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Visual Anthropology
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Storytelling: Armenian Family Albums in the Diaspora Nefissa Naguib
To cite this Article Naguib, Nefissa(2008) 'Storytelling: Armenian Family Albums in the Diaspora', Visual Anthropology,
21: 3, 231 — 244
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/08949460801986228 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08949460801986228
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Visual Anthropology, 21: 231–244, 2008 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online DOI: 10.1080/08949460801986228
Storytelling: Armenian Family Albums in the Diaspora
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Nefissa Naguib Armenians were scattered across the world after experiencing the collective pain of massacres and deportation from Turkey in 1915. They are an example of a people who have lived through loss and the brutalities of history. In this article, I trace one response to enduring loss: the role of photograph albums in capturing such historical ruptures. For scholars concerned with life stories, family photos and records serve both as goads to recollection and as aids to their certification. ‘‘Seeing’’ other pasts obviates somehow our requirement for complete recollection from our interviewees. Yet our sense of other people’s pasts involves more than this. At times photos portray only frozen, static moments cut off from their lived experiences. At other times these albums are a verification of presence in history.
All the sorrows of life can be borne if only we can make them into stories. Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)
INTRODUCTION Roland Barthes [1981], in his later view on photographs, observed that they are a ‘‘certificate of presence.’’ This article is an attempt to explain how, for the dispossessed, photographs may carry several meanings: the people themselves know that their previous life no longer exists, yet their photographs are ‘‘certificates of presence.’’ This is especially significant to Armenians living in the diaspora, who were scattered throughout the world after experiencing violence perpetrated by all sides involved during the upheavals of World War I [Naguib 2008]. During that period, populations in the old Ottoman Empire were undergoing turbulent transformations. Battles, political maneuverings, and alliances between communities brought with them massacres, destruction, deportation, and NEFISSA NAGUIB has conducted research in the interface between anthropology and history, with a focus on critical events and the politics of memory, since the 1990s. Recent publications are in the areas of women and conflicts, relief activities, minorities, and diasporic societies in the Middle East. She is the author of Recasting Lives: Palestinian Women, Events and Memory [Leiden: Brill, forthcoming, 2008], and recently coedited (with Inger Marie Okkenhaug) Interpreting Welfare and Relief in the Middle East [Leiden: Brill]. She is currently working on a research project entitled ‘‘Global Moments in the Levant’’ based at the University of Bergen and financed by the Norwegian Research Council. (For more information, see http://home. hio.no/~nefissa/ or http:// global.uib.no/home/.) E-mail: nefissa.naguib@sosantr.uib.no
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unprecedented convoys of refugees to the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Like other groups, the Armenians also suffered. Although they had always enjoyed special privileged positions under the sultan, their situation changed when, during the turbulent years of the late 19th century, Russia proclaimed itself guardian of all fellow Christians in the Empire, including the Armenians. Russia started to provide the Armenians with weapons and to support their separatist movement [Reiss 2006]. The Turkish minister of war, Envar Pasha, and the minister of the interior, Talaat Bey, orchestrated the banishment and massacre of Turkey’s Armenian population. Most of the atrocities were committed in Eastern Anatolia and in the hot Syrian desert. While ‘‘Many Turkish officers protested, and a number were executed for treason’’ [Reiss 2006: 108], about half the Armenian population perished then. Although scholars have studied how historical recollections of genocide and deportation continue to bind the Armenians in the diaspora, few have examined how memories are concretized in order to preserve movements from the past and relationships within it. In addition to enabling emotional responses to historical ruptures, photographs exemplify how specific objects inform and sustain memory and testimonies to Armenian collective pasts. This article is an attempt to get at how moments of war and human displacement are articulated through sentimental attachments to photographs, and how personal recollections of images serve as an allegory for broader issues of remembering and associating oneself with historical events. A person who has coped with sorting out personal belongings after the death of a relative will know about the unexpected moments of stillness when one comes across photo albums with flaking tiny black flecks, images in disintegrating brown envelopes, or pictures resting freely in shoeboxes. For migrants or the families of migrants, what also matters during these moments is who is absent from the collection of photos and knowing that nobody is there to explain the images one does not know or remember. This, if nothing else, makes looking through family photographs an entirely different experience, both in impression and in sentiments. This article is about impressions as seen in the company of their owner, Victoria Hagopian.
