Magda Tagtachian, a memorable queen in her domains

Magda Tagtachian is a journalist and writer , and this afternoon she opens the door with a smile. She adjusts her knitted purple wool shawl and says, almost as a greeting, "It belonged to my grandmother Armenuhi." The long hallway becomes a passage to another time and another land, and she becomes a queen in her domain.

It's drizzling and cold outside, but inside, everything is warm: the wooden furniture handcrafted by her father, Jorge Tagtachian, and the pillowcases knitted by her grandmother and aunt Alicia . In the room Magda now calls Malva (because it's the color of memory), the Singer sewing machine still has orange thread and a threaded needle.

The flaps of her novels Artsaj (2022), Rojava (2021), Alma armenia (2020) and Nomeolvides Armenuhi, la historia de mi abuela armenia (2016 and 2021) say that she was born in Buenos Aires and is the third generation of Armenians in Argentina . Now added to that series of books is La promesa (Planeta), recently arrived in bookstores.

Her books have also been published in Mexico, Brazil, and Armenia . In 2018, she received the Hrant Dink Award from the Armenian National Council of South America for her work in human rights. She currently remains actively involved in the Armenian community, teaching creative writing workshops and collaborating in various cultural, journalistic, and literary fields.

But now, Magda prepares Armenian coffee and serves it in her grandmother's porcelain cups. The conversation begins, and her life intersperses with that of the characters in her novels. " The promise was born from something my great-aunt and aunt told me, and I knew then that I wanted Alma to be the protagonist ," she says.

“I had wanted to go to Jerusalem for a long time, but one day, while I was having dinner at the Armenia restaurant with my aunt Alicia Tagtachian and my great-aunt Zarman Daghlian (Zarman means wonder in Armenian), they told me how Armenians made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem during the time of the genocide and tattooed the cross on the back of their wrist as a sign of gratitude for being saved and also as an act of faith. I knew I had to go,” she says, while offering Armenian sweets with pistachios and Middle Eastern delicacies.

Before continuing the conversation, Magda explains that when you're about to try something new, something you've never eaten before, Armenian tradition dictates making three wishes.

“ The Armenian people are a Christian people, and while they always say that the reasons for the genocides are religious , in reality religious fundamentalism is used as an excuse to exterminate, because the Armenians were a very important Christian minority in a Muslim environment, but my grandfather and great-grandfather had Muslim, Arab friends,” he explains.

–And why did they get the cross tattooed?

–To be able to enter the churches, it was a way to quickly identify them and allow them to enter Christian churches. And when I heard that, I told myself I wanted to go to Jerusalem. My mother, Beatriz Balian, had traveled there a year after my father's death, in 2013, and made the entire trip to the Holy Land. My mother was very religious, and my father was an atheist. I haven't been able to get there yet, but I've done a lot of research for this novel, and the origin of it was what my aunt and great-aunt told me.

–Reading the novel it seems as if you knew…

–If you drop me off at Jerusalem today, I'll go by heart. When I started researching, just with this story I just told you, I began to follow the thread and came across the Palestinian ceramic workshops in Jerusalem, made by Armenians. Those are beautiful moments, when you find these things through research. But the surprise was even greater when I discovered the name of the workshop: Balian Ceramics, and its founder, Maria Balian, the same first and last name as my maternal grandmother. There were so many signs. You can't not put your body, soul, heart, and spirit into the story: you have to leave headfirst. And so my journey began, from here, to Jerusalem because I truly believe I was there, and I started by contacting the Balian family in Jerusalem. A similar thing happened to me when I wrote Rojava, when I researched the Kurdish people. I felt like I was at the ceremony with the Kurds, following the fire ceremony live on Instagram: I was the only one who wasn't Kurdish. It's like a door to another dimension. Just as this house was a gateway to another dimension, because this is the house where I grew up, this is the armchair where I have had the photo since I was months, days old.

–And how did you build the characters?

