ARMENIAN PATRIOTISM, REVISITED
By Gendy Alimurung
LA Weekly
Feb 3 2011
CA
A Los Angeles man returns to the homeland – and might become its
president
When writer Garin Hovannisian goes home to Armenia in a few days, he
will feel weirdly homesick. “It’s so strange. I always miss the place
where I’m not,” he says, sitting in a cafe in Glendale, the one place
in Los Angeles where there are so many Armenians it can seem like you
already are in the old country. To understand his very contemporary
kind of longing, you have to go back a bit, to the Ottoman Empire.
Specifically, to a guy named Kaspar.
Kaspar was Garin’s great-grandfather, one of the tens of thousands of
people fleeing the Armenian genocide. When the Ottoman Turks butchered
the men of his village, Kaspar escaped to the San Joaquin Valley, where
he started a grape farm. He gave his kids American names and taught
them to embrace their adoptive country. One of these kids was Richard.
Richard did not love the vines and the farm. He fled his home, too,
but to Los Angeles and a professorship at UCLA, where he founded the
department of Armenian studies.
Richard, in turn, begat a son named Raffi, who grew up in Brentwood,
played football at Palisades High, became a lawyer and married. Raffi
set up practice and made lots of money. He became, in short, the
epitome of the American dream. You’d think this is where the story
ends, everybody fat, fulfilled and happy. And it could have ended
there. But if you read the book Garin – Raffi’s son – has written on
the subject, you’d see it’s actually only the beginning.
Because then, the fatherland called. Or rather, faxed.
“My dad sat in his office in Century City and realized history was
waking up miles away,” he says. “It was waking up after decades
of silence.”
Garin was 3 years old when his father announced they were moving to
Soviet Armenia. It was 1989. It was kind of a shock. “My poor mother!”
Garin says. “She was actually a refugee from Soviet Armenia. She had
just become a successful lawyer herself.”
Nevertheless, they traded the house in Brentwood for an apartment
in Yerevan. Garin’s dad didn’t have a job lined up in Armenia, but
his revolutionary and democratic hopes were high. You can live on
patriotism, it turns out.
Raffi joined up with the people who would become the country’s
new leaders and made himself indispensable: visiting the Karabakh
conflict’s front lines one day, arranging interviews between the new
democratic party’s members and the world’s press the next.
In 1991, following mass demonstrations throughout the Soviet Union,
Gorbachev’s empire crumbled and Armenia declared independence from
the Soviet Union. The fledgling government needed just such a natural
connector, a person who knew law and the outside world, who had
contacts in the United States, who could speak English, French and
Russian. Soon Raffi was appointed the new Republic of Armenia’s first
minister of foreign affairs. He negotiated diplomatic relations with
every foreign country. He raised the new flag at the United Nations.
He installed the ministry’s first fax machine. “We recognize,” came the
return transmissions, communiques from Britain and Japan and Mexico,
acknowledging the new country’s independence.
“My dad was born in the U.S. but always had a sense that his future
was somewhere else,” Garin says. “He’s left me kind of a divided
legacy. My immediate family are in Armenia, but my extended family
is in California.”
>From age 3 on, Garin traveled back and forth from L.A. to Armenia,
spending half the school year here, half there. He remembers trips
on Aeroflot planes. He remembers passengers drinking vodka, eating,
handing him candy, “a party in the air.”
He has grown up into a thoughtful, gracious young man who has never
felt fully at home, never fully adjusted to the culture he’s in.
History, apparently, is written not by winners but by their children.
The bicultural upbringing that made a diplomat out of Raffi made a
writer out of Garin. His book Family of Shadows is Armenian history as
seen through the achievements of the prodigal sons – Kaspar, Richard
and Raffi – of one of its leading families. It is a book bursting,
aching with pride. Pride for fathers. Pride for family, duty and
nation. Yet there are feelings left unspoken, too: disappointment,
disillusionment. Hence, the shadows. They slip through the narrative,
darker interior moments that are gone as soon as seen:
We lived in a castle. That is what it seemed like, anyway, because
there was a Russian pool table on the veranda and secret service
agents in the basement. I marveled at all of this, yet I knew this was
not my real home. I knew that beyond the gray walls of the dacha was
Yerevan, which itself was not real, and beyond that was California,
where all my grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins lived.
Where I was now, this was just beautiful nonsense. I was simply
walking through my father’s dreams.
How can a son be anything but proud of a father who has done so much?
How can you be in two places – metaphoric, psychic, geographic –
at once? History may be written by children, but it is made by parents.
To flesh out details, Garin interviewed his father and grandfather.
“The most terrifying ones I did were with my grandfather. He’s the
master interviewer. He’s collected some 800 interviews with genocide
survivors.”
If Garin seems too young to tell the family saga, having personally
lived only 24 years of it, he worried about that as well. “It required
courage,” he says. “No, arrogance.”
Maybe it’s genetic, that courageous arrogance. His father was just 30
when he abandoned his cushy upper-middle-class Southern California
existence and uprooted the family to join the revolution. He is
expected to run for Armenia’s presidency in the next election.
Thus far, the dual life continues. Garin’s dad still lives in Armenia,
and Garin still splits his time between continents, racking up
the frequent-flier miles. When in Los Angeles, he crashes with his
grandfather in Westwood, walking distance from the UCLA campus. In
Armenia, he sits at a desk in an apartment in Yerevan, facing a window
that looks out on Mount Ararat. Reaching across the cafe table now,
he flips to Family of Shadows’ title page and draws a mountain with
the sun peeking out behind it. He will write a novel next, he believes.
For his debut, Garin has, quite literally, put his family first.
“I can’t say that I would make the same decision he did,” Garin
says of his dad, though he’d be lying if he said the dream and the
patriotism mean nothing to him.
But which dream, is the question. Which country?
“The American dream or the Armenian dream. I’m not sure which one I
want yet,” he admits. “Ah, well. Life is meaningful in the balance.”
From: A. Papazian
http://www.laweekly.com/2011-02-03/columns/armenian-patriotism-revisited/