NEW RELEASE
displaced
Photographs by Ara Oshagan
Text by Krikor Beledian
Published by Kehrer Verlag, Germany
Photographs by Ara Oshagan
Text by Krikor Beledian
Text by Krikor Beledian
Translation by Taline Voskeritchian, Chris Millis
Designed by Kehrer Design (Lisa Drechsel)
Designed by Kehrer Design (Lisa Drechsel)
Hardcover, 19 x 25 cm
160 pages
58 duotone illustrations
English & Armenian
ISBN 978-3-96900-014-4
160 pages
58 duotone illustrations
English & Armenian
ISBN 978-3-96900-014-4
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Photographer Ara Oshagan and author Krikor Beledian grew up in Beirut's Armenian communities formed by refugees and survivors of genocide. They came of age in families and streets fraught with the collective memory of extreme violence and dispossession. Both left Beirut decades ago and now return, carrying their own histories of displacement, to immerse themselves in its fractured urbanscape.
Oshagan wades through the spaces and narrow neighborhoods of his past to create dark and lyrical photographs that straddle the line between documentary and narrative: an attempt to articulate his own ambiguous relationship to place and history.
While Beledian, the preeminent author of the Armenian diaspora, drawing from his decades-long research and literary work about these communities, pens an original and poetic semi-autobiographical text based on his youth in the same spaces.
Set in Beirut's dense Armenian neighborhoods of Bourj Hammoud, displaced brings these two symbiotic and deeply personal works of literature and photography together: a unique collaboration interrogating diasporic identity, multi-generational displacement, and the ambiguities of narrative.
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Krikor Beledian is widely regarded as the most important poet writing in Western Armenian. A prolific novelist, essayist, and literary critic, he is the author of more than 30 volumes that have been published in the Middle East, Europe, Armenia, and the United States. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, and a long-time resident of Paris, for the last half-century Beledian has chosen to write almost exclusively in Western Armenian, a UN-designated endangered language. Since 1997, he has written a series of novel-length semi-autobiographical narratives exploring post-Catastrophe generations of Armenians in Beirut. The text for this volume, entitled “The Bridge”, is an original piece he wrote specifically for this book and is similar in nature and is set in Beirut in the 1950s.
Taline Voskeritchian’s work, including translations of the modernist Armenian poet Vahe Oshagan, has appeared widely in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle Eat; she teaches at Boston University. Christopher Millis is the author of four Off Broadway productions and five books of poetry, including translations from the Italian of Umberto Saba. Voskeritchian and Millis’ co-translations of Mahmoud Darwish and Krikor Beledian have appeared in London Review of Books and Los Angeles Review of Books.
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