Yeah, Sometimes I Cry in Armenia, & It Is Amazing
I’m standing in the doorway of some shop on Koryun Street, facing the corner like a school kid, and I’m crying. A minute ago, I was having a good time next door at a small, cool bar. Then I saw an old woman appear in the kitchen window. When I asked about her, I was told she’s a lovely woman and even steps out to dance to the DJ sometimes. No doubt she is grateful to have a job and is treated well by her employers. Nonetheless, I was suddenly overcome by emotions I could not quite understand. And as I felt tears inexplicably coming on, I became well aware that I was at a bar in a country I’d moved to less than 48 hours ago—probably not the best moment to grapple with complex emotions. But there they were anyway, out of the blue, as though being pulled up from a deep well that I never knew was there. I grabbed a cigarette, walked out for some air, and cried in that doorway.
*
Although I was born in the US, I was raised with story after story about life under Stalin, how thousands of Armenians repatriated to Soviet Armenia in the 1930s and 40s with hopes of a new future only to be stripped of whatever assets they brought with them, and how a number of them were just sent straight to Siberia without even setting foot in Armenia. One of those families was my mother’s. They were not sent to Siberia physically, but they were sent there psychologically over and over. My grandfather was interrogated a few times because he refused to join the Communist Party and would not snitch on his neighbors for things they had not done. If they had not escaped when they did, surely their time would have come. Some random night, black cars were going to pull up to their building, men were going to bang on the door, storm in, and take away a young man, his wife, and their four children. And that would be that. Their neighbors would shake in terror while trying to calm their own frightened children, and then it would be over. The building would grow uneasily quiet again. Another morning would arrive as though nothing had happened.
As a teenager, I remember one evening when my mother said it so casually, so matter-of-factly. For sure, we were going to be among the next group sent away. It hit me like a cold stone, rattling me to the core. Here was this woman, my mother, washing dishes in the kitchen while telling me that her and her entire family could have just as easily starved to death in some Siberian prison camp instead of making it to Boston, Massachusetts, to these familiar streets, our neighborhood, our house, and me. If they had been sent away, then I would have been sent away, my cousins would have been sent away, their newborn babies would have been sent away. The savage machinery of politics and power would have easily and smugly erased my family’s future, just as it did to millions, and just as it continues to do in so many places.
That night, my mom settled in to watch some program on TV with my dad and I half-heartedly did my homework while listening to The Smiths. But the whole time I was wrestling with this idea: something that is could quite suddenly not be, or could even have never been at all. It made me queasy, I couldn’t sleep, and at school the next day I felt more different and alienated from the other kids than usual. The coordinates of their lives seemed perfectly placed and preordained, as though of course they were supposed to be here doing what they were doing, going to the homes they were of course supposed to have, and then on to the futures that were all ready and waiting for them. I was the impostor–an American kid drinking chocolate milk, hating math class, and thinking about dying his hair blue, but secretly in this life on some temporary pass from the gods. A paperwork error.
*
Crying is not something I do well with. For a long time, I would have rather stuck a fork in my eye than cry in front of anyone. I did a little better with others crying because it allowed me to be empathetic and strong for them—something I was good at from a young age— while being able to keep a cool demeanor and not show any cracks of my own. This of course meant that I was often a fraud, not intentionally, but contextually. When your childhood lacks confident, unquestioning love, when you are always seen conditionally rather than as a whole separate person, then you are often in a bubble of pain, aloneness, and doubt. And the bubble is nothing but your parents’ projections and unresolved issues. But you’re a shy little kid, so there’s no way for you to know that. You take that bubble and call it your world, and if that is your world, you then assume that it must not want anything to do with you because you are unworthy and a failure. You suppress your talents and aspirations, you punch and choke your self and settle into a normalcy of self-hatred and paralysis. Then you’re diagnosed with PTSD and spend a long time working on coming out of the coma that was your life for at least 25 years.
Recently, after much brutal hard work, my eyes started blinking again, taking in the sky’s light. Every day for me is a thing of joy, melancholia, and possibility, all coexisting peacefully because one cannot be without the other. I could not reclaim my sense of self without accepting that life is a mess of exquisite beauty. We insult it when we don’t allow ourselves to feel deeply, honestly, and with compassion.
As with anyone who comes out of a coma, crying could not be helped at first. Because I’d been so uncomfortable with it for so long, it subconsciously made me want to find a context in which I could channel and explore all the emotions banging at my door. It’s part of the reason I moved to Armenia, a place that has, like me, recently come out of a long, troubled slumber—a slumber that contains my family’s story and the stories of countless others.
*
It’s a few days later now, and I’m still not certain exactly what I was crying about on Koryun Street. I’m not sure it’s possible or even important to figure out a specific reason. It has something to do with the absurdity and inescapability of history. The ways in which time bats us around, lays its haphazard judgments and fates on us, colonizes our youth, then gives us some job working in a kitchen while a new generation dances late into the night. Two worlds seemingly out of sync—one catching smudged glimpses in the rearview mirror, one looking at the horizon hungrily, neither one guilty nor innocent.
The old woman I saw working in that kitchen was carrying parts of my mother and grandmother in her, my aunts and family friends, and all the women and men who suffered unimaginably in this place not too long ago, and the many who continue to suffer. Her hands were my mother’s hands back in our kitchen in Boston. They are the hands of thousands. And because suffering in the world continues, those hands also continue, quietly trying to make their way in the darkness. To forget or ignore that is to forget or ignore parts of who we are.
I am not in Armenia to live in a bubble. It is the responsibility of all diasporan Armenians who visit or live here to acknowledge and grapple with the stark contrast between energetic, modern downtown Yerevan and the poverty in the rest of the country. And one must view that contrast with compassion and humility rather than patronizing righteousness. Although I hope teaching at the American University will benefit my students, I am more aware of the fact that the people of Armenia will teach me much more than I will teach them. Most of them endure harsh, bitter days that the rest of us can only imagine. And they do so with grit, dignity, humor, and intelligence. I am humbled daily.
My family’s stories have haunted and shaped me. They have influenced how I view society, how I treat others, and how I try to remember that the world does not revolve around me. I refuse to pretend that things are not what they are. So yeah, I guess sometimes I’m going to cry in Armenia. It may not be the easiest or most fun way to live, but it’s one of the healthiest, most alive things I’ve done in my life. Every day I listen carefully for the lulling, creaking sound of fragments being pulled out of the well, and I tearfully rejoice.