That place. A liminal space. A mythic place. A space which links present to imagined past and propels you into an unfathomable future. The great cities of Cilicia are all here: Adiyaman, Mardin, Marash, Adana, Sis. Millennial castles rise straight out of clear water to meet azure sky. Norman crusaders whose blond hair and cobalt blue eyes create something wholly unique in Armenian history, a queering of body and face, something neither Asian nor European but both at once, the delicate features on a T’oros Roslin neither quite male nor female, indecipherably both.
As you cross into Bourj Hammoud for the first time, that most mythic of Armenian ghettoes where an entire nation recovered from certain death, where cobblers sit side-by-side leather workers, where animals are slaughtered whole and boiled down into harissa and stew, and women embroider using millennial needlepoint techniques, you breathe completely freely and joyfully perhaps for the first time in your life. This space where East meets West, North meets South, an entire people and empire displaced, relocated, salvaged, born again.
Debligossian family, Nor Marash, Bourj Hammoud, 2018 by Ara Oshagan
A liminal space that leads to the great Mediterranean beyond where, in 1915, orphans jumped and splashed and screamed with joy after their long endless march through desert sands and emerged from the Valleys of Death. In alleys that wind and turn and curve around with no seeming logic that your mind can entertain, you discover boys like delicate flowers with elongated thin reed-like noses, and girls with dark brows furrowed, strong and masculine: gender fluidity seems to take on a new life here in even the most traditional of spaces.
The Armenians who came here as refugees from all over the Cilician plain, the noble priests from The Great House of Cilicia clad in dark pointed hats, through Der Zor and Jerusalem and Aleppo, across orphanage and camp in order to rebuild, first in Karantina, and now here, a space where disease once raged, where men still work sanding down wood into furniture, beating and stretching leather into all manner of accessory and fashion, where women bake traditional breads and still embroider lace, like in the old country. It is a place that you have only been to in your dreams, yet when you step into it for the first time when you cross the Nahr Bayrut past the highway that now divides the ghetto in two, one wealthy and the other poor, it is as if for the first time you have walked into your past.
New Year’s Eve, Nor Sis, Bourj Hammoud, Displaced Series, 2013 by Ara Oshagan
“Stop telling people that I’m from Bourj Hammoud!” your Armenian tutor screams at the top of her lungs so that half of the Columbia University campus might hear her. “We’re not from Bourj Hammoud, damn it! «մենք գյուղացի չենք!» She screams as if being from Bourj Hammoud were a stain, being a villager a naïve unsophisticated disgrace, when for you it is the most beautiful of all places to be from, a place with roots and traditions and a hierarchy of desire take over.
You enjoy telling people that she is from Bourj Hammoud even more now that you know it bothers her so much. You introduce her at parties as “Melina my brilliant Armenian tutor from Bourj Hammoud” and watch her Tatar eyes simmer under blue fez since she cannot express her anger in public. It would seem odd, misplaced, amot, queer. You repeat with a smile on your face that she is from “the Bourj,” as you like to abbreviate it, this liminal queer space, this most Armenian of ghettoes, a space where everything has been squeezed together, concentrated like a morning drink. Where memories stretch from one century to the next, where everything has been reproduced, rebuilt, reimagined as if the simulacra of the past could ever replace its present reality.
Mesekin Armenian Center, Nor Amanos, Bourj Hammoud, Displaced Series, 2017 by Ara Oshagan
Everything seems queer in Bourj Hammoud: the architecture seems queer, the boys and girls queer, the churches queer, the small bakeries that serve warm flatbread and baklava queer as well. How could it ever be otherwise? This is, after all, a city of ghosts, and there are few things queerer than ghosts. Ghosts are very real—and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. Perhaps not your garden variety ghosts, the ones that provide fodder for much of children’s literature and low-brow Hollywood fare—or even those that Tzvetan Todorov analyzed so systematically in his 1970 classic Introduction à la littérature fantastique, but real live historical ghosts. Those that cannot be shaken or shooed away, screened or filtered, psychoanalytically expunged or historically denied.
In this wonderfully rambling, slightly run-down désuet neighborhood founded over one hundred years ago by Catholic Father Ariss, homemade electric wiring—proof of human ingenuity brought about by electricity shortages during the Lebanese Civil War—crisscrosses the Balkan-style houses. It forms such a fantastic mesh of aluminum and plastic that it looks as if aliens randomly descended upon this small, more or less squarish urban enclosure. Queerness personified: there is not a straight line anywhere to be seen.
American University of Beirut, Beirut, Displaced Series, 2014 by Ara Oshagan
In Bourj Hammoud you meet linguistic ghosts as well, in the form of Western Armenian dialects that reverberate from place to place, that to you are the language of your ancestors and not the standard Armenian that you learned in school or church in the U.S. This Armenian is etched in your subconscious, even if now you cannot speak it as well as you would like to.
Even if now it has become queer to you as well, a not quite understandable yet recognizable part of you still—it’s in your blood, ready to boil over and escape from your body. These ghosts—linguistic and other—are the same ghosts that you discovered while on assignment a few years back for Gourmet Magazine, present at Chez Varouj, a reputed restaurant at the end of a long winding alley; at the Church of the 40 Martyrs, at the Karageuzian Foundation building, in the soccer fields, basketball courts, schoolyards, and bakeries that dot this greatest of all Armenian ghettoes.
Easter procession, St. Sarkis Armenian Apostolic Church, Nor Sis, Bourj Hammoud, Displaced Series, 2018 by Ara Oshagan
And as you walk from one end of Bourj Hammoud to the other, it dawns on you that the expressions s on the faces you see, though Armenian, are not all that different from the ones you have seen in Jewish, African-American and Chinese ghettos: the pride, the staunch belief in one’s culture and the refusal to assimilate. No one in your family has ever lived in Bourj Hammoud—your father instead was born in the hills in Zahlé, the so-called “Bride of the Beqaa.”
Sanjak Camp, Bourj Hammoud, Displaced Series, 2013 by Ara Oshagan
Yet it is here that you discover the sounds, voices, faces, and foods of your Armenia, your Giligia. Here, the ghosts are alive again. The goldsmiths and the violinists, the money changers and the bankers, the poets and the revolutionaries. Like other storied and tragic spaces, Bourj Hammoud is filled to the brim with people that have refused to be annihilated. You spew venom at us, we use it to polish our diamonds.
So walk through Bourj Hammoud then, and sense the undeniable intelligence, the life force, on the faces of its Armenian denizens. Walk through Bourj Hammoud and feel the queerness pulsing from every crevice, every alley, every proud face. And remember that when you last crossed the random streets of this fabled ghetto, the ghosts of Bourj Hammoud came out, one by one, and retreated again into the past. They are still here for those who want to meet them, waiting as always to be discovered.