January 20, 2022 • 32 mins
What do you owe your parents? What do you owe your country? What do you owe yourself?
Guests in this episode:
- Dr. Shushan Karapetian, University of Southern California’s Institute of Armenian Studies
- Chris Bohjalian, best-selling author
- John Lacey, steel guitarist
From Fatherly and iHeartRadio, in partnership with Rococo Punch.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
The Armenians became a sort of threat to the Ottoman rulers.
They rounded all of the intellectuals, all of the potential
community leaders, and executed them or exiled them. They disarmed
the men, took their weapons, took their arms, and sent
them to labor camps and to eventual death. What was
(00:39):
left where the elderly women and children. They set them
on marches. These were death marches, so they were sent
to their deaths. So basically it is a government eradicating
its own people. I think people find it so strange. Right,
(01:04):
it's been over a hundred years, what's the big deal?
Get over it? But I don't think people realize that
it's a lived experience for all of us. I'm Chris
Garcia and this is Finding Raffie, a ten part series
(01:26):
from My Heart Radio and Fatherly in partnership with The
Rococo Punch about the life, philosophy, and the work of Raffie,
the man behind the music. Rafie never set out to
(01:47):
make music for kids. A year before his first children's
album came out, he released this instrumental honoring his roots.
It's called Impressions of Armenia. He wrote it before the
Fall of the Soviet Union after spending three weeks in
Armenia with his brother and sister, an invitation from the
government because of their father's renowned photography career. When we went,
(02:13):
we were the privileged ones getting to see it in
a very unique way because some of the resorts that
we went to and state that the people didn't even
know they existed. It was very much closed society in
the Soviet Union era. So it was very moving and
heartbreaking in some ways and promising in other ways. You know,
(02:35):
it was just a lot to process emotionally. Impressions of
Armenia is a song that tells the story of a
homeland raf he's never fully known, of a country and
a people who survived the fall of empires, a genocide,
and diaspora. Rafi was born in Egypt and raised in Canada,
but the history of his Armenian ancestors flows through him.
(02:58):
He may not include an explicit at lee in his music,
but like so many Armenian artists, that legacy has shaped
his life and his work. It was night in Cairo.
The wedding of seventeen year old King Farouk of Egypt
was the event of the decade, complete with a procession
(03:18):
of flowered parade floats, twinkling lights displayed all over the
royal Palace, and a glamorous Parisian wedding gown for the
King's sixteen year old bride, Queen Ferida. And among the
celebrations performers was a young accordionist Arto Cabukian, Raphae's father.
My father was quite a musician. He played two or
(03:39):
three instruments, primarily the accordion, which is what I heard
him playing while we were growing up, and in family
gatherings and parties, we would always urge him to take
out his big red accordion. Arto's accordion playing led him
to Lucy Papasian. The two met at another wedding where
Arto is performing and where Ardo danced only with Lucy.
(04:02):
A few months later, they married five years later. Rafi
Kabukian was born in Cairo, Egypt. Art, music, and literature
were highly valued by the Kabukians, so they named their
second son after one of Lucy's favorite Armenian authors, a
patriotic novelist and poet who used the pen name Raffi.
(04:26):
Rafi Kabukian grew up in Cairo in the nineteen fifties.
He was the middle kid between his older brother Ownig
and his younger sister Annie. Ownig and Raffi shared a
room with their grandmother in the family's three bedroom apartment.
It was a place where you could find hidden chocolates
in the dining room, where the Armenian rugs were perfect
for playing marbles and were pickled cucumbers are ready for
(04:46):
snacking in the kitchen. And there was also the music.
I think we used to hear on our family stereo
set hi fi. We used to go the music we
were listening to in the fifties, which were my formative years.
We're pop music of the time from Europe, from all over,
and these songs were melodic. Melody to me is something
(05:13):
that's just indispensable when the custom music making soul. It's
just interesting to remember that as a form of development
from my Cairo years and my Armenian family with the
rugs and the hi fi. But not all of Ralphie's
childhood memories were heartwarming. I was mocked and humiliated at times,
(05:35):
and I was hit and I couldn't square that with
the fact that I knew I was loved, So why
didn't I feel respected for who I felt I was.
In his autobiography, Raffie writes that a sharp slap in
the face or a snide remark from his mother and
(05:58):
father were at odds with the warmth of their hugs
and compliments. That when company came around, his parents would
make him perform a song or a poem for their guests,
expecting him to do it without complaint and without error.
If Raffie did well, he was praised. If not, his
embarrassment and shame were swept aside with a comment about
(06:19):
doing better next time. That sense of shame and disrespect
Raffi would carry that for years. He would eventually process
it and form a philosophy around how kids should be treated,
one that centered around respect. Raffie's parents loomed large in
(06:43):
his life, especially his father Ardo. He ran a photography studio,
Studio cavuc originally founded by Arto's father, Ohannas Cavukian. Arto
was skilled at shooting, retouching, and framing photographs, but he
was a master portrait artist. He'd work every day, coming
home only for a meal and a nap. On Sundays,
(07:04):
he took his family to church and the Pyramids and
always ended the day back at the studio. He also
had an impressive client list of dignitaries like the former
King of Egypt and the head of the Armenian Church.
