Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission 9781845459703

Citation preview

Argenti_Schramm-Pi-x.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:09

Page i

Remembering Violence

Argenti_Schramm-Pi-x.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:09

Page ii

[For Georgia Kretsi]

Argenti_Schramm-Pi-x.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:09

Page iii

Remembering Violence Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission

Edited by

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

Argenti_Schramm-Pi-x.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:09

Page iv

Published in 2010 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2010 Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging–in–Publication Data

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid–free paper ISBN 978–1–84545–624–5 (hardback)

Argenti_Schramm-Pi-x.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:09

Page v

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

List of Tables

viii

Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm

ix 1

Bodies of Memory 2 Rape and Remembrance in Guadeloupe Janine Klungel

43

3 Uncanny Memories, Violence and Indigenous Medicine in Southern Chile Dorthe Brogaard Kristensen

63

Performance 4 Memories of Initiation Violence: Remembered Pain and Religious Transmission among the Bulongic (Guinea, Conakry) David Berliner

83

5 Nationalising Personal Trauma, Personalising National Redemption: Performing Testimony at Auschwitz–Birkenau Jackie Feldman

103

Argenti_Schramm-Pi-x.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:09

Page vi

Landscapes, Memoryscapes and the Materiality of Objects 6 Memories of Slavery: Narrating History in Ritual Adelheid Pichler

135

7 In a Ruined Country: Place and the Memory of War Destruction in Argonne (France) Paola Filippucci

165

Generations: Chasms and Bridges 8 Silent Legacies of Trauma: A Comparative Study of Cambodian 193 Canadian and Israeli Holocaust Trauma Descendant Memory Work Carol A. Kidron 9 The Transmission of Traumatic Loss: A Case Study in Taiwan Stephan Feuchtwang

229

10 Afterword: Violence and the Generation of Memory Rosalind Shaw

251

Notes on Contributors

261

Index

265

Argenti_Schramm-Pi-x.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:09

Page vii

List of Illustrations

1 The statue of Mulatress Solitude at the Heroes Boulevard.

48

2 Women remembered at the slavery wall.

50

3 ‘150 years after the abolition of slavery I will always remain the whore of the white man.’

51

4 Witness at Treblinka.

103

5 Witness explaining at Auschwitz–1.

113

6 Witness reading poem at Auschwitz–1.

117

7 Prenda / nganga.

140

8 Cepo 1, line drawing by J.V. 2005, La Habana.

148

9 Castigo del Cepo.

148

Argenti_Schramm-Pi-x.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:09

Page viii

List of Tables

1 J.V. (Informant) singing and explaining a mambo, recorded and transcribed by Adelheid Pichler, 2004.

141

2 J.V. (Informant) singing and explaining a mambo, recorded and transcribed 2004.

143

3 J.V. (Informant) singing and explaining a mambo, recorded and transcribed 2004.

144

4 Table of correspondences between slaveholder society and its hierarchy in Cuban colonial times, and the social organisation in contemporary Palo ritual, 2008.

149

5 Moyuba J.V. (Informant) singing and explaining a mambo, recorded and transcribed 2005.

151

6 J.V. (Informant) singing and explaining a mambo, recorded and transcribed 2005.

154

Argenti_Schramm-Pi-x.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:09

Page ix

Acknowledgements

This volume owes its existence to a number of meetings and conversations among different audiences. The first of these was a workshop on ‘Violence and Memory’ that we held during the 2006 EASA Conference in Bristol. We are most grateful to all the participants whose contributions made this initial workshop a memorable experience. Special thanks go to Urania Astrinaki, Ferdinand de Jong, Staffan Löfving and Ramon Sarró, who participated in that session but whose papers are not included in this collection. We also want to thank Peter Loizos, our discussant, who helped us to sharpen our argument and to draw out hitherto unconsidered connections between the different papers. In May 2007 we organised another workshop, ‘The Presence of the Past: Anthropological Perspectives on the Memory of Slavery in Africa and the Diaspora’ as part of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE) conference, ‘Slavery: Unfinished Business’. Thanks go to Janine Klungel and Heidi Pichler, who rejoined us in Hull, as well as to Benedetta Rossi, who also participated in our panel. Finally, we gathered again for the 2007 AAA–conference in Washington DC, where Jackie Feldman and Carol Kidron assisted us in promoting this project. Our thanks also go to Anya Witeska who is unfortunately not represented in this publication but whose paper on memories of Socialist Poland benefitted our panel greatly, as well as to Stephan Palmié, our discussant, for his very thoughtful remarks on the development of the discourse on memory in anthropology. We also wish to express our gratitude to Rosalind Shaw for agreeing to write an afterword to this collection and to our readers, Paul Antze and Stuart McLean (who chose to reveal their identities), who were extremely helpful and encouraging. We hope that we were able to address their criticisms. Last but not least, we would like to thank Marion Berghahn for embracing the idea for this book and facilitating its coming into life.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 1

Introduction

Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm

How does violence affect remembering? How are the large–scale cataclysms, crises, disasters and dispersals that befall communities entrusted by one generation of witnesses to the next? If bearing witness to violence cannot be a disinterested act, and if memory – despite its relationship to the past – is always deployed in the present, a question arises regarding the mediation of memory, or the relationship of remembering to forgetting: How is memory partially (and necessarily) constituted by forgetting? What is the exact nature of the Faustian bargain between transmission and obliteration? If memories of large–scale man–made catastrophes are passed on from the original generation of victims and perpetrators to their children, how do inchoate, individual experiences of political violence – devoid as they often are of any logic, structure or narrative sense – coalesce into an accepted body of knowledge that can be coherently uttered and invested in collectively as legitimate and representative: how, in other words, do individual memories contributes to social memory before social memory can once again – now in the shape of postmemories (Hirsch 1997, 1999; Hirsch and Spitzer 2006: 85) – shape individual subjective experience in the dialectic of self and society? The last few decades have seen a veritable explosion of studies of memory, not only in the humanities and the social sciences but also – and first of all – in public culture and contemporary politics. In popular culture as in academia today, memory sometimes seems to apply to a bewilderingly widening array of phenomena, some of which are apparently only tangentially or metaphorically related to what we commonly understand by memory. Increasing anxiety in academia regarding what constitutes memory (or remembering, remembrance, commemoration, and their ever–present antonyms, forgetting, obliteration and oblivion1) and what qualifies as trauma or as post–traumatic stress highlights the role of memory as a site of struggle outside of academia and clinical practice, in society itself.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

2

4/11/09

13:07

Page 2

Introduction

Memory is not a simple, unmediated reproduction of the past, but rather a selective re–creation that is dependent for its meaning on the remembering individual or community’s contemporary social context, beliefs and aspirations (Huyssen 1995). Indeed, individual memories devoid of such contextualisation and the selective amnesia, telescoping and transformations they entail are considered pathological in their solipsistic detail and isolating particularity. At the collective level, similarly, we could not imagine a social reality in which all of the events of the past and all of the manifold ways in which those events were experienced and interpreted by a multitude of different individuals, factions and interest groups are somehow preserved in the present. By their very nature, the re–creations of the past produced by memory are partial, unstable, often contested, and prone to becoming sites of struggle. As Matt Matsuda puts it, ‘“memory” is not a generic term of analysis, but itself an object appropriated and politicized’ (1996: 6). At the individual and the collective level alike, these can even be ‘false’ memories, but this does not mean that they are not memories for all that, nor does it mean that the very real emotive and political salience with which these memories can be endowed and deployed are somehow void. In this sense, as Stephan Feuchtwang (2006) has recently demonstrated, even ‘false’ memories bear a relation to truths beyond their supposed originary events; a form of meta–truth about the present that is projected back in time. Anxieties about the reliability of memory give rise to concerns regarding the aims and consequences of focusing on memory.2 These concerns have been played out in part in a strict separation between memory and history (cf. Halbwachs 1992, Nora 1989, 1992), the former considered subjective, ‘living’, continuous and organic, and the latter objective, distanced, transformative and critical. Often, this distinction is accompanied by a dichotomy between non–literate or ‘simple’ (i.e. non–Western) and ‘modern’ or ‘complex’ (i.e. Western) societies (e.g. Nora 1989, 1992). Some writers have refuted this essentialist view, insisting on the areas of overlap between the two fields. Hirsch and Stewart (2005), for instance, very usefully distinguish between history and historicity; the latter term highlighting ‘the manner in which persons operating under the constraints of social ideologies make sense of the past, while anticipating the future’. Where history refers to an assumed empirically verifiable past, historicity ‘concerns the ongoing social production of accounts of pasts and futures.’ (Hirsch and Stewart 2005: 262). The focus on memory in much emerging research similarly highlights the social construction of the past across cultures. In his attempt to extend the concept of memory beyond Maurice Halbwachs’ presentist theory of social framing, Jan Assmann (1992) distinguishes between communicative memory – which is actively produced in social groups through everyday

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 3

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 3

interactions – and what he calls cultural memory, which reaches much deeper into the past and is expressed in myths, genealogies or ‘traditions’ and lies outside the realm of the everyday. To him, the distinction between societies that ‘remember’ and those that ‘have history’, which underlies Pierre Nora’s (1989, 1992) conception of lieux de mémoire, is a false dichotomy that elides the historical consciousness of non–literate societies. Writing on the dynamics of memory, history and forgetting in Madagascar, Jennifer Cole (2001) also blurs the clear–cut boundaries between memory and history, showing how historical consciousness might influence memorial practice and vice versa. Joining the sceptics in questioning the new ubiquity of memory, Michael Lambek (2006: 210–11) warns us that the very project of trying to locate a field of enquiry that escapes the hegemony and the monolithic essentialisations of history might paradoxically result in new discourses of authority that are themselves reifications of the oppressed and marginalised to whom the researcher seeks to give a voice: The risk is that we assume that somewhere there exists pure and unsullied memory, memory which accurately reproduces the experience of its subjects and that is their unique possession, that holds and moulds their essence, that is itself an essence. In making ‘memory’ the object of study, we run the risk of naturalising the very phenomenon whose heightened presence or salience is in need of investigation (2006: 211). Clearly, memory cannot be assumed to represent an objective past that has been excluded by historical practice and historiography. This would be to reproduce the essentialisation of some historical writing in contradistinction to which memory is looked to as an escape. Nevertheless, it may still be the case that memory – in all of its heterogeneity, its instability and its liability to contestation – represents ‘the history that cannot be written’ (Lambek 2006: 211; see also Gold and Gujar 2002). It is precisely because memory cannot be trusted as history that it needs to be explored, not as a record of the past, but of the present of those whose interests, views, experiences and life–worlds are somehow inimical to or have fallen outside of the historical project. The contributions to this book restrict themselves to the specific question of how political violence is remembered, how memories of this violence are transmitted, and the uses to which the memories are put. So far, despite the all–pervading memory–boom, few collections have been explicitly concerned with an anthropological exploration of this subject. One of the early efforts in the field has been Richard Werbner’s (1998) seminal edited volume on Memory and the Postcolony, the scope of which is limited to African(ist) perspectives on the violent configurations of the

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4

4/11/09

13:07

Page 4

Introduction

postcolonial state. Another, more recent volume, edited by Baruch Stier and J. Shawn Landres (2006), is concerned with the connection between religion, violence, memory and place, whereby the focus lies on mutual implications between the sacralisation of violence and the violence of religion, and not so much on the specifics of the relationship between violence and memory. Silverstein and Makdisi (2005) make the connection between violence and memory explicit; yet again their analyses are restricted to one contemporary situation, namely that in the Middle East and North Africa, where violence is a major factor of present–day politics. This volume, which is global in its scope, aims to contribute to the nascent anthropology of memory by focusing in particular on the issue of the intergenerational transmission of memories of violence.3 In an age in which discussing the subjective experience of political violence is impossible without reference to trauma and to post–traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), this volume raises questions as to whether the trauma paradigm is to be understood as an empirical description of a universal human psychic response to violence, as a Western culture–bound syndrome, as a folk model of suffering, as a social movement, or as a global discourse as manifold in its interpretations as it is pervasive in its reach. Is trauma an analytical model, or the latest social movement to which students of memory should devote their analytical attention? Can one move from an analytical model of individual, psychic trauma to one of collective or social trauma as one can between individual and collective memory?4 Can trauma (in its association with disruptiveness, inescapability and repetitiveness) and memory (in its connotations with identity, continuity and selectivity) be analytically joined to address the impact of past violence on the present? And if so, can the collective trauma of a generation of victims be passed to their offspring in the next generation, and how might this transference exactly take place? To Ron Eyerman (2001) it is precisely the phenomenon of intergenerational transmission that produces what he calls ‘cultural trauma’. In his discussion of African American collective identity he distinguishes cultural from psychological or physical trauma as follows: Cultural trauma refers to a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric, affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion. In this sense, the trauma need not necessarily be felt by everyone in a community or experienced directly by any or all. While it may be necessary to establish some event as the significant ‘cause’, its traumatic meaning must be established and accepted, a process which requires time, as well as mediation and representation (2001: 2).

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 5

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 5

In this model, present–day discrimination re–produces the trauma of racism, while slavery is nothing more nor less than the historical reference through which the ongoing contemporary experience is framed. Thought–provoking and enlightening as humanist interpretations of the trauma paradigm such as these are, they are culturally and historically specific. Although the contributors to this volume, all of them anthropologists, are cognisant with and, to a greater or lesser degree, informed by recent theories of trauma, they have not started off with a clear–cut definition of what constitutes ‘trauma’ or the ‘memory of violence’, but rather inductively explored those questions on the basis of concrete ethnographic case studies.

From History to Memory and Back Again Despite the controversy surrounding the term, the origins of the notion of collective memory in the social sciences can still be traced back to the work of Maurice Halbwachs (1992) and ultimately to his mentor Durkheim’s notion of collective consciousness. Halbwachs’ method is not to look to individual memories as the building blocks of collective memory, but simply to point out that individual memories cannot exist on their own, as dreams do, but are the result of regular intercourse with others. It therefore follows that what psychologists often take to be the most intimate realm of human thought and experience is in fact a result of collective social interaction. Individual memories are necessarily shared memories, and memories that are not shared are rapidly forgotten; they are therefore not memories at all (1992: 53). Not only did Halbwachs make the case for collective memory, but he also broadened the range of phenomena that were to be considered as memories. In his case study concerning the Catholic rite of communion, for example, he argues convincingly that a contemporary practice that is engaged in and understood as such in fact re–enacts the death and resurrection of Christ that is believed to have happened in the past (1992: 90–119).5 Unlike historical recording, this form of remembering or commemoration is embodied, and as such it collapses the distance and the linearity that history introduces to time; juxtaposing the past and the present and returning a body of believers to the originary events of their faith from which the passage of time would divorce them. Nor does such commemoration necessarily entail a conservative outlook or a reactionary stance. Halbwachs makes the argument that memory serves the purpose of facilitating change in society – even revolution – by masking that change in the guise of continuity. Hence, old rites and religious customs often serve to give a sense of continuity and legitimacy to new political systems. Halbwachs observes that the patrician titles, ranks and manners of the feudal nobility in France were preserved even as the entire feudal

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

6

4/11/09

13:07

Page 6

Introduction

system was being radically supplanted by a bureaucratic one. ‘In this way’, he tells us, ‘the new structure was elaborated in the shadow of the old … The new ideas became salient only after having for a long time behaved as if they were the old ones. It is upon a foundation of remembrances that contemporary institutions were constructed’ (1992: 125). Halbwachs goes on to argue that in time, the memories that had been held by or attributed to the nobility were passed on to the bourgeoisie, and to society as a whole, which became the new repository of memory in a meritocratic, republican France. Halbwachs thus demonstrates that social practices or beliefs are also memories, and that it is because the contemporary or synchronic can also be seen from a diachronic point of view that it can be bathed in the hallowed aura of sanctity associated with the timeless and traditional. To the contention that rites and embodied practices are not memories because they serve only contemporary purposes and interests, Halbwachs responds that the apparent timelessness of ritual in fact conceals a chronology that makes the past essential to the negotiation of the present.6 Halbwachs’ pioneering work on collective memory led to what we might term a democratisation of history and of memory (Bahloul 1996; Radstone and Hodgkin 2006: 2; Samuel 1994), in which some historians (especially those of the annales school) used Halbwachs’ insights to suggest that not only the elite, but also ordinary people, the illiterate and the oppressed might be able to construct histories for themselves, and to act as the guardians and repositories of accepted forms of knowledge about the past. Accepting the voices of informants as valid sources, alongside ‘objective’ textual sources, signalled an ethnographic turn in history that was later paralleled by a historical turn in anthropology – a new preoccupation with memory which once again was concerned with establishing an alternative to histories seen to be too closely associated with patriarchal discourses of the state and practices of state formation.7 In anthropology and history alike then, an emphasis on memory and on oral history can be seen as an attempt to privilege voices that have been marginalised or silenced by projects of state–formation and empire building. Such a position can also implicitly be seen to privilege the subjective experience of individuals and communities over the ‘objective’ social and historical processes that elide individuals and their fallible and partial knowledge, experiences and beliefs. Additionally, the notion of counter–memories (Foucault 1977; Zemon–Davis and Stern 1989; cf. Baker 1994) points towards the continuous struggle between dominant and marginal voices in the production of history/memory. Where critics of the annales school would object that the latter’s histories are based on anecdotes and hearsay and consequently lack analytical rigour and historical authority, advocates of the turn to memory would reply that orthodox historical approaches are needlessly positivistic in their

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 7

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 7

insistence on ‘evidence’ and that their search for ‘facts’ as a means of shedding light on ‘what really happened’ is pursued at the cost of eliding the experience of ordinary people, which is ultimately the only historical fact that there is (see Wilson 2002). As Jan Vansina (1985) has argued for Sub–Saharan Africa, one of the consequences of this turn to memory has been what one might term the de–textualisation of history and the replacement of often rather slender archives with more loquacious informants. As recognition has spread among historians that the past is not only encoded in written records and archival documents, but that it can also be remembered in oral history, oral tradition and other non–textual narratives and accounts, many peoples who were deemed in academia not to have a past worthy of the name were subsequently considered to be able to produce one, often in partnership with (Western) ethnographers.8 As an historian interested in supplementing his knowledge of ‘objective history’ by means of oral tradition, Vansina remains faithful to a conception of history in which the past and the memory thereof are assumed to correspond with each other unproblematically. However, others such as Joëlle Bahloul (1996), Ann Gold and Bhoju Ram Gujar (2002), Jean Comaroff (1985), Peter Geschiere (1997), John Peel (1979), Charles Piot (1999), Rosalind Shaw (2002), and Ann Stoler and Karen Strassler (2000) have been more interested in the ways in which the past can perdure and take on new life in the contemporary contexts into which it is recalled. Replacing the relatively static storage or ‘hydraulic’ model of memory (Stoler and Strassler 2000: 7) with a processual one enables us to see how memories are a source of negotiation and conflict in society, perpetually open to revision and effectively rendering past and present consubstantial (Wilce 2002: 159; Casey 1985: 254). Bridging between these two poles, Marita Sturken keeps a close eye on the historical veracity of the past in the collective memory of United States citizens while recognising its presence as a political force in the present. The title of her book Tangled Memories refers to her critique of Pierre Nora’s opposition between memory and history. Memory and history are not opposed, she argues, but rather ‘entangled’ (1997: 4–7; cf. Cole 2001: 102–34).9 The interest in the social transformations to which memory is prone and in the political salience of the past in the present rather than in memory as a historical record is not restricted to the field of verbal accounts, but also finds its expression in the field of non–verbal, embodied memory. Indeed, while the bodily practices exhibited in rites, dance and everyday life are curiously gnomic with respect to the past they are associated with, they are undeniably powerful factors in the social relations of contemporary societies. Paul Connerton (1989) was among the first to address the importance of bodily practice in and for social memory. According to him, there are two dimensions to embodiment: on the one

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

8

4/11/09

13:07

Page 8

Introduction

hand, he highlights the importance of ritual and ceremonial performances as commemorative acts which allow a community to reassure itself; on the other hand he refers to ‘habitual memory’ through which a ‘mnemonics of the body’ (1989: 74) finds its expression. What was once referred to as ‘bodily techniques’ (‘techniques du corps’, Mauss 1936) or as ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1990) becomes ‘memory’ in Connerton. David Berliner (2005b) has criticised this extension of the memory vocabulary for its uncritical convergence with problematic notions of culture as mainly concerned with continuity. Indeed, Connerton’s interpretation of embodiment does not leave much room for a conceptualisation of memory which allows for social transformation. Yet if one considers the impact of violence on people’s cultural and political identities, as do the authors of this volume, it becomes clear that embodied memory is not only relevant in terms of social stability, but perhaps even more so as an indicator of social disruption (cf. Argenti 2007; Shaw 2002; Stoller 1995; Kleinman and Kleinman 1994).

Trauma, Time and Counter–Time Nietzsche, who says that ‘only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory’ (1899, in Sturken 1997: 15), also depicts the historical past as a dark invisible burden that travels with man, preventing him from living wholly in the present. For this reason, one must learn to forget the past in order to be able to act in the present (Nietzsche 1957: 5; see also White 1973: 347). Here, Nietzsche lays the foundation for a theory of memory and forgetting that pays particular attention to the importance of pain and suffering in the relationship between past and present, an aspect that would inspire and preoccupy later writers. As Maurice Bloch later put it, ‘the devices which select from the past what is to be remembered also inevitably involve selecting what of the past is to be obliterated’ (1996: 229). Two years after Bloch published his observations, Marc Augé developed this insight to its ultimate conclusion, radically challenging the notion that forgetting is a failure of memory, and arguing instead that it must be understood as constitutive of memory. In Augé’s fitting and beautiful metaphor, ‘memories are crafted by oblivion as the outlines of the shore are created by the sea’ (2004: 20).10 James Wilce (2002) has added concrete data to these insights by revealing how the genre of lament is being systematically and wilfully forgotten in Bangladesh as a response to global modernity and Islamisation. If oblivion is part and parcel of memory in normal circumstances, however, its importance appears to be magnified by experiences of colonial domination and of political violence. Looking at the effect of violence on memory and oblivion, Laurence

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 9

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 9

Kirmayer warns that ‘if a family or a community agrees that a trauma did not happen, then it vanishes from collective memory and the possibility for individual memory is severely strained’ (1996: 189–90). Indeed, a good deal of the early psychological research on trauma, starting in the nineteenth century with that of Charcot, Erichsen, Freud and Janet amongst others on the victims of train accidents and shell shock, suggested that there was something about the individual experience of violence that placed it somehow outside of memory, beyond the normal processes of remembering.11 According to this view, the psychic phenomenon of trauma itself engenders amnesia and silence. This view has been transmitted from early clinical theorists of trauma, through later generations of physicians such as Bessel van der Kolk (see van der Kolk and Grenberg 1987; van der Kolk and van der Hart 1991; van der Kolk and Fisler 1995; van der Kolk, McFarlane and Weisath 1996), to contemporary social scientists and literary critics, who have all dwelled on the silences and the aporia brought forth by violent pasts (cf. Agamben 1999; Bettelheim 1943; Caruth 1991a, 1991b, 1991c; Derrida 1976, 1986; Friedlander 1992; LaCapra 2001; Felman and Laub 1992; Laub 1991, 1992; Lyotard 1990; Unnold 2002; Vickroy 2002). According to this theory of traumatic silence, one of the paradoxes of trauma is that those who live through events of excessive violence seldom react to them emotionally at the time of their occurrence or in their immediate aftermath. Janet and Freud’s research in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century showed that some trauma patients became amnestic, believing – since they could not recall them – that the events that had caused their distress had never happened (van der Kolk and van der Hart 1991: 427). Others, while they remembered the horrific events they had lived through, reported a total lack of emotional connection to them.12 And yet, Janet and Freud also noted that the traumatic experience clearly was present at some other level of consciousness, for, unaware as their patients were of the events that had precipitated their crises, they were compelled regularly to re–enact them with complete precision. Far from forgetting, these patients seemed to be suffering from the inability to forget, or the failure to realise they were perpetually remembering. Following Janet, van der Kolk and van der Hart (ibid.) argue that familiar and expectable experiences are automatically assimilated without much conscious awareness, but frightening experiences may not fit in with one’s cognitive schemata. The memories of these experiences are then stored differently and are not available for retrieval under normal circumstances. These memories become dissociated from conscious awareness and voluntary control. Fragments of these unintegrated experiences may later manifest themselves as behavioural re–enactments. According to van der Kolk and van der Hart, one of the characteristics of such embodied traumatic memories is that they ‘take too long’ (ibid.: 431):

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

10

4/11/09

13:07

Page 10

Introduction

as long in fact as the original event that they reproduce integrally. Where narrative memory could describe an accident or crime in thirty seconds, traumatic memories last exactly as long as the events originally suffered – they are therefore to all intents and purposes nothing less than the return of the event.13 The second point about narrative memory, as opposed to re–enactment, is that its summative role necessarily introduces revisions, deletions, elisions and transformations to the original event, which are related rather than reproduced. These transformations introduce difference to an event, making it lose its original accuracy and completeness, but by the same token making the event amenable to the victim’s psyche and to the social life of the community in which the retelling takes place. Thus, where narrative memories are integrative, traumatic memories are intrusive and literal; they have no social component, but rather seem to spring upon their victims quite outside of their volition or control.14 The amnestic nature of traumatic memory and its later involuntary intrusions and re–enactments points to another purported paradox of trauma: that it is never experienced as it happens, nor enters properly into the realm of experience, except, at times, after a protracted delay – often of decades. Hence, the division of the self to which Bruno Bettelheim attests is reported by many Holocaust survivors. Van der Kolk and van der Hart (ibid.: 437–38) argue on the basis of these reports that Freud’s model of repression is too weak to describe the phenomenon, and they suggest instead a model of dissociation. The concept of repression suggests a voluntary or willed suppression of a memory that one possesses but wishes to ignore or forget. In the dissociation model, however, the causal event(s) never enter into consciousness as they happen, so they cannot later be repressed. The dissociation allegedly takes place as an inherent part of the original (non)experience of the event – it happens at the same time as the event as one of its effects, and is inseparable from it – it does not happen afterwards as the result of a decision.15 This suggests that while dissociative experiences may be subconscious, unlike the repressed, they may also dominate consciousness, for example during traumatic re–enactments. This clinical model happens to fit with the reports of many holocaust survivors, who attest to the experience of living in two different worlds simultaneously: the place and time of the trauma, and the place and time of their contemporary lives. In his 1991 work, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, Laurence Langer provides multiple and compelling examples of Holocaust survivors who perceive their lives – and often their bodies – as a duality. As the Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo records in her memoir of the war, Auschwitz et Après, the camp exists for her in a perpetual present that produces a counter–time that impedes her normal progress through ‘ordinary’ time. In her film interview for the Yale Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, which Langer uses as part of his source material,

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 11

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 11

Delbo is asked by one of her interviewers if she still lives with Auschwitz since her ‘liberation’ (a term that many survivors see as misleading given the psychological permanence and inescapability of the camps). She replies: ‘No – I live beside it. Auschwitz is there, fixed and unchangeable, but wrapped in the impervious skin of memory that segregates itself from the present “me”’ (Langer 1991: 5). Another informant who also passed through Auschwitz puts it very similarly: ‘I don’t live with it [Auschwitz], it lives with me’ (Langer 1991: 23).16 For those such as Langer working within the trauma paradigm, the doubling of the self to which Charlotte Delbo and others refer entails the perpetual presence of a past that refuses to become memory, but remains forever that which it never fully was in the first instance: an experience. In Maurice Blanchot’s words, the absent experiences of holocaust survivors ‘cannot be forgotten because [they] have always already fallen outside memory’ (1995: 38). Langer (1991: 95) speaks similarly of a ‘permanent duality’ or a ‘parallel existence’ in which survivors are doomed to dwell, and van der Kolk and van der Hart lend clinical weight to this interpretation of traumatic ellipsis and silence when they state that traumatic memory ‘is not transformed into a story, placed in time, with a beginning, a middle and an end’ (1991: 448). In the realm of traumatic memory, the theory goes, the triggering events have taken place in a realm that is so utterly removed from any known set of ethics or values as to remain forever inconceivable in the terms of society outside the realm of the trauma – not only for those around the victim who escaped trauma, but even to the victims themselves insofar as they try to live lives predicated on taken–for–granted moral principles. This is, according to the PTSD model, one of the reasons for the initial silence of the first generation of victims of trauma. Nor are the incommensurable memories from these two realms totally separated in dissociation. Despite the testimonies of the Holocaust survivors and others, deep or traumatic memories and common memories become intertwined, or dialectically related to one another.17 In a preface written for Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s work on Freud’s Wolf Man case, Cryptonymie: le Verbier de l’Homme aux Loups, Derrida (1976) brings out the relationship of traumatic memory to common memory in all of its paradox when he refers to the realm of deep memory by analogy as a ‘crypt’, or a ‘forum’, a place hidden within or beneath another place, a place complete unto itself, but closed off from that outside itself of which it is nevertheless an inherent part. Derrida thus emphasises the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of traumatic memory. The crypt is formed in violence, by violence, and yet also in silence. In order for this act of violence to remain silent and unheard, one places it as far as one can apart from oneself, but this place is in fact deep within oneself. The cryptic enclave thus becomes a space of incorporation

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

12

4/11/09

13:07

Page 12

Introduction

rather than of introjection, as is the case with ‘normal’ experience and narrative memory. This failure of introjection, in other words, is at the root of a somatic embodiment of memory. It is parasitical, a sort of psychic cyst: ‘an inside heterogeneous to the inside of oneself’ (Derrida 1976: 15, trans. Nicolas Argenti).18 In the case of the death of close family members, the memory of the loved one may take up residence inside the crypt, forum, or for, where s/he will remain ‘safe’: ‘dead, safe (save) in me’ (Derrida 1976: 17).19 By means of incorporation, the dead thus become the living–dead inside oneself. Where introjection – progressive, slow, mediated, effective – fails, incorporation imposes itself – fantasmatic, immediate, unmediated, magical, sometimes hallucinatory (ibid). Lyotard (1990: 16), referring to traumatic memories as ‘unconscious affect’, similarly describes them as ‘a bit monstrous, unformed, confusing, confounding’. As the traumatic amnesia of events never experienced in the first place, traumatic memories are doomed to return only as experiences, and not as discursive memories – they can never be representations, but only presence. In other words, memory is not possible where there lies an absence of meaning, and it is not possible to give meaning to experiences of extreme violence.20 Nicolas Abraham (1975) draws parallels between such incorporations and the experience of ghosts and ghostliness or haunting in Western culture. He likens ghosts to the effect identified as Nachträglichkeit by Freud, or latency: a core ‘symptom’ that has been repeatedly remarked upon in the literature on trauma across disciplines. Jean–Francois Lyotard (1990) brings out this aspect of Freud’s research on trauma, again identifying the paradox of silence at the heart of the initial traumatic shock: it is a shock which is not experienced. This is not to say, however, that it is consigned to oblivion – that, psychically speaking, it never happened. We can say, rather, that it is encrypted, or entombed, within the subject. Far from being a mere absence, this crypt or tomb will come to influence the conscious life of the person – later.21 Following Freud, Lyotard describes Nachträglichkeit as a ‘double blow’: the first blow upsets the mind with such force that it cannot be registered. It is not (yet) meaning, but rather ‘dispersed’ and ‘undetermined’ (ibid.: 16). But what happened at the time of this first blow will be given at a later date: the second blow. This second blow is a ‘symptom’ of the first blow, but because it will be the first one to have been experienced, the second blow will have occurred ‘before’ what happened earlier, which can only come to be known through the second blow. Dori Laub (1991a) thus refers to psychic trauma as ‘a record that has yet to be made’, and Agamben has called the task of recording trauma ‘listening to something absent’ (1999: 13). Of interest to our explorations in transgenerational transmission, ghosts are not laid to rest with those who create them (or in whom they are created). Abraham (1975), Torok (1975), Abraham and Torok (1976) and

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 13

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 13

Derrida (1976) all argue that the inherent silence of incorporation reifies it as a presence or an object that is then handed down from generation to generation. In some situations (though by no means in every case, as some of the chapters in this volume demonstrate), children may thus incorporate the ghosts of their parents as bodily practices. In the case of mass traumatic events, these bodily memories can eventually become established in the community as social practices (Abraham 1975: 175–76; Erikson 1991). Rosalind Shaw (2002: 5–6) thus notes Comaroff and Comaroff’s (1992: 38) aphorism that ‘history involves a sedimentation of micropractices into macroprocesses’, as well as Kleinman and Kleinman’s representation of memory as ‘processes sedimented in gait, posture, movement, and all the other corporal components which together realise cultural code and social dynamics in everyday practices’ (1994: 716–17). Phantoms or ghosts may thus take the form of bodily practices handed down as transgenerational traumatic memories, or transgenerational haunting – what Nicolas Abraham terms ‘the tombs of others’ (1994: 76). How can history take account of the return of repressed or dissociated events that were never experienced normally in the first place? What does a fragmented or cyclical temporality imply for the possibility of historical representation? Is historical representation predicated on leaving the past behind, and is the most inescapable feature of traumatic pasts that they will not be left behind because they exist only in a perpetual present?22 These problems lead Cathy Caruth to envisage ‘a history that is no longer straightforwardly referential’ (1991a: 182), and Lyotard to argue that standard narrative histories do violence to histories of violence. In purporting to reinstate the positivist chronology separating the first blow from the second – causal effect from secondary affect – such positivist history is false to subjective experience. It ‘instantly occults what motivates it, and … is made for this reason’ (1990: 16). This is history as memorialisation, which courts forgetting by attempting to bring false closure to events that will not stay where they belong in time and which refuse to be forgotten. From the perspective of the double blow, ‘the present is the past, and the past is always presence’ (ibid.). In Cathy Caruth’s words: ‘For history to be a history of trauma means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs; … that a history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence’ (1991a: 187). In her historical view of trauma, Caruth also moves from the position that violent events are remembered differently from ordinary experiences by the individual, to a theory of transgenerational transmission, which brings her to view trauma as a form of collective memory with a diachronic dimension. As she puts it, ‘History, like the trauma, is never simply one’s own, … history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas’ (1991a: 192).

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

14

4/11/09

13:07

Page 14

Introduction

Violence and Collective Memory However convincing and apparently well–supported this model of traumatic silence and repetition may seem, benefiting as it does from both positivist medical research and postmodern literary theory, it is not without its detractors. Despite the fecundity of the theory of traumatic silence, it may therefore be time for a re–evaluation of the assumption that trauma automatically engenders amnesia, paradoxically obliterating itself at the very moment of its creation, or that traumatic memories can only recur as identical re–enactments. Like Augé (2004) and Bloch (1996), Kirmayer (1996) argues for a sociological understanding of trauma according to which forgetting is not a clinical inevitability that occurs at the individual level (and therefore a pre–cultural universal physiological phenomenon), but rather part of particular social and political processes that belong to what Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin have aptly termed ‘regimes of memory’ (2006). While not losing sight of the suffering entailed in violence and its sequellae in the body social and the body politic, Radstone and Hodgkin’s model of social memory allows for a more voluntaristic and agentive, if quite a strategic, understanding of memory in which forgetting and remembering are not individual pathologies, but collective processes of representation and identity formation. The work done by Cathy Caruth and others in transposing the clinical research on trauma into the field of literary criticism has had a seminal effect on the humanities and social sciences more broadly. Many recent works on slavery and political violence parallel the notion of social memory with what we might call ‘social trauma’. This model takes as its starting point the assumption that individual PTSD, like individual non–pathological memory, can and does become collectivised over time in a ‘traumatised population’, leading to ‘cultural trauma’ or cultures of trauma that may be passed down over generations (cf. Alexander et al. 2004; Erikson 1991). Alternative views on the mechanisms of trauma and its effects on individual and social memory suggest, however, that we might not be able to take the aetiology of post–traumatic stress disorder for granted as a universal psycho–neurological syndrome, but rather that this syndrome too must become one of the social phenomena of the culture of modern violence that we analyse. Among the more important criticisms levelled at the humanist appropriation of trauma is the argument that a model premised on traumatic silence perversely exculpates perpetrators of violence from responsibility for their crimes. To Sigrid Weigel (2003: 87–88), in its generalisation to stand as a model for all history, the presumption of the literal unspeakableness of trauma as articulated by Caruth leads to the perverse annihilation of the traumatic event (i.e. the Shoah). Weigel, in

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 15

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 15

contrast, takes German National Socialism and the Holocaust as the unique starting point for her theory of transgenerational traumatisation in Germany (1999). She argues that ‘the subconscious memory imprints of National Socialism have been consolidated over the decades and turned into a kind of archaic inheritance that engenders displaced and distorted memories across the generations’ (quoted in Fuchs 2006: 170).23 In another important critical review of trauma theory focused on the work of van der Kolk and Caruth, Ruth Leys (2000) argues that there is in fact no consensus regarding the aetiology or the symptoms of PTSD, that this syndrome is of ‘dubious validity’ as a psychological model (2000: 7), and that its appropriation by poststructuralist literary critics and other humanists is more problematic still. In particular, Leys is concerned that trauma theory and writing on trauma ultimately conflate perpetrators and victims of violence as identical victims of changes in brain function of external origin over which the individual has no control. She critiques this theory for two main reasons; in the first place, she finds the clinical model of traumatic memory grossly reductionistic in its positivistic depiction of the mind as a mechanistic entity in which unmediated memories can be lodged like computer files quite outside of reflection and symbolisation (2000: 229–65, 272–97). Secondly, she argues that this reductive model has the perverse effect of removing any agency or responsibility from perpetrators of violence allegedly suffering from PTSD, thus eroding or eliding the ethical dimensions of violence by equating them with victims – PTSD theory, in other words, equates perpetrators and victims of violence by depicting both uniformly as victims of trauma (2000: 7, 297).24 Similar critical precursors have been pioneered by Ian Hacking (1986, 1995), Derek Summerfield (1996, 1998), and Alan Young (1995), and within anthropology by Alex Argenti–Pillen (2003) and Peter Loizos (2008). According to their critiques, the PTSD paradigm has mutated into a global discourse, but individual and collective reactions to extreme violence, over both the short and longer term, may not be universal but rather socially or culturally informed or determined. This point is taken up in this volume by Carol Kidron with respect to the different forms and effects of memories of violence among Cambodian and Israeli children of genocide victims, and by Stephan Feuchtwang, who also questions the universality of traumatic transmission. Several other authors have pointed out that the concept of healing, which is implicitly articulated in the trauma approach, is connected to a typically Western concern with closure (see van der Veer 2002) and therefore cannot adequately represent the actual terror and the attendant sense of fragmentation, entropy and meaninglessness that experiences of extreme violence may entail. For a number of reasons, experiences of terror may preclude the possibility of dividing populations into perpetrators and victims, assigning blame and punishing ‘culprits’. When,

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

16

4/11/09

13:07

Page 16

Introduction

as just mentioned, violence reveals itself primarily in its senselessness and incomprehensibility, the experience of extreme violence may not be reducible to such formulations. Furthermore, in a social context in which ‘victims’ are forced to continue living alongside ‘perpetrators’, as is common in post–conflict situations following civil war, it may not be ‘good to talk’, and efforts may be focused on silencing the past rather than voicing polemical and divisive interpretations of it (Argenti–Pillen 2003; Passerini 2006; Hamilton 2006).25 Here again we are faced with the inseparability of forgetting and remembering, obliteration and continuity – these equations do not oppose a minus to a plus, but rather amount to one single bifurcated process which only in its entirety can be constitutive of a liveable present. Criticism against the excessive employment of trauma and memory models has also been voiced by some of the authors of a special issue of Representations entitled ‘Grounds of Remembering’ (2000). In their view, memory, alongside identity,26 has been turned into a ‘fashionable commodity’ (Zertal 2000: 97; cf. Gillis 1994) that prevents us from critically relating to the past. Kerwin Lee Klein, for example, warns against the ‘materialization of memory’ (2000: 136), by which memory appears to be an independent social actor. According to him, psychological and quasi–religious categories, such as pain, healing, ritual, trauma etc., now dominate the analytical vocabulary, whereas social, economic and cultural connections are being neglected. The ensuing ‘discourse of sacrality’ (Lacqueur 2000: 4) is counter–productive as it inhibits critical historical scholarship. The discomfort articulated by Klein and others goes along with a claim to scientific objectivity on Klein’s part that is also questionable, however, since it tends to overlook aspects of individual suffering and embodied practice. The critique is nevertheless important because it reminds us to consider socio–political and economic factors in our analysis of the emergence of violence in the past and its repercussions in present situations.27 Moreover, if applied to the specific case of the memory of violence, it cautions us against the danger of pathologising historical experience, whereby people are first turned into ‘victims’ and then into ‘patients’ (Kleinman and Kleinman 1996: 10). Any approach that focuses on pain alone does not leave ample space either for the consideration of political agency or the complex societal arrangements in which violence, as well as its reformulations in and through memory, unfold. Despite these valid objections, then, we might ask why the preoccupation with questions of memory continues to be so popular – not only in academic discourse, but even more so among social actors themselves. To give but three examples, Penelope Papailias (2005) has just unveiled the astoundingly widespread (if controversial) practices of popular historical research among amateur archivists and historians in

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 17

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 17

modern Greece.28 Where one might expect academic historians in Greece to be delighted with the free services effectively offered by innumerable individuals from all walks of life who have selflessly devoted their time (and in some cases their fortunes) to amassing written documents and oral accounts relating to the wars and dislocations of the twentieth century, one finds an atmosphere of simmering hostility dividing these two groups – a fissure that represents nothing more nor less than a struggle over memory in a country that has only recently begun to come to terms with its civil war, its ensuing right–wing dictatorial regime and its silencing of the communist contribution to the resistance against German occupation in the Second World War.29 Secondly, from Africa and many other southern theatres of the postcolonial world as well as from the ‘internal others’ – the aborigines of Australia, the Maori of New Zealand, Native Americans and First Nations in the United States and Canada (not to mention Greece’s war of attrition with the British Museum over the Parthenon Marbles) – metropolitan museums and scientific institutions are being besieged by restitution claims, often for human remains (cf. Cantwell 2000; Bray 2001).30 The key argument made by claimants in these cases is not couched in legalistic terms based on formal ownership, but rather expressed in terms of a spiritual discourse emphasising continuity with the past: a discourse of religious identity and kinship ties that must be memorialised in reified physical remains. Of course, as with the fierce debate raging between amateur and professional historians in Greece, such spiritual discourses have clear political undertones; they seek not only to reconstitute a past fragmented by colonial violence, but in the act of restitution, to force the metropolis and former colonial master to recognise past wrongs and to force new postcolonial states belatedly to acknowledge their ‘first peoples’ or constituent ethnic groups, who now so often find themselves marginalised and powerless.31 Here more than ever we are reminded that remembering is oriented not to the past, but to coming to terms with the past in a present that is continuously troubled by it. Thirdly, the widening gap between rich and poor, the Balkanisation of Europe into a series of ethnic conclaves, and the spread of organised crime that have followed the demise of the Soviet block have engendered innumerable micro–practices of remembering that implicitly critique the neo–liberal doctrine that capitalism generated democracy. Whether these are revealed in the affectionate preservation of communist–era statues, as Nadkarni has shown in the case of Budapest (2003), or in the more sinister movement of dead bodies in a macabre game of post–mortem musical chairs, as Katherine Verdery reveals (1999), or in the resurgence of Orthodox Christianity and the recognition of Soviet atrocities (Merridale 2000), Glasnost and the passing of the Soviet era were marked first and foremost by acts of recollection that sought justice by looking back in time

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

18

4/11/09

13:07

Page 18

Introduction

rather than forward, transforming individual memories silently encrypted within individuals into collective acts of remembrance. From elaborate commemorative rituals to personal genealogies, from the apparently anodyne pastimes of local archivists to the ritual concerns of ‘indigenous’ groups, from the restoration of once neglected cathedrals to the resurgence of ethnic identities round the world, memory seems to be everywhere (and not only in the minds of researchers). Such omnipresence certainly calls for critical attention. Instead of completely doing away with memory as an object of concern, as the approach of Klein and other critics seems to suggest, we ought perhaps to pay still more attention to the politics of memory, or in other words to processes of appropriation, conflicting interests and overlapping discourses.32 The past is always a contested site and its evocation by means of commemorative rituals can be regarded as a strategy of legitimation and self–affirmation for various groups (Young 1989). When a violent past becomes the ground on which to build the future, a hegemonic narrative is often created that first cuts out everything that does not fit into the dominant story–line (of victimisation, heroism etc.) and secondly puts the past at a somewhat comfortable distance from the present. In much of the existing literature, a Foucauldian dichotomy is assumed between the official (and presumably artificial) narrative, usually associated with the state, and the more authentic counter–memory or memories of the ‘people’ (e.g. Bond and Gilliam 1994; Bodnar 1994; Swedenburg 1995; Taussig 1987; Werbner 1998). Somewhat destabilising this dichotomy, Derrida (1986) points to the crucial differences between an original cataclysmic event and its future remembrance, emphasising the ways in which memories introduce differences – différance – and ambiguities to their exemplars that may transform them in important ways, most crucially by turning essentially apolitical, inchoate experiences of violence and oppression into politicised memories that can take the form of a call–to–arms or a call for justice. He goes on to warn, however, that such memories – precisely because of their ambiguity – can also be appropriated by perpetrators of violence and turned into reactionary or revisionist forms of self–justification (cf. Bauman 1993, 1995). Derrida thus usefully questions models that would essentialise groups of perpetrators and victims, or state and people, and seek to pit them against one another. The state is not a monolithic or timeless body and cannot always be neatly separated from or opposed to society – which of course is in itself heterogeneous (cf. Herzfeld 1997; Mitchell 1991; Papailias 2005). Indeed, not only is society heterogeneous, but it may also be helpful to see it in Bakhtinian terms as constitutive of the state, in relation to which it nevertheless exists in a state of tension (Bakhtin 1967). The fixation of subject positions in a memory/counter–memory approach, even if

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 19

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 19

accompanied by an emphasis on contestation or negotiation (cf. Nuttall and Coetzee 1998), tends to obscure the complexities entailed in commemorative praxis. For example, the status and perception of a group as marginal or hegemonic may differ according to the prevailing social setting. It can also change in the course of time, and such changes sometimes depend on precisely the way in which memories of violence are represented (Schramm 2008). A nice example of this is encapsulated in the Soviet Russian aphorism ‘the future is certain – only the past is unpredictable’. Intended in the Soviet era as a wry comment on the monotonous permanence of the single–party state and its predilection for revisionist history, it can be read with post–Soviet hindsight as referring to the appropriations of the past that once–marginalised peoples with resurgent interests in local histories and ethnic identities are now elaborating for themselves. The contributors to this volume likewise avoid dichotomistic views and examine the processes that may lead to such memorial shifts and transformations as well as the possible interfaces between official and popular memory. In a similar manner, together with Frances Pine’s recent work on the entanglement of personal and historical memories in communist Poland (2007), we regard individual and collective memory as mutually constitutive. As we have seen, then, the trauma paradigm as deployed in the human sciences has its limitations: in particular, its possible blurring of victim and perpetrator status and its lack of recognition of the human agency involved in remembering violence. Remembering violence – especially at the collective level – is not only a pathology, it is a political act, and it represents not a mere repetition over which the ‘patient’ has no control and to which they can attribute no meaning, but more often a constructive engagement with a fractured past and a moral judgement of its political significance. Engaging with these trenchant critiques of the trauma paradigm should not, however, lead us to throw out the baby with the bathwater: we can recognise the limitations of the PTSD–model without dismissing the suffering that it aims to record. While questioning models of literal memory, re–enactment and involuntary or intrusive recall, we can nonetheless enquire into the ways that violence is remembered. A faulty seismograph does not mean that there has been no earthquake, nor that its aftershocks will not be felt in the future. In other words, though our instruments may not be perfect, there is still a need to question how extreme political violence is experienced by individuals, enculturated at the collective level and passed down through the generations, and to develop methodologies and theories that can examine this phenomenon without being ethnocentric, Procrustean, or unduly positivist and universalising. We believe that it is this role that ethnographic research and anthropological exegesis can play. A great deal of the PTSD debates

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

20

4/11/09

13:07

Page 20

Introduction

are based on short–term laboratory experiments, brief formal interviews and written texts rather than on the long–term observation of populations over the course of years – and it is precisely the data resulting from long–term participant observation of this kind that has the potential to move the memory debate forward. Michael Lambek’s (2002, 2003) rich description of the effects of precolonial and colonial violence on present generations in Madagascar provides an apt example. His analysis of spirit possession among the Sakalava demonstrates that the remembering engaged in by mediums might evoke the violence of the past in a form that is in fact truer to its original experience than empirical historical texts would be (2003: 70). His analysis may initially be thought to replicate the PTSD model in its emphasis on the intrusive and embodied nature of memories of violence, but Lambek shows that such memories depart from the symptomatology of PTSD in significant ways. Most importantly, he shows that the past does not recur in the present in the form of mere phobic avoidance or as an uninvited and debilitating irruption of a forgotten past in the midst of a wholly incommensurate present, but rather that the past is wilfully brought forth and made to engage with the political present in the seances of the mediums; the latter appropriate the past to address the present in an agentive and open–ended way that is aimed at the present and the future, and is very far removed from the pathologising discourse of trauma (2002: 194, 256–57). Nicolas Argenti’s work on embodied memories of recent state–sponsored violence in Cameroon and of slavery and colonial forced labour (1998, 2007) also bears superficial affinities to the trauma paradigm: in this case, young men and women seem to re–enact episodes of extreme violence in dance performances that come close to possession states. Here again, however, the re–enactment of the original trauma(s) differs crucially from that of typical trauma patients as described in Freud and Janet’s work: the re–enactment is not an involuntary repetition emerging intrusively into the psyche and the body of the isolated ‘patient’, but rather a mimetic interpretation of the original event that is shared, learned and re–enacted consciously and voluntarily. Far from reproducing the original event in all its unmediated horror, the mimetic appropriation of past violence introduces to its exemplar the sense of communion, of mastery, of celebration and of pleasure associated with dance – no longer a traumatic re–enactment, it is pregnant with the supplementarity of performance.33 The importance of the consideration of multiple factors in grasping the meaning of violence for those who are affected by it is demonstrated in Allen Feldman’s (1991) analysis of political terror in Northern Ireland. In his book, he looks at the different levels on which violence has been (and continues to be) articulated in this conflict: from symbolic forms and material practices to narrative strategies and changing spatial formations.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 21

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 21

What emerges from his analysis is the insight that, at least in the case of Northern Ireland, one cannot speak of a straightforward or linear narrative of violence. Rather, such narratives develop situationally and relationally, with a strong impact on everyday life.34 Feldman treats the oral recollections of violence that were voiced by his informants as data, that is, he is not so much concerned with the processes of remembrance and commemoration as such. Nevertheless, his work evokes the principal methodological challenge of combining phenomenological and constructivist analytical perspectives; a challenge that also concerns the study of the memory of violence (or the violence of memory) as a social phenomenon. The following chapters attempt to build on this recent but growing body of ethnographic data and analysis.

Memory in Practice The case studies brought together in this collection cover a wide geographical spectrum (Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, North America and South East Asia) that invites a comparative analysis.35 By choosing a comparative approach, this collection engages with questions of methodology and of interpretation that are at the core of the anthropological analysis of the memory of violence, where, amongst other things (as highlighted by Nordstrom and Robben 1995), the limits of participant observation become obvious. This is not to say that this collection makes claims to establishing a new, homogeneous or monolithic paradigm in the field of memory studies. The new paradigm is memory itself, but it is and must – at this nascent, seminal stage of its evolution in particular – be allowed a plurality of voices, a multiplicity of interpretations and analytical approaches. Just as this collection clearly highlights the richness and complexity of the phenomena that come under the aegis of memory, so too its authors have approached their data from differing, and sometimes even apparently contradictory, standpoints. Rather than trying to iron such differences out, we have sought to present them here in all their incommensurability, showing the extent to which some fundamental questions regarding the psychodynamics of memory and their manifold cultural mutations are not reducible to a single grand narrative. The evidence on whether and how memories of violence or their traumatic enactments are passed from one generation to the next, on whether specific marginalised groups in society can or do develop counter–memories with which to confront dominant models, on whether the experience of violence leads to the suppression of verbal exegesis, or even with what cultural practices can be considered memories in the first place seems to differ from one social setting to another, and so too must our interpretative approaches to such complex data avoid any premature reductions.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

22

4/11/09

13:07

Page 22

Introduction

Bodies of Memory The chapters of the first section of the book Bodies of Memory deal with non–discursive, embodied or practical aspects of memory. As discussed above, one of the key ‘symptoms’ of memories of violence highlighted in the psychoanalytic theory and often observed by researchers and survivors alike since has been their apparent inexpressibility. As Rosalind Shaw has argued for the effects on the Temne of Sierra Leone of the transatlantic slave trade, memories of violence often seem to cursory observers to produce only an unplumbed silence (Shaw 2002: 8–9).36 Though such discursive lacunae have at times been assumed to evince not merely the silencing of memory, but its total obliteration, this section presents two case studies that examine the possibility that catastrophic events can be remembered, transmitted, experienced and expressed in ways other than or in addition to discursive modes, and in particular by means of embodiment. Again, this is not to say that they present analogues of one another. In chapter two, Janine Klungel shows how rape was not only endemic to the political relations of the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe under French colonial occupation, but how these relations have lasted beyond the occupation of the French and the owner–slave relationship, infecting the social body to this day. Her examination of the lasting fear of rape exposes the practice of virginity testing, by means of which mothers regularly assure themselves of the virginity of their daughters, ironically and tragically by means that effectively re–enact rape. A vicious cycle seems thus to have been set in place by means of which the trauma of colonialism, symbolised most mordantly on the bodies of its victims in terms of the pervasive fear of rape, is repeated from generation to generation by the very avoidance practices that its victims deploy on their children. This is not to say, however, that rape is a silent memory in Guadeloupe; Janine Klungel also records the autobiographical rape narratives of her female informants, depicting a cultural idiom in which rape spirits appear to women in their dreams and are then given voice as these women recount these dreams, attesting to the violent resurgence of the past in the intrusive predatory form of the incubus. In contrast to the eloquent discursive memories of Guadeloupian women, the Chilean victims of the Pinochet regime described by Dorthe Kristensen in chapter three embody their memories of this monstrous period of their past in somatised illness experiences rather than discussing them overtly. The symptoms presented by the torture victims of the Pinochet era and their relatives – including anxiety, sadness, lack of energy, intense pain and insecurity, often combined with the experience of ghostly presences – are routinely diagnosed by medical doctors as depression or anxiety, or simply ‘nerves’ (nervios).37 Such dismissal (or biological

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 23

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 23

reductionism) on the part of the medical profession compels sufferers to seek out indigenous healers, who explain such suffering as a product of spiritual and/or human aggression due to fright (susto). Comparing the biomedical model of traumatic memory with that of shamanistic healing practice, Dorthe Kristensen considers the ways in which indigenous illness categories and their treatment by traditional healers allows for what could never be said explicitly, nor perhaps even remembered in literal terms, nonetheless to be confronted by other means. In so doing, Dorthe Kristensen suggests that the total obliteration of memory, which all totalitarian regimes seek to impose, has its limits.

Performance If embodiment applies to the ways in which memory is sedimented in bodily practices that are all the more taken–for–granted – and therefore effective – for being mundane, the realm of performance, ritual and possession marks a sphere of embodied memory that also merits special attention. While embodied memory is often unnoticed and all but invisible, performative memory is set apart from everyday life, collectivised, often conservatively nurtured, and self–consciously entrusted by one generation to the next by means of initiation, apprenticeship and other rites of passage. These cultural phenomena are as formal, explicit and marked as non–performative embodied memories are informal and inconspicuous. Performative genres enable their practitioners to collapse time and to shed light on the historical continuities between past and present by juxtaposing one onto the other, using deep wells of cultural knowledge to interpret contemporary injustices that are often as extreme, ineffable and inchoate as were those of the past.38 Moreover, performances may also leave deep and long–lasting impressions on participants, which may then become the actual subject of transmission and consequently form the core of new memorial practices. The chapters that are brought together in this section analyse this transformative process from two very different angles: while David Berliner looks at the ongoing performance of secrecy in the commemoration of initiation violence in Guinea–Conakry, Jackie Feldman’s chapter on youth pilgrimages to Polish Holocaust sites focuses on a case where witnessing and the need for revelation of violent experiences are constantly emphasised. Both authors deal with the effects of remembered violence on intergenerational relationships. Such memories may be called vicarious (see Climo 1995, quoted in Berliner, this volume) – in other words, they are memories that have a profound impact on the identity of a generation of people who have not directly experienced that which is being remembered.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

24

4/11/09

13:07

Page 24

Introduction

In chapter four, David Berliner discusses the case of Bulongic initiation memory in Guinea–Conakry. Prior to the 1950s, the Bulongic of Guinea–Conakry initiated their young boys into manhood, a rite of passage described today as a ‘very brutal’ one. A process of Islamisation that reached its climax in 1954 brought these practices to an abrupt end. However, the social reality of initiation could be said to have survived the demise of the rite: in the absence of initiation rituals, the pain inflicted on young boys fifty years ago is still a crucial delineator in contemporary Bulongic society. First, the violence of initiation plays a central role in old men’s memories. But, for these elders who have suffered the pain and known the privilege of initiation, talking about their memories is far from a rhetorical or nostalgic gesture. David Berliner looks at the ways in which elders present these memories as narratives of initiatory violence as well as at the response of today’s youths to those narratives. He argues that despite the fact that initiation violence no longer takes place, its social function as a means of supporting the position of elders as guardians of a very powerful secret knowledge continues to hold. Whereas David Berliner thus describes the memory and transmission of ritualised acts of violence, which includes the imposition of voluntary silences, Jackie Feldman in chapter five discusses ritualised acts of commemorating unspeakable violence, that is, attempts to break the silence surrounding traumatic events. By investigating the testimony of Holocaust survivors in Israeli youth pilgrimages to Auschwitz, he illustrates how through the shared bodily presence and ritual performance of elderly witnesses and masses of youths at the sites of extermination, the youths become ‘witnesses of the witnesses’ and come to appreciate their taken–for–granted life–world as an object of desire. The designation of survivors as witnesses (and that of Israeli youths as ‘victims by proxy’) is a way of giving sense to the Holocaust: in the commemorative framework that is established at the Holocaust sites in Poland, the Shoah appears as the foundation of the Israeli nation–state. National symbols, worn, displayed or performed by the students and witnesses, become charged with emotion. Through such totalistic ritual commemoration, the trauma of the Holocaust (which continues to haunt survivors) ought to be brought to redemptive closure. The commemorative performances described by Jackie Feldman not only depend on the co–presence of witnesses and youths, but they also derive much of their power from the sense of ‘being there’ (cf. Urry 2000) that is generated by the actuality of the Holocaust sites at which the groups are gathered, as if those sites themselves could ‘give testimony’. The spatial and material dimension of memory that is suggested here is further developed in the following section.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 25

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 25

Landscapes, Memoryscapes and the Materiality of Objects The connections between memory and spatial inscriptions in places and landscapes have been widely discussed, often in connection with the contested notions of belonging that go along with them (see Lovell 1998; Bender and Winer 2001; Steward and Strathern 2003). As Tim Ingold (1993) has argued, the very perception of a landscape can be seen as an act of remembrance, since all landscape is human–made, processual (cf. Hirsch 1995) and shaped by a history of past dwelling. Landscapes and places are thus not simply ‘containers’ or screens to which memories are attached, but rather they can be said to work as memory (see Küchler 1993). This conception is even more fitting in the case of the memory of violence, where landscape denotes a ‘geography of pain’ (Mueggler 2001: 199), be it in topographic or imaginary terms (or both). Even if the violence may have taken place in the past, such geographies are often maintained and (re)produced by means of narratives and performances, as the following two chapters indicate powerfully. In chapter six, Adelheid Pichler is concerned with memories of the violence of colonial plantation slavery in Cuba. Evincing the silencing effect of traumatic political pasts on contemporary memory practices, Pichler delineates the non–verbal as well as narrative means by which the Palo Monte ceremonies of contemporary Cuba re–enact in graphic – indeed slavish – detail the punishments to which agricultural slave labourers used to be subjected in the colonial era. Through a careful analysis of the performances, songs and material objects of the Palo Monte rituals, Pichler also demonstrates how adherents re–enter the landscape of slavery in their evocation of landmarks that highlight the plantations as well as sites of freedom and resistance, such as the fortifications of the cimarrones in the hills. In addition to those references to Cuban spatial and historic markers, paleros also incorporate memories of the African homeland into their rituals. As Pichler argues in relation to Appadurai (1996), such rituals are not only indicative of an ongoing memory of violence, but at the same time they serve as a means of generating power in the production of locality, and thereby of giving meaning to a violent and disruptive past across the generations. Whereas in Palo Monte, landscape is but one symbolic referent through which the memory of violence is articulated (together with body, kinship and religious hierarchy), the memorial practices discussed by Paola Filippucci in chapter seven focus on the violent destruction of settlements and landscapes in war. Through a case study of rural Argonne in France, which was devastated during the First World War, she demonstrates how the war has turned the landscape into a ‘ruined country’. Despite careful reconstructions, past destruction and loss continue to mark both the physical fabric of villages and local representations of the past, of

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

26

4/11/09

13:07

Page 26

Introduction

landscape and of place. Filippucci shows that in case of the Argonne, the very reconstructions can indeed be said to act as reminders of past destruction. Moreover, as the war recedes from living memory, local memorial practices become closely intertwined with national and international forms of remembering the Great War, be it through heritage preservation efforts or the tourism spectacle of battle re–enactments. Filippucci accords great centrality to the materiality of place, arguing that past violence is remembered in the places of destruction because it is remembered through them. To her, landscapes may play a role in the social remembrance of violence by acting as a bridge between private, individual experiences of violence and violent loss and public discourses and representations about them, making the experience of violence communicable and transmissible.

Generations: Chasms and Bridges Even though all the chapters address the issue of transgenerational transmission in one way or the other, the final section aims explicitly to draw critical attention to that problem. It opens a forum for debate, centred on the question of whether or not past violence may have a traumatic impact on generations who have not directly experienced it; and if it does, how this impact may take shape according to different cultural and political settings. In chapter eight, Carol Kidron analyses two unrelated communities of genocide survivors and their descendants, the Cambodian Diaspora in Canada and the survivors of the Shoah and their families in Israel. Through this comparative approach, she explicitly examines the silencing effect of violence on two generations of survivors. While silence or lack of verbalisation is an aspect of survivors’ reactions to their experiences in both the Cambodian and Israeli communities of survivors, Carol Kidron’s Jewish informants speak of what she sums up as ‘a perpetual amorphous sense of genocidal presence’ in the home. This silent, embodied and interactive presence of the past is not attested to by her Cambodian informants, however, for whom the silence of the past does not equate with its non–verbal presence, but is rather symbolic of the suffering of the past having been overcome and placed behind oneself. Deny as they might the effects of the genocide on their own world–view, however, Kidron notes how memories of the past can work their way into the social fabric even of those who would wish otherwise, in this case influencing in indirect but important ways the world–view of second–generation Cambodians in Canada.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 27

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 27

The final chapter by Stephan Feuchtwang is a case study of an event that was wounding and disrupting for the families of Luku, a remote mountain area in Taiwan. The event, known as the Luku Incident (Luku Shijian), took place in the winter of 1952–53 and can still be recalled as their own experience by the survivors. Even though not all of them present symptoms of what is now called post–traumatic stress disorder, the event could still be described as traumatic by all standards. Feuchtwang asks about the ways in which the event is remembered and transmitted through time. He distinguishes between three different temporalities that are constitutive for such transmissions: first, the time of simultaneity and progress; secondly, the temporality of commemoration and eternity, both of which are connected to the nation–state; and thirdly, the long–term time of family, which includes its own rituals of death, distinct from those evoked in official commemorations and historical accounts. In his discussion of the Luku incident, Feuchtwang demonstrates how survivors’ (traumatic) memories are incorporated into official narratives. In that process, recognition of past violence not only enables victims to articulate their pain, but it also leads to forgetting and closure. When commemoration takes over, Feuchtwang argues, transmission of trauma ceases.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

The latter term from the French oubli, ‘forgetting’, which gives the cognate term oubliette, a dungeon. For recent discussions of this issue, see Berliner (2005a, 2005b), Huyssen (1995: 6), Stewart (2004), Olick and Robbins (1998), Radstone (2000). On the problem of generations, cf. Mannheim (1964). For a discussion of the relation of the PTSD/trauma paradigm to the western legal system and to the concept of damages, see Hodgkin and Radstone (2006: 99). Hodgkin and Radstone (ibid.) refer to the relationship between individual and collective trauma as a sliding scale that is only negotiated with difficulty. For Janet Walker (2006) in the same volume, the theory of traumatic memory provides a means of bridging between the individual and the collective poles of suffering, relocating the psychic within the social and historical context from which violence had removed it. As Halbwachs puts it: ‘The sacrifice through which [Christ] has given us his body and his blood did not take place a single time. It is integrally renewed every time believers are assembled to receive the Eucharist. What is more, the successive sacrifices – celebrated at distinct moments and in distinct places – are but one and the same sacrifice.’ (1992: 90) He illustrates this point with a defining metaphor: The frameworks of memory exist both within the passage of time and outside it. External to the passage of time, they communicate to the images and concrete recollections of which they are made a bit of their stability and generality. But these frameworks are in part captivated by the course of time. They are like those wood–floats that descend along a waterway so slowly that one can easily move from

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

28

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

4/11/09

13:07

Page 28

Introduction

one to the other, but which nevertheless are not immobile and go forward. And so it is in regard to frameworks of memory: while following them we can pass as easily from one notion to another, both of which are general and outside of time, through a series of reflections and arguments, as we can go up and down the course of time from one recollection to another. Or, to put it more exactly, depending on the direction we have chosen to travel, whether we go upstream or pass from one riverbank to the other, the same representations seem to be at times recollections, at times notions or general ideas. (Halbwachs 1992: 182) In Bahloul’s (1996) critical feminist ethnography of such a context in colonial and post–colonial Algeria, memory even reverses gendered power relations. Emigrant women’s narratives about their lost home in the town of Dar–Refayil transform a dominated world into a haven of social cohesion. It is as if the word and remembrance had given voices to those who had not had them in the past that they were recounting. The effect of nostalgia is equivalent to a reversal of status. The main producers of Dar–Refayil’s memoirs are those who could not speak in the past. Time has empowered them, and memory produced authority. The small become great and the weak mighty (1996: 132). For an attempt at such collaboration, see Price (1983), and for a critique of Price’s representational strategies, see Scott (1991). In Sturken’s words: ‘There is so much traffic across the borders of cultural memory and history that in many cases it may be futile to maintain a distinction between them. Yet there are times when those distinctions are important in understanding political intent, when memories are asserted specifically outside of or in response to historical narratives.’ (1997: 5) Sturken acknowledges her debt to Foucault and to his concepts of ‘subjugated knowledges’, ‘naïve knowledges’, and ‘countermemory’, all of which identified the field of collective memory as a site of political struggle. In contrast to what she sees as Foucault’s romanticism, however, Sturken warns that memory is not automatically the site of oppositional knowledge or of resistance: ‘Cultural memory is often entangled with history, scripted through the layered meanings in mass culture, and itself highly contested and conflictual … there is nothing politically prescribed in cultural memory.’ (1997: 7) On the social importance of forgetting, see also Battaglia (1993), Carsten (1991), Forty and Küchler (1999), Smith (1996). On the early history of trauma studies, see the introduction to Ruth Leys’ (2000) monograph on the subject, and Claude Barrois (1988), and Paul Lerner (1996). Thus, Bruno Bettelheim could describe how he felt that he was separated from his own body, watching it from another point in the train car while he was being tortured by the guards on his way to internment in a Nazi concentration camp. Similarly, he notes that while camp inmates would be shocked and angered when they received a mundane insult from a guard, reacting as they might to a similar occurrence in their ordinary lives, they showed no emotional reaction at all to the much more serious injuries and tortures that they suffered. Excessive acts of violence incommensurable with their previous experience were never registered emotionally, nor dreamed of afterwards (1943: 435). Cf. Funes, the man with ‘perfect memory’, in Jorge Luis Borges’ eponymous story. Borges situates the origin of Funes’ extraordinarily precise and unmediated memory in an accident he suffers, when he is thrown from a horse and permanently crippled. He never refers to, and actually seems unaware of, the injuries he has suffered, which keep him bed–bound for life, but other events return with total clarity. ‘Two or three times’, Borges tells us, ‘[Funes] had reconstructed an entire day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day’ (Borges 1998: 96). This forces us to face the very un–Platonic paradox that it is the more accurate memories that are pathological and debilitating, while formally inaccurate memories are in fact therapeutic and socially integrative.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 29

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 29

15. Van der Kolk and van der Hart (1991: 437–38) argue that though Freud and others since have tended to blend repression and dissociation and to use them interchangeably, there is a fundamental difference between them. The repression model is vertical; it posits a layered model of the mind in which unwanted memories are pushed downwards into the unconscious. The subject therefore no longer has access to it. The dissociation model posits a horizontally layered or divided model of mind in which traumatic memories are stored in an alternate stream of consciousness. 16. Nearly all of the informants refer to this dédoublement, or doubling effect of the Shoah. Another survivor quoted by Langer (1991: 53–54) unknowingly uses the very same analogy of a second skin that Delbo does, putting it in its starkest terms: It’s like – like there’s another skin beneath this skin and that skin is called Auschwitz, and you cannot shed it, you know … We carry this. I am not like you. You have one vision of life and I have two. I – you know – I lived on two planets … It’s like the planet was chopped up into a normal [part] – so–called normal: our lives are not really normal – and this other planet, and we were herded onto that planet from this one, and herded back again, having nothing – virtually nothing in common with the inhabitants of this planet … and we have these … these double lives… And it’s too much. 17. For instance, despite Bettelheim’s (1943: 435) statement to the effect that he did not dream of the violence perpetrated against him immediately after it happened, many survivors attest to accessing their deep memory in dreams some years or decades after the triggering events (Langer 1991: 7). These dreams intersect with and inform common memories despite their putative psychic isolation, in effect preventing a total dissociative split in the person – hence the doubling of the world to which extreme violence gives birth. 18. ‘Une inclusion parasitaire, un dedans hétérogène à l’intérieure du moi’. For more on the emergence of the crypt as a ‘secret vault’ within the subject, see Abraham and Torok (1980), Torok (1987), and Abraham (1994). 19. ‘Mort sauf en moi’ (Derrida 1976: 17). Sauf, meaning both ‘safe’ and ‘save’ in the sense of ‘except’. 20. As Agamben (1999: 12) puts it regarding Auschwitz, ‘this truth is … irreducible to the elements that constitute it … a reality that necessarily exceeds its factual elements – such is the aporia of Auschwitz’ (see also Derrida 1986: 88). 21. Something … will make itself understood, ‘later’. That which will not have been introduced will have been ‘acted’, ‘acted out’, ‘enacted’ [in English in the original – Trans.], played out, in the end – and thus re–presented. But without the subject recognising it. It will be represented as something that has never been presented. Renewed absurdity … This will be understood as feeling fear, anxiety, feeling of a threatening excess whose motive is obviously not in the present context. A feeling … which therefore necessarily points to an elsewhere that will have to be located outside this situation … And how can this site be localized without passing through a ‘memory’, without alleging the existence of a reserve where this site has been retained …? (Lyotard 1990: 13) Cf. Freud in Moses and Monotheism: At some later time it will break into their life with obsessional impulses, it will govern their actions. The precipitating cause, with its attendant perceptions and ideas, is forgotten. This, however, is not the end of the process: the instinct has either retained its forces, or collects them again, or it is reawakened by some new precipitating cause [and it] comes to light as a symptom, without the acquiescence of the ego, but also without its understanding. All the phenomena of the formation of symptoms may justly be described as the ‘return of the repressed’ (1939: 124). 22. Or, in Homi Bhabha’s words: ‘How does one narrate the present as a form of contemporaneity that is always belated?’ (1990: 308).

