Confused and Angry
Confused and Angry
The Armenian Diaspora continually divides.
I can’t help but ask, though it might be extremely provocative, even blasphemous:
Is there a positive side to the Armenian diaspora?
For many centuries, the Armenian world has been based on interconnected communities without an umbrella government of their own. The vast majority of people remained on the territory of their ancestors in what is now eastern Turkey and the Caucasus. From Byzantine times onwards, however, the forced transfer of Armenian populations and voluntary migration has continued to create new diaspora centers, for example in Iran, Istanbul (Constantinople), parts of Africa, India, Europe, and Russia. Rouben Adalian, in The Historical Evolution of the Armenian Diasporas1, notes that progressive relocations from early times each "opened a new chapter” in the history of the Armenian Diaspora.
The constant rise and fall of ancient empires in and over the region brought new influences to be absorbed and, following the end of the Byzantine world, Armenians found themselves in the midst of Islamic peoples, Arab, Turkish, and Persian (after their own conversion to Christianity in 301 AD).
In the empires under which they lived, a sizable number of Armenians became thoroughly integrated, to the point of taking on positions of power, for example, in the Byzantine empire, rising to commanders of the military. In addition to forced dispersion, the ancient Armenian diaspora was also formed by trade networks, which involved economic migration going on since at least the tenth century. Adalian believes that at this point people living in communities in diaspora began to speak of themselves as living in exile2.
The modern Armenian diaspora is far more widely spread in the 21st century. Modern innovations have made connections quicker, easier, and fundamentally different than in earlier times.
We even have our own nation-state- the Republic of Armenia (circa 1991).
Whatsapp, Facebook, Aeroflot, the internet, international banking and finance, and the various media all serve to transfer information immediately but also reinforce the role of “Kin-AS-A-Service” (K-aaS), wherever and however far away they may reside.
The concept of "home” for many is mobile and nomadic, more synonymous with family than with a particular place. The experience of place, whether present or known through memory, is always about people and their relationships as well as about the physical surroundings.
Diaspora is a "place" on a large scale, encompassing a wider range of relationships, a grander network of known and possibly knowable.
But this nomadic genetic makeup bred tribalism you can so clearly observe today.
The first question in a conversation between Armenian strangers is always "Vor/Oor deghatsi ek?” or “Where are you from?".
“Are you from Bourj Hammoud? Tehran? Yerevan?”
It’s only natural though, as, for centuries, Armenians everywhere have been trying to survive any way they could. This meant preserving resources, avoiding unifying with other Armenians from more distant lands, and relying solely on the immediate resource and expertise of their tribe, or direct community. For the first time ever, the 20th century gave birth to the “1000 Day Republic”(1918-1920) and the “Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic” (1921-1991), the first modern experiments of unifying tribes of Armenians in Anatolia & the Caucus region into a singular nation-state. Both republics ultimately failed, trying to solve an existential question that plagues every Armenian: “What’s the true vision of the Armenian Homeland?”
Visions of Homeland
As it is for other peoples, a homeland for Armenians is and has been a contested and evolving notion.
It is shaped by the personal memories and experiences, ambitions, and hopes of people at particular times and the desires and plans (and varying degrees of success of these plans) of intellectuals, teachers, priests, donors, and political leaders.
For centuries there has been no single, clearly defined center and periphery acknowledged by all Armenians.
The question of return is equally ambiguous, as people have been haunted by memories of the destruction and pillage of their old villages or towns, while gradually becoming more at home in their new space, in the diaspora. The confusion increases as political parties emphasize ideological notions of homeland, detached perhaps from personal experience but rooted in the past and in contemporary political events.
Homeland is often a Utopian vision of paradise, something which might be created by a person/organization in physical and psychological pain. Today, Armenians have 3 homelands to choose to associate with.
The land that is now the Republic of Armenia, or Hayastan, as Armenians call it. e collapse of the Soviet Union, it has been independent. For those who live there, and increasingly, for many diaspora Armenians, it is the homeland today. It is a place where Armenian is spoken on the streets and heard in pubs and on television. Armenian military, schools and the university, dance troupes and choirs, and soccer (football) teams are all pointed to with pride. It is regarded as a shelter and also as a delicate construction that must be protected. As Levon Avdoyan points out in the First issue of the Armenian Forum, the importance of its survival is one of the few things that nearly all Armenians there and anywhere in diaspora agree upon.
A second homeland is also called Hayastan: the ancient kingdom, the old territories embedded with the 4,000-year-old history, lands reaching from Urartus, Nayirians, Dikranagert in Anatolia to Karabagh in the Caucasus. These have not been together under sovereign Armenian rule since 95 BCE but encompass the ancestral homes of most of those now in the diaspora. This is the homeland for intellectuals, activists, and generally those more historically and politically inclined. A Return to at least some of these lands (in particular Mt. Ararat) forms a major plank in the platform of the most popular diaspora political parties and of the “freedom fighters” or “terrorists” active in the 1890’s to the early 1980’s.
The third homeland is a more intimate vision of the homeland.
