Survivors

Kip Hagopian learned the value of hard work at an early age. From the time he was about ten years old, he spent summers working on his uncle Soak’s farm near Fresno, California, where Soak’s parents settled after emigrating from Western Armenia in the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the century. “I drove around with Soak as he tended the farm. He often had me doing manual labor: irrigating cotton and sugar beets and whatever other chores he tasked me with. By the time I was 12 I was driving a tractor, mowing and raking alfalfa. Sitting on a tractor all day is a tough job, but for a kid my age it was exhilarating. They didn't have any child labor laws in those days!” Hagopian says.

“It might not be a coincidence that I carry the name Sesede,” she says with a sparkle in her eyes. “It’s such a perfect fit to describe my journey through life. After all, Sesede means ‘raise your voice’ in Turkish.”

My heritage means everything to me. I grew up in the Armenian Youth Foundation and have made five or six trips to Armenia in the last 18 years or so, bringing in wheelchairs, shoes and medicine for the orphans in Nubarashen.

“Where are the Nelson Mandelas?” asks Edward Djerejian, sitting forward in his office at Rice University in Houston. “I don't see a Nelson Mandela in Turkey. I don't see a Nelson Mandela in Azerbaijan. I don't see a Nelson Mandela in Armenia. We need one. The great challenge for Armenia now is reconciliation with its neighbors.” If anyone can ask a question like this, it is Djerejian.

In 1915 my grandmother, Maria Ahanikovna Voskanian (born Stepanian), was only seven years old. Her father (my great grandfather, Ahanik Stepanian) managed to take his sick wife and three little daughters from the city of Kars to the south of Russia.

Both my grandmothers are survivors of the Armenian Genocide, as was my husband’s grandmother. All three women suffered from depression throughout their adult lives. Neither of my parents knew their grandparents.

My grandfather died before I was born, yet even today his spirit guides me and gives me strength. His account of the Genocide in his small town in Western Armenia is an amazing read.

Armenia is in my name – Armenoui. Even though I am far away from the historical homeland of my father’s family, I am Armenian and I feel Armenian. Our shared experiences, our memories of exile, my family’s stories… all these have emerged through my art. I am a visual artist, and my work inspired by my family’s past explores the concepts of trauma, remembering and forgetting.

“My father was a taciturn man. Every now and then he would tell us about his youth. All of a sudden he would struggle to fight back the tears. As a child, I understood that something bad must have happened.” Haig Dolabdjian would learn the details of his father’s experience many years later.

Both my paternal and maternal great grandfathers escaped the Genocide. They lived in the Ottoman Empire back then and were caught in the midst when the violence erupted. Too many people helped them to be able to count and name them all - from random strangers to Russian medical personnel and American aid workers.