In all cultures, all languages, and all places, humans suffer trauma. The ways in which we remember and acknowledge that experience, however, often depend on the tools individual cultures provide. This book examines the complex relationship between trauma, memory, place, and narrative in diverse global contexts. We examine the stories told about the placesâreal or imagined âwhere trauma has been inflicted, the types of traumatic stories that we are able to tell in certain places, and also how confrontation with place shapes the memories of trauma. We focus on how traumatic memory is articulated in diverse and decentred cultural contexts in an effort to understand how trauma resounds beyond specific cultures. Rather than being quieted, traumatic memory, both individual and collective, from survivors, witnesses, readers, viewers, and tourists, is amplified in the spaces where trauma is recounted and memorialised. We examine a range of narrative forms including fiction, documentary film, memorial museums and monuments, and survivor testimony, from places across six continents to analyse how narratives of traumatic memory are shaped in, and by, those places.1
To contextualise the diverse forms of memory explored here, in our case studies we embrace the paradigm shift occurring in the social sciences that uncovers and celebrates local and marginalised knowledges. Following this line of thought, we draw attention to the importance of understanding trauma within its contested contexts, sites or places, and how the movements and transactions between places shape our memories and the narratives we produce. In this first chapter, we introduce each of the contributions and the contexts, which span places in Asia, Australia, North and South America, the Pacific, Africa, and Europe, in an effort to make peripheral experiences visible. The authors in this book examine a breadth of narrative forms and variously take up intimate, hidden, collective and media-driven stories that attempt to memorialise traumatic events.
Trauma, Memorial, Narrative, and Place
Trauma results when violence cannot be accommodated, happens suddenly, and is re-experienced in unexpected and uncontrolled ways (Caruth 1996, p. 2). The traumas addressed in this volume are both broad-reaching incidents embedded in cultural memory such as slavery , wars, dictatorships, and genocide, and intimate events such as domestic violence, murder, and torture. To cope with the unpredictable nature of trauma, victims have long been encouraged to narrate their experience as a way to restore and control traumatic memory. Jeffrey C. Alexander explains in âToward a Theory of Cultural Traumaâ that dealing with broad-reaching traumas requires âfindingâthrough public acts of commemoration, cultural representation, and public political struggleâsome collective means for undoing repression and allowing the pent-up emotions of loss and mourning to be expressedâ (2004, p. 7). In other words, narration is only part of the process of recovery; acknowledgement needs to take place for healing and resolution. In the case of traumatic events that shape national history, memorials and artistic representations are symbolic forms that accommodate painful memory.
Memorial in this book refers to a place dedicated to the commemoration of traumatic memories. Some authors make the distinction between memorial as the specific location where atrocities were committed, and sites of memory as places dedicated to their remembrance. We have left the definition wide as each case brings forth situated understandings of place. In some cases, memorials are âsites of conscienceâ because they promote the historical perspective of the marginalised and victims, showing what official history would not address. Sometimes imagined sites are created and imbued with memory because no marker can be found to articulate specific acts of trauma. In other cases, a physical space gives visibility to memories of extreme suffering, sometimes within the framework of national discourses of the past, and at other times within small communities where memorials are created and maintained by locals. Memorials provide a location for public acknowledgement, as they attempt to contain, reconcile, and repair indelible wounds. Memorials and memory museums in this sense stand in the gaps where trauma occurred by offering a physically defined space to an often non-specifically situated location of terror. These sites provide space for reflection on the experience of suffering, they can coherently frame trauma, and can be visited in ways that evoke understanding and raise awareness of past injustice now situated in present discourses (see, for example, Young 1993, 2016; Bicknell et al. 2019).
As some of the authors in this volume explore, memorials and memory museums preserve traumatic history with both short- and long-term objectives. First, they aim to recognise the human right to memories which are often denied to persecuted people. As part of the systemic effort of subjugation and to justify the use of violence, their memories were sometimes ignored, denied, or distorted. On a fundamental level, these traumas happened because of the belief that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides âin the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must dieâ (Mbembe 2003, p. 11). The second objective of memorials is to symbolically âcompensateâ the victims and survivors, by honouring the memory through tribute and visibility. In the long-term, these sites seek to involve people who were not directly affected by the trauma, those engaged with what LaCapra calls âsecondary memoryâ (1998, p. 20), calling them to commit in the construction of a just and pacific society that promotes a solid culture of human rights (EstĂ©vez 2018). Acknowledging trauma is foundational to that goal. This volume seeks to examine the ways in which memorials can engage individuals to collaboratively raise visibility of suffering.
The narratives we examine take many forms, from the guest books in a memory museum (Rojas-Lizana) to the direct recorded testimony of survivors and witnesses, both first- and second-hand accounts of the horrific (Pohlman, Akagawa, Wilkes, Hubbell, Evans, Stevens), as well as fictional accounts of historical and personal traumas (Hayes, Lotsu, La Caze). Sometimes those accounts are raw and unfiltered, fragmented and barely comprehensible, and at other times, there are rehearsed, repeated, and crafted accounts that relate both accepted national versions of historical traumas and minor personalised accounts that would otherwise be overlooked. Sometimes trauma is fictionalised or artistically represented through literature or film so that truth can emerge publicly, at other times, documentary and journalistic genresâ painstaking attempt to report the horrible âtruthâ.
This volume explores diverse spaces in which trauma was experienced and remembered, from national, geographical, and cultural contexts. These are tangible places (a tunnel which once separated Arab and European quarters in Oran), scenes of historic traumatic events (sites of colonisation , prisons, and slavery), or places that have been expunged or have been deliberately made inaccessible (a forest where a massacre occurred, or a city rebuilt after its destruction by bombings). Spaces may be represented only as ruinous monuments and leftover markers of what used to be (a mountain of rubble where houses once stood), yet sometimes those spaces are repurposed to reflect on the history contained within them (a memorial in a city centre). They may be places to which returns can be made and are in themselves the embodiment of traumatic memory. They may also be places that exist only in memory or places that stand in for inaccessible locations. Some of these spaces are transformed by their visitors (memory museums made into pilgrimage sites). Sometimes space is a poetically or visually evoked encounter in literature, film, artistic work, or performance. Place in all such forms activates memory in survivors and witnesses and has the potential to transmit such memory to others. Place can both amplify and dissipate the memory of trauma.
Pierre Nora conceived of âlieux de mĂ©moireâ , as the places âwhere memory crystallizes and secretes itselfâ (1989, p. 7); however, these places are constructs, âcreated by a play of memory and history,â ambiguous sites that come to be invested with âa symbolic auraâ (1989, p. 19). While crystallised forms of memory are examined in this volume, the places of memory studied are not static locations. They are transforming, growing, and adapting to the discourses emerging around them. They do not arise from the disappearance of memory but from the urgent and obstinate presence of trauma. Sites of me...