into my open waiting hands

deborah valoma

When I first opened the cedar chest and boxes packed with my grandmother Sara Sohigian Magarian’s textiles years ago, I found three cotton collars trimmed with Armenian needlelace tucked into a knotted handkerchief. A note in my grandmother’s handwriting said: “These are collars sent to me by my cousin Satinig (auntie Anna Chopoorian’s daughter) before the 1913 [sic] massacres while they were still in Kharpert—and just before she died on the way to Aleppo.”

The collars were trimmed with ultrafine needlelace, each with a meticulous, and yet, distinct pattern. Presumably made by my grandmother’s cousin, I have envisioned Satinig taking the collars off her blouses and, in a prescient moment, sending them to her first-cousin Sara in Fresno-–then only a child of perhaps four. Many years later, I discovered a fourth. Stitched to it was a scrap of faded school paper bearing an English inscription scribed in pencil: “This belongs to Sarra [sic].”

Born in 1892 in Hussenig, “a majority Armenian town in the shadows of the Kharpert fortress,” [1] Satinig was the daughter of Kirkor Chopoorian and Anna Sohigian Chopoorian. Anna was the sister of my great-grandfather Hamparsoum Sohigian, who had emigrated to the United States in 1888 to meet their elder brother Hovhaness in Chicago.

Satinig had been a high school student at Kharpert’s Euphrates College (1852-1915), a well-known missionary institution that included a theological seminary, hospital, orphanage, and high school for both boys and girls. A 1942 publication about the school shows an image of Satinig—one of the few that exist—and cites her graduation date as 1913. [2] But when deportation orders were announced in Kharpert on July 1, 1915, buildings at the college were commandeered and occupied by the Ottoman army, and leading Armenian members of the faculty were arrested, tortured, and executed. [3]

Anna’s husband Sarkis had already emigrated to the United States by 1915, possibly to pave the way for his wife and children. The 1910 United States census shows him living in San Francisco. The family’s youngest son Marderos emigrated to the United States in 1913 to join his father, and the elder son Manign was, according to my grandmother’s notes, conscripted into the Turkish army and perished in 1916.

But little is known about the experiences of Auntie Anna and her only daughter Satinig during those perilous times. We do know that Anna, her daughter Satinig, and perhaps her sister Sultana were forced to leave their homes and walk southward toward the Syrian desert in a mass deportation march. Satinig and Sultana did not survive the brutal conditions; whether they died of starvation, dehydration, illness, or physical violence is unknown. Perhaps they threw themselves into the Euphrates River to escape torment, as women were reported to have done in a “last expression of agency.” [4]

Anna survived and immigrated to the United States alone, arriving in New York City in 1920 to reunite with her husband and settle in Providence, Rhode Island. Ninety-nine years later, I visited Anna’s gravesite at the North Burial Ground in Providence. I sat quietly, leaning against her headstone, and worked the first lines of the filet crochet stitch tablecloth that, when complete, will narrate Satinig’s story. The abundant stories in our lineage of mother-daughter fissures washed over me. So many mothers and daughters were torn from each other’s arms.

Though diminutive in physical size, these four collars are the most precious pieces in my family’s textile archive. To gingerly touch the paper, fabric, and thread that Satinig touched before her tragic death is a “corporeal encounter,” defined by sensorial anthropologists as a moment of touch in which one can feel the “traces of the hand of the object’s creator and former owners.” They go on to say that “one seems to feel what others have felt and bodies seem to be linked to bodies through the medium of the materiality." [5]

Decades after Satinig’s death, her needlelace collars fell into my open waiting hands. One might wonder if this touch is, as touches are, reciprocal.