2021/10/15 by Chahinian, Talar
paper · doi:10.25364/27.1:2021.1.2
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.