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Lingering between defeat and hope: hearing the stories of Armenian women immigrants beyond the limits of transnational migration
Abstract
Last summer, when I was interviewing Siranus --a 45-year-old undocumented Armenian immigrant who had been working in Turkey for more than six years as a domestic worker-- she waited for the right moment to make a confession: “Look, you are a sister to me, I cannot say this to everyone, but what I have suffered most from here for six years is neither poverty nor the harsh conditions of life, what is most difficult is coming back to the land of the enemy, well, a former Armenian land which belongs to the enemy now. It is nothing but a defeat.” Besides deeply affecting me, Siranus’ words left me with the following question: How are the subjectivities of Armenian women immigrants shaped vis-à-vis the drastic migration polices of the Turkish State alongside the legacy of the Armenian Genocide? What does it mean for an Armenian woman to come back to the land of the enemy: is it either an ethical choice or a form of resistance? Is it a hopeful move or a defeat, as Siranus defines it? Referring to this dialectic between hope and defeat, in this paper my overarching argument will be that the significance of undocumented migration for Armenian women in the specific context of Turkey cannot be fully grasped without considering the historical component, i.e., the legacy of the Armenian Genocide. Along these lines, I will reflect upon what defeat might mean in this context and how it is embodied by Armenian women immigrants. For this purpose, in the first part of my paper I will critically engage with the existing literature on transnational migration and will demonstrate its insufficiency in interpreting the possible meaning of this “defeat” in the Armenian migratory process. In the second part, I will trace the radical hope (Garcia, 2014 ; Lear, 2006) in the story of Siranus reflecting upon the continuity and discontinuity of Armenian personhood embedded in this migratory flow.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
Armenian Studies