Why fiction became safer than truth in Armenian literature

2026-02-26 - 17:54

Recently, on my grandfather’s 98th birthday, I asked him to tell me again about his parents’ escape during the Armenian Genocide. We had just finished eating cake, the last crumbs still on our plates, as he sat at the head of the table — back straight, eyes clear, his mind still remarkably sharp for his age. He frequently remembers names and dates, and he loves to recount stories from his own life and from the lives of those who came before him — stories told so often they feel almost rehearsed, yet never tired. But that day, when I pressed gently and asked, “What did they pack? Who left first? Who stayed behind?” he paused longer than usual. “I’m sorry, akhjiges (my girl); I can’t tell you the full story anymore,” he said regretfully. “I only remember parts. The rest of it is lost.” He only remembers parts — fragments of a life-altering catastrophe that shaped the trajectory of our entire family line. Thankfully, those fragments are not all we have. In the 1980s, my father recorded an interview with my great-grandfather, who recounted in painstaking detail his survival: the marches, the losses and the narrow escapes. That tape still exists as a time capsule of testimony and a fragile archive of truth. Sitting there across from my grandfather, I realized something deeply unsettling and human: memories, even the most sacred ones, eventually fade away. And so, I’ve been thinking about how truth survives in Armenian history and how, for many of us, fiction became the safest way to carry it forward. The truth in disguise There is a line often attributed to the author and poet, Oscar Wilde: “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh; otherwise, they’ll kill you.” Whether Wilde intended it as wit, warning or both, the insight feels profoundly relevant to the Armenian literary experience. Humor, irony and satire are not merely stylistic choices but strategies of survival. They allow truth to slip past defenses, disarm before they reveal and soften the blow just enough for it to land. In contexts where truth is dangerous, politically explosive, socially forbidden or psychologically unbearable, fiction becomes a coded language. It is a veil or mirror, angled just enough to reflect reality without shattering the one who holds it. Armenian literature has carried this delicate burden for generations: to remember honestly, yet speak carefully; to preserve truth, yet survive its telling. Some writers confront atrocity head-on, reconstructing events with documentary precision as a way of resisting erasure and denial. Others turn to allegory, myth, science-fiction or multi-generational sagas, allowing collective trauma to surface indirectly through silence, symbolism, fractured timelines and inherited behaviors. In the Armenian diaspora especially, many novelists write of longing, absurdity and displacement without explicitly recounting testimonies or events themselves. This absence is not a denial but a narrative strategy. Trauma persists not only in scenes of violence but in tone, atmosphere and emotional inheritance. The homeland may appear only as a memory fragment, a culinary ritual, a mispronounced name or an unspoken grief that shapes an entire family’s psychology. Why? Because sometimes, the emotional truth is more survivable, and more persuasive, than historical indictment. Fiction invites readers into a real-life account gently, disarming them and allowing recognition without confrontation. Through imagined characters and plot, it recreates the moral and psychological landscape of events without requiring a courtroom. Testimony without retaliation When it comes to Armenian authors using fiction to tell real-life stories, there is also a pragmatic — and deeply historical — dimension at play. Direct accusation can provoke backlash, reopen diplomatic wounds or ignite tensions that are still painfully unresolved. For a long time, explicit naming has carried consequences politically, socially and sometimes personally. By fictionalizing accounts, shifting timelines, changing names and integrating complex characters, writers create a necessary narrative distance between lived catastrophe and literary form. That distance protects its transmission. In the Ottoman era, Armenian intellectuals navigated censorship and real danger. In Soviet Armenia, writers maneuvered ideological constraints. In diaspora communities, communal politics have often been fragile and emotionally charged. Fiction, in effect, has become a protective cloak under which testimony can circulate without direct indictment. As the story unfolds, the reader understands what is being communicated: the march, the loss, the exile, the silence, even when it is not overtly labeled. There is an unspoken literacy between the writer and reader, allowing for the truth to be conveyed while surviving history. Consequently, the truth is narrated, but in a way that allows the writer to endure. Completing the missing puzzle pieces When my grandfather told me he could no longer remember the full story of his family’s survival of the Armenian Genocide, I felt an urgency I hadn’t felt before. If testimony depends solely on direct recall, what happens when the witnesses are gone? Fiction allows us to complete the puzzle by imaginatively entering the emotional gaps. We know the historical record: deportations, death marches, confiscated homes and orphaned children. But what did it feel like to walk barefoot across burning earth? What did a mother whisper to her child at night? What private hopes lingered, even then? These moments rarely appear in archives, yet they are essential to truth. As an author of historical fiction, I have found that imagination does not distort the past but animates it. It restores heartbeat to statistics and bridges the space between documented events and lived experiences. In a culture where archives were destroyed and records erased, storytelling becomes reconstruction. In using fiction, we are resurrecting our history. Softening collective trauma There is another, more psychological layer to using fiction to tell stories in Armenian literature. Trauma, especially inherited trauma, is volatile, overwhelming both the teller and the listener. To recount horror in stark, unmediated detail can re-traumatize, freezing dialogue and silencing the next generation rather than empowering it. Fiction offers containment. Through metaphor, structure, pacing and narrative arc, trauma is given boundaries. It is placed within a story that has a beginning, a middle and an end. Even if the historical wound remains unresolved, the narrative itself creates a holding environment. The reader enters, moves through and exits the experience. What was once chaotic becomes narratively coherent and what was once unspeakable is translated into symbols. A desert can stand in for exile, a crumbling house can embody a shattered homeland, a recurring dream can hold intergenerational memory and a time fracture can mirror the way trauma collapses our perception of time. In Armenian literature, suffering is braided with beauty: apricot trees in bloom, ancestral villages perched against mountains, lullabies sung in minor keys and dark humor at the kitchen table. This link is not sentimentalism but integration. Beauty functions as a stabilizer, reminding both the writer and reader that catastrophe did not erase culture, tenderness or creativity. Humor, especially, has become a bridge. Absurdity softens the unbearable, creating distance without indifference. To laugh, even gently, in the shadow of loss is not disrespect but resilience. It signals that trauma has not monopolized our emotional landscape. As such, readers can approach wounds without being consumed by them. It prevents trauma from becoming a spectacle and invites reflection rather than shock. It permits complexity: perpetrators and victims, faith and doubt, rage and forgiveness, exile and belonging, all coexisting within the same narrative space. In effect, fiction transforms chaos into meaning and that meaning becomes survival. Stories as archive For a people whose trauma has been denied, whose archives have been burned and whose voices have been silenced, fiction symbolizes continuation. It is living testimony carried through metaphor when the direct telling of events from our history is fragile, incomplete or politically contested. When my grandfather forgets a detail, it does not vanish entirely. It survives in the recorded tape from the 1980s. It survives in my father’s questions. It survives in my own writing — in characters who carry pieces of his parents’ journey, even if their names are different. And this is not unique to my family. It applies to anyone who has ever witnessed testimony, who has sat at a kitchen table listening to a survivor speak and who has carried a story that was entrusted to them. Memory does not belong only to the one who lived it. It transfers and settles into the listener, reshaping itself in the mind of the child, the grandchild, the student and the reader. Truth, in the Armenian context, has rarely been granted the safety of standing unguarded. It has been questioned, denied, politicized and at times punished, so we learned to carry it differently. We learned to encode it in narrative, to wrap it in story and to let metaphor speak where direct accusation might be silenced. In doing so, fiction became more than art. It became preservation and protection. For many of us, it remains one of the few forms spacious and safe enough to hold the full weight of our history while still allowing us to endure it.