Post-Conflict Memorialization: Missing Memorials, Absent Bodies 9783030548865, 9783030548872

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
1 Introduction: Absence and Trauma in Post-Conflict Memorialisation
1.1 Memory and Trauma in Post-Conflict Communities
1.2 Absence, Remembrance, and Mourning
References
2 Articulating Presence of Absence: Everyday Memory and the Performance of Silence in Sarajevo
2.1 Introduction
2.1.1 Conceptualising Presence of Absence
2.1.2 Articulations of Silence
2.1.3 Silences and the Siege of Sarajevo
2.1.4 Commemoration, Art and the Presence of Absence
2.1.5 The Red Line of Sarajevo
2.1.6 Connecting Silence, Aesthetic Representation and Peace
2.2 Conclusions
References
3 Mourning in Reluctant Sites of Memory: From Afrophobia to Cultural Productivity
References
4 Dust on Dust: Performing Selk’nam Visions, Tracing Absent Bodies
4.1 The Shoes
4.2 Those Who Walked in the Shoes
4.3 Ghosts
4.4 Haunting
References
5 Absence, Gender, and the Land(Scape) in Palestinian Art
5.1 Gendering the Land and the Landscape
5.2 The Fading Landscape
5.3 Absence and the Figure of the Mother
5.4 Embodying Loss and Exile
References
6 Monumenting Our Pasts: Monuments, What Are They Now?
References
7 The Resolution of Doubts: Towards Recognition of the Systematic Abduction of Yemenite Children in Israel
7.1 Uzi Meshulam and the Yemenite Children Affair
7.2 The Abductions: How Were They Even Possible?
7.3 The Crime of the Silencing: How Is It Not Possible?
7.3.1 In the Cultural Sphere
7.4 In Official State Inquiries
7.5 Back to the Near Past: 2017—Establishing a New Committee of Inquiry
7.6 The Resolution of Doubts: The Commission at Work
7.7 Cover-Ups
7.8 Into the Stock of Stories: Two Kinds of Truths
References
8 The Commemorative Continuum of Partition Violence
8.1 The Partitioning of India and Pakistan
8.2 (Not) Memorializing Partition: Missing Memorials and Avoidance
8.3 Commemorating Independence Sans Partition
8.4 Silences and Scholarly Interventions
8.5 The Digital and Diasporic Turns
8.6 Conclusion: A Partition Museum at Last?
References
9 Absent Bodies, Present Pasts: Forced Disappearance as Historical Injustice in the Peruvian Highlands
9.1 Introduction
9.2 The Peruvian Civil War (1980–2000) and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2001–2003)
9.3 Forced Disappearances in Yachay
9.4 Mourning in Absence of Bodies: ‘the Disappeared Exist, but They Are Not Here’
9.5 Mourning in Absence of Acknowledgment: The Disappeared Are Here, but They Do Not Exist
9.6 The Role of the Dead in Achieving Social Justice in the Present
9.7 Conclusion: Opportunities and Pitfalls of Searching for the Disappeared
References
10 Restoring the Human Dignity of Absent Bodies in Colombia
10.1 Introduction
10.2 Human Dignity in Transitional Justice
10.3 The Human Dignity of Absent Bodies
10.4 The Restoration of Victims’ Dignity in Colombia
10.5 The Process of Dignification of Victims with Absent Bodies
10.6 Conclusion
References
11 The Wandering Memorial: Figures of Ambivalence in Hungarian Holocaust Memorialization
11.1 Figure of Memorial Ambivalence I: The Screen Memorial
11.2 Figure of Memorial Ambivalence II: The Ambiguous Memorial
11.3 Figure of Memorial Ambivalence III: The Wandering Memorial
11.4 Figure of Memorial Ambivalence IV: The Non-memorial
11.5 Figure of Memorial Ambivalence V: The Invisible Memorial
11.6 Conclusion
References
12 Afterword: Mourning, Memorialising, and Absence in the Covid-19 Era
References
Index

Citation preview

MEMORY POLITICS AND TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

Post-Conflict Memorialization Missing Memorials, Absent Bodies Edited by Olivette Otele · Luisa Gandolfo · Yoav Galai

Memory Politics and Transitional Justice

Series Editors Jasna Dragovic-Soso Goldsmiths University of London London, UK Jelena Subotic Georgia State University Atlanta, GA, USA Tsveta Petrova Columbia University New York, NY, USA

The interdisciplinary fields of Memory Studies and Transitional Justice have largely developed in parallel to one another despite both focusing on efforts of societies to confront and (re—)appropriate their past. While scholars working on memory have come mostly from historical, literary, sociological, or anthropological traditions, transitional justice has attracted primarily scholarship from political science and the law. This series bridges this divide: it promotes work that combines a deep understanding of the contexts that have allowed for injustice to occur with an analysis of how legacies of such injustice in political and historical memory influence contemporary projects of redress, acknowledgment, or new cycles of denial. The titles in the series are of interest not only to academics and students but also practitioners in the related fields. The Memory Politics and Transitional Justice series promotes critical dialogue among different theoretical and methodological approaches and among scholarship on different regions. The editors welcome submissions from a variety of disciplines—including political science, history, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies—that confront critical questions at the intersection of memory politics and transitional justice in national, comparative, and global perspective. Memory Politics and Transitional Justice Book Series (Palgrave) Co-editors: Jasna Dragovic-Soso (Goldsmiths, University of London), Jelena Subotic (Georgia State University), Tsveta Petrova (Columbia University) Editorial Board Paige Arthur, New York University Center on International Cooperation Alejandro Baer, University of Minnesota Orli Fridman, Singidunum University Belgrade Carol Gluck, Columbia University Katherine Hite, Vassar College Alexander Karn, Colgate University Jan Kubik, Rutgers University and School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London Bronwyn Leebaw, University of California, Riverside Jan-Werner Mueller, Princeton University Jeffrey Olick, University of Virginia Kathy Powers, University of New Mexico Joanna R. Quinn, Western University Jeremy Sarkin, University of South Africa Leslie Vinjamuri, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Sarah Wagner, George Washington University

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14807

Olivette Otele · Luisa Gandolfo · Yoav Galai Editors

Post-Conflict Memorialization Missing Memorials, Absent Bodies

Editors Olivette Otele Colonial History University of Bristol Bristol, UK

Luisa Gandolfo Department of Sociology University of Aberdeen Aberdeen, UK

Yoav Galai Department of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy Royal Holloway University of London Egham, UK

Memory Politics and Transitional Justice ISBN 978-3-030-54886-5 ISBN 978-3-030-54887-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54887-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Yoav Galai This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Our deepest thanks go to the contributors to this volume: Johanna Mannergren Selimovic, Andrea Zittlau, Manca Bajec, Omri Ben Yehuda, Kelsey J. Utne, Eva Willems, Sandra M. Rios Oyola and Alexandra Kowalski. Your work has brought this volume a profound depth and through your rich reflections, it has unmasked the absences and drawn attention to the silences that engulf communities past and present, around the world. Our thanks also go to our editors, Anca Pusca, Balaji Varadharaju and Katelyn Zingg at Palgrave Macmillan, for their patience and support throughout the writing process. Luisa Gandolfo would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust and British Academy for funding the project that preceded this volume, ‘Missing Memorials and Absent Bodies: Negotiating Post-conflict Trauma and Memorialisation’, and Nancy Adler and Barbara Boender at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, for hosting the symposium in 2016.

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Contents

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Introduction: Absence and Trauma in Post-Conflict Memorialisation Olivette Otele, Luisa Gandolfo, and Yoav Galai

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Articulating Presence of Absence: Everyday Memory and the Performance of Silence in Sarajevo Johanna Mannergren Selimovic

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Mourning in Reluctant Sites of Memory: From Afrophobia to Cultural Productivity Olivette Otele

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Dust on Dust: Performing Selk’nam Visions, Tracing Absent Bodies Andrea Zittlau

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Absence, Gender, and the Land(Scape) in Palestinian Art Luisa Gandolfo

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Monumenting Our Pasts: Monuments, What Are They Now? Manca Bajec

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The Resolution of Doubts: Towards Recognition of the Systematic Abduction of Yemenite Children in Israel Yoav Galai and Omri Ben Yehuda

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The Commemorative Continuum of Partition Violence Kelsey J. Utne

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Absent Bodies, Present Pasts: Forced Disappearance as Historical Injustice in the Peruvian Highlands Eva Willems

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Restoring the Human Dignity of Absent Bodies in Colombia Sandra M. Rios Oyola

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The Wandering Memorial: Figures of Ambivalence in Hungarian Holocaust Memorialization Alexandra Kowalski

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Afterword: Mourning, Memorialising, and Absence in the Covid-19 Era Olivette Otele, Luisa Gandolfo, and Yoav Galai

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Manca Bajec is an artist and researcher whose multidisciplinary work is situated in the realm of sociopolitics. She has presented her work worldwide including at the Kaunas Biennial, ICA, Beside War Italy, WARM Sarajevo, the 9/11 Memorial Museum, Columbia University, New School, Goldsmiths, Royal College of Art and Syracuse. In 2019, she completed a practice-led Ph.D. at the Royal College of Art. She currently works as the Managing Editor of the Journal of Visual Culture while continuing to develop her practice and academic career. Her most recent work was developed as part of a British Council Residency in Ukraine and examined outer-space colonialism through a social science fiction audio play and installation. Manca frequently publishes her work, most recently in the Theatrum Mundi publication, Uncommon Building: Collective Excavation of a Fictional Structure and has an upcoming book chapter in an edited edition for the Memory Studies Series (Palgrave Macmillan) on the effects of Europeanisation in the Western Balkans. Manca was born in Slovenia, grew up in Kuwait and currently lives in London. Omri Ben Yehuda is a scholar of comparative Jewish Literatures. His work focuses on Jewish literatures in German and Hebrew, Mizrahi and Israeli literature, Holocaust literature and postcolonial studies. He is a former Minerva Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for German Philology in the Free University of Berlin and he is currently co-editing a volume with Dotan Halevi on Gaza in Israeli history, literature and culture. His comparative essay on the Holocaust, the Nakba and Mizrahi Trauma was ix

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published in The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia UP, 2019), while his essay on the Mizrahim and the 1967 War was published in Jadmag (Jadaliyya), and his postcolonial reading of Kafka’s ‘A Hunger Artist’ was published in the Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 45 (2017). Yoav Galai is a Lecturer in Global Political Communication at the Department of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. Previously a photojournalist and an NGO project manager, Yoav’s work explores narrative politics and visual politics. Yoav’s forthcoming manuscript with De Gruyter interrogates transnational constellations of collective memory as a site of international politics. Luisa Gandolfo is a Lecturer in Peace and Reconciliation in the Department of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and holds a Ph.D. in Arab and Islamic Studies from the University of Exeter. Luisa’s research focuses on post-war reconciliation and memory in the Middle East and North Africa, with a particular focus on Libya, Palestine-Israel, and Tunisia, and she is the author of Palestinians in Jordan: The Politics of Identity (2012). In 2014–2015, she was a EURIAS Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar, where she worked on the project ‘Comparative Discourses of Memory and Trauma in Palestinian and Israeli Art’. Alexandra Kowalski teaches social theory, the political sociology of culture and heritage studies at CEU (Central European University) in Budapest and Vienna. Her research explores the modern history of power and culture, with particular focus on the state processes and mechanisms that constitute cultural wealth and symbolic value. Published in multiple collective volumes and journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History and The Sociological Review, her work explores the scientific and bureaucratic production of French heritage in the post-war era, the history of UNESCO, the preservation policy formation in the nineteenth century. She has also worked and published on everyday culture, sexuality, critical social theory, TV and nationalism. Johanna Mannergren Selimovic is an Associate Professor in Peace and Development Research in the School of Social Sciences at Södertörn University, and holds a Ph.D. in Peace and Development Research from University of Gothenburg, in Sweden. Her research is driven by a deep

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curiosity about the makings of ‘everyday peace’ in deeply divided societies, specifically in relation to politics of memory, gender, and discourses and practices of transitional justice. Theoretically she engages with narrative theory and methodology. She grounds her work in close ethnographic studies, with fieldwork in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda and Jerusalem. She currently heads two research projects on the connections between memory politics and durable peace (www.peaceandmemo ry.net) and has published her work in journals such as Political Psychology, Memory Studies, International Journal of Transitional Justice and International Feminist Journal of Politics. She is also co-editor of the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies. Olivette Otele is a Professor of Colonial History and Memory of Slavery at the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom, and a Fellow and Vice President of the Royal Historical Society. She works on race, discrimination, citizenship, identities of minority ethnic groups in the Global North. She is the recipient of several major national and international research grants. She has authored numerous academic and non-academic publications and is a broadcaster and a social commentator (BBC, Guardian, BBC History Publications, Radio France International, among others). Her recent book, entitled African Europeans: An Untold History (HurstOUP), was published in 2020. Her publications include, Does Discrimination Shape Identity? Identity Politics and Minorities in the English-Speaking World and in France: Rhetoric and Reality, a special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Studies, edited by Olivette Otele and Rim Latrache (Routledge, 2011), and Histoire de l’esclavage britannique: des origines de la traite transatlantique aux premisses de la colonisation (Editions Michel Houdiard, 2008). Sandra M. Rios Oyola is a Colombian sociologist interested in the study of human dignity, religious peacebuilding, emotions and memory. Sandra is currently an FNRS Postdoctoral Researcher at the Catholic University of Louvain, in Belgium, where she researches how transitional justice helps to restore victims’ human dignity, with a focus on the case of Colombia’s Truth Commission, Historical Memorialization and Reparations. Sandra’s research is interdisciplinary, and it deals with issues of law and society, political science and sociology. She engages in locally based ethnographic observation, as well as digital ethnography, analysis of testimonies, law and policy. Sandra received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Aberdeen in 2014, thanks to a scholarship by the

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Leverhulme Programme, Compromise after Conflict. She is the author of the book, Religion and Social Memory amid Conflict: The Massacre of Bojayá in Colombia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and she is the co-editor, with Natascha Mueller-Hirth, of Time and Temporality in the Study of Transitional Societies (Routledge, 2018). Kelsey J. Utne is a History Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, where she specializes in the history of commemoration in late colonial and early postcolonial South Asia. Situated at the intersection of critical heritage studies and Achille Mbembé’s necropolitics, her dissertation examines the politics of corpse disposal and the memorialization of death in North India during the anti-colonial resistance of the 1920s and 1930s. Her research has been supported by generous grants from Cornell University, the Social Science Research Council, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Fulbright Programme. Eva Willems is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies at Ghent University in Belgium. Eva is interested in the intersection of transitional justice and citizenship (re)construction in (post-)conflict societies. Her Ph.D. research focused on the contestation and appropriation of mechanisms of reparation, exhumation and memorialization by survivors and ex-combatants in post-conflict Peru. Andrea Zittlau is an Assistant Professor at the Department of North American Studies at the University of Rostock, in Germany. Her monograph, entitled Curious Exotica (2016), explores the display of indigenous people, bodies and objects in museum environments. She currently looks at art and poetry in the context of the Anthropocene and publishes on activist artists such as Franci Duran and Erica Mott, as well as on community outreach in prisons and other marginalized settings.

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3

Shoes, Guanaco Skin, Selknam People (Ona). South American Objects in the American Museum of Natural History. Wikimedia Commons Photo-album donated to the then president Miguel Juárez Celman. Världskulturmuseet 008218 Children’s drawing after a Selk’nam image. 2016

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Introduction: Absence and Trauma in Post-Conflict Memorialisation Olivette Otele, Luisa Gandolfo, and Yoav Galai

In his poem, B-Movie (1981), Gil Scott-Heron reflected on the election of Ronald Reagan. He wrote, ‘this country wants nostalgia. They want to go back as far as they can. Even if it’s only as far as last week. Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards’ (ibid.). Reagan ran under the slogan ‘Let’s make America great again’, which was later revived by Donald Trump, albeit truncated into the shorter ‘MAGA’. As we are increasingly seeing, ‘they’ are still waiting for a greater future to be imported from the imagined past, and not only in America. When Reagan was elected, it was a time of crisis, with

O. Otele (B) University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] L. Gandolfo University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK e-mail: [email protected] Y. Galai Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 O. Otele et al. (eds.), Post-Conflict Memorialization, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54887-2_1

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stagflation running amok and a sitting president that wavered in the face of a hostage crisis. Scott-Heron explained that ‘they looked for people like John Wayne. But since John Wayne was no longer available, “they” settled for Ronald Reagan’ (ibid.), a B-movie actor. We are always in a time of crisis if we compare it to a mythical golden age of the silver screen, when, as Scott-Heron wryly commented, ‘movies were in black and white and so was everything else’ (ibid.). However, what ‘they’ are really after is a rose-tinted memory of a past that never was, a product that politicians, whether labelled ‘populist’ or not, are more than happy to supply. Scott-Heron concluded his poem with a dismal summary of the social backslide that is happening while ‘they’ are gazing at the past, And here’s a look at the closing numbers: racism’s up, human rights are down, peace is shaky, war items are hot - the House claims all ties. Jobs are down, money is scarce and common sense is at an all-time low with heavy trading. Movies were looking better than ever and now no one is looking because, we’re starring in a “B” movie. And we would rather have John Wayne. (ibid.)

Alistair MacIntyre wrote that, ‘there is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources’ (2007, 216). Paul Ricoeur referred to this process as ‘phronetic’, indicating a ‘familiarity we have with the types of plot received from our culture’ (1991, 28). Political projects seek legitimacy by means of phronesis, or by claiming to echo the familiar stock of the storied past. However, the stories that are analysed here are not in stock and not in step with any of the political canons that govern the discourses that surround them. Often, they move upstream on the raging flow of the progressive linear narratives that polities are quick to apply after an event has occurred that they deem hurtful to their self-image (Edkins 2006). They are incompatible with the prevalent designs of history and memory and to tell them is to challenge collective memory in the preeminent modern collective—the nation state. Nations legitimise their political claims and policies by referring to their pasts. Collective memory is, then, as Michael Rothberg explains, following Richard Terdiman (1993): ‘the past made present’ (2009, 3). Control over the national collective memory is of such importance that

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Ernst Gellner (1983) revised Weber’s famous definition of a state to suggest that the nation state has monopoly over the legitimate distribution of education. This monopoly, according to Ernst Renan (1990 [1882]), requires extensive maintenance, or a ‘daily plebiscite’. Importantly, the design of the national collective memory necessitates the omission of the memory of the violent foundational acts through which the polity came to be. Renan (1990 [1882], 11) sees it as a given that ‘unity is always effected by means of brutality’. The resulting narrative that must face the ‘daily plebiscite’ is then not as much a canonised account, but a project that requires constant work on a common narrative, which Chiara Bottici (2007) defined as ‘political myth’. On an individual level, this is congruent with what Gramsci (1992, 323) termed the ‘spontaneous philosophy’ of people, as ‘the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and of acting, which are collectively bundled together under the name of “folklore”’ and we resist narratives that contradict our ‘spontaneous philosophy’. James Wertsch explained that members of a society share a ‘deep collective memory’ that is disseminated via culture in the form of ‘schematic narrative templates’ (2002, 57). These general designs used to frame particular narratives reflect the common ‘stock of stories’. When a story does not fit these templates, it is either forced into them or rejected. The idea of collective memory then, concerns a past made present, often in the service of political power that may omit or redact shameful episodes, while retrojecting political projects into it. It occurs on the level of societal narrative, as well as in the cultural designs that manifest themselves among individuals. In Halbwach’s term, collective memory has ‘social frameworks’ (1992), but these are in a state of constant articulation, in which the borders of the polity are continually redrawn by discursive practices that delimit what is contained within it. Often times these claims, and their commemoration, are not only rejected, but actively denied from taking public form, from presence. For example, Rabbi Uzi Meshulam spoke about the crime itself and the crime of the silencing of the crime. Demands for recognition do not mesh with ‘deep collective memory’ (Wertsch 2002, 57), fail the ‘daily plebiscite’ (Renan 1990 [1882], 19) and challenge the ‘spontaneous philosophy’ (Gramsci 1992, 323). In other words, a discursive firewall keeps these stories at bay and their adherents are greeted with silence, suspicion or even violence. In addition, demands for evidence are laid on the very victims by those who hold the archives, marking the absences by doubt.

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The violent act that is omitted is twice silenced. First in the perpetration and second in every instance in which the discursive firewall operates to silence claims. Therefore, employing a narrative lens and rewriting the missing past, thereby replenishing the ‘stock of stories’ or ‘solving’ the historical puzzle is insufficient.

1.1 Memory and Trauma in Post-Conflict Communities The notions of trauma and recovery are central to post-conflict settings. Rebuilding communities that have been affected by war, disunions, various forms of oppressions and deaths, is a challenge that often implies examining the sources of trauma, and finding individual mechanism for coping and community healing strategies. That also may involve civil society including entrepreneurs of memory, coming together to look into ways to write about difficult experiences and reconcile past and present. Trauma theories have been the source of a vast literature in Humanities over the last 30 years, while post-World War II understandings of trauma have moved from clinical definitions of disorders to a re-evaluation of trauma beyond mental illnesses. The conception of trauma is largely based on Freud and Lacan’s analyses of the term. Sigmund Freud (1963) saw trauma as a source of pain, as neurosis was equated with illness, while Jacques Lacan largely acknowledged that trauma is common and recurrent to human experiences (2004). The notion of trauma that is examined in Humanities and this volume, combines both Freudian and Lacanian approaches. Trauma sources in post-conflict settings are by definition based on discontent and pain. They are about situations that have led to a sense of mental dislocation; a feeling of loss and yearning for peace, or mourning in the case of post-conflict settings. Traumatic events have societal trajectories that have shaped cultural memory in post-conflict settings. Cathy Caruth (1995) acknowledged Freud’s work in relation to the unconscious mind and the need to bring unsaid and sometimes unknown pain to the conscious mind. Literature, according to Caruth, could be one of the pathways to recovery. Caruth examined how the language of trauma (literature and oral history, among others) brought human histories to our attention and provided us with tools to understand human trajectories.

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Locating healing in the realm of discourse means retrieving past experiences. It is about placing the key for individual and collective repair in domains that examine violence to understand what traumatic memories are. However, Ruth Kevers et al. have argued that collective violence has been conceptualised in a way that reproduces reductive paradigms, such as the ‘individualizing, depoliticizing, universalizing, and pathologizing tendencies of the trauma discourse and its predominant PTSD construct’ (2016, 623). Examining the work of Jedlowski (2001), Misztal (2003), Olick and Robbins (1998), they highlight the contexts in which rationality took centre stage, and produced valuable, but sometimes limited kinds of theories. Indeed, scholars such as Jedlowski and Misztal have challenged constructing trauma as an individual experience, thus linking the debate to the question of memory. Memory scholars from Maurice Halbwachs to Paul Ricoeur, Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, and Marianne Hirsch, have analysed the articulation between individual memory and collective memory. Traumatic memories are indeed shaped by collective and social interactions, silences and expectations. All these theories however, remain in the domain of PTSD-led approaches that favour external intervention for healing. Kevers et al. note that few scholars have looked into transcultural trauma, an approach that highlights the need for multidirectional and cultural avenues to trauma and repair. Nonetheless, even when the specificity of the social, cultural, and political contexts are taken into account, and even when ‘indigenous strategies’ (Kevers et al. 2016, 634) are advocated, one may still wonder if this linear approach to trauma, that centres on healing through a clear path, whereby the subject moves from past to present, can always be efficient. Many post-conflict societies are characterised by internal divisions that can be ideological, religious, and geographical. An approach to trauma has to take into account the contexts of civil war and profound intracommunity divisions, especially when the antagonism has led to deaths, and when the sites of conflicts and memory are sites of mourning. South Africa, Rwanda, and Northern Ireland are among such examples, while in this volume, our contributors also reflect on Palestine-Israel, BosniaHercegovina, and Colombia, among others. Articulating trauma in a context of nation or community building can become a complex task that pushes victims and perpetrators in directions that they are not always ready to follow. Even the notion of victim and perpetrator becomes blurry in specific contexts, thus making any healing process difficult. Brandon Hamber and Richard A. Wilson demonstrate how mistaking individual

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trauma for national trauma or how converging a nation-building project with individual experiences of trauma can have dire impacts on survivors. They noted that ‘Nations do not have collective psyches that can be healed, nor do whole nations suffer post-traumatic stress disorder and to assert otherwise is to psychologize an abstract entity that exists primarily in the minds of nation-building politicians’ (Hamber and Wilson 2002, 36). Hamber and Wilson took Truth Commissions as examples and demonstrated that even when they do consider voices, they are about public discourses. Those discourses are, one may add, about constructed, and constructing, public memory, and therefore about continuous debate. Using that public space to address the question of reparation, however, can be beneficial to a certain extent as the process brings to the surface a clearer delineation between the moral and physical realm and between the victim and the perpetrator. Yet, as Hamber and Wilson also note, reparations can have limits. They may help mourn, but they can never bring back the lost ones. In the case of families those who have gone missing or made to disappear, it signifies an acceptance the crimes and the end of hope. The two researchers underscore the economic dimension of reparations and the way they may alleviate the financial burden that accompanies loss in many instances of gendered post-conflict settings. They nonetheless bring forward the idea that the refusal for reparations and calls for punishments for the perpetrators should be acknowledged as ‘rituals of closure’ (Hamber and Wilson 2002, 49). Graham Dawson, drawing on Susannah Radstone (2007), critiques this approach, arguing that trauma theorists, such as Caruth, have divided people into two categories: the ‘normal’ and the ‘pathological’ (2017, 64). The clear distinction ignores the fact that trauma is a ‘continuum’ and the so-called subject may not be aware that he/she has been traumatised. In this equation, two other difficulties emerge and they are linked to the power dynamic between the patient and the practitioner or the person who talks and the listener on the one hand, and on the other, to what is deemed relevant enough to be considered traumatic. In those instances, memory and time play a crucial role. Using the example of Northern Ireland, Dawson notes that Alan Young’s ‘architecture of traumatic time’ (1995) troubles the idea that one moves from conflict to post-conflict, and therefore one can move from trauma to recovery in a linear way. Some settings are both conflict and post-conflict zones, and these render recovery and trauma particularly difficult to apprehend. Dawson questions

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the idea of ‘moving on’ in those settings. He makes a case for greater attention to be paid to the history of emotions and its links to the ‘inner world’ whereby, The work of reparation is strengthened by the “introjection”, or taking in, of such capacities where they are encountered in social life. This, as well as the perception of discrepancies between anticipations derived from the internal world and the complex realities of the external social world, enables “something new to happen” within both psychic and social reality. (2017, 97)

Recovery is therefore about going through processes of healing that are both collective and individual. Recovery is articulated while uncovering layers of the past, by telling and sharing one’s story, as well as public and, sometimes, national acknowledgement of wrongdoings. These strategies often range from psychological and financial support, to legal forms of revenge seen in instances such as reparatory justice.

1.2

Absence, Remembrance, and Mourning

A significant contribution of this volume is the authors’ reflections on absence and its impact on remembrance, memorialisation, and the negotiation of post-conflict trauma. As the authors contemplate absence in their research, the concept is revealed to be multi-faceted as it (re)emerges through silence, omission, erasure, and haunting, as well as through the physical and psychological aches that persist among the ever-mourning. During the original workshop held at the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide (NIOD) in Amsterdam in 2016, fresh themes emerged, including the significance of the body and embodiment. Much like absence, the chapters that follow demonstrate that the body can be affective in a number of ways. Among the living, the body remembers, recounts, witnesses, and provides testimonies. Through the living body, the absent bodies are not forgotten, their fate perhaps unknown, but their names are commemorated and committed to funerary rituals, where possible, and the articulation of their biographies provides an opportunity for catharsis, or a temporary release, for those who remain. In other instances, the embodied experience of remembrance brings with it the recognition of erasure, and in Chapters 2 and 3, Johanna Mannergren

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Selimovic, and Olivette Otele, respectively, explore the in-betweenness that marks the edges of absence. Opening the volume, Mannergren Selimovic takes us to Sarajevo, where she contemplates the union of silence and absence in the everyday of survivors of the siege of the city (1992–1996). The ‘everyday silent memory work’ that takes place through subtle acts of omission is both physical and linguistic, and Mannergren Selimovic directs our attention to the embodied, emplaced, and spoken dimensions of memory work. The present absences experienced by the survivors of the conflict congregate under the sensation of ‘a sense of’, which Bertelsen and Murphie’s social body negotiates (2010, 140). For the participants in Mannergren Selimovic’s study, the public spaces of their neighbourhoods retained the tension of the conflict, while the sites of loss continued to be regarded with a reverence that prevented the bereaved from walking on a stretch of pavement (‘I don’t feel good. My body stops me from going there’). The subsequent recollections about mealtimes, scarred buildings, and the reluctance to talk about the war—except through subtle references—generates a feeling of memorialisation on the margins, the memories rarely openly articulated, yet never forgotten. Through her chapter, Mannergren Selimovic demonstrates the liminality of spatial and embodied memory work in the post-war city, and her argument, that the power of silence lies in its capacity to divert contentious conversations or (re)traumatising recollections, locates silence, omission, and absence on the cusp of healing. Before healing can occur, recognition of trauma must take place. While the survivors of the siege of Sarajevo carry their experience, and articulate it in ways that traverse possible retraumatisation, the visitors to sites where past violence, and its legacy, remains untold (or partially revealed) enter a different in-betweenness. In Olivette Otele’s powerful account of moving through Penrhyn Castle in North Wales, and Andrea Zittlau’s reflections (Chapter 4) on the Selk’nam exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, the idea of the ‘condensation of time’ suggests not just a temporal compression, but a narrative one, too (Dekel and Vinitzky-Seroussi 2017, 337). The result, however, is not just ease of access to a vast scope of history, but rather the question of whose history? While Penrhyn Castle is a heritage site, and the AMNH a museum, both connect with Irit Dekel and Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi’s perception of the museum as a site of ‘distinct moments that bring together particular clusters of meaning […] around national memory and private lives’

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(2017, 337; 338). Despite the intimacy suggested by the private lives on display, the omitted narratives create less a condensed history, and more one of historical and cultural amnesia, as Otele demonstrates. The result brings an added edge to the atmosphere of the site; for Dekel and Vinitzky-Seroussi, this is the ‘uncanny experience’ brought about by temporal breakdowns (2017, 338). Otele deconstructs the unsettling sensation further, in her reflection on black performative presence and black visitors at sites of trauma and mourning. In this ‘ambiguous setting’, Otele poses important questions, including ‘to what extent have dominant metanarratives related to the history of transatlantic slavery obscured Afro-descendants’ presence in these reluctant sites of memory?’ Central to this analysis is the embodied presence of the black visitor, as well as, Otele tells us, their absence. This observation draws attention to the effect of historical amnesia and the nature of the memory/ies presented at heritage sites and in museums. Following Astrid Erll’s understanding of memory, that it is a ‘process that connects neurons, people, times, spaces, experiences and histories’ (2017, 6), then the sites that omit experiences and histories are, ultimately, failing to facilitate the connections that produce an inclusive (and historically accurate) narrative of remembrance. Establishing this connection is, in the context of the Selk’nam exhibits at the ANHM, complicated further by the location of the shoes that form the display. As Zittlau explains, locating the shoes in a natural history museum removes the Selk’nam from human history, and thereafter, obscures the cause of their demise, as ‘[t]he shoes mark absence, but disguise the making of absence as a natural cause also, because that particular museum falls into the genre of natural history, which is presumably detached from human influences’. The dissonance created by the choice of location prompts a double-detachment, as the artefacts are removed, first, from their point of origin, in Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago shared by Chile and Argentina. Second, their location in natural history dehumanises the absent bodies who once owned the shoes, and diminishes the link to colonial violence, and the meaningful conversation that should follow. Beyond heritage sites, the authors question how to mourn when a body is missing, and the ways that absence can play a role in mourning and remembrance, amidst silence and disappearance. There is, moreover, an additional facet of memory, wherein the act of recall connects to the physical pain of remembrance. In Gearoid Millar’s consideration of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Sierra Leone, the

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prospect of retelling their experiences was expressed through analogies of pain. For one, the TRC is likened to ‘pouring hot water over your head’; for another, physical and emotional wounds are experienced with fresh intensity, ‘when he heard on the radio, the voice of the man who chopped his hands, it all returned to him. […] the memories of the war came back to the old Pa, hot and painful, and he hated that man anew’ (Millar 2015, 243). Where loss has been experienced, the absence can become an enduring ache. In Simon Robins’ work on the families of those who disappeared during the Nepalese Civil War (1996–2006), the bodies of the absent continued to have an impact on those of the living, as the survivors continued to experience chronic pain and anxiety, which began with the disappearances (2014, 10). For Robins, the duration of the pain’s persistence enables the body to become ‘a physical memorial to the missing, inscribed with the trauma of the past and making absence visible’ (ibid.). As the contributions of Andrea Zittlau (Chapter 4), Manca Bajec (Chapter 7), and Mannergren Selimovic demonstrate, absence can function paradoxically, by being invisible, yet tangible. As each author looks at the material representation of the absent body (or bodies), through empty chairs that line the streets of Sarajevo (Mannergren Selimovic), balloons tagged with the names of victims of the Omarska camp in Bosnia-Hercegovina (Bajec), or Selk’nam shoes that are separated from their owners (Zittlau), they draw attention to the act of framing the spaces left behind. In doing so, the material objects that stand in the stead of the disappeared present, for a moment, a visual acknowledgement of not only the void left by the individual, but also a reminder (and sometimes an acknowledgement) of the root of the loss. So far, these chapters have provided a profound focus on the narratives and rituals that try (and at times, fail) to make sense of, absent bodies. For the bereaved, the absence of the bodies can reinforce the violent event of the past, and in Chapters 9 and 10, by Eva Willems and Sandra M. Rios Oyola, respectively, the living stand less as memorials, and more as channels through which oppression and disempowerment unfold. In Willem’s research on the absence of remains and the remains of absence in the Peruvian Highlands following the Peruvian Civil War (1980–2000), the dead bodies hold ‘an emancipatory potential for their relatives in the present and future’. Central to this premise is the act of burying and reburying, though as Willems cautions, added risks remain, as the narratives concerning the found bodies can be contested, and

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non-recognition (or misrecognition) can equally precipitate harm and/or oppression. To this can be added two further aspects: the potential for retraumatisation while reburying and negotiating contested narratives, and second, the possibility for burial to become a site of control. In her reflection on burials and funerary rites during the conflict in Colombia and Guatemala, Rios Oyola argues that, ‘the absence or prohibition of funerary rituals can be used as a tool for humiliation of the deceased and of those who survived her’. While the use of the absent body can be invoked to exact pain on the living, so too, does Rios Oyola demonstrate the ways that absent bodies disempower survivors, as ‘they feel that they are not able to carry their duties toward their deceased relatives’. The emotional turmoil explored by Willems and Rios Oyola recalls Robins’ discussion of the pain of loss, yet more significantly, they address the urgent need to understand the diverse experiences of trauma among survivors of the disappeared. For scholars working on mass graves, the reluctance of survivors to exhume the graves has been received with ‘shock and even bafflement’ (Rosenblatt 2015, 86). While Adam Rosenblatt is clear that forensic teams follow the lead of the communities involved, their lingering consternation perhaps can be solved by looking at the complex power dynamics that surround post-conflict mourning and memorialisation, which are discussed in the chapters in this volume.

