There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond

by Meline Toumani

  We have a habit of saying that it was the stubbornness, or the wits, or the unique Christian faith of Armenians that allowed the nation to endure for so long without a state; but some historians argue that in fact being spread out and powerless ensured the Armenians’ survival. After all, it is easier to invade and destroy one capital city than a thousand villages.

  One way or another, when I was born in Tehran in 1975, my first language was Armenian, an Indo-European language with no direct cousins. I was baptized under the same doctrine, in the Armenian Apostolic Church, that had governed community affairs since AD 314, when Armenia became the world’s first Christian state. (The only challenge to my christening came not from any existential threat to Armenian culture, but from ideological differences between my mother, the sentimental granddaughter of a minister, and my father, the atheist son of a Bolshevik.)

  We moved from Tehran to the United States when I was two, a few months before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, to a well-off township in New Jersey with streams, woods, excellent schools, and several noteworthy sites from the American Revolution. My father had attended graduate school at Stanford as a foreign student almost a decade earlier, and he won our ticket back to America in the form of a job offer from Bell Labs.

  Things began auspiciously for me as well. In New Jersey, my mother took me with her to the local community college, where she was taking classes. Bubbly young women in the day care center showed me unprejudiced warmth and fed me fascinating snacks: a cupcake with an inconceivable crown of pink frosting, a rolled-up ball of something sweet coated in Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, fruit cocktail from a can. Entry points to a new culture that I recall registering only in terms of food. And when it was time for me to start school, my kindergarten teacher, Miss Kiminkinen, the descendant of Finns, had an even weirder name than I did.

  One afternoon, my mother appeared in the kindergarten classroom. A photo of the occasion shows her in a dark blue knit dress with white trim that flattered her slender figure, and a red-and-white flowered chiffon scarf tied loosely around her neck. In red, white, and blue, with a glorious smile, white teeth against waves of black hair, she could have been a poster girl for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. After my mother spoke briefly with Miss Kiminkinen, we, a room full of five-year-olds, were informed that it was Citizenship Day, September 17, and as a new green card holder I would be feted with the case of lemon cream-filled wafers that my mother had brought in. I was as surprised as anyone by the news—although not by the wafers, which came from the Arab grocery in Paterson where we stocked up once a month. If this had been first or second grade, Middle Eastern packaged wafers would have been embarrassing. But in kindergarten sugar conquered all, and I may have even been a little bit proud.

  Or was I? For years after that day, well into junior high school until I moved away, a redheaded classmate named Danielle would make nostalgic references to the time in kindergarten when my mother had brought in the delicious lemon wafers, and each time, although I knew she meant it kindly, I felt the shame of my foreignness confirmed.

  But compared to my older sisters, I was lucky. The year was 1981, and the Iran hostage crisis had ended that January. My classmates were too young to make the connection, but my oldest sister had entered the fourth grade in New Jersey just a few weeks before Americans were locked up in the embassy in Tehran. The other kids called her Ayatollah Toumani. (Since everybody in school mispronounced our last name as Toe-may-nee, this coinage rhymed perfectly with Khomeini.)

  That my sister’s classmates identified her as Iranian rather than Armenian was inconvenient, but it made sense: we had never lived in Armenia, the Armenian we spoke was riddled with Persian vocabulary, and many of the foods we ate were Iranian. While most Armenians in Tehran went to special Armenian schools, my father had attended an Iranian high school. He spent his college years in Beirut with Iranian roommates, which gave him an intimacy with Iranian culture that many Iranian-Armenians did not share. My mother, though educated in Tehran’s Armenian schools (it was unthinkable for an Armenian girl to be mixed up with Muslims), imparted to me a great enthusiasm for Iranian customs, the exaggerated grace of which suited her character. Neither of my parents were encouraged to participate in Dashnak youth groups, even though such groups were active in the Armenian community in Tehran during those years; my father’s father, as a once-active Communist, was unmoved by Dashnak nationalism, and my mother’s father considered the group’s activities inappropriate because they were coed.

