Lusine Kharatyan

A Syrian Affair

Lusine Kharatyan

Translated into English by Nazareth Seferian

The Emplaced

“They’ve set up a group and emplaced us there,” this was how Esther—whose first language is Russian but, for some reason, believed that she could speak Western Armenian—introduced us on the very first day at a meeting with Armenian community representatives in Damascus.[1]

The emplaced consisted of three of us. Shushan and Esther had studied together, both graduating from the department of ethnography in the faculty of history at Yerevan State University. I was several years younger and had majored in sociology. We had known each other since our student days, and had first met during a research project. I had worked with Shushan on another occasion after that. She and I had been involved in several programmes together, worked in various rural and urban locations in Armenia. I had no real experience of working with Esther. But our paths had crossed at several conferences. This was our first trip out of Armenia together. Esther came from a family of Russian speakers, and Russian had been the language of her education. Her parents were scientists, both had built careers in chemistry. Her mother was from Rostov, her father from Baku. They had met as students in Moscow, fallen in love, married, and then moved to Yerevan to live and work. Her mother was from a family of traditional Rostov Armenians, and her father’s family was from the Armenian proletariat of Baku, with roots in Shushi. While they had gone to Russian-language schools and then furthered their education in Moscow, both of them had also learned to recite Armenian pieces like Nalbandyan’s Freedom and Charents’ My Sweet Armenia as children. The most popular books in the library at Esther’s mother’s childhood home in Rostov were Russian translations of Samvel by Raffi, Marzpetuni by Muratsan, and Vardanank by Demirchyan. The massive library in her father’s childhood home in Armenikend[2] consisted of mostly Armenian-language publications – from Khorenatsi to Leo. The summers of Esther’s childhood were full of all kinds of stories from Rostov and Armenikend, lessons in Armenian history and long conversations with her grandfather, who worked in the oil industry in Baku, discussions about Armenian-Russian relations and chats about the origins of Armenians during lengthy fishing trips with her other grandfather in Rostov. But Esther’s childhood passions were adventure fiction as well as books and films about archaeological expeditions. She had always dreamed of becoming an archaeologist and, after her first visit to the Hermitage with her parents when she was 12, every moment she spent awake or asleep was filled with dreams of archaeology. She was captivated and carried away by thoughts of finding Egyptian treasures, leading expeditions, discovering historical artifacts beneath layers of soil and dust, and so she would organise excavations with friends in the dry soil of their Yerevan courtyard. On one occasion, they even found some bones, and Esther decided that she had to take them to her parents’ chemistry lab for analysis, to determine their age and origins. The parents took the bones and later threw them in a garbage bin, but told Esther that she had found a dinosaur, and that the specimens had been forwarded to another facility for further examination. The whole neighbourhood heard this news the same day. Esther was, naturally, quick to learn from the encyclopaedias that her parents brought from Moscow and Leningrad that it was highly unlikely to have been a dinosaur, but that version of events remained popular in the neighbourhood.

It was no coincidence that, right after finishing school, Esther applied to the faculty of history at Yerevan State with the unwavering intention to become an archaeologist. But in the very first year of her studies, that intention happened upon a course called “Introduction to Archaeology” taught by someone who seemed to be the embodiment of everything archaic, without even a hint of science. His clothes always smelled of grease and looked like they had been buried somewhere for a while, the era of Xenophon seemed to be engraved in his tired and beer-thirsty eyes and trembling hands, and he had a passion for this discipline that was buried so deep in the many archaeological layers of his exhausted body that even the most modern equipment would have difficulty excavating it. In a word, Esther’s passion for archaeology quickly transformed into endless boredom. Instead, the professor for a course called “Introduction to Ethnography” had fire in his eyes, the enthusiasm of Lenin, and boundless love as he talked about the beliefs of the aboriginal people of Australia, the everyday life of the natives of America, and his own direct interaction with the peoples of Siberia and the Caucasus, filling the only audio-visual material the university had—a map of the language families of the world—with the bright totems that popped out of his eyes and mouth, engulfing the map and the girls of the class in sacrificial flames. The spark also caught in Esther’s heart, and her inner world was lit up with the fire of this professor’s ethnography. And that was how she ended up at the department of ethnography.

