My dearest Sadie,
I cannot begin to tell you how overjoyed I have been these past six months to be your father. From the moment you emerged into this world, I have so enjoyed watching you grow, experience happiness, and be loved by me, your mother, and all your grandparents and relatives.
You do not know it yet, but you have already made me a better person. It will be my defining mission in life to return to you that great favor. One of the ways I hope and plan to do that is to begin to introduce you to who we are, of what it means to be alive because our family survived a genocide by giving up everything, going into exile, and eventually landing here. And now you, the first of a fourth generation of diaspora Armenians descended from your great-great grandparents, has begun to live.
You were named for one of those great-great-grandparents. For the several short years in which we coexisted, your great-great-grandmother Satenig was Sadie to me. You are named for an incredible woman who lived and raised up her children and grandchildren by sheer force of will.
That I got to coexist with her—and to exist at all—was precisely and solely because she survived.
Your great-great-grandparents, aunts, and uncles saw the worst of what exists in people, and lost almost everything because of it. They lost parents, siblings, nephews…but they survived. They lost their homes and their homeland…but they survived. Their families were targeted for extermination and their communities fell…but they survived.
Us surviving and thriving as a family is the strongest retort there is to genocide. You are the direct continuation of their victory over evil, for during those moments in which you came into the world, you became the reason why our family survived. After so much was taken from our family, you were given to us.
Our cousin Hagop wrote that though much was taken from us, from our family and from our people, much abides. And he’s right. But my darling girl, you must also never forget what was taken from us. Not simply the material things, or the savings, or even the land…no, you must never forget that our innocence was taken from us—our moral, legal, existential innocence.
You must never forget that we were made into criminals and murder victims simply for existing. You must never forget that we were forced to exile ourselves from our indigenous homeland, leaving the bodies of dead loved ones behind, just to survive. And you must never forget that to get to that point of genocide, decades of demonization and persecution of us were required.
Because there are those who would have the world forget what took place in those wretched and diabolical years. It is why we set aside today to remember, and to seek recognition from others, of what took place that so tore our family and our people asunder. That terrible rush to forget is not limited to our genocide, no—but to the Holocaust, to chattel slavery, to the genocides of others.
Knowing that what happened to us can, and did, happen again and again is what has given your father one of his glimpses of understanding of what it means to be the hated other. And here in the United States, being the hated other usually means being non-white.
For what Turkey did to us—drive us from our homelands, massacre us by the hundreds of thousands—is what the United States did to its own indigenous peoples, and towards its enslaving millions of black African and Caribbean people.
Sadie, there is more, so much more, of our evil to one another to warn you of and to prepare you for. What our family and our people experienced is but one thread in a tapestry of depravity that continues to this day. For there will be a day—and I say this as when, not if—when you will see someone react to your father’s presence in a way that can only be described as prejudiced.
That will be the day when I will sit you down and explain to you that even though daddy isn’t threatening or dangerous, and never would be, there are going to be people, especially in this president’s America, who will see him that way because of his slightly darker hue and even darker beard. Daddy will try to explain to you that people—and not biology—decide what white is and is not white, and that when they decide that certain people exist outside of it (for whatever reason, and whatever their ethnicity may actually be), it becomes a pretext to deliberately treat others so badly.
That glimpse I get into having our whiteness revoked is not the same as, say, being black or indigenous. While my whiteness is conditional, theirs never existed because whiteness always excludes blackness, and colonialism always excludes indigenousness. If you were a woman of color, far be it for me to tell you how to be one, my dear. Yet we also exist in the in-between of sometimes being covered in whiteness and sometimes not.
Whatever the world may see us as, I can, and will, show you what it means to be Armenian, with all the good and great that comes with it: the food, the history, the family, and so much more. It is a rich and beautiful existence that I would not trade for anything in the world.
And alongside it, I will share what I hope that being Armenian can teach you, and what it has taught me about the need to live in solidarity with others. We will not, and should not, pretend to know their existences. But by knowing ours, we understand what it means for us to have once been the hated other. And your daddy cannot ever abide by others being hated as we once were.
That history of our being hated matters, as much as ever. What you do with what I share here is up to you, and you alone, but I would be derelict in my parenting of you if I did not share with you how your great-great grandparents, including your namesake, moved heaven and earth after the deaths of their own parents, siblings, and friends to ensure that you and I might one day live.
You, Sadie, you and me, we live solely because they lived. They lived so that we might one day live as we are today.
You live as my promise, as my hope made flesh, from one generation to the next: that our memories will not be erased, that our stories will be continue to be told, and that I will not be the last of your namesake’s descendants.
We, my darling daughter, are our ancestors’ living rebuttal to genocide. We are an incarnational rebuke to the total depravity required for one people to decide to utterly decimate another.
I choose to embrace that existence every single day when I wake up, and decide to tell the truth about what they endured, and about what others endured and continue to endure at the hands of their oppressors.
May you one day choose to embrace it too, in God’s good time.
All my love,
Dad