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.