Ardo and his family were like an Armenian gold standard,
an example of what dedication, hard work, and resilience could
(07:25):
create even after a horrific genocide. There were stories of
survival of my families survival from the massacres of the
Ottoman Empire, both sides of the family, and my mother
and my father in infancy. Their families survived. The Armenian genocide,
(07:46):
planned and perpetrated by Ottoman Turkish authorities, took place between
the spring of nineteen fifteen and the fall of nineteen sixteen,
and the death toll varies widely. Figures range from six
hundred thousand to as many as one point two million
ethnic Armenian Christians, and that doesn't include the hundreds and
(08:06):
thousands of Assyrians and Greeks who were also targeted. By
the end of World War One, it's estimated that more
than nine of Armenians and the Ottoman Empire had died.
Raphie heard his family's harrowing stories all throughout his childhood
(08:27):
Lucy's father escaped death seven times. He was a building foreman,
and the Turkish officials always ended up sparing him so
they could use his valuable skills. Arto's father, Ohanis, was
an artist. The night before he, his wife, and his
month old son Ardo faced execution, he stayed up drawing
a charcoal portrait of the general commanding officer. When the
(08:50):
officers saw the sketch, he was so impressed he assigned
Ohannis to Aleppo to teach drawing. His entire family was saved,
along with nearly thirty people after Ihan has claimed them
all as family members, all saved because of his drawing.
(09:12):
Isn't an amazing story, right, stories of how arts saved
the day. Do you think your family's trauma leaving Armenia
has impacted you? That's too hard a question to answer.
Of course, it's impacted me. We are products of our experience.
(09:33):
So I've written about this in my autobiography. I've talked
about it. I mean, you know, the stories that you
grow up with, they are the content that you have
to make sense of and then you decide their role
in your emotional landscape. Are those stories going to drive you?
Or are they going to enrich your sense of who
(09:56):
you feel you are and what it feels possible for you.
This is not where I expected to end up when
I started listening to Raffie's music, Genocide and trauma. Could
anything be further away from the image we have of
the guy who sings about baby whales and banana phones.
(10:18):
I began to realize the profound empathy I registered in
his music came from a really deep place. Perhaps without
these stories, Raffie wouldn't be Raffie. There's the generation who
(10:46):
lived the trauma, and then there are the generations who
are descendants of those who are traumatized. They didn't live
the trauma, but they carry this trauma. This is Dr
Shushan got up at theon She's the deputy director of
the University of Southern California's Institute of Armenian Studies. I
think it's it's not difficult to imagine the kind of
(11:08):
trauma surviving, the trauma of rebuilding, um of being in
an environment where you're not sure you're welcome, of your
family being torn apart of maybe missing important family members,
language issues, cultural issues, this kind of constant upheaval each
(11:33):
family dealt with the trauma of the genocide in its
own way. Raphie's family faced it head on, sharing their
story from generation to generation, while others did the opposite.
There were groups who completely shut down and their method
of dealing with this was to just eradicate the memory
and kind of disassociate. There were those who stayed in
(11:56):
a stage of anger, and there were those who talked
about it NonStop. There are two kinds of survivors. The
survivors who write memoirs, who have the luminous stories that
they want to share, and then there are survivors like
my grandparents, who shared almost nothing. This is Chris boj Alien.
(12:20):
He's an Armenian American author who has written more than
twenty bucks, including Midwives, The Flight Attendant, and The Sandcastle Girls,
which is centered around the Armenian genocide. Chris remembers hearing
a story about his aunt and uncle who are starting
a chain of yogurt stands in New York City in
the nineteen seventies. They were explaining the business plan to
(12:43):
my Armenian grandmother, and my Armenian grandmother says, oh, of course,
and you'll be serving tongue, which is in Armenian or
Middle Eastern yogurt drink, and my aunt says yes, and
then my grandmother is to her, oh, well, that's one
of the reasons why my parents first took me out
(13:05):
of the school. They used the tom to poison the children,
and my aunt says, ma, what are you talking about.
And of course my grandmother had never shared with her
daughter the story of when in an Ottoman school at
the start of the Armenian genocide, some of the children
(13:26):
were poisoned with tom. So little by little the stories
would emerge, but it was a trickle because the trauma
was so deeply ingrained inside them that they kept it
to themselves. And then, of course there's the denial. Shushan says.
(13:49):
Part of what keeps the trauma alive is the lack
of recognition from the Turkish government. It has offered its
condolences for the atrocities while actively denying any plan to
systematic we wipe out Armenian Christians despite extensive documentation. This
denial has kept the wound open and festering and kind
(14:11):
of made the genocide this root paradigm in the Armenian narrative,
the victimization. The trauma is constantly relived because there is
no healing because there is no opportunity for moving on.
Right because last year was the first time an American
president actually called it a genocide. Absolutely, because of the denial,
(14:36):
genocide recognition has become the priority on all Armenian platforms.
It's as if we can't move on to anything else.
And it's something I tell my students, right, there were
Armenians before the genocide. There are Armenians after the genocide.
Armenian history doesn't start and end with the genocide. The
Armenian experience is not only about the genocide, but it
(14:57):
seems like this, I mean again, Historian Rasmi Pandosian would say,
it's the equalizer of all Armenians. You know that the
people spread across the globe, among different countries, different cultures,
different experiences, and yet the genocide and the quest for
its recognition unites all Armenians. The stories, the silence, the denial.
(15:24):
Shushan says that instead of destroying the Armenian people, this
shared trauma has resulted in a culture of compassion, resilience,
and artistic expression. In a sense, Raphi comes from a
long line of artists, writers and troubadours, all processing the
(15:45):
wounds of their ancestors. When you look at what Rabbi
has done with his life, what so many Armenians have
done with their lives in the diaspora, We've made art.
