Forget Me Not BY Amelia Wyckoff ILLUSTRATION Jessy Minker DESIGN Daniel Navratil
My grandma was having an allergic reaction to the incense. Tears streamed down her face while the rest of us surreptitiously scanned the room, trying to calculate our next move. Do we kneel to pray or stand up to sing? It was a 50/50 shot. I kept crossing myself wrong— was it the left or the right shoulder first? My grandma passed me a hymnal, and I stared at the script through the smoke until all the letters turned into U’s. “Sing, Anahid.” The music was beautiful, but I didn’t understand a word. We only make the 45 minute drive to Armenian church for special occasions: Christenings, deaths, the occasional Easter. My grandparents, although they aren’t Orthodox by faith, go fairly frequently. My grandfather takes Armenian lessons in the church basement from the priest who baptized me. He is the only one who can speak to my grandma in her native language, Western Armenian. My grandmother’s parents fled Constantinople (now Istanbul) and Syria during the genocide in 1915. They raised her and her sister in Washington Heights, New York. My grandmother didn’t teach my mother Armenian, but she did teach her how to make kourabia and pilaf for the Easter table. In fourth grade, we had to reenact the story of how our families came to America. I wrapped a sheet around me in a makeshift taraz and told the class how I hid under dead bodies in the desert, got on a boat to Cairo, and arrived in New York (and, like every “diary of an immigrant” tale we read, stared wistfully at the Statue of Liberty as my boat came to shore). Armenia was split between two empires in the 1st century, and my grandmother’s country of origin, Western Armenia, is now eastern Turkey. When my grandparents visited Armenia in 2012, my grandmother didn’t understand the Eastern language. The cuisine tasted nothing like the Mediterranean food my grandmother used to cook for Christmas Eve. She expressed her shock and confusion over the phone, but she cried at every genocide memorial they visited. She felt at home in a shared tragic history. Our Armenian identity, therefore, was obsessed with an event that had sought to erase it. Stories of struggle and survival created my sense of ethnicity. My family had assimilated, but we mourned our people and preserved our persecution in hallowed memory. On July 12, 2020, the Armenian and Azerbaijani armed forces clashed on the state border, near the Tavush Province of Armenia and the Tovuz District of Azerbaijan. The head of the Foreign Policy Department of Azerbaijan’s presidential administration and the Armenian Foreign Minister both claimed that the clashes were an attempt to pressure the other side “on the question of Nagorno-Karabakh.” Nagorno-Karabakh is a historically contested breakaway state within the internationally recognized borders of Azerbaijan. It is known by 70 percent of its residents and Armenians generally as Artsakh, an ancient name derived from a time when the region was a part of the Armenian Kingdom. I will be referring to it as Artsakh in modern contexts but using its regional name, Karabakh, when discussing its history. On November 10, Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan agreed to end the war, removing Armenian troops from Artsakh. Some Armenians protested, storming parliament and calling for Pashinyan’s resignation. The violence in Artsakh has killed and displaced Armenian civilians, but citizens and diasporans alike grieved the ceasefire. Artsakh has become a symbol of self-preservation
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for Armenians who remember the 1915 genocide, when 1.5 million Armenians were killed by the Young Turks, a revolutionary party in the Ottoman Empire. The Turkish government continues to deny that the slaughter took place, and diasporans have fought for recognition since fleeing their homes. Rhetoric surrounding the current conflict in Artsakh has invoked vast histories of ancient settlement and Armenian persecution. Diasporans have taken to Instagram to document anti-Armenian quotes from Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, and Recep Erdoğan, the Turkish president. For many diasporans, Erdoğan and Aliyev’s rhetoric reopens old wounds. In their eyes, the war in Artsakh is a continuation of a genocide that never really ended. However, modern day Azerbaijan and Turkey are not the direct descendants of the Ottoman Empire: The Soviet Union and its collapse has significantly shaped the geopolitics of the Caucasus region. The USSR assigned NagornoKarabakh to Azerbaijan in 1923. The country has maintained their control of the region throughout history, but the dispute hasn’t ended. In 2020, Azerbaijan and Armenia have once again gone to war. Reducing this war to Pan-Turkism is an oversimplification, but Turkish nationalist language motivates the diaspora to act. At my dinner table, we regularly condemn the same statements that these posts quote. My grandmother is not from Artsakh, but this conflict has illuminated how myself and many members of the diaspora engage with Armenian nationalism. +++ Azerbaijani forces launched an artillery attack against Stepanakert, the capital of Artsakh, this September. An Armenian friend’s Instagram story implored me to “swipe