By Sananne Wartabetian
Lorne Shirinian’s Intimate Spaces, published in summer 2020 by Blue Heron Press, is a study of two Armenian characters, one living in Paris in 1915 and the other in present-day Toronto. Shirinian, a Canadian-Armenian writer and retired professor, lives in Toronto and has published 24 works of poetry, fiction, drama and literary studies. The first story of the book, “Guests”, asks an age-old question: How do we make sure that the Armenian Genocide is remembered? The second one, “Subway”, replies back: We remember. What will we do with those memories? How do we make sense of them and keep living with the pain that we’re tasked to carry?
“Guests” follows its main character, Siran, who has had to flee the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the Genocide. She starts her life over again in Paris as she tries to stage a play about her family in hopes of spreading awareness about what is happening to Armenians. The play is also included at the end. The second story, “Subway”, is about Nate, a retired old writer coming to terms with COVID-19. He is still trying to figure out what it means to bear in him his parent’s past, survivors of the Genocide. He opens up to his therapist who tries to help him understand why the weight he carries is so immense, and that he needs to find a way to make peace with it. Nate doesn’t know how to apply that in his own life.
The two stories deal with trauma, immediate and future, as well as the responsibility that falls on genocide survivors and descendants to make sense of the horrible events that they have been through or have heard about. The readers feel how eternal it feels to be descendants of survivors of the Armenian Genocide. Although the main character of “Subway” isn’t related to Siran from “Guests”, her story is within Nate the same way that it is within any reader of Armenian descent. The two stories together form a whole.
The novelty of Intimate Spaces is that we are allowed to see an Armenian character who is struggling with his identity because he is not able to answer these extremely complex and layered questions. Although there are numerous texts of Armenian North-American literature that recount the past, Shirinian’s novel is an exploration of two important concepts that all Armenians carry today: intergenerational trauma and post-memory. The immediacy of the catastrophe, living and hearing about it from far and thinking about it and living with the post-memory of it. It’s intimate not because we have experienced it, but because we still carry it.
When I read Shirinian’s book, it was before the war in Artsakh. I understood Nate’s questions about his identity and his responsibility towards the past. I understood why he carried his family’s history. I even felt like I carried Siran’s story in me. The second the war broke out and I saw how I, and other Armenians reacted to it, it felt like it proved Shirinian’s point about how visceral our past still feels. Intimate Spaces is a reminder that our sense of identity will always be shaped by what has happened in 1915.
Lorne Shirinian’s writing is raw and sharp as the characters move through different phases in their lives and try to make sense of what is happening to them. In the end, the book finds a way of answering its most vital question: what can we do? We create our own versions of our understanding and we put it out there for others to connect to and to understand. Hopefully so they can do the same.