I mean, Rapha's music is like the happiest music on
the planet. I mean, you know Banana Phone and you
(16:09):
know Baby Blue Good. All of the joy that he
has brought to so many children and their parents. If
you were to meet Raffie, you wouldn't say, oh, my god,
grandson of survivors of a cataclysmic genocide who is scarred
for life. You'd say, this is one of the nicest, funniest, sweetest,
(16:33):
most talented people on the planet. Our Medians are just
utterly joyful, despite the trauma, despite the fact that forever
it feels like we have been the forgotten people. So yes,
(16:54):
it's important, as the Armenian painter Sarry Un said, to
no one's own homeland. But I like to take that further.
I said, it's important to know your heritage, of course,
but you can also transcend your heritage because you have
a duty to your soul as to what your life
is about. You know, to me, your people, they should
(17:18):
encourage your own growth, not to limit it in any way,
you know, So I can understand the impulse of Armenians
to claim me as one of their own, and of
course I am, but not in a way that you know,
constrains me, but hopefully in a way that celebrates my
own growth. I relate to that so much because there's um,
(17:41):
there's their culture, and it is partially responsible who you are,
but your your individual soul and your individual person that
has no cultural restraints. So in your heart and in
your mind and in your spirit, your your own person.
And so that really resonates with me, like like both
of our families forcibly fled their country. And sometimes I
(18:02):
feel too American to be Cuban, into Cuban to be American.
And sometimes you're laughing because I take it you understand.
I do understand. I do. Did you ever have moments
like that when you felt stuck between two worlds? For me,
it was all about identity. It was a quest for identity.
(18:24):
Who am I? RAPHI makes a really good point. Our
family stories ground us. They honor the past, but if
it's the only story we tell about ourselves, they can
be stifling. My family story is my story, but it's
(18:47):
not my whole story. How do I tell our story
to Sunny without putting her in a box. I want
her to know her history, but I also want her
to break free from any cultural constraints and add her
authentic self to our family story. Maybe the best way
to honor the past is to allow the story to
(19:08):
evolve with each generation. As Ralphie grew up, the political
climate in Egypt was turning more volatile. Raphi writes that
his father considered moving the family to Australia or Brazil.
Van Ardo went on a trip to North America. He
thought New York City was too big, Montreal had too
(19:29):
much snow, but Toronto was just right. My parents had
to leave Egypt to find a place where their kids
could grow and freedom, and that's what they did. I
was certainly appreciative, so thankful that my father had the
foresight to see the family needed to move. It was
not easy for us to leave our comfortable lives in Egypt,
(19:51):
but it was what needed to happen. So you grow
from that. You you appreciate, you know what's happened, and
you you're you're thrown in with the challenges and the
difficulties and the benefits of growing in a new land,
and you just do it so in nt with just
(20:12):
eight pieces of luggage and his grandmother's prayers, Raffi and
his family flew over Europe and crossed the Atlantic for Canada,
a world away where the Cabukians would once again start over.
(20:41):
Raphi's life is a ten year old Armenian Egyptian boy
in Canada couldn't have been more different than the one
he had in Cairo. I was born into a new culture,
if you will. In when we came to Toronto, everything
made an impression, from how cold it was and how
I see it could get to the fact that Mrs
McKinnon in fourth grade one time gave me her lunch
(21:03):
because I had forgotten my lunch. That really moved me
so much. And the fact that, you know, teachers in Toronto,
at the school that my brother and I and we're
going to and later my sister, they didn't hit you whoa.
That was interesting. And of course you know, hockey, ice skating,
(21:24):
new skills, new challenges. What will the kids think of me?
Oh my god, you know, and a lot of kids
were mean, you know, made fun of my name and
played tricks on me, So I had to navigate how
life was, which is really no different than what kids
have to do today, you know. But as you know,
(21:48):
challenges and hardships our test of character, and you learned
to overcome and you become stronger within, and that's just
how you get on with life. Raphie loved singing in
the Armenian choir, but he felt out of place at
the socials held at the Armenian Church. His parents also
didn't allow him to do what other Canadian kids were doing,
(22:09):
like joining after school sports or even riding a bike.
Since Arto and Lucy didn't let him have his own,
he spent a lot of time in his dad's new
portrait studio in Toronto. As Arto meticulously retouched photos, they
listened to music Andy Williams, Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra. These
were moments in Raphae's new world intersected with his old one.
(22:35):
I was listening to the songs of Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan,
joined by as Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, the whole folk
music singer songwriter you know seen and then Motown you know,
and all kinds of other music, diverse music on pop radio.
And I said, to myself, this is cool. I want
(22:57):
to get a guitar. So I went to a pawn
shop and put down my twenty four and about a
Kent nylon string guitar. That was my first one. I
learned to play guitar and sing and imagine, you know,
my thrill and and finding out that you could teach
yourself to do that. As a teenager, raph You would
(23:19):
spend his afternoons listening to records, playing guitar and singing
folk songs with his friends. He also started secretly dating
his first love, Deborah Pike, since Arto had a strict
no dating while you're still living in the house rule.
He was settling into hippie culture, letting his hair grow
along and embracing the flower power of the sixties. I
(23:40):
think there was a questioning of authority that was very healthy,
and people are starting to think for themselves. So, you know,
there was certainty the beginnings of the you know, the
uptake of interest in yoga and Eastern philosophies and so
so think about as an expansive experience for those of
us want to be hippies. You know, it was, you know,
(24:03):
we were starting to think for ourselves as Raphae attended
the University of Toronto. He also started playing gigs around
the city. He'd watch other performers too, learning from them
and practicing the new techniques he saw on stage. He
wanted to see where this music thing would take him,
so in nineteen sixty nine, he moved out of Lucy
Innardo's house, dropped out of university after two years, and
(24:25):
threw himself into his new career. You know, at first,
I was a folk singer, singer songwriter, That's how I started.