Shushan was the only student at that department that year who had been educated in Armenian. She was from Ijevan, while her parents had been from the villages of Shamshadin. Her mother was a teacher, her father, a factory worker. She had grown up in what ethnographers studied – she had seen a silent grandmother, neighbours that muttered incantations to overcome fear, she had personally carried out rain dances, played during the water festival in the mountains, and pranced with the goblins some people believed they saw in the Shamshadin fog. Whatever ethnographers considered to be worthy material had actually simply been a part of Shushan’s life, her air and water, her everyday existence in the village. The professor’s fire had bypassed her, or perhaps it had been extinguished in one of the splashes of the water festival. But the goblins inside kept poking her and asking to sense, learn, and see more, making her study more closely the maps of language families or racial groups presented during the introduction to ethnography, shifting from continent to continent, seeking her childhood among the Mayan and Aztec civilisations, hunting with the Bushmen, and participating in ritual dances with the Hottentots.

Despite their obvious differences, Shushan and Esther became friends in their first year, thanks to the many long hours they spent together at the National Library. Esther helped Shushan make sense of texts in Russian, while Shushan helped Esther summarise those texts in Armenian. Another girl was part of their trio – Karine from Artik. They were the best students of that cohort, the ones that spent the cold winters of the 1990s in unheated reading rooms, who wrote letters to their classmates that were fighting in the Karabakh War, got together for drinks at Shushan’s dormitory room or the damp basement that Karine and her sister rented in Aygestan. This is where they would hear stories from Esther about the rich cultural life in pre-war Yerevan, study together for exams, and talk about their latest crush.

At some point in the late 90s or the early 2000s, when specialists in scientific atheism turned into theologists, and those studying the history and theory of the Communist Party transformed into political scientists, ethnographers transitioned into anthropologists. And while the builders of the nation state expected ethnographers to canonise the elements constituting a nation, and provide universal formulae explaining the essence and identity of the Armenians as well as the instructions for observing national and traditional holidays, the ethnographers-turned-anthropologists did not always satisfy the desires of those that suffered from a mania for “ethnopia”.[3] Many of them were not interested in issues concerning the origins and native belonging of the Armenians, and they were not tasking themselves with gathering evidence to prove that dolma was an Armenian dish. While ethnography was once a tool for colonialists to gather information about various ethnic groups and to better understand them, analyse them, and facilitate their colonisation, and Soviet ethnography partially served the implementation of the Soviet nationality policy, so that the various peoples living in the vast recesses of that multinational state would observe and preserve their national features in accordance with the Soviet ideology, ethnography—followed by anthropology—in the young Republic of Armenia, did not manage to fully redefine itself or gain a new identity. Many people in this profession continued the study of traditional practices, while others entered the broader fields of social studies and research. This was the field where Esther and Shushan had found themselves.

What can I say about myself? I was born in Yerevan and grew up in the city’s outskirts. My parents were engineers. During the collapse of the Soviet Union, when factories shut down, my father went to Moscow to seek his fortune. And he never came back. His fortune and a Russian woman had sought him instead. I did not speak English when I graduated from school. The best I could do was “I am a table.” But I studied hard for a year and achieved impressive results – I managed to get 19 out of 20 in the university admission exams. During my third year, I got a job as an administrative assistant at the American University of Armenia. At first, I would only smile at everything the Americans said, because I couldn’t understand a word. But, in about half a year, I began to make sense of it. And I made good use of the library, taking home all kinds of fiction – Hemingway, Salinger. I made a lot of progress that way. To the extent that I managed to pass the TOEFL and go to the States to continue my education there. On my own. The only thing was that our generation did not have much of a choice when it came to the programmes available to us. We had not yet learned how to apply directly to US and European universities and how to get scholarships. We could only apply through programmes that the Embassy organised. But those were limited to a few disciplines and applicants were forced to pick a major that was closest to what they wanted to do. The one that was closest to mine was “political science”. I was adventurous by nature and kept sticking my nose into all kinds of places. I got into research projects in my second year. We ran surveys. But those quantitative studies, with their “yes-no” closed questions, soon bored me. Perhaps it was because every time I asked a “yes-no” question, I recalled the boys of our neighbourhood shouting “She said yes!” with their eyes round and wide, like those of young bulls. In the middle of the interview. And this is why I started to work more on qualitative studies, where I could pursue a whole range of whys, and where I would never have to hear another “yes” or “no” again. The response would be closer to that Facebook option – “it’s complicated”. That was how I started working with ethnographers, and I discovered a whole new field. A field of ambiguity, full of stories. Real and imagined, but much more credible. Because in life, it’s difficult to differentiate between the real and the imagined. At some point, they are both completely real and valid. And I was somewhere in between – I was neither an ethnographer, nor an anthropologist, neither a sociologist, nor a political scientist. There was a little bit of all that in me, but I was someone without a clear professional identity, someone who should present themselves as… I guess the word would be polyevik, the Russian word for a field worker. A field scholar. I don’t know what the right word would be, neither in Armenian nor English. A specialist in field research. A field blossom. Facing the wind. Someone who goes from the field toward theory, not the other way around. Using methodologies from all the disciplines I had studied. Without forcing theory on the field. Without forcing the field into a frame thought up by one theoretician-colonizer or another.

