Anouch: an incredible singer!

On November 10, 2009, Anouch, a French-Armenian singer, took her audience at Zinc bar in NYC's West Village, on a journey. As soon as the drumming began, mixing with the sounds of saxaphone, cello, duduk and keyboard, the energy in the room began to transform and we inadvertently became a part of something greater, perhaps a solution to the craziness of experience in our world. This, it seems, is one of Anouch's primary goals, what she wants to share with her audience. In an interview a few days after the show, she expressed her desire to have the "audience experience something different of themselves." For Anouch, music is the link to a spirituality that opens doors for others to learn about their own history, of exile and roots, of identity, of eroticism and love. Once the singing began, merging, sometimes going against the music, Anouch's voice became that door, and for those of us in the audience who could not help walking through, a host of emotions began to come up to our throats. For myself, the song "groong" took me on a journey into my own exile as an immigrant in the United States, as well as into the memory of genocide that is unwittingly a part of me.

"Music was my freedom," Anouch told me when asked about how she came to be a singer. She started to sing in a gospel choire at a young age and was influenced by her father's mixed taste in music. From jazz, to Afro-Cuban rhythms, to traditional Armenian songs, Anouch was exposed to a wide range of music that eventually came to symbolize her own evolution and style as a singer. After traveling to Cuba, Anouch learned even more about the mix of Spanish, African, Chinese, Yoruba music that was a big part of the culture of the region. "I mix traditions," she said, "It has to do with my identity, which is multiple." As someone who is repeatedly told that she is not "pure" because she is not fully Armenian, or that her music does not give justice to established Armenian traditions, this intertwining of music and identity is a way for Anouch to be who she is in the most honest and truest possible sense. What she aims to do with her voice is reach out to humans no matter what ethnicity, or age, or religion. "As I mix jazz, and soul, and world music, I have all kinds of audiences," she said. "I do not fit in a box."

This is a difficult disposition to be in, especially as someone who is unintentionally carrying a representative role in the Armenian community. For Anouch who feels deeply connected to her Armenian roots, her music is a way to spread this Armenian culture and spirituality. "And to spread it you have to open yourself," she said. She also went on to explain, “My purpose is to connect the vertical link (past, present, future) to the horizontal one (there, here, over-there), meaning how do I connect my history (and story) to my future and how do I share it with others? All my philosophy and Art is based on this: the connection is at the meeting point, the space and time of creation, the present.” In a mostly traditional musical culture, Anouch often has a hard time finding a duduk player who will share in this vision of evolution with her. “I want a mugham specialist as well as a creative musician who can find his way into other rhythms, so please if you are a new spirit duduk player just call me, I have a place for you,” she concluded.

Toward the end of the interview Anouch expressed to me that she is universally oriented. She went on, "When I did the song about genocide I also related it to slavery, to Native Americans." Music, in its universality, has the power to connect and communicate across all differences, even among Armenians in various parts of the world. In between songs during her incredible performance at Zinc bar, Anouch spoke of the history of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey and how healing cannot happen on either side without recognition of what took place. Perhaps part of the healing happens when not only our Turkish brothers and sisters, but also our Armenian brothers and sisters open themselves up to truth, and understanding, and music. On that note, the encounter of Eastern music and Western music can be the starting point for this difficult task. And what better place to start if not at this crossroads?

Two Women

My first friend in this country was a girl one year younger than me whose house my family and I stayed at for a month when we first arrived. Later we moved down the block from them, feeling secure in knowing another Armenian family so close by. This is how my friend and I spent much of our adolescent years together, went to school together, talked about boys together, and learned of Armenian values distinct from American ones. Maybe it is that our families taught us differently or maybe it is who we are that made us into the two very different people that we are today.

A few years ago my friend expressed how radically different we had become. I would always openly disclose certain information about my life that I would not feel safe doing with her brothers or her other family, or even some of my own family. It would be a shame for news of my queerness to travel from one relative to another. My mother would be devastated. Nevertheless, I trusted my friend with much of what was going on with my life and she always listened, and I never felt judged, just a distance growing between us.

She travels to Armenia more than I've had the privilege to. She is more religious than I am. Although I am spiritual, I am not necessarily interested in a patriarchal and sexist Christianity, which is what most Armenians who are religious follow. The thing that sets us apart the most perhaps is that she has taken a path that is more expected of an Armenian woman. I genuinely believe her when she tells me that it has been her dream since childhood to get married and raise a family. And when it comes to choice, she should be able to choose what life she wants to lead. But how many of my sisters viewed marriage as the only way out of an even more oppressive life living under their father's rule, or in my cousin's case who lives in Yerevan, under the rules of poverty?

