Behind the thousands of certificates of Armenian exiles passing through Marseille lie the traces of a genocide and the countless paths taken by its survivors. In the margins, the erasures and silences of administrative forms read the end of a world and survival.
This book is the result of an encounter, that of a historian and an archive. Fifteen boxes, twelve thousand documents in the basement of the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons, in the very building which welcomes today’s asylum seekers. The duplicates of certificates of Armenian exiles which are at the center of the work were for the most part issued between 1929 and 1941 by the Marseille office of the Office for Armenian Refugees. A face-to-face with a mass of documentation reminiscent of that of Claire Zalc with the files of denaturalized people from Vichy, of Mathias Gardet with those of young Algerians from Savigny-sur-Orge or even “ the intrusion » by Peter Gatrell in the vast archives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
The certificate has the dry appearance, the monotony of the administrative ordinary and the norm: surname, first name, date and place of birth. And yet, this document triggered in Anouche Kunth a desire to “ scrapping with its rough edges, its gaps and unsaid » (pp. 16-17). He pushed the historian to “ challenge yourself with a certificate’s semiology » (p. 11) in order to capture – surprise says the author – the traces of the lives of those who are the object. Here, the archive therefore becomes the starting point for questioning. The source is obsessive, heady to use the words of Clémentine Vidal-Naquet in her presentation of the collection she directs. A collection within which On the verge of erasure finds its place perfectly, due to its ambition to immerse oneself in depth in an archive and its materiality, to offer both history and “ the historical experience » (p. 19), and to propose more particularly, alongside Jérémy Foa, Hélène Dumas and more recently Anne-Laure Porée, a sensitive writing of mass violence.
Facing the source
Kunth is confronted with the silences of the documents, the ruptures in the collection which hosts them, but also the vagueness which surrounds certain parts of the history of the organization which produces them: the Armenian Office was created in 1924 (but the oldest document dates from 1929), it was deleted by Vichy in 1942 and resumed its activities in 1945 before the overhaul of the asylum system in 1951. From then on, she sometimes looked for answers in other archives in order to fill gaps, give depth to certain stories. Names, which have become compasses or breadcrumbs, which she finds with emotion in the passport registers of the Departmental Archives of Bouches-du-Rhône, in the correspondence from an orphanage in Aleppo which found refuge in the Nansen Fund of the League of Nations, or even in the passenger lists of Ellis Island, “ border island » from the port of New York (p. 183) and an inevitable and uncertain step for those who wanted to settle on American territory after their passage in France.
But the historian also accepts with open arms the fragmentary nature of the source at the center of the work and the groping, fragile hypotheses and sometimes errors that accompany reading it. This unresolved part is often at the forefront of a rigorous and methodical history – even quantitative (as on the evolution of the places of birth of exiles or their places of residence in Marseille) – but which does not refuse to “ recognize that an imagination is exercised in contact with the archive » (p. 12) and the questions it raises. Some of these questions remain unanswered. Those that accompany migratory projects and what shapes them: were Kenel, Mariam and Marguerite seeking to reach Spain, the United States or France ? Why did Stépan, after New York, Constantinople and Buenos Aires, end up in Marseille ? And these questions which are almost inherent to the destruction of families and the disappearance of a world: these three points which replace the name of a mother bear the mark of absence, but what an absence ?
Erasures and blanks
The analysis of the certificates that Kunth offers is of rare finesse and exhaustiveness. THE “ solid writing » (p. 163) of typewriters but also those more uncertain in the margins of the sheet, annotations, erasures, botched words which populate this “ pencil territory » so valuable for the historian. THE “ usual formalities » which, beyond their banality, are so many “ markers of absence, clues of destruction » (p. 183) ; an act as innocuous as saying one’s name, for example, indeed bears the traces of persecution and the clandestinity that often accompanied it. But also these gaps that surface, these “ fragments of experience » which are as many “ keepsake knots » (p. 77) jarring in the coldness of daily administrative life.