References Bertelsen, L., & Murphie, A. (2010). An Ethics of Everyday Infinities and Powers: Félix Guattari on Affect and the Refrain. In M. Gregg, and G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The Affect Theory Reader. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bottici, C. (2007). A Philosophy of Political Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Caruth, C. (1995). Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Dawson, G. (2017). The Meaning of “Moving on”: From Trauma to the History and Memory of Emotions in “Post-Conflict” Northern Ireland. Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies, 47 (1): 82–102. https://doi.org/10. 3366/iur.2017.0258. Dekel, I., & Vinitzky-Seroussi, V. (2017). A Living Place: On the Sociology of Atmosphere in Home Museums. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 4(3): 336–362. https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2017. 1332486.

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Edkins, J. (2006). The Local, the Global and the Troubling. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 9(4): 499–511. https://doi. org/10.1080/13698230600941937. Erll, A. (2017). Travelling Memory in European Film: Towards a Morphology of Mnemonic Relationality. Image & Narrative, 18(1): 5–19. Freud, S. (1963). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVI . London: Hogarth Press. Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Gramsci, A. (1992). Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York: International Publishers. Halbwachs, M. (1992). On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hamber, B., & Wilson, R. A. (2002). Symbolic Closure Through Memory, Reparation and Revenge in Post-Conflict Societies. Journal of Human Rights, 1(1): 35–53. Jedlowski, P. (2001). Memory and Sociology: Themes and Issues. Time & Society, 10(1): 29–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463x01010001002. Kevers, R., Rober, P., Derluyn, I., & De Haene, L. (2016). Remembering Collective Violence: Broadening the Notion of Traumatic Memory in Post-Conflict Rehabilitation. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 40(4): 620–640. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s11013-016-9490-y. Lacan, J. (2004). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. London: Karnac Books. MacIntyre, A. (2007). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Millar, G. (2015). Performative Memory and Re-Victimization: Truth-Telling and Provocation in Sierra Leone. Memory Studies, 8(2): 242–254. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1750698013519123. Misztal, B. (2003). Theories of Social Remembering. Maidenhead and Philadelphia: Open University Press. Olick, J., & Robbins, J. (1998). Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices. Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 105–140. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.24.1.105. Radstone, S. (2007). Trauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics. Paragraph, 30(1), 9–29. Renan, E. (1990 [1882]). What Is a Nation? In H. Bhabha (Ed.), Nation and Narration. London: Routledge. Ricœur, P. (1991). Life in Quest of Narrative. In D. Wood (Ed.), On Paul Ricœur. London: Routledge. Robins, S. (2014). Constructing Meaning from Disappearance: Local Memorialisation of the Missing in Nepal. International Journal of Conflict and Violence, 8(1), 104–118. https://doi.org/10.4119/unibi/ijcv.342.

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Rosenblatt, A. (2015). Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science After Atrocity. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Rothberg, M. (2009). Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Terdiman, R. (1993). Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis. Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press. Wertsch, J. (2002). Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, A. (1995). The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Articulating Presence of Absence: Everyday Memory and the Performance of Silence in Sarajevo Johanna Mannergren Selimovic

2.1

Introduction

On 6 April 2012, Bosnian theatre director Haris Pašovi´c placed 11,541 red plastic chairs in rows along Sarajevo’s main street to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 1992–96 siege of the city. There was one chair for each person killed and the seemingly endless line of chairs that snaked through the city centre acknowledged the loss of individuals and lifeworlds through war and violence, a loss that for a moment was made visible and tangible. The art installation, called Sarajevo Red Line, brought to the fore how the war caused both collective and individual loss for the city and its inhabitants. The installation was a far cry from the noisy and politicised remembrance practices that in post-war BosniaHerzegovina is often used to bolster (ethno)nationalist sentiments and

J. Mannergren Selimovic (B) Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 O. Otele et al. (eds.), Post-Conflict Memorialization, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54887-2_2

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divisive politics. For a moment, an intense and silent presence of absence spoke louder. This chapter is interested in the tension between lived silences in the post-war everyday and public commemoration. The concept of presence of absence is developed in order to capture the complex ways that the traumatic past is embedded in the present. I argue that presence of absence is a driving affective force in societies transitioning from conflict. The concept opens up for an understanding of the role of silence in the making and restoring of lifeworlds after traumatic atrocity events. Silence is understood as a productive and expressive articulation of this presence of absence and the chapter explores silence as a practice and performance in the everyday of the post-war Bosnian capital. In a second move the chapter reflects upon how such everyday silent memory work can be represented through public commemoration. It argues that there is a gap between commemorative practices at formal sites of acknowledgement and their emphasis on coherent narratives and organised spaces of mourning, and the ambiguous silences that can contain and express presence of absence. It looks to the importance of art as an alternative realm that does not necessarily strive for closure through speech, but rather embraces a state of suspension that can represent silence as a marker for loss, mourning and protest. The chapter begins with an introduction to the concept of presence of absence and discusses it in relation to practices of silence. It then engages with some ‘empirical moments’ (Mannergren Selimovic 2020) of how individuals in Sarajevo live in and through the presence of absence and discusses their narrative, embodied and emplaced practices of silence. The discussion brings forth an understanding of silence as a multifaceted practice defined by complexities and ambivalences, employed to negotiate the past and present. Taking into consideration Butler’s observation that ‘loss fractures representation itself’ (Butler 2002, 467), I then discuss the problems of commemoration practices in view of these complex everyday silences and return to a more thorough analysis of the Red Line installation. Aesthetic representations of presence of absence may be, the chapter concludes, a powerful means to articulate everyday memory work of silence.

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Conceptualising Presence of Absence

The concept of ‘presence of absence’ is a productive starting point for an investigation into memory politics after war and violence. It captures a central node in post-war politics: the tension between the loss in the past, and the impact of this loss on the present. Absence is present emotionally, corporeally and cognitively and influences how people live in the world. The difficult experiences of the past are not ‘dead’, they are full of vitality and can suddenly burst, or slowly seep, through any temporal and spatial imaginations of before and after. I have come to see presence of absence as one of the most powerful affective forces in post-war politics and in order to understand the relation between memory politics and peace, presence of absence has to be taken into consideration. The shifting tensions and interdependence between the concepts of presence and absence has been a productive theme in philosophy for a long time. Key philosophers bring forth the paradox of absence/presence, including Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida (Bille et al. 2010, 106ff). Some of the most productive engagements with the presence/absence notion have emerged in the literature on the Holocaust, a body of writing that directly or indirectly revolves around this tension, particularly regarding the enormous loss of individuals and communities that is carried by survivors, and the transmission of this loss through generations to the present (Hirsch 2012), and the impossibility of representation (Agamben 1999; Felman and Laub 1992). Explorations by Jessica Auchter (2014) and Brent Steele (2012) bring the discussion of the presence/absence paradox (the ‘haunting’ as Auchter writes building on Derrida’s theorisation, or ‘the scar’ in Steele’s terminology) into discussions of the political in international relations, arguing that the missing, forever marking the present, is a central element of state-crafting and nation-building (see also Edkins 2003). These writings bring important insights of relevance for memory politics in the wake of war and violence. First, to look for the presence of absence one needs to go beyond cognition, disrupting what is considered visible and rational. To think about the presence of absence is to bring into our analysis that which is not seen or talked about. We are, as Auchter (2014, 57) notes, not used to thinking about the political importance of that which operates beyond visible and traditional political realms. The concept of presence of absence thus brings with it some

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spatial disturbances in our thinking about memory politics and transitions from war to peace. Second, the concept of presence of absence unsettles traditional ways of understanding time along linear temporalities of past-present-future. Steele’s metaphor of ‘the scar’ powerfully brings forth the temporal instability of the ‘presence/absence’ relation, arguing that the scar is both momentary and permanent; something that is part of several ‘temporal trajectories’. This makes it so difficult to close a scar or even to conceal it, Steele argues (2012, 29). Scars work backwards, by not letting us forget the horrific events of the past, but they are also present as ‘a companion’ in the present (Steele 2012, 30). Freud’s notion of trauma as an unresolved event that surfaces in the psyche ‘like an unlaid ghost’ comes to mind (Freud, cited in Ball 2014). It is clear that spatial and temporal workings of presence of absence cannot only be approached from a narrative or cognitive perspective. It is (also) an affective state of being, as the term reflects ‘a sense of’ the absent people, things or places. Affect has been defined as ‘intensities’ (Bertelsen and Murphie 2010, 138; Ross 2013, 21) and it has also been pointed out that a shifting register of affective forces constantly circulate through the social body (Bertelsen and Murphie 2010, 140). Such affects are produced in ongoing encounters between material and social constellations and arise ‘in the midst of in-between-ness’ (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, 1–2; Sather-Wagstaff 2017). These conceptualisations touch on anthropology’s long-standing interest regarding practices around absent bodies or things. Writing from a Maho village in Papua New Guinea, Debbora Battaglia notes that (s)ocial behaviour, temporal orders, the social landscape itself are redefined by the invisible agency of an ‘active absence’ (Battaglia, cited in Bille et al 2010, 12; 344). Such theories open towards an analysis of the ongoings in the everyday, the ‘inbetween-ness’ that is excessive of formal and ritualised commemoration practices. Building on these theoretical insights, I am interested in how the presence of absence is articulated in the everyday of world-making in the aftermath of war. The everyday, constituted of events, practices and relations that form an entangled, granular texture, is a vital site for memory making. Yet memory politics is often construed as only concerning various interventions in the official realm that construct certain narratives – be they excluding or including - and the workings of the micropolitics of memory are greatly underexplored. In what follows, I will try to address

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this gap by investigating how presence of absence is enfolded in narrative, embodied and material layers of the everyday and articulated through silence. 2.1.2

Articulations of Silence

In my research among people affected by violence and war, I have often encountered silences as a strategy to manage post-war existence. I have come to see that the meaning of silences is ambiguous and shifts over time and space. While the transitional justice impulse is usually to advocate that silences need to be broken in order to make the absence visible and identifiable, I here want to also discuss how silences are used as a way to contain and mark the presence of absence. Silences have to do about power and agency and from that, it follows that they can be both enabling and disabling (Mannergren Selimovic 2020). Part of their agential function concerns the management of knowledge about atrocious events in the past. Relations and identities are influenced by who knows and who does not. There are tensions between silence and speaking out, between the known and the unknown. In this uncertainty silence may have a disabling effect and actually hide presence of absence through erasure and denial. For example, the loud and conflictual memory discourses of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs in Bosnia-Herzegovina contain erasure and denial; silences that seek to hide and exert power. Such silences can serve to mask new positions of power and privilege, and fear and oppression may be used to enforce the omission of certain crimes from the war narrative and the collective memory in order to have ‘clean’ identities of victimhood. Some stories may be marginalised or challenged through top-down memory politics that seeks to construct hegemonic accounts. The denial of some crimes, in particular sexual violence, hiding and shaming the victims, or marginalising stories of civilian dignity in order to make a more militaristic account hegemonic, are all examples of how silences can be disabling. These are silences that are violent and want to erase presence of absence. However even in hierarchical structures of dominance there is space for enabling silence. In peace and transitional justice research, a body of writings is emerging that investigates silence in post-war contexts not as

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a void or absence, but ‘silence as possibility’.1 Far from mechanisms for forgetting, these silences are productive and expressive. As I will illustrate, such silences can enable and protect close relationships and can be an expression of dignity, and provide a space for mourning, for acknowledgement and resistance. They may make mourning possible and mark loss when representation seems impossible. I propose that silences, oscillating between disabling and enabling, are means to articulate and contain presence of absence. A rich tradition of scholars and artists working through the trauma of the Holocaust have probed into the paradox of silence in relation to the presence/absence tension. The silences carried in and through the bodies of Holocaust survivors and the way that silence has been a means of survival is achingly portrayed in several key literary works. Giorgio Agamben connects silence to ‘the impossibility of bearing witness’ (Agamben 1999, 39). However, the silence that acknowledges this impossibility is not a void but rather articulates an ‘active absence’. To trace these silences and see how they articulate presence of absence, close readings of everyday practices are needed. 2.1.3

Silences and the Siege of Sarajevo

I will now discuss some practices of silence in Sarajevo, building on my interaction with interlocutors in my research on memory politics in Bosnia-Herzegovina. My focus here concerns mundane memories of the nearly four-year siege, of what it was like to live through the hunger and danger of those years in which incessant shelling and sniper fire killed more than 11,000 inhabitants.2 Most adults in present-day Sarajevo carry memories of how their city transformed from a space of tolerance and cosmopolitanism to a space of horrific violence, hunger and fear during the siege, and then emerged post-war as a more segregated and highly politicised space (Jansen 2013; Kappler 2017). The last decade or so has seen new shopping centres mushrooming in the city, and many of the 1 See for example: Eastmond and Mannergren Selimovic 2012; Mac Ginty 2014; Mannergren Selimovic 2020; George and Kent 2017; Kent 2016; Motsemme 2004; Porter 2016. 2 The chapter partly builds upon fieldwork conducted in 2017–2018 for the research project Peace and the Politics of Memory, funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences.

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destroyed buildings have been repaired. The war is in many ways distant as you move through the bustling streets, glass-fronted boutiques and intense cafés in the pedestrian streets. At the same time, there are many physical markers that tell of the violence, including ruins and war monuments, burial grounds, monuments, as well as sculptures by artists and museums dedicated to the siege. More inconspicuously, but very much present in the everyday, is the mundane debris that is floating around the cityscape, everything from bullet cases sold as keyrings to tourists hunting for war souvenirs, to sheets of UNHCR plastic used to patch up a shed, as well as an endless number of chipped marks on buildings from shells and bullets. As the narrative of the siege is under constant negotiation, neither is the meaning of the commemorative places and activities settled (Kappler 2017). The formal memory work around the siege is coloured by the overall memory politics in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina, defined by unresolved tensions and a deeply divisive political climate driven by politicians who thrive on politics of fear with an underlying threat of renewed hostilities. Commemoration regarding the war is often used as an arena for a revisionist rewriting of the past into a tale of ethnonationalism and there is an increasing militarisation of public commemoration. A brief glance at the memoryscape in Sarajevo shows a top-down (ethno)nationalistic appropriation of memories that are more focused on the elite and military aspects of the war rather than the civilian experience. For example, at a prominent place in the city, a prestigious commemoration space is under development that includes a graveyard for war ‘martyrs’, a museum of military war heroes, and a multimedia space for large commemoration events. At a community level, monuments over fallen soldiers from that particular neighbourhood are common and are often acknowledged with flowers from officials. In this ongoing construction of the memory of the siege, the citizens’ resistance against war and their fight for a multicultural cosmopolitan city is often overwritten, although exhibitions at the War Childhood Museum and the Historical Museum try to rectify the dominant ethnonationalist narrative by focusing on citizens’ resilience and the individual and social cost of war. Yet in the midst of these visible demonstrations of memorialisation, ordinary people tend to not speak of the war years. In what follows, I will draw on empirical vignettes that trace how silences are narrated, embodied, and emplaced in the everyday lives of the citizens of Sarajevo. By carefully listening and observing these silences, I have tried to understand their role not as a void or as a forgetting, but rather

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as a performance and a strategy to navigate the contentious post-war memoryscape and find a productive way to articulate presence of absence. As noted above, these silences are not only narrative but are also embodied and emplaced. This became increasingly clear when I spent time with D., a woman in her early thirties who has lived in Sarajevo her whole life. The war started when she was nine years old and she lived with her parents and elder sister in an apartment building on the hills climbing up from central town—a prime target for the snipers positioned on the hills of Trebevi´c directly opposite. She still lives in the same building with her parents. In her family, the war years are seldom mentioned. ‘We don’t like to speak about it’, D. said with a smile. But when I asked her to tell me about how she thinks the siege should be remembered and commemorated, what she does not talk about, and what she is silent about, she began by recounting a childhood memory, thus somewhat paradoxically breaking her silence: Our mum would never allow us to leave the building. It is located on top of a hill. It is the only apartment building on this hill, all the other houses are smaller, and my building is the only one with elevator. It has six stories and I live on the third one. I see the whole city. Trebevi´c is right across. So, from Trebevi´c you can see our building. It was very dangerous. They could see us walking down the street, standing in the window. Our mum did not allow us to leave the building. Of course, she was not working because of the war, but when there was no water, she would take some buckets and go to find some water and then she would say: “don’t leave the house while I am away”. Sometimes we would go to other flats where friends lived, because there were lots of kids at the time in the building and we already had other people coming from other parts of the city fleeing and coming to live there. And we would get together to play in the hallways in the building. But sometimes we would leave and go outside. […] On this day, my mum was coming back and she was carrying some buckets and we were playing in front of the building. […] She was furious, she started yelling: “what are you doing? Why did you go outside? Why did you do this? It is not safe, they are shooting all the time! what are you doing?” She was so angry and she rushed us in, and I remember hearing snipers and seeing bullets hit the facade while we were running to enter

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the building. It was really, really dangerous and one of the bullets went right past my mum’s ear. She was nearly injured, but no one was injured. So, she kind of saved us all because had she not come at that point, we might have been killed. (Personal interview, 26 January 2018)

This story, recounted in detail with intense viscerality, contains an excessively affective experience, including her mother nearly getting killed, the sound of the bullets tearing at the wall, her mother’s anger and fear as she pushed them in through the door, all tinged with the forbidden adventure of going outside. It is a sharp memory that D. does not talk about any longer with her family: it is too painful. Or ‘too direct’, she says. Yet the avoidance of narration does not mean that the shared war experiences are not present: they are in fact ‘part of our DNA’. Rather, these memories are evoked by subtle references that seem to act as code words, as the following example illustrates. D. brings up another anecdote from the war that concerns the constant struggle to find food. She says she doesn’t remember the feeling of hunger but remembers how she was always craving something sweet: We always had the same thing on the menu. What we got from the neighbourhood. Aid would come to Sarajevo, and then it would be distributed in the communities. So, each member was entitled to some portions of rice, some cans or whatever. I remember the ready-made packages from the army. We, the kids, we loved them! All the kids loved the ready-made meals because there would always be some candy or chewing gum inside, something sweet. There would be some real food items, but always the sweet, so we were always thrilled, to find maybe chocolate, chewing gums. (ibid.)

Today the family collectively remembers her craving for sweets, and now and then it will be referred to in family situations, for example when dessert is served at dinner among relatives and friends: ‘My mum always repeats the words I used to say: “mum, is there anything sweet to eat?” And we laugh’. (ibid.) While D. says that they do not talk in detail about the war experience anymore, the visceral sensation of food can bring out affect and conjure up the times they shared during the siege. It is at moments like this that the temporal ordering of past and present dissolves in an instant. The hunger, and the dangerous gathering of food and water, is not talked

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about but the silence does not mean erasure of these memories. On the contrary it is in the moment of laughter that it seems possible to reminiscence about the war. Without having to verbalise the pain, fear and anger of the siege and all that was lost, the family can embrace the absence and share it intersubjectively. Those moments become a restorative space, in which they can evoke memories and loved ones through silence. Open conversations about the war beyond family and close friends carry further complications. D. navigates carefully in order to respect the dignity of others and their right to remember, although they or their relatives might have been on ‘the other side’ of the conflict. This silence is also protective of herself, as she tries to avoid verbal confrontations where her experiences might be questioned or belittled. Sometimes it is more productive not to speak, and silence paradoxically seems to make communication possible as part of everyday negotiations around the traces of a difficult past: I am not a very quiet person. I don’t have a problem with sharing my feelings and telling people how I feel, but I tend to avoid getting into arguments, especially if we have different opinions about the war, especially when it comes to war criminals and prosecutions. So, I tend not to share some of my thoughts and opinions because I don’t feel like arguing with people on different topics. Sometimes talking is frustrating and you have your own history to cherish. And even if it is painful you cherish your own personal history. […] We all remember things differently. (ibid.)

Silence can thus be used in situations when speech might be too divisive and threaten fragile systems of coexistence. There is a liminality to these silences as they oscillate between denial, ignorance, knowledge, and acknowledgement and respect. When the social fabric has been ripped, relationships have been fragmented by violence and insecurity enfolded into the everyday, the work of (re)constructing a lifeworld cannot always be done through words (Das 2007). I have also noted that many of my interlocutors bring up their memories of insecurity and violence by referring to corporeal reactions and sensations. Thinking about the past brings visceral sensations, for example D. eating a sweet dessert and remembering the bliss of chocolate during the war years. Another example of how memories are embodied concerns M., who is a woman in her early fifties. We were walking down a street in Sarajevo when I wanted us to cross the road, but she stopped me.

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After a moment’s reflection, she explained that her uncle had been killed there, and that she avoided that place. ‘I never walk on that side of the street. That is where he was killed. I don’t really consciously think about it, it is just that I don’t feel good. My body stops me from going there’. (Informal conversation, 8 August 2017). I see her movements through the city as an embodied form of silence. In M.’s everyday, she moves in answer to the layers of memories; at this busy street corner at the main thoroughfare of Sarajevo, the inscriptions are of death and loss. The bodily practices of silence connect with the lived peace of the present and the social fabric of everyday life unfolds in relation to the material registers of memory. In fact, the city itself is spatially constructed through these layers of memory as M. and others move along its streets and squares, marked by the affective force of presence of absence. Another corporeal reaction was recounted by S., a man in his thirties, whose brother was killed when they were children during the siege. When a monument that honours the child victims of war was uncovered in a park in central Sarajevo, he and his mother were invited to the ceremony. But, in the middle of the ceremony and ‘a speech by some high-up bloke’, his mother left abruptly. ‘They could not tell her anything’, her son now explained. She seemed to have refused the loudness of speech at the commemoration event, keeping a silence that she did not want to be replaced by political discourse that tried to use the death of her son as a trope for the post-war nation-building project. Such a withdrawal can function as a protest, and silence can thus be an act of resistance of the kind that Michel de Certeau (1984) helps us notice, an act emerging from fluid tactics that are not necessarily outspoken or planned. Such a silent act of resistance is far from mechanisms of forgetting; rather it is a silence used to uphold presence of absence, and make sure that events of violence and abuse do not slip into a mononarrative that could erase the complexity of loss. S. said that ‘it is good that there is a monument to children and his name is engraved there. But I don’t feel that this monument is for us’. (Personal interview, 24 January 2018). Returning to D., and her recounted experience of being a target for snipers in her house on the hill, it later emerged that she did have a material monument of sorts for those times. Just as S. and his mother, D. felt disturbed by official commemoration and preferred silence as a mode for remembering. While she said that she felt ‘somewhat afraid’ to think too much about her ‘lost childhood’, she was also reminded in a way that did

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not depend upon divisive speech and an enrolling of her experiences into official commemoration. The façade of my building has not been repaired; there are still holes and marks from that time. I don’t mind them. Maybe I even prefer to have them because it is like the lines on your face. They show that you have been through some things, the cargo you have, and if you try to remove them you are kind of removing your own experience from your life. I don’t think it is a good idea to hide your experiences or the traces. No, to just hide them, it is not good. Some people have to be reminded visually of what has happened […] When you see something with your own eyes it is different from when people tell you stories. […] Even if it is painful you can cherish it on your own, just by seeing some reminders. (Personal interview, 24 January 2018)

The material marks can carry multiple meanings; they can hold her memories and understandings of what the siege was, something that verbal conversations often fail to do as they threaten to collapse into an argument (‘it is different from when people tell you stories’). She wants it to be possible ‘to cherish it on your own’ without being questioned or having to navigate a socially treacherous conversation. At the same time, as the chipped buildings and bullet holes are there in public, they are evidence that these things did happen, and function as a constant but silent reminder and acknowledgement of presence of absence. 2.1.4

Commemoration, Art and the Presence of Absence

Now, I turn to the second part of this study and ask how this mundane memory work of silence can be expressed through commemoration. Is it possible to represent the presence of absence and its silent articulations through formal commemoration? As I have already indicated, memorial practices tend to be loud and a potent tool for nation-building in the process of (re)constructing the public realm. In Sarajevo as elsewhere, collective remembrance practices often revolve around narratives of patriotism and nationalism. There is a drive to construct delineated subject positions such as ‘victim’ or ‘perpetrator’ and, as always, remembering

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also entails forgetting.3 This means that ‘certain interpretations of the past (are) silenced so as to enable the acceptance of the narrative by a broader public’ (Vintizky-Seroussi and Teeger 2010, 1113). Commemoration is thus a means to create and sustain a particular social order. In any narrative about an event, there are aspects that are glossed over in order to make sense and construct clear subject positions. Paul Connerton (2011, 41) calls this ‘hegemonic forgetting’. How the past is articulated, what stories and texts circulated, and what lives are deemed ‘right’ to grieve is negotiated at sites of commemoration, and as my empirical vignettes demonstrate, an uneasy gap opens between how people conduct silent memory work and formal commemorations. There is little space for the ambiguities and fine-tuned mechanisms of grief, dignity and coexistence in hegemonic accounts of the past, which often seem driven by an opposite ambition to close the ambivalence and mask presence of absence. Jenny Edkins has written about the failures of commemoration in the face of trauma. In her seminal book, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (2003), trauma is defined as ‘events that resist meaning’ (Edkins 2003, 37). A response to that which refuses to be categorised is challenging; her suggestion is to ‘encircle the trauma’. This means to acknowledge that the traumatic event did indeed happen but that it may be impossible to fully understand the incommunicability of atrocity. To encircle the trauma also means to acknowledge the impossibility of reassurance in the face of human fragility (Edkins 2003, 3). Judith Butler develops similar thoughts and brings forth the idea that ‘loss must be marked and it cannot be represented; loss fractures representation itself and loss precipitates its own modes of expression’ (Butler 2004, 467–468). It is at this juncture of incommunicability that we turn to aesthetic representations, which may hold a greater possibility to speak to the presence of absence. Artists have for a long time struggled with trying to approach loss through marking the voids (Huyssens 2003). The challenge is to also understand these voids or silences as not empty and devoid of meaning but rather full of agency and communication. I now turn my gaze once again on the art installation Sarajevo Red Line, to search for what it is that makes this artwork such a powerful manifestation of presence of absence.

3 As noted in Renan’s seminal essay from 1882, ‘What is a Nation?’. See also: (Winter 2006; Zehfuss 2006; Connerton 2011).

