Honeyed Tongues and Hostile Intimacy: Engaging Trauma Across Migrant Worlds
Honeyed Tongues and Hostile Intimacy: Engaging Trauma Across Migrant Worlds
This analysis investigates how the intimacy of trauma moves between people and places. In particular, the article looks at how intimacy is spatially embodied by Iranian Baha'i migrant women as they leave both the familiarity and pain of homelands and negotiate new places and social relations. As a group, Baha'is have historically been persecuted for their religious beliefs, and since the Islamic revolution of 1979 have endured systematic and sustained surveillance and suffering. Drawing on Agamben's philosophical concept of sovereign power and bare life, the article examines the brutality of nation state intimacy upon Islamic bodies and trace how this has been carried in migrant lives, and enfolded into the intimacy of bodies, memories and domestic spaces. In these women's lives, intimacy moves and shifts between differing spatial and emotional levels of engagement, between the Islamic Republic's order of the correct performance of cultural intimacies, the shared social intimacy between Baha'i migrants, and the relations of intimacy and observation between ethnographer and informant. In examining how intimacy spills across differing domains, this paper proposes that intimacy is entailed differently across spaces, and cannot be taken for granted. Getting close to informants' experiences of trauma required the authors to pay attention to the intimate engagements they made with cloth, cooking ingredients and their sensual dimensions in domestic spaces, for it was within these small encounters between migrant body and the objects of everyday life that the pain of trauma was vested, and in and through them that relief from trauma was simultaneously sought. The authors' attention to such smallness penetrated the silences that marked spoken accounts of trauma, and alerted them to the ways in which the largeness of traumatic disruption is experienced in the smallest movements and practices of the body.
This analysis investigates how the intimacy of trauma moves between people and places. In particular, the article looks at how intimacy is spatially embodied by Iranian Baha'i migrant women as they leave both the familiarity and pain of homelands and negotiate new places and social relations. As a group, Baha'is have historically been persecuted for their religious beliefs, and since the Islamic revolution of 1979 have endured systematic and sustained surveillance and suffering. Drawing on Agamben's philosophical concept of sovereign power and bare life, the article examines the brutality of nation state intimacy upon Islamic bodies and trace how this has been carried in migrant lives, and enfolded into the intimacy of bodies, memories and domestic spaces. In these women's lives, intimacy moves and shifts between differing spatial and emotional levels of engagement, between the Islamic Republic's order of the correct performance of cultural intimacies, the shared social intimacy between Baha'i migrants, and the relations of intimacy and observation between ethnographer and informant. In examining how intimacy spills across differing domains, this paper proposes that intimacy is entailed differently across spaces, and cannot be taken for granted. Getting close to informants' experiences of trauma required the authors to pay attention to the intimate engagements they made with cloth, cooking ingredients and their sensual dimensions in domestic spaces, for it was within these small encounters between migrant body and the objects of everyday life that the pain of trauma was vested, and in and through them that relief from trauma was simultaneously sought. The authors' attention to such smallness penetrated the silences that marked spoken accounts of trauma, and alerted them to the ways in which the largeness of traumatic disruption is experienced in the smallest movements and practices of the body.