World Memory is an absorbing collection
of essays that makes an important intervention into the burgeoning
field of trauma studies. Many of the essays derive from papers given
at a conference entitled: "Trauma and Memory: Cross-Cultural Perspectives,"
held at University of New South Wales in 1998. The book's aim is
to diversify or, one might say, postcolonialize — a field that the
editors portray as Eurocentric in its debt to psychoanalysis, its
preference for high modernist aesthetics and its focus on the Holocaust.
They envisage an "outfolding" of trauma studies that would take
in non-European events and experiences, analyse a wider variety
of aesthetic and vernacular modes of representation and explore
alternative critical methodologies.
The collection certainly achieves a more global
and multicultural focus, encompassing the experience of Stolen Generation
aborigines, Korean immigrants in Japan, a field anthropologist who
broke her neck in a car crash, the Abelam of Papua New Guinea, September
11th, apartheid, the invasion of Okinawa during World
War Two, child abuse in the UK and second-generation Jewish-Australian
Holocaust survivors. It also deals with a fairly wide array of representational
modes, including literary texts, films, sculpture, and personal
testimony, both oral and written. However, it is the desire to explore
alternative critical methodologies that raises the most interesting — and
difficult — questions: how does one contest the universal applicability
of psychoanalysis without losing the specific purchase of trauma
as clinical tool and explanatory model? How to avoid the tendency
of cultural studies to decontextualize a term and apply it indiscriminately
across a diverse array of cultural phenomena?
At least three responses to the psychoanalytic
origins of trauma studies are in evidence: 1) borrow from those
European critics who have mounted an internal critique of psychoanalysis,
2) reject the psychoanalytic tradition altogether as inappropriate
for the study of non-Western cultures and peoples, or 3) develop
and expand the insights of psychoanalysis while attempting to remain
sensitive to issues of cultural difference. It is worth bearing
in mind that trauma has always been what Homi Bhabha would call
a "travelling theory," borrowed by Freud from conventional medicine
and put to work as analogy or metaphor, and that the metaphoricity
of trauma as a description is necessarily heightened by attempts
to extrapolate from the clinical understanding of trauma in individuals
to notions of collective or cultural trauma.
The first response is imbedded within the title:
the term "world memory" is taken from Gilles Deleuze's dazzling
study of film, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, as deployed in the
final essay in the collection, Timothy Murray's "Wounds of Repetition
in the Age of the Digital." Deleuze uses the term to describe the
world memory — or more often the "memory world" — produced by the
films of Alain Resnais, and in particular Hiroshima Mon Amour,
which juxtaposes the memory of Hiroshima with a French woman's memory
of the death of her German lover in World War Two. Murray references
Deleuze and Resnais in order to mount a sophisticated argument concerning
"cinematic repetition as the memorial thought of suffering itself"
(209). Like Deleuze, he is making an argument about cinematic form,
and principally about a particular modernist/postmodernist tradition
of film-making. The term "world memory" is thus an unlikely ally
in the editors' attempt to diversify the field of trauma studies.
Although Deleuze has himself mounted a critique of psychoanalysis
in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the term returns
one to precisely the avant-garde European aesthetic from which the
editors are keen to escape: Hiroshima Mon Amour is of course
the subject of the second chapter of Cathy Caruth's seminal Unclaimed
Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Like its Australian
predecessor, The Empire Writes Back, World Memory
borrows extensively from European high theory while simultaneously
critiquing that theory for its Eurocentrism. While I can see the
strategic advantages of deploying Deleuze's term, Caruth's central
thesis that "history is precisely the way we are implicated in one
another's traumas" (24) might have provided a more direct insight
into the relationship between trauma and what Bennett and Kennedy
describe as the "multicultural and diasporic nature of contemporary
culture" (5). Nevertheless, the term "world memory" is suggestive
as a description of how memory moves beyond the individual and translates
itself across and between cultures.
