Violence, Silence, and Migration: Family Figurations in the Biographical Narratives of Assyrian Migrants from Iraq and Syria

In this paper, I examine how family figurations influence the thematization or silencing of violent experiences in tightly controlled migrant societies where discussing violence is often taboo. I focus particularly on how this taboo impacts biographical narratives. Based on two case reconstructions of an Assyrian-Iraqi woman and an Assyrian-Syrian man, I explore how violence is processed within families and communities.

These case studies illustrate how violence and other forms of domination and control are either silenced or cautiously thematized in biographical narratives, depending on the social and political power relations in place. This paper demonstrates the importance of biographical interviews in uncovering the mechanisms that govern speaking and silencing following violent conflicts and migration.

In the first case discussed, the inability to resist power relations outside the family leads to a state of silence, where the inability to react outwardly is transformed into internalized violence within the family, manifesting as domestic abuse. This internalized violence is rarely discussed and, when it is, only cautiously and indirectly. In the second case, collective memories of ethnic defense, passed down through the grandfather's narratives, result in outward expressions of violence for self-protection. These examples illustrate how, depending on social and familial contexts, violence is either turned inward or directed outside the family.

My presentation is based on the first results of research for the project “Migrant arrival contexts in transregional comparison”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).