The Armenian “Other”
by Suzie Abajian
The word “odar” in Armenian means “foreigner.” It is an othering term that is used for labeling everyone who isn’t Armenian but ironically it encapsulates the transnational Armenian experience. “Odar”-ing has been the story of my life. I am a third generation refugee of a genocide that took place at the turn of the 20th century. To this day, this genocide continues to be denied and rewritten by the well funded and concerted efforts of the descendants of the perpetrators, their nation state and their allies.
My grandparents were born in their ancestral homeland which is currently situated in the central and eastern regions of modern day Turkey. Their birth towns, Maraş, Niğde and Gürün were under the control of the Ottoman Empire. Their families were treated as second class citizens and were subjected to restrictive language policies even before they were driven out of their ancestral lands - the lands inhabited by their ancestors for the past several millennia. This is why their first language was Turkish and that’s the reason why I still understand the remnants of a language, Ottoman Turkish, that’s no longer spoken in Turkey. Surviving the genocide, my grandparents made their way to the refugee camps in Aleppo, Syria, where my father and his siblings were born under destitute conditions. My mother was also born in Aleppo, a decade and a half after my father, in an Armenian enclave in Aleppo after her family left the refugee camps. My maternal grandmother remembers being harassed and her life being threatened on the streets of Aleppo, well after the genocide, because she was Armenian.
Both of my parents received their K-12 education in Aleppo and were subjected to subtractive schooling practices and acculturation as their generation was yet again marginalized in a country that wasn’t their ancestral homeland. After Syria gained independence from French control in the mid 1940’s, the new nationalist government made Arabic the official language of the country even though Syria was an ethnically diverse place with an ethnically and linguistically diverse population. Under the new mandate, students had to pass Arabic language exams to graduate in order to be promoted from the elementary, middle and high school levels regardless of their previous education, language upbringing and heritage. Imagine being told in your 12th year of schooling that you have to pass a difficult exam in a foreing language in order for you to graduate when all of your schooling has been in other languages. That’s what my mother experienced. Even though she was one of the top students in her class, she didn’t pass the Arabic language section of the Baccalaureate test, which was a requirement for high school graduation, and resulted in her falling behind several years in her education. My mother was determined to graduate so she tried until she passed the test. Others weren’t so fortunate. There was a whole generation of Armenian students who were left behind and whose education came to a sudden halt.
These language policies also impacted the employment prospects of Armenians and other language minorities. As an educator, my father couldn’t get employment in his field unless he passed a difficult Arabic language test, even though his entire schooling was in French, English and Armenian before Syria’s independence. Armenians in general could not get employment in the government sector because that was almost exclusively reserved for native Arabic speakers or ethnic Arabs. Years later a few token Armenians were allowed to serve in government posts and only after proving their loyalty to the Ba’ath party. These examples give a glimpse of the multiple layers of oppression the Armenian community has navigated and continues to navigate within a transnational context.
This is why I consider my parents to be second generation refugees and my brother and I to be third generation refugees of the Armenian Genocide, We, like our parents, were born in Syria - a country where we were perpetual foreigners with Arabic being our second language. We had to excel in Arabic in order for us to progress in our education. We, similar to our grandparents and parents, were also subjected to subtractive acculturation. Being Armenian was a liability and not an asset in Syria. Even though our parents put us in the local parochial Armenian school, all the subjects were required to be taught in Arabic except for the one hour a day where we were allowed to learn the Armenian language as a second language.
The “odar”-ing and subtractive acculturation did not stop there. Our Armenian schools were forbidden to teach students Armenian history. We could only learn our language during the designated hour in the day and we were told not to speak it with our classmates during recess. This is a schoolbook case of what Angela Valenzuela (1999) calls “subtractive schooling”. Even though we attended an Armenian school, our school had to have an ethnically Arab principal in addition to the Armenian one because Armenians couldn’t be trusted to govern their own schools, lest they transgress and instill in students Armenian nationalism. There were several instances of Armenian principals being forcefully exiled from the country because they were accused of allowing the teaching of Armenian History in their schools.
