Liyah Babayan

In Twin Falls, Idaho. 🌎
NEVER AGAIN, means Never Again Anywhere.

This April, my Aunt Lola would have turned 67.

There are stories we inherit not through memories, but through loss. I never got to grow up with her, but I grew up carrying the horror of what was taken from her, from her daughter, from my uncle, from all our family.

Her life was taken during the Baku Pogroms, in an act of ethnic violence that forever changed the course of our family’s story. Even now, decades later, her absence is still felt in the silence, in the grief, and in unspoken pain.

In my interview with Armenpress, I shared my testimony of what we Armenians survived in the 90's. What we lost, and how those wounds followed us across borders into a new life as refugees in America. My aunt deserved a full life, a future, a family, a 67th birthday.

My book "Liminal, a refugee memoir," was born from that space between trauma and survival. It carries her story with it because she is part of why I wrote it, why I remember, and why I refuse to let the truth, the injustice disappear.

Read the full interview here:
https://armenpress.am/en/article/963236

Read Liminal on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/

They tried to erase her, but they didn’t succeed. She lives on in our story. In our survival. In our voices. In her grandchildren.

Happy heavenly 67th birthday, Aunt Lola. You are forever remembered. You are loved.

Always. 🤍 ✝️

Tradition moments with grandmother are forever sacred memories of the heart. 🐣✨

Armenian Diaspora, a blessed Zatik from our family to yours. We are up preparing, baking, dying eggs in the simple of ways, observing the Christian faith which not too long ago we survived persecution for. God Bless Everyone.

✝️🙏🏽