Dr. Talar Chahinian AmLit magazine / University of Graz

The Space in Between: Overlapping Narratives of Arrival and Departure in Armenian-American Literary and Visual Arts

Talar Chahinian

University of California, Irvine

Abstract

Having fled Lebanon during the Civil War of 1975-1990, New Jersey-based author, Vehanoush Tekian, the LA-based experimental filmmaker, Hrayr Eulmessekian, and LA-based photographer, Ara Madzounian return to Beirut as a figurative repository of layered trauma. In Tekian’s prose and poetry, Family Tree (1997), Of Nourishment and the Abyss (2000) and Dispersion Poems (2017), in Eulmessekian’s film Bruitage (2006), and in Madzounian’s Birds Nest: A Photographic Essay of Bourj Hammoud (2015), Beirut is presented as an aporia of migration, a space that simultaneously serves as a place of becoming and a place of rupture for Armenian diasporic life. Turning to the term “permanently temporary,” coined by anthropologist Joanne Nucho in her discussions of the Armenian district of Beirut, this essay will suggest that the concept of sedentariness rather than mobility, is more apt in framing representations of contemporary Western Armenian migrant narratives produced in the U.S.

Keywords

Armenian-American, Armenian Genocide, Beirut, Diaspora, Testimony, Trauma.

Cited Names

Nicola Migliorino, Ara Sanjian, Razmig Panossian, Vehanoush Tekian, Hrayr Eulmessekian, Ara Madzounian, Joanne Nucho, Khachig Tölölyan, Michel de Certeau, Hagop Gulludjian, Krikor Beledian, Raffi Adjemian, Marc Augé

DOI: 10.25364/27.1:2021.1.2

Our understanding of trauma is generally rooted in temporal dimensions that negotiate between an event’s moment of rupture and its belated revivifications. Discussions of testimony and its demands on the surviving witness are often framed within the tension between the event’s disassimilation within the symbolic order and its belated experience. Through the lens of Caruthian trauma theory, for instance, an event is seen as traumatic insofar as it is not understood by the survivor in the midst of the experience and, therefore, relived belatedly. While the location of the trauma’s revivification can be situated in a geographical elsewhere, multidisciplinary critical studies of post-catastrophe cultural production often place the emphasis of their analysis on the temporal gap rather than the spatial one. In the works of Armenian-American artists and writers, who fled Lebanon during the Civil War of 1975-1990, trauma is defined in spatial terms. The city of Beirut becomes the site that makes testimony possible due to its ability to accept overlapping narratives of displacement.

Having hosted the refugee camps that received the survivors of the Armenian genocide at the turn of the twentieth century, Beirut emerged in the Armenian diaspora’s cultural imaginary as a space of survival in exile. Following the 1915 genocide,¹ survivors were dispersed worldwide, with the largest concentration in the Middle East, namely Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, and Egypt. By the mid-1920s, around 40,000 Armenian refugees had arrived in Lebanon (Sanjian 154), a number which would grow to about 180,000 by the 1970s (Migliorino 145). Lebanon’s religious, educational, and citizenship policies under the French Mandate and the subsequent secularized state ensured conditions of survival for the Armenian refugees and afforded them a life without fear of discrimination or assimilation, as was the case for survivors in Western communities like that of France or the U.S. Within this structure, community institutions like the Armenian church or the rapidly growing day-school network functioned autonomously, and the survivor population had citizenship rights, which were granted by a 1925 decree (Migliorino 55). Having hailed from different vilayets in the Ottoman Empire, the Armenian refugees comprised a regionally, culturally, and linguistically diverse population (Sanjian 154). Yet the crammed living quarters in the camps and their surrounding neighborhoods collapsed the spatial and cultural difference among survivors. Now living in close proximity with people of varying backgrounds, the survivors’ current exilic condition and the genocidal violence that had spawned it became the shared identity trait that both forged a new sense of collective belonging and challenged their past regional loyalties. In Lebanon and in many other diasporic communities, therefore, post-genocide survival was marked in spatial terms that entailed the reconciliation of lost native land with the reconfigured regional belonging on foreign lands.

