I have always felt at home in the Middle East. In my stays
and travels in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Turkey, the
architecture of daily life seems strangely but deeply familiar to me—an
American.
My father brought me up to mock anything
that came from New Jersey. My father is a third-generation
Armenian-/Norwegian-American from New Jersey.
Tomorrow I
travel to that very state of New Jersey for a reunion of a branch of my
Armenian-American family that I have never met. From the little I know of them
they exhibit the crazy that runs in my family as well as the language
brilliance.
I just
finished making a slide show of my December 2010 trip to Turkey. It made me
long to drink tea and to discuss politics and social issues and to make feeble
and dedicated statements in a language that my mouth isn’t familiar with. It made me miss getting to know alleys with no official name that are barely big enough to fit two but you call them your neighborhood. It made
me remember all the dear moments with the close friend with whom I made the
trip.
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| Alleys of the Old City of Dikranagerd (Diyarbakir) |
It is after midnight as I write this, and the shades of the intellectual and the personal blend together like the pigment of pastels. In my Arabic class I have just learned that the word in Arabic for “nostalgia” has the same root as the word for “a mother’s tenderness.”
While I was in Turkey, I began a project about longing for an Armenian family, particularly the Armenian great-grandmother that I was named for but never got to know. My Armenian identity is colored by a longing for the grandmother’s tenderness that my father received and a fervent wish to understand her. It is my destiny to bring her name into the future. Making generations is a form of memetics. I hope that my family that I meet tomorrow will help me to better understand what I am made of. Source of Creation, give me a tender and inquisitive heart.
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| Landscape of the Armenian Homeland, Eastern Turkey |
