Amnesia/ Countermemoryby Helene Shulman Lorenz

An exploration on the theme "When History Wakes" immediately places usin dialogue with ancestors. In nearly all spiritual traditions around the world, thereis a sense that we have obligations to those who came before, to the environment,and to the still unborn generations to come ; and if we don't pay them properrespect -if we live in states of amnesia regarding the past - our lives will behaunted by restless spirits. But whose ancestors should be remembered and how?

Former President Clinton went to Selma , Alabama on March 5, 2000 to celebratethe 35th anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights March that galvanized the CivilRights Movement and led to the passage of the voting rights act of 1965. Thismarch is often referred to as "Bloody Sunday" because participants were tear-gassed, billy-clubbed, and whipped with cattle-Prods. In 1965 less than 1% ofpotential Black voters in Selma were registered to vote - about 250 people; todaythere are 20,000 and Selma elected its first Black mayor in 2000 after a massivevoter registration drive in a highly contested election. President Clinton spoke atthe National Voting Rights Museum. It was founded in 1992 to chronicle the storyof the several hundred years of struggle for the vote, because this story was rarelymentioned in the official histories of Alabama.

The 35th anniversary event was as much about the present as the past. In the year2000, the museum was vandalized - pictures were defaced and a Ku Klux Klanrobe on display was stolen. At the same time, fundraising was begun in anotherpart of Selma to erect a major new monument to Nathan Bedford Forrest, a cottonplanter and slave trader who had raised a battalion of rangers in Alabama duringthe Civil War. Forrest was a leader of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstructionfrom 1865-1869. The monument was placed on public property in a Blackneighborhood in Selma in the Fall of 2000. The next year, a group of protestors ledby Civil Rights lawyer Rose Sanders, one of the founders of the National VotingRights museum, attempted to pull the statue down. After a series of public proteststhe City Council removed the statue to Live Oak Confederate Cemetery at theoutskirts of town. Eventually a series of lawsuits were filed that cost the city ofSelma $100,000.

These events in Selma represent a kind of war of memory and are a clear indicationof an unfinished process of coming to terms with our past in America. PresidentClinton put it this way at the Museum: "As long as the waving symbol of oneAmerica's pride is the shameful symbol of another America's pain, we have

another bridge to cross." That these issues of the past are still troubling the presentbecame painfully obvious in November of 2000, when thousands of Black votersin Florida were disqualified, affecting the outcome of the national elections.

Wars of memory are happening all over the world today, and the subject of howwe honor, forget, or make use of the past is the subject of intense and expandingdialogue. The controversy I've just chronicled in Selma, Alabama is beingparalleled in Argentina, Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Mexico, Rwanda, SouthAfrica, Israel, Japan and many other countries where there have been histories ofbrutal violence that one group wants to remember as a heroic gesture or even anational victory, and another as an unfinished struggle for justice. We know thatsuch divisions in communities can harden into more violence, including terrorism,paramilitary attacks, suicide bombing, and even genocide. This path hasunfortunately been well-trod, but is it inevitable? What is the alternative?

We're here today to explore other ways to live with traces of the past at theintersection of the fields of psychology and history. We want to look at the linkbetween how we remember collective history and how we remember personalhistory, how silence and suffering in one realm, may produce amnesia in the other.

Freudian and Jungian psychology each began with a challenge to the notion ofhuman rationality. Freud saw that our words and actions were not entirely of ourown choosing, but were embedded in unconscious processes that are at onceexpressive and confusing. We forget, bungle, and slip because we are unaware ofso much of what we experience and desire. He proposed Kulturarbeit, literally,cultural work, which involves a long process of recollection, reworking, andmourning the past. We are trapped in our histories, as long as we fail to come toterms with them. For Jung the problem was what he called "the fundamentaldissociability" of the psyche. He imagined our experiences live in memory likeislands in archipelagos, not necessarily linked. He added to Freud's ideas aboutrecollection, an idea of emergence or rebirth, in the sense that the work of depthpsychology could midwife new imaginations and dreams about how to live in theworld.