Kunth goes beyond the typed words, even beyond the erasures around the edges of the sheet. Everything in the source is scrutinized because, “ when there’s nothing left, it’s all in the details » (p. 85). The ellipsis and the boxes left empty bear witness to uncertainty, the destruction of filiations and therefore the disappearance of a world. Identity photos, central to regimes of identification and surveillance of foreigners where the body becomes a border, reveal looks – which are “ sentences that we would like to know how to transcribe » (p. 26) – but also these tiny traces, tattoos, scars, which are the probable marks of cruelty and genocidal degradation. The typists, for their part, become “ skin designs » (p. 62) which recall the obsession with control and precision of the migratory regimes of the interwar period and the walls of paper that they erected. Here, the historian, who draws on literature throughout the book (unsurprisingly we come across George Pérec and Patrick Modiano), also makes references to art history: The Passport (1953), the fake ID photo made entirely of Saul Steinberg’s fingerprints or even Zwei Gänge (1932), the watercolor by Paul Klee (932) which, much more than simple illustrations, offer avenues for reflection, becoming keys to the interpretation of absence and the unspeakable. A dialogue between the archive, photography and artistic practice that Anouche Kunth has extended, elsewhere, through the prism of dance.
Behind the administrative ordinary, annihilation and exile
The story that is told throughout the pages is above all that of the Armenian genocide and its reverberations. The story of its survivors including “ fragmented realities » and the trajectories are drawn – often in dotted lines – and whose emotions appear implicitly behind the “ function words » (p. 8) certificates. The story of his countless murdered lives which, if they certainly do not take on the depth of “ paper corpses » by Kirsten Weld, haunt the archive. And finally the story of the agents of the Armenian Office (like Toross Guédiguian, director for almost all of the thirty years of existence of the Marseille office), who seek to defend the individual and collective rights of Armenian exiles in France. By transcribing the words of the survivors, by naming the individual deaths, by sometimes becoming witnesses themselves, and by revealing some “ subjective traces, sometimes intimate » (p. 79), these agents make the certificate a space of testimony, the memorial of a “ world abolished » (p. 81), a fragile bulwark against the “ double disappearance » (p. 133) which threatens the victims of genocidal violence. Because the demands for clarity from the administrations – whether that of France or those of the countries towards which the exile wished to continue his journey – oblige the survivors to a “ return to oneself » (p. 69), to recount the annihilation and mass death then the spoliations and denaturalizations of which they were the targets.
It is therefore also a story of institutional responses to forced migration and the emergence of an asylum regime which is written here: through the mass of certificates, Kunth captures the slow and imperfect management of statelessness by the League of Nations and Western state administrations, the progress and inadequacies of the protection mechanisms which were then constructed.
Land of welcome, land of passage
Finally, it is a global history of Armenian migratory movements between the wars. These journeys have in common Marseille and France as a land of welcome or passage, often indifferent to the suffering of exiles, but they are not confined there. Because the certificates of course show what happened before, these “ unstable worlds » that the survivors hastily left behind them, the disappeared villages that must be named, Constantinople, a separate territory, or even Aleppo, both key to the genocidal process and unexpected refuge. But we can also see – the certificate being by nature a “ future request » (p. 37) – which could have happened afterwards because, for many, Marseille is only a point in an uncertain trajectory, a transition that must not be fossilized (p. 151). For some, it was a hopeful repatriation to what became the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. For others, many more numerous, their native land is moving away: towards the United States, whose exclusionary migration policies are essential to understanding the paths of exile, but also towards Argentina or even Mexico.
On the verge of erasure is a major contribution to the history of the Armenian genocide and the history of migration and asylum which are in dialogue throughout the book. Continuing his previous work, Kunth addresses genocide and its repercussions at the level of the individual and the family and is part of an embodied history of mass violence. It is also part of recent efforts to take this history out of its national frameworks and to better think about persecution and migration together. This decompartmentalization is, for example, constitutive of the Lubartworld project directed by Claire Zalc and which seeks to reconstruct all of the individual journeys of the Jewish inhabitants of the Polish town of Lubartów from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Beyond its certain historiographical contribution, On the verge of erasure is also a valuable book on historical experience. The sensitive story of immersion in an archive where the slightest sign, the tiny gap, the almost imperceptible detail become material for thinking, for making history. But also to save from oblivion this disappeared world, these destroyed families, these untraceable villages which emerge from the administrative ordinary.