Hamburger and Dolma, Transcription
Edited by Daniel W. Patterson, assisted by Julia Slayton
TITLE CARD:
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody – Too?
Emily Dickinson
(In the opening, and often during the rest of the film, dialogue is interspersed with or spoken over music and shots of the participants as they shop for foods, then prepare and cook dishes, and finally dine together on the meal they have prepared.)
HAMBURGER & DOLMA
Cross-cultural Identities
ARLENE AVAKIAN: I wanted her to cook American foods, like hamburgers. If we could just have a hamburger. If we could just have chicken noodle soup. Lipton's chicken noodle soup, or something like that, like something that was in the culture.
(conversation, - “What do you mean?” - “I like to cook vegetables. I'm good at it.” –“Cooking vegetables?” – “Cutting them.”)
LEAH RYAN (Arlene’s daughter): But I liked cooking. That was the thing. I loved being in the kitchen with my grandmother, and my great grandmother. And they would make these really complicated and wonderful dishes that would take hours. And I loved to help them.
JANICE OKOOMIAN: I have always felt somewhat alienated, both from U.S. culture, and even from feminists, American feminists, on the one hand, and from Armenian American culture on the other hand.
(conversation over food preparations)- It's juicy, and it's succulent.
SHAKE TOPALIAN: And I always felt like an outsider. I felt like an outsider in many different communities. But I also felt like an outsider in the Armenian community.
(pans clattering)
JULIA SLAYTON: I also think that I in some ways look a little different, as I travel around different parts of the United States. If I'm in Northern Michigan, I realize not very many people look as I do. And so to have dark hair and dark eyes and to understand something of its legacy has been important.
(Armenian instrumental music, over shots of food preparations)
ARLENE AVAKIAN: I was born in New York City, in a section of New York City called Washington Heights at the end of the thirties. And I never thought of this area as being an Armenian neighborhood. But I found out years later that it was an Armenian neighborhood. In fact, it was where the church, one of the major churches, was. I think about it now, and I think about how could I not have known this was an Armenian community? And in a way, I think it's because I was so separated from being Armenian--well, at least once I started to go to school. And once I got affected by the parts of the culture that told me that being different was not what you were supposed to be. And so I ran very quickly towards that image of what an American was supposed to be. And I kind of drove my mother crazy, because--well, I wouldn't speak the language. That was one big thing, because real Americans don't speak Armenian. They have to speak English. And I wouldn't let my brother speak Armenian.
LEAH RYAN: My father is Irish, and I didn't have that much contact with his family, but my mom's family, we used to go visit a lot in Jersey, and it was a big family, and I had much more of an identification as an Armenian than I did as an Irish person, even though my last name is Irish. Socially for me, I never made contact with other Armenians. So I didn't know—it was a little strange, you know. Sometimes I would feel like I didn't want anybody to know what I was, and other times I wanted to tell people. You know, I really wanted to tell them. I wanted people to know. And now I talk about it a lot. Because I feel like there just aren't that many of us.
JULIA SLAYTON: My mother was born in this country, but my grandparents came from Turkey. And she married my father, who was not Armenian. He was, as we call, an "otar." But in the household, we grew up actually with this shared identity in terms of the American culture—of growing up in a suburb of Boston—as well as with the Armenian culture of being very close to my grandparents, and lots of family being around.
JANICE OKOOMIAN: My grandmothers were both born in the United States. And my grandfathers were both refugees from the Armenian genocide who came as children. My father's family was brought to the United States by Protestant missionaries. And they grew up in—he grew up in West Haven, Connecticut, and there was no Armenian church nearby. So he grew up Protestant. In my mother's family, even though they lived near the Armenian churches in Boston, they did not go. In fact, they used to send my mother to church with their downstairs tenant, who was a Baptist. And I remember my mother telling me that my grandmother had said, "Oh, it doesn't matter where you practice, how you worship, it's all one and the same." And so there was a kind of openness in her family to multiple religious traditions, I think.
SHAKE TOPALIAN: My parents are genocide survivors. My father was—they both came from Turkey. I think most of my life growing up as a child was bathed in that genocide legacy. It was a lot of depression in my family, and it was also a lot of lifefulness. And I think something that is probably very much a part of my father's identity, and something that I've internalized, is a statement I remember as a child, going for a ride, and we were lost. And my mother got very, very nervous, very upset and very angry, and very worried and frightened. And he said, "How can you get lost? This is America." And that statement, I mean, feels to me to be, a real symbol of my life. The fear on the one hand, and the sense of hope, and the sense of adventure, and which is very different from my family.
