Georgi Ann Bargamian-Oshagan
I don’t know whether it was a fluke or by design, but the Armenian
Weekly’s Aug. 26, 2017 issue included three articles about the role
Armenian-language knowledge plays—or doesn’t play—in one’s Armenian
identity: Marie Papazian’s “A Generational Question: ‘If You Don’t Speak Armenian, Are You Really Armenian?’”; Garen Yegparian’s “Language vs. Spirit”; and Rupen Janbazian’s “‘Where Are You From?’ and the Huge Pile of Complexes.” Those articles were followed by the Weekly’s Oct. 6, 2017 online posting of Ani Bournazian’s “How Do You Measure Armenian Identity?” I read each with interest, and here I offer my reflections that resulted from those readings.
Although scholars conclude that national or ethnic identity is built
on common touchstones—including language—we’ve reached a point in our
corner of the Armenian Diaspora where Armenian identity does not require
Armenian-language knowledge. We all know Armenian Americans who
identified as Armenian but went from cradle to grave not speaking much
Armenian at all. They experienced their Armenian ethnicity in a way that
was different—but not quantitatively “better”—than an Armenian with
Armenian-language proficiency.
In my third-generation experience growing up in an Armenian-American
community, the very fact that we spoke a certain level and kind of
Armenian informed and continues to influence a unique and beautifully
fraught Armenian-American condition. And yet, Armenian identity
survives, and people take the affirmative step of naming themselves
Armenian, whatever their Armenian language skills.
But that’s not the end of the conversation. We have a problem. Too
many have concluded that because Armenian identity survives a lack of
Armenian-language knowledge, Armenian language learning is not
necessary. It’s a reason why student enrollment in our Armenian-language
one-day schools continues to decline steadily: Those schools
increasingly have to cater to children who come to school already
understanding the language; thus, unintentionally, they marginalize
hundreds of non-Armenian-speaking children whose academic needs can’t be
met well in today’s traditional Armenian school classroom.
When are we going to ask the question that we still haven’t
adequately answered, even after all the years that have led us to today:
How can we teach Armenian as a Second Language in a safe and systemic
way and convince thousands of families that have abandoned the language
to return to the classroom so that they and their children can deepen
their Armenian experience, and in doing so strengthen the Armenian
Nation?
The journey to language proficiency isn’t easy. But it’s worth
taking, even as the journey starts with Armenian identity firmly in
hand, head, and heart.
***
It’s Saturday morning, and I’m in class at Mourad Armenian School,
Providence, R.I. My classmates are Armenian American-born peers and we
are reading textbooks filled with many difficult and mysterious words
not heard at home. We are among the last generation of children whose
genocide survivor grandparents are living, so we hear Armenian regularly
and even speak it to older generations. At annual year-end hanteses (concert),
we recite poems and perform roles in plays, not completely
understanding what we are saying and hoping we don’t embarrass ourselves
and our families by stumbling and mispronouncing words in a language we
have been taught is sacred and precious. A language whose erosion is a
sign of assimilation, waste, and loss. We try to make our parents and
grandparents proud.
***
I’m in Lebanon with five other college students from the United
States who have been selected by the Eastern Armenian Prelacy to spend
six weeks in Bikfaya learning Armenian language, history, and culture.
Our stay has been underwritten by Kevork Hovnanian. A trip to Syria by
way of Ainjar (Anjar) takes us to Aleppo, Damascus, Der Zor, and Kessab.
In Aleppo, a fellow student and I are assigned to stay with a family
that includes three sisters and a female visiting cousin. We seem to be
interacting well and the family hosts us all for a pleasant dinner on
our last night in the city. My roommate gets sick and goes to bed early.
I follow later after everyone has left. The sisters and cousin crowd in
the bedroom doorway. They ask me questions that I try to answer in my
expanding, but still child-level Armenian. The atmosphere turns when the
cousin responds, “Jib, jib, jib,” at my efforts and the mocking begins.
I start to cry and tell them in Armenian that they’re breaking my
heart, that we are the same, that we are all Armenian. But we are not
the same and my baby Armenian words don’t move them. I tell them to
leave me alone, and after they leave I weep for the loss of something I
can’t identify.
***
I’m in Radnor, Penn., at the home of poet Vahe Oshagan and my fiancé,
Hayg, son of Vahe and grandson of Hagop Oshagan, the revered Armenian
literary critic and novelist. I’m listening very hard to Hayg’s
conversation with his father, paying attention to words, idioms,
inflections, and tenses, and saying as little as possible. I cannot
participate fully in this high-stakes dialogue, full of nuance and fast
and fluent observations in Armenian. I rehearse sentences and try to fit
them into conversation when I can. I watch for signs and prompts. By
the end of the evening, I’m exhausted. This construct repeats over the
years.
***
It’s my wedding day, and I’m dancing with my new father-in-law at the
reception. He asks, “You’re going to speak Armenian?” It’s a statement
wrapped in a question. “I’ll try,” I promise in Armenian.
***
Hayg and I are walking back to our apartment on the University of
Wisconsin Madison campus, and I’m three months pregnant with our first
child. I have chosen this day to fulfill my promise to speak Armenian.
This is the day I start to build the capacity that will allow Armenian
to be the language of our home, the language of our family, the language
of our firstborn. Hayg says something to me in Armenian and I respond
in Armenian. And we continue from there.
