The Armenian Diaspora
By Etyen Mahcupyan
Zaman newspaper
5 December 2004
We can say that diaspora groups live everywhere in the world in an
environment where they feel ‘out of sorts.’
It is not easy to be the object of a state of permanent and mandatory
guest-hood where they painstakingly learn the language and culture
of a society and as they do, get alienated from themselves.
Especially if one has, like the Armenians, a past
filled with pain, if one has been forcefully torn away from their
homeland and have been so heartbroken as to consider the possibility of
return a sort of non-issue; then being in the diaspora translates into
a very heavy emotional burden. To sum up in a single sentence, the
Armenian diaspora today is ‘the East within the West…’ These people
who were forced to depart from their homelands had to quickly adapt
to modernity of the Western countries they arrived in. This state of
being torn away led to an unavoidable process of individualization,
standing on your own feet, getting into multiple relations with the
people and institutions in the arrived countries. The requirements
of the workplace and especially the needs of children often eroded
the patriarchal codes of the family and a type of normlessness was
experienced in relation to how much the West lured the children away.
Consequently, the destiny of the Eastern diaspora in
the West is necessitated by the fact that the individualization
experienced in the socio-economic sphere does not correspond to
anything in the cultural sphere; more explicitly stated, they have to
sustain their identity within the alienation of the culture offered
them there…
Consequently, in order to retain their own identity, the Armenians had
to reform their communities in the Western world. Their identities
that had been fragmented at the individual level were reproduced anew
over such togetherness. And for this reason, from the viewpoint of
diaspora Armenians, ‘identity’ turned into a characteristic that
could be supported not as an individual but only as a community.
While communal activities became the only functional realm holding
them together, the expression of identity politics was also abandoned
to the charge of the aforementioned organizations… The communal
diaspora organizations acquired immunity and sometimes even a kind of
sacredness in the work they undertook because of the implied meanings
of identity. Hence, while the ‘individual’ implied a subject bounded
by personal life, societal participation was sought and lived through
the ‘community.’
The meaning of this is that it led communal politics to possess force
to create hegemony over the individual. On the other hand the Armenian
community continued to sustain a spiritual hierarchy within itself
because of its communal logic and its Ottoman past. Yet the secular
societies of the West were not made up of a character that would
permit the spiritual leadership to assume, as it did in the Ottoman
case, a political leadership as well… Hence today this political
vacuum is being filled by the political elite heading the communal
organizations in the Armenian diaspora. Yet the political elite of
the Armenian elite that had weak democratic traditions in its own
inception and that still reproduced itself anew within a patriarchal
mentality can be transformed into a type of political oligarchy….
And political oligarchy reproduces itself anew and fortifies its
position through radicalism, for radicalism contains this image that
implies it defends Armenian culture much more. In so far as no one
can claim that Armenian culture should be defended less, radicalism
naturally becomes the only politics… And what emerges is a nationalist
stand that centers on the absence of consideration that is in reality
without any ‘political backbone.’ While the diaspora imagines itself
to be engaged in politics, it actually remains contained by hardening
intra-community politics. The protective instinct created by sudden
change of living space creates, in the end, a reactionism that freezes
time, fixes the community, and obstructs politics by pushing it into
irrational channels.
–Boundary_(ID_afQEgtsAqv5mRuDzqpNxcA)–