TITLE CARD:
From the play Bleach
ACTRESS: ... from when I interviewed my great grandmother.
ACTOR: How wonderful that you have a great grandmother to interview. Where is she from?
ACTRESS: She was born in Armenia.
ACTOR: Can you show us Armenia on the map?
ACTRESS: I don't know.
ACTOR: Okay, let's take a look. Here it is. Armenia is a Republic in the Soviet Union.
ACTRESS: I don't know because that's not where she was born.
ACTOR: You said that she was born in Armenia.
ACTRESS: Yes, but Armenia used to be over here.
ACTOR: Where? Can you show me on the map?
ACTRESS: Over here, kind of.
RYAN: The play that I'm writing about Armenians is kind of about having a sense of what it means to be Armenian but not really wanting to deal with it—which is complicated, and something I've felt a lot.
A SERIES OF TITLE CARDS (with historical information, maps, and photographs, over a soprano singing in Armenian the folksong “Chinar es.” The title cards in sequence read:
“The earliest reference to Armenians dates to 521 BC.”
“By mid-sixth century BC, the Armenians, speakers of an Indo-European language, were settled in Eastern Anatolia – today’s Turkey.”
“In 314 AD, they became Christians.”
“The history of Armenians - like all ancient nations’ - is an epic tale of myths and legends, conquests, defeats, occupation and subjugation.”
“This has naturally resulted in a deep distrust in all non-Armenians, ‘Otar’ - the other.”
“Paradoxically, the reason for the Armenians’ survival as a people is their exceptional ability to adapt.”
Map, “1st Century BC.”
Map, [untitled]
Map, “9th – 13th Century AD.”
Map, “Modern Armenia is a former republic of the USSR.”
“It became fully independent in 1991. Its population is 3.5 million.”
“The Armenian diaspora numbers some 5 million people. USA has one of the largest groups comprising 1 million.”
“Many Armenians settled around the world, do not consider today’s Armenia as their own country.”
SHAKE: But I feel very much like an outsider in the Armenian community, especially now, more so now, at this age than I did when I was younger. I don't fit there anymore. It doesn't allow me to have my own voice. Probably the last eight years or so I have found community with a group of Armenian women. And I mean, it has been so meaningful and so profound. We have been really able to, I think probably more clearly, have a sense of who I am as a woman. That's really interesting. 'cause that feels like, it feels like a real--I think paradox is the right word--that I should, I would be able to find more of my own voice in a group of Armenian women. Who would have ever thought that?
JANICE: The other contributing factor, to how I inhabit, my Armenian American identity as a woman, has to do with the fact that I was raised in a Unitarian church. I was not raised in the Armenian church. And Unitarianism, as I experience it, is very spiritual, and very anti-dogmatic and very open to progressive politics, and in fact has a program of social justice.
JULIA: I think my sense of Armenian identity comes from what I grew up with at a young age. And the community that I grew up in was probably not all that diverse racially, but it was ethnically in some ways. But I think that that sense of identity came from being in a place where people actually were aware of their identities. Whether they were Italian or Irish or Armenian. And as I've gotten older, it's continued to be important to me, as I try to understand something about why I care about the things that I do and what's influenced all of that.
ARLENE: And there are so many different ways to kind of work out your identity. You can be part of an ethnic community, and I don't want any part of that. But at the same time, I don't want to give up my heritage, my legacy. This is my legacy to be an Armenian. And I don't think that the people in the ethnic community have the right to define what it is. So I'm a hundred percent Armenian, and whatever I am is the way to be an Armenian--is the way I feel like, because I'm conscious about it. It's not just that I have these genes, but that I'm conscious about what it means to be Armenian. And what it means to be a woman, and what it means to be a mother, and what it means to be an American, and what it means to be all of the other things, that make for an identity.
LEAH: My mother is, you know, a feminist. So she, having been raised in a pretty traditional Armenian household, really wanted me as a girl to experience not being a traditional Armenian and not feeling like I had to get married, and not feeling like, you know, I was really limited because I was a girl. And so, you know, I had things happen. Like I would go to visit my grandparents, and I would be expected to help in the kitchen and my brother wouldn't.
