Musings of the victorious

by Maria Titizian

Published: Saturday September 15, 2007 in Living in Armenia

For almost a century we have defined ourselves through our tragedies. We have occupied that space in our collective memory with ardent fervor. It is a place that is familiar. On a conscious level it is easy being the victim. You are never accountable; you were after all the prey. It's easy to preach from the pulpit, to declare to the world that you were subjected to the horrors of mankind. You can point your finger at the perpetrators and demand recognition and restitution. You can place blame squarely on the shoulders of humanity. For centuries you were the victim. It's the first thing you tell people about your people. You tell them about the Genocide, about the lost homeland of which only ghostly relics remain and which you have not claimed. We are a nation of emotional cripples, forever looking over our shoulders into the depths of our tragic past and secretly finding comfort and familiarity in that space.

It has crept into our literature, our paintings, our music - even Armenian eyes reflect sorrow and pain with resplendence.

We are so wrapped up in our tragedies that we fail to appreciate our victories.

Artsakh for starters.

Sumgait reminded all of us of what vulnerability could mean even at the end of the 20th century, and we were tired. We were tired of being victims, of the past, of having our homeland usurped and then depopulated, of denying our children their future. And then for the first time in centuries our people rose to the challenge and reclaimed a part of the lost homeland. And we were victorious. The victory was not only a military victory; it was an historic, legal, and moral victory.

So now we are no longer the vanquished; we are the victors. This creates a whole new set of problems, for we do not understand what it means to be victorious. We are also presented with a whole new set of rules which we are not accustomed to. And it makes us nervous.

Last week I was on a plane returning home from Germany. There was an elderly, slightly heavy woman sitting next to me. She clearly looked disoriented. Just before take off, I offered her a piece of gum, which she refused initially but then timidly asked for. Once airborne, she began unbuttoning her sweater and then took a magazine from the seat pocket in front of her and began fanning herself. I leaned over and turned on the fan situated overhead so that she could get some air. She smiled and then pointed to her heart. At first I thought she meant to say that she was scared of flying, but then she showed me four fingers and pointed to her heart again. I then assumed that she was probably trying to tell me that she'd had heart attacks. She took out a piece of paper for me to read, presumably a doctor's note, but as it was in German I told her I didn't understand.

After a while, the flight attendants came by offering refreshments. I asked her what she wanted to drink by pretending to have a cup in my hands and drinking. She turned and whispered in my ear, sok. Sok in Russian means juice. They had orange and apple so I told her the choices in Russian and she told me she wanted apple juice. Curious, I asked her if she was Russian. She didn't seem to understand, so I said, Ruskaya? She replied, Nyet. She said something which I didn't catch at first, and then she said, Baku, kharasho? I just nodded my head, that yes, I understood.

I fell silent. I didn't reply. I didn't tell her I was Armenian. That we were neighbors. That we had fought a war against each other. That we had won. That we were the victors and they, the vanquished. I began pondering the reasons she was living in Germany. Did she escape after the Soviet Union collapsed and like millions of other people migrated in search of a better life? Did she have children? Did one of her sons die in the war? Did she really believe that Artsakh was theirs? Did she even care? The rest of our journey passed in silence.

When the plane landed and we began disembarking, I didn't look at her or say goodbye. I just walked off the plane and into the terminal at the Vienna airport. As I was walking toward my gate, she appeared before me, passport and ticket in hand, and asked me with her eyes to help her. I sighed, looked at her boarding pass, and saw that she had only 15 minutes to get to her gate. I motioned for her to follow me and walked with her to the other end of the airport. I explained to her that she would have to go through passport control, pointed out her gate number on her boarding pass, and told her in Russian to hurry so that she wouldn't miss her flight. Just as I was turning to walk away, she grabbed me by the shoulders, hugged me, and kissed me in gratitude. I smiled at her and watched her walk away.

After a few moments I turned to find my own gate when I overheard a group of Armenians talking. I paused momentarily and then kept walking toward my gate, anxious for the plane to take off so that I could return home.
I was not in Armenia when the Karabakh Movement began. I only saw images captured on video of almost a million Armenians, their fists raised in the air, demanding reunification. And at that moment I knew that my journey in Canada had come to an end, even before I had my children, and even before I was able to articulate it logically to those closest to me.

And today I ask people here in Armenia who are disillusioned and whose spirits are broken, who don't struggle for their rights as citizens, how was it that the Karabakh Movement unified them and gave them hope, gave them a reason to demand. They simply reply that it was a blip in our history, that perhaps it wasn't meant to have happened. We don't win. Our history attests to it. We don't know what to do with victory.

But here we are, victorious and what are we to make of it?

We must become stronger, find ways that unite us, and not divide us. We must understand, finally what it means to have a free and independent homeland. We must rework our collective identity crisis and begin to appreciate the concept of statehood. We must learn how to govern ourselves, protect the rights of our citizens, rebuild, reinvent, defend our borders, and most importantly understand that we are the ones who will create the future. We no longer live under an oppressor and we are now accountable for our actions.