Historians like Nicola Migliorino, Ara Sanjian, and Razmig Panossian have argued that the unique conditions that allowed for favorable, physical survival in Lebanon also enabled the cultivation of Armenian culture in exile. Lebanon was where survivors found safety and subsequently, it became the site where the historical violence of genocide was processed and collectively memorialized. The nonrestrictive regulatory framework of the emergent country that provided protection for the refugees had peripheral effects. It permitted Armenian educational and cultural institutions to flourish and to establish strategies of cultural preservation. By the 1960s, Beirut was regarded as the Armenian diaspora’s intellectual center, the epicenter of Western Armenian’s cultural revival. In conversation with a transnational network of Armenian diasporic communities, Lebanon’s intellectual elite organized themselves around newspapers, literary magazines, publishing houses, printing presses, schools, language academies, theater troupes and other cultural organizations. They initiated efforts to standardize the Western Armenian language, produced textbooks to be used in K-12 schools across the diaspora, anthologized Western Armenian literature, and founded Armenology programs in higher education institutions that focused on training a new generation of teachers, editors, and writers². In other words, Beirut emerged as the nucleus of the diaspora’s political, intellectual, and literary activity³. Moreover, through its centralizing and canon-making efforts, it positioned itself as the continuation of the pre-genocide literary tradition and framed its literary production in national terms (Chahinian 281).

When Lebanon’s civil war broke out in 1975, it not only affected the vibrant local Armenian community, but it also changed the composition of the transnationally linked Armenian diaspora. In addition to the internal displacement of Armenians in Lebanon, the large exodus and migration to Western countries weakened Beirut’s centrality and created new diasporic centers of Armenian cultural life. Yet, for many writers and artists who fled Lebanon during the war, Beirut continued to have a localizing effect on their art. For many Armenians, the city which was once a temporary safe refugee-haven had cultivated attachments that were rooted in a fixed locale rather than in ideas of transitory mobility. In their contemporary works, New Jersey-based author, Vehanoush Tekian, the LA-based experimental filmmaker, Hrayr Eulmessekian, and LA-based photographer, Ara Madzounian return to Beirut as a figurative repository of layered trauma. In Tekian’s prose and poetry, Family Tree (1997), Of Nourishment and the Abyss (2000) and Dispersion Poems (2017), in Eulmessekian’s film Bruitage (2006), and in Madzounian’s Birds Nest: A Photographic Essay of Bourj Hammoud (2015), Beirut is presented as an aporia of migration, a space that simultaneously serves as a place of becoming and a place of rupture for Armenian diasporic life. Turning to the term “permanently temporary,” coined by anthropologist Joanne Nucho in her discussions of the Armenian district of Beirut, this essay suggests that the concept of sedentariness, rather than mobility, is more apt in framing representations of contemporary Western Armenian narratives produced in the U.S. by immigrant artists. My understanding of sedentariness lies in an exilic community’s potential to create a localized space. As Khachig Tölölyan has argued, the logic of sedentary, which is the basis for the concept of indigeneity, often gets dismissed in studies of diaspora communities for fear of it being linked to destructive forms of nationalism. However, it is central to the formation of diasporas that often cultivate local attachments in addition to their attachment to lost lands.

In the case of Lebanon, looking at informal Armenian settlements in what later became the municipality of Bourj Hammoud in Beirut, Joanne Nucho examines the Armenian refugees’ collective desire for permanence in the host country during the years immediately following the genocide and the role of popular histories that authenticate spaces of belonging. Her book, Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon, which argues that sectarian belonging in Lebanon is negotiated through property claims, suggests that the Armenian case entails a process of forging dwellings which she calls “permanently temporary,” referring to the temporary property rights the neighborhood’s inhabitants had received from the municipality. Speaking of Arakadz, an Armenian refugee settlement in the municipality of Bourj Hammoud, she says, “while not necessarily protected from the possibility of eventual destruction, [it] circulates as an image of nostalgia, an important locus of collective memory for Lebanese Armenians” (52). In contrast, popular histories deem Sanjak, a refugee camp with similarly temporary property rights, a backward space, not worthy of living in perpetuity (or permanence) in Lebanese-Armenians’ collective imagination. This drastically different framing of Sanjak, one of the few surviving refugee camps, in contrast to Arakadz, seen as a settlement, demonstrates the Armenian community’s need to territorially ground their diasporic identity in Lebanon.

Arakadz’s preferential standing situates Lebanese Armenians’ sense of belonging within claims of the sedentary. This form of belonging does not necessarily signal rootedness. Rather, it recognizes the transnational fluidity of diasporic belonging, while embracing a sense of permanence attached to the dwelling place. Referring to the Armenians of Lebanon – and more broadly of the Middle East – as an example of territorialized diasporic community, Khachig Tölölyan discusses the fading relevance of place in diasporic communities, which are increasingly becoming more mobile and more transnational. For Tölölyan, this dwindling commitment to place is also reflected in studies of diaspora, where the metaphor of global space reigns and favors concepts of migratory mobility, deterritorialization, and cultural hybridity. He pleads not to let the impact of mobility “obscure the role of place, of ‘sedentariness,’ of reterritorialization and of the institutions that link and mediate between the local sites and attachments of diasporas” (Tölölyan 141). He warns that this kind of oversight in American diasporic discourse could lead to the neglect of important areas of study. In the case of the Armenian diaspora, for instance, he argues that it could lead to the “neglect of the persistence, in the US today, of attachments to place and identity that developed elsewhere and that still retain a certain coherence” (Tölölyan 144).