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

30

4/11/09

13:07

Page 30

Introduction

23. She regards the Historikerstreit and the more recent debates over Germany’s regained ‘normality’ as signs of this ongoing traumatic distortion, and not of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the past. Such an overcoming of the past might often be attempted, especially in official memorialisations (cf. Weissberg 1999), yet it necessarily remains an illusion (cf. Benjamin 1991; Bauman 1993: 224). 24. In making this second argument, Leys could be said to be opening a Pandora’s box: in the first place, although the example of the US soldier in Vietnam she chooses is relatively unambiguous (though even this is debatable), it is often unclear in situations of violent conflict who are the perpetrators and who are the victims, and the reality is that these terms rapidly lose their meaning as survivors become morally tainted to one extent or another. Another problem with her criticism regarding the elision of moral culpability is that it can be applied to her own argument: in her chapter on van der Kolk, Leys points to what she sees as the political bias of trauma theory. The source of trauma is said to be linked to a single violent event by trauma theorists, not because of firm evidence, she argues, but because not to do so would seem to support US government bodies trying to discredit the claims of trauma sufferers who served in Vietnam in the same manner as the German government tried to suggest that concentration camp survivors had always been at risk of psychopathology, and that this had not been caused by the years of persecution in the camps. Leys here would appear to be jettisoning the moral parameters that she defends in her first criticism: the ‘political’ dimension of the trauma paradigm that she critiques is in fact its moral dimension – i.e. that the defendants at Nuremberg should never be allowed to claim that the victims of their concentration camps were predestined to suffer the psychopathology that they did because of individual predispositions. We can agree with Leys that the trauma paradigm is continuously being diluted and overused, but to place responsibility for this at the door of van der Kolk and Caruth’s work on the basis of possible interpretations of their work which are apparently unintended by them would seem to be unjustified. 25. It is obvious that individual and state perpetrators of atrocities want the past to remain unspeakable. Former General Augusto Pinochet spoke for all torturers and mass murderers when he ordered his people with compulsive repetition to forget the past: ‘It is better to remain quiet and to forget. That is the only thing we must do. We must forget … FOR–GET: That’s the word! And for that to happen, both sides must forget and continue with their work’ (from a speech made on 13 September 1995, two days after the twenty–second anniversary of the military coup). But it is not only perpetrators of violence who seek to make communities forget; victims and potential victims might also stand to gain from the containment of conflict that silence promises. Alex Argenti–Pillen (2003) and Carrie Hamilton (2006), focusing on the gendered aspect of memories of violence in nationalist struggles (in Sri Lanka and the Basque movement respectively), show how women in particular are apt to deploy silence as a means of controlling the spread of violence in their communities. 26. For a criticism of ‘identity’ as a useful analytical category, see Brubaker and Cooper (2000). 27. On the politico–economic embeddedness of individual suffering, cf. Farmer (1996). 28. For an analysis of Greek state–memorialism, cf. Herzfeld (1982). 29. For a critical analysis of a comparable phenomenon in Ireland, see Stuart McLean’s (2004) monograph on the state–sponsored folklorisation of the Great Famine of the 1840s as an integral part of the nation–building project. 30. For the analysis of an elaborate re–internment ceremony of the remains of two African slave ancestors in African soil and its implications on diasporic memory culture, see Schramm (2004). 31. Some of these ethnic groups may of course be newly constituted or reconstructed in response to the emerging global discourse of human rights for indigenous people. This discourse of indigenous rights, championed by influential NGOs such as Survival International, is also increasingly recognised by government bodies and policy–makers. Within their own countries too, as Peter Geschiere and Francis Nyamnjoh (2001) illustrate for Cameroon, states

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 31

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 31

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

that once did all they could to suppress ethnic identities now find themselves paradoxically supporting them: in the new political era of multi–party democracy ruling elites find it expedient to fragment the electorate along fault lines that stymie the formation of strong inter–ethnic political parties. By politics we refer to the power relations, collaborations, negotiations and struggles among and between different interest groups in the past and their various articulations in the idiom of memory. Most of all, we are interested in social practices. This is a different approach from Ian Hacking’s (1996) concept of ‘memoro–politics’, which is mainly a critique of the power/knowledge complex in institutionalised psychiatric science. Ann Stoler and Karen Strassler (2000) similarly make the point that in contemporary Java the period of Dutch colonialism is no longer remembered in an insular fashion, but only in relation to later Japanese occupation and in the light of Suharto’s more recent New Order rule, with its ‘eerie resemblance’ to the Dutch period (2000: 12): In popular memory and official history, the Dutch and Japanese periods are discursively paired, mnemonically fused to such an extent that they cannot be accessed independently. This fusing upsets one tacit assumption of those of us who study the colonial: that the key opposition organising contemporary memories is that between a colonial past and a postcolonial present (ibid.: 11). James Wilce, following Edward Casey (1987), also makes the point that ‘Memory is never about the past alone’ (2002: 159). Another dimension is introduced by Jennifer Cole (2001) who speaks of ‘layered memories’ in her analysis of colonial memory in Madagascar. She rightly points out the palimpsest–like nature of the memory of violence, where one historical experience of violence serves as a prerequisite for another and where the memory of each may be articulated in the idiom of the other. This is not to suggest that there are ‘conflict–prone areas’ where violence ought to be considered as a primordial social feature. Silverstein and Makdisi (2005) have rightly warned against such stereotypes. Cf. Farmer (1996). Similarly, a recent Panorama investigation of the massive volcanic eruption in 1883 of Krakatoa, in Indonesia’s Sunda Strait, suggested that the local population today had totally forgotten that this cataclysmic event had ever happened. The claim, as is often the case in such circumstances, was based on the fact that local people did not (or were not willing to) discuss the event with the documentary makers. It would be illuminating to see whether long–term field research would confirm or question this extraordinary amnesia. Cf. Scheper–Hughes’ discussion of a very similar phenomenon in Brazil, where impoverished people term their diffuse and multiple symptoms of severe malnutrition ‘nervos’. When reported to clinicians, these symptoms are treated not as the result of starvation but of psychopathology, and treated with tranquilisers (1992: 167ff). By this means, a collective political injustice is turned into an individualised personal deficiency. The field of literature relating to the Bori and Hauka possession cults of West Africa provides an excellent example of a performative realm structured around the embodiment of colonial violence expressed in somatic terms (see Olivier de Sardan 1984; Rouch 1955; Stoller 1984, 1989: 147ff; Taussig 1993: 240). As with the revelation of political oppression performed in Hauka possession states, Bruce Kapferer’s (1991) study of the tovil healing performances of southern Sri Lanka reveals that demonic affliction there is a class–specific illness affecting only the poor. Here too, experiences of state violence that cannot be remembered discursively are embodied as demonic affliction. In Kapferer’s analysis, the world of demons represents a commentary by the disenfranchised peasantry on a violent political reality of oppression and exploitation. Demons are thoroughly modern entities: the contradiction of a bourgeois political order represented by the quasi–fascist tendencies of orthodox Buddhism, and – like the experiences of state–sponsored violence they reify – they are always waiting to break free in the war–ravaged slums of Sri Lanka.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

32

4/11/09

13:07

Page 32

Introduction

References Agamben, G. 1999. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books. Alexander, J. et al. 2004. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Argenti, N. 1998. ‘Air Youth: Performance, Violence and the State in Cameroon’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4(4): 753–82. –––. 2007. The Intestines of the State: Youth, Violence and Belated Histories in the Cameroon Grassfields. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Argenti–Pillen, A. 2003. Masking Violence: How Women Contain Violence in Southern Sri Lanka. Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press. Assmann, J. 1992. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. München: Beck. Augé, M. 2004 [1998]. Oblivion, trans. Marolijn de Jager. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bahloul, J. 1996. The Architecture of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baker, H.A. Jr. 1994. ‘Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere’, Public Culture 7(1): 3–34. Bakhtin, M. 1968 [1957]. Rabelais and His World. Boston: M.I.T. Press. Barrois, C. 1988. Les Névroses Traumatiques: La Psychothérapeute Face aux Détresses des Chocs Psychiques. Paris: Dunod. Battaglia, D. 1993. ‘At Play in the Fields (and Borders) of the Imaginary: Melanesian Transformations of Forgetting’, Cultural Anthropology 8(4): 430–42. Bauman, Z. 1993. Postmodern Ethics. Oxford / Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. –––. 1995. Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality. Oxford / Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. Bender, B. and M. Winer (eds). 2001. Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place. New York / Oxford: Berg. Benjamin, W. 1991 [1942]. ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte, IX’, in Abhandlungen. Gesammelte Werke I, 2, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, pp. 697–98. Berliner, D. 2005a. ‘An “Impossible” Transmission: Youth Religious Memories in Guinea–Conakry’, American Ethnologist 32(4): 576–92. –––. 2005b. ‘The Abuses of Memory: Reflections on the Memory Boom in Anthropology’, Anthropological Quarterly 78(1): 197–211. Bettelheim, B. 1943. ‘Individual and Mass Behaviour in Extreme Situations’, The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 38: 417–52. Bloch, M. 1996. ‘Internal and External Memory: Different Ways of Being in History’, in P. Antze and M. Lambek (eds), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York/London: Routledge, pp. 215–33. Bodnar, J. 1994. ‘Public Memory in an American City: Commemoration in

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 33

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 33

Cleveland’, in J.R. Gillis (ed), Commemoration: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 74–89. Bond, G.C. and A. Gilliam (eds) 1994. Social Construction of the Past: Representation as Power. London / New York: Routledge. Borges, J.L. 1998. ‘Funes, His Memory’, in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley. London: Penguin, pp. 91–99. Bourdieu, P. 1990. The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity. Bray, T.L. (ed.). 2001. The Future of the Past: Archaeologists, Native Americans, and Repatriation. New York: Garland Publishers. Brubaker, R. and F. Cooper. 2000. ‘Beyond “Identity”’, Theory and Society 29(1): 1–47. Cantwell, A.–M. 2000. ‘“Who Knows the Power of His Bones”: Reburial Redux’, in A.–M. Cantwell, E. Friedlander and M.L. Tramm (eds), Ethics and Anthropology: Facing Future Issues in Human Biology, Globalism, and Cultural Property. New York: The New York Academy of Sciences, pp. 79–119. Carsten, J. 1991. Children in Between: Fostering and the Process of Kinship on Pulau Langkawi, Malaysia Man, New Series, 26(3): 425–43. Caruth, C. 1991a. ‘Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History’, Yale French Studies 79(4): 181–92. –––. 1991b. ‘Introduction: Psychoanalysis, Culture and Trauma’, American Imago 48(1): 1–12. –––. 1991c. ‘Introduction: Psychoanalysis, Culture and Trauma II’, American Imago 48(4): 417–24. Casey, E. 1987. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cole, J. 2001. Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press. Comaroff, J. 1985. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Connerton, P. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, J. 1976. ‘Fors: Les Mots Anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok’, ‘Preface’ in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Cryptonymie: Le Verbier de l’Homme aux Loups. Paris: Aubier Flammarion, pp. 7–73. –––. 1986. Schibboleth: Pour Paul Celan. Paris: Galilée. Erikson, K. 1991. ‘Notes on Trauma and Community’, American Imago 48(4): 455–72. Eyerman, R. 2001. Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Farmer, P. 1996. ‘On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below’, Daedalus 125(1): 261–83.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

34

4/11/09

13:07

Page 34

Introduction

Feldman, A. 1991. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Feuchtwang, S. 2006 [2003]. ‘Loss: Transmissions, Recognitions, Authorizations’, in S. Radstone and K. Hodgkin (eds), Memory Cultures: Memory, Subjectivity and Recognition. New Brunswick and London: Transaction, pp. 76–90. Forty, A. and S. Küchler (eds). 1999. The Art of Forgetting. Oxford / London: Berg. Foucault, M. 1977. Language, Counter–Memory, Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Friedlander, S. 1992. ‘Trauma, Transference, and “Working Through” in Writing the History of the Shoah’, History and Memory 4(1): 39–59. Fuchs, A. 2006. ‘From “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” to Generational Memory Contests in Günter Grass, Monika Maron and Uwe Timm’, German Life and Letters 59(2): 169–86. Geschiere, P. 1997. The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. ––– and F. Nyamnjoh. 2001. ‘Capitalism and Autochthony: The Seesaw of Mobility and Belonging’, in J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff (eds), Millenial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 159–90. Gillis, J.R. 1994. ‘Introduction: Memory and Identity, the History of a Relationship’, in J.R. Gillis (ed.), Commemoration: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 3–24. Gold, A. and B.R. Gujar. 2002. The Time of Trees and Sorrows: Nature, Power and Memory in Rajasthan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hacking, I. 1986. ‘Making Up People’, in T. Heller, M. Sosna and D. Wellbery (eds), Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. –––. 1995. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. –––. 1996. ‘Memory Sciences, Memory Politics’, in P. Antze and M. Lambek (eds), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 67–87. Halbwachs, M. 1992 [1941, 1952]. On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hamilton, Carrie. 2006 [2003]. ‘Memories of Violence in Interviews with Basque Nationalist Women’, in K. Hodgkin and S. Radstone (eds), Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts. New Brunswick / London: Transaction, pp. 120–35. Herzfeld, M. 1982. Ours Once More: Folklore, Identity, and the Making of Modern Greece. Austin: University of Texas Press. –––. 1997. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation–State. New York /

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 35

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 35

London: Routledge. Hirsch, E. 1995. ‘Introduction: Landscape Between Space and Place’, in E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon (eds), The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives of Space and Place. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 1–30. Hirsch, M. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press. –––. 1999. ‘Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy’, in M. Bahl, J. Crewe and L. Spitzer (eds), Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. ––– and L. Spitzer. 2006 [2003]. ‘“We Would Not Have Come Without You”: Generations of Nostalgia’, in K. Hodgkin and S. Radstone (eds), Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts. New Brunswick / London: Transaction, pp. 79–95. ____ and C. Stewart. 2005. ‘Introduction: Ethnographies of historicity,’ History and Anthropology 16(3): 261–274. Hodgkin, K. and S. Radstone. 2006 [2003]. ‘Remembering Suffering: Trauma and History’, in K. Hodgkin and S. Radstone (eds), Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts. New Brunswick / London: Transaction, pp. 97–103. Huyssen, A. 1995. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York / London: Routledge. Ingold, T. 1993. ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, World Archaeology 25(2): 152–74. Kirmayer, L. 1996. ‘Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Narrative and Dissociation’, in P. Antze and M. Lambek (eds), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York / London: Routledge, pp. 173–98. Klein, K. L. 2000. ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’, Representations 69: 127–50. Kleinman, A. and J. Kleinman. 1994. ‘How Bodies Remember: Social Memory and Bodily Experience of Criticism, Resistance, and Delegitimation Following China’s Cultural Revolution’, New Literary History 25: 708–23. –––. 1996. ‘The Appeal of Experience; the Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times’, Daedalus 125(1): 1–23. Küchler, S. 1993. ‘Landscape as Memory: The Mapping of Process and Its Representation in a Melanesian Society’, in B. Bender (ed.), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Oxford: Berg, pp. 85–106. LaCapra, D. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lambek, M. 2002. The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. –––. 2006. ‘Memory in a Maussian Universe’, in S. Radstone and K. Hodgkin (eds), Memory Cultures: Memory, Subjectivity and Recognition. New Brunswick / London: Transaction, pp. 202–16. Langer, L.L. 1996. ‘The Alarmed Vision: Social Suffering and Holocaust

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

36

4/11/09

13:07

Page 36

Introduction

Atrocity’, Daedalus 125(1): 47–65. Laub, D. 1991. ‘Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle’, American Imago 48(1): 75–91. –––. 1992. ‘No One Bears Witness to the Witness’, in S. Felman and D. Laub (eds), Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. London: Routledge. Lerner, P. 1996. ‘Rationalising the Therapeutic Arsenal: German Neuropsychiatry in World War I’, in M. Berg and G. Cocks (eds), Medicine and Modernity: Public Health and Medical Care in Nineteenth– and Twentieth–Century Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 121–48. Leys, R. 2000. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Loizos, P. 2008. Iron in the Soul: Displacement, Livelihood and Health in Cyprus. Oxford: Berghahn. Lovell, N. (ed.). 1998. Locality and Belonging. London: Routledge. Mannheim, K. 1964. ‘Das Problem der Generationen’, in Wissenssoziologie: Auswahl aus dem Werk, eingeleitet und hrsg. von Kurt H. Wolff. Berlin: Luchterhand, pp. 509–65. Matsuda, M. 1996. The Memory of the Modern. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mauss, M. 1936. ‘Les Techniques du Corps’, Journal de Psychologie 32(3–4). Reprinted in Marcel Mauss, 1973. Sociologie et Anthropologie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, pp. 363–86. McLean, S. 2004. The Event and Its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Merridale, C. 2000. Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia. London: Granta. Mitchell, T.J. 1991. ‘The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics’, American Political Science Review 85(1): 77–96. Nietzsche, F. 1899. A Genealogy of Morals. Trans. W.A. Haussmann and J. Gray. Unwin. –––. 1957. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Trans. A. Tille. London: J.M. Dent and Sons. Nora, P. 1989. ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26: 7–25. –––. 1992. ‘Between Memory and History’, in P. Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Columbia University Press, Vol. 1: 1–21. Nordstrom, C. and A. Robben (eds). 1995. Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Nuttall, S. and C. Coetzee (eds). 1998. Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. Olick, J.K. and J. Robbins. 1998. ‘Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices’, Annual

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 37

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 37

Review of Sociology 24: 105–40. Olivier de Sardan, J.–P. 1984. Les Sociétés Songhay–Zarma (Niger – Mali): Chefs, Guerriers, Esclaves, Paysans. Paris: Karthala. Papailias, P. 2006. Genres of Recollection: Archival Poetics and Modern Greece. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Passerini, L. 2006 [2003]. ‘Memories Between Silence and Oblivion’, in K. Hodgkin and S. Radstone (eds), Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts. New Brunswick / London: Transaction, pp. 238–54. Peel, JDY. 1979. ‘Kings, Titles and Quarters: A Conjectural History of Ilesha’, History in Africa 6: 109–53. Pine, F. 2007. ‘Memories of Movement and the Stillness of Place: Kinship Memory in the Polish Highlands’, in J. Carsten (ed.), Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 104–25. Piot, Ch. 1999. Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Price, R. 1983. First–Time: The Historical Vision of an African American People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Radstone, S. 2000. ‘Working with Memory: An Introduction’, in S. Radstone (ed.), Memory and Methodology. Oxford: Berg, pp. 1–22. Radstone, S. and K. Hodgkin (eds). 2006 [2003]. Memory Cultures: Memory, Subjectivity and Recognition. New Brunswick / London: Transaction. Rouch, J. 1955. Les Maitre Fous. (Film). Samuel, R. 1994. Theatres of Memory. London: Verso. Scheper–Hughes, N. 1992. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schramm, K. 2004. ‘Coming Home to the Motherland: Pilgrimage Tourism in Ghana’, in J. Eade and S. Coleman (eds), Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion. London / New York: Routledge, pp. 133–49. –––. 2008. ‘Slave Route Projects: Tracing the Heritage of Slavery in Ghana’, in F. de Jong and M. Rowlands (eds), Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginations in West Africa. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 71–98. Scott, D. 1991. ‘That Event, This Memory: Notes on the Anthropology of African Diasporas in the New World’, Diaspora 1(3): 261–84. Shaw, R. 2002. Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Silverstein, P.A. and U. Makdisi (eds). 2005. Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Smith, G. 1996. ‘Arbeit am Vergessen’, in G. Smith and H. Emrich (eds), Vom Nutzen des Vergessens. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, pp. 15–26. Stewart, M. 2004. ‘Remembering Without Commemoration: The Mnemonics and Politics of Holocaust Memories Among European Roma’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10(3): 561–82. Stewart, P. and A. Strathern (eds). 2003. Landscape, Memory and History:

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

38

4/11/09

13:07

Page 38

Introduction

Anthropological Perspectives. London: Pluto Press. Stier, O.B. and J. Shawn Landres (eds). 2006. Religion, Violence, Memory, and Place. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Stoler, A.L. and K. Strassler. 2000. ‘Castings for the Colonial: Memory Work in “New Order” Java’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 42(1): 4–48. Stoller, P. 1984. ‘Horrific Comedy: Cultural Resistance and Songhay Possession Dance’, Ethos 11: 165–87. –––. 1989. Fusion of the Worlds: An Ethnography of Possession Among the Songhay of Niger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. –––. 1995. Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power, and the Hauka in West Africa. New York and London: Routledge. Sturken, M. 1997. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley, London: University of California Press. Summerfield, D. 1996. ‘The Impact of War and Atrocity on Civilian Populations: Basic Principles for NGO Interventions and a Critique of Psychological Trauma Projects’, Network Paper 14, Relief and Rehabilitation Network. –––. 1998. ‘The Social Experience of War and Some Issues for the Humanitarian Field’, in P. Bracken and C. Petty (eds), Rethinking the Trauma of War. London: Free Association Books, pp. 9–37. Swedenburg, T. 1995. Memories of Revolt: The 1936 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Taussig, M. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. –––. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York and London: Routledge. Unnold, Y.S. 2002. Representing the Unrepresentable: Literature of Trauma Under Pinochet in Chile. New York: Peter Lang. Urry, J. 2002. ‘Mobility and Proximity’, Sociology 36(2): 255–74. Van der Kolk, B. and M. Grenberg. 1987. ‘The Psychobiology of the Trauma Response: Hyperarousal, Constriction, and Addiction to Traumatic Reexposure’, in B. van der Kolk (ed.), Psychological Trauma. Washington, DC, pp 63–88. ––– and O. van der Hart. 1991. ‘The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma’, American Imago 48(1): 425–54. ––– and R. Fisler. 1995. ‘Dissociation and the Fragmentary Nature of Traumatic Memories: Overview and Exploratory Study’, Journal of Traumatic Stress 8(4): 505–25. –––, A. McFarlane and L. Weisath. 1996. Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society. New York: Guilford Press. Van der Veer, P. 2002. ‘The Victim’s Tale: Memory and Forgetting in the Story

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 39

Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm 39

of Violence’, in T. Scheffler (ed.), Religion Between Violence and Reconciliation. Beirut / Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, pp. 229–42. Vansina, 1985. Oral Tradition as History. London: James Currey. Vickroy, L. 2002. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Walker, J. 2006 [2003]. ‘The Traumatic Paradox: Autobiographical Documentary and the Psychology of Memory’, in K. Hodgkin and S. Radstone (eds), Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts. New Brunswick / London: Transaction, pp. 104–19. Weigel, S. 1999. ‘Télescopage im Unbewußten: Zum Verhältnis von Trauma, Geschichtsbegriff und Literatur’, in E. Bronfen, B.R. Erdle and S. Weigel (eds), Trauma: Zwischen Psychoanalyse und kulturellem Deutungsmuster. Köln: Böhlau Verlag, pp. 51–76. –––. 2003. ‘The Symptomatology of a Universalized Concept of Trauma: On the Failing of Freud’s Reading of Tasso in the Trauma of History’, New German Critique 90 (Autumn): 85–94. Weissberg, L. 1999. ‘Memory Confined’, in D. Ben–Amos and L. Weissberg (eds), Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 45–76. Werbner, R. (ed) 1998. Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power. London: Zed. White, H. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth–Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Whitehead, N. 2004. ‘Rethinking Anthropology of Violence’, Anthropology Today 20(5): 1–2. Wilce, J. 2002. ‘Genres of Memory and the Memory of Genres: “Forgetting” Lament in Bangladesh’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 44(1): 159–85. Wilson, R. 2002. The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post–Apartheid State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, A. 1995. The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post–Traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Young, J.E. 1989. ‘The Biography of a Memorial Icon: Nathan Rapoport’s Warsaw Ghetto Monument’, Representations 29 (Spring): 69–106. Zemon–Davis, N. and R. Stern. 1989. ‘Introduction: Special issue “Memory and Counter–Memory”’, Representations 26 (Spring): 1–6. Zertal, I. 2000. ‘From the People’s Hall to the Wailing Wall: A Study in Memory, Fear, and War’, Representations 69 (Winter): 96–126. –––. 2005. Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 41

Bodies of Memory

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 43

Chapter 2

Rape and Remembrance in Guadeloupe Janine Klungel

Rape, which Pat Conroy has called ‘a crime against sleep and memory’ (cited in Pierce–Baker 1998: 47), is often depicted as the ultimate trauma – one that is surrounded by silence. In the academic debate on rape, there is a widespread assumption that rape lacks its own language and that it is beyond words (Das 2004). Nancy Scheper–Hughes and Philippe Bourgois state that rape survivors ‘often become living–dead people, refusing to speak of the unspeakable’ (2004: 1). This is in stark contradiction to the ways in which women from Guadeloupe – a Caribbean island colonised by France in 1635, where Africans were enslaved until 1848, and which remains an overseas territory of France – passionately perform rape stories and devotedly transmit rape memories across the generations. Living in the compound of the Guadeloupian Sangely family, I was constantly confronted with rape stories. Isabelle, a woman in her seventies who throughout her life earned most of her money as a gadedzafè (visionary–healer), continuously drew my attention to the subject of rape. In a matter–of–fact way, she would recount to me how rape had formed a critical event in her life’s journey. She was also particularly attentive to rape news in the media, and once told me the story of a young girl waiting to catch a bus who had accepted a ride on the back of a male acquaintance’s moped, and was subsequently gang–raped. On another occasion, she gave me all the details of a young man who had broken into the house of an old lady, raped and murdered her, and was found asleep on the old woman’s bed; the whole experience had made him tired, she explained. She shared with me her astonishment at the story of a man who offered to babysit for his niece, raped the baby, and then committed suicide as he could no longer live with himself. She warned me of the incident where two ‘imprudent’ beautiful French female tourists were ‘dished up’ and killed, their lifeless corpses left behind on the beach (to which she added a caution that if I continued to act as ‘imprudently’ as they did I would end up like them). She warned me of the

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

44

4/11/09

13:07

Page 44

Rape and Rememberance in Guadeloupe

powers of the spirits of the dead, who continue to solicit sex whilst women are asleep and refuse to take ‘no’ for an answer. She made me aware of the odours that the spirits of the dead spread while they are hunting for their victims. Finally, she informed me that I was the elected victim of a zombie who had been detected in the neighbourhood and who was preparing to go after my ‘white meat’; and, in order to protect me from falling into his evil hands, she started to monitor every move I made, making me feel suffocated at times. It took me rather a long time to understand the impact of rape on the lives of Guadeloupian women, the enormous fear of rape that they experience, and the constant pressure they feel to protect themselves and others against any rape attacks. Rape relations have been a routine part of the island’s history, which is grounded in colonialism and slavery. Few studies, however, have dealt with the anxiety of the constant threat and ‘normal’ reality of rape on the lives and family relations of female slaves and the continuing structural presence of rape in the everyday lives of Guadeloupian women. I therefore argue that rape remembrance is crucial, for it functions as a kind of warning, protecting, and reintegrating system in an environment where women are continually menaced by the threat of rape from within the family, the neighbourhood, and from rape spirits. My central question is in what ways rape is remembered in Guadeloupe, how these rape remembrances have found ways of being transmitted from generation to generation, and what their performative effects are. In doing so, I will question the theoretical and ethnographic ‘unspeakability’ of rape, and intend to show that responses to rape in Guadeloupe have been more complex and the silence surrounding it less profound than has frequently been presumed. In this chapter I hope to unravel three levels of rape memory in Guadeloupe. I will first focus on rape during slavery (1635–1848), showing how the romanticised story of slave heroine Mulatress Solitude (1772–1802) – born of rape and born to be raped – was accepted as an official, historical memory in the twentieth century and how Mulatress Solitude has today been politically appropriated by the Guadeloupian people as mother of the nation. Second, I will discuss the rape experiences of Guadeloupian women and explain how they have found within the religious domain an idiom in which the presence of rape spirits allows them to narrate and therefore memorise rape. Third, I will touch upon the bodily practice of ‘virginity testing’ which some Guadeloupian mothers perform on their daughters’ bodies; describing these acts as ‘desperate control’, I will show how this practice is a kind of embodied rape memory. Although the links between these three levels – between past and present – are unclear, they exist alongside each other. However, before I discuss these three levels of the transmission of rape memories in Guadeloupe, I will first sketch the framework that supports my understanding of the relation between rape and remembrance in Guadeloupe.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 45

Janine Klungel 45

Rape, Social Death, and Re–Membering How have anthropologists dealt with the question of rape? Qualitative and experiential approaches towards rape are rare, but a look at the ethnographic literature reveals that informants have not remained silent on the topic of rape. For example, ‘Grandma–the–nun’ from Bhutan openly recounts her rape experience to anthropologist Unni Wikan (1996: 279). And Aman, the Somali girl whose story has been translated by Virginia Lee Barnes and Janice Boddy (1994: 178–79), is capable of transmitting a very detailed description of a date rape. Marjorie Shostak (1983: 311) related the life–story of Nisa, a !Kung woman living on the northern fringe of the Kalahari desert in Botswana, who recounts how the husband of her daughter Nai broke her daughter’s neck as he forced sexual intercourse upon her. Peggy Reeves Sanday (2003: 344; see also Sanday 1996) gives an account of a campus gang–rape in an off–campus house rented by members of the university lacrosse team. In some ethnographies men talk about rape. Philippe Bourgois (2004: 343–44) provides the transcription of a conversation with his Puerto Rican informants living in El Barrio, New York, who have participated in gang–rapes. Thomas Gregor (1985: 101–2) cites the account of a Mehinaku man who observed a gang–rape perpetrated as a punishment for a woman who had seen sacred Kauka flutes supposed to be seen only by Mehinaku men. And Bronislaw Malinowski (1929: 274–77) describes a Trobriand custom known as theyausa, or ‘standing myth’, which permits women to sexually violate a strange man if he passes and sees them while they are engaged in communal weeding. In these random rape accounts, informants have given vivid descriptions of the experience of rape, but anthropologists have rarely given them much attention, have seldom tried to understand what rape means, or have investigated how rape is related to memory. An exception is provided in the involving ethnographic rape description by anthropologist Cathy Winkler (2002), who defines rape as the experience of social death (1991: 14). According to her, rapists want to socially murder their victims by trying to take control over their bodies and minds and annihilate their social existence (Winkler 1991: 14). It is for this reason that Winkler (2002: vii) does not use the term ‘raped people’ but puts the adjective after the noun – ‘people raped’ – to highlight the fact that people who have survived rape are persons first and foremost, and that although the rape experience has caused them suffering, it does not define them. This is not to say that one should underestimate the effects of social death. First, persons raped feel disempowered and disconnected, and often cannot tell the story of their rape experience, because ‘traumatic memory’ lacks narrative and context (Herman 2001: 33). It is for this reason that Ruth Leys (2000) has called trauma the disorder of memory.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

46

4/11/09

13:07

Page 46

Rape and Rememberance in Guadeloupe

Second, persons raped frequently experience a kind of second rape, when people in society and the justice system react in hostile ways to the rape, blaming the persons raped themselves and doubting their story. Winkler (1994: 254) has defined this second assault as social rape. In the context of slavery, the concept of social death was developed earlier by Orlando Patterson (1982). According to him, the first effect of social death is the loss of one’s social rights. Second, socially dead persons are confined to a marginal social space and are forced to live in a continual state of liminality and dishonour. Third, the presence of socially dead persons in society is made possible by those who stand by and accept it as the normal order of things. Persons raped fall into these categories. Edmund Leach (1982: 115) explains that people attach the status of normality to all things they perceive to be ordered and that of abnormality to things conceived of as disordered. Those things that are categorised as abnormal cause a great deal of anxiety among people and regularly become surrounded by cultural barriers and prohibitions. People who pass these barriers and disobey these prohibitions are usually categorised as ambiguous or marginal and receive a taboo status (Jansen 1987), because they function on the fuzzy edges of social boundaries. Adam Jaworski (1993) builds on Leach’s theory and claims that people with a taboo status are silenced. He explains that ‘normal’ people do not want to talk to ‘abnormal’ people, because they threaten the dominant social order. The politics of rape, says Jaworski (1993: 127), provide the evidence that Leach is right, because persons raped are subject to a taboo status and are often deliberately silenced. In this chapter I explicitly pay attention to the social side of rape and remembrance because, as Maurice Halbwachs (1992: 43) maintains, memory is always socially embedded and language is by definition social. Laurence Kirmayer (2002) argues that memory is a communal construction that depends on the willingness of the audience to listen empathically to what a witness has to say. Susan Brison (2002: 12) was astonished when she received no reaction from her contemporaries after she had been raped: ‘Their early lack of response was so striking that I wondered whether it was the result of self–protective denial, a reluctance to mention something so unspeakable, or a symptom of our society’s widespread illiteracy that prevents most people from conveying any feeling that can’t be expressed in a Hallmark card’. I would argue that persons raped do not necessarily lack the words to express their rape remembrances. It is also because they challenge dominant discourses that they do not receive sufficient public discursive space to vent their experiences. Moreover, the limits of what can be said and the limits of the visible define the space in which political discourses are active and in which some subjects reveal themselves to be ‘important’ topics and actors, where others are silenced and made invisible (Butler 2004).

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 47

Janine Klungel 47

I will therefore explicitly look at those fuzzy edges that normally remain out of sight, those ‘hidden transcripts’, to use James Scott’s (1990) expression, that are usually secreted away. I will attempt to demonstrate that Guadeloupian women have found ways to narrate the tabooed subject of rape, to transmit rape memories, and to make it visible in everyday life. In doing so, they do not threaten the dominant memory discourses, which largely remain silent about rape, but they have created a religious community in which, as Brison (2002: xii) would say, they ‘live to tell’ and ‘tell to live’. And is this not the significance of the word remembering? As Kevin Yelvington (2002: 235) suggests, ‘re–membering, means putting together – perhaps a particular sense of community – what has been broken apart’. The ‘community’ that is central to my research is the family, because it was in particular through my intimate relations with members of the Sangely family that I learned about the complex relationships between rape and memory. According to Janet Carsten (2007: 3), the family is an important personalised site to study memory, because memory is entangled with kinship. Family stories not only tell us something about the life of the family, but also about each individual and about developments on a national or political level (Carsten 2007: 5). My discussion of rape memory production at the national level will begin with the story of slave heroine Mulatress Solitude which is at heart a narrative of both social alienation and broken family relations.

A Nation Conceived in Rape? In Guadeloupe, rape became part of the structural tissue of society from the very beginning of colonisation. In 1635, French colonists embarked on the territory and laid claim to it. Almost immediately slaves, drawn from different African societies, were imported and ended up in situations where their usefulness as labourers was the main consideration (Mintz and Price 1992; Mintz 1996). In addition, female slaves in particular were subjected to gender–specific violence based on their sexuality. Marietta Morrissey (1989: 146–47) explains that during slavery, the Caribbean was a symbol for sexual potentiality for young European men. Arlette Gautier (1988: 13) found documents in the French Antillean colonial archives which show how colonists allowed their European workforce to ‘help themselves’ to female slaves. There are no personal testimonies of female Guadeloupian slaves concerning rape. Notwithstanding the scarcity of primary sources providing access to the voices of female slaves who lived though the experience of rape during slavery, it is generally avowed that ‘forced sexual relations were common’ (Morrissey 1989: 147). As I continued my literature search on rape

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

48

4/11/09

13:07

Page 48

Rape and Rememberance in Guadeloupe

during slavery, however, I became intrigued by the relative scarcity of explicit attention to rape relations on one hand, and the hesitation of authors to apply the word rape on the other. Although it is recognised that the rape of female slaves was common, this fact is frequently undermined by the asertion that female slaves also had love relations with members of the planter’s class (Lerner 1973: 46, Mintz and Price 1992: 29–30, Moitt 2001: 99). In historical writings on slavery, little attention has thus far been paid to the histories of female slaves who were raped. Elizabeth Fox–Genovese maintains that many historians have found it difficult to write about the sexual violence perpetrated against female slaves ‘from a subjective perspective – from the “inside”’ (1993: 1–3). Those who have concentrated on the experiences of female slaves, she continues, have highlighted their sense of autonomy and independence, but have rarely paid any attention to the impact of sexual violence on the minds and hearts of the female slaves or on their relations with others. Nor is this the only troubling aspect of the female slaves’ existence. Are the lives of female slaves not far more complex, dealing as they did at the same time with ‘courage and frailty, anger and love’? I will now focus on one female slave: Mulatress Solitude. As part of the 150th commemoration of the abolition of slavery in 1998, a statue of the Guadeloupian slave heroine, Mulatress Solitude, was erected at the Heroes Boulevard. Katherine Verdery (1999: 5) states that as well as symbolising a specific famous person, in a sense statues are also the body of that person. By arresting the process of that person’s bodily decay, a statue alters the temporality associated with the person, bringing it into the timeless and the sacred, like an icon. It is Solitude, as the mother of the nation, who makes the rape history of Guadeloupe visible. Moreover, it is her ‘presence’ which permits Guadeloupian people to deal with a nation which many perceive as conceived in rape (Mulot 2007).

Figure 1. The statue of Mulatress Solitude at the Heroes Boulevard. Photograph taken by Janine Klungel.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 49

Janine Klungel 49

Solitude was conceived in an act of rape between a European sailor and an African slave during the Middle Passage and due to her lighter skin colour she was educated to become a desirable ‘rapable object’ for European men. Although the colonial records contain very little information on Solitude, what was there offered sufficient inspiration for novelists to recognise her existence and to pass on ‘the story’ of her life in which rape was the principal theme. It has therefore been novelists, rather than historians, who have ‘retrieved’ and ‘reassessed’ the memory of Solitude and have (re)created her story. In particular, the romanticised story of Solitude by the Jewish novelist André Schwarz–Bart (1972) functions as a dominant Guadeloupian discourse of collective memory nowadays, because Solitude is primarily known through his novel which recounts her story as follows. In around 1772, Mulatress Solitude is born as Rosalie on a Guadeloupian plantation. Her mother Bayangumay is African and was probably born in what is now Gambia or Senegal in around 1750. When Bayangumay is about fifteen years old, she falls into the hands of human traffickers who bring her to the slave fort of Gorée. There she remains in the dungeons until the day that she is cleaned, fed and chained for transportation via the Middle Passage. A month before the ship enters the harbour of Guadeloupe, Bayangumay and some other women in the ship are raped by drunken sailors. As a result of this rape, Bayangumay falls pregnant with Solitude, and when the child of mixed descent, having one dark and one greenish eye, is born, Bayangumay does not recognise her as her own. Solitude, in contrast, strongly identifies with her mother and with the other slaves, but is rejected by them time after time. When Solitude is finally abandoned by her mother, her sense of social alienation becomes traumatic. She comes to understand that it is specifically because of her conception in rape and her resulting mixed–race status that she is suspected of disloyalty and shunned (Eastley 2002: 35). It is rape that defines the course of her life, for she carries the stigma of rape on her body. Although Schwarz–Bart does not expand much on the rape itself, he shows the overwhelming significance of this act upon the hurtful relationship between a mother and her unwanted daughter. As Carsten (2004: 29) outlines, the threat or reality of rape, and the pregnancies and births that it can engender, create the possibility of an illicit and negative kind of kinship. For some years now, there has been a lot of support for a kind of historical recovery in Guadeloupe. French Antilleans search for an important ancestry by digging up heroes from the past in order to play out the difficult and uncertain act of national liberation. To Bernard Moitt (2001), this effort represents a conscious attempt to come to grips with a past that has often been suppressed or even denied, as acts of commemoration are socially and politically significant in a country that is

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

50

4/11/09

13:07

Page 50

Rape and Rememberance in Guadeloupe

still an overseas department of France, in a region where almost all the other territories have achieved political independence. It was only on 21 May 2001 that, under the direction of Christiane Taubira–Delanon, a French deputy from French Guiana, the Law 2001–434 recognised the slave trade and slavery as ‘crimes against humanity’ in France. On Heroes Boulevard, behind the statue of Solitude, the lieu de mémoire includes a fresco wall 150 metres long, painted by Guadeloupian artists for the 150th commemoration of the abolition of slavery. The various scenes illustrate the suffering of slaves and the resistance they offered. One shows a close–up of a woman wearing a colonial helmet; her face expresses fierceness and strength. Someone has written near this strong feminine image with a felt pen: ‘150 years after the abolition of slavery I will always remain the whore of the white man’. The person who wrote this, probably a woman because the message is in the first person, expresses a common feeling, namely, that things have not changed at all for women since slavery. The story of Mulatress Solitude, once buried, lives on today in the lives of Guadeloupian women. Although her story was only recently officially recognised, this does not mean that other rape stories have not found ways to travel. I will now concentrate on the ways in which rape stories have been remembered and transmitted in families when they were ‘officially’ forgotten.

Figure 2. Women remembered at the slavery wall. Photograph taken by Janine Klungel.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 51

Janine Klungel 51

Figure 3. ‘150 years after the abolition of slavery I will always remain the whore of the white man.’ Photograph taken by Janine Klungel.

Haunted by the Man–with–Stick Throughout my fieldwork in Guadeloupe, I never asked anyone about rape, but focused on religion instead. In 1989, I had met Isabelle’s youngest daughter Rosalie in a Parisian university residence. In her student room, she had built an altar dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Rosalie explained to me that as soon as she started menstruating, her mother Isabelle only allowed her to wear clothes and underwear that were blue and white – the colours of the Virgin. This would give men the warning sign that she was still a virgin and under the Virgin’s protection. The Virgin would not accept the advances of any boy who dared to point his finger at her daughter. When Rosalie decided to meet up with her family in Guadeloupe again in 1993, she asked me to join her. Her parents’ house, the main one in the family compound and painted in bright Marian blue and white, not only housed the members of the Sangely family, but also a whole family of Catholic saints. In each room of the house, the clear blue eyes of the saints pierced through me, and Isabelle assured me that there was no safer place to stay in Guadeloupe. Isabelle believes that she enjoys a special relationship with the Virgin, because from her youngest age ‘the beautiful Lady’ appeared to her and gave signs that she was with her during times of crisis. On various occasions, the Virgin has rescued her from the hands

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

52

4/11/09

13:07

Page 52

Rape and Rememberance in Guadeloupe

of living and dead violators who attempted to force sexual intercourse on her. As one of Mary’s chosen, she is able to detect the moves of her violators and can prevent their actions. Isabelle lends her body to Mary, so that the benevolent Lady can enter hers to speak to other people who are also in need of her visions. When Mary enters her body, Isabelle is asleep and therefore her religious profession is also known by the name of dormeuse (sleeper), but it would be a mistake to call her job relaxed, as the Virgin is very demanding. In return for Mary’s favours and ‘the power of divine privilege’ (Christian 1996: 162), Mary requests strict devotion and faith from Isabelle. Due to her large clientele, it is a full–time job, and a lifetime dedication, because the Lady must be fed, her thirst must be quenched, and she must be placated by means of small favours. Isabelle routinely puts herself in the stories she tells to her children, grandchildren and the anthropologist for them to learn lessons from. She takes centre stage in the stories (Jackson 2002: 15) in which she emphasises the relational processes which made her the person she is today: a visionary–healer, who, thanks to her privileged relationship with the supernatural, has survived many rape attacks. She continually repeats her rape narratives as a daily mantra which needs to be reiterated. In Isabelle’s view, it is her stepmother Celia, ‘the neighbourhood witch’, who keeps creating the ideal conditions for Isabelle to become the defenceless target of rape attacks by both living and dead men. The first rape experience Isabelle remembers occurred when she was seven years old. Her mother had just died and her father could no longer take care of his nine children. In addition, Isabelle was ill and was sent to her godmother. According to Isabelle, however, her godmother’s son, aged fourteen, ‘did not really appreciate the queen’s treatment I received from his mother. He said that I ate all his food!’ In response, she maintained, he started to bully her: He was so very jealous with me and mistreated me so badly. One day, when there was nobody at home, he entered the house. He wanted to catch me. I ran as fast as I could, but he was quicker and he caught me. He was ready to rape me, but since he was so much taller than I was, he had to lift me up. As he lifted me up, I was suddenly rooted to the ground and lost consciousness. I did not come off the ground. I saw a beautiful light–skinned Lady dressed in blue with gorgeous long hair, an angel, coming from the north, coming from the sea. She protected me. My godmother’s son was so frightened that he left me in peace afterwards. The next rape memory, recalled repeatedly by Isabelle as ‘my harshest moment in life!’, describes an incident which happened when she was

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 53

Janine Klungel 53

twenty–five years old, married to Maximilien, and had just given birth to twins: My stepmother Celia cast a spell on me by using one of my sanitary towels. She spoke the names of dead men over it. Each night, their wicked spirits came to rape me at least ten times. If Maximilien spend the night beside me [he had an affair with another woman at that time], he did not notice anything. He quietly slept through, while big balls of blood came out of me! I lost my speech! I took to bed for years! I could not do anything! One night, I saw in my dreams the angel coming from the sea for the second time. She indicated to me that I had to prepare a bag with seven blue underpants, one for every night of the week. Each night, I wore one of them, and from that moment onwards the rape stopped. It was the Virgin who prevented me from getting raped anew! The raping spirits that Isabelle describes as her attackers resemble the Guadeloupian mythical figure called l’Homme–au–Bâton (the Man–with–Stick). According to Hélène Migerel (1987: 65), the myth of the Man–with–Stick finds its origin in colonial history, when slave women were haunted by their Master as he ‘invisibly’ forced an entrance into their cabins and raped them. However, little is known about the history of the Man–with–Stick. Migerel maintains that the Man–with–Stick introduced himself in many Guadeloupian homes around 1960 in order to cause wounds and sexual violence. In contrast, Genevieve Leti (2000: 83) situates the Man–with–Stick in the 1950s when the rumour was spread after a young girl of an important family became pregnant and talked about a man who used an ivory cane: according to Leti, this event caused a veritable collective psychosis and hysteria. Merchants made the most of this opportunity by providing black or invisible underwear to protect women who felt particularly threatened. In the novel L’Homme–au–Bâton (1992), the Guadeloupian writer Ernest Pépin describes the Man–with–Stick as a mysterious character, without a face or name, invisible and yet with a sinister presence, who pierces women when they are asleep, leaving children behind, and scaring everybody out of their wits. But the Man–with–Stick did not only haunt women in the past. Although I have only repeated some of Isabelle’s narratives here, she is surrounded by women who have been raped. Living at a distance of no more than 100 metres from Isabelle, her daughter–in–law Dolores has frequently been hospitalised in psychiatric institutions due to a youth in which her father physically and sexually abused her; her neighbour’s eldest daughter had a child by her stepfather at the age of fourteen; her cousin’s daughters are all victims of incest; and another young girl became her father’s ‘wife’ as soon as her mother passed away. One might question

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

54

4/11/09

13:07

Page 54

Rape and Rememberance in Guadeloupe

whether the experiences of these women and girls can really be grouped together as one phenomenon. David Riches (1986: 1) has rightly warned anthropologists about the danger that what might be called violence in one culture may not be denoted as such in another. The situations described above, however, are perceived to be unacceptable according to French law. At the Guadeloupian Conference entitled ‘Sexual Violence and its Repercussions for the Adolescent and Adult’ (2000), I listened to Guadeloupian lawyers argue that it is hard to recognise sexual violence in Guadeloupe, because most girls and women who have been raped do not speak about their experiences and remembrances. Their declarations did not match up with my experience within the Sangely family and their surroundings, where much is spoken about rape and it is clearly visible. But it has become so much part of the normal fabric of social life that those who perpetrate sexual violence are rarely penalised and are free to continue living among those they violate. It is not for nothing that Scheper–Hughes has called the family ‘one of the most violent of social institutions’ (in Scheper–Hughes and Bourgois 2004: 3). In line with Nicolas Argenti (2006: 50), it must be underscored that rape violence during slavery as well as everyday rape relations today wound the very heart of the family and have not been forgotten. Listening to these narrations of rape remembrances in which rape spirits haunt women, children learn from a very young age that rape is not necessarily a topic that should be secreted away, but that it is part of everyday life: it is habitual. In Guadeloupe, women narrate ‘heroic’ stories about rape and the awakening of a religious gift, for there is a cultural script available to them which enables them to narrate their rape experiences to an empathetic audience mainly existing of women who are part of the religious community and family members, as well as male relatives who happen to be within earshot. This script, maintains Mieke Bal, serves a social function: ‘it comes about in a cultural context whose frame evokes and enables the memory. It is a context in which, precisely, the past makes sense in the present, to others who can understand it, sympathize with it, or respond with astonishment, surprise, even horror; narrative memory offers some form of feedback that ratifies the memory’ (1999: x). It is in particular the narrating of rape remembrances to others, Brison argues (2002: 71), which enables traumatised persons to gain more control over their lives following the trauma. It is within the religious domain that Guadeloupian women like Isabelle find ways of performing their rape narratives and that they obtain an audience. In doing so, they do not so much bear witness to ‘historical facts’, but they are both working through painful remembrances and struggling against ‘social death’ (Winkler 1991).

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 55

Janine Klungel 55

Embodying the Ghost of Rape Having worked through traumatic rape remembrances, however, does not mean that one is able to avoid a rape attack in the future. Rosalie told me that Isabelle tested her virginity throughout her adolescent years. As Rosalie was taking her shower, Isabelle would put her hand between Rosalie’s legs to check her maidenhead and to feel if her vagina had changed. Rosalie did not like to talk about the virginity testing, because it troubled her and she was still scared when Isabelle ordered her to open the bathroom door and let her in. While I showered, Isabelle and her daughter Moïse frequently tried to break open the two doors to the bathroom. At one of the doors, Isabelle would call out, ‘Janine, are you still a virgin? Please open the door, let me test it. Does your “fish” still belong to mama?’ From the other side of the second door, meanwhile, I could hear Moïse’s deep breath, tired of the strength she had to use to try and force the door. As she was close to succeeding, I would throw myself against it until Moïse had given up her attempt to break in. It was only when I read the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) by the Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat that I truly started to understand the impact of virginity testing and the ways that embodied rape memories are transmitted from mother to daughter in Guadeloupe. In Breath, Eyes, Memory, Danticat narrates the story of a mother and her daughter from Haiti, Martine and Sophie Caco. Martine is raped in a canefield at the age of sixteen by a tonton macoute: ‘he kept pounding her until she was too stunned to make a sound’, narrates Sophie (Danticat 1994: 139). The rape results in a pregnancy and the subsequent birth of Sophie. Traumatised, Martine flees Haiti for the United States, leaving her island and past behind to escape the memory and the living reminder of this violation. Sophie is raised by Martine’s mother and sister Atie instead. However, the trauma travels with Martine and has repercussions on the way in which she lives her daily life in New York. She tries to deal with it, to forget the rape, to dissociate herself from it, but the sexual violation has irrevocably altered her subjectivity and literally rendered her speechless. As Donette Francis (2004: 80) explains, the rape remains a persistent bodily memory: the terror haunts Martine’s nightly existence so that even while asleep she inflicts bodily harm on herself, tearing her sheets and biting off pieces of her own flesh when she has nightmares. When Sophie relocates to New York to rejoin her mother, and asks Martine to tell her the story of her birth. Martine has no choice but to break her silence and tells her daughter: ‘the details are too much … but it happened like this. A man grabbed me from the side of the road, pulled me into a cane field, and put you in my body’ (Danticat 1994: 61). As she witnesses her mother’s nightmares, Sophie not only gains an understanding of the magnitude of her mother’s suffering, but also

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

56

4/11/09

13:07

Page 56

Rape and Rememberance in Guadeloupe

becomes a participant and co–owner of the traumatic event (Francis 2004: 81). Like generations of women before her, Martine performs virginity testing on her daughter, with the insertion of her little finger into Sophie’s vagina. Martine considers it her duty to protect Sophie until marriage and to maintain control over Sophie’s body: ‘a mother is supposed to do that until her daughter is married’ (Danticat 1994: 60). Sophie is made to lie on the bed, while her mother tells her stories to distract her. But Sophie hates the tests: ‘it is the most horrible thing that ever happened to me’ (Danticat 1994: 156). To end the bodily violation of the testing, Sophie finally breaks her hymen with a pestle: I was feeling alone and lost, like there was no longer any reason for me to live. I went down to the kitchen and searched my mother’s cabinet for the mortar and pestle we used to crush spices. I took the pestle to bed with me and held it against my chest … My flesh ripped apart as I pressed the pestle into it. I could see the blood slowly dripping into the bed sheet … My body was quivering when my mother walked into my room to test me. My legs were limp when she drew them aside. I ached so hard I could hardly move. Finally I failed the test (Danticat 1994: 88). Sophie alters the situation to make the violence of the virginity testing stop, although the form of resistance she chooses is still a violation. Danticat (in Hemmerechts 2008: 21) has recently said that Haitians thought that her description of the virginity testing was misleading; ‘but it really happened, only not everywhere and not in all families’. In an earlier interview with Random House (date unknown), she explained that she wanted to deal with mother–daughter relationships and the way in which mothers sometimes attempt to make themselves the guardians of their daughter’s sexuality. She highlights the fact that ‘the essential thing to all the mothers in the book is to try, in their own way, to be the best mothers they can be, given their circumstances’. Following on Danticat, I maintain that virginity testing in Guadeloupe is undertaken by mothers in order to arm their daughters’ bodies against violators in acts which I call ‘desperate control’. Judith Herman has written that many survivors of childhood sexual abuse are terribly afraid that their children will suffer a fate similar to their own, and they will go to great lengths to prevent this from happening (Herman 2001: 114). Although Isabelle tries to shield her daughters’ bodies with Marian blue and white underwear and clothes, she also tests what remains invisible to the eye, the suffering that is inscribed in the body. Danticat calls it ‘a nightmare that is passed on through generations like heirlooms’ (1994: 234), a kind of vicious circle, in which mothers who have been raped try to protect their daughters from rape by raping them. It bears a resemblance to what Primo Levi called a ‘grey zone’, in the sense that the dividing lines between ‘enemy’ and

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 57

Janine Klungel 57

‘victim’ are not clear cut: ‘the world into which one was precipitated was terrible, yes, but also indecipherable: it did not conform to any model; the enemy was all around but also inside’ (2004: 83). The ways in which the painful legacies of a collective past have been passed on from great grandmother to grandmother to mother to daughter have inescapable effects for Guadeloupian women. If religion is the domain in which rape experiences are told and re–told, in which women testify to a painful past and keep its memory alive, in which they come to terms with the trauma that otherwise eludes them, then by the same token, daughters are forced to ‘inherit’ their mothers ‘rape traumas’ in their own bodies: ‘Their past in my blood. … My veins are centuries meeting’ (Jones 1975: 45–46). In this sense, virginity testing in Guadeloupe can be interpreted as what Bal calls an Ur–narrative, ‘learned in childhood, enforced by discipline, and carried along later in life’ (Bal 1999: viii), for it is so buried in routine, that its violence is often painfully internalised and misrecognised as violence by both its perpetrators and victims (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2004, Bourdieu 2004). It was only recently that Rosalie, who is fourty–two years old today, said to me: ‘You know, I have finally come to realise that my mother has done violence to me by continually testing my virginity when I was young. You cannot imagine how afraid I am of her and how much it is still influencing my life’. Although Rosalie has been afraid and has rejected men for her whole life, she has now come to recognise her mother rather than men as her ‘rapist’.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have spoken about the complex relationship between rape and remembrance in Guadeloupe from colonialism until today. By unravelling three levels – national, familial and personal – of intergenerational transmission of rape remembrance, I have pointed out that in Guadeloupe the memory of rape has been transmitted in different ways that do not exist in opposition to each other, but alongside one another (Feldman 1991). Having built upon Winkler’s (1991) definition of rape as the experience of social death, I want to reiterate that rape memory is not only an individual matter, but also a social one that involves the entire social body in ‘re–membering’ persons who have been rendered socially dead as the result of their rape experience. It is probably no coincidence that in a context in which rape is barely recognised officially, it is mainly novelists who have documented rape remembrances. Why might this be the case? Does the framework of an avowedly fictional text afford a space for a different kind of engagement with the past? In the documentary series Van Dis in Afrika (2008) the Dutch writer Adriaan van Dis talks to the Mozambican writer Mia Couto about

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

58

4/11/09

13:07

Page 58

Rape and Rememberance in Guadeloupe

the role of writers with regards to war and memory. Couto says that the Mozambican people still suffer a lot because of the war, but that they do not want to remember and do not want to feel the presence of a war that was deeply traumatic. Couto: This is something that maybe in our work as writers we can help. Van Dis: To remember? Couto: To remember without trauma. Because people want to remember, because they want to become owners again of this time. It belongs to us that time, even if it is a sad time. We have the right to revisit that time. So while transforming it into a story, you allow people to revisit without a sense of guilt, without pointing fingers to the others. This is something we are doing I think as writers. I am therefore of the opinion that anthropologists should take these literary sources seriously, because as the late poet Aimé Césaire (in Richardson and Fijalkowski 1996: 134) once noted: ‘Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge’. One thing is certain: although rape remembrance has been incompletely represented in historical representations, it has been transmitted despite its silencing. I will therefore conclude, in the words of Guadeloupian author Maryse Condé (1989), ‘elle court, elle court’ la mémoire.

References Argenti, N. 2006. ‘Remembering the Future: Slavery, Youth and Masking in the Cameroon Grassfields’, Social Anthropology 14(1): 49–69. Bal, M. 1999. ‘Introduction’, in M. Bal, J. Crewe and L. Spitzer (eds), Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Hanover: Dartmouth College, University Press of New England, pp. vii –xvii. Barnes, V. Lee and J. Boddy. 1994. Aman: The Story of a Somali Girl [as told to Virginia Lee Barnes and Janice Boddy]. New York: Pantheon Books. Bourdieu, P. 2004. ‘Gender and Symbolic Violence’, in N. Scheper–Hughes and P. Bourgois (eds), Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology. Malden: Blackwell University Press, pp. 339–42. ––– and L. Wacquant. 2004. ‘Symbolic violence’, in N. Scheper–Hughes and P. Bourgois (eds), Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology. Malden: Blackwell University Press, pp. 272–80. Bourgois, P. 2004. ‘The everyday violence of gang rape’, in N. Scheper–Hughes and P. Bourgois (eds), Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology. Malden: Blackwell University Press, pp. 343–47. Brison, S. 2002. Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self. Princeton:

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 59

Janine Klungel 59

Princeton University Press. Butler, J. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Carsten, J. 2004. After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. –––. 2007. ‘Introduction: Ghosts of memory’, in Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness. Malden: Blackwell, pp. 1–35. Christian, W. 1996. Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ. Berkeley: University of California Press. Condé, M. 1989. An Tan Revolysion: Elle Court, Elle Court la Liberté. Pointe–à–Pitre: Conseil Régional de la Guadeloupe. Danticat, E. 1994. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Vintage. Das, V. 2004. ‘Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain’, in N. Scheper–Hughes and P. Bourgois (eds), Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology. Malden: Blackwell University Press, pp. 327–33. Eastley, A. 2002. ‘Shaping a Symbol: Schwarz–Bart’s Visions and Revisions of His Guadeloupian Heroine in La Mulâtresse Solitude’, Sargasso (New Century/New Horizons: Emerging Scholars of Caribbean Literatures, Languages, and Cultures), II: 31–43. Feldman, A. 1991. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fox–Genovese, E. 1993. Unspeakable Things Unspoken: Ghosts and Memories in the Narratives of African–American Women [The 1992 Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture]. Mona: Department of History, University of the West Indies. Francis, D.A. 2004. ‘“Silences too Horrific to Disturb”: Writing Sexual Histories in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory’, Research in African Literatures 35(2): 75–90. Gautier, A. 1988. Nouvelles Problématiques dans l’Histoire de l’Esclavage: L’Etude des Rapports Sociaux de Sexe (Paper Presented at Escravidoa Congresso Internacional Sao Paolo, The Museum and the Question of the Negro Past). Paris: ORSTOM. Gregor, T. 1985. Anxious Pleasures: The Sexual Lives of an Amazonian People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Halbwachs, M. 1992 [1941, 1952]. On Collective Memory, trans. L. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hemmerechts, K. 2008. ‘Niemand neemt het op voor Haïti’: Interview Edwidge Danticat. De Volkskrant, 4 July. Herman, J. Lewis. 2001. Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. London: Pandora. Jackson, M. 2002. The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and Intersubjectivity. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen. Jansen, W. 1987. Women Without Men: Gender and Marginality in an Algerian town. Leiden: Brill. Jaworski, A. 1993. The Power of Silence: Social and Pragmatic Perspectives.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

60

4/11/09

13:07

Page 60

Rape and Rememberance in Guadeloupe

Newbury Park: Sage. Jones, G. 1975. Corregidora. Boston: Beacon Press. Kirmayer, L. 2002. ‘The Refugee’s Predicament’. L’Evolution Psychiatrique 67: 724–42. Leach, E. 1982. Social Anthropology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lerner, G. 1973. Black Women in White America: A Documentary History. New York: Vintage Books. Leti, G. 2000. L’Univers Magico–Religieux Antillais: ABC des Croyances et Superstitions d’Hier et d’Aujourd’hui. Paris: l’Harmattan. Levi, P. 2004. ‘The Gray Zone’, in N. Scheper–Hughes and P. Bourgois (eds), Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology. Malden: Blackwell University Press, pp. 83–90. Leys, R. 2000. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Malinowski, B. 1929. The Sexual Life of Savages in Northwest Melanesia [2 volumes]. New York: Horace Liveright. Migerel, H. 1987. La Migration des Zombies: Survivances de la Magie Antillaise en France. Paris: Editions Caribéennes. Mintz, S. 1996. ‘Enduring Substances, Trying Theories: The Caribbean Region as “Óikoumenê”’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Incorporating Man 2(2): 289–311. ––– and R. Price. 1992. The Birth of African–American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. Boston: Beacon Press. Moitt, B. 2001. Women and Slavery in the French West Indies, 1635–1848. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Morrissey, M. 1989. Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Mulot, S. 2007. ‘Le Mythe du Viol Fondateur aux Antilles Françaises’, Ethnologie Française 3: 517–24. Patterson, O. 1982. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pépin, E. 1992. L’Homme–au–Bâton. Paris: Editions Gallimard (Folio). Pierce–Baker, C. 1998. Surviving the Silence: Black Women’s Stories of Rape. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Random House. Date unknown. ‘Behind the Books: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat’. Retrieved 28 July 2008 from http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/danticat.html. Richardson, M. and Fijalkowski, K. 1996. ‘Poetry and Knowledge’, in Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean. London: Verso, pp. 134–46. Riches, D. (ed.). 1986. The Anthropology of Violence. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Sanday, P. Reeves. 1996. A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape on Trial. New York: Doubleday. –––. 2003. ‘Rape–free versus Rape–prone: How Culture Makes a Difference’, in C. Brown Travis (ed.), Evolution, Gender, and Rape.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 61

Janine Klungel 61

Cambridge: Mit Press, pp. 337–61. Scheper–Hughes, N. and P. Bourgois (eds). 2004. ‘Introduction: Making Sense of Violence’, in N. Scheper–Hughes and P. Bourgois (eds), Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology. Malden: Blackwell University Press, pp. 1–31. Schwarz–Bart, A. 1972. La Mulâtresse Solitude: Roman. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Scott, J. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shostak, M. 1983. Nisa, the Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. New York: Vintage Books. Van Dis, A. 2008. ‘“Na het vechten de vrijheid”: Mozambique na de burgeroorlog’, episode 7, in Van Dis in Afrika (documentary). Verdery, K. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. Columbia: University of Columbia Press. Wikan, U. 1996. ‘The Nun’s Story: Reflections on an Age–old, Postmodern Dilemma’, American Anthropologist 98(2): 279–89. Winkler, C. 1991. ‘Rape as Social Murder’, Anthropology Today 7(3): 12–14. ––– with K. Wininger. 1994. ‘Rape Trauma: Contexts of Meaning’, in T. Csordas (ed.), Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 248–68. –––. 2002. One Night: Realities of Rape. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Yelvington, K. 2002. ‘History, Memory and Identity: A Programmatic Prolegomenon’. Critique of Anthropology 22(3): 227–56.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 63

Chapter 3

Uncanny Memories, Violence and Indigenous Medicine in Southern Chile Dorthe Brogaard Kristensen

Not a leaf stirs in Chile without me moving it. (General Augusto Pinochet 1981 cited in Collier and Sater 2004: 359) On 11 September 1973, General Augusto Pinochet and his junta replaced the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende with a military regime. This regime lasted until 1990, when democracy was again introduced in Chile. What happened during these years, especially to the political opponents of the military regime, is a subject that has only recently been discussed publicly in Chile. The topic of state violence became part of a public discussion in connection with the publication of a governmental report on 28 November 2004, which was written on the basis of 35,000 testimonies given to the Comisión Sobre Prisión Política y Tortura (Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture). This report documented the widespread violence carried out during Pinochet’s military regime,1 especially in connection with Mapuche Indians, who were often regarded as left–wing sympathisers due to their fight for collective land rights. The report sent shock waves through Chilean society, as many had previously regarded state violence as an impossibility (Stern 2006; Borzutzky and Oppenheim 2006). Even now, in everyday conversation, this violence is very rarely directly verbalised, and has often been referred to as ‘the black hole in the collective memory of the Chileans’. From 2004 to 2005 I carried out fieldwork in the south of Chile among patients, doctors and traditional healers – the shaman or machi – of the Mapuche Indians. The Mapuche Indians are an ethnic minority with a population of 1.2 million people.2 They live in the south of Chile in reservations (comunidades) as well as in the capital Santiago. The practice of their shamans, the so–called machis, has been revitalised over the last decades and has become a very popular medical choice both among Mapuche Indians and other Chileans – especially those living near urban centres (Bacigalupo 2001). In their medical work the machi normally

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

64

4/11/09

13:07

Page 64

Violence and Indigenous Medicine in Southern Chile

diagnoses on the basis of observing urine (willintun); other ways of diagnosing are through trance (kuymin), through touching the patients’ clothes (pewuntun), or through dreams (peuma). The medical practice consists of a combination of rituals and herbal remedies. This chapter explores the relationship between the medical practice of the machis and issues relating to memory and violence. What happens to experiences of violence that have not been verbalised directly? Are they ever effectively forgotten, or are they still carried within the individual mind or the individual body? Are they transmitted and reworked through the social framework and bodily practices available in a given context? By exploring a case study of illness I will argue that memories of violence are articulated and negotiated through the social framework available in a given context, in this case personal narrative, bodily symptoms and indigenous medical practices. A diagnosis – or an idiom of distress (Nichter 1981) – can be considered a language and even a form of life (Antze 1996: 6). Medical practices and disease categories might serve to articulate, confront and rework situations of terror and threat of personal destruction in connection with memories of state violence. This happens because, through medical practices, the body acquires the vocabulary, images and agency necessary for expressing and negotiating feelings and experiences of terror and destruction. Consequently the overall argument of this chapter is that in a context of medical pluralism – in this case biomedicine and Mapuche shamanistic healing – the patients negotiate social positions and collective memories: that is, in illness stories and medical practice certain memories and values, which appear as ‘holes’ in the public discourse, are highlighted and made visible in a parallel form through the use of metaphors (Johnson 1987; Kirmayer 1992, 1996, 2000; Low 1994) and images (Halbwachs 1992; Taussig 1987). In addition, my aim is to explore how indigenous medicine is used as a means to change the perception and agency of a person confronted by experiences of personal destruction, alienation and violence. I argue that medical practice is a useful tool for people’s articulation and negotiation of the past. More specifically, I show how a Mapuche diagnosis and treatment of susto (soul fright) or mal (sorcery) provides a framework for renegotiating the – perhaps especially traumatic – past. According to Mapuche cosmology there is no separation between mind and body. The individual body is considered an open entity, strongly connected to and influenced by the social order. An illness is thought to affect the spiritual, physical and social aspects of a person’s being; in other words, emotions, physical organs and social relations are all interdependent. As a consequence, it is believed that an incident in a person’s present (or past) may affect his own well–being, as well as the well–being of his social relations; through medical practice, however, it is

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 65

Dorthe Brogaard Kristensen 65

possible to re–enact and resolve events of the past (Bacigalupo 2001: 42; Citarella et al. 1995). Mapuche Indians – as well as many Chileans – believe that there are two types of illnesses. The re kutran or natural diseases are considered to be a product of a loss of balance between a person and his environment, for instance, a sudden shift in temperature or an improper combination of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ food. Spiritual diseases – also called the supernatural diseases – form a second category, the symptoms of which include pains (typically in the head and stomach, though the pain often changes location), lack of energy, dizziness, depression, sadness, weeping, anxiety, lack of appetite, loss of weight, insomnia and apathy (Bacigalupo 2001: 48–50). If a person is suffering from a spiritual disease, it most commonly affects both his physical and social surroundings. Another important piece of information that comes to the fore in illness stories is the role that spirits play in memory and in medical practice. According to Michael Lambek, Malagasy spirits are a vehicle for history and examples of a collective historical memory. Lambek writes about the spirits that “they bring forwards and force people to acknowledge the commitments of and to the past. The past is never completely over; it continues to shape the present, even as it is distinct from it, and at the same time is available to be addressed by the present. Conversely, remembering entails engagement with the present” (Lambek 1996: 243). Consequently a diagnosis involving the presence of spirits can be regarded as a living and embodied history that permits the patient to negotiate his relation to the world in images and metaphors, which in turn allows for the reworking of a situation. Therefore, medical practice can be considered an act of remembering through the body, and also a way to negotiate past memories and present problems. In other words, metaphors play a crucial role as a way to open the doors to the past, and through this, to negotiate the individual’s relationship to the world. Metaphors shape and form bodily experiences, but they also allow the patient to negotiate and act upon a social reality by providing ways of acting on a representation, and simultaneously sharing the representation with others (Kirmayer 1992: 335).

