Announcement

Collapse

Forum Rules (Everyone Must Read!!!)

1] What you CAN NOT post.

You agree, through your use of this service, that you will not use this forum to post any material which is:
- abusive
- vulgar
- hateful
- harassing
- personal attacks
- obscene

You also may not:
- post images that are too large (max is 500*500px)
- post any copyrighted material unless the copyright is owned by you or cited properly.
- post in UPPER CASE, which is considered yelling
- post messages which insult the Armenians, Armenian culture, traditions, etc
- post racist or other intentionally insensitive material that insults or attacks another culture (including Turks)

The Ankap thread is excluded from the strict rules because that place is more relaxed and you can vent and engage in light insults and humor. Notice it's not a blank ticket, but just a place to vent. If you go into the Ankap thread, you enter at your own risk of being clowned on.
What you PROBABLY SHOULD NOT post...
Do not post information that you will regret putting out in public. This site comes up on Google, is cached, and all of that, so be aware of that as you post. Do not ask the staff to go through and delete things that you regret making available on the web for all to see because we will not do it. Think before you post!


2] Use descriptive subject lines & research your post. This means use the SEARCH.

This reduces the chances of double-posting and it also makes it easier for people to see what they do/don't want to read. Using the search function will identify existing threads on the topic so we do not have multiple threads on the same topic.

3] Keep the focus.

Each forum has a focus on a certain topic. Questions outside the scope of a certain forum will either be moved to the appropriate forum, closed, or simply be deleted. Please post your topic in the most appropriate forum. Users that keep doing this will be warned, then banned.

4] Behave as you would in a public location.

This forum is no different than a public place. Behave yourself and act like a decent human being (i.e. be respectful). If you're unable to do so, you're not welcome here and will be made to leave.

5] Respect the authority of moderators/admins.

Public discussions of moderator/admin actions are not allowed on the forum. It is also prohibited to protest moderator actions in titles, avatars, and signatures. If you don't like something that a moderator did, PM or email the moderator and try your best to resolve the problem or difference in private.

6] Promotion of sites or products is not permitted.

Advertisements are not allowed in this venue. No blatant advertising or solicitations of or for business is prohibited.
This includes, but not limited to, personal resumes and links to products or
services with which the poster is affiliated, whether or not a fee is charged
for the product or service. Spamming, in which a user posts the same message repeatedly, is also prohibited.

7] We retain the right to remove any posts and/or Members for any reason, without prior notice.


- PLEASE READ -

Members are welcome to read posts and though we encourage your active participation in the forum, it is not required. If you do participate by posting, however, we expect that on the whole you contribute something to the forum. This means that the bulk of your posts should not be in "fun" threads (e.g. Ankap, Keep & Kill, This or That, etc.). Further, while occasionally it is appropriate to simply voice your agreement or approval, not all of your posts should be of this variety: "LOL Member213!" "I agree."
If it is evident that a member is simply posting for the sake of posting, they will be removed.


8] These Rules & Guidelines may be amended at any time. (last update September 17, 2009)

If you believe an individual is repeatedly breaking the rules, please report to admin/moderator.
See more
See less

Lipanan

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • #2
    Re: Lipanan

    Paradise Lost: Remembering the post-Genocide years in Lebanon

    by Hovsep M. Melkonian


    Published: Sunday June 10, 2012

    This memorial stone to the Genocide at the Catholic Armenian patriarchate
    in Lebanon. Via Wikimedia.

    Paradise is our native country, and we in this world be as exiles and strangers.
    Richard Greenham (1535-1594)

    I. "Cursed be the boat that brought you to this country "!

    I was born in Beirut, Lebanon 68 years ago of Armenian parents.

    My parents lived in a small one-bedroom apartment in one of the more
    popular sections of Beirut that was mostly inhabited by Arabic speaking
    people of modest means.

    Lebanon is a small and ancient country known in history as Phoenicia that
    has always had a broad mixture of different religious communities that
    represent the ancient and historical divisions of both the Christian and
    Muslim faiths in all their denominations, complexities, specific traditions
    and contradictions that often defy a logical explanation. To live in
    Lebanon requires a mix of interpersonal and human skills where flexibility
    and resilience, business acumen and "joie de vivre", opportunistic
    attitudes and deep-seated religious convictions and a belief of being Arab
    world's only window into the western world define the national psyche. More
    specifically, it requires from all levels of the population, no matter how
    sophisticated, poor or illiterate the individuals in question are, a degree
    of acceptance of others that is based more on instincts of practical
    accommodation rather than on tolerance.

