In 1997, psychiatrist and professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, Dr. Ian Stevenson, published his life’s work, Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects. The book was the result of fieldwork in Asia, Turkey, Lebanon, Africa, and Alaska, in which he interviewed and investigated claims of reincarnation with particular attention to the correspondence of birthmarks on the reincarnated subject to the circumstances of their death in their previous life. Stevenson’s book is a strange and beautiful mix of narrative literature, forensic analysis, biological data, historiography, theology, and conflicting scientific hypotheses. In focusing on the claims to reincarnation rather than ethnography, the monologue chronicles a collectivity of people who exist at the threshold of the law and for whom injustices and violence have otherwise escaped the historical record due to colonial subjugation, corruption, rural lawlessness, and legal amnesty.

Abu Hamdan’s raised ink renderings of certain birthmarks photographed by Stevenson highlight the ways in which testimony is stored in the body. They isolate the birthmarks from the bodies, and in this way archive the only surviving remnants of historical erasures such as forced religious conversions, destruction of language and property, colonial occupation, and territorial annexation.