Remembering and Forgetting: A Culture of Fear In contemporary everyday life in Chile, the Pinochet regime, notwithstanding the widespread repression and violence it was responsible for, is very rarely mentioned. The historian Steve Stern, who writes about the memory struggle of Chile’s past, provides some astonishing figures. In a country of ten million people in 1973, individually proved cases of death or disappearance by state agents amount to 3,000, documented political arrests 82,000 and persons exiled 200,000. Torture estimates range between 100,000 and 400,000. These figures indicate that

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

66

4/11/09

13:07

Page 66

Violence and Indigenous Medicine in Southern Chile

the majority of Chilean families have a relative, friend or acquaintance who has been affected by some kind of violence and repression (Stern 2006: xxi). The politics of the military regime also had a profound impact on the mental health of the people, firstly because many suffered severe health problems due to torture. The literature documenting this process is scarce and mostly consists of studies conducted by human rights groups. Following the military coup a number of human rights organisations cooperated with religious groups to provide voluntary health services to persons suffering from mental problems caused by political suppression. The largest organisation was El Comité de Cooperación para la Paz (COPACHI),3 founded in 1973.4 It is very difficult to estimate how many people were victims of political persecution; according to one estimate it was 89,183, but this figure only includes verified cases (ILAS 1996: 90). After the transition to democracy the area of mental health in relation to the victims of political suppression was accorded high priority. In the creation of the programme PRAIS (Programa de Reparación y Atención Integral de Salud) the work of the human rights organisations was officially recognised and included within the national health system. However, the programme had a very limited impact as few people actually knew that it existed (ILAS 1996: 136). In everyday life, however, the violence of the past is rarely a topic of discussion. Nevertheless, conversations about contemporary health problems are omnipresent. Often people related these problems to the economic situation, but hardly ever to political events.5 When I interviewed patients, in their accounts of symptoms, whether psychological or physical, they often expressed feelings of terror and destruction. These symptoms were commonly associated with disputes in the family, and were seen as resulting from the malign influence of spirits or from witchcraft. In contrast, many of my informants were reluctant to discuss issues concerning the political upheavals of the recent past and the state–sponsored violence that accompanied them. Although I seldom heard discussions of the violence of the military regime, many of my informants claimed that during the Pinochet era many dead bodies had been found in the rivers or buried in the ground – especially in indigenous territories. The sharp contrast between the silence surrounding the violence related to government politics, which was rarely described or only mentioned in a very fragmentary and non–chronological way, and the ubiquity and loquaciousness of the public discourse regarding health problems – sometimes of a quite trivial kind – raises the question of whether the latter has not somehow replaced the former, whether talk about current ill–health might link to memories of past persecution. It is possible that these illness stories were – in the end – not trivial at all but

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 67

Dorthe Brogaard Kristensen 67

could provide a key to understand how people cope with their past – and present – suffering through the use of medicine and bodily practices. The embodiment or somatisation of social ills as lingering illness is often shared within a family or group of victims. This has been described in the literature as the ‘psychosomatic family’. These families are also characterised by the sharing of illness problems and having strong boundaries which limit contact with the outside world (e.g. ‘we can only count on ourselves’) and often tend to isolate themselves, choosing not to share their problems with people from outside their family circle. One might even speak of a culture of fear.6 These problems are often related to having a family member who has been subjected to torture (Agger and Jensen 1996: 273). The fate of the Chileans during the military regime has mostly been described by external observers. In an article in 1985 Ariel Dorfman compares the destiny of the Chileans to the rural legend of the imbunche which explains what happens when a child disappears: ‘He has been kidnapped by witches, and his captors, to ensure his servitude, break all his bones, sew together the different part of his body and turn his head around so he must always look and walk backwards. His eyes, ears and mouth are constantly stitched up. The creature is called Imbunche’ (Dorfman 1985). Dorfman further describes the regime’s total control of public discourse – including the closing of six magazines published by the opposition – and the strict censorship of all media, commenting that ‘this control is as arbitrary as it tends to be at times absurd: a child’s dictionary sold on newsstands was confiscated – the censors did not agree with its definition of the word “soldier”’. Subsequently, Dorfman compared the destiny of the Chileans to the creature imbunche: Chileans do not know, cannot know, if today their voices will be overheard, if tomorrow their bodies will be fractured. But even if they are not arrested or beaten up by the police or thrown out of their work, they are, in a way, already like imbunches. They are isolated from each other, their means of communicating suppressed, their connections cut off, their senses blocked by fear. (Dorfman 1985) I came upon Dorfman’s link between the experience of repression and violence and the creature imbunche while I was reviewing the illness stories of shamanistic healing in my notes. Here I encountered a similar metaphorical link between memory of violence and practices of witchcraft embodied in the notion of bicho. The use of the words bicho and imbunche often overlaps. Bicho is the Mapuche word for vermin or an intestinal worm, but also denotes an evil force which, through an act of witchcraft, installs itself and is nurtured by a human host from whom it steals the life force.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

68

4/11/09

13:07

Page 68

Violence and Indigenous Medicine in Southern Chile

The following story of a Mapuche man – Aberlardo – illustrates the role that medical practices and spirits play in the negotiation and subverting of experiences of violence. I suggest that the appearance of imbunche and bicho might be an example of the ‘uncanny’ in traumatic memory. The uncanny is, according to Freud, ‘something, which ought to have remained hidden, but has come to light’. In Aberlardo’s story, the bicho plays a crucial role in the management of an illness. The bicho has many layers of significance, one of which is that it is used to express an experience of being attacked and destroyed by an external evil force. It is suggested that bicho stands as an articulation and negotiation of that which has not been allowed a direct verbal expression, in this case, memories of state violence. Furthermore, the notion of the ‘uncanny’ will be explored, not in the Freudian sense as referring to a fantasy play taking place in the mind of a child, but as a meta–reality, through which the patient is provided with a means of action (Argenti 2001: 71).

The Bewitched Body: The Narrative of a Survivor Aberlardo identified himself strongly as Mapuche; he had been raised in the countryside and distinguished himself by being quite successful, and was now a returned migrant from the north, where he had worked in construction. He was a leader of the local community and in charge of the construction of tower blocks in a big town near his house in the countryside. Aberlardo began his illness story, which took place some four years earlier, in this way: ‘I had a serious health problem, but the doctors did not find anything wrong with me’. Subsequently, he spoke about his bodily symptoms. Firstly, his stomach was painful and swollen, and, especially in the afternoon, he felt that something was moving inside his belly. Furthermore, he suffered from lack of appetite and insomnia, went to bed at 9 P.M. and woke up at 1 A.M., almost jumping out of his bed due to fright. When his colleagues and family suggested that it might be a stomach ulcer, he went to the doctor and had an examination, which revealed no ulcer, so his doctor instead gave him some tranquillisers. Apparently, however, this medicine was not effective in curing his symptoms. In the case of Aberlardo I suspected that he understood the nature of the mysterious suffering he described as resulting from witchcraft practices that had damaged his body and mind. The clues, signs and traces he let drop before arriving at the narrative climax were of course of a personal kind, but also reflected a framework for articulating a life–story, which involved the description of bodily symptoms and the work of evil forces upon human life. During these medical dialogues memories of the past simply poured out. Talking about past bodily symptoms seemed to be a key that opened the door to other memories of the past.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 69

Dorthe Brogaard Kristensen 69

The underlying assumption, which stems from the observations expressed in this illness story, is that medical discourses might encapsulate issues that go beyond health problems. Also, the notion of power and identity in relation to social and political processes seemed to be implied. According to Paul Antze, trivial stories, when told in groups, serve to translate shared ideas into experiential realities. He further proposes that stories ‘might be the chief means by which grand cultural discourses like Christianity or psychoanalysis find their way into something resembling self–knowledge’ (Antze 1996: 6). Or, in other words, these stories reflect how people articulate and negotiate their sense of self in relation to the languages available in a given context. Aberlardo’s story is typical for many citizens in southern Chile – who identify themselves as Mapuche or as mestizo – and who diagnose and treat themselves with Mapuche medicine for afflictions, the so–called Mapuche–illnesses or spiritual diseases. The interesting question is whether these patients actually suffer from a biomedical condition, which the doctors have not discovered. Or is something else going on? And what happens in those cases where patients actually do have a biomedically diagnosed disease, but still believe they had a spiritual or a Mapuche–illness? It in important to note that in most cases – as in the case of Aberlardo – both the diagnosis as well as the treatment of these afflictions take place within a pluralistic medical system, which means that the patient seeks a variety of practitioners such as, for instance, doctors, psychiatrists and Mapuche healers. Furthermore, the patient’s experience, diagnosis and management of illness embodies and reflects a larger socio–economic context. In what follows I will explore Aberlardo’s illness story; it appears that his illness story and the efficacy of healing is not only related to the bodily symptoms implied, but also to its place within the socio–economic context, that is, its position as an marginal but also alternative space to articulate discourses and memories opposed to mainstream discourses on both politics and health. Aberlardo told me that he had talked about his health problem to a colleague, who recommended that he consult a machi he knew. He agreed and went to the countryside one Tuesday morning. The machi diagnosed him by sleeping with his shirt (piwuntun) and by analysing his urine (willintun). Her diagnosis was clear. Due to envy of his success in life he had been bewitched by evil (mal); someone who was looking after his livestock had stolen his clothes – his shirt, socks and underwear – and had soiled it with cemetery soil and then buried it. ‘So that you will be gone’, she said, ‘after seven or eight months … but you are already now feeling very bad’. Aberlardo said that he had felt terribly bad for two months and that his father–in–law had been looking after his livestock, and he therefore suspected that he (the father–in–law) had performed the act of witchcraft. In Aberlardo’s case this was a clear example of sorcery, the

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

70

4/11/09

13:07

Page 70

Violence and Indigenous Medicine in Southern Chile

result of the conscious intention of the envious other – of human agency. The machi and Aberlardo agreed to continue treatment, as he said that he ‘wanted to continue living and knew that [without treatment] he had only five months left’. He also wanted to prove ‘that the power of Good is greater than the power of Evil’. The machi gave him a strong medicine made of herbs – an antidote to witchcraft – to make him vomit the thing that was growing inside. He was instructed to drink it while facing the sun, and making the sign of the cross and praying that he may benefit from the medicine. After fifteen minutes he reacted strongly, his stomach began to make sounds, his vision became blurred and he saw everything upside down. He then had to go to the toilet and his stomach started to swell even more. Then he vomited violently. The sight of the thing was devastating to Aberlardo. He described it as ‘pure egg white with eyes, that means they had black points. That was what was inside me, this bicho.’ Bicho is the Spanish word for vermin, but also the expression used for an entity which is used by evil forces to perform witchcraft. These forces may, as mentioned earlier, take the form of an insect, a lizard, a frog, and often work by inserting themselves inside the victim’s body, where they feed on their hosts’ bodies and grow.

Embodied Memories, Illness and Metaphors In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1928) Freud writes about the way that past painful events seem to repeat themselves against the will of the survivor. While the victim might not have an acute memory of a painful event, the incident is sometimes repeated in dreams and through involuntary actions. Freud claimed that the reason why violent incidents are apparently often erased from the conscious mind is not so much that they have been forgotten, but rather that the victim was never fully conscious when they took place. ‘The person gets away apparently unharmed’ (Caruth 1995: 7), which means that the experience is not fully assimilated at the time it occurs. Only in the repetition – through dreams, thoughts and actions – is the survivor presented with the possibility of actually experiencing the traumatic scenes. Freud observes how the memory of the past often returns in peculiar and ‘uncanny’ ways (1919). By the term ‘uncanny’ (in the original German, ‘unheimlich’) Freud is not referring to something alien, but to the opposite of heimlich (‘homely’), something that is familiar and long–established, but has become alienated through the process of repression. The analysis of the ‘uncanny’ leads, as he says, back ‘to the old animistic concept of the universe’ (Freud 1955: 240). This concept involves, among other things, a view of the world as inhabited by the spirits, where ‘magical power’ is attributed to persons and things outside of oneself. The experience of the uncanny is often related to death

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 71

Dorthe Brogaard Kristensen 71

and dead bodies, and to spirits and ghosts. Another example of the ‘uncanny’ is the dream of the ‘haunted’ house. While psychoanalysis would see the past as something that works on us through incidents buried in the unconscious, I will present an alternative version that rather locates memories in embodiment and as part of a collective and cultural framework for memory. The ‘uncanny’ is not viewed as something happening in the ‘mind’ as Freud would suggest, but as a living and embodied memory that permits the subject to negotiate his or her relation to the world. Through bodily practices the subject is allowed to negotiate an experience of violence and destruction. Thus, rather than taking trauma as an experience on a merely individual level, it is also understood as part of a society’s memory, as traumatic incidents that cannot be shared publicly. According to Jeffrey Alexander, cultural trauma occurs ‘when the members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocably ways’ (Alexander et al. 2004: 2). For a cultural trauma to exist publicly, however, a collective framework for recognising it as such is necessary. Ariel Dorfman’s suggestion of a link between the legend of the imbunche and the destiny of the Chileans is actualised in Aberlardo’s illness story, where the imbunche or bicho plays a crucial role as a metaphor for experiences of destruction of violence. In this way the bicho in medical practice becomes a way to articulate past violence and a means to re–work and transform an experience of subordination. In that way, I argue, in line with other authors (Argenti 1998, 2001; Kirmayer 1992, 2000; Taussig 1987), that ritual practices might serve to mobilise a memory of oppression, terror and violence in order to transform and subvert it.

Defeating the Bicho, Defeating the Violence According to Aberlardo the machi touched the bicho with a Christian cross and a leaf of canelo, a known antidote to witchcraft. However, the thing did not perish, the machi therefore had to cook the bicho with medicine to destroy its power. Then the machi told him that this thing was eating him from inside, and that luckily it had not entered the blood because when this happens, the person is done for. She then gave him another medicine and said that it would make him sleepy. After half an hour he vomited again and then fell asleep. It was 8,30 A.M. When he woke up again it was 4 P.M. Then the machi gave him a massage with a Peruvian ointment and medicinal plants and told him to leave the medicine on his body for three days. She served him a soup and asked him how he was feeling. He noticed that he felt as though someone had uncovered his head and it was

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

72

4/11/09

13:07

Page 72

Violence and Indigenous Medicine in Southern Chile

as though the weight he had felt inside – like a block of concrete or of iron – had vanished. He had recovered and survived – with the help of his friend and the machi he had prevented his journey to the afterworld. According to Aberlardo, all his troubles had ended. ‘From then on I have faith’, he stated, as he ended the first part of his story. This was, however, not at all the end of his story. When I asked his family about their experiences they revealed that the suffering had not only been located inside Aberlardo’s body. They had also heard steps in the house and someone knocking on the door, but when they looked, no one was there. They had just returned from the north to fulfil their dream of going back to live peacefully in their place of origin, but their dreams did not come true. The ‘bicho of envy’, as Aberlardo coined it, was growing, not only in his body, but in his house and among his family and even amidst their neighbours. They lived together with Aberlardo’s wife’s family, drinking, arguing and fighting; at one stage the violence became too much – Aberlardo’s wife told me – and she left the house for some time. But the community was also haunted by other violent memories; it was as though one violent memory seemed to go hand in hand with another. One day, to my surprise, Aberlardo told me that he had just added the testimony of his experiences during the Pinochet regime to the governmental report. Aberlardo remembered that his father was arrested by fifteen soldiers on 26 January 1974. The then eleven–year–old Aberlardo hid in a hole, from where he recalled observing the house, the forest, the riverside. A soldier discovered him and told the capitán that there were no communists here, only children. But there was no mercy. Aberlardo was put on a red truck together with ten brothers and sisters, the youngest so small he could not yet walk. They spent fifteen days in prison, without being given any food and forced to witness the torture of their father. His father, however, survived ‘only because the old ones in that time were so tough’. The children were not tortured, one of the soldiers having said that if they hit them with the club they would die. However, Aberlardo lost a brother due to the harshness of the prison conditions. ‘In the end, we were so lucky’, Aberlardo claimed, ‘it would have been so easy just to kill us, because we were not registered, we did not have any identity papers, they could have killed us and it would have happened as silently as when a leaf falls from a tree, only Aragua [his brother] fell silent. Only because God is so great did we survive.’ But the suffering had not ended. Some years later Aberlardo met a man with white hair and recognised the torturer of his father. He was ill for a month after this. In addition, neighbours went missing for months at a time. Parents told their children ‘this person has committed suicide’, but the children wondered how this could have happened as they knew that the person had been arrested: ‘This happened to Seguel and Don Pedro

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 73

Dorthe Brogaard Kristensen 73

Millaleo, young guys, not even thirty years old, they had killed them and then hung them near their houses, so it happened around here. If this river could speak and this sloop or the school yard, if you uncovered these places, you could find so many dead bichos here.’ In the case of Aberlardo he directly linked his illness narrative with his articulation of the political reality of the Pinochet era. He might not have been aware of having made the link, but metaphorically he used the same expression – bicho – for the ‘thing’ inside his body, the present tensions between people in his family and the corpses of his dead neighbours. Bicho is also known as imbunche, a small four–legged animal or monstrosity. Even prior to the atrocities of the Pinochet era, the terms referred to people who were said to have been abducted by witches, often as children, and who had been tortured and deformed and thereby transformed into a combination of a human being and an animal. First the witches break the left leg, and they bend it over the victim’s back, so that it has to walk by jumping, then they turn the head and destroy all the openings except the mouth. The imbunche is created alone, naked, in a cave, where it never hears a human voice and therefore never learns to speak. It is fed on human flesh, often from buried bodies in cemeteries, whereby it can reincarnate through the spirits of the dead and thereby increase its power. Witches and sorcerers are responsible for its nutrition, and the imbunche also participates in the meetings of the witches and assists them in carrying out their misdeeds. For this reason it is regarded as an instrument for revenge and harm and is associated with confinement, monstrosity and the illegitimate manipulation of power (Montecino 2003: 244–46). While the bicho present inside Aberlardo’s body could be dealt with by means of Mapuche medicine, the corpses of those killed in the Pinochet era were much more difficult to deal with. Aberlardo said: The people went to the authorities to report the dead bodies lying around, the animals would not even go to drink water in the river due to the bodies. These people were beaten to a pulp (sacaron la mugre). There were six of them. We went to fetch the livestock and suddenly the horses became frightened, we found four persons, who were not yet dead; they were completely dirty, a lady with a white apron and a man with a tie. The soldier showed the bodies to the people around and from our hiding place we heard him say: ‘This will happen to you, if you report it’. According to Aberlardo and his wife, the spirits of the dead still caused trouble for the community; often I heard that parents forbid their children to play after sunset or to laugh out loud, to prevent them from attracting unfriendly spirits. On another occasion two mestizo sisters explained

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

74

4/11/09

13:07

Page 74

Violence and Indigenous Medicine in Southern Chile

more about this belief to me, which they referred to as the phenomenon of the ‘almas errantes’, the wandering souls. These were the souls of the deceased who for some reason had not crossed the border to the afterlife, some because of their misdeeds, others because they had died violently. Instead of going to heaven these souls wandered around lost in a vast place – between heaven and hell – and occupied themselves with haunting living beings, by touching them, moving things or perhaps even entering their bodies. These souls could also assist sorcerers and witches in carrying out their evil acts. The sisters told me about a place on the highway, where these souls gathered. This was also a place full of crosses in memory of those who had died in car accidents, so people called it pillanelbun, which is the Mapuche word for the cave of the devil. I also heard many other people talking about the spirits of the dead; one example was witranalwe, the Spanish horseman wearing a hat and poncho. People told me that the sight of this spirit could result in misfortune, sickness and even death. These lost souls could be seen as an example of a ‘living history’. Based on his fieldwork among Malagy speakers on the island of Mayotte and in northwest Madagascar, Michael Lambek argues that spirits are a vehicle for history and examples of a collective historical memory. He writes, ‘Spirits wear the clothing of the time when they were alive, speak the languages of the past, embody past habits, customs, and comportment; they continue to enact the concerns, relationship, and perspectives of the past’ (Lambek 1996: 243). Rather than memories recollected, the spirits are active remembrances, they link past experience with present misfortune and illness (ibid.). They represent a connection with the past; through the human body the spirits become the vehicle for the expression of this past. Aberlardo himself saw his illness as connected to the spirit world; he had experienced problems with spirit presences in the house and his family heard knocking and footsteps, which was related to his illness. Also, metaphorically he connected the past and present by using the same expression – bicho – to refer to the ‘thing’ inside his body as well as to the corpses he saw in his childhood. Could the bicho in his stomach be seen as an example of the uncanny – as Freud phrased it – ‘which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light’? At least it gave past suffering a tangible form that could be treated with an antidote. With the medicine of the machi he was able to throw up the ‘thing’ and to destroy its malign power over him.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 75

Dorthe Brogaard Kristensen 75

The Bicho: The Embodiment and Negotiation of Deformed Nationality In Aberlardo’s case medical diagnosis and metaphors play a crucial role as a way to negotiate his past experiences. As argued by James Fernandez (1986) and Lawrence Kirmayer (1998, 2000), the metaphor of the bicho occupies an intermediate ground between embodied experience and the narrative structure of plots, myths and ideologies and can be considered the primary way in which individuals and cultures make sense of the world. Kirmayer further argues that metaphors are embodied – that is, they are grounded in the body while at the same time providing the body with the ability to extend into the social world. Through metaphor it is possible to move from the abstract and inchoate of lived experience to the concrete and easily graspable. While experiences of extreme violence may not be integrated in the conscious awareness of the victims and the witnesses, images of violence may be absorbed into metaphors in medical practice. Michael Taussig calls this ‘implicit’ social knowledge, and gives as examples the images of unquiet and spiteful spirits of those who died a violent death. Is it possible, he asks, that an image impressed in the memory of an individual struck down by violence, could exist as an unquiet, spiteful soul roaming the earth forever? (Taussig 1987: 373). Might the spirits of wekufe and bicho in Mapuche medical practice be examples of experiences of violence, which society could not contain consciously, but which reappear in uncanny ways? These metaphors provide a framework for action and performance and a tool for working with experience; a metaphor is expressing something that the body is not only victimised by, but also may confront and deal with, communicating something that cannot be expressed openly (Low 1994: 143). In the case of Aberlado the medical practice for coping with spiritual illness certainly provided him with a sense of agency. After this illness episode, Aberlardo and his wife found signs of witchcraft in the house they shared with the family. He then returned to the machi with soil from the ground, in which she found the remains of human bones, and said that someone had also buried a blouse and hair beneath the floor. After this incident Aberlardo and his wife decided to live on their own and make a fresh start. They constructed their new house on a plot nearby with all new materials. Nothing from the old house could be reused. From here, a new and peaceful life started. In their garden they grew medicinal plants for the protection of health, and Aberlardo regained the strength to struggle for his culture, as he put it, by defending indigenous traditional values and territory. He explained how many of his neighbours have been subjected to violence from the police, due to their claiming of indigenous land, even

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

76

4/11/09

13:07

Page 76

Violence and Indigenous Medicine in Southern Chile

today. He regarded this fight as part of a general struggle between good, indigenous and spiritual values, and external evil forces, which try to destroy these values. In this way the diagnosis and treatment not only assisted Aberlardo in recovering from his affliction, but they also served to embody and strengthen his social values, and his sense of the world as consisting in good, positive spiritual forces and damaging, harmful forces. In this way the treatment of the machi influenced his approach to everyday life. The illness story of Aberlardo can be regarded as an example of what Michael Taussig calls ‘history as sorcery’ (1987: 366): a kind of experiential appropriation of the past, an incorporated historical and meta–reality sensitive to the existence of forbidden images. Might the bicho in the stomach be an embodied image from the past? A way in which the past silently afflicts those who cannot speak of it, but by the same token a way for its victims to manage what could not be said in another way? A sort of dialectical image, through which the effects of the past are made available to experience? With the metaphorical link that Aberlardo makes between the dead corpses and the ‘thing’ inside him, this does not seem impossible. The bicho might be an embodiment of the past that continues to act, providing a door to the past and a means of bearing witness to traumatic experiences. In this way medical practice can be considered as an act of remembering through the body, as a way to negotiate the past. According to Merleau–Ponty (2002) the body can symbolise existence, because it realises it and its actuality. On the one hand is the possibility of making existence passive and anonymous, where the body becomes ‘the place where life hides away’ (Merleau–Ponty ibid.: 190). But precisely because the body can shut itself off from existence, it can also be the vehicle through which trauma victims open again to the world. This will happen, not through an intellectual effort nor an abstract effort of the will, but through a conversion in which the whole body is involved. Through the relationship with the machi and in the medical practice, the patient is given the possibility of re–enacting the past and identifying himself as an actor who deals with malign and negative beings, and not as a victim who is acted on and destroyed (Argenti 1998, 2001; Jackson 2002). Aberlardo’s story was in many ways the narrative of a survivor of state violence, the metaphor for a national identity that had been deformed and destroyed through acts of violence. The throwing out of the bicho inside had a powerful effect on Aberlardo and appeared to be an effective coping strategy for dealing with distress and bodily symptoms. Aberlardo’s story also indicates the further social implications of accepting a Mapuche diagnosis, as it gives him agency to approach problems in his current social reality. In this way the images of the past have affected the agency of the present.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 77

Dorthe Brogaard Kristensen 77

Conclusion In this chapter it has been argued that illness symptoms – in the diagnosis of mal and susto – can be regarded as an embodiment of a social reality and past violence. More than simply an idiom of distress, or a metaphor for distress, the embodiment of a social order permits the individual to rework his relationship to the world: rather than being subjected to victimisation, as the object that is acted upon, the bodily symptom allows for a reworking of a situation. The symptoms are constructed within local discourse and institutions, and they facilitate both the expression of and action upon a social situation (Low 1994: 142). It has also been shown that by working through metaphor the medical practice permits the patient to re-create his relationship to the world. The notion of spirits brings together separate spheres of experience, which allows for a negotiation of shared memories. In Aberlardo’s case it is through the metaphor of the ‘bicho’ that distinct areas of experience – dead bodies, envy towards others, a ‘thing’ inside the body – which all reflect a moral world where the subject easily becomes the object for others, coalesce. In shamanistic practice and through the relationship to the machi the patient is allowed to rework an experience of the world. By literally vomiting out the evil inside the body, ‘evil’ is externalised and made manageable, which permits the patient to regain a sense of control and power over a disabling past and to embody those social values that serve to deal positively with everyday life. The focus of this chapter has been on how medical practice works. It is now relevant to identity the frameworks that influence what can be remembered and told, and the discourses and regime of knowledge that form how memories are told. In Aberlardo’s case two factors influenced his illness story: the general focus on illness practice and medical focus as part of sociality; and, secondly, the institutional framework of the current government’s efforts to collect testimonies of the military regime, which made it possible for him to tell his individual story. When a person articulates an illness experience, it serves as an opportunity to articulate past experiences within a common framework, and through this to confirm and produce a sense of continuity and community. But medical practice is more than remembering as a mental act. Remembering is a social act, one that serves to negotiate one’s relationship to the world. Medical practice can be considered as a way to remember through acts, and a way to cope with both a troubled past and a troubled present. Medical practice allows for a joint social framework in which the ‘uncanny’, understood as incidents that could not be shared openly, are given form; this allows for a collective memorial practice and also a way in which to deal with present problems. Through the management of metaphors – in this case the bicho – medical practice gives the subject a framework to work with the past; symbolically establishing the self as the

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

78

4/11/09

13:07

Page 78

Violence and Indigenous Medicine in Southern Chile

one who acts, not the one who is acted on (Jackson 2002). The bicho represents an appropriation of state violence, it allows for the patient not only to remember but also to remodel and transform the experience of destruction (Argenti 1998). In this case the use of indigenous medicine stands both as a symbol for a social position and a resource for negotiating social and power relations. I further suggest that medical practices and illness narratives are connected to collective memories of violence through the use of metaphors that was experienced by the patient as concrete entities. In the case of Aberlardo the reworking of past traumas was also connected to a conscious recall. I would argue that the use of medical practice assisted Aberlardo in confronting not only past traumas, but present problems as well. Thus, medicine is deeply embedded in a social and cultural world and connected with social values; that is, medical practices are resources through which actors not only articulate their present and past, but also act upon the present consequences of past problems.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

As a consequence, in November 2004, the former president Ricardo Lagos officially recognised the responsibility of the government for the violation of human rights during the military regime (La Nación, 29 November 2004). According to a census from 1992, 998,385 adults (above fourteen year old) declared themselves as Mapuche. Taking into consideration persons below the age of fourteen, the study estimated the Mapuche population at a figure of 1,282,111. This organisation was formed by La Iglesia Evangélica Luterana, La Iglesia Metodista, La Iglesia Ortodoxa and La Iglesia Pentecostal y la Comunidad Judía de Chile. Synthesis from Informe de la Comisión Verdad y Reconciliación Para creer en Chile, 1991 (Lira 1996: 83). A number of programmes followed. Later in 1977 the organisation El Fundación Social de las Iglesias Cristianas (FASIC) founded a psychiatric programme; in 1979 the program PIDEE (Fundación para la Protección de la Infancia Dañada por los Estados de Emergencía) was established for the treatment of children. Furthermore, in 1980 El Comité de Defensa de los Derechos del Pueblo (COPECU) was founded, which united left–wing personalities; in 1982 the programme DITT (equipo de Denuncia, Investigación y Tratamiento del Torturado y su grupo familiar) was created, for the reporting, investigation and treatment of victims of torture and their families. In 1982 El Departamento Pastoral de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Concepción started a programme for medical attention. In 1984, in cooperation with RCT (Centre for Torture and Rehabilitation) in Denmark, a centre for documentation and treatment of stress was developed, called (CINTRAS). In 1985 Policlínica Metodista de Temuco established a programme for mental health, and in 1988 Instituto Latinoamericano de Salud Mental y Derechos Humanos (ILAS) began to specialise in clinical work for the treatment of ‘extreme traumatisation’ (ILAS 1996). Turning to the literature on mental health and the effects of torture on family structure, similar symptoms appear. Not only do the victims suffer, but the entire family suffers directly or indirectly from the torture of family members. In the literature on torture and traumas, family members are described as often suffering from feelings of fear, anxiety, uncertainty and grief (ILAS 1996). This idea has been suggested by Desjarlais et al. as applicable in the case of Chile, in their

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 79

Dorthe Brogaard Kristensen 79

volume World Mental Health, where they point to a study that has identified three core features of persistent fear among the Chilean population: firstly, a sense of personal weakness and vulnerability and a feeling of powerlessness; secondly, sensory perception in a permanent state of alert; and thirdly, a distorted perception of reality (1995: 199–122).

References Agger, I. and S.B. Jensen. 1996. Trauma y Cura en Situaciones de Terrorismo de Estado. Derechos Humanos y Salud Mental en Chile bajo la Dictadura Militar. Santiago: Ediciones Chile America CESOC. Alexander, J. et al. 2004. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Antze, P. 1996. ‘Telling Stories, Making Selves: Memory and Identity in Multiple Personality Disorder’, in P. Antze and M. Lambek (eds), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York: Routledge, pp. 3–25. Argenti, N. 1998. ‘Air Youth: Performance, Violence and the State in Cameroon’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4(4): 753–82. –––. 2001. ‘Kesum–Body and the Places of the Gods: The Politics of Children’s Masking and Second–World Realities in Oku (Cameroon)’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7(1): 67–94. Bacigalupo, A.M. 2001. La Voz del Kultrun en la Modernidad. Tradición y Cambio en la Terapéutica de Siete Machi Mapuche. Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile. Borzutzky, S. and L. Hecht Oppenheim (eds). 2006. After Pinochet: The Chilean Road to Democracy and the Market. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Caruth, C. (ed.). 1995. Trauma. Explorations in Memory. London: The John Hopkins University Press. Citarella, L. et al. 1995. Medicinas y Culturas en la Araucania. Santiago: Editorial Sudamericana. Collier, S. and W.F. Sater. 2004. A History of Chile, 1808–2002. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Desjarlais, R. et al. 1995. World Mental Health: Problems and Priorities in Low–Income Countries. New York: Oxford University Press. Dorfman, A. 1985. ‘A Rural Chilean Legend Come True’, The New York Times, February 18. Fernandez, J. 1986. ‘The Argument of Images and the Experience of Returning to the Whole’, in E. Bruner and V. Turner (eds), Anthropology of Experience. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, pp. 159–87. Freud, S. 1928. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Pioneer Study in the Death

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

80

4/11/09

13:07

Page 80

Violence and Indigenous Medicine in Southern Chile

Instinct in Man. New York: Bantam Books. –––. 1955 [1919]. ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, vol. XVII, London: Hogarth. Halbwachs, M. 1992. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ILAS, Instituto Latinamericano de Salud Mental y Derechos Humanos. 1996. Reparación Derechos Humanos y Salud Mental. Santiago: Ediciones Chile America CESOC. Jackson, M. 2002. The Politics of Storytelling. Violence, Transgression and ´ Intersubjectivity. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Kirmayer, L. 1992. ‘The Body’s Insistence on Meaning: Metaphor as Presentation and Representation in Illness Experience’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly N.S. 6(4): 323–46. –––. 1996. ‘Landscapes of Trauma: Trauma, Narrative and Dissociation’, in: P. Antze, and M. Lambek (eds), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York: Routledge, pp. 89–103. –––. 2000. ‘Broken Narratives. Clinical Encounters and the Poetics of Illness Experience’, in Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing. London: University of California Press, pp. 153–81. Lambek, M. 1996. ‘The Past Imperfect: Remembering as Moral Practice’, in P. Antze and M. Lambek (eds), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York: Routledge, pp. 235–54. Low, S. 1994. ‘Embodied Metaphors: Nerves as Lived Experience’, in T. Csordas (ed.), Embodiment and Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 139–62. Merleau–Ponty, M. 2002 [1945]. Phenomenology of Perception. London and New York: Routledge. Montecino, S. 2003. Mitos de Chile. Diccionario de Seres, Magias y Encantos. Santiago: Editorial Sudamericana. Nichter, M. 1981. ‘Idioms of Distress: Alternatives in the Expression of Psychosocial Distress. A Case Study from South India’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 5: 379–408. Stern, S. 2006. Remembering Pinochet’s Chile. On the Eve of London 1998. Book One of the Trilogy: The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile. Durham: Duke University Press. Taussig, M. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 81

Performance

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 83

Chapter 4

Memories of Initiation Violence: Remembered Pain and Religious Transmission among the Bulongic (Guinea, Conakry) David Berliner

Introduction How and why are some representations, emotions, values and experiences transmitted from one generation to a younger one? How and why have some practices and attitudes endured? Why do some of them seem so tenacious? ‘Why’, asks French philosopher Régis Debray, ‘is there today, two thousands years after Jesus, something like Christianity? Marxism or Darwinism 100 years after Marx and Darwin’s death? Lacanism 15 years after Lacan passed away?’i (Debray 1997: 25) For anthropologists, there is nothing new about these ideas. Anthropology has always been concerned with the retention of the old, the persistence of cultural items and the transmission of forms, the maintenance of social order, the resilience of cognitive structures and the reproduction of symbolic systems. Are not social sciences historically skewed toward explaining these issues (Latour 2005)? From Tylorian ‘survivals’ to Herskovits ‘acculturation’ and Bourdieusian ‘habitus’ (to cite only a few), the history of our discipline is haunted by the question of cultural transmission and continuity. In this regard, the introduction of the concept of memory in anthropology was critical, although its uses tend to border on sloppiness. As I have suggested elsewhere (Berliner 2005b), for many anthropologists ‘collective memory’ refers to the memory of the society (and not memory in society), its ability to reproduce itself through time and to persist. Indeed, ‘memory’ gave scholars the opportunity to consider the persistence of their objects of study – that is, the reproduction of societies through time, the continuity of representations, practices, emotions and institutions, despite dramatic changes in context. Suffused with nostalgia, the notion is a witness to the fact that, beyond historical traumatic events as well as the pains of modernity, the past does not evaporate, but persists in multiple ways. This is particularly clear in recent fine–grained

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

84

4/11/09

13:07

Page 84

Memories of Initiation Violence: the Bulongic (Guinea, Conakry)

ethnographies by Maurice Bloch (1998), Jennifer Cole (2001), Grant Evans (1998), Jun Jing (1996), Rosalind Shaw (2002) and Paul Stoller (1995) where memory is used as a synonym for persistence after trauma or, phrased differently, for persistence and continuity after important societal and historical changes and supposed subsequent losses. Perhaps one might see in this new anthropological lens a combination of Freudian and Braudelian influences (Harris 2004). Is such an emphasis on continuity and persistence a sign of anthropology entering the reign of longue durée (deep past)? And are not anthropologists, who are nowadays inclined to see all over the globe ‘persistent ’ societies (yet transformed) beyond historical traumas and ruptures, being driven to some kind of ‘cult of persistence’ (a cult manifesting itself through a copious use in contemporary anthropology of notions such as memory, resurgence, revival, reinvention, resilience, syncretism, heritage, habitus or neo–traditionalism)? In this paper, I will use the concept of memory almost in the same vein, as I look at the persistence, the transmission of representations, experiences, emotions, values, attitudes and practices that are passed down from older generations to younger ones who inherit and actively negotiate them (Tschuggnall and Welzer 2002). Here, memory does not only refer to the recollection of first–hand experienced events, but also, in its broadest sense, to knowledge from the past and about the past transmitted to younger generations. At this point I am inclined to follow Jim Wertsch who, in his Voices of Collective Remembering (2002), lucidly notes the ambiguous liaison that exists between knowledge about the past and memory. ‘Because’, he writes, so many discussions in disciplines other than psychology employ ‘collective memory’ rather than a term such as ‘collective knowledge’ I shall continue using it as well. However, the distinction between remembering and knowing outlined by Gardiner and others is one that makes sense in my view, and much of what I shall say could be discussed under the heading of knowledge rather than memory. (Wertsch 2002: 27) In particular, to bridge the gap between personal reminiscences and knowledge from and about the past, I propose taking a closer look at what scholars have named ‘vicarious memories’, these memories evoking ‘powerful feelings in individuals, which link them to important group events they did not experience directly in their individual life, but which impact greatly on their identities and connect them profoundly to their heritage and culture’ (Climo 1995: 183, my emphasis). However, although used to describe the consequences of extremely traumatic and destructive events (such as genocides and wars), ‘vicarious memories’ can also be

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 85

David Berliner 85

found in different contexts and understood through a different lens. Prior to the 1950s, the Bulongic of coastal Guinea–Conakry initiated their young boys into manhood through a rite of passage described today by my interlocutors as a ‘very brutal’ one. A process of Islamisation, which reached its climax in 1954, brought these practices to an abrupt end. However, the social reality of initiation could be said to have survived the demise of the rite: in the absence of initiation rituals, the pain inflicted on young boys fifty years ago is still a crucial marker in contemporary Bulongic society. In his provocative essay about Amerindian societies (1974), Pierre Clastres suggested that initiation torture as a ritualised form of imposed physical pain, because it leaves unforgettable traces on initiates’ bodies (so as the body becomes ‘memory’), contributes to the reinforcement of the group as a ‘community of memory’. Used in order to write societies’ laws onto individual bodies, ritualised acts of violence make everyone remember the foundational laws of the society: ‘La loi écrite sur le corps, c’est un souvenir inoubliable’2 (ibid.: 160). However shocking it may sound, his argument showed how memory and trauma are closely interwoven in these so–called primitive societies. As Houseman (1999) reminds us, Clastres was scathingly criticised at the time, mostly for comparing torture and initiation and for legitimating the functional necessity of such acts of violence. In the same vein, without explicitly referring to Clastres, Harvey Whitehouse (1996) has recently looked at ‘rites of terror’. He emphasises that violent initiation practices bring into play a very specific form of remembering associated with singular traumatic events. Borrowing the concept of ‘flashbulb memory’ from experimental psychologists, Whitehouse shows that in these Melanesian societies initiation rites, because of their intrinsic violence, are associated with ‘unforgettable vivid and haunting’ memories (Whitehouse 1996: 712). These traumatic initiations combine extreme emotions and cognitive shocks, and by so doing, they leave long mnemonic traces in the initiates’ minds. In this paper, I will follow the path cleared by Pierre Clastres and later Harvey Whitehouse, by investigating the intricacies of memory and violence in a society where initiation rites disappeared fifty years ago. First, although initiation practices have now vanished, the violence of initiation still plays a central discursive and emotional role in old men’s memories, which I will analyse in the pages that follow. Yet these reminiscences are not only inner (socially constructed) mental states, but they are also displayed and somehow ‘shared’ within very specific forms of interactions. Indeed, in the Bulongic area, the trope of ‘initiation violence’ is a fundamental delineator in contemporary intergenerational relations. Between these elders who were initiated fifty years ago and their sons and grandsons ‘who have never experienced the pain of initiation’, the memories of initiation violence are crucial matters. Building on

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

86

4/11/09

13:07

Page 86

Memories of Initiation Violence: the Bulongic (Guinea, Conakry)

Houseman and Sévéri’s interactive approach to ritual action (Houseman 1993, 2002; Houseman and Sévéri 1994), I will describe how remembered pain is, in this context, associated with the persistence of a form of interaction between initiates and non–initiates that pre–dated Islamisation. Based on secrecy, this emotionally charged form of interaction – a specific ‘dynamic relational structure’ – defines non–initiate youth as ignorant, fearful and fascinated, and initiated elders as guardians of a very powerful knowledge that was acquired in pain and should not be revealed. This is precisely what this article intends to elaborate, and the ethnographical accounts given below highlight how, in this specific environment, remembered violence of initiation, far from being destructive (as traumatic memories are usually described in psychological literature), can be seen as socially significant in the texture of contemporary intergenerational interactions.

A Brutal Initiation The place under discussion is Monchon, a Bulongic village with a population of 1,000, surrounded by mangrove swamps. Situated between the Baga Sitem in the north and the Baga Kakissa in the south, the Bulongic people are a small group of 6,000 rice cultivators. Called the Baga Forè by their Susu neighbours (they are best known under this name in ethnological literature), they identify themselves and are recognised as the natives of the Rio Kapatchez. Ethnographically speaking, they are practically unknown (Paulme 1956, 1957, 1958; Camara 1984). Like the Baga subgroups, the Nalu and the Landuma of Guinea, the Bulongic are located at the periphery of an area characterised by the presence of the Poro and Sandé secret societies, described by W. d’Azévédo as the ‘Central West Atlantic Region’ (d’Azévédo 1962). They all share strong cultural affinities with many micro–populations of the area along the coast of Guinea, Guinea–Bissau, Sierra Leone and Liberia. Before the 1950s the Bulongic were great sculptors, ritual specialists and drinkers of palm wine. Yet very few sources document their religion before the 1950s. From the seventeenth to the twentieth century, the people of the Southern Rivers, especially the Baga, were mainly defined as idolatrous, incorrigible fetishists organised in fearful secret societies called ‘Simo’ (Bérenger–Féraud 1879, Chevrier 1906). An art historian conducting fieldwork in the area in the 1990s, Fred Lamp (1996), has happily deconstructed these erroneous views showing, for instance, that there is no such thing as one Simo secret society in the Baga area. Still, in the absence of reliable colonial archives and other documentation from that time, there is a lot to be ‘invented’ about pre–1950s religion in this coastal area. Ramon Sarro (1999, 2008) and myself (Berliner 2002, 2005a and 2007)

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 87

David Berliner 87

have attempted to describe the religious practices that were characteristic of Guinean coastal populations. For such historical reconstruction, one has to count on the memories of elderly men and women and on what they were willing to tell us, in these societies saturated with secrets, while keeping in mind various methodological obstacles entailed in this kind of forced remembering (Vansina 1985, Tonkin 1992). Also, when reading the account below, one must take into consideration the fact that most of these practices came to an end in the 1950s. The Bulongic elders, who agreed to speak to me, are now in their sixties or older. They were only ten or fifteen years old at the time of the last initiation in 1954. Anyone who has worked in secret societies knows that young boys of ten or fifteen have very little to say about initiation at this young age. Peering at a past enveloped in thick fog, I will focus on male initiation to manhood, which in Bulongic area incorporated two masks called Mossolo Kombo and Sangaran. In 1954 French ethnologist Denise Paulme discovered the existence of two moieties in the Bulongic village of Monchon. One moiety was named ‘Camara’, and the other ‘Bangoura’. Paulme was the first to describe what she immediately perceived as a ‘genuine social dualism’ in this area (Paulme 1957: 5). Conducted fifty years later, my own fieldwork confirmed some of Paulme’s brilliant ethnographical observations. In Monchon today, there are four ‘quartiers’ (neighbourhoods), whose names are Mbicpun, Ndom, Tentinpun and Kiyaye, belonging to the Bangoura side, while the Nièpun, Kitala and Mantancè neighbourhoods are part of the Camara moiety. ‘Mampenka Monchon’ (literally, ‘on the other side of Monchon’) is the formula used by each moiety to refer to the other side. As Paulme has shown, there is a limit dividing the village into two parts and nothing can be built over this limit. Certainly, in the past there was a spirit of competition between the moieties, for instance at harvest times, during initiations and collective dance performances. According to my older interlocutors, in the olden days each moiety owned its own masks (some of them, like Demba, are well–known in the art world). The Camara were in charge of Mossolo Kombo, a mask–spirit in the form of a serpentine headdress which was conserved in its own sacred forest, called Amancongopun (in Kitala district), whilst ‘his wife’ Sangaran was kept in Kumbumpun, the Bangoura’s sacred grove. According to my interlocutors, Mossolo Kombo, the mask of the Camara moiety, and perceived as ‘masculine’, had a series of ritual prerogatives and played the most important role in pre–Islamic religious life. The mask appeared at funerals and for the collective magical purge of the village. To call for rain, Bulongic elders would make sacrifices in Mossolo’s sacred grove. A moral authority, Mossolo Kombo was said to punish thieves, liars and deviants of all kinds; people also swore oaths on it. The mask played a fundamental ritual, social, legal and moral role in the Bulongic ‘time of

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

88

4/11/09

13:07

Page 88

Memories of Initiation Violence: the Bulongic (Guinea, Conakry)

custom’, its salience having been already described by local teacher Sékouba Sinayoko in 1937. Although the role of Sangaran seems to have been less important in pre–Islamic times, both Sangaran and Mossolo Kombo were initiation masks used in the transformation of uncircumcised boys (bilakoro) into circumcised men (bilgbili). The two masks were said to preside over the circumcision (biliwong) of boys, which in theory happened every twenty–four years. The initiation logic followed the dualist principle, because belonging to one moiety determined the site where the young boy would be initiated. Boys from the Camara side were circumcised by Mossolo Kombo, whilst Sangaran was the entity presiding over the circumcision of Bangoura boys. Spatially segregated, young initiates of both moieties were, nevertheless, circumcised at the same moment, and they gathered all together at the very end of the initiation process for public dance performances. In Monchon, only two initiations can be dated: the one that took place in 1937 and the last one in 1954 (although very old men remember an earlier one happening in the 1920s). In the words of the elders who were initiated in 1937 and 1954, the initiation was a great social and ritual event whose organisation required months of preparation. Many bulls would be sacrificed, palm wine had to be abundant and rice plentiful. Also, the circumcision was preceded by a period of six months when the elders ‘closed the land’ (kcang bong), a pre–initiation time characterised by prohibitions on the village: no theft, noise or dance was allowed under threat of death. In both cases, in 1937 and 1954, after initial circumcision within their separate sacred groves, young Camara and Bangoura boys spent six months secluded from the village, invisible to women’s gaze. Indeed, initiation was thought of as a process of separation from the women’s world. An initiation song describes this separation: Muni èbèl mma nokèyènga (Go and see my mom) To otuyiong cin kamin (Tell her not to cry) Monè mampè (This is my grief) Allah apang kowolo (Allah wanted it) This image of the women mourning the parting from their children is stereotypical and is well known throughout Africanist anthropology (La Fontaine 1985). Far from their mothers and sisters, under the supervision of their initiators, young boys learnt secret dances and songs in the presence of their respective spirits, Mossolo Kombo and Sangaran. Violence was a necessary ingredient of Bulongic initiations, as has been described elsewhere by generations of anthropologists.3 I will come back to this point in the following pages, but suffice it to say for now that during initiation young boys had to suffer deprivations and brutal ordeals

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 89

David Berliner 89

intended to measure their physical and moral maturity. Most initiation songs that I have collected exalt the hard life of the initiates. They were repeatedly beaten, insulted, humiliated and starved and had to walk under the sun for hours in the mangrove swamps. Scared, young boys were exposed to a world of dreadful spirits, to Mossolo Kombo ‘painted with human blood’ and Sangaran ‘whose eyes were scary like cats eyes’, but also to ‘the ben be kiyitun (literally “the people of the sea”), the spirits working with Mossolo Kombo that you hear but can never see’. And violence did not stop after the initiation of the young boys. In particular, elders remember the ritual called ‘to catch Amacong’ (amancong wala), during which, in order to become the new initiators, the first four circumcised boys of the previous initiation (the first to be cut were the individuals who had elected to become, later in life, the guardians of the masks of circumcision) had to run between two rows of initiated men armed with wheat stalks. Badly beaten from both sides, the young boys had to reach the end of the line where Mossolo Kombo was standing and grab a tiny sacred horn at his feet.

Techniques of Enchantment and the Epistemology of Secrecy A Belgian anthropologist Pierre Smith (1984), borrowing Georg Simmel’s (1996) idea that secrecy is basically an interactive phenomenon, effectively described the process of ‘simulation’ implied in initiation. In his powerful text, Smith emphasised the twofold nature of the initiation process. It functions, on the one hand, because the initiates perform with masks and sounds to conjure the presence of presumably invisible entities, and, on the other hand, because non–initiates are required to legitimise the mystery surrounding this ritual. Non–initiates must be kept away from the dissimulations of the ritual so that they may believe that they are witnessing extraordinary appearances. I will now focus on the ‘techniques of enchantment’, technologies of simulation and dissimulation (Houseman 2002) implied in the initiation process in Monchon. Pre–Islamic initiation practices in the Bulongic area relied on the existence of spiritual agencies (called calè) and on the relationship of these agencies with initiated elders. ‘Found in the sea and in the mangrove swamps’, Mossolo Kombo and Sangaran, the male initiation spirits, were seen as terrifying calè, dangerous entities that the elders alone could control. They were perceived as unpredictable, powerful and able to manifest themselves spontaneously within the visible world and to interfere in the everyday world of the people by causing misfortune or by benevolently granting good harvests. Both entities were refered as tolum, a hermetical notion used among the Bulongic but also by most Baga subgroups. Fred Lamp translates tolum,

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

90

4/11/09

13:07

Page 90

Memories of Initiation Violence: the Bulongic (Guinea, Conakry)

rather imprecisely, as ‘anything sacred, mask, masquerade, initiation’ (Lamp 1996). Ramon Sarro has emphasised the semantic density of this concept and its connection with secrecy (Sarro 1999). I also believe that Bulongic society is structurally organised around the notion of secrecy and that molumil (plural of tolum), to be translated as ‘powerful and dangerous secrets’, are central in this context. As one of my interlocutor once told me, ‘We, the Bulongic, have secrets we cannot even tell our mothers. We are people of secrecy. In the past, we cut the throat of people who disclosed our secrets.’ Indeed, molumil are secrets with frightening ritual and social efficiency: they can kill but they also exclude people who have no access to them. In praxis, pre–Islamic institutions relied on a particular interactive configuration saturated with secrecy, tolum. As has been amply described in literature related to secrecy (Barth 1975, Bellman 1984, Herdt 2003, Houseman 1993, Keesing 1982, Zempléni 1996), before 1955 Bulongic male ritual practices of initiation presupposed exclusive practices and bodies of knowledge – those savoirs barricadés (secluded knowledge) and their system of ritual prohibitions. Not everyone was allowed to perform and attend these rites. Indeed, ‘les pratiques coutumières’ (customary practices) established the limits between those who knew the practices and those who did not, between those who could participate and those who could not, and between those who were privy to the secret and those who were not –in a word, between initiates and non–initiates. These ritual practices had a special language, esoteric knowledge and secluded spaces, and, of course, they required the perpetuation of silence. Those who were involved in the secret rites reproduced secrecy using unintelligible languages and bodily gestures to befuddle, confuse and intimidate the uninitiated. For those who were not initiated, the secrecy implied a multitude of prohibitions, enforced under threat of death: not to ask questions, not to go out, not to be seen, but to be respectful, to greet, to dance. The main principle was that initiation knowledge was dangerous, so that it was safer to avoid it as much as possible. In Bulongic country, only initiated men could penetrate sacred groves and approach Mossolo Kombo and Sangaran. Subjected to a series of prohibitions linked to their category as the ‘noninitiable’, women were never able to enter them, and were kept at a distance from the masks.4 An initiates’ song reveals what awaits a woman who is too curious: ‘Mariama has seen. We cannot do anything. She will die’ (Mariama o pomo, mba kontuto). When the masks appeared in the village, women were expected to flee or rush immediately into the houses. Even when some of the performances were public, they had to stay at a respectable distance. In addition, since they participated in the discourse and rumours concerning the existence of the men’s spirits and secrets, and showed fear or incomprehension of them, these same women reinforced the simulation and maintained the persistence of the secret. They practically contributed

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 91

David Berliner 91

to the fiction of the men by staying excluded from their secrets, ‘adopting their role in the game of Mystery with at least as much conviction as the men, doing everything to make one believe that they believed that their sons were really going to die and be reborn as other people during the initiation, and that the masks were spirits’ (Smith 1984: 32). In this ritual context overloaded with simulation and dissimulation, it was strictly prohibited for the initiates to publicly disclose the object nature of the mask. Neither before 1954 nor afterward was Mossolo Kombo discussed as an object – this silence was enforced by the threat of death. ‘In olden times, they would kill you if you said it is a piece of wood’, old initiates say today. In 1954, newly circumcised boys were told at the end of the initiation that Mossolo Kombo was, in part, a deception and they learned some of the tricks and illusions of the men’s cult. According to my interlocutors, after initiation young boys discovered that Mossolo Kombo and Sangaran were to some extent carved objects carried by their initiators. A few days before the end of seclusion, they were shown the material objects. Techniques used to produce the ‘weeping cry of Mossolo’ as well as the scary noises of the ben be kiyitun, followers of Mossolo Kombo, were disclosed. A few weeks later, young boys were allowed to ‘visit’ their initiation sacred grove and to observe it from a different view, from that moment on the view of a young initiate. Needless to say, all these revelations were made under the threat of death. As was recounted by many, after the disclosure of some of these tricks, elders dug a hole in the ground in which each initiate had to urinate and spit inside, swearing not to reveal the secrets learnt. If one of these boys dared to reveal what had been disclosed, it is said that he would be tracked via his urine and saliva and immediately killed. Many interlocutors related countless stories of young boys being slaughtered because of their lack of discretion in this realm drenched with secrecy.

Elders’ Memories of Initiation The last initiation of young men took place in 1954. A year later, an Islamic expert, Asékou Bokaré, arrived in Bulongic country. I have described elsewhere (Berliner 2002, 2005a) how his arrival in Bulongic country signalled the definitive end of initiation, public performances of Mossolo Kombo and Sangaran as well as of most of the pre–Islamic rituals. Islam is flourishing and highly visible in present–day Bulongic country. ‘Everybody is Muslim today in Monchon’ is a phrase that often welcomes the anthropologist interested in local religions. Today, knowledge about initiation is rarely articulated in public speech (a point I will return to in the next sections). When elders agreed to speak

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

92

4/11/09

13:07

Page 92

Memories of Initiation Violence: the Bulongic (Guinea, Conakry)

to me about pre–1950s initiation practices, I was particularly struck by the centrality of suffering and brutality in their discourses. To convince me, some of them proudly exhibited scars on their arms, legs and backs, traces left by painful series of beating combined with humiliation, insults, deprivation of food and sleep, etc. ‘In the sacred bush, life was tough!’ is a sentence that I heard many times during my fieldwork. This was emphasised by Abou, an old man from Monchon: ‘when you are initiated, for six months, you don’t see your mother anymore. In there, you don’t eat in calabashes. There is no salt and no sauce with the rice. You only eat grilled fish and rice from a basket. If one boy happens to die, his mother won’t be told until initiation is over.’ To press upon me the cruelty and secrecy surrounding the initiation process, I was repeatedly told that if a child died in the sacred grove, as was often the case, the mothers would not be alerted until the end of the seclusion. However, most of the time, in the course of interviews, male elders insisted on a necessary distancing from the time of custom. These old men often mentioned to me that initiation practices ‘had to be abandoned’ because the Bulongic ‘were tired of the custom’ which, as adults and youths in the 1950s, they viewed as a symbol of backwardness in postcolonial Guinea. To explain this need for a radical change, many elders invoke the idea that so much violence had become unnecessary. As Fodé underlined: Before Islam, when you were doing something wrong in the sacred forest, people would just cut your throat. You sing, you suddenly make a mistake and the elders decide to cut your throat, even if your dad and your brother are present. Nobody dared say anything in the village, but ‘Amancong or the Bush (ilopun) ate him’. Before, we had no pity for people. Is that any good? Custom is now behind us. It killed too many people here. Similarly, Séni, another old man, stresses that ‘initiation was too violent. It was just about beating people and singing songs in the sacred grove. Custom was just about killing others and partying all the time. At that moment, we wanted to go to school instead of the sacred forest.’ Corresponding with ‘la fin de la coutume’ (end of custom), the advent of Islam is always described by these elders in an apologetic tone, never as an affliction (‘Islam cleaned the village of its fetishes’, ‘we have decided to abandon everything thanks to Allah’). For them, there was no religion before Islam. According to an evolutionist schema propagated by Islamic religious experts, religion arrived with Islam. And most people in Monchon praise the perseverance of these first Muslim converts who dared to challenge the power of the elders. For instance, Fama Soumah was one of these first converts who is said to have insulted the elders

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 93

David Berliner 93

during one ritual where youths were beaten with sabres on their backs. He provocatively threw a sacred horn on the ground and exclaimed in front of the elders that ‘all that was futile’. In fact, listening to the elders, I noticed their ambiguous attitude – a mixture of repulsion and attraction – toward initiation and the time of custom. Oddly, although most of them first emphasise the necessity of ridding themselves of the practices of the 1950s and valorise the implementation of Islam as a sign of progress, many also describe the pre–Islamic period as a golden age, stressing the real loss of ritual power brought about by the end of that period, and they cling to nostalgia. They also construe nostalgically the disappearance of initiation as a loss of vitality for the Bulongic country, the ‘sacred forest’ being seen as ‘the’ symbol of non–Islamic religious power. As my interlocutor Maurice puts it, ‘In the sacred grove, there was the real power. It’s a pity that the Bulongic don’t do that anymore. We were authentic Bulongic at the time.’ He continues, ‘Initiation was a good education. Youth were beaten to learn to obey. They were tamed by the whip. Education was much better in the forest than today. Today people don’t respect each other anymore.’ Paradoxically overlapping with apologetic discourses about Islamisation, these are memories of a precious past time when the Bulongic were ritually powerful and respected by their sons and their neighbours, memories of the genuine roots of Bulongic identity which was substantially connected to the secrets painfully learned in initiation. Strangely hovering between contentment with change and nostalgia for the past, all these discourses do, nevertheless, connect brutality with secrecy. Initiation violence is indeed described as the indispensable component of learning secrets. As was said by most elders, secrets were ‘eaten’ (molumil kororo) in the sacred grove. The circumcised boys were said ‘to eat the forest’, a dimension already investigated by Ramon Sarro among the Baga sitem Sitem (Sarro 1999, 2008). Rather than suggesting the explicit transmission of secret propositional knowledge, initiation implied the embodiment of secrets in the stomach of initiates (ibid.: 182). Accordingly, what was acquired and embodied in the sacred forest was a ‘knowledge–substance’ made of disparate pieces of knowledge, plants and powders, songs and sayings, rites and ritual formulae, magical techniques not to be disclosed. As Bulongic elder Séni puts it, ‘Initiates have to suffer to know. You were beaten hard in the forest to get to know the secrets!’ Another continues: ‘Secrets could not be taught at school. You learnt it in the sacred grove only. You were beaten hard to know. Secrets are not taught at school. Never! Unfortunately, these youth are ignorant today.’ Undeniably, this knowledge–substance required a very specific space for its transmission – the sacred grove – as well as violent practices aimed at the preservation of secrecy, and at reminding the neophytes about the preciousness of this knowledge.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

94

4/11/09

13:07

Page 94

Memories of Initiation Violence: the Bulongic (Guinea, Conakry)

Youth Vicarious Memories Bulongic elders, men who put an end to initiation practices in the name of Islam, always tried to temper my curiosity about young people’s perceptions (‘David, that’s not interesting, young people don’t know anything about custom’, they told me). Nevertheless, I started conducting interviews with young people of Monchon in 1999, and a set of questions about the pre–Islamic past slowly emerged. What was the attitude of these générations montantes (rising generations) vis–à–vis the religious past of their parents? What did they know about this past? What did Mossolo Kombo, custom and initiation mean to those who grew up in an Islamised environment? Was this past still a salient and valorised one, or was it a forgotten history of no interest whatsoever? Bulongic people born after 1954 have not suffered the pain and known the privilege of initiation. They have never penetrated a sacred grove nor seen Mossolo Kombo and Sangaran headdresses. Nevertheless, young Bulongic possess a striking amount of information about the time of custom. In evoking this past, they initially describe an idyllic period that was peaceful and prosperous. At that time, they say, people never experienced starvation, the rice paddies produced enough, and the fish were abundant. In contrast, they depict the present as a blighted and vulnerable period, full of frustrations over political and economic changes. During the last decades, Bulongic country has indeed experienced rapid ecological, economic, religious, linguistic and political change that has radically transformed the life of the villagers. The young people have been told about boys being painfully initiated in the sacred grove, and they have heard about palm–wine consumption, powerful rites, secret places and ritual prohibitions. According to Mohamed (age eighteen), ‘Mossolo Kombo’, the all–powerful mask of the male initiates, ‘was a very strong and dangerous spirit. All people were scared of him. If one woman was preparing rice and suddenly heard Mossolo Kombo’s cry, she had to run away from her kitchen not to be caught by the spirit.’ In the same vein, Houssairou (age nineteen) notes that, Amancong is a tall spirit that our elders only knew. Beware of you if you are not initiated and you try to dance with him or penetrate his sacred forest. If you were not an initiate, they would grab you, torture you like an animal and even kill you. None would tell your mother and your father stayed silent. To approach Amancong, you first have to ‘eat the Amancong’. For that, you have to be beaten hardly so that you’ll become one his followers.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 95

David Berliner 95

For Lansana, ‘Circumcision was called tolum. Only people who had been beaten there could know what it was. Otherwise, you would be killed without discussion!’ In addition to the centrality of the trope of violence and secrecy, what is particularly telling about the young people’s idealised description of the pre–Islamic ‘time of custom’ is the emphasis that they place on the great magical powers supposedly rooted in this past. They repeatedly told me about the danger inherent in that epoch, when their fathers and grandfathers, these ‘genuine Bulongic’, were able to establish contact with potentially dangerous invisible entities. With these great powers, powers ‘that could kill’, the Bulongic people were able to protect themselves against their neighbouring Susu or Fula enemies. ‘Nobody dared insult a Bulongic!’ Lamine, age twenty–nine, said proudly. In fact, Mossolo Kombo is still a powerful identity marker for young people, despite the disappearance of initiation performances after 1954. As became evident from my conversations with young people, this mask is seen first and foremost as the embodiment of a spirit, an immaterial agency that, although invisible, is still very much present in Bulongic country. Oumar, an eighteen–year–old male, said, ‘Mossolo Kombo is still there with his wife and children. He lives in the mangrove swamps. When the sun is hot and you walk alone in the field, you can see him.’ Similarly, Lamine told me that ‘at the beginning of the rainy season, you can see Mossolo Kombo. He looks like an old man, he asks you something and suddenly he disappears with the wind.’ During my latest fieldwork in 2001, a group of youths purportedly saw Mossolo Kombo when they went to cut down wood in an old sacred bush. The spirit supposedly appeared in front of them to tell them that wood must not be cut in that place. Young people see Mossolo Kombo mainly as a spiritual entity that is known by their elders and that still rouses terror. Above all, these youths do not doubt that, in spite of the turn toward Islam, their fathers remain ‘customised persons’ (Boyer 1990: 94–106) whose status as initiates ‘is a prerequisite of a truthful discourse’ (ibid.: 98) – initiates who, even after Islamisation, because they have suffered in the sacred forest still hold the potentially dangerous secrets that they learned. Thus, the dangerous past invades the vulnerable present. ‘Everything is there, the elders hide themselves but they keep on practicing custom secretly’, most of the young people say. For the young, it does not matter that the sacred groves have been cut down and the beating ceased. Today elders go to Mecca, ‘this place reserved for elders only and where they see all the secrets’ (Abdoulaye, age twenty). Young villagers manifest a real infatuation with the past of custom, vacillating between fear and fascination. Suffice it to say, my presence as an ethnographer was actively interpreted in this context by the young people of the village. For them, I was someone external to the village,

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

96

4/11/09

13:07

Page 96

Memories of Initiation Violence: the Bulongic (Guinea, Conakry)

someone who ‘dared approach the elders’ and who could ‘make the secrets accessible to the young generations’ by writing them down. Young people know that asking questions used to be prohibited – and still is. They are keenly aware of the danger inherent in approaching the secrets of their fathers (Barth 1975: 217–22). Abdoulaye, age sixteen, told me in an anxious tone, ‘Young people would like to know, but they are scared. Even a fly can betray you if you speak. One day, a young man wanted to know, and the elders killed him. That’s why young people don’t dare ask their fathers.’ Albeit scared, young Bulongic are also keen to participate in the transmission of custom and secrets. Today, they would like to have access to the secrets that rendered their fathers and grandfathers ‘the most powerful [people] on earth’. I was told that the young people of Monchon recently gathered to implore the elders to pass on ‘the secrets of Mossolo Kombo’ but that the elders firmly refused to transmit them. Although they were born after their parents had stopped performing initiation rites and other pre–Islamic rituals, young Bulongic nevertheless carry vicarious memories of that time. Dangerous, frightening, protective, endowed with powerful magical secrets, the pre–1950s time of custom is highly valorised by youth today as a ‘genuinely Bulongic’ epoch that the elders alone know and whose secret knowledge the elders continue to guard jealously. This past, where acquiring this powerful knowledge implied suffering and ordeals, was not comparable to youngsters’ experience of going to school. Far from lacking memory, these young people seem overloaded with a memory shaped by fear and fascination. It is a memory representing the ideal and dangerous past that their fathers embody.

The Trope of Initiation Violence Conducting public interviews with young people about custom and initiation is difficult, yet it reveals a great deal about emotionally charged interactions related to secrecy. Interactions between elders and youths are always marked by distance and suspicion, but also by a certain degree of correspondence. Each time I sat with young villagers in a yard, we were interrupted by old men who exclaimed to me that ‘young people, they do not know anything about that. Custom, that is us!’ In the context of private interviews, young people never contradicted this statement. On the contrary, they told me, ‘Yes, we know nothing. We did not experience the sacred grove. The elders know!’ Like the Samburu youth described by Spencer who were convinced by the elders of their immaturity and who acknowledged ‘that all the elders accuse [us] of is quite true’ (Spencer 1962: 142), young Bulongic emphasise their exclusion from and their ignorance of these secluded fields of knowledge.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 97

David Berliner 97

Moreover, they point out their own responsibility for the present–day ‘impossible transmission’ of secrets. Most of the time, young people shamefully describe themselves as ‘egoistic’, ‘disrespectful’ and ‘nasty’. All of these flaws make them a priori ‘incapable of inheriting custom’ from their fathers: ‘The elders refuse to transmit the secrets of the custom. They do not trust us and are scared that we would disclose them. But, that is true. Young people are often careless and unable to keep secrets. They say that we are not Bulongic anymore. We are little Susu’ (Abou, age twenty–five). To communicate with an old initiate is indeed an art, as the attitude of elders toward secrecy has not changed. When it happens, most of the time informally, the content of communication – what is said – is strongly rarefied by the old initiates themselves. Sitting next to the elders reminds you that initiation knowledge is power, and that one must never reveal what one knows. Their posture and obscure linguistic code create the ‘appearance of being knowledgeable’ (Borofsky 1987: 107). Indeed, through their manners, body language (facial expressions, etc.), tone of voice, inscrutable attitude, laughter, secret language and meaningful silence, which Andras Zempléni (1996) describes as the sécrétion (secretion), the Bulongic elders ‘perform’ secrecy: they contribute to maintaining the idea that they possess a very powerful knowledge that should not be revealed, that is no longer transmissible. Observing and taking part in these interactions gave me a strong sense of the meta–communicational meanings conveyed in contexts so saturated with secrecy. In fact, the elders still wish to make young people believe that they have secrets, that these secrets are precious and dangerous, and that the young have no right to know what their elders are entitled to know. In that, the trope of ‘initiation violence’ plays a crucial role. For elders, referring publicly to custom and its pains is always a way of impressing young generations ‘with the postulate of a further, superior order of meaning or authority’ (Houseman 1993: 220) from which the young are excluded. As Abou, an old Monchonese, told me once, ‘here we all are Bulongic, but those who didn’t go to the sacred grove, they don’t know like us’. I noticed that public speeches about the period always serve the same function. As an old man was pointing at his young sons, he commented, ‘Young people do not know anything. They are Susu today. In the olden days, we had a good education in the sacred grove. We are the last Bulongic’. My impression is that the old men’s discourses not only lamented the degeneration of younger generations but also conveyed subtle ‘metacommunicational meanings’ (Bellman 1984), in this case, the importance of secrets painfully learned in the sacred grove. In another situation, an old initiate who was angry at his apparently ‘lazy’ sons shouted at them, ‘Don’t make fun of me! You don’t know who I am! I am Mossolo Kombo!’ (i.e., I am an initiate of Mossolo Kombo). With their

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

98

4/11/09

13:07

Page 98

Memories of Initiation Violence: the Bulongic (Guinea, Conakry)

lasting memories of the time of Mossolo Kombo and Sangaran, the old initiates consider themselves the final guardians of the secrets they learned, painfully, in the sacred bush. In the absence of initiation, they claim, intergenerational transmission is now impossible. Therefore, they are the ‘last Bulongic’, the last to be able to say that. In fact, male elders, by transmitting to young people a sense of nostalgia for the time of custom, its pains and privileges, do their best to maintain this idea as well as young people’s thirst for knowing. Although they do not perform pre–Islamic visible practices, and although they have stopped simulating, i.e. playing with masks and sounds to create the presence of invisible entities, old initiates perpetuate the fiction of men’s secrecy, the existence of Mossolo Kombo and Sangaran and this body of potentially dangerous secret knowledge. By producing appropriate narratives about the toughness and the privileges of initiation, but also by dissimulating knowledge, they keep young people in the state of non–initiates. As they did fifty years earlier, they pass just enough knowledge to young people to maintain the perpetuation of their fiction. Above all, the elders’ refusal to disclose their secrecy seem to function itself as a mode of inter–generational transmission, albeit one very different from the violence of the initiation rites themselves. By explicitly refusing to transmit, elders do pass on something to the youth, a sense of the very existence of these precious secrets which they still embody.

Conclusion Speaking of the Poro ritual society, Bellman remarked that the Poro as an institution has endured for centuries. It has been able to do so not because of the secrets that it protects but because it is the very embodiment of the procedures necessary for ‘doing’ secrecy. The society’s rituals are an expression of the form of secrecy rather than its content. The society has survived because of its concern with form. (Bellman 1984: 140) In the absence of pre–Islamic rituals and objects, in Monchon there is still a ‘memory of a system of relationships between individuals’ (Bastide 1970: 92), a pre–Islamic interactive form that goes without saying and defines the elders as guardians of a very powerful knowledge obtained with pain that should not be revealed, and youth as ignorant, fearful and fascinated. Indeed, young people have never experienced the pain of initiation, but they know a lot about it. They carry vicarious memories of this past, knowing how dangerous, painful and thus precious it was and still is. In an environment saturated with secrecy, their fathers and grandfathers

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 99

David Berliner 99

hold today the last first–hand memories of initiation. By manipulating the trope of initiation violence, these men certainly add to the youths’ sense of fear and fascination. In the nooks and crannies of intergenerational interactions, remembered pain acts as a signal to remind young people of their exclusion from the empowering experience of initiation, which is forever abandoned but of which the elders carry the last traces. Above all, in these cultures of secrecy, instilling fear and fascination does not require a large apparatus: linguistic interjections, silences, emotional expressions, these seemingly insignificant gestures, tones and actions in daily interactions contribute to saving, often implicitly, power for the elders and to imprinting vivid vicarious memories on their sons and grandsons.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

All translations from French to English in this chapter are mine. ‘The law written on the body is an unforgettable memory.’ The list of contributions in this field of research is too voluminous to even begin to report; see among many others Herdt (1981) or Zempléni (1993). See also my discussion of the role of women in initiation process (Berliner 2005a, 2008).

