At Home in Diaspora: Armenians in America

Diaspora 3:2 1994 At Home in Diaspora: Armenians in America Susan Pattie University College, London Armenian-Americans: From Being to Feeling Armenian. Anny Bakalian. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993. "Amen degh Hye ga."1 Armenians delight in telling each other jokes, stories, and tales of woe set in both busy and forsaken points ofthe globe, all punctuated with these words: "There are Armenians everywhere." They take a particular pleasure in encountering other Armenians by chance and recognizing each other for what they are, due to accidentally overhearing an exchange in their "secret" language —for Armenians will loudly share gossip and intimate thoughts in very public spaces, confident that no one will understand them. The key phrase concerning Armenian dispersion and omnipresence is equivocal: it conveys pleasure at meeting a new Armenian , but often and at the same time also dismay that both parties should be so far from home, from the fatherland. What or where is "home" now for Armenians? Armstrong describes the Armenians as an "archetypal diaspora," having a "sacral myth" that sustains their collectivity. The myth and more informal constructions of connectedness have linked the Armenians, who, like the Jews, have survived many centuries ofdispersion and living among other peoples. Today some 6-7 million are spread among the Republic of Armenia (3.5 million), the rest of the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, the United States, Canada, South America, Europe, and Australia—"everywhere." Even before the recent independence of Armenia, the nature and location of "home" had been the subject of argument and debate as the emphasis shifted from the specifics ofthe present or past residence offamily and kin, to the ideal national borders and to an "imagined community" (Anderson). "Home," "homeland," "the old country," "diaspora," are at times overlapping, sometimes antagonistic terms; they have different implications and point toward varying interpretations of experience, as well as changing connections between place and culture. Armenians around the diaspora live in multiethnic states and multicultural societies, often crossing cultural borders both within and be- 186 Diaspora 3:2 1994 tween countries. Thus, the concept of "home" for many is both mobile and nomadic, more synonymous with family than a particular place. Edward Relph has noted that "places are defined less by unique locations, landscape, and communities than by the focusing of experiences and intentions onto particular settings" (141). The experience ofplace, whether actually lived in by the present generation or known only through transmitted memory, is always about people and their relationships as well as about the physical surroundings . A diasporan place can be important because ofthe people who were, are, or could be there; diaspora is "place" on a large scale, encompassing a wider range of relationships, a grander network of known and possibly knowable people. In Armenian-Americans: From Being to Feeling Armenian, Anny Bakalian explores both shared and contested notions ofhome, building a complex picture of the associations of identity and place. She surveys a variety ofunderstandings between generations and across different waves of immigration to the United States. While some accept the increasing permanence of diaspora, others advocate a nationalism that spans international borders and is directed by a network of social and political organizations that are inspired by the goal of maintaining at least the ideal of a "nation in diaspora" and, optimally, by the goal of returning to a homeland. Bakalian also discusses the changing nature of Armenian ethnicity in the United States and the tension between formal and informal aspects ofidentity , contending that later generations tend toward a symbolic, "side-stream" ethnicity. Most of the people in this study see the United States as a permanent place of abode, and many describe it, in positive terms, as "home." But among these same people a large number also speak of potent links with another place, a "homeland" (the Republic ofArmenia, or historic Armenia, or the specific village or town that the family left or from which it was forced to flee generations ago); Bakalian includes diverse material and opinions. New and rapidly changing associations of identity and place begin , in Bakalian's story, in the period between 1880 and 1914—the time of the great labor migrations to America; the...