thru!!!!” a slideshow from the New Zealand based, catch-all social justice account @shityoushouldcareabout entitled, “Understanding the conflict between: Armenia and Azerbaijan,” with information provided by the Armenia Support Fund. Its caption read: “It’s a complex situation .” Complex is a vast understatement, and, unsurprisingly, the post didn’t do much to clear it up. For months since then, ArmenianAmericans have flooded Instagram with infographics to publicize what they see as the second genocide of Armenians. I’ve seen posts describing intergenerational trauma and explaining diasporic guilt. There are soldiers and civilians dying, important churches being destroyed, and war crimes being committed— Genocide Watch even issued a Genocide Emergency Alert. The current situation in Artsakh is radically different from that of 1915, and yet many Armenians are experiencing and publicizing it as déjà vu. Born into the words “Never Forget,” those fighting persecution in the 21st century feel like they are fulfilling an ethnic prophecy that began with the desert massacres in Western Armenia over 100 years ago. One Armenian tweeted, “As the great granddaughter of genocide survivors, I never thought I would live to see history repeat itself. Let this post serve as a record.” Diasporans have taken to the streets, pointed megaphones at the New York Times, and shut down highways in Los Angeles to call for an end to United States aid to Azerbaijan. These demonstrations began after the Black Lives Matter movement mobilized across America, with Armenian diasporans capitalizing on the momentum behind social change. The posts I saw on social media ranged from small businesses donating their proceeds, to personal accounts of family
members in Armenia, to calculated infographics full of social justice buzzwords. I had been thrilled to share posts about Armenian culture, but I grew increasingly uncomfortable as Armenian-American activists began positioning themselves as part of a persecuted minority. The Indy talked to Sarine Zeitlian, an Armenian activist from New York, about her social media strategy. “I began posting on Instagram about Black Lives Matter during the surge of support this summer. Posting then almost became a trend, which of course isn’t ideal, but helped to spread awareness,” she said. “When the conflict in Artsakh got worse, I thought if we used social media like they had, we could get more support than we’ve had before.” Zeitlian’s page now focuses solely on Artsakh. Kooyrigs, an organization and Instagram page with upwards of 20,000 followers dedicated to “providing resources to Armenian women around the world,” seemed to think the same way. On October 3, they posted a red square with the text “TEXT PASSAGE TO 52-886 #PEACEFORARMENIANS” superimposed. The caption read, “An extremely effective red square. Do it now, Armenian existence is at stake.” The square echoed the black square of earlier this summer, which flooded the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag and social media with blank images instead of resources. This red square at once attempted to imitate the Black Lives Matter movement and modeled itself on a trend that epitomized performativity. Like the aesthetically pleasing infographics on Artsakh I had read in July, these posts seemed to be getting attention and little else. If you texted the number, you’d be taken to a petition to urge Congress to “denounce Azeri and Turkish aggression.” I signed it without really knowing what that meant. Several Armenians have further misused social justice rhetoric for their own purposes by appropriating claims to Indigeneity in order to advance their quest for recognition. A post widely circulated by Armenians on Indigenous People’s Day read, “I will always unapologetically declare that Armenians are an Indigenous group from West Asia because the only reason that is doubted today is because of our genocide, removal, occupation, subsequent denial, and historical revisionism. We have lived there since time immemorial.” That post included slides likening the assimilation of Armenian women to the forced conversion of Indigenous people into white settler society in the US. Although the region has changed hands throughout history, claiming the contemporary discourse of Indigeneity allows Armenian activists to unequivocally claim the Karabakh region. Using Indigenous People’s Day to lament Artsakh feels like a convenient play for national attention. For diasporans, the rhetoric of genocide and Indigeneity are strategic tools, problematically feeding off of the momentum created by the Black Lives Matter movement. These claims are rooted in a historic loss of ethnic identity for diasporans in America. Sophia Armen, an Armenian-American activist, writes, “So much of Armenian diasporic literature and political theory is about anti-assimilation as a response to ongoing anxieties about erasure, the driving force of genocide. Our nationalism, it means something different than the nationalism of colonial powers. It quite literally means nation—a body of people of which one is a part, a collective belonging that is a connection to land and community beyond borders, and the struggle of self-determination over our own lives. ”
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