Contemporary trauma theory has ratified these insights. Many volumes have beenwritten now on the catastrophic effects that both individual and collective traumahave on psychological life. Often people who have been through violent traumacannot remember the event at all, but only what happened just before. Thesymptoms of trauma are the fragmentation of memory, the creation of aporias or akind of "black hole" in the narrative of the self and the world that cannot be filled.With the loss of narrative, time is distorted, and fragments of the traumatic event

repeat themselves again and again in psychological life as a return of the repressed.These fragments which might be physical symptoms or tensions, nightmares,hallucinations, or recurring images of nearby events or things, haunt survivors whoessentially live in a state of imperfect amnesia. They become cut off from others intheir inability to speak about what has affected them so deeply. Yet they cannot letgo of symptoms because they may be the only memorials to the traumatic event.

Particularly in collective trauma such as war, state terror, or industrial disasters likeChernobyl, people begin to doubt the whole possibility of human empathy andsolidarity so that rituals of community building begin to die out as people becomeresigned and disillusioned. This process has been called "symbolic loss" in thework of Peter Homans, and when it has set in, people lose the ability to processand mourn their losses, or to carry out any kind of recovery or creative repair. InGermany, France, and Poland it took between 30 and 40 years before there was apublic process of recollecting the effects of World War II on community life. In theSouthern Cone of Latin America, it is only in the last few years that publicdiscussions of the terror of the 1970's and 1980's has been possible. Argentinewriter Elizabeth Jelin has written about the need for the "labor of memory"highlighting the break in transmission of oral histories and personal recollectionsfrom one generation to another in this period. When people forget this labor,memory becomes habitual and passive, and the quality of subjective life isdiminished. Without witness who are willing to hear, and testimony aboutmemories, people become trapped in silences about the past.

While some types of personal suffering can be worked through within the safecontainer of one-on-one encounter, it may be that certain kinds of traumaticcollective events require public witness and memorializing. The violence andtrauma of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, could not have been metabolizedwith individual counseling; it needed the public accounting of the Truth andReconciliation Commission to begin a process of recovery. Similarly, peopleworking with post-traumatic stress syndrome in Vietnam veterans in the UnitedStates, have discovered that group processes are critical. The creation of theVietnam monument in Washington, has opened an important space for reckoning,even though a war of memory has developed on this issue once again in the currentpresidential electoral campaigns.

Now here is the crucial question: To what extent are the wars of memory Ireferenced earlier, signs of traumatic events that have not yet been worked throughand memorialized in ways that honor the dead? Could we see events in Selma asrelated to symbolic loss, amnesia, and the inability to mourn? To what extent mightwe also be constructing our own memories within the logic of historical amnesia,

given that American history has been filled periods of extreme violence andmassive protests over injustice, as well as war? Can we make a link between atraumatic past, a failure of the labor of memory, and the kinds of issues that troubleAmerican life that are the topic of many of the papers that will be given today?

Around the world, people involved in trauma work are suggesting that normalprocesses of official national history, and the heroic monuments that are built tomemorialize events, are actually a form of amnesia and deadening, pushing awaythe real suffering and violence experienced in the past and covering it over withnational myths. Such structures create public grave markers that literalize historyinto dates or victories, but open no space for questioning their psychological andcommunity traces in the present. Yet without such possibilities for of dialoguehistory hardens and freezes into repetitive patriotic narratives. There are also thosewho are invested in our forgetting. Yosef Yerushalami speaks of "agents ofoblivion, the shredders of documents, the assassins of memory, the revisers ofencyclopedias, the conspirators of silence." He writes:

...it is no longer merely a question of the decay of public memory...but of theaggressive rape of whatever memory remains, the deliberate distortion of thehistorical record, the invention of mythological pasts in the service of thepowers of darkness. (1989, p.116)

The question then, is how to create possibilities for dialogue about historicalmemory within a framework of amnesia.. We need to develop new forms ofrecollection, subjectivity , agency, and freedom; and if these spaces are surroundedby active and passive forgetting, part of the work will be creating ways to bringamnesia and forgetting out into the open.