And I wanted a career kind of like James Taylor.
You know, I wanted to play medium sized halls, not
Madison Square gardens. You know, the folks scene in Toronto
was vibrant and tight knit. Ralphie's friend and fellow folky
John Lacy, remembers those days. Well, you'd usually go to
(24:49):
a place and you do a guest set on a
jam night or hoot Nanny Knight who was called back then,
and you do your thing and if they like you enough,
they'd hire you and you come back whenever the date was.
He and Raffi would often back each other up at gigs.
He was doing the same stuff. Was we all work
on and then he wrote a few songs too, but
predominantly he was he was doing covers. Who would you
(25:11):
guys cover? John Prine, the Birds, uh Pete Seeger and
joined byas and don't he met schell O'Neil young that
type of thing. Just whatever tune in the grabbed you,
you know. John and Raffie moved into a big house
(25:33):
with a bunch of other young hippies in an area
of Toronto called Cabbage Town. John says he taught Raffie
a guitar technique called flat picking. He even got to
know Rafy's Armenian heritage through the meals at the Kabukian home,
where he remembers eating tabuli for the first time. John
also saw how Ralphie's parents had a different vision for
their son's life. I think that he felt a certain
(25:56):
tension because here he was, his folky musician going on
the world, and all of us who decided to do
music for a living, that was the thing, was the living.
There was a certain stress with the parents over that,
certainly with my parents, so they didn't want me to
do it. His folks weren't a hundred percent behind on
doing it. They are typical immigrant parents. They wanted the
(26:19):
kids to go to university and get a classic degree
and education and go into a bona fide of business.
I think his parents might have wanted him to the
photography think too. As Ralfie was finding his way as
a folk musician, the pressure and pull from his parents continued.
They didn't seem to understand that he had his own
(26:39):
goals and dreams for his life. Ralphie remembers the time
in his early twenties when he sat for a portrait
at Arto Studio. My father had taken a beautiful color
portrait of me head and shoulders, and he had this
abstract painting. I don't know who who did the painting,
but he kind of took the two image. Isn't made that,
(27:01):
you know, a double exposure color print, and so there
there's my head and shoulders, but you know, abstract colors
all over the place and forms and so on. Are
They called it the indecision of youth, And I wouldn't
say he called it that in a flattering way. So
I was a little upset about it, but I also
understood that that's how he saw me at the time.
(27:24):
But I was exploring. I was excited. I was alive.
I was, I was awake, you know. So do you
think this portrait was your dad's reaction to just not
understanding you? Whoa he was struggling with the man I
was becoming. Yeah, because it didn't go along the script
that he would have wanted. I wasn't gonna just say, oh, yeah,
(27:47):
I'll work in your studio, dad, you know from now. No, No,
I was on my own path, and that was hard
for him because he had gone into his father's work
after his father's death, even as he my father had
taken his father's work and run with it, as in,
you know, pioneered in color portraiture, something his father never did.
(28:11):
So we all have a duty to ourselves to to
grow our hearts yearnings, to to put those yearnings into
the expressions of who we are and how we might
serve in society. Was it hard for you to go
against your parents expectations like that? Not at all. No.
(28:32):
I I knew that I needed to, you know, travel
my own path. Decades later, Raphi wrote that perhaps his
parents were culturally and personally incapable of seeing him as
his own person rather than as an extension of themselves.
(28:54):
But He says Ardo's portrait does remind him of how
tough his path towards discover or in his authentic self
actually was. Finding an identity free of the one his
parents had dreamt up for him would take years. For
(29:18):
the first half of the nineteen seventies, Rapie hitchhiked through
Canada and the United States. He performed at a folk
festival in Regina, busked in bamf and played for six
weeks in the lounge of a resort in Arkansas. He
says it felt like he was enrolled in life one
oh one, learning how to live as a struggling folk
singer and finding his own musical style. Then in nineteen seventy,
(29:51):
Rafi took another chance. He'd seen how better paying gigs
went to artists who had a recording contract, so he
formed Troubadour Wreck, his own record company, and he signed
his first artist himself. And because he'd be a one
man record label, this would give him full control of
his artistic vision books most all of my mind, never
(30:17):
no much trouble. I guess I'm nowhere to hide. Through Troubadour,
he released his first album, Good Luck Boy, a folk
album for adults it's the album that featured Impressions of Armenia.
There's a line in the title track that really sticks
out to me. I'm huven money hunt. I hope I
(30:39):
started trend. Feel like everything I've ever wanted was spitting
around the bind. I feel like everything I ever wanted
was waiting around the bend. And I mean he wasn't
wrong next time. On Finding Raffie, the language in most
(31:24):
children's albums at the time, it didn't reflect anything, and
just it just talked down to children as if they
were all babies and idiots. We weren't going by any
market research or anythink We were kind of winging it,
you know, having fun, including songs that we thought kids
would enjoy singing, and that's what we did. Finding Raffi
(31:53):
is a production in My Heart Radio and Fatherly in
partnership with Rococo Punch. It's produced by Athor and Fendalosa,
Meredith Hannig, and James Trout. Production assistance from Charlotte Livingston.
Alex French is our story consultant. Our senior producer is
Andrea Swahe. Emily Foreman is our editor. Fact checking by
(32:14):
Andrea Lopez Crusado Raphae's music is courtesy of Troubadour Records.
