Home is where the genocide was

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the Armenian Weekly’s June 2026 magazine, “Reclaiming Home and Heritage,” which explores how the Armenian community maintains its heritage and culture following genocide and displacement. The issue was edited by Weekly magazine editor Pauline Getzoyan. Genocide typically physically displaces survivors as part of the elimination of their group from where they lived pre-genocide. Even “mere” displacement is in fact a violent expulsion and alienation from one’s home area. It is easy to dissolve the human pain of displacement in abstract statistics and the illusion of inevitability in our violent world. But, none of us would fail to understand the devastation of losing our home to fire. Not only would we suddenly be without a place to live and have to scramble into temporary housing in a hotel or with family, if we are lucky, but every artifact of our lives would be gone as well — our favorite chair, the drawing our child made in kindergarten, everything. Maybe some photos and financial documents would survive on the Cloud somewhere despite the melting of our cell phone. But there is no denying how much a fire would fundamentally disrupt our lives in a way that could never be fully repaired. And that is a fire in which no one is killed or injured. What if we lost a loved one or had permanent damage from burns or smoke inhalation? Loss of home would not just be loss of the place of home, but the people of home. Even so, with a fire, we sometimes have an opportunity to rebuild our dwelling or at least to find other housing in the same area. We might still live in the same community, close to friends and family, where we can go to the same schools and keep the same employment. In genocide, this is seldom, if ever, possible. Survivors are driven out and forbidden to return under threat of death — and those who try are often killed simply for trying to go back to their homes. Homes, businesses and social networks that families, communities and people struggled for generations, centuries and even millennia to build are gone in a paroxysm of violence and exclusion. Everything must be rebuilt — and rebuilt in a new place. Refugees have few resources, and the help others give, no matter how generous, will be just a pittance compared to the resources they have lost. When, to the trauma of displacement, the demographic, familial, psychological and material impacts of killing, rape, torture and family separation are added, those who must rebuild are the most vulnerable and weakened kind of people. How can they be forced to rebuild? Yet, their survival depends on it. It is not just that the resources they need to build are not there and that trauma pulls them back from their forward progress at every moment, requiring superhuman efforts simply to survive let alone rebuild. They are inevitably somewhere that is new and alien to them. They try to build what they can of their old home space — their communities, their religious institutions, their cultures — but the structures built over generations are no longer there and everything must be painstakingly built from, at most, the few remnants of things and relationships they have been able to carry with them. New relationships must be formed, new religious and cultural institutions erected and new businesses started. What is more, these testaments to their resilience must be constructed in a new place that is not theirs. They must get themselves invited into someone else’s home, where they will always somehow be guests, the new people. Assimilation in the dominant society offers one pathway, but it requires sacrifice of identity grounded on a fundamental connection to place. Diasporas can succeed, but typically only in connection to some homeland, real or imagined, that serves as a reference point for continued identity. Even in cases where survivors persist in what had been their homelands, things are no better. Often, expropriation has taken its toll, and their familial, social, cultural and spiritual connections and lives are shattered and fragmented. The “home” they lived in before the destruction no longer exists, as the genocidal process has attacked its essence as their place and made them placeless in the places that used to be home. While many survivors of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide continued to live in Rwanda or returned shortly after the defeat of the Interahamwe perpetrators, it was not their Rwanda any longer. Even though Tutsis had gained control of the government, it was not the survivors who built the new Rwanda but co-ethnics. But even if they did try to rebuild their home, how could their neighborhoods, homes and community spaces be what they once were? Once, they would walk around their home area noting where they went to school, their favorite café, the park where old-timers played backgammon, chess, checkers, mancala, mahjong, cards or some other pastime, their church or mosque or temple or shrine, where their family members are buried and where they were born. Now, they see the alley in which their uncle was hunted down and killed, the town square where their niece and other girls were raped and killed and the road down which their spouse and little children tried to escape the firestorm of violence, only to be cut down for all to see. No matter how green the vegetation planted to cover the ground, no matter how aesthetically refined the buildings erected over the killing spots, the survivors see the crimson tinge haunting grass and concrete. Think of the young girl whose words are memorialized on a stone outside the Kigali Genocide Museum: yes, she survived, but next door to her lived the very people who murdered her entire family but her; every day going to school she had to walk past their house and witness their full family, while hers had been reduced to ghosts. That was what home after genocide was for her. Genocide always destroys home and survivors’ sense of place, whether they are expelled from home or imprisoned in it. The loss of home is likewise a key factor in the destruction of identity. A great myth of capitalism and communism is that land is a commodity. Being a commodity means that it has an economic value. What is more, it means that it has the same value as all other land that can support the same level of economic activity. Certainly, land is not fully interchangeable, in that arable land has specific features, as do wetlands. But the commodification of land means that it can be reduced to the economic value of what can be