(laughter and conversation during the food preparation)
LEAH: And if I went in the kitchen, it was like my mother would, you know--weird because then I would be like being a girl, and that wasn't good. But you know my mother would sometimes help in the kitchen, and what did that mean? And everything, you know, everything meant something. So it was, it was definitely complicated.
ARLENE: Yeah, I teach women's studies at the University of Massachusetts. And I teach about race, class, gender, and ethnicity. And that's kind of what I try to convey--that these things are very complex. You can't just look at what it means to be a woman because every woman has all of these identities. Every woman has a race, in a racially defined culture, which the entire world is now. Every woman has a sexuality, whether she's heterosexual or lesbian, or bisexual or transsexual, or whatever. Every one of us has that. Every one of us has a gender. Every one of us has a class. And it's much more complicated than we used to think in the 1970s, when we were women, and we were going to take over the world. And it's much more complex, but it's much more real.
JULIA: My mother's an artist, and she taught me something about beholding—what it is to look at the world, how it is to see both beauty and truth, how it is to see what's not seen sometimes by the culture. And who's not seen. So to be able to hold in the one place, actually, the truth of both is what I understood a God who is a God that cares can do, as painful as that is. So in line with that, I guess I learned something about caring about the souls of people. And so much of my work—what I do now is actually I work in the church. I work for the Episcopal church.
SHAKE: I'm a psychoanalyst. And I don't think there were, growing up, there were too many Armenian mentors, women especially, that I had—except for one woman who happened to be a nurse with a master's degree. And she actually was the only educated Armenian woman that I knew. I wanted to be like her. I really wanted to be like her. So I became a nurse originally. Which was very good for me in many ways. Because I really was the first one in my family to go on to school. A family of five, there were five of us.
JANICE: I just finished a Ph.D. at Brown university, in Rhode Island, and my Ph.D. is in American Studies. My focus is on contemporary multi-ethnic literatures. It's actually no accident that I ended up in this line of work, I think, because I've done a lot of thinking about identity, questions of identity, questions of the body, questions of visibility/invisibility, dominant historical narratives, and how to make other historical narratives present again. So those are some of the things that have come to me, because of my experience growing up Armenian.
(Armenian music, over shots of food preparation)
LEAH: My grandmother's family were refugees. They came really from nothing. In my generation, you know, I had everything as a kid. I never wanted for anything. So that in itself made it hard for us to understand each other, because they expected me to go to college, and have a profession, have a career. And I was kinda all over the place, didn't know what I wanted to do, and I was bumming around, and they were like, what are you doing? So, you know, there was a lot of ways that generationally we just didn't understand each other at all. So.
JANICE: My partner is, is Jewish American. And we have a four-and-a-half-year-old daughter. One of the cultures is really what in a sense what she is inescapably. There's no way that she can not be American. I think that the Jewish identity and the Armenian identity, from my perspective, are more chosen for her because she could live as an American without practicing anything from either tradition, without identifying as a member of either tradition, and nothing would happen. Whereas she can't really quite do that with the American identity.
JULIA: And as I've grown up. I guess I really appreciate the fact that through those various lives of people, it's taught me to continue to be open.
SHAKE: It's my identity, and taking up my own voice, and being a person, and a woman in my own right has been, probably the story of my life. Probably what I have been struggling with forever—and still to this day.
(Armenian music resumes, with shots of food preparation)
ARLENE: I took away, as much as I could, what was Armenian about myself. And here I am, all these years later, still thinking about these questions. What is it to be Armenian? What does it mean to be Armenian? What does it mean to be the granddaughter and daughter of survivors and victims of the genocide?
TITLE CARDS (with instrumental music over the cards and photographs from the Armenian genocide):
“By 1916, 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey had been eradicated by the Turkish government.”
“The remainder of the population ended up in exile.”
“This plan of action, construed by the Young Turks, has become known as the first genocide of the 20th century.”
“The Turks denial of the atrocities has left a wound that time is unable to heal.”
ARLENE: And now, I feel that, all of these identities—my Armenian identity, my identity as a woman, my identity as a lesbian, my identity as a white person in a very racist culture—are there with me all the time, all together. And sometimes one is foregrounded and another one isn't, you know, and as I say to my students, when I try to talk about this—how all of these identities impact on each other—I wasn't raised an Armenian on Saturday, and a woman on Sunday, you know. I am an Armenian woman, and it all comes together all at the same time.
