Distinguished Scholars Speak on Survivor Meaning

By Taleen Babayan

A symposium on survivor meaning, which featured reputable leaders in the field of study, including Peter Balakian, Jay Lifton and Marianne Hirsch, was held at Columbia University on Wednesday evening, December 4, in an event hosted by the Armenian Center at Columbia University.

Titled “Survivor Meaning: After the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima,” the panel delved into the aftermath of the survivors of these human catastrophes as they searched for an understanding of their tragic experiences.

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, which was the case of his grandmother Nafina, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide as a “way of engaging conversation in survivor experience.”

A resident of Diyarbekir during the time of the Armenian 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 of 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 over 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 the encounter itself to 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’s 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 himself 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.”

Lifton observed that it was a series of bearing witness since Nafina experienced the catastrophe and retold the story through the means of her legal claim. “What is unsuccessful in a legal sense, starts legal ramifications of the witness, and there’s something moving about that. “

Lifton 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.”

The presentation was followed by lively audience questions and the aftermath conversations went on well into the evening in what was the conclusion to a

memorable semester of events hosted by the Armenian Center at Columbia.

Caption:

Professor Peter Balakian recounting the story of his grandmother Nafina’s escape during the Armenian Genocide

Distinguished Scholars Speak on Survivor Meaning