Confronted by my own peculiarities
-
As I was reading Gualtieri’s work about Syrian migration, I found myself thinking about my own family and their experience with migration. Gualtieri discusses the concept of internal migration from within the Ottoman Empire. In light of conflicts and riots in Damascus and Mount Lebanon, the people who fled the chaos, the refugees, would migrate within the empire before going across the ocean. My own family went through something very similar in the Armenian Genocide. Though borders were not as explicit, my great-great grandparents and their children would have been in a region that is defined by Armenian borders today. However, during the Genocide, these children would be orphaned, and my great grandparents would migrate to today’s Istanbul. They would be adopted into Turkish families, coincidentally end up a neighbors and have their marriage arranged due to their shared ethnicity. This is just one example of the many millions of Armenians, and other victims of conflict and war. It explains why there are so many “non-Turks” in these areas, as their families had been settled for a long time. It makes one wonder what kind of identity they choose to keep. I know my family went through a type of “identity crisis” in the beginning, as they did not practice any kind of religion, a core aspect of Armenia. Another aspect about Gualtieri’s work I found interesting was the point of origin in the narratives of migration. Gualtieri describes how certain immigrants believe it is in their blood to migrate to the West. I found this interesting because my family went through the complete opposite. My mother’s side of the family did indeed see immigration as an opportunity, but they did not feel a familial connection with the North America. In fact, they wanted to go to places like Germany but were rejected. My own family settled on Canada because they were also rejected from the US. With this background, I was shocked to hear that migrants felt a connection with the places they migrate to. The idea of Phoenicianism is very foreign to me. Despite also being Caucasian and Christian, my family still feels no connection with the West. Even I, born in the West and raised in the West, do not have a concrete connection with the Canada or the US.