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At home, Lebanon permeated the air. I became used to waking up, coming home, and falling asleep to the sounds of CNN, our only lifeline to a Beirut ravaged by civil war. My parents’ worries and sadness were palpable. I would fall into an uneasy sleep, dreading being woken up by the phone. Those awful nights when it would ring, a chill would run down my spine as I tried to make out my parents’ voices, all the while praying that our relatives were okay, that Lebanon was okay.

This was my normal. My feet so firmly planted in the present that it hardly ever occurred to me that there was something else—something that happened somewhere else, long ago—that had touched my family in ways I could hardly begin to understand. I had my hands full as a 6-year-old processing our exile—little did I know we were exiled from our exile.

I learned about it almost by accident. We had received an assignment in school to fill out a family tree. I came home, a bit baffled by the assignment (fill in some names? that’s it?), and became more baffled still when, after asking my parents for help, it turned out that most of those branches on the family tree were going to have to remain blank. I implored my parents to try to remember. I became desperate, begging them to just make up some names. (I was about to receive a lesson in ethics and family history all at once.)

As delicately as they could, my parents told me my mother’s parents were orphaned when they were young. That my mom’s aunt, who helped raise her, was not actually her aunt, but a member of the makeshift family that formed in the Beirut orphanage where my grandparents met and grew up. I remember asking what happened and being told that there had been fighting in a country called Turkey, where my grandparents were born (yet another revelation: they weren’t even from Beirut!). That bad things had happened and many people died but my grandparents survived. That they were little when they were found and rescued and taken to Beirut. I thought about my grandpa. My always smiling, cuddly dede, who only had one eye and whom I loved more than anything. Who wore a beret, snuck me candy bars, and sang funny songs to me while the bombs fell that time we visited Beirut.

It all suddenly became too much. I just wanted to finish my assignment. I asked for just enough information to include in a note for my teacher. And so, I scrawled on the bottom of that half-empty family tree, “I couldn’t fill in all the names because of the Armenian genocide. One million people died but my grandparents survived. You can ask my parents.”

Somehow, along with the war in Lebanon, the genocide was folded into my consciousness, yet another part of my normal. Something bad had happened to people I loved long ago, and that was it. Absent in my conception of the war and of the genocide were those markers so often used to differentiate and to categorize: there was no Christian, there was no Muslim; there was no Turk, there was no Arab. There was only dede and yaya and mez mama and all those others I would never know. I knew I was Armenian, but I couldn’t have told you what that meant. It was something I only understood through the prism of the life I knew at home: the mixture of Armenian, Turkish, and Arabic we spoke; the shish kebab, hummus, and manti we ate; and the Armenian, Turkish, Lebanese, and American pop that we danced and laughed to when my parents finally had enough of CNN. All my happiness and all my sadness existed here, in this unquestioned plurality.

Of course, I couldn’t stay there forever. Eventually, I began to see myself through other peoples’ eyes and realized the strangeness of our normal. I became painfully aware of the incongruity of all the different parts of myself and of the way my ethnicity, nationality, past, and present appeared to others. I saw a Lebanon of terrorists and belligerent Armenians who couldn’t let go of the past. I became ashamed of my father’s dark skin—that most obvious sign of our “Otherness”—and of my mother’s insistence on asking my teachers why they don’t teach the Armenian genocide in school. And soon I saw the question mark that follows this genocide wherever it goes and that shows itself in the linguistic acrobatics of politicians and journalists avoiding the g-word.

I first saw it at 13, when I volunteered with my mother at an international fair where the small Armenian community in Tulsa had a booth. Included in the brochure that we were handing out was a small paragraph on the genocide. As I returned to the booth after a short break, I saw a stranger berating my mother, telling her she was lying about the genocide. When she calmly engaged him, I should have been proud. But then, I could only see the humiliation of it. The utter humiliation of having to fight to be believed, of having to fight to be heard. Of knowing your narrative must be silenced in order to keep another’s intact. As I watched her with tears in my eyes, an image of my now deceased dede—who I missed more than anything—flashed before me and I wanted to hug him, to protect him like he protected me. And it all suddenly became too much. I wanted her to stop—just please, stop. I didn’t want this anymore. I didn’t want to be Armenian, I didn’t want to be Lebanese. I wanted to be something that could just be.

It’s a yearning too many of us know, this desire to be something stripped of implications, of politics, and of history. It’s something you can’t think about too much because it can feel overwhelming, suffocating. In those moments, I close my eyes and think about when I don’t have to be anything other than myself: eating Turkish food, dreaming in English, gossiping in Armenian, cursing in Arabic, singing with Johnny Cash, and going to the football games on Fridays. I grieve for the family I’ll never know, for those empty branches on the family tree. My stomach turns as I think about the horrors they suffered and recoil at the taunting question mark that mocks our pain. And I cry—I cry because I’m sad, because I’m angry, because I still don’t understand.

And then, when it becomes too much, I think about my dede. I can feel his hand in mine. He sings to me that funny song and we laugh.

The post The Day I Discovered My Grandparents Survived a Genocide appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Get up, we’re going shopping,” she would say. She never meant at the Vons or Ralphs grocery chains, where you could buy waffles and milk. She meant at one of the markets in Glendale or Burbank or Pasadena where I could find huge rolls of fresh unleavened lavash bread that amounted to double my height when fully spread across a table. A market with yogurt soda, a carbonated, fermented drink seasoned with pepper and mint.