done on it and all land of that type is, in essence, interchangeable. Land is not simply the quantities of minerals on it, what level and kind of fertility it has or what its climate is like. Land has value for people based on the relationships they have with it. That is why family farmers in the United States struggle so hard to stay on “their family’s land” — neglecting that the land is ultimately Native American — for them, it is not “farmland in general,” the land that they and theirs have toiled on for generations and struggled to make productive. That is why people being displaced by eminent domain experience their loss as profound, even if it’s financially beneficial; their land is where they have their community and life, and that particular land is where it happens. Over time, individuals and groups both preserve and transform the land they inhabit. The best stewards balance these activities in a productive, sustainable way. Think of Armenian Artsakh before 2020. The land had churches and stone carvings, roads and more that Armenians shaped in the land over centuries and millennia. But the land also had natural features: the cliffs of Shushi, the rivers, the fields, the mountains and hills. The natural and the human made functioned together as the space in which Artsakh Armenian life thrived. It was through the land — in its common areas, on its roads, in its churches, in its apartment buildings — that Artsakh Armenians bonded to other Artsakh Armenians to build and maintain a society, a culture and a community. Groups whose land has been taken or transformed might make heroic efforts to build new communities and identities in new places, but whatever they build will never be what was lost. Cosmopolitan and wealthy scholars and politicians might condescend to, even mock, those who hold on to a sense of lost home and the fading hope to go back despite the impossibility of true return. Those true people, however, have understood something that the scholars and politicians are incapable of grasping through their commodified worldviews, that this land is not that land, that which land you are on actually matters. Land is given meaning and made sacred not through superstition or premodern naivete but through a capacity to genuinely live in the world and to invest that world with meaning, even as that world — that land — invests the lives of the human beings upon it with meaning. Land is identity, and the expulsion from land, the permanent displacement from it or its transformation into something different is the genocidal destruction of identity. There is no way to “fix” this. Were Armenians to gain the right to return to Artsakh, they would return to a violently, genocidally transformed land, where both churches and natural features have been destroyed. Even returning, they would not be able to truly return home, because that home doesn’t exist. Even if Israel stopped its genocidal destruction of Gaza and left Palestinians there alone long enough so that they might build something in the place of their leveled society, the moans of the dead children would still echo to those who lived in new buildings on new streets. It would always be the second Gaza that, as much as it would be the place to live for surviving Palestinians, would likewise be the grave marker of all who died and suffered and of the old Gaza itself. Rohingya might one day be granted Burmese citizenship and allowed to go back to the ancestral lands they have been expelled from, but they will forever be unable to see their lives in their old homeland as provisional and vulnerable, while the echoes of the cries of those girls and women raped and the horrifying invective of their rapists sound through the trees at night as an irrepressible reminder. For Black Sudanese, even the places they have been displaced to are sites of genocide so that there is no return home and no home to try to construct. They are people for whom genocide is a denial of home in all possible ways. This essay is not written out of despair or cynicism. It might appear to be a testimony to the futility of addressing genocide and thus to be a call to inaction. It is intended to be quite the opposite. In making clear that genocide destroys home and identity, it demonstrates compellingly that the only solution to genocide is prevention. Humanity should never allow genocide to expel people from home and to destroy home. We live, of course, in the real world, the world in which genocide continues at the same rate in the current century as it did in the 20th and the 19th and the 18th. As much as prevention is the only solution to the problem of genocide, that does not mean that we should not call for action on behalf of those groups whose homes genocide has destroyed and/or stolen. A corollary of the argument that because home is essential and is destroyed through genocide, genocide should be prevented is that, where genocide has not been prevented, the world community, and especially the perpetrators, have an undeniable, unabridgeable obligation to restore as much as is in their power to the place of those targeted. Yes, Armenian Artsakh will never exist as it once was, but Artsakh Armenians have an absolute right to return to their homeland and to be provided the resources to build a new home space and the political independence to make it genuinely their home. Gazan Palestinians have an absolute right to the end of violence and to be provided the resources — including an end to Israeli threat and aggression and free statehood — necessary to build a new Gazan homeland. Rohingya have a right to return home, and instead of continuing under the domination of Myanmar’s government, to have the full independence they need to build a place of safety and dignity after the genocidal treatment by Myanmar. And Black Sudanese deserve a return to their place and independence from both Sudan and South Sudan, neither of which can be trusted to protect and nurture their place of home. Native Americans, in what is today the United States, deserve their lands and their right to live on them in the meaningful ways their ancestors did, though of course that means building new places and spaces and ways of interacting with them. And, perhaps, if genocidal land thievery and destruction are no longer tolerated by the world community, we will in fact have found a route toward genocide prevention.

Home is where the genocide was

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Henry Theriault

This story is FREE for you...

Henry Theriault

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