“Oor deghatsi ek”?
In the diaspora, the homeland is, or at least includes, an Armenian's own town or village of origin. Now, of course, that usually means the village of their ancestors' origin. This includes personal and collective memories of towns such as Beriut, Bourj Hammoud, Tehran, Sau Paulo, Lyon, Moscow, Kessab in Syria, places that people wonder about and care about and long to see.
If the Homeland means something different for every Armenian, then why are leaders of the Armenian Diaspora continually telling us how to be Armenian?
Various diaspora centers have, of course, developed in different ways. Each imagines the diaspora, the homeland, and the nation in particular ways.
Similarly, the aims and methods of nationalism differ widely among them. Loosely connected, relying on each other, sometimes criticizing or killing each other, each rationalizing a certain hierarchy of these ideologies (never the same), the diaspora centers share a common feature in that, with each generation in place, diaspora becomes more comfortable and at home for itself.
The evolution of our tribalism, or the Armenian curse, the White Genocide, what Stepan Partamian mockingly parades as “Armenianess”- is merely a systematic mistrust in our collective identity.
If we are to accept all the visions, history, and opinions of the tribes that make up the collective Armenian people as a whole, are we willing to accept opposing views and release ourselves from the self-serving addiction of maintaining the tribalist status quo?
AS ARMENIAN YOUTH DIE TO PRESERVE HAYASTAN, WHY ARE THE ARMENIAN DIASPORA INSTITUTIONS NOT UNITING?
Leaders of Armenian Diaspora Institutions in the international partisan networks shape and cultivate public opinion within the Armenian community to serve their own visions of the homeland, a process directly facilitated by the leading media outlets of the community that the parties own, by local party headquarters that served as social clubs for members, and by field workers who labored actively as personal liaisons between the rank and file and the leaders of their respective parties.
The years of deliberate top-down cultivation, not only of conflicting opinions but of sharply differing memories of key events and circumstances, go far to explain why, when the news story broke that Artsakh was under attack, every single Armenian had a different opinion of the war, its response, and the reasons why the battle was lost.
The Armenian religious, political, and charitable organizations are in constant competition to monopolize diasporic nationalism -defined as the attachment of immigrants to a real or imagined homeland, with not only sentimentality but also a desire to influence that homeland’s political future.
In the case of the Armenian Americans, the rival political, religious, and charitable parties own the major press organs that the general Armenian population consumes. Through control of the newspapers, social media channels, as well as the social clubs (AGOOMP) to which many Armenian Americans belong, the diaspora organizations market their respective visions, both destructive and constructive, of the homeland's future and their interpretations of unfolding events, both local and global, to the entire Armenian population.
Armenians interpret their own history in such opposite ways and display such starkly contrasting reactions to days of significance that even non-Armenians can notice and appreciate the internal strifes of the Armenian community3. With great influence from the press and other channels of communication within their respective political, cultural, and religious parties, Armenian internalize multiple conflicting visions of their nationality and starkly contrasting memories of the past, the present, and the future.
For Armenians, this has the effect of distancing many people who consider themselves part of the collective but "different."
There remain many ways of unofficial belonging, and people drift between public and private realms. The shared memory of the genocide has united people and fed a certain sense of responsibility to the community (however imagined), to the past, and to the future. Having been taught to behave as citizens of diaspora, in recent years, Armenians are increasingly being urged by their political, religious, and intellectual leaders also to behave as potential citizens of the homeland.
Like the Israeli situation4, some Armenians growing up in the diaspora have been shown the map and are now applying it to new terrain, occupying perhaps the same physical location, but greatly transformed. In the most radical cases, new orthodoxies and fanaticisms are being bred away from the homeland and then transported there in a quixotic effort to "save" the homeland from itself and its enemies.
Do Armenian Diaspora Organizations breed a particular kind of idealism without the constraints of responsibility and experience?
Many would anwser yes, while many would also answer no.
It is what it is.
Armenians will continue to disagree among themselves about interpretations and the relative importance of different components of certain issues, such as the homeland, including where and what it is, how central it is, and whether the myth of returning is a sustained dream or a practical if distant reality. Very few are migrating to Armenia. Tens of thousands have left for Los Angeles and Moscow.
Many Armenian-American homes bear a plaque with the following words by the author, William Soroyan…
I would like to see any power in this world destroy this ... small tribe of unimportant people.... When two Armenians meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia
Saroyan describes us perfectly.. a small tribe, who constantly tries to create a New Armenia. Could this small tribe, unite to become one big nation?
Adalian, Paul
The Historical Evolution of the Armenian Diasporas." In Journal of Modern Hellenism 6: 81-114.
The Formation of the Armenian Nation." In The Armenian People: From Ancient to Modern Times. Richard G. Hovannisian, ed, New York: St. Martin's Press.
Mirak, Robert
Torn Between Two Lands: Armenians in America, 1890 to World War I. Cambridge: Harvard
Boyarin, Daniel and Jonathan Boyari
“Diaspora: Generational Ground of Jewish identity." Critical Inquiry 19: 4.