the dismemorization of the Kemalist State. If the founding fact of the Armenian diasporic identity has been death, taking an ethical position will be inventing life. Ethics that is, inevitably, an act of language. A language that makes us subjects. So when we think of language we think of the political. A language that does not replace melee, that does not make the Eucharistic rite a distribution of food that are bodies. A language whose gift is not to give to the child.
A legend from the times of the genocide tells that dying and exhausted women who escaped into the desert wrote the letters of the Armenian alphabet with their fingers on the sand. The desert wind came and erased what they had written, but they were so tenacious that they did not resign themselves and wrote it again. Thus the letters were saved. However, the buried manuscripts could not be found until today. They look forward to the day when the Armenians will come together again. It is said that in the hand of the last Armenian there will be a key and, as soon as he approaches the stones, the books will murmur from the depths of the earth.
The gift, the key, the books, that identity in a language, the grace. Mothers for so many orphans.
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