VICTORIA’S ALBUMS Albums and a Shoebox The first time I visited Mrs. Hagopian (a retired librarian), to interview her about being an Armenian in Cairo, she asked me if wanted to see her family albums; but before I could even respond, she said, ‘‘You know pictures are good for storytelling, they will make us weep and laugh?’’ I have seen her photos many times; often when I visit she asks me how my research ‘‘about Armenian life’’ is progressing and if I have met any new Armenians lately ‘‘with stories to tell.’’ Then she brings out her albums and the shoebox [Figure 1] from the chiffonier and tells me, ‘‘Let’s lament together.’’ Sharing with me her life’s sorrows and gratifications includes not only a series of posed photographs of her beautiful young mother
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Figure 1 Victoria’s albums and a shoebox.
and fine-looking father [Figure 2], a portrait of her as a young woman [Figure 3], and photos from her own wedding, but also reproductions of photographs of carnage and deportations that her husband, Krikor, gathered and which she keeps wrapped in anti-acid paper in a shoebox [Figures 1 and 4], together with letters and postcards from relatives and friends. Mrs. Hagopian talks mostly about her mother’s side of the family. They were affluent tobacco merchants from the southwest with affable connections to Turkish officials. ‘‘When the Turkification of the Ottoman Empire became intense, my grandfather decided it was time for everyone to leave,’’ she explains. But before leaving, ‘‘My Ottoman grandfather asked his wife and daughters to stitch gold in the hems of everyone’s coats. Then they were all sent off in different directions in the hope that some would survive, which they all did. Of course, having the right connections and gold made this terrible journey much easier for all.’’ Her mother ended up in Aleppo, where she was welcomed and accommodated with open arms by one of the grandfather’s many trading associates in that city. In Aleppo she went to school, and when the time was right she was married off to a much older Armenian merchant ‘‘or shopkeeper, something like that.’’ Victoria opens the album with a colorful plastic cover showing Swiss mountains and valleys; she finds the first picture of her father as a young man in a three-piece suit, tie, and hat standing in front of a furniture shop. In another picture, he is in a gathering of young men at an open-door restaurant, his hat laid aside on a table, his hair glistening and combed just so. In this picture he is holding a cigarette, looking straight at the photographer and smiling. Victoria asks me to look closely at the trees in the background: ‘‘I think they are pistachio trees; they had a good time in a beautiful place.’’ Then she turns to her parent’s wedding picture [Figure 2]. Her mother’s wedding dress was made by an Armenian dressmaker in Aleppo, who copied the style from an American fashion magazine. The dreamy studio photograph with its luxuriant backdrop of heavy silk drapes gives no indication of the distressing times ‘‘Anatolian’’ Armenians were then going through. ‘‘She looks so beautiful,
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Figure 2 Victoria’s parents’ wedding picture.
youthful, and happy in this picture. My mother lived a good life, but she died young.’’ Victoria Hagopian and her sister, Mary, were young children when they lost both their father and mother; her mother’s foster family kept Mary, who was the youngest, ‘‘and I think probably the prettiest.’’ A friend of the family accompanied Victoria on the short sea voyage to Port Said. There she was met by another friend of the family who had a car and drove her to an orphanage in Cairo. When I ask her to tell me more about the orphanage, she sighs: ‘‘Well, I say it’s a maytam [orphanage]; but it was in fact a boarding school. I was an orphan.’’ I ask how old she was: ‘‘I was a little girl when I arrived in Cairo. I only remember myself as in a snapshot, like a dream.’’ There are no pictures of Victoria as a child in Cairo. The first picture after childhood [Figure 3] is one of her as a young adult taken at H. Chimchidian’s, an Armenian photography studio that remains practically unchanged in downtown Cairo. The photo was taken because a young shopkeeper, Krikor Hagopian, wanted to find a bride; one of the teachers at school proposed he should choose Victoria. A picture was taken of Victoria and shown to the young man: ‘‘He thought I had a good face.’’ On a casual walk past Krikor’s store, Victoria got
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Figure 3 The first portrait taken of Victoria (photo by H. Chimchidian).