One response to this question has been the development of work called counter-memory or counter-memorial. In answer to a 1995 contest by the Germangovernment for designs for a "memorial to the mudered Jews of Europe," artistHorst Hoheisel proposed blowing up one of Germany's most beloved monuments,the Brandenburg Gate. He reasoned that this would produce an empty space filledwith rubble, a disorienting ruin perfectly representing the outcome of theHolocaust. A new monumental construction would only have created an artificialclosure, a new "final solution" that failed to witness the horror of genocide thatwent unmarked for fifty years. Of course, the artist knew his design would berejected by the government but that was the point: to open dialogue about memoryand forgetting.

What Foucault called subjugated knowledges and depth psychology the personal

unconscious can open out unexpectedly into creative forms of narrative, bodilyawareness, and affective experience through public arts. Horheistel began his ownHolocaust memorial project by visiting classrooms in Kassel where he lives andspeaking of the Jewish community that had disappeared during the war. He askedstudents who knew any Jews in Kassel to raise their hands; no one did, marking thevoid. He then encouraged each student to research one of Kassel's deported Jews,interviewing their former neighbors, visiting their homes and writing a shortnarrative about the person. The stories were then wrapped around cobblestones andplaced in bins in the railroad station from which the Jews were deported. Now apermanent and ever-growing community art installation, the stone cairns mimic apractice of creating informal rituals of honoring the dead in Jewish cemeteries.Everyone who travels to Kassel by train is now confronted with this puzzling,,troubling,, unexpected memorial that breaks open new forms of conversationwithin normalized amnesia.

Community art of counter-memory is being practiced all over the world. Historyand theater projects and living history tours have been organized in the AmericanSouth, so that new generations can engage with the diverse perspectives of thosewho lived through other periods of history. Kim Abels, a Los Angeles artist,encouraged teens to interview elders in their communities and create a sculptureand textual fragments from the themes of the interview. These were assembled andpresented in a large gallery space to which the public was invited, integrating theexperiences of diverse communities. Joyce Kohl worked with artists and AIDSorphans in Zimbabwe to create an AIDS memorial in a park after realizing therewas an official silence on the subject. According to art historian Betty Ann Brown,such projects are gifts that generate social cohesion. "They create community bynourishing those parts of our spirit that are not entirely personal..." For SuziGablik, writing on "the reenchantment of art," such projects are part of a newparadigm, "emphasizing our essential connectedness rather than ourseparateness,...evoking the feeling of belonging to a larger whole, rather thanexpressing the isolated, alienated self." (1991, p..5)

The work of architect Maya Lin on the Washington Vietnam memorial and laterthe Civil Rights memorial also illustrates this logic. Each memorial featuresreflecting surfaces that refract the vision of the viewer toward the surroundingviewers, the landscape, and the sky, hinting at the thin veil between the dead andthe living. The Civil Rights Memorial has water falling over a waist-high roundstone table that lists the dates of important Civil Rights events. Those who enterthe space spontaneously place their hands in the water and rotate around the tableto read what is engraved, thus enacting a kind of baptism in the present that

engenders a rebirth of solidarity.

New visions of how to mark historical events within the frame ofcountermemory and countermemorial stress the theme of the local, personal,embodied labor of memory in public space. Spectators become what Augusto Boalcalled "spectactors." Countermemory explores the way the body in symptom,affect, and dream bears traces of the past that can be given voice when there is anempathetic situation of witness. In fact, it has been suggested that trauma is theoutcome of situations where no one was available to understand and validateexperiences of violence so they were endured in lonely isolation.

Tzvetan Todorov has proposed that rather than developing literal memory, we needto begin a process he calls "exemplary" memory of past violence and genocide. Inexemplary memory, the first step is to create protected spaces where recollectioncan occur, but successfully contain it so that it does not take over one's lifecompletely. Secondly, exemplary memory should be a public process ofinterpreting the past from multiple perspectives, learning from it, asking what workof reparation and restoration it requires, and building new myths and solidaritiesfor the future.

