Abstract
Trump’s “Make America Great Again” or Reagan’s “Let’s make America great again” seemed to share the same ambition of “[. . .] waiting for a greater future to be imported from the imagined past” (p. 1). Uses of the past in political settings are often “nation-based” and many political projects “seek legitimacy [. . .] by claiming to echo the familiar stock of the storied past” (p. 2). In Post-Conflict Memorialization: Missing Memorials, Absent Bodies, the editors want to challenge this perspective by analyzing stories that “are not in stock and not in step with any of the political canons that govern the discourses that surround them” (p. 2). In this regard, memory is understood as a process that includes complex dynamics of remembering, silencing, forgetting, and absence. This topic is of major importance in many societies around the globe where nationalist discourses are (still) used to promote essentialist ideas of collective and individual identities.
In societies with violent or conflictual pasts, many memories are absent or kept silenced. But simply re-telling or re-writing the missing past is insufficient in post-conflict societies. Demands of recognition require action which not only highlights the absence but also looks at the consequences of the absence on communities and/or individuals and suggests solutions in the present and for the future. That’s why, in post-conflict societies, traumatic experiences and processes of recovery must be taken into consideration in finding “ways to write about difficult experiences and reconcile past and present” (p. 4, my italics). This argument is not new in the field of cultural memory studies and a long list of researchers have focused on these aspects. In the introduction of this volume, we find references to many of them, including Caruth (1995), Olick and Robbins (1998), Misztal (2003), Radstone (2007), and Dawson (2017). The choice of the editors to mainly focus on trauma theorists is easily understandable, but theories that have emphasized the role of silence in the field of cultural memory studies (a notion which is actively used in the volume) could have been a clarifying supplement to the suggested theoretical framework (e.g. Ben-Ze’ev et al., 2010; Dessingué and Winter, 2016). By including a more systematic differentiation between the (many) different concepts (trauma, absence, silence, forgetting, erasure, omission), the volume could have made clearer theoretical contributions to the field of cultural memory studies and trauma theory. Moreover, such a theoretical framework would have made it easier for the reader to establish transcultural correspondences between the different case-studies presented in this volume.
Nonetheless, the case studies illustrate implicitly two central ideas developed by the editors in the introduction. First, traumatic experiences don’t follow a linear logic which may not “always be efficient” (p. 5). Second, complexity of such processes resides both in individual and in collective dynamics and frameworks (p. 7). Through the 10 chapters, each based on a particular post-conflict case study, the volume emphasizes the role played by “absence” in the processes of remembrance and mourning. Absence “is revealed to be multifaceted,” and “(re)-emerges through silence, omission, erasure, and haunting, as well as through the physical and psychological aches that persist among the ever-mourning” (p. 7).
Chapter 2, by Johanna Mannergren Selimovic, introduces the powerful art installation Sarajevo Red Line consisting of “11541 red plastic chairs in rows along Sarajevo’s main street” (p. 15), commemorating the siege of the city in 1992–1996. Each chair represented a person killed during the conflict. According to Mannergren Selimovic, this art installation clearly contrasted with official politicized and nationalist practices of remembrance. She develops the interesting concept of “presence of absence” in vernacular contexts in today’s Sarajevo to show how silences are multifaceted in everyday practices and speech acts and can assume different provocative and/or empowering functions (p. 31). In post-conflict societies, history and historical narratives are often unable to make sense and/or to be heard. On the contrary, art works and performative representations of the past have the potential to create dialogue and reflection among people.
Olivette Otele suggests in Chapter 3 to look at the notion of Afrophobia in relation to sites of memory connected to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade in Britain. The question she asks is “how ‘negative attitudes towards people of African descent’ (Afrophobia) influence the way knowledge and memory are produced and consumed at twenty-first-century sites of memory in Britain?” (p. 35). This case-study focuses on the Penrhyn Castle in Wales as a memory site. Otele’s argument is that since many of the country houses in Britain were built with “the dividends of the slave trade” (p. 36), the Penrhyn Castle should also integrate the colonial past and focus on “multicultural history and identity” (p. 51). She concludes by suggesting that engaging with contested narratives, especially in education, may “counteract colonial narratives of oblivion that have invariably lead to forms of exclusion” (p. 51). This chapter demonstrates to what extent historical narratives may not only participate in shaping absence but also that silences and absences may lead to exclusion. Teaching history is therefore not about teaching or telling facts (or absence of facts), it also creates the conditions for social (in)justice.
