A & G
Mariam says when she dies, she wants Pink Floyd to be played at her funeral. She’s perhaps the only person I know who does not want people to wail their eyes out, not eat for months or just hop in the coffin with her and stop breathing all together when she dies. Even some tiny part of me would certainly want some of that. Mind you, I have not yet planned my funeral, which might be a bit surprising for a Georgian. After all, people already have their burial stones in place years and years before there is any danger for them to go out of the game in my country. The funny thing I noticed when I thought about our countries and our names is that even the first letters of our last names stand for our countries, Mariam’s A for Armenia, my G for Georgia, and that’s how this story became the one of A & G.
Mariam and I decided we would ask each other any question that would come to our minds. What do you think came to the minds of twenty something year olds? Yeah, obviously, it was sex and we found out how much a hymen is worth in each other’s countries. We found out it still remains something husbands want to buy in both markets. We also shared the business of our own hymens, which I think is none of your business, so don’t be wondering please.
What is the subject of equal importance to sex we thought next. Maybe something that demonizes sex, like our religions, for instance. Two girls carrying a name of a mother of a god they’ve been obliged to believe in, yet both turned out to be agnostic. What are the odds. Let’s hug it out.
We talked about colors as well, the two of us, we asked one another to pick a color that meant something to us. A picked white and G picked red. A said white brings me peace, G said red brings me strength. Maybe that’s what they value most in life, one peace and one strength. Not that they can’t value them both together. Even with wine, which they had together, A picked white and G picked red. As the wine, white or red, hit their cells, they wondered what animal they wanted to be, if they had to be one in another life. They both wanted to be a bird. The odds again. A said perhaps she liked to be a penguin and G who wanted to be an eagle, or a swan or something equally majestic, thought how kind A must be. And G decided the letter A in the other’s name stood for adorable and they laughed and pinched each other’s cheeks.
Mariam Gurgenishvili
My name is Mariam, like any other girl’s, born during the 90’s in Georgia. In my case, it was 1996 and late May – a month of clear, balmy days and enthusiastic, newly awakened mosquitos. Ever since then, each and every birthday I had to listen to the toasts of my father’s friends about Jesus and Mary, how I was a bearer of the greatest name and had to lead an equally great, worthy-of-the-name life. Often mid-toasts I felt like asking them to focus a little on me, too.
Despite all the birthday wishes, ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a witch and a writer. Perhaps it began at the gates of Villa Villekula where I met Pippi who could do anything or in the magical forest where the little witch lived with her talking raven, Abraxas. In any case, I started daydreaming and writing around eight years old and still have tons of finished and unfinished stories from my primary school years, partly inspired by Colombian soap operas I watched with my grandmothers and partly by the tales of Hans Christian Andersen I read every night. I wrote all those stories during my gym classes where some part of my body was always hurting and I needed to be invalided out and carried inside a school library. I used to sit there gleefully and write about John Smiths and Bridget Watsons who drank Gin and Tonic and ate pineapple cubes with sugar coating and called one another “darling” and “beloved”, instead of “dumbhead” and “scumbag”, like the women in my neighborhood called their husbands. I was seventeen years old when I took a part in an exchange program and went to the United States to study there for a year. I have met many John Smiths and Bridget Watsons I had been admiring from books and films before, I tried pineapple cubes too for the first time (too young for Gin & Tonic), got called “darling”, “sweetie” and “love” and had a beautiful experience overall, but my deepest feelings, impressions and memories still belonged to the people I had left behind. People who had never tried pineapple cubes or Gin & Tonic in their lives. Those were the people that raised me and the people I grew up with. My first novel “Pearls”, which debuted in 2021, is a collection of those childhood impressions and memories, not only mine, but also of my mother and my grandmothers. It is mainly inspired by the women in my family and is about sisterhood and survival during the 90’s Georgia. I want to keep telling stories of young girls and women who were silenced, who were made to believe they were unimportant, so that those stories can bring them back their voices and their strength to make big old mountains tremble like tiny baby leaves. For me to continue writing, especially about the topics that require both courage and delicacy, I will have to grow, learn and evolve myself and I am deeply grateful that I am given the chance to do so.
