A Riveting Graphic Novel of an Armenian Family in San Francisco
In 1999, the year she graduated from art school, Bay Area illustrator Nadine Takvorian wrote in an Armenian magazine that she hoped to someday write a book about her experience in the Armenian diaspora. Now, 27 years later, the first-generation Armenian American has released Armaveni:A Graphic Novel of the Armenian Genocide, an autobiographical graphic novel named after her grandmother.
“It’s taken me over half a lifetime to make that dream a reality,” she says.
Armaveni tells the story of how Takvorian’s family survived the Armenian genocide, became Bolsahye (Armenians who live in Istanbul) and eventually made a life in San Francisco, operating a small business. Takvorian’s family ran a specialty food shop founded in 1956 called Haig’s Delicacies, named after her uncle, located a block away from Green Apple Books in the Inner Richmond. It was later operated by her parents before its retail space closed.
“It was a very special place for me growing up,” Takvorian says. “It was kind of like a San Francisco foodie destination for a while, a well known place to find delicacies from Europe and the Middle East and India. Now it’s easier to find these kinds of items, but back in the day it was pretty hard.”
In Armaveni, Nadine works occasionally at the shop, showcasing her industriousness and cultural curiosity. An inquisitive young girl, she pesters her parents to explain why her grandmother’s eyes “are always so sad” until one day they acquiesce and unfold her backstory. The book moves back and forth through time from Nadine’s perspective as a schoolgirl who has a homeland she’s never visited and her grandmother Armaveni’s perspective as a young girl in Hayastan (Armenia) living through the Meds Yeghern or “Great Catastrophe” during WWI.
Though she began her career working in the children’s educational market, and has worked on projects like a richly color-saturated Beowulf comic adaptation for kids, Takvorian’s first graphic novel is not in full color. “The subject matter required more restraint,” the author explains. The pages are covered in a lavender wash that gives them an archival feel, in line with the book’s theme of an old family story being dusted off and recounted.
Though we follow Nadine in the book as a teen, in reality, Takvorian was in her thirties when she learned Armaveni’s tale. In a note at the end of Armaveni, she attributes this delay to “old-world habits of the adults shielding children from information that could put them in danger, and my own fear of what I might learn about our family’s history.”
Her grandmother’s story takes place in an Armenia that’s under attack from the Ottoman Empire, which is waging a campaign of ethnic cleansing in an attempt to consolidate power and cultural hegemony. It is estimated over one million Armenians were exiled from their land and massacred. Grandma Armaveni’s story panels show Armenians (who were among the earliest adopters of Christianity) forced into religious conversion, trafficked, and, in one harrowing scene, women and children fleeing a schoolhouse they’d been corralled into by soldiers and left to burn.
Though Armaveni is a memoir of her family’s story, the heart of the novel is Nadine’s discovery of this persecution, which Armenians identify as a genocide, and the frustrations she feels when she realizes her parents do not wish to discuss it. Many deny it ever happened, including one of her American schoolteachers, and the country that perpetrated it, Turkey.
“Genocide recognition is so important to the Armenian community,” Takvorian explains, noting that the issue is unfortunately used “as a political football” by politicians. “It’s dangled as, Well, if you do this, then we might recognize the genocide and we don’t want to do that and you don’t want us to do that.” In 2021, on the 106th anniversary of its start, President Biden became the first American president to officially recognize the Armenian genocide — a recognition that the Trump administration has been accused of walking back.
At the end of the novel, Takvorian offers a primer on the consequences of cultural erasure. That includes a note on Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which states it is illegal to insult Turkey, and has been used to go after journalists and writers like Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk for bringing up the persecution of Armenians. For her and other members of the Armenian community, it is important for there to be “closure and consequences” after years of being denied them.
Armaveni is visually personalized. A typeface is based on Takvorian’s actual handwriting, and the pages that recount her grandmother’s story have a storybook frame inspired by ancient Armenian manuscripts that Takvorian encountered at a library in England, “really lush and full of a lot of decorative elements,” she explains. “It’s one of my favorite Easter eggs in the book.”
The nuances of Nadine’s daily experience help the reader’s understanding of Armenian identity. For example, when a fellow Armenian accuses her of being “Turkified,” Nadine experiences the stigma of being Bolsahye —a word that combines “Bolis,” the Armenian word for Istanbul, with a term that signifies Armenian identity. These interactions reveal purity tests and friction that exist within the Armenian diaspora.
Throughout, Takvorian’s book offers readers a cultural education simply by threading in Armenian words and customs. In a subtle one-page seven-panel sequence, Nadine and her family are pulling out of their driveway before a plane trip and her mom splashes water from a pitcher at them and says, “May your journey flow like water.” While the action goes unexplained, it is easily inferred that this is an Armenian custom. Spilling water for luck is in fact a folk tradition in the country and in many of its neighboring countries.
Armaveni is ultimately a very personal story, but one whose themes offer a timely lesson about what it means for a people to be forced to insist on their existence. “This is important for all of us to learn about, because it’s our collective humanity,” Takvorian explains. “This is something that happened to Armenians, but then you see it happening again and again to different groups of people … It’s an Armenian story, but it’s also our story, and it’s really important to share that and help people understand that.”
‘Armaveni:A Graphic Novel of the Armenian Genocide’ is out now. Nadine Takvorian appears March 10 at Green Apple Books in San Francisco; March 14 at Mrs. Dalloway’s in Berkeley; March 15 at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco; and March 21 at Linden Tree Books in Los Altos. Details on author appearances here.
