I Am an Armenian: My Reaction to "Passage to Ararat"

[funnel101]

... perhaps in the end the message of Armenians is more particular than mere persistence. Perhaps, if there exists a deeper possibility in the psyche of this ancient, sturdy, and minor race, it is this: the capacity of a people for proceeding beyond nationhood. For to be a nation -- a member of a modern nation -- is to inherit territory, and pride

Comments

[youngpadowan]

i really really hope that you include something like this in your autobiography...
that was moving, wonderful to read, and i have so much to discuss with you about it :)

thank you for letting me read that :)

[funnel101]

Thank you. :) I probably will include something like that in the autobiography, but I'm not sure in what form (cuz this spans several years in a very short span of writing... the same span of writing in my autobiography is at least 30 pages). At the very least, I might work on this and my Quaker Belly Dancer piece a bit more and try to get them published on their own somewhere.

What do you want to discuss with me? Ask away!

[tanyahp]

Thank you for posting this, it was so good to read, especially as someone else from a "cultural minority" who went to St. John's and also found aspects of it stifling. It is difficult to have to explain yourself to people who might want to understand but inevitably will miss crucial aspects that can only be communicated, really, through living as a part of the culture. Sometimes it feels like silence is easier to maintain than the constant bridge-construction that is required to maintain both American and Armenian (or Jewish, in my case) cultures at once, and share with other people what it is like. I still struggle Daily with being Jewish, with what that means as a citizen of American and the world. Genocide is in my past too, and it leaves its mark on generation after generation - at least in my case, the genocides have been acknowledged (maybe not by some idiots, but they are a minority). Sometimes I wonder how the world lives with such bloody hands. Well, this is a more gruesome comment than I intended, but I wanted to thank

[funnel101]

You're very welcome. I think Jews and Armenians really have a lot in common, but I think Jews have been able to recover better from their genocide. (At least, that is how it looks to me from where I am.) And I don't think that has anything in particular to do with Jewishness or Armenianness, but the difference between the world's response to the two genocides... At least in the time Passage to Ararat was written, (in the 70s) people living in Turkey believed the government propaganda that the genocide "wasn't really as bad as the Armenians make it out to be" and that, essentially, the "Armenians asked for it". It sounds eerily similar to people who are raped who, when they tell someone, are either told it wasn't as bad as all that or that they asked for it.