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2.1.5

The Red Line of Sarajevo

The Sarajevo Red Line, part of the commemoration the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the siege, was created by the Bosnian theatre and film director Haris Pašovi´c, who searched for a way to converse with those who had been lost and make them the centre of the event.4 The 11,541 red plastic chairs, were arranged into 825 rows and stretched for 800 metres along the main street of the city centre. 643 of them were small in size, fitting for the children killed. The chairs all faced a stage where performances of dancing, singing, and poetry readings unfolded over the course of the day and evening. The installation completely dominated the centre of Sarajevo. Seeing the installation on video (for example on Youtube), one gets a sense of its dramatic and shocking impact. The roar of everyday life in these streets fell silent as the blood-red river of the chairs tore through the city and made the loss tangible. The anonymous numbers of the dead seem momentarily possible to grasp. Every empty chair represents a tear in an intersubjective web of relations, family, relatives, friends, co-workers, neighbours, acquaintances. And, of course, the missing strangers, fellow city-dwellers who no longer honk their horn when you run across the street to the bus; no longer check your food in the supermarket. Pašovi´c, who lived through the siege himself, took his ongoing experience of the presence of absence of those killed in the city as a point of departure for the installation. He writes, I often find myself trying to imagine how these individuals would have lived today were they not killed. Most of them were between 20 and 45 years old. Today they would have been workers, bakers, professors, engineers, football players. […] They would have had their families; some would have had grandchildren. What is it that they would have liked? What is it that they would have admired? They would have creatively contributed to this city and this country; they would have had celebrated their birthdays and New Year’s, they would have had their vacations at the Adriatic Sea, they would have gone skiing on Mt. Bjelašnica and Mt. Jahorina. (Eastwest Theatre, https://eastwest. ba/sarajevo-red-line/) 4 The project was organised in cooperation between the City of Sarajevo and East West Theatre Company, a non-profit cultural institution established in Sarajevo in 2005.

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In the video recordings of the installation, one can see how people came up to the chairs, some touched them, put their hands on them, walked along the rows. Some cried, others lay down flowers. The chairs formed a space that could contain the silent articulations of presence of absence. There were no prescriptions, and no need to talk and break the silence through polarising narratives: no heroes and no villains. Only bringing forth the voids and the silences created by violent destruction. Maybe for a moment at least, the loss was represented. The highly visual, emplaced and embodied installation did not come with a message to remember in order to heal, or to understand better. It was simply an acknowledgement of the enormity of the individual and collective loss. As such it was quiet. Thus, it was an artistic gesture that remains radically open in its silence. The installation did contain music and recitations, yet while the performances on stage turned to face the chairs, they were not for the living: Pašovi´c directed them for the dead. The artistic performances were for those who were no longer there; the living were transformed into bystanders. Pašovi´c explained that the chairs were arranged as ‘an audience’ (Eastwest theatre, https://eastwest.ba/sarajevo-red-line/), and as a result, art became a language that connected the dead and the living, and communicated the ever-present loss. It also ‘encircled the trauma’ and offered the survivors an opportunity to be silent, to let art speak beyond polarising narratives. A sense of temporal unsettling seemed to occur as the missing were offered songs and poetry. They were silent (the dead are always silent), but their presence of absence was felt. 2.1.6

Connecting Silence, Aesthetic Representation and Peace

The question of how the presence of absence after war and violence can be represented is deeply political. Roland Bleiker has noted that the work of representation is in fact political work, arguing that ‘the inevitable difference between the represented and its representation is the very location of politics’, and that to engage aesthetically is to reorder our basic understanding of what the political is (Bleiker 2009, 19). My investigation into the everyday silences of mundane memory work and the difficulties of its public representations suggests that aesthetic interventions can bring forth representations that intervene in the broader memoryscape by disturbing a mononarrative of the past and resisting standardised ways of remembering. Art can reconfigure the political imaginaries of both the

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past (the way we remember) and the future, the way we envision where we go from here with our painful memories. The art installation Sarajevo Red Line demonstrates how aesthetic representation can encompass the spatial and temporal disturbances that are part of the affective phenomenon of presence of absence. As I outlined at the beginning of this chapter, it is as though the installation, by bringing forth the presence of absence, disrupted the notion that politics is ‘rational and visible’ as Auchter noted. The installation managed to contain and bring forth silences from the margins, thereby challenging our understanding of the spaces in which memory politics play out. Further, as we have seen through the work of Edkins (and others), the definition of traumatic events is that they defy cognition and are hard to temporally control. They seep back into the present and as a consequence, what Mueller-Hirth and Rios Oyola (2018, 354) call ‘temporal conflicts’ may occur between ‘local, or lived, temporalities and institutional, or official temporalities’. Some of the situated practices of silence that have been discussed in this chapter certainly stand in ‘temporal conflicts’ with formal attempts to erase or simplify the past. This is the critical juncture at which art interventions can make visible the hidden scars, and create space for uncertainty and liminality that refuses amnesia, yet abstains from loud commemoration practices. Instead of masking the fluid and contested status of memory processes, art can acknowledge that which can never be healed. On this note I would like to open up for reflections regarding what this artwork does on a greater scale in the contexts of societies transitioning from war to peace, which is the underlying theme of this chapter. I propose that artistic engagement with presence of absence can give space to, and acknowledge, that peace is ambiguous. Commemoration activities must engage with, instead of closing off, the experiences of lived peace with its silent and shifting memory work. In this sense, the chapter is a contribution to literatures that look at everyday occurrences and phenomena in order to disclose and understand how private and intimate social relations are connected to the construction of inclusive memory politics and a durable peace. Bringing the strands of this chapter together, it becomes clear that a study of memory, silence and the presence of absence can deepen our understanding of how peace is produced in the ongoing frictions between everyday and formal, individual and collective, memory work.

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Conclusions

The chapter set out to reflect on how difficult loss and pain is remembered in the everyday in communities dealing with the legacy of mass atrocities and violence. I have suggested that the concept of presence of absence can help us access the often silent and invisible memory work that goes on in vernacular contexts. I have investigated silences as a productive mode for articulating presence of absence and have pointed to multilayered and contextual practices of silence as part of (re)construction of lifeworlds. Silence can be a sign of respect, a tool for navigating precarious social landscapes of ‘friends and foes’. Silence can be provocative but also empowering. The ambiguity silence allows may be employed to counteract or undermine positions of privilege, forming part of acts of resistance. Such silences can be narrative and used to mark private and public boundaries, organising what ‘comes up’ or not in conversation within families, or among friends and acquaintances. There are also what I term ‘embodied silences’, as bodies silently reconfigure the space around traces of the past. These silences are emplaced through the marks in the material registers of the city that function as silent reminders of the presence of absence. It is clear that multilayered silences, rather than uniform speech, constitute the minute and finely calibrated memory work of the everyday. There is clearly a gap between this informal memory work and the formal rituals and spaces of commemoration. The chapter briefly outlined how the memoryscape in Sarajevo is increasingly militarised and ethnonationalistic, disregarding of everyday experiences of the siege. I turned to art as a possible realm for remembering without breaking silences and without replacing ambiguity with mononarratives. In my analysis of the art installation Sarajevo Red Lines, I could see that the artwork derived its meaning from its silence. It managed to speak directly to the post-war experience of many Sarajevans today, whose present everyday is interfoliated by presence of absence. Their own strategies, of using multi-layered silence as a mode for navigation between past and present, were reflected in the installation. It seems that art can speak to the desire for liminality that comes from the impossibility of ‘closure’. Art can be a way of encircling the trauma, while allowing the ambiguities that silence can contain. Aesthetic representations of the presence of absence may thus hold power to contain the everyday memory work of silence. Silence, used as part of the ‘agentic

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work of the imagination’ (Motsemme 2004, 910), articulates presence of absence and allows it to unsettle temporal and spatial maps. In this state of uncertainty, inclusive peace may grow.

References Agamben, G. (1999). Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books. Auchter, J. (2014). The Politics of Haunting and Memory in International Relations. London and New York: Routledge. Ball, A. (2014). Communing with Darwish’s Ghosts: Absent Presence in Dialogue with the Palestinian Moving Image. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 7, 135–151. Bertelsen, L., & Murphie, A. (2010). An Ethics of Everyday Infinities and Powers: Félix Guattari on Affect and the Refrain. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The Affect Theory Reader. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bille, M., Hastrup, F., & Sørensen, T. F. (2010). An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss. London: Springer. Bleiker, R. (2009). Aesthtetics and World Politics. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Butler, J. (2002). Afterword: After Loss, What Then? In D. L. Eng & D. Kazanjian (Eds.), Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Berkeley: University of California Press. Butler, J. (2004). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Connerton, P. (2011). The Spirit of Mourning: History, Memory and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Das, V. (2007). Life and Words. Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. De Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press. Eastmond, M., & Mannergren Selimovic, J. (2012). Silence as Possibility in PostWar Everyday Life. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 6(3), 502– 524. Eastwest Theatre Company. https://eastwest.ba/sarajevo-red-line. Accessed 10 November 2018. Edkins, J. (2003). Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Felman, S., & Laub, D. (Eds.). (1992). Testimony: Crises in Witnessing in Psychoanalysis, Literature and History. New York: Routledge.

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George, N., & Kent, L. (2017). Sexual Violence and Hybrid Peacebuilding: How Does Silence “Speak”? Third World Thematics: a TWQ Journal, 2(4), 518–537. Gregg, M., & Seigworth, G. J. (2010). The Affect Theory Reader. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hirsch, M. (2012). The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. Huyssen, A. (2003). Present Pasts. Urban Palimpsests and Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jansen, S. (2013). People and Things in the Ethnography of Borders: Materialising the Division of Sarajevo. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 21(1), 23–37. Kappler, S. (2017). Sarajevo’s Ambivalent Memoryscape: Spatial Stories of Peace and Conflict. Memory Studies, 10(2), 130–143. Kent, L. (2016). Sounds of Silence: Everyday Strategies of Social Repair in Timor-Leste. Australian Feminist Law Journal, 42(1), 31–50. Mac Ginty, R. (2014). Everyday Peace: Bottom-up and Local Agency in Conflictaffected Societies. Security Dialogue, 45(6), 548–564. Mannergren Selimovic, J. (2020). Gendered Silences in Post-conflict Societies: A Typology. Journal of Peacebuilding, 8(1), 1–15. Motsemme, N. (2004). The Mute Always Speak: On Women’s Silences at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Current Sociology, 52(5), 909–932. Mueller-Hirth, N., & Rios Oyola, S. (Eds.). (2018). Time and Temporality in Transitional and Post-Conflict Societies. London and New York: Routledge. Porter, E. (2016). Gendered Narratives: Stories and Silences in Transitional Justice. Human Rights Review, 17 (1), 35–50. Ross, A. G. (2013). Mixed Emotions: Beyond Fear and Hatred in International Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sather-Wagstaff, J. (2017). Making Polysense of the World: Affect, Memory and Emotion. In D. P. Tolia-Kelly, E. Waterton, & S. Watson (Eds.), Heritage, Affect and Emotion: Politics, Practices and Infrastructures. London and New York: Routledge. Steele, B. (2012). Alternative Accountabilities in Global Politics: The Scars of Violence. London and New York: Routledge. Vintizky-Seroussi, V., & Teeger, C. (2010). Unpacking the Unspoken: Silence in Collective Memory and Forgetting. Social Forces, 88(3), 1103–1122. Winter, J. (2006). Notes on the Memory Boom: War Remembrance and the Uses of the Past. In D. Bell (Ed.), Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship Between the Past and the Present. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave and Macmillan.

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Zehfuss, M. (2006). Remembering to Forget/Forgetting to Remember. In D. Bell (Ed.), Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship Between the Past and the Present. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave and MacMillan.

CHAPTER 3

Mourning in Reluctant Sites of Memory: From Afrophobia to Cultural Productivity Olivette Otele

The term Afrophobia1 that refers to a series of negative behaviours, is the starting point to investigate how these attitudes influence the way knowledge and memory are produced and consumed at twenty-first-century sites of memory in Britain. These attitudes go from unease in the presence of people racialised as black to overt and covert acts of discrimination against these populations. The history of such behaviours can be traced back to encounters between people of African and European descent from the third century onwards.2 The transatlantic slave trade and slavery, for example, opened the door to the social alienation of African captives in the Americas. The subjugation at the heart of the social and cultural development of an institution known as the plantocracy in the eighteenth century, 1 Afrophobia is defined as negative attitudes towards people of African descent racialised as black. 2 For the purpose of this article, we will be looking at the experiences of Afro-Europeans in Britain but Afrophobia is present in other places.

O. Otele (B) Colonial History, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 O. Otele et al. (eds.), Post-Conflict Memorialization, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54887-2_3

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led to so-called scientific racism in the nineteenth century. Two centuries after the abolition of slavery in British and French colonies, the denigration of black and brown European citizens and those denied citizenship is particularly evident in the rise of white supremacy in the Global North and far-right movements in Europe. This chapter proposes to investigate how various forms of Afrophobia are apparent at a few sites that attract very specific kinds of tourist populations in Britain. However, understanding Afrophobia in these settings can only shed light on one side of the story. Analysing cultural production as a counter discourse to local and national narratives allows us to apprehend aspects of memory and history that may have a profound impact on questions such as trauma, recovery, identity, discrimination or social cohesion. Britain is proud of the large number of majestic country houses that were built centuries ago, even though some of these places were built with the dividends of the slave trade (Dresser and Hann 2013), a very lucrative business that was based on the commodification and exploitation of African captives, as well as on the perdurance of the institution of slavery for centuries. In this chapter, I will focus on Penrhyn Castle in North Wales. The Castle as a ‘realm’ of memory, is a place where the process of mourning, remembering and forgetting are intertwined. Drawing on the work of Pierre Nora (Nora 1997) about sites/realms of memory, this article analyses places of remembrance as ‘reluctant sites of memory’.3 That is to say, settings that reluctantly tell the stories of the legacies of colonial encounters. These reluctant sites use a series of apparatus to resist or to diffuse too strong a link between the trauma of slavery and national or local heritage (Violi 2012). Paradoxically they tend to benefit from flows of tourists eager to learn more about the local or national heritage. These settings are trauma sites of memory, but one might add in absentia, as well as being conscious or unconscious examples of dark tourism (Dann and Seaton 2002). A few questions are particularly useful guides in this synthesis of reluctant sites of memory. Firstly, to what extent have dominant metanarratives related to the history of

3 My work on memory led me to reassess Pierre Nora’s term and to attempt to apply it in various settings relating to the history of the slave trade and slavery. Out of that assessment was born a 19-month AHRC funded project entitled, People of African Descent in the 21st Century: Knowledge and Cultural Production in Reluctant Sites of Memory.

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transatlantic slavery obscured Afro-descendants’ presence in these reluctant sites of memory? How has the practice of telling one’s story, as well as certain commemorative practices, resulted in knowledge production and perhaps cultural heritage definitions that have in turn enriched local histories and national discourses? From Marie-Claire Lavabre (2007, 2012), Tzvetan Todorov (1998) to Pierre Nora and many others, we learnt that memory is a work of reduction or a compromise between several ‘entrepreneurs of memory’ (Lavabre 2012, 271). Entrepreneurs are chosen leaders who are supposed to represent the views of the majority group. The compromise mentioned is allegedly a necessary step towards social cohesion at national and regional levels. In the process, certain stories which are deemed irrelevant are left out. In the case of Wales, regional participation in transatlantic slavery mostly came to light during the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in 2007. Prior to the bicentenary, the BBC consulted historian Chris Evans for the documentary Wales and Slavery: The Untold Story (2007). Up to that point, very few studies had investigated the history of slavery from an economic point of view. There were, however, noticeable and renowned studies about multi-heritage Wales and its links with Empire. Charlotte Williams’ acclaimed volume, published in 2002, was about her experience as a mixed heritage child growing up in North Wales (Williams 2002). Her journey as the daughter of a Guyanese father and a Welsh-speaking mother led her to try and find out more about Wales’ links with the Americas and slavery. The second important volume was born out of the collaboration between Alan Llwyd and Butetown History and Arts Centre’s director Glenn Jordan (Llwyd and Jordan 2005) The volume remains to this day alongside Williams, Evans and O’Leary’s edited volume, A tolerant Nation?: Revisiting Ethnic Diversity in a Devolved Wales, the books that extensively tells the story of the black presence in Wales since the sixteenth century, as well as the links between Welsh and imperial subjects, notably populations that settled in what used to be known as Tiger Bay in Cardiff. The BBC documentary about Wales and slavery was aimed at detailing these links but subsequent research mostly delved into economic considerations and left aside the lived experiences of those who did not benefit from that trade directly. It looked at plantation owners and slave traders and thus discarded the stories of people of African descent. Welsh links with slavery became the story of those racialised as white. Stories such as that of Nathaniel Wells, the son of a Cardiff born planter and an enslaved

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woman, also became peripheral (Evans 2002). Written documents about people of dual heritage or stories about black people in Wales might have been difficult to recount. The availability of archival material about Welshborn planters and other Welsh residents who benefitted from the slave trade could have explained why they were the focus of most academic research. Equally interesting was the availability of records about those planters that allowed historians to trace their roots back to the Caribbean. These studies established strong links between Wales and slavery, but seemed to shy away from furthering those links by looking into the trajectories of those racialised as black, who arrived in Wales prior to World War II. In the process of writing the history of Wales, oral history seems to have been left aside. This, one could argue, is directly linked to the way historians have tackled the discipline for centuries. As French scholar Michel de Certeau put it, It seems that in the West over the last four centuries, ‘doing history’ is about writing history. […] an ambiguous practice, a commercial and utopic one […] that is supposed to be a scientific model. It is not interested in a hidden ‘truth’ that should be uncovered. It is a symbol between a new timed and delimitated space and a modus operandi that fabricates scenarios. (De Certeau 1975)

What de Certeau is referring to, is the need at the time of the bicentenary to fabricate a new space that proposed to present ‘uncovered’ new history. The problem was that the mechanisms of erasure that had taken place and rendered that history invisible, were themselves forgotten during the uncovering. It was also as much about Wales and slavery as it was about Wales and England’s common history. Prior stories about minority ethnic groups and people of African descent in particular, had held little attention in the region, but the new ‘space’ that was created, served as the apparatus needed to set in motion a new ‘untold’ history. In turn that history was to be widely shared and transmitted. Knowledge produced was to be integrated into the national practices of memorialisation. After all, this was about the way Britain abolished the slave trade and set about abolishing slavery in the rest of the world. The story was one of the British values of decency and humanitarianism. Wales, it seemed, had a chapter in that book. The books and radio and television programmes that focused on the economic links, as well as on abolition were to become the new sites

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of memory: unavoidable references to understand the history of Wales and slavery. On the outskirts of this crafted narrative about the 2007 commemoration, stood a different kind of history. It encompassed the stories of people of African descent and the legacies of Empire inscribed on their individual and family timeline. Williams and many others had stories to tell and they were not necessarily drawn from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century testimonies of enslavement. They were drawn from long family histories where oral history played a crucial role. These stories highlighted the fact that telling and teaching an inclusive history of Wales had a place in counteracting a narrative solely based on English oppression and on rural Welsh-speaking Wales that had been favoured by Welsh nationalists in the last part of the twentieth century (Johnes 2015). The 2007 commemoration emphasised the role played by Welsh abolitionists such as William Williams Pantycelyn, Iolo Morganwg, and many others. The absence of research about the lived experiences of eighteenthand nineteenth-century black Welsh people further reinforced the disconnect between past and present. These absences perhaps unintentionally, contributed to the belief that multicultural Wales was born after the World Wars (Williams 2012) and specifically with the arrival of African American soldiers who fought during the Second World War. In this context, the bicentennial commemoration in Cardiff was a defining moment for Welsh history at many levels. Beyond the recognition of the region’s involvement in slavery, the commemoration also defined whose history and which stories were to be considered. This was primarily about planters and slave traders, who contributed to the Welsh economy. This was not about the workforce that was mainly located in the West Indies at the time. The commemoration was about abolitionists who drove the fight to end that trade and those practices. Referring to commemorations in general, Geoffrey Cubitt has noted that, ‘heroic as the many possibly appear in themselves, founding moments are significant, by definition, mainly through what they are believed to have produced; they can only truly be celebrated by evoking and defining the communities they have given rise to’ (Cubitt 2007, 221). The question that remained when I attended the 2007 commemoration in Cardiff led by First Minister Rhodri Morgan was, whose communities were being celebrated? Morgan applauded abolitionists and mentioned the ordinary Welsh people who benefitted from the products and the investments made by wealthy plantation owners in Wales. He hardly mentioned the lives of those who worked and died in plantations in

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the Americas (BBC News 2007). He did, however, broach the subject of enslavement when he stated that modern slavery should not be forgotten and should be the target of Wales’ efforts. The lives, contribution, and work of the individuals and communities of African descent in Wales who were part of the commemoration were left aside. As Nora has argued, commemorations are sites of memory and as such they play a crucial role in regional identity. Coming together and sharing a carefully formulated narrative was supposed to foster a sense of belonging. In this instance, it also providing a space to promote Welshness as much as to state one’s sense of belonging to Britain. The commemoration was the first of its kind in Wales and indeed in Britain but perhaps too much was expected from that event. Cubitt argued that beneath the idealised view that commemorations offer a society whose past is stably ordered and stably connected to its present, a more complex play of exclusions and imposition can usually be detected (Cubitt 2007). Social, racial, and other forms of cohesion in Wales could not be achieved through one or even a series of commemorations. Time was needed for all communities across Wales to absorb the wealth of information about the involvement of the region in the slave trade, slavery and abolition. Stories about communities people of African descent and cross-cultural collaboration existed even if they stayed within the racial and geographical boundaries of places such as Tiger Bay. Notably renowned, Butetown History and Arts Centre was at the heart of vibrant and valued activities that had engaged for decades with a community of researchers from Cardiff Docklands and beyond. Residents co-founded the Centre in 1990, and Butetown was one of the most important repositories for minority ethnic stories. Their archival material ranged from family letters, sailors discharges, passports and photographs, to audiovisual material such as interviews and documentaries about Docklands residents and families of multiple heritages. The particularly strong emphasis put on the preservation of residents’ stories, had an equally strong academic support who also played a key role in promoting these experiences in various settings. The director and the chair, Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon, were both respected and internationally known academics. Unfortunately, funding proved to be an issue over the years. The Centre relied on public funds to pay for the premises and other running costs. Volunteers, the director, chair and other members of the community worked tirelessly to keep the doors open. The Centre risked closure in 2016, and funding and the preservation of archives including digitisation was much

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needed. The Centre eventually closed in 2017 and archival material was deposited at the Heritage and Culture Exchange in Cardiff. Notwithstanding the Centre’s difficulties, its ethos and journey showed that telling one’s story shed light on extraordinary stories and the centre provided a space for communities to mourn, reminisce and bond. Over the years, Butetown had curated several exhibitions and organised other cultural activities that ranged from concerts, poetry nights and school workshops on painting, to writing and other creative activities. In that sense, it was not different from many cultural centres in the country. However, its community-led ownership and location on the edge of Cardiff Bay, near both young professionals and some of the most deprived areas of Butetown, had provided it with opportunities to connect with people whose families have lived close by for decades, and in some cases centuries, as well as with newly arrived migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. It also attracted a number of socially conscious white Welsh middle-class families. The Centre had also ensured that the wealth and diversity of identities that indeed characterised Tiger Bay, one of the oldest multicultural communities in Britain, made space for people from various religious denominations. Butetown History and Arts Centre was for several decades a site of memory that constantly reinvented its connection with Welsh, British and global history. It remained community-led until the end and its financial struggle brought to the surface the question of prioritisation of stories and histories. One could rightly argue that funding is an issue for most heritage sites in the country. One could also argue that the local histories of a minority group could not be prioritised as constructing a regional narrative is often about the stories of majority group, as we have noted with the work of compromise and reduction. Welsh regional narratives have been produced without integrating minority history and the history of people of African descent. Defining what constituted a minority history in that context was related to the question of race. It was accepted that being born in Wales did make a person Welsh. Yet surveys also showed that the question of race was not put forward (YouGov 2016). Welshness was a unifying attribute that erased the possibilities of multiple identities. Bringing about a possible minority story was not deemed relevant to Welshness. Yet, as David L. Adamson remarked, Ethnicity is based on the recognition by elements of a social group or collectivity that there exist certain features or characteristics shared by

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all members of that group. The characteristics are employed as criteria for identifying group membership and constructing a group identity. The criteria most commonly adopted include language, culture, religion, common history and residential pattern. Whilst racial characteristics may not feature visibly in the construction of an ethnic identity there is general assumption that members of an ethnic group have a common ancestry and cultural inheritance. (Adamson 1991, 5)

Welsh people are Welsh by language, ancestry and place of birth, but a person of African descent could not be completely perceived as Welsh (even if their family had been in Wales for several generations), because belonging to and resembling the majority group that considered itself Welsh was an implicit criterion. The absent and yet dominant question of race was as much an important component as other considerations (Otele 2008). Wales was caught up between the reality of a culturally diverse society and the discourse of Welshness that relied on specific parameters where race had no place. Rural Wales, which was not always culturally diverse was an important criterion in some instances in defining Welshness (Johnes 2015). Telling one’s story and having a platform for these stories was not a strong enough argument for some Welsh historians to incorporate the history of black Welsh people into mainstream Welsh history. One could argue that inclusion at all costs could lead to forms of erasure. Minority stories exist outside grand narratives; they had been shared for generations by these specific groups. Inclusion in the broader history could mean a work of reduction that could be detrimental, as it meant the nuances that characterised these communities’ lived experience ran the risk of being removed. For example, the history of Afro-Caribbean carnivals in Wales did not need the acquiescence of the historians of the Welsh working class in order to continue to exist and to be celebrated by people of AfroCaribbean communities. Both these histories have seemingly little to do with each other and yet they continued to be transmitted and are accepted (or not) by the communities that produced them. They are all still part of Welsh history. These stories are also transmitted in ways that are important to the preservation of these stories. One can learn about carnivals for instance by reading books about them but holding a carnival provides the audience and participants with the means to live and transmit these stories. Teaching these local stories in school is also an interesting route to pass on to what is allegedly a shared history of Wales. As Martin Johnes

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noted, ‘The extent to which school history lessons actually foster national identity is not a question for which definitive empirical evidence exists, but studies in other parts of Britain do indicate it has an influence. It is thus not unreasonable to suggest that schools must have had some impact on Welsh national identity’ (Johnes 2015). Johnes also explained that Welsh history was not always a given as generations of educators had to work hard to see Welsh history taught in schools. Competing narratives about the place of Welsh history in the British curriculum before and after devolution, as well as competing discourses about what part of Welsh history should be taught, had rendered the place of black Welsh history difficult to assess. One of the issues was the category in which the history of people of African descent in Wales was put. It was black history, and as such did not necessarily need to be placed within the confines of Welsh history, one could argue. Black history itself supports a political stance that does not always consider regional aspirations of belonging (Otele 2016). Black Welsh history intersected with regional Welsh history and was not, however, recognised by the white Welsh majority as ‘one of theirs’. Multiple identities and a need to belong to the place that shaped these local histories did add layers to the debate. Beside these considerations, a dominant history of Wales rose to prominence in the nineteenth century. It shaped the historiography and blurred the already troubled waters of the debate about culturally diverse Wales. Histories competed and the story of the Pennant family presented a relevant example that showed how embellishing a site that showcased a family story participated in processed erasure or ‘historical amnesia’. Presented as an ‘improver’, Lord Penrhyn, or Richard Pennant’s, rise to politics is presented as an extraordinary achievement in Penrhyn Castle (The National Trust 2009). The rest of the family is depicted in similar fashion. It is, however, the part related to Welsh slate and the quarry that is the most controversial. One is told how the family’s management of the quarry was equitable, and Richard Pennant had schools built and provided employment for the local community. That narrative was challenged by the work of Judy Ling Wong (1999). The narrative was, however, nuanced in school textbooks. The GCSE and WJEC history books did cover the lockdown (1900–1903) between quarrymen and Lord Penrhyn over wages and working conditions (WJEC /Heinemann 2003/2013). Yet, they did not look at the history of slavery and Wales’

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involvement in the slave trade.4 Ling Wong explained how that memory was still vivid in Wales. Invited to the opening of the Castle by the National Trust in 1999, the last quarrymen attended the opening and visibly expressed their anger at the glorifying narrative the Castle was presenting, ‘although it was the exploitation of enslaved Africans in Jamaica which provided the profits for the family to establish a quarrying empire that in turn exploited the men and women of North Wales, their histories were neither celebrated nor connected’ (Bressey 2009, 393). Fourteen years after the 2007 commemoration, re-evaluating the way Welshness is understood in post-colonial settings could provide us with information about identity, racial and social cohesion in Wales. More pointedly, understanding how the history of slavery has been narrated in certain settings could help us grasp the complexity inherent in the notion of collective memory when it comes to minority ethnic groups, and in this case, to people of African descent. Specifically looking at Penrhyn Castle could show us how a dominant discourse can shape sites of remembrance and how that does or does not contribute to re-shaping regional identity. The conclusions drawn from the analysis of Penrhyn Castle cannot define Wales’ policy or politics or identity and remembrance.5 They are however useful tools to examine questions such as the representation of the past and its impact on consumers of heritage sites and what could be termed dark tourism. This example also shows how a heritage site can become a trauma site depending on the background of the visitor. As Evans has noted, the Pennant family’s involvement in the slave trade was relatively limited due to the proximity to two major ports, namely Bristol and Liverpool. Wales fitted out a small number of vessels but invested directly in the plantations in the West Indies (Evans 2010). The Pennant family was, however, a key player in the trade in Wales. The family’s trajectory is particularly relevant to understanding ‘reluctant 4 They focus instead on the Civil Rights movements in the 1960s in the United States. 5 In 2020, following the killing of African American George Floyd in the United States

and demonstrations organised by the Black Lives Matter movement across Britain, local groups sent letters of complaints to the Welsh Government about the lack of inclusion of Black history into the Welsh school curriculum. First Minister of Wales Mark Drakeford, responded by setting up a Task and Finish Group whose aim was to undertake an audit about Welsh memorials related to slavery. A report was published in November 2020 theslave-trade-and-the-british-empire-an-audit-of-commemoration-in-wales.pdf (http://www. gov.wales). Another group was set up to work on ways to integrate Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic histories into the curriculum.