We had barely prepared for this visit. It’s difficult to do research in Armenia. Sometimes, impossible. The system had collapsed, and this took the physical form of its buildings – academic institutions that were huge in the past now creaked, bearing wide and long cracks from the earthquakes that had shaken them, barely managing to eke out an existence and licking their wounds. Their toilets were in terrible shape – the bowls were rust-coloured, and there was no toilet paper to be seen. The taps always open and water constantly running. The chairs. Sometimes updated with office furniture that was black, sometimes old, wooden. The tables. A mix of old and new, with computers on them that were or were not used. The shelves. In the digital age. An academy of old people. Small change as salary. Faded, worn out academic ideas and words. Technical and natural sciences, without any technology or industry. Social sciences that were cut off from society.

After independence, those among the most “agile” social scientists began to earn their daily bread through the grants and research projects of international organisations. And so did we. Education for the kids, health issues, house maintenance costs. These were all needs that were impossible to cover using the miserly salaries offered in academia, and all that remained was to do applied research commissioned by a third party – asking someone else’s whys, with no time, language, resources, or space to pose one’s own questions.

An unknown and mainly invisible Armenian-American organisation had announced a competition for a grant to study the Armenian communities in the Middle East. The foundation bore the name of an Armenian family. One day, in a moment between running other tasks, I came across the ad for that opportunity on my husband’s computer screen. I called Shushan and Esther. We met and talked about it, each of us recounting our own children’s needs as well as our sense of adventure and curious desire to stick our noses everywhere, and without much further thought, we submitted an application. We wanted to study the Armenian communities in Syria and Lebanon. An ethnographic study, with interviews and participant observation. The objective would be to see any changes in the ritual and festive life of the communities as influenced by the Syrian and Lebanese setting. That was the “why”. A week later, we received a reply from the foundation. They said that they were interested in issues of identity and, judging from our CVs, this was a topic where we could understand the existing issues and questions, given that we had carried out research on the topic of identity in the past. They basically asked if we could either add questions on identity to our research plan or whether we could refocus on identity and resubmit our application. They understood that the rituals and festivities were part of this, but they were only a part, while they needed a broader study. They also wanted us to cover the community structures, their approach to self-organisation, their communication with Armenia and Armenian communities in other countries, their positioning in Syria/Lebanon, and in the Diaspora. We got together at Esther’s place, made changes in the application around coffee and eclairs, and sent it with a cover letter expressing the greatest of interest in identity-related research. We were sure that we would be able to manage. We could worry about details later. Who could do it better than us? In 2007, there weren’t many researchers in Armenia that spoke English and had experience in ethnographic fieldwork. So, we went about our daily tasks in a self-satisfied way for another week before the confirmation message arrived and we learned that the foundation had given us just three weeks to prepare. We would go to Syria first, and then travel by road from there to Lebanon.

The next two weeks flew by as each of us ran our own errands; we were unable to allocate enough time to learn more about the Armenian community in Syria or read appropriate literature. We barely managed to arrange our visas and work on the interview guides, read a couple of small things and talk to a few friends who had a background in Arabic studies. We packed our bags and it was yalla to Syria.

[1] There are two main variants of the Armenian language – Eastern Armenian (which is spoken in the Republic of Armenia, from where Esther and her friends are, and Western Armenian, which is spoken by the Armenians in Syria and some other Diaspora communities. Though mostly mutually intelligible, some words from one variant sound out of place or unnecessarily complicated in the other, as “emplace” would in a sentence like this [translator’s note].

[2] An Armenian district in Baku [translator’s note].

[3] Ethnic utopia – a term introduced by Gevorg Ter-Gabrielyan