    Although Armenian by birth, our family lived among Arabic speaking
    population. This was not uncommon in those days, though the majority of
    Armenians lived in areas east of the city, mostly inhabited by other
    Armenians and named after their original hometowns in Cilicia. My brother,
    my sisters and I spoke Armenian at home but were fluent in Arabic and as
    children had no inkling that we were different from the neighborhood kids,
    so great was our integration into the social environment we were born and
    raised in. Indeed, hearing us speak Arabic no one could for a moment
    believe that we were non-Arab Arabic speakers. In those days the majority
    of Armenians had difficulty learning the local language or mostly spoke a
    broken Arabic confusing the masculine and feminine genders in their speech
    when they meant the opposite. In that respect, we belonged to the
    privileged few among Armenians as far as Arabic was concerned. We conversed
    correctly with others, played with the children of the neighborhood, had
    the same toys, dressed like them, were welcomed in their homes and went to
    the same neighborhood school. People knew me as Joseph, and by my nickname
    Zouzou, the equivalent of Hovsep in Arabic.

    What happened next was indeed unexpected.

    I was 8 or 9 at the time and the event has marked me forever. In fact, I
    still carry the scars deep down my heart and my memory.

    On that day, as usual, we were playing football (as we called our little
    game in our daily parlance in that part of the world) in the courtyard of
    the houses where we lived, when a minor incident among some of the children
    took an ugly turn. Soon the quarrel turned into a scuffle, blows were
    exchanged, cries were raised and the commotion brought out to the courtyard
    some of the parents who intervened to separate us. Seeing her son with a
    bloody nose, one of our neighbors, Um Suleiman, (it meant the mother of
    Suleiman, one of the kids involved in the melee) without ever making an
    effort to establish the identity of the real culprit, addressing herself to
    me said in anger: "Cursed be the boat that brought you people into this
    country"! Saying this, she dragged her son away screaming and crying, with
    a hateful and an angry look on her face that I have never forgotten.

    I was stunned.

    This unexpected outburst, the crudeness and coarseness of the language used
    on that occasion , and the harshness of the tone had a devastating effect
    on me. For the purposes of the article I have sanitized the uttered curse
    here, but whoever has lived in Lebanon knows that Lebanese, whether man or
    woman, especially of Christian origin, have an incredibly colorful and
    graphic way with their verbal expressions when angry. Um Suleyman's curse
    left me speechless. We had known her for years as a neighbor, a kind woman
    though given to quick temper. She came from Deir el Kamar, a historical
    fiefdom of feisty people in Mount Lebanon , and on account of this she
    seemed to have a chip on her shoulder.

    People in the neighborhood had always liked me, had always been kind to me
    and had treated me as a "good kid". Hence, this unexpected tongue-lashing
    in public caused a deep humiliation and utter shame to me because the
    idyllic world of adult approval that I had enjoyed until then had been
    shattered. I felt as if I was dethroned and had been brought down from the
    pedestal of the high esteem where I was held since I remember walking the
    streets of the neighborhood. Therefore, my first reaction was a feeling of
    deep shame, and at the same time anger for I did not deserve the scorn! I
    had nothing to do with the scuffle but had been trying to separate the two
    fighting sides. However, I could not, on the spur of the moment , find any
    words to protest and proclaim my innocence.

    The tension hung in the air throughout the evening until my mother called
    us home for dinner. The incident bothered me because I did not understand
    the meaning of what the neighbor said, although the words were clear to me.
    I felt something sinister was in store for me. Naturally, at the dinner
    table I turned to my mother, told her what happened, and asked her what the
    neighbor had meant. At first my mother did not react, but explained that we
    were Armenians and therefore we were different from the rest of the
    neighbors. However, she never explained to me why we were different from
    the neighbors, and what actually these words had meant.

    At night, before he went to bed, my father had a few words with the
    neighbor. Things were patched up apparently, because the next morning Um
    Suleiman, when she saw me in the stairs going to school, smiled and said to
    me:

    -You did not need to tell your parents about yesterday. You know I like
    you. Take this and run to school now.

    She dipped her hand into her apron's pocket and thrust in my hand a small
    bar of locally made chocolate. Off I went to school that morning feeling
    better.

    However, after that incident my father started inexplicably to read to us
    Armenian books. Whenever he was early home from work, he would gather us
    around him and he would read to us one of the enchanting Armenian tales he
    had the secret of bringing alive before our eyes. I loved these tales,
    whether it was Dork Ankegh, Areknazan or Katch Nazar. These were magic
    moments and they would end when he told us to go to bed. We had never heard
    our dad read to us in Armenian before. Our daily life was limited to Arabic
    and French that we learned at school. We were familiar with Arab and French
    tales and stories but until then we were totally ignorant of anything that
    was written in Armenian. There was hardly any discussion or discourse on
    any thing related to Armenians, Armenia or history in general in our small
    dwelling. My parents were of limited means and of limited education,
    although I would see my father reading Armenian books whenever he could
    find time at night before going to bed. He never talked to us about
    anything he read. Furthermore, whenever there was any "adult" topic to
    discuss, my father and mother, as well as visitors to our house, spoke a
    different language among themselves that subsequently I learned was
    Turkish. Life for us was mostly limited to our games in the courtyard and
    to homework due the next day when classes resumed in the Arabic school.