–I already had the story researched and was making progress, but I needed a narrative excuse to take Alma Parsehyan to Jerusalem. The novel also tells of the fall of Artsakh. The 2020 Artsakh war is recounted in my previous novel, entitled Artsakh. And in The Promise, I narrated the 10-month blockade of Artsakh, where the Azerbaijani regime, in partnership with the Turkish regime of Erdogan, cut off the Lachin Corridor, the only route linking the Armenian population of Artsakh, ancestrally Armenian (Armenians had lived there since ancient times), with the rest of the world. Then they were left for 10 months without water, as is happening now in Gaza, without food, without medicine, suffocating in full view of the world and Instagram: a genocide broadcast on social media 100 years after 1915.

–An open-air genocide.

–Yes, all the human rights and international law organizations were calling for it to end, but it didn't happen. The Armenians living there were starving. Those who had a small piece of land planted potatoes or carrots and shared them with their neighbors. People from around the capital came in horse-drawn carts because they had cars but no fuel, bringing food. It seems like something from the last century, but it happened two years ago. The same thing I wrote in Forget-Me-Nots, Armenuhi, in the Soviet era when there was famine due to Stalin's regime, but it's still happening today. When you commit genocide, first you lock up the population, then you starve them, weaken them, kill the males, and then you bomb on a massive scale. Like what's happening in Gaza: the methods of extermination are identical. The Armenians had to leave Artsakh because it was an open-air concentration camp, and they were forced to abandon their ancestral land. Returning to The Promise , I wanted to take Alma to Jerusalem, and throughout the first part, I spent the setting where Alma's husband is trapped in the Stepanakert hospital, leaving Alma in Armenia. There, she meets Garo, an architect, and together they travel to Jerusalem. And that's when the sexual tension between them begins. As in my other novels, geopolitics, war, and love also appear here.

–And what happened to you when you returned to your grandmother's house?

–My aunt Alicia, who left me the whole story, died in January 2023. And I was traveling to Armenia in February. It was my last trip to Armenia (I stayed for three months). Alicia was already dying. I remember sitting here, in this green corduroy armchair, dressed in green. I had come to visit her. And she was looking at the sun through the window. I approached her and told her I was going to Armenia, and she looked at me and said, 'Be careful with the Turks.' I went out onto the balcony; it was January, and the garden was in bloom, and I said to myself, 'What a lovely place to live.' For the first time, I said that. Alicia died four days after that conversation. I went to Armenia, and when I returned, my uncle Eduardo, Alicia's and my father's brother, told me they were going to put the house up for sale, and it came from my heart to say, 'I'm going to buy this house,' even though I didn't have the money to buy it. But it sprouted within me: my grandparents had their house evicted twice, in 1915 and 1920. They fled twice from the Ottoman Empire, now the Turkish state, and twice their house was destroyed, forcing them to leave. And the last time, they never returned. Today, I feel an enormous peace and it gives me great happiness to go out onto the balcony and say, "Hello" to my father's first cousins who live downstairs, and to be able to eat the avocados from the tree in the garden, the same one my father used to climb to push the fruit and throw it onto the grass. And to enjoy the same yard where my grandparents played tavli (it's like backgammon) and chess. When I came to live here, in Villa Urquiza, I didn't know if I was going to adapt, and today I'm much happier than I was before. And I knew that that bedroom, moreover, would be the room of remembrance, the Malva room, which I call the forget-me-not room.

"Because it was the room where my dad's cousins slept, whom my grandmother Armenuhi brought from Syria and Lebanon, all those who remained refugees after the genocide. That's why it's painted mauve, the color of remembrance, and it's where I'm learning to speak and read Armenian today, and where I found the Singer typewriter with the thread on it, orange, which is a color of great energy, of great warmth. I feel totally at one with it, and I think my mom, my dad, my grandparents, Aunt Alicia, are with me. I feel like I've reclaimed it for my parents, for myself, for the whole family. It's also like an act of justice, I say this humbly, for the Armenian people."

The Promise , by Magda Tagtachian (Planeta).