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STORIES OF A SILENT GENERATION: FATHER-DAUGHTER FILMMAKERS SET OUT TO TELL FAMILY STORY
BY ABBY ALEXANIAN
ASBAREZ
http://asbarez.com/101701/stories-of-a-silent-generation-father-daughter-filmmakers-set-out-to-tell-family-story/
Thur. March 15, 2012
I don't speak Armenian. I've never been to the Republic of Armenia. I
rarely eat the food or attend Armenian Church services. But I can't
shake the feeling that I am definitely Armenian. Yet as much as I feel
that I am Armenian, I also can't seem to figure out what that means.
Human beings are "meaning makers" - we turn our memories into stories
that give meaning to the past. Meaning helps us understand pain and
joy, it teaches us about ourselves, and it gives us various parts of
our identities. Family histories especially confer meaning on each
new generation; in many ways, our family stories create us. Yet what
happens when those stories are immensely painful? And what happens
when these stories in particular are not told?
Whenever my dad talked about growing up in an Armenian family
in Worcester, Massachusetts, the life he described always felt so
foreign to me that he and I might have grown up in entirely different
countries. I cherished those rare stories I heard about my dad's
childhood - like how he spent afternoons with his grandfather on
the second floor of his family's tenement, speaking only Armenian
and learning woodworking. Yet his family had been desperately poor;
life hadn't been easy, but even amidst the difficulties - or perhaps
because of them - his family maintained the Armenian way of life that
my dad's grandparents carried with them from the old country.
There are many things about my Armenian family that I learned only in
small bits and pieces scattered through my childhood, or that I never
knew until I started asking questions. For instance: the grandfather
that my dad spent so much time with as a boy was a survivor of the
1915 Armenian Genocide, and my grandmother's mother saw her husband,
three daughters, and parents killed before she was marched through
the desert for months. These were not the stories I heard growing up.
The genocide is not often spoken of, even amongst Armenians, and this
silence has carried scars of its own. An undercurrent of deep unhealed
pain runs through the Armenian's identity, and even if we know little
of the genocide, our ancient heritage, or the vanishing traditions -
this pain touches us.
But how are we supposed to make sense of this pain? When silence
replaces stories, we grasp at meaning but have nothing to hold onto.
For the children of the silent generations, any identity we receive
from our part-Armenian-ness consists almost entirely of wanting to
have more of it, to know more of it, and to be more of it. Michael J.
Arlen, son of an Armenian father and a Greek-American mother, begins
his memoir Passage to Ararat with this very idea: "At a particular time
in my life, I set out on a voyage to discover for myself what it is
to be Armenian. For although I myself am Armenian, or part Armenian,
until then I knew nothing about either Armenians or Armenia." A
generation of Armenians was swallowed by the genocide in 1915, but
now a new generation of Armenians is threatened with extinction as
well, though of a different sort: for the great-grandchildren of the
survivors, Armenia is losing its meaning.
How can we go about creating meaning where what we have encountered
most often is silence? We can start by looking for the stories.
The silence in my family has started to relax, mostly because my dad
and I decided to make a film about it. Our documentary, tentatively
titled Journey to Armenia: Three Generations from Genocide, will
be the story of our trips together to the Republic of Armenia and
Eastern Turkey (aka Western Armenia), beginning with our first trip
this summer. Like archeologists of our own family history, we will
visit the four villages that our family members fled from almost a
hundred years ago. And in the process, we hope to learn more about
what being Armenian really means.
Learn more about the film at Kickstarter or visit the film's Facebook
page:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Journey-to-Armenia-Three-Generations-from-Genocide/131000973689205
BY ABBY ALEXANIAN
ASBAREZ
http://asbarez.com/101701/stories-of-a-silent-generation-father-daughter-filmmakers-set-out-to-tell-family-story/
Thur. March 15, 2012
I don't speak Armenian. I've never been to the Republic of Armenia. I
rarely eat the food or attend Armenian Church services. But I can't
shake the feeling that I am definitely Armenian. Yet as much as I feel
that I am Armenian, I also can't seem to figure out what that means.
Human beings are "meaning makers" - we turn our memories into stories
that give meaning to the past. Meaning helps us understand pain and
joy, it teaches us about ourselves, and it gives us various parts of
our identities. Family histories especially confer meaning on each
new generation; in many ways, our family stories create us. Yet what
happens when those stories are immensely painful? And what happens
when these stories in particular are not told?
Whenever my dad talked about growing up in an Armenian family
in Worcester, Massachusetts, the life he described always felt so
foreign to me that he and I might have grown up in entirely different
countries. I cherished those rare stories I heard about my dad's
childhood - like how he spent afternoons with his grandfather on
the second floor of his family's tenement, speaking only Armenian
and learning woodworking. Yet his family had been desperately poor;
life hadn't been easy, but even amidst the difficulties - or perhaps
because of them - his family maintained the Armenian way of life that
my dad's grandparents carried with them from the old country.
There are many things about my Armenian family that I learned only in
small bits and pieces scattered through my childhood, or that I never
knew until I started asking questions. For instance: the grandfather
that my dad spent so much time with as a boy was a survivor of the
1915 Armenian Genocide, and my grandmother's mother saw her husband,
three daughters, and parents killed before she was marched through
the desert for months. These were not the stories I heard growing up.
The genocide is not often spoken of, even amongst Armenians, and this
silence has carried scars of its own. An undercurrent of deep unhealed
pain runs through the Armenian's identity, and even if we know little
of the genocide, our ancient heritage, or the vanishing traditions -
this pain touches us.
But how are we supposed to make sense of this pain? When silence
replaces stories, we grasp at meaning but have nothing to hold onto.
For the children of the silent generations, any identity we receive
from our part-Armenian-ness consists almost entirely of wanting to
have more of it, to know more of it, and to be more of it. Michael J.
Arlen, son of an Armenian father and a Greek-American mother, begins
his memoir Passage to Ararat with this very idea: "At a particular time
in my life, I set out on a voyage to discover for myself what it is
to be Armenian. For although I myself am Armenian, or part Armenian,
until then I knew nothing about either Armenians or Armenia." A
generation of Armenians was swallowed by the genocide in 1915, but
now a new generation of Armenians is threatened with extinction as
well, though of a different sort: for the great-grandchildren of the
survivors, Armenia is losing its meaning.
How can we go about creating meaning where what we have encountered
most often is silence? We can start by looking for the stories.
The silence in my family has started to relax, mostly because my dad
and I decided to make a film about it. Our documentary, tentatively
titled Journey to Armenia: Three Generations from Genocide, will
be the story of our trips together to the Republic of Armenia and
Eastern Turkey (aka Western Armenia), beginning with our first trip
this summer. Like archeologists of our own family history, we will
visit the four villages that our family members fled from almost a
hundred years ago. And in the process, we hope to learn more about
what being Armenian really means.
Learn more about the film at Kickstarter or visit the film's Facebook
page:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Journey-to-Armenia-Three-Generations-from-Genocide/131000973689205