Our Roots

by Lily Daly (United States of America)

I didn't expect to find Armenia

As a volunteer abroad, the line between traveling and being has blurred. For two years, I have lived in a small village by a body of water, a lake named after its sister lake in the country to the west, but named as the dark, life-taking relative. Not much grows inside Lake Sevan. The lake is still pretty; you can’t tell that it’s the ungiving sister. On certain cold days, it looks so pristinely flat and gray, like the most beckoning bathwater. When there is fog and the lake’s horizon is covered, you can almost believe that this is the way the newly dead walk home. I am in a country obsessed with roots. This national fixation stems partly from the fact that their ancestors and their lands were taken in a way that, for them, was so blatant and brutal and ignored; yet, to their aggressors, the exodus of Western Armenians was more shadowed, less grossly meditated, a result of the ugly but accepted interactions of war. One night, after I had lived here a year, my mother called me. The results of her DNA kit, something she had wanted to do for months for fun, had arrived. To her shock, the results said that nearly half of her genetic make-up was “Turkey and the Caucasus.” It was a mistake, wasn’t it? she asked. I figured so: we were both pale with tiny, unassuming features, and we knew the stories of our ancestors crossing the Irish Sea and fighting in the Scottish Highlands. We had heard wonderful stories of valor and royalty. After knotted days of thinking and asking, she found out, from her mother, that her biological father was not the man who raised her; somehow, the man whose blood coursed through her was a now-dead stranger, his roots from the exact country where—absurdly— I was at that moment, sitting in my cold room, surrounded by the foreign tongue of my host family. It was a tongue that, in the matter of seconds, became not my mother tongue, but something both softer and more suspicious, like being told the person next to me in the grocery line has known me for years, yet I can’t place her face at all. Perhaps coincidence knows best. Armenia, the country I am somewhat arbitrarily in, runs through half of my mother’s blood, one-fourth of mine. I look for my mother in female faces around me. Before I came to Armenia, I dyed my hair blonde, a brash color that did not go with my pink-toned skin but made me feel new. Now, my dark roots have taken back over, becoming longer and longer as the blonde seems to melt and hold on just at the tips, an odd sight for the volunteers here who know the true me as the one with blonde hair. I, on the other hand, cannot even picture myself as blonde. I see roots everywhere now. I see the roots of so much beautiful hair walking by me in the city on weekends, I see a new person’s face and for the first time I wonder where this person was planted, how they found themselves here, next to me. I wonder how much life their roots give, how much the roots take away. I see my students’ teeth turning brown because they do not wash them, and I think of the tooth’s roots, too. I went to Turkey, by chance, after learning about my roots. In Istanbul, I heard a British woman and her daughter asking a store clerk about Armenians. I did not know if I had the right to jump in and assert my newfound Armenianness as any sort of claim or feat or rebellion. But I did speak up, for whatever reason. And the store clerk looked at me and smiled. “Brothers,” he said.