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sites’ of memory. The first Pennant (Gifford) emigrated to Jamaica in 1658, and established himself as a planter. His son Edward continued investing in the slave trade and became Chief Justice in Jamaica. Edward’s sons eventually moved to London and delegated the family business to their employees while becoming absentee plantation owners. One of the Pennants, Samuel, became an alderman and sheriff before becoming a Lord Mayor in 1749 and passing away the same year. The other sons acquired properties in Britain. The family-owned Penrhyn Castle as a result of marriage and inheritance. Although accurate, the information provided by the National Trust did not try to paint any picture of what life was like in the West Indies for the Pennants or the enslaved population (The National Trust 2009). This distance creates a sense of dislocation between the alleged neutrality and an account of a history that was traumatic for Afro-Caribbean communities. The Pennants were not noticeably different from other traders and merchants. In fact, the information about their plantation management was in line with the care they took to preserve their assets. From Sasha Turner’s work, we learn that, ‘Lord Penrhyn dismissed his overseer after learning how he brutally flogged a group of women, some of whom were pregnant. The extreme cruelty towards women, Lord Penrhyn explained, would “discourage [rather] than encourage breeding women”’ (Turner 2011, 51). While women were not fully immune from punishment, they received some protection from their owners who advocated that overseers use greater discretion when reprimanding prospective mothers (The National Trust 2009). In 2016, my family and I visited Penrhyn Castle located near the city of Bangor in North Wales. The visit began with a treasure hunt for the youngest child. Amicable and professional, the castle employees sent us off to discover what the intriguing place had to offer. Silently proceeding through various rooms, we quickly noticed the reverence and admiration from the group that preceded us. The grandeur of the place was not lost on us either, despite a sense of unease. Prior knowledge about Penrhyn’s connections with the slave trade could lead the visitor to expect if not a homage paid in a plaque, at least a mention of those who unwillingly contributed to the castle’s wealth through their work as captives in the West Indies centuries before. No black visitors were to be found in the place. Friendly, but unsubtle gazes, followed at times by a series of questions from a few visitors about which island I was from led me to believe that my children and I were those missing black visitors. We were to perform blackness in this suddenly ambiguous setting where history,

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heritage, and legacies of colonisation were colliding. Similar interactions continued at various stages during the visit. They seemed to result in the same way: a friendly bond and a relief from the enquiring visitors. I was not from an island and one of my children had a Welsh accent, while the other had English received pronunciation. We had shown our credentials, it appeared. We were an Afro-Euro-Welsh family. This allowed the conversation to turn to unsolicited discussions about identity in a few instances. We were also attributing new meanings to the place through a common kinesthetics experience. Drawing on Aleksandr R. Luria’s approach to body memory, we were both as a family as visitors, re-encoding pain and sensations, adhering to or creating new signifiers and ‘enduring’ pain. ‘Enduring’ opens the door to a world of inner dialogues and refers to what is, a term that has a double sense: enduring something means undergoing it in such a way that one is somehow able to bear what one is suffering (German aushalten, ertragen), while at the same time, this experience of withstanding what one is enduring is lasting rather than momentary (German andauern, fortdauern), demanding persistence and perseverance (German anhalten, ausdauern). (Behenke 2012, 83)

While that was happening, one could not help but be struck by the physicality of the various families’ narratives presented in these rooms. These were stories about people long gone. More specifically, it was a story about a family’s rise to prominence through colonisation: the Pennants. The enslaved population had paid a heavy price for these beautiful objects to exist in the castle. Death impregnated the place and yet no mention was made to the black dead bodies. From the painting located in the Ebony Room presenting the Virgin and the Child (1450) bought by Edward, Lord Penrhyn in 1850, to the portrait of Sir Prescott Garnett Hewett, one of Queen Victoria’s surgeons, located in the India Room, the site was a celebration of Empire and its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century goods from across the globe. Queen Victoria had paid the Pennants a visit in 1859, and she had the opportunity to look at the exotic plants in the castle’s impressive garden (The National Trust 2009). Most visitors who encountered these memories and memorabilia, may not have been actively seeking engagement, yet were nonetheless drawn into the process of re-shaping the collective memory of the place. They were contributing to the collective and cultural experiences that

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constantly engage with aspects of our identity, individual memory and even national history. As Mieke Bal puts it, ‘Cultural memory recognises that cultures reproduce and reform themselves and that, in this process, understandings of the past are transformed’ (Bal et al. 1999, 57). Other rooms told the story of a family that took pride in acquiring the finest pieces of arts: from the stain glass in the Medieval Hall to the gilded bronze candelabra (possibly from Venice) located in the drawing room. The narrative told was polished, victorious and was illustrated by aesthetically pleasing objects. One was to celebrate Welsh heritage and its links with the outer world. Black bodies in absentia and death as a whole, were erased in a discourse where the visitor was invited to have a glimpse at the home of a wealthy family. One could not mourn at this site, since death had not occurred. The very essence of these visits was to keep that heritage alive and funded through visitors’ fees. Employees had encouraged many families before ours to become National Trust members and thus have the opportunity to enjoy other British heritage sites. Penrhyn Castle is part of the National Trust, a charity set up more than 120 years ago, that is aimed at preserving some of Britain’s cultural heritage sites. The decision to preserve these sites has economic, social and cultural implications. Economically speaking, the National Trust owns more than 500 historic sites that can be accessed through membership or visitors paying fees. Social and culturally speaking, they are places where history is performed and presented to the visitor as an authentic recreation of past lives. These sites were, to use Jan Assmann’s words, the physical and ‘outer dimension of human memory’ (2011, 120–121). In other words, they are useful tools that allow society to pass their history, heritage, and even values to the next generations. The abundant objects in Penrhyn Castle might have seemed superfluous at times as they rendered certain rooms crammed, but in fact they were cultural artefacts that contributed to transmitting collective memory. As Stavros Kamma noted in relation to cultural artefacts and their aim, they ‘include the potentials of a society to preserve its collective memory from one generation to another with the use of cultural artefacts, and its capability to reconstruct a cultural identity from this collective memory’ (Kamma 2009). While the rooms in the castle evaded links between Penrhyn’s wealth and the lives and work of people of African descent, that history has been told and recognised by academics. One may criticise the

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National Trust6 for a tunnel vision of a traumatic aspect of British history, but some acknowledgement of the links between Penrhyn and slavery is provided through the National Trust booklet guide to Penrhyn Castle. One page is dedicated to sugar and slavery, while another one is about the Pennants’ ties to that industry and how they became absentee plantation owners after one generation. The text is aimed at being factual but the fine line between glorification and neutrality seemed blurred when it stated, ‘The Pennants were pioneers in developing what was to become a vastly profitable industry. […] Following the final expulsion of the Spanish from Jamaica in 1660, English settlers such as the Pennants were free to concentrate on satisfying the growing European preference for sugar as a sweetener’ (The National Trust 2009). A few lines mention enslaved people. ‘Manufactured goods were exported from Britain to West Africa with which to buy slaves. The slaves were transported from there on the dreaded “middle passage” to the West Indies’ (The National Trust 2009). Plantation life, subjugation of black bodies, fear and the dehumanisation involved, were not mentioned, even though these were the places that produced those sought-after goods. The ‘dreaded’ passage appeared to have been a necessary evil to satisfy the European appetite for exotic products. The question that springs to mind is how one could counter a dominant narrative that denies people racialised as black any ownership of what a common history should be. There is no simplistic answer. The very act of writing one’s testimony can be considered an act of resistance against a hegemonic discourse, as well as a tool for knowledge production (Agulhon et al. 1987). This chapter can be placed in such categories. Drawing on the work of Della Pollock (2006) on performance ethnography, I am arguing that a black presence does trouble the essentialist narrative presented in Penrhyn Castle. As Pollock notes, This is an effort in marking: in walking through – from place to place – possibilities for new work in performance ethnography. Accordingly, I begin by rehearsing some of what performance has done for ethnography. Very briefly: 1. It has shifted the object of ethnography to performance, redefining the cultural field that the ethnographer writes as broadly 6 While this volume is going through its final phase of editing, a debate about the National Trust’s decision to examine the links between its properties and colonial history has provoked outrage in various quarters. Colonialism and historic slavery report | National Trust and Minister summons heritage charities to meeting over empire row (http://www. civilsociety.co.uk).

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composed of radically contingent […]. 2. It has shifted the relationship of the researcher and the ostensibly “researched” (the field and field subjects), reconfiguring longstanding subject-object relations as coperformative; beyond anything like documentary interview: as the reciprocal intervention of each on the other, transforming each in turn. 3. It has consequently moved the writing in the “writing of culture” into a performance frame such that (a) performance ethnography manifests given power relations in the poeisis of their undoing, and (b) it not only allows for but requires variously sensuous retellings and ongoing re-creations, in word and body. (Pollock 2006, 325 [emphasis in the original ])

The absence of any mention or representation of that past was quite significant and black Welsh communities in many ways were denied access to a history that would have helped to connect the past and present. In that sense, the Castle was a reluctant site of memory. The narrative presented reinforced the idea of a sanitised history that was only accessible through prior knowledge. Yet, anecdotal as they may seem, and despite the absence of black visitors, these visits could provide a space to mourn a traumatic past and to commemorate the history of transatlantic slavery. Black performative presence or black visitors could become an arsenal that disrupts cultural amnesia in the Welsh memorial landscape. Black visitors may well have helped reshape regional certainties about cultural diversity in Wales.7 As Kamma contended, ‘places like national cultural monuments and sites which tend to have a vast amount of multicultural visitors every year are these which tend to necessitate more a meaningful collective understanding of the past culture within a contemporary setting’ (Kamma 2009). Further research would need to be conducted about the volume of visitors from minority ethnic groups and in particular people of African descent (including those of mixed heritage), in order to see if their lower numbers (an assumption based on my personal experience) did play a role in the lack of an inclusive narrative. One cannot help but wonder how Wales could have evaded the history of slavery in one of the most renowned heritage sites. The reasons are numerous, yet a few seem to be directly related to the question of memory, regional identity and the notion of grand narratives and competing discourses. For a very long time

7 Many Welsh people see the region as first and foremost white and working class Otele (2008).

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Welsh history was linked to the history of the Labour party and links with the history of Plaid Cymru or the history of industrialisation and the role of mines in the British economy (Adamson 1991; Morgan 1981). These political, social and economic histories have provided the region with opportunities to incorporate the history of Empire and colonisation within their narratives. One may however wonder why people of African descent would wish to visit places where their history was absent especially when they had at times very successfully recreated places of remembrance that suited their needs. Elements of answers could be found in Hirsch and Miller’s volume Rites of Return (2011). The scholars argued that the need at times, to return to places of trauma (even in absentia) is related to the attempt to retrieve or find a sense of belonging. It is about ‘an articulation of the complex interaction between the affects of belonging and the politics of entitlement in a diasporic world, rethinking and retheorizing the complex interaction between loss and reclamation, mourning and repair, departure and return’ (Hirsch and Miller 2011, 5). In the case of Penrhyn Castle, it is about a different kind of return. It is about claiming a space that could be perceived as the locus for symbolic trauma: the home of generations of plantation owners. It is about those who did not personally experience the trauma of the slave trade and slavery, but whose destinies were touched by postcolonial legacies. Postmemory is, as Marianne Hirsch puts it, a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor recreated. (Hirsch 1996, 659)

It is also one might add, the erasure of economic legacies of racial capitalism. Understood as a place of trauma, yet also a place of mourning, Penrhyn Castle becomes a site of leisure and reinvention for generations of visitors. Some might argue that it could even be bordering the slippery slope of dark tourism. This chapter argues that the connection between past and present in that case would transform the walking practices of visitors. Rather than alluding to the ‘exotic garden’ in a leaflet, the grounds could provide an opportunity to learn about the history of Empire and the fascination the Victorians had with collecting all kind of species. In Penrhyn’s case,

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the very act of erasing the other’s collective memory by not representing common history and by finding a way to present a dominant narrative conforms to/mirrors the locus for ideological battles currently in Britain. As Ilan Gur-Ze’ev put it, ‘The destruction of the collective memory of the Other, through the construction of one’s own is a central element in the formation of national identities. Violence, direct as well as symbolic, plays thereby a crucial part as collective memories are produced, reproduced, disseminated and consumed’ (2003, 51 [emphasis in the original ]). This chapter’s aim was to argue that many reluctant sites of memory in Britain do not provide space for people of African descent to mourn the era of transatlantic slavery. One of the questions that begged to be answered was whether country houses in Britain as a whole, and Penrhyn Castle in particular, should be about multicultural history and identity. After all, black Welsh communities have always found places to remember the past and celebrate African and Afro-Caribbean heritage. The analysis was as much about shared space as it was about historical amnesia. Glorifying the past without mentioning the human cost can leave people of mixed heritage and African descent out of the supposedly all-inclusive multicultural project that is still dear to Britain. Secondly, the analysis highlights how places of heritage in Wales suffer from financial constraints. These are not places which date back to the eighteenth century and they certainly do not have the financial support of the English Heritage and the National Trust. These are sites such as Butetown History and Art Centre, the Mary Seacole statue unveiled (only) in 2016 in London, and Betty Campbell’s statue, which will be located in the centre of Cardiff. In 2018, Colonial Countryside: Youth-led History, a project funded by the Lottery Fund and Arts Council England, was set up. It was aimed at engaging with primary school pupils in order to look into English country houses’ colonial pasts. The project gathered writers and historians. The transformative benefits of such projects on Black Welsh and on questions of identity and inclusion would be interesting to measure in the future. It seems, however, that being able to tell one’s story and engaging with contested histories remain important ways to counteract colonial narratives of oblivion that have for centuries invariably lead to forms of exclusion. These forms of engagements may imply going back to these trauma sites and embracing the painful, and yet potentially liberating, power of body memory that has at times found ways to bring about healing through movement (Konopatsch and Payne 2012).

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References Adamson, L. D. (1991). Class, Ideology and the Nation: A Theory of Welsh Nationalism. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Agulhon, M., Chaunu, P., Duby, G., Girardet, R., Le Goff, J., Perrot, M., Rémond, R., & compiled by Nora, P. (1987). Essais d’Ego-histoire. Paris: Gallimard. Assmann, J. (2011). Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bal, M., Crewe, J., & Spitzer, L. (Eds.). (1999). Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Hanover: University Press of New England. BBC News. (2007, March 25). Welsh Links to Slavery Abolition. Accessed Oct 2017. Via: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/north_east/6491737.stm. Behenke, A. E. (2012). Enduring: A Phenomenological Investigation. In S. C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa, & C. Müller (Eds.), Body Memory, Metaphor and Movement (pp. 83–104). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Bressey, C. (2009). Cultural Archaeology and Historical Geographies of the Black Presence in Rural England. Journal of Rural Studies, 25(4), 386–395. Colonial Countryside: Youth-Led History. (2017). Accessed Jan 2019, https:// colonialcountryside.wordpress.com/. Cubitt, G. (2007). History and Memory. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Dann, G. M. S., & Seaton, A. V. (2002). Slavery, Contested Heritage and Thanatourism. London: Routledge. De Certeau, M. (1975). L’Ecriture de l’Histoire. Paris: Gallimard. Dresser, M., & Hann, A. (Eds.). (2013). Slavery and the British Country House. Swindon: English Heritage. Evans, C. (2007). BBC, Wales and Slavery: The Untold Story. Last accessed Oct 2020. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b007hzkt/wales-and-slaverythe-untold-story. Evans, C. (2010). Slave Wales: The Welsh and Atlantic Slavery, 1660–1850. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Evans, J. (2002). Nathaniel Wells of Monmouthshire and St. Kitts: From Slave to Sheriff. Black and Asian Studies Association Newsletter 33. Evans, R. P. (2003). A GCSE History for WJEC Specification: In-Depth and Outline Studies of Aspects of Welsh/English and World History (WJEC GCSE History COMET). New Hampshire, NH: Heinemann. Gur-Ze’ev, I. (2003). Destroying the Other’s Collective Memory. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Hirsch, M. (1996). Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile. Poetics Today, 17 (4), 659– 686. Hirsch, M., & Miller, K. N. (2011). Rites of Returns. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

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History Specimen Assessment Material. (2013). Accessed Sept 2017. Via: http:// www.wjec.co.uk/uploads/publications/15788.pdf. Johnes, M. (2015). History and the Making and Remaking of Wales. Journal of Historical Association, 100(343), 667–684. Kamma, S. (2009). A Mobile Technology Framework for the Dissemination of Cultural Memory. Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology (TOJET), 8(3), 6–13. Konopatsch, I., & Payne, H. (2012). The Emergence of Body Memory in Authentic Movement. In C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa, & S. C. Müller (Eds.), Body Memory, Metaphor and Movement (pp. 341–352). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Lavabre, M.-C. (2007). ‘Paradigmes de la Mémoire’. Transcontinentales: Société Idéologie, Système Mondial, 9, 139–147. Lavabre, M.-C. (2012). Circulation, Internationalization, Globalization of the Question of Memory. Journal of Historical Sociology, 25(2), 261–274. Llwyd, A., & Jordan, G. (2005). Cymru Ddu / Black Wales: A History: A History of Black Welsh People. Wrexham: Hughes and Son. Morgan, O. K. (1981). Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880–1980. Clarendon and Cardiff: Oxford and University of Wales Press. Nora, P. (1997). Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (Vol. 1, 2, 3). New York, NY: Colombia University Press. Otele, O. (2008). Multiculturalisme et Régionalisme: Les Apories d’une Identité Britannique au Pays de Galles. In T. Whitton (Ed.), Le New Labour et l’Identité Britannique. Clermont-Ferrand: Observatoire De La Société Britannique. Otele, O. (2016, November 2016). Black History: Challenges and Opportunities. Royal Historical Society Newsletter. Accessed Nov 2016. Via: http://roy alhistsoc.org/publications/newsletter/. Pollock, D. (2006). Marking New Directions in Performance Ethnography. Text and Performance Quarterly, 26(4), 325–329. The National Trust. (n.d.) Accessed Oct 2017. Via: https://www.nationaltrust. org.uk/features/about-the-national-trust. The National Trust. (2009). Penrhyn Castle. Bangor, UK: The National Trust. Turner, S. (2011). Home-grown Slaves: Women, Reproduction, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Jamaica 1788–1807. Journal of Women’s History, 23(3), 39–62. Todorov, Tzvetan. (1998). Les abus de la mémoire. Paris: Arléa. Violi, P. (2012). Trauma Site Museums and Politics of Memory: Tuol Sleng, Villa Grimaldi and the Bologna Ustica Museum. Theory, Culture and Society, 29(1), 36–75.

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YouGov. (2016). What Makes a Person Welsh Survey. Accessed Jan 2017. Via: https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/ ovugfu4tor/What%20makes%20a%20person%20Welsh_W.pdf. Williams, C. (2002). Sugar and Slate. Aberystwyth: Planet. Williams, C., Evans, N., & O’Leary, P. (2015). A Tolerant Nation? Revisiting Ethnic Diversity in a Devolved Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Williams, D. (2012). Black Skin, Blue Book: African Americans and Wales, 1845– 1945. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Wong, J. L. (1999). Multi-Cultural Interpretation and Access to Heritage. Paper produced for Whose Heritage Conference, Manchester. Ethnic Environmental Participation (Vol. 3, pp. 1–9).

CHAPTER 4

Dust on Dust: Performing Selk’nam Visions, Tracing Absent Bodies Andrea Zittlau

In the halls of ethnographic museums, dust creates layers of memory on the objects that collectors obtained during the nineteenth and early twentieth century in colonial settings. Narratives of the primitive and the exotic other have long been covered by, more or less, critical investigations of the objects’ journeys to the museum and attempts to establish links to contemporary lives and communities. In current exhibitions, an arrangement of voices surrounds the objects orchestrating the scientific descriptions of communities. This discourse does not allow for spaces devoted to silence and mourning, narratives of trauma and dispossession, markers of absence, voids, and abysses. And yet every arrangement of objects is haunted by everything that has been lost in past discourses of conquest. The performance scholar Diana Taylor uses Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology that is focused on invisible presence to argue that performance creates visibility where there is none. This essay uses the case

A. Zittlau (B) University of Rostock, Rostock, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 O. Otele et al. (eds.), Post-Conflict Memorialization, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54887-2_4

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of the Selk’nam, the indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego who were systematically executed in the early twentieth century to illustrate the tension between museum exhibition and performance to create historical consciousness. Material remains of their nineteenth-century quotidian practices are spread around the world in museums and collections. In a recent performance project, the group Regreso de los Espiritus marks the absent bodies of the Selk’nam and draws attention to the dark history of Chile and the Selk’nam genocide. Rather than arguing with the museum space and discourse, the group takes the streets as if marking a path to the future.

4.1

The Shoes

The American Museum of Natural History houses a traditional collection of objects from the flora and fauna worldwide as well as artefacts made by those who caught the interest of anthropologists during the nineteenth century. Its halls—right across from Central Park in Manhattan, New York City—mimic a journey through space and time. Material is ordered by its geographic origin. Moving through areas, continents, and space creates shifts of thoughts but not of a narrative that expresses a nostalgic longing for the past. Johannes Fabian’s denial of coevalness is vividly at work within the museum halls (1983, 31). The past is romanticized but not historized. The exhibited communities (all non-European) are presented as frozen and unchanging entities that suggest an exotic present as well as creating the longing for a past that never existed—an imperialist nostalgia (Rosaldo 1989). The historic costumes and other artefacts of the exhibited communities derive mainly from collections of the nineteenth century. They are someone else’s memory and someone else’s history woven into the narrative of colonial conquest and anthropology. As such, the exhibits suggest not only a point in history (the time of the collection) but mark the absence of those who are on display. The academy has perceived museums as institutions of power that determine the norm, as manifestations of science’s uncertain order, as evidence to the world made rational and comprehensible. As Benedict Anderson, Tony Bennett, and others have argued, the museum developed as a division of an apparatus of institutional control producing an economy of cultural power in the nineteenth century (Anderson 1983, 178–185; Bennett 1995, 20–23). It created a much-needed collective

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and national consciousness and made an expanding world easily accessible. In many ways, ethnographic and natural history exhibitions replaced travel experiences by simulating them, thus enforcing exotic encounters as educational enterprises. The museum presented collected communities as childlike, primitive, backward, and uncivilized (compared to European ideas of advancement) and thus confirmed the superiority of the collecting communities. As an object-driven institution, the ethnographic museum stores, presents, and preserves material culture. In current post-, neo- and decolonial scenarios, the visually and materially exotic is mass produced and readily available for example as souvenirs and ethno-aesthetic accessory.1 Ethnographic exhibitions are trapped by strategies of estrangement that rely inevitably on the dichotomies provoked by the collecting context of the material. The display of objects has become a familiar trope that in a way has lost its exotic appeal but not its power of enchantment. Postcolonial approaches to ethnographic museums recover the suppression and silencing of voices (of the collected) with an attempt of reconciliation. Scholars uncover the tricky distributions of agency and insist on the presence of various points of view in exhibitions (Karp and Lavine 2007; McCarthy 2007). But often, the approach to objects (and their interpretation) is faithful to the concept of ownership (and entitlement)—whose (version of the) story is illustrated, confirmed, or created with the help of ethnographic objects? The established chorus of voices cannot hide the context and time in which these collections emerged and the fact that the voices we desperately try to recover were silenced intentionally when the collections emerged. All these approaches are like layers of dust covering the objects. The goal in the nineteenth century, when the ethnographic exhibition developed as a concept, was to collect as many objects (of a very specific kind) as possible. In fact, originally, exhibitions stressed the quantity instead of the quality of artefacts by crowding glass cases with its collections that suggested a former state of mankind, a less advanced society. The quality and value of ethnographic objects raise proportionally to the traces of use found on the objects, thus the more questions are 1 As early as 1976, anthropologist Nelson Graburn pioneered with a collection of essays that address the marketing and sale of ethnic art on a global level academically. The phenomenon is, of course, much older and it can be argued that many items that are found in ethnographic collections have already been manufactured for the mass market.

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unanswered (the users and ways of using) the more precious an object is. As any collection, the museum was constructed with a closure in mind— to complete its set of artefacts (and to advance all communities). Needless to say, that this mission was impossible because objects continued to be produced by communities (especially once the demand by anthropologists for these objects grew).2 But the imagination was possible because salvage anthropology conceptualized the communities of its interest as vanishing. Objects collected were those that had been manufactured by indigenous people who were thought to disappear in a very near future. Thus, everything collected would be remembrance to that which was soon to be lost, an archive of saved evidence of humanity’s past. In that sense, the thought of closure was not absurd because the number of objects would then indeed be limited. Yet, with every object came its taxonomy that came with answers rather than questions (Fig. 4.1). “Shoe of guanaco skin, worn principally in winter, lined with grass”. Ona, says the label that accompanies the shoes in the above image. This pair of shoes is located in the South American section of the America Museum of Natural History which in traditional fashion includes indigenous communities as part of nature (as opposed to civilization). Apart from pottery, basketry, religious and sacred items, clothing was a popular collector’s object during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All items presented a contrast to European ideas of living. Bows and arrows opposed guns, pottery metal kitchenware, and clothing made from animal hide was presented as a pre-stage of the cotton garment industry. The description in the label enforces the visually obvious because the shoes are clearly identifiable as such and it is also visible that they have been made from animal skin including the fur and are thus warm and most likely to be used in cold weather. The fur, placed on the outside of the shoes contrasts European aesthetics of the time. The taxonomy of the animal and the people (Ona and guanaco) is the information that may be not obvious at first glance and yet, apart from the terms no other facts are provided that would help to understand who walked in these shoes. Ona objects are distributed in museums around the world. They commonly include bows and arrows, cradles, and clothing made of guanaco hide and thus present them as a vision of prehistoric life. 2 See also the essay “Art, Authenticity, and the Baggage of Cultural Encounter” by Ruth Phillips and Christopher Steiner in which they discuss the manufacture of products for the anthropologists and the tricky issue of authenticity (1999, 3).

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Fig. 4.1 Shoes, Guanaco Skin, Selknam People (Ona). South American Objects in the American Museum of Natural History. Wikimedia Commons

In the museum, these objects become markers of absence—absence of the people who wore the shoes and clothes, the people who made the bows, those who hunted and gathered the material for making them, and those who hunted with them. They not only mark the absence of knowledge but more importantly the making of absence of that knowledge. As such, museum objects are important reminders of all the information we cannot access and never will. They are reminders of the colonial past, of anthropology’s quest to imagine humanity’s progress and of the way we construct narratives to fit our own needs.

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4.2

Those Who Walked in the Shoes

The Ona,3 or Selk’nam how they would call themselves, were an indigenous community living in Tierra del Fuego. Even in an essay as recently published as 2002, the history of the Selk’nam begins with their encounter with Europeans although they have inhabited Tierra del Fuego for more than 11,000 years. In an essay entitled “Brief History of the Selk’nam from the Late Sixteenth Century to the Present”, the Chilean historian Mateo Martinic acknowledges Ferdinand Magellan as the “first to discover the existence of human beings on the land bounded to the South by the transcontinental strait which was later to be called after its famous discoverer” (2002, 227) employing colonial vocabulary unfiltered to a colonial situation. His colleague, Luis Alberto Borrero, likewise begins to tell the story of the Selk’nam in the sixteenth century but chooses a different focus. His essay, “The Extermination of the Selk’nam”, does indeed begin with their contact with European explorers (Borrero 1994, 247). To tell that story, one has to go back to the names of explorers who set out to expand the maps of Renaissance Europe, such as the Portuguese nobleman, Ferdinand Magellan, who travelled the strait that separates the Isla Grande of Tierra del Fuego from continental Patagonia in 1520 and that was thus named after him as the name Tierra del Fuego was given on the same expedition in reference to the smoke on the islands that was seen from the ship (Borrero 1994, 252). As a matter of fact, smoke was all the explorers saw of the Selk’nam, the actual encounter did not take place until 1579, when the Spanish explorer Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa entered their world and forced one of their people to be a guide to his exploration of the land (Borrero 1994, 252). While this encounter marked the beginning of a difficult relationship, their systematic extermination, however, began three hundred years later, in 1879, when the Chilean Navy officer Ramon Serrano Montaner discovered gold on the land inhabited by around 4000 Selk’nam. This was at a time when European expansion in the Americas (and elsewhere) was at its peak colliding with the establishment of anthropology as a science at universities and the spread of missions by the Christian church around the world due to easier travel conditions. Anthropologists and missionaries alike observed the people that resisted their expansion, exhibited, 3 The term Ona was used by the Selk’nam neighbours the Yámana in reference to them. See: Anne Chapman (1982, 155).

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and collected them in museums to defend their erasure by presuming they were less civilized and thus in need of guidance. However, the gold rush did not turn out to be as prosperous as expected; yet this intervention already led to serious conflicts between the European settlers and the Selk’nam population over mining areas (Borrero 1994, 253). Conflicts expanded when sheep farming became the dominant source of income to the European settlers in Tierra del Fuego. Fences divided the land marking private property, former Selk’nam territory, to which the Selk’nam did no longer have access to. As a hunter and gatherer culture, they depended on the free and seasonal movement across the islands to hunt mainly guanaco and birds. Those animals were driven away by the farmers who also persecuted the Selk’nam who crossed their fences. However, the Selk’nam had their own logic of the land that was divided among them and now brought to chaos. Conflicts among the Selk’nam community arose. “Paradoxically, internecine feuds became more violent during this final period of hardship and suffering and many Selk’nam were killed by their own people”, as anthropologist Anne Chapman reports (1982, 1). They could no longer practice hunting, and thus were starving and stealing sheep from the farmers, who in turn hired professional killers to exterminate them (1994, 255). Among the contracted assassins was the Romanian-born Argentine engineer Julius Popper, who later designed the modern outline of the city of Havana. Today he is mainly known for professionalising the genocide against the Selk’nam. He arrived in Tierra del Fuego in the 1880s, attracted by the gold rush. Since that did not prove successful, Popper built his own army to professionally hunt Selk’nam people for frustrated gold miners and sheep farmers. He famously photographed himself with hunted down and dead Selk’nam, possibly the reason why he remains in the collective memory connected to the Selk’nam. As the eccentric character he was, he published photo albums called Tierra del Fuego: Expedición Popper that include images of the murdered. He distributed these albums as gifts to officials of the Chilean and Argentinian government (Odone and Palma 2002, 288) and thus produced evidence of the genocide committed by him and others. In his vision, his private expedition recalled the fame of Renaissance explorers, discovering and conquering unknown land. The fact that he bragged with the photographs rather than hiding his crimes, shows his distorted consciousness, but also the common perception of the Selk’nam (and other indigenous communities) as inferior.

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The image below belongs to the series of images he was eager to spread. The bare dead body, still holding on to bow and arrows is already abandoned. The contract killers, Popper’s private army, turn their backs on the photographer and the dead man which makes them unidentifiable—at least in that image. Other images exist that present traditional group shots of the hunting party. But here, the remains of a Selk’nam camp make a last attempt to pierce the sky of the image while three of the four hunters point their guns towards the horizon. Their next shot must have been fatal already since there is nobody occupying the empty space of the vast landscape in the photograph. As painful as these images are due to their casual portrayal of violence, they are necessary and important documents to the history of Tierre del Fuego’s indigenous communities (Fig. 4.2). Popper presented these images at public lectures at the time, which did not lead to any criticism of the killing procedures (Odone and Palma

Fig. 4.2 Photo-album donated to the then president Miguel Juárez Celman. Världskulturmuseet 008218

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2002, 282).4 However, Popper was aware of his audiences. While on the one hand he staged himself as the adventurous explorer and enthusiastic amateur ethnographer, on the other hand, he exposed open hatred for the indigenous population, creating his own forces to fight against them depending on whom he spoke to. Amateur ethnographer and missionary Martin Gusinde calls Popper “a blight of pseudo-civilization”, something that “poisoned indigenous life and besmirches even nature” (1931, 153).5 However, he also acknowledged the ethnographic information left by Popper (ibid.). Popper died unexpectedly in 1897 at the age of 35 in Buenos Aires, but his death did not conclude the persecution of the Selk’nam since the killings proved to be a steady business. Farmers and gold miners would pay for each dead body. To prove the death, body parts were traded. A head would bring one pound of sterling silver. Since hunters thought it impractical to carry many heads, a pair of ears would go for the same price (Gusinde 1931, 160). Those ears were then burned, to prevent a second use. In many cases, however, the skull was sent to an ethnographic museum, or a medical anatomical collection, where it would bring additional money (Gusinde 1931, 160). The Scottish settler, Alexander MacLennan, optimized the killing practices that he called “battues”, clearly perceiving the people he killed as animals (Gusinde 1931, 159). The Englishman, Samuel Ishlop, specialized in torturing, raping, and dismembering his victims, which according to the historian, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, was widely accepted by the colonial administrators as “mildly regrettable necessities” (2003, 126). Only because those two did not document their work, we have little record and awareness of them. The farmers who did not want to pay bounty hunters, poisoned a few sheep with strychnine—a highly toxic chemical normally used as pesticide. The poisoned sheep would be put deliberately close to the Selk’nam camps outside of the fences (hence it seemed that the sheep had escaped)

4 However, according to missionary and amateur ethnographer Martin Gusinde, Popper was publically accused of the killing at one point and defended himself with a passionate speech in which he portrayed himself as a supporter of the Selk’nam (Gusinde 57). 5 My translation. The original reads: “Ein Pesthauch der Pseudozivilisation zog über das bisher unberührte Land, alles einheimische Leben vergiftend und selbst die leblose Natur besudelnd”.