In the works of Tekian, Eulmessekian, and Madzounian, that “elsewhere” is Beirut. While they live, produce, and publish in the United States, their works represent the sedentary attachment to their former dwelling place, a diasporic space itself. Here, the distinction I make between place and space draws from Michel de Certeau’s proposed differentiation which understands place as a distinct, stable location as opposed to space, which is composed of the “intersections of mobile elements” (De Certeau 117). Therefore, it is the situational operations and interactions that create space, or in Certeau’s words, “[i]n short, space is a practiced place” (117). Whereas Tekian, Eulmessekian, and Madzounian recognize Beirut as a diasporic space, organized and dictated by the ideologies and practices of diaspora institutions, their works more profoundly represent Beirut as place, highlighting stable and sedentary attachments to distinct locales within it.

The Written Word: Diasporic Attachment in Tekian’s Poetry and Prose

In her short story, “Ashkharh me ew kani me diezerk” [A World and a Few Universes] Vehanoush Tekian describes a New Jersey party scene where the autobiographical narrator encounters an old classmate from Beirut, occasioning a series of reminiscences that center around mutually shared acquaintances and an inventory of their diasporic paths following the Lebanese Civil War. Having settled in the States shortly before the narrator, Silva, the narrator’s interlocutor, advises her to forget about the nebulous notion of homeland. She says, “Forget this talk of nation. The homeland-complex has tired our soul. We’re Beirut-born. There was nothing wrong with Lebanon. It was a homeland, period. And what’s not to like about America?” (Dohmadzar 251) Silva’s comments refer to the multifariousness of homeland and the multiplicity of migratory patterns that constitute Armenian diaspora communities. In the case of the narrator, for instance, homeland can refer to her birthplace Lebanon, the birthplace of her grandparents in Western Armenia (now part of Turkey), the then-newly formed Republic of Armenia, or her newly acquired host country. Yet, the tension Silva draws our attention to is more explicitly between, on the one hand, an ideological, constructed homeland that places diasporic understanding within a nationalist framework and, on the other, the territorialized community in Lebanon, where the narrator locates her loss. For Silva, the ideological homeland burdens diasporic Armenians with a need to create attachments to place, forcing their itinerant lives to be perpetually marked by loss; Whereas for the story’s narrator, it is the very attachment to place that frees the diasporic Armenian of homeland’s ideological burdens.

In the poetry and prose writings of New Jersey-based writer, Vehanoush Tekian, the narrative voice is most often autobiographical⁴. Like the narrator of “A World and a Few Universes,” Tekian moved from Lebanon to the States in 1978, at the age of 30. Written in the stateless, Western Armenian language, Tekian’s works, produced in the United States, frequently return to Beirut as the site of loss that entails a double rendering of rupture. Beirut is the beloved city the author was forced to abruptly leave behind due to the country’s civil war. Beirut is also the city that, following World War I, received the author’s displaced grandparents, who were survivors of the Armenian genocide. Tekian’s fascination with these overlapping narratives of arrival and departure, localized in Beirut, drive the quest for home in her writing. As both a Lebanese-Armenian writer and an Armenian-American writer, she asks: What does home come to mean for a displaced people? How is home redefined, regained after an expulsion from a physical space on indigenous lands? And ultimately, does a secondary expulsion solidify or indefinitely nullify the possibility for home?

