On Being Armenian

I was in my 7^th grade social studies class and we had just completed a geography unit on Europe and the Middle East. I was sitting in my usual seat in the back row listening to my teacher Mrs. Barone talk about the coming events after the new year.

“We’re going to have a cultural celebration,” she explained, “and I will be asking each of you to bring in a dish from your country of origin.”

I noted the date and decided I would feign illness the night before.

“Now let’s go around the room and share our country of origin, even if your parents are third or fourth generation.”

I watched as my classmates stood up one by one. Italy. Germany. Russia. Israel. Korea. When it was my turn I stood up and mumbled, “Armenia.”

“You have to speak up, Aida. We can’t hear you from all the way in the back.”

It wouldn’t have made a difference if I had said it through a loud speaker. “Armenia.”

My classmates looked at each other wonderingly, as if I had created a mythical land. They snickered. I heard one of them say, “Arma – who?”

It was the same face they made when I unpacked my lunch in the cafeteria, where I endured their imaginative and crude speculations of what I was eating.

“What is that?” someone had once asked, conveying the table’s collective revulsion.

“Dolma,” I had said.

I had looked down at the meat-stuffed zucchini covered in garlicky yogurt and sumac, realizing the question was more a declaration of disgust.

The anonymity of my origin followed me everywhere. Most adults had never heard of Armenia.

“Albanian?” someone once asked.

“No,” I said. “Armenian.”

“Where is that?”

Patiently, I would explain that we were part of the Soviet Republic. I wanted to tell them that historically, we were the first people to accept Christianity as a religion. That our first churches were built in the fourth century. That the Genocide in 1915 had orphaned my grandfather, and my father’s side of the family consisted of my grandmother, my aunt and my father. When I peered at the map hanging in my bedroom I saw the small speck of land, the size of a fingernail bordered in the center of Turkey, Iran and Azerbaijan. We wouldn’t claim independence until 1991.

“Don’t forget that you are a Zilelian!” my father would say.

He was practically fanatical, his obsession with our family name and Armenian heritage. Feeling invisible by the world, his emphatic stance seemed overblown and embarrassing.

Worse still was explaining to people the turn of the century Genocide during World War I and the Turkish government’s denial of murdering nearly two-million Armenians. If no one knew what Armenia was, how would this crime against humanity, against my people ever be recognized? I did not feel marginalized, overlooked, discriminated against. I felt as if I did not exist.

I looked through books about the Genocide that my father had purchased from the Armenian Prelacy, turning each page over with the realization that my father’s aunts, uncles, relatives had all been killed. Pictures of the barren Syrian desert and a long procession of Armenians on a death march. Disembodied heads placed on shelves as if on display. Skeletal bodies in a heaping pile in a mass grave. Images of the front pages of the New York Times: Million Armenians Killed or In Exile, Armenians Sent to Perish in Desert – it would all plague me. The world had looked on silently and done nothing. And nearly a hundred years later, it seemed no one knew who we were, who I was.

Adding to my hollow sense of identity was another layer that would alienate me from my peers: I was first-generation Armenian. To a passive onlooker, this would not mean all that much. But to me it meant being deprived of joys that felt significant. That I did not go trick-or-treating. I’m not sending you to strangers’ homes begging for candy. There were no sleepovers. You have your own bed to sleep in, you don’t need to sleep anywhere else. I was discouraged from having American friends. You can play with your sister and your cousins (who all lived out of state). Chinese takeout was out of the question.

They’re goal was not to isolate me anymore than I already was, but to protect me from a fate that was equivalent to death: marrying an odar – an American. Ironically, the word means out of place, unfamiliar. And it’s the feeling that consumed me for most of my upbringing. Looking back, I wonder if my parents realized the naïveté of their expectations. I attended Armenian elementary school five days a week, followed by Armenian Saturday school and Sunday school at the Armenian church in Manhattan. I didn’t realize it then, but I was suffocating.

Looking back, there were glimmers of happiness that I experienced. The Festival of Grapes, which was held annually in Astoria’s Bohemian Hall. There, we all came together and danced, ate, ran around with friends as Armenian music blared through the speakers. The bara-hanteses – dinner dances were a splendid thing. Platters of food crowding our dinner table, the noise and chatter of people speaking Armenian, the live band bringing to life the albums my parents played on Sunday afternoons. We were a clan, orphaned by tragedy.

It wasn’t until years after my parents’ scandalous divorce and remarrying that I was able to break away from my community. I married an American and had one child. I wrote a novel which received an award funded by an Armenian foundation. At my book signing I stood in awe at the sight of all the Armenians, many of whom I did not know personally, who had come to support me. They were there because I was one of them. They didn’t need to know me. I remember their beaming faces sitting in the crowd, how proud they seemed that an Armenian had written a book and it was being celebrated.

After the event many of them approached me to extend their congratulations. I was ashamed suddenly that I had turned away from my Armenian culture.

The distance of decades since my adolescence has come full circle in my realizations. I understand that I am part of an ancient history, a small and mighty tribe. And that we are not fragile. We defied the age-old cliché of reigning strength in numbers. We didn’t just survive. We live.

Aida Zilelian is a first generation American-Armenian writer, educator and storyteller from Queens, NY. She is the author of The Legacy of Lost Things (2015, Bleeding Heart Publications) which was the recipient of the 2014 Tololyan Literary Award. Aida’s most recent novel, All the Ways We Lied, released in January 2024 (Keylight Books/Turner Bookstore).