a glimpse of her future husband and agreed to marry him. He was considered an ideal husband for Victoria, because Krikor Hagopian also did not belong to the established Egyptian Armenian community. Victoria explained that, unlike the Armenians who had left for the Americas and Europe, Middle Eastern Armenians have a much longer history of settlement. At the core of the communities in the region are the native Armenians and the refugee Armenians. The native Armenians in Cairo are simply referred to as ‘‘those who have always been here.’’ In general, they belong to families that were recruited from Turkey by the Sultan Muhammad Ali in the 1800s to plan and construct palaces and for positions in the military or government bureaucracy. Following the events of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire, there was a major demographic transformation in Cairo. The aftermath of persecutions, political maneuverings, economic ruin, and social destruction saw the arrival of convoys with Armenian refugees financed and organized by the Armenian Benevolent Organization and the American Near East Relief to the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In Egypt, families belonging to refugees who arrived after 1915 refer to each other as mezme´e, one of us. Krikor Hagopian was one of them. There is the wedding picture: ‘‘My mother’s guardians in Aleppo partly financed the wedding. They came with my sister to give me away. God bless
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them for that,’’ Victoria says. The sermon was held at St. Gregory the Illuminator on Ramses Street, across from the Ghamra metro station. Until the late 1950s this was a lively Armenian residential and business neighborhood. The wedding party was held at one of the Armenian clubs, and it was during all the long hours spent in the club’s kitchen preparing the dishes that Victoria was told the story of her grandfather, a man of reason whose wit saved the whole family; they also told her the story of her mother and all they knew about her father (which, Victoria tells me, was very little). The wedding portrait is the first picture of her husband. He was a quiet man, and she tells me his story. Beginning its work in 1915 with the first large-scale refugee crisis of the 20th century, Near East Relief collected orphans by the thousands. They were sent all over the world, and it was in these countries that the Armenian diaspora was created. Krikor, along with other orphans, was taken to Lebanon. From the shoebox, Victoria takes out a faded page from a Near East Relief poster with the following text: 1925 . . . the Egyptian government . . . opened the doors in Egypt for 3,000 more [orphans]. Two centers were established in Cairo and Alexandria and the director assumed the role of parent to the entire 3,000, supervising their moral and physical welfare, their education, employment, and recreation.
Krikor was among the 3,000 orphans mentioned in the text. Victoria tells me that Krikor did not remember how long he stayed in Port Said, but that he timed his arrival in Cairo via Alexandria to when he had begun to shave regularly, at either 14 or 15 years of age. He lived in an orphanage established by the Armenian Church in Moharram Bay, in Alexandria. He spent the days working for a cobbler, mending and polishing shoes, and returned to the orphanage to eat and sleep. Krikor soon left the place and rented a room on the roof of a building owned by an Armenian pharmacist. He worked in a grocery store, where he saved enough money to move and start his own shop in Cairo, which sold hard-to-find imported spirits, wine, cognac, and canned sardines. Krikor collected all the photographs, postcards, and pamphlets he could find: ‘‘The shoebox is his contribution to our family photo albums,’’ Victoria says. I recognize the images in cuttings and facsimiles from books written about the Armenian genocide. These are distressing photographs of human pain: disoriented and withered faces of men, women, and children of all ages; skeletal torsos in shreds; and masses of lifeless bodies. A photograph of a woman in rags carrying her baby catches my eye: ‘‘I have seen this on several book covers,’’ I say. Looking at the picture, Victoria tells me the following story: On one of the marches of death, when the Armenians were being deported and walking through the hostile Syrian Desert, a woman suddenly left the line and walked in the opposite direction. Others called out to her come back, but she kept on walking; then a woman shouted to her, ‘‘Where are you going?’’ ‘‘I am going to a funeral,’’ the woman responded. ‘‘What funeral?’’ the others asked. ‘‘God’s funeral,’’ she replied.
