445) Istanbul Armenians

It is hard to be an immigrant...These people rejected and isolated in their own country have to travel to an unknown country and culture, probably without sufficient financial means to survive.

This adventure undertaken by them without knowing the language, rules, traditions of the country they are going to, leads them to lands in which they will be strangers and will always remain strangers... Their only hope and point of resistance is the new and secure life they will give to their children. The first generation sacrifices itself and expects this sacrifice to be praised even if it does not say it openly. . . . However, even though it is somewhat possible to keep the next generation under cultural discipline, the grandchildren, in particular, adapt to this new culture and are detached from the traditional culture. Hence, alienation among generations surfaces and past sacrifices become a topic of conversation remembered only by its funny aspects. Elderliness for the first generation immigrants always implies sadness and solitude...

Just as the elderly in the family perceive this act of scattering that takes place before the very eyes of the people as a kind of deculturalization, the immigrants also seek ways of becoming a community. Because a community means an organization producing common grounds and values. The communities established remind the immigrants of their language, religion and artistic accumulation and to teach their children about these. Marriages within the community make this common culture concrete and reinforce it. However, all these are not enough for the community to reproduce itself the same way: Facing the crushing effect of the host culture, the gap between home and street widens, the immigrant family becomes a stranger to the public sphere in the street, makes this alienation normal in its inner world and creeps into its own shell, into its home.

This process triggers an identity need that exceeds the daily lifestyle which surrounds it and also makes it more meaningful. Because, every human being needs the “street,” that is to say, the public sphere and the public sphere that cannot be acquired in the new country is new being sought in the motherland... Social and political events of the abandoned country become more and more the basic focus of attention and a “diaspora” comes into being... This position peculiar to itself, uniting the policies of the old country and the daily life of the new one, produces an identity that is equal to the power of the motherland. Therefore, in examples where the motherland is weak, the diaspora turns to an additional source of identity, generally to history...

However, I must confess that the night organized by Istanbul Armenians in Melbourne, Australia reflected more than this state of mind. I have just returned from this trip, and I will probably not be able to forget one of the peak points of the trip, that night when nearly 200 people danced the “halay” in the accompaniment of Armenian, Greek and Arabic songs, sang songs in Turkish in a chorus and wept... An elderly Istanbul Armenian young at heart, dropping his walking stick and dancing as the “misket havasi” ( a Turkish folk music) began, will remain engraved in my mind. Istanbul Armenians are both inside and outside the line that goes from immigrantship to the diaspora... It is impossible not to perceive a thousand-year Anatolian resistance behind all those years they have spent in another land; however, what is more important is their supporting this past as a whole, their becoming the real men of that land... This is what presumably makes them healthy...


03.12.2005
ETYEN MAHCUPYAN
http://www.zaman.com