Providing the soil for a new voice

The weight of the word in a teenager’s mouth is a heavy thing … especially when that word is Armenian. 

Last year, I served on the jury for the “Tsil” creative competition — an initiative by the Amrots Foundation that gives teenagers a platform to express themselves in their native tongue. The name of the project itself, which translates to “sprout,” suggests something tender, something in the early stages of reaching for the sun, full of the latent energy of a life yet to be lived. As a judge, I walked into the process expecting to witness this growth in its most innocent form. The theme for the 2025 cycle was “My Name, My Country,” a prompt that might elicit coming-of-age reflections, lighthearted regional pride, or perhaps simple descriptions of a favorite village square or a family tradition. I should have known better. I should have anticipated that for an Armenian child living through the mid-2020s, the concept of “country” is not a playground topic. 

Before diving into the entries, I had to reconcile my own position on the panel. I will be the first to admit that I was hardly the preeminent expert in the room. I am far more comfortable reading English or Western Armenian, and while I certainly read Eastern Armenian literature, I am by no means an expert. There is, after all, a certain level of self-doubt in judging works written in Eastern. However, I hoped that by being a bit of an “outsider,” I could bring a different perspective to the table.

A part of me had hoped, perhaps naively, that the submissions would be lighter. I wanted to read about the mundane joys of being 14 — about friendships, crushes, the changing seasons, or the rebellions of adolescence. I looked for the “sprout” that was simply enjoying the soil — see what I did there? Instead, reading through the more than 200 submissions, I was struck by a pervasive and unsettling sense of gravity. These kids were 13 to 17 years old, yet the prose they produced felt as if it were written by souls who had lived three lifetimes. They were not writing about the typical anxieties of adolescence; they were carrying the collective weight of a nation’s existential crisis on their shoulders. 

While the competition had expanded its reach to include the diaspora and even allowed for foreign-language entries, the bulk of the submissions came from within Armenia. These entries offered a raw, unfiltered look at the psyche of a generation raised in the shadow of conflict, displacement and systemic loss.

The tone across the board was one of profound, heavy worry. They wrote of war, of the loss of ancestral lands like Artsakh, of divisive internal politics, and of a precarious future with a weary, seasoned perspective that no child should possess. There were moments during the evaluation process when I found myself questioning the authenticity of the voice, wondering if a 14-year-old could truly produce such somber, heavy reflections. I initially suspected the heavy hand of a parent or a teacher, because it read so much like the tired observations of an older person. But when you move to the interview phase and speak with these finalists, the realization hits you like a ton of bricks: They did write this. 

The trauma of the last few years — the 2020 Artsakh War and the immense loss of life, the 10-month blockade, the loss of land and the subsequent displacement — has effectively stripped away the carefree phase of Armenian childhood. This, I believe, is the result of a history that refuses to stay in the past. To build a resilient future, these young folks must be firmly rooted in their history — not as a script for mourning, but as the foundation of their truth. Today, we see an official push to flatten our collective memory for the sake of a hollow promise of a better tomorrow, but these writers prove that you cannot simply switch off the past to build a meaningful future.

Beyond the intensity of the subject matter, another pattern emerged that spoke to the way we teach creativity and language. A significant portion of the entries felt less like spontaneous short stories and more like polished school assignments. They were “correct” in a way that felt stifling. They followed a specific, standardized structure — perhaps a legacy of an educational model that prizes excellence and formal tradition over often messy, but original thought. I had previously assumed this was a problem unique to the Armenian diaspora, where the language is often treated as a museum piece behind glass, preserved out of a sense of duty rather than used in everyday life. Yet, reading the entries from within Armenia, I saw the same rigid mold. The writing was frequently saturated with a specific kind of pathos that frames being Armenian as an eternal struggle of the “small but brave” or the “suffering but resilient.” It was standardized and safe, an imitation of what they think “proper” literature should sound like, rather than an exploration of what they actually feel or observe in their daily lives.

This realization led me to reflect on the limitations of our current creative environment. When a language is used primarily to discuss national survival, it begins to shrink to fit that narrow purpose. For many of these writers, being Armenian was synonymous with being “diminished” or “wounded.” A young person at that age should not be conditioned to think that their primary value lies in their ability to mourn or to endure. The competition’s goal was to take them out of this mold, to break the chains of these standardized expectations and encourage them to put their true selves out into the world. We want to move away from the idea of Armenian as a secret language of shared trauma and toward the idea of Armenian as a vibrant, living tool for universal expression. 

Breaking free from the mold does not mean abandoning our story. True creative freedom requires historical literacy and a grounded sense of identity; you cannot transcend a past you have been told to forget. 

This is why I find the shift in the 2026 competition theme — “Through Armenian Eyes, to the World’s Ear” — so vital for the future of the program. It is a necessary attempt to break certain chains of convention. The goal is to move these kids away from the inward-looking, self-sacrificial tone that has dominated our national discourse for decades. We are asking them to take their inner worlds, their unique worldviews and their universal human experiences, and articulate them in Armenian — not just for a local audience, but as a contribution to the global conversation. The prompt is a call to action: to formulate their worldview in their native tongue and communicate it to the world, making the language a medium for universal human values. A young person should not feel that their identity is a burden they are obligated to carry or a tragedy they must perpetually inhabit. We need to show them that our language is robust enough to handle their anger, their curiosity, their avant-garde ideas and their joy, rather than just our collective grief.

Despite my concerns, the experience of judging also left me with a genuine sense of promise. Amid the formal structures and the heavy themes, there were undeniable flashes of brilliance — raw, unvarnished talent that signaled the arrival of a new generation of thinkers. I saw real potential for future writers who, if guided correctly, can move beyond performance and toward true art. I witnessed teenagers who, despite the weight they carry, possess a clarity of thought that is terrifyingly beautiful. Our job as an older generation — as judges, mentors and community members — is to stop handing them the same tired scripts and to foster an environment where they don’t feel the need to perform patriotism just to be validated. 

The Armenian language should be the root of their values, but the sprout must be allowed to grow in any direction it chooses, even if that direction is unconventional or nontraditional. If we can help these kids break out of the standardized expectations of the past, they won’t just preserve our culture; they will reinvent it for a world that needs to hear their true voices. 

Participating in the jury opened my eyes to the wealth of talent waiting to be unleashed. The challenge now is to lead them in the right way, to encourage the kind of creativity that isn’t afraid to be messy, and to ensure that when they voice their minds to the world, they are speaking from a place of strength and individuality, not just from inherited sorrow.

We must provide the soil in which the sprout can grow into something unexpected, something that looks back at what was lost, yes, but looks forward to what can be built.