My “Diaspora Blues"

Graphic by Emma Baynes

I dance somewhere on the periphery of belonging. I have never walked a tightrope, but I imagine that if this vision metamorphosed into reality, I would wobble on a string separating two alternate dimensions. As an Armenian-American residing in the diaspora, I exist in a permanent state of contorted foreignness. Writing this piece in my suburban home at the end of a small, winding cul-de-sac, I long to be in my homeland, a piece of me always absent. When I am in my homeland, the absence becomes subdued but ever-present. I am noticeably an outsider to city locals who detect my American accent and unfamiliar clothing brands. I am “too foreign for home / too foreign for here.”

I became acquainted with Ijeoma Umebinyuo’s poem, “Diaspora Blues,” two years ago and it has pierced the center of my heart, surviving the faults of memory to this very day. I have memorized its words like I have the westernized pronunciation of my last name. Each syllable hangs from my shoulder like a mnemonic, reminding me of the barricades between my body, mind, spirit, and homeland. 

My entire thought-process is constructed and materialized by diaspora blues. Ever since I came into contact with the term, my dreams, aspirations, and desires have taken the shape of distortion. Every thought is accompanied by an after-thought, my body singular, but my mind and spirit split in two. Upon entering a large public college after spending the entirety of my life at an Armenian private school, the diaspora blues visited as a simple, funny, inexplicable feeling. As time went on and I grew further from the Armenian bubble I had grown up in, the perception of my internal division constructed a home of my thoughts. As I write this now, I think that the feeling of diaspora blues might have always been there in front of me, but I stayed either ignorant or unknowing of its presence. Initially, I shoved the feeling of alienation and disconnection down my throat, not allowing it to occupy any space beyond the bounds of my mind. Before I made the effort to understand what diaspora blues was doing to my subconscious, I couldn’t acknowledge that it even existed. It was too complex a feeling, an uncharted territory, a notion more in line with a nightmare. 

The most recent time I recall someone asking me what my ethnicity is was just a few weeks ago. When I asked the questioner to guess, they laughed nervously, remarking, “I don’t know. You just have sharp features.” I think about this comment now, wondering just how sharp my features had to be in order to be so defined through the pixelated Zoom call. The anxiousness in my laugh matched theirs as I replied, “I’m Armenian.” 

“Ar-men-ia?” they asked, enunciating the word carefully like it would break in half if they said it too quickly. “I don’t know where that is. Where is that on the map?”

Their response left me with a pang in my chest that I still don’t quite understand, but I jumped at the opportunity to talk about my homeland. After explaining its geographic location,I asked if they had ever heard about the Armenian Genocide, to which they reacted, “Yeah, kind of.” 

“Cool,” I replied, nodding my head. “You know, it’s happening again. My people are facing a second genocide. They’re being forced from their homes, losing their ancestral lands, and being murdered while the world watches in silence.”

“Damn,” they nodded their head back at me, their facial features obscured from the faulty connection of the Zoom call. “2020 sucks.” 

I agreed that 2020 sucked, that we were all struggling, and we moved on from the conversation without saying another word about the sharpness of my dark eyebrows, the pointed outline of my nose, or the war that had just recently transpired in Armenia. The interaction left me confounded, serving as an unambiguous memento of my diaspora blues and making my pain feel all the more foreign. 

The aftermath of the war waged against the indigenous Armenian people of Artsakh during the last few months of this year heightened my interaction with diaspora blues. Watching ancestral Armenian lands being taken away by the same government that perpetrates and actively denies the occurrence of the Armenian Genocide was simply enraging. Watching Turkey and Azerbaijan move along with their agenda to erase Armenian culture and life from the world felt utterly impossible, yet a despondent reality. I was formally introduced to the guilt portion of the diaspora blues during the escalation of this war, always feeling that my place in the suburbs of Los Angeles limited my Armenian identity. Because I wasn’t in my homeland, I felt the guilt of comparing my pain to those directly impacted by the fighting. And because I wasn’t in my homeland, I felt the carelessness of the international community destroy me, just as that fruitless conversation about my ethnicity destroyed me. The threat to my people’s existence meant nothing to the place I physically inhabited. I felt like I was in the middle of two separate yet eternally connected battles, like my pain was too much for here and not nearly enough for there. 

After nearly three months of evading the inner distress and heartbreak that the war had caused me, I became practically forced to confront my thoughts and emotions. I became shadowbanned from some of my social media accounts for bombarding politicians and state officials with messages about the existential threat that Armenians were facing in their very homeland. At the time, I felt like all I could do was message, retweet, repost, and share the gruesome war crimes the Azerbaijani government and soldiers were perpetrating against Armenians. I had turned my phone into a weapon, refusing to acknowledge the toll it was taking on my mental health. When that was taken away from me, I was left with nothing but to acknowledge the amalgamation of disappointment and fear grappling somewhere in my subconscious. By the end of my quite strictly enforced two-week social media cleanse, I had come full circle, reconnecting with the Umebinyuo’s words: “too foreign for home / too foreign for here.” The words tasted different than before, like metal against the tip of my tongue. I didn’t shove the feelings of alienation and disconnection down my throat this time, letting the acceptance of foreignness consume my body and the syllables melt into my throat. 

“What am I if I am too foreign for both places?” I asked myself throughout the weeks, my existence like slices of data that couldn’t quite fit into any graph. The question seemed trivial in comparison to the displacement and suffering of Armenians whose lives were torn to shreds by the reality of war, but the enigma of existing as a member of a diaspora endured, beating against the back of my mind. My worries about the threats to Armenia’s existence lived concurrently with my own existential mysteries. I concluded that I could be an anomaly, a deviation from all standards. I could be an act of resistance, the origin story of my ancestor’s survival tethered to my limbs. I could be a token of the failure of genocide, my body and soul evidence of generational endurance and trauma in the face of calculated attacks. Or, I could be anything but a symbol. I am an Armenian-American who loves my homeland so persistently because I don’t know what it means not to. To me, that is all that matters.

I think I will live in a constant state of diaspora blues. I let the strange sensation of unbelonging teach me. I let it guide me rather than torture me as it used to. When the feeling becomes too conscious or overbearing, I find power and solace in community, in knowing that there are others who live intoning the words of “Diaspora Blues” every day, as I do.