and the curse of bastirma
7. If you easily get pestered and aggravated over remarkably trivial
things but manage to stay composed when there is something
really grave to worry or panic about
8. If you have had (or are planning to have) a nose job
9. If you have a jar of Nutella in your refrigerator and a tav/a board
somewhere in your storeroom
10. If you have a cherished rug on the floor of your living room
11. If you can't help feeling sad when you dance to "Lorke Lorke,"
even if the melody is bouncy and you don't understand the lyrics 12. If gathering to eat fruit after each dinner is a deeply rooted habit
at your house and if your dad still peels oranges for you, no
matter what age you might have reached
13. If your relatives keep shoveling food into your mouth and do not
accept "I am full" as an answer
14. If the sound of duduk sends shivers down your spine and you
cannot help wondering how a flute made from an apricot tree
can cry so sadly
15. If deep inside you feel like there is always more about your past than you will ever be allowed to learn
Having given a "yes" to every single one of the questions, Armanoush scrolled down to learn her score:
0-3 points: Sorry dude, you must be an outsider.
4-8 points: You sound like an inside-outsider. Chances are you are
married to an Armenian.
9-12 points: Almost certainly you are an Armenian.
13-15 points: There's no doubt, you are a proud Armenian.
Armanoush smiled at the screen. And in that moment she grasped what she already knew. It was as if a secret gate had been unlatched in the depths of her brain, and before her mind could accommodate the thoughts gushing in, a wave of introspection rolled over her. She had to go there. That was what she sorely needed: a journey.
Because of her fragmented childhood, she had still not been able to find a sense of continuity and identity. She had to make a journey to her past to be able to start living her own life. As the weight of this new revelation dawned on her, it also motivated her to type a message, seemingly to everyone but in particular to Baron Baghdassarian:
The Janissary's Paradox is being torn between two clashing states of existence. On the one hand, the remnants of the past pile up-a womb of tenderness and sorrow, a sense of injustice and discrimination. On the other hand glimmers the promised future-a shelter decorated with the trimmings and trappings of success, a sense of safety like you have never had before, the comfort of joining the majority and finally being deemed normal.
Hello there Madame My-Exiled-Soul! Glad you are back. So nice to hear the poetess in you.
That was Baron Baghdassarian. Armanoush couldn't help rereading the last part aloud: so nice to hear the poetess in you. She lost her train of thought but only momentarily.
I think I can relate to the Janissary's Paradox. As the only child of resentfully divorced parents coming from different cultural backgrounds,
She paused with the discomfort of revealing her personal story, but the urge to carry on was too strong.
Being the only daughter of an Armenian father, he himself a child of survivors, and of a mother from Elizabethtown, Kentucky, I do know how it feels to be torn between opposite sides, unable to fully belong anywhere, constantly fluctuating between two states of existence.
To this day she had never written anything so personal and so direct to anyone in the group. Her heart pumping hard, she took a breather. What was Baron Baghdassarian going'to think about her now and would he write his true thoughts?
That must be hard. For most Armenians in the diaspora, Hai Dat is the sole psychological anchor that we have in order to sustain an identity. Your situation is different but ultimately we are all Americans and Armenians, that plurality is good as long as we do not lose our anchor.
That was Miserable-Coexistence, a housewife unhappily married to the editor-in-chief of a prominent literary journal in the Bay Area.
Plurality means the state of being more than one. But that was not the case with me. I've never been able to become an Armenian in the first place, Armanoush wrote, realizing she was on the brink of making a confession. I need to find my identity. You know what I've been secretly contemplating? Going to visit my family's house in Turkey. Grandma always talks about this gorgeous house in Istanbul. I'll go and see it with my own eyes. This is a journey into my family's past, as well as into my future. The Janissary's Paradox will haunt me unless I do something to discover my past.
Wait, wait, wait, Lady Peacock/Siramark typed in panic. What the hell do you think you are doing? Are you planning to go to Turkey on your own, did you take leave of your senses?
I can find connections. It's not that difficult.
How so Madame My-Exiled-Soul? Lady Peacock/Siramark insisted. How far do you think you can go with that name on your passport?
Why don't you instead directly walk into a police headquarters in Istanbul and get yourself nicely arrested! broke in Anti-Khavurma, a grad student in Near Eastern Studies at Columbia University.
Armanoush felt this could be the right moment to confess another fundamental truth of her life. Finding the right connections might not be that difficult for me since my mother is now married to a Turk.
There was an unsettling lull. For a full minute no one wrote anything back, so Armanoush continued.
His name is Mustafa, he is a geologist who works for a company in Arizona. He's a nice man, but he is completely disinterested in history and ever since he arrived in the USA, which is like twenty years ago, he has never been back home. He didn't even invite his family to the wedding. Something's fishy there but I don't know what. He just doesn't talk about that. But I know he has a large family in Istanbul. I asked him once what kind of people they were and he said: Oh, they are just ordinary people, like you and me.
He doesn't sound like the most sensitive man on earth-that-is, of course, if men can ever have feelings, barged in the Daughter of Sappho, a lesbian bartender who had recently found a job in a shabby reggae bar in Brooklyn.
He sure doesn't, Miserable-Coexistence added. Does he have a heart?
Oh, he does. He loves my mom, and my mom loves him, Armanoush replied. She realized she had for the first time recognized the love between her mother and stepfather, as if seeing them through a stranger's eyes. Anyway, I can stay with his family; after all I am his stepdaughter, I guess they will have to accept me as a guest. It's a puzzle to me how t will be received by ordinary Turks. A real Turkish family, not one of those Americanized academics.
What are you going to talk about with ordinary Turks? asked Lady Peacock/Siramark. Look, even the well-educated are either nationalist or ignorant. Do you think ordinary people will be interested in accepting historical truths? Do you think they are going to say: Oh yeah, we are sorry we massacred and deported you guys and then contentedly denied it all. Why do you want to get yourself in trouble?
I understand that. But you should try to understand me as well.
Armanoush felt a sudden surge of despondency. Disclosing one secret after another had triggered the feeling of being lonely in this huge world-something she always knew about but waited for the right moment to face. You guys were all born into the Armenian community and never had to prove you were one of them. Whereas I have been stuck on this threshold since the day I was born, constantly fluctuating between a proud but traumatized Armenian family and a hysterically antiArmenian mom. For me to be able to become an Armenian American the way you guys are, I need to find my Armenianness first. If this requires a voyage into the past, so be it, I am going to do that, no matter what the Turks will say or do.