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and predictably, the Selk’nam would hunt and eat those sheep, and die of poisoning (Gusinde 1931, 163). In 1886, a year after Popper had established his Selk’nam hunting practices, the Argentinan soldier and explorer, Ramon Lista, went on an official expedition that was commissioned by the Argentinian government. In a report to the then president, Miguel Juárez Celman, he expressed his disgust for the Selk’nam. He reportedly killed many of the men and raped Selk’nam women, and took those who resisted as prisoners (Gusinde 1931, 55). Those who did not die were brought to camps that had been arranged by the missionaries, as well as by the Chilean government. While Gusinde, a missionary himself, praises the church for saving the Selk’nam from the brutality of the settlers, he also states that there was a clear attempt in the second half of the nineteenth century “by the white settlers to clean the Isla Grande of the indigenous population” (1931, 46).6 Gusinde predicts little chances for the Selk’nam to survive and suggests quick and effective conversions to prevent them from being hunted down (1931, 46). Therefore, the Selk’nam were deported to camps erected by the missions, for example the Salesian Mission that had facilities on Isla Dawson located on the Pacific Coast. Any resistance to deportation by the Selk’nam was met with violence by the missionaries (Borrero 1994, 256). But once in the camps, the Selk’nam were concentrated in barracks, forced to wear European clothing and undergo a training that supposedly taught them basic European manners and ways of living prohibiting their own language and cultural practices. Exposed to poor living conditions and European diseases such as several influenza epidemics, many died in those camps and those who survived were stripped of their cultural identities. During the 1930s, the Chilean government deported the Selk’nam to camps that had been arranged for that purpose at Puntas Arenas (Gusinde 1931, 163). By the 1940s, very few Selk’nam remained; the Salesian mission, for example, reported only 25 individuals. In the 1960s, French anthropologist Anne Chapman began her extended interviews with Lola Kiepja and Ángela Loij who became known as the last Selk’nam and died in 1974—a year that supposedly marks the end of a people.

6 My translation. The original reads: “Schon hatten nämlich die ersten Versuche der Weißen eingesetzt, um die Landstriche der Isla Grande von den Indianern zu säubern”.

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Ghosts

When the Austrian amateur ethnologist and Missionary, Martin Gusinde, took his first trip to Tierra del Fuego in 1918, he found a community of barely 270 Selk’nam left to learn from. His book on the Selk’nam, published in 1931, represents an extensive document of ethnographic writing and a witness to his life with the community. Although a missionary of the Society of the Divine Word, Gusinde understood himself as a cultural anthropologist trying to learn from the people he studied. He had joined the museum of ethnology and prehistory in Santiago de Chile and had become a professor of anthropology in 1917 at the Catholic University in Santiago de Chile. His trips had been funded partially by the Chilean Ministry of Education. Gusinde practised participant observation when it was not yet the norm, even among those within the field of anthropology, although he preferred the houses of farmers and missionaries as his accommodation (Quack 2002, 17). His publication shows a deep and sincere interest in the local rituals and his devotion to document his experiences. He left approximately 1000 photographs of the ritual practices of the Selk’nam. Most famously, he documented the Hain ritual in 1923, to which he devoted around 700 pages of his book about the Selk’nam world view.7 His photographs of the ceremony have become iconic. The Selk’nam painted their bodies during the ritual in unique ways to represent characters from the Selk’nam universe. Costumes were carefully fashioned from guanaco skin and bark stuffed with leaves and grass (Chapman 2002b, 212). Bodies were fully painted with mesmerizing patterns in black, red, and white. The ritual was built around the initiation of the young men of the Selk’nam society, and thus particularly focused on the male community, with the woman being the audience in multiple ways. Chapman devoted a large part of her studies to Mesoamerican societies, particularly to those living in Tierra del Fuego where she interviewed the last two women that were familiar with the traditional Selk’nam ways of life. In her 1982 book Drama and Power in a Hunting Society, Chapman explores the Hain ritual as “the phantom of matriarchy that haunts the patriarchies” (155).

7 In his book, Gusinde calls the Hain kloketen (after the term referring to the boys who were to be initiated), a term that many after him used for the ceremony. Anne Chapman, however, clarifies after having talked extensively to those who remained that the ritual was referred to as Hain after the meeting house in which most of it took place (1982, 157).

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Based on the story about the cruel and terrorizing regime of women headed by the powerful Shaman, Moon Woman, and the eventual overthrow of that system by men (narrated as a liberating moment in Selk’nam history), the ritual initiated and celebrated the empowerment of the men of the Selk’nam society.8 It largely took place in a community space called “the Hain”, “that was a microcosm of the Selk’nam universe” (Chapman 1982, 149). Every member of the community took part in the months of the ceremony: “Every individual was related to this complex imaginative edifice and its associated mythological and shamanistic lore through the ‘skies’ (divisions) and ‘earths’ (territories) with which everyone was identified as part of their everyday existence” (Chapman 1982, 149). The main secret of the ceremony was to reveal to the initiated boys that the spirits were community members in disguise, but to keep that secret to themselves and not pass it on to the women. The spirits would run out to scare the women and children and punish and beat those whose husbands had complained about them previously (Chapman 2002a, 19). A particularly mean spirit called “Shoort”, would torture boys and women alike. Chapman compares the ceremony to a (theatre) performance: “The Hain is comparable to the theatre in our society as a secular performance, and also on a psychological level in terms of the relationship between audience and actors, even though in the Hain the audience (the women) had a far more active role in the performance than in the theatre as we know it” (1982, 153). It can be argued that contemporary practices of performance art deconstruct that classical role of the audience and fits more the idea of Chapman’s performance comparison, than the classical theatre does. While Chapman asked her female informants about the ritual, Gusinde intended to participate and document the Hain in his awareness that it may be one of the very last times that this ceremony would take place. In 1923, at a time when only few members of the Selk’nam community remained, Gusinde insisted on witnessing the ritual. However, the ceremony was repeatedly delayed because the available food (guanaco) was rare but necessary, since the ritual interrupted the daily lives (and thus food production) of the Selk’nam for months. Gusinde provided 8 The myth of the Hain ceremony has been told and continues to be told in numerous ways. One example is Los Espiritus Selk’nam. Cuento basado en un mito Selk’nam by Ana Maria Paveu and Constanza Recart with illustrations by Raquel Echenique (editorial amanita, 2009).

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money and sheep to eventually make the Hain ceremony happen. In 1923, the two young men to be initiated (called “kloketen”) were only 14 and 16 years old. The ceremony normally required participants aged 17–20 years old, but this time, an exception was made. Thus, the ceremony took place under special and limited conditions and was most likely a smaller and tamer version of the actual ritual. The images of that ceremony continue to fascinate, although they reveal the same challenges as other photographs of sacred rituals. When Chapman showed some of the images to her loyal informant Lola, she became annoyed. She pushed the photographs aside “and refused to look at others”, saying that “whites should not see them” (Chapman 2002b, 35). Gusinde himself faced the resistance of the elders who opposed to him photographing the ceremony in 1923, which was another reason for the extended negotiations before the Hain (Quack 2002, 30). Nevertheless, both researchers ignored the request of their indigenous informants and decided in favour of the archive, even if that would be culturally insensitive.9 Gusinde’s images and Chapman’s descriptions have become iconic and connected to the authors, rather than their material and subjects. In fact, Chapman collaborated with a coffee-table book publisher that focused on the imagery in 2002. The Taller Experimental Cuerpos Pintados, a non-profit project interested in painted bodies and their rituals, published three coffee-table books about the Selk’nam stating that “nobody can fail to be moved by the beauty and documentary power of Gusinde’s images” (2002a, 11). The painted bodies have also been appropriated by the tourist industry, and clothing, postcards, and dolls are produced in the absence of the actual bodies, as souvenirs from Chile. This phenomenon becomes interesting when thinking about the souvenir as memory. As Susan Stewart argues in her book On Longing (1993) about the nature of the souvenir, it “involves the displacement of attention into the past. [It]s function is to envelop the present within the past. […] The place of origin must remain unavailable in order for desire to be generated” (1993, 151). The place of origin, in case of the Selk’nam souvenirs, is not only a geographical and temporal one that refers to the personal connection of the souvenir owner. It is most of all a displacement in terms of geography and time, since the objects refuse to disconnect from the actual historical 9 I have decided against including the images but they can easily be found on the internet.

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reference. And yet, the reference made continues to be fiction—it remains a reference to a nostalgic past that has been inevitably destroyed by the settlers. There is no present and no actual memory. The souvenir can only be attached to a fictional and/or historical narrative that is manifested in a material item—not a memory without material reference but quite the opposite—a memory connected to material evidence. And yet, the souvenir is doomed to trivialize its possibilities of historical references since its main function is to refer to a tourist experience from which the Selk’nam genocide is entirely absent. The task of keeping the memory alive is publically attributed to museums and archives whose gift shops will not continue the educational adventure, but the personalized tourist one.

4.4

Haunting

Museums such as the American Museum of Natural History or the Chilean National Museum of Natural History (Museo Nacional de Historia Natural ) that both exhibit Selk’nam artefacts are haunted spaces, and thus the perfect setting for conjuring the spirits of the Selk’nam. The concept of hauntology proves to be useful to investigate this marking of absence. Introduced by Jacques Derrida and Avery Gordon almost simultaneously in the early 1990s, the theory of haunting (different from notions of popular ghosts) has become a concept widely applied in the humanities and elsewhere.10 In Spectres de Marx (1993), Jacques Derrida introduced the term hauntology (hantologie) a near homonym (at least in its original French) to ontology. Hauntology questions the focus on material and manifested forms of being by introducing the spectre as an omnipresent and yet absent character—an invisible and influential form of presence. The spectre, Derrida suggests, is in-between: a state of irritation, confusion, and mystery that we have to learn to live with. He speaks of the revenant , a repetition, always expected to return (from the past or from the future) and disturb in unpleasant ways. Thus, the spectre becomes potentially the remains of that which cannot be forgotten, which is too easily neglected, and which cannot be erased. The Selk’nam shoes mark this uncomfortable history in the museum space, and yet are not narrated as such by the exhibit. 10 A great collection of texts and documentary to the spectral turn is The Spectralities Reader edited by Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (2013).

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Conceptualized as an inevitable threat, Derrida’s spectres (dis)embody what should not be, they are emotional diagnoses and moral categories depending on notions of fear of the unknown whose presence (a timeless existence) is never impossible, whose dark power cannot be denied. At the heart of Derrida’s hauntology is the inevitability of being seen while not being able to see the observer, a familiar recipe of power and oppression. In this context, ethnographic museums are clear-cut power constellations of collectors and collected. Hauntology threatens the omnipotence of the collector and presenter of the ethnographic narrative by suggesting that the objects are not detached neither from their collecting contexts nor their pre-collecting pasts. The concept questions the superiority of the collector’s gaze (represented by the display) by introducing its limitations through a possibility of other presences. The Selk’nam shoes that are presented in the American Museum of Natural History are part of a narrative that strengthened the contrast between constructs such as the primitive and the civilized, and thus justifies colonial practices to exterminate the indigenous population. However, the history of that genocide cannot be erased by retelling the story differently. The idea of haunting stresses the fact that the shoes mark that untold story that continues to haunt contemporary Chilean society. Alas, the presence of the spectres or revenants need a particular consciousness that is easily described in theory, but is often absent in the average museum visitor whose is guided by the exhibition tour. In Ghostly Matters (1997), Avery Gordon does not so much trace the spectres as she follows the events that create the spectres. Therefore, her spectres are not the ultimate threats lurking in dark corners of power systems, but essential aftermaths that resist reconciliation. They are the lives that remain unsolved and unsolvable—the missing stories. In this context, ethnographic museums become containers of spectres in which the haunted and the haunting are the same depending on the point of view. Traces of the unsolvable and unsolved are everywhere. Nothing is easily distinguishable. Gordon’s spectres are ambivalent and manifest in words unspoken. Power is no longer clear-cut, but a troubled misadventure. Norms, (scientific) order, chaos, and control become shadows of larger things unsolved. Hauntology turns into the questions that have not been asked. However, looking at the Selk’nam shoes does not create a presence of the history, it does not trigger questions (because they are presented as answers and facts). Their display does not disturb because it is placed

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in the familiar discourse of ethnography. In that discourse, a genocide does not exist. The common narrative holds the indigenous community responsible for their disappearance due to their diverse (and termed primitive by the European settlers) ways of living. Unlike the display of shoes at the former concentration camp site Auschwitz that clearly refers to the violence of the Holocaust by marking the absence of the people who wore them, the shoes in the American Museum of Natural History do not provoke the sense of disappeared bodies. The museum exhibit is not automatically haunted by its history. The shoes mark absence but disguise the making of absence as a natural cause also because that particular museum falls into the genre of natural history which is presumably detached from human influences. The spectres are invisible but present. Diana Taylor provides a theory for making the spectres visible. In her book, entitled The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), she understands performance as a possibility to interact with the spectres—those blind spots of history. She writes: Performance makes visible (for an instant, live, now) that which is always already there: the ghosts, the tropes, the scenarios that structure our individual and collective life. These specters, made manifest through performance, alter future phantoms, future fantasies…The power of seeing through performance is the recognition that we’ve seen it all before— the fantasies that shape our sense of self, of community, that organize our scenarios of interaction, conflict, and resolution. (Taylor 2003, 143)

A performance is a non-static interaction, a unique moment in time that dissolves the sense of time by its radical interactions beyond time. The Chilean interdisciplinary collective Regreso de los Espiritus (The Return of the Spirits), consists of artists, sociologists, and political activists who commit themselves to connecting past and present. In their performances, they use the popular imagery of the Hain ceremony to call attention to the Selk’nam genocide. In a time-consuming process, the performers paint their bodies inspired by Gusinde’s historical photographs, but not ethnographically true to them. They use commercial body paint in red, black, and white and create their own patterns on their skins. Then they dance on the streets or in performance spaces presenting their own spontaneous choreographies, creating shadows and shapes that cross the

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distance between performer and audience in uncomfortable ways.11 Their characters recall the spirits that frightened the village during the Hain ceremony. They are, at the same time, hauntology’s spectres marking the absence of the people celebrating the Hain. A strong part of Regreso de los Espiritus’ performances are the historical references made in form of the names of the exterminators, connected places, and institutions written on paper, which are then attacked with red paint that the performers splatter like blood across the paper, the audience, and the floor. The long list includes, of course, Julius Popper and Ramon Lista. Popper’s photographs are projected to the wall in a quick interchange with photographs of the Hain ceremony. Both series of images present evidence here—one is evidence to the rich and fascinating traditions the other to their extermination. However, as mentioned above, Gusinde’s pictures present a desperate attempt to document the traditions that he saw disappearing. His images are already part of the salvage anthropology discourse that reads the Selk’nam as outdated and unfit for the encounter with the European settlers. His images work in many ways just like the shoes displayed in the museum. They are evidence of a once existing culture but at the same time mark its disappearance—a process that the photographer (and the collector) were inevitably part of as bystander-like witnesses who benefited from the act of witnessing. As objects were sold to museums, the photographs continue to be published and spread the name of the photographer. There is a dangerous loop in the context of the taking of the images. One cannot escape the presence of the photographer due to the historical setting. The group recognizes that the material available to them which serves as their inspiration—Gusinde’s and Popper’s images, is the material they criticize and depend on at the same time. The images find their ways into their imagery that again plays with the exotic notion of the painted body in ritual practice. The photographs that derive from their performances and that travel in exhibitions make a reference to the images and not to the ceremony of the Hain. There is no reference to initiation, no male dominance, no reference to the mythological basis of the ritual.

11 The description is based on two performances I witnessed in July 2016 in Santiago de Chile. One performance was accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation with clear reference to the genocide. However, the possibility of a presentation and conversation is not always given in the context of the group’s performances, particularly when they are taken to the streets as it was the case with the second performance I witnessed.

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This way, the disappearance of the Hain and its people are marked more painfully. Questions are raised and left unanswered. * Chapman asks in a poem she devoted to the Selk’nam: “How to write, in a few lines, of a once powerful people?”, and continues to describe the tourist setting that lures with exotic visions, rather than troubling messages: Banners stamped with their gigures, statuettes in their native head-dress, postcards showing them as they really were. A choice for any purse. Souvenirs of the Fuegian Braves. And the tourist is told: ‘we can’t compete in the national and international festivals with our own native stuff. Our Fuegian Indians didn’t leave us folklore.’ But wait. (2002b, 277–279)

Wait. At least the imagery circulates in many ways. Perhaps trivialized. Perhaps romanticized. But, as the shoes in the museum, it marks an absence. The Museum of Natural History in Santiago de Chile includes an exhibit of the Selk’nam, but it remains within the traditional frame of the museum setting. Much like the American Museum of Natural History, Chile’s national museum shows the Selk’nam in romanticized dioramas, mourning the loss of idealized primitivism while concealing the history of violence that is a crucial part of colonial settings. In fact, the museum’s interpretation of the Selk’nam justifies that violence because it determines the people afit for the ways of lives brought by the settlers. Understandably, Regreso de los Espiritus’ feel that the museum setting is haunted by its ahistorical approach to the cultural communities it presents. It is an awkward setting, they say, a setting that they avoid, and yet only there the dimensions of absence could enfold in their entire complexity because it is the place in which people would look for the Selk’nam. The ethnographic museum wrongly suggests a non-performative setting by giving supposedly universal (and thus static) categories and definitions. Nevertheless, exhibitions are not representations of scientific endeavours—they are performances of objects. The objects can produce meaning only when interacting with each other and the museum space. Thus, at each occasion of rearranging the objects, the procedures of making knowledge can be revealed. Let’s have Regresa de los Espiritus dance in those shoes until the dust falls off (Fig. 4.3).

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Fig. 4.3 Children’s drawing after a Selk’nam image. 2016

References Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bennett, T. (1995). The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. New York: Routledge. Borrero, A. (1994). The Extermination of the Selk’nam. In Burch & Ellanna (Eds.), Key Issues in Hunter-Gatherer Research (pp. 247–261). Oxford: Berg. Chapman, A. (1982). Drama and Power in a Hunting Society: The Selk’nam of Tierra del Fuego. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapman, A. (2002a). Hain. Selk’nam Initiation Ceremony. Santiago de Chile: Taller Experimental Cuerpos Pintados. Chapman, A. (2002b). End of a World: The Selk’nam of Tierra del Fuego. Santiago de Chile: Taller Experimental Cuerpos Pintados. Derrida, J. (1993) Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (P. Kamuf, Trans.). New York: Routledge.

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Fabian, J. (1983). Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Fernández-Armesto, F. (2003). The Americas: The History of a Hemisphere. London: Phoenix. Gordon, A. (1997). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Graburn, N. (1976). Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gusinde, M. (1931). Die Feuerland Indianer. Die Selk’nam. Mödling bei Wien: Verlag der internationalen Zeitschrift “Anthropos”. Karp, I., & Lavine, S. D. (Eds.). (2007). Exhibiting Museums: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Martinic, M. (2002). Brief History of the Selknam from the Late Sixteenth Century to the Present. In C. Odone & P. Mason (Eds.), 12 Perspectives on Selknam: Yahgan & Kawesqar (pp. 227–253). Santiago de Chile: Taller Experimental Cuerpos Pintados. McCarthy, C. (2007). Exhibiting Maori: A History of Colonial Cultures on Display. Oxford: Berg. Odone, C., & Palma, M. (2002). Death on Display: Photographs of Julius Popper in Tierra del Fuego (1886–1887). In C. Odone & P. Mason (Eds.), 12 Perspectives on Selknam: Yahgan & Kawesqar (pp. 257–307). Santiago de Chile: Taller Experimental Cuerpos Pintados. Paveu, A. M., & Recard, C. (2009). Los Espiritus Selk’nam. Cuento basado en un mito Selk’nam. Santiago de Chile: editorial amanita. Peeren, E., & del Pilar Blanco, M. (Eds.). (2013). The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. London: Bloomsbury. Phillips, R., & Steiner, C. (1999). Art, Authenticity, and the Baggage of Cultural Encounter. In R. Phillips & C. Steiner (Eds.), Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds (pp. 3–19). Berkeley: University of California Press. Quack, A. (2002). Mank’acen—The Shadow Snatcher: Martin Gusinde as Ethnographer and Photographer of the Last Indians of Tierra del Fuego. In C. Odone & P. Mason (Eds.), 12 Perspectives on Selknam: Yahgan & Kawesqar (pp. 17–37). Santiago de Chile: Taller Experimental Cuerpos Pintados. Rosaldo, R. (1989). Imperialist Nostalgia. Representations, 26, 107–122. Stewart, S. (1993). On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press. Taylor, D. (2003). The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memories in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Absence, Gender, and the Land(Scape) in Palestinian Art Luisa Gandolfo

In Jean Genet’s reflection on an evening passed under the stars in Ajloun, Jordan, the night sky is viewed through a gaze that sees the Pole Star as a woman, and her constellation a metaphor for the perceived otherworldliness of womankind (2003 [1986]). Bringing this metaphor to earth, Genet’s narrative, inspired by a fisherman’s procession in Lebanon, draws attention to how nature, from the stars to the sea and the soil, has been viewed, portrayed, and written about in a gendered manner. This chapter remains in the region, and considers the ways that Palestine is remembered and represented by female artists on the brink of displacement, and in exile. The chapter focuses on representations and recollections of the land and the landscape, starting during the pre-1948 Mandate period and ending in the twenty-first century, and incorporates the mediums of painting, photography, and audio-visual installations.

L. Gandolfo (B) University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2021 O. Otele et al. (eds.), Post-Conflict Memorialization, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54887-2_5

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While doing so, it adopts Mieke Bal’s understanding of cultural memory, as the artistic medium ‘mediate[s] between the parties to the traumatizing scene and between these and the reader or viewer’ (Bal 1999, x), and in the process ‘links the past to the present and the future’ (ibid., vii). In the context of this chapter, the ‘traumatizing scene’ is defined by imminent loss, or the recollection of loss, and in each case, the ongoing absence is lived through displacement and/or exile. As each artwork reflects on Palestine, the land’s ‘narratable’ (ibid., x) absence is articulated in gendered terms, whether covertly through the gendered readings of the landscape, or overtly through the use of the maternal body as a visual and physical metaphor for the land. As the land and landscape are linked to, and represented by, the female form, this chapter explores the works with three questions in mind. First, as Andrew Jones notes, ‘the past of places is nearly always remembered by reference to the body’ (2007, 58); accordingly, when the contemporary place (or site) is unreachable, how is the past of that place remembered through the female body? Second, when reading representations of the Palestinian landscape, how does the female gaze challenge the male gaze and articulate emotions beyond pleasure and desire (Rose 1993), such as loss, nostalgia, and grief? Finally, if we revisit the concept of the land as the fertile mother, how does the female body provide an embodiment of the absent motherland that is disconnected from ‘its historical connections with heterosexual male power’ (Nash 2008)? Drawing on the work of Gillian Rose (1993), Catherine Nash (2008), and Rosemary Betterton (2014), among others, this chapter moves beyond the conversation surrounding the landscape and the female body in European art, and grounds the analysis in Palestine-Israel and the Palestinian diaspora. In doing so, it explores narratives of nation and occupation, and the significance of absence, the land, and landscape in the broader memory discourse.

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Gendering the Land and the Landscape

Since the land and the landscape are closely knotted (linguistically and physically), it is necessary to untangle the two to understand how art can present a political, cultural, and emotional response to the absence of both. The discourse on the dichotomy between the land and the landscape has, to date, been rooted in geography, art history, and anthropology; when the disciplines are brought together, an interpretation emerges that traces the visual and the tangible elements of experiencing the land and landscape through reading, looking, seeing, and walking. While each disciplinary approach varies in its tipping point between the land/~scape, commonalities are perceptible, including the deep connection held between individuals, communities, and an absent place. Depending on the context, this connection can be informed by history, politics, religion, and/or culture. For Susanne Küchler, the landscape emerges once the vista becomes measurable and is visually mapped through landmarks that provide a recognizable aide-mémoire, guided by a viewer’s grasp of the past and present of the site (1993, 85). As the viewer’s understanding of the space determines how the landscape is perceived, the transition from a piece of land to a landscape lies, as Barbara Bender suggests, with the viewer, as ‘we “perceive” landscapes, we are the point from which the “seeing” occurs. It is thus an ego-centred landscape, a perspectival landscape, a landscape of views and vistas’ (1993, 1). Within this ego-centricity is a fraught journey that unfolds on two levels: in the viewer who negotiates their personal understanding of the space, and among the collective, whose interpretations are pooled to create a shared interpretation of the view. At both stages, an evolving process of definition occurs that includes ‘a living tapestry of practices, imaginations, emergences and erasures […] claims concerning distinctions of image and reality, mind and body, subject and object [that] are disputed and refuted’ (Wylie 2009, 282). The melee that John Wylie describes captures the dynamic between the viewer and the ~scape, and he draws attention to the sensations and negotiations that transform the act of viewing the land/~scape into one that takes place in simultaneous, yet at times different, ways. In the context of Palestine, the tension escalates as older interpretations of the land and landscape sit alongside newer narratives, some experienced directly, others passed down through the generations; some revisited, yet others inaccessible, due to exile or the sites altering beyond recognition.

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The process of becoming a landscape raises further questions: which views become landscapes? And, is it only by the artist’s hand that a space moves from one to the other? In this respect, the allegory of the tree falling in the forest comes to mind—if there is no viewer to see the landmarks, could a place still shift from being ‘land’ to becoming a ‘landscape’? In the context of cultural production, John Urry centres the artist in the transition that occurred in the Lake District during the eighteenth century, when the ‘[l]and got changed into landscape through artists and writers “moving” the Lake counties into English culture’ (2007, 81). In his broader consideration, Urry observes how the Alps and the Caribbean, as well as the Lakes, shift from sites of foreboding and even ‘terror’ (2007, 78) to places that are desired or romantic. The introduction of positive emotions in place of trepidation prompts a reflection on the alternative responses that can transform a site. For example, where a village might once have stood, in its stead could emerge the memory of a massacre, as is the case at sites such as Deir Yassin and Al-Dawayima,1 which prompt an array of emotional responses. Depending on the viewer, the emotions could include nostalgia for a bucolic past (Al-Dawayima being located in the countryside), but an understanding of the region’s history could equally bring sensations of grief, loss, and sadness. In this respect, Küchler’s aide-mémoire could take the form of a variety of landmarks, including the remains of a village, the absence of its inhabitants, the memorials that mark what passed (as well as the absence of the memorials), or the narratives told (or not told) at, and about, the site. Thus far, the focus has been on what the landscape is, and attention must also be given to what it is not, and by extension, how the land differs. For Urry, the land is ‘a physical, tangible resource that can be ploughed, sown, grazed and built upon. Land is a place of work conceived functionally’ (2007, 77). In this interpretation, the land is practical, and with this comes a sense of the unsentimental and functional side of nature. However, while the land might stop short of stimulating the emotional response elicited by the landscape, the actions done to the land, the ability

1 For a deeper consideration of the events at Deir Yassin and Al-Dawayima, see Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948, by Meron Benvenisti (Berkeley, Los Angeles; London: University of California Press) 2000, and Remembering Deir Yassin: The Future of Israel and Palestine, edited by Daniel McGowan and Marc H. Ellis (New York: Olive Branch Press) 1998.

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to do those actions, and the attachment nurtured while doing those actions, prompt an emotive narrative. Perhaps a bridge can be found in Carl O. Sauer’s delineation between the natural landscape and the cultural landscape, a division that is, he suggests, unified by geographers, for whom ‘the content of a landscape is found therefore in the physical qualities of an area that are significant to man and in the forms of his use of the area, in facts of physical background and facts of human culture’ (2007 [1925], 46). While Sauer’s consideration is gendered (both the looking and doing on the land is by the male viewer), the possibility of viewing a landscape as nature and, subsequently, cultural, leads Sauer to the concept of the ‘cultural landscape’, a vista whose narrative shifts with time, depending on the culture of the individuals dwelling on, or viewing, the landscape (2007 [1925], 54). Within this, the landscape has been discussed more widely by alluding to the female form, with accounts that include the process of carving out a landscape from ‘“virgin” nature’ (Olwig 1993, 317); the shaping of areas vast and small, as ‘the contours of countries and districts are frequently drawn by using the concepts of motherland or mother tongue’ (Best 1995, 181), and in the context of Palestinian poetry, the land as ‘a fecund woman who gave birth to revolutionary freedom fighters’ (Salti 2010, 43), and more broadly, ‘land-as-woman’, a space in which ‘possession’, ‘control’, ‘fulfilment’, and/or the ‘consummation of desire’ is enacted (Layoun 2001, 147). Whether positioned as the mother who gives birth and welcomes the returning fighters, or the virgin/beloved to be possessed and desired, the gendering of the land reveals a gaze shaped by power and culture, as well as the nuances of an individual’s gaze, whether male or female. The delineation of the gaze-on-the-land between the male and the female is helpful and challenging. For its critics, discerning between the two is polemicizing; for others, the gendering of the land can be attributed to the writer’s need for ‘a conventional rhetorical device’ (Mills 2005, 75). To this can be added a third perspective, that the gendering of the gaze-on-the-land provides an insight into the power relations involved in reading, experiencing, and drawing the landscape. On a subtle level, the masculine aspects of the land can be ‘invisible’, but still active in their capacity as ‘the invisible structuring geometries which create the illusion of infinite spatial depth’ (Olwig 1993, 324). When set against the feminine, Kenneth Olwig’s reading of the gendered land resonates with Julia Kristeva’s reflection on the ‘paternal metaphor’, which she suggests is,

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‘unconscious, crystallized as it is at the threshold of primal repression, is not yet verbal […] Let’s say it conveys some imagos, some unconscious fantasies, some complexes that are capable of being translated into the maternal language, or, quite the opposite, that resist any translation [emphasis in original]’ (Kristeva 2014, 74). The feminine is, then, visible: her gender written in narratives about the land, and her symbol substituting a large entity when words or distance cut between the individual and the land itself. However, the masculine dimension of the land is not intangible; it can be palpable and lustful, as Olwig observes in his consideration of Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612; 1622, cited in Olwig 2002), where the (masculine) wind caresses the (female) land, coursing through the ‘Cluyd Vale’ (2002, 127). Similarly, David Bell and Ruth Holliday’s study of German and English naturist movements considers the mythopoetic men’s movement, for whom the wilderness is a site of physical and conceptual re-masculinization, where the ‘Earth Father’ enables participants to ‘once again become men’ through ‘close, communal contact with nature’ (2001, 135). Both Bell and Holliday’s focus on the ‘re-masculinization’ of the land, and Sara Mills’ interrogation of nineteenth-century women travellers in Australia and the United States (2005), draw attention to the multiple ways of viewing and talking about the land. Between those who caution polemicizing the gaze-on-the-land (Nash 2008) and those who distinguish (Lentin 2006; Olwig 1993, 2002; Best 1995; Rose 1993), a middle path can be found through Mills’ recommendation that the gaze be assessed on an individual basis (2005, 81). In doing so, ‘rather than analysing the view of landscape as an individual process, dependent on an individual’s particular aesthetic preference or poetic skill, we need instead to examine the way that within the colonial context, certain forms of viewing predominate’ (Mills 2005, 81). This approach is particularly relevant in the context of Palestine, where the land has passed through the British Mandate (1920–1948) and continues to be marked and re-drawn while under occupation (B’Tselem 2018; ICAHD 2018; UNHCR 2018). In this sense, the loss of the land is an ongoing experience and the continued displacement of Palestinians adds, weekly, more accounts to the broader narrative of dispossession. Casting a look back to the early twentieth century, the gendered land and landscape feature in both Palestinian and Israeli cultural narratives, at times

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attributing female symbolism, at others, male.2 Following Mills’ suggestion that the significance of the gaze lies in the forms of viewing, the artistic pieces addressed in this chapter reflect on the gendered gaze on the land, as much as the gendered power dynamic that shapes experiences of exile and the occupation.

