Arts & Literature: Songs of My Ancestors

About the PieceAs an immigrant writer who's been living in the U.S. since 1995, I've often struggled to reconcile my cultural heritage with my newly adopted identity.Several years ago, my son and I travelled to Yerevan to meet my father's family and to participate in AGBU's (Armenian Global Benevolent Union) summer music program.Toward the end of the trip, we visited Komitas Museum-Institute and the Armenian Genocide Memorial complex, both of which left me speechless.Surrounded by other people's memories and testimonies, the photos of those murdered, tortured, and misplaced Armenians, I felt as though I'd been one of them.I wrote this story in their honor.-Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, author of What Isn't Remembered and The Orchard. Songs of My AncestorsArmen had never seen his father.Or if he had, he couldn't remember.He was eight months old when his mother discovered that another woman, a neighbor, had gotten pregnant by his father.A plump voracious infant, whose only concern was breastmilk and warmth, Armen slept through it all-his mother's flight from Yerevan to Moscow, the painful divorce, her grief and tears.In the following years, his father hadn't called or voiced any desire to meet Armen.There were no birthday or holiday gifts, or money, other than the meager child-support allowance.When Armen was old enough to know the truth, his mother had already remarried a tall hairychested stranger, and for the next decade, the three of them shared a rather happy uncomplicated existence, filled with garlicky borsch, classical piano lessons, and weekend movies.His last name, Sarkisyan, was still his father's, betraying his Armenian identity, the fact that he was someone else's child, but Armen could've changed it as soon as he graduated and turned eighteen.And maybe he would've done just that had it not been for perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union and a sudden, much-coveted, opportunity to attend a conservatory in the U.S.A.To Armen, America represented the land of the daring and the escaped.There, no one cared about his nationality, and many girls found his looks exotic and his accent irresistible.During his second year at James Madison University, Armen fell in love with a part-Native American woman, a singer, AllStar Shining, whose skin was a beautiful nutmeg-brown, just like Armen's.It was a short blissful union built on tenderness and much laughter.Armen didn't know English in all its magnanimity and kept mispronouncing words and confusing body parts.AllStar Shining had blackberry nipples and a pebble-smooth belly and gorgeous hair, a waterfall that streamed down her arched back when she rode Armen in the dark.After she left, unexpectedly and without any warning, any fights or surliness, Armen discovered a long strand of shiny black hair coiling on her pillow.But nothing else.Armen felt bereft, but also embarrassed because he didn't know much about her, where she came from, or whether she would return.All he knew was that she loved salmon and hated cheese, and that her spirit animal was a squirrel.When Armen called his mother, she said that Native Americans were nomads, just like Armenians.They couldn't stay long in one place."They'd been forced to leave," Armen said."Their land had been stolen from them."

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