What do you owe your parents? What do you owe your country? What do you owe yourself?
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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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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. 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. 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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.