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Distinguished Scholars Speak on `Survivor Meaning'
http://www.armenianweekly.com/2013/12/31/distinguished-scholars-speak-on-survivor-meaning/
By Taleen Babayan // December 31, 2013
NEW YORK - On Wed., Dec. 4, the Armenian Center at Columbia University
hosted a symposium on survivor meaning featuring reputable leaders in
the field of study, including Peter Balakian, Jay Lifton, and Marianne
Hirsch. Titled `Survivor Meaning: After the Armenian Genocide, the
Holocaust, and Hiroshima,' the panel delved into the experience of
survivors as they searched for an understanding of their tragic
experiences.
Peter Balakian recounting the story of his grandmother's escape during
the Armenian Genocide
Acclaimed poet and prize-winning author, Balakian was introduced by
Marianne Hirsch, the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University, who served as the
moderator of the panel and who has written several important books on
trauma and memory and the Holocaust.
Balakian presented a personal and inherited familial narrative - the
case of his grandmother Nafina, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide - as
a `way of engaging conversation in survivor experience.'
A resident of Diyarbakir/Dikranagerd during the genocide, her family's
homes and properties were looted and confiscated, and she was witness
to the massacre of her family and community. Nafina survived a forced
march, in which everyone in her family was killed.
Having arrived in Aleppo in the fall of 1915, she began to compile
affidavits for what would be a human rights suit against the Turkish
government for all the losses endured by her family. Balakian read his
grandmother's insurance claim from his New York Times bestselling
memoir,Black Dog of Fate. He said the claim, which she filed when she
arrived in the United States, `contributed to the understanding of a
survivor in the immediate aftermath of an enormous encounter with mass
killing, rape, starvation, famine, and death.'
`She was witness to the truth,' said Balakian, who is the Donald M.
and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities at Colgate
University and the Ordjanian Visiting Professor in Armenian Studies at
Columbia University.
Scholar, psychiatrist, and historian Robert Jay Lifton, who has
written more than 20 books on trauma, survival, and violence, defined
a survivor as someone who has in some way encountered death, witnessed
it, and at the same time remained alive.
`There's a triumph in surviving because one stays alive,' said Lifton,
Distinguished Professor Emeritus at CUNY/Graduate Center and John Jay
College for Criminal Justice. `It's necessary to give meaning to that
catastrophe if one is to find meaning in the rest of one's life.'
He said survivors of the bombing in Hiroshima, Japan, after World War
II experienced a lifetime of `death-haunted imagery' from both the
encounter itself and the effects of the tragedy that carried over to
the next generation.
`From survivor meaning comes a survivor mission which one carries out
in order to assert that meaning,' said Lifton, who concluded his
presentation by returning to Nefina's story. `There was a heroic
struggle by this woman who sought to oppose the forces of destruction
in her life. I don't think there could be a better moral principle in
which to base our world.'
Following Balakian and Lifton's presentations, Hirsch posed follow-up
questions, including why Nafina `chose a legal claim, not to seek
repair but to voice the wrong and to commemorate the dead.'
`It's a stay against being expunged or annihilated,' said Balakian,
who remarked that nothing came of the claim and that the document
remained in a dresser drawer for 60 years until he found it. `In cases
of mass killings and genocides, the survivors end up taking the
ethical role, and family is essential. This claim has a graveyard
dimension to it.'
Nafina experienced the catastrophe and retold the story through the
means of her legal claim, Lifton said. `What is unsuccessful in a
legal sense starts legal ramifications of the witness, and there's
something moving about that.'
He noted that calamities like the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the
Armenian Genocide annihilate meaning along with human beings and
structures.
`As human beings, we are meaning-hungry creatures,' said Lifton.
`That's why the struggle for meaning is so difficult and poignant and
painful. But it always goes on because that's how we function
mentally. We must recreate all that we perceive.'
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
http://www.armenianweekly.com/2013/12/31/distinguished-scholars-speak-on-survivor-meaning/
By Taleen Babayan // December 31, 2013
NEW YORK - On Wed., Dec. 4, the Armenian Center at Columbia University
hosted a symposium on survivor meaning featuring reputable leaders in
the field of study, including Peter Balakian, Jay Lifton, and Marianne
Hirsch. Titled `Survivor Meaning: After the Armenian Genocide, the
Holocaust, and Hiroshima,' the panel delved into the experience of
survivors as they searched for an understanding of their tragic
experiences.
Peter Balakian recounting the story of his grandmother's escape during
the Armenian Genocide
Acclaimed poet and prize-winning author, Balakian was introduced by
Marianne Hirsch, the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University, who served as the
moderator of the panel and who has written several important books on
trauma and memory and the Holocaust.
Balakian presented a personal and inherited familial narrative - the
case of his grandmother Nafina, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide - as
a `way of engaging conversation in survivor experience.'
A resident of Diyarbakir/Dikranagerd during the genocide, her family's
homes and properties were looted and confiscated, and she was witness
to the massacre of her family and community. Nafina survived a forced
march, in which everyone in her family was killed.
Having arrived in Aleppo in the fall of 1915, she began to compile
affidavits for what would be a human rights suit against the Turkish
government for all the losses endured by her family. Balakian read his
grandmother's insurance claim from his New York Times bestselling
memoir,Black Dog of Fate. He said the claim, which she filed when she
arrived in the United States, `contributed to the understanding of a
survivor in the immediate aftermath of an enormous encounter with mass
killing, rape, starvation, famine, and death.'
`She was witness to the truth,' said Balakian, who is the Donald M.
and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities at Colgate
University and the Ordjanian Visiting Professor in Armenian Studies at
Columbia University.
Scholar, psychiatrist, and historian Robert Jay Lifton, who has
written more than 20 books on trauma, survival, and violence, defined
a survivor as someone who has in some way encountered death, witnessed
it, and at the same time remained alive.
`There's a triumph in surviving because one stays alive,' said Lifton,
Distinguished Professor Emeritus at CUNY/Graduate Center and John Jay
College for Criminal Justice. `It's necessary to give meaning to that
catastrophe if one is to find meaning in the rest of one's life.'
He said survivors of the bombing in Hiroshima, Japan, after World War
II experienced a lifetime of `death-haunted imagery' from both the
encounter itself and the effects of the tragedy that carried over to
the next generation.
`From survivor meaning comes a survivor mission which one carries out
in order to assert that meaning,' said Lifton, who concluded his
presentation by returning to Nefina's story. `There was a heroic
struggle by this woman who sought to oppose the forces of destruction
in her life. I don't think there could be a better moral principle in
which to base our world.'
Following Balakian and Lifton's presentations, Hirsch posed follow-up
questions, including why Nafina `chose a legal claim, not to seek
repair but to voice the wrong and to commemorate the dead.'
`It's a stay against being expunged or annihilated,' said Balakian,
who remarked that nothing came of the claim and that the document
remained in a dresser drawer for 60 years until he found it. `In cases
of mass killings and genocides, the survivors end up taking the
ethical role, and family is essential. This claim has a graveyard
dimension to it.'
Nafina experienced the catastrophe and retold the story through the
means of her legal claim, Lifton said. `What is unsuccessful in a
legal sense starts legal ramifications of the witness, and there's
something moving about that.'
He noted that calamities like the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the
Armenian Genocide annihilate meaning along with human beings and
structures.
`As human beings, we are meaning-hungry creatures,' said Lifton.
`That's why the struggle for meaning is so difficult and poignant and
painful. But it always goes on because that's how we function
mentally. We must recreate all that we perceive.'
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress