{"id":4918,"date":"2021-09-15T13:04:26","date_gmt":"2021-09-15T13:04:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=4918"},"modified":"2025-09-05T09:23:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T07:23:06","slug":"displaced-an-armenian-journey-from-beirut-to-los-angeles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/displaced-an-armenian-journey-from-beirut-to-los-angeles\/","title":{"rendered":"Displaced: From Beirut to Los Angeles to Beirut"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sanjak Camp, Bourj Hammoud, 2103<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ara Oshagan<\/h4>\n

I am walking along the narrow and labyrinthine Armenian neighborhoods of Bourj Hammoud in Beirut\u2014spaces with names like Nor (new) Marash, Nor Sis, Nor Yozgat. These are the namesakes of towns that hearken back to a distant past, to places and lands from which these communities, my communities were exiled by genocide. My friends who live in Nor Marash still call themselves Marashtsi (from Marash), even though the last time any of us, our parents or grandparents saw Marash, was 105 years ago.<\/p>\n

Nor Marash is a few intense urban blocks of concrete, electric wire and rush of life. It was originally settled by the same refugee families who were pushed to the brink of extinction by genocide. They re-started their lives and families in Beirut, Aleppo and other Levantine cities.<\/p>\n

My friends in Beirut and I were born into these and nearby communities and grew up in families and spaces fraught with the collective memory of extreme violence and dislocation. Such internalized histories of dispossession persist. Across geographies. Across generations. They remain under your skin. They do not leave you in peace.<\/p>\n

I was born in the American University of Beirut hospital \u2014 to Armenians parents, who despite nearly 30 years in an Arab country, hardly spoke the language at all. As a child, I knew Armenian and French better than Arabic. We looked back in time more than over the fence to our neighbors. We lived in suspension.<\/p>\n

At the first sign of trouble, in 1975, we fled to the States, eventually to Los Angeles. A displacement that also accompanied a dissolution: my parents separated, and our family scattered. I carried one diaspora into another, along a fault-line of disruption and dislocation. I live in hyperdiaspora and as a result, own multiple histories. My identity is fluid and shapeshifts between Armenian, American, Lebanese, always unmoored, othered, ambiguous. My identity is a process \u2014 in harmony and contradiction, simultaneously.<\/p>\n

Beirut has always occupied the spaces on the edges of my consciousness, always a presence. Now, 40 years later, I have returned to photograph.<\/p>\n