The second response, to reject the psychoanalytic
tradition outright, is employed by Diane Losche in her essay on
the nature of memory in Abelam culture, and by Rosanne Kennedy and
Tikka Jan Wilson in their search for a mode of analysis that could
do justice to the testimonies of the Stolen Generation.
Losche's essay is fascinating: how does one recognise
memory in a culture that is indifferent to personal genealogy, recycling
names to the extent that the individual identity of the dead seems
to be submerged? Losche eventually locates something approaching
memory in dances that reenact the mythic stories of the community's - rather
than the individual's - origins. Reading these dances as "an expression
of mourning for loss" (38), she notes that in performance they become
a mode of exchange: "the burden of enacting memory and mourning
is passed from one moiety to another with each cycle of exchange
and the burden of the past is passed on, or given, at least temporarily,
to another social group" (40). Losche writes that the Abelam stories
"could lend themselves effectively to Freudian or Lacanian interpretations
but that the idea of memory as exchange "‘struck [her] as a more
mature insight'" (41). Undoubtedly so, but what remains obscured
is the way in which she has declined the opportunity to explore
Abelam culture in relation to the psychoanalytic categories in order
to return to the familiar anthropological interest in the idea of
exchange, a practise that is tacitly assumed to be common to all
cultures.
Anthropology has, of course, grappled for years
with its own universalizing heritage. But it seems to me that,
like psychoanalysis, anthropology is at its best (and its worst)
when it takes the risk of cross-cultural analysis. When Losche notes
the length of mourning in Abelam ceremonies in order to contrast
them with the brevity of such ceremonies in her own culture, she
falls into a familiar trap. But what might have been the consequence
of comparing the Abelam exchange of memories with that undertaken
by the characters in Hiroshima Mon Amour? Might it be possible
to arrive at a genuinely universal insight into the inter-subjective
exchange economy of mourning, the paradoxical imperative to share
precisely those traumatic experiences that mark us out as different?
Kennedy and Wilson go a step further than Losche,
actively contrasting a psychoanalytic approach to aboriginal testimony
with a narrative therapy model, ostensibly based on a Foucauldian
understanding of the relationship between discourse and power. Like
that of Deleuze Foucault's work offers a sustained critique of psychoanalysis.
The article is successful in pointing out that a psychoanalytic
understanding of testimony as an indirect presentation of a truth
that the speaker may not be consciously aware of functions to disempower
those "who wish to use testimony to make political and social claims"
(123). While psychoanalysis tends to pathologize the testifier and
make him/her understand herself as the victim of a trauma, narrative
therapy seeks to empower individuals by allowing them to recognise
how they have been manipulated by various discourses and to "retrieve
and then perform alternative narratives of themselves" (130). Such
a process transforms the potential address of testimony, replacing
Felman and Laub's notion of an "empathic witness" with an emphasis
on "becoming critically conscious of our own positions in the ongoing
practises of denial" (129). This is an important intervention, and
one that serves to highlight the political blind spots in Felman
and Laub's work. Nevertheless, the narrative of heroic resistance
that narrative therapy seeks to promote, while politically preferable
to the pathos-laden narrative of the trauma victim, may take the
post-structuralist understanding of the self as a construction a
little too seriously: isn't part of the lesson of trauma studies
that we are precisely not free to make ourselves up, that the unconscious
will always be there to disrupt those meticulously assembled fictions
of the self?
The final approach seeks to extend and contextualise
the insights of psychoanalytic theory. Several authors explore the
distinction between deep and common memory, first formulated by
the Ravensbruck survivor Charlotte Delbo and taken up by Holocaust
commentators such as Lawrence Langer and Saul Friedlander. The
term is certainly much more widely employed than "world memory,"
which only appears in the introduction and final essay, and it is
in the threads that connect the various discussions of deep memory
that the collection may turn out to have made its most telling contribution
to the field.
Sandra Soo-Jin Lee's "Aged Bodies as Sites of
Remembrance" and Esther Faye's "Impossible Memories and the History
of Trauma" both point to the bodily dimensions of traumatic memories.