5.2

The Fading Landscape

As with other art forms, the scope of interpretation in paintings is vast, yet in this range is the opportunity to tell a story and, in the case of the works of Sophie Halaby (1905–1998), to capture a landscape in flux, through the eyes of an artist painting under unstable circumstances. Born in 1905 in Jerusalem, Sophie Halaby left to study in the studios of Paris between 1929 and 1932 (Halaby 2015, 88–89), and in the years that followed, Halaby returned to Europe twice more, each journey coinciding with an outbreak of conflict in Palestine (Halaby 2015, 89). The first, in 1948, drove her family towards East Jerusalem (Boullata 2009, 166; Halaby 2015, 86) and as Kamal Boullata observes, in their haste to flee, the family left behind all their possessions, perhaps imagining that they would return home after a few weeks (2009, 166–167). Ultimately, unable to return, the Halabys moved towards the east side of the city, which was then under Jordanian jurisdiction (Boullata 2009, 167). For Halaby, the years leading up to and following 1948 marked the beginning of a fading landscape, one affected by population movement and displacement, as villages declined and the vistas grew to encompass the new residents, their houses, and businesses, a point that was not lost on Halaby, later in life (‘All the while in Palestine I sketched and drew the original views of Palestine. Nowadays it all changes with their stupid buildings’ [Halaby 2015, 84]). It is notable then, that Halaby’s landscapes have a timeless quality, the seasons forever under a golden hue, the buildings ever ancient, and the land devoid of visitors or inhabitants. In The Mount of Olives series (1954), the landscape comes to the fore, its blend of colours rich enough to distract the viewer’s eye from the structure to the right of the frame. Dotted with green trees that stretch towards the horizon, their uniformity provides numerous receding landmarks and the suggestion that while the

2 See also Boaz Newmann, Land and Desire in Early Zionism (Lebanon: Brandeis), 2007.

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house is faded and the occupants unseen, the presence of orchards hints at a life being lived on the land. While the vista might shift, Halaby’s landscapes share several commonalities, including the palette (ranging between lilac/blue for the sky, dark green/rusty red for trees and shrubs; cream/white for structures, and golden for the soil and mountains), the gentle curves of the land that bob towards a distant point, and a silence that while visual, nevertheless extends from the canvas to suggest a quiet space, unpunctuated by planes, cars, or human voices; accompanied perhaps only by the trill of crickets and the birds flying overhead. By capturing this tranquil landscape, Halaby presents two visions: the first an alternative paradise that is not lush, but ruggedly unspoiled. On the other, her paintings offer a view that is fading as the landscape becomes unreachable and at points, forever changed by humankind as new structures rise and fresh roads wind through the previously uninterrupted ~scape. In each case, the landscape appears—despite the events unfolding—hospitable, gentle, and warm, aspects that are conveyed through the lines of her work. Reflecting on these facets of Halaby’s work, Boullata draws attention to the parts that can be likened to the human body, and within this, the body in question could, perhaps, be read as female, Halaby’s identification with her Mount comes to light as the swelling bareness of the landscape becomes synonymous with the naked body. The undulating hills, washed with rose tints, earthy dots and shades, assume the nuances of skin, its freckles and birthmarks, as the brush strokes suggesting distant trees or scattered bushes resemble the curls of body hair. (2009, 172)

While it could be countered that the ‘naked body’, ‘freckles’, birthmarks’, and ‘curls of body hair’ could just as much belong to a male landscape, Boullata’s earlier reference to Halaby’s depiction of a ‘virgin stretch of land’ (2009, 171) suggests otherwise. Harking to the broader references in Palestinian poetry, the use of the word ‘virgin’ also connects to the broader corpus on gender, art, and cultural geography, which genders the ‘virgin’ as female, an ascription that facilitates the realization of nationalist sentiments on a wider scale. For Boullata, Halaby’s landscape is viewed through an anthropomorphic, gendered lens, and in doing so, he presents the opportunity to read it as sexualized, the subtle observation of curls of body hair, swells, and

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the freckles that dot the skin/landscape, suggesting an intimacy and proximity to the subject. These close observations can be extended to include love as much as desire, a perspective that evokes Olwig’s reflection on the painters of the European Renaissance, for whom ‘the generative force of love […] transformed [the vista] into a gendered, largely female landscape scene’ (2002, 133–134). Beyond the Renaissance, the trope of the virgin landscape invokes emotions that range from desire to protectiveness, coveting, and mourning. The invocation of the virgin by artists and viewers works on two levels: first, it portrays a bond between the view and the artist, as the view is more than an insight into a moment in time, but also an opportunity to see through the eyes of the artist and sense their response to what is unfolding in the wider ~scape, beyond the canvas. In this sense, an awareness of the context of the landscape allows affect to unfold, as the longing anthropomorphizes the landscape and allows human emotions to be projected onto nature. Once the land was occupied, the paintings provided a reminder of the past and the transition, as much as how the changes were received by the artist, who, in this sense, witnessed the transforming landscape. Second, framing the landscape as ‘virgin’ generates, as Olwig suggests, ‘an “enclosed” topological space’ that has ‘Freudian implications’ (1993, 317). In cases where ‘the virginal’ has been associated with desire (and at times a desire that carries sexual undertones), it has often been done so in parts. As Kristeva observes, the virginal body is offered in segments, ‘the ear, the tears, and the breasts’, while ‘sexuality is reduced to a mere implication’, her sexual organ ‘an innocent shell’ (1985, 142). More broadly, the sexualisation of the land and the landscape elicits feelings of belonging, owning, and becoming of the space, which are linked to desire and longing. However, if the concept of the virgin-as-the-land provides a convergence for these sentiments, it also raises questions regarding how the virgin trope is constructed in each cultural context: whether she is whole, and if not, what do the absent/inactive parts tell us about how the metaphor is applied? Perhaps an answer can be found in the work of Tamam Al-Akhal, who draws on the virgin, as well as the bride, as a representation of the land and nation. Born in Jaffa in 1935, Al-Akhal and her family were, like the Halabys, forced to flee their home in 1948, though the Al-Akhals did not move across the city twice, but went beyond the borders of Palestine and over the sea, first to Lebanon, and later Egypt, where Al-Akhal studied art in Cairo (Tibawi 1963, 519). Reflecting on her early pieces, Al-Akhal considers the possibilities for the body to engage in the act of making

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art, and in one example, by using hair as a means of improvisation when schooling, money, and art tools were hard to come by in the camp. My intense desire to draw led me to fix one streak of my hair onto a pencil, and to use the colors of detergents designed to die the old clothes that my mother used for fixing the faded colors of our clothes […] I drew our people as they line up to get milk for their children. Then I painted another painting about the crowdedness that would take place around filling small containers with water brought by transport cars to Palestinian refugee camps. I painted these two scenes with a sense of awareness of what was taking place. (Al-Akhal 2003)

At the time, the young Al-Akhal chronicled the everyday scenes of camp life, not unlike the early pieces by Ismail Shammout, including his 1951 works, The Little Refugee, Cold and Hunger, Feeding Her Baby Brother, and Refugee. However, with time, her work became a point of reflection and Inheritance (1992) and Uprooting (1998) present a window into a tumultuous time, the scale of the images capturing the trauma of her subjects. Guided by the memory of her family’s displacement from Jaffa, Al-Akhal’s pieces are notable for their visceral realism and the various ways that trauma is represented, at certain times realistic; at others, surreal, abstract, or symbolic. In the case of the latter, the everyday (a close-up of a field of poppies or oranges plump on their branches, an evocation of a tranquil, lost past) is punctuated by the supernatural (flying horses; apparitions of bereft brides floating above the ground; a child carrying an out-sized naked man, Sisyphus-like through an empty ~scape). The use of the fantastical serves a dual function: on the one hand, it creates a barrier between the real and the unreal, as the surreal proportions and abstract actions disconnect reality from the viewer. On the other hand, this disconnection accentuates the trauma: as opposed to being out-of-proportion, the over-sized figures and ~scapes represent the overwhelming sensation of loss, grief, and trepidation. In The Rift (1999), the viewer is struck by a mélange of emotions: the landscape, once lush and green, is sandy and barren; unlike Halaby’s golden vistas, there are no shrubs pushing through, nor a sky to separate the horizon from the moonscape. The rocks that shape the landscape differ in their lines, too: where Halaby showed smooth contours, AlAkhal brings corners and angles, a terrain jagged and ready to cut. The break in the landscape arrives at the midpoint, the titular rift a chasm

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that holds only darkness. The sense of the unknown that this brings is the least unsettling aspect of the painting, for on either side is a spectre of grief and pain. To the right, a bride hovers, the train of her white dress immaculate yet nebulous, its gauzy fringe grazing inches above the ground. Her gaze, directed across the rift, is morose. With one hand, she clutches a bouquet of white flowers, her arm slightly extended, as though to hand them across the line; the other arm hangs empty, devoid of purpose. The bride is resplendent in her sadness, an angel looking into a hellish tableau of exile and dispossession. The view across the rift is small-scale, but concentrated in its pain: men and women contort, cower, and hang loosely; some are clothed in rags, others naked, all dishevelled, starved, and bruised. Behind them floats a window that leads nowhere, the bars stark against a gloomy sky. The dichotomy between the bride and the prisoners is more than a contrast between the intact and the broken, the clean and the dusty, for what is not explicitly shown is as significant as what is depicted. The bride is waiting, but she will not be reached so long as the chains and bars remain, and the rift broadens. The bride is close, but her proximity is tempered by being both untouchable and unable to touch. The bride is longing; the prisoners dare not look, but in a gap in the rocks, midway to the rift is a hand, fingers reaching up to the sky, its body hidden from view. The rift is large, the chains strong, but, Al-Akhal suggests, the determination to return to the land remains. In its purest sense, The Rift evokes a disassociation born of trauma, as well as the sense of futility of being unable to intervene, while the use of the surreal engages in an alternative articulation of memory. While alternative, abstract memory narratives are a frequent device in literary reflections on trauma, parallels can be drawn with Al-Akhal’s piece, as ‘traumatic memory usually emerges in visual images or other sense memories and affects, rather than narrative articulations, indicating an incomplete and conflicted relation to memory’ (Vickroy 2005, 129). In this respect, her work equally functions as an extension of Bal’s cultural memory (1999, x), as the images bridge the trauma of her recollection and the emotional response of the viewer. While the land as it is commonly viewed is absent (for there is no soil for the groves to clutch, here), the embodiment of Palestine as a bride invokes the trope of the feminized land (Benvenisti 2002, 255–256; Malhi-Sherwell 2001;

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Darwish 2008, 205; Al-Qasim [in Jayyusi] 1987, 381–384; Ali 2007, 42– 45), and locates the nation as the one to be longed for, and ultimately, possessed. The relevance of The Rift is heightened by the date of production, 1999, 51 years after the Nakba and the Al-Akhal’s displacement from Jaffa. From this perspective, the legacy of the Nakba and the occupation that followed are seen from the vantage point of (at the time) the present, and the spectral form of the bride (as well as the bodies of the prisoners) corresponds with Andrew Jones’ suggestion that ‘the past of places is nearly always remembered by reference to the body’ (2007, 58). In this case, Palestine is remembered less through the jagged peaks in the background, and more so through the bride who presents a corporeal representation of the nation and the land. However, Mary N. Layoun (2001) urges a deeper interrogation of the presence of the bride in national cultural discourse. In her reflection on the film, Wedding in Galilee (1987), she draws attention to the ‘generative basis’ on which the bride is linked to the land and the implications of the juxtaposition of nation with woman, for ‘following mundanely on that trope, the representation of the fulfilment or consummation of desire is possession and control of the land-as-woman. The profoundly problematic nature of this latter equation is conspicuous; increasingly, there are challenges to its putative naturalness’ (2001, 147). Layoun raises an important point that extends beyond Wedding in Galilee and connects to Rose’s (1999) broader consideration of the gendered gaze. Both in terms of conceptualizing the land and the framing of the female form in the national discourse, Layoun and Rose emphasize the chain of cause-and-effect, and the power of the visual medium in shaping the social implications in the long-term. Within this power is a further possibility, for the female artistic gaze to revisit figures, such as the virgin and the mother, and create an alternative perspective that reimagines both symbols and imbues them with multiple narratives.

5.3

Absence and the Figure of the Mother

There is a land called Palestine and I am one of her daughters… (Alshaibi 2006, 52)

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In Sama Alshaibi’s collection, Birthright (2004–2005), the female form occupies the frame, at times in its entirety, at others in part: a face gazing into the lens, or thoughtfully at the floor, a midriff adorned with drawings and poetry; hands that extend a clutch of Gazan olives towards the viewer. The images, sepia with scorched edges (shot with Type 55 film), hark to an indeterminate time, Alshaibi’s dress and the stark background (a dusty floor, stone walls, and at times, the silhouette of a sun-lit window) afford the viewer little inkling of whether the images were captured in 2004, 1948, or earlier. The austere timelessness of the surroundings is no coincidence, however, for the absence of a vista or a vivid background is replicated in a number of Alshaibi’s works and represents ‘a sense of alienation’ felt as she moved between countries as a child (Bajaj 2015). If Al-Akhal’s work charts the direct experience of the events of 1948 and her flight from Jaffa, then Alshaibi brings an insight into the legacy of the Nakba, felt by subsequent generations. In the essay that accompanies Birthright, Alshaibi (2006) describes the dislocation that began with her maternal grandparents escape from Jaffa to Nablus in 1948 (after hearing news of the massacre at Deir Yassin), before finally moving to Baghdad. Once settled in Iraq, Alshaibi’s parents met and married, and moved to Basra, where Alshaibi was born (Alshaibi 2006, 36). The years that followed brought further conflict with the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), and the second generation, Alshaibi’s parents, once again experienced the trauma of conflict and displacement. After fleeing Iraq, her family moved between countries in the region, and the repeated dislocation highlighted the complexities of being both a Palestinian and Iraqi refugee. ‘In each country where we lived, some aspect of our mixed Iraqi-Palestinian, Shiite-Sunni or American identity [the family lived in Iowa between 1973 and 1979] was problematic. Every year I started a new school weary of describing who I was and where I was from’ (Alshaibi 2006, 37). In 1985, the family relocated to the United States, yet in later interviews, the question, ‘where are you from?’ persisted, as Neelika M. Jayawardane recollects, Sama can tell you that there was never one answer for that question. An inquiry about origins is often innocent, but it is also a question asked of the perceived other at security checkpoints, by border-keepers. It demands an easy origin, a pinpoint, a reference through which the inquirer can easily package the supplicant at the border. (Jayawardane 2014, 156)

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The absence of ‘an easy origin’ and the inability to be ‘packaged’ is palpable in Alshaibi’s work, and it is powerfully addressed through her exploration of the types of absence, as well as how absence is enacted, and on whom. A double dislocation in part, guides the diversity of absences: first, through the exile of Alshaibi’s grandparents from Palestine; next, by her parents’ flight from Iraq. In each context, Alshaibi draws on the female form to negotiate issues of power, agency, war, politics, and exile. In doing so, her pieces become an active form of memory work, but as Alshaibi (2006) suggests, the memories are not alive, but rather reanimations of past memories. ‘For one exiled and unable to have a living connection with a homeland, any representations of identity connected to that homeland are also representations of death; a homeland from which one has been long “unhoused” means that one’s memory of it remains mummified’ (2006, 39). The ‘living connection’, in the context of Alshaibi’s work, emerges through the body—her body—and by doing so, Alshaibi calls witness to absence and erasure, as well as bears witness (ibid., 40). In the Birthright collection, Alshaibi gently lifts a pendant towards the camera. On the black thread dangles Handala, Naji Al Ali’s refugee child who bears witness to the Nakba and its aftermath, a character synonymous with the trauma of Palestinian displacement. Behind the pendant, Alshaibi turns her head to the side, her face obscured, while the top of a white bustier pops in its clarity along the base of the image. The female form fills the frame, but the focus is on Handala, the surrounding figure (Alshaibi’s shoulders, neck, chin, and chest) smoothed into a blur, and the small pendant is located as the focus of the viewer’s scrutiny. Whether close- or long-shot, Alshaibi’s images connect with exile, erasure, and absence in a multi-layered process of memory work that is perceptible in her other collections, including Between Two Rivers (2008–2009), the collaborative short film with Ala’ Younis, End of September (2009–2010), and the short film and photography collection created with Dena Al-Adeeb, Baghdadi Mem/Wars (2010). Birthright is, however, notable for its reflection on absence that is not restricted to the absent land or nation. Rather, Alshaibi draws our attention to ‘the world’s denial of the Palestinian humanity’ (Alshaibi 2004–2005), a denial that forms a broader absence of recognition and erasure of sites that works in tandem with the absence and mourning created by exile.

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The realism brought by Alshaibi’s visual presence prompts further questions regarding the gaze, both in relation to how the artist in exile conceptualizes the land, as well as how representations of the land position (and frame) the female subject. If the contours of Halaby’s work suggest desire for the female form, and Al-Akhal’s spectral bride exudes longing and loss, then Birthright interrogates the association between the land, nurturing, and motherhood. In Target Practice, Alshaibi, at the time six-months pregnant with her son, stands in a path of sunlight, her vest stretched midway over her stomach, and her black skirt loose around her hips. Motionless, Alshaibi stands in the centre of a circle of olives, four lines extending compass-like in each direction. As the title hints, she is located in the crosshairs, a target, but also ‘the victim and the victimizer’, treading ‘the delicate line of perspective’ (Alshaibi 2006, 49). Although the scene is sparse, the few elements (the olives, her body, the sunlight) express a paradoxical symbolism that reflects the complexity of the Palestinian case. On the one hand, the olives are synonymous with peace, and (in light of the previously mentioned image) with Gaza. Small, shrivelled, and carefully arranged, there is a gentleness in their presence. However, they also represent crosshairs and by extension the brutality of the occupation that has, in particular, afflicted Gaza. There is an additional aspect, too, that can be read in the context of Alshaibi’s works, where she draws on the circle as a symbol, that ‘is about the recycling of history, repeating and recreating the same mistakes through time, through one’s life, and yet, paradoxically, the vision of the perfect form of wholeness’ (Bajaj 2015). Whether on the ground or drawn on her stomach, curling around verses of Fadwa Tuqan’s poetry (In My Country’s Embrace; Birthright ), her pregnant form interrogates the role of woman, the mother-to-be, and the mother in the narrative on Palestine, distance, and erasure. Whether representing the nation, a people (‘the body (my body) was the symbol of a country or people’ [ibid.]), or the conflict, Alshaibi’s work uses the body to devastating effect, as she becomes an extension of the broader political and social discourse. As she explains, The media’s largest triumph is the reduction of the Palestinian persona into a single crude terrorist ‘body’. This propaganda is perhaps most palpable in mediate attitudes about mothers whose sons kill in the cause for nationhood. The perception exists that Palestinian mothers are suicide-bomber-producing machines […] Freedom fighter, terrorist,

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soldier, insurgent, peacekeeper – this conundrum of perception taking place in my womb was a microcosm, of the agenda of righteousness played out in modern day politics. (Alshaibi 2006, 46)

To circumvent the media narrative, Alshaibi positions the image of the mother-to-be as a figure of resistance, as much as a ‘retrospective witness’ who prompts us to remember a land that is steadily being erased by geography and political rhetoric (Alshaibi 2004–2005). This is particularly significant when considered in the context of motherhood in national and cultural narratives, which frames the mother as the ‘bearer of meaning’, the figurehead of a collectivity, and a symbol of nature (Mulvey 2015, 7; Lentin 2006, 465; Helphand 2005, 263; Yuval-Davis 1997, 45–46). Within this, the mother, and motherhood, jostles with issues of agency and action. The challenge lies, as Laura Mulvey suggests, with the positioning of woman as a ‘bearer of meaning’ who is ‘not [a] maker of meaning’ (2015, 7). Ronit Lentin shares this perspective in her consideration of the femina sacra, where woman is placed, at the mercy of sovereign power […] due to her function as a vehicle of ethnic cleansing, and to her sexual vulnerability […] becomes femina sacra at the mercy of sovereign power, she who can be killed, but also impregnated […] The body of woman creates and contains birth-nations and demarcates territories, and is therefore the basis of nation-states. (Lentin 2006, 465)

While Mulvey (2015) provides a clear argument for the lack of agency held by woman, Lentin’s reflection contains a deeper subtlety: on the one hand, woman is ‘at the mercy’ and ‘a vehicle’ to whom actions are done (‘killed’, ‘impregnated’) (2006, 465). On the other, woman is a creator, demarcating nations, countries, and areas (Lentin 2006, 465). However, while there is a degree of power in the role of the creator, we cannot overlook how the role emerges, particularly if it is a result of war and/or occupation. In Birthright, Alshaibi presents the viewer with a mother-to-be who is also a figure of resistance, a decision that assists the disconnection between Nash’s ‘historical connections with heterosexual male power’ (2008). Instead, Alshaibi positions the pregnant form as an equal and active protagonist, rather than a passive bearer, in the Palestinian national narrative.

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Embodying Loss and Exile

In this final section, we move towards an absence that is total. For Halaby and Al-Akhal, the land and landscapes that they painted were directly experienced, Palestine being the land of their birth, and for Halaby’s family, the displacement initially occurred within Jerusalem. Alshaibi, born in Mosul and raised in the United States, composed Birthright during her journey to Palestine, the images caught in situ, with an awareness of the challenges negotiated in order to reach the country, as well as an understanding of the temporariness of her stay. In several of Mona Hatoum’s pieces, however, absence is invoked through their locations and narratives, as her subjects (whether the artist herself, or in Measures of Distance (1988) her mother) are ‘dislocated’. Both the body and the trope of dislocation feature in Hatoum’s works, the body seemingly referring to politics, gender, exile, and/or memory in pieces such as Under Siege (1982), Jardin Public (1993), Corps Étranger (1994), and Keffieh (1993–1999). When locating these tropes (politics and gender, among others), ‘seemingly’ is an important addition, for while the pieces bring to mind the occupation and gender issues to varying degrees, there is the risk of ascribing meaning in lieu of the deeper nuances of the piece. In an interview with Janine Antoni in 1998, Antoni noted the recurring questions that Hatoum negotiates in interviews regarding her culture, whether Arab, Palestinian, and/or as a woman. Hatoum’s response highlighted the spontaneous reaction of the viewer that precludes the possibility of alternative stories in the pieces. ‘If you come from an embattled background there is often the expectation that your work should somehow articulate the struggle or represent the voice of the people. That’s a tall order […] [and] I find myself often wanting to contradict those expectations’ (Antoni 1998). Hatoum’s work, like other artists, requires the viewer to tread a fine line: on the one hand, the viewer must keep an open mind and embrace the narratives in their uniqueness; at times addressing regional politics, at others a conflict of another variety. On the other hand, Hatoum’s pieces are visually, physically, and emotionally immersive, as she aims for affect first, and meaning second, I always find it problematic when museums and galleries want to put up an explanatory text on the wall. It fixes the meaning and limits the reading of the work and doesn’t allow the viewer to have this very expansive imaginative interpretation of their own which reflects on their experience. […]

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My work [is] always constructed with the viewer in mind. The viewer is somehow implicated or even visually or psychologically entrapped in some of the installations. (Antoni 1998)

The confluence of ‘contradicting expectations’ and ‘visually or psychologically entrapping’ the viewer is achieved in her works through the use of the body and, more significantly, intimacy. While the use of the body (and its excretions) is not unusual in art, Hatoum’s pieces are remarkable for her use of the body in its entirety, at times capturing the naked form whole; at others, only parts: hair, blood, or the internal organs via an endoscopy (Corps Étranger). Conversely, the absence of the body in a piece can be as powerful, as Jaleh Mansoor observes in her consideration of Interior Landscape (2008), where ‘the body, personal and political, is missing, leaving a ghostly vestige’ (2010, 58). Through varied degrees of proximity and intimacy, Hatoum takes the viewer on a multi-layered journey, one that is narrative driven and linked to the broader themes of gender, conflict, and/or memory, as well as the liminal boundaries set by distance, norms, and trust. When considered in the context of absence, Hatoum negotiates loss through reflections on dislocation and distance. For Edward Said (2011), the dislocation in Hatoum’s pieces is organic and intentional; the sensation travelling from the personal to the public. The result can be disquieting or paradoxical, for ‘not only does one feel that one cannot return to the way things were, but there is a sense of just how acceptable and “normal” these oddly distorted objects have become, just because they remain very close to what they have left behind’ (Said 2011, 108). For Hatoum, the geographical dislocation occurred twice: having fled Palestine to Lebanon after 1948 (where Hatoum was born), her family was displaced once more during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). Already studying in London in 1975, Hatoum was, in her own words, ‘stranded’, and returned to Palestine in 1996, when she exhibited Present Tense (1996) at the Anadiel Gallery (now the Al Ma’mal Foundation) in East Jerusalem (Schulenberg 2014, 11; Antoni 1998). In her reflection on being ‘stranded’, absence is wrapped in expressions of ‘tremendous loss’, ‘a sense of dislocation’, ‘a sense of disjunction’, and, in pieces such as Light Sentence (1992), dislocation emerges through ‘a sense of instability and restlessness in the work’ (Antoni 1998). Instability, among other sensations, is represented through installations that include electricity, barbed wire, and furniture, and while in each the human is

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absent, the human presence is felt (an empty crib; electrical wires that come alive when touched; barbed wire that curtails the movement of the viewer). In others, the body is the focus, and Measures of Distance unites the trifecta at the heart of this chapter: gender, the absent land, and the body. At first, there is silence, before the darkness gives way to a blue-tinged scene and lines of writing emerge, overlaying the scene beyond. A dim light is provided by a lamp and at first, the body framing the left side of the screen is obscured, the lens closed in on the form. The visual element emerges slowly, lulling the viewer awake through the smooth transition. The audio contrasts this: a burst of laughter by Hatoum’s mother, brings a snap of joy through the grainy vista. As viewers, we have the sensation of voyeurism as we listen to a conversation between mother and daughter that is perhaps not meant for our ears, while our eyes cautiously take in the scene, as though the view is not for us to see. One and a half minutes on, a new voice enters, overlaying the conversation. Hatoum softly reads five letters sent by her mother, each responding to queries sent by Hatoum from London to Beirut in 1981. The contents of the letters are an emotional journey compressed into 16 minutes, each sentence concentrated in its affect. The emotions move between longing (‘How I miss you and long to feast my eyes on your beautiful face that brightens up my days’ [00:01:42]) and frustration (‘I wish this bloody war would be over soon, so that you and your sisters can return’ [00:02:24]); entreating (‘why don’t you come back and live here, and we can make all the photographs and tapes you want’ [00:02:33]) and self-reflecting (‘[your letters] make me think about myself in a way that I hadn’t looked at before’ [00:07:49]). Opening with love and regret at the distance between them, they travel through the individual—a recollection of Hatoum’s transition from ‘the little devil’ to ‘a quiet and shy little girl’; the peculiarity of the phrase ‘lie back and think of England’ and a woman’s right to enjoy sex—to the collective, as the fourth letter touches on exile, and the fifth on the violence unfolding in Lebanon and its impact on daily life (‘the post office was completely destroyed by that car bomb’ [00:13:30]). The fourth letter, in which Hatoum’s mother reflects on Palestine, displacement, and fragmentation, is, like much of the piece, poignant in its fragmented delivery. As Hatoum reads the letters aloud, she pauses longer than a sentence’s end would need, at times the hiatus extending and gaining intensity through the static vibration that is undiminished by

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the background conversation, which tries to fill the auditory void. While the ellipses offer a transition between the letters, Hatoum’s breakages, at times mid-sentence, introduce fragmentation to her delivery and enable it to function actively as well as thematically, Before we ended up in Lebanon, we were living in our own land in a village with all our family and friends around us, always ready to lend a hand. We felt happy and secure, and it was paradise compared to where we are now. So, if I seem to be always irritable and impatient, it’s because life was very hard when we left Palestine. Can you imagine us having to separate from all our loved ones? Leaving everything behind and starting again from scratch, our family scattered all over the world? Some of our relatives we never saw again to this day. I personally felt as if I had been stripped naked of my very soul and I’m not just talking about the land and property that we left behind, but with that our identity and our sense of pride in who we are went out of the window.

* Yes, of course, I suppose this must have affected you as well, because being born in exile, in a country that does not want you, is not fun at all.