“There were several instances of Armenian principals being forcefully exiled from the country because they were accused of allowing the teaching of Armenian History in their schools.”
In the late 1980s, we moved to the United States. Although people might view this as voluntary immigration, it was not. We were economic and political refugees fleeing another country where we were treated as second class citizens and where we had no future.
In the U.S. our experience continued to be that of “odar”-ing. After our immigeraton, as a twelve-year-old English Learner I was made to repeat 6th grade in PS7 in the Bronx because we were told that my language skills were lacking for middle school. There was no ESL class (English as a Second Language - the acronym given at the time for classes geared towards English Learners) or English Language Development support for me. No one knew what to do with me so my teachers made me color and paint in the back of the room and complete worksheets. My younger brother was bullied because of his language to the point that he no longer wanted to attend school. That was the beginning of our educational experience in the United States. When we moved to Glendale, California, my brother and I attended an Armenian school for a few years where we learned English, before going to the local public school. I remember being bullied on the streets of Glendale while we were waiting for our school bus. We were harassed and called names like FOBs (Fresh Off the Boat). We were harrassed because of the clothes we wore, the food we ate, our cultural practices and our accents. I was so self-concious of my English accent that I would spend hours in front of the mirror practicing the sound “th” that didn’t exist in either my first or my second language. I had to correct my pronunciation because I kept saying “d” instead of “th”, which would make me the object of mockery. To this day, I feel self-conscious about public speaking because of my residual accent and because I make syntactical mistakes which gives away my language learner status. In the U.S. I felt that I had to lose my accent, the way I dressed and the way in which I performed my cultural identity to fit and move forward but even all this was never enough to belong. That is why, for a long time, I didn’t want to be called an American. I was an “odar” in the U.S., so I insisted on being called a Syrian-Armenian as a way of owning my identity and resisting the subtractive acculturation practices of my new context.
I remember an incident when I was a student at Glendale High School. Our school had lowered the American flag on April 24th in commemoration of the Armenian Genocide-- a move which received a lot of community backlash. I read articles in the opinion section of the local paper telling Armenians to go back to their country because this is America and the American flag should not be lowered for the Armenian Genocide. This was not the first nor the last time that I received the message that I and my people should go back to our country-- which is ironic because such a country doesn’t exist. In high school, I remember getting lower grades than other students when I was certain that my work was just as good, if not better than others. I remember that even though Armenians made up a third of the student population in my high school, we weren’t well represented in the honors and Advanced Placement classes.
After high school, the only reason why I ended up at Occidental College and wasn’t stuck perpetually at a community college was because of the intentional mentoring of a teacher. The school system wasn’t set up for an immigrant English Learner like myself to end up in one of the leading liberal arts colleges in the area. I was fortunate that I had a great local option for higher education because going out of state was out of question and out of my habitus.
In college, I decided to major in mathematics, partially because I loved the subject but also because I needed to feel competent. It was exhausting to continually have to prove my competency in my third language and anything in the humanities and social sciences would have demanded a certain level of confidence and command of the English language. Mathematics was an entirely different language and one I excelled in, so I didn’t continually need to prove to myself and everyone else that I was intelligent and that I belonged in college.
After receiving my undergraduate degree, I moved to a community that was predominantly Latinx. I was one of the two Armenians in my neighborhood in North East LA and for once in my life, my Armenianness wouldn’t be thrown regularly in my face and I could just be. I remember shortly after I began teaching at the local high school in Lincoln Heights, 9/11 took place. That day, all the teachers and students were glued to the television sets in their classrooms watching the planes crashing into the twin towers. As we were watching the news, I remember my students asking me if I was “from one of those terrorist countries''. My heart sank. Even when I thought I was invisible and I wanted to be invisible, I was not. I could have done everything to fit in, including learning a fourth language but my last name was a marker for race, that race being a “Middle- Eastern-Muslim-other.” At this same school, there were only two Armenian students to my knowledge. One of them once came to my class crying and saying that a teacher had asked her why Armenian women were so hairy. This was a common pejorative used against Armenian women. I remember myself being rejected by white men and other men of color because I wasn’t the right race.