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Victoria studies the picture some more, then she gets up to make us ‘‘real Turkish coffee.’’ In the kitchen she calls out, ‘‘She looks like my good neighbor who died a couple of weeks ago. It’s really very sad, a real shame to lose such a lady in our neighborhood.’’ Victoria is a remarkable storyteller; anticipating another heartbreaking story, but this time about Mrs. Gregorian, her neighbor, I go to sit in the kitchen so that she does not have to strain her voice with another hurtful story of a painful loss: ‘‘You know Mrs. Gregorian was a wonderful cook; not cakes but real food. Now her bamia stew recipe is with her in the grave.’’ Victoria continues to tell me how Armenians never share recipes and that I must always be wary of any Armenian giving me a recipe: ‘‘There is always something missing from an Armenian recipe.’’ She gives me the cup of coffee and winks. ‘‘Don’t look so miserable. It is all about keeping pace with life. Pictures are nice, the way they help us muddle through tragedies. You suddenly remember a good neighbor like Mrs. Gregorian and her tasty meals.’’ On a much later visit, Victoria Hagopian teasingly mimics what she has now dubbed my ‘‘traumatic look’’ following her remark about her neighbor taking a recipe to the grave. When she was at school her English teacher—who was, in fact, as Armenian ‘‘as dolma’’—taught the children to say in English, ‘‘Every cloud has a silver lining.’’ Victoria likes that. When the time comes, her daughter Rubi will be the ‘‘keeper of this family archive.’’ Rubi will pass it on then to her children, who will pass the collection to their children, ‘‘and so on, and so on. They will remember.’’
THE WEIGHT OF PICTURES Gail Hoist-Warhaft has questioned whether photographs of loved ones have the same power to stir emotions as do lament-singers in Greece [2005]. She noted, and rightly so, that, whereas photographs are reproductions of ‘‘truth’’ that preserve and enthuse memory, they cannot replace lament-singers’ performances of grief, stimuli to memory or remembrance on the communal behalf. While, at the outset, Victoria’s albums and shoebox promise to be tranquil glimpses at snapshots from the past and anecdotes about loved ones and everyday events; before long, though, the photos evoke accounts that have the evocative power to challenge our more general reliance on photos as simply visualizing aspects of representations. We know that images of people and happenings by their very nature are inclined to be particular—arbitrarily associative, in contrast to representations that may be more collectively felt. Such emotional gazes involve both meanings and feelings stitched together with time and place; reviewing and visualizing her life, Victoria picks up the pieces and unfolds her life. Turning the pages of her albums, the sense of emotion is not always explicitly articulated; it is best felt in Rosaldo’s statement, ‘‘with reference to the cultural scenarios and associations it evokes’’ [1980: 142]. Emotions marked by hurting are both portrayed and evoked by anecdotes or statements contained in the realization that past lives are times that are painfully lost.
