Letter from an Armenian
i received this emotional message – in its tone and content – from a reader and friend karo kyumjian, a well-known armenian businessman who has been living in kuwait for decades, and asked me to publish it in my column. i accepted, although the al-qabas newspaper does not encourage such an approach, in spite of my need for the column and since there are about thirty articles pending publication.
he says: “this is not the first time for the writer ahmad al-sarraf to mention the armenians in his articles. since the time i have been following up his articles, i saw him making a mention of the armenian people with good intention, whether by just making a mention of them in general or directly mentioning them by their position on the issue of forced displacement and what they were subjected to by the ottoman empire especially during the beginning of the first world war.
“i would like to refer to a novel by al-sarraf ‘abdullatif the armenian and the three apples’ which was recently published after the censorship in kuwait had banned its publication for special reasons before giving the green light. i found in the character of its hero ‘calost siroj’ much of our tragedy as a people and their conflict with the conditions of life, and his embodiment of the truth of this good and strong people at the same time.
“with all honesty and clear psychological interaction, the author as stated in the introduction of his novel portrays the life story and the death of an armenian who spent his life in countries in which he and his fellow armenians were ‘driven’ to after losing their homeland. the author also portrayed the life of calost, his father and his grandfather which is an interesting story with all honesty although the end is sad and tragic (in kuwait), where he spent the last years of his life and loved the host country and the people and was finally buried here.
“i personally believe that the writer succeeded in his novel ‘abdullatif the armenian’ to describe and illustrate the sufferings of an entire people in total honestly through an individual who believes in belonging to his country, his faith and his people, and lived his life carrying with him his bitter memories of his tragedy and narrates it wherever he is.
“the write also succeeded in describing the life of the hero of his novel in more than 175 pages that meant much to me personally and i expressed a great deal of joy, sadness, suffering, agonies and humiliation after all the bitter experiences of his father and his people, especially since what was experienced over the years by hundreds or rather thousands of children, women and the elderly.
“i wish every armenian and lover of freedom read the novel ‘abdullatif the armenian and the three apples’ not because its hero is portrayed as a great armenian hero who made exciting adventures and cut the head of the dragon with a single strike with his sword and returned back of his horse ‘the daughter of fire’ ... etc.
“i was pleased that this hero, despite his humility, modest life and the life of his honorable family was sincere and courageous and thus imposed himself by the very fact of his character on a well-known kuwaiti writer to put his biography in a book with a distinctive and expressive cover that looks like doors of an old church,” he concluded.
