While on quasi-hiatus, it is tempting to look in and remark on the odd ill-advised wager of steak or comment on the idiocy of the Senate’s failed cloture motion connected to the surge “debate” (Al Franken must have Coleman running scared–he even voted for cloture), but really of far greater interest for all, I think, is to comment on my recent reading of the first part of Taner Akcam’s A Shameful Act in connection with my L.A. Armenian experience.

Over the weekend, I was in L.A. among many Armenians at a graduate student colloquium at UCLA.  The colloquium was well-done and successful all around, though there was the occasional, minor flaring-up of arevmtyan and arevelyan hay disputes that are fascinating in their subtlety and complete imperceptibility to most of us otarner (foreigners/non-Armenians).  For those who scarcely know what the Armenian language is, the distinction between the two major dialects is even more obscure, and so, too, are the slight cultural variations between the different Armenian communities.   

Part of the dispute is, of course, the different place of the genocide in the collective memory of the Diasporans around the world and the Eastern Armenians living in the Republic, and the other part is the related problem that the Diasporans–because their people came from eastern Anatolia in Van, Erzerum, Cilicia and elsewhere–tend not to see the Republic as their real home country.  This brings us back to the tragic story of Hrant Dink, whose prosecution by the Turkish state–leading to the incitement of the public and Mr. Dink’s murder at the hands of a nationalist fanatic–turned on the twisting of a phrase that he intended for a Diasporan audience.  He had said that the Diasporan preoccupation with Turkish guilt was acting like “poison in their blood,” which some time-serving goons in the Turkish government managed to twist into a claim that Turkish blood was poison.  Mr. Dink’s point, lost on so many Diasporans and even more Turks, was that obsession with recognition of the genocide, the extensive leaning on this one historical event as the definition of your identity, was crippling them as a people and diverting their energies from the necessary work of building up Armenia.  He was essentially right, but it is another tragedy that his murder by a Turkish nationalist will almost certainly drown out his reasonable appeal and make recognition of the genocide that much more of a priority over more practical concerns of aiding the actual state that Armenians finally have. 

As related in one of the talks at the colloquium, Western Armenians, scattered around the globe as they are, are focused more intensely on the nature of their national identity, while the Armenians in the Republic tend to be focused more on the bread-and-butter concerns of economic and political reform in their country.  This is not to say that Eastern Armenians aren’t concerned with their history, since they are very much concerned, or that Western Armenians aren’t concerned about Armenia, because they are quite concerned, but that the primary emphasis for each community, broadly speaking, often lies elsewhere.

This got me to thinking after having read the early parts of A Shameful Act (Dr. Akcam, by the way, will be speaking at the University of Chicago this Friday at the Oriental Institute at 7:00), because it occurred to me that, as often as various early republican Turkish officials insisted that the genocide had been necessary to pave the way for the Turkish national state (hence the Turkish Republic’s obsession with denial), the genocide also served ironically to artificially divide Armenians from the Diaspora and Armenia from one another to some degree.  The memory of this horror has proved to be so much more powerful and central for many Diasporan Armenians in a way that was never entirely possible for the Eastern Armenians whose ancestors did not experience it, and it has probably come to form a larger part of the Diasporan identity because it is directly part of their history–rather than part of a general national history in which their immediate kin never directly participated–and has thus managed to introduce a barrier of sorts between them and their fellow Armenians.  Its final bitter fruit has been to create something of a gap in understanding between the two largest parts of the Armenian world.  Of course, I think it is fair to say that almost all Armenians still desire recognition of the genocide as genocide from Turkey, but even then it is possible that this recognition will not mean quite the same thing–and so may have very different effects in the two communities–because the genocide does not have quite the same meaning for both.