Do you sometimes question if they’re all dead?

A few ponderings on devastation, disconnected family, and utterly deteriorating mental health (+ poem).

BEFORE PROCEEDING

Please help aid my friend Deema and her family’s escape from Ġaza to safety in Miṣr by supporting their GoFundMe. Whether you do so through donating to it yourself, or simply sharing the link to it.

They have a big family and are so close to their goal.

Don’t forget to keep helping a comrade with type 1 diabetes afford insulin.

Ⓐ

I think it had just been seething there. Under the skin—I mean, I knew it was there. That’s why it felt so close to the surface.

I didn’t even get to make mention of everything with how it all came down. Pухнуло (rúhnulo). I wish English had a word that felt as appropriate for how that avalanche hit me.

19th of September, 2024, was the 1-year anniversary of the complete ethnic cleansing of Artsakh (“Nagorno-Karabakh”); the 1-year anniversary of over 120,000 indigenous Armenians being chased off their ancestral homeland by the tyrannical terrorist state of Azerbaijan (which celebrated its “Sovereignty” Day around that time, too). On the 20th was the 2-year anniversary of 16-year-old Nika Shakarami’s kidnapping and murder by the IRGC. On October 2nd, she would’ve turned 18. Had she been with us still. آرام بگیر، ای فرشته… September 14th was Greek Genocide Remembrance Day. September 13th was the Smyrna Catastrophe Memorial. September 6th marked Septemvrianá Day of Memory. September 27th will be Sukhumi Massacre Remembrance Day. All of that during Rtveli.

Our children just wanted to live.

Evidently, no one else wanted them to.

September 21st was also Paqtaqan, the Altai and Turkic autumn festival. I could’t even bring myself to mention it that day, certainly not partake in any of my rituals.

I’ve been in freeze mode for months—had barely been able to get myself out of bed, or even feed and water myself, with the unbearable heaviness of being. Yet that which weighs on me is so much bigger than I am—not some interpersonal drama or little friendship squabbles, but humanity-devastating cataclysms. It’s the only thing I feel stirred by anymore, though I’ve learned my lesson about trying to convince Westerners to care with me (yet I’m still speaking this oil-spill of a language I was forced to swallow just so people might hear me, even if not listen; they never listen).

I distinctly recall this one interaction years ago. It was the midst of the genocidal Azerbaijani blockade of Artsakh and the fever pitch of anti-government demonstrations in Irân. I learned of Nika Shakarami’s death, and in my utter grief and devastation, I posted to my Instagram story a vent, as I often do.

What did I get for it?

A USAmerican man—30 years old to my dumb little 20—bombarding into my DMs to make the suffering of West Asian people—women and children, in the context of what I was saying in that precise instance—about himself. Then again, this man told a woman I used to know that her ethnic group deserved genocide, so I don’t exactly know what I expected.

I managed to dig up what I had said that day, and I’m harrowed by how true it rings to this very second. If anything, I was so much kinder back then; you’d never see this degree of restraint from me now—depending on how you manage to catch me, it’s very possible that, these days, I’d be calling for somebody’s death in this context, and I certainly wouldn’t skimp on profanity (including that c-word USians are so terrified of).

I think I was still holding out hope that the blockade would end, then. It never did. Not the way I wished it would, anyway.

And you know what, maybe USians don’t necessarily live in the ~cushiest~ country on earth, but please don’t play in my face—you know exactly what I meant. This vent was also about Irân and Artsakh specifically; I’m ashamed to admit that I wasn’t really thinking about Ukraine at that moment.

That was probably the day I started despising that abortion of an Anglo colony irrevocably. Western people will eat their fvcking mac&cheese over freshly-laden graves of our indigenous Eastern people. Western people will do everything in their power to derail a conversation just to make themselves the centre of conversation.

If there was God, USians killed Him.

Just like they’d kill the brown Palestinian Jew who is ܩܕܝܫܐ Yeshū M’shīḥā should He ever return (for His sake, I hope He does not).

screenie from Angie’s Instagram; շնորհակալություն, חברי

I vented about my jaded hopelessness apropos of all this at length both in my Substack notes, and on my YouTube community page. I’m not going to copy and paste what I’ve already said twice (thrice, if counting my CF list on IG where a lot more profanity made cameos). Go read it, if you’re so agog. It’s not pleasant for anyone involved.

I’m not a sympathetic person and it’s not my intention to ever be one. I just want to be angry in peace(HA!) this time around.

