My parents bothered me about this now and then, but they went easy compared to other Armenian parents, who refused even to respond to the sound of English. I lived in terror of some of those fathers; the memory of turning into the driveway of one family’s home in Westchester, where English was officially banned, still fills me with dread. It was all I could do to endure a silent rush of kiss-kisses in the front hallway on our arrival before I could run to the yard or the playroom with the kids. Why aren’t you speaking Armenian? Why don’t you make them speak Armenian? Aren’t you ashamed that you don’t speak Armenian? Once, after a concert in Manhattan given by a famous Armenian soprano, my sister and I ran into the diva herself in the ladies’ room. She blocked our exit and said, as if we were her own grandchildren, “You must speak Armenian, my dears. It is your responsibility to our people.” Incidents like this were cause for giggles or rolled eyes when they happened—but the pileup of them, the accrual of moments of falling short, of disappointing, of letting down parents and strangers, and potentially an entire posterity, took its toll. It felt like a debt that could never be paid.
My phobia around speaking Armenian became even more unbearable when, in the years after the Iranian revolution, relatives who had remained in Iran began making their way to the United States. They all wanted to know why I didn’t speak Armenian. “She can,” my parents would say. “She just won’t.”
My mother’s mother, Shushan, who we called Shushumama, was my only refuge; she was fluent in English. She had attended an American high school in Tabriz and later taught English at the British Council in Tehran. For a few months when I was seven, Shushumama, fresh off the plane, occupied the extra bed in my room. She carried a tiny yellow notebook, spiral-bound across the top, and wrote down every new English expression she learned, whether at the grocery store or the post office, or while reading the newspaper. Together, we recited nursery rhymes as if they were high theater, taking pleasure in perfect English articulations and the satisfying patterns they yielded: Jack Sprat could eat no fat, Hickory dickory dock. Once, Shushumama asked me to teach her all the words for “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” schooling me on the British original in return, and we stood together singing to my shelf of stuffed animals as though the queen herself were nestled among them. But after Shushumama moved on to Los Angeles, where most of my extended family had migrated, my father’s mother took her place as my roommate.
Arammama—we called her that after my grandfather Aram, although her name was Siranoush—spoke very little English. I figured I could get by on smiles and kisses when the rest of the family was around to carry the conversation; but I worried about what would happen when my grandmother and I were going to sleep in my bedroom at night and there would be nobody else to fill the silence. At the time of her visit, I had a nightgown that I was fond of, pink cotton, with a picture of a rainbow streaking out from a wide paintbrush, and the words “Paint a Rainbow Day.” For several days preceding Arammama’s arrival, I focused my anxiety on this nightgown. What if, some evening as we climbed into bed, she asked me to tell her what was written on my nightgown?
To prepare, I asked my eldest sister to tell me the Armenian word for “rainbow.” Dziadzan, she said. Dzi-a-dzan. I repeated it to myself like a protective spell. Mi hat dziadzan or nerki. Paint a rainbow day. (This made as little sense in Armenian as in English.) I imagined Arammama’s reaction. It got to the point that I was almost looking forward to the moment when she would ask me about my nightgown, so that I could impress her with my feigned impromptu translation. But she never did ask. (It turned out she needed cataract surgery and could hardly see.) We never had a real conversation at all, not then or later, Arammama and I. My older cousins, who grew up with her in Iran, describe Arammama as nothing less than a saint; as love incarnate. But I was so ashamed of my refusal to speak Armenian with Arammama that I somehow assumed she was ashamed of me. When I was much older and Arammama was no longer alive, relatives sometimes said I must have gotten my love of language from her. Despite not having finished high school, she had been known for her talent in reciting poetry, for telling elaborate stories, and for writing long, sensitive letters in Armenian.