Today when my friend came over I had a chance to observe who she has become since we were children and ran around caring nothing about our sex or who we were supposed to grow up to be. She crossed her legs and spoke of her plans to marry next year, how she was going to make a family in Armenia and then come back to NYC to live with her husband. She believes that she is going to have more freedom because her husband would allow her to live her life as she wants instead of having to follow her father's rigid rules and where she can go and what time she can come home and with who. All the while she was expressing to me her desire to cut her hair but how she can't because her husband-to-be likes her hair long.

One of my biggest fears for a while has been that I would lose my roots or whatever it is that is supposed to make me Armenian and that one of the ways I would lose those roots would be to reject heterosexuality and marriage. Those things already eradicate some of the traditions that would be considered Armenian. Out goes the Armenian style wedding (and it would probably not even be very Armenian style if I am living in NYC because we would not have yards and neighbors who would all participate when the husband came to get the bride). Out goes the red apple (which is already gone). Out goes moving in with in-laws like my parents did.

Times change and living in another country does not help. Because traditions have changed even in Armenia and newly-weds no longer have to live with their in laws like they used to. In either case, I would most certainly not get to enjoy some of these traditions, some of which I would probably not really enjoy in the first place, being that I plan on spending my life with a woman instead of a man. I have to convince myself most days that I am not losing my roots, that I never can. I am simply redefining, creating, and expressing a new way of being- a combinaion of all that I am.

My friend told me while we were in the kitchen and I kept asking her if I could feed her, that it is so Armenian of me to want to have the guest eat and eat and eat. I accepted this at the time and still do. I even felt a little proud, like I was being reassured that my roots are still intact. But I have a friend who is Afghani who would probably say the same things about her people. And a friend who is Greek, and a friend who is Turkish, and a friend who is Colombian, a friend who is Pakistani, who is Chicano, Palestinian, Burmese, Black, Trinidadi. Maybe Armenians do it differently?

conversation with my mother

I don't remember what sparked it when we began talking about my desire to change the world. This is always an opportunity for storytelling among my parents, my father especially. This time it was my mother who was beating down upon my dreams and hopes for the possibility of another world. You can't change the world, she always tells me with conviction, trying to convince me to give up my fight against poverty, racism, violence, inequality, and so on. She tells me what she knows and I listen because I think her words hold clues to her disappointment with the world.

I am seeking answers and clarity about what was happening in the years before we immigrated, to find some rational, coherent chain of events that could explain the conditions under which we were living in. She tells me things like the reason that they cut the light was to sell candles to the population. Or how some people still had light from generators because they had power and/or money. The rest of the population, if they were smart enough, would attach cables in the yards to steal light from people/institutions who had light. I find it most bizarre that the government was trying to make money from the people so they cut the light. But this belief can also be due to the major increase in people's distrust of their government after the Soviet Union collapsed.

Our government was awful, she tells me. They did not care for environmental concerns and now people are dying in alarming numbers from cancer. You cannot change them, she tells me. The people are corrupt and this has forced anyone who can leave to leave. In a political climate where people were ending up on hit lists for opposing the government, or politicians were being assassinated, and international aid was being pocketed more than it was being used for aid, people found ways to emigrate to secure better futures for themselves and their families. You were probably luckiest if you got to the United States.

This country is asylum for my parents. When my father came back from Armenia several years ago after a brief visit for the first time since he left, he was enraged. I think it was partly because he could no longer recognize the faces and the faces could no longer recognize him in the streets of his home country. When my mother came back she was blessing the streets here, how paved they are, how orderly things work, how much more at peace she is. She tells me that she has changed a lot since first immigrating and that she has adapted to life in the United States. Your father is still in Armenia in his mind, she tells me.

He once told me, when he was still driving taxis in NYC, that there are secret places in the hills of Armenia that only he knows how to get to and that this place will never be home for him. Maybe it's because he is getting older in a country that is still foreign, maybe it is that he is heartbroken from time and its chain of events, maybe he has seen too much death and destruction as a doctor in a particular time and place in the world, and he can no longer fight.

