By Nana Asfour
Special To The Daily Star
“I’m a real diasporan person,” declares Lebanese-Armenian Anny Bakalian, as she sits, cross-legged, at her office at the City University of New York, overlooking the Empire State Building in New York City.
“I like being a diasporan,” she adds laughing. “It gives you this ability, this mobility, and it gives you choice.”
In that sense, Bakalian, who left her native Lebanon 23 years ago, is perfectly suited for her position as the associate director of the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center (MEMEAC).
The center, after all, was created to, among other things, promote the understanding of the Middle Eastern diaspora. As such, it has hosted a series of lectures and performances that explore this issue.
Last year, MEMEAC organized a talk by historian Akram Khater about Lebanese immigrants, and a presentation of Kathryn Leila Buck’s one-woman show, “I Site,” about growing up multi-cultural.
Under Bakalian’s helm and that of Mehdi Bozorgmehr and Beth Baron, MEMEAC’s co-directors the center has become one of the leading venues in New York for Arab, Armenian and Iranian cultural events and studies.
“We’ve done a lot in the two-and-a-half years we’ve been in operation,” Bakalian says. “I really think we’ve been very successful.”
With the help of a grant from the Ford Foundation, MEMEAC came into being in September 2001, merely one week before the attacks on the World Trade Center. At the time, Bakalian was a volunteer; she was in between jobs, having recently moved to New York from Baltimore, Maryland, where she had been teaching sociology for the past 10 years.
She had met Bozorgmehr a few years earlier and when he asked her to come and help out, she happily obliged.
“When we started out, we were in a tiny cubicle downstairs, we didn’t have any windows, and we were barely managing,” Bakalian says.
“Then September 11th happened. What timing! Right after that, the demand for Middle Eastern studies and for the diaspora became very evident.”
MEMEAC, which was conceived as the first center of its kind to combine studies of the Middle East and Middle Eastern American, now saw its role taking on greater importance.
Immediately thereafter, reports of violent attacks on Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans began to fill the newspapers and the airwaves. Wishing to investigate the backlash, the National Science Foundation (NSF) sent out applications for short-term grants.
“Mehdi and I talked about it and said, ‘Shall we go for this?’ In three days, we wrote a proposal and sent it. In less than three hours, we heard that they were funding it, which was extremely unusual.”
Ever since, Bozorgmehr and Bakalian, whose volunteer stint quickly grew into a full-time position, have been working on the NSF project, studying how Middle Eastern and South Asian American support organizations responded to Sept. 11, 2001.
“We have already conducted 7,500 interviews and we’re now slowly getting the results out,” Bakalian says.
Bakalian’s responsibilities at MEMEAC have continued to grow over the last two years. Between planning events and lectures, organizing conferences (such as one on race and slavery between the Middle East and Africa which is scheduled for April), doing research for the NSF grant, and trying to create a BA in Middle East studies at the City University of New York, she has little time to do anything else, let alone travel.
This might explain why Bakalian has not been back to Lebanon since April 2001. “It’s a long trip,” she says. But there is another reason why she doesn’t often visit: not much remains of the Lebanon she knew.
“On the one hand, it’s very interesting to go back and try to figure out, where was this? Where was that?” she says. “On the other hand, I am very saddened by the fact that the middle class no longer exists, that there is so much poverty. There needs to be a middle class in order to have a stable society. I’m also still distressed by how parts of Lebanon are now a solid block of concrete. There’s no urban planning, no sense of esthetics. What has happened to all the villages?”
Bakalian was born in Beirut in 1953 to first-generation Armenian parents. She came into adolescence at a time when Beirut was in its glorious prime, and she has fond memories of the city of her youth.
“Baalbek was a fantastic thing: Being 18, 19, or 20 at the time and seeing LaMama experimental theater, or Ella Fitzgerald it was exceptional,” she says.
She attended the American University of Beirut and graduated in 1973 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology (“I’m a very proud AUB alumni,” she professes). For her Master’s she traveled to England, then she returned to Lebanon in the summer of 1975. She had hoped to find work but Beirut was now embroiled in war.
“I was dodging bullets for a while,” she says. Finally, she landed a part-time teaching position at AUB’s off-campus program, and that opened the doors for more work opportunities. But the war continued to escalate and, eventually, she followed in the footsteps of the hoards of Lebanese fleeing the city.
In 1981, she moved to New York to pursue a doctorate at Columbia University. For her thesis she toyed with the idea of going back to Lebanon to write about professional women “I’ve always been interested in women’s issues,” she says but she feared that the fighting might prevent her from completing her dissertation.
In the end, she opted to stay put, in the US, and to write a book about Armenian-Americans. “I realized nobody had done anything about it so I said to myself, let me do it,” she says.
Soon after, she settled in Baltimore, Maryland, where she taught sociology at a small liberal arts college. She remained there for 10 years.
Living in New York whose cosmopolitanism and chaos Bakalian likens to Beirut and working at MEMAC, where she gets to use her many languages and engage on a daily basis with fellow diasporan, Bakalian feels that “things have come around full circle for me.” Although she misses her native country, Bakalian would never consider leaving America for good.
“To be honest as a single woman, it’s much more liberating to be in a place like this. No one here says min beit min inti? (What family do you belong to?), or Inshallah nifrah minneki (May we celebrate your wedding day). Here, at least, you can have an identity of your own.” She pauses for a moment, trying to think of a further explanation, then says, “I like it here too much.”
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