References Barth, Fredrik. 1975. Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea. Oslo/New Haven: Universiteitforlaget and Yale University Press. Bastide, Roger. 1970. ‘Mémoire Collective et Sociologie du Bricolage’, L’Année Sociologique 21: 65–108. Bellman, Beryl. 1984. The Language of Secrecy: Symbols and Metaphors in Poro Ritual. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bérenger–Féraud, Laurent Jean B. 1879. Les Peuplades de la Sénégambie. Paris: Ernest Leroux Editeur. Berliner, David. 2002. ‘“Nous Sommes les Derniers Bulongic.” Sur une Impossible Transmission dans une Société d’Afrique de l’Ouest’, Ph.D. dissertation. Université Libre de Bruxelles. –––. 2005a. ‘La Féminisation de la Coutume. Femmes Possédées et Transmission Religieuse en Pays Bulongic (Guinée, Conakry)’, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 177 45(1): 15–38. –––. 2005b. ‘The Abuses of Memory. Reflections on the Memory Boom in Anthropology’, Anthropological Quarterly 78(1): 183–97. –––. 2007. ‘When the Object of the Transmission is Not an Object. A West African Example’, RES Anthropology and Aesthetics 51: 87–97. –––. 2008. ‘The Anthropologist in the Middle of a Tug–of–War’, Men and Masculinities 11(2): 174–85.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

100

4/11/09

13:07

Page 100

Memories of Initiation Violence: the Bulongic (Guinea, Conakry)

Bloch, Maurice. 1998. How We Think They Think. Anthropological Approach to Cognition, Memory and Literacy. UKBoulder/Oxford: Westview Press. Borofsky, Robert. 1987. Making History. Pukapukan and Anthropological Construction of Knowledge. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Boyer, Pascal. 1990. Tradition as Truth and Communication. A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Camara, Oumar. 1984. ‘Monographie Géographique du Village de Monchon, Préfecture de Boffa’, undergraduate dissertation. Conakry: IPGAN. Chevrier, A., 1906. ‘Notes Relatives aux Coutumes des Adeptes de la Société des Scymos’, L’Anthropologie 27: 359–76. Clastres, Pierre. 1974. ‘De la Torture dans les Sociétés Primitives’, in La Société contre l’Etat. Paris: Editions de Minuit, pp. 152–60. Climo, Jacob, 1995. ‘Prisoners of Silence: A Vicarious Holocaust Memory’, in Climo Jacob and Marea Teski (eds), The Labyrinth of Memory: Ethnographic Journeys. Wesport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, pp. 175–85. Cole, Jennifer. 2001. Forget Colonialism? Sacrifices and the Art of Memory. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. d’Azévédo, Warren. 1962. ‘Some Historical Problems in the Delineation of a Central West Atlantic Region’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 96(2): 512–38. Debray, Régis. 1997. Transmettre. Paris: Editions Odile Jacob. Evans, Grant. 1998. The Politics of Ritual and Remembrance. Laos since 1975. Honolulu: Hawaii University Press. Harris, Olivia. 2004. ‘Braudel: Historical Time and the Horror of Discontinuity’, History Workshop Journal 57: 161–74. Herdt, Gilbert. 1981. Guardians of the Flute. A Study of Ritualised Homosexual Behavior. New York: McGraw–Hill. –––. 2003. Secrecy and Cultural Reality. Utopian Ideologies of the New Guinea Men’s House. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Houseman, Michael. 1993. ‘The Interactive Basis of Ritual Effectiveness in a Male Initiation Rite’, in Pascal Boyer (ed.), Cognitive Aspects of Religious Symbolism. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 207–24. –––. 1999. ‘Quelques Configurations Relationnelles de la Douleur’, in Françoise Héritier (ed.), De la Violence 2. Paris: Odile Jacob, pp. 77–112. –––. 2002. ‘Dissimulation and Simulation as Forms of Religious Reflexivity’, Social Anthropology 10(1): 77–89. ––– and Carlo Sévéri, 1994. Naven ou le Donner à Voir. Essai d’interprétation de l’action rituelle. Paris: CNRS–Editions, Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Jing, Jun. 1996. The Temple of Memories. History, Power and Morality in a

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 101

David Berliner 101

Chinese Village. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Keesing, Roger. 1982. Kwaio Religion. The Living and the Dead in a Solomon Island Society. New York: Columbia University Press. La Fontaine, Jean. 1985. Initiation: Ritual Drama and Secret Knowledge across the World. Manchester, Manchester University Press. Lamp, Frederick. 1996. Art of the Baga. A Drama of Cultural Reinvention. New York/Munich: The Museum for African Art and Prestel Verlag. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor–Network–Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paulme, Denise. 1956. ‘Structures Sociales en Pays Baga’, Bulletin de l’IFAN 18 (série B): 98–116. –––. 1957. ‘Des Riziculteurs Africains’, Cahiers d’Outre–Mer (Bordeaux) 10: 257–78. –––. 1958. ‘La Notion de Sorcier chez les Baga’, Bulletin de l’IFAN 20 (série B): 406–16. Sarro, Ramon. 1999. ‘Baga Identity: Religious Movements and Political Transformations in the Republic of Guinea’, Ph.D. dissertation. University College London. –––. 2008. The Politics of Religious Change on the Upper Guinea Coast: Iconoclasm Done and Undone. Bloomington and Edinburgh: Indiana University Press and Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute. Shaw, Rosalind. 2002. Memories of the Slave Trade. Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone. Chicago/London: The Chicago University Press. Simmel, Georg. 1996. Secret et Sociétés Secrètes. Aubenas: Circé Poche. Sinayoko, Sakoba. 1937. ‘Quelques Coutumes “Baga–Fore”’, L’Education Africaine 98 (Oct.–Dec.): 220–25. Smith, Pierre. 1984. ‘Le Mystère et ses Masques chez les Bédik’, L’Homme 24(3–4): 5–33. Spencer, Paul. 1962. The Samburu. A Study of Gerontocraty in a Nomadic Tribe. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Stoller, Paul. 1995. Embodying Colonial Memories. Spirit Possession, Power and the Hauka in West Africa. New York/London: Routledge. Tonkin, Elizabeth, 1992. Narrating our Past. The Social Construction of Oral History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tschuggnall, Caroline and Harald Welzer. 2002. ‘Rewriting Memories: Family Recollections of the National Socialist Past in Germany’, Culture and Psychology 8(1): 130–45. Vansina, Jan, 1985. Oral Ttradition as History. London: James Currey. Wertsch, Jim. 2002. Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitehouse, Harvey. 1996. ‘Rites of Terror: Emotion, Metaphor and Memory in Melanesian Initiation Cults’, Journal of Royal Anthropological

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

102

4/11/09

13:07

Page 102

Memories of Initiation Violence: the Bulongic (Guinea, Conakry)

Institute 2: 703–15. Zempléni, Andras. 1993. ‘L’Invisible et le Dissimulé. Du Statut Religieux des Entités Initiatiques’, Gradhiva 14: 3–15. –––. 1996. ‘Savoir Taire. Du Ssecret et de l’Intrusion Ethnologique dans la Vie des Autres’, Gradhiva 20: 23–41.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 103

Chapter 5

Nationalising Personal Trauma, Personalising National Redemption: Performing Testimony at Auschwitz–Birkenau* Jackie Feldman

The visit to Auschwitz–Birkenau draws to a close. The 150 members of the Israeli Ministry of Education youth delegation 75d gather opposite the remains of the gas chambers, clad in blue and white sweatshirts. The students of Sulam High School form a line atop the ruins of the crematoria, Israeli flags raised aloft. The Israeli survivor–witness climbs up onto the ‘stage’, takes a flag from one of the students and plants its staff firmly in the soil and ash. He raises his eyes towards heaven and cries: ‘How long, will we Jews, your chosen children, be a victim and prey of the Gentiles? How long? How long?’ He then turns to the students: ‘You know, you give me the strength to continue … I’m transmitting things that were sealed for fifty years, and I see that you thirst to know. And that’s why we’re here, so that you can be witnesses to what they did to our nation.’ He concludes with the words: ‘You, in this place, know that you are the correct answer to Nazism and anti–Semitism. On one side are the crematoria, in which hundreds of thousands were burnt. And now children, girls and lads, bring many sons to the nation, so that we may live forever!’ (Hayim, 17.9.95)

Figure 4. Witness at Treblinka. Photograph taken by Jackie Feldman. A survivor-witness related her family's story at the memorial stone for her community at Treblinka. The constructed voyage forges a surrogate grandparent-grandchild relation between witness and students.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

104

4/11/09

13:07

Page 104

Performing Testimony at Auschwitz–Birkenau

This chapter examines the performance of testimony by survivor–witnesses at Auschwitz–Birkenau, in the context of Israeli youth voyages to Poland. These performances involve a complex interaction between witness, students, the sites of mass murder and the display of the icons of the state. By bringing personal memories and collective history into the same discursive and physical spaces, history becomes imbued with emotion, understandings of self and community are nationalised, and both are grounded in the sensory experience of place. I will demonstrate how the meanings of the traumatic events of Auschwitz emerge through the ritual performance of testimony in the voyage. Traumatic narratives of survivors may become imprinted with social understandings rooted in the Israeli present, while the authority of the tellers of those stories, as survivors of traumatic events, enables those narratives to serve as group resources. Against the background of Zionist understandings of history and territory, the witness’s trajectory is cast as a paradigmatic path of destruction and redemption. The acts of testimony in Auschwitz lend authority to the picture of an eternally hostile, anti–Semitic world, in order to recharge the life–world of Israel with contingency: were it not for the State, what happened in Auschwitz could happen to Jews today. Jewish existence thus becomes contingent on the State, and this contingency charges the taken–for–granted life–world of Israel with emotion and ultimately, reinforces commitment to the state. Through the ritual re–enactment of the path of the witness, the students become witnesses of the witnesses, and their bodily presence as young, vital Israelis on the site of the murder of the Jewish people is cast as proof of Jewish continuity, a redemptive answer to the Shoah. Jewish travel to Poland has been the subject of several articles and book chapters, notably by Jack Kugelmass (1993, 1994, 1996), Oren Stier (1995, 2005: 150–90) and myself (Feldman 1995, 2002, 2008). Kugelmass distinguishes between mostly family–based ‘roots’ tours to sites of childhood or parental experiences, which ‘reclaim a connection to East European roots’, and more institutionalised tours, which tend to ‘reappropriate those roots and replant them … in less hostile soil’ (Kugelmass 1996: 200, 211–12; cf. Feldman 2008, preface). Most studies, including my own, focus on the latter, demonstrating how Poland becomes not so much a present–day reality to be encountered, but a stage on which various (American or Israeli) Jewish groups enact aspects of their own identities in the present; this drama can be effectively performed on the stage of Poland because so many evocative ‘props’ are scattered through the landscape, while few live actors are around to contest the performance (Kugelmass 1996: 201; Feldman 1995). I agree with Kugelmass (1996: 205–6), that the organised tours to Holocaust sites are ‘an attempt to counteract fragmentation and the loss of belief’ by bringing the past to life in the present in order to create new,

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 105

Jackie Feldman 105

more flattering narratives about power and powerlessness. However, the ways in which this is done, the solidarities and commitments the voyage seeks to strengthen, and the evolving roles of both Holocaust memory and state ritual differ considerably between the American Jewish case (studied by Kugelmass) and the Israeli case (which is my focus). In the Israeli case, the role of Zionism and the state is central, while many of the American Jewish practices incorporate Israeli practices and orientations, often only partially integrating them into a coherent narrative.1 In this chapter, I will focus on the performative role of the survivor–witness in the Israeli youth voyages and its relation to the Zionist narrative of the Holocaust. While other works have mentioned the role of the survivor–witness in such voyages (Stier 1995), and even provided reflections on the moral role of witnessing (Kugelmass 1996),2 none, to my knowledge, have provided a thick description of in situ performances of testimony. As I maintain that the significance of survivor–testimony, for the hearers, as well as for the survivor, unfolds through performance, I believe that a contextualised account of acts of witnessing is essential for an understanding of the ways in which the past and present are integrated – and reshaped – through performance.3 I will begin by briefly describing the relation of Holocaust memory and national identity in Israel, and contextualise the voyages within Israeli memorial practice. I then provide a sketch of the organisation and ritualised structure of the Israeli youth voyages to Poland. Next, I demonstrate how the co–presence of survivor–witness and listener in the spaces of violent death evokes certain images of the past and creates new memories – for the witness as well as for his/her listeners. I characterise the role of the witness as quasi–shamanic, insofar as he ‘brings the ruins to life’ and makes the dead speak through them. I will then show that the voyage enables the imagined community of ‘Israel’ to be visualised as a multigenerational family, and enquire as to how this construction empowers the survivors. I reflect on how the survivor–witness becomes ritually framed as exemplary national hero, and how his ritualised (though spontaneous) testimony accords a redemptive role to the students. I will argue that such performances create victims and survivors ‘by proxy’ (Bauman 1998), reinforcing the boundaries between self and other and promoting a redemptive closure to the Holocaust through a defence of the state of Israel. Finally, I will claim that the central role accorded the survivor–witness reflects broader changes in Israeli collective memory occasioned by the second Intifada, while the ways in which the dead are summoned up to support the state reflects a particular Zionist view of the relation between the death–sites, the Diaspora and the state.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

106

4/11/09

13:07

Page 106

Performing Testimony at Auschwitz–Birkenau

Collective Memory of the Holocaust and Israeli National Identity Memories of the past, Halbwachs (1992 [1952]) teaches us, are always shaped by the social needs of the present, while the collective memory of a group serves to strengthen the identity of that particular group vis–à–vis others. Commemorative rituals are an important element in re–presenting the past in the present by articulating and incorporating shared memories through bodily practices (Connerton 1989). Yet not all pasts are equally serviceable or equally malleable. Memories may be constrained by traumas and commitments (Schudson 1989), implicit models (Kirmayer 1996: 117), or past commemorative performances. The ensemble of commemorations shapes what Yael Zerubavel has termed a ‘master commemorative narrative’. This narrative, she writes, ‘contributes to the formation of the nation, portraying it as a unified group moving through history’ (1995: 7). Historical events become part of collective memory to the extent that they can be fit into this master narrative. Zionism, the ideology upon which the state of Israel was founded, maintained a conflicted attitude towards the Jewish past. On the one hand, the state saw itself as the culmination of three millennia of Jewish history, and heir to the Jewish past; this past included traditional paradigms organising historical events into transmissible transgenerational narratives – particularly sequences moving from destruction to redemption (Yerushalmi 1982). On the other hand, in the dominant Zionist narrative, significant positive Jewish history ended with the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem in the year 70 CE. The founding fathers of the state sought to distance themselves from the Jewish society in exile, which for them represented passivity, humiliation, obscurantism and suffering. Exile, for Zionist leaders, stood for the loss of the physical bond to the land as well as the loss of the Jews’ collective experience as a nation.4 These ‘ills’ were to be remedied through the construction of a ‘new’ peasant–soldier Jew, wedded to the ancestral homeland. He5 would be the antithesis of the ‘exilic Jew’ and heir to the biblical Israelites. Consequently, the initial reaction of Zionist leaders in Israel was to view the Shoah as a ‘natural’ end to exile – the inevitable, tragic epitome of the vulnerability and weakness inherent in Jewish life outside the homeland. The founding of the state could thus be seen as both the antithesis to the Holocaust and as symbolic compensation for its trauma (Zerubavel 1995: 34). Yet a large segment of the population of the country were Holocaust survivors and/or traditional Jews who saw the state of Israel as a continuation and culmination of previous Jewish existence rather than as a break with the past. Furthermore, Israel’s link with the Shoah provided it with moral legitimacy in the world arena. These factors,

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 107

Jackie Feldman 107

along with the persistence of the organising paradigm of ‘from destruction to redemption’, continued to inform Shoah memory in Israel, sometimes supporting later–developing hegemonic understandings, sometimes subverting them. Finally, the ways in which the Shoah was remembered were continually shaped by the Arab–Israeli conflict (Zertal 2005; Shapira 1996–97), whereas traumatic aspects of the Shoah have, in turn, influenced Israeli behaviour in the conflict. Increasingly, especially following the Six Day War (1967), the Yom Kippur War (1973) and Menachem Begin’s rise to power (1977), Israelis came to identify themselves with Holocaust victims and the state came to see and present itself as ‘rising from the ashes of the Shoah’ (Liebman and Don–Yehiya 1983). Once the Holocaust was incorporated into the Zionist narrative as the founding event of the state, subsequent historical events would serve to confirm the truth of this understanding. As with all nationalist ideologies, ‘realities once multiple and even distinct begin to refract similar messages and to shine with the same burning light that is shone over them’ (Kertzer 1988: 4). The Shoah now provided an interpretative model for current events, leading to greater political manipulation of Holocaust symbols in justification of Israel’s policies. Especially from the mid–1970s onwards, the hegemonic understandings of the Shoah, those that legitimised the state and its policies, were expressed through curricula which prescribed the study of the Shoah, school ceremonies (Handelman 1990; Ben–Amos and Beit–El 1999, 2003), the annual commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day (Handelman 1990; Friedlander and Seligman 1994), and the erection and development of Holocaust memorial sites and museums throughout the country. Although counter–hegemonic understandings of the Shoah were voiced by left–wing intellectuals (see Ofir 1986), these were primarily expressed in speeches in contexts that were seen by the public as overtly political. The national and local ceremonies, on the other hand, could trigger public expression of emotion and convince people that the nation, its understandings of the Shoah and the state and its consequent moral claims on the individual were organic, part of the natural order of things (Kertzer 1988: 4). In short, the ensemble of practices made Holocaust memory an inseparable part of Israeli national identity. In the mid–1980s, with the thawing of diplomatic relations with Poland, the greater identification with Holocaust victims, the ageing of the survivors, the increased irrelevance of the pioneer model in the present, the rise of ethnic identities and roots–seeking especially among Mizrahim, the diffusion of global Western youth culture, growing individualist and materialist orientations, and the decline in motivation to serve in the military (resulting from the Lebanon War), the Ministry of Education initiated the voyages to Poland. These voyages turned to the Holocaust past as a way of inculcating pride in Jewish heritage and

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

108

4/11/09

13:07

Page 108

Performing Testimony at Auschwitz–Birkenau

uniting Israeli Jews in a sense of common destiny in an era in which pioneering ideology had become increasingly irrelevant.6

Organisation and Structure of the Voyage Frame Since their inception, over twenty years ago, over 350 thousand students have travelled on Israeli youth voyages to Poland. They have become one of the most popular and most intense commemorations of the Shoah in Israel. The ethnography on the voyages to Poland was carried out between 1992 and 1998 and is documented in my recent book (Feldman 2008). The Ministry of Education trips I have studied are organised in delegations of 120–150 participants, which travel together in four to five buses, accompanied by Israeli guides, teachers, armed Israeli security guards, medical doctors and administrators and survivors. The standard voyage is eight days long and includes visits to four concentration or death camps, two mass death pits, several cemeteries, empty synagogues, remnants of shtetlach, the Warsaw Ghetto and several Polish tourist sites. The high points of interest and emotional charge are the death camps, and the Ministry marks them as such by allotting more time to their visits and designating them as the loci of witness testimony and large group ceremonies. Poland is depicted as a dangerously anti–Semitic place, and students are under the constant watch of Israeli security guards – in the hotel, at the sites and on the bus. The tight schedule and security, the absence of any significant encounters with Poles or diaspora Jews, and the frequent display of Israeli symbols, creates an environmental bubble. The voyage’s constructed world is divided into two polar categories: inside space, homologous with Israel, and outside space, homologous with Holocaust Poland (for further details, see Feldman 2002). One student summarised this as follows: POLAND: For me, it all starts when we boarded the plane. Not a plane, but a kind of time machine. In this time machine, we traveled to the past … 52 years back. There, in that place, Poland, the world seemed to be divided in two. Present and past. Today, with the help of the Polish bus, which travels at no more than 60 kilometers per hour, we arrive in the past, our past, of the Jewish people. A past concentrated in Poland. The wide plains, on which the barracks were built, were made of red brick. In these barracks were wooden platforms and chimneys. The barracks, some of them had piles of hair, artificial limbs, statues and other difficult sites … There’s a depressing atmosphere in the air: museums inside, pictures of the past, shoes and the stink of shoes, piles of glasses, quiet, cold, slow and detached from the rest of the world … all is associations

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 109

Jackie Feldman 109

and feelings … Towards evening, we return from the world of the past to the present. The same bus takes us to some hotel in Poland. There, we rest and relax from the sights of the day. We talk about the past and unload the charge which has accumulated and prepare for a new day. We raise depressed spirits. Here in Poland, we all worry about each other, we all help each other – we’re all in the same boat, we’re all in a foreign country.’ (Trip book, Kiryat Gat, 1993, pp. 69–70) Note that all of Poland (‘the wide plains’) is compressed into the death camps (‘the barracks of red brick’). In these voyages, the death camps are framed as the high points of the voyage and as metonyms not only of the Holocaust, but of all of Poland.

Selection and Preparation of Guides and Witnesses The story of the Holocaust and (to a lesser extent) the Jewish past in Poland is narrated on the voyage by two authority figures: the guide and the witness. The guides are usually Israeli teachers who have completed the five–month preparatory course of the Ministry of Education. Their job is to give explanations on the site, provide logistic information and direction for the group’s teachers, assign readings to students, and employ visual and audio aids to help students visualise sites of the past. Many of the guides are children of survivors themselves and some see their participation as a means of biographical reparation for humiliation they may have suffered in their youth. One veteran guide said: ‘We had to compete with the Palmach generation. It bothered me that my father was just a private somewhere. We weren’t like those whose parents were born in Israel.’ Another explained: ‘They taught us that our parents went as sheep to the slaughter, while the Israelis fought like lions. Once the Zionists decided that there was no place but Israel, exile became an object of disgust.’ The more significant narrators are the Holocaust survivors, who accompany each delegation. They are designated as anshei edut, witness persons, a neologism resonating with aron haedut, the Ark of the Covenant. The survivor is the representative of the dead, a symbolic type (Handelman 1994), whose bodily presence, accent, posture and voice are reminders of their age and origin, and are integral to their testimony; their authority is inseparable from their physical presence at the site. Survivor–witnesses usually initiate contact with the Ministry and volunteer to accompany the groups to Poland. While some witnesses are ‘veterans’, returning to Poland with groups as many as twenty–five (!)

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

110

4/11/09

13:07

Page 110

Performing Testimony at Auschwitz–Birkenau

times over the course of several years, many are there for the first time. Some of the aged witnesses (usually between the ages of sixty–five and seventy–five, cf. Kramer 2007: 202) are well aware of the difficult physical conditions of the trip; others are less so.7 Yossi Levi, a Ministry of Education official responsible for assigning witnesses to groups, said that witnesses who overly traumatise the students by not knowing when to spare them gruesome details, or witness who are ‘infected’ with a blind hatred for the Poles or ‘fanatical opinions’ are weeded out. Speaking skills are not required. As long as they can produce a reasonably clear narrative, they are accepted, in the assumption that they will open up in the course of the trip. Witnesses are given only minimal guidance. They are told to restrict themselves to personal testimony, not to usurp the role of the educators, to censor themselves in accounts in which the experience may be too difficult for the students to handle, and to consult frequently with the guides. Witnesses are not screened for their political opinions. They are, however, all residents of Israel. The assumption is that the witness’s choice of Israel as their post–Holocaust place of residence, and their daily life over the course of five decades there, will result in their assigning Israel a significant role in their life–story, a role transcending political commitments – especially in the context of the visit to Poland. As one Ministry advisor said, ‘the witness is too old to be a Bundist [a non–Zionist Yiddishist socialist movement]. We all forgive them their faults. They are witnesses netto. They can become symbols of national unity.’ (N.K., 28.6.95) The model of transmission created by the voyage is that of a three–generational ‘substitute family’, that will serve as a stand–in for the biological family, the traditional conduit of transmission of Jewish memory (Yerushalmi 1982). The guides are instructed to support the witness’s role and bolster their authority, even if the witness makes factual mistakes. In the words addressed by one group leader to the survivors, ‘you are the important ones. We [the delegation leaders and guides] are the messengers of the witnesses who were with us, some of whom are no longer around.’ (Y.B., 15.6.97) The witness’s narrative function is clearly distinguished from that of the guide: the guide tells stories, whereas the witness is instructed by the delegation leader to tell only their own story. One provides ‘the facts’ about the Shoah; the other provides its incarnation.8 As they travel through Poland, the survivor–witness addresses the group in two major contexts: reciting their life–story in the moving bus, and testifying to their suffering and survival in the Holocaust before the entire delegation at Auschwitz–Birkenau. In the first case, the testimony lacks material referents, places which reinforce and ground its authority. Students often sleep through the narrative, disembodied as it floats over the raspy bus microphone somewhere, anywhere, nowhere in Poland. The

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 111

Jackie Feldman 111

death–camp testimony, on the other hand, is one of the most memorable events of most students’ voyages. Whereas the details of the survivor’s story are often quickly forgotten, the bodily presence of the survivor and their act of narration in the death camps are often described in detail in student diaries and are mentioned by students as composing one of the most significant events of the voyage.

The Enactment of Testimony at Auschwitz–Birkenau I now turn to the specific enactments of witness testimony at the death camps of Auschwitz. I will demonstrate how individual memories of trauma are shaped by and participate in collective Israeli discourses defining the events of the Shoah (see Ballinger 1998: 120–21). These narratives are performed in a ritualised context whose material remains can trigger affective states similar to those obtaining when the memories were first registered, so that often suppressed fragments of memories may be recalled (Kirmayer 1996: 181). Within that context, the survivor is a representative of all Holocaust survivors and victims and speaks in their name, with their collective authority. Yet that context is also peopled with redemptive symbols – young Jewish bodies carrying (and wearing) Israeli flags. Thus, the transformation of what the survivor experienced as a traumatic event into testimony – narrative memory9 – takes place in a surrounding that, like an actual telephone ring heard at the end of a dream which becomes integrated into the fabric of the dream, ‘pulls’ the survivor’s testimony to lend a redemptive role to the state and to the students as his symbolic progeny. Through the emplaced testimony, individual and social discourses come to form a seamless web, ‘whose articulations are ordered and symbolised in accordance with conventional yet changeable codes of narrative expression’ (Mayer 1994: 448). I will document this process by demonstrating how the survivor–witness performs their narrative as shaman, grandparent and national hero.

The Survivor–Witness as Shaman For the students, the survivor plays a quasi–shamanistic role in ‘bringing the ruins to life’ at Auschwitz and making the dead speak through them, while the students’ sympathetic presence at the original site enables the recollection to take place and be spoken, to become testimony. The mise–en–scéne of the significant testimony of the survivor–witness in the barracks at Auschwitz–Birkenau, and the administration’s instruction to the survivors that they limit their narrative to their personal lived

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

112

4/11/09

13:07

Page 112

Performing Testimony at Auschwitz–Birkenau

experiences, frame this testimony as incarnation rather than explanation. During their visit of Auschwitz 1, the witness Hayim takes a small group of students to block 17, where he was imprisoned. He says to them: ‘I feel in the air as if the air is full of floating souls, and the earth is soaked with blood and tears and Jewish suffering … After a few days the Poles asked, where are your parents? And we said, working. And they laughed and pointed to the crematoria fires [Hayim points] and said, there are your parents.’ For the witness, the dead are physically present everywhere at Auschwitz. Their blood is in the earth, their ashes in the river, their smoke in the air. By enunciating their presence at the site, the survivor makes their spirits known, palpable. One student described the visit with the survivor, ‘All of a sudden you see the reality of the things and someone comes and tells you exactly where he was and what he did and who talked to him and … It really affected me.’ Another related: We walked among all the barracks and they’re all empty, just air. And they [the guides] talk with you about the terrible smell and you smell the smell of nothing. Of a house. And you see the pictures, and you see the people from forty years ago. Especially where the chimneys were, I see everything in black and white, in gray. I see all the people milling around and I felt like some disembodied spirit looking at them and returning where we are today. I thought maybe that’ll happen to me and in a hundred years people will come and say he was here, he was here, especially when the witnesses were talking, I saw a flash of a picture in black and white and then it was gone. It was really scary. The actuality of the situation. The witness becomes a sort of shaman, through which the students come to sense these spirits of the dead present on site. Through his mediation, a quasi–revelatory moment may occur, in which the students are able to dissolve themselves into the black–and–white Shoah picture. Note the student’s unconscious repetition of Hayim’s words, ‘I feel in the air, as if the air is full of floating souls’. Sometimes the witness enters a dissociative state while accompanying the students. One student recounted: [Hayim] stood there and said, ‘here it was,’ and we sensed what happened and it was hard to feel what happened, and a bit frustrating, because he sees it with his eyes and feels it and we stand with him and understand but don’t feel. Sometimes we feel. When he went to the place where he slept with another five friends on half a bed, I got emotional, and he said where he was and what he touched fifty years ago and I looked at him and said ‘he was here’, and it was moving how

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 113

Jackie Feldman 113

he knew about the crematoria and the gas chambers and what he did and what he told. Sometimes we asked him questions and he continued to tell his own story (without answering directly) and that helped.

Figure 5. Witness explaining at Auschwitz–1. Photograph taken by Jackie Feldman. By telling his story at the place of its occurrence, at Auschwitz, the witness animates the ruins, enables the students to identify with the past, and conjures up new memories of his own. Thus, students become witness to an event – the generation of new testimony.

As psychiatrists van der Kolk and van der Hart observed: ‘The more the contextual stimuli resemble conditions prevailing at the time of original storage, the more retrieval is likely. Thus, memories are reactivated when a person is exposed to a situation, or is in a somatic state, reminiscent of the one when the original memory was stored’ (1995: 183). Van der Kolk and van der Hart claim that such traumatic memories may be recognised by their form: ‘Recital of traumatic memory is inflexible, whereas narrative memory is adaptive, integrated into other experiences, and, as a result, variable according to the audience addressed. Traumatic memory has no social component’ (ibid.: 183; Langer 1995: 22–23). While the ‘reactivation’ of dormant impressions through particular sensory stimuli has been well–documented, from Proust’s madeleine on, I would question the certainty expressed in the latter citation.10 Certainly, a session on a psychiatrist’s or hypnotists’ couch (van der Kolk and van der Hart), a filmed interview of a person alone in front of a video camera (Langer), or a narrative spoken while standing in a darkened barracks at Auschwitz are hardly bereft of ‘social components’ which might shape the story as ‘trance–like’.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

114

4/11/09

13:07

Page 114

Performing Testimony at Auschwitz–Birkenau

Yet it is precisely this form of performance of memory, expressed through the dissociative inability of the witness to respond to the students’ questions in the barracks (and identified by psychiatric researchers of trauma as prototypical), which is registered by the students as a sign of its authenticity (for some, one might even claim, its numinous nature) – as the unearthing of a frozen, archaeological fragment of traumatic experience.11 Thus, we see how narratives of personal trauma ‘represent powerful constructions that, in and of themselves, serve as group resources’ (Ballinger 1998: 122–23).12 The ‘authentic testimony’, in turn, increases the attention of the students, who then accompany the survivor to other barracks, posing further questions and providing the listening co–presence which, in turn, evoke new memories and produce further acts of testimony. Outside this social and ritual context, such dissociative recollections might not enjoy the same aura that they do within it, and might even be deemed pathological. The act of bearing witness provides a social context ‘that allows the story to cohere because of the emotional meaning of receiving another’s empathic attention and because it evokes the tacit dimension of shared (or public) history’ (Kirmayer 1996: 186). The survivor’s testimony is, then, not simply a recollection; it is a re–enactment, an event in its own right (Laub 1992: 62). This emplacement of the witness in the remains of the death camps transforms the story, its tellers and listeners. As Claude Lanzmann explained in making his film, Shoah: It is their own story that they are telling. But it’s not enough to tell it. They have to act it out … They have to be placed, not only in a particular mental state, but in a particular physical state [my emphasis]. Not in order to make them speak, but so that their words suddenly become transmissible and charged with another dimension … It is through the mise–en–scene that [the witnesses] become characters. (Lanzmann 1990: 301) Here, however, the ‘physical state’ evoking or charging the narrative is buttressed by a prominent social component (Alexander 2004) – the students’ listening presence that makes the unearthing of such memories possible. I might draw an analogy here from Susan Harding’s (1987) study of Evangelical speaking: she describes how in Christian ‘witnessing’, listening to testimony is not a passive act , but one of ‘coming under conviction’, whereas the transmission of testimony is essential to one’s being (a true) Christian. So too, through attentive listening, the student enters the process of becoming a ‘witness of the witness’, while the survivor becomes a witness by performing an act of transmission to listening others.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 115

Jackie Feldman 115

The Survivor–Witness as Grandparent In the barracks at Birkenau, Hayim points to the bunk beds as he tells the students: ‘It moves me to tell you all I went through in the terrible years of the Shoah at a time when I was your age, 17 years old, fifty years ago … Imagine, a boy of your age … and I found myself here, alone at Auschwitz’ (Hayim, 17.9.95). After leaving the barracks, students gather at the selection ramp. Hayim turns to them: Look, here was the iron ramp [he points]. This earth is soaked with blood and tears of innocent people … There was a selection. For life or death … where you’re standing now, there were the officers and they pointed left or right. There [the witness points] to the crematorium, or here [he points again] to work … And I passed at a run … and he directed me to the left and I joined the group. And maybe it was my fate, so that I can tell you the story today. The touch and smell of the barracks, the presence of the witness in the environment of horror and the immediacy of the witness’s reference to them (pointing ‘here’, ‘there’), makes death and life spaces intermingle, and gives witnesses and students the sense of reverting back to the illum temporum (cf. Eliade 1959: 68–113) of the Shoah. If Auschwitz exerts its emotional effect on visitors insofar as it is conceived as a site frozen in time,13 the witness is the key to the lock that opens that time. It is he who enables the students to sense that they are ‘in Auschwitz’; and not just in its petrified ruins. Interviews with students held several years after their visit show that the site and the sensory conditions of presentation of testimony at Auschwitz will be remembered long after the content of the testimony is forgotten. More than the details of the narrative, it is the students’ experience of being there with the witness that they will place at the centre of the stories they tell as part of their mission and claim to be ‘witnesses of the witness’. The students’ sympathetic presence at the original site empowers the survivor to become a witness. As Hayim continued at the selection ramp: You know, it is you who give me the strength so that I can go on, even until nightfall … Maybe [the delegation leader] thinks that I don’t have the strength to transmit things that were hidden for fifty years. But I see that you’re thirsty to know, and that’s why we came, so that you can be witnesses to what they did to our people. The students are not just a ‘blank screen on which the [traumatic] event comes to be inscribed for the first time’ (Laub 1992: 57). The students’

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

116

4/11/09

13:07

Page 116

Performing Testimony at Auschwitz–Birkenau

listening presence, ‘elicit(s) testimony which exceeds the testifier’s own awareness, to bring forth a complexity of truth which, paradoxically, is not available as such to the very speaker who pronounces it’ (Felman 1992: 263). Thus, witness and student become partners in the creation of a sacred narrative, which inserts the Holocaust into a teleology with reaches its redemptive summit through the students’ presence at the site as proud Israeli ‘witnesses of the witnesses’. As voyage organiser Yossi Levi put it, ‘the kid takes the witness by the hand – through the honour he gives him. The witness puts the kid in touch with the reality – that it really happened … This makes it easier for the child to understand that these are not just things written by a writer’ (Interview, 31.7.94). The students have become witnesses to and agents of the transformation of the survivor from victim to victorious witness. Auschwitz is thus re–created as a live death world; a death world that calls for continuity and renewal, not just destruction. And that call is issued to the students from the most authoritative voice available: that of the witness, the voice of the dead. The witness gives the students a genealogy of victory that protrudes forward, out of catastrophe. By identifying with the witness, students not only become descendents of the victim, but of the heroic survivor, who overcame death to live as a Jew in Israel. On one trip, the witness Hayim observed the students’ reluctance to eat during the lunch break following the visit to Auschwitz 1. He grabbed a soggy roll from the lunch carton and held it up before the students: ‘Hevre, take a look! A roll in Auschwitz! Who could ever have imagined! Come on, give a bite!’ With that, he bit into his roll with exaggerated relish. This performance both reaffirms the contemporaneity of the students’ presence with the time of the survivor’s suffering (‘a roll in Auschwitz’), while according the students’ daily life functions (eating lunch) redemptive value as part of a shared victory over death. These practices of embodied testimony build on Jewish practices, in which memory, zekher, has traditionally been transmitted from generation to generation through common rituals, liturgies, oral traditions and sacred texts. Traditionally, ‘only that which was transfigured ritually and liturgically was endowed with a real chance for survival and permanence’ (Yerushalmi 1982: 40). The redemptive close also conforms to the pattern of destruction to redemption – mihurban ligeulah – which runs as a leitmotif through Jewish memory practices. This pattern, especially as embedded in the Zionist master narrative (see Zerubavel 1995), is an important part of the Israeli ‘landscape of memory’, which, as Lawrence Kirmayer formulates it, ‘(is) given shape by … specific memories, but also draw(s) from … implicit models of memory which influence what can be recalled and cited as veridical’ (1996: 175). By re–enacting the path of their ‘grandparent’ survivors in their travels to sites of past Jewish life in Poland, to the death camps and through their

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 117

Jackie Feldman 117

triumphant return to Israel, the youths acquire an imagined common past, an identity as survivor–witness. By listening to and pledging to tell the story of the Shoah, and by reciting the mourning prayer along with him,14 they create the witnesses as grandparents. As a girl told one of the witnesses, ‘I want a grandpa, so I adopt here all the grandpas’ (S., 16.9.97). The student is born as a survivor–witness, as a carrier of memory, through their performance in the Israeli voyage, rather than through their family lineage or personal relationship with the survivor. Throughout the voyage, and at Auschwitz in particular, the witnesses remind them that they, the students, are their ‘family’ and their future. As one witness said: ‘I’ve fallen in love with every one of you. I felt like with family. Although I have six grandchildren at home, I feel like you’re all mine’ (O., 19.9.1995). By envisioning the students as grandchildren – a construction facilitated through the state’s sponsoring and organisation of the voyage – the survivors may also be empowered. As one witness reported a month after the trip: ‘Here I am tired. And there I had tremendous force – because of the kids. People ask, “How was it?” And I tell them: “The kids! The kids!” And they call me, and they send me pictures. I got strength from them … I’m sure that they’ll pass the message on to others’ (N., 21.11.1995).

Figure 6. Witness reading poem at Auschwitz–1. Photograph taken by Jackie Feldman. The survivor-witness addresses the students from atop the ruins of the crematorium at Birkenau, commanding them to 'bring many sons to the nation, so that we may live forever'.

As psychologist and PTSD researcher Danieli (1994: 5) writes, ‘for the survivor, essential components of the aging person’s preoccupation with “Who loves me?”, “Who cares if I live?” are the devastating questions: “Who will remember me?”, “Will the memory of my people and of the

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

118

4/11/09

13:07

Page 118

Performing Testimony at Auschwitz–Birkenau

Holocaust perish?”’ When the survivor is heard by a large group of youngsters, when he can recite the Kaddish by the ashes of his family in the presence of over a hundred fellow mourners,15 he may well feel that the tale of his suffering and the memory of his murdered family or town will not expire with his approaching death. In the words of another survivor: ‘As long as they remember, the person continues to live. If I transmit the story to them, they continue to live in the memories of the kids’ (quot. in Kramer 2007: 219–20). Thus, the performance of testimony on the voyage may correspond to the need of older people to seek integration between past and present by rewriting their life–history (including the stories of their loved ones) in order to achieve a sense of continuity and completion (Myerhoff 1984).16 Through the shared practices of reading victims’ names and reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish, the members of the group come to recognise themselves as bearers of an inter–generational Jewish legacy.17 Upon their return home, the students often recite accounts of their experiences in Poland as part of their school’s Holocaust Memorial Day ceremonies, alongside (or instead of) testimony of the survivors. This provides public recognition of the students’ new role as witnesses. The witnesses also endow the students’ taken–for–granted youth with moral value. Immediately after the visit to the death camps, students climbed on the bus, and turned on techno music at full volume. The witness justified this, admiring the ‘Israeli youth, strong in body and spirit’, whose effervescence was taken as a sign of victory over the Nazis.

The Survivor–Witness as National Hero The witness’s most significant testimony ends with his participation in the ceremony conducted atop the crematoria (see above). No one has scripted what the witness will say. There are no explicitly articulated rules. But behind the scenes, an unseen social script, an ordered sequence of actions appropriate to a particular spatial/temporal setting, generates similarities in performances through generalised socialisation (Dominguez 1989: 149–51; cf. Alexander 2004; Kirmayer 1996; Mayer 1994). Placed in Auschwitz, before a uniformed, attentive group of 150 young Israelis, ‘strong in body and soul’, what can he say? Looking down at the crematoria ruins, the survivor is reminded of his dead. But when he looks out at the ‘living flags’ in front of him, the blue–and–white clad Israeli youth, his eyes are directed upwards to the raised Israeli flags waving overhead. At that moment, can he do anything other than see the Israeli youth as a response to his suffering, as a guarantor of the future of a Jewish people and as a carrier of his memory? He then turns to the flag–sweatshirt–clad students and tells them that

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 119

Jackie Feldman 119

as embodiments of the nation’s force, they provide the answer – the guarantee of the Jewish people’s continued existence: ‘Bring many sons to the nation, so that the people of Israel live forever.’ At the place of his greatest loss, the witness sees the students stand erect, facing the witness as embodiments of the state. Through the place of honour accorded him by an official Israeli delegation, the state not only acknowledges the survivor’s tragedy and suffering, but, following many decades of denigration and denial (Ofer 1996; Zertal 2005), celebrates him as an exemplary Israeli. Surrounded by symbols of the state, hailed by the blue–and–white clad ‘living flags’ honouring him and empowering him to speak before them, the witness thus comes to re–member his performed story in accordance with the Zionist master narrative. The temporal sequencing and spatial emplacement of testimony gives direction to the witness’s narrative utterances and lends them the authority of place.18 In the initial performance, students and witness are enclosed together within the walls of the barracks, sandwiched in between the decaying bunk–beds, which the witness points to (‘here’) as silent confirmation of his story. Next, the students move to the selection ramp, in which inmates were divided into immediate victims and potential survivors. The students then follow the witness through the camp barracks, and, at the end of their tour, face the ruined crematoria, now festooned with Israeli flags. The witness’s public discourse has an emotional impact and transformatory effect, because it supports and is supported by the perceived immutability of the site, the students’ trajectory over the course of eight days, and the ceremonies performed by the students as a group. All these blur the distinction between Auschwitz and its remains. The witness supports the notion that in a sense the students have been through Auschwitz, and have ‘come out of it’ through the state of Israel. Voiced by the survivor, supported by their own bodily performances as they sing the anthem at the crematoria ruins, the Zionist master narrative of the Holocaust can become naturalised as lived bodily experience. By designating the youths’ taken–for–granted vital force at the death camps as a response to the Nazis’ programme of extermination, this vital force is now given cosmological and teleological significance: ‘Maybe it was my fate, so that I can tell you the story today’. Being Israeli is no longer an accident of birth, but a response to extermination. Raising a flag becomes a stab against darkness, death and Hitler. Bringing children to the nation redeems the Holocaust dead from oblivion; by assuring the continuity of the Jewish people and Jewish life on earth, in spite of the Nazis’ attempt to systematically annihilate them. In a poem recited as part of a ceremony held by students in their honour, the witnesses are called ‘a special force’, ‘soldiers without weapons’, and ‘a regiment without uniforms’. Through the witness,

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

120

4/11/09

13:07

Page 120

Performing Testimony at Auschwitz–Birkenau

students identify not only with death, but also with victory over death (Caruth 1995: 135–36). The students can share in the glory and the responsibility of this elite group if they successfully carry out their mission to ensure Jewish survival.

The Transmission of Testimony, Changing Israeli Memory and Victims by Proxy The trips to Holocaust Poland do not take place in a social vacuum. Most of the students participating in the voyage will be drafted into the army within a year of the voyage. Although military service is not a prominent theme of the voyages, some parents and educators make an explicit link between the two. As one parent said to me, ‘the trip comes at just the right time, so that they know what they’re fighting for’. When the students enter the army, which most will a year later, they will be reminded, in military speeches and ceremonies, of the link between the battle for Jewish existence in the ghettos and Israel’s struggle against her enemies.19 In their study of American flag rituals, Marvin and Ingle (1999) have illustrated that patriotic rituals proliferate in times of uncertainty. The voyage makes the student into a ‘survivor’, at the very time when changes in the nature of Israel’s battles – from frontline combat to intifada urban terror – blur distinctions between soldiers and civilian victims (Feldman 2005: 25–28), implying that all are the victims of the same murderous forces. The nonconsensual nature of some of these engagements has resulted in the gradual replacement of the sacrificial discourse of the heroic fallen soldier with an individualising discourse of survival, suffering and mourning, while the prototype of Holocaust survival has shifted from the armed revolt to ‘spiritual resistance’. If in the 1950s the Warsaw Ghetto fighters were invoked to legitimise Shoah memory for a nation in arms, and Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers served as the template for Holocaust memorial ceremonies (Ben–Amos and Beit–El 1999, 2003), in the current context, the total innocence of the survivor of Auschwitz is invoked to increase the sanctity of the war dead and the legitimacy of the state (see Feldman, 2007).20 The voyage as a whole, and the witness’s testimony in particular, support the ‘lesson’ that Shoah death is the inevitable result of Jewish weakness in exile, and that another Shoah can only be avoided through the manifestation of Jewish strength (Romi and Lev 2003: 235–36), as the same murderous forces that led to the Shoah are alive today in the battles against Israel. The contact with death fascinates the students, but this death remains romantic and heroic. In this romanticising of death, the fear of death is mitigated through the use of symbols and language that ‘overcome’ it.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 121

Jackie Feldman 121

This may be seen as a kind of homeopathic inoculation with small doses of death, in order to neutralise the big one – the army, which awaits the students a year later. The voyage mystifies and glorifies sacrificial death, as it glorifies Israel as the source of life. Through their participation in the voyage, and through subsequent invocations of the voyage experience, students are encouraged to become what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘adopted victims’ or ‘victims by proxy’ who ‘need to re–forge their own imagined continuity of victimhood into the world’s real continuity of victimisation’. That can be done, writes Bauman, ‘only by acting as if … the world they live in reveals its hostility, conspires against them – and, indeed, contains the possibility of another holocaust’. Consequently, ‘the flawed children of the martyrs do not live in homes; they live in fortresses. And to make their homes into fortresses, they need them besieged and under fire’ (1998: 37). The greater the intensity of contact with death in Poland, the more military service becomes mystified as its antithesis. Insofar as students come to see themselves as ‘survivors by proxy’, military service thus becomes not only an antidote to Diaspora Jewish weakness, but also a sacred duty towards the dead. What better way to continue the legacy of the ‘regiment without uniforms’ than by defending the Jewish state in uniform? In addition to its implications for the understanding of military service, the dominant text of the voyage forgets the ways in which the survivor is ‘not quite’ the war hero. As Robert Lifton said in an interview with Cathy Caruth, ‘that “not quite” is the tragic dimension, the “hauntedness” of the experience, the ways in which the survivor is “not quite” the war hero, and which provoke open questions more than they provide answers’ (Caruth 1995: 135–36). The testimony on the voyages, like the voyages as a whole, promotes closure. At a time of weakening commitment to national goals and civil religious symbols, their depiction of a hostile world and a doomed Diaspora recharge the life–world with contingency, emotion and ultimately, commitment to the state. Yet, while such emotionally–laden, multi–sensory contact with uncertainty and death serves to re–enchant the state, this contact must be carefully controlled (Handelman 1990: 60) to neutralise subversive messages which may arise from the destabilising of the taken–for–granted life–worlds of the participants. In one of the discussion groups, one student said: Many said they felt as if they’d won. And I didn’t feel victory. I said, you know, they can take me, they can take the State of Israel, they can take the flag, they can take it all, if they could only bring back the force of life of the six million, those people, and give them their normal, everyday, boring lives, that they watch TV every day and die at age

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

122

4/11/09

13:07

Page 122

Performing Testimony at Auschwitz–Birkenau

seventy–two, without doing a thing. I’m willing, I’m willing, because I know that that’s what they would want (H., discussion, 1995). In order for the voyage to accomplish its aims, the state must assure that the changes the students undergo are channelled into paths that reaffirm the state and the nation. The radical uncertainty engendered by contact with the material remains and the embodiment of the death–world (by the survivor, and – by proxy – by the students) is limited by ritually hedging possibilities, by the voyage’s definition of absolute, impermeable boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘here’ and ‘there’. These boundary–defining practices may even neutralise the subversive potential of certain actions (such as playing loud music on the bus while parked at Majdanek) by incorporating them into an overriding moral logic (in which youthful vitality is interpreted as a sign of victory over Nazism). Furthermore, many of the voyage practices employ widely diffused cultural texts and symbols which are central to spectacles of ordering, such as school commemorations and military ceremonies (Ben–Amos and Beit–El 1999, 2003). This makes it likely that the one–time experience will be interpreted in accordance with a similar logic expressed on other later occasions.

The Holocaust Witness and Necromancy in Service of the State In her study of the reburial of heroes and martyrs in postsocialist Eastern Europe, Catherine Verdery demonstrates how such rituals ‘saturate countless spaces with powerful emotion that blends the personal grief of kin with rage against the enemy, nationally conceived … [and] sacralize and nationalize spaces as ‘ours’, binding people to their national territories in an orderly fashion’ (1999: 110). It is quite common for nations to summon up the personal suffering and death of the (putative, often reclaimed) ancestors in order to create an identification between personal suffering and the suffering of one’s nation, charging the state with mythic value (ibid.: 114–15; Taussig 1997). Yet the ways in which such practices of necromancy are constructed are culturally specific and teach us much about the cosmology of particular nations. Unlike the case studies by Verdery (1999) and Michael Taussig (1997), the Israeli youth tours do not sanctify the ground of Poland, which in the Zionist ritual performed there stands for exile, suffering and finally

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 123

Jackie Feldman 123

Auschwitz. It can be incorporated into the national homeland only through negative sanctification – as the site of evil and chaos. If in the cult of the fallen (Mosse 1990) memorial practices symbolise the repose of the body of the soldier in the womb of the earth that fertilises the motherland, the verse quoted in the Jewish barracks memorial at Auschwitz refers to Cain’s murder of Abel: ‘The voice of your brother cries out to Me from the ground’ (Genesis 3: 11). In the Israeli voyages, the cursed earth of Poland can provide no rest. Rest for the Jewish dead must be found elsewhere, in the Land of Israel. This can be accomplished only insofar as the students carry the dead with them – not by collecting endless dispersed ashes, but by embodying the dead through their presence and movement. The survivor–witness becomes the key to this transport, as he straddles the chasm between death and salvational life – embodying both the dead of the Holocaust, as well as the survivors who made their new home, their new life, in Israel (Handelman 2004: 176). As students follow the survivor–witness’s narrative and his movement from the death camps to Israel, they become victims, survivors, ‘ascenders’ (immigrants) to the Land of Israel and witnesses of the witnesses. They come to claim the Jewish dead as their own, and bring the dead with them to the homeland. Redemption is territorialised and the path of the witness becomes a teleology. The founder of the Ministry of Education’s voyages wrote in an oft–repeated speech: Opposite the flag of Israel raised on high and over the death pits and ovens of destruction, we stand erect and our lips whisper – the people of Israel lives! The eternity of Israel does not deceive! And we swear to the millions of our murdered brethren – if I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its strength! In the ears of our spirit we hear their souls calling to us – through our death we have commanded you to live! Guard and protect the State of Israel like the apple of your eye! And we answer wholeheartedly – long live the State of Israel forever and ever! (Israel. Ministry of Education 1989: 3). While the students at the crematoria at Auschwitz hear the spirits of the dead in the ‘ears of their spirit’, and answer their call by mobilising their entire bodies (backs, lips, hands, ears, eyes), it is the survivor–witness–as–shaman who makes that voice a living one. It is he who translates the mythical (but no less real)21 ‘command of the dead’ into the quotidian path of the living. In her testimony to the group in Poland, Ora, one of the survivor–witnesses, concluded as follows: Then we came on Aliyah Bet [illegal immigration] and were sent to be interned in Cyprus [by the British]. We came on aliyah in time for the

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

124

4/11/09

13:07

Page 124

Performing Testimony at Auschwitz–Birkenau

War [of Independence], and settled on a young kibbutz. In Israel, too, we didn’t lick honey, but it’s ours and that’s what there is. And my sons are in the army, and in the reserves. And it’s ours. And you’ll come back home tomorrow and it’s yours. And this you’ll be able to appreciate better after what you’ve heard here’ (Ora, 19.10.95). The survivor draws lines of continuity between the Holocaust and subsequent Israeli battles. Her sons, so she tells, continue the same inevitable, ontological struggle (‘that’s what there is’) through their military service in the Israeli army. As she leaves Poland to return home the eternal struggle that is life, she instructs the students ‘go thou and do likewise’.

Conclusions: Voyage Testimony and the Magic of the State The performances of witnesses on Israeli voyages to the death camps demonstrate the mutual influences of personal trauma, implicit cultural models of memory, ritual frames and practices, and national identity. The contents and significance of Holocaust testimony, both for the survivors as well as for the listeners, emerge through the performance of the voyage. The students come to identify with the trauma of the Holocaust survivor, the survivor comes to see the Israeli youth as collective guarantors of their memory and those of their murdered kin, and both come to acknowledge the state of Israel as the existential response to the Holocaust. What are the implications of the testimony of these voyages for the contemporary memory of the Holocaust? Jeffrey Alexander has argued that, in contemporary discourse the Holocaust has become a ‘trauma drama’, an event attaining ‘a mythical status that transformed it into the archetypical sacred–evil of our time’ (2004: 227). He claims that ‘psychological identification with the Jewish mass killings and the symbolic extension of its moral implications beyond the immediate parties involved has stimulated an unprecedented universalization of political and moral responsibility’ (ibid.: 229). Similarly, Levy and Sznaider celebrate the rise of a ‘cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust’ (2002: 88, 2006). In an age marked by the secularisation of religion and the progressive disenchantment of the nation, they claim, collective memory is finally floating free of the ‘cracked container of the Nation–State.’ The new global discourse has made the Holocaust a universal ‘moral touchstone in an age of uncertainty and [in] the absence of master ideological narratives’ and ‘a moral certainty that now stretches across national borders’ (ibid.:102, 94). My study of the testimony of the youth voyages to Poland demonstrates that in their celebration of global memory, these sociologists

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 125

Jackie Feldman 125

underestimate the power of rituals and embodied practices to create coherent, totalistic local worlds of meaning, and the extent to which trauma narratives continue to acquire their moral value from local ‘landscapes of memory’ (Kirmayer 1996). Durkheimian ‘sacred–evils’ not only create solidarity; they also, notoriously, mark the borders of the community by constituting that community through their opposition to a present evil ‘them’ outside its borders. Alexander’s and Levy and Sznaider’s generalising theory also undervalues the continued ability of modern nations to ground their ontology in traditional religion–based paradigms and embodied practices (Kapferer 1988). The study of this particular case of Israeli Holocaust ritual, sponsored by the bureaucratic apparatus of the state, illustrates that symbols of death and suffering are not mere instruments of a secularising state power in a progressively disenchanting world. The practices witnessed here are evidence of the powers of enchantment: how the spectre of human death, ‘that soul–stirring insufficiency of Being’ underlies ‘the big S of the State’ (Taussig 1997: 3). The modern state is hardly a ‘cracked vessel’ from which a universal meaning ‘floats free’; rather, it exercises upon us a ‘magic of attraction and repulsion’, because it is an invented entity into which ‘we have placed soulstuff’ (ibid.). The symbols and rituals of the state do not reflect a universalised (or ‘globalised’) language of suffering; rather, they gain their power (to do good and evil) from their capacity to express historically specific configurations of the links between nations, death and territory. The answers that the state provides to the insufficiency of Being can be so convincing that even the survivor, at the place of his greatest loss, gives voice to his deepest personal suffering – and that of his murdered loved ones – through the victory march of the state.

Notes * My thanks to the editors, Katharina Schramm and Nicolas Argenti, as well as to the readers of Berghahn Press for their helpful comments and challenging questions. I have addressed some of them in the final version of this article, while others will provide food for further thought. 1.

2.

Thus, most organised American Jewish tours to Poland end in Israel. Many visit Auschwitz on Holocaust Memorial Day and land in Israel just in time for the Memorial Day for the Fallen Israeli Soldiers and Israel Independence Day. This configuration conveys the message that ‘Poland is my past, Israel is my future.’ What, then, is the ultimate value assigned to Jewish life in the present in North America? I offer some reflections in a preliminary comparison in Feldman (1995: 36–37). See also Stier (2005: 150–90). Kugelmass (1996: 207–11) brings these elements into proximity, by citing De Pres and Lifton on survival and moral witnessing (one could mention many others, a few of which

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

126

4/11/09

13:07

Page 126

Performing Testimony at Auschwitz–Birkenau

appear in the bibliography to this chapter), and insists on the centrality of performance in creating meaning; he does not, however, follow up by tracing the witness–survivor’s trajectory and performances on the voyage. His remark on how the rites in Poland are constructed dialogically, through prayer and photography (ibid.: 211), is important, and I demonstrate how this is done in practice in my book (Feldman 2008). 3. Although I seldom refer to him in the course of this article, my approach is deeply indebted to the analysis of public events by my doctoral mentor, Don Handelman, as applied in his book Models and Mirrors (1990). 4. In an introductory survey of such limited scope, I can hardly do justice to the variety of attitudes towards the past, and towards exile and Jewish tradition held by various Zionist thinkers. However, these generalisations do reflect the basic view of the founders of the state responsible for government policy and the shaping of much of Israeli public culture. For a more detailed survey, see Ofer (1996); Zertal (2005); Friedlander and Seligman (1994); Feldman (2008, Chapter 2). 5. The hegemonic Zionist pioneer–soldier is male. 6. As one of the founding advisors of the voyage put it: ‘Even if there were amongst us social, ethnic and ideological differences – in Treblinka, Majdanek and Bergen–Belsen these differences disappeared … there they made us one nation – the nation that was murdered!’ (Keren in State of Israel 1993: 103). 7. Ilana Kramer (2007: 202) reports that each year, approximately one quarter of all ‘witness people’ accompanying the Israeli groups are first–timers. 8. In the first years of the voyages, witness–survivors also served as guides. A lecturer in the guides’ preparatory course related, ‘one of the students approached me saying, “how could that witness have been in all of those concentration camps. Wherever we come, she says. “we were here, we did this”“…’. Consequently, the Ministry instituted a special training course for Israeli guides and instructed witnesses to restrict their testimony to eye–witness events (Guide course lecture, 29.6.92). 9. On the process of the transformation of traumatic memory into narrative memory, see Caruth (1995), esp. pp. 151–57. 10. The ‘frozen memory’ model of trauma has also been contested on other grounds. Thus, Cathy Caruth writes: What is particularly striking in this singular experience is that its insistent reenactments of the past do not simply serve as testimony to an event, but may also, paradoxically enough, bear witness to a past that was never fully experienced as it occurred. Trauma, that is, does not simply serve as record of the past but precisely registers the force of an experience that is not yet fully owned. (1995: 151) She goes on: Apparently, the event itself is constituted in part, by its lack of integration into consciousness. Indeed, the literal registration of an event – the capacity to continually, in the flashback, reproduce it in exact detail – appears to be connected, in traumatic experience, precisely with the way it escapes full consciousness as it occurs. Modern neurobiologists have in fact suggested that the unerring ‘engraving’ on the mind, the ‘etching into the brain’ of an event in trauma may be associated with the elision of its normal encoding in memory. (ibid.: 153) Such approaches provide a psychodynamic account which supports a moderate constructivist approach to traumatic memory. 11. This hermeneutic of traumatic memory is reproduced in scholarship as well. Thus, Lawrence Langer distinguishes between progressive survivor stories which end with a redemptive element, and those in which ‘durational time relentlessly stalks the memory of the witness, imprinting there moments immune to the ebb and flow of chronological time’ (1995: 22). He privileges the latter as ‘deep memory’, while dismissing the former as ‘surface memory’, which ‘entreats and enables us to forget the unforgettable’ (ibid.:

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 127

Jackie Feldman 127

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

23). Dominic LaCapra counters that ‘[Langer] tends to … discount as illusory, testimony that … tensely combines the reliving of a traumatic past with a counterideological attempt to recount a history, reconstruct a sense of agency, and rebuild a life’ (1994: 196). One teacher summed up the testimony as follows: This trip to Poland, I feel like we’re getting the Oral Law. We see things as they were and we get the living testimony from the people who were here and saw the things when they happened. I hope I have the strength to transmit the stories to the next generation, when the witnesses are no longer with us. In this sense, I compare it to the Oral Law. (K., 15.10.95). As Halbwachs wrote, ‘the collective thought of the group of believers has the best chance of immobilising itself and enduring when it concentrates on places, sealing itself within their confines and molding its character to theirs’ (Halbwachs 1992 [1952]: 156; cf. Casey 1987: 191–215). Claudia Koonz applies some of Halbwachs’ observations on Holy Land sites and pilgrimages to exhibitions in concentration camps (1994: 258–80). Of course, no site is frozen in time, and Auschwitz requires extensive and extremely costly maintenance works so that it may look as if ‘nothing has changed’ since 1945 (Szurek 1990). In fact, many changes impose partisan meanings upon the landscape (Dwork and Van Pelt 1994), but those changes must either be hidden from the eyes of the visitors, or ‘read out’ as irrelevant or accidental (Webber 1992). Although this sense of visual authenticity is essential to heritage sites, it is the visitors who bring with them explicit and implicit expectations, as to how the site ‘should’ look. These expectations are formed by understandings rooted in visitors’ life–worlds as well as the media industry, which diffuses particular representations of sites (see Bruner 1991). Furthermore, the expectations of Jews and Poles differ and differing policies of representation and reconstruction engender contestations over the meaning of the site (Webber 1992). As Auerhahn and Loeb Laub remind us (1990: 452), ‘the survivor’s testimony about the dead also speaks to the dead, reassuring them that they are not forgotten’. I use the masculine pronoun here, as I have never encountered a female witness–survivor reciting the Kaddish at the death–sites. I cannot explore the question of the therapeutic value of public witnessing on the voyage for the witnesses within the limits of this article. In a recent article, Ilana Kramer (2007) argues that the lack of genuine intimacy in the encounter between witness–survivor and the mass of students makes the transmission of testimony less effective as a means of working–through the past than the telling of testimony in a family (or professional psychological) context. Often, she claims, witnesses may compulsively return on repeat voyages, and become emotionally flooded by memories each time, which they transmit in order to shock students (and compete with other survivors on the voyage). While Kramer raises important psychological questions, her methodology – asking survivors to retell their stories as they told them in Poland – is problematic, as it ignores the crucial performative elements of in situ voyage testimony. Note that, according to Jewish law, one may not recite the Kaddish without a quorum of ten Jewish males over the age of thirteen. Thus, this particular act of mourning on the part of the survivor requires a community of mourners, which is constituted through the shared recital of the prayer. In addition, the spatio–temporal sequence described in the testimony narratives is replicated in the sequence of ritual texts and acts within the ceremony, as well as in the movement within the overall eight–day itinerary. This is an example of the fractal effect of rituals, where certain sequences replicate in miniature the larger structures embodied within the voyage, thus energising the entire structure (see Feldman 2008, Chapter 7). Groups of Israeli officers have also been taken on trips to Auschwitz, in order to increase their dedication to the State.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

128

4/11/09

13:07

Page 128

Performing Testimony at Auschwitz–Birkenau

20. Thus in her Holocaust 2001 Holocaust Memorial Day Speech, Education Minister Limor Livnat addressed the public: Primo Levi once wrote that an unbridgeable abyss yawns between one who was there and one who wasn’t. Astoundingly, it seems today that this gap is narrowing. Many of us feel as though we might have been there; to a certain extent, it’s as if we were there. Our young people, second and third generation offspring of native–born Israelis, gravitate towards Auschwitz. They want their own feet to tread that cursed earth, as though to assure themselves that the sun which rises there is the same one which rises in our world. I’ve watched them there clinging to one another, clutching the flag of Israel, weeping … We shouldn’t suppose that we differ from our grandfathers and grandparents who went to the gas chambers. What separates us form them is not that we are some sort of new Jew. The main difference is external: we have a state, and a flag and an army: caught in their tragedy, they lacked all three. (Livnat 2001) Livnat invokes the Poland visits as a lived experience that will render plausible the view that the Holocaust never really ended, and that, but for the state and its defence forces, the Jews in Israel would today be on their way to the gas chambers. 21. Lest we be tempted to dismiss such words as mere metaphor, Taussig reminds us, quoting Nietzsche, that, ‘metaphor constitutes the human world by being forgotten, absorbed into the cultural reality it forms as literal truth … “Truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses”… reality is a sort of conjuring trick whereby poetic illumination flares for the moment only to pass into routine, engorged with value by virtue of this vanishing act’ (1997: 35).

References Alexander, J.C. 2004. ‘On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The “Holocaust” from War Crime to Trauma Drama’, in J. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N.J. Smelser and P. Sztompka (eds), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 196–263. Auerhahn, N.C. and D. Laub 1990, ‘Holocaust Testimony‘, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 5(4): 447–62. Ballinger, P. 1998. ‘The Culture of Survivors: Post–Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Memory’, History and Memory 10(1): 99–132. Bauman, Z. 1998. ‘Hereditary Victimhood: The Holocaust’s Life as a Ghost’, Tikkun 13(4): 33–38. Ben–Amos, A. and I. Beit–El. 1999. ‘Ceremonies, Education and History: Holocaust Memorial Day and Memorial Day for the Fallen in Israeli Schools’ (Hebrew), in R. Paldahi and E. Etkes (eds), Education and History: Cultural and Political Contexts. Jerusalem: Zalmam Shazar Center, pp. 457–79. –––. 2003. ‘Education for Militarism and Commemoration: National Memorial Ceremonies in Israeli Schools’, in M. el–Haj and U. Ben–Eliezer (eds), In the Name of Security: Sociology of Peace and War in Israel in A Changing Era (Hebrew). Haifa: University of Haifa, pp. 369–400.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 129

Jackie Feldman 129

Bruner, E.M. 1991. ‘Abraham Lincoln as Authentic Reproduction: A Critique of Postmodernism’, American Anthropologist 96(2): 397–415. Caruth, C. 1995. ‘An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton’, in C. Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 128–47. Casey, E. 1987. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Connerton, P. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Danieli, Y. 1994. ‘As Survivors Age, Part 1’, Clinical Quarterly, The National Center for Post–Traumatic Stress Disorder 4(1): 1–7. Dominguez, V.R. 1989. People as Subject, People as Object; Selfhood and Peoplehood in Contemporary Israel. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Dwork, D. and R.J. van Pelt. 1994. ‘Reclaiming Auschwitz’, in G.H. Hartman (ed.), Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 232–51. Eliade, M. 1959. Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. New York: Harper and Row. Feldman, J. 1995. ‘“It Is my Brothers whom I am Seeking”: Israeli Youths’ Pilgrimages to Poland of the Shoah’, Jewish Ethnology and Folklore Review 17: 33–37. –––. 2002. ‘Marking the Boundaries of the Enclave: Defining the Israeli Collective through the Poland “Experience”’, Israel Studies 7(2): 84–114. –––. 2005. ‘Individuelles Leid und die Stärkung der Nation. Nichtkosmopolitisches Gedenken an die Shoah in Israel’, Mittelweg 36 14(5): 3–28. –––. 2007. ‘Between Yad Vashem and Mount Herzl: Changing Inscriptions of Sacrifice on Jerusalem’s ‘Mountain of Memory’‘, Anthropological Quarterly 80(4), pp. 1147–172. –––. 2008. Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Holocaust Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Felman, S. 1992. ‘The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah’, in S. Felman and D. Laub (eds), Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge, pp. 204–83. Friedlander, S., with A. Seligman. 1994. ‘Memory of the Shoah in Israel: Symbols, Rituals and Ideological Polarization’, in J. Young (ed.), The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History. New York and Munich: Prestel, pp. 149–58. Halbwachs, M. 1992. On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago. Handelman, D. 1990. Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

130

4/11/09

13:07

Page 130

Performing Testimony at Auschwitz–Birkenau

–––. 1994. ‘SRB Insights: Symbolic Type’, The Semiotic Review of Books 5 (1): 10–11. –––. 2004. Nationalism and the Israeli State: Bureaucratic Logic in Public Events. Oxford: Berg. Harding, S. 1987. ‘Convicted by the Holy Spirit: The Rhetoric of Fundamental Baptist Conversion’, American Ethnologist 14(1): 167–81. Israel. Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, Youth and Society Administration. 1989. Guide for Guides (Hebrew), Jerusalem. Kapferer, B. 1988. Legends of People, Myths of State. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Instititute. Kertzer, D. 1988. Ritual, Politics and Power. New Haven: Yale. Kirmayer, L. 1996. ‘Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Narrative, and Dissociation’, in P. Antze and M. Lambek (eds), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York: Routledge, pp. 173–98. Koonz, C. 1994. ‘Between Memory and Oblivion: Concentration Camps in German Memory’, in J.R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, pp. 258–80. Kramer, I. 2007. ‘The Working through of the Trauma of the Shoah in Old Age: The “Witness People” Accompanying Youth Groups on the Voyage to Poland – A New Way to Work through the Trauma of the Shoah in Old Age’ (Hebrew), in Z. Solomon and J. Chaitin (eds), Childhood in the Shadow of the Holocaust: Survived Children and Second Generation. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hame’uhad, pp. 202–29. Kugelmass, J. 1993. ‘The Rites of the Tribe: The Meaning of Poland for American Jewish Tourists’, in J. Kugelmass (ed.), Going Home: YIVO Annual 21. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 395–453. –––. 1994. ‘Why We Go to Poland; Holocaust Tourism as Secular Ritual’, in James Young (ed.), The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History. Munich and New York: Prestel., pp. 174–83. –––. 1996. ‘Missions to the Past: Poland in Contemporary Jewish Thought and Deed’, in P. Antze and M. Lambek (eds), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York: Routledge, pp. 199–214. LaCapra, D. 1994. History, Theory, Trauma: Representing the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Langer, L. 1995. Admitting the Holocaust. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Lanzmann, C. 1990. ‘Le Lieu et la Parole’, in M. Deguy (ed.), Au Sujet de Shoah. Le Film de Claude Lanzmann. Paris: Belin, pp. 293–305. Laub, D. 1992. ‘An Event without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival’, in S. Felman and D. Laub (eds), Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge, pp. 75–92. Levy, D. and N. Sznaider. 2002. ‘Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 131

Jackie Feldman 131

Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory’, European Journal of Social Theory 5(1): 87–106. ——–. 2006. Holocaust and Memory in a Global Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Liebman, Ch.S. and E. Don–Yehiya. 1983. Civil Religion in Israel. Berkeley: University of California Press. Livnat, L. 2001. ‘“Of Holocaust and Heroism’,” Ha’aretz, 19 April, p. B2. Marvin, C. and D.W. Ingle. 1999. Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mayer, A.J. 1994. ‘Memory and History: On the Poverty of Remembering and Forgetting the Judeocide’, in R. Steininger (ed.), Der Umgang mit dem Holocaust in Europa / USA / Israel. Vienna, Cologne and Weimar: Böhlau: Vol. 1, pp. 444–56. Mosse, G.L. 1990. Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Myerhoff, B. 1984. ‘Rites and Signs of Ripening: The Intertwining of Ritual, Time and Growing Older’, in D.J. Kertzer and J. Keith (eds), Age and Anthropological Theory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 305–30. Ofer, D. 1996. ‘Israel’, in David S. Wyman (ed.), The World Reacts to the Holocaust. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 836–922. Ofir, A. 1986. ‘On the Revival of the Name, Shoah: An Anti–Theological Treatise’, Politika 8: 2–5 (Hebrew). Romi, Sh. and M. Lev. 2003. ‘Knowledge, Feelings and Positions of Israeli Youth towards the Shoah: Changes following the Voyage to Poland’ (Hebrew), Magamot 42(2): 219–39. Schudson, M. 1989. ‘The Present in the Past versus the Past in the Present’, Communication 11: 105–13. Shapira, A. 1996–97. ‘The Shoah: Individual Memory and Public Memory’, Zemanim 57 (Winter): 4–13 (Hebrew). State of Israel, Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport. Youth and Culture Division. 1993. It is My Brothers I Am Seeking…: A Youth Voyage to Poland, Jerusalem (Hebrew). Stier, O.B. 1995. ‘Lunch at Majdanek: The March of the Living as a Contemporary Pilgrimage of Memory’, Jewish Ethnology and Folklore Review 17(1–2): 57–66. –––. 2005. Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press. Szurek, J.–Ch. 1990. ‘Le camp–Musee d’Auschwitz: De l’Anti–Fascisme comme Paravant’, Bulletin Trimestriel de la Fondation Auschwitz, Editions du Centre d’Etudes et de Documentation 23 (janvier–mars): 9–29. Taussig, M. 1997. The Magic of the State. New York and London: Routledge. Van der Kolk, B.A. and O. van der Hart. 1995. ‘The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma’, in C. Caruth (ed.),

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 133

Landscapes, Memoryscapes and the Materiality of Objects

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 135

Chapter 6

Memories of Slavery: Narrating History in Ritual Adelheid Pichler The late Cuban anthropologist and historian Joel James Figarola repeatedly insisted that: Neither in Cuba nor anywhere else have the social sciences ever been able to apprehend the true nature of the trauma of the slave ship, the rupture of emotional context and world of reference, the market of human beings, the slave barracks, the rope, the overseer’s whip or the flat side of the machete of the rural police. We have never succeeded in grasping the dramatic dimension of all these violations and dislocations, nor can we integrate into our own lived experience the study of this suffering. But the traumatic effects of forced immigration and labour, and the disruption of social order, affected not only those it directly touched, but also those who came later. Cuba, as a people and as a culture, emerged from the depths of solitude and uprooting which always accompany torture and death. The examination of this emergence is what constitutes Cuban history, and the consequences of these convulsive events – alienation, desolation, anxiety – are fully ours, belong to us. (1998: 47) James Figarola asserts here that conventional histories have never been able to grasp the most fundamental aspects of the experience of slavery, a perspective which contrasts with the tremendous growth in scholarly knowledge about resistance to slavery, and suggests a discursive silence from within the world of slavery. In a remarkably similar way, in a discussion of Jewish museums in Germany and Austria, Sabine Offe refers to the true legacy of the Holocaust as that which cannot be addressed by memorials, ‘the other half–life of remembrance, sensed as a gap of silence’ (2008: 298), when contemplating the ‘staged memory’ of museum exhibits. This is the part of history ‘that cannot be written’ (Lambek 2006: 211). Slavery lasted for 360 years in Cuba. Between 1526 and 1886, over one million Africans of different ethnic groups were transported across the

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

136

4/11/09

13:07

Page 136

Memories of Slavery: Narrating History in Ritual

Atlantic to work in mines and sugar mills, on coffee and tobacco plantations, as domestic servants, and in the construction of houses and fortifications throughout the Cuban island. And yet, despite a mountain of retrospective literature, both imaginative and scholarly, there were no public monuments to commemorate slavery until 1997, when the Cuban state commissioned Alberto Lescay to mount a huge sculpture of a ‘Runaway Slave’ in the hills overlooking El Cobre near Santiago de Cuba.1 The figure of the slave, just over nine metres high, is significantly set in an iron pedestal in the form of a huge cauldron of the type used in nineteenth–century sugar mills for boiling sugar juice. This cauldron explicitly represents a nganga (sp. prenda), a container of spiritual forces in the Congo–derived Afro–Cuban religion, Regla de Palo Monte, and the artifact which, in its continued ritual use, opens a path into the ‘gap of silence’ which is slavery’s legacy. Focusing on the ritual use and significance of this artifact (the nganga), I will argue that in ritual performance memories of violent events and experiences during the Cuban colonial past are evoked and transmitted. These ritually evoked forms of remembrance differ from the verbally discursive assertions of public memory. The rituals of Palo Monte produce a setting in which the cultural memory of slavery – a body of memory that continues to affect the whole of Cuban society – are transmitted.2 In the passage cited, James Figarola asserts that conventional histories have never been able to grasp fundamental aspects of the experience of slavery. I suggest here that, viewed as performed, embodied behaviour, Palo ritual offers an articulated medium for assimilating that experience in a way that allows participants to re–negotiate their relationship to the past and to fashion alternative futures.3

Palo Monte in Contemporary Cuba: A Short Introduction Very little is known about the formative phases of Palo Monte in Cuba. Despite Lydia Cabrera´s pioneering fieldwork in the first half of the twentieth century (1954, 1979), Palo Monte has not received much scholarly attention until recently.4 The bibliography of Santería, the other major Afro–Cuban religion still practiced on the island, on the other hand, is large and growing, but it would take us too far afield to speculate on the reasons for this striking disparity. The legacy of the Cuban colonial past is a complex of hybrid Afro–Cuban socio–religious practices, which has four main branches: (1) the Yoruba–derived Santería, also known as the Regla de Ocha; (2) the Congo–derived Regla de Palo Monte (which itself has three main branches, known as Mayombe, Kimbisa and Vrillumba); (3) the Abakuá secret society, also known as ñáñigos (Efik–Ibibio); and (4) the Regla de

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 137

Adelheid Pichler 137

Arará (Adja–Fon).5 The Regla de Arará has been largely absorbed by Santería and has a few remaining followers in a handful of locations, while Santería and Palo Monte have countless adherents throughout the island, and the Abakuá society counts 100,000 members in Havana and Matanzas, the only places it has ever existed (Palmié 2002: 162). All of these groups emerged from the repeated transplantation of African aggregates of knowledge throughout the entire course of the slave trade, and their progressive transformation, under the conditions of slavery and its aftermath, into relatively coherent sets of social practices and beliefs. In the early nineteenth century, the neighbourhoods of Havana were inhabited by many African–born blacks (negros de nación), almost all of them domestic slaves, or employed in public service, such as construction or the military; ‘coloured folk’ (gente de color); and freed blacks working as craftsmen, carpenters, gardeners, etc. They organised themselves into fraternal associations known as cabildos de nación (Brown 2003: 25).6 The sugar boom of 1820–60 produced a spiralling demand for new slave labour to work the canefields, under an increasingly brutal plantation regime which steadily augmented its repression of Afro–Cuban social and cultural activity following a series of slave insurrections (1810–44). During the period of emancipation (1880–86) Africans and Afro–Cubans (negros de nación) and their creole descendents strongly identified with their cabildos de nación (mutual aid societies) which were the formal structures for the transmission of African–derived tradition. Many Afro–Cuban creoles were the offspring of intermarriages. Did an Afro–Cuban belong to a Lucumí cabildo because of his or her transparent Yoruba ancestry? Or was an Afro–Cuban creole rather considered ‘Lucumí’ because of his official membership in a Lucumí cabildo, as David Brown suggests (2003: 28)? As the twentieth century approached, one could ‘become’ Lucumí through initiation into the Lucumí religion (Regla de Ocha). One could become a tata nkisi (father of the secret, or priest of Palo Monte), worship Arará deities of Ewe–Fon origin, become an obonékue (member) of the Abakuá society (of Old Calabar origin), and so on. These Afro–Cuban societies were originaly based on ethnic affiliations (Cabildo Congo, Cabildo Mandinga, Cabildo Tácua, Cabildo Lucumí, etc.). These affiliations followed an ethnic nomenclatura derived from the slave trade, in which the alleged origin of a slave directly affected his economic value,7 but from the early colonial period on the slaves themselves adapted this system to construct group identities. Subjectively perceived linguistic or cultural traits provided sufficient criteria for integration into one of these societies. The differences between the ‘nations’ – Lucumí, Arará, Congo, Carabalí – owed as much to ongoing institutional and performative ‘boundary making’ strategies as to the conservation of essential African elements from their African source locales and regions, which were themselves

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

138

4/11/09

13:07

Page 138

Memories of Slavery: Narrating History in Ritual

highly dynamic and changed over time (Palmié 1989, Bastide 1978). The cabildos were social clubs and religious mutual aid societies of neo–African ethnic denomination. At the same time, the members of the heterogeneous nations took on significant aspects of a creole identity, sharing a class position, at first as slaves, but later on as working class (Brown 2003: 31). In the Havana of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, urban slaves worked alongside free people of colour, in many of the semi–skilled and skilled occupations. Slaves who were hired out (known as jornaleros) could keep part of the earnings of the cabildos, thus gaining an opportunity to save money for their coartición (Cuban practice of self purchase),8 as slaves could buy their freedom. Moreover, the African brotherhoods and other kinds of lodges dedicated much of their available funds to buy the freedom of their brethren (cf. Bremer 1883, 2: 381, Barcia Zequeira 2003). Today Palo Monte is practiced throughout the island. The Regla (religious branch) is divided into three different ramas: Mayombe, Briyumba and Kimbisa. Mayombe refers to a jungle area in the Angolan province of Cabinda from which a large number of Kikongo–speaking slaves were deported.9 Members of these ‘cult houses’ (nsó–nganga) are called paleros.