What if we were to begin our discussion of historical memory, grounded in anew logic, what Jung called a "revolutionary" idea. Instead of seeing ourselvesprimarily as modernist searchers for fact, evidence, and certainty, we formulatedour methodology as "thinking from the underside of history" (the title of a recentbook by Linda Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta on the work of Enrique Dussel.) Inthis perspective, which is being called in different locations a philosophy,psychology, or ethics of liberation, we begin with the idea that the history ofcolonial institutions, and colonial ways of thinking have divided both self-knowledge and world-knowledge into one set of stereotyped official histories thatare re-enforced, and other set of untold stories that are stopped at the border oflanguage. I mean by "colonial" the historic economic global system in which wefind ourselves, where today nearly a billion people on earth are without sufficientfood and fresh water, in an ongoing genocide that is silenced by a language ofdelinquency, police and prison regimes, military occupation, and business as usual.Enrique Dussel has proposed that we stop thinking about this as a problem ofsocial morality based on individual action and instead begin to create ethicalcommunities that live in ways that invite dialogue and action about unjust andsilencing arrangements. Dussel argues for what he calls a "transmodern"perspective, a kind of archeology of silenced narratives, utopian dreams, andindigenous cosmovisions, combined with networks of communities committed todemilitarization, sustainable economies, and the protection of human rights.

Our hope is that this conference too can be a place for exemplary

memory "when history wakes", a place where we can think together intransformative ways about past and future. Our speakers have all been facilitatorsof new kinds of dialogue that open what the Zapatistas have called "spaces forpeace." Just as in some therapies the strength of personality is used to organize anencounter where that same personality may be questioned, disorganized, andtransformed, the Zapatistas have proposed that those in power need to use power toorganize spaces for communities and individuals to find their own voices andprojects. Facilitators, in this way of thinking, restore the connections betweenpower and freedom, speech and silence. For Gloria Anzaldua, such people are"nepantleras" - those who know how to live in transitional and liminal spacesbetwixt and between that the Nahuatl called nepantla. In her last work publishedjust before she died, Gloria wrote this about the work of nepantleras, drawing oncenturies of Mexican folk tradition of community healers or curanderas:

"In gatherings where people feel powerless, la nepantlera offers rituals to saygoodbye to old ways of relating; prayers to thank life for making us faceloss, anger, guilt, fear, and separation; rezos to acknowledge our individualwounds; and commitments to not give up on others just because they hurt us.In gatherings where we've forgotten that the aim of conflict is peace, lanepantlera proposes spiritual techniques (mindfulness, openness, receptivity)along with activist tactics. Where before we saw only separateness,differences, and polarities, our connectionist sense of spirit recognizesnurturance and reciprocity and encourages alliances among groups workingto transform communities. In gatherings where we feel our dreams havebeen sucked out of us, la nepantlera leads us in celebrating la communidadsonada, reminding us that spirit connects the irreconcilable warring partspara que todo el mundo se haga un pais, so that the whole world maybecome un peublo. (2002, p.568)

Today, I invite you to join a gathering of nepantleras in dialogue about theserious questions of culture and environment that face us locally, nationally, andinternationally. I hope you'll bring your wisdom and doubts, wounds and dreams,spirits and souls into the conversation and help us imagine how we can be part ofbuilding transmodern spaces for peace.

References

Alcoff, L.M. and Mendieta, E. [Eds.]. (2000). Thinking from the underside of

history: Enriquez Dussel's philosophy of liberation. New York: Rowman andLittlefield

Anzaldua, G. and Keating, A. [Eds.] (2002) This Bridge we call home: Radicalvisions for transformation. New York: Routledge

Boal, A. (1985). Theater of the Oppressed. New York: Theater CommunicationsGroup

Bouchard, D. [Ed.]. (1977). Language,countermemory,practice:Selected essaysand interviews by Michel Foucault. Ithica: Cornell University Press

Brown, B. (1996). Expanding circles: Women, art, and community. New York:Midmarch Arts Press

Gablik, S. (1991). The Reenchantment of Art. London: Thames and Hudson

Homans, P. (2000) Symbolic loss:The ambiguity of Mourning and Memory atcentury's end. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press

Jelin, E. (2003). State repression and the labor of memory. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press

Todorov, T. (1997). The conquest of America: The question of the other. NewYork: Harper Perennial

Yerushalmi, Y.H. (1996).Zakhor: Jewish history and Jewish memory. Seattle:University of Washington Press

Young, J.E., (2000). Memory, counter-memory, and the end of the monument.http://www.arthist.lu.se/discontinuities/texts/young1.htm