Reported by Cody Schmidt, class of 2025
This talk is part of Duke Kunshan’s Statelessness Conference, a 2-day event held from December 1st to 2nd showcasing multi-disciplinary research conducted by faculty both in and outside of DKU. The Statelessness Conference focuses on the story of refugeeism in Asia and the Pacific during the Second World War.
Poet Peter Balakian (Colgate University) and visual artist Mary Behrens joined Professors Kolleen Guy and Jay Winter in an event for Duke Kunshan’s Statelessness Conference, speaking on the role of art in developing and remembering family narratives surrounding statelessness. Balakian and Behrens have family members who were stateless and feel a deep postmemory attachment to their ancestors’ stories, choosing to represent and connect to them through their work. Balakian began by posing the question: “What can we, as artists, offer to the complex problems of statelessness, the histories of refugees? What kind of knowledge can we bring in our arts?”
Both sides of Balakian’s family were affected by the Armenian genocide, with his grandparents sent into statelessness. He writes about his family and these losses and turmoils they experienced throughout his poetry, explaining that he has a “preoccupation with my own family’s experiences before and after the Armenian genocide” through the complexities of postmemory. Balakian presented three poems at the event. “History, Bitterness” was the first piece, which follows multiple narratives, from a conversation the poet had with a dying James Baldwin from a phone booth in Saratoga Springs in 1986 to his grandparents escaping the Ottoman Empire due to the genocide in 1919. These create a story full of interconnections, showing how the memories and trauma have been kept alive in younger generations.
He followed this with “Coming to Istanbul” and “Home,” two poems about his personal retracing of his family history through visiting his family’s home country and where they landed in America, respectively. In these, he explores the complex emotions he feels with this postmemory, as well as the sights and sounds surrounding him from Armenia and America.
After these poems, there was a shift to visual art, with Behrens presenting a series of images from her series “RUN.” The pieces are digitally and physically manipulated photos of refugeedom. These poignantly depicted images of families, refugee caravans, and the dangerous journey that accompanies statelessness. She explains that much of her work in the past 20 years has focused on her own dealings of postmemory, with her grandfather being considered an “alien enemy” in Britain, explaining that this has inspired her to focus on “what [stateless] people have gone through, and trying to make some kind of art out of these ideas of flight and historical memory.”
Professor Winter asked Behrens if this work was an attempt to make a comment on her family histories, attempting to seize the imagery when her own family memories are impossible to fully recreate. Behrens, in response, claims that she has “steer[ed] away from using too personal imagery or history” and instead chooses to explore the more personal aspects of postmemory separately from her art.
She ended with an acceptance of postmemory, acknowledging how statelessness has impacted her family and their collective identity.
“Our families, they live inside of us, whether they’re here or gone already, they are embodied in our lives, for better or worst.”
