The Azerbaijani Student Association hosted a discussion on immigrant identity crisis and community building experience on Saturday in the University Student Center.

The Azerbaijani Student Association hosted “Azerbaijani Night,” featuring an educational discussion from Mohamed Mohamed, a professor of sociology, traditional food, a Kahoot game about the country, a poetry reading from students and a live tar — a stringed traditional Azerbaijan lute — performance from an American University alum. AZESA co-President Humay Sadig said the event, which featured their first speaker event of the semester, was meant to embrace and establish diverse Azerbaijani communities on campus.

Sadig said the organization wanted to emphasize the ethnic and religious diversity of Azerbaijani culture, as the country has more than 13 different ethnic groups, and create a space for community through this event because of the struggle of finding community on campus.

“I know the event is called Azerbaijani, but the whole point is also that Azerbaijani is very multi-diverse, there are so many, not only ethnicities, but also languages and then religions present in our country,” Sadig said.

Sadig said the main difficulty in organizing the event was finding a date and time that would attract the most attendees due to finals season. The organization also had performers for the event decline because of travel issues and illness and instead opted to show a video of a traditional Azerbaijani dance. 

“It’s a little hard to get people together, but I believe, I’m sure, people are gonna come,” Sadig said. 

Sadig said the organization was founded around the time of the pandemic, but COVID-19 made it difficult to host events that garnered large attendance when AZESA was first established. She said AZESA is in the process of increasing their programing to host events more frequently throughout the spring semester.

“Now we started growing and introducing ourselves to other backgrounds, because we want to show our culture, show our history and just show our food,” Sadig said.

In Mohamed’s speech, he said he experienced culture shocks when moving to the United States from Egypt for his master’s degree, like individualism and drinking culture in the U.S. He said the path to feeling at home in America was difficult because he felt a disconnect from those around him but that he eventually made connections with other immigrants who shared his feelings of culture shock.

First-year student Angela Mamedli said she attended the event to feel connected to her Azerbaijani culture through food and meeting other Azerbaijanis.

“In America, it’s very hard to find other Azerbaijanis. So here I get to actually meet people from there. Yeah. So it’s nice to connect with people from my culture,” Mamedli said.

First-year student Bianca Bayona said she came to support her friend, Mamedli, and to learn about Azerbaijani culture.

I think that a lot of the time people will be like, ‘Oh yeah I know so much about so many people in so many places’, but like, they don’t. And I think that it’s a great way to just connect with people in a way that isn’t really like a lecture, and you’re not sitting in a classroom,” Bayona said.