For this project, I wanted to engage with the idea of negotiating discordant identities – specifically through my experience as a 1st generation (first-gen born in US) Lebanese-Armenian American who is also trans/genderqueer… the feeling of being caught between two competing worlds, and that particular dreamlike “in-between” of ambiguous belonging. Liminality is a word I learned during this process. I explore the idea of these interacting identities, seeing myself as a subject of history who also carries the histories of all my ancestors.
Through this project, I learned how to take the pain and vulnerability I feel in regards to the loss of familial connection, and use it to create spaces that have room for all parts of me and others who share in this experience. We can build or join in a community that embraces rather than fears intersectionality.
My medzmama, Virjinie, speaks in the video about the experience of assimilation in the US, the individual and shared trauma through loss of language, which isolates you from yourself and your community.
The video is called “Hello From Beirut!” based on the name of a cassette tape sent from family in Beirut to my family in the US after they fled the Civil War in Lebanon. Armenian was my first language, but I lost most of it due to pressures of assimilating and attending American versus Armenian school.
This video starts with medzmama saying to me in Armenian: “I wish I could give you my Armenian tongue.” I include audio from the tape: medzmama’s cousin, Ankiné sings a song of mourning, love lost between two people who were separated on a Sunday. “Just like you left us on Sunday,” she says to Virjinie before singing.
I wanted to bridge the idea of cultural preservation of the diaspora with the preservation of my queer current self: I reject the idea that my queerness reduces or takes away from my Armenianness and vice versa. Instead, I am powered by both/all of these identities: an embodiment of the old world that came before me as well as the new one I create for myself. I want to create new forms of communication where I don’t have the “lehzous” (or language) to speak it.
There is not enough queer Armenian representation in the world; I’m also putting this out there to change that.