Memory Encoded in Speech: The Use of Bozal Nowadays, paleros communicate with each other in standard Spanish, but earlier their spoken language was bozal, Black Spanish, now reserved for liturgical use. For example ‘Palente, mingo, y crabela’ (relative, my friend, ‘shipmate’) is how one reporter has transcribed a bozal speaker’s phonology (Brown 2003: 311). The terms are characterised by typical creole elisions and liquids (use of ‘l’ in place of ‘r’). The Spanish lexical equivalents of palente and mingo are pariente (relative) and amigo (my friend), while crabela is an elided form of carabela, a word originally referring to a type of sailing vessel but, among slaves, given the meaning (African) countryman (paisano) or ‘shipmate’ (combarcero) (Brown 2003:311). The last term has apparent roots in Congo and in European continental languages. Mintz and Price (1992) show that the ‘shipmate’ relationship (carabela) was understood both literally and figuratively to cover various surrogate kinship relationships created throughout the Americas. Carabela emblematises the ‘new social ties’ and incipient institutions at the heart of diasporic experience and ‘culture building’ (Mintz and Price [1976] 1992: 42–44). Despite their disparate origins on the continent of Africa (Guiné), slaves became relatives, friends and countrymen/shipmates through their experience of the Middle Passage, the slave plantation, and colonial cities like Havana. They and their

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 139

Adelheid Pichler 139

descendants maintained bozal as their common spoken language for a long time, and it continues to be produced and transmitted within the context of social and religious practices referring to the world of the plantation. Although contemporary practitioners use ‘Congo’10 or bozal without truly mastering it, many experienced priests make use of an elaborate lexicon of bozal, and know the meaning of the words and phrases, many of them improvised as they sing. To master bozal is highly esteemed, its skilled use demonstrating the proximity of a singer to his ancestors – to the creole slaves whose daily spoken language was bozal, but also to the African–born ‘negros de nación’ who had to learn it too. In contemporary ceremonies priests enter into dialogue with the spirits and ancestors using bozal as a ritual code and language of power. The language therefore serves as an important instrument of memory. Through language the past invades the present, and the present derives its power from a carefully maintained relationship with the past. Viewed from this angle, the primary meaning of ‘remembering through language’ appears to inform Nora´s definition of ‘milieu de mémoire’. For Nora (1992: 12) ‘sites of memory’ are deliberately created, and paleros, in fact, employ ‘commemorative vigilance’, careful to respect the anniversaries of the bestowal of a nganga and at pains to organise other celebrations which no longer spontaneously occur. Keeping language alive in Cuba serves as a memory technique11 in which language becomes a complex communication system, expressed in verbal incantations, and defining the relationship between practitioners, spirits and material objects. In this communication the object is at once a locus of historical memory, a source of magical power and a social agent, as I discuss below.

Memory Archive12: The Nganga The Spanish name of the religion Palo Monte refers to ‘trees of the forest’ (palo = tree, el monte = forest). Palo also refers to the stakes of wood forming a palisade (palenque) around a rural stronghold.13 Implicit in the name of the religion then are the fortifications built by cimarrones, runaway slaves, who sought refuge in palenques concealed in the high forests of Cuba. The religion’s central icon is the nganga, a term which in Central Africa refers to a ‘master of ritual, a sage capable of communicating with the transcendental, and, in particular, a sorcerer capable of communicating with the dead’ (Bettelheim 2001: 36), but which in Cuba has been transferred from the sorcerer (in Cuba, tata nganga14 or ngudi nganga15) to the receptacle, charged with objects of power, which he employs. Known in Spanish as prenda (or cazuela, caldero, fundamento), this is usually a clay pot or an iron cauldron which is kept in a separate room in the sorcerer’s house (munansó), in a closet, in a hut in the backyard or in the bush (monte),

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

140

4/11/09

13:07

Page 140

Memories of Slavery: Narrating History in Ritual

buried under a tree. This shift from person to object, which James Figarola considers striking, is ‘a product of the slave trade, the uprooting and alienation it meant for the slave, and of his will to resist’ (2006: 27). We cannot pursue here Figarola´s profound line of speculation – the basis for his thesis that Cuba itself is a great nganga – but it is important to add that what he sees as the common factor in both uses of the term is its ‘prior meaning’ as the spirit incarnated by the priest, in Africa, substituted in Cuba with the mpungus (nature spirits) and nfumbi (spirits of the dead) which endow the prenda with its power.16

Figure 7. Prenda / nganga. Photograph taken by Adelheid Pichler.

The word nganga, then, can refer to the pot itself, the power of the pot or, by extension, the owner of the pot. It is a world in miniature, and when one is initiated into a further level of Palo, one receives a personal nganga. Thus, initiation makes nganga – both priests and pots (Bettelheim 2001: 36). The Cuban nganga is filled with a wide range of elements from nature – human bones, woods from various kinds of trees, the remains of animals, and the scrapings and powders of substances of the most diverse origin – and every palero, whether he receives his own (when he becomes a tata nganga) or is simply initiated to the prenda, or to one of the prendas, in the munansó (home) of his godfather, is intimately related to it, and participates in its power.17 Paleros are popularly referred to as brujos (sorcerers) as their daily practice involves casting spells to heal or solve problems for members of the community, often ‘doing harm’ – a universal American euphemism for working ‘witchcraft’. The tatas and ngudis, while performing the rituals

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 141

Adelheid Pichler 141

involved, enter into dialogue with the mpungu and nfumbi in the prenda, speaking or singing to them – together with all those present – in Congo or bozal, or both (see also Ochoa 2007). The nfumbi (dead soul) shut into the prenda has not volunteered for the position. The priest first steals his remains from a cemetery – usually his skull, kiyumba – and then enters into a contract with his spirit. But the nfumbi, who has not read the small print, does not realise that he is about to be ritually shut into a small bottle (entumbo), also known as the ‘holy trap’ (santa trampa), in which he will be permanently imprisoned in the prenda and forced to do his master’s bidding. The tasks given to the nfumbi may concern such everyday matters as a pending criminal trial, the desire to emigrate, problems in the workplace, a forthcoming operation in the hospital, etc. According to the task, the means and end of the ritual, and the forces employed by the nfumbi (slave) on behalf of his master, differ.

History Encoded in Songs and Ritual Performance According to the following explanation given by a ritual specialist, at the beginning of the ceremony all participants alter social relations and bodily dispositions. In the words of my informant, ‘When the bell that opens the ceremony rings, we cleanse ourselves with ashes.’ The tata (priest) marks all participants, in hierarchical order, with a chalk sign (arrow or crosses, depending on their rank) on the forehead and the backs of the hands. With this act, he says, ‘we don the clothes of the dead, and begin to work. We send our slave gang into the fields.’ (J.V. 2004) While the prenda is being set up in its place, over signs traced on the floor with ashes, the priest sings the following mambo:

(1) Ya e yá patimpolo

(1) Ya e yá = ngoyaya = ngoya = group of trees; Ngoya ya patimpola: ngo = government; Patimpolo: mpolo = ashes, powder. Pati = a bozalismo for repartir = share, spread around. They are cleansing their impure bodies with ashes

Table 1. J.V. (Informant) singing and explaining a mambo, recorded and transcribed by Adelheid Pichler, 2004.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

142

4/11/09

13:07

Page 142

Memories of Slavery: Narrating History in Ritual

(2) Que vamos a ver

(2) Let’s see what happens

(3) Goya ya que patimpolo

(3) Government of evil: prenda, or a group of trees. One way or the other: either ngoya ya: the ‘woods’ that are surrounding the nfumb or = ngo yaya = government of evil. Both readings make sense in the context of defence.

(4) Pa to lo mundo, simbico

(4) For everyone, simbico (see below)

(5) Ya ya ya, María Nganga

(5) María Nganga refers here to Mama Lola, in this case the nfumbi (dead spirit)

(6) Lo simbico, que patimpolo

(6) Simbico = the prenda (< simba, tremble, quake, vibrate, which is what an activated prenda does). The prenda is now in place on top of the tracings that have been made with ashes on the floor. The implied sense is a challenge: ‘Let’s see what’s happening with this prenda that’s over the ashes’, referring to the “death spirit” inside the object.

(7) Mambé mambé Dío!

(7) The line that always marks the end of a song.

Table 1. J.V. (Informant) singing and explaining a mambo, recorded and transcribed by Adelheid Pichler, 2004.

This mambo is sung while all those present ‘cleanse’ themselves by rubbing their faces and bodies with ashes: ‘to enter the world of the dead you must disguise yourself as a dead person; you must disguise yourself with ashes’ (J.V. 2004). They also share ashes with the prenda, entering into communion with it. The song lasts until the last person has doused himself with ashes. The ashes (mpolo) have exactly the same ritual function here as kaolin, mpemba, among African Bantu, a shift which is reflected in – and possibly determined by – the Spanish phrase which is always used to explain the ritual: polvo a polvo (dust to dust), as mpolo means polvo in both its senses, powder and dust. In this passage pati (a bozalismo) literally means ‘to share’, or ‘to spread around’. The participants clean themselves with ashes

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 143

Adelheid Pichler 143

taken from the prenda that represents the dead slave, effectively covering their bodies with the substance of the dead slave and returning to the world of the plantation. In this way, the group of participants is transformed into a community of the dead. I come back to this aspect later in the chapter. Que vamos a ver, ‘we’ll see’ or ‘let’s see’, is a common expression in mambos; seeing is believing. Ngoyaya or ngoya is a group of trees, so by extension the forest itself. Ashes, too, have the power of the bush. The term ngoyaya or ngoya refers to the group of trees in the prenda. Patimpolo pa to lo mundo: Let’s share the ashes with everyone. María Nganga, the name given by paleros to ‘the Virgin Mary’, is also a traditional way to refer to Mama Lola, the nfumbi of the famous prenda of Andrés Petit, who founded this branch of Palo Monte (Kimbisa) in the mid–nineteenth century, and by extension, to the prenda itself, to which it lent its name (Mama Lola). The next mambo in this ritual sequence introduces another white powder, chalk: (1) Patti patti patti

(1) ‘Let’s cut with the chalk’ (Bozal patti < Spanish repartir, ‘to cut, divide, distribute’)

(2) mpémba simbico

(2) mpemba refers to chalk, which is analogous to the kaolin used in much the same way in Central Africa.

Table 2. J.V. (Informant) singing and explaining a mambo, recorded and transcribed 2004.

‘Let’s cut with the chalk’ (Bozal patti < spanish repartir, cut, divide) refers to dividing into four quarters the tracing of a circle onto which the prenda is set, or ‘Let’s draw with the chalk’. In Kikongo, mpemba refers both to kaolin and to the subterranean white country where beneficent and omniscient spirits live, and at which one can arrive only after crossing a river. The other world of ancestors and spirits is often symbolised by river chalk or clay (luvemba), and dying is spoken of as ‘going [to the] white’ (ku mpemba), (see Janzen 1978: 200). Mpemba, which primarily means white, refers here to chalk which has, in this context, the same implied other–worldly connotations that have been explicity displaced onto mpolo, ashes, in the preceding mambo, (in the line Ya e yá patimpolo – let’s share the ashes with everyone).

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

144

4/11/09

13:07

Page 144

Memories of Slavery: Narrating History in Ritual

Once the prenda has been set in place over the chalk drawing in a ritual emplacement called the cepo (‘stocks’), the padre and the mayordomo (his ritual assistant, bakonfula, in bozal), spray it with aguardiente (a kind of rum) and then all the others present do the same. (1) Sála minganga sálalaló

(1) Go to work, my nganga, go to work

(2) Nsunga da vuelta l’ingenio

(2) Tobacco is making the rounds of the sugar mill (here also meaning all those present in the ceremony)

(3) Arriba munda tó moana

3) We’re all here on top of the world

(4) Súnga, vamo nsunga

(4) Let’s blow smoke

(5) yimbila, vamo un poco yimbila

(5) Yimbula: < boba = to talk; let’s have a little talk

Table 3. J.V. (Informant) singing and explaining a mambo, recorded and transcribed 2004.

This mambo is sung while tempering the prenda with cigar smoke: ‘Work, my nganga, work, the cigar smoke makes a round of the sugar mill, we’re all here on top of the world, let’s blow smoke’. The prenda is also the world. Only the padre and the mayordomo can temper the prenda with aguardiente and cigar smoke: one or the other takes turns around the prenda, ‘tempering’ it and shaking hands with everyone. And then: “Yimbila, vamo un poco yimbila”, the prenda is ready: They want to sit down for a little chat, to talk about life on the old ingenios: “lets talk about the past”. The floor is open, everyone is now part of the ingenio, has entered the plantation.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 145

Adelheid Pichler 145

Ritual Performance and the Transformation of Space, Persons and Objects What we see reflected in the sung discourse of the priest to his prenda is its transformation from artifact to active social agent. The object becomes a mediator, a social thing. It mediates the relationship between the spirit and its human counterpart in what is referred to as a pact or bargain. Recent theorists in anthropology have suggested that we should view artifacts less as objects than as active subjects in a web of relationships between persons and things. Part of this movement, as Jon Mitchell demonstrates (2006: 391, citing Pels et al. 2002: 2), involves moving away from principally semiological understandings of the relationship between materiality and meaning – in which the former is seen to stand for or symbolise the latter – to understand material artifacts as things in themselves. As Pels (2002) puts it, ‘it is not so much what materials … symbolise within social action that matters but their constitutive agentic effects within the entangled networks of sociality / materiality. Materials are not given meaning by a volitional will but are taken as actants, their agency is understood as constituted as a relational and non–volitional “will as force”’ (Pels et al. 2002: 2). Such artifacts or idols achieve this status through an iconography of orifices and enclosures, both of which communicate a property internal to the artifact. ‘Agency’ is attributed through the invocation of an ‘inside’ beyond the surface of the artifact, according to Alfred Gell’s formulation (1998: 132), and of course prendas, containers which enclose a concealed, intrinsically mysterious universe, endowed with life, lend themselves perfectly to this purpose: ‘The power of artifacts is not that they convey meaning but that they are social agents in and of themselves’ (Gell 1998: 5–6). In all these considerations, our focus is not on the objects of material culture as separate entities in themselves, but rather on the relationships between persons, spaces and objects, and the substantive transformations of all three, effected through ritual performance. Each transformation addressed here involves an intersection and interaction between the material and the conceptual. Following Mitchell (2006), material artifacts are transformed in performance into active ‘social agents’. The focus on agency necessarily draws us to questions of power (as Anthony Giddens’ theory of agency makes clear). The conception that power is an inherent ‘quality’ of this kind of artifact is a common feature of West African and Circum–Caribbean cosmologies (Horton 1997).18 From this angle, the entire ceremony can be interpreted as a communication process between priest and the agent, in this case the slave. The priest commands his slaves by songs and words. The aim of the ceremony is to stimulate the dead soul to work for its

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

146

4/11/09

13:07

Page 146

Memories of Slavery: Narrating History in Ritual

owner, literally to ‘wake him up’, as he is thought to be slumbering. This ritually enslaved soul, the nfumbi, which gives the prenda its decisive importance, represents, on the one hand, the condition of ‘being enslaved’, and, on the other, great power. The enslaved soul has at its command a broad arsenal both for attack and defence, which is present in all the other components of the prenda, and which the nfumbi deploys in the service of the priest. That this hierarchical structure mirrors that of the plantation is evident: the tata nganga is the amo, the owner and master of the plantation, who has paid for this slave and has a contract to prove it. The mayoral is the overseer, who is directly in charge of the slave force (dotación), and assigns to the various slave gangs (cuadrillas) their tasks.

The Inheritance of Slavery – The Master–Slave Relationship The symbolism of the prenda is imbued with dominance and subordination, enslavement and revolt. The father of the nganga (tata nganga) is a mystical entrepreneur commanding a labour force bound by contract or capture. The relationship of dominance and control recalls slavery, and this is underscored in ritual symbolism. The ritually meaningful material objects can be interpreted as condensed memories of the forced work on the plantation. When the ancestors and spirits have been greeted, they are present, and bring the prenda to life. The priest calls them to work, first in a friendly tone, but they do not set to work willingly, demanding first to be fed. ´Sometimes the slaves are very hungry and we have to give them many animals, especially when they have difficult jobs (trabajos) to carry out. Even so, the slaves have to be driven to work’ (source: J.V., 2004). This means that the tata nganga, together with his ritual assistant, the mayordomo (the same name is given to the amo’s right–hand man on the plantation, the administrator of the estate), often has to curse them, insult them, provoke them. He has to wake them from their slumber and fire them up to work, and he does so in word and song: ‘Only when they are angered, incensed, wild, will they work well’ (source: J.V., 2004). Fernando Ortiz mentioned practices of verbally abusing, beating, spitting on or flogging the nganga in order to activate it, drive it to work. ‘The brujos themselves’, writes Ortiz, customarily say to their prenda: kotina ngua ko, which is an offending comment about ‘your mother’; they address it as nkenta muya nkala or ‘lesbian’, if the spirit thus conjured is that of a woman; mpangui manganone and mpangui nkoya or ‘sodomite’, if it is a man; and [they use] other similarly insulting terms, both in the African language and

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 147

Adelheid Pichler 147

in Spanish, while they simultaneously spit on or beat it to drive it on so that it gets to work; just as the slave driver used to in order to make a slave work for him. He further indicates that this practice may combine ideas about the abuse of ‘dead souls’ widespread in Europe as well as West Africa, although modified in the present case by the historical experience of a system of chattel slavery (Ortiz 1958: 851). Just as nails and other sharp metal objects are driven into the object to incite its wrath and send it on errands of vengeance, so do other forms of abuse stimulate the Afro–Cuban nganga. When asked why he insulted the enkise, the dead soul in the prenda, and threatened him with beating, Ortiz continues, the priest answered: ‘In order for it to heat up and start moving, so that it [begins] to work. The spirit has to get exited, enraged, heated up, as if it were a machine that had to be under steam to function or an electric battery that had to be charged with energy’ (ibid.: 854). Constantly repeated ritual gestures become habit, and as Connerton says, ‘habit is knowledge, and in the cultivation of habit it is our body which understands’ (1996: 95). The repetitive character inherent in embodied performative acts or utterances makes them an especially powerful mnemonic tool for a bodily social memory. Moreover, ritual itself can be considered a technique of corporeal mnemonics. For Connerton, rituals are performance in a semiotic sense, i.e. constitutive of a language of action. A performative utterance does not describe a specific action, but rather constitutes a specific type of action itself (ibid.: 58). Working the prenda effects a transformation of persons and of objects, and at the same time it transforms the space where it takes place into the symbolically charged space of the plantation.

Cepo – Transformation of Space Memories of violent experiences are conserved in material objects used for ritual purposes. This argument becomes clearer when we look at objects and their relationship to plantation slavery: for example, the word cepo designates the place where the prenda is set, in the house of the priest, when it has to work. But the term properly refers to an instrument of torture, a wooden stocks with three openings, two for the hands, one for the head, in which recalcitrant slaves were locked, face down, boca abajo, to be whipped. The enslaved soul, then, is locked up in the prenda and forced to work.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

148

4/11/09

13:07

Page 148

Memories of Slavery: Narrating History in Ritual

Figure 8. Cepo 1, line drawing by J.V. 2005, La Habana. Fieldnotes. Adelheid Pichler.

Figure 9. Castigo del Cepo. Source: 'Castigo del Cepo. Dibujo de la epoca.,' in Los Negros Esclavos, 1916, p. 257. This engraving, signed 'A.P.,' was first published in an abolitionist pamphlet entitled Cepo y grillete, [Madrid] 1881. See: Ortiz, Fernando. [1916] 1987. Los Negros Esclavos. Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. La Habana. Page 46.

The material culture – tools and everyday objects – and the technical vocabulary of the world of the sugar plantations have been appropriated as categories which give the ritual its structure. The cepo, the place where prendas are placed to work, was in colonial times both a place of torture and a kind of stocks, where blood flowed, sentences were pronounced, and life and death were decided. In palero ritual, it is the place in which the

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:07

Page 149

Adelheid Pichler 149

enslaved nfumbi waits to learn its tasks and from where it is taken to be fed. According to the nature of the work to be performed, chickens, goats, turtles and other animals are sacrificed and the prenda is fed with their blood. That ritually meaningful ethnographic objects are places of memory is evident, then, on different levels (see Table 4). By means of their ceremonies, paleros enter the world of the plantation. The social organisation of the ritual duplicates the social status functions of the slaveholder society according to a specific scheme, beginning with the representation of the slave as an enslaved soul. The enslaved soul is locked up in the prenda and forced to work. The paleros enter the time and space of the plantation. The owner of the prenda buys one or more slaves and puts them to work for him. The owner and his helper (the mayordomo), also play the role of slave drivers (mayoral). Table 4 shows correspondences between the slaveholder society and its hierarchy in Cuban colonial times, and social organisation in contemporary Palo ritual: Slaveholder society

Palo ritual

Sugar plantation, sugar estate

munansó / casa de palo / house of the tata

(Ingenio)

nganga and the nganga itself

Owner, amo

tata nganga, owner of the prenda

Mayordomo (administrator of the sugar estate, right–hand man of the amo)

baconfula, ritual assistant

slave, esclavo

nfumbi, slave

Table 4. Table of correspondences between slaveholder society and its hierarchy in Cuban colonial times, and the social organisation in contemporary Palo ritual, 2008.

Inherent in the social control and brutality of the slaveholder society are rigidly hierarchical social classes and a system of mutual control and punishment, as well as a structure of secrecy, silence and vengeance. To understand Palo ritual, it is not enough to decipher its symbolism and its embodied semantic clusters. We also have to perceive the substantive

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

150

4/11/09

13:08

Page 150

Memories of Slavery: Narrating History in Ritual

transformations of persons, spaces and objects brought about by performance. By focusing here on the interaction between the artifact and the conceptual, and its resultant transformation, I do not invoke its ‘spiritual’ nature (in the sense of entities or spirits) but rather the active relationship between persons and things. The multiple transformations are brought about by and through performance. Each transformation adressed here involves an intersection / interaction of the material and the conceptual. But the material things (bodies, objects and spaces) are not treated here as objects. Rather, the example explores the extent to which they become subjects (master and slaves) within the performative process – through their performative deployment. Following again Mitchell (2006), material artifacts are transformed in performance to active ‘social agents’. The prenda and its inhabiting slave becomes an ‘active subject’ in a web of relationships between persons and things.

Memories Encoded in Landscapes The last mambo cited above (Table 3) ended with the line ‘Lets have a little talk (yimbila, vamo un poco yimbila).’ But what is said about the past? What stories are told, and how do they differ from ‘official history’? A priest’s genealogical descent and historical consciousness are detailed in chants called moyubas,19 which pay homage to the deceased founders of the religious family line (rama), their descendants, influential priests, his parents, grandparents and selected blood relatives, as well as the great living authorities of the rama (Mason 2002: 41–42). These recited listings of the root founders of each rama constitute the single most complete resource, and the logical starting point, for an inquiry into historical knowledge and memory within Palo Monte lineages. Many of the names (in this case twenty–three) refer to early creole founders of the rama (ritual family line), often by their African (ritual) names or sacred signs. The ‘history’ of the branch depends on a series of emblematic, sometimes cryptic references, upon shifting memory, talk and ongoing ritualising in the formal veneration of ancestors (Brown 2003: 98). Through moyuba prayers, as well as ongoing talk, contemporary practitioners recognise and elaborate upon their spiritual identities with reference to the founders and bearers of their traditions. This is an explicitly genealogical form of ‘remembering’.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 151

Adelheid Pichler 151

(1) Andrés Petit, Tomás Piedra

(1) Invoking the names of great tatas (in this case up to 23 names cited)

(2) Si no se depierta, no bailamos

(2) If you (the nfumbi) don’t wake up, we won’t dance

(3) vamos encima de loma

(3) We are going to the top of the hill (the spirits of Palo live high up)

(4) dar licencia mi casa de cura

Tata nganga, owner of the prenda

(5) vamos a Violeta, Triumvirato

(5) Lets go to Violeta, Triumvirato (names of sugar plantations in the region of Matanzas)

(6) mi ingenio esta moliendo

(6) My plantation is working (literally, ‘milling’) = the ceremony is going on

(7) vamos a Adelaida, vamos a Luisa

(7) Let’s go to Adelaida, to Luisa = plantations in Matanzas

(8) vamos lejos

(8) Let’s go far back

(9) el ingenio esta molienda

(9) The plantation is working

(10) mi colonia mi semana

(10) My crew is my wage / my crew, my wage

(11) Mayombe fué bueno en Guinea

(11) Mayombe was good in Africa

(12) Mayombero abre camino!

(12) Mayombe, open the ways!

(13) Simbico!, etc

(13) Simbico = the prenda is trembling

(14) Jacinto Congo tá la loma, etc

(14) Jacinto is over the hills

(15) Mi Congo Luango ta la camino

(15) My Congo Luango is on its way

Table 5. Moyuba J.V. (Informant) singing and explaining a mambo, recorded and transcribed 2005.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

152

4/11/09

13:08

Page 152

Memories of Slavery: Narrating History in Ritual

The mambo goes on and on, invoking the ancestors as the sun sets, the moon rises, and the hour of the nganga is at hand. ‘Mayombe was good in Africa / Guinea, when will it arrive? The nganga is ready; give us your permission, Mama Lola. Mayombe is going to the jurubana,20 Mayombe was good in Africa, Simbico! Walking through the forest. Mayombe was good in Africa, it opens the road everywhere, the mayombero opens the road, Simbico!’ The priest further has the implied permission of Jacinto Congo, whose füiri (dead spirit, but free) is over the hill. Analysing this moyuba and mambo sequence, we can see that two kinds of diasporic storylines shape the historical consciousness of Palo practitioners. One is a story of linear continuity with an authentic origin or primordial spiritual ground: an ancestral personage, starting with the creole founder of the rama, Andrés Petit, and ending with Congo spirits (mi Congo Luango), the tierra (homeland) of Africa and the Cuban–born Jacinto Congo, who, according to my informant, founded a Palo rama in Matanzas in the late nineteenth century. The second storyline referring to Jacinto Congo is about agency, struggle, discontinuity and heroic achievement. Its figures include the haloed African who was an ingenious and resourceful slave. The two stories are often intertwined to form a narrative dynamic of spiritual continuity and human creativity in the face of great social ills, foremost among them slavery. Arjun Appadurai (1996) emphasises that the reproduction of diaspora communities requires the specification of times and places, and, of course, someone with the knowledge to reproduce them (culture of memory). As the reproduction of localities always involves the creation and re–creation of emotional links between the people and ‘their’ land, which is in this case the plantation, such sense of place is not a given. It is an ‘inherently fragile social achievement that requires constant collective input to reproduce and maintain’ (ibid.: 179). In this case the production of locality, or more specifically, spaces of moral solidarity and security, is dependent on the need for cooperation in daily interaction, and requires a strategy for the creation of common structures of feeling. In the ‘imagined’ religious families of Palo Monte, emotional attachment to place is generated through a variety of ritual performances. This type of historical knowledge includes references to landmarks, mythical sites of origin and the names of plantations (ingenios). Accurate allusions to names, events and certain facets of earlier historical periods are among the elements which paleros use in their construction of history. They combine more or less verifiable chronology with oral history, legend and personal memories. Suggestive hypotheses about the genesis and development of the Palo Monte emerge from the legendary names and events preserved in stories that contemporary priests tell about its history. In some respects, practitioners do tend to think of their ramas as continuous and unbroken lines of spiritual descent from Africa, but they also fully recognise that the

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 153

Adelheid Pichler 153

bodies of knowledge and ritual practices they have inherited from their ancestors were not simply ‘handed down’, but rather were discontinuous, interrupted by upheaval, and actively created and re-created over time. While caution is needed in dealing with the details of oral history, which are rarely, if ever, wholly factual, the stories do delineate a historical consciousness that includes a sense of dynamic process and conflict. For example, Jacinto Congo was a famous nineteenth–century Congolese, a baptised African – had he been born in Cuba, he would have been given the surname of the owner of the sugar mill. He became a legend in the Cuban Congo, almost a god, merging with mpungus, nature spirits, and lending his name to prendas such as ‘Tiembla Mundo Jacinto Congo’. ‘Over the hill’ (tá la loma, literally, ‘he’s on the hill’) is a key Congo metaphor for the place where their ancestors live: in diamfinda, monte alto, the high hilltops where the forest is most dense, and where the African spirits move freely. The moyuba and its world elaborate the second category of stories about agency, struggle, discontinuity and heroic achievement. Its figures are royalty and warriors: ‘The royalty and warriors of this religion formed the beloved and heroic dramatic personae of an epic alternative narrative or “counter–narrative” built upon themes of ancestral continuity and connection to nature’s forces, spiritual empowerment agency, personal transformation through initiation and priesthood, respect and mutual aid through membership in a “house”, healing and defense through ritual work’ (Brown 2003: 276–77). The Afro–Cuban nganga complex condenses historical experiences not only of control and brutalisation, but also of resistance and violent retaliation.

From Terror to Triumph: How Remembering Transforms Violence The ethno–historical interpretation of some of the Palo Monte ritual mambos we have cited is particularly striking: they refer explicitly to plantations which were the sites of uprisings in the mid–nineteenth century. The plantations Triunvirato, Luisa and Adelaida mentioned in the mambo of one particular informant were sites of resistance, and other such names occur in other mambos (they may vary according to the rama). In 1843 there were serious slave revolts in the province of Matanzas. I transcribe here the reconstruction made by J.M. Morales (1843) from the reports that reached him in Havana, of the first phase, which began one night toward the end of May: About the 26th of the current month, the blacks of the Alcancía estate, situated near Cárdenas and belonging to Dr. Joaquín Peñalver, went to

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

154

4/11/09

13:08

Page 154

Memories of Slavery: Narrating History in Ritual

the Vega estate, led by the young Almagro, and destroyed the place, leaving intact only the sugar house. Afterwards they did the same with the Luisa, of José Baro. About 200 blacks of the Cárdenas Railroad were brought to the port of Cárdenas and shut into a wooden house; at night they escaped and attempted to join the mutineers, but it was possible to keep this from happening. Most died in the scuffle and others fled to the forests. At last count only 25 had been found. Fortunately, the rustics [white peasants21] were able to crush the insurrection before troops from Matanzas arrived, and peace was restored. Only three or four whites died. We can expect that there is great alarm in various parts of the country, and I will find out if our friends in Sagua la Grande have abandoned their estates. (From Ely 2001: 496–97) The rebellion was attributed to the most diverse causes. The English machinists who worked in the affected plantations were accused of having poisoned the slaves with abolitionist propaganda; others blamed the local transporters, who stood to lose once the Cárdenas Railroad had unburdened many estates in the region from the high prices they had to pay to deliver their products to market in ox–carts. Another uprising shook the same region on 5 November. It originated in ‘Triumvirato’, one of the estates of the Alfonso family. There the slaves took control of the establishment and marched against its neighbours, burning cane fields and destroying everything in their path. They had already sacked five estates when they were stopped by a troop of peasants armed as militia. In the ensuing struggle more than a hundred slaves perished, another two hundred were taken prisoner, and an undetermined number managed to flee. The following mambo celebrates the burning canefields. (1) se tá kemandó, se ta kemandò

(1) they are burning, they are burning

(2) camino cabanilla, se ta kemandòfinda

(2) the bells are ringing, they are burning

(3) musenga22 sabanilla se tá kemando

(3) the sugarfields are burning

(4) Ah diò! miá que pena

(4) how sorry we are

(5) es tá kemando

(5) the sugarfields are burning

Table 6. J.V. (Informant) singing and explaining a mambo, 2005.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 155

Adelheid Pichler 155

In the way they recall history, the mambos make the present and the past permeable to each other. Allusions to African places (Luango, Luanda) keep memories of the homeland alive, and the names of sugar mills (Luisa, Triumvirata, Adelaida) which were either the sites of uprisings or home to great (Cuban) Congos who transform a landscape of terror into scenarios of triumph against the totalitarian machine. One of the most striking characteristics of the Afro–Cuban construction of identity embedded in the discourse of the prenda is the reversal of values expressed in the master/slave relationship, and a related series of inversions of power. African (and creole) ancestors were slaves but they are never depicted as disempowered; on the contrary, they are shown to have rescued their people from the danger of enslavement. Both groups of ancestors protect their spiritual descendants from becoming enslaved (by someone else’s sorcery) and the ‘gang’ celebrates their victory. The places and regions named in the mambos evoke events, experiences or problems associated with particular historical periods. Although the divisions are hardly formalised, paleros tend to refer to time in three major periods. The first is the time of the slave raids during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which produced continuous skirmishes along the Central African coast (for example, the slave port Luanda, referred to in a mambo recorded by Lydia Cabrera, ‘Guerra Luanda tá retoño,’ the Luanda wars are always blossoming). The second is the time of forced plantation work on the island of Cuba (1820–86), which was also a period of insurrections and heroic actions by ancestral figures, cimarrones (runaway slaves) and the resistance of cimarrones living in the bush. The third is the time after the abolition of the slave trade.

’We all have a great time …’: Ritual, Performance and Memory in Palo Monte When we look at the different practices that constitute memories of ancestors, we see that the means through which paleros commemorate ancestors sometimes indicate specific historical periods, even though memories of slavery, in ritual, may be entirely implicit and unexplored. After listening to my interpretation, one palero objected: ‘We all have a great time during these ceremonies, which have nothing to do with pain or trauma. We have long since left all that behind. Now we are the “masters” and have fun.’ This criticism only apparently contradicts the images of slavery evoked during the ceremonies, which have been transformed into apparently independent ritual complexes or general mythological schemata (comparable to the orisha complex and its pantheon). Looking at the material through the lens of memory yields a good deal of unexpected insight into practices associated with language (see Ochoa

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

156

4/11/09

13:08

Page 156

Memories of Slavery: Narrating History in Ritual

2007), socioreligious hagiography and embodied performance. The plantation economy and its forced labour system, violence, torture, social humiliation and degradation, are mirrored in the strucures and themes of ritual. Memories of these historical experiences are transmitted in performative practices. What differentiates this anthropological perspective from the work of academic historians and ‘archival memory’ is the insights it generates into how memories of historical experiences are transmitted in performative practices. When the Congo legends alluded to in the mambos sung in ‘rituals of reversal’, the ‘people without history’ create history for themselves, they are reaffirming that, in their minds, they were always free. ‘Mayombe was great in Africa’: they are the descendants of powerful Africans who, in spirit, never abandoned them throughout long periods of repression. What remains to be explored is the extent to which the names and events preserved in the mambos differ from rama to rama (religious family lineages), allowing us to identify the loci of tradition complexes related to specific plantations (Triunvirato, Adelaida, etc.) and the great Congos of the past (Jacinto Congo, Má Viviana, Tá Lucas, Marigwanga, etc.). It is evident that the interpretation of polyphonic ritual performance is a methodological challenge. The images of the time of slavery are not ‘precise’, in the sense of historical research. But they are concise, which lends them meaning, makes them adaptable to new ritual purposes, and secures them a definitive place in the cultural archives. In the passage cited at the beginning of this article, James Figarola (2006) asserts that conventional histories have never been able to grasp fundamental aspects of the experience of slavery. I suggest here that, viewed as performed, embodied behaviour, Palo ritual offers an articulated medium for working through those very experiences in a way that allows participants to re–negotiate their relationship to the past and fashion alternative futures. By focusing on various levels I have demonstrated that memories of the time of slavery in Cuba are transmitted from one generation of paleros to another in various ways at once. The terror and violence of slavery has not been forgotten. It has been passed on in mythical figures and landscapes, all represented in a register of names, stories and songs, transmitted in ritual language. My intent has been to show that slavery can be remembered in ritual performance, in oral history, in ritual songs and language, and in the narratives of spirits and landscapes. Ghosts and spirits act as repertoires of forms of knowledge about the past. The ritual performance reveals that collective remembering is tied to values of kinship. Illusions of family and caste are created in the ritual performance. Rather than a fractured and disjointed past, a complete vision is offered by lines of ancestors, saints and spirits which lead back to the time of slavery. Lineages, however, are not constructed very

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 157

Adelheid Pichler 157

elaborately. On closer inspection, ritual pedigrees reveal themselves as a horizontal chain of sibling relations, more like a slave gang (mi colonia está en el camino). The leading characters of these units are represented in two horizontal planes: as brothers and sisters of ancestors, all of the same generation; and as living members of the rama, of roughly the same generation. So far my argument and its implication is clear: if (ritual) performance did not transmit knowledge, only the literate and powerful could claim social memory and identity (Taylor 2003: xvii). Paleros access the past, calling forth the power of the ancestors in the contemporary world, through the language bozal. The use of ritual language functions as an instrument of power by ‘witnessing’ participation in the past. Bozal words are used to ‘awaken’ the dead spirit, to activate his powers. For example, to call the slave to work, the priest chants ‘if you don’t wake up, we won’t dance’. The power of speech is most dramatically revealed in the mambos transcribed above. Memory transports distant space and time into an experiential here and now, visualised and embodied in the iconography of the prenda. People sing of the battles fought by brother saints and the blessings they received from sister saints; they sing of the victory, struggles and games played by the ancestors, and finally about brother and sister saints whirling in dance. During possession, the themes of memory evoked though the songs are mimicked and transformed into bodily movements by the performers. The medium (ngombo), ‘mounted’ by the saint whose body incorporates the nfumbi’s spirit, speaks in a linguistic register identified by the practitioners with bozal. He is likewise expected to, and indeed tends to, address the tata nganga as mi amo, my master. Underscoring this analogy in another register, the onset of possession is marked by a ritualised passage of the medium along the perimeter of the ritual space, which, according to Lydia Cabrera’s informant, is known as ‘making the rounds of the sugar mill’ (dar vueltas por el ingenio) (1979: 142). Often addressed by what nowadays are regarded as stereotypical slave names, combined with terms referring to the type of nganga that their spirits inhabit (Francisco Siete Rayos, María Cholan Wengue, and so forth), they exhibit brutish and violent possession behaviour, countered by no less violent ritual action, thereby enacting a present–day reading of the nineteenth–century slave experience (cf. Palmié 2002). Maurice Halbwachs (1985) claims that the close association of historical narratives with particular families distinguishes memory from history. He observes that collective memory differs from history: ‘it is a current of continuous thought whose continuity is not at all artificial, for it retains from the past only what still lives or is capable of living in the consciousness of the groups keeping the memory alive. By definition it does not exceed the boundaries of the group’ (1985: 80). For paleros

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

158

4/11/09

13:08

Page 158

Memories of Slavery: Narrating History in Ritual

historical knowledge, and the access to power embodied in the ancestors, are available only to the descendants of a given line. It is also the case, however, that practitioners of one rama may have heard this or that story of another, and then appropriate it into their own lineage. Implicit knowledge, memory – in the sense of historically encoded ritual songs – is something like the private property of a ritual family lineage. This knowledge – in the sense of property – is not even equally accessible to all members of the community. Only their highest–ranking priests have the knowledge and distribute this history. This kind of history is not ‘public property’, but rather secret, accessible only to the initiated. It represents practices of controlling history, and the very identity of the society. To have detailed knowledge of the history of a rama means that you can manipulate it, and even have power over the rama itself, much as ritual knowledge empowers a sorcerer. The power of historical knowledge is transformed by the priests into a corpus of magical power, legitimated by speech (bozal), kinship and embodiment. The ruptures experienced by slaves who were torn out of their original familial and social contexts are forgotten; what is remembered is an abstract knowledge of how kinship bonds are generated. The socioreligious lineages provide sites of institutionalised memory; memory expressed in ritual performance and through material objects imbued with meaning and agency. Recognising the religious performance of the Cuban paleros ‘as a valid focus of analyses contributes to an understanding of embodied practice as an episteme and a praxis, a way of knowing as well as a way of storing and transmitting cultural knowledge and identity’ (Taylor 2003: 278). Ritual performance and theory of memory allow us to engage in a sustained historical analysis of the cultural practices that both bind and fragment the Americas.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

As part of UNESCO´s transatlantic project on The Slave Route, begun in Limonar (Matanzas, Cuba) in 2006, there will be a Museum in El Cobre dedicated to slavery and its copper mines, considered to be the oldest in the Americas, and which gave the town its name. For more details on the UNESCO Slave Route Project (see Schramm 2008). I use the term ‘cultural memory’ in the sense of Diana Taylor (2003). She distinguishes between memory as archive and repertoire – the latter which is actively produced in social groups through everyday interactions and performance – and what she calls the cultural memory, which reaches far deeper into the past, is expessed in rituals, dances, genealogies or traditions and lies outside the realm of the everyday (Taylor 2003: 18). This chapter is based on long–term field research in Havanna and Cienfuegos, carried out in 1996 and 1998 and between 2002 and 2006. I am grateful to the Austrian Fund for Scientific Research (FWF), for financing this research. I am also grateful to my colleague Elliot Klein for his helpful comments. Cf. Valdés Bernal (1978), Valdés Acosta (2002) Millet (1996), Palmié (2002), Fuentes Guerra and Schwegler (2005).

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 159

Adelheid Pichler 159

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

The internal differentiation of regional African–American religious formations has been mentioned in the anthropological literature. See Palmié (1989), Brown (1989), Brandom (1983), Cabrera (1954), Ortiz (1975), to mention just a few. These nations had their putative origins in the then Western Sudan, which is present–day Mali and Sierra Leone (Mandinga), the Gulf of Guinea region of present–day Togo, Ghana, Benin and southwestern Nigeria (Arara, Fanti, Mina, Lucumi), the semi–Bantu regions spanning the Niger River and Cross River deltas (Carabali and Brichi), the Bantu Kongo–Angola regions (Congo, Luango, Mondongo), and the eastern Bantu region of Mozambique (Macuá). According to these names they organised Cabildos de Congo, casa templos de Congo and Sociedades de Congo towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. See Ortiz ([1916] 1987: 40–59), listing the ethnonyms applied to ‘African nations’. For example, the price for slaves from the inner African continent was higher than for slaves from the coast (MacGaffey 1986). In Cuba the practice of coarticiòn permitted the slave to bring his or her owner to court to set a price for his or her purchase. Fuentes Guerra (2002: 4) also refers to a people whose language, Mayombe, is a dialect of Kikongo. Reduced ki–kongo, referred to as ‘Congo’ or ‘lengua’. Cf. Assmann (1992), Cole (2001), Shaw (2002), Argenti (2007), Taylor (2003). See Assmann (1992). See Palmié (2002); for a different interpretation of the prenda see Ochoa (2007). Tata nganga (kikongo). Tatá, father of the prenda, chief, leader; Ngánga (kikongo), priest, medicine man (Laman 1964: 683). Ngúdi nganga (kikongo), ngúdi (kikongo), mother, female elder, authority, (Laman 1964: 693). James Figarola (2006: 165). Paleros belong to small autonomous ‘families’, hierarchically organised. The tata nganga or ngudi is the head of the household, which consists of his or her ‘godchildren’, ahijados. This is often linked to ideas of sorcery and witchcraft as technologies of harnessing this power (Geschiere 1997), and the initiation cults, secret societies and masquerade associations as legitimate custodians of the means to invoke power. Cf. Palmié (2002: 174). This is the Lucumí term, which may have ‘crossed’ into Palo. Jurubana: ‘one of the great trees of Mayombe’ (Cabrera 1954: 462). J.M. Morales (Havana) to Henry A. Coit (New York), 1 April 1843. Literally, ‘montero’ is a person who makes his living from hunting in the forest or in the mountains, but in Cuba the term was used in a wider sense: It included the white peasants of the back country, especially those who rode horseback. The ‘monteros’ looked down on blacks, who constituted the only class economically and socially inferior to them. For this reason, they welcomed any opportunity to crush slave insurrections, a detail given great weight when their services were sought as a mounted militia. (Concha 1853: 24) The sugarcane. Musenga = sugarcane; Musenga sabanilla = canefields. At the end of the sixteenth century the Portuguese established a permanent settlement at Luanda, to the south of Kongo, and this formed the basis of colonial expansion and the emergence of Angola as the principal source of slaves for the Americas (see Lovejoy 2007: 32). The mambo also names Luango as a trans–shipment centre. Luango is a former African state in the basin of the Kouilou and Niari Rivers rivers (now largely in southwestern Congo [Brazzaville]). Founded by the Vili people (Bavili) probably before 1485, it was one of the oldest and largest kingdoms of the region. By 1600 it was importing ivory and slaves from the interior along well–established trade routes that extended as far inland as Malebo Pool. Source: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/345354/Kingdom of Luango.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

160

4/11/09

13:08

Page 160

Memories of Slavery: Narrating History in Ritual

References Alfonso, M. 2004. Tata Nganga. El Mundo Mágico–Místico de la Religión Bantú. La Habana: Ediciones Prensa Latina. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Argenti, N. 2007. The Intestines of the State: Youth, Violence and Belated Histories in the Cameroon Grassfields. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Assmann, J. 1992. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. München: Becksche Reihe. Barcia Zequeira, M. del C. 2003. La Otra Familia. Parientes, Redes y Descendencia de los Esclavos en Cuba. La Habana: Casa de las Americas. Barnet, M. [1966] 1987. Cimarrón. Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Sol S.A. Bastide, R. 1978. The African Religions of Brazil. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bettelheim, J. 2001. ‘Palo Monte Mayombe and its influence on Cuban Contemporary Art’, African Arts XXXIV (2): 36–49. Bolívar Aróstegui, N. and C. González Díaz De Villegas. 1998. Ta Makuende Yaya y las Reglas de Palo Monte. Mayombe, Brillumba, Kimbisi, Shamalongo. La Habana: Ediciones Unión. Brandon, G.E. 1983. ‘The Dead Sell Memories. An Anthropological Study of Santeria in New York’, Ph.D. dissertation. New Jersey: Rutgers University. Bremer, F. 1853. The Homes of the New World. Impressions of America. 2.vols. Translated by Mary Howitt. New York: Harper Brothers. Brown, D. 1989. ‘Garden in the Machine. Afro Cuban Sacred Art and Performance in Urban New Jersey and New York’, Ph.D. dissertation. New Haven: Yale University. –––. 2003. Santería Enthroned. Art, Ritual and Innovation in an Afro–Cuban Religion. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Cabrera, L. [1954] 1983. El Monte. Igbo Finda. Ewe Orisha. Vititi Nfinda. Miami: Colección del Chicherekú. –––. 1979. Reglas de Congo. Palo Monte Mayombe. Miami: Ediciones CR. Calleja Leal, G. 1989. ‘Estudio de un Sistema Religioso Afro–Cubano: El Palo Monte Mayombe’, Ph.D. dissertation. Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Geografía Historia. Cole, J. 2001. Forget colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Concha, José Gutiérrez de la. 1853. Memorias sobre el estado polìtico, gobierno y administración de las isla de Cuba. Establecimiento Tipográfico de D. José Trujillo, Madrid. Connerton, P. 1996. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 161

Adelheid Pichler 161

Corominas, J. 1961. Breve Diccionario Etimológico de la Lengua Castellana. Madrid: Gredos. Volume 1–4. Ely, R. 2001. Cuando Reinaba su Majestad el Azúcar. Estudio Historico–Sociológico de una Tragedia Latinoamericana: El Monocultivo en Cuba. Origen y Evolución del Proceso. La Habana: Ediciones Imagen Contemporánea. Fuentes Guerra, J. 2002. Nzila ya Mpika (la Ruta del Esclavo). Una Aproximación Lingüística. Cienfuegos and Cuba: Ediciones Mecenas. ––– and A. Schwegler. 2005. Lengua y Ritos del Palo Monte Mayombe. Dioses Cubanos y sus Fuentes Africanas. Frankfurt: Vervuert and Madrid: Iberoamericana. Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Geschiere, P. 1997. The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. Charollesville: University Press of Virginia. Halbwachs, M. 1985. Das Gedächtnis und seine sozialen Beziehungen. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Horton, Robin. 1997. Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion and Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James Figarola, J. 1998. ‘La Cuba profunda y la religiosidad Popular’, La Gaceta de Cuba 5: 47. –––. 2006. Cuba: la Gran Nganga. (Algunas Prácticas de la Brujería). Santiago de Cuba: Ediciones Caserón. Janzen, J.M. 1978. The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Laman, K. 1964 [1936]. Dictionaire Kikongo–Francais. Ridgewood, NJ: The Gregg Press. Lambek, M. 2006.´Memory in a Maussian universe`, in S. Radstone and K. Hodgkin (eds.), Memory Cultures: Memory, Subjectivity and Recognition. New Brunswick and London: Transaction, pp. 202–216. Lambek, M. and P. Antze. 1996. Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York: Routledge. Lovejoy, P.E. 2007. ´Slavery, the Slave Trade and African Society`, in D. Hamilton and R.J. Blyth (eds), Representing Slavery. Art, Artifacts and the Archives in the Collections of the National Maritime Museum. Hampshire and Burlington: Lund Humphries, pp. 28–39. MacGaffey, W. 1986. Religion and Society in Central Africa. The Bakongo of Lower Zaire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mason, M.A. 2002. Living Santeria. Rituals and Experiences in an Afro–Cuban Religion. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press. Millet, J. 1996. ‘Vocabulario Mínimo del Palero’, in Glossario Mágico Religioso Cubano. Barquisimeto, Venezula: Ediciones Gaby / Casa del Caribe. Part 2, pp. 91–117.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

162

4/11/09

13:08

Page 162

Memories of Slavery: Narrating History in Ritual

Mintz, S. and R. Price [1976] 1992. The Birth of African–American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. Boston: Beacon Press. Mitchell, J. 2006. ‘Performance’, in Ch. Tilley et al. (eds), Handbook of Material Culture. London, New Delhi and Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, pp. 384–401. Nora, P. 1992. ‘Between Memory and History’, in P. Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, vol.1, pp. 1–21. Ochoa, T.R. 2007. ‘Versions of the Dead: Kalunga, Cuban–Kongo Materiality, and Ethnography’, Cultural Anthropology 22(4): 473–500. Offe, S. 2008. ‘Umstrittenes Erbe. Überlegungen zur Arbeit am Gedächtnis‘, in A. Pichler and G. Marinelli–König (eds), Kultur – Erbe Stadt. Stadtentwicklung und UNESCO–Mandat in spät– und postsozialistischen Städten. Ein Vergleich aus kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive. Innsbruck, Wien, Bozen: Studienverlag: pp. 298. Ortiz, F. 1958. ‘Las Malas Palabras en los Sacriloquios Afrocubanos’, in Miscelanea Paul Rivet. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico: pp. 849–56. –––. 1975. Historia de una Pelea Cubana Contra los Demonios. La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. –––. [1916] 1987. Los Negros Esclavos. La Havana: Editorial de Sciencias Sociales. Palmié, S. 1989. Das Exil der Götter. Geschichte und Vorstellungswelt einer afrokubanischen Religion. New York: Peter Lang. –––. 2002. Wizards and Scientists. Explorations in Afro–Cuban Modernity and Tradition. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Pels, D. et al. 2002. ‘The Status of the Object’, Theory, Culture and Society 19(5): 1–22. Romero, F. 1988. Quimba, Fa, Malambo, Ñeque Afronegrismos en el Perú. Bogotá. Insituto de Estudios Peruanos, pp. 52–53. Röschenthaler, U. 2004. ‘Neuheit, bricolage oder Plagiat. Zur Entstehung neuer Tanzbünde im Cross River–Gebiet (im Südwesten Kameruns und Südosten Nigerias)’, Paideuma:. Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde, Frankfurt/ Main, 3–25. Rubiera Castillo, D. 1997. Reyita, Sencillamente. (Testimonio de una Negra Cubana Nonagenaria). La Habana: Instituto Cubano del Libro. Schramm, K. 2008. ‘Slave Route Projects: Tracing the Heritage of Slavery in Ghana’, in F. de Jong and M. Rowlands (eds), Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginations in West Africa. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 71–98. Shaw, R. 2002. Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. Tambiah, S. 1985. Culture, Thought, and Social Action: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 163

Adelheid Pichler 163

Taylor, D. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Valdés Acosta, G. 2002. Los Remanentes de las Lenguas Bantúes en Cuba. La Habana: Fundación Ortiz. Valdés Bernal, Sergio. 1978. Las Lenguas Africanas y el Espanól Coloquial de Cuba. Santiago de Cuba: Editorial Académica.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 165

Chapter 7

In a Ruined Country: Place and the Memory of War Destruction in Argonne (France)* Paola Filippucci This chapter considers the question of how violence is socially remembered by focusing on a particular sort of violence, that which is inflicted on places during war. Though not necessarily associated with loss of life or limb, the destruction of landscapes and builtscapes is one of the ways in which war can hurt individuals and collectivities, and is arguably no less catastrophic in its effect on material surroundings than bodies (cf. Bevan 2006; Read 1996). The violent destruction of places is profoundly painful for individuals and collectivities because places are repositories and indeed objectifications of identity and continuity (Casey 1996; Feld and Basso 1996; Read 1996). As such, places can be seen as mnemonic devices, ‘providing an image of permanence and stability’ for individuals and groups, ‘like a silent and immobile society unconcerned with our own restlessness and changes of mood’, in Halbwachs’ evocative phrase (1980: 128). Is the mnemonic potential of places removed when they are subject to destructive violence, such as in war? Can places also operate as vehicles for transmitting the memory of that violence? As the literature on trauma indicates, extreme violence may be experienced in such a way that it is not accessible to conscious recall (e.g. Caruth 1995). Accordingly it may not be communicable or transmissible through the channels of personal or social memory. However, the materiality of places may give them the potential to evoke and therefore transmit the incommunicable. Through the case study of villages and surroundings devastated during the Great War in Eastern France, I will show how, in spite of reconstruction, in its immediate aftermath the war and its violence were widely accessed and remembered through the materiality of the places where it had occurred. In the longer term, this materiality interacts with visual and verbal representations of the war to engage later generations and make the war ‘real’ for them. I shall argue that the potential of material objects to act as bridges between the known and the unknown, between the sayable and unsayable, and indeed perhaps

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

166

4/11/09

13:08

Page 166

Place and the Memory of War Destruction in Argonne (France)

the unconscious and the conscious, may contribute to transmit the untransmissible (cf. Miller 1987: 99).

Au Pays des Ruines The regions of France crossed by the Western Front between 1914 and 1918 were devastated by the violence of combat: houses, settlements and entire landscapes were pulverised by the brutality of fighting, leaving behind what a contemporary newspaper called a pays des ruines, a ‘country of ruins’ (BM 1919). This was for instance the fate of Malancourt, a village in the Meuse department that was the site of fierce fighting as the front line moved back and forth across its territory for the whole of the war. The state of the area after the war is graphically illustrated by an account heard by a present–day villager from one of her elders: ‘He told me that when he returned he had to check which way the water in the stream was flowing, because he could recognise nothing at all – he had to check the direction of the water so he could say “Malancourt was that way”’. This description recalls Walter Benjamin’s comment that when combat ceased on the Western Front ‘nothing remained unchanged but the clouds’ (Benjamin 1992: 84). In Malancourt not only houses and streets but also fields and forest were in such a state of destruction that the authorities had decided not to reconstruct; it was only at the insistence of a few inhabitants that the village was partially rebuilt (Fiel 1935: 17; CM 1919; cf. Clout 1996: 24, 29). Malancourt was one of several villages evacuated between 1914 and 1915 and later totally destroyed in a section of the Western Front immediately to the west of Verdun, the French army’s principal battlefield of the Great War (Prost 1986). Most of Malancourt and its surroundings were rebuilt by the mid–1920s but a whole section of the village was never reconstructed as 90 per cent of its population never returned. The village has never recovered its pre–war size (the population declined from 700 in 1911 to around 100 in 1921; only eighty people still lived there in 1999). Other villages were less severely damaged but their builtscape and landscape bore the clear marks of war: for example, in nearby Neuvilly, south of the front line on the French side, 80 per cent of houses were destroyed and its territory in 1918 was reported to be ‘criss–crossed by trenches and innumerable networks of barbed wire’ (AMN, Régistre des Déliberations, 24 June 1918). It was completely reconstructed but some 60 per cent of its population never returned and the village never regained pre–war levels (falling from over 600 in 1911 to around 300 in 1921, and only 199 in 1999). After the war, both Neuvilly and Malancourt were decorated with the medal of ‘martyr villages’ (villages martyres) like others in the region of Verdun.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 167

Paola Filippucci 167

Malancourt and Neuvilly are in the Argonne, a woodland region at the border of Champagne and Lorraine that from 1914 to 1918 was a key part of the Verdun theatre. Reconstruction in Argonne was largely completed by the late 1920s but the war accelerated a demographic and economic decline begun in the mid–nineteenth century and continuing today (see Hussenet 1982). Today, the Argonne is a rural area with small villages that are steadily losing their population as jobs and services migrate to neighbouring, more prosperous regions. Though it is a place of some natural beauty (it has a vast, and in parts, very ancient forest), the Argonne is mainly known in the rest of France for its many Great War memorials, monuments and cemeteries; it also contains significant remains of trenches, tunnels, bunkers and other installations, partly on land that since 1918 has been classified as zone rouge (red zone), deemed too damaged for peacetime use and habitation (see Amat 1987; Clout 1996). Monuments and remains remember the events and military losses of the Great War, while there is no memorial to the civilian war experience, which included of evacuation, the eventual return to a devastated landscape and the work of reconstruction. Even in the villages that had to be completely reconstructed, the only public monuments are to the fallen soldiers (cf. Prost 1984; Sherman 1999: 291). Apparently, reconstruction erased the evidence of place destruction. But has the violent impact of the Great War on the builtscape and landscape really been forgotten?

Aftermaths This chaos of soil and stones under such a gloomy sky seems absurd. Consciousness no longer feels any relationship between this, that resembles nothing, and us, we who have seen so many things in the course of our lives (Pézard 1974 [1918]: 96, my translation). These words of French officer André Pézard describe the terrain of battle at Vauquois, some three kilometres from Neuvilly, where Pézard fought in 1915–16. They express clearly a central concept in the anthropology of space and place: that people recognise themselves in their material surroundings, which thereby play an important role in forming and expressing individual and collective identities and relations (e.g. Bachelard 1994; Casey 1996; Feld and Basso 1996; Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1996). As Halbwachs writes, ‘things are part of society’ and so ‘our physical surroundings bear ours’ and others’ imprints’, while mutually we bear the imprint of our surroundings (1980: 129–30). For this reason the destruction of places is not experienced simply as the loss of replaceable physical landmarks and material property: for example, Read argues that this experience can cause intense emotion,

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

168

4/11/09

13:08

Page 168

Place and the Memory of War Destruction in Argonne (France)

including feelings similar to those of bereavement, because of the centrality of spatial identity for the ‘sense of continuity of person and community’ in many societies (1996: 21). So place loss can undermine survivors’ ‘self–identity, mental well–being and sense of belonging’ (ibid.: xii). For Read this explains survivors’ ‘desperate need to go home’ and their wish to rebuild in the same location and with as little change as possible (ibid.: 157, 159). Re–building is used to re–stabilise and re–familiarise devastated and radically altered landscapes (cf. Halbwachs 1980). Read adds that reconstruction, however faithful, does not totally relieve the longing for the ‘lost place’, which may surface for instance in a desire to keep any surviving fragments or remains from before destruction (ibid.: 166). These reactions reflect the deep psychological impact of place loss, and like reconstruction, they may be seen as ways of addressing and trying to ‘work through’ the grief of place loss, as a sort of ‘therapy of rebuilding’ (Read 1996: 108, 158; cf. Freud 2006 [1914]). Clear parallels with these findings may be found in the post–war reconstruction in the Argonne and indeed across the ‘devastated departments’ of the Western Front. All over the area, people pleaded to be allowed to return home, in some cases, as in Malancourt, overriding the official decision not to reconstruct (see Fiel 1935; Clout 1996: 261–72; Nivet 2004: 425–53). Almost everywhere returnees insisted on reconstructing everything to be identical to how it had been before the war, resisting authorities’ bid to modernise agriculture and improve living conditions (see Clout 1996: 241; Reconstructions 2000). In both Malancourt and Neuvilly, archival documents show that returnees resisted plans to redraw property and field boundaries in order to remedy the extreme fragmentation of holdings in the pre–war period: ‘I intend to keep my properties exactly as they are’ (telles qu’elles sont) wrote a Malancourt landowner to the Municipal commission in charge (ADM 10R 322). The conservatism of returnees has been interpreted not only as the effort to reclaim their property and re-create pre–war conditions and surroundings but also as a bid to address and redress the humiliations and privations suffered by the inhabitants of the areas of combat during their years as refugees. Evacuees of the war zone from northern and eastern France not only struggled materially because of poor state provision for refugees, but also morally because of the hostility and prejudice of their hosts in other parts of France (Nivet 2004). This stemmed from resentment for having to accommodate, feed and give up jobs to ‘strangers’ at a time of national material hardship; they also expressed a perception that populations from the ‘frontier’ areas of northern and eastern France collaborated or even shared blood with Germans (hence the term Boches du Nord used to refer to the refugees, translatable as ‘Northern Krauts’) (see Nivet 2004; cf. Ceschin 2006 for parallels in Italy). Less well–documented are the attitudes of returnees towards pre–war

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 169

Paola Filippucci 169

remains; however, diaries and letters (e.g. in Audoin–Rouzeau 2003) have been found to painstakingly record every tiny relic and recognisable remains of the writer’s pre–war house or village, and while this is not explicitly documented, it is conceivable that some may have been kept as souvenirs. For instance an Argonnais informant told me that her family kept for many years the tiles from the floor of a pig sty, which had been the only part of their house that they had been able to recognise on return to the ruins of their village in 1920. Another instance of conserving pre–war remains may be the bid to preserve the name of villages that were not reconstructed by attaching it to that of a nearby locality (often to where some inhabitants had moved), as occurred in parts of Champagne near the Argonne. Finally, surviving parts of pre–existing buildings (e.g. cellars, walls and foundations) and recuperable materials from destroyed ones were reused in reconstruction. This made sense from the practical point of view, as materials were scarce and expensive due to the scale of reconstruction (Clout 1996). At the same time this physically conserved and incorporated parts of the pre–war fabric of the builtscape into the reconstructed one. More broadly, descendants claim today that everything was rebuilt so that it was ‘identical’ (à l’identique) to how it had been pre–war, including the appearance, plan and orientation of houses. So, although post–war accounts of the reconstruction emphasise rebirth and renewal,1 in practice the effort was mostly conservative in spirit. This is encapsulated by the term which was self–consciously introduced at the time to denote it: reconstitution. Following Read (1996), this may be interpreted as a response to the destabilising and possibly traumatic impact of destruction, even if (or perhaps because) this impact was not publicly memorialised. Civilian suffering, destruction and the reconstruction effort were not memorialised formally in Malancourt, Neuvilly2 or indeed in the vast majority of destroyed villages on the Western Front (see Sherman 1999: 291–92). This may be explained by the massive, dominant space taken up both in private and public consciousness, and both nationally and at the local level, by the work of mourning and coming to terms with the military loss of life (see e.g. Winter 1995; Audoin–Rouzeau and Becker 2002). Indeed, even in the devastated areas local participation in mourning for the military losses was explicit and shown for instance in the rapid erection of monuments to the fallen, which took place alongside, and sometimes preceded, the reconstruction of civilian infrastructure. These monuments, however, have a local dimension that may have been central to reconstruction. Firstly, they were financed by villagers’ donations, reconstituting the village community virtually, in and through the act of giving, including those who had not, or not yet, returned (this was the case in Malancourt, where lists of donors and donations published weekly in the local page of the regional newspaper between 1919 and 1925, when

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

170

4/11/09

13:08

Page 170

Place and the Memory of War Destruction in Argonne (France)

only a few tens of villagers had returned, show several hundred names of people resident away from the village) (cf. Tarlow 1999: 163). Secondly, the erection of a war memorial was also perhaps a bid to claim a place in the national community of sacrifice and mourning, once again responding to the experience of rejection during the refugee period and also to a ‘feeling of abandonment’ by the state and the rest of France felt in the devastated areas during reconstruction (see Nivet 2004: 496–529). The physical fabric of the reconstructed surroundings of the Western Front also incorporated the war experience through the reuse of war debris. This was partly through the recuperation of materials (for instance the reuse of corrugated iron to build animal shelters) and partly through the use of military materials for decoration, for instance shell–cases to decorate the façade of a town hall. Such remains also became part of interior decoration: in many households in Argonne today one finds shrapnel, shell–cases and other war debris displayed on mantelpieces or in yards and gardens, that are said by the owners to have been passed down by ancestors as war ‘souvenirs’, either acquired during reconstruction or brought back from returning veterans in the family. Such war souvenirs are a well–documented phenomenon (see Saunders 2003) and, like monuments, show local participation in national forms of commemoration and remembrance focused on soldiers and their suffering, apparently at the expense of remembering the local civilian experience in the war. In addition, the incorporation of war remains in public buildings exemplifies local–level acceptance of the identity of these as ‘martyr villages’ and more broadly of the area as one of the ‘battlefields’ (champs de bataille) or ‘honour fields’ (champs d’honneur) that became destinations for pilgrimage and ‘war tourism’ (see e.g. Sherman 1999; Winter 1995). However, when displayed in domestic settings in the former battlefield areas, war debris may also have alluded to the damage and loss inflicted by war on civilian surroundings. For example, an elderly informant kept lead shrapnel on her mantelpiece and explained that it had been collected by her mother when the house was hit by a shell in 1915: ‘There were shrapnel everywhere! She swept them all out but she kept one, saying “it will be a souvenir!”’ Shrapnel was not the only ‘souvenir’ of the war for my informant’s mother: her daughter explained that ‘because of the fright she had in the war’, her mother suffered from palpitations for the rest of her life and ‘could not stand loud noises’. Other informants described comparable physical symptoms in their elders ‘who lived the war’ (‘my grandfather would start crying every time the war was mentioned’), and attributed them to their ‘suffering’ (souffrance) in the war. This was also said to justify why elders ‘never spoke’ about the wartime nor about the period of return and reconstruction (‘Every time I asked grandmother about the wartime she would just remain silent and cry’).