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Holst-Warhaft concluded, ‘‘Photographs remain what they are, the only variables being the fading ink and yellowing paper on which they are printed’’ [2005: 159]; but then we have Victoria’s case, in which photos do more than stimulate remembrance: they also absorb the intractable complexity of disruptive historical moments and wrestling with personal evocations of loss. Obviously, my use of ‘‘evocative’’ is meant as an attempt to describe an affect and not to recommend an analysis. Although Victoria was not a 1915 refugee and came to Egypt because of her parents’ early deaths, members of her family were deported, she herself experienced displacement, and her husband arrived in Egypt on a convoy as an orphan and a refugee. With other Armenians in the diaspora, Victoria and Krikor share the tragic narrative of genocide, deportations, and displacement; as such, it is the ‘‘glue that binds’’ [Panossian 2006]. And we do know that genocide, deportation, and rescue by humanitarian organizations are core aspects in not only a shared and remembered past but also a collective memory that is actively shaping Armenian distinctiveness in the diaspora. But there is more. We have what Herzig and Kukchiyan referred to as ‘‘different strands of Armenian identity’’ [2005: 2], or what Laurence Ritter [2007] called their ‘‘individual translations.’’ I am reminded here of a portrait hanging in Victoria’s apartment in Heliopolis, a suburb of Cairo. It is a large framed picture showing several generations of Armenian merchants and their household. Victoria is in no way related to the people in the portrait hanging over her old Singer treadle sewing machine in the sitting room. Still, she has that same picture in her shoebox, also wrapped in non-acid paper. She keeps the portrait because ‘‘It reminds my neighbors and me that we were respectable-looking before the catastrophe. When I have my neighbors over for coffee, they look at it, remember all we have lost, and we think of our loved ones and cry a little together.’’ At a mundane level we have an image folded up to everyday worlds and the ladies in the Armenian neighborhood of Heliopolis ‘‘enjoying’’ a sense of the past; but the portrait is also part of the collection, and displayed occasionally, if even informally, it evokes a deep feeling of communal attachments to a shared expressed story of enduring loss. With the portrait of the merchant family, which is considered here as an extension of individual memory, we are in the realm of Halbwachs’s collective memory. Memory and society were indeed his central issue; his argument is against considering memory as an exclusively individual faculty. To remember means to be attached to collective orientations that allow memories to be synchronized in both time and space. Not only are memories obtained through society, they are recounted, recognized, and located socially [Halbwachs 1980]. Cherished photographs convey visions of both dispersing out from and belonging to a point of reference; to remember, we need to recognize and understand particular relations, to know and, to a certain degree, share references. The distinction between history and memory was also made by Pierre Nora, for whom ‘‘sites’’ of memory are ‘‘any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community’’ [Nora 1996: xvii, trans.]. Consequently, Victoria’s photographs, which are located in albums or a shoebox, are concrete sites ‘‘where memory crystallizes’’ [ibid.].
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Nora made a slightly different comparison than that of Halbwachs: he looked at the difference between artificial history and true memory; he maintained that, by its very nature, memory is living, while history is not only constructed but also reconstructed. Unlike Halbwachs, Nora was less unclear on the question of memory as ‘‘being in the world’’; that is, the way memory of informal everyday life is created between individuals and sentimental attachments. For those of us concerned with oral testimonies and personal autobiographical memories made public, family albums and personal collections of newspaper cuttings or pamphlets serve as goads to large historical issues, personal memories, and aids to the verification of both, making recollections more faithful to the actual past. Perhaps the very notion of ‘‘seeing’’ other pasts obviates somehow our need for detailed explanations from our interviewees. Yet the impact of photographs in albums on our sense of other people’s pasts involves more than this. At times they portray only revered but frozen, static moments cut off from another time experience, conveying a general sense of diachronic connections. At other times, these albums are evidence of disrupted live—instant pathos and commemorations. Victoria’s photo collection functions as a verification of understanding and ‘‘being in the world’’ and also ‘‘knowing the world,’’ repeating accounts she wishes to remember, needs to remember, will not or cannot forget. Her albums and shoebox are testimonies infused with human detail, individual experiences, and historical consciousness. The historical consciousness found in the albums or shoebox involve ordinary experiences of accounts which are selected, expressed, and sheltered by the person telling