Writer’s note: I intentionally wrote this piece as a celebration of Armenian identity — or at the very least, an exploration of it — as I rarely see Armenians or Armenia covered in American media without a strong attachment to the Genocide, the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020 or more generally to the hardships endured by the Armenian people. In American media, positive coverage of Armenia is rare, and I wanted this piece to speak to parts of being Armenian that are often left unheard. However, I’d like to acknowledge that connecting with Armenian culture in a full and sincere way cannot happen without also feeling the unhealed wounds of the Genocide, recognizing a degree of bitterness toward American media’s apathy to issues outside of the global West and carrying the continuous fear for our homeland’s future. As I write this, more than 120,000 ethnic Armenians in the Nagorno-Karabakh region have been left without essential supplies for five weeks due to Azerbaijan’s blockade of the Lachin Corridor. Being a part of the diaspora comes with a certain level of separation from these events and their fallout — which can be a privilege to exploit or a dissonance to mourn. As I am distinctly Armenian-American, my experiences in Armenia do not fully represent what it means to be Armenian — I do not have the bandwidth in this article nor the experience necessary to do so — but rather point to tensions and questions regarding my own Armenian identity.
Somewhere along an uneven road in Charentsavan, a small town about 30 minutes outside of Armenia’s capital city, Yerevan, I walked with one of the students I had spent the last year working with, Ala, and Arsen, her 8-year-old nephew. Only having met me formally about 30 seconds prior, Arsen asked his aunt if I understood Armenian. She had to translate this for me and subsequently told Arsen I didn’t speak Armenian. He looked up at me, his gaze a reprimand that signaled an almost grandfatherly air of disapproval. He averted his large eyes and responded to his aunt in Armenian. Ala then told me that Arsen thought I should know Armenian, with that special sort of unrestricted, blunt honesty that only a child can deliver. Simultaneously amused and ashamed, I laughed and told Ala that he was right — I should know Armenian.
This sense of responsibility is rooted mostly in the fact that I’m half-Armenian. Because my dad did not speak the language with me throughout my childhood, and because I chose not to continue with Armenian school when I was younger, learning Armenian became a distant, lofty goal that I’ve never consistently stepped up to the plate for; while I’ve lamented both of these decisions before, I have seldom felt the consequences of them as strongly as I did during this first trip of mine to Armenia.
By the time I was walking with Ala and Arsen, I had already grown accustomed to not understanding most of what was being said around me. I had frequently been silenced by my own lack of understanding, and had no choice but to be okay with that — there’s no way to learn a language in two weeks. But, as an Armenian, I felt intense shame for not being able to communicate with these people in Armenian. It was surreal to finally make it to my family’s homeland, but this trip also came with a deep sense of inadequacy and regret.
Through an organization called EducationUSA, I had spent the past year working remotely with a cohort of about 25 Armenian high school students who were interested in applying to American universities. Throughout the year, I met with many of them in group sessions and individual meetings to brainstorm and edit their college admissions essays. Toward the end of the school year, the cohort hosted a graduation ceremony to celebrate their work, and I decided to make the trip to Armenia to join them. Of course, on top of this graduation ceremony, there was also a personal incentive for me to make a trip to a country I had only ever heard about from my family.
On my second night in Yerevan, as I came back to the guest house I was staying in after about eight hours of sightseeing with the students, I felt deflated and out of my element. The guilt I felt over not knowing Armenian was nothing new to me, but it was more potent than it had been in many years, and brought many of the insecurities I had tried to bury back to the surface. All at once, I was 11 years old at Camp Haiastan again — my face flushed because I didn’t know the Lord’s Prayer in Armenian; I was 19 and being asked why I pronounced my Armenian last name wrong; I was 12 or 14 or 15 or 18 or 21 years old being told that I don’t look Armenian. In the background of all these excursions and day trips, my inability to comprehend most of the interactions around me ate away at me and generated a new iteration of shame that I could not blame anyone for but myself.