  But many Armenians, no matter where they came from, had a tendency to conflate Iranians with Turks, Azeris, Arabs, and all other Muslims, considering them one large and undesirable group. This first occurred to me during a conversation I had with one of my cousins the summer we were ten, when she was visiting with her family for the weekend. Standing in the driveway of my house in New Jersey, we were ranking ethnic groups by the order in which we guessed our parents would not want us to marry someone from them.

  At first it was a given that black would be at the top of the list, but then my cousin changed her mind. “I think my parents would rather I marry a black guy than a Muslim.”

  I was shocked. If she had said Turk, I would not have been surprised—but I thought we liked Muslims in general. It turned out my parents’ equanimity was unusual.

  Recently I asked my parents whether Armenians in Iran had lived comfortably as Christians within a Muslim majority.

  “There was no problem,” they both said at first. “We were very comfortable with our Muslim neighbors.”

  We were sitting at our round kitchen table drinking tea. But then my mother’s face changed as she remembered something. She set her cup down on its saucer and looked out the glass door to the yard. “When I was a child,” she said, speaking slowly, surprised by what her memory was offering up, “if one of the Iranian neighbors came over for tea, we would sit and talk and have a very nice time, and then the cup the guest had drunk from would be put aside so that it could be washed out with bleach.”

  My father stood up and crossed the room, shaking his head hard as if to cancel her comment, and placed his cup in the sink. “No. My parents never would have done such a thing,” he said. “Mom’s family were snobs.”

  I believed him about the last bit. But then he sat down and as the two of them started to puzzle over my question, it became clear that there was no easy answer. On one hand, people said that Armenians were held in a certain regard in Iran—“If there were two Iranians making a business deal,” I had heard more than once, “they would ask an Armenian to be their witness.” On the other hand, there was a school yard taunt familiar to all the Tehran children of my parents’ generation: giggling, they sang it to me in unison. “Armani sag Armani, jar-u-kesheh jahanami!” It meant “Armenian, Armenian dog, the sweeper of hell.” My father reassured me that it was playful—the sort of thing you would shout if you lost a soccer game. Armenian kids sang an equally appalling verse in reply: “Mosalmun, shekleh meymun, khaket konam tuyeh meydun”—“Muslim, looks like a monkey, I’ll bury you in the town square.”

  It was difficult for me to understand the subtleties of normalized separation that they grew up with, but I had absorbed something of them. I had always felt that Iran was a fond part of our family story, and since I was born there, the administrative attachment could not be assimilated away, a fact I am reminded of frequently in airport security lines. But I had never called myself Iranian. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to call myself anything but Armenian.

  * * *

  ONE DAY, I was summoned from my fourth-grade classroom to the principal’s office. Mrs. Green, the secretary, said to me, “Meline, you speak Armenian, don’t you?” I nodded, and wondered how she knew. I had no accent in English and had recently entered a phase of pronouncing my name as “Melanie” instead of Meh-lee-neh, its arduous, proper form.

  “We may need your help with something,” she said. I was sent back to class.

  A few days later,
another teacher came to my classroom and took me into the hallway. There was a boy standing there, a bit younger than I was, and I understood immediately by looking at him that this was why they needed my help.

  “Meline, this is Artun. He has just come to America. He speaks Armenian. Can you tell him that on Tuesdays he needs to bring gym clothes for PE?”

  It was a big deal to see another Armenian child in my school. It had never happened before. I did not say hello but looked into Artun’s hazel eyes, which resembled my sister’s, and wondered where, exactly, he had come from. Armenians typically stated their geographic affiliations by way of introduction: Beirutahai (Armenian from Beirut), Suryahai (Armenian from Syria), Parskahai (Armenian from Iran), or the grand prize, Hayastantsi—Armenian from Armenia—sometimes adding in the name of the town in Turkey where their ancestors had lived before 1915 (Vanetsi, Urfatsi, and so on). My thoughts were stuck on the fact that the teacher had not said that Artun was Armenian, but that he spoke Armenian.