At family gatherings over the years, nobody knew what to make of the fact that I answered them only in English, whether it was as simple as hello and how are you, or as complicated as an argument over current events. Nobody knew this, either: that from the time I got my driver’s license at sixteen, I developed a habit of taking the car for long solo drives during which I would describe, out loud to the steering wheel and the windshield, everything I saw—in Armenian. There are many trees here. We’re getting close to the city. I’m going to the store to buy food. I didn’t want anybody to hear me, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget.
My parents never stopped addressing me in Armenian, but more than twenty years would pass before they heard the language from my mouth again. And for a long time, I blamed my teacher at St. Mary’s for this, but I suspect she was only a small part of a larger problem: the problem of not feeling entirely at ease in either the American world or the Armenian one. It amazed me that Armenians, as few as we were and as doomed as we liked to imagine ourselves, separated at every opportunity into endless subdivisions, including this loaded divide over language. The entire experience of being Armenian in the diaspora was a bizarre fluctuation between sweeping, unconditional unity and irrational, hostile fragmentation. The reality was that we came from different host countries that had treated us with varying degrees of respect or intolerance; we spoke different dialects (and within both Eastern and Western Armenian there were many local variations), ate different foods, and represented different classes of wealth and levels of education. Among ourselves, these differences had a way of chafing. As the diaspora evolved and assimilated, there was only one thing that everybody agreed on: the Turks hated us and we hated the Turks. This trumped everything.
Hostility toward Turkey came in various forms, but in the American suburbs opportunities for conflict were limited, so it skewed toward the trivial. We referred to Turkish coffee, which we drank every day, as “Armenian coffee,” steered clear of shops rumored to have Turkish owners, and refused to buy products labeled “Made in Turkey.” My mother once spent weeks trying to buy a new bathrobe, but at store after store, every robe declared its Turkish origins: the Turks had cornered the market on terry cloth. One evening, my mom returned home, exhausted, with a large bag from Sears. “Don’t tell anyone,” she warned me. She clipped the label and then held out her plush, pale yellow purchase.
* * *
DIVISIONS AMONG DIASPORA Armenians were not merely implied; there was an explicit, institutionalized divide that extended to communities all over the world and mattered more than the differences between dialect or origin. It was whether or not you sympathized with the Dashnak Party. This determined which schools you would send your children to, which youth groups, and especially which church you would attend. “Which church are you?” we used to ask each other. This was not a question about which building your family drove to on Sundays—it was a question of whether or not your church was Dashnak. None of the children knew what this meant or why it mattered, only that it did.
But the reason for the church schism was, even as these things go, pretty strange and had nothing to do with religious doctrine. It was the result of long-simmering political differences between Armenian diaspora clubs (and their newspapers). These differences exploded in an incident involving the Soviet Union, the Chicago World’s Fair, a murder in New York City, and, at heart, Turkey.
In 1918, as the weakened Ottoman Empire fought against Russia, most Armenian provinces of eastern Turkey were held by the Ottoman army. All of Eastern Armenia, meanwhile, was under Russian control. Armenians, led by a Dashnak committee headquartered in Tbilisi, managed to take over a sliver of eastern Turkey that they would control from 1918 until 1920. Armenians call this the “Thousand-Day Republic,” and still celebrate its brief existence every ye
ar as a national holiday, the first time in six hundred years that Armenians had an independent state.
When this land was divided between Turkey and Russia in 1920, many Armenians saw Russia as the lesser of two evils—the greater being Turkey. But for the Dashnaks, already the most nationalist among Armenian parties, Soviet rule looked like intolerable subjugation, while for other Armenian parties, it was safe shelter in lieu of better options. The thousand-day republic had a flag—red, blue, and orange stripes—and brandishing this flag instead of the Soviet one became standard Dashnak practice even after the short-lived republic was dissolved.
