From Pre-Bolshevik Baku to the Post-Soviet Camp: Emigree Post-memory in the Works of Banine and Gunel Movlud

This paper explores Azerbaijani émigré and refugee literature through the prism of memory, violence, and trauma. It focuses on two women writers separated by nearly a century: Ümül Banine (Baninee), who left Baku after 1920 following the collapse of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic and settled in Paris, and Günel Mövlud, who fled her native Jabrayil in the 1990s as part of the displaced generation of the Karabakh war. These two figures frame two historical moments that mark, respectively, the beginning and the end of the Soviet era. Their literary works are examined through the lenses of collective and individual memory, trauma and post-trauma, pre- and post-bolshevik historical rupture, and the neurobiology of violence. Alongside them, the paper briefly considers a third voice – Dilbar Axund­zadə – whose memoir of life with the repressed poet Mikayıl Müşfiq reflects a different con­dition: not exile, but internal survival under Soviet repression. Although connec­ted to the same cultural space, these women represent distinct historical periods and modes of displacement, revealing how personal destinies are shaped, remembered, and narrated under radically different political regimes. While Banine’s narrative preserves an episode of internal displacement experienced by her mother in 1905, during the early phase of the Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict in Baku and other Azer­baijani territories, Mövlud’s narrative presents a different configuration of violence and memory: not cosmopolitan exile but internal displacement in the post-Soviet period. Research methods: Both individual and collective memory are selective and interpretive; they are never static but always reconstructive. Émigré and refugee literature foregrounds this process with particular clarity. Banine’s Days in the Caucasus transforms childhood upheaval into an ironic and reflective narrative, while Mövlud’s The Camp fragments refugee experience into intense sensory episodes – mirroring neurobiological re­search on trauma, which shows that violence imprints memory in sharpened yet dis­continuous traces. Stress hormones heighten certain recollections while disrupting nar­rative coherence, and adolescence, as a period of neural plasticity, renders such memories especially enduring. Banine’s memoir reveals generational tensions within a multicultural household: her grandmother’s conservatism, her father’s cosmopolitan aspirations, and the coexistence of German, Russian, and English alongside Azerbaijani tradi­tions. Christmas trees stand next to Novruz celebrations, and a German governess introduces Christian rituals into a Muslim family home. At the same time, the text ex­poses darker layers of postmemory: the Armenian–Azerbaijani clashes of 1905 and 1918-1920 resurface in children’s “games” played with their half-Armenian friend Tamara. What adults leave unspoken, children reenact symbolically. As Marianne Hirsch defines it, postmemory transmits trauma to those who did not directly experience it but nonetheless inherit its emotional weight. While Banine’s narrative preserves an episode of internal displacement ex­perienced by her mother in 1905, during the early phase of the Armenian–Azerbai­jani conflict in Baku and other Azerbaijani territories, Mövlud’s narrative presents a different configuration of violence and memory: not cosmopolitan exile but internal displacement in the post-Soviet period. Her camp narrative depicts weddings reduced to survival strategies, improvised libraries in cramped “kletka” rooms, and mosques built by foreign sponsors. Here, the rupture is not between generations but between two historical conditions – the stability of the Soviet past and the fragmentation of post-war displacement. Trauma becomes embodied: Mövlud describes a paralyzed girl repeatedly abused while others avert their gaze. This scene resonates with trau­ma theory’s “freeze response,” in which neither fight nor flight is possible and the bo­dy and psyche enter a state of paralysis.