Special thanks to Kim Layton at Troubadour. Our Executive producers
are Jessica Albert and John Parotti at Rococo, punch Ty Trimble,
Mike Rothman and Jeff Eisenman at Fatherly and Me. Chris
Garcia thank you for listening.
The Armenians became a sort of threat to the Ottoman rulers.
They rounded all of the intellectuals, all of the potential
community leaders, and executed them or exiled them. They disarmed
the men, took their weapons, took their arms, and sent
them to labor camps and to eventual death. What was
(00:39):
left where the elderly women and children. They set them
on marches. These were death marches, so they were sent
to their deaths. So basically it is a government eradicating
its own people. I think people find it so strange. Right,
(01:04):
it's been over a hundred years, what's the big deal?
Get over it? But I don't think people realize that
it's a lived experience for all of us. I'm Chris
Garcia and this is Finding Raffie, a ten part series
(01:26):
from My Heart Radio and Fatherly in partnership with The
Rococo Punch about the life, philosophy, and the work of Raffie,
the man behind the music. Rafie never set out to
(01:47):
make music for kids. A year before his first children's
album came out, he released this instrumental honoring his roots.
It's called Impressions of Armenia. He wrote it before the
Fall of the Soviet Union after spending three weeks in
Armenia with his brother and sister, an invitation from the
government because of their father's renowned photography career. When we went,
(02:13):
we were the privileged ones getting to see it in
a very unique way because some of the resorts that
we went to and state that the people didn't even
know they existed. It was very much closed society in
the Soviet Union era. So it was very moving and
heartbreaking in some ways and promising in other ways. You know,
(02:35):
it was just a lot to process emotionally. Impressions of
Armenia is a song that tells the story of a
homeland raf he's never fully known, of a country and
a people who survived the fall of empires, a genocide,
and diaspora. Rafi was born in Egypt and raised in Canada,
but the history of his Armenian ancestors flows through him.
(02:58):
He may not include an explicit at lee in his music,
but like so many Armenian artists, that legacy has shaped
his life and his work. It was night in Cairo.
The wedding of seventeen year old King Farouk of Egypt
was the event of the decade, complete with a procession
(03:18):
of flowered parade floats, twinkling lights displayed all over the
royal Palace, and a glamorous Parisian wedding gown for the
King's sixteen year old bride, Queen Ferida. And among the
celebrations performers was a young accordionist Arto Cabukian, Raphae's father.
My father was quite a musician. He played two or
(03:39):
three instruments, primarily the accordion, which is what I heard
him playing while we were growing up, and in family
gatherings and parties, we would always urge him to take
out his big red accordion. Arto's accordion playing led him
to Lucy Papasian. The two met at another wedding where
Arto is performing and where Ardo danced only with Lucy.
(04:02):
A few months later, they married five years later. Rafi
Kabukian was born in Cairo, Egypt. Art, music, and literature
were highly valued by the Kabukians, so they named their
second son after one of Lucy's favorite Armenian authors, a
patriotic novelist and poet who used the pen name Raffi.
(04:26):
Rafi Kabukian grew up in Cairo in the nineteen fifties.
He was the middle kid between his older brother Ownig
and his younger sister Annie. Ownig and Raffi shared a
room with their grandmother in the family's three bedroom apartment.
It was a place where you could find hidden chocolates
in the dining room, where the Armenian rugs were perfect
for playing marbles and were pickled cucumbers are ready for
(04:46):
snacking in the kitchen. And there was also the music.
I think we used to hear on our family stereo
set hi fi. We used to go the music we
were listening to in the fifties, which were my formative years.
We're pop music of the time from Europe, from all over,
and these songs were melodic. Melody to me is something
(05:13):
that's just indispensable when the custom music making soul. It's
just interesting to remember that as a form of development
from my Cairo years and my Armenian family with the
rugs and the hi fi. But not all of Ralphie's
childhood memories were heartwarming. I was mocked and humiliated at times,
(05:35):
and I was hit and I couldn't square that with
the fact that I knew I was loved, So why
didn't I feel respected for who I felt I was.
In his autobiography, Raffie writes that a sharp slap in
the face or a snide remark from his mother and
(05:58):
father were at odds with the warmth of their hugs
and compliments. That when company came around, his parents would
make him perform a song or a poem for their guests,
expecting him to do it without complaint and without error.
If Raffie did well, he was praised. If not, his
embarrassment and shame were swept aside with a comment about
(06:19):
doing better next time. That sense of shame and disrespect
Raffi would carry that for years. He would eventually process
it and form a philosophy around how kids should be treated,
one that centered around respect. Raffie's parents loomed large in
(06:43):
his life, especially his father Ardo. He ran a photography studio,
Studio cavuc originally founded by Arto's father, Ohannas Cavukian. Arto
was skilled at shooting, retouching, and framing photographs, but he
was a master portrait artist. He'd work every day, coming
home only for a meal and a nap. On Sundays,
(07:04):
he took his family to church and the Pyramids and
always ended the day back at the studio. He also
had an impressive client list of dignitaries like the former
King of Egypt and the head of the Armenian Church.
Ardo and his family were like an Armenian gold standard,
an example of what dedication, hard work, and resilience could
(07:25):
create even after a horrific genocide. There were stories of
survival of my families survival from the massacres of the
Ottoman Empire, both sides of the family, and my mother
and my father in infancy. Their families survived. The Armenian genocide,
(07:46):
planned and perpetrated by Ottoman Turkish authorities, took place between
the spring of nineteen fifteen and the fall of nineteen sixteen,
and the death toll varies widely. Figures range from six
hundred thousand to as many as one point two million
ethnic Armenian Christians, and that doesn't include the hundreds and
(08:06):
thousands of Assyrians and Greeks who were also targeted. By
the end of World War One, it's estimated that more
than nine of Armenians and the Ottoman Empire had died.