the story of the photographs. Historical consciousness contains recollections that are kept alive because they are simply salient moments. Most people in the photographs are known to Victoria, although some are not; in a sense, her family ‘‘archive’’ remakes an imagined community that includes people who are unrelated, who lived in completely different epochs and places, belong to different social classes, or have no connection whatsoever. Still, they are on some level part of the same story. For Victoria, the photographs are structured around questions involving reconstructions from essential instances in her past and her losses. The loss may be that of an attachment to a world where her mother’s family belonged to the echelons of prosperous merchants in Turkey, from which she is now separated by historical rupture: loved ones are no longer available because of massacre, death, or geographical or physical dislocation. Ultimately, Victoria’s photographs tell us less about the finer details of events and experiences than about their meaning in her life and her ‘‘being and knowing’’ the world. Her collection of photos reveals only aspects of ancestral experiences, records of professional or domestic lives, near and close places; but they are sites that attach pasts to her present life and emotions. We find in the albums and shoebox a place to which memory connects to objects that Pierre Nora [1984] called ‘‘lieux de me´moire.’’ The significance of family photo albums lies not only in their capacity as observable aspects of people’s hurting pasts but also in their capacity to recapture and maintain memory that makes sense of individual loss. Looking, securing, and reflecting on familiar faces and other people in her album and shoebox, Victoria’s photos prompt associations and stimulate recognition of
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particular moments in her life; summoning the dead with their power to evoke a more individual memory and account of 1915. Constructions of memory are also about the ways in which processes of remembering depend on the possibilities of forgetting. This is not the same as stating that forgetting is retaining information; rather, it is an incorporated aspect of remembering or sorting out the past. Or, as Elizabeth Tonkin put it, ‘‘People talk of the ‘past’ so as to distinguish ‘now’ from a different ‘then’’’ [1995], and she was not categorical as to whether it is memory or history. Her main objective was to understand individual stories as social interactions. A fruitful outcome of her approach is that she listens carefully to the person telling the story. She makes a note of the location and includes temporality: ‘‘The representations of pastness that these interconnections involve include the occasion, when teller and listener intersect at a point in time and space, as well as the times recounted’’ [ibid.]. Tonkin was telling us that narration only exists within and can only be articulated through social relationships. A more visualistic approach than Tonkin’s takes us back to Roland Barthes, who wrote something to the effect that photography records what we cannot record existentially. When engaging with a photograph, one can never deny that what it reveals was there [1981]. Following Barthes’ lead concerning the way photographs relate to Victoria’s (and her neighbors’) past, we learn from this that the photographs do not necessarily say ‘‘what is no longer,’’ but only and for certain ‘‘what has been,’’ Victoria’s accounts are dependent on her recollections, the relationship between images, absent moments, and the felt relevance between the past and her ‘‘being in the world.’’ Once we open up to these complexities that photographs allow us to make, we find that what appears as simple family photo collections turn out to be also images of something else. When Victoria tells me that albums ‘‘are good for storytelling’’ or ‘‘let’s lament together,’’ memories take form, they proclaim connections, and her story develops. Let me quickly add what I think the reader already knows, that I am not concerned with the objective truth that photos signify, but with the subjective truth of private ‘‘workings of memory’’—individuals’ ‘‘postmemory’’ [Hirsh 1997], and the experiences and veneration of visions from the past. If we visualize further the relationship between 1915, its aftermath, and individual autobiographical memories, then Jan Assman’s statement comes to mind, that meanings in present references do not lie with ‘‘actual history’’ [2002: 8]; instead, Assman found meanings in the narratives that have been constructed by the people (in his case Egyptians) to account for the traces, messages, and memories they have inherited from the past. Traces are actual archaeological remnants, human bones and ruins of houses, while messages are the ‘‘symbolical signs,’’ the meanings invested by contemporaries around political moments and condensed to inscriptions or images. The task is to decode messages according to contemporary possibilities. Assman’s third historical category, memories, are defined as myths: they reveal how the past is remembered at any given point in time. As such, memories are kept alive so long as those who ‘‘know’’ the events are there to maintain those moments out there in society. Jan Assman’s categories of evidence are useful in the visualization of relationships between
