MORE THAN I COULD EVER HAVE WISHED FOR

I just returned from my first trip to Armenia where I spent two months on a personal quest to understand what it is to be Armenian. Sponsored by the Birthright Foundation, I arrived to Yerevan and was immediately embarrassed to find their motto ‘A Journey of Self Discovery’ printed in bold letters on the back of the van we rode in and the shirts we wore. Ultimately this motto proved amazingly accurate with regards to the impact the country had on my psyche.

Firstly a little about myself. Raised in Montreal, I received my Armenian education at Saturday school and at home where we spoke Armenian, though with English words increasingly thrown in as we grew older. Without having many Armenian friends, at the age of thirty two all I could respond with when asked about being Armenian was a description of the Genocide, the cruelty and cunning of Turks and some blip in history when there was an Armenia sea to sea. Essentially my Armenian identity was founded on a sense of victimization. The lack of any day to day understanding of what it meant to be Armenian impacted all facets of how I lived my life. When confronted by the possibility of marriage to a non-Armenian well steeped in the essence of her own culture, I found myself voiceless, empty and powerless to direct our daily conversations in a way that satisfied my needs for personal growth and I constantly worried about how much I could really pass on to our future children. In the end this powerlessness was occasionally expressed as criticism during discussions relating to other cultures or bold reaffirmations of the victimization of Armenians. Though I knew what was happening, I could do nothing to change it. Similarly, when speaking with a Turkish friend, despite my respect for him as a person, I could not help but quietly sit and feel my stomach churn each time he mentioned his homeland or described in any way its people or places. Though I enjoyed interacting with the person, I could not acknowledge his origins because it threatened my understanding of myself. It was at this point that I decided to learn what I felt I needed to know.

Learning about Armenia and ultimately about myself came from many angles and at many levels. It was my first experience volunteering anywhere and I realized that over and beyond any help that we volunteers offered, it is was a very privileged position for us to learn of our surroundings. In general NGOs, even the most active on the ground, deal with problems that are at a societal level. Working with an NGO involved in the agricultural sector, I spent two months learning of the problems faced by farmers in producing and bringing to market their goods, as well as the chain of events that ended in the collapse of agriculture after the fall of the Soviet Union. As enlightening as it all was, it was only multiplied when we volunteers would meet for drinks and discuss what we each were working to achieve. From political transparency to healthcare, the discussions with other volunteers provided a very macro view on the development of Armenian society. Meanwhile the time I spent with my host families and friends provided a ground level, micro perspective, on how individuals coped with all the tragedies and triumphs of the past 15 years. Whether working from the top down or learning from locals from the bottom up, it was in working to consolidate and unify these two perspectives which ended in me finding myself.

It is in the harmony, the paradoxes, churn and change occurring daily in Armenia that make it a place for us all. In a word, it is alive. Despite the obvious problems, where legal structures are absent they are being established, where businesses are missing they are being opened, where artists have not yet ventured they are being explored. Yes people are leaving, but many are coming back. Those leaving are doing so with a deep regret but as the economy develops they will have less and less need to feel that regret. Villagers and even the older generations in Yerevan still adhere to the mentality that since they have done things a certain way for thousands of years, there is no need for change; meanwhile it is obvious how the youth are pushing boundaries and transforming society.

Only a handful of Armenian diasporas around the globe can claim this kind of vitality, the others live in a constant fear of decay and dispersion. In Montreal I studied in Saturday school about Armenian history and Armenian culture, but was never once able to touch the history, swim in the culture, feel that it was something living and breathing and not relegated to a text book. The friendships I made in Armenia, the countless bars and coffee shops I visited, the local rock bands I heard brought it all to life and to the present day. There is much work to be done in the Diaspora to have the Genocide recognized and to maintain western Armenian, however first we all simply need to feel Armenian, something those raised in the west can rarely claim they do. We can study the paintings of Saryan, however in order to truly understand them we need to see the colors that inspired him and breath the air that dried his paint.

Now that I have returned, my perspective on things has decidedly changed. I am still confronted by the challenges of finding time in my busy schedule to ‘be Armenian’ for a couple hours a week, however I realize that there is a place in the world to which I can return and recharge completely. A place where others like me from the west either visit regularly or have moved to open businesses and carve out their own slice of the world. And what of my Turkish friend? It was the smallest things I learned in Armenia that had the most powerful impact on our relationship. Today I no longer feel ignorant or speechless when being described some irrelevant fact on Istanbul, because I can now reply with an equally irrelevant fact on Yerevan.

Johnny Bogossian (Canada)
AVC Volunteer and BR/DH participant