I tell my mother, this is why I am here, as the next generation, to continue the fight. She still doesn't understand why I am fighting, what is it that I am so upset about in this country of plenty. And I realize that there is so much she still does not know about me. I want to tell her that I am fighting for the peace of mind to walk down any street in this world holding my partner's hand and be unafraid. So much of who I am is bound with queerness and so many gaps are left in conversation with my mother when I am still lying to her about who I am.

race issues

For a long time when I first came to this country I felt at ease checking the box next to "Caucasian" whenever I was filling out a form that asked for my information. In my mind, this word did not translate as "White," but as someone from the Caucasus, the region of the world where Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and several other countries are found. I was familiar with the Russian term "kavkazets," which means someone from the Caucasus and assumed that it meant the same thing in English. Charles King writes in a book on the history of the Caucasus, "The collective categories that would eventually come to be used for ethnic groups, nationalities, and religions in the Caucasus were not present, fully formed, when the Russians arrived. They were products of the imperial system itself- negotiated, reworked, and in some cases wholly invented as part of the process of imperial absorption and administration."

I no longer check the box under "Caucasian" because I do not identify as "white." Often there is no other box left to check but "Other," which is comical in itself. The part of the world where I come from is in between East and West, Europe and Asia, sometimes associated with the Orient, Oriental, Other. Until recently I did not come into the knowledge that what people sometimes find so "beautiful" about my curly, unruly hair and dark features is that it is "exotic." Depending on the environment and people I find myself surrounded by, I am seen as different, my ethic background some unknown mystery.

I never know what to tell people when they ask me what Armenia is considered a part of: Europe? Eastern-Europe? Middle-East? Asia? I get confused for Latina, Arab, Italian, mixed-race. People come up to me on the train and speak to me in Hebrew. Just as the country where I come from is in-between, so is my identity. I can be Italian, Israeli, Colombian, Palestinian, Turkish. What does it mean to be Armenian, to look Armenian? Some of us have darker features, some of us have green eyes, light hair. Some of us have lighter skin than others, some have straight hair instead of curly. We can look Georgian, Azerbaijani, Iranian. I was also once told that I could be South Asian.

Still, I also do not identity as a woman of color although most often I find my liberation bound up in the liberation of women of color (to quote Lila Watson). I believe that I have always benefited from my lighter skin color in this country, although this would most certainly not be the case in Moscow where my cousins struggle daily with their ostracized status as "black" in a Russian-nationalistic society, where race-driven killings are not uncommon. Is my identity then defined by where I benefit and where I have a privilege due to the color of my skin? Is it not then defined by the same system that creates these definitions, these categories, mainly to oppress those who fall in the lower ranks of that racial hierarchy.

By the way, I hate theory. So to bring it back to the practical, at the end of the day, race matters when you are someone affected by it. And as long as there is racism, we are all affected by it, although to varying degrees. Even my Armenian brothers and sisters are affected living in this country, practicing ignorance when they make racist remarks, when they do not recognize the ways in which they benefit from racism due to the privilege of their lighter skin color, when they do not question their upbringing rooted in being anti-Turkish, having never come in contact with someone who is Turkish.

When considering the term people of color I also think about the term "third world" and wonder how the two merge and how they do not. I have been identified by others as someone who comes from a "third world country" although I have often hesitated using the term to speak of the country that I come from. There are ways in which my memory of Yerevan in 1994 resembles a less "developed" part of the world and ways even today that Armenia may be considered a "developing" nation. But what is being "developed"? By who and for whom? Under whose definition of "development"? Do people in Armenia see themselves as people from a third world nation? How does this affect their identity if they identify more as European?

For now I am content with identifying as Armenian, although even that brings up the problem of being nationalistic, believing in borders. But the woman who went over my application and found that I had identified as "other" (due to lack of more categories, maybe even due to the fact that there are categories and I was asked to use one to define myself) and written next to it "Armenian," was not so happy with this. She laughed a little at my attempt to be rebellious, and changed my identity to White/Caucasian/Eastern-European. What do my efforts to self-define matter if at every turn someone else places me in a category they see as fitting to my appearance. "Gypsy!" someone once pointed to me and exclaimed.

I do not get upset anymore. I am whatever you think I am if it makes you happy. But you would never really know who I am until you get to know me.

queer in the Diaspora

I did not always consider myself a part of the Diaspora even though by definition, as soon as I set foot in New York City and began living here with my family, awaiting our green cards to transform into citizenships, I was a Diasporan. To me the Diaspora was always an other, people who spoke in Western Armenian, who had lived in the Diaspora for generations and had become like the people where they lived. As I came into more knowledge about the different generations of Diasporans, I learned that one of the major migrations occurred during the years when Armenians, Greeks, and other non-Turkish people living in the Ottoman Empire were being deported, killed, raped, and kicked off their land. Armenians settled in great numbers in Argentina, Lebanon, Palestine, Paris, and parts of the United States and Canada. I know people from my generation of leaving who have made homes for themselves in Moscow, Belgium, Germany, LA, and New York City.