Delbo uses the term "deep memory" to describe experiences that become
"sedimented into the body" (88). Lee shows us how the bodies of
Koreans forced to migrate to Japan during Japan's colonization become
"colonial archives" (91). Inscribed with the metaphorical and literal
scars of racism and invested with the deferred desire to return
home (if only as ashes), these diasporic bodies become monuments
to difficult and incomplete cultural passages.
Faye's article borders uncomfortably on psychobiography,
reading Brett's stories and memoirs as evidence of an eating disorder
that is bound up with her mother's experience of starvation in the
Lodz ghetto and the death camps. As with many readings of literature
by clinical psychoanalysts, there is scant attention paid to the
significance of genre and literariness in framing what she takes
to be "unconscious testimony" (164); there is little acknowledgement
that Brett may in fact be using writing as a way of understanding - and
even mastering - her symptom. Nevertheless Faye is right to emphasise
the way in which the symptom exceeds the boundaries of the individual
as it "remembers" a collective history of anti-Semitism and the
stereotype of the fat Jew. As in Lee's article, deep memory turns
out to be a collective memory of racism that inscribes itself on
individual bodies.
Although deep memory may have a transpersonal
dimension, it is not to be confused with what Delbo terms common
memory. While deep memory is bodily, fragmented and traumatic, common
memory, as Heidi Grunebaum and Yazir Henri argue in "Re-membering
Bodies, Producing Histories: Holocaust Survivor Narrative and Truth
and Reconciliation Commission," "resides in the intellect, in thought,
and in language" (109) and manifests itself in the collective narratives
that a culture develops about its past. For them, deep memory is
a bodily, non-narratalogical record of the individual's experience,
and as such antithetical to the unifying telos of common
memory. They are concerned to show how mediatized representations
of the TRC process subsume the "problematic memories" present in
personal testimony into a national narrative of reconciliation and
forgiveness. Henri speaks of the way in which his own TRC testimony
was "disembodied" by the media and appropriated by Antje Krog in
her account of the TRC hearings, Country of My Skull.
As another contributor, Fiona Ross argues in
her own contribution, "Bearing Witness to Pain," Country of My
Skull is part of a tradition of representation that "collectivizes"
individual pain for political purposes. A number of questions arise:
how might a literary (or non-literary) text bear witness to deep
memories without subsuming the individual experience within the
collective? Delbo's own fragmented testimony provides a model for
Grunebaum and Henri, but what about texts that testify to the experience
of others ? Can a privileged white South African, such as Antje
Krog, produce a text that testifies to the suffering of black South
Africans or is such a task better left to other black South Africans?
Fiona Ross compares the controversy surrounding Country of My
Skull with the positive reception of Mother to Mother,
in which Sindiwe Magona imagines herself as the mother of the murderer
of a white American student. Her suggestion that the differing receptions
may have to do with differences in genre seems to me (as a non-South
African) slightly disingenuous. Whilst it perpetuates apartheid
thinking to refer to writers in racial terms, the reception of each
text is clearly marked by the problem of cross-racial identification.
Perhaps the problem lies not simply in the collectivisation of traumatic
personal experience - the very possibility of a political text lies
in its ability to transform individual deep memories into a collective
memory-consciousness of oppression - but in the nature of the collective
consciousness that the text attempts to bring into being. Although
Magona's text is addressed to the American student's mother, its
true task is to make one township mother's loss and anger representative
of all those forced to live in the townships. Krog's text, by contrast,
attempts to represent the TRC hearings as constitutive of a new
national consciousness ("if you cut yourself off from the process,
you will wake up in a different country" (131)) but ends up producing
a text that perhaps says more about the guilt-laden memory-consciousness
of privileged Afrikaners. Both texts ultimately testify to the near-impossibility
of producing a truly collective post-apartheid memory. How to reconcile
Krog's desperate plea for forgiveness (Country of My Skull
ends with, "You who I have wronged, please/ take me/ with you" (278))
with Magona's sense of outrage (she ends up presenting - if not quite
justifying - the mother's son as "an agent, executing the long-simmering
dark desires of his race" (210))?
