Armenian-American's Genocide Graphic Novel Names Gaza — SkimNews
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- Dana Mashoian Walrath, a 66-year-old Armenian-American artist, writer and anthropologist from Vermont, published "The Book of Genocides," an experimental work blending anthropology, memoir and visual art that covers 10 case studies from the killing of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and the Atlantic slave trade through the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Palestine and the Rohingya.
- The Book of Genocides uses a physically interactive design in which readers cut portrait pages into thirds, with the segmented figures flipping between recognisable human faces and non-human creatures — beasts, predators, vermin and parasites — to dramatise the dehumanisation that Walrath argues precedes every mass killing she documents.
- Walrath traveled to all 10 locations, meeting survivors in Phnom Penh, perpetrators and survivors in Rwanda, Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh's camps, Auschwitz, and Bethlehem in 2013, which she crossed into through the West Bank wall with Armenian pilgrims; she says she repeatedly came down with severe chest colds afterward, calling grief "supposed to live in the lungs."
- The book applies Raphael Lemkin's definition enshrined in the 1948 Genocide Convention to the Palestinian experience and Gaza, where Walrath states that indiscriminate bombing, "killing babies and killing children" and "selectively bombing hospitals and journalists" amounts to "a systemic attempt to eliminate a people."
- Walrath argues the cases share a near-universal engine of settler colonialism and land theft — "land theft almost always" — with dehumanisation and systemic injustice as precursors, drawing a comparison between mass incarceration of strictly disenfranchised people in the US and the Warsaw Ghetto.
- Walrath's stake is Armenian: she is the granddaughter of survivors of the Ottoman-era destruction, and only learned in the past five years that her grandmother hid in an urn while her father was dismembered and later struck her enslaver on the head with a stone before fleeing with her son.
Why it matters: By applying Lemkin's 1948 Genocide Convention framework to Gaza and explicitly calling the campaign "a systemic attempt to eliminate a people," the book — released commercially through standard publishing channels — turns a literary artefact into a flashpoint for cultural institutions deciding whether to distribute a work that names a contemporary, politically toxic case. Its Armenian-American author expects to be barred from Israel as a result, putting a personal price tag on the publishing decision.
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