Acerca de
Trauma and Sorrow
The Armenian Genocide upheaved the lives of millions of Armenians across the Ottoman Empire. They were subject to mass deportations, and were then sent on death marches across deserts; they were raped, forced into marriage with their assailants, murdered in droves. In the wake of this, there has been much literature about the horrors of the genocide, the wide-ranging feeling of loss, their shared memory of the past, and their own Armenian identity. In post-genocide Turkey, for example, some of the lullabies that mothers sing to their children are passed from from genocide victims, and these descendants in turn carry on their pain; even if places and names are forgotten, the lamentations of these lullabies persist. Melissa Bilal's paper on post-genocide Armenian lullabies offers the following:
​
"For decades following the genocide, survivors and their children lulled their babies to sleep with songs that openly or metaphorically articulated loss. Besides, lullabies composed as art songs to commemorate the genocide on stage were appropriated as cradle songs. Many melodized lullaby poems from the pre-genocide repertoire also took on new meanings associated with the memory of the genocide."
​
Other survivors passed down harrowing stories of what they had seen and experienced; horrific accounts of slaughter, torture, and abuse on a heretofore unbelievable level. This more direct trauma too lives on in the hearts of following generations of Armenians; according to my father, my own great grandfather (or perhaps my grandfather, I cannot remember fully) escaped the claws of the genocide himself, and reading others' accounts of what happened gives me a sense of duty to carry some remnant of that burden, so as not to forget the atrocities of the past. It is a shared folklore of sorts.
​
Music and Literature
A Shared Burden
Armenian diasporas do not all exemplify their shared folklore in the same way; however, music and literature are two common forms. In post-genocide Lebanon for example, Armenian pop music helps to bind together the Lebanese-Armenian population; it explores the social status of Armenians, given their motherland-severed existence, and has historically acted as a political tool for Armenian lobbying (especially while lobbying for genocide recognition). As author Sylvia A. Alajaji puts it:
​
"In the years after the genocide, music became a critical space in which to explore the multiple dimensions of and alternatives to the Armenian exilic reality. For the Armenians in Lebanon, the shifts in musical representations of Self
illuminate not only the shifts in their process of becoming, but also the ways in which music negotiates the “simultaneous dimensions”—whether spatial or temporal—of those in exile."
​
In a way, this manner of reclaiming their 'Armenian-ness' might be compared to the reterritorializing aspect of the Puerto Rican décima, which also seeks to maintain an overall sense of identity in the wake of mass colonization. Through the décima, themes of agricultural life and independence are reinforced, bringing its listeners together in a way that is not dissimilar from that of Lebanese-Armenian pop.
Of course, many other forms of art on the genocide. Poetry, autobiographies, and fictional stories (both in writing and on the screen) range from Varujan Vosganian's 'The Book of Whispers', to Terry George's 'The Promise.'
In Martha Sims' and Martine Stephens' Living Folklore: An Introduction to the Study of People and Their Traditions, a folk group is defined as any specific group of people who are bound into a shared system of customs, attitudes, behaviors, and more. The flexibility of this terms endows the moniker of "folk group" upon both the most niche possible subcultures and large, monolithic cultures; the degree of participation required for membership varies on a case by case basis. In this context, regardless of arbitrary percentages of ancestry, all Armenians are privy to a sort of post-genocide folk group, the identity of an Armenian - and a descendant of an almost ethnically cleansed peoples. The price of membership is our preserved memory of the brutal past, and our continued existence and passing-on of this memory. Regardless of race, sex, gender, and otherwise, we all carry a shared burden.
​
​
​
​
Conclusion
As previously mentioned, this examination of a handful of post-genocide folklore examples is far, far too short to encompass the full breadth of my people's simultaneously separate and shared coping in the wake of such a horrible event. This may be the best I can do with the time and resources allotted to me, but it is not enough for you, the reader, to be fully informed on this sort of matter. I encourage further personal study into a few expressions of folklore (whether material, customary, or verbal) performed by some of the many disparate Armenian diasporas - expressions that directly spring from and/or address the Armenian Genocide. I personally would like to delve into the contentious nature of Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day in regard to international politics, as Turkey's government still denies the genocide's existence.
I hope you will all leave this page with at least a slightly better understanding of how Armenian folklore on the whole continues to be shaped by the Armenian Genocide.