As a kid growing up in Los Angeles in the ‘90s who could not identify with the synthesizer-backed Armenian songs that blared during family celebrations, or the video cassettes of sketch comedy skits imported from Armenia that my parents couldn’t wait to get their hands on, I didn’t understand the importance of these markets. I didn’t get that there was a communal hunger they were trying to satiate.

Armenians have always lived in a wide swath of terrain that stretches from Iran to Caucasus to the Mediterranean. We began migrating to the U.S. as early as the 19th century. That migration has always come in waves, thanks to war and political turmoil. One wave in particular changed the course of thousands of years of Armenian history.

One hundred years ago today, the Ottoman Empire began an ethnic cleansing campaign against its Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek populations, rounding up and killing several hundred Armenian intellectuals. Over the next few years, some 1.5 million Armenians were killed and over 100,000 children left orphaned because of their ethnicity—acts that scholars, several governments around the world, Armenians, and even the Pope have condemned as genocide, even if the Turkish government refuses to acknowledge it as such. Among its deeply unsettling, long-lasting effects, the genocide made Armenians feel lost about where “home” actually was.

Many of those who survived were taken in as refugees in Middle Eastern countries, but events like the Lebanese Civil War and Iranian Revolution uprooted Armenians again, bringing them en masse to America throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. This is what happened to my family. I was born in Tehran, but, after the revolution, the institution of Sharia law and the war with Iraq made life for almost all Iranians more difficult. The final straw for my parents came in 1989 when they put up lights on a Christmas tree that could be seen from the street and a paramilitary volunteer militia burst into our home with machine guns. They mistakenly thought the Christmas lights meant we were having a party with alcohol, which was forbidden. My parents decided this was no place for their young children.

The majority of Armenian immigrants to the U.S. came to California, and the Golden State still claims the largest population of Armenians in the U.S. While many Armenians first settled in Fresno—due to the San Joaquin Valley’s agricultural opportunities and arid landscape, which reminded them of their ancestral homelands—the Los Angeles area became the cultural stronghold for the Armenian-American diaspora, where churches, organizations and various businesses flourished from Glendale to the Valley. After stopping in Greece first, my family settled in the L.A. area because like many Armenians, we had relatives here.

The Armenian markets in Glendale were where you’d find announcements for dinner dances featuring shiny-haired Armenian singers in terribly outdated suits and advertisements for translation services—an allure my mother could not resist. We went every week, unless our market day fell on April 24. The markets were always closed that day, in honor of the Armenian genocide.

Whenever we went to the markets, I hid behind the cart as my mom pushed through aisles of olive oil, rose petal jam and pomegranate paste. I wanted to run away every time I caught a glimpse of the “evil eye trinkets” hanging by the check-out counter—talismans to be hung in homes, cars, and even on baby diapers, to ward off misfortune.

In the winter, you could find cow’s feet soup, a delicacy that traditionally helped Armenians survive the cold season, even though there was no real need for it in the year-round temperateness of L.A. Donkey oil from the Armenian-populated village of Gharaghan, Iran, was prized as a medicine akin to Neosporin.

Patriotic songs blared over megaphones installed throughout the entire store and paintings of Mount Ararat, the biblical mountain that functions as a unifying symbol for Armenians across the world, loomed overhead. The smell of pickled cucumbers in plastic jars permeated through the store, mixing in with the scent of ground coffee that produced the thick mud-like drink consumed at every family gathering.

When I was young, the entire experience was overwhelming. The stores we frequented were so compact that there was nowhere to hide from the wandering grandmothers who tried to talk to me as if I was their own progeny. The saran-wrapped lamb’s head at the deli counter among bologna and mortadella sausages haunted me, and I often begged to be allowed to wait in the car.

As I grew up, the shopping trips gradually stopped. I was busy refining the American part of my Armenian-American identity. When I entered adulthood, however, I began to return to the same markets I had built up such a strong aversion to—and noticed that my aversion had turned into nostalgia.

The markets were brimming with the same characters from my childhood, and I was glad to see the haggling grandmothers I once feared. I loaded up my cart with tarragon soda, Medjool dates, and pickled shallots—the purchases of someone who had been born in the Middle East, grew up in a diaspora and visited Post-Soviet Armenia as often as she could. I offered to run errands there for my mom.

Soon I began to visit the markets even when I didn’t immediately need anything. I wanted to be there, in the midst of the chaos, squeezing between the men and women on a quest to find the best cucumber, to soak in the spice-laden atmosphere. This market wasn’t a place I wanted to escape from anymore, but its own kind of refuge.

The Armenian markets became a place that transported me from the mundane of every day life. I looked forward to asking whoever was at the deli counter, in Armenian, if he could please give me a half-pound of the most flavorful Feta cheese I had ever tasted.

Going through the cramped maze was far more appealing than large, slick corporate supermarkets where everything is strategically positioned to make you buy something. It made me feel rooted, grounded, part of a community that I didn’t even understand I belonged to until I was back in the chaos of the market as a young adult.

On a recent trip there I overheard a young girl helping her grandfather read English labels on wines imported from Armenia, where wine cultivation has remerged as an exciting industry. She read several labels out loud until he finally made his choice and then off they went to check out. I envied the ease with which she wore her multiple identities. But then I quickly went back to piling pomegranates in my plastic bag. I wanted to select the best ones, before anyone else had a chance to get to them.

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