In Chapter 4, Andrea Zittlau focuses on the performance project by the group Regreso de los Espíritus, which works to draw attention to the Selk’nam genocide in Chile. The author critiques the portrayal of the Selk’nam people in ethnographic museums (specifically the American Museum of Natural History) and, in particular, the display of shoes, which, unlike the shoes at Auschwitz, “mark absence but disguise the making of absence as a natural cause . . . which is presumably detached from human influences. The spectres are invisible but present” (p. 70). On the contrary, the activist group Regreso de los Espíritus “commit themselves to connecting past and present” (p. 70) through their improvised dance performances among people in the streets of different cities in Chile. Zittlau convincingly argues that it is paradoxically the museum which proposes an “ahistorical approach to the cultural communities it presents” (p. 72) and demonstrates to what extent the objectification of the past and its people may create misunderstandings by reinforcing absence in an already silenced narrative.
In Chapter 5, Luisa Gandolfo analyzes “the ways that Palestine is remembered and represented by female artists on the brink of displacement and exile” (p. 75). The chapter spans time from before the 1948 Mandate through the twenty-first century and includes multiple mediums like “painting, photography, and audio-visual installations” (p. 75). The notion of absence in this chapter is directly connected to exile and displacement, that is, the absence of the land. The female artists connect with the land in multiple ways and offer “alternative ways of reading and remembering the land and landscape from afar” (p. 97). In particular, the author explains that the memory of the absent land is never complete because “Palestine is not lost in a distant past . . . the possibility and the tangibility of return remains strong” (p. 97). But more interestingly, the processes of female artists remembering and connecting with the absent land show a clear desire to disconnect with “historical connections with heterosexual male power” (p. 97). As in Chapters 2 and 4, this chapter shows us that arts have potential not only to suggest new ways of telling traumatic past experiences, but also to powerfully contest established historical narratives and challenge our understanding of the past.
In Chapter 6, Manca Bajec takes the reader on a journey to the Serbian part of Bosnia Herzegovina, and the villages of Omarska, Kozarac, and Trnopolje. In this region, where several concentration camps were located during the war, Bajec, who has Bosnian origins, narrates her participation in a 2-day commemoration ceremony. What she observes and documents in this chapter is that there is still a huge distance in Bosnia Herzegovina between the official narratives and those of individuals that “refuse a singular narrative” (p. 108). The consequences of such silenced and contested narratives are the existence of “post-conflict spaces with unresolved ideas of commemoration and reconciliation, a lack of state supported symbolic repair, and a population in a state of continuous uncertainty” (p. 108). Bajec shows that many local artistic groups (Four Faces of Omarska and Most Mira) are actively participating in the effort of reconciliation and memorialization across communities in the region. Interviews with founders of both groups make explicit the complexity and the difficulty of such processes but also the energy and the hope such processes shape in the local communities. In this way, the chapter suggests a contrast in today’s Bosnia Herzegovina between strong local and individual efforts toward reconciliation and disinterest or distance from political and/or economic actors.
In Chapter 7, Yoav Galai and Omri Ben Yehuda introduce the “Yemenite Children Affair” in Israel, the “abduction of the children of Yemenite immigrants [. . .] orchestrated by the state in its early years” (p. 120). After a protest against the absence of recognition of these crimes, a state commission of inquiry, appointed in 1995, determined that “of the 1053 cases of missing children . . . other than 33 children whose whereabouts are unknown, all others had died rather than had been abducted” (p. 133). But the case was re-opened in 2016 with the establishment of a new commission of inquiry, which rapidly concluded that the methods used by the previous committee were inappropriate, underlying a “dual criminality,” through both “the act of the abduction and the silence of those complicit” (p. 143). Nevertheless, the tensions between the families, the new commission and the state did not stop there. Families wanted recognition that these past crimes were committed by the state “rather than . . . some rogue institution, problematic figure or outdated practice” (p. 145). But the commission’s conclusions recognizing “a role to Yemenite community as Zionist pioneers rather the victims of Zionism” (p. 146) did not meet the expectations of the families. The authors conclude that “the time of willing has ended” (p. 146), which implies a new period of silence and the absence of solution. Like in Chapter 6, this chapter proposes a deep analysis of contested narratives that juxtapose local and individual experiences to national and political interests.
In Chapter 8, Kelsey J. Utne discusses processes of memorialization and forgetting in connection with violence that resulted from Partition in India and Pakistan in 1947. Inspired by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the author insists on the need to include not only “individual experiences and losses” (p. 153), but also “the societal structures that enabled violence” (p. 154). In the case of Partition, one of the difficulties of memorialization and recognition of past crimes is that the identification of the actors (perpetrators vs victims) is not easy: “On the community level, both Hindus and Muslims committed acts of astounding violence upon the other” (p. 154). The consequence is that the memorialization of the victims of the Partition has been avoided and the nationalist remembering of the wars of Independence has been privileged until 2017 when the “world’s first Partition Museum opened its galleries” in India (p. 165). Nevertheless, this enterprise which is trying to create its own oral history collection “is facing the increasing scarcity of Partition witnesses” (p. 166). According to Utne, this new museum is “a watershed moment in the commemoration of Partition; the culmination of decades of demands” (p. 166), but she also questions whether it will be enough.
