Searching for the Self: Classic Stories, Christian Scripture, and the Quest for Personal Identity

by Adrian T. Smith

Around the time of the Second World War, Turkish troops slaughtered over 1.5 million Armenians, an atrocity “called the ‘silent genocide’ since it has always been denied by the Turkish government.”467 The 1970s witnessed a wave of Armenian terrorism “in response” to the silent genocide. However, Armenian scholar Khachig Tölölyan refuses to reduce such terrorism to political protest. He argues that Armenian terrorism must be understood as an attempt to construct a narrative identity.468 Robbed of their homeland by acts of genocide, the Armenian Diaspora preserved their identity by reciting the stories of national heroes. In Sunday School, Armenian-Americans would recite, “I am Armenian, I am Armenian, the grandchild of valiant Vartian.”469 Vartian who? The fifth century Armenian leader, who resisted unto death Persian attempts to impose the Zoroastrian religion upon his people. Armenian terrorists garb their actions in Vartian’s clothing, leading Tölölyan to claim: [Armenian terrorism] is not the product of a particular individual’s alienation, but the manifestation of a desire to give one’s individual life an iconic centrality in the eyes of the community, which professes to value certain forms of behavior articulated in narratives.470 The true audience of Armenian terrorism remains the Armenian Diaspora, whose fraying culture is constituted to a remarkable degree by old stories, and who see in contemporary terrorists Vartan’s refusal to abandon cultural identity and natio...