Young in Mogadishu, c. 1966

My father, age ~16 (bottom left.)

Crazy 60s photo-paint. Check out the forehead twirl and sideburns.



Smoking is bad---I think he started ~age 12! I'm just about quit (again) myself. But I can't say I don't love this picture---the shades, the shades.



This is my favorite.

MEMORY FRAGMENTS FROM THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE, by Margaret DiCanio (My maternal family history)

My Armenian grandparents' parents & siblings fled their homes in Marash (in what is now Turkey) following the onset of the Armenian Genocide under the Ottoman Turks.

From the Wikipedia entry:

The Armenian Genocide (Armenian: Հայոց Ցեղասպանություն, translit.: Hayoc’ C’eġaspanowt’yowt’; Turkish: Ermeni Soykırımı), also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and, by Armenians, as the Great Calamity (Մեծ Եղեռն, Meç Eġeṙt’, Armenian pronunciation: [Mɛtsʼ jɛʁɛrn]), refers to the deliberate and systematic destruction (genocide) of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I.^[1] It was characterised by the use of massacres, and the use of deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of Armenian deaths generally held to have been between one and one-and-a-half million.^[2] Other ethnic groups were similarly attacked by the Empire during this period, including Assyrians and Greeks, and some scholars consider those events to be part of the same policy of extermination.^[3]

It is widely acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides,^[4][5][6] as many Western sources point to the systematic, organized manner the killings were carried out to eliminate the Armenians.^[7]

The date of the onset of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse commonplace. The Armenian Genocide is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust.^[8]

The Republic of Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, does not accept the word genocide as an accurate description of the events.^[9] In recent years, it has faced repeated calls to accept the events as genocide. To date, twenty-one countries have officially recognized the events of the period as genocide, and most genocide scholars and historians accept this view.^{[10][11][12][13]} The majority of Armenian diaspora communities were founded as a result of the Armenian genocide.

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Memory Fragments from the Armenian Genocide:
A Mosaic of a Shared Heritage

By Margaret DiCanio


* This book is available for limited previewing through Google Books. I'm assuming that I'm not violating any copyrights by providing these screenshot excerpts here, as the material is available for online public viewing, and all credits are provided. If I'm wrong, please do let me know. Please see the link above to go directly to the preview. All the commentary here is my own and does not reflect the opinions or endorsement of the book's author. I use this: ~~~ to separate screenshots from my own comments, etc. All book excerpts are ⓒ Margaret DiCanio 2002.

Find this book on Goodreads, here:
Memory Fragments from the Armenian Genocide: A Mosaic of a Shared Heritage

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Pages 124-131 : Leon Janikian

(my Uncle Leon---my mother's brother & only sibling)

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• Charles Janikian (born Garabed) is my Grampa!
• My Armenian fam lives in Watertown, Massachusetts.
• Marash is the name of the city/region (in what is now south-central Turkey) where my family hails from. People from Marash are called Marashtsis.

This is a picture of the city of Marash today (it is now officially known as Kahraman-Marash.) See the entry at Armeniapedia.


Here's Marash on a map. The region is in red, the city is the dot. (From Wikipedia's entry on Marash. You'll notice that this entry and Armeniapedia's take different angles...)

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• Aaron: My only maternal first cousin, he's like my brother.
• Krikor Janikian/Janigian: My paternal great grandfather (my Grampa's father.)

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• Miriam Galolyan: My Grampa's mother was Elmas Galolyan. Miriam must have been her mother.
• My Great Aunt Areka (my Grampa's only surviving sibling) was the youngest in the family at the time of their arrival in the US, just a little girl. I've seen her tattoo.
  

[...page 129 is not part of the online preview]
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• Armenianmusicarch.com My uncle's Armenian music preservation project:
  

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Hello, World!

What's an Armali?

To start with, I'm half Somali and half Armenian. I could go with Somenian, but I think Armali sounds nicer, right?

That means I'm half black and half white---like a certain president we know, I have a black African father and a white (ish?) American mother.

oh THAT's healthy!

My mother is a second generation Armenian American (or third generation, depending on how you count it---her grandparents all came to the US from Armenian villages in Turkey around the 1920s.) My father is Somali. He was born and raised in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, and first immigrated to the US as a young man. My parents met in Boston, Massachusetts. I have a younger sister and brother by the same parents.


But that's not all! (Ha, I feel like a game show.)

My mother's first husband was Ghanaian, and I have two sisters by that marriage. So they're half Ghanaian and half Armenian. Their father's second wife is Tanzanian, and my sisters have a brother (my step-half brother?) by that marriage, who's half Tanzanian and half Ghanaian.

My father's second wife was European American, and I have one sister by that marriage. So she's half European American and half Somali.

My stepdad, my mom's husband now, is African American, and I have two stepbrothers (by his first marriage) who are African American on both sides.

My stepmom, my father's wife now, is Somali, and I have a whole lotta siblings who are Somali on both sides.

