Let me paint a picture for you all: about a month ago, I was giving a speech in front of Sproul Hall. Alongside many other Armenian students, I was protesting the cancelation of a film screening about the displaced people of Nagorno-Karabakh, which we had planned for Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. Now, I'm kind of an introverted guy, and I'd never given a speech before — let alone an angry speech about academic freedom — so when I got in bed that evening I told myself “alright, I’m good on public speaking for the next decade.” And of course, what I woke up to the next morning was an email telling me that I have the honor of giving a speech at commencement. It turns out that it's a lot easier to write an angry speech than a funny one.
So you must be wondering why I’m standing up here. To answer that question, I’d have to tell you why I’m an English major. I like to think that my first encounter with literature was Hovhannes Tumanyan’s Armenian folktales, which my grandmother would read to me at bedtime. Though I was born in Yerevan, I was raised abroad in the American diaspora, and I felt that these pastoral fables were transporting me to a world which I had a profound connection to, despite having no memory of it. This was when I first fell in love with the magic of storytelling, and I knew from that young age that I wanted to pursue its secrets.
And then fast forward 15 years, and I'm a totally aimless community college student with awful grades, who’s like maybe thinking of doing Psychology or something? I didn't actually decide to become an English major until I was well into college. What converted me was a literature class that I had enrolled in on a whim. The professor — shoutouts to Dr. Shane Underwood at Pasadena City College — was a guy in a black T-shirt with a buzzcut and tattoos up his arms, and I was pretty sure that he was a student until he went to the front of the classroom and started explaining postmodernism. His classes, which I would go on to take many more of, felt like they were provoking me to think critically for the first time in my life. That was the start of a newfound passion for English academia that brought me all the way here to Berkeley.
But to return to the question: what do we do as English majors that made me so invested in it? Well, that’s exactly what it is. We ask questions more than we try to answer them. Regardless of whether it’s reconsidering how we think of identity and authority in Shakespeare, or how contemporary authors reshape the aesthetics of migrancy and movement across borders, in our work we’re always trying to challenge assumptions and break out of rigid and canonical frameworks instead of adhering to them. Where many other disciplines aim for certainty, English majors thrive in paradox, and we’re okay with things not always having simple explanations.
And that's why I loved it. The critical thinking we do wasn’t just a way to cope with The Sound and the Fury (though it helped!); it was a way of understanding my own self. It’s allowed me to reconcile being both American and Armenian, and yet not exactly either of these things. And it’s allowed me to embrace the paradox that a near high school dropout can go on to give a speech at Berkeley. I've found that in a lot of respects, I'm okay with remaining a question mark.
So I guess this all boils down to the totally hackneyed platitude that you should always be yourself. But I think that really is an important thing. Though today we’re all sharing in the same success, we’ve all taken different paths to get there, and you should be proud of your own story. I hope that as we go forward in life, though we hopefully won’t be reading three novels a week, we'll continue to be critical thinkers who strive to challenge the status quo. And if you're ever nervous about public speaking, just pretend you're one of your English professors and that you're giving a lecture on a Jane Austen novel instead. To my fellow students and my phenomenal professors and GSIs, thank you for an awesome two years; to the English Department, thank you again for this great honor; to my family, ես ձեզ շատ եմ սիրում (I love you). And to everyone else, thank you for bearing with this clumsy and hastily written speech of mine.