Thirteen years later in Chicago, in 1933, the highest-ranking Armenian priest in the United States, Archbishop Leon Tourian, was invited to give an invocation at the Chicago World’s Fair. But there was a problem. The archbishop refused to speak until a red, blue, and orange Dashnak flag was removed from the stage. His boss was the Patriarch of All Armenians at the Holy See of Etchmiadzin, the Armenian equivalent of the Vatican, in Soviet Armenia. Archbishop Tourian feared that standing beside the Dashnak flag at the World’s Fair would be an unwise public rejection of Soviet leadership, which some Armenians believed was all they had to protect them from further invasion and massacre. This decision would cost him his life. A few months later, during a Christmas Eve service at the Holy Cross Church in New York City, as the archbishop proceeded up the aisle toward the altar, a group of Dashnak activists sprang from the pews and stabbed him dead.
Following the murder, Armenian churches began to affiliate as Dashnak or non-Dashnak. A dual narrative was born: In one version, the Dashnaks had secured a precious window of Armenian freedom in the thousand-day republic, and for snubbing it, Archbishop Tourian got what he deserved. In the other version, the thousand-day republic was a sloppy accident, and Armenians were lucky to have been saved from themselves by the Soviets, a powerful opponent to Turkey; the priest had been prudent in his choice at the World’s Fair, and a reckless gang of nationalists had committed unforgivable murder. Congregations in the northeastern United States reshuffled themselves along political lines, sometimes going so far as to lock their opponents out of the building during Sunday services, and soon the divisions spread to Armenian churches all over the world. In 1956, the schism was formalized after the Armenian Patriarchate of Antelias (based in Lebanon) broke away from the Mother See at Etchmiadzin, and took the loyalty of Dashnak churches with it. Where previously all churches answered to Etchmiadzin, now Dashnak churches answered to Antelias.
In the 1980s, Armenian church leaders made gestures toward reunification, and today the divide is not as charged. But still we asked each other that question: which church are you? Many Armenians would sigh and say, “You know, it really doesn’t make any sense. Why should we be divided like this?” And yet we loved being divided. The most important thing was to belong to something, but it only worked when you had something or someone to fight against, an inch of air that could surround you and let you feel yourself not overly but just slightly separate. The scale of us-ness versus them-ness was amazingly fluid and could shift with the circumstances.
The Dashnak Party, and groups affiliated with it, sponsor perhaps half of all organized Armenian activity in the world: schools, charities, arts organizations, sports teams, youth groups, even New Year’s Eve parties. Nearly anything Armenian that is not connected to the Dashnak Party is affiliated with another group, the Armenian General Benevolent Union, or AGBU. A nonprofit with a thirty-six-million-dollar budget, the AGBU also sponsors schools, camps, and, indeed, New Year’s Eve parties, but its ethos is more humanitarian than political. And yet, while the two groups pursue different agendas, it should be noted that involvement in either group is often passive, merely circumstantial. That is, a Dashnak New Year’s Eve party might just be the nearest one around, and attendance does not necessarily make one an aspirant to the lands of Eastern Turkey. Which is the only way to explain how I ended up spending five summers of my youth at Camp Haiastan.
* * *
IN THE SAME box where I found my old camp newsletters, I found a paper that I had written in the ninth grade for my English class. The assignment had been completely open-ended as far as subject matter; our task was merely to demonstrate that we had learned how to make a proper outline. I called my paper “The Survival of a Nation,” quietly stealing the title of a book about Armenia that I had found on my parents’ bookshelf.
My outline begins like this: “Purpose—To show that although some people would disagree, the Armenian Genocide of 1915 did occur.”
As the outline proceeds, I describe the genocide with numbered points such as: “1. Armenians starved, soon became inhuman. 2. World closed its eyes.” I end the outline where it began: “Conclusion—As horrible as the story of the Armenian Genocide is, it is the truth.”
Then comes the paper itself, thirteen pages about life in the Ottoman Empire as I imagined it: “Much of Turkey’s business dealings were in the hands of Armenians, because the Turks, as a whole, have always been a poorly, if at all, educated people, and very barbaric and untactful in their methods.”
I go on to depict the genocide as a continuous, two-year-long death march—the picture was clear to me, an unbroken column of Armenian women and children dragging their feet across the whole of Turkey—offering that “the march came to an end only when there was nobody left to march.”
