The conflict between the two former trans-caucasian republics of the Soviet Union goes back to 1988 and has caused waves of refugee movements: between 300,000 to 500,000 Armenians and 724,000 Azeris.
This has involved the intervention of international organizations with conflicting agendas. There is the initial CSTO, or Collective Security Treaty Organization composed of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia. On the other hand, Armenia has been a member of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council since 1994 and has participated in the wars of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kosovo. A variety of mercenaries, motivated by financial gain or religious conviction, have also been engaged in the conflict. The Wagner Group, a Russian private military company has been active in Armenia, while a private Turkish Security Company has fought for Azerbaijan: As Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey has put it, “Turkey and Azerbaijan are two countries, one nation.” The conflict has also been a lucrative business for arms manufacturers: Human Rights Watch reported the use of white phosphorous, and among other munitions, Israeli cluster bombs.
Geopolitical actors are always ready to use local conflicts to further their own interests. I would like to examine this episode of their perennial “great game” from the point of view of a young Armenian refugee, Liya Babyan, who has written a remarkable memoir. She was born in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. In 1988 the Armenian population of Baku was subjected to massive pogroms: the author’s favorite aunt Lola was murdered. They flee to Spitak, the second largest city in Armenia. But instead of refuge, they find themselves vilified because they only know Russian: under the Soviet system Baku had used the Russian language as a platform of communication between its various ethnic inhabitants. They are caught up in the earthquake of 1988, and the general economic collapse resulting from the dissolution of the Soviet Union causes them to be “homeless” in their own country.
They survive cold, hunger, and general hostility living in the author’s school’s storage closet: “This place was disgusting, with rats as plump as mid-size dogs, open sewage and thrash everywhere.” But they do survive thanks to the steadfast efforts of her parents, and her own indomitable spirit: “My best memory with my brother is the day we made a sled from a metal back off an old T.V. We piled the snow to be 5 feet tall and took turns sliding down in the metal container. I carved steps in the slope for us to climb up. We laughed so much that day.”
After much anxious waiting they finally enter the next episode of their odyssey: immigration to the United States in 1992. The author’s gift for vivid language, which she had used to depict years of horror and deprivation, is as trenchant in describing her new American life. The preface of the memoir sets the tone: she is in the fourth grade, and she punches a boy “straight in the nose.” Backed by other kids in the class, the boy Cody keeps telling her: “Go back to your country.” Obviously, she has no country to go back to: not Baku, where she thought she was at home, with memories of family picnics on the Caspian shore, and not even Armenia which had discarded them like excess baggage.
Just the same, stepping into the new world that just opened to them is an amazing experience: they get an apartment of their own, and there is even a one-legged doll on the sofa, and a bowl of candy on the table. They step out, and the stores are full of food: is this for real? And all the people, are they for real? “Why do they smile at us,” she wonders, “when they don’t know us?” She decides that “Americans must just like to show their teeth to each other… I thought it might be rude to show my teeth back.” As it happens, she finds that their lives, hers in school, and her parents’ struggle in menial, low-paying jobs, is not very conducive to generate smiles of their own. As she puts it, “We are rebuilding our lives from the crumbs of the American Dream.”
She also observes that “in America, there are set structures for identity – for race, color and heritage…” But she finds that the only box for her to check off on all the forms she is required to fill, is “other.” But she rebels against being locked in that box. She recovers her erased identity from the example of other struggles like her own: “Hip-Hop is America’s most honest ambassador, representing the truth of its peoples’ history and struggles to the world.” This liberates her to assert her heritage: she had been embarrassed by her Armenian looks, but now she states: “I am proud of my Middle Eastern features because they represent deep roots of honor, civilization, and fundamental contribution to the whole world. I know who we are.”
This proud assertion seems to question the very title of her memoir – Liminal – which had suggested the author’s sense of remaining forever “at a threshold.” The paradox of her situation is that she may have recovered a sense of her national identity, but what does it mean to be “Armenian” – in America? Is it as questionable as being Armenian in Azerbaijan?
