Zabel
Asadour, also known by the pen name Sibil, was one of the few Armenian
public women who reached recognition in her lifetime as a writer, but
more importantly, as an educator and spokesperson for women.
She
was born Zabel Khanjian on October 8, 1863 in Scutari, an
Armenian-populated district of Constantinople. She received her
education at the Armenian schools of the area and graduated from the
Scutari Lyceum in 1879. Together with her eight classmates and with the
guidance of her mother and aunt, she was among the founders of the
Nation-Devoted Armenian Women Society (Azkanuver Hayoohyats Unkerootyoon),
an organization that supported the construction, maintenance, and
operation of a network for schools for Armenian girls in the Ottoman
provinces. In the second session of the Society, young Zabel showed her
maturity, when she declared: “Let’s work to avoid being in debt with the
nation and humankind, to make our sisters in the provinces get the
light of education, to have the female gender have a place in humankind…
Many people say and will say that you cannot succeed, however, which
big work has succeeded in its first attempt; if we do not succeed, at
least we will have set the foundations and someone else will perfect
it…”
In
1882 she married lawyer Garabed Donelian, with whom she had a daughter.
From 1882-1889, they lived in Bilejik, Brusa, and Ankara. Khanjian
worked as a teacher and opened schools, while contributing poetry and
articles to the Armenian press in Constantinople under the synonyms of
Anahid and Sibil, which she would finally adopt. After 1889 she returned
to the Ottoman capital. In 1891 she serialized in the newspaper
Arevelk
her novel
The Heart of a Girl,
where she espoused her progressive views about the advancement of Armenian women.
Sibil co-edited the
Masis
journal
with writers Krikor Zohrab and Hrant Asadour (1862-1928) from 1892
onward. She also wrote for other periodicals contributing literary works
(poems, short stories, plays) and essays on women issues, education,
and literature. In 1894 the Women Society was shut down by the Ottoman
government, and it would only reopen in 1908, after the Young Turk
revolution and the restoration of the Ottoman Constitution. Meanwhile,
in the 1890s Zabel Donelian and Hrant Asadour had started a romantic
liaison that would find its culmination after the death of Garabed
Donelian in 1901 and their marriage in the same year. Sibil would have a
daughter from her second marriage. In 1902 she collected her romantic
poems in a volume entitled
Reflections.
She was also an accomplished translator of French poetry.
For
the next decades, she continued her educational work as a teacher in
the Esayan and Getronagan schools, as well as the Hamazkyats School and
local British and French schools. Among her students were famed art
historian Sirarpie Der Nersessian, journalist and feminist writer
Haiganush Mark, actor Vahram Papazian, and many other important names of
Armenian culture.
Together
with her husband, an expert of the Armenian language, she wrote grammar
and language readers that went through many reprints and remained in
use in Armenian schools for many decades. In her twilight years, she
collected her short stories in a volume,
Souls of Women,
published
in 1926. Her seventieth birthday was marked with great pomp in
Istanbul, Cairo, Alexandria, Paris and Plovdiv (Bulgaria) in 1933.
Zabel Asadour passed away on July 19, 1934, in Istanbul, and was buried at the Armenian cemetery of Shishli.
