The Burning Heart of the World Follows an Armenian Family in Exile

During the Lebanese Civil War, Vera’s family flees to New York City; more than a decade later they witness the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Though Vera grows to become a successful visual artist and married mother of twins living in Manhattan, neither she nor her parents have fully adjusted to life in the United States. ​“I came here like a wounded bird from a burning country,” her father tells her. ​“This is no country for humans. People work all the time. When they aren’t working, they lock themselves in their houses surrounded by white fences. It’s a land of the lonely.”

Navigating this loneliness while trying to find one’s place is the core of The Burning Heart of the World. Released to coincide with the 50^th anniversary of the start of the Lebanese Civil War and commemorate the 110^th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, this beautiful, heartfelt book weaves humor, romantic foibles and love into a coming-of-age story that is a prayerful lament for the victims of war.

I sat down with Kricorian to discuss the themes of displacement and community that give this story heft, and the invisible thread that links war to racial and religious animus.

Eleanor J. Bader: The transmission of generational trauma is one of the novel’s themes. From the Armenian genocide to the Lebanese Civil War to 9/11 in the United States, trauma is ever-present as people go about their daily lives. Why is this important to you?

Nancy Kricorian: Although I am interested in intergenerational trauma, I am also interested in the ways people remake their communities. On one hand, yes, the novel is about trauma, but on the other, it is about perseverance.

I grew up in an Armenian community in Watertown, Massachusetts. We lived in a two-family house and my grandmother, who had survived the genocide, lived upstairs. We never spoke about it directly, but in my first novel, Zabelle, I refer to the unspoken residue of the genocide as living with ​“dead and rotting animals behind the walls.”

When I was in college, I took a class on mothers and daughters in literature. One of the assignments was to conduct an oral history with a woman in our family. I went home and interviewed my grandmother who, for the first time, told me about what she called the ​“deportations” or the ​“massacres.” She never used the word genocide. My grandmother never told anyone in our family about being forced from her home and made to walk into the desert.

She ended up in a tent camp with 8,000 Armenian orphans in the desert outside the Syrian town of Ras al Ain and explained how she found her way to Watertown, a town that has had a large Armenian community since the early 1900s, with multiple churches, cultural centers, shops and bakeries. These refugees came to the United States and recreated an Armenian life in America. Hearing my grandmother’s story explained a lot that I had not understood about her and our community. She died in 1985.

After she died, I did a lot of additional research and steeped myself in Armenian history. I feel that all four of my novels are a tribute to the ways Armenians have persevered despite trauma and pain. In The Burning Heart of the World, Vera’s grandmother refuses to leave Lebanon for the United States, causing emotional upheaval for Vera and her parents and siblings, who feel badly about leaving her behind.

EJB: The character Vera, her parents, brothers and husband all respond to the same events differently. Seeing the role personality plays helps the reader avoid formulaic assumptions about how events impact individual people. How did you model these characters?

NK: I interviewed at least 40 Armenians who had lived through the Lebanese Civil War. Some of the folks who were kids during the war remembered the period as fun. They told me that school was frequently canceled and, for them, staying in a shelter and playing with their friends was pleasant. In the novel, you see some of the girls flirting with boys. You also see the boys collecting bullets, which I was repeatedly told was a common male pastime. The adults, of course, had a very different account of those years.

As for temperament, even as a child, Vera was considered sensitive. She often wept over things she saw. Her mother was angry much of the time and presented as tough and businesslike. At one point in the book, when Vera is crying over something that happened, her mother berates her, saying, ​“You can’t cry for the whole world.” But Vera doesn’t accept this and thinks to herself that her mother is wrong, that it is absolutely possible to cry for the universe.

Her brother, Armen, the middle child, has his own way of dealing with the war and is a daredevil. He not only collects bullets but, in one scene, shows his friends an unexploded grenade he found. At another point, he gets caught in a crossfire while riding his bike. He sees the war as an opportunity for adventure.

EJB: How much archival or other research did you do to learn about the civil war?

NK: The amount of detail about the war that made it into the final version of the novel is relatively small, but I immersed myself in Lebanese history. I learned about all the different militias in the civil war and about the leaders of each. But because the story is told from Vera’s perspective, and covers the period when she was between the ages of 10 and 15, when she is still in Lebanon, I wanted the story to focus on what she was thinking, feeling and seeing as a child and adolescent.

Part of my research involved going to Lebanon. I traveled there three times; my goal was to make the experience of reading the book as immersive as possible. I wanted to present the streets, the sounds and the smells of the Armenian areas. I walked everywhere, went into people’s homes and visited the school Vera would have gone to. I looked at yearbooks for the years she would have been there and became fully engaged with the community despite being there decades after the war ended.

And I read dozens of books. In fact, my early drafts of the novel were bristling with historical details that I later pared away.

As for the first section of the book, about 9/11, I went back to my journals from that period. I was in the city when the attacks happened, so I reread what I’d written. But I had to be sure to keep ​“Nancy” [referring to herself] and Vera separate. I needed to make sure that what I wrote in the novel was authentic to Vera’s personality and voice and did not reflect my own experience.

Finally, I spoke to Lebanese-Armenian friends who had been in Beirut during the civil war and were also in New York City on 9/11. They told me that being in New York City during the attacks opened up old wounds for them. This helped me understand that the attacks would cause Beirut-Vera’s trauma to reemerge in American-Vera.

EJB: What do you hope readers will take away from The Burning Heart of the World?

NK: The book’s release is timed to coincide with the start of the Lebanese Civil War 50 years ago. It also commemorates the 110^th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. The book feels timely since Lebanon and the Middle East are again under assault.

All four books in the quartet are part of a chain. Zabelle was a fictionalized account of my grandmother’s experience as a genocide survivor and immigrant bride. Dreams of Bread and Fire was about people of my generation coming to terms with the unspoken trauma that overshadows their community. All the Light There Was is about people who fled to Paris during the genocide only to face the Nazis several decades later. The themes in my books are often dark, but I try to brighten them with humor. I enjoyed writing the scenes in The Burning Heart of the World where Vera’s 15-year-old cousin is hiding a romance with a 30-year-old man. Each of these books is for my people, Armenians around the world, but, of course, I mean for the books to be read more widely.

In addition to being a writer, I’m an organizer and I do Palestine solidarity work. The goal in my writing and activism is to inspire the humane in the human. Humans do a lot of terrible things, but I am interested in showing how people are able to retain their humanity in the face of war and mass violence.