Listen Up: Collective Armenian Genocide Postmemory in Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s Three Apples Fell from Heaven

Abstract

In 2001, Micheline Aharonian Marcom published her novel Three Apples Fell from Heaven to imagine the Armenian genocide her family survived. Marcom's novel could aptly be described as a work of ‘postmemory,’ per Marianne Hirsch's coinage. And yet, reading Marcom’s novel as a work of postmemory poses many problems, since the novel does not fit neatly into Hirsch’s theory which scholars have criticized as being too individualistic. By close reading Three Apples Fell from Heaven and Marcom's use of storytelling as an ethical mediator between memory and postmemory, I arrive at a modified theorization of Hirsch's theory. I identify the potential of a collective postmemory that invigorates the productive anger of both writer and reader.

Keywords

• micheline aharonian marcom
• armenian
• postmemory
• memory
• ethics