Suren M. Vetsigian’s Lost Armenian Homeland and the Quest for New Forms of Belonging in His Autobiography: His Guiding Hand to Serve my People

From Firenze University Press Journal: Studi Slavistici

Giustina Selvelli, “Ca’ Foscari” University of Venice

In this paper, I present the autobiography of Suren Mkhitar Vetsigian (1905, Shabin Karahisar –1961, Plovdiv), exploring its connections to questions of forced migration and traumatic memory in the Armenian diasporic context. Vetsigian was born in a town in the current Turkish Giresun province, not far from the Black Sea coast, in the inland territory viewed by Armenians as ‘Historic Armenia’ (Karanian 2015; Ferrari 2016a) which came to embody for many a “lost homeland” (Payaslian 2010: 128) after the Genocide. Handwritten in English in 1947–1948 (Vetsigian 2014: 135), Autobiography.His Guiding Hand to Serve My People was translated into Bulgarian by his son Horen in the late 1990s and issued in Plovdiv in 2001 with limited circulation. The English edition, made available online in 2015 by the Armenian General Benevolent Union, is dedicated to the 110th anniversary of Vetsigian’s birth and to the first century since the beginning of the Armenian Genocide.

Written when the extent of the Holocaust against Jews was still largely unknown, Vetsigian’s narrative has as its focal point “the greatest crime in history, the mass murder of a million and a half unarmed Armenian people” (Vetsigian 2014: 75), reconstructed from the perspective of the common Armenian destiny and history and from his personal life. It describes life in the town of Shabin Karahisar before the First World War, the vicissitudes faced by the author as a displaced and orphaned child, and the migratory experiences as a young man moving to Greece, Bulgaria, United States and then permanently to the city of Plovdiv, to fulfill his vocation of serving his people, that is the local Armenian community. The book, which contains analyses and comments on the events, often based on written sources6, arrives to the year 1948, when the author is undergoing a difficult time because of his position as Armenian school director during the first year of overt communist rule, a condition that most likely availed him with time for introspection.

Vetsigian admits that for years he hesitated to write any autobiographical text, in the fear of contributing to foment the hatred between Armenians and Turks. However, the sense of responsibility he felt towards both his nation and truth itself, supported by his rejection of any war, prompted him to overcome such worries, “having the humble hope” to be able to “shed some new light on the recent history of the Near East” (Vetsigian 2014: 4) and to counteract the books written by the Turks on the subject.Recurrent massacres, persecutions and displacement in Armenian history nurtured the need among survivors and their descendants to give meaning to the tragedy that destroyed their homeland and marked their lives indelibly. Therefore, unsurprisingly, “Armenian literature is a repository of echoes of these responses to catastrophe” (Peroomian 2003: 157). Genocide is a specific topos within Armenian diaspora literature; no other event in Armenian history is comparable to the ‘Mec Ełeṙn’ (Kevorkian 2011, Akçam 2018) and has given rise to such a proliferation of texts: autobiographies, fictions, essays, unpublished memoirs (Lessersohn 2019: 566). Underneath the motivations to write about the wounds of the Genocide, we often find a desire to affirm and reinforce a sense of community, and to contribute to the cause of keeping historical memory alive (Holslag 2018: 35).

An important exemption is the case of Soviet Armenia: there was a weaker need to reinforce a sense of community, and limited freedom to write about this topic, although there were still some significant examples, such as the work of Verjiné K. Svazlian (see Peroomian 2015: 234). From the distance of the diasporic condition, a “re-evaluation of self ” (Grace 2007: 9) appears as a way to reconcile personal trauma and the quest for an externalized visibility of the Armenian suffering. The challenge seems achievable, since “eyewitness accounts of decisive events may be as valuable as official dispatches and reports. It is in such version especially that the human element becomes manifest, affording insights not to be found in documents” (Richard Hovannisian, cited in Totten and Parsons 2013: 6).

The Genocide is a symbol through which Armenians reach consciousness of them-selves and feel the specific mission of convincing others of their existence as a nation: the literature of the diaspora is an expression of this need (Lorne Shirinian, cited in Peroom-ian 2003: 158)and, at the same time, an autotherapeutic means (Peroomian 2003: 160; cfr. Grace 2007: 62).

With respect to memory studies, French historian Pierre Nora’s master work Les Lieux de mémoire (Nora 1984) defined the most consequential conceptualization of different types of “memory sites”, corresponding to places where the tragedy of the past is re-membered and expressed with a social perspective of sharedness. Among these, we observe so-called “functional places”, consisting, among others, of testimonies, manuals, autobiographies (Linke 2005: 182). In relation to this last category, Suren Vetsigian’s memoir can be inscribed in the type of survivors’ direct testimony that remained unpublished for a long time, comparable to Hagop S. Der-Garabedian’s Jail to jail: Autobiography of a Survivor of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and Vahan Hamamdjian’s Vahan’s Triumph: Autobiography of an Adolescent Survivor of the Armenian Genocide (both posthumously published in 2004) as well as John Minassian’s Surviving the Forgotten Genocide: An Armenian Memoir, appeared in Spring 2020.

In what follows, I trace the role of Vetsigian’s hometown and the thematization of his mother tongue in the narration, exploring his memoir as a specimen of literary work that alternates between direct testimony and detached narrative, thus recomposing the divide between personal and collective remembrance. I approach the issue of forced migration and identity in relation to the construction of complex patterns of non-exclusive, trans-national belonging (Levitt, Glick Schiller 2004: 1011), affirming the role of exilic-migratory narratives in the creation of a meaningful imaginary on the lost “homeland” (see Laycock 2012: 105 and Safran 1991: 84). I then analyze the unusual trajectory of Vetsigian’s life with respect to his decision to go back to a country of the ‘Orient’ although having prospects for a career in the us. Lastly, I discuss the author’s civic engagement in the Bulgarian setting and interpret it as a form of ‘inner migration’ within emigration, in which his personal political views had unfavorable consequences on his life and career; I relate the issue to the wider topic of genocide survivors’ responsibility towards questions of human rights and reconciliation.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/Studi_Slavis-8400

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