Having started her literary career in 1968, Tekian belongs to the generation of post-genocide Western Armenian writers who emerged as a result of the Middle Eastern Armenian diaspora’s cultural renaissance of the 1950s. As such, she comes from a decades-long tradition of diaspora literature that dwells on the notion of home in exile, often reconfiguring it as language or as cultural practice. Evading these symbolic representations of home, Tekian focuses instead on the tangible elements of home, as a structural haven, as house. In this context, the violence of genocide and war is imagined through the destruction of edifice. Loss of one’s dwelling place appears congruent with the loss of life, highlighting displacement as the survivor’s characteristic feature. In her autobiographical short story, “Tsugn er loghum vjid chrum” [The Fish Swam in Clear Waters], from the collection Dohmadzar [Family Tree] (1997), she writes, “It’s the house that enters through man, and not the man who enters a house. Oh Father, how many houses will you have to lose in order to find your place. Here, the table was plentiful, across from Ararat” (65-66). This lamentation on loss of houses comes after several passages that describe the bombing of Tekian’s family home in West Beirut. In these sections, Tekian, assuming the narrative voice, recalls and recounts arriving at the scene of the aftermath, walking through the ashes and debris, and assessing the catastrophic damage. Amid descriptions that identify burnt objects, the narrative dwells on the few items like silver trays and water jugs that Tekian’s grandparents had carried with them on the deportation route from their native home in Talas, Turkey. While the first sentence of this lament focuses on the transportability of home as an abstract category that resides within a person, the second sentence binds the idea of home to a house, a place, and brings our attention back to edifice. The Beirut house, now burnt to the ground, evokes the memory of a previous family house, similarly lost to a catastrophe. The reference to the plentiful table, marked as “here,” both confuses the reader and compounds the two references of homes lost. Set across from “Ararat,” the mountain that serves as an Armenian national symbol left on the Turkish side of the border and overlooking Armenia’s current capital, Yerevan, the plentiful table that the narrator refers to can have dual locales. “Here” can be either Beirut or Talas. In both cases, the figure of Mt. Ararat that is said to reign over the table, a family’s main congregation space in a home, is imagined. Mt. Ararat could not be seen from either Talas or Beirut, therefore, represents a symbol of Armenian national belonging. In other words, the passage presents the homeliness of Tekian’s house in Beirut as being akin to their family house in their natal lands, challenging the itinerary of loss often associated with exile and hinting at the possibility of diasporic rootedness.

In many of Tekian’s poems about Beirut, structural properties of a house are framed within a language that suggests indigeneity. Repetitive imagery of walls ground the narrator’s dwelling place to land, while images of doors connect memories of home to their surrounding natural environment. In poems that refer to displacement, the narrator remembers the lost home as being rooted in native lands. In the 1993 poem “Hors atore” [My Father’s Chair], originally published in Pazmadzup Ashkharh [Tempestuous World], Tekian writes, “The walls have collapsed of the city that the eagles fled / The shutters have been plucked, the native trees have melted / And the pleasure of memory wanders from land to land like a wounded bird” (Spiwrkakir 33). In this poem about loss and erasure, the narrator describes her childhood home as deserted, within an equally emptied city, destroyed by bombardment. Beyond structural damage evoked by images of collapsed walls, the narrator draws our attention to melted, native trees, emphasizing their indigenous belonging to that space. Similarly, in “Mama” [Momma], a 2000 poem originally published in Snunt ew Antunt [Of Nourishment and the Abyss], Tekian grounds her lost home in a seemingly indigenous locale. She writes, “Although the tall chimney walls of that ancestral house / collapsed to the ground, / In their place, there are now pillars of light and memory / Because you were mother, omnipotent” (Spiwrkakir 63). In this poem dedicated to her mother, Tekian once again conjures an image of collapsed walls, only to celebrate their resurrection in memories of happy experiences that those walls once witnessed. Here, by referring to the lost house as an ancestral home, Tekian frames her former dwelling place as a space of generational transference and inherited belonging. As such, its loss and her own exile from it are seen as an expulsion from a place of native, timeless attachment.

Tekian’s emphasis on edifice and attachment to territory develops through the imposing imagery of walls and doors. Walls defend, doors invite. Walls witness and archive, doors release. In Tekian’s poetry, the imagery of doors connects the lives contained within the frame of walls to their surrounding natural or urban habitat, reminding us that the sense of concrete rootedness we associate with houses is ultimately ephemeral. In “Moreninere” [Blackberry Bushes] originally published in Snunt ew Antunt (2000), Tekian writes, “But there no longer is a wellspring / To wash ourselves with cold water / Nor a thorny Blackberry bush carrying the songs of the village sun / Nor a door, where we would wait to receive the lavash / So that we write with our purple hands that had untangled the many knots of life” (Spiwrkakir 32). This poem locates the lost home in a village town of Lebanon where the poet’s family used to spend their summers. In it, rather than seeing an enumeration of objects enclosed in the spatial confines of a house, we encounter an outdoor setting marked by natural elements like a beloved blackberry bush, the sun, and a wellspring. In contrast to the fixed setting of indoor spaces described within other poems that highlight the archival quality of walls and homes, here, the environment described is dynamic and seasonal. The door of the house connects the narrator and her family to both nature and the social fabric of the community that lies beyond the walls of their home. This active environment challenges the permanence of a house and hints to the transitory nature of belonging. In many ways, the poem suggests that all attachments to place are inherently impermanent, despite the forced conditions of displacement caused by the civil war. It reminds us that within a bigger picture of life on this earth, rootedness is temporary and perhaps even more desirable for it.

