Did you see her?

Yes, she is sitting on the quay, she's searching....

She was there.  She saw it all.

History can close eyes just as it can half open them to deform facts by changing the contour of silhouettes.  It can also twist them into unrecogniseable anamorphoses of events. However, what it can never do is escape the look any more than it can escape time..

This old woman's look taught me that in Izmir in 1922 during the occupation by the Turkish army, Armenians were obliged to remain at home. During this period, neighbours in the streets, while serving lemonade to the Turkish soldiers sitting on  the footpaths, denounced each other: « the ones living below the balcony are Armenians, the ones living in the house on the right are Christians....» They believed they would protect themselves in this way but the Turkish two-edged sword cut them all down..

Others, braving the restrictions, secretly brought food and water to their Armenian friends. Houses that were normally full of life became antichambers of death..

The Armenians tried to flee, to find refuge with their distant relatives or friends. Then they learned that the ships of France, Italy and from other European countries were coming to repatriate their nationals

The assault by the Turkish army was also not going to be long coming.

On September 13th 1922, the army set fire to the town. The people all fled their refuges in an attempt to reach the quays, but the French and Italian soldiers there were not sufficiently numerous to protect them. 

The Turkish soldiers entered the houses, creating havoc and destroying everything in their path. They carried out the genocide by applying its first rule : break the family structure, separate the men from the women and children. 

The men were killed or loaded on to trains going to the void, death catching up with them every minute. Some found refuge in the Gregorian cathedral of Saint-Etienne, screaming and crying as  the Turkish soldiers, their eyes shining with lust, shouted : "Your God is dead!", and carried away the young girls to rape them.

The church bells tolled loudly to summon help but no one responded to the call, the world had become deaf..

Still in our day, every evening on the 13^th of September the bells of the Eglise Saint Etienne ring, but Mother Church remains deaf and blind.

On the red night of  this 13^th of September 1922 the flames flickered on the women and children who rushed to the quay trying to get aboard. The French sailors had hung the flag at half mast in an effort to protect the people who were trying to escape. The Turkish soldiers continued to fire on them, targeting those who tried to swim to the boats. Those who escaped were taken to (.......ne) on the island of Lesbos, then transported to Athens. From there they went all over the world.

Simon was 6 on the day of  the great debacle of Izmir, he was walking with his father when a ball struck his hat, sending it into a doorway.  From there he watched the soldiers come and pick up his father.

Simon remained hidden under the stairs until evening then, wanting to rejoin his family, he was carried along by the fleeing crowd boarding a ship. There he found his aunt and his two young cousins and was taken with them to Argentina..

Massacres, burnings, robberies, rapes, the whole catalogue of human barbarity was at the meeting. Nothing stopped those men drunk on enjoying without limits. Not the superego, nor morality, not ethics, nothing could stop it. The boundaries of humanity were useless, the limits had been crossed..

It was on board one of these boats, asking the others for news, that a woman learned that her mother was sitting in the quay looking for her…  The old lady knew that her daughter and her two grand daughters had fled to the quay, but she had not been able to find them. In search of her family she refused to give up, she would continue to search, to look everywhere in the world until she found them..

Time was her ally and her family would not allow her to be forgotten; from generation to generation, she knew it, her decendants would continue to look for her.

Alsace, Auschwitz 1942

Jean was 18 and worked in his parents' grocery in Alsace.

He loved Anna and David equally.  Both were jews engaged in the resistance..

One evening on the way back from a party they were arrested in front of David's house, and all their relations were rounded up within a few hours.

Jean was interrogated and brutally beaten before being deported to Auschwitz.

When the train arrived at the camp the doors of the wagons were opened with a deafening racket. Jean had to jump down from the wagon with the others, as he did so he caught sight of the German officer who was standing at the exit.

The officer said to him: « You, cook, stand over there! ». Jean was not a cook but the officer had decided that he was..

A blue triangle was put on the prisoner's uniform, a sign that he had comitted some infraction against German law.  The officer who had caught his eye came up and ordered him to follow him. His name was Adrian. He led him to the cellar of a house at the edge of the camp and told him not to attract anyone's attention to himself. Only he knew that he was there.  That evening  Jean had to join him in his bed..

During the day he spent the hours looking through a gap in the shutter at a woman with grey hair who was watching him. Gradually, reflecting each other, they developed a dialogue of looks.  She knew everything that happened in the camp and taught him a lot of things..

He discovered that man was the most vile of the animal world. Perhaps it was because he was the only one to use speech?

She told him that she had seen a woman working with her daughter clearing the snow outside when a passing soldier shot the child with his gun in one hand while caressing his genitals with the other.

The woman taught him that, while the massacre of bodies certainly existed in the present, that of souls would continue in the survivors for generations.

The woman also told him one day that a little girl had been born. Jean told Adrian. Straight away he went to find the child and, declaring that she was his own daughter, hid her outside the camp with a farming couple.

Little by little a friendship developed between the two men. Adrian confided that he had got some men from the camp taken on by a factory nearby, so giving  them a chance of survival. Jean asked him to try to discover what had happened to his friends. Anna had been deported to Treblinka, David to Dachau, then… silence !

One day, Adrian announced to Jean that he had managed to remove all traces of his existence. His name no longer appeared on any lists, he had managed to make him disappear from  the eyes of the camp authorities. A short while later they both undertook a long journey to liberty..

The old woman was always there, invisible.  Sitting there she continued to search, scrutinising  the forms in the smoke rising from the chimneys of the cremation ovens.. She tried to recognise her daughter or one of her grand daughters, someone from her family at last....but the images that formed took such familiar shapes that she saw everyone at once..