Turning to current events, I write: “Because of the blindfolded hordes who side with the Turks, it has become necessary to recognize that the events of the Armenian Genocide are not affirmed by all.”
In the final two sentences, I use the word “truth” five times. In the bibliography I cite as a source the Armenian national anthem.
5
False Assumptions
It was my senior year of college at UC Berkeley, and Armenian genocide memorial day number 83: April 24, 1998. On Sproul Plaza, in front of the main entrance to campus, we set up several easels holding black-and-white photographs of corpses. Blown up to poster size, the old pictures had become so distorted they looked like patchy shadows interrupted by eyes and teeth. Above them we strung up a banner made of dot-matrix printer paper, the kind with holes along the edges, bearing a message handwritten in black Sharpie, capitalized strategically to catch the eyes of passersby: “‘Who today remembers the extermination of the Armenians?’ SAID ADOLF HITLER.”
There was a long table with flyers explaining what happened on April 24, 1915, along with lists of institutions all over the world that had recognized the events as genocide. The Berkeley Armenian Student Association, of which I was an active member, put together a display like this every year.
It was a windy day, this particular April 24, and with each gust, one or two of the posters fell over. My assigned task was to reset them on the easels whenever they fell, and as I lifted one back into place, I noticed a middle-aged man who looked like a professor approaching our table. I picked up a flyer and prepared to tell him about the importance of genocide recognition.
But he stopped a few feet away and shook his head, waving his hands in a crossing-out motion. “This is pathetic,” he said.
How did we know so instantaneously that he did not mean the obvious—that the massacre of the Armenians had been pathetic? It was as if our mythological demon—Turkish denial—had suddenly taken living form before us and we sensed it the way animals in the wild recognize their enemies for the sake of survival.
Within seconds, one of our members, Patrick, was in a shouting match with this man. They were only five feet away from me, but over the wind and the chronic rattle of the drum circles of Berkeley I could not make out what they were saying. As students streamed past, unaware, Patrick and the professor lurched at each other with their shoulders and chests and yelled in each other’s faces. Then it was over, and the professor paced toward a nearby classroom building.
A particularly disorienting kind of shock sets in when you have acted as if in anticipation of something, even though
that thing was always more an abstraction than a real threat, but then it actually happens—like a fire drill that isn’t just a drill after all. A Turkish professor had brought genocide denial directly into our liberal collegiate utopia. Even if our goal with the April 24 display was to combat precisely this, we had never expected such a confrontation—certainly not here. This was UC Berkeley, bastion of truth-telling, pride of a city so politically correct that the parking meters listed as a holiday “Indigenous People’s Day” instead of honoring Christopher Columbus.
We circled around Patrick. Because it was lunchtime, between classes, many more club members were arriving to help with the commemoration. Breathless with confusion and excitement, we rushed to replay for them what had happened.
At the same time, privately, I considered a different problem: it was Friday, and every Friday the California Golden Overtones, an a cappella singing group of which I was the musical director, held a performance at one p.m., at a spot twenty feet away from our genocide display table. It was almost one o’clock. I felt slightly sick at the prospect of leaving the scene of my Armenian club’s drama and joining my other group, a group I spent considerably more time with, to sing doo-wop tunes and the occasional Indigo Girls number. I also worried what the others would think about my priorities.
When I had arrived at the Armenian Student Association table that morning, I had noticed that somebody brought black armbands for us to wear, so that people might stop us throughout the day and ask what they signified. I had opted not to put one on—the idea struck me as melodramatic. But now it seemed like my best shot at compromise. Watching my singing mates assemble across the walkway, I grabbed an armband and tied it on over my red thrift-store shirt, a men’s button-down with a butterfly collar, apologized feebly to my Armenian friends, and went to sing, facing the corpse posters all the while. At the end of the performance I thanked the audience and then invited them to take a look at the genocide display behind them.
There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond Page 6
