Afbeelding auteur

Micheline Aharonian Marcom

Auteur van Three Apples Fell From Heaven

7 Werken 268 Leden 8 Besprekingen

Over de Auteur

Micheline Aharonian Marcom teaches creative writing at Mills College.

Werken van Micheline Aharonian Marcom

Three Apples Fell From Heaven (2001) 123 exemplaren
The Daydreaming Boy (1656) 40 exemplaren
The Mirror in the Well (2008) 31 exemplaren
The New American (2020) 28 exemplaren
Draining the Sea (2008) 21 exemplaren
A Brief History of Yes (2013) 17 exemplaren
The Brick House (2017) 8 exemplaren

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And three apples fell from heaven: one for the storyteller, one for the listener, and one for the eavesdropper.
To write the history of those who have been lost, whose culture has been erased, and who are often, to this day, greeted by an emphatic rejection that such an erasure ever took place: this requires an immense skill, an ability to toe the fence deftly on the side of factual evidence in favor of more traditional, oral source material. But it also requires the ability to keep both the victims and the victimized in sight in equal measure, not losing sight of possibly historical misreadings, downright dismissals, and even personal—especially familial—sources that can sway the balance toward one side of the fence.

So what does it require, then, to write the history of your own people, those whom you never knew because they died before you were born? What does it take to reconstruct their narratives from oral sources when decanters might require more solid facts? Does one's heritage prevent one from accurately depicting both sides of a cultural conflict—a conflict that is the first genocide of the twentieth century? I would suggest that a certain audacity is required of a writer in this position: the foreknowledge that there will be decriers and nay-sayers; that there will be those who survived or who have heard stories from family members who have, and yet who are still unable to find themselves in the personal narratives the writer eventuality constructs. This means bravery, then, as it means taking risks in order to tell a story the very telling of which is riddled with anxiety, trauma, denial, betrayal; it means telling the story of one-and-a-half-million murdered Armenians by using only a half-dozen or so speakers to carry the weight of such a history.

And yet this is something that Marcom pulls off in a dazzling, heartbreaking, haunting, and frightening way in her debut novel, Three Apples Fell from Heaven. One would hardly know it was her first effort: there is a skill here that is as wise as a voice raised from 1915, telling the story of the massacres from beyond the grave; there is a wisdom here that is eons beyond other writers of Marcom's generation, and, indeed, it is an intermingling of generations itself that makes Three Apples such a phenomenal feat in and of itself. It also begins by addressing directly the problematical attempt to catalog such a history, due to an apostrophized Rumor who straddles either side of the above-mentioned fence:
She writes at night, while you are dozing.

Rumor says things like, And so, and so
There was and
There was not

Rumor tells stories. This is the story she writes.
Despite the fact that most of her readers are likely unfamiliar with many of the details about the Armenian genocide that took place between 1915 and 1917, Marcom goes lightly when it comes to concrete, solid facts. One might think that this would render a book like Three Apples—a history of the genocide, after all—flawed, but instead it works to Marcom's immense favor: using facts and intercalary sections that are more rooted in giving accounts of historical evidence (e.g., one way Marcom does this is through the use of the American missionary's letters back to his home office, some of which are in cypher to bypass Turkish censors), this is enough of a framework to build on individual stories. By focusing on several characters, Marcom risks losing sight of the one-and-a-half-million dead for whom she is speaking; however, her speakers are all marginalized figures, figures who are viewed by their own communities as outsiders already, and this adds a more humanitarian lens through which to view both the daily travails of living in fear of the invading Turks and also confronting the very real fact that one's culture might survive only with oneself—if one is even lucky to survive, that is.

This emphasis on the importance of stories and storytelling is Marcom's strength, and each of her narrators speak in ways unique to them but also with a poetically charged rhythm that is found throughout the entire text, uniting them despite their differences, making a cohesive patchwork of voices that insist on the importance of Armenian identity, culture, and its resistance to erasure, silence, and complete annihilation I think it worth looking in brief detail at three of Marcom's main narrators in Three Apples for the perspectives each affords her history, and their own stories' potentiality for stressing the importance of storytelling in order to survive.

Anaguil, a young woman who witnesses the murder of her Armenian father, loses her mother, and is forced to raise her younger brothers and sisters in a Turkish home that has been kind enough to give them shelter. Anaguil's constant conflict between keeping her old language, religion, and culture alive in her mind—and also feeding pieces of this in small doses to her younger sister, Nevart, in particular, so that it may pass on to the next generation—and, alternatively, trying to pass as Muslim in a world that would otherwise see her bought, sold, raped, or killed is a conflict Marcom handles very plausibly and in achingly humane terms: "She is writing a book of memory on her body and destroying it as she writes."

