ABSTRACT
Throughout my life I’ve had an implicit, unspoken understanding of what it means to me to be Armenian. Perhaps more specifically I mean how I have always felt as an Armenian who is displaced from his homeland and living in the United States. My identity as an Armenian, including my ancestor’s traumas, is woven into my conscious and unconscious mind as strands in the garment of my life. As a young boy growing up in the suburbs of Boston, I was not aware of why we went to church, why I went to Sunday School, or why everyone around me looked like me, like family. Armenians in the Boston area had gathered in communities, set up schools, churches, and opened restaurants and grocery stores. It unconsciously solidified a feeling in my mind that the world around me was accepting of Armenian culture. My family is unquestionably Armenian; and yet, as I grew older, I began to question the ritualistic gatherings of religion. I began seeing an irony that my parents wanted my brother and I to identify as Armenian and be involved in the Armenian community, but later moved us to a different white, middle-upper class neighborhood. On a surface level, I identified as a white Caucasian male, but we were now living in communities where we were one of four Armenian families in the town. As time went on, I began to wonder what the label Middle Eastern meant. Was it just Armenian, or did it include Turkish and Kurdish, Greek and Israeli? I didn’t fully grasp the concept then, but this assertion of Armenianness was one of my first understandings of my family wanting to give a certain presentation of who they were. We were (and are still now) devoted Armenians, strong in culture and religion, and upstanding citizens of the world. Going to church, for lack of a better understanding, was done out of obligation to the previous generations. It is what they
did, so it is what we would do. When my grandparents were alive, going to church appeared to be much more important. Later in life I learned that they also had conflicting feelings about religion. The church signified the Armenian community, and as a community we have learned to stay strong by sticking together. When my mother’s mother came to this country, they found their relatives on survivor lists in the churches. The church was the essence of connection and in the post-traumatic exile it aided in re-connection. This resulted in an extensive network of relatives, to the point that we joke that all Armenians know each other. After my family moved from the suburbs of Boston to the suburbs of Chicago, there was very little church in our lives, and very little talk of religion at home. Even amongst my grandparents, it didn’t seem like God was the most important part of religion. It had never occurred to me while growing up that we weren’t very religious in the traditional sense, because there had been such a ritualistic focus on going to church and Sunday school while we were younger. As my brother and I grew up, being Armenian, that is culturally, felt like its own religion. It was our religion. As a result, growing up Armenian in the United States meant many things for me: foods with a wide variety of flavors and names, the mixing of more than one language with English, intricate music with rhythms outside of common Western time signatures, and bedtime stories about the Genocide. Each of these segments was engrained in me, creating the whole. And many times, they overlapped: being around my grandparents and their friends meant hearing both Armenian and Turkish spoken, eating whatever delicious homemade delicacy was put in front of me, and listening to them talk about their families while Armenian music played in the background. The most powerful and enduring stories were about my grandmother Helen. She was forced to leave her home in 1915 when she was 40 days old. I was put to bed with the story of my grandmother being left by the side of the road by Ottoman soldiers for crying too much, only to be saved by her brother and sister who used a piece of candy as a pacifier. Her mother hid gold coins in her diaper as a means of survival, and eventually saved her family’s life after three months on a death march by becoming a slave seamstress for the Ottoman army. The moral of this bedtime story was that my grandmother was strong and resilient, and survived, becoming the matriarch of my family. This left me with a complicated understanding
of who the Turkish people are, why there is a continued denial of these atrocities, and how I am to grow and identify as an Armenian. There were paradoxes growing up and ones that continue in my family. My father won’t eat at a Turkish restaurant in New York City with me. The menu is almost identical to an Armenian restaurant, with the same names of region specific dishes. But this to him would be a low level of treason against Armenia. Because this was the culture I grew up in, I didn’t fully accept Turkish people or the food myself until I traveled there. As an Armenian, there is a fear and an anger associated against all Turkish people that was taught to me from the moment I was able to understand bedtime stories. Up until traveling to Turkey, my desire was to have the United States, the country my grandmother was forced to relocate to and I subsequently have lived in, recognize that the Armenian Genocide occurred, using the word Genocide to describe accurately the horrific events that resulted in 1.5 million people being massacred. This remains true, but my understanding of the geopolitical landscape has widened, and I would much rather see the Turkish government recognize the Genocide. The people of Turkey know about the Genocide. There is a large “denialist” and brainwashing regime in place, and if something this horrific can happen once without being officially recognized, it can happen again. Adolf Hitler, in 1939 while preparing to invade Poland wrote: “I have placed my death-head formations in readiness for the present only in the East with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space [Lebens raum] which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”1