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 171

Paola Filippucci 171

This appears to be a folk rendition of psychological theories of trauma that characterise it as inexpressible and incommunicable and, indeed, escaping conscious signification and even encoding into ordinary experience (see e.g. Caruth 1995). Silence about their experiences was widely reported among Great War veterans (see e.g. Sherman 1999): the fact that in Argonne it is also attributed to non–combatants supports the idea that the experience of losing home places as well as relatives and friends might have been similarly traumatic and that rebuilding may have been a way of ‘working through’ the hurt and loss. But was rebuilding simply a matter of ‘working through’ the pain of destruction or may reconstructed surroundings also have played a role in transmitting the memory of it to later generations?

Remembering Destruction and Reconstruction in Today’s Argonne In explaining her elders’ silence about the war, one informant said that ‘after the war they had to put the village back into shape, there was work to do and there was no time to talk about what had happened’. She implied a matter–of–fact attitude among survivors that recalls that of the woman mentioned above, who when her house was hit just took up her broom and swept out the shrapnel. In that case, as noted, a practical response did not exclude trauma. The fact that this woman kept a shrapnel ball as a ‘souvenir’ also suggests that trauma did not exclude some form of memorialisation, if not verbal then through a material object. The shrapnel, like many other such ‘souvenirs’, was passed down to the next generation. Along with it, what may have been transmitted is the pained, charged silences that while not ostensibly communicating anything about the war experience, nevertheless may have brought the war into the lives of later generations, as a gap to be filled by imagination and emotion. This gap is central to what Hirsch (1997) calls ‘postmemory’: a scenario in which people must bear or engage with a past known to them only indirectly, as the experience of an earlier generation ‘shaped by events that can be neither understood nor re-created’ (1997: 22; cf. Young 2000: 3). In Argonnais villages today people often say that they know ‘nothing’ of the destruction and reconstruction of villages, because of the silence of survivors and because those ‘who have lived the war’ have now mostly passed away. In spite of this many of today’s inhabitants were able to relate what seem like received memories of that time, containing details some of which I was able to confirm through historical documentation from the period. They speak of the misery and cold of living in temporary wooden huts at a time when wood was scarce because the forest had been burnt down; of the hard work of infilling trenches and removing bodies

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

172

4/11/09

13:08

Page 172

Place and the Memory of War Destruction in Argonne (France)

and debris; of the infestation of rats attracted by the assorted organic remains of war (‘they would even attack babies in their cradle’); and more local episodes such as the fact that ‘the first post–war wedding party in the village’ was held in the ruins of a particular house; or that material help had been given to returning refugees by ‘Americans’ or ‘Amish’ (in fact members of the Quakers who were active in war relief in parts of the area, including Neuvilly; see Clout 1996: 77). In general there is quite precise knowledge about the extent of the destruction both in the village and in its wider surroundings, and as already noted a widespread perception that individual buildings and villages were reconstructed to be ‘identical’ (à l’identique) to what they were like before. More than just a perception, this is also a claim: something that villagers seek to demonstrate. They do so by reference to photographs of the pre–war villages. As I have discussed in detail elsewhere (Filippucci in press b), today’s Argonnais avidly collect photographs of local villages published as postcards from the first half of the twentieth century. Nearly every household has a few kept with the family photographs, framed on the walls or collected in albums; and they are also displayed in many public buildings and shown to those, like myself, who ask about the local past. Routinely informants used these images to prove to me how much the present village replicates the past, to demonstrate that a building is still standing, or to show the accuracy of reconstruction. Such value attributed to accurate reconstruction or reproduction is in striking contrast with the over–valuation of age, originality and authenticity in French (and more generally Euro–American) attitudes towards the past, in particular the rural past (see e.g. Augé 1994; Lowenthal 1985; cf. Filippucci 2004a). This may be interpreted as a way to acknowledge and possibly memorialise and celebrate the work of reconstruction, and therefore as a way to claim continuity and authenticity in the face of violent destruction and radical discontinuity in the village past. In other words, these images may tell a ‘story’ in counterpoint to the military narrative about the war, centred on the civilian experience of return and reconstruction and celebrating what contemporary sources called the ‘tenacity of [the] brave populations’ who returned to reconstruct the devastated zone (Magny 1928). The fact that this may act today as a foundation of identity is signalled by the words of one inhabitant of Malancourt, who said that ‘it’s the most tenacious who returned, those who loved the pays [country, village]’. In turn, the idea of return and tenacious hold may be relevant for today’s villagers because of the current predicament of these villages, which are steadily losing population and where the continuity of life and presence is almost as much in doubt now as it was in 1919. Fears for the loss of village ‘life’ and activity are widely voiced in today’s Argonne and give poignancy to representations and images of village destruction and

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 173

Paola Filippucci 173

reconstruction. In this respect today’s fascination with these images in Argonne and the desire to discuss continuity and discontinuity that they appear to express and satisfy, could be explained less by past trauma than by today’s experience of economic, demographic and political decline and the fears for the future that this generates. At the same time, the war is also implicitly evoked via these images and so brought into the village present. Most cherished and prized are postcards from ‘before ‘14’, as locals put it. This is because in the words of one collector, through these images ‘one retrieves the villages’ (on retrouve les villages). This idea takes on a particular meaning in the reconstructed villages; for example, the mayor of a village which was obliterated and later reconstructed at a different location had quite literally used the postcards to find again the pre–war village. Over the years, he had painstakingly surveyed the original village site and identified a number of remains which he showed me: a stretch of road railing, an old fountain, a few stones from the church found when making a car park, and some bricks and tiles and remains of cellars from the houses now in a patch of woodland. He authenticated these as village remains by comparing them to the photographic images in the postcards. In the reconstructed villages these images may also be cherished as, themselves, physical remains of the pre–war villages. An elderly informant from a village devastated in the war said, speaking of the collection that she inherited from her mother who had started it before the Great War: ‘My mother in 1916 left the village with these postcards. And in 1940 [when the village was again evacuated] she says “we must rescue the postcards”. I had my bike and a school bag, and in the school bag were the postcards. Oh la la, for her it was a sacred thing – her village…’ Whether or not this story is true, it suggests that in the context of village destruction these images may have come to be seen as ruins or relics alongside or replacing more material remains of the pre–war period. A physical link between images and village was suggested by another collector when he said that it is hard to find pre–war images of Malancourt ‘because since the war there are people from Malancourt everywhere, so the postcards have all been dispersed’. Photographs share with ruins a materiality based on a tension between presence and absence, that can trigger conversations and imaginings about the relationship between present and past (see e.g. Barkan 1999; Sontag 1971: 16; Barthes 1984). Following Barthes, Sontag and others, Hirsch sees photographs as authenticating the reality of the past: ‘the picture exists because something was there’ (1997: 6). As such they are repositories of ‘some truth about the past’ even as that past (in her case, the Holocaust) remains invisible, outside the frame (ibid.: 6, 21). For this reason, Hirsch sees photographs as privileged vehicles for ‘post–memory’, communicating and transmitting past events that escape signification and

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

174

4/11/09

13:08

Page 174

Place and the Memory of War Destruction in Argonne (France)

struggle to make it into narrative. Seen through this optic, the interest in pre–war photographs among today’s inhabitants of reconstructed villages in the Argonne concerns the pre–war villages and their reconstruction as much as the moment of their destruction by war, the inexpressible thing that remains ‘outside the frame’ but is insistently alluded to when people date these images to ‘before ‘14’ (whatever their actual date).3 Sometimes war destruction is ‘inside the frame’, in images of war ruins produced in the immediate post–war period and also collected and displayed today: interestingly in showing them today people mostly say nothing, or give ‘no comment’, as if that particular aspect is indeed shrouded in silence, struggling to make it into words even now. It may be suggested that like the shrapnel and other souvenirs of the war collected at the time, these images may have helped to transmit the unspoken, unspeakable part of the war experience to later generations. Their power to transmit the war experience is embedded in a wider process whereby the Argonne as a whole has become constituted as a place where the war may be ‘touched’.

War and Place All was reconstructed identical to how it had been – to the point that if before the war one had built an extra staircase or a room for a relative, one would remake it exactly as it had been beforehand. This remark about post–war reconstruction was voiced by one of my informants in response to my comment that a society’s character is linked to events in its past. Jeanne went on to use the example of reconstruction to claim that the Great War has rendered the Argonnais deeply conservative: for example, her in–laws refused to update the furnishings of their shop even though they were hopelessly out of date. She added that ‘I too became used to that mentality and by the time I took over the shop I no longer had any new ideas’. In Jeanne’s words, the historical contingency of reconstruction ‘à l’identique’ after the Great War is linked with a less contingent aspect of local ‘character’, a ‘mentality’ attributed to the impact of the Great War on local society. The formative impact of war, and not only the Great War, on local character is a common refrain in today’s Argonne: ‘There have been three wars and for this reason there is little energy here, people from here are afraid of the new, they close in upon themselves’. The ‘three wars’ referred to in this quotation are the Franco–Prussian War of 1870–71, the Great War and the ‘War of ‘40’, when the Argonne was once again a battlefield on the path of German invasion and retreat though

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 175

Paola Filippucci 175

without suffering extensive damage (see below). The refrain of the ‘three wars’ commonly blurs into the idea of a place chronically affected and shaped by war: It’s a region that has suffered from wars, areas that have been destabilised each time and each time have had to start over… when they get you once you close in on yourself, when they get you twice you close in even more. It’s a reflex that makes people’s mentality like that here. As in this quotation, in today’s Argonne war is frequently presented as a permanent aspect of local reality, definitive of ‘local character’ and so accounting for aspects of local reality such as, in this case, the area’s economic and demographic decline. Indeed, war is at the very heart of local conceptions of place, centred on the idea that this is a ‘frontier region’, a région frontière. By this people refer to the fact that the area is today divided between two regions and three departments, but also to a putative past as a political border. At various times in the Middle Ages and early modern period the Argonne marked the border between the Kingdom of France and the Lorraine (an independent buffer state between France and the Holy Roman Empire until the eighteenth century). However, people today usually know it as ‘the border between France and Germany’. This (historically inaccurate) claim may be said to allude to the role of the Argonne as a battlefield in Franco–German conflicts over the past century and a half: the ‘three wars’. Indeed, historically in French the term frontière indicates a militarised and/or militarily contested area, and it was specifically in the late nineteenth century and in the Great War that the term was widely used to denote the whole of Eastern France (see Nordman 1986). Thus, in today’s Argonne war is both referred to as a historical event in the area’s past, and represented as a chronic aspect of local reality, naturalised as a fact of geography and a sort of destiny. This may be seen as a product of the historic role of the area as a battlefield at various times, but also more explicitly of the reconstruction after the Great War, when material and symbolic processes contributed to crystallise an association and indeed almost identification with the war of places where the fighting had occurred. Post–war reconstruction of the battlefield areas included the erection of cemeteries, memorials and monuments all over the Western Front (see e.g. Winter 1995). The former battlefield areas became the centre of a ‘cult’ of the Fallen Soldier animated by private mourning but organised around public sites for remembrance. The French authorities strongly supported the concentration of mourning and commemoration in the former battlefields in a (more or less explicit) bid to control the memorial process and secure a particular interpretation of the conflict that sublimated and moralised its

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

176

4/11/09

13:08

Page 176

Place and the Memory of War Destruction in Argonne (France)

violence and brutality as heroic sacrifice on behalf of the national community (Sherman 1999: 203). This policy went against the desire of local communities and families to privatise their mourning, notably by repatriating the bodies of the dead for civilian burial in their places of origin (ibid.: 215–60). In practice the vast majority of the bodies of the fallen were grouped in large military cemeteries ‘where they had fallen’ on the former battlefields, also riddled with the remains and bodies of the missing. Thus, the lands of the former Western Front were almost literally transformed into a vast cemetery, ‘sacralised’ as much by the interred and dispersed bodies of the dead as by monuments and memorials (see Price 2008). Monuments not only punctuated the landscape but also incorporated it into the commemorative space, for instance by inscribing the names of surrounding localities or including reproductions of landmarks with particular importance in the war narrative (see Filippucci 2004b; cf. Young 1993: 7). In Argonne, for instance, many monuments allude figuratively or discursively to the forest, a defining feature of the local landscape that dominates visual and verbal representations of the war at this location. The monumentalisation of landmarks and surroundings and the localised nature of the war, which was largely fought along a geographically delimited front line, facilitated an identification between the event and the landscapes where it occurred that has crystallised into a particular sense of place. Today the image of a ‘place of war’ influences interpretations of local reality. As mentioned, war is blamed for economic and demographic stagnation and the area’s ‘frontier’ status and its putative history as a political border are routinely invoked by policy–makers to explain and justify policy failure (blamed for instance on the poor coordination of administrative agencies or on the lack of cooperation among local administrators, all traced back to the fact that ‘the historic frontier is still very alive’ among the population as one policy–maker put it to me). This obscures other, less intractable reasons for policy failure, such as the area’s demographic weakness which causes lack of resources and attention from central authorities. Economic and demographic decline is less due to war than to wider and longer–term political economic processes such as the restructuring of the French economy with industrialisation from the mid–nineteenth century (see Hussenet 1982) and, today, the area’s position at the outer margins of a highly polarised centre–periphery system centred on Paris (Thiard 2003). While these facts are well–known, not least to local and regional policy–makers, the war–related narrative offers a ready–made explanation for present problems and an excuse for not offering solutions. The persistent association of the Argonne with war also blocks local efforts to formulate and publicise images of place which are based, for example, on its natural beauty or rural character, to promote

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 177

Paola Filippucci 177

tourism or to attract new residents and investors. Instead regional and departmental policies of and funding for tourist and heritage valorisation in the Meuse sector of the Argonne have in recent years been almost exclusively linked with the ‘memory policy’ (politique de mémoire) of the Lorraine region, centred on the promotion of Great War sites and remains (see Mémoire de la Grande Guerre: le devoir de mémoire). Thus, a century after the war, the image of the Argonne as a battlefield is partly kept in place by the instrumental interests of policy–making agencies. However, a sense of place is not just about image but also an active engagement with surroundings that contributes to create and recreate that image. In Argonne, today this includes activities explicitly aimed at keeping alive the ‘memory’ of the Great War but simultaneously refreshing its association with this event in the public imagination both locally and beyond.

Places of War In the post–war period ‘the battlefields’ did not simply become associated with the Great War but became almost identified with the war for survivors. The former battlefields became the destination for ‘battlefield tourists’ who came not only to mourn but also to see war debris and other vestiges of the fighting (Sherman 1999). These played a prominent role in the immediate aftermath of the war, and had an impact on how people came to know about the war: such vestiges became sources of knowledge, memory and ‘experience’ of the war, especially for non–combatants. Debris or more rarely preserved stretches of the battlefield enabled visitors to contemplate and indeed to touch ‘discernibly “real” traces of war experience’ (ibid.: 16–17). The desire to ‘know’ the war by these direct, embodied means was fuelled by the silence of veterans and the fact that even those narratives that were produced could not ultimately bridge the experiential gap between combatants and non–combatants, which was particularly wide in the Great War. Indeed, the enormity of the events of the war was such that even those narratives that were produced may have created rather than filled a gap in discursive reality, which people strove to fill in by visiting the places of combat (ibid.: 17). Almost a century after the conflict, such remains and places may continue to generate ‘knowledge and experience’ of the war. Many locals in today’s Argonne are keenly interested in the Great War and as well as in collecting memorabilia and visiting war sites in the area and beyond; many also take active part in initiatives aimed at ‘valorising’ local war sites for tourism and commemoration. These include, firstly, the exploration and restoration of war remains and sites, many of which survive in the Argonne forest and which are now the focus of the activity

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

178

4/11/09

13:08

Page 178

Place and the Memory of War Destruction in Argonne (France)

of voluntary groups such as the Association Franco–Allemande, founded a few years ago to unite local and German volunteers (including schoolchildren) in restoring German sites and installations in the name of ‘Franco–German reconciliation’; the Amis de Vauquois, founded some twenty years ago to restore the important war site of Vauquois but also now conducting systematic exploration and recording of tunnels and other underground structures in the forest; and another unnamed group of volunteers loosely attached to one of the local tourist offices and active since 2000 in restoring and opening to the public installations and other sites preserved in the forest (both French and German). Some of these sites are used for costume displays, and volunteers in period costumes come to the war sites as well as to monuments either for commemorative ceremonies or for re–enactments of wartime scenes (though not full–blown battle re–enactments). Finally, local ramblers’ groups regularly organise ‘themed’ hikes taking in local Great War sites. Similar activities are found today all over the Western Front (see e.g. Saunders 2002; Price 2004; Filippucci in press a) and while their focus is recreational, they may also be seen as forms of commemoration. Commemorative activity has intensified, especially since the eightieth anniversary of the war in the 1990s: in the Argonne major commemorations have taken place both for the eightieth and the ninetieth anniversaries of the Argonne combats (1915) and of the battle of Verdun (1916). This has included both traditional commemorative ceremonies and activities like those described: re–enactments, conservation of sites, etc. The idea that these have a commemorative aspect is substantiated by the motivations voiced by those involved, who regularly mention the memory of family members who fought in the war as the reason for their passionate interest in the Great War and their engagement in these activities. Many also stressed that what draws them to the Great War sites is the ‘suffering’ of those who fought in or lived through the war. As a participant in a Great War themed walk explained, ‘I really like anything to do with the war of ’14 [as the Great War is known colloquially] – it’s not exactly about liking, it’s the fact that it’s suffering (c’est de la souffrance).’ The suffering was often said to institute a moral obligation to remember: We have a duty, it’s the main duty, our objective is the duty of remembrance – we must not forget all they did, those who fought the Great War … They sacrificed their lives, their youth, all this for us, so we cannot forget them! … They have suffered. We try to understand it, we do reconstitutions, we are very serious, dress like the soldiers, we respect the uniform, we are proud to wear it because we think about them, it’s something, but we cannot understand the suffering they experienced.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 179

Paola Filippucci 179

The speaker is a man in his forties, promoter of a group who attend local Great War commemoration ceremonies wearing period costume (men in French military uniforms, women in nurses’ frocks). His words summarise the central theme underpinning the memorial aspects of these activities: the soldiers’ suffering was a supreme ‘sacrifice’ which created an inextinguishable debt among survivors, partially repaid by remembrance that therefore becomes a perennial ‘duty’. This theme is today promoted by an association known as Souvenir Français (of which this man is a member) but is pervasive in Great War commemoration and invoked by other Argonnais involved in the activities described above, as well as by visitors to the Argonnais war sites. The notion of remembrance as a moral duty originated in the war itself: the Souvenir Français emerged in response to the losses of the Franco–Prussian war in 1870–71, but primarily during and after the Great War in relation to the ‘cult’ of the fallen (see e.g. Winter 2006: 25–26, 1995; Prost 2002: 11–43; Audoin–Rouzeau and Becker 2002: 175–81). As in the immediate aftermath of the war, today too the idea of a ‘duty to remember’ is coupled with (and indeed rests on) the perception that ‘memory’ fails to fully grasp the war experience. As the quotation above suggests, people today see a gap between their knowledge about the war and that of direct survivors. As after the war, in attempting to bridge that gap people draw on its material vestiges. For instance one of the war–theme walks in Argonne, entitled ‘On the Steps of the Soldiers’, was advertised as ‘recreating the experience’ of soldiers going up the line, by leading participants through the vestiges of rear positions and communication trenches to the front–line trenches to look out over the battlefields through a reconstructed lookout point, and finally ‘over the top’ across no man’s land, among the preserved remains of burnt and fallen trees and shell–holes. All along the way people were shown wartime debris and even at one point invited to ‘smell’ the battlefield (‘minus the smell of dead bodies’) by one of the guides burning powder extracted from a shell–case. Participants in such activities routinely commented that visiting and knowing the ‘actual sites’ of battle ‘brought to life’ the war, so far only known ‘in the abstract’ through distant family memory or schoolbooks, making you realise ‘that it really happened’. More broadly the wartime vestiges and remains across the Argonne are said by locals and visitors to ‘show the war as it really was’ by contrast with the more monumentalised landscape at the Verdun battlefield. A costume re–enactment in the Argonne forest by a Verdun–based group in 2005 was said both by spectators and by participants to ‘really bring the war to life’ because of the ‘suggestive’ environment of the forest and the remains. Arguably it is the presence of monuments that determines the meaning and significance of the less monumental vestiges and debris of

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

180

4/11/09

13:08

Page 180

Place and the Memory of War Destruction in Argonne (France)

war that riddle the landscape, insofar as it marks and even sacralises surroundings such as those of the Argonne as part of the battlefields. However, today it is these non–monumental remains that capture the attention, are the focus of activity and are attributed a power of their own to ‘bring the war to life’. This may be linked to their materiality. War remains in the Argonne today are rather decayed: half–buried in soil, rusty, covered in vegetation and mould, damaged by tree–growth and animal activity in the forest soil, often dangerous (as they open up sudden gaps or thrust up jagged edges or even explosive matter in the forest soil). Unlike monuments and formal memorials, these remains are not neatly incorporated into their surroundings through landscaping and so they have the ability to startle, even frighten and, in their decayed, often unrecognisable state, to stimulate the imagination (see Edensor 2005). In particular their ‘shifty materialities’ blur the categories we use to order experience: the boundaries between artifact and natural matter, between animal and human and also, as here, between past and present (DeSilvey 2006: 321). Vestiges and the sites in which they occur thus encourage people to envisage the past in terms of experience rather than just meaning (see Bloch 1998): in this case they encourage a sort of somatic knowledge of the war that includes getting muddy, entering the suffocating darkness of tunnels, touching the sharpness and weight of shrapnel and weapons, feeling the danger of ordnance. They open spaces for the imagination and thereby facilitate a kind of remembering that in Bloch’s words ‘enables the presence of a past’ as though one was there (1998: 120). As one of the tour guides in Argonne put it, ‘when I am in the forest I day–dream, I see the soldiers and the fighting’. It almost transports us into the past: during these visits or activities people speak of ‘going up the line’, feeling cold or wet or scared ‘just like the soldiers’. Such a bid to access the war past from the point of view of individuals and their experiences is pervasive in early twenty–first–century Europe and has been related to factors such as the crisis of the idea of nation and of ‘solid collectives’, leading both historiography and memory to focus on individuals and their predicament in the face of war. This interest in the point of view of victims of violence is also partly fuelled by public debates about atrocities and extreme violence in twentieth–century conflicts (Prost and Winter 2005: 203–5, 209–10). Meanwhile the continuing force of the notion of a ‘debt’ to the fallen is explained by ‘unfinished mourning’ for the enormous losses inflicted by the Great War on French society (see Audoin–Rouzeau and Becker 2002). It may also be animated by ‘unfinished mourning’ for the losses and pain inflicted by wars more generally in the twentieth century that some see as being at the core of today’s ‘memory boom’ (e.g. Winter 2006). In France, the Second World in particular is said to haunt the country’s social memory because of the

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 181

Paola Filippucci 181

moral ambiguities associated with it in relation to collaboration both in the German–occupied areas and in the zone under Vichy (see e.g. Rousso 1991). The problem of remembering the Second World War may well animate interest for the Great War in Argonne. The Second World War was much less destructive to the area than the First World War: local populations left the area upon the German invasion of June 1940 but they returned soon after and found villages and property more or less untouched. Between 1940 and 1944 the area was part of the German–occupied ‘reserved zone’ but locals describe the occupying German forces as ‘friendly’, favourably comparing their behaviour with that of Germans in the First World War. However, the area was also the site of anti–German resistance and notably during the German retreat in 1944, when around a hundred men from the area were deported to Germany, most of whom never returned, allegedly as reprisal for a partisan action. The exact reasons and responsibilities for the reprisal are still controversial locally (as I discovered when I attempted to interview people about it), exemplifying the morally treacherous grounds for remembering the French experience of the Second World War. This was alluded to when many informants described the Great War as ‘more honest’ than the Second World War (une guerre plus honnête). Today, when some of the actors of the Second World War are still alive, remembering the ‘more honest’ war may be an oblique way of remembering and mourning the losses of the later conflict. For example, the son of a man rumoured to have been involved in the events leading to the deportation in 1944 and later brutally killed by Germans, is today one of the main local promoters of Great War commemorations and site conservation, which he presents as a way to honour his grandfather, who witnessed (but survived) the battle of Verdun in 1916; however, he never mentions his father’s death in the later war, evidently more problematic to mourn and remember publicly. These arguments account for today’s impulse to remember a war that occurred almost a century ago, but not fully for why people should seek to remember the world wars through material objects. As mentioned, objects seem to have the power to elicit emotion and imagination about the past. What empowers them to do so is both their intrinsic materiality and also their historical connection with the war, which in the case of the Argonne works through their being part of a specific landscape and place, materially and symbolically moulded by war. The fact that the sites of combat have a growing role in remembrance as the war recedes into the past may be explained by the disappearance of survivors and, with them, of the ‘living memory’ of the war. For Nora, when social communication fails, remembrance may be facilitated by such material ‘sites of memory’ (Nora 1989). More specifically, as no one alive directly remembers the dead anymore, the physical sites of combat may now be central in reviving the

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

182

4/11/09

13:08

Page 182

Place and the Memory of War Destruction in Argonne (France)

memory of the dead, something that is pivotal to the ‘duty of remembrance’, founded on the notion of ‘survival through memory’ (Margalit 2002: 69). Sites and objects, in other words, may today replace the people who lived through the event in carrying forward the memory of a momentous event into later times. However, Nora also implicitly opposes things and people in transmitting memory when he writes that ‘the materiality of the trace’ that dominates contemporary memory provides knowledge of the past lacking in affect and magic (1989: 13). And yet, as shown, people today go to the former battlefields and engage with the remains of the war precisely to ‘feel’ and ‘experience’, as they put it, the ‘reality’ of the war. The materiality of the trace in this case triggers emotion and imagination. It may be suggested that through material traces people today do not simply seek to reconnect with the event after the demise of survivors, but also to connect with that which survivors did not say about the war, the unspoken and unspeakable aspect of the event. That is, the sites and material vestiges of war may be used today to access survivors’ silence. Sites and vestiges may help address silences and gaps in signification because of their materiality. Material sites and objects may help to capture or convey experiences that escape the bounds of common knowledge and signification because they have the potential to incarnate an event rather than just represent it: to ‘be’ it (cf. Pels 1998: 104). Material objects mediate and promote knowledge in a sensuous, aesthetic way (ibid.: 100–1). This is an intrinsic and critical part of how human subjects are moulded and come to know the world (ibid.: 104). As such objects do not stand opposed to people (and in the context of remembering the past, substitute for them) but may give access to aspects of subjectivity that are not readily translatable into words. Where words fail, things may help to bridge the gap between the sayable and the unsayable, the shareable and the unshareable, they may help to grasp or denote the unrepresentable. This is because objects are implicated both in the constitution of subjects and in a web of contingency and causality that exceeds human subjectivity and representation. They occur between the interiority of the subject and the externality of the world and mediate between them (Pels 1998; cf. Keane 2003). Places too occur between the interiority of subjects and the exteriority of the world, incarnating the mutual engagement of subjects and material surroundings that are an intrinsic part of being in the world (see Casey 1996). As such they are moulded by people but also shaped and, as in this case, mangled by forces that exceed subjects and their ability to comprehend, such as the forces of political economy or indeed of war. So the places of the Great War are not only settings where the war took place but also the media through which the incomprehensible brutality of the war impacted on subjects and through which subjects strove to reclaim and re-create a world in the war’s aftermath, in the phase of reconstruction and in the longer–term

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 183

Paola Filippucci 183

process of memorialisation. In both processes, the materiality of places was not and is not only drawn upon to repair the hurt and loss of the war by recreating a habitable world. It is also drawn upon to engage with that hurt and loss, for instance by making visible the gap of signification that the war’s violence created. As local representations of place suggest, the surroundings of the Argonne not only recall the war but have also arguably ‘become’ the war. By attending to the materiality of these surroundings, whether the builtscape of villages or the landscape of the forest with its war vestiges, people transmit not only the discursive memory of the event but also the aspect of the event that did not make it into discourse, the violence that brutalised people both in their bodies and minds and, also, in their places. Finally, it may also be the fact that in the battlefield areas war brutalised both people and places; that is acknowledged and remembered in and through the identification of war with place. As shown, in Argonne today the most explicit aspect of war–related memorialisation is that of the military narrative and military losses. This has characterised the memorialisation and social memory of the Great War from the start: the fact that the populations of the former battlefields not only lost relatives and friends in the war but also houses, animals, fields and gardens was largely overshadowed by a focus on the military losses. As long as those remembering and commemorating were people who had ‘lived the war’, they could covertly commemorate these ‘other’ losses within the public framework of memorialisation: a shell–case could simultaneously recall and embody a soldier’s war experiences and the destruction of his or his family’s house or village. With the passage of time and the gradual demise of those who remember the war directly, the civilian experience of loss may have entirely slipped out of memory. However, by imagining and remembering the war in and through place, a complex artifact of war in all its aspects, this additional dimension of the war’s impact may be carried forward in the consciousness of the populations of the Argonne.

Remembering Through Places Writing between the wars, the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs theorised the fundamental importance of physical spaces and places in ‘stabilising’ the identity of individuals and groups, for their capacity to hold and carry forward in time images and memories of the past (Halbwachs 1980 [1950]: 128–36). For Halbwachs, physical surroundings provide individuals and groups with ‘an image of permanence and stability’ that gives them ‘a comforting image of their own continuity’ (ibid.: 128); this supports arguments already made above about the painful impact of place loss on individuals and collectivities.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

184

4/11/09

13:08

Page 184

Place and the Memory of War Destruction in Argonne (France)

Halbwachs’ work on social memory was arguably an oblique meditation on his (civilian) experience of the Great War, spent partly in Nancy, a city near the front line that was severely damaged by the conflict (Becker 2003). However, his theory did not directly incorporate the impact on memory of the Great War or, indeed, of the Second World War (during which Halbwachs published his book, just before being interned in Buchenwald where he died). Therefore, his theorisation of the role of spaces in transmitting memory does not take into account the fact that, as in the case discussed here, the violence of twentieth–century wars often impacted on material surroundings, generating images of chaos and destruction that ‘resembled nothing’ (in the words of Pézard cited above), least of all the individuals and groups faced with them and with the problem of reconstructing identities and places after them. Indeed Halbwachs’ theory can be criticised for its Durkheimian emphasis on the role of remembrance in upholding the stability and cohesion of social groups (see e.g. Winter and Sivan 1999). An alternative strand in the theorisation of memory is that centred on the notion of trauma, that also has its roots, to some extent, in the brutality of the world wars since it crystallised in the work of Freud and others, partly in response to the effect of the Great War on soldiers (e.g. Antze and Lambek 1996; Caruth 1995). The notion of trauma does take into account the problematic aspects of remembering violent events but, particularly in Caruth’s interpretation, it is clear that this notion refers to something which must be kept analytically separate from ‘memory’, particularly in its social aspects. Trauma is said to reside in the unconscious and to be largely inaccessible to conscious signification and communication. It represents something which may not be encoded into experience and that is only ever accessible in its absence, through symptoms or forms of flash recall not subsumed within the temporal sequence and narrative structure of memory, ‘outside the boundaries of any single place or time’ (Caruth 1995: 9). In spite of the essential incommunicability of trauma, work on descendants of Holocaust survivors has argued that what can be transmitted is a silence, a gap in signification that others are then compelled to fill with their imagination and emotion (e.g. Hirsch 1997; Young 2000). Both Hirsch and Young point to the role of material objects in this transmission. For Young, in the case of events that are hard to communicate, to share and to agree upon, such as the Shoah, monuments and memorials not only ‘bring events in some cognitive order’ by embodying narratives that ‘valorize the suffering in such a way as to justify it historically’ (Young 1993: 7) but also provide ‘sites where groups of people meet to create a common past’ or indeed propagate the ‘illusion’ of such a past (ibid.: 6, my emphasis). This may have been the role of monuments and memorials in the aftermath of the Great War. In addition, however, in the Great War the

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 185

Paola Filippucci 185

very fabric of the battlefields and its war–related debris was called into play to engage with the event of the war, both in the immediate aftermath and now, almost a century later. In relation to these, Hirsch’s analysis of the role of photographs in transmitting the unspeakable (1997) is more useful. As already noted, she highlights the power of material objects to stand between the sayable and unsayable, to bridge the gap between representation and that which exceeds it. This, following Pels (1998), is rooted in the ability of material objects to be, rather than merely stand for or represent. This power in turn is rooted in the sensuous dimension of human knowledge processes. Sensuous engagement with the world is central to how humans know the world and, in the process, know themselves so that material objects are not radically separate entities waiting to be invested by signification, but arise during that process, as humans know the world and themselves. Places are a particularly good example of this: they instantiate the sensuous and thoughtful engagement of people with their surroundings which is not an optional but an integral and necessary part of our being in the world, something that we do not only through our mind but also through our body and so always, inevitably, somewhere (Casey 1996). As such places are part and parcel of how subjects – individual or collective – define and make themselves through their concrete experiences of being in the world. Such experiences include violent events such as wars that generate traumatic responses, including the loss of places themselves, as in this case. This motivates the desire to reconstitute places after catastrophes, but I have also argued that places are not only means by which identity can be reconstituted and arguably repaired against such traumatic impacts, but can also act as mediators and, arguably, transmitters of such impacts to later times. Through their materiality places can hold the unspoken and evoke it by allusion and by triggering emotion and imagination, even in those who have not directly lived through an event. Therefore, for example, in places like the Argonne people engage with the materiality of place to ‘bring to life’ and, in other words, authenticate images about the Great War (and perhaps war in general) that they receive from family narratives but also from schoolbooks, films, fiction and other sources (cf. Winter 2006). It is in this sense that the former battlefields, arguably figuring and transfiguring the original violence and trauma of the war for its immediate survivors, may continue to act to transmit it to later generations. In conclusion, in this case the past violence of war is socially remembered in the places where it occurred first and foremost because it was and is remembered through them. Places have become ‘the war’ for those wishing to connect with the event. Following Cole (2001), it may be proposed that physical places can act as technologies of remembering, bridging the gap between individual and collective

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

186

4/11/09

13:08

Page 186

Place and the Memory of War Destruction in Argonne (France)

‘memory’, the speakable and the unspeakable, and also as technologies of transmission, bridging the gap between individuals and distant and receding pasts.

Notes * I would like to gratefully acknowledge the financial support of an Eileen and Phyllis Gibbs Travelling Fellowship from Newnham College, Cambridge, for the ethnographic fieldwork on which this paper is partly based. I would also like to thank one of the reviewers of this chapter, Stuart McLean, for his very helpful comments on the first draft, though any faults in the final outcome are obviously all mine. 1. For example, both in Malancourt and Neuvilly newspaper accounts of the inauguration, respectively, of the reconstructed Church and Town Hall use the word ‘resurrection’, resurrection. 2. In Neuvilly, village destruction is commemorated visually in a stained glass window in the church. This may reflect a perceived distinction between the village square as a national, ‘Republican’ space and therefore devoted to the Republican cult of the Fallen Soldiers, as opposed to the church which is a more local, village space. 3. Indeed, in the case of one village that was obliterated in the Great War, I was told by several informants about one of the postcards that it immortalises ‘the day the Germans arrived’ – literally the moment before the war reached it.

References ADM: Archive Departemental de la Meuse, Bar–le–Duc. Amat, J.–P. 1987. ‘Guerre et Milieux Naturels: Les Forêts Meurtries de l’Est de la France, 70 ans aprés Verdun’, L’Espace Géographique 3: 217–33. AMN: Archive Municipal, Neuvilly. Antze, P. and M. Lambek (eds). 1996. Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. London: Routledge. Audoin–Rouzeau, S. 2003. ‘Découvrir les Ruines de sa Maison dans la Somme, en Août 1918’, in A. Duménil and P. Nivet (eds), Les Reconstructions en Picardie. Amiens: Encrage, pp. 71–86. ––– and A. Becker. 2002. 1914–1918 Understanding the Great War. London: Profile Books. Augé, M. 1994. Ville e Tenute. Milan: Elèuthera. Bachelard, G. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press. Barkan, L. 1999. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Barthes, R. 1984. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Vintage.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 187

Paola Filippucci 187

Becker, A. 2003. Maurice Halbwachs: un Intellectuel en Guerres Mondiales 1914–1945. Paris: Agnès Viénot Editions. Benjamin, W. 1992. Illuminations. London: Fontana Press. Bevan, R. 2006. The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War. London: Reaktion Books. Bloch, M. 1998. How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory and Literacy. London: Westview. BM 1919. ‘Au Pays des Ruines’, Bulletin Meusien, 8 May 1919. Caruth, C. 1995. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Casey, E. 1996. ‘How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time’, in S. Feld and K. Basso (eds), Senses of Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 13–51. Ceschin, D. 2006. Gli Esuli di Caporetto. Roma–Bari: Laterza. Clout, H. 1996. After the Ruins. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. CM 1919. ‘Malancourt’, La Croix Meusienne, 22 June 1919. Cole, J. 2001. Forget Colonialism? Berkeley: University of California Press. DeSilvey, C. 2006. ‘Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things’, Journal of Material Culture 11(1/2): 318–38. Edensor, T. 2005. Industrial Ruins. Oxford: Berg. Feld, S. and K. Basso (eds). 1996. Senses of Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Fiel, P. 1935. ‘La Reconstitution des Régions Devastées en Lorraine’, Le Pays Lorrain 27(1): 1–23. Filippucci, P. 2004a. ‘A French Place Without a Cheese: Problems with Heritage and Identity in Northeastern France’, Focaal – European Journal of Anthropology 44: 72–86. –––. 2004b. ‘Memory and Marginality: Remembrance of World War I in Argonne, France’, in D. Kaneff, F. Pine and H. Haukanes (eds), Politics, Religion and Remembering the Past. Münster: LIT–Verlag, pp. 35–57. –––. In press a. ‘Archaeology and Memory on the Western Front’, in D. Boric (ed.), Archaeology and Memory. Oxford: Oxbow Books. –––. In press b. ‘Postcards from the Past: Landscape, Place and the Memory of War in Argonne (France)’, in P. Cornish and N.J. Saunders (eds), Contested Objects: Material Memories of the Great War. London: Routledge. Freud, S. 2006 [1914]. ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through’, in A. Phillips (ed.), The Penguin Freud Reader. London: Penguin Books, pp. 391–401. Halbwachs, M. 1980 [1950]. The Collective Memory. New York and London: Harper and Row. Hirsch, M. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

188

4/11/09

13:08

Page 188

Place and the Memory of War Destruction in Argonne (France)

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hirsch, E. and M. O’Hanlon (eds). 1996. The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hussenet, J. 1982. Argonne 1630–1980. Reims: Cendrée. Keane, W. 2003. ‘Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things’, Language and Communication 23(3–4): 409–25. Lowenthal, D. 1985. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Magny, C. 1928. La Reconstitution du Département de la Meuse: la Tenacité d’une Courageuse Population. Bar–le–Duc: Imprimerie Comte–Jacquet. Margalit, A. 2002. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Mémoire de la Grande Guerre: Le Devoir de Mémoire. Retrieved from http://www.cg55.fr/culture/user_memoire_presentation.htm (29 August 2007). Miller, D. 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell. Nivet, P. 2004. Les Réfugiés Français de la Grande Guerre. Paris: Economica. Nora, P. 1989. ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26, Spring: 7–25. Nordman, D. 1986. ‘Des Limites d’Etat aux Frontières Nationales’, in Nora, P. (ed.), Les Lieux de Mémoire. Vol. 2, La Nation 2, Paris: Gallimard, pp. 35–61. Pels, P. 1998. ‘The Spirit of Matter: On Fetish, Rarity, Fact and Fancy’, in P. Spyer (ed.), Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 91–121. Pézard, A. 1974 [1918]. Nous Autres à Vauquois. Aurillac: Imprimerie Moderne U.S.H.A. Price, J. 2004. ‘The Ocean Villas Project: Archaeology in the Service of European Remembrance’, in N.J. Saunders (ed.), Matters of Conflict: Material Culture, Memory and the First World War 1914–1918. London: Routledge, pp. 179–91. –––. 2008. ‘The Devonshires Hold This Trench, They Hold It Still: Cultural Landscapes of Sacrifice and the Problem of the Sacred Ground of the Great War 1914–1918’, in A. Smith and A. Gazin–Schwartz (eds), Landscapes of Clearance: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives. Walnut Creek: California Left Coast Press, pp. 180–89. Prost, A. 1984. ‘Les Monuments aux Morts’, in P. Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de Mémoire. Vol. I, La République. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 195–225. –––. 1986. ‘Verdun’, in P. Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de Mémoire. Vol. II, La Nation 3. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 111–41. –––. 2002. Republican Identities in War and Peace: Representations of France in

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 189

Paola Filippucci 189

the nineteenth and twenieth Centuries. Oxford: Berg. ––– and Winter, J. 2005. The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies 1914 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Read, P. 1996. Returning to Nothing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reconstructions. 2000. Reconstructions en Picardie Aprés 1918. Amiens: Encrage. Rousso, H. 1991. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press. Saunders, N.J. 2002. ‘Excavating Memories: Archaeology and the Great War, 1914–2001’, Antiquity 76 (291): 101–8. –––. 2003. Trench Art: Materialities and Memories of War. Oxford: Berg. Sherman, D. 1999. The Construction of Memory in Interwar France. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Sontag, S. 1971. On Photography. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Tarlow, S. 1999. Bereavement and Commemoration: An Archaeology of Mortality. Oxford: Blackwell. Thiard, P. 2003. ‘Les Marges du Bassin Parisien, des Peripheries Durablement Fragiles: Approches Méthodologiques des Dynamiques du Déclin’, Mosella XXVVII (3–4): 117–29. Winter, J. 1995. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. –––. 2006. Remembering War: the Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ––– and Sivan, E. 1999. War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, J. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. –––. 2000. At Memory’s Edge: After–Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 191

Generations: Chasms and Bridges

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 193

Chapter 8

Silent Legacies of Trauma: A Comparative Study of Cambodian Canadian and Israeli Holocaust Trauma Descendant Memory Work* Carol A. Kidron Foundational paradigms in psychology and Holocaust and genocide studies have asserted that trauma descendants share a legacy of PTSD–related psychosocial scars (Danieli 1998; Rousseau and Drapeau 1998) and childhood memories of a familial ‘conspiracy of silence’ (Bar–On 1992). According to the above epistemologies, trauma descendants are thought to suffer parental repression and/or denial of a violent past, and in certain contexts – such as the sociopolitical silencing of parental testimonies – an absence of articulated historical accounts of the familial past. Mental health professionals, genocide scholars and political activists alike call our attention to descendants’ newly emergent commitment to psychological working through and the voicing of silenced familial narratives of suffering and their desire to contribute to public forms of monumental commemoration (Lentin 2000). This descendant redemptive voice, according to the discourse, is dependent upon the intervention of expert cultural brokers – the therapist, political activist, historian or even the anthropologist (Schepper–Hughes 2002). My ethnographic fieldwork, carried out first in Israel (1997–99 and 2000–03) with the descendants of Holocaust survivors, and then in Canada (the summer and fall of 2005 and 2006) with descendants of the Cambodian genocide, challenges the underlying theoretical assumptions of the PTSD literature. This comparative work points to the ways in which the adult children of trauma victims reject the pathological profile of transmitted PTSD, show a disinterest in historicising their familial past and avoid public forms of commemoration. Instead, both descendant groups depict the tacit, non–pathological, yet no less constitutive impact of the past in the survivor home. For Holocaust descendants, visceral embodied practices, parent–child silent face work (Goffman’s [1959] concept for non–verbal facial inter–subjective interaction)1, and fragmented mythic tales of survival create a silent, or partially silent, matrix of Holocaust presence, which is perpetually interwoven within the everyday domestic life–world (Kidron 2009). In contrast, Cambodian–Canadian descendants recount the almost total absence of non–verbal presence of the genocidal past and only

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

194

4/11/09

13:08

Page 194

Silent Legacies of Trauma

infrequent verbal references to the past. Nevertheless, Cambodian or Khmer descendants assert that the genocide tacitly constituted personally enriching and empowering ‘modes of being’, which morally frame a forward–looking sense of descendant selfhood. Distinctive Jewish–Israeli and Buddhist–Cambodian attitudes regarding the centrality/marginality and function of memory work in every day life, shaped in part by divergent political and historical contexts, account for such divergent legacies. Therefore, this study questions both the centrality of therapeutic intervention within ethnically diverse traumatised populations, and the enlistment of survivors/descendants in public commemorative projects.

Epistemologies of Trauma Traumatic memory appears to have taken centre stage as victims of violence, therapists and social scientists all attempt to access and interpret fragments of painful pasts (Caruth 1995). Beyond earlier work carried out on shell shock and survivor syndrome, the diagnostic category of post–traumatic stress disorder (Young 1995; Solomon 1995) is being applied to an ever–growing number of social ills, labelling previously unclassified suffering as trauma–related. As in the case of other idioms of illness, the experience of trauma and the resultant disorder entail culturally constituted meaning systems, which frame how one interprets and practices the suffering self (Hacking 1997; Lambek and Antze 1996). These complex meaning systems are shaped by psychological explanatory models (Young 1995) and therapeutic discourses of treatment and recovery (Herman 1992). Despite the abundance of studies on the haunting presence of the past in the lives of trauma victims and the therapeutic benefits of narrating their story (Langer 1991), traumatic suffering has been found to resist articulation (Caruth 1995). When attempting to elicit these accounts, researchers have noted that the great majority of trauma survivors have kept the details of their pasts a painful secret (Danieli 1998). According to the scholarship cited above, descendants of trauma survivors around the world appear to be undertaking the arduous task of resurrecting the past in search of their troubled familial and/or ethnic legacy, and are exploring the long–term effects of trauma on their own lives. Psychological studies abound pertaining to descendants of the Armenian genocide (Altounian 1999), African bondage (Cross 1998), Southeast Asian massacres and forced migration (Ida and Yang 2003) and First Nation subjugation (Brave–Heart and Debruyn 1998). All examine the psychosocial scars of historical trauma. Cultural studies describe grass–roots organisations where descendants voice their entitlement to social recognition and recompense. According to psychological research, trauma victims may suffer from a

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 195

Carol A. Kidron 195

multitude of emotional and behavioral symptoms diagnosed as post–traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (DSM IV 1994). In studies on Holocaust victims (Barocas and Barocas 1973) and Vietnam veterans (Rosenheck and Fontana 1998), the disorder was found to impair survivor/veteran parenting, whereby the effects of PTSD may potentially be transmitted to their children. Although non–clinical findings have failed to show evidence of psychopathology (Sagi–Schwartz et al. 2003), both clinical and non–clinical studies have found that descendants of Holocaust victims and Vietnam veterans may suffer from maladaptive behavioral patterns and a damaged sense of self (Zilberfein 1995; Dansby and Marinelli 1999). According to the logic of the PTSD paradigm, if left untreated, the long–term psychosocial effects of survivor and/or shell shock trauma could be transmitted from generation to generation. Therapeutic treatment entails working through the effects of one’s family’s distant past and resultant re–integration of painful legacies (Bar–On 1992; Danieli 1998). Talk therapy in particular would allow the descendant to integrate the past narratively, and to heal and ‘historically redeem’ the destructive legacy (Leys 2000; Herman 1992). The above research on Holocaust survivors and Vietnam veterans has served as a prototypical model for more recent psychological studies on unexplored collective traumatic events such as the Cambodian genocide (Kinzie et al. 1984; Rousseau et al. 1999). Research has focused both on first– (Tobin and Friedman 1984; Huang 1998; Bit 1991; Marukusen 1992) and second–generation southeast Asian traumatisation (Rousseau and Drapeau 1998; Rousseau et al. 1999; Rousseau et al. 2003; Sack et al. 1994). Consistent with foundational paradigms, these studies conclude that survivors of the Cambodian genocide continue to suffer from PTSD–related emotional scars and somatised bodily distress (Becker et al. 2001; Stevens 2001) while their children – Cambodian–American, Canadian and Australian adolescents and young adults – have been found to exhibit increased symptomology causally related to their parents’ pre–migratory traumatic experience. As will be expanded upon below, even the paradoxical findings regarding resilience, positive adjustment and high self–esteem of Cambodian or Khmer youth have been tentatively interpreted in accordance with the therapeutic ethos as signifying over–compensation and psychically burdensome trauma–related intergenerational dynamics (Rousseau et al. 1999). Although the above case studies emerge from totally diverse sociocultural and national contexts, psychological studies utilise standardised psychological models and measures focusing soley on interfamily psychosocial dynamics. Cultural studies and collective memory studies have also explored historical trauma, particularly its implications for the politics of memory and identity. These works focus on the silencing or constraining of memory work and call for the voicing of silent narratives of suffering

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

196

4/11/09

13:08

Page 196

Silent Legacies of Trauma

(Lentin 2000). In the same vein, contemporary trends in anthropology have engendered new forms of politically interventionist ethnographies, intending to expose injustice and give voice to the suffering of silenced and subjugated populations (Schepper–Hughes 2002). More culturally sensitive studies in critical psychology and medical anthropology have deconstructed post–traumatic stress disorder, charting its cultural constitution as an idiom of illness (Young 1995). As outlined above, somatisation of trauma survivors has been interpreted in accordance with culture–specific idioms of distress, that have been found to shape their phenomenological experience of suffering and enable or disable the articulation of difficult pasts (Kleinman 1980). With the exception of my earlier work on a support group for children of Holocaust survivors (2003), no parallel attempt has been made to critically assess the transmitted PTSD construct or the descendant’s subjective phenomenological experience of wellness or illness. Thus, despite the extensive literature on PTSD, questions remain. What do we actually know about the everyday childhood and adult experience of trauma descendants? Was their experience of childhood one of onerous silence regarding the parental past or was silence accepted as a culturally normative form of desirous ‘forgetting’? Were there other channels of ‘remembrance’, other forms of silent transmission that left non–pathological traces of the past interwoven in the social milieu of everyday life? Do descendants wish to access verbal accounts of their legacies and publicly commemorate their violent histories? In order to grapple with the above questions, a comparative ethnographic study was undertaken of Cambodian–Canadian descendants of genocide and Israeli Holocaust descendants.

The Comparative Case Study and Methodology In–depth interviews were conducted using a semi–structured and thematic format. Interviewees were asked open–ended questions about themselves and their families, allowing them to narrate and present the self as they saw fit. The assumption in such an ethnographic stance (Fontana and Frey 2000: 652) is that the interviewees will reveal the cultural and discursive forms that enable them to speak their identities and present themselves as trauma descendants (Lieblich et al. 1998: 8). Their presentation of themselves as descendant survivors not only allows access to the ways in which one ‘is’ (or is not), and ‘does’ (or does not do) trauma descendant identity, but also alludes to the broader cultural world–view that informs such identity formation. In accordance with the concept of ‘narrative truth’, the issue at hand is not whether they present phenomenologically ‘true’ identities (Lieblich et al. 1998), but rather with

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 197

Carol A. Kidron 197

the ‘ways’ in which they narratively construct and selectively represent selfhood (Holland 1997). Similar questions were used with both Holocaust and Cambodian descendants. These questions attempted to illicit responses along the following themes: parental past and present behaviour and parent–child relationship; childhood memories of genocide–related dialogue or story–telling and/or genocide–related practices in the home; past and present ‘consumption’ of trauma–related discourse and cultural products; participation in genocide–related practices in the public domain; and finally envisioned future of commemorative practices. I conducted fifty–five in–depth interviews with children of Holocaust survivors. Accessing the sample using the snowball method, Israeli descendant respondents ranged in age between thirty–five and fifty–five, with equal gender representation. The great majority were born in Israel, to survivor parents who had emigrated to Israel from Europe in the late 1940s and 1950s after surviving Nazi extermination camps, forced labour camps, ghetto incarceration or extended periods of hiding. After an initial period of economic hardship, the majority achieved middle–upper middle–class status and the majority of descendants had some form of higher education. Twenty–three in–depth ethnographic interviews were undertaken with Cambodian–Canadian descendants, between the ages of seventeen and twenty–six, residing in Montreal, Quebec and Toronto, Ontario. Participant observation was also undertaken at the Cambodian–Canadian Association of Toronto (from which initial respondents were accessed) and at a Buddhist Temple in Montreal. In the case of the majority of descendants, their parents had emigrated to Canada in the mid– to late 1980s after surviving conditions of forced migration, gruelling forced labour, near starvation and the loss of loved ones. 40 per cent of the interviewees were born in refugee camps on the Thai border, although only one descendant retained vivid memories of the camp. After arriving in Canada, survivor families experienced severe economic hardship, and nearly two decades later many families still live in inner–city, low–income housing and at least 60 per cent recounted some form of substance abuse, and parental separation/divorce. Although 55 per cent of descendants attend or have attended a community college/university they recount being encouraged by their parents to focus on securing a stable income rather than higher education. Not to underplay the critical role of sociopolitical contexts, read dialogically the two case studies strongly suggest that one must be sensitive to culturally constituted memory work. The Cambodian case study is of particular comparative value because it highlights the normative ‘practice’ of silence within Asian cultures, Buddhist forward–looking world–views (Mortland 1994) and the relatively minimal

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

198

4/11/09

13:08

Page 198

Silent Legacies of Trauma

exposure to therapeutic discourse and practice. Beyond studies on migration patterns (Montgomery 1991) or Buddhist practice (Mclellan 1999), research on Cambodians and other southeast Asian Canadians have been almost exclusively in the fields of psychology and genocide studies. Cambodian genocide studies have focused on cultural factors that may account for the genocide (Hinton 1996, 2004), macro psychosocial contexts, the politics of memory and the supposed silencing or forgetting of difficult pasts (Kiernan 1996) and post–genocide culture change (Ledgerwood et al. 1994). However, beyond two psychologically framed anthropological studies focusing on first–generation narratives of trauma (Becker et al. 2001; Stevens 2001), there have been no attempts to explore ethnographically the ‘silent or semi–silent’ intergenerational process of survivor–descendant memory work.

Narratives of Silence: The Israeli Case In logocentric Euro–Western culture, silence has come to signify a ‘breakdown of conversation’, while conversation is conceptualised as the normative and ‘normal’ form of interpersonal interaction (Gurevitch 2001). Interpersonal relations ‘shrouded’ in silence are most commonly read as causally related to the repression or denial of socially or psychologically dangerous knowledge, or the failure of words to express sublime forms of experience thought to be ‘unspeakable’. Assuming silence implies the failure of interaction and transmission of knowledge and/or emotions. The taken–for–granted supposition is that silence marks the absence of presence. Therapeutic discourse has been most influential in casting a hermeneutics of suspicion surrounding silence in family dynamics, promoting the redemptive power of talk therapy and working through (Kidron 2009). As stated above, Holocaust and genocide literature, as well as PTSD–related psychological literature, abound with references to the unspeakability of the traumatic past, framing survivor experience as one of pathological repression and denial and descendant experience as one of pained ignorance. It was thus no surprise that at the outset of my interviews with children of Holocaust survivors, descendants claimed that due to the silence in their homes, they would most probably disappoint me, as they regretably had little to tell regarding their parents’ past. When asked why they did not break the silence and ask questions, the great majority of descendants explained that they feared opening up old wounds and hurting their parents. They then proceeded to tell me who had perished in their families and where their parents had spent their war years. However, they could provide only approximate chronological details of the dates or duration of their incarceration/hiding. When asking

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 199

Carol A. Kidron 199

them to tell me about the silence, richly evocative accounts of absence emerged. Emma recounts as follows:2 E: I’m sorry, but I think I don’t have much to say, I don’t know more than just very basic facts about my parents’ experience. You know, they were in Auschwitz, they were liberated and made Aliya [emigrated to Israel]. I don’t know … they … we never spoke about it at home. You didn’t speak about it … at least not then. There was just silence. (long pause) But you know, it was there, all the time, everywhere. C: What was there? E: The Holocaust … (pause) it was like a dark cloud hanging over everything. C: Could you tell you me what you mean by a dark cloud? E: It’s hard to describe. C: Could you maybe tell me what it felt like? E: I guess it’s a mood, or … maybe more … it’s hard to put into words.

Emma distinguishes between what she knows and does not know. As for the causal explanation of her ‘ignorance’, Emma points to the fact that speech as a medium of the transmission of potential knowledge was not utilised. More importantly, Emma culturally contextualises the phenomenon, informing us that the absence of speech on the topic of the Holocaust was normative behaviour when she was growing up, although today ‘things have changed’ and apparently one does speak of the Holocaust. Silence caps off Emma’s description of the absence of speech; however, after pausing, she refers enigmatically to another presence, namely ‘it’ or the Holocaust that was ‘everywhere’ in the home. It is not clear as to whether the omnipresence of the Holocaust (‘it was everywhere’) is intended to challenge the possible negation of speech about the Shoah that is silence (‘But, it was everywhere’), or on the contrary, opens up the experience of the presence of Holocaust–related silence as all encompassing and sorely felt. What is clear, however, is that ‘just silence’ and the Holocaust were both present in the place of speech and knowledge. Beyond Emma’s use of the ‘cloud’ metaphor, it was impossible for her to describe ‘in words’ what a cloud/Shoah felt like in her home. In other accounts, other complex and often contradictory metaphors such as ever–present void and permanent echo were utilised to evoke the feeling world of the presence of the past. The metaphoric descriptions above raise numerous questions. How

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

200

4/11/09

13:08

Page 200

Silent Legacies of Trauma

can the Holocaust be ‘present’ in the home? Something absent must be signified in order to become present. However, without speech – and the knowledge speech entails – how is the Shoah signified? Considering that Emma cannot put this presence ‘into words’, can other forms of non–verbal media signify the presence of the Holocaust without our explicit awareness of their process of signification? After a number of ‘failed interviews’ eliciting only references to domestic silence and the descendants’ resultant historical void, I changed my opening question from ‘What do you know about your parents’ past?’ to ‘Was the past present in your home?’ From that point on I received rich, emotively powerful accounts, lasting two to three hours, of the non–verbal forms of Holocaust presence. I also received accounts of parental partially–verbal references to the past which, despite initial avowals of ignorance, might be considered fragmentary familial tales.3

The Silent Matrix of Genocidal Presence The extended study of the phenomenological experience of trauma descendants found that parent–child silent face work, person–object interaction, and diverse forms of visceral embodied practices of survival form a silent matrix of Holocaust presence perpetually interwoven within the everyday domestic life–world (Kidron 2009). In the present study I will focus on face work, person–object interaction and food–related practices. Batya, a thirty–seven year old Holocaust descendant, describedher survivor father as being a zombie in daily life, dead among his living family members and alive only when ‘visiting’ the few surviving souvenirs of his ruptured past hidden away in a secret drawer in his bedroom dresser. Batya recounts her father’s daily death–like demeanour as follows: I would look at him sometimes and try to speak to him about something. He would have this glazed look in his eyes, as if he was far away. My brother would tell me to leave him alone. He’d say ‘can’t you see he’s not with us, he’s dead, he’s … there.’ Sometimes I’d try to catch his attention … look at him … he’d look back at me with those sad eyes. I knew he was there … I’d try to imagine … where he was, what he was feeling as he remembered … being there. According to Batya’s account, both her and her brother appear familiar with the facial signification of their survivor father’s painful recollection of the traumatic Holocaust past, the facial signification of what they both term being ‘there’. When attempting to speak to her father during these

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 201

Carol A. Kidron 201

reveries, Batya was faced with his silent sad gaze and the apparent insurmountable challenge of accessing her father via an alternative form of interaction – namely through a conversation of exchanged expressive glances and her empathic imagination as she tried to imagine where he was – where there was – and where his memory so to speak ‘had taken him’. At first glance, the above account of the silent survivor home is in keeping with the illness construct of survivor PTSD and the effects of intergenerationally transmitted PTSD. In keeping with the literature cited above, intergenerational relations between Batya and her father depict a wall of silence and avoidance, where the impaired parenting of anxiety–ridden and emotionally absent survivor parent transmits psychosocial scars to descendants and the absence of knowledge regarding the historical past. However, is it possible that silent parent–child encounters might perhaps somehow vicariously take – in Batya’s terms – the descendant ‘there’ so that she/he might share her/his parents’ passage into the past? Goffman’s pioneering study of ‘face work’ as an important part of self–presentation shifted scholarly attention away from speech to the rich world of facial and bodily gestures. According to Goffman, silent facial and bodily gestures, alongside spoken stories, function to constitute performances enacted for a particular audience. In fact numerous descendant narratives recounted the experience of parental face work or what Goffman termed the ‘giving off’ of emotive traces of the past that descendants described in interactionist terms as ‘recognisable tokens of meaning’ (Goffman 1959; Mead 1934). Later in her interview, Batya provides an account of the signification of emotive face work accompanied by person–object interaction and Holocaust–related embodied practices which, despite the silence, serve to intensify the presence of the past. She recounts her father’s sporadic visits to his hidden drawer of Holocaust mementos in his bedroom and the silent yet meaningful parent–child encounter that ensued: Sometimes I would follow him into the bedroom. The drawer was in his dresser, next to his bed. It was his secret place, where he kept things close to his heart … He would open the drawer and begin taking out a picture of himself with his parents from before the war and a collection of toys he had salvaged from his childhood. … The minute he opened the drawer his face changed. He became softer, more gentle, and … more alive. In our every day life he was … a zombie … you could see the death in his eyes … But when he opened the drawer and took out his things it was like he was taken back to his life before the Holocaust – before the rupture … to his childhood. He reenacted intimate moments of his childhood, playing with his magnets, smiling at his family in the picture. The

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

202

4/11/09

13:08

Page 202

Silent Legacies of Trauma

drawer for me was like an enchanted forest … not just because of its content but because I could be with the person I never really knew. We would sit together on his bed while he ‘played’ with his things. It was really … intimate … He never told me anything about the toys, or the people in the picture, no story, but by the way he acted … like a child … and the way he wouldn’t let any of us open the drawer ourselves or touch his things, we knew he was back there … The way he was when he played with the drawer, so different, so alive … we had to realise that his life with us was not real to him … because he never really left his past. If we were to use a psychological conceptual frame to deconstruct Batya’s narrative, we might conclude that the descendant was not only the victim of her father’s everyday traumatic numbness and apathy, but that even when he appeared to ‘come alive’ when re–enacting his childhood past, he failed to provide narrative tales of his childhood or allow his daughter to actively ‘play’ with him or gaze into his photographs in his hidden virtual world. The encounter provided no verbal or embodied interaction that would allow her to access a story or even an embodied memory of his past or his absent self. For Batya, it appeared to retain the perpetual silence and ultimate absence of the Holocaust and pre–Holocaust past. However, before diagnosing Batya as the victim of her father’s traumatic past, let us explore her experience from an emic perspective, as she perceives and narrates it. Despite their silence, Batya claims that her moments with her father allowed her to ‘enter his enchanted forest’, to ‘be with the person she never really knew’ and to share albeit passively in the ‘intimacy’ of his playful imaginary world, to be with him in his distant past. Intimate bonding was made possible via person–object interaction (Latour 1996), whereby the survivor’s pre–war mementos were material conduits bridging time and space to allow for the virtual experience of co–presence in the distant past. By no means belittling the empathic challenge of relating to and interacting with the ‘zombie’ that he was during the great majority of her childhood, Batya nonetheless paints a dual picture of both parental emotional absence alongside moments of intense emotional presence and sharing when he ‘opened up’. The text calls upon us to move beyond psychological and popular cultural frames of intergenerational dysfunctional silence to uncover the underlying silent connection, interaction and ‘communication’ and finally explore the way in which Batya entered the gateway into her father’s past. It illustrates the way in which silence did not preserve absence or prevent emotive interaction but rather functioned as a container – milieu – gateway that facilitated the movement into the past, into the otherwise sublime deathworld and lost pre–war life–world.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 203

Carol A. Kidron 203

As stated above, in the broader ethnographic study of Holocaust trauma descendant memory–identity work already described, descendant narrative accounts were seen to depict non–verbal and partially verbal forms of parent–child interaction that functions to constitute the active co–presence of the past in the so–called silent survivor home. Silent interaction entailed not only parent–child face work, person–object interaction with embodied and free–standing artifacts that survived the Holocaust, but also intergenerationally transmitted practices of survival. Food–related practices were one of these practices of survival. In popular cultural accounts of survivor family life, ‘obsessive’ food–related habits are perhaps the most extensively cited and stereotypical survivor characteristic. Interview accounts almost unanimously mentioned either the phenomenon of hoarding food in preparation for the next catastrophe, and/or parental pressure to finish food on one’s plate, avoiding at all cost the ‘sacrilege’ of throwing food out. Recalling the tragic accounts of wartime starvation and the critical magnitude of daily bread rations, the great majority of second– and third–generation interviewees recounted bread–related survivor practices. In keeping with popular cultural accounts, Chana jokingly describes the ‘recycling’ of bread: Bread was the most holy object in the house. They almost worshipped it. Every piece they ate was like … I don’t know … like reliving the moment they almost died of hunger and were saved by that piece of bread. So you never throw out bread, because it’s always as if it was that piece of bread. That meant that you eat old bread until it’s dry and then you turn it into toast, then bread crumbs, which become meatballs … and then when the bread crumbs are stale you feed it to the birds … but you never ever throw it out. Too holy to be discarded, Chana’s family’s bread is transformed and reincarnated into other forms of sustenance. While it cannot compete with the semiotic evocative potential of the objects in Batya’s father’s drawer, as Chana reflexively asserts, the practice of eating their daily pieces of bread nevertheless allows survivors to ritually re–enact the moment when they ate ‘that piece of bread’.4 Dan provides an additional food–related memory: ‘You had to leave an empty plate. These meals were never just sitting down to eat together, it was like the Shoah never ended, it returned every time you ate something. My wife tells me that I also have Shoah eating habits, that I‘m impossible if I don’t eat.’ Remaining fully present in their contemporary Israeli kitchen, the past is nevertheless co–memorated and re–presented through the daily enactment of Holocaust–inspired eating habits. As Dan explains, the Shoah ‘returned every time you ate’. This return of the past took the form

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

204

4/11/09

13:08

Page 204

Silent Legacies of Trauma

of precautionary practices, informing the second generation that one is never full enough and one can never discard what may potentially save your life. Thus, rather than the family going back into the past, it would appear that the strategic lessons would periodically haunt the present. The Holocaust was once again woven into daily intimate and corporeal life and Holocaust–related practices of survival which are transmitted from generation to generation.5

Fragmentary Speech and The Constitution of Genocidal Presence Despite the overall silence in survivor homes, descendants recount their parents’ sporadic, fragmentary verbal references to their Holocaust experiences. Verbal references took two different forms: the first, what Ruth Wajnryb terms Holocaust Dicta (2001: 192), and the second, fragmentary mythic tales of survival. Dicta were brief, one–sentence survivor references to conditions they withstood during the Holocaust such as cold, hunger, forced labour and the constant threat of death. For example, David recalls coming home after school and complaining that he was starving and wanted something to eat. His father would respond, ‘You think you’re hungry, you don’t know what hunger is!’ The great majority of descendants describe the occurence of dicta in the most mundane moments of daily life, arising when they complained of their own relatively minor hardships. In the same vein, Eva recounts telling her mother, while walking on a cold winter night, that it was too cold and they should go home. Her mother responded, ‘You think this is cold, this is nothing, you don’t know what cold is, I walked in the snow with only the shirt on my back’. As is reflected in descendant responses, these sudden references to the past, although amazingly sparse in historical content, transmitted numerous pedagogic, visceral and emotive messages. A number of descendants recall their parents’ dicta disparagingly, claiming for example as Nathan did that ‘it was unfair to judge us when we lived in such different times, how could we compete with their unbelievable endurance’. Nevertheless, Rina, echoing most descendant responses, was more forgiving: ‘It seemed almost normal to us that we had to meet their standards … it was just the way one had to be’. More importantly, as Dan asserts, these brief windows into the physical conditions endured during the genocide were opportunities to access rare bits of descriptive information and moments of empathy: ‘When they told me I had no idea how hungry one could be, I would try to imagine what it was like not to eat, or to eat so little and to be weak, so I could understand how it was for them.’ It may thus be claimed that during these unexpected and brief

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 205

Carol A. Kidron 205

verbal re–presentations of the embodied experiences of the past, descendants could familiarise themselves with the visceral sensations of genocidal suffering. In this way, despite the absence of historical detail regarding the past, they might still empathically imagine and share inter–subjective moments of embodied suffering.