When I visited Argentina briefly early this year, my partner at the time and I took the subte to Calle Armenia too see what the Diaspora in Buenos Aires was all about. We stumbled upon a cultural center where a woman, whose name I believe was Arax, welcomed us and spoke to me in broken Western Armenian. I was so excited about seeing the name Armenia on the street signs and then to see the Armenian church on the same street where we stumbled upon the Armenian cultural center. But now that this woman was speaking to me in a tongue I could not remember, from a place I could not have been to, I felt cold and strange in my body. I had a hard time feeling the excitement I had known of meeting someone else who was Armenian in a country other than Armenia to which I traveled over 10 hours in order to see my partner. And after Arax spoke a little about which part of Turkey her family came from and invited us to stay and watch the dance rehearsal she and her friends were doing, my partner did not reveal that aside from being Greek, she was also part Turkish, and that we were both queer.

Maybe we both assumed that these facts would lead to bias and prejudice from these women, but we had also learned from experience that often, these two identities were cause for hatred among Armenians. I have experienced this from Armenians in the Diaspora regardless of when they left their homeland, as well as from Armenians in Armenia. I know that we are not all prejudiced against people who are Turkish, or people who identify as gay, or lesbian, or queer. Some of us sleep with whoever we want to and think it should not be a problem. But often we are forced to hide in narrow closets in our homes, whether from our immediate family or relatives that are scattered in Germany, or Russia, or Argentina.

What was unfamiliar to me, in the end, was not only the fact that when Arax and her friends began to dance, I realized that I had never seen traditional Armenian dancing in all my life of identifying so strongly with being Armenian. I saw that in an attempt to preserve their culture, the women of this particular Diaspora met occasionally to dance under the traditional Armenian dhol, dances that their ancestors created centuries ago. But I did not come from not tasting the soil of my ancestors and the dirt of where I came from under my nails as a child playing in the yards of pink Soviet style buildings. I did not feel as urgent a need to preserve my culture because I had not yet known the threat of losing my identity. And now I am not even sure what it means to have an identity.

What was unfamiliar to me among these beautiful Armenian women, opening my heart with the music they were playing on an old cassette tape, overwhelming me with this cultural enlightment, was that they had never known the love and desire for a woman deep in their gut as I had. For wasn’t it also this queerness that would seem to be just another threat to their identity? They have preserved the culture so carefully, as if there never was a disruption to the story of their people, as if their people had been dancing one day and by some great mystery they suddenly began to appear across the Atlantic or in different parts of Europe and the Middle East, to pick up right where they left off in their dancing.

So much has changed since the turn of the century. My identity as queer and Armenian is still seen as immoral, contradictory, wrong, dirty by my people. Armenians in the Diaspora oragnize around issues of genocide and recognition but not on human rights violations, or violence against women, or corruption among polititians in Armenia. In Yerevan, where I grew up, being Armenian did not mean the same thing as it did in Argentina, or in Lebanon, or in Canada. It meant speaking Russian as fluently as Armenian, it meant valuing cities and industrialization and being ‘civilized,’ it meant believing that ‘civilized’ did not mean living in the mountains as Armenians had done for thousands of years, it meant aspiring to be European. Even as I make these distinctions, I know that the Diaspora dealt with another set of issues, perhaps even at times their issues paralleled mine.

I also cannot say that my generation of immigrants, those who left after the Soviet Union collapsed, feel familiar to me. There is among this generation of immigrants, a culture that identifies itself with Russian-speaking immigrants from various parts of what used to be the Soviet Union. A lot of Armenians who settled in NYC, in the melting pot, were drawn to others who had experienced life during Soviet times, who spoke a common language. Although I come from this same place and time, I do not always identify with this culture, I only speak Russian if I have to, I do not agree that one culture and way of being is better or above another, and I do not believe that women have roles to fulfill as mothers and wives as their greatest contribution to society.