TITLE CARD:
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage we did not take
T.S. Eliot
JULIA (as she and others prepare food together and talk): I think something that's particular, that I sense in identifying as Armenian, is this sense of memory, and the importance of that, in that in being people who are in exile that there's this sense whether people told the stories, or they didn't tell the stories, memory had an incredible power. And so sometimes growing up, I used to feel as though I was more pastward looking, than future looking—that there was something of the past that bound you to one another and to place and to no place.
SHAKE: There's something about rootedness and connection and a sense of oneself that has a history and a root. And it's so hard to connect it. I think becoming more Armenian in a certain way, because I think it's about deciding what it is for me, but that has a lot to do with memory and connection. And really connecting to things that are important to me—genocide, music, art.
ARLENE: To me, it goes back to what you said, Shake, earlier about, it is what you are as a kid, you know. I mean, that's what you are, that's what you—that's what you are. You don't know anything else. And I think that, that for me doesn't go away. We try to cover it up. I tried to cover it up, and I tried to get away from it. But essentially, it doesn't go away, that feeling of home in a way. And this isn't to romanticize and say that it was wonderful, but that's what we knew. You know. And so for me it feels like it's pre-verbal.
SHAKE: So it's like body and smell and touch and sensory motor.
ARLENE: And it's kind of an introduction to the world. Like, what does the world look like from this perspective? And this perspective is THE perspective, you know, until you go out into the world. And then it becomes more complicated and layered.
JULIA: I think for me too it was the sense of growing up in two places at once. This place that I lived in, and this place I'd never been—but I'd always been there. And so to know this village of Kozoluk, and to know it was both a field of poppies and play and a field of bloodshed, everything that I grew up living these stories and in such a way that, that I was there, being an exile at home any place in the world, and that I wasn't attached to any place, but that I was at home any place. And I think some of that comes from this sense of place that is no longer.
ARLENE: It's, it's such a different experience. 'Cause I heard no stories, you know. There was a silence which was powerful. You know, the stories not being told. And I don't know. I know so little about the village, and there's so little that I know. And it wasn't talked about any—but there were asides about the other side. And I know that silence is also part of the story for me.
LEAH: That's part of the invisibility too.
ARLENE: Yes!
LEAH: You know, the whole—I mean, the whole thing about it, for me—I mean, I think it was all—it was so shadowy for so much of my childhood that it's, it's easy to say I'm something else or just ignore it completely. But then at the same time I used to want to be part of it, you know, and especially because I was only half Armenian. I wanted—I wanted to be told that I looked Armenian or that I was Armenian, you know. I wanted to be part of it, and I didn't really know what that meant. It was like wanting to be part of a club but not knowing what it is exactly. Just because I wanted a sense of belonging. But then I don't think that the people in that club knew what they belonged to either. So it was, it was very confusing. I mean, I knew that the food linked everybody, and I knew that when I was maybe sixteen, I went to a music performance in Ithaca, and it was an Armenian music recital. And everybody there, a lot of people there, were Armenian. It was the first time I'd been in a room full of people that were Armenian that I wasn't related to in my life. And everybody looked like me, and it was amazing.
(more Armenian music over still shots from the food preparation)
TITLE CARD:
The best
Thing we can do is to make wherever
we’re lost in
Look as much like home as we can
Christopher Fry
JANICE: I was going to say something more about this question of choice, versus it's what you are. And that is that I grew up really having a sense that, more that it was chosen. Because I lived in a place where there were a lot of other Armenians. And I didn't choose to ever to not say I was, but that it was more, it was more about choice in my family. But I think that where I come now is that I'm recognizing that my psychology, is not—which I have not chosen—is very invested in and wrapped up in Armenian history. The questions of cultural difference, the revisions of history, those kinds of issues which are very deep, have really wound their way into my psychology. So that's the level at which I feel I don't choose.
ARLENE: And that goes back to, I think, what you know in your family and what you don't. Your introduction to the world is an Armenian introduction.
JANICE: But I didn't know it. I didn't have that sense when I was little.
ARLENE: No, no, no, because it IS the world.
JANICE: Right.
(several respond in agreement)
JANICE: But I just felt, in some ways I just felt, well, I'm American. And I didn't recognize that my introduction to the world was an Armenian introduction. I thought it was an American, and it was, mostly. But there were these other dimensions of it that were not an American introduction that I've only reconstructed later.
