April 24, 2016
Reflections on my first April 24th in Armenia.
On the morning of April 24, 2016, my wife asked me if I was going to write anything, especially as it was my first time in Armenia for it. I mumbled something about how after years of writing commemorative messages on that day, I didn’t know what else I could add that wouldn’t be a revised version of something I, or someone else, had written in the past. Besides, I was late. That day was the culmination of more than two years of work to develop an international award for humanitarianism to be awarded in Yerevan called the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity.
First stop, Tsitsernakaberd.
Like I said, I had never been in Armenia for April 24. I was born and raised in the United States. I went to Montebello as a kid, dragged along by my father to the towering Genocide memorial built at the center of a golf course. I’d sit under the burning hot sun, annoyed that I didn’t understand what was being said by any of the day’s speakers because of the always-faulty sound system. But I knew I had to go.
The Armenian Genocide is inextricable from my life. My grandfather survived it and grew up in a refugee camp in Aleppo. My great-grandmother escaped the burning of Smyrna. I felt a responsibility to the survivors and martyrs; they suffered because, and for, their identity so I had to do something in return. Judging by the number of people at the commemorations with me, almost 100 years after it happened, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.
As a teen, I started to attend the annual April 24 march in Hollywood and the protest in front of the Turkish Consulate in Los Angeles. These involved marching and yelling and were a better fit for my adolescent energy than the more demure Montebello commemorations.
But the luster of the march and protest faded with every year. There was an awful lot of laughing, honking, inattention, and makeup while commemorating the deaths of 1.5 million people. I was becoming cynical. Why were we here? I didn’t have an answer so I continued to go; I had to do something. Then I discovered lobbying for Genocide recognition, which led to me serving as the executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America’s Western Region for two years. The work was fulfilling but I was still surrounded by cynicism, except this time it came to me: “Why are you lobbying for recognition? It’s not making any difference.” The loudest and most dismissive scoffed and said that we were stuck in the past while having a country to look after, Armenia.
Not long after, I moved to Armenia. I continued to believe Genocide recognition was important. Turns out doing both these things was possible.
I had been part of the Aurora Prize team from its earliest days, when it was still called The 100 Lives; it had come a long way since its inception. Lots of sharp minds, lots of time, lots of ideas. Plans were made, discarded, and reconceived. It was two years of perpetual change and now we were going to be witness to the final product.
The last months had been taxing for me, not because of the hours but because of what I was asked to do: one of my tasks was to write snippets about the nominees for the Aurora Prize, people who worked in the most violent, inhumane places on earth.
As an Armenian growing up in Los Angeles (Glendale, for those in the know), the Genocide is a part of your life whether you want it to be or not. Even if you don’t participate in commemoration activities, it’s hard not to notice that somewhere between 20% and 60% of your classmates are either not at school on every April 24 or are dressed in black. You have a choice about whether you want to indulge your curiosity about it or if you want to ignore it. I ignored it at first but then I indulged. I read the books, I watched the videos, and I listened to the stories. I engaged in the self-flagellation that every Armenian goes through when they learn about the Genocide.
Inexplicably, you file through story after macabre story. Kids drowned by their mothers in the Euphrates, Kurdish marauders, a narrow escape, starvation, kidnapping, rape, death. You watch barely-alive old ladies who all look eerily like your grandmother recount their horrors. You become desensitized not because it is repetitive but because it is torture, to salvage your sanity. You learn to cope, resist the tears, get angry, meet with thousands of others in an annual outdoor support group and call it a protest. You start searching for the humanity that abandoned your ancestors.
I dove into the sordid world of these humanitarians nominated for the inaugural prize, neatly packaged into briefs and Google searches. Turns out I wasn’t as desensitized as I thought.
On April 23, before the award ceremony, there were a series of panels about humanitarian issues called the Aurora Dialogues. Leymah Gbowee, a Nobel Laureate from Liberia, told the story of a woman caring for and feeding a soldier. The soldier asked her to call her daughter. The woman replied that she couldn’t. When the soldier asked why, the woman said because her daughter was dead, she had been killed. He said, “I know…I killed her.” The woman continued to feed the soldier.
The prize ceremony took place on the following evening, April 24. Marguerite Barankitse won the inaugural Aurora Prize. I knew about Ms. Barankitse because hers was one of the scripts I had to write. The smiling woman on the stage who had been dancing throughout Yerevan the past few days had years ago been forced to watch as the 72 people she was hiding from predatory militants were slaughtered before her eyes. She continued to hide people.
If anybody wanted to know why we commemorated every year in Montebello, protested on Wilshire, lobbied in Washington, DC, they would have their answer on April 24, 2016: we wouldn’t have been able to celebrate those humanitarians that day if we had forgotten the survivors, martyrs, and saviors in whose honor we were gathered.
The award ceremony for me was as much a recognition of those who refused to forget; who commemorated, protested, lobbied, and even died for it.
And what of my first visit on April 24 to Tsitsernakaberd?
I walked toward the memorial, built to commemorate the tragedy wrought upon a defenseless nation. As I approached, a corps of young soldiers appeared suddenly: coiffed, erect, and immaculate, they encircled the basalt structure. They sounded off in order, gripping their ceremonial rifles with sparkling bayonets affixed to the barrels. Commemorating the Armenian Genocide in the United States had been somber, dreary, enraging but that day, for the first time, I felt confident. Carnation in hand, I neared the eternal flame to pay my respects and smiled unexpectedly. We will always remember, but we are defenseless no more.
