On the streets of Yerevan, the capital and largest city of Armenia, where Muscovites have opened trendy coffee shops that sell not the dark, thick brew of Armenian soorj but the creamy confections of specialty coffees, ignorance does not free one from the past, and running away does not save anyone. Only by turning around and facing the horrors can the ghosts be laid to rest, as Elvina Valieva argues.
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Leila opens her colorful book about Komitas, which we bought next to the National Gallery in Yerevan. The press of the button is followed by the acapella singing, so beautiful but so short, mere 20 seconds. Still not satisfied, Leila presses the button again and again, resting her head on the pages. They show a bright background with mountains, horses and country dances contrasted with a man in a gloomy monk’s habit. Colorful images are sanitizing Komitas to a child of not yet two, his reimagined folk tunes and children’s choir pieces are just a fraction of what he’s famous for, among the rest: his liturgical pieces, ethnomusicology and attributed act of single-handedly creating the Armenian National Music School.
An orphaned boy, he was raised by the church in the old capital of Echmiadzin, a quaint and quintessentially Armenian place. Yet his music is at home here in Berlin, where he himself studied and later toured with his choir. It fills my living room as my daughter points at horses and names them in Russian: конь.
It will be years before she learns that the man from her children’s book has died in a mental hospital, suffering tremendously. His suffering is caused by what he survived, what he saw others suffer, and what he ultimately couldn’t forget in the early days of what is now known as the Armenian Genocide at the hands of the Ottomans. A project so efficient that it became a blueprint for the Holocaust and later genocides. I did not know who Komitas was when I bought the book. In fact, I knew so little then, but this is the kind of legacy I chose for myself when I decided to visit Armenia, and this is the legacy my daughter has no say in inheriting in time.
Nature of inheritance
My first mental reference to inheritance is, ironically, Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, who, in the very first lines of the novel of the same name, rushes to visit his ailing uncle, who conveniently dies before the nephew arrives and leaves him his considerable estate. Soon after, we learn that when Onegin’s own father died, he, ever the pragmatist, refused his inheritance because it consisted mostly of debt and was sure to cause the young man more trouble than good. This act, though legally acceptable, would certainly tarnish his reputation somewhat for not attempting to save his father’s honor and preserve the family home. Many of us would like to follow his example, rushing to get what we want and shrugging off the burden, but I have learned that things do not work that way.
While I have two different legal and religious traditions of wealth distribution to rely on, I know more about the 19th century Russian aristocratic way of life. Frankly, there was no wealth to distribute among the people whose DNA I share and propagate. My grandparents were proudly working class, not an insignificant achievement for those who survived collectivization, famine and war again and again. They were only the most fortunate in the long line of people who barely made it, who survived just long enough to be born and, if they are lucky, to raise another generation of survivors; I have not and do not expect to inherit any material possessions. I count among my treasures a handful of souvenirs given to me by my grandmother and photographs of people no living person can name.
Price of the legacy
And here in this essay I am quoting not Sayat-Nova or Qol Şärif, but Pushkin, a sun of Russian literature, another mighty creator, this time of a Russian language as it exists today. Yet he and I have more in common than the shared complexity of postcolonial concerns. His face is so distinctly non-Slavic, just another example of those faces so often seen on posters and T-shirts: Tsoi, Bodrov, even Lenin. A striking face blindness overcomes many who have inherited the belief that one can become Russian enough, overcome the obstacle of a foreign face like a shameful past or a youthful mistake, just as Pushkin’s grandfather and his brood of sons, generals, admirals, and captains became more than Peter the Great’s Moors once they won enough battles for their emperors and empresses.
This forces me to claim Pushkin as my own inheritance at his best, when he supported women’s autonomy of action, and at his worst, with his contemptuous disdain for the Polish independence movement. I will pass this contradiction on to my Polish daughter, who has heard Pushkin’s poetry since she was born. My mother and I, like Gvidon and his own mother, sailed the sea in a barrel, and the rise and fall of Pushkin’s lines lulled me in the silence of our Sundays together, when the sun bathed us through the windows on short winter afternoons.
