Talk:Ravished Armenia

A 20-minute clip of the original film was found and restored and is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTnCaW-Uo_s and also at the external link given in the article. The book is at https://archive.org/details/ravishedarmenias00mard Andygx (talk) 15:16, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

Possible improvements

The article should be expanded into a fuller summary. Many incidents, including the author's rescue, are not here yet.

Add link to html online copy https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53046/53046-h/53046-h.htm

The article, as now written, implies that the film inaccurately interprets Mardiganian's initial account. This is not true. Evidently, either Mardiganian herself or Henry Leyford Gates suppressed the nature of the actual atrocity. The film exactly replicates the atrocity as she had described it in her book, except that sixteen victims became twelve.

Her fictionalized account of the atrocity might be quoted from her book in block quote, before the quote of her true account of the sadistic atrocity that actually was committed.

The account of the real atrocity should be set off as a block quote, just as it is in the article for the film.

Some words about the atrocity.

1) The atrocity was unspeakable barbarity. It continued the rape that immediately preceded murder; to die in torment like this takes an entire day, per what somebody wrote beneath a YouTube (writer gave no citation, I can't remember link); their naked corpses remained on display, in post-mortem rape, to rot and be eaten by animals.

2) Her three fictionalized accounts in English (one in "her" newspaper feature--one in a "her" book--one in person before an audience) differ. In interviews, she gave at least three factual accounts, in English and Armenian. They do not meaningfully differ.

3) The description(s) of the atrocity contains details that only an eyewitness to it could know. In her fictionalized account in the book (pp. 132, 3 of the link so courteously provided above), how could she possibly know that they "had been nailed alive" when days later she saw their dead bodies and vultures congregating? In her true account quoted in the Wikipedia article, how could she explain, with step by step precision, what the atrocity involved, so many decades later? Had she seen the aftermath and spoken with an eyewitness of the atrocity? Or, had she seen both the atrocity and its aftermath?

4) In her fictionalized account in the book (and nowhere else), she says the atrocity was a "warning" to be "submissive" as well as a "ridicule" of the "Crucifixion." I'm not convinced. It could be, if in the way she described in the English language interviews, they "crucified" atop "crosses" Christian girls who had tried to resist being made concubines. But huge difficulties stand in the way of interpreting the atrocity's "meaning."

Her descriptions unmediated by her handlers (including but not limited to Gates) omit the mockery and threat angle. Probably, they made that part up. At the premiere for the movie she stated the motivation thusly: "The Kurd Shiekh, Bekram Bey....did not want to bother with us anymore." (quoted in Andrew A. Erish, Col. William N. Selig, 2012, p. 212)

It isn't clear from her English language interviews she knew "cross" implies a T- or +-shaped structure (English was her second language) or that English speakers don't use "crucify" for what she described. (See video exerpt within interview and [poor] transcription at https://channel.hammer.ucla.edu/video/1306/discussing-the-silent-film-ravished-armenia; its multiple inaccuracies about her, the film, its production, other matters, were corrected by new discoveries several years later). In footage of one Armenian-language interview with the Zoryan Institute Oral History Project, she used the Turkish word "kaziklar" which DeepL translates "stake" (exerpted in Aurora's Sunrise [2022], ca. 1:04:46); she also denied that it was crucifixion (ca. 1:04:43).

Not implausibly, the atrocity functioned as a quick, cheap, convenient, "entertaining" way to dispose of the girls as worthless rubbish. Once tired of (presumably) watching, jeering, and abusing them as they died, they could leave, sure they'd neither survive nor the perpetrators be found out.

Her searing memory seems to be of brutal atrocity too horrible and heartless and senseless to be usable for publicity. So it was changed.

5) The victims were certainly still young and possibly even minors, based how the author uses "girls" in her book and her interview.

Some words about the book.

One fictionalized incident might imply others. She might have been suppressing in her public narrative many of the horrors she experienced. Indeed she writes at one point (148) "I saw terrible things that night which I cannot tell. When I see them in my dreams now I scream, so even though I am safe in America, my nights are not peaceful."

As she tells it, the Armenian women and girls were several times forced to go without clothes long times--e.g. pp. 116, 7; 184; 189.

Ever-present sexual violence is a not unreasonable inference of how she describes the oppressors and the oppressions. Authors of the time did not write openly of rape. Nevertheless, she actually repeatedly mentions the fact of it (never the word) and makes a point to have the reader know the crime was committed against "all the pretty girls" then present (78). In one instance (112), the crime was repeatedly nightly, against nuns, two of whom committed suicide with their bare hands. In another (149-151), the oppressors searched hard to find even one not already "shamed." She also speaks repeatedly of the oppressors "tiring of" or "wearying of" their victims. In addition, girls and women are always being "stolen," sold, chosen, or forced into marriages. Besides, the title of the book is fraught with implication.

Per Arsinée Khanjian interview, "While I was reading the passages in her book over and over again, I kept on thinking about the word “rape,” but I couldn’t read it anywhere....Then I realized that it was because it was all euphemisms." (Baronian, Marie-Aude, and Erica Biolchini. "Performance, Memory, and the Archive: A Conversation with Arsinée Khanjian", Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 28, 2 (2021): 177-201, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/26670038-12342761).

Besides sexual violence, torture and murder saturate her account.

Perhaps sources can be found that note all of these things.

195.252.203.158 (talk) 03:31, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Edited and expanded.195.252.203.158 (talk) 22:39, 19 March 2024 (UTC)