Attempting to categorize these feelings only seemed to complicate them further. As I was with locals, my trip felt more personal than a tourist’s, but I still felt like an outsider, and, considering my nationality, I am an outsider. Yes, some Armenian line dances are familiar to me; I have drank tahn before; I could identify a few words and numbers in Armenian. But, for me, knowing what madzoon is and having done the Tamzara before was hardly enough of a cultural background to feel a comprehensive sense of belonging in Armenia. At the end of the day, I still couldn’t communicate with the people around me in their native tongue.
This is not to say nothing in Armenia felt familiar. One minute I would be drowning in words I didn’t know, and the next I would hear an Armenian song that evoked the same exact sense of home that Armenian music has always created for me in America. It’s a familiarity that surpasses both language and geographic borders; my best attempts to put it into words will still fall short. It’s not an emotion, categorically, but a feeling — one that resists nomination. In Armenia, I felt a sense of familiarity that I have never experienced in the country I have spent my entire life living in; I had never felt so simultaneously close to and yet so far away from home, a duality that made me question what the very idea of home means for me.
In the moments that I felt like a foreigner and was perceived as one, it was as if a light had been projected onto my limited understanding of Armenia, beams pouring through all of the cracks in that understanding, shining upon me the label of “foreigner.” This was destabilizing, to say the least, as the only cultural identity I’ve ever actively laid claim to is my Armenian identity. The realization that I was missing all of these pieces to an identity I’ve always claimed as mine made me question: why don’t I know more about Armenian art? Why have I never bothered to pick up a book by an Armenian author? Why am I so unfamiliar with certain major events in Armenian history? And I was berating myself for quitting Armenian school when I was seven. I felt a new level of imposter syndrome — and what was most frustrating about this feeling was that it was largely of my own creation.
Of course, it’s a losing game to compare the strength of my Armenian identity to that of people who were born and raised in Armenia, but the shame I felt in Armenia is a heightened reflection of the difficulty I’ve had in feeling “Armenian enough” among other Armenian-Americans for the majority of my life. My mom isn’t Armenian, and I don’t think my dad realized how easily his culture was passed on to him because of the way his parents raised him. With two Armenian parents who are completely immersed in the Armenian-American community, he hasn’t had to “try” to be Armenian, but, in many ways, I’ve had to. I didn’t grow up around Armenian cuisine, culture or community to the same degree that he did. So if I want to know more about my culture, it’s going to be a primarily self-motivated pursuit.
This account of my trip might have painted my time in Armenia as an isolating experience rich with self-loathing and feelings of inadequacy, but ultimately these feelings are reflections of how much I enjoyed my time in Armenia — because if I hadn’t loved my time there in the way that I did, the dissonance I so strongly feel would not exist. Seeing this country that previously felt fabled to me through the eyes of the students I worked with is an experience that brings tears to my eyes as I sit in a coffee shop in Ann Arbor, over six months later, writing this. These students’ generosity is something I will carry with me for as long as I am here to talk about it; from small moments like eating lahmajoun with them to the days they devoted to showing me different museums and monuments, my time with them was so special to me. I never thought I would have 25 friends to show me around Armenia when I finally made it back home, but I am so grateful that I did.
While seeing Armenia for myself made me realize how out of touch I am with the country, it also showed me the elements of a culture that could be mine, if I chose to reach out for it. As cliché as it might sound, in doing line dances in high school gymnasiums and staring up at ceilings of churches that have been standing for over a millenia, I felt the birth of that “New Armenia” many Armenians refer to in parts of my heart that had been dormant for my entire life until then. Seeing and understanding the pieces of a culture that you have lost is the first step to regaining them, and eventually making them your own. A lasting cultural identity certainly doesn’t grow overnight, but it has to start somewhere. I think Arsen would be happy to know that I started Armenian lessons this past summer.
Statement Columnist Olivia Mouradian can be reached at omouradi@umich.edu.