Araxia, Halide, Sabiha, Liji, and Meryem. In a book that blends her own fragmented narrative about the war in Syria with the forgotten memory of the Armenian genocide in Turkey, Suzan Meryem Rosita looks closely at the lives of four women, Armenian and Turkish, during the last century. She tells the story of an evangelical preacher, a Turkish novelist, a combat pilot, a Proustian scholar. All have been touched, in one painful way or another, by the Armenian genocide of 1915. Those repercussions echo into the present day, in the grief and commemoration for those murdered in the first of twentieth century´s many genocides, and in the shattered worlds of those living the horrors of warfare today. At the same time, these stories point to the ways silence is always part of our language about war and genocide. Throughout the book, silences are left uncovered. Rosita does so not because of political concerns but because she wants emphasize that silence can be very eloquent if there are those who listen. "I find that silence can be both enabling and disabling," she writes. "And even when silence seems to bracket the unspoken, we can use it to illuminate not just which stories are told and untold, or silenced and suppressed, but how these stories and their silences affect us as their listeners."