SHAKE: Well, you know also your parents, your grandparents, were survivors. So I just, I think it's probably interesting that it would be something different. I mean, I don't know anything. I didn't know anything different.
SHAKE: Like there was no choice, 'cause we ate it, and we slept it. We drank it, and we touched and smelled it.
LEAH: Yeah, I think that's so generational too 'cause I could, I could go, you know, I could not think about it, very easily.
SHAKE: I think I've had to think about it every day in my life in some way.
JULIA: Some of you hear me kid too about that "perushun" factor, the part that has to do with not really a feeling—I don't know—as though you don't deserve to be in a particular place, or being quick to step aside. And I think that is something to do with being both somebody of exile but also in the class stuff for—at least in terms of the family that I grew up in. I grew up probably more middle-class, upper-middle-class, but the roots of my family's identity—and it's still its psychology—were very poor. And so the combination of, I think, being persecuted as well as them being in a whole other class. There was both the health of personhood but also this "perushun" factor that crops up. It surprises me when it comes up.
[Ed.: Julia Slayton provided the following elaboration: “The word that you heard me say with ‘shun’ in the dialogue is ‘Perushun’ (rolled r sound) which I always thought was an Armenian word that meant: humble, poor, sense of being unworthy. In a Turkish dictionary, I found a similar word (perisan) that means wretched—I prefer the meaning I understood it to be in how I used it. It was not unusual for Armenian and Turkish words to be mingled as many were required or forced to learn and speak only Turkish”.]
ARLENE: But there's another part, though, that I want to talk about, and it's being American, you know—that we are Armenian American or American Armenian, you know, depending on your emphasis. And I think that very much shapes us, not only that we grow up in this country and we take on Americanness that shapes our Armenianness. Because if we grew up in the middle East, we would be living in probably enclosed, somewhat enclosed, ethnic communities. We would be one among many ethnicities that would stay fairly distinct. Whereas in this so-called melting pot, you know—
LEAH: Not a melting pot.
ARLENE (continuing) there isn't anything like, you know, I mean, it—It's not true that there isn't anything like that because there are ghettos. There are lots of ghettos.
SHAKE: There were Armenian ghettos.
ARLENE: Yeah, but the thing is to become one of, to become an American. That's kind of the impetus, you know. So that shapes our lives, but it also shapes how Armenian develops—Armenianness develops—different in, in the United States from say Syria or Egypt.
LEAH: Oh sure. And it's so varied depending on where you are. I mean, if you live somewhere where there's no other Armenians, which is how I spent most of my life—I mean, no other Armenians at all—that's, you know—you really feel like a freak, basically. It's just that simple.
JANICE: So for instance, the exoticness is particular to, you know, a European-American context. That you wouldn't if you lived in the middle East, people wouldn't perceive you as exotic. So that becomes part of the way, what it means to some of us to be Armenian. But that's very particular to you.
LEAH: Yeah, but even if you're somewhere where there's so many other cultures, like where I live in New York, there's—I hear fifteen different languages when I'm going to the post office. So I don't necessarily see other Armenians, but I see a lot of different people, and there's a sense that everybody's from somewhere else. And I feel more at home there than I have anywhere in my life actually. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it doesn't matter so much where particular people are from. It sounds weird, but it's true, because everybody's from somewhere else.
ARLENE: Do you feel at home there because you identify more now as Armenian, or…?
LEAH: I don't know. I mean, I think, I feel like I blend in. I feel like I belong. I feel like I don't—I mean this partly because I spent two years in the Midwest where I really—I didn't look like anybody, and people would actually say things like, "Did you dye your hair that color?" and ask me weird questions that I didn't want to answer. So I felt very exotic in not such a good way there. And in New York, I feel like I can, in a lot of ways—it's not just about how I look or being Armenian. It's about how I dress and how I live my life—but I don't feel like I stand out there. And I really like that. I really like feeling that I blend in.
SHAKE: That's so interesting to me that, that our otherness is—I never thought about that, and it is really, I mean I've always felt comfortable in New York.
LEAH: Everybody's other.
SHAKE: But, you know, it's like our otherness is really the context. Otherness is the context.
LEAH: It's the rule rather than the exception.
TITLE CARD:
Whether you like it or not, your genes have a political past, your skin—a political cast, your eyes—a political slant”
Wislawa Szymborska
SHAKE: Here's a toast to the other community, to the other side.
(everyone responds spontaneously)
ARLENE: What other community? I want the world to be clear what we're toasting to. I want to know what I'm toasting here.
