Voices from the Diaspora : We Are All Armenian - 1

 Attached are quotes from the first nine of the eighteen writers who contributed in making a remarkable and uniquely readable book “We Are All Armenian”, ably edited by Aram Mrjoian, who claims, “My name, yes, is Armenian. My heritage, yes, is Armenian, But I don’t speak the language. I don’t attend the church. I’ve never spent much time in Armenian communities. I’ve never traveled back to the land of my ancestors.  I am still constantly learning the basics of diasporan Armenian culture, feeling simultaneously distant from and near to this part of who I am.” But Aram Mrjoian edited one of the most captivating books I am reading.

LIANA AGHAJANIAN

“How Armenian Funeral Halva Helped My Family Find Home in America” (pp.5-8)

 

“They say you don’t fully become part of a place until you put your dead in the ground.

My family has created a home in America. Our traditions have become as much a part of this landscape as our deceased kin have. Though I’ll aways associate halva with funerals, it’s become a bigger symbol of all the people and places I could no longer access: the city I never knew as an adult, the language I never fully learned, the relatives I never got to see over the years. Growing up I often felt like I didn’t have much to ground me in one place or another, but food, especially halva, became a tangible personification of my roots, the same way it has for so many immigrants and their children.

Though much was lost during the years, there was always halva. It helped me explore and connect a history interrupted by forced migration and political upheaval; it is a sweet intermediary between life and death, a dense fusion made of flour, sugar, and butter.” 

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NAIRA KUZMICH

“HAVA NAGILA” (pp.9-21)

 

“But when I danced (note: Hava Nagila) in Berlin and I understood that when my parents pressed upon me my Armenianness, it was not the same as white strangers pressing upon me my foreignness. My Armenianness was a gift from my parents. It was not a weapon. It was a book I could turn to again and again and find myself there. A reminder: I was not a gap in the history pages. Not 1915. When my parents said, “You’re Armenian, not American,” they meant I knew where I came from, and I knew what that meant: I’d be confronted by my past everywhere. It meant I could not dance to another culture’s song, in another culture’s bar, and feel light in my skin. It meant I smelled the stink in the air, heard the laughter dark and mean. Long.

I thought about explaining this to my friends, thinking they’d get it because their own histories, but then I realized I couldn’t expect that of them. How to say to someone you love that they could never understand your pain because they haven’t been in your shoes? They have not danced the same dance as you.  Even when the music playing is the same, the body dancing is not.  The body moves to a different rhythm.

So I will say it to someone I don’t love. I will say it to the stranger reading: there are certain things you will never understand, but you must listen.” 

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SOPHIA ARMEN

“Where Are You From? No, Where Are you Really From?” (pp.23-36)

“The first time a middle-aged while man yelled at me, “Get out and go back to your country!” I froze. It was in the immediate days following 9/11. I was nine years old and at my school. I didn’t understand. I could not hold this stranger’s well of hate in my small body. I did not understand what he needed from me. I remember having two thoughts. One, while I clenched my small fists, was “no, no, NO!” The “no” was rage. The "no" I felt that day was important: it was one of the first times in my life I felt my power, my rejection of immortality and injustice; it’s the everyday feeling I get as I work in community today. That it doesn’t have to be this day. That these systems feel wrong.

But something else happened that day. I heard my insides scream in anger, but then it came, a deep and unexplainable rush of sadness. It engulfed me, poured over all my contours of my young body. A second thought rushed into my head. Even though I was so young, I remember I wanted to yell back at this man, “I can’t.”

It does not exist. Not really.”

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KOHAR AVAKIAN

“An Inter/Racial Love Story” (pp. 37-53)

 

“GROWING UP, I genuinely believed that when you married someone, you became that person’s race. My sisters did too. In our eyes, everyone in our family was the same. We shared the same interests, habits, and characteristics. We celebrated and took part in the same cultures. We spoke the same language, and we understood the same things. After all, we even had the same last name. We were one Armenian, Black, and Nipmuc family because that was just what we were. There was nothing else to it.” (p. 37)

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NANCY KRICORIAN

Language Lessons (pp. 55-62)

 

“For the past four years, I’ve been taking private lessons over Skype with Sosy a teacher who fled Aleppo for Yerevan because of the Syrian Civil War. I have finally learned the simple past and imperfect past tenses. I have been writing micro stories in Armenian which Sosy proofreads and corrects. Recently she said to me, ”Now you have the grammar you understand the workings of the language, you just need more vocabulary. You need to listen, and to talk, talk, talk.”

I keep walking this long road back to my grandmother. Talking to myself as I walk. I eventually end up climbing the steps to the back porch of her house in heaven, where together she and I will roll stuffed grape leaves in the enamel-topped table and talk in her native language

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OLIVIA KATRANDJIAN

“A Good, Solid Name” (pp. 63-67)

 

“THERE’S A LOT in life you can’t protect your kids against,” a friend from Nebraska advised me when I told him I wanted to have a baby. “The one thing you can do is put them into the world with a good solid name.”

I knew what he meant:  recognizable name the general American public can pronounce. But even then, before my daughter was conceived, I knew I wouldn’t follow his advice…

…………..

But I hope she comes to see Lusin`e  Zabelle Wildt as good and solid. I hope I have given her a sense of the difficulties minorities face and respect for others no matter what they look like, where they come from, what religion they practice, or whom they love. I hope I have paid homage to those who came before her and were stripped of their identity by murder, conversion, or assimilation. I hope I have given her instant membership to a community of people who want to help each other thrive. I hope, when she introduces herself and people say, “What?” it will be an opportunity to explain her name and identity

“It’s Armenian,” I imagine her saying, “I am Armenian”.

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CHRIS MCCORMICK

My Armenia On Imagining and Seeing. (pp. 69-76)

 

“I calmed myself by thinking of my mother – I was being a baby, after all. In 1975, when she immigrated to the United States from then - Soviet Armenia at the age of nineteen, she had flown from the same airport I now approached. What had she imagined standing at the gate with a suitcase in her grip?  Certainly not a white husband from the American Midwest, a pair of half-Armenian children, and one of them growing up to write books in a language she didn’t yet speak to imagine his own version of her country, to arrive in the place she ‘d left behind – the very same spot – without her. 

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NANCY AGABIAN

Inside the Walls Reflections on Revolutionary Armenians (pp.77-104)

 

“Armenia is not my homeland in the traditional sense of the word. As far as I know, I have no relatives in Hayastan because all my ancestors scattered to the West after the genocide The language spoken there is foreign to me, a dialect with a syncopated rhythm compared to the melody of Western Armenian that my relatives spoke. The Eastern Antatolia cuisine of my ancestors as manifest in the United States – roasted chicken and pilaf, giragud like fasulya and batlijan – are not common in Armenia (the one I knew anyway, before Syrian Armenians arrived fleeing the war). But in many ways, Armenia has chosen me, and I have chosen it to love like family. And like any family, our love is complicated. We place demands on each other that we can’t always fulfill.”

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Chris Bohjalian

Going Home Again (pp. 105-109)

 

“Could I actually live there? Of course not. My last name alone could make me a pariah in parts of that region, and most of the time I am deeply proud to be an American. I have been (thank you very much) quite happily spoiled by American way of life. It’s really hard to find Ben&Jerry’s or binge-watch Breaking Bad in Diyarbakir, Kayseri,or Van.

But I can’t imagine not returning to visit.”