Hayeren Lezvi Mech, Hyphen Muh Chgaw (In the Armenian language, the hyphen doesn’t exist)

By JESSE ARLEN
Jessearlen@gmail.com

I.

Where I grew up, you didn’t meet any others.
What it was—was hidden by a lost language.

I even remember when I first heard that there was another language that my people spoke;
I was so young—I didn’t even know what another language meant.

The dictionary was the place you went for words you didn’t know.
And to me then, what was language, but a collection of words?

I remember thinking:
I will find our lost language,
And I will surprise everyone when I start speaking it.
So I started writing down words from the dictionary on tiny cut-up notecards,
Obscure words, lost words,
And putting them into my pockets.
I would study them,
Alone in the backyard.

I remember: I would be starting my homeschool lessons before the sun had risen, Work at a feverish pace,
And finish when it was a few suns’ heights above the horizon;
I would write out the words for the day,
Then hide under the apricot tree alone with my notecards.

I remember some of them: Sacrosanct. Asphodel. Halse. Kenning. Laconic. Fenestella. Ichor. Doddered. Droff. I tried to forget every word I knew before, and decided I would only speak using these words.

My Dad found me one day and I had to explain prematurely my plan—the resurrection of our lost language. When he told me all the little words on all the little cards were all English,
My hyphenated heart comma-ed,
Then resumed with an outburst of frustrated and hopeless tears.
But he explained to me that one day I could learn to speak Armenian, and not to worry now, because I’m still Armenian even though I can’t speak it and what I’m doing now is proof. (In Armenian, there is a different word for the language and the person).

Ah yes, I remember why he said that:
Because I had told him in between sobs that he shouldn’t have married Mom because now I will only ever be half-Armenian, and didn’t he care that that other half of me was lost forever? (I remember how I pictured it: that other half that should have been, that stalked by imagination like a ghost that couldn’t find its grave—colorless, between existence and whatever is the opposite of existence.)

He tried to explain to me that it doesn’t work like that.
I wondered what that it meant—
What that it has ever meant in any sentence.

II.

Then I remember when it became necessary to forget that I was only half-Armenian,
Because I am Armenian was the explanation I would pull out of my pocket like the old note cards,
When I was alone in my room,
Every night of four years of public high school,
Where I thought to them: You probably don’t even know what that is, so you may keep eating hamburgers and I’ll just keep eating words (even if they are invisible);
Where I learned that whatever I was or was not, I was not what those Americans around me were;
Where I was first introduced to a world of politically correct definitions:
“You’re Armenian-American,” it told me.
Like I said, what has it ever known?

Where I grew up, you didn’t meet any others,
And I was Armenian thank you, no hyphen American,
The most Armenian around,
And if you need proof, you can look at my father’s hooked nose.

That was the time when that stalking half of me,
My half-identity-ghost, was incarnated beside me in my room every night,
And between him and books for company,
I felt never alone.

III.

Then I went to college at UCLA, near the diaspora capital—Glendale, Little Armenia.
Then I first heard our lost language,
And I fell madly in love with the ch’s and the kh’s and the ts’s
And I fell madly determined to learn to speak this found language,
And I fell madly confused when I was face-to-face talking with someone who looked at me like I looked at every American,
And I fell madly.
And I was on the other side of the hyphen.

That was when I started saying again that I was half-Armenian to every whole-Armenian who wondered in their heads why this American was in their language class.
That was when I realized that I am not Armenian,
That was when I realized that I am not Armenian hyphen American
That was when I realized that I am not half anything.
That was when I realized that I am whole hyphen,
And it was my explanation every night alone ever since.

IV.

Now the stalking ghost has started haunting about my mind again,
Like creeping out of yellow wall-paper,
Like a spirit that cannot find its grave, creeping relentlessly over the ground.
It speaks to me in Armenian,
And I reply in my old lost language of Ichor and Asphodel,
And we understand each other.