By Nareg Seferian
I was recently quite moved by one of the fantastic posts of the Armenian Museum of America’s Sound Archive series. It featured the voice of Karnig Kuludjian from 1945. A genocide survivor who ended up in the Chicago area, Kuludjian expresses confidence on the disc now online that the war in Europe would soon come to an end in favor of the Allies and the boys would return home. It is a fun recording, quite organic, made at home — a rarity for the era. You can hear the muffled voices of people in the background, laughing at Kuludjian’s amusing observations. The disc becomes even more compelling with a wonderful à propos song: Gharib Akhper, a work addressed to, roughly, a brother in exile, often framed as brothers in arms, expressing hope that they will come back. It is a song I have heard my father sing many times around many tables. So, I got a good sense of what that gathering in Chicago eighty years and more ago must have been like — beautiful, charming, melancholic.
The post offers an explanation of the term gharib — an exile, a wanderer, an emigrant. That category has featured vividly in Armenian life and times over the past few centuries. Even before the genocide, the Armenian Diaspora existed for a thousand years or so. Many Armenians have moved away from their communities for economic opportunity, following violence, for the sake of curiosity or adventure, and many other reasons. The phenomenon of the gharib also has garod tied to it — that is, a yearning. The gharib may be an economic migrant, but he (in art and literature, almost always male) would have preferred living and working at home, being near his loved ones. Many Armenian poems and stories display this theme of the lonely gharib in a far-off land, longing for home. (One remarkable modern manifestation of that tradition are the musical renditions of the works by the medieval poet, artist, and clergyman Mgrdich Naghash by John Hodian and the Naghash Ensemble, reflecting yet again the enduring nature of being a gharib and expressing garod in Armenian life.)
It is a thought-provoking and moving category as such, and something that personally resonates with me. Indeed, I, unfortunately, sound too self-centred — the status of being a gharib has probably applied to most Armenians in the 20th century, and into the 21st. I would like to invite the consideration of some nuance along these lines, mainly tackling the dimension of identity and degrees of belonging to a place. Many Armenians in the West live in what some scholars call “second diaspora” or “second-generation diaspora.” That is to say, they have moved more than once in the recent past. Most of the survivors of the Armenian Genocide were driven away from their homes and communities where they had lived for generations, centuries, and perhaps even millennia. To put it another way, they were dispossessed of their long-standing geographies and had to accommodate themselves in new ones. That was a violent exile creating hundreds of thousands of gharibs, forever driven apart, their garods never to be fulfilled as a “first diaspora,” so to speak.
My great-grandparents were among them. Their children and children’s children found new homes and communities in the Middle East. In the decades that followed, for a variety of reasons, many of them ended up in the West — a “second diaspora,” yet another new geography, though not always the result of a violent deprivation of one’s long-standing home. Surely the generation of my parents had meaningful senses of identity as Syrians, Lebanese, Egyptians, Iraqis, Jordanians, or otherwise. Becoming American, Canadian, Brazilian, Australian, or something else could not erase their past. Still, I know more than one person in Boston who would have gladly stayed on in Beirut had the war not caused such immense upheaval in Lebanon. I would say that that is a different kind of gharib status than the lonely, nostalgic migrants of old or the survivors of genocide. It is painful in its own way. But that layering of identity becomes entangled with numerous related phenomena — including modern ones, such as legal citizenship — which makes it problematic to categorize directly as gharib in the older sense.
Armenians from Armenia who have moved elsewhere for various reasons might in some sense or other consider themselves gharibs. (Seasonal workers who spend part of the year in Russia or elsewhere often use the term khopan to describe their travels.) But they have the luxury of regular communication and connection with the country — another modern facet that changes the intensity and the directionality of the garod. Armenians from Artsakh, meanwhile, display the tragic, classical dimension of being violently driven away from a long-standing geography. At the same time, they have access to an identity and belonging with a country and government that offers, again, multiple layers of entanglements to tease out. Some of our brothers and sisters from Artsakh choose to live in and become full citizens of the Republic of Armenia, some do not — yet again, for a variety of reasons.
