We are Armenians from Iran. None of my grandparents or great grandparents were involved in the Genocide. Yet I hardly consider this when I think about the Genocide, since my knowledge of the atrocities has been a force in my life for as long as I can remember. When I was about seven, my mother sat us down on her bed and read to us from The Road From Home. But at that age the tragic story was just a wild adventure whose implications for my own life I could not yet understand.
It was a few years later that I picked up the book again and became incredibly absorbed by its story. We were driving from New Jersey to Boston, for my first summer at Camp Haiastan. I sat alone in the very back of our huge station wagon and in my own private space there, I began to read David Kherdian's tale of his mother's tragic, awful experiences. I was fascinated and traumatized. I sat in the back of that car and sobbed, my quiet consistent crying drowned out by the rush of the highway, the car radio and my family's conversations. My fervor was awakened that day, and it grew deeper and more complex as I got older and learned more.
We moved to California when I was in junior high school. When I went to college at UC Berkeley, I was involved with the Armenian Students Association. In the last few years, my thoughts about the Genocide and its role in my life have changed. I look at our community, and amidst the passion and zeal and desire to stick together and particularly to work for Genocide acknowledgment, I see a generation that is traumatized in a new way that has nothing to do with genocide.
Our trauma is assimilation. We are trying to determine what to call ourselves. We are trying to decide what language to speak and what last name to marry. These are deeply difficult issues and they leave us in a crisis about who we are. We use the Genocide as a focal point to answer this identity crisis. We bind ourselves together with a shared grief, and the resulting sense of community fills the holes in our identity; but it simultaneously creates other holes as we rely on a hideous massacre to be our most significant cultural marker.
I am not disassociating myself from the throngs of Armenians who look to the Genocide for endless cultural fuel. In elementary school my every book report was written on a genocide memoir. In high school this was the basis for every research project, and in college I wrote countless papers and finally my 88-page honors thesis on Armenian Genocide literature.
But I am frustrated when I see the incredible energy of our community focused on one-albeit significant part of our history; I do not believe that our future is getting its fair share of attention.
I would never sum it up brusquely as "let's forgive and forget." But have not the perpetrators of genocide twice massacred us if they killed our ancestors and are now killing our spiritual and social progress as a cultural group?
I wonder sometimes, what would happen if we no longer had the Turk as the target of our incredible anger? I believe this anger is as much the product of our current trauma-assimilation, and the confusion of Diasporas it is bred from the century-old trauma of genocide. What would we or will we do on the day that denial is lifted; if suddenly the government of Turkey acknowledged the crimes in its history? What, then, would define our cultural group? What would we do with the energy that now organizes parades, marches, protests, vigils, books, articles, magazines, courses, seminars, conferences, camps; what else binds us? This is what I wonder about now, when I hear the words Armenian Genocide.