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moments in history, the photographs, and Victoria’s memories, recalling her interpretations, her emotions, and reflections on enduring loss. One obvious constraint in the use of expressively powerful biographical accounts is that life stories are based on remembering and forgetting. They create and invent traditions; when evoking emotions, the truth is not altogether clear or coherent. An apparent reason is possibly the irregularity and fragility of human memory and the obligation to edit disordered human life. Using photographs as narratives is rather awkward, despite their significance, because they are visual stories; dialogues and remarks are carelessly conveyed while regarding the pictures; and yet it is just this method that contains the spirit and gives vitality to photographs as significant stimuli to memory. Motivated by Ricoeur [1984], my approach to narratives is twofold: that they are fundamental as instructions in human experiences through time, and basically also because it’s our only possibility to turn up the volume on individual evocative memories. One layer of meaning in photographs as stimuli of memory is to provide the immediate context, the form in which the photographs are presented and the use to which they are put—for example, to tell me the story of Victoria’s loss. The sense of emotive attachment to her collection and her capacity to remake its pastness create a setting of enduring loss for Mrs. Hagopian; she is indeed left to look at the photographs. It is partly true, as Marguerite Duras maintained [1987], that it is in the nature of photographs to endorse forgetfulness; they are merely evidences of death. But to suggest that photographs’ only link to loss is to bring the past back as fathoms from afar is to discard photos as only irrevocable history. I propose that photos make connections that people allow them to make. Just as we might examine ‘‘the social life of things’’ [Appadurai 1986], photographs can be explained by their maze of entanglements, the way they unpack the workings of memory. While it is true that Victoria Hagopian is simply there—‘‘abandoned,’’ as it were, to mourn—her collections of photos claim not only forceful longings but also belongings. She grieves for family, places, and events that have not merely deserted her and her neighbors in a deconstructed and fragmented haunted world. Her photographs, those in her collection and the portrait on her sitting-room wall, are of very ‘‘real’’ deceased persons who are cherished by the very fact that they belong to her personal story. Along with personal accounts or recollections, Victoria transforms images on photographs into private and communal records and narratives. In effect, her albums and shoebox are a historical account about a historical account; it deals with personal bereavement and an Armenian community of refugees and shared dimensions of postmemory. Photographs preserve her private memory and emotional anguish for the loss of loved ones and for a painful moment in the history she shares with others in her community. The form in which the photograph is presented also dictates what I think I expect of it: for instance, I expect ‘‘data,’’ that is, ethnography, that connects the world of the dead with the living. Photographs in the albums and shoebox are fragile sites containing stories of loss, yet we have also heard how Victoria fleshes out anecdotes and remarks that tell us something more about the range of emotional aspects that create a sense of balance. It is certainly rather simplistic to claim that, in spite of terrible experiences, individuals continue to cope with their life circumstances; yet we must
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Figure 4 Pictures carefully wrapped in acid-free paper.
agree with Veena Das that it is indeed an achievement that persons whose lives have been dreadfully disrupted are able to remake their life and cope [2007]. Despite the overwhelming and terrible pain we know Victoria has experienced, we also note her range of emotional responses; how she switches from life’s sorrows to savored recipes as one feature of what seems to me her sought-after and continued balance between memories of devastating loss, ongoing life, and healing—indeed an accomplishment. As fragments of personal memory and recounting of collective Armenian experiences, Victoria Hagopian’s photographs carry metonymic references to what it means for her to lose her world and her attachments to specific persons and particular events. Her stories contain people and sites that have vanished; there are moments in Victoria’s life absent from the albums but recollected by images in Krikor’s collection. Some of the photographs of suffering children and women that are wrapped up in acid-free paper in the shoebox have indistinct edges and are obscure [Figure 4]; this, Susan Sontag tells us, is pain regarded from a distance, as simply an image [2003]. But not to Victoria: the unclaimed photographs Krikor collected are together with her family pictures at the core of her sorrow and endurance: ‘‘Look,’’ she tells me, waving a hand at her albums and shoebox, ‘‘there is so much death in our life. God, will you not look our way?’’