Raphie heard his family's harrowing stories all throughout his childhood
(08:27):
Lucy's father escaped death seven times. He was a building foreman,
and the Turkish officials always ended up sparing him so
they could use his valuable skills. Arto's father, Ohanis, was
an artist. The night before he, his wife, and his
month old son Ardo faced execution, he stayed up drawing
a charcoal portrait of the general commanding officer. When the
(08:50):
officers saw the sketch, he was so impressed he assigned
Ohannis to Aleppo to teach drawing. His entire family was saved,
along with nearly thirty people after Ihan has claimed them
all as family members, all saved because of his drawing.
(09:12):
Isn't an amazing story, right, stories of how arts saved
the day. Do you think your family's trauma leaving Armenia
has impacted you? That's too hard a question to answer.
Of course, it's impacted me. We are products of our experience.
(09:33):
So I've written about this in my autobiography. I've talked
about it. I mean, you know, the stories that you
grow up with, they are the content that you have
to make sense of and then you decide their role
in your emotional landscape. Are those stories going to drive you?
Or are they going to enrich your sense of who
(09:56):
you feel you are and what it feels possible for you.
This is not where I expected to end up when
I started listening to Raffie's music, Genocide and trauma. Could
anything be further away from the image we have of
the guy who sings about baby whales and banana phones.
(10:18):
I began to realize the profound empathy I registered in
his music came from a really deep place. Perhaps without
these stories, Raffie wouldn't be Raffie. There's the generation who
(10:46):
lived the trauma, and then there are the generations who
are descendants of those who are traumatized. They didn't live
the trauma, but they carry this trauma. This is Dr
Shushan got up at theon She's the deputy director of
the University of Southern California's Institute of Armenian Studies. I
think it's it's not difficult to imagine the kind of
(11:08):
trauma surviving, the trauma of rebuilding, um of being in
an environment where you're not sure you're welcome, of your
family being torn apart of maybe missing important family members,
language issues, cultural issues, this kind of constant upheaval each
(11:33):
family dealt with the trauma of the genocide in its
own way. Raphie's family faced it head on, sharing their
story from generation to generation, while others did the opposite.
There were groups who completely shut down and their method
of dealing with this was to just eradicate the memory
and kind of disassociate. There were those who stayed in
(11:56):
a stage of anger, and there were those who talked
about it NonStop. There are two kinds of survivors. The
survivors who write memoirs, who have the luminous stories that
they want to share, and then there are survivors like
my grandparents, who shared almost nothing. This is Chris boj Alien.
(12:20):
He's an Armenian American author who has written more than
twenty bucks, including Midwives, The Flight Attendant, and The Sandcastle Girls,
which is centered around the Armenian genocide. Chris remembers hearing
a story about his aunt and uncle who are starting
a chain of yogurt stands in New York City in
the nineteen seventies. They were explaining the business plan to
(12:43):
my Armenian grandmother, and my Armenian grandmother says, oh, of course,
and you'll be serving tongue, which is in Armenian or
Middle Eastern yogurt drink, and my aunt says yes, and
then my grandmother is to her, oh, well, that's one
of the reasons why my parents first took me out
(13:05):
of the school. They used the tom to poison the children,
and my aunt says, ma, what are you talking about.
And of course my grandmother had never shared with her
daughter the story of when in an Ottoman school at
the start of the Armenian genocide, some of the children
(13:26):
were poisoned with tom. So little by little the stories
would emerge, but it was a trickle because the trauma
was so deeply ingrained inside them that they kept it
to themselves. And then, of course there's the denial. Shushan says.
(13:49):
Part of what keeps the trauma alive is the lack
of recognition from the Turkish government. It has offered its
condolences for the atrocities while actively denying any plan to
systematic we wipe out Armenian Christians despite extensive documentation. This
denial has kept the wound open and festering and kind
(14:11):
of made the genocide this root paradigm in the Armenian narrative,
the victimization. The trauma is constantly relived because there is
no healing because there is no opportunity for moving on.
Right because last year was the first time an American
president actually called it a genocide. Absolutely, because of the denial,
(14:36):
genocide recognition has become the priority on all Armenian platforms.
It's as if we can't move on to anything else.
And it's something I tell my students, right, there were
Armenians before the genocide. There are Armenians after the genocide.
Armenian history doesn't start and end with the genocide. The
Armenian experience is not only about the genocide, but it
(14:57):
seems like this, I mean again, Historian Rasmi Pandosian would say,
it's the equalizer of all Armenians. You know that the
people spread across the globe, among different countries, different cultures,
different experiences, and yet the genocide and the quest for
its recognition unites all Armenians. The stories, the silence, the denial.
(15:24):
Shushan says that instead of destroying the Armenian people, this
shared trauma has resulted in a culture of compassion, resilience,
and artistic expression. In a sense, Raphi comes from a
long line of artists, writers and troubadours, all processing the
(15:45):
wounds of their ancestors. When you look at what Rabbi
has done with his life, what so many Armenians have
done with their lives in the diaspora, We've made art.
I mean, Rapha's music is like the happiest music on
the planet. I mean, you know Banana Phone and you
(16:09):
know Baby Blue Good. All of the joy that he
has brought to so many children and their parents. If
you were to meet Raffie, you wouldn't say, oh, my god,
grandson of survivors of a cataclysmic genocide who is scarred
for life. You'd say, this is one of the nicest, funniest, sweetest,
(16:33):
most talented people on the planet. Our Medians are just
utterly joyful, despite the trauma, despite the fact that forever
it feels like we have been the forgotten people. So yes,
(16:54):
it's important, as the Armenian painter Sarry Un said, to
no one's own homeland. But I like to take that further.
