Tyaray and My Grandmother’s Hidden Wounds

She was born on March 12, 1906 in Ashitha, Turkey. According to my cousin, she was named Gulestani after a flower that grows in the mountains of Turkey and Iraq. But her family abbreviated it and called her by the nickname “Janey.”

When my Grandparents came to the America we had no idea of what they had been through and didn’t think to ask. They were happy to be here and said very little about what had happened to them. Perhaps they just wanted to move on and didn’t want to trouble us with the past.

I did know that my Grandma gave birth to my dad in the mountains of northern Iraq in 1930. Dad said she went behind a rock and he fell head-first in the soft sand. It seemed strange that she would be so alone in such an isolated place and without any medical help around.

Over the years little pieces of her story have come together. She was a child during some of the darkest days of our tribe’s history–World War I. This was a traumatic time of genocide when 700,000 Assyrian Christians died and the last of them left Turkey.

I confirmed this last week along with other more-upsetting news… My grandmother’s dad was murdered by Kurds for his beautiful socks.

You see, Assyrian women knitted colorful strings (called durgaiye) into the socks of the men they loved. What a heartbreak it must have been for my great Grandmother to have suffered this loss. How she must have struggled with the weight of knowing that men’s desire for something that she created, was the motive for her husband’s murder.

Looking back it is still hard to conceive of such a thing, but Turkish Christian lives were cheap in those days and thousands were killed for less than a pair of socks. It was during the time in which the Turkish leadership pushed forward a program to annihilate or remove all indigenous Christian ethnic groups within their borders. One has only to google the images of the Turkish genocide to see what was happening less than a hundred years ago.

This sorrowful experience may not have been the only thing that my grandmothers suffered. Many Assyrian women and girls survived only to be abused and raped. The lucky ones escaped through the mountains to safer locations. Yet many of those who attempted this died of exposure and sickness along the way.

All we know for sure is that my great Grandmother passed away. No doubt the trauma of the experience deeply affected her, and also left my dad’s mother, and her brothers, without a family.

Fortunately, they were welcomed into the home of Zaia Gewargis who later became her husband. Together they joined the Assyrian refugees fleeing from the on-going Turk and Kurdish atrocities. They left hundreds of thousands of their dead kinfolk behind. They reached northern Iraq where my Grandpa joined the British forces as a levy.

By then my Grandma was a young woman who spent a large part of each year in the northern part of Iraq–living like wandering gypsies in sheep camps of the mountains. With the atrocities so fresh in her mind, it is understandable that she tried to hide the birth of my dad behind a big rock…the Kurds shared the same nomadic territory.

She was a short but beautiful woman who a few weeks later carried my dad down, out of the mountains on her back. She held the hand of her older son, my Uncle Dinkha, as they walked down the rocky trail together. The Winter storms were coming and the temperatures were already dropping below freezing at night. The lower elevations made it easier for them and the sheep.

Over thirty years later, she flew to the America, and at first she lived in our home. I was happy to have an empty place in my heart and life filled by my long-lost family. I had longed to see and know them, but after they arrived a strange thing began to happen.

Boys in my neighborhood suddenly seemed to take pleasure in saying belittling about me and Assyrians in general. Before this time I had easily blended in with other American children, but now the word was out about my foreign relatives. My little Grandma still wore her little green scarf and ancient clothes. I couldn’t hide her and didn’t want to.

One day as I was playing in my back yard two boys started in on me again from just outside our property. This time I jumped the fence and got into a fight with them. They were both older than me and were soon getting the upper hand.

I thought I was alone but my Grandma had noticed from inside the house and came rushing out–lecturing the boys in her best Assyrian! They stopped fighting and stared at her in surprise. This gave me a chance to escape over the fence and back into my yard. My Grandma comforted me as I went crying back to the house. I had never before experienced ethnic/racial hatred and it grieved my soul.

But my Grandma understood. She had survived untold woundings in Turkey and Iraq, and was not surprised to see it in the new world. She showed me what it was like to move on and leave hateful people behind.

In the end, Grandma courageously made her final move. We were away on a vacation when we heard the news that she’d suffered a stroke. I remember dad droving all night to get us back to where she was in Denver. I was too young to drive but I prayed while dad drove. Earnestly I asked God through the night to keep my Grandma alive–I wanted to see her again.

Once in Denver my dad dropped us off and went to the hospital. He came back with bad news. The doctors gave no hope for Grandma to make it. I put up a fuss until my dad took me with him to the hospital on his next visit.

The hospital was a frightening place for me as I had painful memories from when I went to the same facility earlier to have my tonsils removed. But I stayed close to dad and entered a strange room where Grandma lay in a bed looking very sick.

Dad read promises to her from the Bible as I watched from one side of the room. When Dad finished she kissed the Bible. Grandma could not read, but in faith she received the Word of God.

Dad then prayed and she repeated it after him, phrase by phrase. In the end, I too found a way to say good-bye and even in her pain, she made me feel loved.

It is my last memory of Gulestani…a woman of Tyaray!

“Then I heard a voice from Heaven saying unto me ‘Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors and their works do follow them.'” Revelation 14: 13