Tsolin Nalbantian

Batal: Fighting for Truth, Justice and the Armenian Way

When I first moved to Beirut to start my doctoral research, I would spend hours at the apartment of my mother’s family in the neighborhood of Zarif. Sometimes I would bring work with me and sit on the chair reading as clouds of smoke from my aunts’ cigarettes and nargila varied in intensity around me. My attention would drift between conversing with my cousins and their mothers, and the reading at hand. I visited them almost daily. I did this, even though I had not grown ...