Nancy Bartekian co-founded a local anti-colonial, anti-borders youth collective, SWANA Chicago (SouthWest Asia and North Afrika), that wants to decolonize language, hearts and minds.
By Ata Younan
Photo: Samantha Cabrera Friend
This profile is part of our How a Community Heals series.
On a balmy Friday afternoon, Nancy Bartekian is all passion and purpose as she dives headfirst into explaining her deep connection to her ancestors’ land.
On her dad’s side, Bartekian’s grandfather is from Sasun, a region in what is now Turkey, that was the site of massacres and Armenian resistance. Her grandmother and maternal grandfather are from Bethlehem, Palestine, and she recently discovered that her maternal grandmother is from Syria. And while none of her family members are originally from Jordan, many of them have sought refuge in its capital city of Amman. Every year Bartekian and her immediate family make the trek to visit them in Jordan, which she now considers a second home.
Bartekian speaks on complex issues with an air of candor and care with interspersed moments of laughter and levity. At moments during our conversation, she’ll sit calmly in reflection, pausing as she takes time to consider her words.
Growing up both Armenian and Palestinian, with ancestors from a region of the world where ethnicities often share similar cultures and traditions, Bartekian found herself rejecting the idea of the political nation-states that divide her ancestry and instead embracing an anti-colonial approach to her personal identity and community work.
When the war began between Armenia and Azerbaijan last fall, over disputed land in Artsakh (also known as Nagorno-Karabakh), Bartekian was disappointed by the lack of Palestinian solidarity with Armenian resistance. “I felt silence in the Palestinian community that I'm also a part of,” she remembers. “There needed to be a little bit of a push for recognition of Armenians in our struggle. And it didn't really make sense to me.”
That’s when the momentum for SWANA Chicago (SouthWest Asian North Afrikan) really took hold. Bartekian, who has worked with Students for Justice in Palestine and Students Against Incarceration DePaul, co-founded SWANA Chicago with her fellow Armenian classmate Kat Williams at the beginning of 2021. The Chicago collective is made up of Assyrians, Kurds, Armenians, Palestinians and more who are connected to the region through identity, culture or land and who identify with anti-capitalist, land-back principles and self-determination.
“We don't believe in harsh borders. We don't believe in ultra-nationalism,” explains Bartekian. “We knew we wanted to be a little bit more free-flowing with the concepts of [connection to SWANA land], whether by blood or by cultural connections.”
Here they tend to a digital healing space and in-person events where they raise funds for community members and uplift the voices of folks affected by occupation and war. In April, they hosted a healing circle to provide a space for reflection and conversation around the ongoing war in Syria and the Biden-Harris administration’s recent bombing there. Last week, they spoke at a Free Palestine event in downtown Chicago against the displacement of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem.
The goal is to bring together people to support liberation movements in their own communities and to stand in active solidarity with other oppressed people globally while decolonizing terms and identifiers like the Middle East, which the group instead identifies as “SouthWest Asia and North Afrika.” Bartekian says her organizing builds on the internal solidarity that can exist between SWANA community members who often share interweaving values, customs and languages but have been divided along ethnic, religious or political lines due to colonialism.
(Photo: Samantha Cabrera Friend)
She emphasizes the importance of having moments of vulnerability, stillness and reflection, individually or in communion with each other. “It's easy to go to protests and yell and be angry and chant together. There's nothing wrong with anger,” she says, especially in the face of decades of occupation and upheaval of their homelands. “[But] we’re more than those stories. We have interests in life and dreams and things that we want… Sometimes we just need to be tender with one another, and just breathe.”
This quieter, deeper, behind-the-scenes approach to organizing is more genuine and more connected, explains Bartekian. There’s a healing power to the conversations that happen before and after protests, the laughter shared in moments of calm and the seemingly trivial exchanges during car rides and dinners.
While SWANA folks can find healing outside this community, there is something to be said for sharing intimate thoughts and feelings with people from a similar, albeit nuanced, background.
“[Healing justice] is a form of resistance against the state, because you are taking time to be reflective and imagine a future for yourself,” Bartekian says. “Imagine never doing that. Imagine never knowing what a good future actually looks like. This isn't normal.”
For Bartekian and her collective, they hope that the future will include a borderless SWANA region that moves away from relying on government entities and instead relies on the agencies of individuals and communities.
Part of that vision is dismantling anti-Blackness both outside and within the community. The uprisings last summer after the murder of George Floyd were critical; while many SWANA people marched on the streets, others sat down for long, difficult conversations with their often overtly and at times subtly racist family members.
“A lot of our ancestors enslaved people. That is the truth of it,” Bartekian says. “How are we going to heal ourselves in our communities, if we can't take accountability for our oppression in a violent state against Black folks and our Black peers?”
Liberation is interconnected, she says—meaning Palestine will never be free till Yemen is free, till Artsakh is free, till all peoples living under colonial rule are free.
SWANA Chicago is planning an in-person, socially distanced gathering in Humboldt Park in June. Follow them @swanachicago for the latest updates.
Ata Younan (she/her) is a first-generation American-Assyrian multimedia storyteller. Her work explores the nuance at the intersection of origin, culture and identity.
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