* And, now that you and your sisters have left Lebanon, you’re again living in another exile, in a culture that is totally different to your own. So, when you talk about a feeling of fragmentation, and not knowing where you really belong, well, this has been the painful reality of all our people. (Hatoum 1988, [00:10:40–00:13:03])

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The disconnection that emerges when the text is transcribed and separated emphasizes the ~scapes of Measures of Distance. The land is mourned as an extension of the body (‘I personally felt as if I had been stripped naked of my very soul’ [00:11:40]), as much as the sense of self (‘our identity and our sense of pride’ [00:12:00]). Her naked body, meanwhile, is revealed in fragments that during her reflection on exile decrease in proximity, but increase in intimacy, as her full form is revealed in the shower, her arms raised as she pushes her hair back. Throughout the piece, Hatoum’s gaze connects with the maternal form from various angles, at times focusing her mother’s back, her stomach, her breasts, all the while overlaid with text, conversation, and her own voice. If the multitude of layers seems chaotic, Hatoum’s blend achieves the opposite, the images and voices folding over one another into a package of nostalgia, love, and sensuality. On the latter, sensuality, the maternal form interrogates the possibility for an alternative subject and gaze that challenges the dichotomy of the active/male and passive/female gaze (Mulvey 2015, 11; Nash 2008, 71–72), as well as conservative perspectives that question the sensuality of the maternal form (Betterton 1996, 2014; Kristeva 1985, 2014). That both Hatoum and her mother were naked during the filming of Measures of Distance brings not only a female (and familial) gaze, but a naked one, too. In doing so, Hatoum’s gaze opens the encounter to one that is egalitarian in its corporeal intimacy, yet the new boundaries that it draws inadvertently realign her mother’s body with a different kind of land, one that is possessed by the male other and framed as ‘property’ that is in flux. In her reflection on her husband’s response to the project, her mother observes that, ‘It’s as if you had trespassed on his property and now he feels like there are some weird exchanges going on between us from which he is excluded’ [00:08:50]. With sensuality comes the possibility of self-reflection and exploration (‘[your letters] make me think about myself in a way that I hadn’t looked at before’), but it also raises new possibilities regarding how the body is valued, read, and used. In the case of value and reading, the maternal form has been (beyond Hatoum’s piece) metaphorically and symbolically associated with the land and landscape; the subtext of her body being associated with ‘property’ and the act of ‘trespass’ build on an older narrative that informs national discourse throughout history. When harnessed, however, the naked maternal form becomes a source of memory, emotion (painful and pleasurable), and honest connection, the naked gaze creating

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an intimacy between the viewer, the artist, and her subject that evokes Jill Bennett’s ‘affective contagion’, as the viewer ‘feels rather than simply sees the event’ (2004, 32). The affective power of Hatoum’s gaze in Measures of Distance allows the female gaze to go beyond pleasure and desire, as problematized by Rose at the start of this chapter, and enables the landbody-mother to become a space of memory, exploration, and familial and national longing. Similarly, revisiting the concept of the land as the mother, the female body affords an alternative embodiment of the absent motherland, one that is disconnected from ‘its historical connections with heterosexual male power’ (Nash 2008), yet is evocative of the fragmentation that is felt in the absence of the mother and the motherland, as much as the exile from both (Betterton 1996, 189). *

The works considered in this chapter demonstrate the multiple ways that the female form connects with the land and the landscape, whether captured on the cusp of immense change or in its lingering aftermath. From in situ paintings of a shifting political and geographical landscape to recollections of scenes of trauma; onwards to embodied reconnections in Palestine, and finally, the convergence of lived memories and the naked maternal form compiled in the diaspora. Threading through their narratives, the Nakba remains a constant reference point: it is the beginning of their travails, and the end of the land as it had been. However, Palestine is recalled through the juxtaposition of Bal’s (1999) understanding of cultural memory, memory in its original sense, and Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory (1997). The result, in cases where the Nakba has not been experienced directly, is a cultural postmemory that ‘links the past to the present and the future’ (Bal 1999, vii), while at the same time being ‘directly connected to the past’, despite being ‘generationally distant’ (Hirsch 1997, 22). While the three appear to sit comfortably alongside one another, Ernst Van Alphen’s caution regarding the use of the term ‘memory’, and thereafter ‘postmemory’ when connecting to the past, is worth revisiting. As Van Alphen observes, ‘The term postmemory risks […] becoming unwittingly symptomatic of the desire of the generation of survivors’ children to connect to the past of their parents, a desire that remains frustrated. This desire is so strong because of the radical dis-connection with that past, because of ‘absent memory’ [emphasis in the original] (2006, 487).

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The ‘desire’ to which Van Alphen refers is present in various forms in the pieces featured, both in the gaze and narrative of each artist, as well as in the broader readings of land and landscape in Palestine. Despite this commonality, the artists discussed in this chapter waver from the need for caution: whether working during or (long) after the Nakba, the ‘dis-connection’ is not wholly complete, so long as Palestine remains occupied. In this sense, Palestine is not lost in a distant past: the landscape might be lined with new roads and barriers, and the hillsides marked by settlements, but the possibility and the tangibility of return remains strong. The diversity of the female gazes also shows that desire can be ‘so strong’ (Van Alphen 2006, 487), while being re-articulated in a way that differs from the male-informed understanding of desire and pleasure. At the same time, the works of Halaby, Al-Akhal, Alshaibi, and Hatoum offer the possibility of ‘dis-connecting’ not from ‘the past of their parents’ (Van Alphen 2006, 487), but rather from ideas of the motherland being inextricably tied to ‘historical connections with heterosexual male power’ (Nash 2008). In this way, new connections are fostered that provide alternative ways of reading and remembering the land and landscape from afar. Those connections integrate the female form as an active participant who is complex, determined, and engaged; no longer a passive trope in which woman-is-land. The artists and their works studied in this chapter are but a few of the Palestinian cultural practitioners who draw on the female form as inspiration (one could also look at Rheim Alkadhi’s Collective Knotting Together of Hairs (40 Kilometres of the Narrowest Margin) (2012); Mary Tuma’s Body Extensions (1993); Jumana Abboud’s audiovisual piece, Holding my Breath (2006), and Iman Al Sayed’s Geometry and Statistics of Displacement (2015), as continuing paths) and as the occupation continues, the female form evolves as a symbolic, active figure in contemporary narratives about the past, present, and future.

References Al-Akhal, T. (2003). Historical Turning Points That Affected My Life. Artist Statement. Birzeit Virtual Gallery. http://virtualgallery.birzeit.edu/p/ps?url= artistmonth/Alakhal/artiststatement. Accessed 1 Aug 2018. Al-Qasim, S. (1987). From: After the Apocalypse. In S. K. Jayyusi (Ed.), Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology (pp. 381–384). New York: Columbia University Press.

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CHAPTER 6

Monumenting Our Pasts: Monuments, What Are They Now? Manca Bajec

One will always question a past that is not remembered on plaques, in stone, on paper, in media. While wind and rain weather the sculptures that stand to remember our histories, it is the act of consistent re-construction, of those same stories of the past, that creates a space for surpassing any doubts of their truth value. Omarska, Kozarac, and Trnopolje are small villages in close proximity to the city of Prijedor. Prijedor is situated in the Serb Republic or Republika Srpska (the Serb entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina). The region appeared in international media in 1992 when a group of journalists reported on the brutal concentration camps at various sites in the area. One of the journalists Ed Vulliamy explained, ‘It was said we had “discovered” Omarska, but this was an inaccurate flattery. Diplomats, politicians, aid workers and intelligence officers had known about

This article was prepared in 2017 as part of a chapter of the author’s doctoral dissertation. M. Bajec (B) Journal of Visual Culture, London, UK © The Author(s) 2021 O. Otele et al. (eds.), Post-Conflict Memorialization, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54887-2_6

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the place for months and kept it secret. All we did was announce and denounce it to the world’ (1999, 603). Since the end of the war, the region has remained in a static moment of denial. Republika Srpska did not have a planned format for reconciliation, as they do not acknowledge the idea of the very existence of the camps and the events that occurred there. There are no monuments to the victims of the camps in the region, apart from one in the village of Kozarac, which remains mostly populated by the Muslim community, although a large part of the population now resides out of the country and only return occasionally, leaving the newly rebuilt village practically abandoned. There were a number of camps that existed in the region including Omarska, Keraterm, Trnopolje, and Manjaˇca. Omarska, an iron ore mine before the war, is located in close proximity to the city of Prijedor and is most frequently referred to as being the most brutal of the camps. Before the wars of the 1990s, Omarska was relatively unknown; it is now notable as one of the only concentration camps of post-Second World War II Europe. It opened in early 1992, and within the few months of functioning, Omarska held over 3000 prisoners. It is said that several thousands of people perished in the region and in the Omarska camp, although many are still missing and mass graves continue to be discovered. In 2004, ArcelorMittal, one of the world’s largest steel companies acquired 51% of shares in the company, therefore standing as the majority owner. ArcelorMittal initially committed to building a monument at the site of the now functioning mine, but have since done nothing (Schuppli 2012). Instead once a year they allow the victims, their families, and others who come in solidarity, to enter the camp for three hours, during which time a ceremony is held, organised by the visitors. The annual commemoration occurs on August 6th and is preceded by an evening at the former camp Trnopolje: a school before the war that is now in ruins. From the evening of August 5th, until the afternoon of August 6th, a form of memorial exists, as a mass of bodies gather, from all parts of Europe and even the world, to remember together. This year, this experience, was very different for me, this year I was towards the end or supposed end, or close to the end of my research, and felt more aware of what to expect. I planned what I thought was the best route to get from the little seaside village of Novigrad in Croatia to Prijedor in Republika Srpska, a 400 kilometre drive. In an attempt to avoid traffic and to cut my driving time, I drove in a diagonal line from my departure point to my destination. This decision meant driving through

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villages and over hills. I didn’t have a GPS system but a map and was left with no phone signal for a long stretch of the drive. The beginning of the trip went smoothly with little traffic and beautiful scenic driving. Soon after what I thought was almost halfway through my trip, and almost as soon as I got off the highway, there was little to no signage. I drove from one village into another, recognising only every other or third name of the villages on my map. I didn’t come across many people, as most of the villages seemed abandoned and there weren’t many cars on the roads either. After a couple of wrong turns and the distraction of the stunning views, I managed to find a very small, almost hidden, border crossing. According to some people I spoke with in the following days, it used to be quite a busy border crossing, as the town close to it was a very developed industrial town, Velika Kladuša. The journey seemed never-ending after arriving into Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). I drove past a village that had a river running through it, and the villagers were gathered on the banks, enjoying the cool waters in the summer heat. Meanwhile, I was in my overheated car, which at the point when my air conditioning stopped working, turned into an oven on wheels. But slowly, I made my way to Prijedor and driving into the town, I recognised where I was. I made my way to Hotel Prijedor which was also next to the Motel Prijedor, both close to the river bank. I went inside each of them and surprisingly they were both full to capacity. I found this a little strange because this is hardly a tourist town but I was told about a B&B nearby. I made my way to a café to relax for a moment and call the B&B. At this point, I had been driving and getting lost for over 8 hours. I called the B&B and a nice gentleman said they had a room for me and explained their location. It was only minutes away, so I said I would be there in about 20 minutes, and slowly finished my coffee while checking with friends about the evening events. Leaving the café and walking with my two bags, I looked into a small alley and a man popped his head out of a door, and said, ‘you must be Manca, welcome’. A little odd but then again, in such a small town, everyone notices the foreigner wandering around. I paid e15 cash on the spot, and was shown to a large double bed with a view of the stunning yet derelict shopping mall on the main square: a spectacular view, I was quite pleased with myself. I showered and contacted Four Faces of Omarska, explaining that I’ll be coming to Trnopolje for the first event. I seemed so sure, getting into the car again, that I’ll find my way to the former camp. I drove for twenty minutes on the main road and turned at the sign, and continued down a road running through Trnopolje. Driving down the road, I was looking

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for the stone eagle monument that I had seen the year before—the only monument on the site, built in a style similar to 1950s monuments, it stands in front of the old school, dedicated to Serbian forces. But I couldn’t recognise anything. I drove very slowly which attracted the attention of some people in their gardens. I decided to turn around and try again as I felt I must have missed it. I went up and down the street twice and finally got the courage to ask a man mowing his lawn whether this was Trnopolje, and whether the village continues further down. He replied that it goes further down for more kilometres so I turned back again and continued driving. Suddenly, I recognised the little shop, the white building, and stone eagle. There were only three cars parked in the front-yard of the school so I parked next to them although I hesitated for a moment when I noticed people from the little shop staring. I heard noise coming from behind the building and made my way through a field of tall grass. On a concrete basketball court stood a white tent, similar to ones at festivals, with long tables underneath. People were sitting and chatting, and one table was a make-shift kitchen with a lot of onions being chopped. I recognised my friends in the crowd and went to say hello. We all stood in amazement, staring at the back of the school, where large oriental-looking carpets were being spread out and a projection was being prepared. Everyone was ready to camp out there for the evening. I assumed I was going to sleep in the car if necessary. The sky got darker, getting ready for a spectacular storm, a proper summer storm after a hot day; clouds danced across the sky and the sunset colours went from pinks and oranges to deep blues and purples. The sun was setting and in the distance, I could hear the sound of the prayers from a mosque. I missed that sound, the familiarity of it. Then the thunder started. The wind blew; more thunder, and all of a sudden, the sky exploded in buckets of rain and bursts of wind. We hid under the tents, but the gusts of wind started lifting the tent. The tallest of men stood on the edges and held the aluminium construction while the rest of us moved anything valuable to centre of the tent so it wouldn’t get washed by the rain. The rain continued and there was a discussion about how to solve the matter of the evening of planned events and speakers. As soon as the storm calmed to a drizzle, I followed two friends to take a closer look at the school. Coming to the back steps, we were greeted by a blonde man in his forties, he was standing inside the building behind what was once a glass door, but now with no glass only the aluminium frame remained. He was introduced to me as the

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‘Actor’. He smiled and started poking his head through the frame and said, ‘Look…in the camp…out of the camp’. Everyone laughed! I smiled but felt I needed some form of approval to laugh. We made our way back to the tent to find out where the events would now take place. It was almost dark. S, saw me, smiled and gave me a hug. I met S on my previous trip. He looked up and said something along the lines of: ‘I hear it was in Kozarac earlier today, the storm, and now here; tomorrow it’s supposed to be in Omarska […] storming from camp to camp’. Again, everyone laughed. I remembered how it rained the last time I was there, and that when I offered S my umbrella he replied with a smile and said something like, ‘It stopped raining for me in 1992’. There were a lot of people, and not enough cars. I yelled out that I have plenty of space and four youngsters and a dog got into the car with me. They were very sweet, but completely unsure of what they were doing there and like most other teenagers, chatting and gossiping while I was trying to figure out whether I was lost again. We drove to another village, Kozarac, to the House of Peace (Ku´ca mira), where the event was to take place. Dripping in one by one, the living room or social space became filled with people chatting away and lighting up cigarettes. The walls were covered with what I assumed were pictures of people that had died in the region, and images of previous events and people that had visited. An elderly woman walked in and started hugging people, ran off again into the kitchen and suddenly I could smell the scent of Bosnian coffee being brewed on the stove, like my grandparents used to make. We sat around big tables, when the electricity went off, everyone began laughing and in a moment candles were lit and we all continued chatting. Not much later a projector was up and the events started with a panel discussion and book launch by Four Faces of Omarska. A great discussion and debate followed the presentation but by that point I was exhausted and finding it difficult to listen and communicate in a foreign language. This was followed by another book launch by a woman that I recognised. It took me a couple of minutes, but I remembered that I had met her at Royal Holloway University some years before, when I was asked to speak at the 20th Anniversary of Srebrenica. This woman was in the audience and after the symposium, she stayed for drinks and all I remember was that she wasn’t very pleased about the event or the presentations. She began the presentation of her own book and quickly went into a speech about intruding foreigners and artists coming to Bosnia. Sitting right next to her, I started to feel incredibly unwanted. I fiddled in my chair. As she

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finished, S stood up and spoke briefly. His exact words I don’t remember, but he said something like, ‘Today in Trnopolje, as the rain started and we huddled under the tent, I was approached by two Bosnian women, they came to me and asked, “S, who are all these foreigners here, what are all these Serbs doing here?”’. Stood quietly and continued that unfortunately they decided not to join us now and talk together about why we have decided to gather. He said nothing more, but it was enough for everyone to remain quiet for some moments. The evening continued and suddenly Florence Hartmann walked in with Ed Vulliamy. I was pleasantly surprised that after so many years the journalists that were among the first to speak about these camps in western media attend these two days of commemoration. By now it was past midnight and I was getting worried I wouldn’t be able to drive back without getting lost again. My friends decided to leave so I asked if I could drive behind them, since there was little street lighting and I was already tired and feeling emotional from the long day. I woke up to a cloudy and muddy day but at least it wasn’t raining. I followed some friends and we drove into the procession of cars, surrounded by police, that inched towards the factory. This experience felt quite different from the previous time I was there. I knew what to expect, and yet, parking my car in the long serpent-like organised queue and walking through the mud, it seemed exactly the same, as if time had stopped. It probably does so each year for those few hours. The Omarska mine complex is constructed of three structures: the red hangar, the administration building, which we can see in the ITN videos from 1992 (ITN YouTube video), and the so-called White House, where I was told the torture and murders took place. There is a specific dymanic of movements that happens for those few hours. People walk in and out of those buildings, some looking for specific places, some recalling stories they remember or had heard from someone else, and some drifting in silence. One cannot but feel the pain and anguish watching the faces of those who lost their families there and the ones that went through an unbelievable living hell and survived. The same ceremony was taking place that I had seen last time I was there: white balloons, with the names of the victims hanging on tags from the string, were filling up the ceilings of the White House. This time there was an official ceremony, which was interrupted last time because of the rain. The speakers stood in front of the administration building and spoke

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about the gathering, told stories about the victims that died there and about the necessity of breaking the silence that was caught in the invisible boundaries of this site. For a moment I felt uncomfortable, hearing descriptions of torture and death through a microphone/megaphone was something uncommon and surreal. There were a couple of speakers from different organisations and one told the story of an old man who was caught by the army in Višegrad during the Second World War and was taken to the Mehmed Paša Sokolovi´c Bridge, where he was stabbed and thrown in the river. The man survived and continued to live in Višegrad where he regularly saw the perpetrator that tried to kill him. The story continues into the 1990s wars, when the old man was caught again by the same perpetrator but this time his throat is slit before he was thrown into the river to his death. The story was meant to warn people about keeping quiet and not standing up to the aggressor. I was slightly surprised as the mood of the ceremony took a more political direction compared to the subtle, quiet balloon ceremony I had witnessed before. I stood next to an elderly woman who started crying loudly when hearing these stories and was soon shushed by some men in front of us. It was different experience, but not in a way that I would personally think speaks of a reconciliation but rather of a desperate need for the breaking of invisible walls of silence that are suffocating the voices that wish to be heard. If we observe these moments that take place in this region as remains of a history and culture, a memory of a time past, what will the remains of our present be like in the future? What will memorialise this struggle for history and memory? These commemorative acts, which are mainly recorded via oral narratives, but also appear in the work of artists, are completely excluded from the narrative provided by Republika Srpska. In societies, where narrative plays a key role in the distribution of information and knowledge, the nation state described by James V. Wertsch and Doc M. Billingsley (2011), holds the ability to shape or manipulate the collective identity of the society. In spaces such as Republika Srpska, the decision over what history should be acknowledged in the textbooks used in educational institutions, creates the potential for manipulation of the masses, in an attempt to create a unified society in the present. Whether or not we are discussing the collective thought implemented by Republika Srpska or Bosnia and Herzegovina or whether the discussion returns to the nostalgic remains of a Yugoslavia, it is important to critically observe that it is no longer through violence that nation states are

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battling for control of their citizens’ subjectivity, but through the uses of mnemonic tools; removing these tools in order to attempt to irrigate ideas that do not stand within the limits of the nationally agreed curriculum. This complete suppression of dual or multiple historical narratives creates a divide excluding people that refuse a singular narrative, therefore immediately presenting themselves as a threat to the state. The Yugoslav Wars manifested in a problem that had not been seen on such a scale since the Second World War, an unexpected shift in a society living in relative peace erupting into an into a explosion of violence that spread between neighbours and within families. The results are 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. Furthermore, the building of monuments or markers in the public realm is often not possible. The removal or denial of these mnemonic tools has left the excluded members of society in need of alternative methods of memorialisation. The Yugoslav Wars saw civilians take up arms in addition to the presence of government-led militarised battle. This led a need for both local and international criminal court intervention. Since the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was the first war crime tribunal established by the UN. While crimes committed during the Wars were prosecuted both at the International Court Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and regional courts, there was a lack of support to deal with the consequences of civilian-on-civilian brutality. These seemed, to many, to have had a quality of similar to that of the Dayton Agreement (1995), apparently presenting a unified decision that results in progress, but in reality, creates long-running Cold War-like symptoms. The ICTY, on the other hand, could appear as if it might have provided some form of consolation, but to many it is seen as inefficient and far from aiding with reconciliation between the different nations involved in the war and the victims of the crimes. Support in the form of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) had been conceptualised as projects in development since the 1970s as a solution to, challenges in post-authoritarian societies which cannot be coped with by means of justice alone. This concerns, in particular, the contradiction between the political imperative to integrate a society in transition— victims, perpetrators, bystanders, and profiteers—and the ethical, social,

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and juridical imperatives to do justice to victims and to indict perpetrators. (Langenohl 2008, 48)

While a TRC could have potentially aided in the local reparation processes, following the dissolution of the first attempt, no other clear efforts have been made (Ili´c 2004). However, in 2008 an initiative called RECOM was formed. In the description about the initiative, it is noted as ‘a regional commission for the establishment of facts about war crimes and other serious violations of human rights committed in the former Yugoslavia from January 1, 1991 until December 31, 2001’ (RECOM n.d.). RECOM has called on government officials of former Yugoslav states to recognise its work and the establishment of facts and evidence it has collected. According to its website, and as of 2017, 580,000 citizens of former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) have signed the petition calling on their governments for recognition of RECOM and its work. The accountability gap in the post-conflict process has created a situation where there is a division amongst the people and their historicisation of the events that took place during the war. The region surrounding the city of Prijedor, as previously mentioned, is one of the most apparent examples of such a space with dissonant heritage, mainly because of the extent of the atrocities that were committed there, but also because it has seen a consistent flow of artistic initiatives, NGOs, journalists, and scholars entering and exiting the space. Could this be an attempt of ‘prescriptive forgetting’, as defined by Paul Connerton (2008)? It is a situation in which there is, ‘the incapacity to forget on the domestic level, and the risk of forgetting on the international level’ (Coppieters 2018, 580). Of the groups that have been working in the area, I will focus on two groups, Four Faces of Omarska and Most Mira. Both these groups centre their activities towards artistic or multi-disciplinary practices, in this way almost functioning as collectives, and their projects could be observed as forms of creative output or even artworks. The Four Faces of Omarska is a collective that observes ‘the strategies of memorial production from the position of those whose experience and knowledge have been subjugated, rejected, and excluded from public memory and public history’ (AICGS 2015). The name, Four Faces of Omarska, derives from reflections on four layers in the history of this mining complex: its establishment as an iron mine; its use as a concentration camp in 1992; ArcelorMittal’s acquisition; its use as a film location

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for the Serbian film, Saint George Slays the Dragon (Sveti Georgije ubiva aždahu). One of the founders of the Four Faces of Omarska, Milica Tomi´c, was also a member of the Monument Group, which was established in 2002 as a discussion group that focused on questioning forms of memorialisation in Former Yugoslavia and whether the state could assume the responsibility for building monuments that can represent the victims while also presenting an insight into their own role in the violence. Four Faces of Omarska also worked on mapping out relations of power. It was an attempt to further understand how to build a culture of collective memorialisation and instigate methods of implementing a unified but multi-vocal history. As one of the members of Four Faces of Omarska, Srdjan Hercigonja, explained, it is about the methodology of production, non-production, about members of the group taking on different roles and weaving a transdisciplinary way of thinking. The group (Four Faces of Omarska) applies artistic strategies, behaving almost as the agent through which ideas can be implemented. Coming into the space as outsiders from the victorious nation, Serbia, that is glorified in Republika Srpska, the members of the group initially had certain privileges. In this way, they were able to perform a role that others could not, taking on the idea of soft-power and instead using it for its own purposes. Through the use of artistic strategies and appropriating state strategies in order to create the desired political outcome, this group creates a form of appropriation of soft-power: appropriating the roles that the State should have set into place, but instead using their position to present their own ideological positions. The group does not create or function as a collective whose primary or even secondary role would include production, they behave more as supporters of local initiatives. What follows is an excerpt from a recent discussion with Hercigonja (SH). SH:

Basically, in our approach in Omarska, we never actually advocated for a monument, but we asked the question of what a monument would actually do: would it solve the problem, would it reconcile the different social or ethnic groups? Of course not, so there must be something more to be done than a monument. The monument is needed in our opinion because there is a need for the victims to have an object…literally an object, something that is touchable, tangible. As a proof that in that locality, in this place, they suffered and that something bad

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happened. This was the case with the White House, in which people are literally touching the walls, grabbing, and in need of a physical object to prove that something happened there. There is a need from everyone who is involved for something like that. For me, it is very interesting that we were the first Serbs that came to the commemoration in Omarska in 2010. But it is also interesting that as an artistic collective we never produced anything and we did not aim to produce any kind of art. It was our very presence that was productive in a way as it opened a political space for locals to get involved and for other people from Serbia to come, because no one had come before us. It was an ice-breaker. It wasn’t easy. The most difficult part was that we had to adopt an identity that was forced upon us and we accepted it despite enormous difficulties because we realised that was needed in order to gain a greater social acceptance or greater social inclusion, so that everyone could work together not just as a polarised organisation.

MB: SH:

Do you produce, in a sense—just not in the form of objects? Yes, we have these so-called working groups where we discuss media, memory, trauma, memorials, human rights, different artistic practices in relation to post-conflict, post-war, postYugoslav spaces and so on, and we do consider it as a form of performance, one which is open for everybody to participate in, so it is not only us, we do not moderate but we just give a space for the audience and public to participate.

MB:

Would you say that your presence in the space, once a year, is a form of performance? Yes, the ritual of coming. This year it will be the 8th year and that in itself is a form of production and also of performance. People coming to the space, of many different generations, associate memorialisation and commemoration with a tangible object and with the tradition of building monuments. But for one moment in a year there is a physicality, a physical mass of

SH: MB:

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SH: MB: SH:

MB: SH:

people in that one space, that create a physical object, formed of people? Yes, for three hours the memorial exists, always at the same time from 10.00 to 13.00. So, the memorial exists once a year for 3 hours? I was thinking about it in terms of a social sculpture but also in terms of what a memorial typically looks like. Every year panels are put in the same place, people move from one building to another, speeches take place. For me, it is interesting to think about what kind of monument it becomes. I imagine that the place becomes a completely politically independent space, so these three hours it is not part of Republika Srpska, it is not part of the municipality or the city of Prijedor. It’s a form of ex-territoriality? But our position there is always tricky since we come and go. In Bosnia, the situation is fragile but I don’t mean that things shouldn’t be done because it can raise tensions or instability. No, that is a production of fear created by the government. Something really does have to happen but as with artistic practices and scientific research that there is a sense of responsibility, social responsibility towards the people you are working with who are also your partners in your work. We behave as agents.

So, it is like a fluid space? Yes. It is not like we have a firm definition, there is no right or wrong. We are never organisers of any events however we participate by attending and we always support petitions. There is no past or present in that sense when exploring Omarska that’s why we use the term ‘four faces’, the idea is also to examine how these periods overlap between each other like socialism, war and concentration camps and the capitalism. Also questioning whether it was possible to transform Bosnia from socialism to capitalism without a war…without these concentration camps? Would privatisation have been possible without a war, having in mind we all had social property?

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Looking at Most Mira, we can observe a different approach. It was created, as the founder Kemal Pervani´c explained, as a mode of interacting with methods of reconciliation. ‘We are not there yet, even though we started our first reconciliation project three years ago’, he explained. The project started in this absence of official efforts of symbolic repair. People were not given an opportunity to communicate openly about the events that occurred during the wars and there was, and still is, a lack of an official acceptance of the existence of the camps. The work that Most Mira conducts deals with reconciliation in a way of presenting opportunities for the community to work together. As talking about the events of the war was too uncomfortable, bringing together the community, especially the younger generations, through activities became a method of generating interaction. ‘We use arts and culture as our tools for reconciliation’, Kemal explained, and when I asked him to define ‘reconciliation’ he continued, ‘Reconciliation is something you don’t try to define, it can change from one day to the next, it’s about bringing people together, you try one thing and you see what doesn’t work and see why and then try something else’. Pervani´c related how crushing the experience of trying to work in the area is, as change is something that does not happen overnight, and there are no immediate results. You have to accept that ten years later there are still no results, and people often get crushed by their expectations. You want something good to happen but you cannot afford to be disappointed, you have to keep trying. When there is a crisis, you have to double your efforts. And, that is my approach: it is observational, you follow what is happening and then you decide what the appropriate course of action is. You cannot plan too much because of the constant instability and people’s uncertainties – the lack of trust is due to the many failed initiatives by foreign and local NGOs. But, I believe that small victories will accumulate into something big.

When I asked about Truth Commissions and whether that would have been something suitable in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kemal replied that, it would mean that the state would have to support it, and even televise it, and while that would be great, it was not something that was possible. Instead, the discussions happen behind closed doors, and as Kemal stressed, the longer that it takes to address the problem in public, the more likely it is that the next generations will become new

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victims. This lack of a public debate or discourse leads people to patchwork history with personal stories, which tend to perpetuate myths and create new ones, therefore widening the gap and moving further away from a collective history and memorialisation. Most Mira are currently preparing to build a Youth Peace Centre, in one of the local villages, that will offer spaces for people to work together (Most Mira, n.d). Through the process of preparing and running Most Mira, Kemal has already begun to create bridges between the two communities, involving young professionals from the two different ethnic groups to work together. It is with the act of introducing them to each other as colleagues that have common interests, that the potential of discussion of the political past becomes a possibility. This adaptation of strategies to construe ideologies has become the only method of functioning in the area. In doing so, it tests the boundaries of local governments by using the support systems of the ‘foreign’ hero, in order to implement certain ideas that the local suppressed community would not be allowed to put forward themselves. Could these methods be proposed as counter-monuments, as nonmonumental moments that are not structures that stand as aestheticised objects, but rather present themselves in an ever-changing form that adapts? Perhaps through these forms, almost as a chameleon or shapeshifter, it avoids destruction; almost becoming the absolute appropriation of soft-power. Or, as Hercigonja explained, ‘There is production of alternative knowledge which art gives you and provides opportunities for many things within a marginalised space’. In this way, Omarska inevitably becomes a monument in itself, whether or not it is recognised officially. ArcelorMittal has throughout remained unscathed by the less than flattering press it receives occasionally. Very little coverage exists of the yearly event at the mine. However, in 2012, the multi-billion-pound company made a large investment in financing the Olympic Orbit, designed by artist Anish Kapoor as Britain’s tallest permanent public art sculpture to remain after the 2012 London Olympics. The structure was selected as the winning design for a commission for an Olympic Tower. The Orbit was to stand as a proud emblem of the London Olympic Games. The ArcelorMittal Orbit is named after its main sponsor, the world’s largest steel company (ArcelorMittal, n.d.). The project cost £22.7 million with £19.6 million coming from the company itself (Schuppli 2012). In a statement from June 29, 2011, ArcelorMittal explains that the 2200 tons of steel used in

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the structure of the Orbit come from all parts of the world, in order to reflect on the notion of Olympic spirit (Schuppli 2012). On 14th April 2012, Mladen Jelaˇca, Director of ArcelorMittal Prijedor confirmed to Eyal Weizman (Forensic Architecture) and Milica Tomi´c (Monument Group; Four Faces of Omarska), that the iron ore mined at the Omarska mine has been used in the fabrication of the ArcelorMittal Orbit. ArcelorMittal later denied all claims of this. On 2nd July, 2012, the Forensic Architecture Research Center along with the group Four Faces of Omarska, some survivors of Omarska, and Ed Vulliamy, hosted a press conference where they (re)named the ArcelorMittal Orbit as the Omarska Memorial in Exile (Wright 2012). Since its construction, the ArcelorMittal Orbit has been heavily criticised by the Labour Party because of undeniable financial losses (Café 2017; Crerar 2015). Despite the fact that the tower was financed in the majority by ArcelorMittal, £3.1 million pounds of tax-payer money went towards the costs of building the attraction that cannot seem to charm neither Londoners nor tourists into paying the admission fee. According to an article in The Guardian (Gani 2015), the tower is losing as much as a £10,000 per week. The same article mentions plans to turn the tower into the world’s longest slide. On 24 June 2016, the slide designed by Carsten Höller, opened to the public (Edmonds 2016). In an article by in The Daily Telegraph, Anish Kapoor is quoted to have warned the then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, against turning his sculpture into an amusement park (Furness 2016). However, according to the same article, it was Kapoor’s idea to invite Höller, in order to in some way preserve the idea of the tower remaining a public artwork. There is little news of the current state of ticket sales for the amusement park experience. The very particular situation of the large investment of the company and its name branding, has been for the most part forgotten in terms of the company’s relationship to their ownership of the mine/former concentration camp in Republika Srpska. For the most part, it remains a Memorial in Exile, a placeholder, for the memorial that is seemingly never to be built in Omarska. Neither of the artists involved in the building of, or intervention in, the Orbit have publicly commented about the history relating to the sponsorship. In recent years, we have seen artistic resistance to sponsors who have questionable involvement in socio-political and ecological matters. In this case, this was something that neither artist chose to speak up about despite Kapoor’s desire to portray himself as a political artist speaking out about human rights abuse and, most

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recently, the refugee crisis (Brown 2015). The two artistic interventions do, however, shed some light on the potential for artistic action. The ArcelorMittal Orbit remains (to some) the Memorial in Exile: the memorial that ArcelorMittal never built, but is appropriated through the action of claiming and renaming.

