Paper short abstract:

This paper retraces my encounter with ‘Yasmeen’ –a woman, mother, daughter, (ex-)wife– and her archive of legal documents to question the nature of repair from the different forms of violence –war, patriarchy and ethnonationalism– making up her archive and repertoire between Syria and Germany.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2011, Syrians have been saving and retrieving copies of mundane legal papers as official proof of legal identities, education and relations to kin in their attempt to flee war-torn Syria. These papers are fundamental in any migratory project where they are needed for numerous procedures such as getting married. They are also central in preserving a connection to family members scattered between Syria and the diaspora.

I retrace my encounter with ‘Yasmeen’ –a woman, mother, daughter, (ex-)wife– and her archive to capture the affective entanglement of these repositories with people’s life biographies and families’ relations. However, to what extent can this archive and its political history be disarticulated from state forms of knowledge-power? Yasmeen’s archive is shaped by Syria’s Personal Status Law and its patriarchal principles that record her only as the daughter of her father or the wife of her husband. Such principles have been violently reproduced outside the archive –in wartime Syria– and reinscribed ex-novo in the archive by Germany’s bureaucracy and its ethnonationalism.

The paper captures the different forms of violence –war, patriarchy, ethnonationalism– making up the relationship between Yasmeen’s archive and her repertoire questioning the possibility of repair. I argue that repair becomes an act of emancipation that cannot fully occur through a migratory project. Indeed, repair cannot be situated in the archive per se but it may occur in ephemeral, unfinished and unstable forms of mending such as the re-reading of the archive and the cultivation of a new voice and historical consciousness.