In Chapter 9, Eva Willems emphasizes the question of forced disappearance of over 15,000 people in the Peruvian Highlands during the civil war (1980–2000). Drawing on Connerton (2011), the author asserts that for many Peruvians this traumatic event is connected to a paradox: the question of “repressive erasure” where “the requirement to forget ends in reinforcing memory” (p. 172). In this article, Willems deals with two forms of absence: first, the problematic process of remembering disappeared persons. and second, the “absence of acknowledgment of the Peruvian state towards the relatives” (p. 173). This case study is based on ethnographic field research in the region of Ayacucho, and the village of Yachay and Willems shows to what extent the locating of the bodies and mourning remain central “in achieving recognition for the injustices of the past and restoring human dignity in order to turn toward the future” (p. 190). At the same time, Willems insists that such processes are highly complex, especially “in contexts characterized by socio-economic exclusion of certain (indigenous) population groups” (p. 190). Her recommendations are then to develop in-depth empirical and local studies of post-conflict societies as a way of informing “for future design and implementation of transitional justice strategies” (p. 190).
Sandra Rios Oyola in Chapter 10 explores “how mechanisms such as reparations, memorialization, and truth commissions can contribute to the dignification of the victims with absent bodies” (p. 196). This case-study combines both theoretical approaches to the notion of human dignity and empirical analyses around processes of exhumations and grief in the regions of Bojayá and Ayacucho, Colombia. Exhumations of absent bodies are an important “institutional form of recognizing a victim’s dignity,” but the author also insists that “to guarantee a dignified process, the grief that accompanies the process of exhumation should be respected, done in privacy and not as spectacle” (p. 208). Moreover, and in cases when exhumations are not possible, strategies of memorialization and ritualization of the disappeared are considered necessary efforts “to recognize the dignity of the lost ones” (p. 208). The author concludes that even though the processes of recognition and justice mechanisms have been integrated in the Colombian context, it still lacks “mechanisms of reparation that respond to the demands of the victims” (p. 209).
In Chapter 11, Alexandre Kowalski “reflects on the difficulties of genocide memorialization in Hungary,” which are linked to “a particularly intense history of denial and forgetting under socialism,” a context common in many countries of Eastern Europe (p. 214). But Kowalski points toward “Hungary’s early history of governmental collaboration and anti-semitic policies” (p. 214) and analyzes “Holocaust memorials in Budapest, and specifically its production of ambiguity and ambivalence” (p. 215). The author explains these ambiguities through three main ideas: “lines of struggle” inside the Hungarian communities concerned by the processes of memorialization; the fact that “memorials, their forms, contents, and place in social space are traces of the struggles that begot them” (p. 236); and, drawing on Rousso’s (1994) “syndrome of Vichy” in France, the fact that Hungary’s memorialization of the genocide is perceived as “a past that does not pass” (p. 237). The ambivalence that remains in Hungarian memorialization of the genocide leads to a “polarized struggle” which, according to Kowalski, is “provoked by the brash distortions of an illiberal, conservative government” (p. 237).
In the afterword, editors reflect on mourning, memorializing, and absence during the Covid-19 era. The pandemic has shaped powerful moments of togetherness but also moments of tensions (p. 243). The editors argue that it is essential to address silences in societies, such as in what they call “moments of mass consciousness” (p. 244), like the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, and “ensuing movements” in other countries. This kind of social movement implies that “we must interrogate the stories told about the past, seek out the absences, and confront the historical episodes that shape the world around us, today” (p. 245). The case-studies presented in the volume are clear illustrations of what uses of the past, processes of silencing, erasing, and absence are capable of. They demonstrate that such processes shape communities for the best and for the worst. They also influence perceptions of the Other, ignore victims and necessary recognition, divide communities and individuals over several generations, and make processes of mourning and grief impossible.
This volume is intended “to prevent the omission of names, and to grieve everyone equally” (p. 250), and the message is clearly formulated, including in the context of the pandemic that we still are experiencing. This volume demonstrates in a powerful manner that the work of/with memory demands a profound understanding of which consequences specific narrations and uses of the past may have for the future. It implies then a huge responsibility for all of those who narrate, perform, and use the pasts in different fields and contexts. Absences like silences are not only “absence of conventional verbal exchanges,” they are also “socially constructed spaces” (Winter, 2010, 4). Interests and focuses in historical research should be not only about creating new narratives about missing pasts, but also about deconstructing established socially constructed spaces and narratives. This volume contributes to this never-ending but still fundamental process and to the necessary development of a historical and critical historical consciousness both individually and collectively (Dessingué, 2020).