Society

Perhaps the identity of a person or nation describes the insides and outsides. Maybe because thousands of scientists, scientific research centers and other centers have been studying the issues regarding essence, but I am just taking it and wording it my own way.

If I am wrong, I ask the people who have dedicated their whole life to this topic to please forgive me. If I am right, again, forgive me because nobody usually takes a topic like this and comes out straight forward. However, it just came to me because I had been pondering about this a couple of days. I was trying to find a definition for the Armenian identity, but I could not come up with anything. My heart feels crushed, bitter because I could not find anything. I understand that identity is something that one must have and cherish.

Last year, my friend was telling me that Armenian Americans had gathered in one of the cinemas of Glendale to view the premiere of Atom Egoyan’s movie “Ararat”. The movie had not begun yet. Some of the viewers had been seated and others were still finding their seats. The newly immigrated Armenians from Armenia were talking in Russian from one end of the theatre to the other. My friend says to me: you can’t imagine what was going on there. The Beirut Armenians, the Iranian Armenians, Egyptian Armenians, the Iraqi Armenians-and all the other Armenians who had been in America for a while were listening to the Russian, and they were surprised, in doubt and angry and they were thinking about what they were going to say to their children for waking them up so early on Sunday mornings to send them to Armenian school, the children whom(by violating human rights) they had taken to an Armenian church, whom they had enrolled in some folk dance group and had paid the money to some non-professional dancer which could have been spent on McDonalds or Pizza Hut.

This clash of identities, unfortunately, is not the only one. It is not the only one because the same Beirut Armenians, Iranian Armenians, Egyptian Armenians and Iraqi Armenians also have identity conflicts between each other. The Persian that sells ice on a donkey is more welcoming to someone who has never even seen Mount Ararat, the pacific coasts of the Mediterranean Sea bring back more memories than the sky-blue color of Sevan Lake and many other things.

There are some reasons for this. One of them is that the birthplace and homelands are different. Another reason is that the environment where the Armenians live and the culture are different, the mentality and the daily life are different. It is different in every aspect. In Abkhazia, the mentality of an Armenian is to not be noticed. An Armenian living in Russia tries to be noticed. The Georgian Armenian suffers from not being noticed, after all, he was the one who owned that land less than 100 years ago and now that same person drives a taxi, or works in a store, or better yet, has a small buffet where he serves the khinkali or khachapuri which is part of the Georgian cuisine. An Armenian living in Iraq lives in fear, there is no problem of getting noticed, the Iraqi Armenian is in fear of all the forces and thinks that others are traitors. In the not too distant country of Lebanon, the identity is seen in the inside-there is one Armenian neighborhood where non Armenians don’t enter. When I was in Lebanon in 1996, I asked my young friend to accompany me to Burj Hamut. He told me that we could go anywhere I liked, except that place. I asked him how he got filled with so much hatred when he was only 20-21 years old. He told me that he did not know what my religion was but he would not go near that neighborhood. I told him that I believe that we are all Armenians, we are all brothers and that we must all love and forgive one another. He told me that they are not Armenians because they killed his uncle.

“They are not Armenian”-this is probably how the Beirut Armenians, Iranian Armenians, Egyptian Armenians, Iraqi Armenians and all the other Armenians who had emigrated from Armenia thought about the Russian speaking Armenians who had came to the “Ararat” premiere. “These people are not Armenians, they are foreigners”, -this is how the locals referred to the Armenians who had immigrated to the Homeland in 1946 after World War II. Why? It was because the Armenians who immigrated to Armenia brought with them different cultural backgrounds, because they were drinking a different type of coffee in the morning and men were walking around their house in short pants, because the French Armenians considered French products as their own, the Bulgarian Armenians considered their products as native, because the Lebanese or Syrians preferred eating Lahmajo rather than, let’s say, khash (stewed meat). As time passed by, the locals learned how to drink coffee, a little later on it became OK to wear short pants, and then there were so many lahmajo stores opening up, so many that the smell of the cooked bread was permeating the air. But before all of this would take place, the once immigrants left the Homeland, turned into Diasporan Armenians thus going back to their Lebanese, Syrian, Egyptian and Iraqi roots. This is probably why those people do not understand the Russian spoken by the new Armenians. It’s not that they don’t understand the Russian, but rather they don’t perceive how those people have managed to become Diasporan Armenians in the Homeland. According to them, a Diasporan Armenian changes his language a little, stays far from religion a little, leaves the folk dance group after graduating from school(after all, he can’t dance the same dances his whole life can he), and the whirlpool of this big world mixes us with the Big Flood which then brings us to Mount Ararat on the fortieth day.

An Armenian does not become a Diasporan Armenian, but rather, he or she is born one. It does not matter where, whether that be in some country, or some continent, in the Homeland or anywhere else. Last year, an Armenian who had emigrated to Germany visited the Homeland in the summer. In the morning, while looking at Mount Ararat from the balcony, he could barely hold back his tears and said “Our Ararat”. When did he manage to become a Diasporan Armenian? Had he become one or was he born that way?

“My mother used to tell me that we are not Turks, nor Kurds. We are Armenian, we are Christians and that is why they call us atheists. From that day on I felt the bitterness of having two identities. I kept thinking to myself that the Turk says that he is a Turk and the same goes for Kurds. How come I can’t say that I am Armenian? When I was young, I wanted to be a Turk so badly, so much that I wanted to be more than a Turk so no one would doubt that I was not a Turk. Our second misery was that we did not know what we were hiding,” said one apostate Armenian woman who had recently came to Armenia. Her family had moved from Turkey to Germany so that they could feel themselves more Armenian, but instead, the third misfortune had taken place. The local Armenians in Germany had not accepted them and considered them as Turks.

One’s identity, or national identity describes the insides and outsides of the person or nation. Perhaps it is like that. Since “the outside is in the inside and the inside is outside”, it is pretty hard to discover some identity whose inexistence is probably the guarantee of our existence.