In 1915, Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were deported or killed by the Turks, which was later recognized by many states as a genocide. Through the intimate story of her life in Quebec, Astrid Aprahamian invites her reader to dive into the heart of a resilient and stubborn community, for which the worst sentence would “no longer be exile or even death (we have been there many times), but rather assimilation and forgetting oneself and one’s roots. So we should not be surprised, she explains with nuances, to see the members of their diaspora isolate themselves from non-Armenians: they oscillate between the vital desire to preserve their culture and that of integrating into their host lands, which remain in their minds stopovers on a generational journey which will one day end with a return to their native country. Armed with militant and documented writing, Aprahamian resists silence, while the Turkish government still denies the genocide and she notes the powerlessness of international organizations in the management of humanitarian crises.
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