Rwanda 1994

Sitting on the ground on a carpet of rainbow coloured stripes, wrapped in an orange shawl over a white dress with green flowers, an old lady was searching, searching for her family…

The camp was stuck in the middle of semi-dry land scattered with a few shrubs, the sun was red. She could not move, a sand storm was battering the camp. In an ochre orange hubub people arrived from all directions at once.

The old woman had never known such a hot place. She thought she had fallen into the devil’s cauldron.  Water evaporated the moment it appeared as if the thirsty gods and demons of the firmament were sucking it up.

The Tutsi fled Rwanda, their houses burned, the red of the fire mixed with the ochre of the sand. The heart of Africa beat wildly, woken with a start. It was like a heart attack that started to cross the cracks in the earth, flowing blood formed into streams.  The spirits escaped from the bodies clutching one another, navigating these bleeding streams. They would rejoin the infinite.....

A group of Hutu men of all ages were drinking as much alcohol as they could get their hands on, drunk with the taste of death they were dancing, spitting and laughing wildly. One young man, drooling with pleasure, said that he had thrown grenades into the church where the Tutsi had taken refuge, blowing them up. Another proudly recounted that he had gutted a woman, three others described in detail their rape of a young woman. They egged each other on, showing that their sadism had no limits. In despair the old lady watched as meaning drained from life. Men, women and children, given up to these excesses had been reduced to mere things.

Politicians all over the world, just like Mother Church, kept quiet once more. Did the ferocious jouissance of the assassins find an echo in their own jouissances ?

The old woman spotted a small boy of about five in the distance and beckoned him to come to her.

The closer he got the bigger his eyes became and his lips began to stretch wide enough to join his earlobes.  He believed he had found his grandmother.  The old woman, well used to long journeys and great changes, did not want to deceive him. She began to change the colour of her eyes, which became progressively blacker. Then she changed her skin colour and became dark, her lips swelled a little. The joy of rediscovery could be read in her.

With the child in her arms she made him food out of rainwater. They were content together, the old woman hummed as the child ate.  But suddenly an incredible force ripped them apart.

The Hutus had returned to the camp with machetes, hoes and studded clubs. They began to massacre but the child, buried under the dead, stayed alive.  Hungry dogs feeding on the cadavers would wake him.

The powerless old woman could only witness the list of atrocities that had reared up in front of her. Each one would engrave itself in stone, trait by trait, side by side, recording the sad and shameful history of humanity.

The act of killing joins the catalogue of the jouissances of men.

Chapadmalal

Argentina, the country that welcomed those fleeing the genocides, massacres and famine of Europe. On the Atlantic coast is Chapadmalal. This land belonged to an Indian chief of the Tehuelche tribe. The name Chapadmalal had been given to this land by the indiginous people because it was the place where the paths of several currents of wind crossed.

Simon was among the imigrants who were welcomed in these southern lands. He wanted to celebrate his 91st birthday and asked everyone in his family, which was scattered all over the world, to come and join him in Chapadmalal. They came from everywhere : from San Francisco, Athens,  London,  Berlin, from Kosovo and Rwanda. Children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, all had responded to the call. His family had become so huge that he could hardly believe it. Mixed marriages had achieved an astonishing alchemy, a wide range of skin colours and different languages, and they were all polyglot.

To celebrate Simon’s birthday they gathered in a large hotel restaurant near the beach. Everyone was greeting everyone else, trying to rediscover the parental links that united them. On this beautiful evening the sky emptied of all its clouds and left its kingdom to the moon. The moon, dressed in her most beautiful lights, was also invited to the feast.  She looked proudly at her reflection in the sea and surveyed her accomplices

Dancing and singing from every country made up the spectacle. The young adolescents were thrilled to find themselves among each other’s relatives and friends. Life sparkled like a thousand little droplets on the surface of their skin. This evening would be remembered for ever by all of them

Just before dawn the whole family decided to go for a walk on the beach. They were so numerous that they looked like a demonstration : life reclaimed its right to exist so forcefully.

An old lady sitting on a rock near the beach was watching. She could hear, approaching from a distance, a group of people talking and singing. She distinguished words she knew in the words of some of the songs : she had once sung them herself. Then she heard different languages being spoken that she had also spoken. Her heart beat uncontrollably. All these people were coming towards her but how could she call out to them ?

A little girl who was dancing with her arms spread out like a spinning top, spotted the old lady. Curious, she started to go towards her. The lady with white hair and blue-grey eyes was dressed as she had been on the day she had left, in a checked dress in every colour of grey.

The little girl approached her with her arms wide and the old lady did the same.  They asked each other’s names. Tamara and Candelaria hugged each other. « Do you know who I am? I am your great, great, great grandmother. Come into my arms my little one ! »

The whole family had stopped, only just able to gather breath, watching the scene. Candelaria turned and shouted to them to come quickly : «  It’s Grandmother ! ». The old lady beckoned her hand and the family started to come towards her. Simon was the first. As soon as he got to the old lady she said to him : « Simon, my son, come ! ». They had both changed but their eyes had stayed the same. Their meeting was so emotional that it made the earth tremble and the trees shook their leaves in applause. The old lady summoned them all one by one : « Tomas, the youngest, Juan come and kiss me ! Marie, Silvia, Gigi, Johnny, Aleka, Emilia, Anita, Edgar, Luisa, Véné, Béata, Camille, Aaron, Bilha, Ephraïm, Ami, Délila, Aviel, Hadassa, Baroukh, Iris, Benaya, ……..

Juan Carlos Der Dadjadian