Mythic Tales of Survival Despite their initial disavowal of knowledge regarding concrete events in their parents’ Holocaust past, almost all Holocaust descendants interviewed recalled that their parents had occasionally and apparently spontaneously recounted a near–death experience and/or key turning points in their battles for survival. Like the dicta above, they were always brief and devoid of temporal or spatial coordinates that might historicise the tale. Told with great pathos, in monologue form, they never triggered a dialogue with family members nor did they evoke questions that might access further historical elaboration. Many descendants explained that the same tale would be repeatedly and identically recounted by the survivor parent (see Wajnryb 2001). Becoming emblematic of their parent’s almost heroic nature, these ‘pivotal memories’ (Hollander–Goldfein 2002) consequently engendered ‘family scripts’ (Bertaux and Thompson 1993: 34) which, according to descendants, embedded and transmitted valorised key scenarios and key values central to their sense of self and mode of being. Tamar recounts her mother’s battle of will as follows: T: When I was very young I remember my mother telling me that one day in Auschwitz, when she was about to … give up, she realised that the only way to beat the Germans was to deny them what they want, that she die. She wrote on the wall of the camp block ‘I won’t die because that’s what they want’. This had a huge impact on me ... (tears well up in her eyes, she wipes them and pauses to compose herself). Sorry … [that’s okay]. Everything she was…was somehow rolled up in this story. Someone who endures, no matter what, never gives up… C: You said the story had a big impact on you? T: Well, it sounds corny I know but my mother was like a hero for me. She showed strength and determination under unbearable conditions. I think I try to be strong that way too and when someone or something stands in my way it somehow energises me instead of stopping me.6

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

206

4/11/09

13:08

Page 206

Silent Legacies of Trauma

Descendant Memories of Familial Post–Trauma When asked about their parents, 70 per cent of this descendant sample believed that their parents did suffer from various symptoms of PTSD; however, 80 per cent of this sample insisted that considering the intensity of their parents’ suffering, they were highly resilient and emotionally strong and did not require therapy. Regarding their own mental health, 80 per cent of descendant interviewees asserted that they did not believe they were suffering from the transmitted effects of PTSD. It is important to note that the entire sample showed great familiarity with popular cultural literature on transmitted PTSD and approximately 25 per cent had experienced some form of short– or long–term psychosocial therapy, support group or workshop in which they explored their psychological legacy. Nevertheless, more than half of this ‘psychologically sophisticated’ sample sharply critiqued the PTSD construct and the efficacy of therapy. When examining the texts of those who critiqued the construct, and a number of those who did not, an interesting phenomenon emerges. These descendants claimed that they were in fact srutim, a Hebrew slang expression literally translated in English as ‘scratched’ – parallel to the English slang ‘cracked’ or ‘touched’. Nevertheless, these descendants claimed that their scars were not markers of pathology or disorder, but rather fall within the norm and can be lived with in a reasonable manner. When, for example, David asked me jokingly if he was as sarut (the singular of srutim) as my previous interviewees, I asked him if he thought he was. He answered smiling, ‘Well I think I’m probably as sarut as the next guy but I live with it pretty well.’ Like Karen below, the great majority are unwilling to return to therapy, stating cynically: They say we are scratched (Srutim) (she laughs). Okay, maybe we aren’t totally normal … our parents screaming at night, hiding food in their pockets at weddings, checking if we’re alive all the time … okay so we have Post–Trauma (said with a cynical grin) … not bad huh…? But then so what … so we’ve got this defect (laughs), other people have other defects. But what good does it do me to break my head thinking about what it [Holocaust] did to me. I live my life, I manage, sometimes its harder and sometimes its not. You can’t say its all about what they [war] did to us … because it’s not. Simon, another critic of the PTSD construct who had also spent years in therapy after a messy divorce, goes one step further to question not only the psychological discourse but the postmodern search for culturally constructed explanatory models of selfhood. He asks me rhetorically if the Holocaust as key event in his narrative is ‘just decoration … my interpretation of our personal problems? Am I just telling you a nice story?

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 207

Carol A. Kidron 207

If someone will offer me another story or tool for happiness, I’ll take it’. When asking him to clarify he explains, ‘it is a means to an end but I can be the perfect post–modern man with many possible stories, all of them might be true.’ Nevertheless, one descendant describes the ‘scratch’ as a wound that is permanently embodied, creating a perpetual testament to the past: I have had a very hard life. But I am proud of the fact that I know who I am and have worked on myself, dealing with all my emotional scars and I hope improving myself all the time. But this Holocaust thing … its just too intense, part of our flesh … you can’t really ‘cure’ it. It will always be there … to remind us of what happened. As has already been asserted regarding descendants who attended a support group for children of Holocaust survivors (Kidron 2003), the accounts of the permanence of an emotional wound, and the disinterest in coping skills or ‘healing’, may actually be conceptualised as a form of descendent commemoration. By virtue of their wound they are transformed into wounded carriers of memory in their own right. As will be briefly discussed below, the importance of the wound as commemoration must be read as part and parcel of Jewish culture–specific paradigms of memory (Yerushalmi 1982).

Commemoration Holocaust–related memory work of trauma descendants in both the private and public domain must be contextualised within Jewish paradigms of memory. The remembrance and re–enactment of the past are key tropes in Jewish culture. In traditional liturgical texts, biblical founding myths structure Jewish conceptions of time and causality in history. Re–enactment takes place via ritual and liturgy where perpetual narration of mythic sequences guarantee that they remain culturally embedded as blueprints for interpretation. The imperative of personal remembrance encompasses the commemoration of communal and personal dead. The individual, perceived as the eternal witness embodying memory, and the community of which he/she is a part, loop back to the past in order to make that past present and to create a meaningful ‘place’ for the events and people on the continuum of history (Yerushalmi 1982). Filial responsibility to the memory of one’s parents and ancestors is of special importance and is deeply embedded in Jewish cosmology and praxis. The individual is also obliged to transmit the past to future generations. However, the Jewish witness need not have been an eye–witness to the past, as knowledge of the past is sufficient to require

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

208

4/11/09

13:08

Page 208

Silent Legacies of Trauma

testimony and transmission (Young 1988).7 In keeping with the above mnemonic tropes, the descendant sample unanimously expressed great concern with the future of Holocaust commemoration. The majority also recounted partaking in private votive practices of lighting candles in memory of the Holocaust dead and those who were more religiously observant recounted participating in synagogue–based communal prayers commemorating both family members killed in the Holocaust and communities lost to the genocide. Interestingly, however, when asked about the transmission of the Holocaust past to their children, or public forms of commemorative testimony to the past, descendants explained that they preferred to remain silent, avoiding any verbal interaction with their children surrounding the Holocaust past or public forms of testimony to their parents’ past or their own Holocaust–related experience in the shadow of the Holocaust. Descendants asserted that their children, the third generation, could access the familial tale directly from their aging survivor parents, many of whom have begun to publicly voice their Holocaust tales, or learn about other survivor tales from teachers and agents of memory in the public sphere. When asked why they themselves did not want to pass on their legacy (in the form of verbal accounts) to their children, Doris for example explained as follows:8 What can I tell them? I can’t tell them about the Holocaust. I don’t know anything. I guess I could tell them about what it was like to grow up with them [the survivors], in that silence, the crying at night, … but do we need to commemorate that, is that the Holocaust? …Who am I to compete with their story? And to be honest, I don’t want to, that’s not what they need to know, and I don’t want to tell it, let the experts do it.

The Cambodian Case Study Comparing Cambodian–Canadian and Jewish–Israeli responses to the genocide is extremely challenging. On the one hand, there are complex differences in present–day socioeconomic and political realities within divergent national contexts. On the other hand there are cosmological and cultural differences. Together they form a subtle dialectic. Although this chapter focuses primarily on the role of cultural factors framing descendant memory work, sociopolitical factors should not be overlooked. First and foremost, the Cambodian experience of genocide has been coloured by the unique sociopolitical context of ‘auto–genocide’ (see Ledgerwood et al. 1994), whereas Jewish victims of genocide historically perceived their perpetrators as a potentially antagonistic and ethnic and religious ‘Other’ even prior to the Holocaust.9 Post–genocide survivor

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 209

Carol A. Kidron 209

experience has also been shaped by drastically different social contexts. In Canada, Cambodian refugees were positioned as a religious and ethnic minority, socioeconomically under–privileged in a relatively prosperous host country (Mclellan 1999), which exacerbated and/or provided alternative sources of distress (see Sack et al. 1994). In contrast, the Jewish survivor was assimilated into the existing European–Jewish majority while their economic hardship of resettlement was not only substantially more short–lived but was also collectively shared with the native population. Ironically, the two groups move historically in opposite directions, from marginality to majority and visa versa. Although at first silenced by the ethos of native–born Israeli strength, the legacy of the victimhood of Jewish survivors (Bar–On 1992) has now found a relatively univocal voice in shared Israeli national master narratives of suffering and multiple monumental forms of public commemoration. This must be compared to the relative absence of public memory work in Cambodian diaspora communities around the world (Stevens 2001). However, as will be discussed below, these differences have also been shaped by key cultural – Jewish and Buddhist – paradigms of memory, entailing extremely different approaches to death, history and commemoration.

Khmer Narratives of Silence As in the case of children of Jewish Holocaust survivors, Cambodian –Canadian descendants recount the presence of silence in their homes surrounding the genocidal past, or what they refer to as ‘the time of Pot’.10 When asked at the beginning of the interview if they could tell me about their parents’ and/or their own experience during the genocide, Khmer young people showed little knowledge of their familial past. Unlike Israeli descendants, the great majority could not provide the names and locations of cities/villages or refugee camps where their parents had been during the genocide, nor could they provide a rough time–line of the events. Indeed, the great majority of Cambodian respondents had little general historical knowledge of the genocide, and have read no academic or popular culture accounts pertaining to it. 40 per cent expressed relative disinterest in doing so in the future. Beyond the very basic fact that their parents had been in Cambodia during the genocide, and had experienced some form of forced migration, harsh labour, hunger and the loss of immediate relatives, most were unable to tell me, when asked, how many, or even which of their relatives, had perished in the genocide. Again, in contrast to Israeli descendants, 30 per cent stated that they were not sure whether their close relatives, including older siblings, had died prior to the genocide or during the war. If they did know, they could not describe the way in which they had died.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

210

4/11/09

13:08

Page 210

Silent Legacies of Trauma

As described above, children of Jewish Holocaust survivors immediately ‘excused’ or accounted for their relative ignorance surrounding the familial past, by evoking the milieu of silence ever present in their homes. In contrast, Khmer descendants did not describe an overall silent presence of the past in the home, but rather only spoke of the lack of verbal references to the genocide, essentially depicting a very different form of silence. Penny recounts her parents’ silence surrounding genocidal suffering as follows: It’s one thing for us to know that they suffered, it’s another thing to talk about it. They don’t bring it up and we don’t ask questions. I don’t think they want to get into it … my people don’t talk about suffering, cry or show emotions. To allow for the passage of life is a way of living, you just be. Echoing Penny’s description of ‘her people’s’ way of being, Rachel explains: We [Khmer] don’t speak our minds easily. We’re born that way. We are taught at home that children are not involved in what’s going on and if something happens in the family they teach you that you’re not supposed to talk about it. Strangers should never know about it. It’s just not in our make–up, even if I have a problem, I’d never talk to friends, or my children, or my parents, maybe … I’d tell my husband. Never a psychiatrist. The Khmer descendants either claim that their parents (and they themselves) do not wish to speak of the past, or they refer to cultural norms and practices relating to expressions of distress. Therapy appears not to be an option for the Canadian–Cambodian. Indeed, Seth insists that his family’s silence is ‘Asian’, in other words culture–specific: ‘My family is a typical Asian family. We don’t talk so much, we don’t discuss things at the table the way others do.’11Keith echoes this and directly challenges the PTSD construct: ‘The older generation in Canada, they don’t talk. It’s taboo. It’s problematic to ask them questions, that’s just who we are. It’s not that we’re traumatised or something, we don’t talk about it because that’s just Cambodian culture.’ Although, as stated above, silence might signify the presence of traumatic memory, resistant to narrativisation, the descendants above all highlight a lay awareness of the relative value accorded to speech and silence in different cultures (Crapanzano 2004; Kidron 2009).12 Sarah too refers to Cambodian cultural silence, but she adds a socioeconomic factor – namely the community’s more pressing need to

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 211

Carol A. Kidron 211

survive as new immigrants in Canada: ‘Cambodians do not openly share their problems, they just deal with it … there’s a lot of pressure just to survive and there’s no time or energy to share your feelings, anyway, Cambodians don’t share their feelings … I did speak to my father once when I was twelve … but I didn’t want to open old wounds.’ Larry also refers to the more pressing and multiple problems shared by the Cambodian immigrants in Canada, but he provides a further piece of the emergent cultural puzzle to account for parental silence: ‘I think my parents were ashamed of what happened to them … they thought it happened because they were weak. Silence is strength and if you speak about it – it makes you weak. The stronger the community gets, I think they might start to speak about it, but now they still have too many problems to solve.’ In contrast to the accounts of culture–specific, normative silence as Khmer ‘modes of being’, according to Larry, if one is not ashamed of the past, one might be willing to speak. However, again returning to a descriptive account of culture–specific behaviour, he explains that speaking of suffering implies or perpetuates weakness whereas remaining silent regarding one’s suffering, perhaps exhibiting stoic silence, reflects a much admired strength. He is thus the only descendant to predict that as the community grows stronger they may not fear the weakness entailed in articulating their historical suffering. Echoing Keith, Sam explains why voicing the past and inquiring into the historical details of suffering go against the grain of Cambodian cultural values and ideal selfhood: S: We Cambodians don’t like to speak about the past. Especially if you experienced bad things you keep it inside. We don’t share anything private, and if you do it’s only in the family … and even with your family … not much. If it comes up … we just listened. They told the story and we just listened. The story told itself, we just let them tell it. C: Did you ever think of asking questions? S: If you interrupt … the details don’t reveal themselves. There is really no need anyway for the details. Everybody understands suffering and does not need affirmation of what kind it was, or what did they do, for a mind to indulge in such misery does not breed the kind of attitude the Khmers have, Khmers are strong, proud forgiving but not forgetful. Although descendants stress there is a cultural taboo against speaking about the past, Sam admitted that survivor parents would make sporadic verbal references to wartime experiences or briefly teach descendants a genocide–related moral lesson. Nevertheless, even when provided with verbal triggers, descendants like Sam chose not to request historical details. As he explains, questions and the resultant dialogue regarding

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

212

4/11/09

13:08

Page 212

Silent Legacies of Trauma

past suffering – what he refers to as an ‘indulgence in misery’ – would be counterproductive to normative and desirable Khmer ‘attitudes’ of strength, pride and forgiveness. Although diverse in many ways, the texts above all have in common an attempt to account for the silence surrounding the genocide past. It may be noted that contrary to discursive explanatory models pertaining to the psychologically damaging wall of silence in survivor families, and the call for a therapeutic or political voice, many of the accounts focus on and validate culture–specific Cambodian silent modes of being that are depicted as empowering. Unlike the case of Holocaust descendants, one does not sense that Cambodian parental silence was experienced as an oppressive presence. The presence of silence they describe apparently does not embed and preserve the presence of the past, but rather it appears to facilitate the absence, or at least the attenuation of remembering. One may thus ask if children of survivors were not transmitted historically rich verbal accounts, are they not in Sam’s words ‘forgetful’? Do Khmer cultural norms surrounding personal or collective suffering promote forgetting, or did descendants experience a silent, alternative form of genocidal presence and transmission in the home?

Silent Presence or the Absence of the Genocidal Cambodian Past? Contrary to Jewish Holocaust descendants, the majority of Cambodian descendants do not depict a matrix of silent genocidal presence in the Cambodian home. There were no accounts of parent–child silent face work, parent–child interaction with surviving objects, or food, health or risk–taking related embodied practices of survival. Attempting a direct question, I asked descendants if they had experienced ‘the presence of the genocide in their homes’ and all but two descendants replied either that they had not, or that they did not understand the question. After briefly describing the presence of the Holocaust past in my own childhood home, most replied negatively, stating that they had no such experience of the presence of the past in their homes. However, there were two exceptions which present an important insight into Cambodian silence. At the end of my interview with Penny, I asked her if the genocide was present in her home. After a very long pause, she responded: P: Yes, it was present in the pictures of my grandparents in our shrine … every time my mother wanted to talk to them, she would go to the shrine in the living room … It was always there for me … on the wall. We don’t know what happened, they never told us children, but the pictures are present on the wall. It’s the only thing we have of them…

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 213

Carol A. Kidron 213

C: Did you ever go to the shrine, look at the pictures? P: Sometimes I would look at my grandmother and think … how did she die … (she suddenly weeps, quickly avoids eye contact and apologises) I’m so sorry I … never … cry … never! Penny’s response was unusual in a number of ways. Reminiscent of the very emotional responses of Jewish children of survivors, Penny was the only Cambodian–Canadian descendant to show any strong emotions during an interview. Her obvious discomfort, apology and surprise bear witness to her departure from the more stoic model of Khmer composure. She was also the only Cambodian descendant, other than one young woman who had lost her father in the genocide, who spoke of an intimate longing to have known the dead. Penny was also the only respondent to describe the survivor parent as practicing memory work in everyday life. Penny’s mother’s visits to the shrine recall Batya’s father’s visits to the drawer. It is important to note, however, that in contrast to Batya and other Holocaust descendants, Penny does not describe her own imaginative memory work vis–à–vis her grandmother’s pictures as part of an inter–subjective and intimate practice with her mother. We cannot know from Penny’s text whether she does not join her mother due to the nature of the shrine as a more religious/spiritual site entailing a solitary votive experience, or whether this form of parent–child interaction would breach the rather strict limits surrounding intergenerational emotive interaction. Although Penny’s mother’s interaction with her dead parent and Penny’s personal attempt to ‘imagine’ her grandmother’s death might be read as the consciously conjured presence of the past interwoven in the mundane domestic space and everyday present life–world of the family, it should be noted that Penny and others describe Buddhist shrines as containing photographs of all deceased relatives, not only those who died in the genocide. The domestic shrine, as lieu de memoire (Nora 1989), was thus not a commemorative site of genocide as was Batya’s drawer or Chana’s slice of bread, but rather a familial meditative corner facilitating the ‘merit–making’ related to the commemoration of ancestors (see Mortland 1994). As Seth explains, he too would occasionally pray (alone) at his family shrine and attempt to access ‘merit from the dead’. When I asked if he ever thought about the genocide when praying or about how his relatives had died, he insisted: ‘No, all the dead are the same … there’s no difference how or when they died. We respect them all and get merit from all of them.’

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

214

4/11/09

13:08

Page 214

Silent Legacies of Trauma

Verbal Fragmentary Transmission of Genocidal Past Parallel to the case of Holocaust descendants, Cambodians describe the occasional and spontaneous verbal references to the genocide past. As in the Holocaust case, these references take two forms: short dicta and the longer, yet no less fragmentary, mythic tales of survival, both embedding explicit moral lessons regarding valorised modes of being. Karl describes his father’s occasional commentary on the world and advice: ‘He never talked about what happened to him during the war but it was just terrible experiences and that’s what he remembered. My father would tell us, “the world is a terrible and evil place, you need to look out for yourself, be careful of those who want to do you harm”.’ Although Karl begins his account with the statement that his father never ‘talked about the past’, he proceeds to describe his father’s brief comments on the moral deprivation of the world and the related message of survival he wishes to transmit to his son. As his father’s ‘terrible’ memories frame Karl’s text, he appears to be well aware of the fact that his father’s world–view and concomitant advice have emerged from his ‘terrible’ genocidal past. Thus, although the survivor parent did not ‘talk’ about his past, through these fragmentary verbal messages or dicta, his father’s past left its mark on the descendant generation. Aiming not only to transmit their view of the world and tools of survival, Cambodian parents would also use dicta to discipline and educate what they perceived as potentially lazy or spoiled children. In this process they provided descendants with fragmentary glimpses of the horrors of the death world that they had experienced. Penny, for example, recalls her mother’s critical comments when she would complain of being hungry. Her mother would tell her: ‘You think you’re hungry, you don’t know what it feels like to be really hungry.’ Although Penny was forgiving of her mother’s scolding, Mike resented his father’s remarks: ‘I’m sick of my father telling me “you’re lazy, when I was your age I carried shit all day on my back”. I don’t have to feel bad or lazy because of that, things are different now.’ Although the above dicta are not situated within a wider historical narrative, they do morally frame the descendant world–view. As such these genocidal lessons shape a particular mode of being in the sense that they clearly transmit a legacy of the past to children of survivors. This point is articulated by Ken: ‘I guess it would have been important for us to document our parents’ story, but parts of the story would always get lost anyway and what’s really important is not the story but the themes and universal values that are under the surface, that’s what we need to pass on.’

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 215

Carol A. Kidron 215

Mythic Tales While rich in genocide–related dicta, only five out of twenty–three Cambodian descendant narrative accounts relate mythic tales of survival, far less than the Holocaust sample. Although infrequent, these mythic tales embed the same moral messages and culturally validated key scenarios of survival. Sean recalls his mother’s tale as follows: My mother would tell me, ‘you think you’re tough, but if I dump you in the woods you wouldn’t last a day, because you wouldn’t know what to do. I know what to do. You grew up in Toronto … I made it in Toronto with nothing in my pocket. I’ve lived in those camps. I know what it’s like to look for and eat grasshoppers, I know what it feels like to have bombs falling down next to you. I know what it’s like to watch a kid die in front of you. See kids deserted on the road and you want to pick them up but you can’t because you need to watch out for your own, so that’s why you need to keep working hard.’ A couple a days ago my mom fought with my sister. She nagged at me that I don’t help her with my sister. Now that I’m older I think I understand now … that you gotta work hard and watch out for your own. This tale is fraught with vivid images of death and devastation. Although she begins with a relatively benign critique of her spoiled son, and proceeds to only vaguely glorify her own resourcefulness, she dramatically shifts to a devastating depiction of her genocide experience. From hunger, to near death experience, the witnessed execution of innocent lives and the moral crisis of showing a blind eye to suffering, the survivor leads her son vicariously through hell, in order to transmit a moral lesson of hard work, responsibility and family solidarity. Despite his young age of seventeen, Sean cannot dismiss his mother’s message and is able to adopt her world–view and ideal mode of being in the practice of everyday life. Once again, beyond the transmission of the events of her past, the genocide has left a fateful trace on the descendants’ moral universe. Betty recounts her mother’s battle to survive alone after she lost her entire family. This tale creates an exceptionally symbiotic emotional link between mother and daughter as her tale of survival includes Betty as her yet unborn child. The tale transforms Betty into a survivor in her own right and creates a moral burden for this young woman (aged twenty–three) as her mother’s life–line. Betty’s mythic tale unfolds as follows: My mom told me how my father was killed, her parents, two sisters and a brother all in one day. She was pregnant with me and wanted to

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

216

4/11/09

13:08

Page 216

Silent Legacies of Trauma

die … but she knew she had to struggle to survive for my sake. She told me she had to pretend to be illiterate so the Khmer Rouge wouldn’t kill her and dirty her face so they wouldn’t see how white she was [the rural peasant class was predominantly darker skinned]. After all that you can’t help but realise how life is precious and appreciate every minute. For Betty, the events of the transmitted historical tale may be perceived as her own personal founding or creation story. Although her tale is in fact unique, as reflected in the Jewish tales above, and in Sean’s tale, all genocidal domestic myths (Natanson 1970) may be read as moral founding events, framing one’s moral universe and thus shaping descendant meaning worlds. As in the case of the Holocaust descendants, Cambodian respondents were asked whether they felt that the genocide had in any way defined their sense of self, their attitudes about others and their view of the world. As reflected in the dicta and mythic tales, respondents highlighted their view of the ideal self as stoic, hard–working, and committed to their families. Once again echoing the Holocaust sample, they also asserted that they could not help being wary of those who may wish them ill. As David explains: ‘Our parents never trusted anyone, after the Pol Pot time, how could they? … I think that makes me suspicious too, although I’d like to try to focus on the good in people.’

Traumatic Legacies Most surprisingly, twenty–one out of twenty–three Cambodian Canadians interviewed asserted that neither their parents nor themselves suffered from the psychosocial scars of genocide. In great contrast to the Holocaust sample, they also did not refer to any form of descendant emotional wound or distinct ‘scratch’. The first exception, Sonia, described her own memories of terrifying raids in the refugee camps which obliged her family to flee in the middle of the night: ‘I remember running in the dark, I was terrified’. According to Sonia, as a result of this early trauma, she suffers as an adult from depression and anxiety and has sporadically been in therapy since early adolescence. The second exception is Sarah, who believes her mother does exhibit PTSD–related symptoms, as do many other survivors. It is important to note that Sarah is a mental health professional and therefore highly invested in the therapeutic ethos. Interestingly however, Sarah asserts that she herself does not suffer from the intergenerational effects of PTSD. In addition, echoing the majority of my respondents, she added the following comments to her ‘diagnosis’: ‘Our community is struggling with poverty,

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 217

Carol A. Kidron 217

unemployment and substance abuse. Many of us come from broken families. Our parents’ lives were disrupted and they will never be able to really pull their lives together here in Canada. All this contributes to their emotional distress.’ When I told Sarah that my other respondents attributed their parents’ emotional battles to their socioeconomic status and difficult acclimation to Canadian life, and not to genocide–related trauma, she responded that this reflected their ignorance and not the Cambodian reality. Most interesting however, were the lengthy references to Cambodian culture, specifically Buddhism, as a source of resilience and emotional strength. Respondents directly attributed their parents’ emotional resilience to Cambodian Buddhist precepts. Ken explains: ‘Buddhism tells us that suffering is a part of life. This helped my father get over his traumatic experience. Belief systems like Buddhism are meant to strengthen people and help them succeed.’ Karl’s comparison of his parents’ very different attitudes toward life once again brings home the contribution of Buddhist beliefs: My grandfather was a Buddhist monk. He learned peace of mind and how to deal with suffering and passed it on to my mother. She can tell me about the bad that happened but also about how you can get over it, and she teaches me that life has a good side to it too. My father, on the other hand, he still hasn’t dealt with what happened because he isn’t connected to his spiritual side. Sam was particularly insightful regarding the topic of trauma and transmitted trauma and its link to Buddhism. He was one of two respondents who provided consistently lengthy accounts: The literature talks about these people [survivors] as victims who have been traumatised and that they’re sick and miserable. I felt that these people were really strong and healthy and not weak or sick. And after they survived it made them even stronger. Like my father said, during the Y2K thing [the panic around a technology crash at turn of millennium] that ‘nothing could beat me now, I lived through much worse. I can survive on almost no food. I’ve done it before I can do it again.’ So I think they were really resilient, really strong enough to start their lives again. And they know they survived because they were strong. Regarding Buddhism Sam is no less expressive: I think the mentality, the way you live your life in general effects how you experience suffering. They believe in Karma, so they believe the

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

218

4/11/09

13:08

Page 218

Silent Legacies of Trauma

fact that it happened, your suffering, or death, is an effect of natural causes ... they accept what happened to them … not being angry, bitter or vengeful. ... Acceptance here does not warrant the fact that it is acceptable conduct, but rather that it happened, it’s horrible but we must move on because it was just a matter of Karma. I asked Sam if it was possible that the Khmer may still have suffered the long–term effects of trauma despite their acceptance. He responded: ‘The nature of the strength that prevails above all else leads me to believe that the effects of trauma are negligible … trauma is like Atkins diet 2.0, it’s just the next fad’. On the subject of intergenerationally transmitted trauma, Sam adds: ‘they say things can affect you even in the womb … these are just conjectures … I was very young [in the refugee camp] and what affects you is the context where you grew up and for me that was Canada and I have no recollections of the early years, so it didn’t affect me.’ It may be enlightening to contextualise the above references to Buddhism as part and parcel of Cambodian–Canadian diaspora–based identity work. As Keith reflexively noted, he joined the Asian students’ club and began to explore his heritage for the first time when he discovered ‘how different he was from white students’. Only a comparative study with descendants in Cambodia would determine whether this implies that Cambodian–Canadian youth might have otherwise appealed to psychological theories to account for familial responses to the genocide.

Commemoration Perhaps even more surprising than descendant attitudes toward traumatic legacies, is their disinterest in and at times complete rejection of commemorative practice, be it first– or second–generation commemoration. In order to understand the above attitudes toward commemoration, it is important to consider the role of history and memory in the Cambodian world–view. When I asked descendants about the place of the genocide in Cambodian history, many returned to the question of Karma and acceptance and the deleterious effects of dwelling unnecessarily on the past while Ron explained that ‘time itself from a Buddhist perspective was in fact an illusion’, making collective memory superfluous. The majority asserted that although it was important to know about the Pol Pot time, the genocide should not be considered more important than other events in their past. In great contrast to the perceived centrality of the Holocaust in Jewish history and collective memory, Penny explains: ‘We accept the past and deal with the present, the genocide is over, we look toward the future. It was just one event and not even a major one.’ When asking Seth if he would be

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 219

Carol A. Kidron 219

interested in establishing a memorial in Canada to commemorate the genocide, he asserts: ‘I don’t think we need one, everyone remembers their own dead privately at home. We could have a heritage and history museum though.’ Asking how much of the museum would be dedicated to the genocide, he appeared confused and asked me to explain the question a number of times, until he responded, ‘everything would be represented equally, the genocide is just one part of our history’. When I asked Seth if he would wish to transmit anything about the genocide to his children, he said: ‘No, not openly, unless they asked me questions.’ Sam makes a final comparison between commemoration in Cambodia and in Canada: Now if I have children who are as enquiring as me, then I’m pretty sure they will discover what happened in the past, but none of this is relevant to the situation they are in and also it does nothing in terms of making them better people. What we ought to do is learn to love them and … pass down the virtues that were taken from our parents as it pertains to the situations related to the war. It is important for it to remain in history, but not to be reflected on in the future. A future remembered in good nature is better than a forgotten past reflected upon in sorrow.

Discussion This comparative study of Cambodian–Canadian and Israeli–Holocaust trauma descendants set out to evaluate the similarities and differences of trauma descendant emic experiences of intergenerational transmission of genocidal legacies. The comparison of the two descendant samples yielded significant differences in the perceived presence or absence of the transmitted genocidal past in everyday life, the mechanisms with which that presence is maintained or curtailed, the perceived content and cultural meaning attributed to that presence and finally the future trajectory of the presence and transmission of the past. Despite the obvious importance of divergent socioeconomic and political contexts, descendant accounts of their very different experiences point to the constitutive role of culture in shaping the contours of descendant memory work. Having highlighted culturally specific paradigms and practices of memory, the study critiques epistemologies of Holocaust and genocide studies that draw on therapeutic and political practices that often conceptualise and ‘treat’ trauma descendant experience as universal. Both Israeli and Khmer descendants recount parental silence surrounding the genocidal past, and both groups consciously chose to respect survivor silence. Differences emerge in the attributed reasons for

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

220

4/11/09

13:08

Page 220

Silent Legacies of Trauma

this choice, with Cambodians appealing to culture–specific inter–familial silence and Israeli–Jews relating to more ‘universal’ inter–personal concerns for parental well–being. Furthermore, the degree and the content of the presence of silence in the everyday life–worlds of the different groups differ. There is a relative absence of non–verbal presence of the past in the domestic life–worlds of the Khmer, while the Jewish descendants recount a perpetual amorphous sense of genocidal presence. Despite its amorphous quality, Israeli descendants depicted a complex matrix of non–verbal mechanisms of intergenerational transmission of surviving traces of the past, ranging from parent–child face work, person–object interaction and embodied practices of survival. Both groups recall brief verbal references to the past in the form of dicta and fragmentary ‘domestic myths’.13 These references were seen to embed and transmit key genocide–related personal values and scenarios among both groups, such as emotional strength and endurance, and family solidarity. Both groups also recounted transmitted world–views, such as the instrumentally critical view of the world as a dangerous or evil place. Unique to each group, the Khmer unanimously highlighted the importance of hard work and Jews emphasised a sense of existential loneliness. Thus, these dicta and mythic tales provided brief glimpses into the genocidal experience, allowing for not only empathic identification but also the transmission of genocide–specific modes of being. The most blatant differences between the two groups emerge in regards to self–perceived psychosocial effects of trauma and intended practices of commemoration. The Khmer respondents almost unanimously assert they are not suffering from the intergenerational effects of PTSD, whereas the Israeli sample, albeit critical of the psychological construct, nevertheless describe the experience of an emotional wound that cannot be healed. Most interestingly, core religious Jewish and Buddhist paradigms of memory appear to have engendered these very different experiences of what has been conflated in the literature as a potentially universal trauma–related and intergenerationally transmitted experience of distress and suffering. Rejecting the role of carriers of collective and even familial memory, both groups show little interest in providing public testimony to their parents’ past and even have their doubts regarding the degree to which they will transmit the little historical knowledge they do have (or their own experiential embodied memories of their childhood) to future generations. Once again, culture–specific Jewish and Buddhist paradigms emerge as shaping the contours of these attitudes. Although Jewish paradigms promote the practice of intergenerational transmission of memory, the Israelis suffice in the existential status of their wounded commemorative role, preferring to relegate the role of transmission to their survivor parents and the education system. Alternatively, the Khmer

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 221

Carol A. Kidron 221

appeal to Buddhist principles such as Karma and other general cosmological precepts which favour forward–looking modes of being. As far as the future of public collective memory of the genocide is concerned, the samples express key differences regarding the centrality/marginality of collective memory. Whereas the Israeli sample views the future of public Holocaust remembrance as very important, the Khmer appear relatively indifferent to future public or even communal–ethnic commemorative projects. This difference may very well be related to their very basic readings of their respective collective histories, with Israelis perceiving the Holocaust as one, if not the major event in Jewish history, whereas the Khmer assert that the genocide is only one of many equally important events. Recalling the trauma–related literature outlined above, it may be asserted that descendant accounts challenge what appears to be a reductionist epistemology that has pathologised and appropriated descendant voices for historical and or politically motivated commemorative projects (Kidron 2009). One may ask, how are we to explain this gap between academic discourse and descendant accounts of everyday lives, between discourse and practice? Some might resort to the Marxian–Foucauldian concept of false consciousness, or a psychological reading regarding the repression of latent trauma–ridden identities. Considering that the postmodern individual is so bombarded with both popular cultural psychology and genocide–related commemorative representations, it would, in my view, demean our subjects to deny them even this minimal reflexivity. Perhaps anthropology’s most important contribution has been the importance of accessing the emic perspective and placing great value on the interview as a site for the constitution of selfhood, and the belief that the self that emerges is not a false, or screened–self but a narratively true, while forever fluid, self. Although recent psychological literature has in fact drawn attention to individual resilience (Bonanno 2004), the great majority of academic and popular cultural accounts present trauma victims and their descendants as psychosocially wounded, while ignoring more positive characteristics such as strength of spirit, human endurance, hope, and sacrifice for significant others. The data above allows us to consider not only the ways in which these empowering legacies have been tacitly transmitted in everyday life, but also how heterogeneous effects that have been conflated under the rubric of ‘traumatic experience’ may have constituted micro–cultures with culture–specific values, practices and modes of being. Although studies have begun to consider the long–term macro effect of trauma on the social fabric of nations and ethnic groups (Alexander 2004), micro–cultures of families or communities of survivors are still very much within the exclusive domain of the psychological scholarship. Moving beyond the specific question of trauma and resilience, both case

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

222

4/11/09

13:08

Page 222

Silent Legacies of Trauma

studies may serve to highlight the general importance of a closer reading of culture–specific conceptualisations of selfhood, personal and collective suffering, and memory/history and the way in which these conceptualisations enable or curtail memory work. In the present study, religious paradigms appear to play a central role in the constitutive process of all these conceptualisations. As asserted by many of the descendants, the way in which one learns these Jewish and Buddhist paradigms is especially amorphous, in the sense that one need not observe religious ritual or even be proficient in the basic precepts of one’s belief system to have internalised core principles as part and parcel of one’s taken–for–granted life–world. Despite the extensive ethnographic accounts of culture–bound illnesses, somatisation, healing and related belief systems (Hinton 2001 et al.; Kleinman et al. 1997), and cross–cultural studies of collective memory (Schwarcz 1998), there have been few attempts to examine the way in which the above core–cultural conceptualisations of selfhood, illness and memory work de–legitimise or valorise remembering and forgetting or how and why they constitute unique mechanisms of transmission, be they verbal, embodied, or ideational. Finally, the above comparative study problematises the taken–for–granted dichotomy of remembering and forgetting. Beginning with the Jewish–Israeli case, domestic silence and rejection of familial historicity, and their implications regarding the absence of intergenerational transmission, only appear to signify forgetting. Yet alternative forms of non–verbal interaction and embodied memory which imply the commemoration of genocidal death worlds are interwoven in the everyday life–world of the family. From the emic point of view of descendants, who fear the loss of intimacy and authenticity in public forms of commemoration, it is actually verbal, historical and collective memory that verge on forgetting. Although the Khmer study appears to signify a more conventional reading of cultural forgetting, here too a transmitted genocide–related world–view and mode of being present alternative conduits of transmitted memory. The numerous benign or empowering characteristics constituted or fortified by genocide are referred to by descendants as encapsulating ‘Khmerness’ as they know it (see Ledgerwood et al. 1994), signifying the transmission of an alternative legacy. Once again, this form of ‘re–membering’ the past may not contribute to a historical canon, or to monumental commemorative projects, but it is a cultural legacy that challenges our conceptualisation of processes of remembrance and forgetting. As mental health professionals begin to work with Khmer survivors and their descendants and memory workers establish commemorative projects, introducing western forms of talk therapy and testimony, the above findings point once again to the importance of culturally sensitive

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 223

Carol A. Kidron 223

conceptualisations of illness, healing and memory work. Further comparative studies are called for so that lessons learned from the victims of genocide may serve to sensitise those who seek to interpret, heal, historicise and liberate silent voices of genocide.

Notes * I would like to sincerely thank Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm for their very insightfull comments and editorial suggestions during all stages of the writing process. I would also like to thank Stuart McLean and Paul Antze for their thought-provoking reviews that ultimately enrich this chapter. Donna Young’s critical ethnographic and editorial eye was also indispensable. I would also like to thank Michael Lambek, Allen Young and Laurence Kirmayer, who as my hosts during my postdoctoral research in Canada, triggered much thought. I am grateful to the Halbert Exchange Program, the CIHR Training Program in Culture and Mental Health Services, and the Morris Ginsberg Foundation for the funding towards my postdoctoral research in Montreal and in Toronto between 2005 and 2006. I would also like to thank the Canadian-Cambodian Association of Ontario for their great assistance and my respondents for allowing me to share in their memories. 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

Goffman's concept 'facework' conceptualised non–verbal facial interaction (1959) as one form of taken for granted interpersonal nonverbal interaction between two or more people present. The process of facework was understood by Goffman as the use of facial gestures to “give off” emotive traces that were “recognizable tokens of meaning” which ultimately facilitated intersubjective meaning and understanding. In the paper herein, I refer to nonverbal facial forms of parent–child interaction. All names were altered for confidentiality. In middle age, 50 per cent of the descendant sample began practices of public memory work that was experiential in nature, such as attending roots trips to Europe and Greece, attending museum and ethnic based organisation lectures/ceremonies where they learned about their communal/ethnic legacy. Some descendants participated in internet chats and a minority accessed information from their children who heard testimonies from their grandparents. Thus, recalling Seremetakis’ account (1994) of the nostalgic act of eating a peach that did or did not taste like the peach of her youth, the commensal act of eating bread incarnates the sensuous memory of the satisfaction of life–threatening hunger. Grandchildren of survivors – or the third generation – also recount having inherited Holocaust–related practices such as the attempt to avoid discarding food, yet as one moves into the third generation, far fewer practices are recounted. Natanson (1970) makes the distinction between historiography and testimony as epistemology on the one hand and family tales as ‘domesticated myth’ on the other. In contrast to history, and culturally re–constituted public testimony, domesticated myth does not document the past for the sake of scientific endeavour, posterity or even commemoration, but rather appears to transmit a particular feeling world, meaning world, moral lesson encapsulating personal, familial and collective key scenarios, values or attributes. It should be noted that non–observant Israeli–Jews partake in these rituals in the domestic sphere and in civil religious commemorative public practice. As noted in Kidron (2003), descendant support group participants did in fact speak of transmitting their emotional wound to their children as part of their obligations to the dictates of collective commemoration and not the transmission of historical information they knew.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

224

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

4/11/09

13:08

Page 224

Silent Legacies of Trauma

In 1970 General Lon Nol’s military coup deposed Prince Shihanouk and allied itself with the US, at which point the Cambodian monarchy was renamed the Khmer Republic. US and south Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia to block north Vietnamese incursion. Communist insurgency, aided by north Vietnamese support, culminated in 1975 in the downfall of the Khmer Republic and the rise of the Communist Party of Kampuchea and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime. The CPK instigated the evacuation of urban populations to the countryside to work as farmers. Beyond the brutal mass round–ups and executions of intellectuals, bureaucrats and businessmen, educated Cambodians and Buddhist monks, hundreds of thousands died of starvation and disease. The total death toll between 1975 and 1979 has been estimated at one to three million. It should be noted that Khmer descendants were far more reticent than Israeli descendants. Their responses were on the whole briefer than those of Israeli descendants. For a discussion on Asian silence see Dunlop (1999). The self–attribution of ‘Asian silence’ may have emerged in the multi–cultural setting of Canadian society. Although the comparison of the two descendant groups clearly points to the relative absence of the non–verbal presence of the genocide past in the Cambodian–Canadian home, the constitutive role of dicta and mythic tales in the formation of a Khmer mode of being implies that one cannot claim that the genocidal past was absent in the Cambodian–Canadian home. There also may be silent forms of presence in the Cambodian–Canadian home that have not been narrativised in the interview.

References Alexander, J.C. 2004. ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, in J.C. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Geisen and P. Sztompka (eds), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1–30. Altounian, J. 1999. ‘Putting into Words, Putting to Rest and Putting Aside the Ancestors – How an Analysand who Was Heir to the Armenian Genocide of 1915 Worked Through Mourning’, International Journal of Psycho–Analysis 80(3): 439–48. Antze, P. 1996. ‘Telling Stories, Making Selves: Memory and Identity in Multiple Personality Disorder’, in P. Antze and M. Lambek (eds), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York: Routledge, pp. 3–24. Barocas, H.A. and C. Barocas. 1973. ‘Manifestations of Concentration Camp Effects on the Second Generation’, American Journal of Psychiatry 130(7): 820–21. Bar–On, D. 1992. ‘Israeli and German Students Encounter the Holocaust through a Group Process: “Working Through” and “Partial Relevance”’, International Journal of Group Tensions 22(2): 81–118. Becker, G., Y. Beyene Y and P. Ken. 2001. ‘Memory, Trauma and Embodied Distress: The Management of Disruption in the Stories of Cambodians in Exile’, Ethos 21(3): 320–45. Berger, P. and T. Luckmann. 1967. Social Construction of Reality. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Bertaux, D. and P. Thompson. 1993. ‘Introduction’, in D. Bertaux and P.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 225

Carol A. Kidron 225

Thompson (eds), Between Generations: Family Models, Myths, and Memories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–12. Bit, A. 1991. The Warrior Heritage: A Psychological Perspective of Cambodian Trauma. California: Seanglim Bit. Bonanno, G. A. 2004. ‘Loss, Trauma and Human Resilience: Have we Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive after Extremely Aversive Events?’, American Psychologist 59(1): 20–28. Brave–Heart, M.Y.H. and L.M. DeBruyn. 1998. ‘The American Indian Holocaust: Healing Historical Unresolved Grief’, American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research 8(2): 56–78. Cain, C. 1991. ‘Personal Stories: Identity Acquisition and Self–Understanding in Alcoholics Anonymous’, Ethos 19(2): 210–52. Caruth, C. 1995. ‘Recapturing the Past – Introduction’, in C. Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 151–57. Crapanzano, V. 2004. Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary–Philosophical Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cross, W.E. 1998. ‘Black Psychological Functioning and the Legacy of Slavery’, in Y. Danieli (ed.), International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma. New York: Plenum Press, pp. 387–400. Danieli, Y. 1998. ‘Introduction: History and Conceptual Foundations’, in Y. Danieli (ed.), International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma. New York: Plenum Press, pp. 1–17. Dansby, V.S. and R.P. Marinelli. 1999. ‘Adolescent Children of Vietnam Combat Veteran Fathers: A Population at Risk’, Journal of Adolescence 22(3): 329–40. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM IV, 1994. American Psychiatric Association: Washington D.C. Dunlop, R. 1999. ‘Toward a Dialogic Negotiation of Difference’, Canadian Journal of Education 24(1): 57–69. Fontana, A. and J.H. Frey. 2000. ‘The Interview: From Structured Questions to Negotiated Text’, in N.K. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (eds), Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, pp. 645–72. Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. Gurevitch, Z. 2001. ‘Dialectical Dialogue: The Struggle for Speech, Repressive Silence, and the Shift to Multiplicity’, British Journal of Sociology 52(1): 87–104. Haas, A. 1991. In the Shadows of the Holocaust – The Second Generation. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Hacking, I. 1997. Mad Travelers. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. Herman, J.L. 1992. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books. Hinton, A.L. 1996. ‘Agents of Death: Explaining the Cambodian Genocide in

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

226

4/11/09

13:08

Page 226

Silent Legacies of Trauma

Terms of Psycho–social Dissonance’, American Anthropologist 98(4): 818–33. –––. 2004. Why Did they Kill: Cambodian in the Shadow of Genocide. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hinton, D., K. Um and P. Ba. 2001. ‘Kyol Goeu (‘Wind Overload’) Part I: A Cultural Syndrome of Orthostatic Panic Disorder among Khmer Refugees’, Transcultural Psychiatry 38(4): 403–432. Holland, D. 1997. ‘Selves as Cultured: as Told by an Anthropologist who Lacks a Soul’, in R.D. Ashmore and L. Jussim (eds), Self and Identity. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 160–90. Hollander–Goldfein, B. 2002. ‘Family Dynamics as the Mediator of Trauma’. Living the Legacy. Chicago, IL 2, July 2000. Association of the Descendants of Shoah Annual Conference. Huang, L.N. 1998. ‘Southeast Asian Refugee Children and Adolescents’, in J.T. Gibbs and L.N. Huang (eds), Children of Color: Psychological Interventions with Culturally Diverse Youth. San Francisco: Jossey–Bass, pp. 264–304. Ida, D. and P. Young. 2003. ‘Southeast Asian Children and Adolescents’, in J.T. Gibbs and L.N. Huang (eds), Children of Color: Psychological Interventions with Culturally Diverse Youth. San Francisco: Jossey–Bass, pp. 265–95. Illouz, E. 2003. Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Kidron, C.A. 2003. ‘Surviving the Distant Past: A Case Study of the Cultural Construction of Trauma Descendant Identity’, Ethos 31(4): 1–32. –––. 2009. ‘Toward an Ethnography of Silence: The Lived Presence of the Past in the Everyday Lives of Holocaust Trauma Descendants in Israel’, Current Anthropology 50 (1): 5–27. Kiernan, B. 1996. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kinzie, J.D., R.H. Frederickson, R. Ben, J. Fleck and W. Karls. 1984. ‘Post–Traumatic Stress Disorder among Survivors of Cambodian Concentration Camps’, American Journal of Psychiatry 141(5): 645–50. Kleinman, A. 1980. Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. –––, V. Das and M. Lock. 1997. ‘Introduction’, in A. Kleinman, V. Das and M. Lock (eds), Social Suffering. Berkley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, pp. ix–xxv. Lambek, M. 1996. ‘The Past Imperfect: Remembering as a Moral Practice’, in P. Antze and M. Lambek (eds), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York: Routledge, pp. 235–54. ––– and P. Antze. 1996. ‘Introduction: Forecasting Memory’, in P. Antze and M. Lambek (eds), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York: Routledge, pp. xi–xxxviii. Langer, L.L. 1991. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press. Latour, B. 1996. ‘On Interobjectivity’, Mind, Culture and Activity 3(4): 228–45.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 227

Carol A. Kidron 227

Ledgerwood, J., M.M. Ebihara and C. Mortland. 1994. ‘Introduction’, in M.M. Ebihara, C.A. Mortland and J. Ledgerwood (eds), Cambodian Culture since 1975: Homeland and Exile. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 1–26. Lentin, R. 2000. Israel and the Daughters of the Shoa: Re–occupying the Territories of Silence. New York: Berghahn Books. Leys, R. 2000. Trauma: A Geneology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lieblich, A., R. Tuval–Mashiach and T. Zilber. 1998. Narrative Research: Reading, Analysis, and Interpretation. Thousand Oaks, London and New Delhi: Sage Publications. Marukusen, E. 1992. ‘Comprehending the Cambodian Genocide: An Application of Robert Jay Lifton’s Model of Genocidal Killing’, Psychohistory Review 20(2): 145–69. Mason–Schrock, D. 1996. ‘Transsexuals’ Narrative Construction of the “True Self”’, Social Psychology Quarterly 59(3): 176–92. Mclellan, J. 1999. Many Petals of the Lotus: Five Asian Buddhist Communities in Toronto. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mead, G.H. 1934. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Montgomery, R. 1991. ‘Predicting Vietnamese Refugee Adjustment to Western Canada’, International Migration 29(1): 89–117. Mortland, C.A. 1994. ‘Khmer Buddhists in the United States: Ultimate Questions’, in M.M. Ebihara, C.A. Mortland and J. Ledgerwood (eds), Cambodian Culture since 1975: Homeland and Exile. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 72–90. Natanson, M. 1970. The Journeying Self. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison–Wesley. Nora, P. 1989. ‘Between Memory and History’, Representations 26 (Spring): 7–25. Ortner, S. 1990. ‘Patterns of History: Cultural Schemas in the Foundings of Sherpa Religious Institutions’, in Emiko Ohnuk Tierney (ed.), Culture Through Time: Anthropological Approaches. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 60–90. Rosenheck, R. and A. Fontana. 1998. ‘Transgenerational Effects of Abusive Violence on the Children of Vietnam Combat Veterans’, Journal of Traumatic Stress 11(4): 731–42. Rousseau, C. and A. Drapeau. 1998. ‘The Impact of Culture on the Transmission of Trauma: Refugees’ Stories and Silence Embodied in Their Children’s Lives’, in Y. Danieli (ed.), International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma. New York: Plenum Press, pp. 465–85. –––, A. Drapeau and R. Platt. 1999. ‘Family Trauma and its Association with Emotional and Behavioral Problems and Social Adjustment in Adolescent Cambodian Refugees’, Child Abuse and Neglect 23(12): 1263–73. –––, A. Drapeau and S. Rahimi. 2003. ‘The Complexity of Trauma Response: A Four–Year Follow–Up of Adolescent Cambodian Refugees’, Child Abuse

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

228

4/11/09

13:08

Page 228

Silent Legacies of Trauma

and Neglect 27(11): 1277–90. Sack, W.H., S. McSharry, G.N. Clarke and R. Kinney. 1994. ‘The Khmer Adolescent Project: 1. Epidemiologic Findings in Two Generations of Cambodian Refugees’, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 182(7): 387–95. Sagi–Schwartz, A. et al. 2003. ‘Attachment and Traumatic Stress in Female Holocaust Child Survivors and Their Daughters’, American Journal of Psychiatry 160(6): 1086–92. Schepper–Hughes, N. 2002. ‘Coming to Our Senses: Anthropology and Genocide’, in A.L. Hinton (ed.), Annihiliating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 348–81. Schwarcz, V. 1998. Bridge Across Broken Time: Chinese and Jewish Cultural Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press. Seremetakis, C.N. 1994. ‘The Memory of the Senses, Part I: Marks of the Transitory’, in C.N. Seremetakis (ed.), The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford: Westview, pp. 1–18. Solomon, Z. 1995. ‘Oscillating between Denial and Recognition of PTSD: Why Are Lessons Learned and Forgotten’, Journal of Traumatic Stress 8(2): 271–82. Stevens, C.A. 2001. ‘Perspectives on the Meaning of Symptoms among Cambodian Refugees’, Journal of Sociology 37(1): 81–98. Tobin, J. and J. Friedman. 1984. ‘Intercultural and Developmental Stresses Confronting Southeast Asian Refugee Adolescents’, Journal of Operational Psychiatry 15: 39–45. Wajnryb, R. 2001. The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk. Crows Nest, Australia: Allen and Unwin. Yablonka, H. 1998. ‘The Formation of Holocaust Consciousness in the State of Israel: The Early Days’, in E. Sicker (ed.), Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 119–36. Yerushalmi, Y.H. 1982. Zakhor– Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Young, A. 1995. Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Young, J.E. 1988. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Zilberfein, F. 1995. ‘Children of Holocaust Survivors: Separation Obstacles, Attachments and Anxiety’, in J. Lemberger (ed.), A Global Perspective on Working with Holocaust Survivors and the Second Generation. Jerusalem: JDC–Brookdale Institute and Amcha, pp. 413–22.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 229

Chapter 9

The Transmission of Traumatic Loss: A Case Study in Taiwan Stephan Feuchtwang This case study deals with an event that was wounding and disrupting for the families of Luku, a remote mountain area in Taiwan. The event, now known as the Luku Incident (Luku Shijian), took place in the winter of 1952 to 1953 so it can still be recalled as their own experience by the survivors, who are grandfathers and grandmothers. One of those we interviewed presented symptoms of what is now called post–traumatic stress syndrome: involuntary recall and weeping. The others recalled and told their stories of torture at the hands of armed police without displaying such symptoms, but some did enact interrogation torture1 and others told us of the strong feelings they have about their experience. In the broader sense in which the term is used, the event would without doubt be described as traumatic. But I doubt that the trauma of the event is transmitted to subsequent generations of the families concerned. Indeed, one of my main conclusions is that even such a shared and painful experience is easily forgotten, in the sense that it may be both commemorated and not transmitted. To say there has been a transmission of trauma, as distinct from transmission of an event that was traumatic, the transmission must have had a traumatic effect. Cases of the effects of trauma from parent to child and possibly on to the next generation are treated by therapists. It is possible that those effects are themselves traumatic. But more usually the second and third generation conditions are not those of post–traumatic stress. A traumatised person doing traumatising violence to someone else as a result of the original traumatic experience is exceptional and the ensuing trauma will not be the same as the original trauma. We observed something more usual: emotion, avoidance and secrecy. I will tell the story of the traumatic event but my main concern will be to distinguish different modes and means of its transmission, as an event and as a kind of death suffered by its victims and remedied by ritual and other means, organised by its survivors. It is obvious by the very existence of this article that the event and its trauma are capable of being recorded and that therefore something can be passed on, at the very least to me and my research colleague, Dr Shih Fanglong, for us to have been able to make a study of their transmission.2 Before that, most of the so–called victim survivors (shounan zhe) had been

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

230

4/11/09

13:08

Page 230

The Transmission of Traumatic Loss in Taiwan

interviewed by Professor Zhang Yanxian, first head of the Institute of Taiwan History in the Central Academy of Research, the most prestigious government–funded research establishment in Taiwan. Their willing interviews provided the bulk of his two volumes on the Incident.3 But of course the event is not recalled and transmitted in the same way by and to all. For example, what the survivors tell a historian on one hand and what they tell their children on the other is likely to differ, if only because what their children are prepared to hear is not what the historian wants to know and is expected to want to know. The way in which the historian turns the interview into a chronology may be quite different from the more fragmented way in which the information is conveyed to a child. Quite apart from what is transmitted to whom in a more or less fragmented narrative mode – historical or biographical – I shall argue that there is another mode of transmission, one that keeps a sense of family going. It can be both verbal and non–verbal, but its main means are regular rituals, including the rituals performed for those who were killed in the event. In this transmission for family reproduction or, in these circumstances, for family repair, another sense of time is at work, beyond that of biographical or historical narrative and historical commemoration. It conveys what is habitually ritualised as bad death, broken familial and neighbourly relations, and repairs to these breaches if they can be made. I shall therefore begin by presenting the two modes. Both kinds of time, of event–story on one hand and of generation or repair of social being on the other, are available to the same families. But to the middle–class intelligentsia, or to the many who have opted for new ways of disposing of their dead, the discourse of bad death has been rejected. Their recommended way of commemorating the dead is to emphasise the living, to commemorate the suffering of the victims of trauma and then to forget them. The leadership of the administration and politics of commemoration come mainly from this class, so it is questionable if official commemoration in registering trauma even transmits the event of the trauma. It may indeed end transmission, having in its own lights completed commemoration. But before concluding, I will turn to a reckoning that takes something from each mode: the recounting of an event of bad death. By some outsiders, not members of victims’ families, the event and its victims are imagined as an incident that created vengeful, suffering ghosts, where ghosts are the forgotten dead that return unbidden.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 231

Stephan Feuchtwang 231

Temporalities When Nicolas Argenti (2007: chapter 1) contrasts commemoration that enables forgetting with the mask rites that reproduce the terrifying relation between chiefs, youth and the rest of the Grassfields population, he discusses both as social memory, one discursive, the other not. But I suggest that it would be helpful to say that this is also a contrast between temporalities, one of events, the other of ritual reproduction and presence. These are temporalities that we should distinguish from the basic senses of time found to be universal features of the human animal by cognitive psychologists, phenomenological philosophers and anthropologists, so usefully expounded by Alfred Gell (1992).This is not a very controversial contention. It is already a commonplace that cyclical senses of time extend to seasonal practices such as transhumance with herds or agrarian cropping seasons and that by contrast industrial time is abstract clock time. Alongside the times of agrarian and pastoral cycles are calendrical times in a number of ritual and religious traditions based on observations of the night and day skies through various instruments of observation and measurement, from European standing stones to the instruments of Chinese diviners. Within this field of possibilities, we must take note of Benedict Anderson’s widely accepted argument that the sense of shared history, narrating a commonality of experience of a nation and its state, constitutes a distinct order of long–term time. It is a time of simultaneity projected forwards on the unborn future members of a people and backwards on the events of the emergence of the people. Nation–people narration supersedes preceding senses of the long–term, in particular it supersedes the eternal, its repetitions and its miraculous interventions, as in Biblical time, or that of human adjustments in order to approximate perfection or to fail and fall further away from it, as in Chinese cosmological time. Anderson’s theory is not acceptable as a simple history of times, since secular time does not simply replace eternal time. As both Asad (1999) and Harootunian (1999) have argued, the religious sense of eternal repetition and adjustment – their respective examples are Islam and imperial Japanese Shinto – challenges in its renewed, nationalist or global ambitions the authority of a state and its secular chronological history. They posit the contemporaneity of at least two long–term senses of time, or what Harootunian calls ‘different temporalities’ (1999: 150). Let me follow his usage, as long as ‘temporality’ is understood to be long–term, rather than either the instantaneous senses of time by which automatic perception, memory and recognition work, or the daily and seasonal temporalities to which I have briefly referred. It seems plausible to extend Asad’s and Harutoonian’s arguments and say that in all nation–states and capitalist economies there exist a pair of

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

232

4/11/09

13:08

Page 232

The Transmission of Traumatic Loss in Taiwan

closely related strands of temporality. One is the time of simultaneity and its events of war and civil war, the booms and slumps of political economy, or the events of scientific discovery. This strand projects modernity and the programmes of modernisation. The other strand celebrates those who have given their lives in sacrifice to the nation of the living and the as–yet unborn, and to the universal humanity in which all peoples have their place and are their own versions, even though it may not in other cases be as sacralised and identified with a divine emperor as it is in Japan. In discussing the historical narration of peoples, Anderson (1999: 200) suggests that the moral nation demands loyalty as a mother does her children, without preference as long as they are loyal to her. He points out that there is a strong tension between mother–country and the sexual family of procreation and sibling rivalry. In common with many religious ideologies, including Christian ones (although his example is Hinduism), loyalty to the mother–country tends toward celibacy and fraternity. I would extend this to say that the sense of long–term time involved in family and sexual reproduction is yet another temporality, including its own rituals of death and the presence of the dead, coexisting with the other, two–stranded temporality. The mode and means of the two–stranded temporality of modernity and commemoration are secular historiography and news media (a continuously moving present of events and its academic and school extensions into ‘history’) on one hand, and archaic in commemoration and ceremonial ritual on the other. The temporality of family reproduction and death includes life–cycle events and biographical and reproductive events and deaths, as well as rituals. But the events and rituals of reproduction, life and death are cast in another, equivalent but differentiable pair of tenses and have as their subject a family, not a people’s emergence, nor modernity’s break from one or many past into a future and its commemoration. The two family–mode tenses are those of stories that are repeated as family myths on one hand and the rituals and places of continuation of family life and reproduction on the other.

An Event in History: the Luku Incident After participating in the defeat of Japan in the Pacific War, some Chinese troops and a governor appointed by Generalissimo Chiang Kai–shek took control of the island of Taiwan in 1945. At that time Taiwan had been part of the empire of Japan and its reforming, Meiji restoration of imperial rule for fifty years. The brutality and corruption of Chinese rule under the military command of the Nationalist Party (the Guomindang) led to an uprising in 1947 against the regime and a demand for self–determination by an association of many of the most prominent of the Japanese–educated

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 233

Stephan Feuchtwang 233

Taiwanese intelligentsia. The Nationalist military suppression of the intelligentsia was even more lethal and overwhelming than its suppression of the original protests and demonstrations. This event has become known as 2: 28, after the anniversary of the original demonstration on 28 February 1947. Some of those involved in opposition to the Nationalists in Taiwan were sympathetic to Communism. A few of them formed a Marxist study group in the city of Taipei and eventually, in 1950 and 1951, went into hiding near the mountain hamlets of Luku, on the borders of three townships – Shiding, Xizhe and Nangang – in the county of Taipei. The choice of hiding place was determined by its mountainous and forested terrain and by the fact that one of the original group, Chen Chunqing, had a family house in Luku. In what was a very poor and isolated village, his family and the family of his paternal uncle were two of the relatively more prosperous among the subsistence horticulturalists and coal miners who scraped a living there. The collateral Chen family included the Japanese–appointed head of Luku administrative village (bao). He continued in that position under Nationalist rule, but he and his oldest son became active participants and leaders of the mountain base that the outsiders and Chen Chunqing began to organise there. The outsiders built huts away from paths and deep in the undergrowth and the trees, making themselves known very selectively to a few families in Luku and only then by false names that amounted to ranks of leadership. They began to educate and train small groups of schoolchildren in each of the families with which they made contact, including those of the two Chen families. Their’s was a moral education in principles of social justice derived from Communism, and the training was in combat drills using wooden replicas of weapons. Three of those to whom we have spoken (August 2006) were siblings of or were among these children. They remember seeing Communist Chinese flags raised briefly over the hidden huts in a short ceremony. But most Luku villagers claim not to have seen anything. They may indeed not have. Even if they had seen this or that flag, they meant nothing to them, since they were completely out of touch with the politics of the Chinese civil war. In late December 1952 a joint military and police operation, involving thousands of soldiers and armed police, encircled the Luku hamlets, declared them a military zone and imposed a curfew for twenty–three days during which all but the very young and the very old were rounded up and held for questioning. The interrogators were determined to find those who had participated in what the Secret Service (Bao Mi Ju) had from its intelligence identified as ‘an armed Communist base’. In particular, they sought to arrest those whose names were on a list they had extracted from one of the leaders already arrested while he was on a trip home to Taipei city. The Secret Service had also secured information from

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

234

4/11/09

13:08

Page 234

The Transmission of Traumatic Loss in Taiwan

local people in the base leadership who were either already working for the Nationalists or had agreed to do so after being arrested. In the course of the operation one person was killed and his body displayed. The detained were interrogated in a small local Buddhist temple, known as the Luku Vegetarian Temple (Caimiao). They were beaten into admitting they had participated in the Communist base and made to point out or name the leaders. 142 of these ‘participants’ and leaders were then charged with insurrection (panluan) imprisoned, tried in military tribunals and found guilty, with various sentences according to degrees of responsibility. Of these, 35 were executed. Another 32 went into hiding or were kept under surveillance but not sentenced. In all, 164 of the economically active men and a few women of the mountain area were removed.4 Chen Chunqing was one of those who went into hiding. But after a few months he gave himself up and was imprisoned for only three months. Most people, including his youngest brother who was imprisoned for twelve years, suspect he agreed to work with the Nationalists and inform on his fellow villagers. In summary, Luku village had been overtaken and depopulated by extremely confusing and fearsome political violence. The scary term feidie (Communist bandits) still gives pause to people we interviewed between 2000 and 2005. This is not surprising, because at the time of the operation and for the next thirty–five years, martial law censorship and anti–Communist Cold War rhetoric turned any dissenter into a ‘Communist’, an accusation which meant being sent away for long prison sentences. The Luku villagers, long after the release of their imprisoned family members, could not feel safe talking about what had happened to anyone beyond the closest family, neighbour or ex–neighbour. So they were compelled to silence and secrecy. Over the previous five or six generations from the first settlers in these mountains from the mainland until 1952, the settlers had organised themselves into small neighbourhoods of dispersed houses and their holdings, each neighbourhood tending to be of one surname. Now the households were even more isolated, their isolation compounded by having to migrate to the city to find work when, from the late 1960s over the next ten years, all the coalmines – in which women from the families of prisoners found work – closed down one by one.

Mode 1: History and Official Commemoration The first historical documentation in which this event figures is the intelligence used in the secret military trials and their documentation. There it is counted as a victory over Communists in Taiwan, in a narrative

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 235

Stephan Feuchtwang 235

of the Chinese nation in which Taiwan was a base for retaking the rest of China from Communist bandits. Thirty–five years later, another narrative had emerged, in the same historiographic mode of narrating a nation but with another national unit of simultaneous time: Taiwan as its own history, focusing on the 1947 uprising. Success by non–Nationalist Party (Dang–wai) candidates in local elections and the diplomatic isolation of the Republic of China based in Taiwan, replaced in international diplomacy by the mainland People’s Republic of China, had by 1987 persuaded Chiang Kai–shek’s son and successor, Chiang Ching–kuo, to move from repression and military command to civil administration and civil liberty. When Chiang Ching–kuo died, the Nationalist Party selected a Taiwanese person, Li Teng–hui, to succeed him. Li’s government began a process of revising history for monuments and school curriculi. It included a campaign to commemorate and provide compensation to the families of those who were killed in the suppression of the 1947 protests and those executed and imprisoned for political dissent throughout the period of martial law, including those accused of being Communist bandits. That period openly acquired the formerly whispered name of the White Terror (Baise Kongbu). After 1987 many of the independent, non–Party candidates for local elections formed themselves into a party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Among its members were those who in prison had met prisoners who knew about other prisoners held after the Luku tribunals. They began to research these and other instances of the White Terror in Taiwan. A member of the Shiding assembly, the only open supporter of the DPP in the township, began to interview Luku ex–prisoners and provide materials that could be used in a campaign in the provincial and later the national assembly to recognise and compensate them for their wrongful imprisonment, a campaign that met with success. A socialist–inclined novelist, Lan Bozhou, interviewed other ex–prisoners and the surviving leaders of the Luku base for two TV documentaries. Later, a new, more thorough work of interviews published verbatim, together with the results of research in the files of the military tribunals, was financially sponsored by the Taipei County government led by the DPP and undertaken by Professor Zhang Yanxian of the Central Academy of Research, and two more TV documentaries on the incident and its survivors were produced. At the end of the year 2000, the Taipei County government inaugurated a monument to the victims of the incident, on the anniversary of the operation, 29 December. Su Zhen–zhang, a senior DPP member, presided over the inauguration. He also wrote a preface to the first volume of interviews in which he said that as head of Taipei County government he had tried to promote the cultural life of the people. As part of this effort, he had actively encouraged the investigation and publication of Taipei

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

236

4/11/09

13:08

Page 236

The Transmission of Traumatic Loss in Taiwan

County’s history and culture. He and Professor Zhang Yanxian were both born in 1947 (the year of 2: 28) and were both members of the ’47 Society (Siqi She). Zhang Yanxian had always been keen on reconstructing history (lishi chongjian) (Zhang Yanxian and Gao Shuyuan 1998: 3). According to another preface, by the Director of the Culture Centre of Taipei County, Yang Guozhu, the publication of these interviews would provide material for the discussion of historical truths, comfort those who are innocent, and tell a history of blood and tears that could become a force to reconstruct the culture of Taiwan. From now on Taiwanese people would be able to understand and be kinder to each other, and would protect Taiwan (Zhang Yanxian and Gao Shuyuan 1998: 5). Professor Zhang wrote a postscript to his first volume in which he concluded that ‘investigating the Luku incident made me think of the poor peasants and miners who lived in cold villages: through blood relationships and traditional social networks they were caught in what was to them an unrecognisable and unpredictable political whirlpool. They had no way to understand the views of the leaders; they became sacrificial offerings’ (Zhang Yanxian and Gao Shuyuan 1998: 318). These are the sentiments inscribed in the marble plaques on the pedestals of the monument, which is a horizontal twisted blade in shining chromium–plated metal. According to such sentiments, the Luku villagers are victims of a political fate, an event of political history in which they did not participate but which violated their existence. Recording their fate is to inscribe them into the modern history of humanity and injustice and into a general, island–wide subjection of Taiwan. But they are not portrayed as makers of history, unlike the political dissenters who are the other victims compensated for their suffering during the White Terror. What is written out of this account is that some villagers in Luku were being trained and educated,or were in other ways convinced and willing precisely to take part in the making of history, in the righting of the wrongs of social injustice of capitalism and of Nationalist rule. But that is the way any official history works, by selective amnesia. My main purpose here is to step back in order to bring the temporality or mode of transmission into focus and see how the Luku victims participated in this temporality of being inscribed in nationalist historiography and commemoration.

Luku Victims’ Participation in Nationalist Temporality For the family members and ex–prisoners themselves, telling interviewers what happened in the round–up and afterwards was part of the process of speaking about their humiliation and extreme hardship in public for the first time, and to a much larger public than just other villagers. This

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 237

Stephan Feuchtwang 237

strange reversal turned what had been an isolating experience into a confusing experience of being included in a new history as sacrificial heroes, or martyrs to human injustice, along with political dissenters against the Nationalists, representatives of the dormant and emerging subject of its own history, the people of Taiwan. On 12 August 1998 a conference was held by Taipei County to launch the first volume of interviews and ten Luku victims and family members of victims were present. The official version says that during the meeting, they asked the government to rectify the injustice (pingfan) of the incident so that they could regain their purity (qingbai). This is the language of the County report.5 But it does convey what some of the victims we interviewed expressed, that the government had cheated them, that the charge of rebellion was a slur on their name that they wished to have expunged and that it was the worst experience of their life and the result of a twisting of the truth, symbolised in the huge twisted chromium blade of the memorial. All those we interviewed said that they had told their children something about the torture of interrogation, the execution of husbands and brothers, the miseries of imprisonment, hard labour and subsequent isolation, and the extreme hardship that wives of prisoners suffered, that they later told Professor Zhang and then us. Their children have tended to inherit from them a hatred for the party that led the regime in which they suffered. That much is transmitted. But things have changed. History has been remade. The Guomindang under its first Taiwanese leader, and again under its current leader, Ma Yinjiu, has apologised for these past crimes of injustice and turned away from its former rhetoric of retaking the mainland, towards identification with Taiwan. This raises questions about interruptions in the interpersonal transmission of the experience. The now adult children of the victims preferred to talk to us about current affairs or other things, rather than tell us about what their parents suffered. It may be that, although they said to us either that they had spoken to their children about what happened or that their children could not help but know, the victims had in fact given them very few details. In two instances, a daughter was present when we interviewed the mother and it turned out to be the first time that she had heard the details her mother was recalling. When in one of these cases, the mother began to weep as she told my colleague Shih Fanglong of the last time she saw her husband before collecting his corpse after execution, the daughter stopped the interview. But the mother said that stopping her talking would not stop her weeping. She weeps every night anyway, and so she carried on with the interview. We can interpret this in a number of ways, all of which can be true at the same time. The daughter may be protecting herself from the burden of her mother’s grief. The mother is able to talk to Shih Fanglong, as she had to Professor Zhang, but this time

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

238

4/11/09

13:08

Page 238

The Transmission of Traumatic Loss in Taiwan

she has wanted her daughter to be present to hear. For the daughter it confirms what she already knows, that something terrible occurred from which she has been excluded but which has affected her all her life. Perhaps she felt that it confirms a sense that something in her mother’s history, which is for her a biographical prehistory, overshadows her own life–story. Such a feeling would be a transformed but transmitted and profound feeling, though not a trauma.6 On a later occasion (December 2006), Shih Fanglong visited and sat with the old lady alone, not to talk about the incident but just to enquire about her family. The television was on, broadcasting news of elections. She commented on the DPP losing Taipei that it was because, unlike the Nationalist Party, the DPP had no money: ‘The Nationalist Party accuse [President] Chen Shuibian [of the DPP] of “eating money”. But how can he have money when it has all been eaten by the Nationalist Party.’ The news programme was in Mandarin, of which she understands little, so she was gathering the news largely from what she saw and what it reminded her of. Thus, she went on immediately: ‘Chiang Kai–shek beat many good people to death. It is all beyond my control. I have no means [of doing anything]. I really wanted to attack him [literally take a mouthful out of him – T: ga yi cit+e)]’.7 On the election of Chen Ju, DPP, to be mayor of the second city, Kaohsiung, she said: ‘On the last night of election campaigning Chen Ju was crying and I cried with her. She too is a woman and has no husband and she too had been gaoled, much to be pitied.’ Chen Ju had been one of the dissenters imprisoned during the White Terror period. A suicide case came up in the news and she said ‘I did not think of committing suicide because my children [6 children] would then have died.’ As the constantly changing present of the news media moves on, she is constantly reminded of the ever–present execution of her husband. For her, the narrative consigning her experience to the past remains a narrative of the present. Her biographical narrative returns all the time to the ever–present violence done to her and her family, and so does her viewing of the news. History as a past–present–future narrative of event and change is, for her, the ever–present experience of the past, but it is also the hope for a future of her children. Elapsed time and the future of her children run through an ever–rolling present, which for her has the ever–vivid reference point of her trauma. We asked all the victims of the Luku Incident who we interviewed what they thought of the Incident’s monument. A few of them said it was not as good as having a museum. We were told that the Chen family of the executed village head would donate land for it. Those in favour of a museum said that they wanted to participate in providing their own materials and renewing them with others, as things change. But the County under the DPP was not active in pursuing anything more than the

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 239

Stephan Feuchtwang 239

monument. The County under the Nationalists is not at all interested. Tourism is now the major industry of the Luku mountain area, and tourists usually pass by the monument without stopping. The Nationalists, having apologised, remind people to look to the future not the past. Commemorative history has acknowledged their loss, but it has moved on. The families of intelligentsia who had provided documents for another museum, in Taipei city, commemorating the 28 February 1947 uprising and its suppression, have withdrawn them because of the neglect of the museum by the Nationalist party government. The headteacher of the local primary and junior middle school from 2003 to 2006 would have liked to include the incident in its regular classes on local culture and did include a visit to the monument once. But he insisted that to include it in class required that teachers compile their own materials from interviews with the victims. For some reason he could not rely on the copious documentation and interviews in Professor Zhang’s two volumes. The victims did not want to be interviewed again by the teachers. The headteacher told us what one of Professor Zhang’s assistants also told us, that the incident raised too many complications, both political and personal, including rifts between the families of the victims. Because of these, then, the incident is not a subject in any lesson or school activity even in the local school primary and middle school. The victims have been willing if selective participants in the new Taiwanese narrative. But it looks as though the traumatic event, having been inscribed in historical documentation and in the monument, is hardly any longer transmitted. It is covered but not specifically mentioned by a page on the White Terror as a whole that now appears in school history books. It is, as one person told us, not of national significance, as 2: 28 is. It is local history. And local history is ‘complicated’ by the rifts between families that the political violence of the incident itself produced, rifts of death and betrayal which are to be found in the details of all other such situations of civil war and occupation. As examples of several victims’ attitudes to this lack, here are excerpts from two interviews in 2004 with male survivors of the Luku incident: I was interviewed once by Professor Zhang Yanxian. The head of the neighbourhood …came with me. At first I did not want to be interviewed by Professor Zhang. I did not know him or what the interview was for. Shih Fanglong: do you think it is necessary to remember the Luku Incident? It is a lot of trouble (T: tua mahuan). Not any use (T: bou simmiq lou ieng) S F: Do you think it should be taught about in school? No need (T: m bian). It’s just one more thing….The grandchild of [a close friend and another victim] is at university. To know about this is no use [to her]. What has gone has gone (T: kue khi, lo kue khi).

