Music and the Armenian Diaspora: Searching for Home in Exile by Sylvia Angelique Alajaji (review)

In May 2015 I joined several hundred Circassians in the Turkish city Kayseri for their annual ‘genocide day’ commemoration. The genocide in question—there are the usual debates about the term—took place in the mid-1860s. In the wake of a comprehensive defeat of the legendary Dagestani warrior Imam Shamyl in 1859, Russia engaged in a campaign of destruction and deportation, marking a definitive stage in its conquest of the Caucasus. At this point vast numbers of Circassians were exiled to Anatolia and beyond, and Abkhazian Muslims were expelled shortly after. The preservation and subsequent reconstruction of their cultural identities in the Ottoman world was a long, arduous, and defensive process. But it was driven throughout by a powerful sense of that original injustice. The imperative was to counter the injustice through the reconstitution of an ethnic memory. Preserving the culture—the cultural nation—was a political enterprise from the start.

It is hard not to be struck by the parallel with Armenian histories, albeit with oppressors (Turkey and Russia) and faiths (Christian and Muslim) standing in something like an inverse relation. There are similar stories to tell about the nation-defining role of the genocides, especially in the light of non-recognition by respective perpetrators, about the ambivalence that attaches itself to concepts of home(s) and of return (more recently, the Internet has transformed the latter concept), about the key roles of language and music in validating the diasporic nation, about the ‘second generation’ effect beloved of exile studies more generally, and about an internal east–west division—with associated dialects—within the respective national communities. Even the outsider characterization of femininity constitutes a shared narrative. Naturally there are differences. Despite their best efforts, Circassians in diaspora arguably lost the battle for language, and partly for this reason music and dance have assumed primary significance in defining their culture, albeit in a homogenized form that can rather easily fall prey to exoticist readings by host communities. In comparison, as Sylvia Angelique Alajaji makes clear in her book, the Armenians, and especially the Lebanese Armenians, secured the language and quickly harnessed it to the national cause. Another crucial difference is that the entire world knows about the Armenian genocide, while the Circassian story struggles to be heard, as does, incidentally, the story of the Crimean Tatars, to cite another viable comparator. There is an asymmetry of visibility, and we may well ask why.

The history of Armenian people might be illuminated in yet other ways by adopting a contextual approach. Consider their position within the Ottoman Empire. Alajaji has a chapter on this, and very instructive it is, notably on the iconic figure Komitas Vartabed and on the related construction of a discourse about ‘Armenianness’ in music (her Frigyesi-inspired comparison with Bartók is helpful up to a point, but in the end diminishes Bartók by simplifying his relation to traditional music; Adorno is still the best guide here). But when we widen the lens a little and look at other ethnic and confessional communities, a fuller picture emerges. One obvious comparator is the Greek community, though what constitutes ‘Greek’ here may also be a question. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries both Greek and Armenian communities (but especially Greek) had considerable status in cities like Trabzon, and that included a European orientation in education and cultural life. Then, following their respective displacements, both communities had marked success in nationalizing and then promoting (notably in the USA) a repertory that belonged centrally to a pan-Ottoman fasıl tradition; Alajaji gives us chapter and verse in relation to kef music in New York. Strikingly, in both cases this very process generated a contrary narrative of authenticity, making the polemical sparks fly. But again there are invisibles in this tale of an Ottoman ecumene and its aftermath. What of the Laz people, for...