But make no mistake; I come from countries far, far worse. I don’t think Westerners are capable of wrapping their heads around that truth.

And I will be honest: because of that, recently, I’ve been spiralling about my brother.

Yes, I have a brother. Well, a half brother—he’s my dad’s, not my mom’s. I’ve never met him (or my father), but I know he’s 10 years older than me, making him in his early 30s as of 2024.

And I do think it’s very possible that my brother isn’t alive anymore.

It all goes back to February 2022. He lived in Stavropolye at the time, and my dad is from Ossetia (though isn’t Ossetian); they’re in ethnic minority “Middle Eastern” regions which were some of the first to be mobilised to Ukraine during a time when Russian soldiers didn’t know where exactly they were going or why. That time has long passed, a genocidal war rages on in full awareness of the world, and those who were clueless cannon fodder at the start have been wasted irreversibly and всуе.

My father is 10 years older than my mother, probably a pensioner by the time the war started, so it’s not especially likely that he was mobilised, though there’s still a slim possibility, given this is a totalitarian Police State we’re talking about.

My maternal uncle didn’t get mobilised (🧿), but you need to understand that he is in his mid-late 40s, so possibly just dodged the cut-off, and lives in an ethnic majority region whilst being assimilated. My paternal family are unassimilated from, and in, again, an ethnic minority, occupied, province.

The RF quite literally used mobilisation as a tool of ethnic cleansing by mobilising ethnic minorities and ethnic minority, colonised regions first, meaning my paternal family was basically first up on the chopping block.

I don’t know what the point of writing any of this out is. It’s not like anyone will find it, certainly not with it being in English, nor do the people on the territory of the RF have access to the same internet as the privileged West.

χόιλαλα!

It must be nice to not jump at the sound of planes. To not lie awake tossing all night because your family might have been bombed. To not panic when your friends in a war zone or occupied territories or autocratic countries aren’t picking up or replying. To not sometimes question if they’re all dead.

I do, on occasion, wish I could be like you. The heaviness of being wouldn’t be so unbearable, perhaps. Or perhaps I’d be the dead one. In spirit.

And if you think I’m speaking out of resentment, I am.

Maybe when I turn 25 I’ll start pushing it down.

That gives me 2 more years of solid resenting.

Do not tone-police me.

Anyway…

The night before I sat down to type out this “essay”, I was compelled to write a prose poem. I hadn’t written any poetry in months, and what I purged up wasn’t exactly my magnum opus, but it was written in one go at 1 AM which must be worth something.

Unedited besides spelling errors and a word I missed in my near-sleep state.

For additional context:

The primary reason given for Mlaḥsô’s extinction is the Sayfo (ܣܲܝܦܵܐ; lit. “sword”) perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire in the early 1900s—one of the swathes of anti-indigenous genocides which resulted as well in my paternal family’s exile from their ancestral homeland.

They say there’s possibility that Mlaḥsô is dormant, but remember what happened the last time I held out hope?

My favourite photo of my brother was taken in 1999.

Mehmaná was the last Pontian village of Artsakh, now ethnically cleansed by Azerbaijan just like the rest of that historical Armenian territory. My family has no direct connection to Eastern Armenia (or Assyria for that matter, except for my connection to Türkmeneli which overlaps with Assyria; though I do have some cultural links to historical Western Armenia—Hamshen, to be exact). Certainly not to Artsakh, but this is akin to a familial grief spanning generations and bloodlines. The loss of Artsakh, the murder of Armenians, is like the death of a sibling to me. Just like the erasure of Mehmaná. Just like the extinction of Mlaḥsô; I’ve already talked about how my own ancestral languages will likely be extinct in my lifetime.

And it all makes me question whether my brother is still alive.

RF citizens have no access to social media, so finding out is not as simple as reaching out to my father and asking him, or even contacting my brother himself. It wouldn’t even be a guarantee that they’d respond to me, given we’ve not been in each other’s lives ever.

I do hope I’ll one day be able to get in contact with ο αδελφός μου at the very least and speak to him; know he’s alive and as well as one living in a Police State can be. Maybe one day there’ll be no Police State, but “holding out hope” and all that.

And if he’s not, I hope I’ll one day be able to visit his grave. But I hope against that. Because our children deserve to live.

from “Earth Hagiography” by Sfarda L. Gül

~Sfar~Ⓐ🧿֎⨳