I grew up in a two-family house in the Armenian enclave of East Watertown, Massachusetts. My parents, my sister, and I lived on the ground floor, and my grandmother and uncle lived above us. My grandmother and her friends spoke Armenian, cooked Armenian food, and as a community worked to recreate an Armenian world out of the remnants of what had survived the genocide and ethnic cleansing they had endured but rarely spoke about.

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On Saturday afternoons, my sister and I would climb the back stairs of the house and enter that world, where we would sit on my grandmother’s couch and watch old Shirley Temple movies on television. My grandmother loved Shirley Temple, that ringleted and dimpled tap-dancing blonde charmer.

And we loved her too. Most of the films were forgettable, simple vehicles for her winsome smiles, pouts, and song and dance numbers. But there was a particular scene from one film that stayed with me.

The film was The Blue Bird, a 1940 production directed by Walter Lang that was intended as 20th Century Fox’s response to MGM’s 1939 The Wizard of Oz. In the film, which was an adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s play of the same name, Shirley Temple stars as Mytl, a discontented little girl who goes on a magical journey in search of the Bluebird of Happiness.

As in The Wizard of Oz, the film starts in black and white and then transforms into Technicolor once the adventure begins. In one sequence, Mytl and her brother Tyltl happen upon a gloomy cemetery where they discover their grandparents’ gravestones. But then the camera moves to an ivy-covered cottage, in front of which these very same grandparents, sleeping on a wooden bench, slowly wake. The children and grandparents embrace each other with relief and delight.

My grandmother and her friends spoke Armenian, cooked Armenian food, and as a community worked to recreate an Armenian world out of the remnants of what had survived the genocide and ethnic cleansing they had endured but rarely spoke about.

When Mytl says, “We thought you were dead,” the grandmother replies, “No, dear. Only when we are forgotten.” She goes on to explain that whenever the children think of them, the old people come to life. The grandfather complains that he has been working on a whittling project for more than a year because they are thought of so infrequently.

Sitting next to my grandmother, I took the scene as an admonition—forgetting is a sin, remembering a duty. By remembering someone I could extend their life. But if I forgot them, I would be consigning them to oblivion. I sensed at that moment the future loss of my grandmother, and that my love for her was also, and would also have to be, a kind of devotion.

That devotion has taken the form of my own lifelong journey into literature and history, one guided by the spirit of my grandmother. She died forty years ago but has been my constant muse. It turns out, though, that remembering her has been a complicated task, for to remember her is to remember someone who passed on her own memories of trauma and loss in the form of silence and repression.

To love her, to keep her alive, has required a commitment to stories she could not bring herself to tell, except only occasionally, and then in the vaguest of terms. As the eponymous heroine of my first novel, Zabelle, who is a composite character inspired in part by my grandmother, puts it, “We never spoke of those times, but they were like the smell of dead and rotting animals behind the walls of our house.”

My devotion to her has been displayed in my love for my fictional characters and in my commitment to telling her and other Armenian stories. I have written four novels about post-genocide Armenian diaspora experience, and in those works I explore the intergenerational transmission of mass trauma and the reverberations of these experiences in individuals and communities over time.

When I was in college and enrolled in a class on mothers and daughters in literature, one of the paper topic assignments was to conduct an oral history with a woman in your family. I took the bus back to Watertown and sat on the second-floor porch with my grandmother, the grape vine that climbed up the side of the house shading us from the afternoon sun.

She told me about being driven from their home and marched towards the desert with her family and their neighbors. She described her father, mother, and twin sisters dying one by one, until just she and her younger brother were left.

They ended up in a tent in a desert camp outside the Syrian town of Ras ul-Ain along with eight thousand other orphaned and starving Armenian children. She never used the legal term genocide—she used the words “the deportations” and “the massacres.” She had never related these stories to anyone in our family before.

When I remember my Armenian grandmother, Mariam Kodjababian Kricorian, the love I feel towards her is one of devotion, devotion in the form of remembrance, remembrance in the form of writing.

But a few years later, when she lay dying in the hospital, she repeated them to her daughter, my Aunt Grace. My aunt was shocked by what she heard and asked me if my grandmother had told me about it as well. Yes, I said, she had.

It made me sad that this extended horror from her childhood, all its grievous losses, and the exile that followed were what my grandmother was thinking and talking about in her final hours. I also felt that these stories were for me both a grief-filled burden and a crucial inheritance.

Several years after my grandmother died and I was starting work on what would become Zabelle, I went to interview my grandmother’s best friend, Alice Kharibian. Mariam and Alice had been girls together in the desert, had been separated after the war, and then by chance had found each other again a decade later in Boston. They had known each other from Mersin, where both had been born.

Alice filled in some details that my grandmother had left out—for example, the story of how they had used the jagged top of a tin can to cut maggot-filled flesh off a dead camel. They cooked it over a small fire, and unable to eat it themselves because they had seen the squirming maggots, they sold the meat for a few coins that they used to buy bread.

Alice said to me, “Your grandmother was so wishy-washy. She would have been dead in the desert without me. She was too proud to beg. But me, I was jarbig.” I love the sound of this Armenian word that means clever and resourceful. Alice was those things, and she was also externally tough, unlike my grandmother who was fearful and had a tender heart.

But both of them had a strong sense of humor, and I can remember them sitting together on the couch on the second-story porch, their laughter ringing down into the garden where my sister and I were at play.

Each of my novels features a character who relates different stories or bears personal traits that are a direct inheritance from Mariam Kodjababian Kricorian. In my second novel, the deportation narrative that my grandmother relayed to me is spoken into a tape recorder by the heroine’s grandmother.

In my third novel, the father’s Armenian proverbs are ones that could have emanated from my grandmother’s mouth. And in my latest book, Vera’s Medz Mama tells her grandchildren Armenian folk tales that share a familiar tone and cadence with the ones I heard from my grandmother as a child.

There are many varieties of love—passion for a romantic partner, attachment to a child, care for a friend, and filial piety towards a parent. When I remember my Armenian grandmother, Mariam Kodjababian Kricorian, the love I feel towards her is one of devotion, devotion in the form of remembrance, remembrance in the form of writing.

My writing is neither monument nor memorial, but through its practice, I imagine that I wake my grandmother from her slumber as I amplify the stories of the Armenian people. I send the stories up to her, as she sits perched in the heaven she believed in, looking down at me, brought back to life as she hears the tales.

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The Burning Heart of the World by Nancy Kricorian is available via Red Hen Press.