These were not only my own experiences but also the experiences of my family members, relatives, friends and others. My brother was harassed and bullied by his boss who would regularly correct his English in front of his coworkers and denigrate and minimize him because of his Armenianness to the point that his co-workers felt they had to stand up for him and say something to the extent that English was my brother’s third language. I witnessed multiple times when my parents were talked down to and treated in a disparaging manner by medical doctors, sales people and others because of their accents.
“I witnessed multiple times when my parents were talked down to and treated in a disparaging manner by medical doctors, sales people and others because of their accents.”
During my Ph.D. program in education at UCLA, I studied about the experiences of different communities of color within the United States. While I deeply resonated with these experiences, my community’s experiences were completely missing from the field. In fact my community was constructed as white and this categorization was reified every time I had to fill out a race/ethnicity survey on employment, scholarship or grant applications.
My first year in the program, I was treated horribly by my first advisor, who basically questioned my competency on a regular basis, accused me of things that were untrue and made me take care of his personal errands. While graduate students often have to pay their dues in academia, I felt that I paid well over my fair share of dues because of who I was. On one occasion I was told by a senior faculty member that I had an “exotic” look. I kept being asked “where I was from” and “where I was really from”.
I remember an incident in my Race and Education class at UCLA where my professor divided the class into four groups: Asian, Latinx, Black and white and asked students to choose the group that they most identified with to discuss their experiences. This was problematic on so many levels, which I will not go into in this essay. I did tell her that I didn’t identify with any group and I couldn’t participate in this activity. Her response to me was “just pick one.” Subsequently I received a lower grade than expected in this course.
Going through any Ph.D. program is a bit like hazing but being an Armenian brought with it its own set of challenges. In a history class in the Near Eastern Studies department, my professor asked me in front of the entire class “what was I doing as a social science major and why wasn’t I in law school or medical school?” -- insinuating that Armenians pursue these fields because of money and they don’t understand or appreciate the finer, more intellectual fields. The same professor had written a book, which was one of our assigned readings, on the modern history of the “Middle East” and the late Ottoman Empire yet barely mentioned Armenians in his writing.
These sorts of experiences coupled with the lack of resources, funding and mentoring for Armenian students made it nothing short of a miracle for me to complete the program, even though it took me ten years.
Finding a job was an entirely different task. Getting a tenure track job was difficult but I could have possibly gotten a position if I was willing to move away from Los Angeles to a remote place. I could not bring myself to do this because my entire community and support network was in Los Angeles and moving away meant that I would lose my network and would likely not be around any individuals who spoke my language. That was too great of a price to pay for employment so I floundered in adjunct positions until I finally left academia. I had dared to pursue a field that wasn’t meant for a working class child of immigrants like me.
My Armenianness was a liability in the job market. I felt that in order for me to be considered for a position, I needed to work much harder and accomplish much more than others to be taken seriously as a candidate. While I was “white” on paper and on the Census, my actual reality was rife with racialized experiences.
When I ran for office for the first time in South Pasadena, a city that was predominantly run by white electeds even though it has a very diverse population, I stood out because I wasn’t part of the establishment. The opposition campaign spread a rumor that I didn’t actually live in my city and that I was an outsider who was not to be trusted, unlike all of them who had been living in the city for generations. These thinly veiled racialized and nativist discourses were the driving narratives of the campaigns of my opponents. Even after winning my election, and for years to come, people would approach me and ask me if I really lived in the city.
