Mari Firkatian
Mari's life began in Bulgaria, where she spent half her youth before moving to America in the 1970s. Her grandparents had previously been refugees in Bulgaria, which is also where Mari's parents were born. She discusses the experience with her Armenian roots through her maternal grandmother at the time she was living in Bulgaria, as her parents worked and refused to go to church because of their jobs.
"My grandmother was the one who took me to church. Basically my grandmother was my primary caregiver. And that's kind of a standard modus operandi in those communities, in those societies, simply because daycare was either unavailable or really expensive or both."
Mari was able to learn so much through her grandmother's stories, as well as her own mother. Her father was proud to be Armenian, however he didn't impose any stories on Mari and maintained a fatherly role to her. This photo is a portrait of Mari's mother Anahid as a child alongside Mari's grandmother Iskouhi. Both of individuals had a big impact on what Mari was able to learn about her identity as an Armenian, and continue to maintain it when she eventually moved to America.
A lot of what Mari learned was not told to her directly, and so she gained a lot of her knowedge based on what she heard from the people around her. When her grandmother would visit friends, she learned a lot from the women there who talked about it amonst themselves.
"I learned about the genocide inadvertently, it was never a direct subject in my home. So because my Nena was my primary caretaker, she would take me with me her when she went to visit her friends. And so they're all genocide survivors. So there's a bunch of little old ladies sitting around having coffee and little demitasse cups and they would start talking and crying about it. And they probably forgot that I was there because they never would have done that deliberately, as you can imagine."
To hear these stories from her grandmother and others who had been involved in the genocide themselves is something Mari still recalls today, even discussing a particular story where one of the women had to abandon her children since she could no longer care for them.
With everything Mari learned, the topic of the genocide was generally unspoken at her home. She shares how there was never a desire for the people of her parents' generation to push for more information from their own parents who had lived through it.
"The impression was that the people of my parents' generation understood that they had to survive and they either didn't want to or didn't take the time to listen to their parents' stories about what went on. Obviously they probably knew way more than I ever would, but they never really dug deep and never were intrusive in questioning. And so it was kind of left unsaid in the corners, and that's the legacy shock and trauma passed on all sorts of ways"
These last two photos show Mari with her cousin and mother in the snow, and also one with her parents and grandmother Mariam in Istanbul. Mari didn't have her own siblings, so she never knew what that kind of relationship personally looked like. After her grandmother's passing, Mari speaks about things she wishes she could ask her now, such as her relationship with her own siblings.
"I would've liked to have known what her relationships with her siblings were. I ended up being an only child, so I had no siblings. Unfortunately, most of my friends now who have siblings don't seem to have good relationships with them. So I think I should be counting my lucky stars or something. But I still would have liked to have known what their relationship was like."
Mari also expresses her desires to know more about her grandmother's village, and what the interior of her house looked like. There are many unanswered questions on the life her grandmother lived alongside her family members, before the genocide occurred. Unfortunately many of these memories have been lost to time due to the erasure of Armenians and their culture, but continuing to pass on what is remembered is very valuable to these Armenian descendants.