JULIA: What your desire was: either to reconnect or to form your identity as, as you wanted to within terms you could accept.
ARLENE: Actually, I never, I never wanted to connect with the Armenian community. I never even considered it because it's so conservative politically. It's so racist. It's so homophobic. It's so sexist. I can't be myself. I can't be who I am in the Armenian community. So I don't really want any part of that at all. But to be able to participate in some of the events of parts of the community with my political self feels very good. And I think then out of that you can make connections with people and begin to form your own communities.
SHAKE: I think I was pretty steeped in it in the Armenian community until—it's interesting—until I left home at twenty-three and came to New York, and then the only involvement was cultural. I mean really cultural. I'm ... going down to the dance, but I began to feel more and more like it wasn't anything about who I was other than that cultural piece, the music I loved. But the people were very unfamiliar to me. I mean, they were familiar and unfamiliar, and they didn't, didn't hold my values.
ARLENE: Is that what you mean by unfamiliar, that they didn't hold your values?
SHAKE: Yes.
ARLENE: 'Cause they're very familiar.
SHAKE: Oh no, they're very familiar, but they were unfamiliar, I think, to the part of me that was growing and developing and getting more education, and being more expansive. And I really felt like a freak there.
LEAH: I think it's really about adulthood, you know, like what you're talking about, and what you're talking about too. It's about becoming an adult. And that, that whole thing of, I think, anytime you're dealing with something that was all-encompassing and sort of you had no perspective on as a child. When you come into your own as an adult, you're able to kind of go into it to a certain degree and maintain some sense of identity, but it takes being separate
SHAKE: It takes being—
LEAH: first. And then you can go back.
SHAKE: Absolutely.
JULIA: I wonder if for me it was both familiar and in some ways different enough that that I could pick and choose how I related. So it wasn't as encompassing an environment I grew up in.
JANICE: I felt a real difference between my family and even most of my extended family on the one hand, in which I felt mostly pretty comfortable being in an Armenian community because it was a family community. And then there was this other Armenian community that I had no connection to at all, except that every once in a while, like on Easter, we would go to church, and I wouldn't understand, you know, what was said, but I would smell the incense. And so there was that, but also that the culture of that Armenian community seemed somehow different from my own family and my extended family. So there's a way in which—and it's sort of a puzzle to me—but there's a way in which I feel more comfortable and have felt totally comfortable in some ways on this fringe. Like it's harder for me to be in a community than to be on the fringe of it— 'cause to me that's normal. That's the normal thing. And that that's what was my—What was my world was that we were on this edge, and we'd sort of always been on this edge.
SHAKE: See none, none of my Armenian friends had any aspirations to go on to school. Not any. So I was, I was an outsider in that group, just with that—the idea of wanting to go, go to school. And then when I moved to New York, other than . . . I really felt very outside, but I was involved in in a whole other new world that was very exciting to me. And I think really, really it wasn't until I met Arlene that—I couldn't believe that I had met someone that was like me, that held my values. And she was Armenian. It was incredible.
ARLENE: Very powerful for me too when we met. And you, you said that this is the first time (I’ll never forget this). And you said, "This is the first time that I've been able to be an Armenian and an adult in the same space." And I think for women there is no adult space in the Armenian community outside of the very traditional roles.
JANICE: And it doesn't recognize things that we do. I mean, I think you're saying you've been able to find some ways of being in, in the community and have recognition and have sort of some place, but I feel in general that there's this level at which we get ignored, and what we do gets ignored and passed over, and people don't think of including or recognizing accomplishments or achievements.
ARLENE: Part of it is that we're women. I think it is . . .
JULIA: When you were talking about being recognized for some of the ways that you have made accomplishments and contributions—and I agree with you—that for, in regard to politics, that that's the big deciding piece of it. But there's pride sometimes for, I would imagine, men and women who have different accomplishments but are much more geared towards the success story of an American.
(murmurs of agreement from the others)
So there's recognition, but it's recognition within the class system that exists, which is a whole different political thing. But I, I guess I'm still sort of struck by your two stories—that I think it is partly because you grew up more within, in some ways, an enclave or enclosure in some ways to an Armenian community more than I did. And maybe that's partly from having the identity of a father who's not Armenian, but the underlying culture was Armenian in the household. And, but then I'm struck by, in some ways, the values of my grandparents, who were really proud of their children who became an artist and a priest and a musician, and they weren't the big achievers, and all of them married otars actually. And I think that probably my grandfather might've had some sadness about that, but it was accepted, you know, that that there was freedom that was given in the household. And so for me, that experience of Armenian identity as not being a place of freedom at times, or the possibility to come into maturation and the gifts of your own identity—I didn't experience that from that side of the identity, but I, again, didn't grow up as much with it from all sides.