At the heart of this dilemma is the humanist
assumption that is possible to empathise and identify with those
whose experience is radically different from our own. Several essays
draw attention to the way in which such an assumption functions
to ignore the radical difference of traumatic experience - or indeed
simply the fact of difference itself. Jill Bennett's essay on September
11th mobilises Kaja Silverman's distinction between idiopathic
identification (which operates according to an assumption of sameness)
and heteropathic identification (which preserves a sense of the
other's alterity), eventually championing the work of the Columbian
artist Doris Salcedo for its refusal to offer easy modes of identification.
However, the "foreboding austerity" of Salcedo's sculpture almost
amounts to a dehumanising absence of affect. If we are to represent
the complex relations that make up our postcoloniality then we need
an art that both engages and keeps its distance at the same time.
As Bennett argues: "In the spaces opened up by post-colonial literature,
theory and politics, such sharing of suffering via a form of heteropathic
identification has become something of an ethical imperative" (181).
This imperative haunts Jennifer Loureide Biddle's
"Anthropology as Eulogy: On Loss, Lies and License," which concerns
the author's own experience of breaking her neck during a car crash
while doing fieldwork with a remote aboriginal tribe in the Australian
outback. The trauma turns out to be connected not simply to her
own physical experience and painful recovery, but to the loss of
her aboriginal "sister," who is turned away from the hospital but
eventually dies from wounds sustained during the crash. Before she
dies, the sister returns to the hospital unit but Biddle declines
the offer to have her bed placed next to hers, declines the opportunity
to "share her trauma" across the colour line (56). This refusal,
she writes, "is the violence not yet finished with, not yet over"
(57). Biddle has subsequently found herself unwilling to return
to the field and she meditates suggestively on the corporeal shock
that is constitutive of the field-worker's encounter with cultural
difference. She doesn't quite spell it out, but it is as if the
accident of the car crash is the belated registration of a blow
that had already occurred at the first moment of cross-cultural
contact: this is why it is the gulf that the hospital exposes between
herself and her "sister," rather than her physical injuries, that
she struggles to come to terms with. Although she does not use the
term deep memory, her account, like those of many in the collection,
points towards the inextricable relationship between trauma, the
body and cultural/racial difference: what binds her to others - her
corporeality, the fact of her embodiment, her capacity to suffer - is
also precisely that which differentiates her. Deep memory is an
embodied memory precisely because racism has rendered the body the
traumatic signifier of our difference.
What is missing from this collection is adequate
recognition of the extent to which postcolonial studies has already
developed its own discussion about cultural or collective trauma:
African-American writers are referenced but no mention is made of
Caribbean or Black British writers such as Wilson Harris, Edouard
Glissant and Paul Gilroy, who have written on the Middle Passage
as constitutively traumatic, as the abyssal and diasporic foundation
of Caribbean or Black Atlantic subjectivity and community. There
is also a growing amount of work on the traumatic effects of partition
in India and Homi Bhabha has of course employed the concept of nachträglichkeit
or belatedness to explore postwar immigration from the ex-colonies
to Europe as the traumatic return of a history that happened overseas.
What may perhaps emerge out of a postcolonializing of trauma studies
is a clearer understanding of the traumatic nature of racial identity - as
the ultimate embodiment of deep memory in which skin is rendered
symptom. That such a memory is always bound to disrupt the collective
fictions inspired by official common memory might go a long way
to explaining the failures of multiculturalism and the persistence
of racism. As work in postcolonial studies makes its way back to
work on the Holocaust, it may appear (as Jean-François Lyotard has
already suggested in Heidegger and "the jews") that what
was traumatic about the Holocaust was not the numbers involved or
the horrors of the camps but precisely racial difference itself,
as the violent negation of our commonality.
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