Back in March 2016 I encountered a photo of a newborn in a lifejacket, being carried out of a refugee boat and onto a beach on the island of Lesvos, Greece.
There was no dearth of images of people fleeing Syria and arriving in Greece at the time. Images of refugees in boats, in lifejackets, in make-shift camps on Aegean islands, were all over the media. They were a product and a reflection of the state of world affairs at the time.
French literary critic Roland Barthes described this general cultural, political or social interest that we have in an image as studium. Studium defines the image as a vehicle for information on a particular situation or zeitgeist.
This one photograph stood out from the large field of studium-like photographs that flooded our screens and newspapers at the time. It struck a particular chord with me, and resonated through both my physical being and the immaterial body of my memories.
In Barthes’ terms, I had found in this photograph a punctum: a ‘wounding’, ‘piercing’, ‘stinging’ detail, a personally sensitive point that established a direct, and intimate, relationship between myself and the image.
Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images
The punctum was no other than the baby’s mouth, shaped in the small ‘o’ of an inarticulate cry, squished on each side by the inflated lifejacket. But that’s not the whole story. A punctum is like a taut string: it has two ends. It’s the force between those ends that keeps the string from going slack.
My end of the string was a story repeatedly recounted by my father: How my grandmother, Argyro, and her family, got to Cyprus.
My grandmother was born on 1 November 1922 in Mersin, a port city on the southern coast of present-day Turkey. She was born on the very day that the Ottoman Sultanate was abolished, the official end date of the 600-year-old Ottoman Empire. The Greco-Turkish War had just ended, Greece was defeated, and hundreds of thousands of Asia Minor Greeks were fleeing Kemal Ataturk’s newly-founded state of modern Turkey.
My grandmother was only a few hours old when her mother, father, and two older siblings boarded a British ship that evacuated Christian refugees from Asia Minor to Cyprus, then a newly-acquired British colony.
This is the story my father never tires of sharing: that his mother was a newborn on a refugee boat. It isn’t very long. In fact, much like the photograph of the crying baby from March 2016, it’s only a fragment of a story. Whole lives were lived before and after the events of both these inchoate narratives.
The March 2016 photograph moved me because it let me imagine something I was unable to before. In that baby’s crying ‘O’ I saw my grandmother. My grandmother, whom I only know as an older lady holding my baby self in another photograph, taken a few months before her death in 1990.
A grandmother who was a baby. And a baby, whose crossing may very well become the inception point for a family like mine.