***
After several weeks of conversation, my Armenian comes out of my
mouth more fluently, if not always perfectly. I can better recall and
use the Armenian words buried in my brain. I still talk to myself to
practice what I’m going to say, to try out that more precise word, to
elevate my expression. I make mistakes and feel anger and shame when
corrected, but I carry on to keep the promises I’ve made to others and
myself. For my family’s sake. For my sake.
***
Years pass and my Armenian is stronger. Vocabulary is situational, so
mine revolves around home, school, work, and meetings. I’m conversant
in Armenian, and know my share of 25-cent words. I read the Hairenik
Weekly—using the Armenian school lessons of decades past—to build
vocabulary or correct pronunciation of certain words, seeing the
spelling. My children speak Armenian and attend Armenian school. For an
Armenian whose family has been in the U.S. for nearly 100 years, I’m
satisfied with my achievement, but never completely relaxed using the
fruits of that achievement.
***
I’m at a community event that has babies and toddlers everywhere, and
Armenian is in the air because Armenian is the language spoken to small
children, by instinct and impulse. Pari (good), char (bad), yegour (come), voch (no), gatig (milk). In
this moment, these are not baby words. They are gold among the tin of
English. The Armenian words are few, but they are present and they
resonate, said with love and memory. For some parents and grandparents,
these words and others like them are all that is left to say. But they
are beautiful and meaningful to the listening children who will only
pass on these few remnants of Armenian themselves without more Armenian
language learning opportunities.
***
I’m at Detroit’s Armenian Relief Society (ARS ) Zavarian Armenian
School on opening day and see five-year-old Sevana Derderian enrolling
for the new school year. It’s her first Armenian-school experience, and I
watch her as I speak to her mother. There are few non-Armenian-speaking
peers in the room, and the parents of Sevana’s friends have chosen not
to enroll their children. I wonder how Sevana will feel about herself in
the dynamics of a class filled mostly with children from homes where
Armenian is spoken regularly. Will she crack a code that others already
know innately? I silently make a wish that she won’t learn to connect
Armenian-language learning with negative feelings that hurt her heart
and spirit.
* * *
Xenoglossophobia. This is the fear of foreign-language learning. It’s
my theory that thousands of Diasporan Armenians suffer from this
phobia, which teachers of second languages debate and discuss.
University of Texas Austin foreign-language educator Elaine Horwitz
says that, for many, foreign language learning can be filled with
anxiety and can negatively impact learning.
“I think that there’s some amount of inherent anxiety in language
learning, because A, it’s just difficult, time-consuming and
complicated, and B, I think that for some people it’s a threat to our
self-concept,” she told Inside Higher Ed. “We can’t be ourselves when we
speak the language. We have to be limited just to whatever it is that
we can say.”
Second-language scholar Alexander Z. Guiora has written that learning
a second language is “a profoundly unsettling psychological proposition
because it directly threatens an individual’s self-concept and
worldview.”
Armenian-American parents who have bad memories of Armenian school
and have not sent their children to avoid their negative experiences
will recognize Guiora’s additional observation that students learning a
second language—even when it is the language of their
ancestors—“experience apprehension, worry, even dread. They exhibit
avoidance behavior such as missing class and postponing homework.”
***
There has been much discussion in the Armenian press recently about
reconciling differences between Western and Eastern Armenian and
protecting Western Armenian generally as we continue reflecting on the
meaning of our nationhood in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide’s
centennial observance and in the run up to the 100th anniversary of the first Armenian Republic’s establishment.
As a community and nation, we may also want to focus on the survival
of Western Armenian’s use throughout the Diaspora and on ways to rebuild
an Armenian-language learning infrastructure that will teach Armenian
as a Second Language using a strong, relevant, and systematic curriculum
that meets children where they are and builds to a satisfactory and
satisfying language-proficiency level.
“One shot” classes that have Armenian as a Second Language learners
for a year or two and disband because of teacher or student
discontinuity, together with piecemeal approaches in integrated
classrooms, only perpetuate both the current atmosphere of parent
abandonment of our Armenian one-day schools and the derision and
eye-rolling that greets the question, “Are you sending your child to
Armenian school this year?”
Continuing patchwork solutions to halfheartedly teach Armenian to
non-Armenian-speaking Armenian children will only continue to keep
Armenian Americans away from most of today’s Armenian schools. Parents
will not send their non-Armenian-speaking children to a place where
their understanding of themselves as Armenian may be threatened. The
emotional connection between the non-Armenian-speaker’s
language-learning discomfort and their Armenian identity may create the
conflation that leads to that destructive question: Am I a “real”
Armenian if I don’t know Armenian?
The sooner we implement and advance an Armenian-language learning
environment for non-Armenian-speakers that deepens their Armenian
experience in a safe and supportive space, the sooner the lingering
divisions in our communities based on language and experience with
language will blur, especially as the influx of fresh native Armenian
speakers diminishes throughout the eastern U.S.
Until that happens, old debate questions about identity and language
will pit us against each other and serve as a distraction, until we come
together and confront the real danger we face together: the absence of a
meaningful plan to shape the destiny of Western Armenian’s relevance,
learning and use in our eastern U.S. communities, and the mindset of too
many Armenian Americans who have concluded in the full embrace of their
Armenian identity that it is not worth learning and using the language
of their ancestors.
"The Armenian Weekly," October 27, 2017
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