My mother has only one sibling, my uncle. My aunt-by-marriage is Jewish American, and my only maternal first cousin (he's like my brother) is half Jewish and half Armenian.

My name is Arabic, and I minored in Arabic in college, but English is my only native language. My parents never taught us Somali or Armenian---I really, really want to learn, someday.

I was raised Muslim---I think of myself as agnostic now, just FYI. My mother's family are
(at least nominally) Armenian Orthodox Christian, and since my aunt is Jewish, we kids got to celebrate all kinds of holidays, when we were growing up : )

I have family in Boston, New York, Arizona, Virginia, London, Kenya and who knows where else!

Okay, I know I'm forgetting something...

Let's Try This Again

So----I think I've figured out why I haven't been posting here! It's just too overwhelming. When I started doing research for this blog, I thought this was going to be a list/journal/mishmash of all sorts of mixed/multiracial resources, my thoughts & analysis etc. But there are SO many great sites/organizations out there already doing that, on a much larger level than I could ever manage. (And with such wonderful depth and dedication! Please see the links at the sidebar.)

I'm going to start over, and make this a personal blog about my own particular mixed experience. I think that will leave me feeling less like this is a chore, and more like it's just a fun place to talk about issues (and people! or should i say people and issues) that are important to me. So look out for that, if you're interested.

"Navigating New Definitions of a Multiracial Identity," by Richard Rodriguez From PBS Online NewsHour, 12/11/08:
Essayist Richard Rodriguez reflects on how Americans view multiracial and multicultural identities in the wake of Barack Obama's election to the presidency.

Here's a link, you can read the transcript and/or download the audio (audio/video?) at their site.

Living Outside of the Boxes

Here's a little piece I wrote for an anthropology class called "Writing Culture," during the Spring 2008 semester.

*

Living Outside of the Boxes

On “Rethinking Race: Examining the Multiracial Experience”
A Guest Lecture and Discussion with Dr. Kelly Jackson
Sponsored by the University of Arizona Social Justice Leadership Center
4/24/2008

Growing up, when I was in middle school and high school we didn’t have the option of checking more than one box. And in that town and in that, you know, place where I grew up, if you were black you were black. You know, ‘one drop, you’re black.’ So, I identified as black. That’s how I identified, that’s what I checked on forms. Um, and that was who I was. And then in college, kind of understanding this idea of you can be alll different pieces of yourself, and not wanting to—reject that part of me that was my mom’s side, which was the white side, I identified as biracial. And that wasn’t really cool then.

-Dr. Kelly Jackson

Dr. Kelly Jackson is a visiting speaker from the ASU School of Social Work. She stands in the center of the Kiva Room at the UA Student Union, slim and stylish in a red pencil skirt and pointed green flats. There is an air of friendly self-assurance about her, in the way she holds her shoulders straight back but doesn’t refrain from leaning into one hip at times, and in the readiness of her smile. She speaks in conversational, yet passionate tones—a vibrant young professional. Her hair falls just above her collarbone, in tight ringlets much like my own, except hers are a lighter brown. Her eyes might be blue or green or hazel, it’s hard to tell from where I’m sitting, two rows back in the center of the semicircular audience area. For her dissertation, she “asked multiracial people about their identity,” using the question “Who are you culturally?” Asking about culture, she felt, “encapsulates more” than focusing on categories like race, and allows for more “fluid” responses.

She begins her talk by going over five basic thematic areas that her respondents seemed to veer towards: “Transforming self,” being “ethnically ambiguous,” being “racially defiant,” “feeling like an outsider,” and “seeking community.” She discusses the way that people tend to want to “box” each other, and the often unpleasant What are you? question.

“As I’ve gotten older,” she says, “I joke that I’ve gotten whiter—looking. [Scattered laughs break out across the room] People, you know, they don’t understand, they’re like, ‘Oh, why are you interested in this topic?’ and I say ‘Well, I’m biracial,’ and they’re like ‘Really? I can’t believe it!’”

Heavy chuckling ensues. I identify with what she is saying. There are about twenty of us in the audience, maybe less, there appear to be a few more women than men. We seem like a relatively ethnically diverse group, more so than is often usual in a classroom at the U of A. As a person of biracial/ethnic/cultural heritage myself (my father is Somali and my mother is Armenian—according to the conventional US racial binary, he is black and she is white), I’m never quite comfortable with applying racial labels to other people.

So here, of all places, I prefer to refrain from “boxing” people into racial categories based on their physical features. I wait for people to speak for themselves. During the discussion session, audience members begin to self-identify: black/African American, white/Caucasian, black and white, Korean and white, Native American and black, white mother of biracial children, white and transgender/gender ambiguous, and more. At one point Dr. Jackson suggests that multiracial/ethnic/cultural people and people who identify as GLBTQ often seem to relate to each other, as somehow ‘falling outside of the boxes’ drawn by US society. Many of us start to nod our heads, perhaps sensing a commonality there—a “shared experience,” as one audience member will put it.

