Illustration by Bernice Delos Reyes
The Armenian Genocide is Where We Come From
On accepting the history of genocide as part of one's identity and a symbol of the survival of one's ethnicity.
Apr 30, 2017
“My family tree, like those of millions of Armenians around the world, stops at my great-grandparents. I don't know who came before them, where they lived and what they did. My family tree was uprooted from its ancestral lands, leaving me with a strange feeling of perpetual longing and restlessness.” - Alik Arzoumanian on the account of the Armenian Genocide of 1915.
*Video Courtesy Channel 4*
The complexity of one’s identity has been shown numerous times in many issues of The Gazelle. Often the authors stress on the idea of belonging and their inability of defining where they come from. Yet there is another type of identity crisis — the uprooting of one’s identity and the elimination of its heritage.
I have always been jealous of people who know their ethnic heritage; that their ancestors lived in this particular city two centuries ago. All I know about my family is that all of the members were born in Eastern Armenia. Although I have heard that one of my great-grandmothers, Paytsar, is from the city of Van, in modern day Turkey, no one knows how she ended up in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia in the East.
Paytsar did not lose her memory, nor did she die so young that everyone would forget her story. The problem was that she would never speak about it. Shame, sadness and sorrow would come on her face every time we would ask her about her childhood. She was not the only one bearing the scars of the horrors that Armenians witnessed in the early 1900s.
Once I heard a story of an elderly man, who would never ask for water, even after he was saved. During the genocide, he was severely dehydrated on the road of exile in the deserts of Deir ez-Zor. He begged for water. Under gunpoint the desperate mother decided to risk and try to find water for her child. She never came back.
The real story of my grand-grandmother remains unknown. Was it one of disgrace and violence? Certainly, it was. But why does this matter more than a century later?
The Armenian Genocide has become part of the Armenian identity. It became the symbol of our struggle for survival. Over 1.5 million Armenians, including children, were killed during the genocide. Three times more Armenians live abroad than in Armenia itself. But we exist, we speak our language, we pray in our churches and sing the songs of our ancestors.
Armenian-American author William Saroyan put it best:
“I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose history is ended, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, whose literature is unread, whose music is unheard, whose prayers are no longer uttered. Go ahead, destroy this race. Let us say that it is again 1915. There is war in the world. Destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them from their homes into the desert. Let them have neither bread nor water. Burn their houses and their churches. See if they will not live again. See if they will not laugh again. See if the race will not live again when two of them meet in a beer parlor, twenty years after, and laugh, and speak in their tongue. Go ahead, see if you can do anything about it. See if you can stop them from mocking the big ideas of the world, you sons of bitches, a couple of Armenians talking in the world, go ahead and try to destroy them.”
Where do I come from? I don’t care. I am Armenian and we all are one. Whether my ancestors are from one city or another does not matter. Whether a friend of mine is from the same region as I, or not, does not matter. We are Armenians and we are here. Standing on par with those that wanted to eliminate us, we strive and grow. We existed when there was Rome, when there was Byzantium, when there was the Soviet Union. We outlived them all and will outlive those trying to bury us. They try to bury us; they don’t know that we are seeds, as Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos had written.
Gurgen Tadevosyan is a contributing writer. Email him at feedback@thegazelle.org.
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