Many of Tekian’s autobiographical short stories begin in present time New Jersey and switch back to the author’s past in Beirut. In these fleeting passages about her life in the United States, the author addresses divorce, single parenthood, homosexuality, AIDS, feminism⁵. In Tekian’s prose, they are presented through brief storylines that recount everyday encounters of the author’s life in New Jersey and New York. Many of the Beirut sections, on the other hand, lack narrative progression as their organizing logic. Rather, they are photographic descriptions of the past. The story called “Dohmadzar” [Family Tree], which gives the collected volume its title, begins by locating the narrative on a very specific site: an attempt of mapping, but on a multidimensional space full of sights, sounds, and the bustle of people. Tekian writes, “Perched atop the hot plateau of Beirut, this terrifying landmass is called Fern Shbbek National Cemetery, where the playground noise of the next-door Arab boys and the skeletons of the neighborhoods’ leaves spread like a net, embracing the tombstones” (Dohmadzar 265). Tekian’s description of an Armenian cemetery, referred in “national” terms by Armenians of Lebanon, has a grounding effect. Lebanon, once a temporary refugee stop for Armenian survivors of the genocide, is now home to an Armenian community territorially bound to its land through the dead. Having buried their elders in their new home, the Armenians of Lebanon are presented as having left their indelible imprint on the host country. This powerful image of integration is amplified by the proximity and overlap of next-door playground, where Arab boys play, their vibrant sounds overcoming the silence of the graves. The Armenian community’s spatial integration is thus paralleled by their social integration.

Often, in similarly conjuring images of Lebanon, Tekian presents us with drone-like views of the various neighborhoods of Beirut, drawing up geographical musings in descriptive language. In the same story mentioned above, she momentarily pulls the narrative back to her present time in New Jersey, in order to remind us that the images in the story are part of her memory work. And before continuing with her visual journey of Beirut, she says, “They had created a sub-world within the small world of Lebanon. The tricolor, the skulls of the martyrs, the songs of Sasun, Sose Mayrig, the soldiers of Antranig were symbols, with which we spoke also with song, and partly anew” (292). Here, the pronoun “they” has a distancing effect, clearly marking Beirut as an elsewhere and reminding the reader that the narrative is unfolding from a place of memory. Despite the interpolation of the narrator’s present time, the remembrance of the Armenian community’s territorial belonging in Lebanon once again locates the narrative in spatial terms. While many of the national symbols identified in this passage refer to intangible icons like heroes (Sose Mayrig and Antranig) or cultural practices like the singing of patriotic songs, we still see the image’s attachment to specificities of Beirut as a locale. The “skulls of the martyrs” for instance, refers to the memorial chapel dedicated to the victims of the genocide, built next to the main church in Antelias, Beirut that houses the Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia. The shrine exhibits skulls and remains of genocide victims, collected from deportation routes in the Syrian desert.

Lebanon’s centrality to Tekian’s poetry and prose written in New Jersey is marked by overlapping narratives of survival and departure. The trauma of genocide’s displacement foreshadows and haunts the secondary exile caused by the civil war. Like photographs, images of the author’s past in Lebanon appear in descriptive terms, rather than as part of a linear narrative sequence or plot. Instead of action, we get scenarios, snaps of events or conversations, painted from memory. In a special issue of the Beirut-based literary magazine Pakine dedicated to Tekian, Hagop Gulludjian suggests that in many respects, Tekian’s work is reminiscent of Krikor Beledian’s (another Armenian writer from Lebanon now living in France) work, in its suggestion that Western Armenian is an “unpeopled language” and can only produce photographic retellings of the past that center on the “teller” as individual (Gulludjian 14). Raffi Adjemian similarly describes Tekian’s work as exposing the distancing of the language from its people, its listeners, its consumers, suggesting that Tekian’s autobiographical writings speak inward, to themselves, rather than outward to an audience. He writes, “In one word, day and night we mourn the detachment of the language from ourselves, accounting it to our circumstances, whereas it’s us. We’re the ones intentionally distancing ourselves from the language, systematically renouncing its future. In reality, herein lies the Diaspora’s true tragedy. Tekian puts an end to the great lie” (Adjemian 124). Centered on herself and her memories, Tekian produces works that have a reflexive quality and speak to themselves. Her insistence on writing in Western Armenian suggests a type of diasporic literary production dependent on recycling: one that looks backward, but one that is also located in an elsewhere. In this way, Tekian’s American publications reveal the author’s attachment to Lebanon, both as a place of arrival and departure, and depict its Armenian community as territorially bound to that land.

