Meditations: Some Kind of Satellite by Anahit Ghazaryan

In this Meditations piece, Anahit Ghazaryan contemplates what motivates people to learn Armenian — and how language itself is lost, reshaped, hidden, questioned. Translated from the Eastern Armenian by Ani Jilavyan, this piece has been commissioned to celebrate Wasafiri 120: Armenia(n)s – Elevation.

Wasafiri’s ‘Meditations’ is a series that features creative and personal responses to literature, asking writers to seek connections with themselves, their own work, and any texts they may be reading. Lying between criticism and life writing, each Meditation offers a unique angle to view the writer and the reader, and the world around them.

Sending a signal. The word exits the mouth at the speed of thought, travels through air from Armenia to the USA. To France. Germany. Another country. From screen to screen. From ear to ear. And lands inside the consciousness. We – kilometres apart – are in front of each other.

Receiving side. The tongue touches words in the air, the word tumbles on the tongue, the tongue retreats to its nest. A lizard’s action. Word — a fly. It gets shut between the teeth. Words — arrows towards the mouth. An unfamiliar fitness routine, a foreign object, an effort to catch that foreign, to keep it in the mind. To associate with another word. The tongue’s unusual behaviour inside the oral cavity. An irregular swing of lips. The tongue has new messages to the throat, the jaw, the windpipe. Air moving and vocal cords vibrating — from a new place. Letters — a trap for the eyes, nonstop failures, back and forth.

The eye slipped up. The word fell out of focus in the eye. Fell off the line. The eyelid closed. Opened. Up-and-down of tiny hairs. A new effort to catch the letters – running mosquitos – to create a word, to pronounce, to extract.

To be a teacher means to be a witness — to the encounter between a person and language. I’m asking a question and looking at my student's face. On the other side of the screen, somewhere – in a bedroom, a living room – in the dim light of the early morning, they’re sitting, their brains making an effort. I see suffering, struggle in their eyes. Delight at recall.

I have my question before everything. Before letters, before words, and after the first name.

Why? Why do you want to learn Armenian?

Because …

Because my lover is Armenian.

Because my father/mother is Armenian.

Because my grandmother is Armenian.

Because my grandfather is Armenian.

Because I am Armenian.

Because I want my child to speak Armenian.

Because I am an Armenologist.

After or before the because is a story of a clan in one sentence. Lived lives. Relocations across the globe’s surface. Displacements. Crossed borders. Loss and misery. Rage. Wretchedness.

Renouncement. Repudiation. Forgetting. Turning. Re-turning. Births inside other languages. But there, somewhere in the mind, is a preserved document of identity. A found birth certificate. A travel permit, written in Ottoman Turkish, modern Turkish, or Persian. A photograph of a grandma, a grandpa, with a stamp on. A date.

Before or after the because is a sentence, or two, or three. Or a summary of a tragedy. And a need, a need to go fishing in the past. To throw the fishing net back and collect fish-letters in it. Letters that bring with them silenced voices. Stories that have outlasted people. Bodies that have locked whatever has happened to them within the tongue. Knowledge that froze with the forgetting of the language and did not get transmitted, stayed as a hint in the family album. In the basement. In the pages of a book. After three generations, the yearning for the unknown wakes up, escalates. Pushes towards the tongue. To go back to the mouth. To speak from Grandpa’s throat, to speak from Grandma’s throat.

Language. To be a dream of bringing the loss back. Armenian.

*

I am a teacher of Armenian. I teach to say I, I teach to say that the I is there, it exists․ I AM. How easy! I exist and I speak. I teach them to say, sirum em, to say chgitem, to say chem haskanum, to say uzum em haskanal.^[i]

The stories of my students, those of their clans, their grandmothers' and grandfathers' names, and their Anglicised or Frenchified versions, the years of their displacement and countries of their emigration — they enter my life.

I ask the question: Why learn Armenian?

And sometimes after the question and before the answer, there is silence. A silence of several seconds.

Stones in between the silence. There, wedged letters.

My French-Armenian student, a twenty-year-old young man with a confused face, teared up and said: ‘In our house it was forbidden to speak Armenian, my grandfather did not want my father to speak Armenian. He never spoke Armenian. To speak Armenian means to be Armenian. Instead, he’d say, “You are not Armenian, you are French”.’

To be Armenian means to be in danger of not existing. It means to make an invitation to murder you. The experience of the genocide survivor is nothing but an effort to unremember.

TANYA.

