GRANDMA’S TATTOOS
Director: Suzanne Khardalian
Producer: PeÅ Holmquist
HB PeÅ Holmquist Film
Grandma Khanoum was not like every one else. As a child I remember her as a wicked
woman. She despised physical contact. This was a grandma who never hugged, gave no
kisses. And she wore those gloves. Which hid her hands and the tattoos. Hid her secret. As a
child I thought these were devilish signs that came from a dark world. They stirred fear in me.
What were these tattoos? Who had done them and why?
For years I dedicated my time and expertise to study genocide, including Armenian genocide.
I thought I knew everything about it that I had seen all the pictures that I knew all about the
pain and the suffering. I realize today that I have been both blind and deaf. I had detached
myself from the obvious. My Grandma and her blue tattoos. She did not exist in my world.
Yet I know that grandma’s hands were a taboo, we never spoke about it. However fragments
of memories, - escape, a boat, a Turk, and a child crying for help- still linger on in my head.
Recently I found out that grandma was brutally raped at the age of twelve, in the presence of
her mother and sister. One sentence keeps coming back to me, from a topic we never
discussed openly at home. I hear my own mother repeat the words “Mummy, help me,
mummy, this man is pushing something hard in my bottom.”. Grandma was then abducted and
kept in slavery for many years somewhere in Turkey. She was also forcibly marked, -tattooed
- as a property, the same way you mark your animals. The discovery of the story has shaken
me. I share the shame, the guilt and anger that infected my grandma’s life.
Grandma’s fate was not an aberration. On the contrary tens of thousands of Armenian
children and teenagers were raped and abducted, kept in slavery. Some of these young girls
ended up in Fresno, California, where the local Americans called them the blue lips. We have
found the victims’ descendents who also suffer from guilt and shame.
Background
The Armenian genocide ( 1915-23) was the first genocide of the 20th century, perpetrated by
the Ottoman Turkish government against the Armenians, a Christian minority at that time
living in today’s Eastern Anatolia. This resulted in the murder and deportation of about 1.5
million Armenians from their historic homeland, and the kidnapping of Armenian children
and women. The allied forces reclaimed 90.819 Armenian orphans, these were girls and
children who, during the war years, were forced to become prostitutes to survive, or had given
birth to children after forced or arranged marriages or rape. Many of these women were
tattooed as a sign that they belonged to abductor. European and American missionaries
organized help and picked up and saved thousands of refugees who later were scattered all
over the world to places like Beirut, Marseille and Fresno.
The Armenian genocide is today recognized by EU and 21 governments. Turkish law has
criminalized describing the event as genocide, while French law criminalizes not stating that
it was a genocide. The question of the Turkish denial of the genocide has been one of the
main disputes regarding a Turkish membership in the European Union.
The Story
Grandma’s Tattoos is a personal film about what happened to many of the Armenian women
during the genocide 1915. Author and filmmaker Suzanne Khardalian makes a personal
journey into her own family to investigate the truth behind Khanoum, her late grandmother.
The film is like a ghost story; a mystery, a taboo. No one wants to tell the whole story. In
order to bring the pieces of the puzzle together we move between different scenes, from
today’s welfare Sweden all the way to Suzanne Khardalian’s childhood Beirut.
In the film we meet Grandmother’s sister, 98 years old Lucia, who today is living in
Hollywood. Lucia too has those odd tattoos. She is willing to tell us only a part of the story;
how she tried to escape together with her sister and mother during the Armenian Genocide in
1915, instead they ended up living with a Kurdish tribe for several years.
We also meet with Aunt Marie, grandma’s only still living child in Beirut. But aunt Marie
doesn’t know the whole story either. Grandma has never told it to her. It was a taboo to talk
about the “unspeakable”. Aunt Marie too has the same unpleasant memories as I have of
Grandma. Grandma avoided all physical contact. She did not like to be touched or to touch.
She was never close to anyone, not even to her own husband...
It’s finally Suzanne’s mother who tells us the story about Grandmother. Grandma Khanoum
was just about twelve years old when she was raped in front of her own mother and sister by
the Kurdish boatman on the river Euphrates, when they were escaping from the genocide.
The words “Mummy, mummy help me. He is putting something hard in my bottom” is the
sentence that haunts Suzanne and her family.
In this film we will also make the same journey as Grandma Khanoum did. We will go up the
river Euphrates to the Syrian desert of Deir ez Zor, where hundreds of thousands Armenians
met their final destiny.
Through travels to Armenia, Lebanon, Syria and USA we also meet the children of other
tattooed Armenian women and understand that their trauma was common, that the rape and
sexual violence was a “typical” fate for all those women who survived the ordeal.
Grandma’s Tattoos is a story where the worlds of reality and fantasy become so intermingled
that it becomes difficult to take them apart. The child is both the grandmother who is forcibly
tattooed and raped, and the child who later on will observe the tattoos and feel disgust, and do
everything in order to dissociate itself from the pain.
58 min
HD
Sweden, Lebanon, Syria, Armenia, USA 2008-2011
Director: Suzanne Khardalian, filmdirector /writer, Sweden.
Suzanne Khardalian is an independent filmmaker and writer. She studied journalism in Beirut
and Paris and worked as a journalist in Paris until 1988 when she started to work with films.
She holds a Masters Degree in International Law and Diplomacy from Fletcher School at
Tuft's University and contributes with articles to different journals. She had directed a dozen
films that have been shown both in Europé and theUSA.
Producer: PeÅ Holmquist, HB PeÅ Holmquist Film (Sweden)
PeÅ Holmquist Film is a production company established in 1973.The company has been
producing films mostly for Scandinavian TV-channels often with Scandinavian co-producers.
Several films have been sold all over the world.
Selected Filmography by Suzanne Khardalian and PeÅ Holmquist :
Back to Ararat ( 1988); Unsafe Ground 1993); The Lion from Gaza (1996); Her Armenian
Prince (1997); From Opium to Chrysanthemums ( 2000); Where Lies My Victory (2002); I
hate Dogs ( 2005); Bullshit ( 2006); Young Freud in Gaza(2009).
pea.holmquist@comhem.se
suzanne.khardalian@comhem.se
www.peaholmquist.com