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

240

4/11/09

13:08

Page 240

The Transmission of Traumatic Loss in Taiwan

Another ex–prisoner and ex–coal miner, husband of a paternal cousin of Chen Chunqing, was a little more positive, but still very ambivalent. He possesses a copy of the book of interviews by Professor Zhang, including his own interview with him and has read it (he had primary school Japanese and then learned Mandarin in prison). We asked him whether his imprisonment mattered now. He said that prison and the years of difficulty were gone: ‘To whom should I complain? Chiang Kai–shek and his son are dead. As for my personal pain, I try to forget it. But the history of it should be written.’ Whatever the reasons for their reluctance to be interviewed – overcome for the sake of compensation, not overcome for the school, then overcome for us – they did participate in but were not the main agents for their inscription in the history of Taiwanese suffering. I think that one of the reasons for reluctance is a continuing anti–Communism. Victim families had to say they were not Communist in order to receive compensation and the most important testimony to this effect came from the man, now a retired general, who led the military operation itself. Some of the victims, including one of the children, who was an active participant in the political education classes held by her older sibling and supervised by the hidden leaders of the base, are still sympathetic to socialist ideals. Significantly, she was not interviewed by Professor Zhang. Others, including older people who had no contact with the leaders of the base, and who knew almost nothing of their politics, learned more about them while in prison and came out with leftist sympathies. What the victims know and remember may be food for an alternative history of Taiwan and its relationship with the mainland. It is extremely unlikely that any of them would take the initiative to have that version written, though they may respond to writers of a more socialist inclination such as Lan Bozhou and other political activists of the left in Taiwan. In 2004 the Compensation Fund held a ritual commemoration of the suffering of all the victims of the White Terror. It was organised at the behest of the head of the White Terror section of the Compensation Fund, a member of one of the new Buddhist charitable organisations, which have flourished and grown enormously in Taiwan. To officiate at the ceremony, he chose another of the new Buddhist organisations, one that specialises in ceremonies for the dead. Their version of salvation rejects the older tradition of aiding the soul of the dead person by rituals of making merit and crossing through purgatory to rebirth or to the Western Paradise. Instead, they emphasise comfort for the living and reduce to little and preferably nothing the making of merit for the individual dead, stressing instead general salvation. Out of consideration of the older practices which the victims’ families, especially the more working–class ones such as those from Luku, were used to, the head of the White Terror section had to persuade the organisation to include the names of the dead, those

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 241

Stephan Feuchtwang 241

executed during the White Terror, on separate paper flags at the ceremony. But they were quickly disposed of without further ceremony at the end. So the ceremony commemorating their deaths also looked to the future, not the past, and to the future of the living, not the dead. Only one or two of the Luku families of the executed came to this new–fangled ceremony. They had already arranged for rituals to be performed for their dead in their own, more traditional ways. A few others attend the annual, formerly twice annual, ceremony in the park that was used as the execution ground for all those condemned to death during the period of the White Terror, enacting their own participation in a version of Taiwanese historicity. The Nationalist government changed its name to Youth Park (Qingnian Gongyuan), but more recently the DPP restored the old name as an act of remembrance. The park is now a political site of contention and a sacral resource. In July 2006 a leftist tendency within the DPP organised a large demonstration in the park, demanding the resignation of the President, Chen Shuibian of the DPP, because of his family’s alleged involvement in financial scandals. The annual commemoration of the White Terror dead is also a rallying point for another leftist tendency, in which Lan Bozhou is active. The two leftist tendencies are contrasted in common usage as ‘using the left to work for independence’ (yizuo rudu) and ‘using the left to work for reunification [with the mainland]’ (yizuo rutong). Politicisation of the White Terror has drawn one or two of the Luku ‘victims’ into political activism, but not as initiators. There is still, then, a potential organisation of the history and commemoration of the incident as part of the White Terror by a leftist political tendency. But most others in the Luku families want to avoid any further politicisation. A few might like to be remembered through a museum, but funding is not available for it to be part of local history. Tourism in Luku has a host of other attractions. The brief bloom of historical transmission is fading. Participation in the writing of history by providing testimony must always be amplified or diminished by the politics of history. And commemoration is in any case a way of forgetting. The survivors were passive but willing to be included in the temporality of commemoration that appealed to universal standards of human justice and inscribed them as sacrificial victims in the eternity of Taiwanese humanity, at the launch of the first volume of interviews and at the inauguration of the chrome blade monument. But in the political history of Taiwan, the trauma thus commemorated is being forgotten, not by the ageing victims, but by most members of the next and following generations.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

242

4/11/09

13:08

Page 242

The Transmission of Traumatic Loss in Taiwan

Mode 2: Disruption and Repair of Families In the traditional ritual cosmology surrounding death in China and Taiwan, at the moment of death a spirit is still bound to earth and is a ghost. If ghosts were produced by a violent death, they are particularly fearsome and malicious. The rituals of death turn a ghost into an ancestor in its tomb and in the domestic shrine of its family. If these rituals have not been performed, they remain ghosts. In addition, merit–making rituals enact the journey through purgatory and towards release, the soul represented by a spirit flag and a paper figure burned in a final rite. But even without merit–making rituals, the ghost becomes an ancestor through proper burial and inclusion in the domestic shrine. This temporality can therefore be called ‘ancestral time’. The name makes the point that lineal family reproduction and repair – which is also repair of a place containing an ancestral home – is not a universal temporality. It is certainly Chinese and it entails the continuing individualised story of the soul in its statuses as ghost or ancestor after death, unlike, for example, the generalised Last Days eschatology of Judaism or Christianity.8 All the families resident in Luku in 1952 eventually had to leave to find work and set up homes elsewhere. But they kept entitlements to their land and many of the ex–prisoners have returned, usually not to live there again but to tend garden plots. Many have repaired their ancestral homes for themselves and for their siblings’ and their own children and grandchildren to come up for the clean air and fine views, just as other tourists do at weekends. For the ex–prisoners, these ancestral houses and garden plots are reminders of what they experienced at the time of the incident. For their adult children, they are simply their ancestral home. The house and its land stand for the continuation of the family. The incident itself is not transmitted by the children of the survivors as a story in the families of Luku, but the recovery of the bodies of the executed was in all cases agonising. It was extremely difficult to find out where the men were held in the first place, and in many cases it was only through close relatives in the city that the widows or sisters heard about the execution. Poor as they were, they then had to walk down to the city, to collect the bodies, if they were in time, and spend what little money they had in employing someone to fill and close the holes made by the bullets. They then had to pay for cremation, sometimes directly to the military in charge of the execution ground when they were too late to collect the bodies. In all cases that we know about, they lacked sufficient funds for the immediate burial of the body or ashes, let alone for merit–making rituals. Delay in one or both lasted for many years, until in a number of instances another older member of the family had died, and burial and merit–making for both were performed. But in all cases the remains were

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 243

Stephan Feuchtwang 243

eventually buried, using the customary rituals of care for the dead. Then in the 1980s when their incomes increased in the general prosperity of Taiwan, the families pooled resources to build family tombs, to which they removed the ash or bone urns of all their ancestors, until then in single burial plots. These family tombs are, in nearly all cases, near where the single burial plots had been, in the Luku public graveyard. The graveyard was established on land donated in the Japanese period by a family of settlers and expanded by further subscription and purchase organised by the head of Luku village who was afterwards executed for his part in the Luku base. His daughter told us about his public spirit as we went to visit the public graveyard with her (2 August 2006). She also recalled the beatings she had borne when interrogated as a seven year old, refusing to recognise and thereby incriminate fellow prisoners by association with her dangerous family. The ancestral home and the family tomb in the public graveyard mark both family continuity and identification with the mountain area of the original settlers. Indirectly, they are also possible but not explicit reminders of the incident and of the trauma of recovering their dead. There is nothing about the event in the grave inscriptions of names, which are organised by generation. Nor do the rituals of burial and merit–making refer to the incident or any other event than the death itself. Instead they refer to general suffering. But apart from tomb and ritual, in one family a story about the recovery of the ashes from the execution ground is repeated verbally. The story is that on the day when the husband was executed, the prison officials had the body cremated. The family could not afford a coffin anyway, nor to transport it. His wife walked all day to collect the ashes and put them in an oilcan. The mine in which she had found work and in whose hostel she lived with her son was quite far from the city execution ground. As she walked back into the night a glow lit the path. It was the fire of her husband’s ghost. He was not yet an ancestor and was still hanging around. When she got back to her cubicle in the mine hostel, she put the can under the bed on which their young son slept. A school friend of her son (interviewed 29 October 2004) remembers that she had a prominent picture of Chiang Kai–shek up on the wall and would bow to it every day, as a way of avoiding trouble. When we spoke to her son at the old house in 2004, he told us how the same ghost fire (guihuo) came to him in the night for two years, and how he could make it go away by a downward gesture of his hand, which he demonstrated to us. His mother eventually found the time to walk up from the mine or from where she had subsequently found work. She buried the can temporarily in a small glade above the ruins of their ancestral house. Many years later, in the late 1980s, the family had the urn transferred to their new family tomb in the Luku public graveyard. They

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

244

4/11/09

13:08

Page 244

The Transmission of Traumatic Loss in Taiwan

honour him on his death day, but his son did not include him in the merit–making performed for his mother when she died. So the father’s karmic soul is still not saved, but he is an ancestor because he is properly entombed and honoured on his death day. A tour bus driver who is a friend of the family was with us when the son of the executed man told us this story. The bus driver said he had heard the story at least twenty times. It seems then that it is one of the things which binds the families of at least two of the brothers together and that the disruption has in this way been turned into a bond between brothers and their families and close friends. In addition, their meeting together at the family tomb for the ceremony of the cleaning of graves formally brings together the families of all five brothers. Some of them meet more frequently anyway since they have all maintained use of the ancestral land in Luku. The same formal and informal reasons also bring them together with a much smaller close collateral branch (tang qin) of the family, whose family tomb is just above their’s and whose ancestral land is nearby on the same mountainside. So from their various scattered city residences they re–create the neighbourhood and sense of family that their grandparents had known before the incident disrupted it. In the two Chen families, that of the informer Chen Chunqing and that of the village head who was executed, it is the very disruption of family relations that is a reminder and transmitter of the incident. On 2 August 2006 we drove, guided by one of the victims, to visit a fellow victim who is married to a paternal cousin of Chen Chunqing, near the house of Chunqing’s elder brother. The elder brother is long dead and was never involved in the incident anyway. His sons have kept his land and the house he built on it as a weekend resort. As we passed their weekend house a chain across the road prevented us from going on up, so we drove into its walled parking yard, which our friend said would be all right. A man came out, then two others and then an older man, possibly a son of the elder brother, and our friend began a sentence ‘isn’t this the house of’… But then he could not remember the name, and instead he mentioned Chen Chunqing. We got a very cold and hostile reception. So we walked back and up while the driver parked our car out on the roadside. Some days later we told the daughter of the executed village head about this and she informed us that the families of all the brothers of Chen Chunqing had grown apart over the years. This is reflected in their burial places. The older brother, because he had become a wealthy businessman, was buried as only the wealthy can afford, in a tomb on his own land near the Luku house. Chunqing is buried in the suburb of Taipei city where he died. The youngest of the four brothers, who was executed for participation in the base, is buried in the family tomb, which is near but not in the Luku public graveyard. The fourth brother, imprisoned for twelve years, is still alive.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 245

Stephan Feuchtwang 245

By contrast, her own Chen family remains close. All their dead, including the executed village head and her brother who helped educate the young in the short–lived base and was executed, are in a family tomb together in the Luku graveyard. The whole family meet at least once a year for the festival of cleaning the graves. In this temporality of family reproduction, the keeping of the land, the building of family tombs and the rituals of turning the unhappy dead into ancestors do not narrate events as does the temporality of nation histories. It is true that family tombs can still be a reminder of the disruption, but only if someone asks about the separation of tombs or why there is a distance between the brothers of Chen Chunqing. In the case of the other family, the story of the ashes of the executed brother does explicitly if indirectly refer to the incident and is retold as an addition to the death rituals of family reproduction. It is exceptional and crosses between the two temporalities of historical event and family reproduction.

Ghosts between Temporalities For the families of the executed, their spirits are ancestors, not ghosts. But to many who come to Luku and bother to learn about the incident, the place is haunted by the spirits of the executed as if they are still ghosts. Some months after the inauguration of the monument in 2000, Shih Fanglong and I met a group of three men there. They had heard about it from news media. Only a little younger than the victims, they had decided to walk up the winding road from Nangang, which is now a suburb of Taipei city, for an outing to see the monument to this incident about which they had previously not known. We asked them what it is about. They replied that the spirits wanted to revenge themselves on Chiang Kai–shek, and they referred to them as ‘the good brothers’ (hou hia:–ti in Taiwanese), a euphemism for ghosts. So this was a transfer from the temporality of Taiwanese history and of commemoration (of human justice and injustice) to the temporality of family reproduction and its tragedies, registering the trauma in both and they told us about it in both modes. Four years later, we overheard some other visitors near the bus stop at the foot of a road leading to the temple where the villagers had been detained. They were standing by a map which showed the attractions of this area, places to see or to eat a speciality or to buy a local product, as well as the monument. They said to one another that they had heard that thousands had been killed here by the Nationalist troops (in fact only one, with the other thirty–five being executed after military tribunals). These are instances of complete outsiders who had some interest in and knowledge of the incident, however rudimentary. What the memorial or just the landscape reminds them of is a mixture of their own experiences

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

246

4/11/09

13:08

Page 246

The Transmission of Traumatic Loss in Taiwan

and some knowledge that spurs them to imagine the fate of others, traumatic even if their own experiences were not. A similar effect would be achieved by a museum, were there one commemorating the tragedy. I turn lastly to a more local resident, also of the generation below that of the survivors of the incident. He is from another part of Shiding township and remembers how, as a child at the primary school in Shiding town, he had been taken with other children on a long trek across the mountains to visit the one–room branch primary school in Luku, then long since closed. They also went to the vegetarian hall temple. There, he says, he stumbled upon some bones. This frightened him, because he knew they must be human bones and it is bad luck even to speak of having touched them, so he kept his dark secret to himself. Telling us this near the temple as an adult of over forty years old, he looked up at a mountain top opposite the hill on which we were standing and said that was where they must all have been killed. Again there is no historical evidence for either the identification of the bones in the temple or the location of an indefinite, implicitly large number of killings. But the childhood memory is vivid and has lasted. This man not only runs a café that is one of the attractions on the tourist routes through Shiding, but also personally takes tours around, including tours to Luku. When he stops at the gates of the temple he likes to tell a version of this story. He does want to pass on the fact of the traumatic event. We have spoken to others who manage attractions on the tourist route near Luku, two tea houses and a restaurant, and in another restaurant in Shiding town, and who know something about it but make no effort to find out more or to pass on what they know. This man, on the contrary, became quite involved and very interested in our interviews. When he mentioned the bones or indicated the mass graves that he imagined, he did not refer to ghosts, but I know from many previous encounters and conversations with him that he is knowledgeable about death and other local rituals. As a child, the fear of ghosts certainly affected him, in particular his fear of having touched the human bones in Luku. On the other hand, he is and counts himself as a serious local historian and tour guide. His vivid childhood memory therefore makes the transition from the discourse and temporality of death and ghosts to the temporality of local history and, since he stood for elections to the township assembly in 2006 as an independent candidate, he is bound to take his pride in the locality and its history into more central politics and history, making him a full participant in both temporalities. But for him, history is valued only if it has a use. Like the Luku victim I quoted earlier, he agrees that history for its own sake is ‘no use’ (bou lou ieng). In other words, even this local historian is ambivalent enough sometimes to put tourism first, remembrance second. The monument and the landscape trigger stories of ghosts, whereas

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 247

Stephan Feuchtwang 247

the family monuments, of ancestral homes and the Luku graveyard tombs, which tourists do not visit, trigger no ghosts.9 Ancestors are named, individualised and incorporated into family reproduction without further narrative or event. Ghosts are anonymous, of other families, unknown, or they are forgotten ancestors of families which have ceased to reproduce or of lines ended while collateral lines are reproduced. They result from the disruption or ending of lines of ancestral time. Ancestral time removes the event, but recounting the event can bring ghosts to mind. Ghosts are, then, by definition between event and ancestral time, reminders of ancestral time and themselves triggered by event time. Historical commemoration consigns the event to a past, where it can be archived but forgotten. Yet when it is recalled by those in whom the pairing of ancestors and ghosts in the temporality of bad death is still alive, the event is present as ghosts.10

Conclusion Only for the survivors is the Luku incident a trauma, in the sense of an unforgettable and deeply wounding experience. Those to whom they have told most fully their stories of torture and imprisonment, or shown their still vivid grief, can now turn their attention away because after thirty–five years of isolation, their stories have been recorded, they have received some compensation, and a monument to their suffering stands in Luku. These all give recognition to their suffering. Political history, propelled partly by international events that excluded from the international system the Republic of China represented by the Guomindang in Taiwan in favour of the People’s Republic of China and partly by local opposition to the Guomindang, has turned the perpetrating political party into another politics in which it has apologised and furthers another history. Others like the documentary film–makers, the DPP politicians, the historians and the anthropologists add to the record of recognition. But neither we, nor the politicians, nor the survivors, nor their families pursue let alone form a movement of grievance for further recognition. In the temporality of the event, in which the trauma is most fully recorded, the incident is not transmitted as ongoing grief beyond the generation of those who first experienced it and in which it eventually found recognition. An example of a continuation of grievance in this case study is the gathering of two or three of the Luku survivors alongside other survivors of the White Terror, with younger supporters from their families, and a great many others without family connection to the victims, for the annual mourning in the park that was once an execution ground. This is becoming a leftist political movement, using but not transmitting a past grievance. Both history and commemoration have enabled forgetting. But of course the records and the monument remain. The monument and its

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

248

4/11/09

13:08

Page 248

The Transmission of Traumatic Loss in Taiwan

surrounding landscape trigger imagined reconstructions of what must have happened, using what little information visitors have gained. Images of traumatic violence feed on other events that have been in the news. They certainly are a transmission in the temporality of history, nations and humanity. But since they also trigger childhood experiences and fears, fears that may also thrill with exaggeration, that are not formulated in this temporality, they are less chronological and less logically reasoned, less articulate. In the second mode, the discourse and temporality of ritual continuation of families relates generations and names chronologically but not historical events. Its units are not peoples or states, they are the localities (of Luku and its graveyard for instance) and families for whom the trauma was a violent disruption and wound. To outsiders the violent deaths and disruption conjure up images of suffering souls and of ghosts. But to the insiders, including close friends and neighbours of the disrupted families, violence in this temporality is known explicitly, which is to say verbally, only in the stories that a family tells of and for itself, as part of its own mythology. The example I have given is the story of the light from the ashes of the executed husband and father. Non–verbally the violence is there in the very separation of tombs that mark continuing disruption of some families, such as the Chen families, from each other. But this is exceptional. In this mode of transmission, in this temporality, chronology is simply family reproduction in its reduced or repaired form. As long as a memory is triggered by it, the traumatic event may be directly or indirectly referred to. As a disruption, it is marked in the names of the dead on tombs and transmitted in cases of perpetuated disruption, although this can as easily be caused by migration for economic reasons. When the children of survivors seek to avoid the pain that recalling their suffering brings their parents, or when they hear the details and feel some of the emotions that their empathy and family identification prompts them to feel, they have had some of the trauma transmitted to them in a mode similar to childhood recollection and imagination. But it is not being passed on to the next generation. Transmission of trauma beyond the children of the survivors is rare. As for the transmission of a traumatic event, in one mode it is history and commemoration; in between or in a combination of the two modes it is an intergenerational grievance passed through families but reinforced by a politics of seeking acknowledgment; in the family mode itself it is a perpetuated disruption, but for the sufferer it is a vivid trauma informing a sense of elapsed time and the future of children; and crossing between the two modes is empathetic imagination of ghosts or a family myth. A historical record, a monument and the imagined stories people tell, like family myths, depend for transmission either on the politics of history or on the reproduction of families, which is affected by all kinds of other

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 249

Stephan Feuchtwang 249

circumstances, including social mobility, migration and education. In their fervour to claim a sense of belonging to a national, Taiwanese history, some Taiwanese people refer to the military command rule of the Guomindang as a collective trauma for the subjected Taiwanese. I have given an important example of what was undoubtedly traumatic for the victims and survivors and on the evidence I cannot conclude even that the event of the experience has been transmitted to many others, let alone that the transmission has itself been experienced as a trauma. Politically dramatising the period named the White Terror as a ‘collective trauma’ merely enables subsequent generations to project onto it their identification as Taiwanese.

Notes 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

I have described this enactment in ‘Gestures of suffering, politics of suffering’, an unpublished paper presented to a conference on the politics of gesture, 2007. The study was part of a broader study entitled ‘The Transmission of Grievous Loss’, funded from 2002–2006 by the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK. Dr Shih Fanglong is a native of Taiwan who is presently convenor of the Taiwan Culture Research Programme at the London School of Economics’ Asia Research Centre. We have interviewed fourteen of the victim generation, including six ex–prisoners. In addition, we have interviewed nine children and younger brothers of the executed and prisoners and of other people living in the affected area. We interviewed three well–informed locals from outside the affected area who were adults at the time. We also interviewed eight people of the next generation who are local but who lived outside the area affected by the operation. To these we added three people who had come to live in the affected area in recent years, and five historians and officials concerned with the incident. In total, we have so far interviewed fifty–two people, most of them more than once. Zhang Yanxian and Gao Shuyuan (1998), Zhang Yanxian and Chen Fenghua (2000). Zhang Yanxian and Gao Shuyuan (1998: 30–31). The most affected villages were in Shiding township (xiang), in the upper and middle sections of Luku village (cun). According to the Shiding population register (Shiding xiang renkou tongjibiao) in 1952 there were 820 people in 139 households in Luku village. If we count half of these to be the young and middle–aged and half of those to be male, we are left with 105 men. According to Zhang and Gao (1998: 32), the executed and imprisoned from these parts of Luku number 48, all men. So almost half of the most active males were removed, and it must have been a higher proportion from the higher parts of the village area. From one interviewee in 2005 there is a strong hint that others were forced by police action to leave the area (Mother Cai, 6 November 2005). Kindly supplied to Shih Fanglong by Adela Lin, of the Taipei Xian (County) office’s document centre, Taipei Xian Zhengfu Choujian Luku Shijian Jinian Gongyuan Tashiji (Taipei County Government Documentation of the Schedule of the Establishment of the Luku Incident Memorial Park). Thanks to Tom Wengraf for inspiring these reflections. T stands for transliteration from Taiwanese, a dialect of the spoken language of Southern Fujian, using N. Bodman’s system. All other transliterations are from Mandarin, the spoken language of schooling and the pronunciation of written Chinese. Thanks to Olivia Harris and Michael Lambek for drawing this to my attention. Thanks to Girish Daswani for remarking on this paradox.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

250

4/11/09

13:08

Page 250

The Transmission of Traumatic Loss in Taiwan

10. Dealing with a similar space between ancestral time and the time of commemoration of heroes in Vietnam, Heonik Kwon (2008) has drawn out further the hospitable or sympathetic invocation of ghosts, in his instances going as far as possession by forlorn ghosts, the forgotten of other families, who are then adopted as a kind of hospitality, by which villagers transgress nationalist and political boundaries of commemoration.

References Anderson, B. 1999. ‘The Goodness of Nations’, in P. van der Veer and H. Lehmann (eds), Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 197–203. Argenti, N. 2007. The Intestines of the State: Youth, Violence, and Belated Histories in the Cameroons Grassfields. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Asad, T. 1999. ‘Religion, Nation–State, Secularism’, in P. van der Veer and H. Lehmann (eds), Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 178–96. Gell, A. 1992. The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images. Oxford: Berg. Harootunian, H. 1999. ‘Memory, Mourning, and National Morality: Yasukuni Shrine and the Reunion of State and Religion in Post–war Japan’, in P. van der Veer and H. Lehmann (eds), Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 144–60. Kwon, H. 2008. Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van der Veer, P. and H. Lehmann (eds). 1999. Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zhang Yanxian and Gao Shuyuan. 1998. Luku Shijian Yanjiu Diaocha (The Luku Incident: Investigation Research). Taipei: Taipei County Government Publishing House. ––– and Chen Fenghua. 2000. Luku Shijian: Han Cunde Kuqi (The Luku Incident: Lament of a Winter Village). Taipei: Taipei County Government Publishing House.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 251

Chapter 10

Afterword: Violence and the Generation of Memory Rosalind Shaw How can people remember what they have never directly experienced? While Durkheim’s student Halbwachs developed the concept of memory as extending beyond the individual, Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm explore the ways in which memories – specifically, memories of political violence – extend across time, through intergenerational transmission. Moving beyond the false dichotomy between memory and history that has dominated much of the literature on memory, they seek to examine what violence means to those affected by it, how it shapes practices, representations and identities, how people remember and communicate it to subsequent generations, and how such memories may be mobilised in contexts of political struggle. The editors open their introduction with a hypothetical trajectory from inchoate individual experiences of violence to a coherent, socially accepted memory narrative that then shapes individual experience in subsequent generations. But as they later make clear, just as ‘one cannot speak of a straightforward or linear narrative of violence’ (Argenti and Schramm, introduction, ‘Violence and Collective Memory’), nor can one speak of a single teleology of transmission. While some memories of violence do cohere into approved forms – such as the nationalised Holocaust narratives and the legitimating memories of Bulongic initiatory ordeals examined in this volume by Jackie Feldman and David Berliner respectively – others – such as embodied memories of rape in Guadaloupe and ritual memories of slavery in Cuban Palo Monte ritual analysed respectively by Janine Klungel and Adelheid Pichler – do not necessarily become more verbally discursive with the succession of generations. This issue – that of the relationship among experiences of political violence, verbal exegesis, less discursive forms of memory, and the ways in which the latter two are transmitted (or not) – runs through all the chapters of this book.

Memory = Culture? Some feel strongly that the term ‘memory’ should be reserved for individual perceptions and processes, thereby implicitly rejecting

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

252

4/11/09

13:08

Page 252

Afterword: Violence and the Generation of Memory

Halbwachs’s entire thesis. In a recent critique, Berliner rhetorically asks ‘Are not only individuals capable of remembering?’ (2005: 198). Characterising analyses that extend the concept of memory beyond the scope of individual mental acts as semantically ‘dangerous’ (ibid.: 197; 203; 207, n. 4; 208, n. 5), he makes the following charges: Here, there is neither perception nor remembering. Memory is not seen as a set of representations of events and experiences that are shared, but as the way lasting traces of the past persist within us, as the transmission and persistence of cultural elements through the generations. Memory is not these series of recalled mental images, but a synonym for cultural storage of the past: it is the reproduction of the past in the present, this accumulated past which acts on us and makes us act. (ibid.: 201) Thus according to Berliner, such studies render memory almost indistinguishable from culture more generally. Memory is a ‘boom’ topic, he concludes, because it enables anthropologists to pursue their longstanding concern with cultural continuity (ibid.: 205). Certain scholars, heavily influenced by Connerton, do indeed appear to equate memory, social reproduction and cultural continuity. But overall, Berliner’s argument is difficult to reconcile with developments in anthropological thought over the past twenty years, in which anthropologists have been taught to privilege disjuncture, rupture and instability. When anthropologists focus specifically on how violence may be remembered in the sociocultural environment, moreover, their arguments tend to work differently from the way Berliner suggests. By extending the concept of memory into the realm of non–discursive sociocultural practice, such studies have, I would argue, contributed to the historicising of our understanding of culture, moving these further from – not closer to – notions of timeless continuity. For instance, both Kleinman and Kleinman (1994) and Stoller (1995) address, for China and for Nigerien Songhay spirit possession, the ways in which the body as a mnemonic and mimetic entity may incorporate historical experiences of political subjugation; Jennifer Cole (2001) traces how people use social practices not normally regarded as ‘arts of memory’ to shape their memories of colonial violence in east Madagascar; Michael Lambek (2002) examines the ways in which spirit mediums in Mahajanga, Madagascar ‘bear history’ through performance; in my own study of Temne memories of the slave trade in Sierra Leone (2002), I explore how a history of violence and rupture articulates with social reproduction; and Nicolas Argenti (2007) analyses the multiple ways in which masked dances in Cameroon’s Grassfields retrace both the slave trade and colonial forced labour. Far from simply collapsing memory and culture, these studies indicate how

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 253

Rosalind Shaw 253

sociocultural practices intersect with historical experience and personal memories to reconfigure both the present and the past. Thus rather than consolidating a long–term anthropological preoccupation with cultural continuity, they instead move beyond the binary logic that makes rupture and social reproduction mutually exclusive alternatives.

Generational Transmission and the Mutability of Memory Attempts to restrict the term ‘memory’ either to individual perceptions or to verbally discursive remembering confront a further problem. The dichotomies on which these categorisations are based – individual versus social memories, and discursive versus non–discursive memories – often tend to be blurred, incomplete, unstable, reversible. Cole (2001: 7–8) uses the analogy of the ‘reversible illusion’ to describe how in east Madagascar, apparently forgotten colonial experiences dispersed as non–discursive traces throughout the sociocultural environment could suddenly snap into focus and appear as discursive memories again, only to be re–erased later. ‘Common sense’ notions of remembering and forgetting cannot encompass this instability, or the work of sociocultural practices through which people produce and modify these processes. Likewise, when memories of violence are transmitted between generations, we often see (as we do in this volume) a similar instability in which one form of memory transmutes into another, sometimes shifting back and forth between predominantly discursive and non–discursive forms, remembering and forgetting, commemoration and erasure. Nor can we take the starting point of violence itself for granted. Given that memories of past violence shape the ways in which people experience, enact and respond to subsequent violence, violent events are themselves mediated by memory. And contrary to much of the early work on trauma and memory by Freud and Janet, as well as the writings of subsequent generations of social scientists and critics influenced by this work (see Introduction, section Trauma, Time and Counter–Time), experiences of violence are not necessarily inchoate and resistant to verbalisation. Sometimes, as Hoffman (2005) observes, the ways in which we experience violence are shaped by narratives in specific ways. Anthropologists have documented the impact of Rambo videos on violence in Sierra Leone’s civil war, for example, where ‘Rambo: First Blood, Part One’ was used as a training video for combatants and sometimes served as a model to empower civilians who lived in the bush to evade attack (Richards 1996; Hoffman 2005). And disaster movies provided such a powerful lens for experiences of the 9/11 attacks (Hoffman 2005) that some of those who initially viewed media images of the World Trade Center believed that they were watching one. Such

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

254

4/11/09

13:08

Page 254

Afterword: Violence and the Generation of Memory

narratives shape not only experiences of violence but also the way we remember and re–narrate them (Shaw 2007a). In this present volume, the contributors document different trajectories of mutability as memories of violence are passed to the next generation. Some move from personal or fragmented accounts to legitimised vehicles for shaping the dispositions of youth. Both Jackie Feldman and David Berliner, whose chapters concern Israeli Ministry of Education youth tours of Auschwitz–Birkenau and Bulongic memories of initiation violence in coastal Guinea–Conakry, describe the creation of ‘approved’ narratives through the transmission of memories from elders to youth. In the charged setting of Auschwitz, the personal testimonies of survivor–witnesses are transformed by their juxtaposition with official narratives of the founding of the Israeli state and the frequent display of national symbols, thereby turning personal Holocaust memories into powerful sources of national identity. Among Bulongic youth, the painful initiation techniques that marked the distinction between men and boys, and between powerful secret knowledge and careless ignorance, still sustain the elders’ dominance and authority, despite the fact that these initiations ceased due to the onset of Islamisation more than fifty years ago. While, in keeping with the politics of secrecy, the elders speak of their initiation ordeals only in sparse, suggestive fragments, Bulongic youth expand these into more elaborate ‘vicarious memories’. In both cases, the ‘approved’ memories transmitted to the youth are enmeshed within crucial political struggles – the maintenance of Bulongic elders’ gerontocratic authority on the one hand, and Israel’s military actions on the other hand. Feldman provides an especially important political contextualisation, arguing that ‘The voyage [to Auschwitz] makes the student into a “survivor”, at the very time when changes in the nature of Israel’s battles – from frontline combat to intifada urban terror – blur distinctions between soldiers and civilian victims …, implying that all are the victims of the same murderous forces.’ This dimension of official memory–making acquires particular force given that, Feldman reminds us, most youths on the tour will enter military service in a year’s time. The nationalised Holocaust testimonies of the Auschwitz tour will thus shape these youths’ experiences (and subsequent memories) of future violence as combatants in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Traumatic Silence Studies of memory and violence are frequently entangled with pervasive ideas about trauma and PTSD. Anthropological studies of memory have both mounted an important challenge to this universalising discourse and examined it as an important object of study in its own right (e.g. Young

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 255

Rosalind Shaw 255

1995). One of the strengths of the current volume lies in the editors’ close engagement with this discourse in the introduction. Exploring its origins in the work of Freud and Janet, they unpack the theory of traumatic silence, according to which trauma generates amnesia and cycles of repetition instead of remembering. Unable to narrativise (and therefore integrate) the traumatic event, victims undergo a dissociative splitting, simultaneously inhabiting the past and the present as two incommensurable realities, and pass on their psychosocial wounds to their children. According to this model, which is especially prominent in the literature on genocide and Holocaust memories, silence is pathologised, while narrative remembering constitutes the only ‘normal’, ‘healthy’ form of memory. But responses to mass violence in other contexts do not necessarily conform to this model of traumatic silence. In such forms as Sakalava spirit mediumship in Madagascar (Lambek 2002), Songhay spirit possession and postcolonial politics in Niger (Stoller 1995), cannibalism rumours in Sierra Leone (Shaw 2002), and masquerades in Cameroon’s Grassfields (Argenti 2007), people engage with the violent past – often through embodied, mimetic and ‘displaced’ verbal forms – and make it address concerns of the present. Rejecting intellectual frames that treat people primarily as patients, the editors conclude: ‘Any approach which focuses on pain alone does not leave ample space either for the consideration of political agency or the complex societal arrangements in which violence as well as its reformulations in and through memory unfold.’ Neither silence nor forgetting are necessarily pathological ‘symptoms’. Rather, there are different modes of silence and forgetting, produced by different kinds of memory work. In the present volume, several contributors reveal forms of silence that are – paradoxically – fundamental to generational transmissions of memory. Filippucci offers a sensitive account of civilian memory mediated by landscape, objects and images in the Argonne region of France, devastated when it became part of the Western Front during the First World War. When they returned after the war, villagers insisted that villages were at least partially rebuilt exactly as they had been, resisting authorities’ projects of modernisation. Objects that survived the destruction, as well as old photographs, were kept and treasured as relics. The memories of these returning Argonne civilians have been subject to two forms of silence. First, inhabitants did not talk about the war and its consequences. Second, civilian experiences and memories are excluded from the official memories promoted in this region by the state, which emphasise heroic military sacrifice for the nation through monuments and memorial battlefield sites, war–themed tourism and costumed re–enactments. Yet both forms of silence seem to have become vehicles for the generational transmission of civilian memories. Filippucci notes:

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

256

4/11/09

13:08

Page 256

Afterword: Violence and the Generation of Memory

The fact that what many in Argonne remember of the Great War experience is the silence of the older generations does not mean that nothing was transmitted to them. A charged silence may have brought the war into the lives of later generations in a compelling way, creating a space for their imagination to fill and prompting or indeed forcing a vicarious relationship with that past... Descendants learned a great deal from their parents’ memory objects and photographs, and built upon these by compiling their own collections of old postcards and by taking part in such public forms of commemoration as costume re–enactments and visits to war sites. While their parents’ civilian silences propel today’s descendants to participate in official memory practices, however, it would be interesting to know how they actually use the latter: do they do so in ways not anticipated by the state’s attempts to control militarised public memory in this region for nationalist purposes? Similarly, Kidron’s comparison of Israeli Holocaust descendants and Cambodian Canadian descendants of genocide survivors reveals two contrasting modes of silence, both of which are experienced as constructive and empowering rather than ‘unhealthy’ by the two groups. This research, she points out, casts doubt on dominant ideas in psychology, holocaust studies and genocide studies about the transmission of traumatic silence, according to which ‘trauma descendants share in common a legacy of PTSD–related psycho–social scars … and childhood memories of a familial “conspiracy of silence”’. While Holocaust descendants describe the pervasive non–verbal presence of Holocaust memories in their parents’ homes through everyday domestic practices, Cambodian Canadian descendants describe a more complete absence of the genocidal past. For the former group, the non–verbal character of their parents’ memories makes these especially intimate and meaningful, while for the latter, silence is a sign that the genocidal past has been overcome. Both sets of adult descendants, writes Kidron, ‘reject the pathological profile of transmitted PTSD, show a disinterest in historicizing their familial past and avoid public forms of commemoration’. Nevertheless, they each assert that they find their parents’ pasts as survivors morally enriching in their own construction of descendant selfhoods. Kidron’s research thus mounts a powerful challenge to standard epistemologies of silence, and to approaches that valorise only those forms of public memory work that aim to ‘break the silence’. Surprisingly, only Kidron specifically addresses the critical influence of psychotherapy and post–traumatic stress disorder, despite the editors’ strong treatment of this topic in their introduction. In these discourses, which are globalised through a range of contexts from media

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 257

Rosalind Shaw 257

representations and New Age techniques to truth commissions (Ross 2003; Shaw 2007b; Wilson 2001; Yezer 2007), humanitarian assistance (James, forthcoming), and psychosocial programmes (Argenti–Pillen 2003; Rall 2005), verbal exegesis has become the only form of memory deemed acceptable and ‘healthy’. Such contexts are crucial sites for the shaping, transmission and erasure of memories of violence, and for the state’s deployment of these processes, to which I now turn.

Memory, Testimony, Justice Theories of traumatic silence and the corresponding construction of public memory as uniquely redemptive have been disseminated and reshaped by the expansion of transitional justice over the past twenty–five years. Often modelled on the Nuremberg trials, and shaped by the fall of repressive regimes at the end of the Cold War, such mechanisms as national and international tribunals and truth commissions were extended to the aftermaths of civil wars, and have now become normalised as part of a post–violence ‘toolkit’, together with public apologies, memorial sites and reparations. After violent state repression in Latin America during the 1980s, personal testimonies before truth commissions became powerful weapons against human rights abuses. Then through the influence of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in the mid–1990s, the language of justice was melded with the language of therapy (Minow 1998: 63). Such official slogans as ‘revealing is healing’ configured public testimony as a cathartic process of cleansing the ‘festering wounds’ of violent memory – a process that was made to serve the new post–Apartheid state’s purposes of nation–building (Wilson 2001). Although transitional justice policy–makers and practitioners no longer assume that publicly recounting narratives of terrible violence in a court or truth commission is necessarily ‘healing’, most share the dominant assumption that silence results in the reproduction of cycles of violence for subsequent generations. This imperative to remember is often problematic, however, in the context of low–intensity civil wars that have now become the most usual sites for transitional justice interventions. In the moral ‘grey zone’ of conflict, as the editors point out, it may not be possible to neatly divide people into ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’ in the way that post–conflict justice processes typically require. Where civilians live in face–to–face relationships with rank–and–file ex–combatants, neighbours often reconstruct their lives through strategies of silence (Argenti–Pillen 2003), ‘sealing the past’ (Honwana 1998), and what Cole (2001: 224) describes as ‘directed forgetting’. Such practices of reintegration through modes of forgetting do not necessarily mean the absence of memory, however. The

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

258

4/11/09

13:08

Page 258

Afterword: Violence and the Generation of Memory

violent past may be invoked non–verbally and separated from the present through embodied ritual action (Honwana 1998), or it may be verbally reworked into standardised moral scripts through which ex–combatants seek (re)integration into communities (Theidon 2006). In Sierra Leone, ex–combatants drew upon such standardised narratives while ostensibly ‘confessing’ and ‘apologising’ before a truth commission, thereby retooling this post–war justice mechanism from below in accordance with local memory practices that better foster reintegration (Shaw, in press). In the current volume, two contributions concern the work of memory following earlier periods of state repression. In her research in post–Pinochet Chile, Dorthe Brogaard Kristensen traces the reworking of memories of terror through Mapuche illness narratives and shamanistic healing techniques. Here, in a context of enduring political fear and denial, memories of state violence are rarely verbalised. Such contexts make up the locus classicus of institutional silencing from which standard models of memory and silence in transitional justice were developed. In contrast to this repressive silencing, Kristensen argues, ‘memories of violence are articulated and negotiated through [Mapuche] personal narrative, bodily symptoms and indigenous medical practices’. At the same time, Chile’s Commission Sobre Prisión Politica y Tortura collected very different memories about the Pinochet era: direct verbal testimonies. We learn, significantly, that the informant on whose illness narrative and healing process the chapter is focused also testified before the Commission: it would have been especially illuminating to hear how these contrasting modes of memory intersected for this man. Somatised experiences such as those Kristensen describes are sometimes interpreted in a quasi–hydraulic manner, as having efficacy primarily because discursive ways of dealing with the past are unavailable in contexts of state repression. But the concurrence of these modes of memory in this instance suggests that Mapuche illness and healing experiences are not merely ‘second best’ substitutes for discursive remembering, but may offer techniques of reworking that are not accessible through verbal testimony alone. The second contribution, by Stephen Feuchtwang, concerns intersecting forms of memory following a brutal state crackdown upon a Communist movement in Luku, Taiwan, in 1952/1953. As in Chile, in this context of Cold War state repression the families of victims and survivors felt unsafe talking about the ‘Luku Incident’ afterwards. Yet its memory took the powerful form of unquiet ghosts, especially among families lacking funds for proper burial. In the 1980s, however, increasing prosperity made it possible for the families to conduct the rituals that would transform their dead into ancestors. At the same time, the late 1980s saw the repressive Nationalist government replaced with a new government that wished to commemorate earlier state abuses and compensate affected families. Thus while, among the victims’ families,

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 259

Rosalind Shaw 259

disordered hauntings were transformed into formal commemorative domestic rituals, on the part of the state a repressive silence was replaced by a flurry of official narratives in books and films, a physical monument to the victims, and compensation for the families. Despite – or perhaps because of – these initiatives, however, silences were intensified by an enduring political context of anti–Communism and state paternalism. Victim families, Feuchtwang notes, ‘had to say they were not Communists in order to receive compensation’. Later, the families decided that they wanted a museum, but funding was no longer available: the state now wished to move on. Thus neither during the Cold War era nor that of state commemoration could the families determine how the Luku Incident was publicly remembered. In Luku, this incident is no longer transmitted to the next generation. When Feuchtwang concludes ‘[b]oth history and commemoration have enabled forgetting’, this appears to confirm standard models of the redemptive power of commemoration and memorials. Yet given the contradictions generated by the top–down state projects he describes, the erasure of the Luku incident from the memory of subsequent generations would appear to owe little to a process of ‘closure’. Nevertheless, this and other studies in this volume explore extremely important questions about contrasting modes of memory after political violence, how these develop through time, how they intersect with each other, and how they are enmeshed in subsequent political processes. By tracing a broad range of trajectories of transmission and analysing these in terms of complex political agency, they demonstrate that we can assume neither that commemoration necessarily redeems nor that silence necessarily represents a ‘failure to deal with the past’. The next question this raises for me – of how the generational transmission of post–violence memory affects the recurrence of violence – must be left for a future volume.

References Argenti, N. 2007. The Intestines of the State: Youth, Violence, and Belated Histories in the Cameroon Grassfields. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Argenti–Pillen, A. 2003. Masking Violence: How Women Contain Violence in Southern Sri Lanka. Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press. Berliner, D. 2005. ‘The Abuses of Memory: Reflections on the Memory Boom in Anthropology’, Anthropological Quarterly 78(1): 197–211. Cole, J. 2001. Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hoffman, D. 2005. ‘Violent Events as Narrative Blocs: The Disarmament at Bo, Sierra Leone’, Anthropological Quarterly 78(2): 328–53.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

260

4/11/09

13:08

Page 260

Afterword: Violence and the Generation of Memory

Honwana, A. 1998. ‘Sealing the Past, Facing the Future: Trauma Healing in Mozambique’, Accord (Conciliation Resources) issue on the Mozambican peace process. http://www.c–r.org/our–work/ accord/mozambique/past–future.php James, E. forthcoming. ‘Ruptures, Rights, and Repair: The Politics of Truth in Haiti’, in K.M. Clarke and Mark Goodale (eds), Mirrors of Justice: Law, Power and the Making of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kleinman, A. and J. Kleinman. 1994. ‘How Bodies Remember: Social Memory and Bodily Experience of Criticism, Resistance, and Delegitimation Following China’s Cultural Revolution’, New Literary History 25: 708–23. Lambek, M. 2002. The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Minow, M. 1998. Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence. Boston: Beacon Press. Rall, A.P. 2005. ‘Trauma and the Politics of Exclusion: Social Work and “Post–War” Rwanda’, Ph.D. dissertation, Departments of Anthropology and Social Work. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan. Richards, P. 1996. Fighting for the Rain Forest: War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone. Oxford: James Currey. Ross, F.C. 2003. Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. London: Pluto Press. Shaw, R. 2002. Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. –––. 2007a. ‘Displacing Violence: Making Pentecostal Memory in Postwar Sierra Leone’, Cultural Anthropology 22(1): 65–92. –––. 2007b. ‘Memory Frictions: Localizing Truth and Reconciliation in Sierra Leone’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 1: 183–207. –––. in press. ‘Linking Justice with Reintegration? Ex-Combatants and the Sierra Leone Experiment’, in R. Shaw and L. Waldorf, with P. Hazan (eds), Localizing Transitional Justice: Interventions and Priorities After Mass Violence. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Stoller, P. 1995. Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power, and the Hauka in West Africa. New York and London: Routledge. Theidon, K. 2006. ‘Justice in Transition: The Micropolitics of Reconciliation in Postwar Peru’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 50(3): 433–57. Wilson, R.A. 2001. The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post–apartheid State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yezer, C. 2007. ‘Anxious Citizenship: Insecurity, Apocalypse, and War Memories in Peru’s Andes’, Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University. Young, A. 1995. The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post–Traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 261

Notes on Contributors Nicolas Argenti is a lecturer in the department of anthropology, Brunel University. He has been conducting research in the Cameroon Grassfields since 1991. His 2007 monograph – The Intestines of the State: Youth, Violence and Belated Histories in the Cameroon Grassfields – examines the historical development of youth as an oppressed social category and a source of repeated insurrections in the region, arguing that memories of tensions between youth and elders are still embodied in relations between these two groups today. His present research focuses on the memories of slavery, pawning and fosterage addressed in children’s story–telling and healing rites. David Berliner is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), a position preceded by an appointment at the Central European University (Hungary). In 2001–2003, he was a post–doctoral fellow at Harvard University. He has published various articles about learning and transmission, memory, religion, youth, art and gender in West Africa. He has co–edited (with Ramon Sarró) a collection of essays, Learning Religion: Anthropological Approaches (2007), and a special issue of Men and Masculinities entitled ‘Men Doing Anthropology of Women’ (with Douglas Falen, 2008). He is now starting a new research project in Laos about UNESCO heritage–making policies and cultural transmission in Luang Prabang. Jackie Feldman is a lecturer in anthropology at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, Israel. His book, Above the Death Pits, beneath the Flag; Youth Voyages to Holocaust Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity, was published by Berghahn Press in 2008. He has also published on the uncosmopolitan memory of the Shoah in Mittelweg 36. Based on his experience as a tour guide for Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land, he has undertaken a project entitled ‘Jewish Guide, Christian Pilgrim, Holy Land: Negotiations of Identity’ and his article ‘Constructing a Bible Land: Jewish–Israeli Guiding Performances for Protestant Pilgrims’ appeared in American Ethnologist in 2008. He is currently engaged in a project comparing the new Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem with the Jewish Museum, Berlin. His main interests are anthropology of religion, pilgrimage, tourism and collective memory.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

262

4/11/09

13:08

Page 262

Notes on Contributors

Stephan Feuchtwang is part–time Professor in the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics. His current research interests include anthropology of history and of self–realisation in different temporalities, and comparative approaches to large–scale entities, empires, oekumenes and civilisations. Recent publications include, as editor and contributor, Making Place: State Projects, Globalisation and Local Responses in China, UCL Press (2004); (with Wang Mingming) Grassroots Charisma: Four Local Leaders in China, Routledge (2001); and Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor, Routledge/Curzon (2001). Paola Filippucci is College Lecturer and Director of Studies in Archaeology and Anthropology at New Hall, Cambridge. She has done fieldwork on the remembrance of the Great War in one of the former battlefields in Eastern France on which she is currently writing a book. Her research interests include the social and cultural construction of the past; historicity; temporality; the anthropology of place and landscape; and the anthropology of archaeology and of ‘heritage’. Her research to date has been in Western Europe (Italy, Spain and France). Carol A. Kidron is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology–Anthropology at the University of Haifa, Israel. Her publications include ‘Toward an Ethnography of Silence: The Lived Presence of the Past in the Every Day Lives of Holocaust Trauma Descendants in Israel’ in Current Anthropology (2009), ‘The Homeric Hymn to Hermes: A Journey across the Continuum of Paradox’ published in Semiotica: Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (2006) and ‘Surviving a Distant Past: A Case Study of the Cultural Construction of Trauma Descendant Identity’ published in Ethos (2003). Kidron has undertaken ethnographic work with Holocaust trauma descendants in Israel and children of Cambodian genocide survivors in Canada. Her other research interests include: cultural critiques of the therapeutic discourse; illness constructs; personal and collective memory–identity–work; and Psychological Anthropology and Symbolic Anthropology. Janine Klungel studied cultural anthropology at Radboud University Nijmegen (RU), The Netherlands, and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France. She currently combines her PhD work with a teaching position at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies at RU. Her research focuses on rape in Guadeloupe: the ways it is expressed and its long–lasting effects on relationships. Additionally, she teaches the courses ‘Anthropology of Violence’ at RU.

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 263

Notes on Contributors 263

Dorthe Brogaard Kristensen is a postdoc in consumption studies at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense and an extern lecturer in public health at the University of Copenhagen. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Copenhagen (2008) and a M.Sc. in medical anthropology from University College London (1998). Her current research interests include health and embodiment, transcultural psychiatry, medical pluralism and indigenous peoples. She has conducted long–term fieldwork in southern Chile between 1999 and 2005. This article is based on her Ph.D. thesis entitled The Shaman and the Doctor? Patient, Culture and Power in Southern Chile (2008). Adelheid Pichler has studied Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. Since 1996 she has done long–term fieldwork in Cuba. Since 2002 she has worked as an Associate Researcher at the Commission for Social Anthropology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her ongoing research project on ‘Perceptions of Space and Time in Afro–Cuban Ritual Performance’ has been financed by the Austrian Research Fund for Scientific Research (FWF–Austrian Research Fund). Katharina Schramm is a lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology at Martin–Luther–University Halle–Wittenberg and research associate at the Max–Planck–Institute for Social Anthropology (LOST–group). She has conducted fieldwork on the politics of memory and heritage in Ghana, mainly with regard to the representation of the slave trade and the homecoming movement of African Americans, on which she has published a number of articles. Her book Struggling over the Past: The Politics of Heritage and Homecoming in Ghana is forthcoming with Left Coast Press. Her current research focuses on the interface between new genetics, race and citizenship. Rosalind Shaw is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University. She is the author of Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone (University of Chicago Press, 2002), co–editor of Dreaming, Religion and Society in Africa (E.J. Brill, 1992), and of Syncretism/Anti–Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis (Routledge, 1994). Memories of the Slave Trade was a finalist for the 2003 Herskovitz Prize for the best scholarly work on Africa. Recent awards include a Jennings Randolph Senior Fellowship at the US Institute of Peace, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Grant, and a Fellowship at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Transitional Justice. Her current research includes a book project on practices of post–war memory, justice and social recovery in Sierra Leone, and a co–edited volume, Localizing Transitional Justice (Stanford University Press).

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 265

Index A Africa, 4, 7, 17, 21, 138, 139, 140, 143, 147, 151, 155, 257, 263 Agamben, Girogio, 9, 12, 263 agency, 15, 16, 19, 64, 70, 75, 76, 95, 145, 151, 152, 157, 255, 259 Alexander, Jeffrey, 14, 71, 115, 119, 125, 126, 222 Aliyah – immigration to Israel, 124 anti-Semitism, 103 aporia, 9, 263 Appadurai, Arjun, 25, 151 Argenti, Nicolas, 1, 8, 12, 15, 16, 20, 54, 68, 71, 76, 78, 103, 231, 251, 252, 255, 257, 263 Argenti-Pillen, Alex, 15, 16, 257, 263 army, 121, 122, 125, 166 Assmann, Jan, 2 Augé, Marc, 8, 14, 172 Auschwitz-Birkenau, 103, 104, 111, 112, 254 authenticity, 115, 172, 223

boundaries, 3, 46, 67, 106, 123, 157, 168, 180, 184 Bourdieu, 8, 58 bozal, 138, 139, 141, 144, 156, 157 Bray, Tamara, 17 Brown, David, 137, 138, 150, 152 Brubaker, Rogers, 263 brujos, 140, 146 Buddhism, 218, 219, 263

C cabildo, 137 Cabrera, Lydia, 136, 154, 157 Cambodia, 209, 219, 220 and Cambodian-Canadian diaspora, 219 Cameroon, 20, 252, 255, 263 Cantwell, Anne-Marie, 17 Caruth, Cathy, 9, 13, 14, 15, 70, 121, 122, 165, 171, 184, 194, 263 Casey, Edward, 7, 165, 167, 182, 185, 263 Charcot, Jean Martin, 9 B cimarrones, 25, 139, 154 Bahloul, Joëlle, 6, 7, 263 Cole, Jennifer, 3, 84, 252, 263 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 18 collective memory, 4–7, 9, 13, 19, 49, Ballinger, Pamela, 112, 115 63, 83, 84, 106, 107, 125, 157, 195, Bangladesh, 8 219, 222, 223, 263 Barcia Zequeira, 138 Comaroff, Jean, 7, 13 Battaglia, Debbora, 263 commemoration, 1, 5, 21, 23, 24, 27, Bauman, Zygmunt, 18, 106, 122, 263 48, 50, 108, 170, 175, 177–179, 193, Beit-El, Ilana, 108, 121, 123 207–209, 214, 219–223, 230–234, Ben-Amos, Avner, 108, 121, 123 236, 240, 241, 245, 247, 248, 253, Bender, Barbara, 25 256, 259 Benjamin, Walter, 166, 263 Congo, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 151, Bettelheim, Bruno., 9, 10, 139, 140, 152, 155 263 Connerton, Paul, 7, 8, 107, 147, 252 Bloch, Maurice, 8, 14, 84, 180 Cooper, Frederick, 263 blood, 53, 57–58, 71, 89, 113, 116, cosmology, 64, 123, 207, 242 148–150, 168, 236, 263 crematoria, 103, 113, 114, 119, 120, 124 Borges, Jorge Luis., 263 Cuba, 25, 135–156

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

266

4/11/09

13:08

Page 266

Index

D death, 5, 12, 27, 45, 46, 54, 58, 65, 71, 74, 75, 83, 88, 90, 91, 106, 109, 110, 112, 115–126, 135, 142, 148, 181, 200, 201, 204, 205, 209, 214, 215, 216, 219, 223, 229, 230, 232, 238, 239, 241–247 Derrida, Jacques, 9, 11, 12, 13, 18, 263 diaspora, 109, 151, 209, 219 dissociation, 10, 11, 263 Don-Yehiya, Eliezer, 108

G Geschiere, Peter, 7, 263 ghostliness, 12 ghosts, 12, 13, 71, 230, 242, 245–248, 258 Giddens, Anthony, 145 Gillis, John, 16 global memory, 125 Gold, Ann and Bhoju Ram Gujar, 7 Greece, 17

H Hacking, Ian, 15, 263 Halbwachs, Maurice, 2, 5, 6, 46, 64, 107, 157, 165, 167, 168, 183, 184, 251, 252, 263 Hamilton, Carrie, 263 Handelman, Don, 108, 110, 122, 124 Havana, 137, 138, 153 heroism, 18 Herzfeld, Michael, 18, 263 Historikerstreit, 263 Hodgkin, Katharine, 6, 14, 263 Holocaust, 10, 11, 14, 15, 23, 24, 26, 104–126, 135, 173, 184, 193–222, F 251, 254–256, 263 family, 9, 12, 27, 43, 44, 47, 51, 53, 54, and PTSD, 117, 193, 195, 196, 198, 66–68, 72–75, 104, 106, 111, 201, 254, 256 118–119, 150, 153, 155–157, 169, and second generation, 203, 204 170, 172, 178–179, 183, 185, 195, survivors, 10, 11, 24, 26, 103–127, 198, 200, 202–205, 208, 210–211, 193–217 214–217, 221, 223, 230, 232–238, Holocaust Memorial Day, 108, 119 241–248 Horton, 145 Feldman, Allen, 20 Huyssen, Andreas, 2, 263 Feldman, Jackie, 23, 24, 103, 251, 254 Felman, Shoshana, 9, 117 I Feuchtwang, Stephan, 2, 15, 27, 229, intifada, 121, 254 258, 259 Ireland, 20, 21, 263 flag, 103, 119–122, 124, 233, 242 Islamisation, 8, 24, 85, 86, 93, 95, 254 Foucault, Michel, 6, 263 Freud, Sigmund, 9–12, 20, 68, 70, 71, J 74, 168, 184, 253, 255, 263 Jacinto Congo, 151, 152, 155 Friedlander, Saul, 9, 108 James Figarola, Joel, 135, 136, 140, 155 Fuchs, Anne, 15 Janet, Pierre, 9, 20, 47, 253, 255, 263 E El Cobre, 136 embodied memory, 7, 8, 23, 71, 202, 223 embodiment, 8, 12, 22, 23, 67, 71, 76, 77, 93, 95, 98, 123, 157, 263 emotion, 24, 104, 108, 122, 123, 167, 171, 181, 182, 184, 185, 229 environmental bubble, 109 Erikson, Kai, 13, 14 exile, 107, 110, 121, 123 Eyerman, Ron, 4

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 267

Index 267

Janzen, 143

245, 247, 248, 253, 256, 259 counter-memories, 6, 21 K embodied, 7, 8, 23, 71, 202, 223 Kaddish, 119 forgetting, 1, 3, 8, 9, 13, 14, 16, 27, Kertzer, David, 108 196, 198, 213, 223, 231, 241, 247, Kirmayer, Lawrence, 9, 14, 46, 64, 65, 253, 255–259, 263 71, 75, 107, 112, 115, 117, 119, 126 habitual, 8 Klein, Kerwin Lee, 16 habitus, 8, 83, 84 Küchler, Susanne, 25, 263 memorialisation, 13, 171, 183 Kugelmass, Jack, 104, 106 micro-practices of remembering, 17 L milieu de mémoire, 3, 48, 57, 133, LaCapra, Dominick, 9 171, 206 Lambek, Michael and Paul Antze, 3, narrative, 10, 12, 54, 112, 114 20, 65, 69, 74, 135, 184, 194, 252, obliteration, 1, 16, 22, 23 255 oblivion, 1, 8, 9, 12, 120 Landres, J. Shawn, 4 politics of, 18, 196, 198 Langer, Lawrence, 10, 11, 114, 194, postmemories, 1 263 re-enactment, 9, 10, 14, 19, 20, 26, Lanzmann, Claude, 115 104, 115, 178, 179, 207, 255, 256 latency, 12 remembering, 1, 2, 5, 9, 14, 16, 17, Laub, Dori, 9, 12, 115, 116 19, 20, 26, 47, 65, 76, 77, 84, 85, Lescay, Alberto, 136 87, 139, 150, 153, 156, 170, 180, Levi, Primo, 58 181, 182, 183, 184, 187, 213, 223, Liebman, Charles, 108 252, 253, 255, 258 lieux de mémoire, 3 remembrance, 1, 18, 21, 25, 26, 44, 46, 58, 59, 135, 136, 170, 175, M 178, 179, 181, 182, 184, 196, 207, Madagascar, 3, 20, 74, 252, 253, 255, 222, 223, 241, 246, 263 and 263 revision, 7 Makdisi, Usama, 4, 263 social, 1, 7, 14, 147, 156, 165, 181, Mannheim, Karl, 263 183, 184, 231 master commemorative narrative, techniques du corps, 8 107 Middle Passage, 49, 138 Matanzas, 137, 151, 153 military service, 121, 122, 125, 254 Matsuda, Matt, 2 Ministry of Education, Israel, 103, Mauss, Marcel, 8 108–111, 124, 254 Mayombe, 136, 138, 151, 155 Mintz, Sidney and Richard Price, 47, memory, 48, 138, 176, 178, 263 bearing witness, 1, 76, 115 Mitchell, Jon, 145 commemoration, 1, 5, 21, 23, 24, moral legitimacy, 107 27, 48, 50, 108, 170, 175, Mosse, George, 124 177–179, 193, 207–209, 214, mourning, 88, 118, 121, 169, 170, 175, 219–223, 230–232, 236, 240, 241, 176, 180, 181, 247

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

268

4/11/09

13:08

Page 268

Index

Moyuba, 150 Mythic Tales, 205, 216 N Nachträglichkeit, 12 narrative, 1, 10, 12, 13, 18, 20, 21, 25, 45, 47, 54, 58, 64, 68, 73, 75, 76, 106–108, 111–117, 120, 124, 151, 152, 172, 174, 176, 183, 184, 197, 202, 203, 206, 215, 216, 230, 234, 235, 238, 239, 247, 251, 255, 258 nation, 24, 27, 44, 48, 103, 107, 108, 120, 121, 123, 125, 180, 231, 232, 235, 245, 255, 257, 263 national redemption, 104, 107, 108, 117 National Socialism, 15 necromancy, 123 negative sanctification, 124 nganga, 136, 138–140, 144, 146, 147, 149, 151, 152, 156, 157 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8 Nora, Pierre, 2, 3, 7, 139, 181, 182, 214 Nordstrom, Carolyn, 21 Northern Ireland, 20, 21 Nuttall Sarah and Carli Coetzee, 19 O Ochoa, Todd, 141, 155 Ofer, Dalia, 120 Offe, Sabine, 135 Olick, Jeffrey K., 263 Olivier de Sardan, Jean-Pierre, 263 Ortiz, Fernando, 146, 147 P paleros, 25, 138, 139, 143, 149, 151, 154, 155, 156, 157 Palmié, Stefan, 137, 138, 157 Palo Monte,, 25, 136, 137, 138, 139, 143, 150, 151, 153, 155, 251 Papailias, Penelope, 16, 18 Passerini, Luisa, 16

Peel, JDY., 7 Pels, 145, 182, 185 performance, 20, 23, 24, 75, 104, 106, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 125, 136, 145, 147, 150, 155–157, 252 Piot, Charles, 7 Poland, 19, 24, 104, 106, 108–111, 117, 119, 121–125 Postcolony, 3 PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), 4, 11, 14, 15, 19, 20, 118, 193, 195, 196, 198, 201, 206, 210, 217, 221, 254, 256, 263 R Radstone, Susannah, 6, 14, 263 redemption, 104, 107, 108, 117 Regla de Ocha, 136, 137 Regla de Palo, 136 ritual, 6, 8, 16, 18, 23, 24, 71, 86–94, 98, 104, 106, 115, 123, 125, 126, 136, 139, 141–157, 207, 223, 229, 231, 232, 240, 242, 243, 248, 251, 258 Ritual Performance, 141, 145 Robben, Antonius, 21 Robbins, Joyce, 263 roots-seeking, 108 Rouch, Jean, 263 Runaway Slave, 136 S sacralisation, 4 Sakalava, 20, 255 sanctification, 124 Santiago de Cuba, 136 Scheper-Hughes, 43, 54, 263 Schramm, Katharina, 1, 19, 103, 251, 263 Seligman, Adam, 108 shaman,, 63, 112, 113, 124 Shaw, Rosalind, 7, 8, 13, 22, 84, 251, 254, 255, 257, 258 Silence, 171, 198, 199, 209, 211, 254

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

4/11/09

13:08

Page 269

Index 269

and trauma, 6, 9, 11–14, 22, 24, 26, 27, 44, 55, 66, 135, 136, 151, 171, 174, 177, 182, 184, 193, 196, 198–204, 207–212, 220, 222, 223, 224 (note 12), 234, 254–262 Silverstein, Paul A., 4, 263 slaveholder society, 149 slavery, 5, 14, 20, 25, 44, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 54, 135, 136, 137, 146, 147, 151, 155, 156, 251 social script, 119 Spitzer, Leo, 1 state, 4, 6, 11, 18–20, 24, 27, 43, 46, 63–66, 68, 76, 78, 98, 104, 106–108, 112–115, 118, 120–126, 136, 166, 168, 170, 175, 180, 231, 254–259, 263 Stier, Baruch, 4 Stoler, Ann Laura, 7, 263 Stoller, Paul, 8, 84, 252, 255, 263 Strassler, Karen, 7, 263 Strathern, Andrew, 25 Sturken, Marita, 7, 8, 263 suffering, 4, 8, 9, 14–16, 19, 23, 26, 45, 50, 55, 57, 65–68, 72, 74, 92, 96, 107, 111, 113, 117, 119–123, 126, 135, 169, 170, 175, 178, 179, 184, 193, 194, 196, 205, 206, 209–213, 216, 218, 219, 221, 223, 230, 236, 240, 243, 247, 248, 263 supplementarity, 20 survivors, 10, 11, 22, 24, 26, 27, 43, 57, 104, 106–125, 168, 171, 177, 179, 181–185, 193–198, 203, 207–210, 213–215, 217, 218, 222, 223, 229, 230, 235, 239, 241, 242, 246–249, 256, 258, 263 survivors 'by proxy', 24, 106, 122, 123 Swedenburg, Ted, 18 symbolic type, 110 Sznaider, Natan, 125, 126

T Taiwan, 27, 229–47, 258 Taussig, Michael, 18, 64, 71, 75, 76, 123, 126, 263 Taylor, Diana, 156, 157 teleology, 117, 124, 251 territory, 43, 47, 75, 104, 126, 166 testimony, 24, 72, 104, 106, 109–125, 208, 221, 223, 240, 241, 257, 258 testimony as incarnation, 113 torture, 22, 66, 67, 72, 85, 94, 135, 147, 148, 155, 229, 237, 247 tour guide, 180, 246 transformation, 8, 88, 112, 117, 137, 145, 147, 150, 152 trauma, 1, 4, 5, 9–24, 27, 43, 45, 54, 55, 58, 59, 71, 76, 84, 85, 107, 112, 115, 125, 126, 135, 155, 165, 171, 173, 184, 185, 193–198, 200, 203, 207, 217–223, 229, 230, 238, 241, 243, 245, 247–249, 253–256, 263 and racism, 5 and slavery, 5, 14, 20, 25, 44, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 54, 135, 136, 137, 146, 147, 151, 155, 156, 251 transgenerational traumatic memories, 13 memory, 10, 11, 15, 23, 45, 68, 114, 210, 263 U uncertainty, 121, 122, 123, 125 Unnold, Yvonne S, 9 Urry, J., 24 V van der Hart, Onno, 9, 10, 11, 114, 263 van der Kolk, Bessel A., 9, 11, 15, 114, 263 van der Veer, Peter, 15 Verdery, Katherine, 17, 48, 123 Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 263 Vickroy, Laurie, 9

Argenti_Schramm-p1-270.qxd:Argenti

270

4/11/09

13:08

Page 270

Index

victory, 117–126, 154, 156, 234 violence, 1–39, 54, 57, 63–80, 85, 86, 99, 157, 165, 166, 176, 180, 183, 185, 194, 229, 234, 238, 239, 248, 251–260 and memory, 1–5, 8–26, 43, 44, 45, 49–59, 63–76, 83–5, 96, 105–107, 111, 113–117, 120, 124, 126 (notes 10, 11, 12), 136, 156–159, 165, 171, 173, 177–186, 194, 196, 198, 201–213, 219–223, 231, 246, 248, 251–259 political, 1, 3, 4, 8, 14, 19, 234, 239, 251, 259 and trauma, 1–27, 43, 45, 54, 55, 58, 59, 71, 76, 84, 85, 107, 112, 115, 125, 126, 135, 155, 165, 171, 173, 184, 185, 193–207, 217–223, 229, 230, 238, 241, 243, 245–256, 263 see also collective memory W Walker, Janet, 263 Weigel, Sigrid, 14

Weissberg, Liliane, 263 White, Hayden, 8, 235, 236, 238–241, 247, 249 Wilce, James, 7, 8, 263 Winer, Margot, 25 witness, 1, 46, 54, 72, 76, 83, 103, 104, 106, 109–124, 207, 214 witnesses of the witnesses, 24, 104, 117, 124 Y Yale Video Archive, 10 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 107, 111, 117, 207 youth, 23, 24, 53, 86, 93, 96, 98, 103, 104, 106, 108, 109, 110, 119, 123, 125, 178, 195, 219, 231, 254 Z Zemon-Davis, Nathalie and Randolph Stern, 6, 63, 65, 66 Zertal, Idith, 16, 108, 120 Zerubavel, Yael, 107, 117 Zionism, 106, 107