  I needed to know where he was from. Armenians from Armenia were not emigrating to the United States in those years; they couldn’t leave the Soviet Union very easily, and the few who did were more likely to end up in Los Angeles than in New Jersey. Neither were they likely to arrive, in those years, from Iran; we had gotten out just before the revolution, and those who hadn’t been as lucky generally had to wait a few years longer until things loosened up (unless, like some families we knew, they escaped through the mountains and sought asylum). As for Armenians from Lebanon or Syria, they had, in my mind, a swagger about them that did not match with the sight of this quiet, awkward boy standing before me in pants that were belted too high. I knew all this intuitively in a way that made Artun’s presence fail to add up.

  What I did not know was that right around the time that Artun arrived at my school, in the mid-1980s, Armenians from Turkey—from Istanbul’s small, leftover Armenian community—were leaving in droves and settling in New Jersey. Discrimination against them had flared in Turkey after the Armenian terrorist groups whose activities we debated at camp started assassinating Turkish diplomats all over the world. I had no idea there were still Armenians living among Turks at all. In my own life, another twenty years and a long journey later, it would be obvious to me for a constellation of reasons that Artun Danis was a Turkish-Armenian name. But at the time I only stared at this boy’s face and wondered what journey had brought him to Randolph, New Jersey.

  I paused for a moment to think about whether we had words for “gym clothes” or “PE,” and then I said, in an Armenian as stripped of dialect as I could devise, “On Tuesdays you must bring short pants for exercising.”

  Artun nodded.

  “Does he have any questions?” the teacher asked me.

  “Do you have any questions?”

  Artun shook his head.

  Later I noticed that Artun turned up on my school bus line; in fact, he lived just a few streets away from my family. Every time the bus approached the cul-de-sac at the end of Shady Lane, his mom was waiting for him, a small crime of social sabotage typical of an immigrant parent. When I told my mother about Artun, she told me to get his telephone number so she could make contact with his mother.

  My mom had become a one-woman welcome wagon of the West; the consulates of various Middle Eastern countries should have been paying her a retainer for resettlement aid to foreigners who found themselves in the northern New Jersey suburbs. People would come over for dinner—I never understood where my parents collected these embarrassing new arrivals, Armenians as well as regular Iranians, with bad hair and inexorably alien names—and my mother would set to work matchmaking or career coaching; if they couldn’t get to our house because they didn’t have a car, we would drive long distances to pick them up.

  My parents had lived in Palo Alto, California, in the late 1960s, while my father earned his doctorate in engineering, before returning to Iran for a brief spell during which I was born. They both spoke English well and moved gracefully through the barbecues and potluck dinners of our new American neighborhood within months of emigrating. But the bonds of culture were nonetheless a source of survival. One of the first things my mother had done upon arrival in New Jersey was to get a copy of the Morris County telephone book and page through it in search of any conceivably Armenian last name; she finally struck gold in the S’s. She wrote down the address, checked a map, drove across town, and knocked on the front door to introduce herself. “Hello, I’m Armenian,” was the long and the short of what she said. The Surenians remain among my parents’ dearest friends to this day.

  But I did not inherit even enough of her limitless courage to get Artun’s phone number. I felt sorry for him, because he was so much more immigrant than I, but it was the kind of sorry where you avoid the person. Artun seemed nothing like my Armenian friends at camp, and besides, my tenuous social standing at Shongum School couldn’t accommodate any additional burdens.

  * * *

  ALL FIVE MEMBERS of the Toumani family—my parents, my two older sisters, and I—had, in our own ways, quickly integrated ourselves into American life. My father was earning a string of patents at Bell Labs, my mother was finishing a business degree at Rutgers, and my sisters and I were Brownies and Girl Scouts (although my parents found the cookie-selling ritual disgraceful and forbade us to go door-to-door asking for money). But our weekends were Armenian. The Saturday and Sunday afternoons of my youth elapsed in traffic jams on the Long Island Expressway or the Garden State Parkway, as we drove an hour or two each way to see other Armenian families.