Maritsa, a woman who grows up thinking she is male, introducing a potential transgender theme to Three Apples which joins a text that already has its store of sexual "perversions" aplenty. Marcom's use of sexuality is very interesting throughout: instead of asking us to judge characters in scenes where they are fingering themselves, being rimmed, masturbating, and so on, it is sexuality that somehow joins all of us together. We all know how closely linked pain is to pleasure; we all know that each side informs the other, in the same way that Marcom insists on her stories informing other stories. Sexuality is relational, then, in Marcom's world, and its often crude and disgusting ends are a means by which we somehow go on, join the ranks, and see ourselves—in all of our nakedness, with all of our perversions and fetishes laid bare to the searchlight—somehow linked to others in our individual shame and in our collective guilt. Another use of Maritsa's character is to demonstrate how many women internalize patriarchal ideologies about their own inferiority, thus unwittingly assisting operations like a genocide whose logic is obviously rooted in phallocentrism: "I always wished to have been born a man. To slap the woman. To beat them. And yet, every man I have known has left me with only one desire: to lift my hand and bring it swiftly down on his face."

Sargis, a young man with a gift for words—especially poetry—and whose mother dresses him as a woman and locks him in the attic to escape Turkish detection. Exploring through Sargis the age-old links between poetic inspiration and madness, Marcom is able to introduce a homosexual character who stands at the outskirts of his own culture: a better vantage point from which to offer judgment and a more objective view. Through Sargis, Marcom's brief examination of the ways in which male relations were allowed in the hamam ritual but frowned upon openly in public (and were punishable by death as far as the law went), a rift that allows her overall lamentation about the genocide to also point to flaws within the very systemic structure under fire:
You said, Make plans. You said, Here is History, and handed me a leather-bound tome. You said, spreading your arms open and smiling with a sly grin, This is the way the world is. I never questioned the verb. I never peeked behind it.
Is shit.
Only the viscera of my body comfort me.
Marcom's Three Apples is both effective and affecting; her talent with the written word, especially her use of poetic conventions, make it nearly impossible to quote from the text in order to place them on display. These poetic refrains and structures are ones that run the gamut of each section, logically beginning and ending each voice, and then spiraling into the next section's disparate logic: Marcom is creating a music of sorts. This is how memory would sound. This is how my ancestors, she seems to be saying, may have lived—and most likely did—and this is how I will remember them: in all of their bravery, in all of their fear, in all of their excrement. It is the tale of their darkest days, told with respect for the sheer dark as well as the possibility of light as the stories heal, as generations reflect, as history is acknowledged and learned from so that "[t]he dark root night" need never replicate itself again:
This is the inside-out world. The black side. The devil's world. I cannot recall if there has ever been a place different from this one; a time of a different velocity. Here the days have no beginning, there is no rising sun to mark them. Each day is endless, each day is the night. The dark root night. Devouring us.
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
proustitute | 3 andere besprekingen | Apr 2, 2023 |
A powerful, likely close to true, rendition of the courage and steadfastness of persons migrating through Mexico to pursue their dreams to live in America. This heart-wrenching book was very close to a 5-star rating from me (when will Goodreads give us 1/2 stars?).
 
Gemarkeerd
ChetBowers | Mar 10, 2021 |
This book was really hard to read, for a lot of reasons. It is about the Armenian genocide, and there are a lot of parts that are really graphic and I had to put down the book sometimes because I just couldn't handle it. There are a lot of bitter truths that come out in the book.

The style in which the book is written also made it difficult to read, but it is also the reason I loved it. Every chapter is told from a different perspective, and sometimes it takes a while to figure out whose perspective it is being told from because of pronoun usage. Some of the characters appear in only one chapter, and that is the last you hear from them. The chapters aren't in chronological order, so that got a little confusing at times. I kept having to flip back to previous chapters to figure out what was going on. But this writing style is one of the main reasons I really liked this book. It was really beautiful the way that it all came together and gradually I got a sense of what the novel was about. I just kept reading and it all fell into place.

The writing style is very poetic, which sometimes I find annoying in books, but in this case even though I often missed the deeper meaning behind the words, I still found them beautiful and engaging.


Part of me wants to pick up the book and start reading it again, because I think it would all come together a lot more in a second reading.
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
klburnside | 3 andere besprekingen | Aug 11, 2015 |
More or less a plotless book, but the writing here is amazing (and rare) and the obsessiveness of the character has a unique inertia that keeps one locked-in and reading. Marcom explores the chaos of love, lust and infidelity, and she delves into the minds of her characters (and their acts) with total candor.
 
Gemarkeerd
pessoanongrata | 1 andere bespreking | Mar 31, 2013 |

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Statistieken

Werken
7
Leden
268
Populariteit
#86,166
Waardering
½ 3.4
Besprekingen
8
ISBNs
20
Talen
1

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