The Moving Image: Diasporic Attachment in Eulmessekian’s Bruitage

Hrayr Eulmessekian’s 2006 film Bruitage similarly depicts sedentary attachment to Lebanon, highlighting the tension between rootedness and mobility inherent to diasporic life. Like Tekian, Eulmessekian was born in Beirut and moved to the United States in 1984 and completed both undergraduate and graduate studies at the San Francisco Art Institute. Currently living in Los Angeles, Eulmessekian produces films and other multi-media works that question diasporic identity and transnational belonging. Having witnessed the first nine years of the Lebanese civil war, the filmmaker often imagines the violence of war both as an origin and an endgame for Armenian diasporic life and cyclically returns to it as a mode of rewriting the past accordingly.

With a running time of 58 minutes, Bruitage zooms across a series of black-and-white photographs at a slow, deliberate pace, in what the filmmaker has referred to as an “exploration of pictorial backgrounds of old family photographs” taken before the civil war (ehrayr.com). Throughout the film, the camera eludes any visible foreground, making it difficult to decipher the context of the family photographs. Instead, the viewer is invited to locate the photograph’s content in the grainy close-ups of each image’s backdrop. This focused invitation has a grounding effect. The camera stretches over still images of outdoor spaces that include the soil of the ground, wild grass, rocky terrains, the beach, and concrete structures in what seems to be a construction site or an incomplete settlement community. The stillness of the image in contrast to the slowly moving camera ties our gaze to the landscapes being depicted. In the opening sequence, the camera pans over clustered concrete houses, stacked one behind the other, and some left incomplete. The structures are empty with dark window holes that gape back at the viewer. Themselves unoccupied, they seem to occupy the land, hinting at the potential of rootedness for newly forming communities. When we finally see people in the frame, they appear in dark silhouettes, indistinguishable as individuals. Moreover, they are shown as walking through a door along a concrete wall that stretches across the image and divides a field into two. It is not clear whether the people are arriving or departing. In contrast to the concrete edifice that forms a wall of arbitrary separation, the still bodies, captured in motion, seem perpetually in transit, stuck in this liminal space. They are both attached to territory and itinerant, just like diasporic bodies.

In the absence of the foreground of the family photographs, the viewer is also invited to depend on the audio track of the film in search of context. Matching the visual content, the sound effects of the opening sequence projects sounds that signal outdoor spaces, particularly in nature. We hear the chirping of birds, the buzzing of flies, the crow of a rooster, rain and the sound of waves. The quiet stillness of the photographs amplifies the calculated disconnect between image and sound and reminds the viewer to process the two tracks (the visual and the aural) as simultaneous narratives rather than integrated ones. After the appearance of silhouettes in the photographs, the audio track begins to reveal tidbits of conversation. In these instances, just as the faces of the people in the photographs are out of reach, so are the words of the languages being spoken. The spoken word comes to us muffled, layered by noises and voices from multiple directions, and often dubbed by the sound of a musical instrument or cars honking or driving in the distance. Although we can recognize a mix of languages, Armenian and Arabic mainly, we cannot determine exactly what is being said. The audio track of the film Bruitage is precisely what its French title suggests – the artificial reconstruction of natural noises and sounds that accompany the action in films, television, or theater. In the filmmaker’s own words,

the audio tracks, looped and laid down as background noise tracks, also of Lebanon, have been retrieved from online sources or existing home video tracks, which are played and re-recorded on open microphones along with the room tones and ambient noise of the different spaces and surroundings of our former home in San Francisco. (Hrayr Eulmessekian YouTube Channel)

The convergence of these incidental sounds or background noises and the still shots of the moving image on the screen provide the conceptual framework of the film. Ultimately, with its simultaneous progression of visual and auditory background content, Bruitage asks us to confront the deep background of family portraits and family histories of diasporic life.

“Deep background” is a journalistic term referring to information offered by a source that may not be included in the article but that nevertheless enhances the journalist’s understanding of an event. In Bruitage, Eulmessekian strips away everything but the deep background of family photographs. In doing so, he helps his viewers arrive at the transnational context of diasporic familial experiences and diasporic cultural memory. What we see and hear on the screen are the subtractions that diasporic memory makes in order to preserve that which it calls Armenian. In the case of Lebanon, a place of temporary refuge-turned-home for Armenians, sedentary attachments are often subtracted for the sake of preserving the mythical potency of the original homeland lost. The “deep background” in the telling of one’s diasporic self is the tension between temporariness and permanence that characterizes a diasporic space and between sedentariness and mobility that marks diasporic belonging.