    Some other things changed over time too after the courtyard incident.
    Shortly thereafter, we started attending an Armenian school and with time
    we imperceptibly "became" Armenians and the difference with our surrounding
    sharpened. We no longer played with former friends and our circle of
    acquaintances shifted significantly. My name at school officially changed
    to Hovsep and I learned to live with two names depending where I was:
    Joseph or Zouzou for the neighborhood but Hovsep for the Armenian school
    and my classmates there.

    Comment


    • #3
      Re: Lipanan

      However, it was many years later, when I started to attend the Armenian
      High School outside the neighborhood where we lived that the meaning and
      context of the angry neighbor's words became clearer to me and assumed a
      heart-wrenching dimension.

      It was a story, our story as Armenians, and the story of the first
      generation of Armenians growing up in Lebanon, my birthplace, my country
      but not my motherland.

      I first learned that Armenians had arrived in Lebanon, as well as in the
      neighboring Arab countries, from their ancestral lands in what today is
      known as modern Turkey in 1918 as survivors and refugees of the genocidal
      massacres perpetrated on them by Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1918. These
      massacres had caused the brutal death of 1.5 million Armenians. My parents,
      like thousand of others, who suffered the same fate and tragedy were among
      the orphaned survivors who had found refuge in Lebanon and were in the
      process of rebuilding their lives at the time the incident of our courtyard
      happened. Once a well to-do, educated, propertied and affluent community in
      Ottoman Turkey, the Armenians, as a result of the events of 1915-1918 , had
      become miserable and impoverished refugees across the Middle Eastern
      countries and they were not always welcome.

      None of the Armenian boys and girls of my age, growing up in Lebanon or in
      the other neighboring Arab countries where the other survivors had found
      refuge, knew anything about the genocide , and its aftermath in those
      years. Our parents had avoided talking to us about the genocide and had
      kept a wall of silence around the events of which they had been the
      victims.

      However, they had one obsession: to survive, to stand on their feet and to
      carry on. They needed safety and shelter, food and jobs and all their
      efforts were directed at securing these resources from an economically poor
      and limited market that offered them few opportunities to exercise their
      professional skills and knowledge that they had carried with them from
      their ancestral land. They could not speak the language of the country,
      they mostly lived in malaria infested slum areas and unlike our family did
      not mix with the local population and conducted business among themselves.

      This was the daily life of the Armenian refugees in Lebanon in the early
      years and the surrounding local population had difficulty accepting their
      presence. Indeed, the unexpected and unwelcome arrival of poor, unsightly
      and sickly Armenians in Lebanon in 1918, weakened by months of forced march
      in the Syrian Desert, had exasperated the local population that had just
      come through an incredibly severe famine during the years of World War I.
      The famine was so severe, so devastating that it had sent thousands of the
      local population scurrying as immigrants to the Unites States and South
      America looking for a better future and brighter prospects. Thus, the
      arrival of foreign refugees at a time of national crisis could not but
      further strain the meager resources of the country and thus antagonize the
      local population.

      But what about the boat that Um Suleiman had mentioned in her angry
      outburst?

      Years later when talking to my grandmother, a survivor of the Adana
      massacres of 1905 and a subsequent deportee, I discovered that indeed some
      Armenians had come to Lebanon by boat from Adana and the Turkish port of
      Mersin. Um Suleiman may have witnessed their arrival or heard about it from
      her parents and family members who were not thrilled either seeing a new
      wave of refugees land in their country at this critical juncture of the
      history of their country. So cursing the boat, she was also cursing those
      that came on the boat to her country, including us who had caused so much
      trouble for her child!

      Cursing the "boat" seems a universal human exercise to express one's anger
      and frustration in a confrontation! Jared Diamond, the author of "Guns,
      Germs and Steel" puts similar angry words in the mouth of his hero when
      faced with a conflict: "Damn you, Fred Hirschy, and damn the ship that
      brought you from Switzerland"! he screams at his interlocutor in a key
      passage of the book.

      For sure Um Suleiman did not dip into a literary text to come up with her
      colorful expression!

      Remembering my childhood years and the misery we endured as offspring of
      surviving Armenians born in the diaspora as a direct result of the
      genocidal massacres bring to mind painful memories now.