In the aftermath of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, I was separated from my Armenian biological father early on and didn’t meet him until I was a grown woman, just like Gvidon, who, unlike me, took hours, not years, to grow to his full height. My mother and I became war refugees, as once again Armenian children like me had to be taken to safety by their caretakers. So last year I decided to fly to visit him, my half siblings and my grandmother. Maybe I just wanted to see the famous views of Mount Ararat for myself.
Claiming and being claimed
I walked the streets of Yerevan, where Muscovites have opened trendy coffee shops, selling not the dark and thick brew of Armenian soorj, but the creamy confections of specialty coffees, and since I spoke the same language, I felt the need to make a distinction between us. I was not here by accident, I was here by choice, I wanted to see what it was like to be Armenian and decide for myself if this was something I could do. And though I spoke Russian and not Armenian, it was not my fault, there was simply no one around to teach me, I did not reject the gift of my mother tongue, it was just another inheritance stolen from me, like the land of my ancestors collectivized or taken by a foreign power, like the names of people in family albums.
Later, as we climbed the hill to see the famous Sevan Monastery, we stopped to buy gata from a woman who claimed it was the best gata in Armenia, a claim we’ll hear again and again as we travel the country. She squinted one eye at me before asking if I was Armenian, something in my white passing face giving me away to her knowing eye. I said my father was Armenian, and she said that made me fully Armenian. “Then what about my daughter?” I asked laughing, pointing to a toddler on her father’s back in a baby carrier. She was carried around like a princess, and her every wish for a snack or a sip of water was quickly granted. She is also fully Armenian, the woman said earnestly. Her father came to Sevan, so now he’s one of us.
That’s when the tables were turned, and not only was I claiming what was rightfully mine, but I and my own child were being claimed. We were integrated into a complex set of familial and geographical relationships and became part of a proud tradition of diaspora, which is nothing unusual in our story. We think of inheritance as something passive, but it’s quite capable of capturing, hunting, and haunting those who try to escape it.
“Post-memory”
Since Marianne Hirsch introduced the often-criticized term “post-memory” to the world, there have been many studies that prove its tangible existence. Not knowing does not free you from the past, and running away does not save anyone. In fact, it’s often only by turning around and facing the horrors that the ghosts can be put to rest. In this way, I unwittingly perpetuate the traumas of people whose names I do not know, as the Caucasian knot tightens and the war in Artsakh continues. The very war that began before I was born and continues to this day, the images of people leaving their homes on foot trigger memories of genocide and the pain of displacement and injury. My father’s family is originally from this land and it could have been me walking with my then newborn child in my arms.
As I write this, Azerbaijan and Armenia are debating the terms of a peace treaty, and I am sure that the streets of my father’s hometown are filled with a mixture of resentment, hope, and coffee fumes. At the same time, Tatars, Bashkirs, and Chuvash, along with other minorities, are dying in disproportionate numbers in Ukraine in the name of ‘the Russian world’, some of whom call themselves Russians, while those same Russians have to check to see if they need a passport to travel to the exotic lands of Tatarstan, which are safely within the borders of the Russian Federation.
What I will pass on
In both of my cultures, women were excluded from inheritance, yet here I am presented with such riches: I come from the land as old as writing, where Christianity was adopted before Constantine, while people who would become my maternal ancestors built their first cities on the banks of the Idel. Kingdoms rose and fell, the great Golden Horde encompassed both lands of my people and they outlasted it, to be united under the same ruler centuries later when another empire took over. I have much to be proud of, but I owe my existence to the fate of being conquered, of having to flee again and again to survive, of clinging to my children and what’s left of my home.
My daughter inherited the name of my great-grandmother, a woman who took her young daughters to Baku, which the Red Army bravely guarded because of the rich black blood of this land, an oil reserve capable of satisfying the young hunger of all the Soviet republics. There’s one more thing she will inherit, and what a simple lesson it is. Ask the Lipka Tatars of Belarus and Poland, or the Finnish diaspora, who preserve their language better than my Volga relatives. Ask the monks of San Lazzaro degli Armeni in Venice, or members of the Armenian-American community. When things get hard, you take what you can, you rebuild what you must, you heal, you look back, and you forget what you cannot hold on to. And then you thank the heavens for your survival and sacrifice a lamb (or a slab of tofu) as qurban or matagh, you share the meal with those around you, and you live on.