As it happens, the very assertion of Armenian identity in Nagorno Karabakh had been the cause of the ethnic cleansing her family suffered in Baku. Because the majority Armenian population of Nagorno Karabakh, a geographical enclave of Azerbaijan, insisted on actual secession, the newly independent republic of Azerbaijan viewed this claim as a declaration of war.
Although the author does not refer to the conflict beyond her own childhood experience, the inevitable wages of war suffered by both countries reflect her initial definition of Liminal: “the point of transitional time or condition in which one, or a group, or a territory, is not what it was and not what it will become, but something in between, something marginal, vague and flexible.” If this describes her initial experience as a refugee in America, it also refers to the history of the very “territory,” not just the “enclave” of Nagorno Karabakh but of Armenia itself – and for that matter, also of Azerbaijan. After all, Central Asia has been subject to the invasions and claims of multiple empires – Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Mongol, Turkish, Russian.
As to Armenia as a nation state, its territory has also expanded and contracted over the centuries. The “Trail of Tears” during the Armenians’ expulsion from newly formed Turkey after its loss of empire during World War I has not been erased by time: it is part of the author’s personal family history as well. Is there a way, then, to escape the paradox of belonging and not belonging to a country? And what is the meaning of the concept of country or state or nation? Is it about geographical territory, or about “ethnicity” expressed in language and religion? And what about the role of conflicting concepts of political ideology?
As the author’s experience demonstrates, these concepts turn out to be “marginal, vague and flexible.” And yet, as she comes to assert, the loss of territory or the obligation to function in a different language or to be confronted by different political standards, should not erase the right to certain values. The author observes in the character and behavior of her parents a model of foundational human dignity which must be salvaged regardless of the vicissitudes of history.
One of the underlying questions is what kind of society will offer the conditions to support and further such values? She describes that their lost life in Baku before the disintegration of the Soviet Union did offer the material and social conditions conducive to the practice of such values: “Our basic needs were met and our quality of life included leisure, luxuries, family time, country homes, rest and long summer holidays… Life in the Soviet Union was one of every basic need and decent living conditions provided by the government.” If these material conditions were satisfactory, there was also a sense of social tolerance: “My parents never taught us to see the differences in people. They had Russian friends, Jewish friends, Muslim friends, and there was never talk of us and them… During Soviet rule, everyone’s first identity was as Soviet citizen. However, as ethnic Armenians we continued to keep our language, religion, culture and traditions alive.”
It’s not as if it’s all perfect. The freedom of religion had been suppressed under earlier Communist rule. And since Gorbachev’s easing under Glasnost and Perestroika, she refers to corruption and “the shadow economy,” which her parents, apparently, knew how to navigate. Understandably, they are not equipped to do the same in America. Is the proverbial “melting pot” then a practical solution to the problem for the next generation? The author, however, seems unprepared to step onto that escalator. As her experience demonstrates, the expectation of the melting pot is pretty much defined by WASP parameters, and she doesn’t fit in. Instead, she identifies with all those who have been left out: the Native Americans and African Americans and Latinos and, as it happens, Armenians because she looks suspiciously like a Middle Easterner. Has anybody ever heard of Christian Middle Easterners?
Is this an unfair estimate when Identity Politics is so actively highlighted in American politics? But did not “identity politics” cause the very flash point of the Armenian-Azeri conflict to begin with? By spelling out her liminal experience, Liya Babyan gives voice to all those “others” also caught in no man’s land – all the refugees from all the battlefields fought out of sight and out of mind – in the Middle East or Africa or Asia or South America – and Europe as well, why not? Clearly, the invisible players care nothing about the pawns on their global chessboard.
Although she does not offer an extensive analysis of the geopolitical stakes in the Armenian-Azeri conflict, Liya Babyan does offer food for thought. She innocently presents the case of decent life under the umbrella of the Socialist system of the now dismantled Soviet Union. And just as unabashedly, she worries about the ubiquitous American smiles: what could be behind them? Maybe they don’t feel rude at all showing their teeth around the world.
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