So, as participants in this year’s Memorial Workshop, as memorialists, we find ourselves balancing perilously between the remembrance of recent and not-so-recent violence, on the one hand, and the promise of a future that we are still struggling to imagine, on the other.
-- David Kazanjian
By David Kazanjian via Ararat Magazine
Editor’s note: Versions of this paper were presented on November 13, 2010 at the Pratt Institute in New York during a panel organized by the Blind Dates Project, and on May 29, 2010 at the Hrant Dink Memorial Workshop in Istanbul.
As we gather here this weekend in Istanbul, at the “Hrant Dink Memorial Workshop,” we find ourselves balancing perilously between two meanings of the word “memorial”: first, the remembrance of a past, in this case a past that was rich and brilliant but that ended so violently; and second, the preservation of a memory for the future, a memory that we are asked to carry on, sustain, enliven, and reanimate so that it may live in ways we are in the very process of crafting this weekend, and presumably well beyond this weekend.