  Some Sundays, we went to a place we called “agoomp.” Agoomp means “club,” in Armenian. The club met in a pair of freshly cemented buildings in Saddle Brook, New Jersey, belonging to an Armenian charity. My parents and their friends had organized this club as an alternative to the more politicized or religious Armenian groups in the area. A handful of families showed up each weekend. It was an informal gathering place, like a village contrived from a suburban New Jersey parking lot. As in a village, at agoomp people idled in clusters, simultaneously ignoring and scrutinizing one another, simply being together, which was what immigrants did, creating for themselves a comfortable pocket of society within the larger, less comfortable one. While kids ran around the corridors and the yard, the men played backgammon and the women brewed coffee and gossiped. There were cultural and social events now and then—including, once, a yogurt-eating contest, a diversion crafted by my mother on a lazy summer day. Another time she brought in a stack of brown paper bags and had the children make “Michael Jackson vests” with sequins, glitter, and glue.

  Occasionally the club held panel discussions. At one of these, the topic was “What makes somebody a real Armenian?” Speaking the language and attending church and sending money to Armenia were the obvious answers, but each one met with debate. Finally somebody spoke up with an idea that everyone could agree on: a real Armenian was the one who, at the end of a film, sat through the credits to search for an Armenian name.

  * * *

  DOES THIS SOUND quaint, or warm, like it gave me a cozy sense of belonging to counteract the relentless mortifications of being foreign? The problem is that belonging and not belonging are so intricately linked. Once the lines are drawn, there is a possibility that you may fall on the wrong side of them. This is what I learned at Armenian school at St. Mary’s Church in Livingston, where we went now and then for Sunday services and special events. We also visited the church one evening a week for Armenian language lessons. My mother taught the older students, and my eldest sister was in her class. But my middle sister and I were stuck in a class down the hall where the teacher spoke a different dialect than we did: she spoke Western Armenian.

  Western Armenian is the dialect of Armenians who originated in Turkey. This meant that in the northeastern United States, where most Armenians were descendants of genocide survivors, Western Armenian was dominant. My family spoke Eastern Armenian, the official language of the Republic o
f Armenia and the one used by Armenians from Iran and Russia. The Western and Eastern dialects have big differences in grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and spelling. They are mutually intelligible with some strain; but the issue is not merely comprehension. Coded in the difference between the two dialects is a difference of histories: Western means your parents or grandparents probably suffered unspeakable horrors. Eastern means they probably did not. It was clear to me from an early age that each side considered theirs the “real” Armenian: Western Armenian speakers had claims on the national tragedy; Eastern Armenian speakers could argue that theirs was the official language of modern Armenia.

  In our class in the church basement, my sister and I were the only Eastern Armenian speakers. Nobody had explained to us why there were two different dialects or that both were legitimate. It seemed like a zero-sum game: if theirs is right, ours must be wrong, and vice versa. We already knew Armenian conversationally; the class focused on learning to read and write. (The Armenian alphabet has thirty-eight letters; as a friend would note many years later, and rather accurately, it looks like somebody has thrown a pot of spaghetti in the air and walked away.) Paging through glossy workbooks, we muddled through an Armenian version of Dick and Jane—featuring Ara and Maral, their dog, and their family members, to whom they showed great respect. Sometimes the differences in dialect were manageable: their word for spoon, tekal, was, in our dialect, ketal. Their good night—kisher paree—was baree gisher for us. But not all the differences could be resolved with just a dyslexic shimmy.

  One day my teacher asked me how to say egg, and I gave her the obvious answer: dzu. She howled with laughter and then, catching her breath, corrected me: “havgit!” she shouted across the room. Her word for egg meant “came from the chicken.” Ours meant something like “came from the ovary.” I was humiliated. The ridicule did not end with eggs, and little by little I refused to speak Armenian to anyone.