The last image of the film presents a panoramic view of Beirut, as seen from a rooftop of a building. It is the only photograph of the film from which the camera zooms outward, rather than simply moving across it. In other words, it is the only photograph of the film that is revealed as a complete image. Here, in this totalizing view, we see the whole of the city, represented through the merger of its many walls, in the form of closely-knit buildings. The collection of walls no longer signals a kind of anthropological place, which celebrates indigenous belonging or attachment to land, like in the earlier sequences of the film. Instead, what we see is a city space, an animated version of all the places we have seen before. The imagined moving bodies that lie on its streets below present the city in motion, and, as Michel de Certeau would argue, as space rather than place. As the image zooms out from background to foreground, the film’s emphasis shifts from place– as defined by territorial attachment, to space– as constructed through quotidian cultural practices. The aerial view of the final scene is accompanied by background sounds that, at first, resemble distant city noises. In fact, the final audio track presents a layering of all previous tracks, now playing in reverse, suggesting a shift from sounds that depicted lived experiences to those that depict memories. The city, first as place and then as space, is seen as fleeting and impermanent. Moreover, the audio track projects a sound of an airplane taking off, leaving us, the viewer, stranded mid-air, in what Marc Augé has called a non-place. Arguing that late-capitalist phenomena produce non-places, Augé explains that in contrast to a place, “a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place” (77-78). For him, means of transport like aircrafts, trains and road vehicles host parenthetical experiences and are forms of non-places. By ending Bruitage – an otherwise formal meditation on the sedentary – in a non-place, Eulmessekian suggests that diasporic attachment to place entails both feelings of having left and always leaving. Having hosted the arrival and departure of Armenians, Beirut, for the LA-based filmmaker, exemplifies the temporary permanence of a diasporic community.

The Photograph: Diasporic Attachment in Ara Madzounian’s Birds Nest

Like Tekian and Eulmessekian, Ara Madzounian moved to Los Angeles as result of the Lebanese civil war in 1975. Birds Nest: A Photographic Essay of Bourj Hammoud exhibits a collection of photographs taken between 2008 and 2009, upon the photographer’s return to his hometown to visit his terminally ill brother, to whom the book is dedicated. In it, Madzounian documents the neighborhoods of Bourj Hammoud at the brink of dramatic changes to their demographic landscape due to the rapid migration of the Armenian population. With the looming threat of the once-vibrant community’s demise, his camera captures the almost mythical regard with which Bourj Hammoud is revered as a place of origin for diasporic belonging. Having emerged out of the refugee camps near the eastern port of Beirut, the district of Bourj Hammoud holds a unique place in the history of post-genocide dispersion and in the making of a collective Armenian diasporic identity. Often referred to as the “Armenian quarter” or the “Armenian ghetto” of Beirut, the small plot of land served as a site where lost Armenian villages and towns were resurrected in the form of renamed neighborhoods in the aftermath of 1915. The vibrant community forged in the following decades allows Bourj Hammoud to be read as a metaphor for the possibility of “Little Armenias.” Indeed, in the pre-civil war years, Bourj Hammoud was the epicenter of nation-building in the diaspora, where new myths, street culture, schools, churches and theaters flourished.

In Birds Nest,⁶ many of the photographs and the places they feature are presented as interchangeable or indistinguishable. While the images demonstrate the centrality of micro-neighborhoods to Bourj Hammoud, the photographs themselves are untitled, though an index in the back of the book names their district origins. A satellite image of Bourj Hammoud prefaces the collection, and the series of photographs that follows maintains the aerial view, while zooming in further and further. This approach offers the viewer the opportunity to peer and peek. Through the photographer’s lens, the viewer stands at a threshold and looks into stores, bakeries, and restaurants or peeks at balconies and rooftops. In these liminal spaces, thresholds are crossed from the opposite direction as well: the contents of buildings always seem to be spilling into the streets. Sidewalks are seen occupied by grocery pallets filled with fruits, vegetables or bread and the building inhabitants playing backgammon or eating sandwiches on plastic chairs and makeshift tables.