CONCLUSION Photographs that Victoria keeps unfold a life; basically, they are also valid sources we might want to apply in questioning already recorded, documented, and written-down history. But this is not this article’s topic or intention. The issue here is that the use of the past in articulating photographs in Victoria’s albums and shoebox is not a way of explaining the present as a reflection of ‘‘a’’ past. The idea is that there are multiple ways through which historical processes found
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in the photographs provide material for various responses among concerned individuals—in this case, Victoria. In this article, I have been concerned with photographs as objects that evoke a painful global moment; I explain that in recalling loss, photography manifests bereavement as an activity—a ‘‘performance’’ of grief. Even if Victoria’s photographs are indeed just fragments, reproducing fractions of seconds of her world, nevertheless her albums and shoebox are indeed good storyteller portraits, and the images of skeletal children, destruction, and heaps of dead bodies fill in the gaps of her story and explain why possible photographs from her family albums are absent. Victoria Hagopian’s experiences are produced, reproduced, and articulated in photographs; they ‘‘have eye-witness status’’ [Lowenthal 1985: 200]. In conclusion, the study of these photographs as evidences of the repulsiveness of history needs to be framed in the works of those who have thought about the nature of photography, about photography to record violence and death, and about the violence itself. Victoria’s photographs reflect deeply on the traumatic roots of her personal and also her national identity, the role of memory and amnesia—history, but also mythical narratives. We find in her collection eyewitness testimonies, women’s experiences, men’s business, and lost places found again in her recollections and pictures. Finally, Victoria’s recollections try out Karen Blixen’s bold declaration of the redemptive feature found in recollections, no matter how sorrowing. Sontag, in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), advised that we not use the depictions of suffering and dying (e.g., as produced by war correspondents) for our own voyeuristic purposes, but approach them with empathic acknowledgment of the real pain the subjects were enduring at the time they were ‘‘regarded’’ by the camera. Simone Weil, in L’Iliade ou la poe`me de la force [Miles 2000], also warned that depictions of violence—as by Homer—are not to be used for celebration but for objection and with lament for those who are violated. Still, within such strictures, we accept the photographs as evidence of the massacres and the consequent history of lamentation of the survivors. A crucial next step must be to ask about our observations of the pain of ordinary individuals caught up in the cruelty of history, which renders them anonymous to us. I have drawn on one individual to explain how some victims of oppressive historical conditions cope with ruptures; still, we will need to go further and look more closely at how we, the scholars, gaze and theorize upon the sorrows of others.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Research for this article was supported by the University of Bergen’s (UiB) Global Moment in the Levant, and financed by the Norwegian Research Council. Fieldwork on which this article is based took place during my stay as a visiting scholar at the American University in Cairo in the winter and spring of 2006. I would like to express my gratitude to Nicholas Hopkins for inviting me. I want to thank Araxy Deronian for introducing me to the Armenian community in Cairo. (To protect privacy, all names in the text of the article have been changed.) I am deeply indebted to Mrs. Victoria Hagopian for sharing with me her pictures and biography. A draft of the article was discussed with Susanne Dahlgren, Ingvild Flaskerud, Annika Rabo, Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Katharine Lange, and Ellen Fleishman during our ‘‘Understanding the Middle East: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives’’ workshop at the Swedish Research Centre in Istanbul, May 2007. Bert De Vries graciously read and made significant suggestions, and I want to thank the anonymous reader for Visual Anthropology who helped me make this more focused. Any errors of fact or interpretation are, of course, my own.
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