I said, it's important to know your heritage, of course,
but you can also transcend your heritage because you have
a duty to your soul as to what your life
is about. You know, to me, your people, they should
(17:18):
encourage your own growth, not to limit it in any way,
you know, So I can understand the impulse of Armenians
to claim me as one of their own, and of
course I am, but not in a way that you know,
constrains me, but hopefully in a way that celebrates my
own growth. I relate to that so much because there's um,
(17:41):
there's their culture, and it is partially responsible who you are,
but your your individual soul and your individual person that
has no cultural restraints. So in your heart and in
your mind and in your spirit, your your own person.
And so that really resonates with me, like like both
of our families forcibly fled their country. And sometimes I
(18:02):
feel too American to be Cuban, into Cuban to be American.
And sometimes you're laughing because I take it you understand.
I do understand. I do. Did you ever have moments
like that when you felt stuck between two worlds? For me,
it was all about identity. It was a quest for identity.
(18:24):
Who am I? RAPHI makes a really good point. Our
family stories ground us. They honor the past, but if
it's the only story we tell about ourselves, they can
be stifling. My family story is my story, but it's
(18:47):
not my whole story. How do I tell our story
to Sunny without putting her in a box. I want
her to know her history, but I also want her
to break free from any cultural constraints and add her
authentic self to our family story. Maybe the best way
to honor the past is to allow the story to
(19:08):
evolve with each generation. As Ralphie grew up, the political
climate in Egypt was turning more volatile. Raphi writes that
his father considered moving the family to Australia or Brazil.
Van Ardo went on a trip to North America. He
thought New York City was too big, Montreal had too
(19:29):
much snow, but Toronto was just right. My parents had
to leave Egypt to find a place where their kids
could grow and freedom, and that's what they did. I
was certainly appreciative, so thankful that my father had the
foresight to see the family needed to move. It was
not easy for us to leave our comfortable lives in Egypt,
(19:51):
but it was what needed to happen. So you grow
from that. You you appreciate, you know what's happened, and
you you're you're thrown in with the challenges and the
difficulties and the benefits of growing in a new land,
and you just do it so in nt with just
(20:12):
eight pieces of luggage and his grandmother's prayers, Raffi and
his family flew over Europe and crossed the Atlantic for Canada,
a world away where the Cabukians would once again start over.
(20:41):
Raphi's life is a ten year old Armenian Egyptian boy
in Canada couldn't have been more different than the one
he had in Cairo. I was born into a new culture,
if you will. In when we came to Toronto, everything
made an impression, from how cold it was and how
I see it could get to the fact that Mrs
McKinnon in fourth grade one time gave me her lunch
(21:03):
because I had forgotten my lunch. That really moved me
so much. And the fact that, you know, teachers in Toronto,
at the school that my brother and I and we're
going to and later my sister, they didn't hit you whoa.
That was interesting. And of course you know, hockey, ice skating,
(21:24):
new skills, new challenges. What will the kids think of me?
Oh my god, you know, and a lot of kids
were mean, you know, made fun of my name and
played tricks on me, So I had to navigate how
life was, which is really no different than what kids
have to do today, you know. But as you know,
(21:48):
challenges and hardships our test of character, and you learned
to overcome and you become stronger within, and that's just
how you get on with life. Raphie loved singing in
the Armenian choir, but he felt out of place at
the socials held at the Armenian Church. His parents also
didn't allow him to do what other Canadian kids were doing,
(22:09):
like joining after school sports or even riding a bike.
Since Arto and Lucy didn't let him have his own,
he spent a lot of time in his dad's new
portrait studio in Toronto. As Arto meticulously retouched photos, they
listened to music Andy Williams, Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra. These
were moments in Raphae's new world intersected with his old one.
(22:35):
I was listening to the songs of Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan,
joined by as Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, the whole folk
music singer songwriter you know seen and then Motown you know,
and all kinds of other music, diverse music on pop radio.
And I said, to myself, this is cool. I want
(22:57):
to get a guitar. So I went to a pawn
shop and put down my twenty four and about a
Kent nylon string guitar. That was my first one. I
learned to play guitar and sing and imagine, you know,
my thrill and and finding out that you could teach
yourself to do that. As a teenager, raph You would
(23:19):
spend his afternoons listening to records, playing guitar and singing
folk songs with his friends. He also started secretly dating
his first love, Deborah Pike, since Arto had a strict
no dating while you're still living in the house rule.
He was settling into hippie culture, letting his hair grow
along and embracing the flower power of the sixties. I
(23:40):
think there was a questioning of authority that was very healthy,
and people are starting to think for themselves. So, you know,
there was certainty the beginnings of the you know, the
uptake of interest in yoga and Eastern philosophies and so
so think about as an expansive experience for those of
us want to be hippies. You know, it was, you know,
(24:03):
we were starting to think for ourselves as Raphae attended
the University of Toronto. He also started playing gigs around
the city. He'd watch other performers too, learning from them
and practicing the new techniques he saw on stage. He
wanted to see where this music thing would take him,
so in nineteen sixty nine, he moved out of Lucy
Innardo's house, dropped out of university after two years, and
(24:25):
threw himself into his new career. You know, at first,
I was a folk singer, singer songwriter, That's how I started.
