Ellen Sarkisian Chesnut Family Haiku Made Me Cry

Ellen Sarkisian Chesnut Piece Exposes Memory of  Armenian  Genocide at Kalligraphia 13






Ellen Sarkisian Chesnut  piece doesn't have the colorful 'gimmickry' or layout  to make her piece noticeable. It's more like a mystery, a puzzle or a symbol to decode in a novel which holds the key to a solution. I'm glad my criteria to write about a piece is more about  content and narrative rather than how pretty a piece looks or if a piece was created by a star calligrapher.



Ellen Sarkisian Chestnut "Family  Haiku"



I'm also glad I ventured writing on pieces in an exhibition; it gave me an insight what critics and journalists are looking for in an art exhibit. It's more than visual. It invites dialogue and brings a viewer further into deeper meaning of our existence.

Of all the pieces in Kalligraphia 13, Ellen's piece is the one with 'gravitas' , haikus  stewed with gravity   which concerned 1.5 million people that were removed on the face of the earth. Her five haikus tell brief moments of the Armenian people genocide under the Ottoman Empire and the vehicle is poetry  expressed  in calligraphy.

John Kifner of the New York Times in "Armenian Genocide in an Overview" wrote:
"Armenians mark the date April 24, 1915, when several hundred Armenian intellectuals were rounded up, arrested and later executed as the start of the Armenian genocide and it is generally said to have extended to 1917. However, there were also massacres of Armenians in 1894, 1895, 1896, 1909, and a reprise between 1920 and 1923."
He added, "The University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies has compiled figures by province and district that show there were 2,133,190 Armenians in the empire in 1914 and only about 387,800 by 1922. "

I know about the atrociousness of Nazi Adolf Hitler to the six million Jews in concentration camp but this is my first time to know about the Armenian Genocide. It took Kalligraphia 13 to educate me  what genocide means.

Ellen Writes: These five haikus are based on my family history(mother and father) of which the crime of the Armenian  Genocide  during the waning years of the Ottoman Empire(1915-1923) played a big part. But life goes on as finding the great good in life."

  Family  Haiku

In rush to vacate
one child's red slipper left there
like wound in dirt road.

He refused to move.
We left him in desert waste
a distant black speck.

"What are those strange cries?"
At dawn charred bodies revealed
Inside burning church.

Key to alphabet
took her sixty years to find.
Her letters are blest.

We are your children
who heard the stories and wept.
"Keep moving, seize life!"

Ellen notes on the  mulberry leaves.that show up in the canvas ." Those  words described the little leaves that I drew at the bottom as mulberry trees were abundant in my father's village because they  raised silk worms for the silk industry".

It's sad to note what human beings can do to dehumanize another human being to be in power. Yet the inspiration of Ellen's final haiku is enough for me and you to appreciate life everyday.  "Keep moving seize life." Like Carpe Diem, Seize the Day.

Thanks Ellen for sharing part of your family history.