Tanya came home, put the fruit on the table, and said in English: ‘I showed my parents' wedding photo to a woman working at a fruit stand. I love sharing their wedding photo with people here — no one believes I'm Armenian.’ I showed it to her and said:

«Հայրիկ՝ հայ, մայրիկ՝ Լիտվա»: (‘Hayrik hay, mayrik Litva.’)^[ii]

Then she took her phone out of her pocket and showed me the photo of her parents again, probably for the fourth time this week already.

«Հայրիկ՝ հայ, մայրիկ՝ Լիտվա»:

We laughed.

‘I don’t look Armenian, but I am Armenian,’ said Tanya.

Drops of water appeared on her Slavic face.

'What have I done with my writing?' I thought to myself․ I said Slavic. Did I say she’s not Armenian? I said nothing like that.

‘Don’t get upset. You are what you want to be, what you decide to be, who you feel you are,’ I said.

Tanya is forty years old and has just started learning Armenian. With difficulty. Fighting against her weak memory, throwing around bad words, getting annoyed from busy daily routines and her many responsibilities. Tanya has started learning Armenian by trying to speak, failing.

Tanya. To not be understood. To be in a foreign place, which isn’t a homeland, and to never be understood.

To learn a language means to flow in waters of foreignness. To learn Armenian — to flow towards. Homeland? What is a homeland?

Tanya. ‘I was born in Miami. My grandmother was born in Alexandria, Egypt.’

Her parents emigrated to Egypt from Anatolia. Then from Egypt to France, then from France to the USA. But there are no Armenians in Anatolia anymore. Why? Armenians were killed, slaughtered, chased off to the desert. They said: ‘This is no place for you to live in anymore. Get killed! Die! Leave! Do not remember!’ 

Some survived. The price of being alive became the continuous reliving of that story.

I just read my writing again and thought, ‘Anahit, come on, you’re writing a pathetic text again.’ But I didn’t do anything, I simply did not falter, and the text, like an instinctive memory, flowed into the whiteness.

Now Tanya cannot go to Anatolia, she has no place to go to get closer to her grandmother. Tanya came to Armenia. Armenia is not Anatolia. Armenia is a pin. A rocky pin on the map of the world.

 
TAMAR.

Tamar is twenty-seven years old. She was born in Germany. Her parents are Armenian and, emigrated to Germany from Turkey. Tamar speaks Turkish with her parents. Outside of family, in German. With colleagues, in English. With me, Armenian-English. Tamar is on my balcony now. We are sitting on the fourth floor of a Soviet-era stone building. We’re drinking tea. The sunset is spreading out beyond the balcony. At sunset, pink dust sits on the buildings of Yerevan. We talk about this and that. Showing each other photos from Bumble. We’re laughing. We agree that the guy is a real showoff. I say the Turkish word kokoş so Tamar will understand. A kokoş guy. Tamar agrees and laughs at my Turkish pronunciation. I ask: ‘Tamar, how come you know Turkish?’

TAMAR. ‘My parents don’t know Armenian. They always spoke with each other in Turkish. The language of the home is Turkish. Then in Germany, they started learning German. Their German is not very good but it’s good enough. At home we mostly speak Turkish, mixing in German words. Only my grandma spoke Armenian, but not with us. We just knew that she knew Armenian. Then, when she grew older, she had some illness and also Alzheimer's; when we transferred her to a hospital, she suddenly started to speak only Armenian. She would talk and talk. She would say things loudly or in a quiet whisper. The caregivers did not understand what she was saying. My parents didn’t understand. My brother and I didn’t understand. No one understood her. I don’t know what my grandma was saying. What did she want before she died? I wish I knew Armenian then.’

I’m a decrepit woman, my body is weak, my vigor evaporated. I’m lying inside white walls. I’m sending codes, sounds, messages to the world. Silence. I’m sending them again. I wait. There’s no answer. There’s no receiving side. My voice comes back as a sound in a mirror reversal and rings in my room with white walls.

How does a genocide survivor bid goodbye? When you speak and no one reacts. When you don’t know where you are. When that’s not even important. You probably don’t expect a reply. Probably you are just inside the language. What is language? A return to childhood?

My students, my little big humans, as if voices awakened from childhood, come into my life, bring me emotions, whisper stories to me, give me the gift of being the witness of their encounters with language. My students, with their burdens and the sorrow of their pasts, with the heft of the names of their grandmas-grandpas, with their confusion, lostness, and searching. They come and say, I AM. I DO EXIST. I AM PRESENT.

New York, 16 October, 2024

[i] ‘I love’; ‘I don’t know’; ‘I don’t understand’; ‘I want to understand’.

[ii] Father – Armenian, mother – Lithuanian

Image: Still Life (Red and Yellow) by Arshile Gorky, 1930, oil on linen, 28.9 x 40.9 in. Courtesy of Debra Force Fine Art, NY, via Wikimedia Commons