And I wanted a career kind of like James Taylor.
You know, I wanted to play medium sized halls, not
Madison Square gardens. You know, the folks scene in Toronto
was vibrant and tight knit. Ralphie's friend and fellow folky
John Lacy, remembers those days. Well, you'd usually go to
(24:49):
a place and you do a guest set on a
jam night or hoot Nanny Knight who was called back then,
and you do your thing and if they like you enough,
they'd hire you and you come back whenever the date was.
He and Raffi would often back each other up at gigs.
He was doing the same stuff. Was we all work
on and then he wrote a few songs too, but
predominantly he was he was doing covers. Who would you
(25:11):
guys cover? John Prine, the Birds, uh Pete Seeger and
joined byas and don't he met schell O'Neil young that
type of thing. Just whatever tune in the grabbed you,
you know. John and Raffie moved into a big house
(25:33):
with a bunch of other young hippies in an area
of Toronto called Cabbage Town. John says he taught Raffie
a guitar technique called flat picking. He even got to
know Rafy's Armenian heritage through the meals at the Kabukian home,
where he remembers eating tabuli for the first time. John
also saw how Ralphie's parents had a different vision for
their son's life. I think that he felt a certain
(25:56):
tension because here he was, his folky musician going on
the world, and all of us who decided to do
music for a living, that was the thing, was the living.
There was a certain stress with the parents over that,
certainly with my parents, so they didn't want me to
do it. His folks weren't a hundred percent behind on
doing it. They are typical immigrant parents. They wanted the
(26:19):
kids to go to university and get a classic degree
and education and go into a bona fide of business.
I think his parents might have wanted him to the
photography think too. As Ralfie was finding his way as
a folk musician, the pressure and pull from his parents continued.
They didn't seem to understand that he had his own
(26:39):
goals and dreams for his life. Ralphie remembers the time
in his early twenties when he sat for a portrait
at Arto Studio. My father had taken a beautiful color
portrait of me head and shoulders, and he had this
abstract painting. I don't know who who did the painting,
but he kind of took the two image. Isn't made that,
(27:01):
you know, a double exposure color print, and so there
there's my head and shoulders, but you know, abstract colors
all over the place and forms and so on. Are
They called it the indecision of youth, And I wouldn't
say he called it that in a flattering way. So
I was a little upset about it, but I also
understood that that's how he saw me at the time.
(27:24):
But I was exploring. I was excited. I was alive.
I was, I was awake, you know. So do you
think this portrait was your dad's reaction to just not
understanding you? Whoa he was struggling with the man I
was becoming. Yeah, because it didn't go along the script
that he would have wanted. I wasn't gonna just say, oh, yeah,
(27:47):
I'll work in your studio, dad, you know from now. No, No,
I was on my own path, and that was hard
for him because he had gone into his father's work
after his father's death, even as he my father had
taken his father's work and run with it, as in,
you know, pioneered in color portraiture, something his father never did.
(28:11):
So we all have a duty to ourselves to to
grow our hearts yearnings, to to put those yearnings into
the expressions of who we are and how we might
serve in society. Was it hard for you to go
against your parents expectations like that? Not at all. No.
(28:32):
I I knew that I needed to, you know, travel
my own path. Decades later, Raphi wrote that perhaps his
parents were culturally and personally incapable of seeing him as
his own person rather than as an extension of themselves.
(28:54):
But He says Ardo's portrait does remind him of how
tough his path towards discover or in his authentic self
actually was. Finding an identity free of the one his
parents had dreamt up for him would take years. For
(29:18):
the first half of the nineteen seventies, Rapie hitchhiked through
Canada and the United States. He performed at a folk
festival in Regina, busked in bamf and played for six
weeks in the lounge of a resort in Arkansas. He
says it felt like he was enrolled in life one
oh one, learning how to live as a struggling folk
singer and finding his own musical style. Then in nineteen seventy,
(29:51):
Rafi took another chance. He'd seen how better paying gigs
went to artists who had a recording contract, so he
formed Troubadour Wreck, his own record company, and he signed
his first artist himself. And because he'd be a one
man record label, this would give him full control of
his artistic vision books most all of my mind, never
(30:17):
no much trouble. I guess I'm nowhere to hide. Through Troubadour,
he released his first album, Good Luck Boy, a folk
album for adults it's the album that featured Impressions of Armenia.
There's a line in the title track that really sticks
out to me. I'm huven money hunt. I hope I
(30:39):
started trend. Feel like everything I've ever wanted was spitting
around the bind. I feel like everything I ever wanted
was waiting around the bend. And I mean he wasn't
wrong next time. On Finding Raffie, the language in most
(31:24):
children's albums at the time, it didn't reflect anything, and
just it just talked down to children as if they
were all babies and idiots. We weren't going by any
market research or anythink We were kind of winging it,
you know, having fun, including songs that we thought kids
would enjoy singing, and that's what we did. Finding Raffi
(31:53):
is a production in My Heart Radio and Fatherly in
partnership with Rococo Punch. It's produced by Athor and Fendalosa,
Meredith Hannig, and James Trout. Production assistance from Charlotte Livingston.
Alex French is our story consultant. Our senior producer is
Andrea Swahe. Emily Foreman is our editor. Fact checking by
(32:14):
Andrea Lopez Crusado Raphae's music is courtesy of Troubadour Records.
Special thanks to Kim Layton at Troubadour. Our Executive producers
are Jessica Albert and John Parotti at Rococo, punch Ty Trimble,
Mike Rothman and Jeff Eisenman at Fatherly and Me. Chris
Garcia thank you for listening.
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