Muttart

Who Am I Today?

Not too long ago, my twenty-three-year-old daughter asked me about where her great-grandparents came from.  To her surprise, she found out that she is a sixth generation diasporan Armenian, with three different countries (Armenia, Syria, and Lebanon) that she could call hyrenik or her ‘homeland’.  Through the process of learning the history of our ancestors, Ani and I situated ourselves within our ethnic and diasporic landmark and constructed our identities as Armenians living in yet another ‘hostland’, Canada.  Records from India and Italy between 1717-1789 show that Armenians were dispersed from their historic homeland throughout the world (Panossian, 80).  Armenians have not had a fixed centre for centuries having therefore formed fluid identities.

  Armenians refer to Armenia as Myre Hyasstan, meaning ‘Mother Armenia’; however, not having a direct translation for ‘homeland’, we use the word hyrenik, which translates to ‘land of our father’.  This might be an indication that ‘homeland’ does not only refer to Armenia but rather to any country where our fathers were born.  Our history shows that our ancestors were constantly on the move -- voluntarily or by force.  Therefore, it has become a habit to ask each other, “Where do your parents come from?” or “Where were your parents born?”.  The answer to these questions never surprise us because we know that Armenians have established communities in all corners of the world.  Hence, “diaspora’s idea of the homeland … could be the ancestral village in the Ottoman Empire, the city of birth, present day Armenia, or the ideal of an Armenia to be – and probably a combination of all these” (Panossian, 86).  

My homeland is the imagined Armenia (I have never been there), but I introduce myself as an Armenian born and raised in Lebanon.  My identity is a construction based on my history, my language, and my culture.  In fact, this paper is another reconstruction of myself for my readers (and for myself).  Just as Stuart Hall (1996) observes that “Identity is a narrative of the self; it’s the story we tell about the self in order to know who we are” (346).

Hall postulates the concept of identity as a “diverse and pluralized situation” that can only be understood in terms of “history”, “the unconscious life”, “linguistics”, and “the discovery of other worlds, other peoples, other cultures, and other languages” (340, 341, 344).  The history of our family, the history of our country, and the history of our world, are all determinants, now and in the future, of who we are and where and how we live.  We cannot look at ourselves independently from “the practices and the discourses that make us. … Marx reminds us that we are always lodged and implicated in the practices and structures of everybody else’s life” (Hall, 340).  I am an Armenian because my parents are Armenians.  I was born in Beirut because the political situation in Syria forced my father to flee that hostland.  I am living in Canada now because the civil war in Beirut forced me to seek refuge elsewhere and because Canada was one of the few countries at the time accepting immigrants from Lebanon.  Events in my particular family and events in the world at large dictated my destiny and provided me with the building blocks of my identity.

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Not only history but also the unconscious life provides bases to build and alter identities.  Expanding on Freud’s concept of the psyche, Hall elaborates: “Identity is itself grounded on the huge unknowns of our psychic lives, … it is formed not only in the line of the practice of other structures and discourses, but also in a complex relationship with unconscious life”(340).  Therefore, a unique self might emerge from within me and give me an identity that I could call a “true self” until external influences merge and reconstruct my identity.  

Judith Butler (1990) refers to this creation of ...

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