Derelicted responsibility
The responsibility in question here is one that most of us are likely unaware of. It’s not one that, to my knowledge, has ever been formally discussed.
It hit me last weekend at a sad family gathering.
Many who were present live scattered all across North America, mostly in areas with precious few Armenians around, therefore no organized communities or structures to speak of.
These are the children and grandchildren of Armenians with strong national sentiments. Yet due to the vagaries of the assimilative forces—be it through intermarriage, the absence of Armenian infrastructure, language (dis)utility, or the need to earn a living—their connection to Armenian life has weakened.
Yet there is a palpable thirst for connection, mostly through family history, to things Armenian.
Living in the bowels of greater Los Angeles’s Armenian neighborhoods for the past 36+ years had distanced me from these realities, but that weekend rekindled my awareness.
Is it not our responsibility, as members of the active and functioning Armenian communities, to reach out and reintegrate our compatriots who find themselves in this life situation?
I can never forget the story Hourig Papazian Sahagian told me some four decades ago about her experience three decades prior to that. It occurred during her sojourn in Lebanon for an Armenian studies program (organized through the Armenian Relief Society, if memory serves me). One day, she was speaking to a giant of our revolutionary and First Republic period—I don’t recall whether it was Levon Shant or Nigol Aghpalian. She had complained about the Turkish-speaking Armenians with origins in Cilicia, who constituted the bulk of the Armenian community in the U.S. Her remark was: “What kind of Armenians are these?”
The response she received was chilling in its depth of wisdom. “Aghcheegs, trank el hye en.” (“My daughter, they, too, are Armenians.”)
This, and a few other experiences, has always guided my thinking. It’s in this context that I now raise the issue of reaching out to our scattered, Armenian-wise-battered compatriots.
Should we create new infrastructure to reintegrate these folks? Should we try to pull them in to existing organizations?
The former presents challenges because of the massive effort it takes to create functional organizations. The latter also requires a significant amount of patience, open-mindedness and tolerance on both sides, due to the inevitable culture shock each may experience.
What about encouraging greater participation in groups such as the Armenian Genealogy Forum or Armenian Immigration Project? There’s even the possibility that organizing trips to Western Armenia—the homeland of many of these compatriots’ families—or to the Republic of Armenia could help strengthen their connection to Armenian identity in daily life.
This is an issue whose time came long ago and must be addressed—not least because numbers matter. If we truly care about Armenianness and our perpetuation as a national entity on this planet, regaining our distanced compatriots is essential.
The effort will require the attention and action of just about every Armenian. Each of us will have to reach out to relatives who are in this life situation. Those living in dense Armenian communities, such as in the Los Angeles basin, may believe they are immune to the phenomena described above—but they are not. It’s just that, given the density and sheer numbers of Armenians in this region, the forces that drive people to drift away from Armenian community life are less perceptible, and therefore, all the more insidious and dangerous.
Let’s all get busy discussing this challenge, organizing to solve it, then reaching out to our “missing” compatriots.
Garen Yegparian
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Assimilation is the biggest danger facing the Armenian communities in the diaspora, like every diaspora. I am one of the many “assimilated” Armenians, which I fear make up the majority of the Armenian Diaspora. Unfortunately, when a small ethnic group is a minority in a foreign country, is dispersed, has no educational facilities teaching their native language, culture and customs or are very few and far between, and has little or no links with the homeland, assimiliation is almost always inevitable. That many parents and grandparents have not passed on their language, culture and customs to their children, grandchildren and beyond, is also part of the problem. Marrying a non-Armenian, and not passing on the language, culture and customs to the children, is another factor. Many Armenians, perhaps more than half, marry a non-Armenian. One can hardly forbid people marrying for love. Assimilation then was either due to pressure exerted by officialdom and also due to discrimination by the larger society. That is why, many immigrants assimilated, in order not to “stand out” for being “different” and “foreign”, and to be “accepted” by the larger society. The latter reason is still the case, for example in the United States to a lesser extent. Assimilation today, is mostly due to internal reasons. The advent of the internet, connectivity and online language courses, can remedy a bit the problem of assimilation and isolation.