I don’t know what it means to be Armenian but I know that it isn’t a one way street and there are so many people in the Diaspora practicing this Armenian-ness in different ways; ways that parallel other Diasporan’s ways and ways that don’t. All I know is that if there is room to practice being Armenian by being homophobic and sexist and racist, then there must be room to practice being Armenian and being queer, being feminist, being pro-Palestine, being conscious of the different oppressions that afflict our common world all at the same time. At the end of the day, when I trace back my roots to where I come from and I end up in the lands of the Caucasus mountains, in Van, in Tbilisi, in Yerevan, I know that I can never ‘lose’ this history/memory. Who I am and where I come from has made me. Queer.

introduction: Identity

It was not always like this, the quest for where I come from, digging for my Armenian roots. When my family and I immigrated to the United States in 1997, I was only ten years old and still very much in the dark about what it meant to be uprooted. I assimilated fast in Brooklyn because most of my experience in the first several years of living in NYC was limited to the world of family and school and the street we lived on. My neighborhood was and still is a mixed working class community of Russian and Chinese immigrants, with the Italian population that settled here in the 1950's, still going strong.

We settled right into the melting pot, and in a strange way, fit right in. It happened slowly and as time passed, my sisters and I shed the Armenian language and only spoke to each other in English. My parents were never one of those immigrant parents who made their kids speak their native tongue when at home. They had too much on their minds to waste time watching over which tongue slipped out of our mouths. We did not have any Armenian friends outside of some family friends who over the years became less and less a part of our lives. My father's disappointment in his people did not help when it came time to be part of some kind of larger Armenian community. We only saw other Armenians at church on Easters, and only when we actually joined our parents to church on Easter.

I am not sure what exactly made me an angsty teenager (maybe just the age can do that to a person), but now that I think back on those years of development, I was no different in my ways than a typical "American" teenager would have been. Or there was something particularly "American" about being angsty as a teenager. My sisters to this day will tell me that I am so "Americanized" whenever it fits their motive to say so. Like getting angry at my parents and expressing that anger toward them would be seen as "American." My teenage years were more angsty because my parents gave me very little freedom compared to some of the liberties my friends enjoyed. I could not go to the movies, or go too far by myself in the city, or have sleepovers, or even go to pajama day at school. I found these things obnoxious to miss out on and hated every time my father reminded me, "You were born Armenian, you will die Armenian."

So, I am trying to find out what this "Armenian-ness" means. Is its meaning only significant to an Armenian? What about other cultures, ethnicities, traditions that are similar to Armenians? Do I need an Armenia to be Armenian? How do I maintain my Armenian-ness outside of those borders of Armenia? Being an Armenian in Armenia is a completely different experience than being an Armenian in the Diaspora. Is such an identity issue even something relevant to Armenians in Armenia.? Don't they already claim that identity by virtue of being inside the borders that signify the country of one's origin?

The older I become, the more time passes between Armenia and me. So much had changed when I visited Yerevan for the first time in 11 years last year. And things just keep changing. I grow very differently than the people there, and this creates an even greater distance between my native land and me. I have not yet been able to find a home among other Diasporans and it is even stranger to call myself a Diasporan. In the beginning, I was still very much tied to where I had recently come from, and there was no need to hold on to something that I did not feel like I had lost. The older I get and enter the world from different angles, the more I feel a threat of getting lost in the chaos of this melting pot; everything that I have come from or that I identify with, turned into a soup of indistinguishable parts.

When I let go of this fear of loss: loss of home, loss of identity, loss of belonging, I have the most incredible power to create who I am out of different elements of where I come from and the encounters with others I have on my path. I am not only Armenian, or a New Yorker, or a daughter, or a sister. I am also queer, I am a feminist, a poet, an artist. And I am all these things at the same time, and there is no pulling one apart from the other. There are identities that sometimes present a conflict with other identities such as being Armenian and being queer. This is not easily swallowed in my culture. Or being a feminist in a patriarchal household where my father asks me if he ever hit me would I call the cops. When I tell him I wouldn't he says that is a good thing because I haven't completely become like "them," the "Americans." As if being an Armenian woman is synonyms with accepting violence from the men around you as part of a normal life.

Sometimes there are moments when I just want to give it all up, this struggle with identity, with my history, with this tiny country on the border between East and West. I am afraid that I become too nationalistic at times and that makes me feel limited and dangerous. I want to take this incredible experience of exile, displacement, and uprooting and create something beautiful with it, create a new possibility, a way of being that was unheard of 'til now. This blog will be a piece of that puzzle, or rather, solution.

Welcome.