The Making of “The Burning Heart of the World”
My new novel The Burning Heart of the World is the fourth in a series of works focused on the post-genocide Armenian diaspora experience. Zabelle, published in 1998, is a fictionalized account of my grandmother’s life as a genocide survivor and immigrant bride. Dreams of Bread and Fire, from 2003, tells the story of a half-Armenian girl of my generation who comes to terms with the unspoken family and community trauma of the genocide. All the Light There Was, published in 2013, is set in the Armenian community of Paris during the Nazi occupation. My latest novel tells the story of a Beirut Armenian family before, during and after the Lebanese Civil War.
Each of these novels grew organically out of the work that preceded it. Zabelle was inspired in part by a series of poems I wrote in the voices of my grandmother and her friends while I was a creative writing MFA student at Columbia. Dreams of Bread and Fire returned to Watertown, where I grew up, and to Paris, where I had studied, and featured a character who emerged from my fascination with modern fedayee Monte Melkonian, about whom I had previously written a poem. While researching non-state actors who used political violence for Dreams, I came across a documentary film called Terrorists in Retirement, which was about the Manouchian Group, a Paris-based communist resistance network led by Armenian genocide survivor and poet Missak Manouchian. This interest then led me again to Paris and All the Light There Was. But as with all my novels, my motivation was not in portraying the heroic, but in illuminating the lives of Armenian women and the daily, domestic acts they undertake to sustain and protect their families in the face of mass violence.
While I was researching All The Light There Was, my “fixer” in Paris was Hagop Papazian, an Armenian who was born and raised in the municipality of Bourj Hammoud, just outside the city limits of Beirut. Hagop introduced me to Armenians who had lived through the Nazi occupation, among them was Arsène Tchakarian—one of the last surviving members of the Manouchian Group—and a woman whose father had been a cobbler in Belleville. Her family had briefly sheltered one of her Jewish schoolmates after the child’s parents were arrested during the Vélodrome d’Hiver roundup. Hagop also introduced me to his circle of Lebanese Armenian friends, who had fled Bourj Hammoud during the Civil War for various reasons.
Hagop was a playwright, two of his friends were folk singers and another, an actor. I was compelled by their stories—the children of genocide survivors who had rebuilt their lives and communities in Lebanon, forming part of an Armenian cultural renaissance in Beirut. They talked about their golden years in the early seventies—before the civil war blew it all to smithereens. My interest in their stories turned my attention to Beirut and resulted in the research and writing that produced The Burning Heart of the World.
When I went to Beirut for the first time in 2012, Hagop’s sister picked me up at the airport. His good friend Bedig was my guide. I met friends of friends and built a larger host community, so that when I returned in 2016, I had the help of a broad network of contacts to navigate and map Armenian Beirut. In my work, I try to create an immersive world that a reader enters the way you would walk into a neighborhood, so that the place’s smells, sounds, alleyways and byways are palpable, and if you had been there before, it would be immediately recognizable. I did that in Watertown and in Paris. I wanted to be able to do that in Beirut.
After my stays in Beirut, I was deep in the writing. I had my characters and the basic plot trajectory sketched out, but I was still struggling to securely and specifically situate Vera Serinossian and her family.
I try to create an immersive world that a reader enters the way you would walk into a neighborhood, so that the place’s smells, sounds, alleyways and byways are palpable…I did that in Watertown and in Paris. I wanted to be able to do that in Beirut.
Another reason that Nor Hadjin appealed to me was that my grandmother’s family came from Hadjin. My grandmother herself was born in Mersin, but her parents and grandparents hailed from Hadjin. I wrote about Hadjintsis in Zabelle. Returning to this lost Armenian town in the Taurus mountains and placing my characters in a new—Nor—Hadjin in Beirut would in a way bookend the project I started years ago—creating an Armenian diaspora quartet.
The title for my new novel comes from a quotation in Leon Surmelian’s bestselling 1945 genocide memoir, I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen, a story of survival and a lost world. When Susan Pattie asked me to write a quotation for the back cover of the Armenian Institute’s 2019 reissue of this book, I was too embarrassed to admit that I had never read it before. From the first page, I was awed by Surmelian’s writing, bowled over by its warmth and intelligence and by the fluidity of the prose. Late in the book, when Surmelian was on a ship taking him to exile and to a new life in America, he wrote,
My heart is a hard red shield, I said. My heart is a star upon my breast. And my breast is the world. I am sailing on to America, to the great future, on the raft of my thought. A lighthouse—the burning heart of the world—my guide through the starry night.
I was so taken with this phrase “the burning heart of the world” that I wrote to Susan to suggest using it as the title for the new edition of the book, which I thought would have more appeal for today’s reader. When she consulted with the committee and they decided to stick with the original, I realized that I had found the title for my own novel.
April 2025 is the 50th anniversary of the start of the Lebanese Civil War and the 110th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. My novel reverberates with both of these cataclysms, and it appears at a time when Lebanon and Armenia have just experienced more paroxysms of violence, suffering under existential threats to their sovereignty and territorial integrity. My novel is a journey through these histories and into this burning heart of the world. The title evokes both illumination and conflagration. The world is on fire, and while there is much darkness in the book, there is also humor, empathy and a commitment to amplifying that which is humane in the human. This last is central to my literary project.
Latest posts by Nancy Kricorian (see all)
- The Making of “The Burning Heart of the World” - March 25, 2025
- Dr. Patricia Kaishian: Advocate for Diversity of Life, Advocate for Armenia - January 26, 2022
- On Violence and Racism in the Armenian Quarter: A Call for Respect and Equality - May 26, 2021