While for the city’s inhabitants the borderline between indoor and outdoor spaces is blurred in this way, a clear demarcation blocks the viewer’s gaze as the camera lens attempts to “peer in.” The residents of Bourj Hammoud often look defiantly at the camera, challenging the outsider’s gaze. In a shawarma stand, for instance, a young man, captured in profile view, prepares a sandwich while behind him, five men stand and stare at the camera questioningly. Only one of the men in the back is an employee of that establishment, marked by his uniform that matches that of the occupied cook. The others appear to be customers, residents of the district, safeguarding their local spot with their cold stares. In another photograph, an old man sits on a low chair in front of a grocery store, which looks to be a family business. Captured in profile view, he is seen busy sorting out grape leaves used to roll an Armenian dish called “sarma.” Next to him, a young man bends over to fill a crate with black olives. With a tilted head and raised eyebrows, he looks straight into the camera with a challenging stare. In another example, the camera peers into a shoe repair shop, where a cobbler is busy at work. His back is to a wall, aged with chipped paint and covered with pictures of Jesus and Mother Mary. Two bookshelves frame the picture, one filled with cassette tapes, the other with faded books. In the center, the cobbler sits and stares at the camera over his glasses, which are lowered on his nose. His hands are busy with work. Like the grocery store worker, the cobbler does not grace the presence of the camera with a pause from his work. On the contrary, he regards the camera as an intrusion and stares at the lens in contempt. Whether it be a young mechanic staring at the camera from beneath a car, a priest conducting service at a cemetery or a child walking with his grandmother on the sidewalk, the residents of Bourj Hammoud stare back at the camera, defying our gaze. We are foreigners, uninvited flaneurs in their midst. Whether guided by a sense of betrayal they feel toward those who have left them behind or a sense of duty to protect their communal attachments to the district, those captured in the Birds Nest draw a clear line between insider and outsider.

The exclusive sense of communal belonging demarcated by the residents’ uninviting gaze seems to be less motivated by ethnic homogeneity and more by attachment to place. In other words, the outsider is defined as she who is from an elsewhere. In fact, while we know that Bourj Hammoud is predominantly populated by Armenians, in the photographs, we cannot distinguish between the Arab and Armenian residents of the district. Territorial markers are what reveal the neighborhoods as Armenian diasporic spaces. In one image, an elderly woman clad in elegant attire and adorned by excess faux-bijoux captures our gaze as she’s seen crossing an intersection. In the background, we read the name of a corner shoe store called Talin, a feminine Armenian name, written on the storefront in French, Arabic and Armenian. Billboards, signs, and storefront names in general appear in multiple languages throughout the photographs. In fact, Arabic, French, English, and Armenian are mingled together so seamlessly that they eventually appear as interchangeable languages in the backdrop of the shots. “Service for All Cars: Zaven Avakian” reads a sign in English in the background of a shot that captures car traffic at a busy intersection. “Dead Sea, Jordan River, first-rate hotels, tours, breakfast and dinner included $315” says a travel poster in Armenian. Referencing the commemoration date of the Armenian genocide, “24 April” reads a black-and-red graffiti, painted on one of the background walls of a photograph that features a street vendor whose cart is marked by Arabic letters. In the background of a photograph centered on converging powerlines, a tricolor Armenian flag hangs from a balcony, next to a row of hanging laundry. Or a traditional triangular dome of Armenian church peers through an opening in an image that captures the contrast between an old and a newly constructed building. Revealed in the photographs’ background, the Armenian community’s presence is seen as being attached to edifice and landmarks, highlighting the possibility of sedentary belonging in Little Armenias.

The photographs in Madzounian’s Birds Nest are accompanied by a collection of essays, one of which is written by the filmmaker Eulmessekian, who calls Bourj Hammoud “a synecdoche for the diaspora” (133). As an example of an organized diaspora district, Bourj Hammoud serves as a miniature model of Lebanon, as a host country for a territorial diaspora community, which in turn speaks to the broader diasporic narrative of the region. In one of her short stories, Vehanoush Tekian writes, “There once was a time when the world was different, when Lebanon was the world” (Dohmadzar 25). Lebanon’s world-making potential for survivors of the Armenian genocide is captured in the works of Tekian, Eulmessekian, and Madzounian. For these Armenian-American artists, who left Lebanon during the civil war, Beirut remains the focal point of diasporic locality to be reproduced in art and in writing. Through their works produced and published in the United States, the writer, the filmmaker, and the photographer expose their attachment to a previous diasporic locale and depict territorial belonging as characteristic of diaspora. Lebanon as a site of both arrival and departure captures the dichotomous relationship between the sedentary and the mobile that defines diasporic life and allows diaspora communities to establish, in new places, a relationship that drives toward permanence, however fleeting that may be.

Notes

1 The Armenian genocide refers to the systematic massacre and deportation of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire, orchestrated by the Young Turk regime during World War I. An estimated 1.5 million Armenians were killed, and thousands were driven out of their native lands during the years 1915-1923.

2 The expansive diasporic cultural and literary apparatus in Lebanon focused largely on the preservation of the Western Armenian language. In an effort to consolidate the dispersed Armenian population’s identity as an organized diaspora, many intellectuals worked to standardize the Western Armenian language and to posit it against its Eastern Armenian other, used in Soviet Armenia. The mechanism used for this standardization and education project consisted of day schools, which numbered at sixty-three by 1958 (Migliorino 114); numerous printing houses belonging to the Armenian political parties, the Catholicosate, or independent individuals; the publication of textboo