She recalls a college experience that many audience members seem to sympathize (and/or empathize) with:

I took this class I remember, with a prominent African American lecturer, and he was trying to make a point about race relations, and he said, "I want all my white students to go on this side of the room, and I want all my black students to go on this side." [...] I raised my hand and I said, “What if you’re both?” And he looked at me, with so much disdain, that I will never forget, he looked at me like I was, you know, pretty much an abomination, and said "Choose."

In the audience, some of us gasp, others shake their heads with mouths open, or lean back in their seats and sigh, eyebrows knotted. Audience members start talking about their own experiences. This pressure to “choose” one category to identify with seems to be a common, as does the urge to defy that pressure and define oneself on one’s own terms. Some people want all of the parts of their heritage to be recognized and feel left out when this doesn’t happen because of the way they look, some talk about fears regarding loss of identity for their children unless they marry someone of the/a minority part of their heritage, others argue that such fears are unfounded. Many people just keep echoing this sentiment: “I just want to be around people who get it.” And, Dr. Jackson asks, “Don’t we all just want that?”

“Even though race isn’t real, we experience race,” Dr Jackson says, and heads nod. That, she argues, is why the idea of “color-blindness” can be dangerous—when it’s used to deny the existence of racial inequality and injustice in our society.

Dr. Jackson reads a poem by a 14 year-old boy, including the line, “race is just a very small part of me,” and tears fill my own eyes. When I look around I see a few other people sniffling, too. Dr. Jackson’s voice breaks before she’s finished reading it.

“It gets blurry for me,” she says. “In a sense, guys, we’re all really multiracial.” Audience members talk excitedly about the idea of our generation becoming increasingly “mixed,” at the idea that we might be the “rainbow generation.” In a way, a sense of community seems to have been built right here in this room, over the course of this discussion. People respond to one another with encouraging tones, nodding heads, open eyes. In discussing a shared experience of alienation, a feeling of connection seems to have been reached.

But “Change will only happen if everyone gets onboard,” Dr. Jackson adds.

“So, you know, we all need to have this conversation, not just if you can identify with a minority culture.”

When it’s time to go, everyone in the room starts clapping.

"DARK SKINNED WHITE GIRLS," by Murs

"D.S.W.G. (Dark Skinned White Girls)"

From Murray's Revenge,
album by Murs & producer 9th Wonder

[Verse 1:]

She got that mocha-chino baby on the back of the bus
If you close your eyes and listen she would be one of us

Never did trust her family at home
So she kicked it in the hood, raised herself on her own

She talk with that tone, but she white to the bone
You would swear she was black if you spoke on the phone

Some say it's overblown, but she don't give a damn
All the black girls think that she want they man

But it's not your fault that they attracted to you
That you blessed and got as much back as you do

Some white boys say that you're way too thick
And some brothers might say, you're the number one pick

You say [psh], "Girrrl," roll your eyes, twist your neck
But it comes from the soul, you don't mean no disrespect

And even when they check you, you just keep it moving
Cuz in your heart you feel you ain't got nothing to be proving

*

[Chorus x2:]

Whether chocolate or vanilla, or you're somewhere in between
A cappuccino, mocha or a caramel queen

Rejected by the black, not accepted by the white world
And this is dedicated to them dark skinned white girls

*

[Verse 2:]

Now she like The Smiths, The Cure, really into Morrisey
Heavy on the rock, never fooled with the Jodeci

You would notice she was never really welcomed by the others
Hard to find a date when there was only ten brothers
In the whole damn school, and they thought she was weird
Cuz she wore her hair different, and she never joined cheer

A melancholy dolly with a Polly-wanna syndrome
White stepfather, black daddy never been home

And when on the quad she could hear 'em say
"Look at how she walks, why she talk that way?"

But girl it's okay, your black is beautiful
No matter how you dress, or no matter what music you like

Forget what they say, you're doing it right
No more grabbing on your pillow as you cry through the night

Stand strong, hold your ground at any cost
and know that everyone who tries to put you down is lost

[Chorus x2]

[Verse 3:]

Now for you half-and-half and mixed girls,
I know what the battle be
Every time you go out, it's "What's your nationality?"

Everybody always wanna dig up in your background---
"You don't look _____," now how does that sound?

"I couldn't tell you were _____." (Tell you were...)
Oh, is that right?
Do you take it as a compliment or start up a fight?

Venezuelan and Indian, 'Rican and Dominican
Japanese or Portuguese, quarter a' Brazilian and
White and Korean, Black and Pinay
I could find out later it don't matter you're fly

It really don't make a difference to most of us guys
We just need an excuse to get close and say hi

I know they call you stuck up, say you think you're too pretty
Spreading rumors about you, all throughout the city

So much attention, so many haters
But don't be bitter, you'll be better for it later and...

[Chorus x2]

lyrics from lyricsondemand.com
(punctuation modified/errors corrected here)

*

Here's the song:




This next one is live, but doesn't include the third verse about being mixed.

WARNING: skip ahead to 20 seconds if you want to avoid some iffy language at the beginning.