LEAH: I mean, really, again the only community I ever really experienced was my family. And I didn't really—I don't think they knew what to make of me, 'cause I didn't really do any of the right things. You know, I didn't initially go to school. I dropped out of high school. And then, you know, I don't now, even though I've been to school and I've got an education. I mean I live from paycheck to paycheck, and I write and I don't have any kind of security, and I'm in debt, and you know, I'm not, certainly not a business success story. And I'm certainly not not something that I think they would look at and say, "This is,” you know, “this is good. This is like a solid citizen," you know? I mean, I think it's hard to—it's always been hard to explain myself. It's always like, "So what are you doing now now?" "Well, I don't know." And I can add up all the little pieces, but it doesn't feel like it adds up to anything. Like, I can say I'm doing this and this and this. And if I were talking to somebody else it would sound like something. But when I'm talking to them, it doesn't sound like anything. I hear myself say it. It's like I'm not doing anything.
ARLENE And you left out the one major thing too that you didn't do. And you did get married.
LEAH: Well, there's that.
ARLENE: Yes, yes.
LEAH: No, and there is that. And you know, I mean, they were talking to me about that. I mean, Great-grandma would talk to me about that when I was twelve.
(exclamations of surprise: Twelve? - Wow! )
LEAH: Yeah, I remember I was eating my fruit loops sitting at the table, and she said, "So, when are you going to get married?" Like, "Well, it's not really in the plan right now." But she started talking about finding me a nice Armenian boy. You know? And I was like, “Good luck.”
(laughter and exclamations: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, yes, yes.)
LEAH: Okay, that's a good story. This is the “Smoking with the Fingers.”
JULIA: The marital rite.
ARLENE: It's very good 'cause it speaks so much of silence, this story.
LEAH: Why? Because they didn't talk about why their fingers were cut off?
ARLENE: Yeah, they didn't talk about that. They didn't talk about—You didn't know what it was. You knew nothing.
LEAH: Right, I knew nothing. Right. I did. I made it all up. My great-aunt and great-uncle were first cousins, and. . .
ARLENE: The trouble started there.
LEAH: Yeah, it's problematic. And they each cut off the same finger within a year of each other on different machines—was the lawn mower and the table saw ('cause the uncle made the backgammon boards and stuff in the basement). So they both had these fingers that were cut off, and they both smoked, and they had these vinyl cigarette cases with little lighters, you know, little lighter things. And so they would sit at the table, and they would smoke like this 'cause their fingers were cut off, and they would sit kind of the same way, and they were about the same height, you know? And they'd sit there like this, and they'd smoke like this. And I would look at them, and I'd think, is this like an ancient Armenian marriage ritual? They have these fingers cut off, and they smoke like this?
JULIA: Their marriage was really good, hunh?
LEAH: Well, and as it turns out, their marriage was arranged, which I didn't know. So—and I didn't know they were first cousins either. I mean, as a kid all I knew was that they looked alike, they were married, and they had no fingers, and they'd smoke like this. And I thought, “God, help me”—you know? “What do they have in store for me?”
TITLE CARD:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot
[Credits]
Sound
Susan M. Ericsson
Lighting Camera
Hilde Malme
Additional Photography
Yorgos Bolanos
Edit
Terje Paasche
Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives
Project SAVE Armenian Photographs and Alma
Music
George Gershwin
The Prelude for Piano No. 1 in B Flat Major
From the Series The Music of Armenia
Artcakhi Par
Nazani
Chinar es
Nazani par
Vardani mor voghp
The reading of Leah Ryan’s “Bleach”
was directed by Laura Tichler, and
featured Moira Gentry and Michael Puzzo.
Michael Puzzo appears courtesy of
Actors Equity Association
Thanks to all the participants
for their good humor and stamina
A special thanks to Arlene Avakian, without whom
this documentary would not have been possible
and a big thanks to Martha Ayres for her
cheerful support and generous hospitality
Produced and Directed by
Caroline Babayan
Babayan Productions
©2000