Zooming out from the current U.S. context and taking a transnational look, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the recent war on Artsakh by Azerbaijan, supported by its close ally Turkey and the hate crimes against Armenians across the globe, including here in California. The silence of the Western media on the war crimes perpetrated against my people and the loss of our ancestral lands was deafening. The reduction of this aggression to a “conflict” and the “both-sidism” was even prevalent in the most respected progressive and leftist media outlets and circles. This narrative was propagated by large US PR firms hired by the Azerbaijani government to push their narrative. We were being attacked by the descendants of the perpetrators of unrecognized genocides against our people without the world flinching and without the left thinking critically because we didn’t fit their schema of who is “oppressed” and who is not, because we were constructed as “white”, “christian”, “European” while at the same time being among the communities heavily impacted by the Muslim ban, anti-SWANA racism and by orientalist discourses and demonization in the media. It was quiet telling when the United States and the European Union imposed sanctions on Russia for Navalny’s attempted poisoning while nothing was done about the vast human rights violation and war crimes of the Azerbaijani government including the torture and beheadings of POWs, the use of white phosphorus on civilans, and the destruction of cultural and historic sites in Artsakh. We continue to be under attack today by those seeking to destroy our indegenous communities and culture and take over our ancestral lands.
“On one occasion I was told by a senior faculty member that I had an “exotic” look. I kept being asked ‘where I was from’ and ‘where I was really from’”
Continual experiences of micro and often macro aggressions as well as systemic erasure, invisibility, exclusion and subtractive assimilation have marked my entire life but in academia, I was finally able to name them. These were racialized experiences, but because of our “white” categorization we have not been allowed to address them, not even to ourselves. As my good friend Sophia Armen explained in a recent talk, the labeling of Armenians as “white” comes from the history of Armenians being targeted by the U.S. government for mass deportation as refugees from the Armenian Genocide. Armenians were initially bestowed “whiteness” because of the Cartozian case in 1925 because they fought to not be displaced once again to villages that were destroyed. Although Armenians were categorized as “white” in 1925, their experiences throughout the past century has been and continues to be that of racialization. Today, the same categorization not only erases our continued experiences of marginalization in the US but also constructs our identity as foreign to West/Cental Asia and the Levant and hence erases us from our own ancestral lands-- reifying the discourses of our colonizers.
When you ask Armenians whether they’ve had experiences of racism, discrimination and othering in the United States you might get a “no” answer. That’s because for most Armenians, this has been normalized for generations whether inside or outside the US and even in our own ancestral lands. We have been colonized by the East and the West. As indigenous people in West Asia, we have always faced the threat of violent erasure. As immigrants and refugees in the West and across the globe, we have faced forceful assimilation and violence. So, if we are not being slaughtered, tortured, imprisoned and displaced then we think we must be doing fine.
When people find out that I speak five languages, they usually respond with a “you’re brilliant” type of comment, but if you knew Armenians you would know that I am not an anomaly. Many of us are polyglots, not because we have a special language gene but because we’ve always had to survive in someone else’s world. We’ve had to operate in someone else’s language and culture. The only surprising thing is that, with all of the subtractive acculturation and othering that we have experienced, some of us still speak our native tongue which is an endangered language according to UNESCO. My dialect, Western Armenian is peppered with Ottoman Turkish that is no longer spoken in Turkey. It is yet another evidence and reminder of where I come from and it is a testament to our collective past.
My experience and the experiences of many in my community not only demonstrate the racialization, marginalization and erasure that we have faced but also our resilience as a people. We continue to resist through our relentless love for life. Our artists, intellectuals and political leaders continue to create, lead and thrive. We persist in speaking our beautiful yet endangered language and build community wherever we find ourselves. We continue to reimagine our reality and organize regardless of our forced uprootings and continued “odar”-ing.
Suzie Abajian is a Syrian Armenian immigrant and a third generation refugee of the Armenian Genocide, has been an educator for the past 23 years in K-12 and higher education. She received her Ph.D. form UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Over the past 18 years, she has worked as a field supervisor for the Teacher Education Program at UCLA, a mathematics lecturer at LMU, an NTT Assistant Professor of Education at Occidental College and an administrator at the Orange County Office of Education. In addition to her educational career, Dr. Abajian has served her community through her volunteer work on executive boards of several local non-profits and her elected position on the South Pasadena School Board since 2015. In 2018, she was named Congressional Woman of the Year for the City of South Pasadena by Congresswoman Judy Chu.