When we began reflecting on and writing about our experiences of migration as members of the Parrhesia Collective, I was not quite sure where to place my own experience within these narratives. In her previous essay, Talin Suciyan recalled how the possibilities of leaving, being unable to leave, and building a life elsewhere have accompanied Armenians across generations. Her words invited me to revisit my own experience of migration. In my story, being a student, marriage, and migration were intertwined.
At twenty-one, I left Istanbul to settle in New York. Alongside an early marriage, I planned to continue my university education at Barnard College, known for its feminist tradition. I was leaving by choice, but I did not yet know what that choice would mean in everyday life. As a young Armenian woman from Istanbul, I would also discover how the languages and affiliations I carried with me would be received in my new life. As I tried to learn the city’s rhythms, relationships, and distances, I maintained my connection to the life I had left behind through letters. These were the years before the internet and email became part of our everyday lives. Sometimes, when I sat down to write to my family and friends, I did not know what to say. What words could convey my loneliness and sense of being lost? What could I choose to tell them about my daily life? These remained questions I did not know how to answer.
Before leaving, I had thought my English was good. Yet following lectures, understanding what was being said, and speaking in class proved more difficult than I had expected. It was there that I felt the distance between knowing a language and being able to move comfortably within it. I also missed the solidarity among students that I had known during my brief university experience in Istanbul. Once, I asked the student sitting next to me about a term I had not understood because of our professor’s accent. She turned away and quickly covered her notebook. Though it may seem a very small gesture, I still remember the weight of that moment. Added to the difficulty of not having understood the word was the experience of a request for help going unanswered.
The questions I encountered when I said I came from Turkey deepened this sense of being a stranger: “Do you go to school on camels?” “Are you allowed to wear trousers?” Then there was the comment I heard again and again: “You have a nice accent. Where are you from?” Over time, this remark began to anger me. I sensed a distance within it. Where my voice came from took precedence over what I was saying. Amid the ready-made images of an orientalist gaze that exoticised the place I came from, I did not know how to make room for my own story.
Hoping to feel a little more at home, I decided to attend a meeting of the university’s Armenian Student Club. I had imagined a setting where I could speak Armenian and connect with Armenians in New York. After days spent trying to understand English and make myself understood, I thought I might feel safe within a familiar language. Yet at the door to the meeting room, I found myself being questioned about being an Armenian from Istanbul by a club member who did not speak Armenian. Neither where I came from nor my presence seemed welcome. I experienced that encounter as an exclusion. I did not want to return. Today, as I reflect on my experience of migration, this remains one of the memories I dwell on most, and one that still hurts. Before a relationship in which I could tell my story had even begun to take shape, I already felt shut out. I do not know what those spaces are like today. What remains in my memory is turning back from a doorway I had approached in the hope of finding connection. What happened at that door still makes me reflect on the forms Armenian identity takes in different places, and on how much room we are able to make for one another’s experiences.
Today, I also reconsider what it meant to turn to German Language and Literature for my graduate studies at Columbia University after completing my undergraduate degree. German was the first foreign language I had learned. In turning towards it in New York, was I following the trace of a familiar sound? Perhaps this choice held a search for home. I remember the sense of recognition I felt when I encountered the concept of “transcendental homelessness” in Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel. Lukács was considering the modern human condition of no longer finding a given unity of meaning between oneself and the world. In the form of the novel, he saw the condition of a person living in a world where meaning had to be sought.
As I read about this concept, I found myself returning to my own life. There was a gap between me and the world I inhabited, and I did not know how to cross it. I was trying to learn the language, understand my classes, and form relationships. Yet within all of this, I could not quite work out where to place myself. Lukács’s concept allowed me to approach a feeling I was living with but could not yet name. My connection to the concept arose from a reading shaped by my own experience. The concrete conditions of migration and displacement in Armenian history carry their own historical and political weight. In Lukács’s words, I had found an echo of the estrangement I felt in my own life. What I read gave words to a condition I sensed in everyday encounters but struggled to articulate.
Novalis’s words, which Lukács also draws upon, accompanied this search: his understanding of philosophy as homesickness, as the desire to be at home everywhere. For me, in those years, this desire took very ordinary forms: being able to ask a question in class without hesitation, being heard beyond my accent, finding a place for myself in a setting where I wanted to speak Armenian. Above all, I wanted the people I was meeting to listen with curiosity to the life I carried with me from Istanbul.
When my first marriage did not work out, I returned to Istanbul, leaving my studies unfinished. Years later, I was able to go back and complete my master’s degree. I carried with me the intervening years and the knowledge of what it meant to leave something unfinished. The estrangement I had experienced in those early years remained in my memory. Looking at that young woman now, I understand more fully how alone she could find herself on a path she had chosen. With the Armenian identity she had brought from Istanbul, her languages, and her desire for connection, she was trying to make room for a life of her own. I want to linger a little longer beside her as she sits before those letters she could not write. Perhaps this essay, too, opens a space, years later, for what she struggled to say then.
