Art by Betsy Burrow
Transparency Item: This is the opinion and perspective of the writer.
It’s difficult for me to fully consider America home. The food is different, the streets are different, the language is different, the music is different, the whole culture is just: different. I grew up feeling like a foreigner, like an immigrant who misses “back home,” unsettled in this country because it just didn’t have the same flavor.
I was born in Mission Hills, Calif. I went almost 20 years without having ever gone “back home.” I understand this sounds baffling to the average person.
To give some context, I come from Armenian heritage and identify as a Western Armenian, a type of Armenian native to a land west of present-day Armenia and now commonly spread outside present-day Armenia living in diaspora.
My father was born in Aleppo, Syria within a community of Armenian immigrants whose families had found refuge there during the early 20th century. When he was a teenager, he joined another part of the Armenian diaspora in Beirut, Lebanon, the same city my mother’s family had immigrated to after the beginning of the same century.
When I was 19 years old, I traveled to Beirut. I had expectations of immediately being at home, but once again, I felt like I was in a foreign land. Things changed towards the second half of my trip, when I had finally visited a place called Bourj Hammoud, a small town in Beirut heavily populated by Western Armenians — people that I wouldn’t just say are very similar to me but are actually the same.
I was with people who spoke not only the same language, but the same dialect. I was with people who not only ate similar foods to what I grew up eating, but had the same preparation styles and spices, giving it that homemade feel. I was with people whose families had fled the same genocide and persecution that mine had and chose to settle in the same place, making me feel like I was connected with them generationally.
It’s difficult to try and put myself in the shoes of my parents’ and grandparents’ generation. Their families had fled genocide and religious persecution, so they came to a new country with hope of things turning around only to be faced with a civil war in Lebanon, where death and destruction had become common within the city of Beirut for people of all ages. But as a child of that generation, I can relate through the community that found peace in a shared religion, cuisine, lifestyle and music.
I realize how odd this might sound, but I believe a region can give off a certain sound or genre. After all, different parts of the world have different styles of music that are influenced by their surroundings.
When I think of my time in Bourj Hammoud, and what the town must’ve been like when my parents were my age, I think of a known album within our community, “Sev Atcher” by Paul Baghdadlian. Every time I listen to that album, I feel connected with a part of my community, with a part of my people. As the album’s lush synths and poetic strums play, I hear and feel things that simple words couldn’t have done.
If you were to look up pictures of Bourj Hammoud, you might be confused with this glamorization. The town is often recognized as a ghetto with cheap housing and low standard living, but sometimes I wish I had grown up in the community and fellowship that I’ve always craved, the community and fellowship I’ve heard so much about 50 years ago in that beautiful “ghetto.”
Things don’t last forever, and that community has largely moved to different countries. Some of them have assimilated and lost some of that “flavor.” But every time I press play on the album’s opening track “Sirel Yem,” I imagine that I’m back there, surrounded by my people, at home.
__________________
Follow the Graphic on X: @PeppGraphic
Email Nick Charkhedian: nareg.charkhedian@pepperdine.edu