      None of our parents had talked to us about this and we discovered it the
      hard way. The terrible wall of silence that had surrounded our childhood
      finally crumbled when we achieved adolescence and youth and now we were
      faced with the terrible past and the difficulty to adjusting to duality: of
      being Armenian and Lebanese, Armenian and Syrian and/or Armenian and
      Jordanian at the same time: in one word being an Arab citizen when we as an
      ethnic group had nothing in common either with the people or civilization
      of the countries where we lived.

      I do not know whether I have anger towards my parents for having raised us
      in this world of total silence about the past that is so inextricably
      interconnected with our being and common memory, or total incomprehension
      for their behavior and attitude in this matter. However, I discovered
      similar parental silences and experiences from other generation of
      Armenians born and raised in different countries of the Diaspora.

      One of them, Peter Balakian, a Professor of English at Colgate University
      and an established American author and poet, has expressed the same feeling
      of ambiguity, hurt and shock at finding belatedly the truth about his
      parent's past in his book titled "Black dog of faith" (published by Basic
      Books in 1997). Like other Armenian children of his generation who were
      born and raised a continent away in European or Middle Eastern countries,
      Balakian did not know about the trauma his family and ancestors had endured
      in 1915 during which more than one and half million Armenians perished,
      including many of his relatives.

      "Except for those infrequent and awkward moments when my father made some
      kind of gesture that was directed at the meaning of Genocide, no one in my
      family considered the events of Armenia's recent nightmare a reality
      suitable for conversation or knowledge" writes Balakian in his book. "The
      scalding facts of the Genocide had been buried, consigned to a deeper layer
      of consciousness, only to erupt in certain odd moments, as when my
      grandmother told me a story or a dream" wistfully remarks Balakian.
      II. The weight of silence

      My parents as well as Peter Balakian's parents, had shrouded their story of
      the Genocide with a thick layer of silence and had created an artificial
      environment, a bubble of sort, where our generation of Armenians lived in
      relative ignorance, oblivious of the harsh reality and painful experience
      our parents had lived through and tried to protect us from the
      psychological consequences that were ours to discover in years to come.
      Perhaps it was a subconscious effort on their part to protect us from the
      pain they had endured or a way of safeguarding their mental sanity. That
      layer of silence accompanied my adolescence through high school and college
      years.

      It was through the study of history and through my individual readings
      subsequently that I became aware of the Armenian Genocide, the events
      surrounding the crime committed against my parents and their like and the
      world's general indifference and amnesia towards its aftermath and
      consequences. As I went through this painful discovery, I also discovered ,
      like the rest of my generation, how little was known about the Armenian
      Genocide outside our immediate world and how little did the outside world
      care about what had happened. The victims had kept silent and the world
      around them had also conveniently emulated their silence.

      It was only in 1965, in connection with the 50th Anniversary of the
      "forgotten" Genocide that the suppressed anger, frustration and the fury of
      victims yearning for recognition of their pain erupted in public. Whether
      it was in Lebanon, Syria, France, Australia or the United States masses of
      the first generation of Armenians after the Genocide came face to face with
      their destiny, the internal as well as the external demons of the fate that
      had befallen them. This was also the first generation of diasporan
      Armenians who were born in their adopted countries, conscious of their
      civic responsibilities as well as their rights as citizens, educated in
      universities across the Western world and suddenly aware of the enormous
      psychological weight and burden of the "silence" they had labored under
      while fully aware and cognizant of the worldwide struggle to bring freedom
      and equal rights to the downtrodden, the neglected and the invisible in
      many parts of Asia and Africa.

      Thus a new generation of Armenians took over the leadership role in
      communities spread throughout the world, determined to share in the general
      progress the world had achieved and the promises it held for emerging
      nations. They understood well the language that the world spoke, and they
      knew how to articulate their thoughts and ideas through that common
      language of education, communication and solidarity. It was a new
      beginning, marked by activism, a new sense of belonging and self-discovery.

      It was thanks to this generation of new Armenians that the modern world
      started to hear about the first Genocide of the 20th century, to take stock
      of the human toll, the psychological damage, the loss of life, the
      usurpation of property and confiscation of land as well as the need for
      justice, restitution and compensation. It took 50 years from the date of
      the Genocide for Armenians to wake up in 1965 and scream for justice and
      demand recognition for their pain.

      What will the centenary of the Genocide bring to Armenians in 2015?

      What will Armenians achieve by 2015?

      Comment


      • #4
        Re: Lipanan

        I hope it will bring new generation of Armenian , knowing the wrongs of the past and the plans of future,tutored by the older generation will bring only good.

        Comment

        Working...
        X