References American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. (2015, December). Working Group: Four Faces of Omarska. Accessed 27 May 2020. Via https://www.aicgs.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Four-Facesof-Omarska.pdf. ArcelorMittal. (n.d.). Culture. Accessed 12 Sept 2018. Via https://corporate.arc elormittal.com/about-us/culture. Brown, M. (2015, September 17). Ai Weiwei and Anish Kapoor Lead London Walk of Compassion for Refugees. The Guardian. Accessed 12 Sept 2018. Via https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/sep/17/ai-weiwei-anishkapoor-london-walk-refugees. Café, R. (2017, July 27). Olympic Park Tower ‘Saddled with Debt That Will Never Be Repaid’. BBC News. Accessed 12 Sept 2018. Via https://www.bbc. co.uk/news/uk-england-london-40728541. Connerton, P. (2008). Seven Tyes of Forgetting. Memory Studies, 59. Last accessed 12 Sept 2018. Via http://mss.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/ 1/1/59. Coppieters, B. (2018). Three Types of Forgetting: On Contested States in Europe. Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 20, 578–598. Crerar, P. (2015, October 20). ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower “Losing £10,000 Each Week”. Evening Standard. Accessed 12 Sept 2018. Via https:// www.standard.co.uk/news/london/obit-tower-losing-10000-each-week-a30 94971.html. Edmonds, L. (2016, June 23). Olympic Park Slide: What It’s Like to Ride the ArcelorMittal Orbit. Evening Standard. Accessed 12 Sept 2018. Via https://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/great-days-out/what-its-like-toride-the-olympic-slide-a3278826.html. Furness, H. (2016, March 26). Anish Kapoor: Boris ‘Foisted’ New Slide on My Sculpture. The Daily Telegraph. Accessed 12 Sept 2018. Via http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/26/anish-kapoor-boris-foi sted-new-slide-on-my-sculpture/. Gani, A. (2015, October 20). Olympic Park’s Orbit Tower Costing Taxpayer £10,000 a Week. The Guardian. Accessed 12 Sept 2018. Via https://www. theguardian.com/sport/2015/oct/20/olympic-parks-orbit-tower-costingtaxpayer-10000-a-week.

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Ili´c, D. (2004, April 23). The Yugoslav Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Eurozine. Accessed 13 Sept 2018. Via https://www.eurozine.com/the-yug oslav-truth-and-reconciliation-commission/. ITN, Penny Marshall and The Observer, Ed Vulliamy in Omarska and Trnopolje. Via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6-ZDvwPxk8. Langenohl, A. (2008). Memory in Post-Authoritarian Societies. In A. Erll & A. Nünning (Eds.), The Invention of Cultural Memory. New York: Walter De Gruyter. Most Mira. (n.d.). What We Do. Accessed 12 Sept 2018. Via https://www.mos tmiraproject.org/what-we-do. RECOM. (n.d.). What Is RECOM? Accessed 12 Sept 2018. Via http://recom. link/about-recom/what-is-recom/. Schuppli, S. (2012, July 2). A Memorial in Exile in London’s Olympics: Orbits of Responsibility. Open Democracy. Accessed 12 Sept 2018. Via https://www. opendemocracy.net/en/memorial-in-exile-in-londons-olympics-orbits-of-res ponsibility/. Vulliamy, E. (1999). “Neutrality” and the Absence of Reckoning: A Journalist’s Account. Journal of International Affairs, 52, 603–620. Wertsch, J. V., & Billingsley, D. M. (2011). The Role of Narratives in Commemoration: Remembering as Mediated Action. In H. Anheier & Y. R. Isar (Eds.), The Cultures and Globalization Series: Heritage, Memory and Identity. London: Sage. Wright, R. (2012). Omarska: Memorial in Exile. BBC World Service. Accessed 13 Sept 2018. Via https://vimeo.com/47299561.

CHAPTER 7

The Resolution of Doubts: Towards Recognition of the Systematic Abduction of Yemenite Children in Israel Yoav Galai and Omri Ben Yehuda

On 10 May 1994, a month-long stand-off in the Israeli town of Yehud ended when a police sniper shot and killed an armed man and the police stormed the barricaded compound. This was not the first time that Israeli security forces faced an armed group in a stand-off. However, this was the first time that the group was Jewish. However, the besieged compound was less of a garrison than it was a site of protest. It was the private home of Rabbi Uzi Meshulam, where he and several dozens of his followers barricaded themselves and refused to come out. The gates were adorned with posters and artful displays made for onlookers and for the media, which reported on the happenings daily. Provisions were brought inside

Y. Galai Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, England, UK e-mail: [email protected] O. Ben Yehuda (B) EUME, Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, Germany © The Author(s) 2021 O. Otele et al. (eds.), Post-Conflict Memorialization, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54887-2_7

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by sympathetic members of the public and the fabric of life around the Rabbi’s home gave no sign of the violence to come. This was more a media event than it was a hostage situation that was meant to advance the call for an independent State Commission of Inquiry to investigate a matter of grave importance to the Yemenite Jewish community, of which Meshulam was a prominent leader. It concerned what was euphemistically called ‘The Yemenite Children affair’: a long-standing claim from members of the Yemeni community that a campaign regarding the abduction of the children of Yemenite immigrants was orchestrated by the state in its early years. This claim was often raised by the families and dismissed by the state, and at the time it was under investigation by a second committee of inquiry, which like the previous one, seemed to endlessly drag its procedures. The term ‘affair’ lends a neutral value to this traumatic episode, which concerns the systematic abduction of infants and children. In the early years of the state, a time of mass immigration, children of mostly Yemenite immigrants were taken from the temporary camps in which they were housed or the hospitals to which they were brought to receive treatment. Parents were often told that their children must be left to receive care and soon after, they were told that the children had died. No bodies were shown to the parents and burials were said to have already taken place, in defiance of Jewish tradition, of which Yemenite Jews were ardent followers. The frequency of such cases is well-documented in the testimonies of parents and siblings, while some documented botched attempts, in which the children who were declared dead were found by their parents after they had been given for adoption, clash with the vehement denials of the crime by the state. After the incident in Yehud, a third commission of inquiry into the abduction of children was set up, which similarly found no wrongdoing by the state and embargoed its evidence. Meshulam was incarcerated for five years and later retired from public life. However, Meshulam’s death in 2013 reignited public interest in the abductions and advocacy pertaining to the traumatic episode. As we will later show, this time, families and activists achieved recognition from Israeli officials of the validity of the claims of the victims’ families. The government has even entered negotiations with family representatives about taking official responsibility and providing redress. The figure of Meshulam therefore encapsulates a transition in the place of the abduction trauma in Israel. As we will show, he was ridiculed, vilified, and jailed as a terrorist, but his actions inspired victims to come forward. He was

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released from prison under terms that prohibited his public activism, but his death sparked a new round of activism. Most recently, the date of his death was marked in the Israeli parliament as an official Memorial Day dedicated to the abductions he fought to bring to light, and importantly, under the very terms that he introduced. In what follows, we intend to unravel how that which was held ‘marginal’, ‘subversive’, ‘eccentric’, and in all forms ‘outcast’, has become affirmative, even national, and has reached the point of consensus among Israelis. But, more important than the memory of Meshulam, is the rehabilitation of the voices of the victims that he represented. The ‘Yemenite Children Affair’ is a story of the families and communities that found acknowledgement, only in the mid-2010s, as part of a global movement that works to assist subalterns’ ability to speak (using here Gayatri Charkravorty Spivak’s [1998] classic term) and it was their testimonies that brought about change. Both state authorities and historians in Israel regularly discount witness testimonies and prefer to rely on documents as the grounds for historical claims and knowledge. However, victims, and especially those of former colonial regimes, challenge in their stories the teleological historical and social narrative frameworks that make up official historiography and sociography (Ram 1995). Conversely, the interaction between the testimonies and the official version jeopardises the former’s subversive potential if the claims are accepted only after they are reshaped so that they comply with terms of the prevalent and teleological narrative templates that make up the national story (Galai 2017). Recognising that scant material on the subject is available in English, this chapter attempts to present to the reader the history and the recent developments of this traumatic episode and the ways in which its inclusion in the national canon was negotiated, with a particular focus on the most recent development—the special committee that operated between February 2017 and December 2018. We begin by returning to Meshulam’s advocacy to argue that the dismissive attitude towards the community leader also enables the dismissal of the accusations of the families, before aligning it with interethnic relations in Israel in general. We then proceed to tell the history of desultory attempts to investigate the abductions until the most recent episode began with a full admission from the highest echelons of the Israeli state, only to quickly dissipate after a failed negotiation with the government. We adopt the reflections of MK

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Jamal Zahalka who addressed the committee early on, that the abductions can be integrated into the collective Israeli experience in one of two ways (Zahalka in SC 8/29). First, as an archaeological truth, explicating the bureaucratic conditions that made it possible for individual cases to occur. Second, as a historical truth, in which the sociocultural conditions that made it possible for such harm to be done to a marginalised group are recognised, contextualised, and redressed. It is our contention that the state pursued the former, while the families and the advocacy organisations pursued the latter, leading to the breakdown of conciliation.

7.1 Uzi Meshulam and the Yemenite Children Affair The Meshulam showdown dominated the headlines in 1994, and the coverage was dismissive and even hostile. The idea that a large Jewish group would pursue claims about state-crimes and their subsequent coverup to the degree that they would challenge the state with threats of violence did not carry itself favourably in a public discourse that was generally inhospitable to the voices of Jews of Mizrahi (Arab) descent. Madmoni-Gerber (2009, 166–167) investigated the representation of the abductions in Israeli discourses through the years and demonstrated how Meshulam and his followers were labelled as ‘a cult of delusional fanatics’, and compared to David Koresh’s Waco cult, which committed mass suicide in 1993. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite (2013) explained that Meshulam was labelled by the media as ‘a clown’, to undermine the validity of his claims. The word most often used to describe Meshulam in particular, and Yemenite claims in general, as we shall demonstrate below, was ‘delusional’. Uzi Meshulam was a working-class Mizrahi leader whose appearance and style differed from the secularised customs of political communication in Israel: his style of speaking was direct and unpolished, his language was peppered with religious symbolism and he was prone to polemics, and these characteristics did not mesh well with the rhetorical style of the elites who normally addressed the Israeli public sphere. Moreover, Meshulam’s authority stemmed from his role as the spiritual leader of a congregation, which also contradicted political conventions. Simply put, there was no other dissident like him in Jewish Israeli society and as the stand-off reached a boiling point, his extreme statements (for example,

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his comparing the Israeli state to Nazis) helped to cement his framing as a dangerous and delusional radical. Following the Yehud incident, Meshulam and eleven of his followers were put in prison (they refused to contest the state in the trial, not recognising its authority), but their original demand for an institutional public inquiry was granted when a state commission of inquiry was convened by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. The Yehud affair, as a media event, alerted relatives of abducted children to the scope of the tragedy and many felt encouraged to approach the commission, which convened for six years, before eventually dismissing all accusations of a systematic abduction of children. Instead, it reassured the families that their relatives had died, rather than been given away for adoption, and it even provided families with retroactive death certificates. These clear-cut conclusions contrasted with the evidence that was gathered, which was sealed for a period of 70 years. The long embargo prompted calls of a cover-up and instigated another round of activism that culminated in the publication of the documents and the establishment of a new committee in 2017, which we will focus on in the last part of this chapter.1 Academic scholarship on Meshulam dismissed the person along with the claims of the Yemenite community. In the following examples, written recently by Israeli scholars, the author’s language draws attention to the ominous nature of the group and the spuriousness of its claims, demonstrating how the very different rhetorical conventions of Israeli mass media and of international peer-reviewed academe can promote the same discourse. In particular, they accuse Meshulam, and the other claim-makers in general, of promoting delusional and harmful theories. Arie Perliger and Ami Pedahzur (2009) employ the ‘delusion’ frame to argue that the Meshulam incident provides a case study in Israeli Jewish terrorism. They explain that Meshulam, whose group they refer to as a ‘cult’ (ibid., 138), existed on the ‘fringes of the settler counterculture’. In this way, they link the group to territorial claims to Palestinian lands, a spurious charge. Meshulam’s actual claims regarding the abduction of children are framed by Perliger and Pedahzur as a marginal concern about ‘one of the most perplexing episodes in the history of Israel’ (ibid., 138).

1 As we will demonstrate below, this is no longer a contentious claim. Most of the evidence was both given in public and released in 2016 and government ministers have referred to the Cohen-Kedmi Committee as a ‘cover up committee’.

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The note about the ‘perplexing episode’ is worth exploring, as it is actually the official theory that explains away the accusations of abduction. The discursive act of aligning the abductions with confusion and clearing the act of maleficent intent is not an ‘agnostic’ take. The official line in the face of any evidence of wrongdoing in this context is often that the harm is the inadvertent result of a time of confusion and the ‘Chaos of resettlement’ (Madmoni-Gerber 2009, 71). According to this ‘chaos theory’, it is impossible to blame systemic features of the political structures on the overstretched nascent state: it was merely good-will-gone-wrong. More recently, Motti Inbari (2017) explored the belief system of Meshulam’s congregation of ‘Mishkan Ohalim’ by analysing his taped sermons. He also drew on the ‘delusion’ frame, writing that the sermons offer an apocalyptic triumph (2017, 30), an end of days in which the ‘Oppressed Oriental-Jewish communities—the Mizrahim—would achieve superior status over the Ashkenazim and the secularists’ (ibid.). Inbari’s text frames Meshulam’s religiously tinged transformative social narrative, which is not out of step with that of other oppressed groups, as a cause for concern not only for the media but also for scholars who frame Meshulam’s congregation as a dangerous cult, explicating the accusation of ‘delusion’ and placing it not far from Perliger and Pedahzur’s framing of Meshulam as a terrorist. Unsurprisingly, any claims regarding systematic abductions are outright dismissed and the testimonies of families are not afforded any consideration. Moreover, Meshulam is blamed for inventing this untruth, which works to the detriment of the Israeli state, ‘adding another layer to framing Israel as a criminal state’ (ibid., 39). Inbari’s analysis is reflected by Nadav Molchadsky (2018, 72), who took an ‘agnostic’ stance on the matter of the abductions. Molchadsky attempted to lend legitimacy to the ‘chaos theory’ and to use it to also explain the unconvincing nature of the official narratives of the state and the insistence of the families to continue to pursue investigations, as if the source of the claims of families whose children were abducted was discrepancies in documentation. Molchadsky follows Inbari to castigate Meshulam’s framing of the abductions, accusing Meshulam of stirring ‘ethnic antipathy’ towards the Ashkenazi establishment, in effect framing the whole affair as a matter of slander. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore the role of Israeli academia in dismissing the experiences of the families of the abducted children. Self-proclaimed academic experts regularly expound on the impossibility of the abduction in the media and in professional networks,

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less so in peer-reviewed publications. Perhaps they do so to fight ‘framing Israel as a criminal state’ (Inbari 2017, 39), perhaps to fight ‘ethnic antipathy’ (Molchadsky 2018, 72), but these three examples demonstrate how narrative strategies of denial can be subtly deployed in a variety of discursive environments. Next, we will explore how the logic that leads to the abductions is anything but ‘delusional’, before expounding on the theoretical and historical conditions that lead to the rejection of the narrative of abductions.

7.2 The Abductions: How Were They Even Possible? A crime such as the systematic abduction of children would do great harm to the internal Zionist narrative about the absorption of mass immigration as an ‘ingathering of the exiles’.2 The very reason for a national home for the Jewish people, to cite the Balfour Declaration (1917), was to make a safe haven for Jews from persecution. However, while the abductions are out of step with Zionist narratives, they are in line with Zionist practice towards Mizrahim, which demanded that individuals expunge their Jewish identity of its (Arab) exilic culture (Raz Krakotzkin 2005). The orientalist contrast between the ‘two cultures’ reflects the twofold traumas of Mizrahim and Palestinians. These traumas were almost complementary in the colonial settings of the Israeli establishment in the first decade of the state. Palestinians who were made refugees by the state were labelled as dangerous ‘infiltrators’, while Jews of Muslim countries were recruited to enter the state with the demand that they relinquish their Arabness. Moreover, Mizrahim were often sent to live in peripheral settlements taken from the same Palestinian ‘infiltrators’ and tasked with physically guarding the borders of the new state (Ben Yehuda 2019, 264; Chetrit 2009, 201). The allocation of families to provincial towns according to centralised decisions and often against their will and in spite of their protestations (Sharon 2017) also played a role in priming the conditions for acts of abduction. It is in this setting that we catch a glimpse of the two traumas together, in what is perhaps the ultimate narration of the Nakba and its aftermath, 2 About one million Jewish immigrants immigrated to the state in its first decade, about half of whom were Mizrahim, and many immigrated under duress, including 43,000 immigrants from Yemen who arrived between 1948 and 1949 (Chetrit 2009, 82–83).

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the novel Gate of the Sun (1998) by Lebanese author, Elias Khoury. Khoury based many of his accounts on interviews he took in refugee camps in southern Lebanon. In one of these texts, the two communities meet and stories about abducted Yemenite children were recounted without the reservation that is exhibited when these stories are told in Israel. Yemenite victims—mourning parents—were met by Palestinian victims who attempted to return to their villages: Naheeleh told Yunis about the weeping that people heard coming from the moshav the Yemenis had built over El Bruwweh and spoke of the mysterious rumours of children dying and disappearing. She said the Yemeni Jewesses would go out into the fields and lament like Arab women and that she’d started to fear for her children, for “if the children of the Jews are disappearing, what will happen to ours?” (ibid., 461)

The sense of disbelief, encapsulated in the framing of the abductions as ‘mysterious rumours’ looms over the account. In the coming section, we will address the logic behind these abductions by interrogating ideological, institutional, comparative, and historical contexts to answer the question ‘how is it possible?’. Ideologically, the shedding of an Arab identity consummate with that of Israel’s enemies was explained through a ‘developmental’ narrative, by which Mizrahim should shed their ‘primitive’ oriental culture in favour of western ‘modernity’ (Ram 1995). The practice of coercive removal of children aligns with the more general trend of the under-privileging of Mizrahi immigrants and their placement within an ethnic division of labour, as well as an ethnic division of space (Swirski 1981). The former mayor of the Yemenite majority city of Rosh Ha-Ayin, whose sister was abducted, explained that the ethnic division was extended from production to reproduction,3 ‘The Yemenite mothers were perceived by the State as “baby-machines”, commodity suppliers for the state that one less child would not matter to. The thinking of the time was that these Yemenites have so many children’ (Yosef, in Weiss 2001a, 99). In the colonial racist mind, the abduction was a benevolent act, ameliorating these children’s fate by instilling in them the western values of education, psychology and

3 Yosef further hints that the harm done to the Yemenites was legitimised with the needs of ‘childless Holocaust survivors’, a telling enjoinder that falls beyond the scope of this chapter.

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hygiene. As we will demonstrate below, the ideological framework of the Zionist enterprise includes not only an emancipatory element (related to flourishing), but also a redemptive one (related to transformation), which acted as a powerful filter that managed to silence even the protestations of victims and witnesses, whose plights were dismissed in the clamour of a greater collective purpose that might have required individual sacrifice. Institutionally, the site of the majority of the abductions of children was the temporary ‘immigrant camps’ in which they were placed. These were closed off ‘total institutions’ (Amir 2014, 9) that were often governed by coercion, and in which babies were kept separately from their parents in infant homes. This practice began in temporary camps in Aden, from which the immigrants departed, which were effectively run by representatives of the Yishuv and were the scene of abuse and neglect (Madmoni-Gerber 2009, 35). It was also in Aden that religious and cultural artefacts, the precious cultural heritage of one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities, was looted and often sold (ibid., 36; Amir 2015, 72).4 The ‘immigrant camps’ in Israel were also the site of the religious studies crisis in 1950, which reflects some of the attitudes around the abductions (Amir 2015, 74). Yemenite children in these camps were not provided with religious education as was the wish of the community. This conflict between secular Zionist ideology and the Yemenite’s traditional Jewish custom, which culminated in the forcible cutting off children’s Payos (sidelocks), revealed the violent potential of the clash. This was a case in which, according to Ruth Amir, ‘children were isolated from the influence of their ethnic group so that they could be re-socialised into the dominant culture’ (ibid., 76). Amir’s theoretical explication allows a comparative explanation, by aligning the Israeli practice with acts of child abduction elsewhere. The Australian ‘stolen generation’ refers to children of mixed indigenous and white descent who were forcefully removed from their indigenous families and taken to government institutions and missionaries up until the

4 Later, in the Israeli camps, Mizrahi immigrants were coerced to participate in a

dangerous, and now redundant, large-scale hygienic project. Between 1948 and 1959, tens of thousands (and possibly hundreds of thousands) of children of Mizrahi descent were forcefully treated for ringworm, a minor illness, with powerful x-ray projections on their heads that caused them severe physical and mental ailments (Amir 2015, 108–109; Davidovich and Margalit 2008).

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1970s (cf. Bringing Them Home, 1997). In Canada, the residential school system for Aboriginal children sought to ‘cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada’ (TRC 2015) and operated until the 1990s. In both cases, children were removed from their families and communities in order for them to shed distinctive social traits that the state deemed undesirable. Importantly, these are crimes that have been explicitly recognised as cases of cultural genocide. Historically, Yemenite immigrants in particular were the subject of harsh treatment by Ashkenazi-dominated Yishuv even before their mass immigration.5 Yemenite Jews were actively sought by the early Jewish settlers in the early twentieth century who deemed them fit to replace Arab labour. They were tasked with low-paying manual labour and disallowed from integrating into the Jewish settlements (Amir 2015, 68–69). As a result of these conditions Yemenite immigrants suffered an extremely high mortality rate (Shafir 1996, 106).6 While the abduction of children is out of step with the most basic tenets of political Zionism, it aligns with the practice of the nascent state. We answered the question ‘how is it possible?’ by referring to the contextual, historical, ideological, and institutional frameworks that align with the practice of abduction. Interestingly, Meshulam referred to this crime as only half the story. Alongside the crime of the abductions, he said, there was also the ‘crime of silencing’ (SC 27/11). To understand the second crime, we must ask the question ‘how is it not possible?’, what are the conditions that prevented victims from being believed? After all, even if the ideational frameworks listed above were deemed unconvincing, the testimonies of parents, siblings, and other witnesses are loud and clear. 5 The Yishuv is the pre-state settlement in Palestine that was consolidated into the state of Israel after the declaration of independence in May 1948. 6 For a reading of David Shimonovich’s poems that delineate the Ashkenazi–Yemenite relations of the second ‘Aliya and sought to conceal the ethnic conflict between the two communities’, see Hever (2015). It is important to note here that the Ashlenazi–Yemenite relations of the second Aliya were also dubbed an ‘affair’ in the Israeli discourse—this time as the ‘Kinnereth Yemenite Affair’, which refers to those workers who were subjugated and abused by their Jewish landlords in communities near the see of Galilee (Kinnereth). A more grievous account, known as the ‘Makub Affair’, was composed by the singer Izhar Cohen (who was also the first Israeli to win the Eurovision Song Contest) to words by Dan Almagor in the song Zmorot Yeveshot (Dry Twigs ). The song tells of three Yemenite women workers who were abused by their employer, Yonatan Makub, after they stole some dry twigs to heat their homes.

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The Crime of the Silencing: How Is It Not Possible? 7.3.1

In the Cultural Sphere

Alasdair MacIntyre argued that ‘there is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources’ (2001, 254). In this section, we will briefly explore the Israeli ‘stock of stories’ and consider ways in which Israeli society has approached the issue of abductions as well as related tropes and how the cultural atmosphere, before the most recent round of activism, was inhospitable to storytelling involving the abductions. The engagement with this traumatic history has been hesitant, indirect, and abortive. The abduction of children from mothers of underprivileged colonial background into privileged Western hands is a well-known practice that is widely reflected in popular culture.7 Given the particular history and prevalence of the practice in Israel, it is perhaps not surprising that Israeli film and literature was even more reluctant to deal with this traumatic trope than with the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948 (the Nakba) and the continuous oppression of the Palestinian people by means of state violence. Interestingly, when prominent (rather than popular) Israeli authors dealt with the abductions, they did not approach the most glaring case of Yemenite children. In his acclaimed Hebrew novel, Arabesque (1986), Palestinian-Israeli author Anton Shamas wrote about abduction among Palestinians on socio-economical grounds (sending the baby of a poor woman to be raised by wealthy immigrants in the United States). Shamas’ work would soon be followed by other cultural works that touched on the issue, including Mizrahi author, Ronit Matalon’s semi-autobiography novel, The Sound of Our Steps (2008), in which she reflected on the attempt of a wealthy Ashkenazi to adopt the daughter (identified with the author herself) of his Mizrahi cleaning lady (Ben Yehuda 2016). In the realm of film, Tzedek Muhlat (Primal Justice, Israel, 1997) was based on the abducted children, which, as the publicity material explains 7 Recently, in the film Philomena (2013), the background for such an abduction is social and not necessarily ethnic; in the Lebanese film Capernaum (2018) the neglect of children of refugees exposes them to trade. In one way or another, the danger of separation seems always to loom over impoverished families.

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is ‘one of the best kept secrets of Israeli society’. The crime thriller starred Ofra Haza, arguably the most prominent singer of Yemenite decent in Israel. However, despite its considerable efforts to generate mass appeal through star power (the film also features popular leading man Arnon Zadok), and perhaps because of its direct approach to the abductions, the film was not even distributed in Israel.8 Nevertheless, narratives related to the trauma of the abductions have received some play in popular music, a sphere where Yemenite Jews and Israeli Jews of Yemenite descent are well represented. Before reaching the height of his success, Israel’s most popular singer, Eyal Golan, performed a song written by Netanel Noam that predates the Meshulam incident. It tells the story of an abducted girl with the Arab name ‘Sa’ida’ and the devastation her abduction wreaked on her family.9 Following the memory event of the Meshulam stand-off, more songs were released. Nisim Garame, a singer whose elder sister was also abducted, released the song The Children of Yemen (written by Hamotal Ben Zeev and Yoni Ro’eh) in 1998, while another prominent singer of Yemenite descent, Ahuva Ozeri, recorded a song with a similar name that same year. Perhaps the most telling instance of how casually references to the abductions are dismissed is the song, Rachel, written by iconic Israeli folk singer Meir Ariel shortly before his passing. It is an allegorical tale that links the biblical story of Rachel who ‘weeps for her children, refusing to be comforted - for her children are no more’ (Jeremiah, 31) to the plight of Yemenite mothers, to whom the song was dedicated. The line that relates the allegory to the present plays on the Jeremiah: ‘do not be consoled while your sons and daughters are abducted, stolen, taken’. However, when the song was released in 2005 by singer, Ronit Shahar, this line was omitted.10 The cultural framework in which Yemenite claims were promoted left little chance for their stories to echo with wider audiences, as they did not display fidelity with known experience (Fisher 1987, 47). Moreover, 8 Conversely, the recent round of activism was accompanied by a substantial flow of

artistic reflections. A partial includes the play, Abducted, written by Yoav Levi, the book Galbi by Iris Eliya-Cohen, both debuting in 2016. 9 The song was first performed in 1987 by the singer Sasi Ya’ish, whose older sister was abducted. 10 More recently, a version of the song true to the original lyrics and intent was produced by singer Yuval Sela.

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this incongruity was compounded by an Ashkenazi domination of the public sphere and a general scepticism to Yemenite plights in the popular press, as Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber (2009) deftly demonstrated. The scarcity of known narratives relating to the abductions demonstrates that such stories were not part of Jewish Israeli society’s canonical ‘stock’ (MacIntyre 2007) or its ‘paradigmatic truth’ (Lincoln 1989). Moreover, such narratives are rejected from reaching the communal ‘stock of stories’ in different ways that perhaps stem from the labelling of Yemenite claimants as ‘delusional’ or ‘insane’ (Madmoni-Gerber 2009, 166). As we will demonstrate below, the framing of the testimonies of Yemenite parents as ‘delusional’ was a common tactic in every societal level as are the challenges of approaching the ‘stock of stories’.

7.4

In Official State Inquiries

Meshulam’s actions, as well as the narrative he promoted, radically challenged the hegemonic cultural framework of Zionism.11 His intervention was traumatic for Israeli society in the sense that it was: ‘an encounter that betrays our faith in previously established personal and social worlds and calls into question the resolutions of impossible questions that people have arrived at in order to continue with day-to-day life’ (Edkins 2006, 109). To be sure, Jewish Israeli society has been practising an ethnic division of labour from its early days (Swirski 1981). However, the practice of immigration absorption, which culminated in the ‘mass immigration’ of the early years of the state was organised around the idea of ‘modernisation’ and an ‘advancement’ of Mizrahim from presumed primitivity to a ‘Europeanised’ way of life, which was purportedly practised in the new state (Shohat 1988). This problematic immigration regime was coupled with a condescending attitude that had severe repercussions on the lives of Mizrahim. Beyond disempowering social stigmas (see Khazzoom 2003 for a theorisation of the function of stigma), the spatial distribution of immigrants and the allocation of land and land rights to them in relation to their ethnic origin has had far-reaching effects to this day (Yiftachel 2006; for a fuller account of Mizrahim in Israel, which does not go into detail on the Yemenite case, see Smoocha 1993). 11 For the hegemonic structures in Israeli society, Kimmerling (2004) is still the authoritative source.

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The discrimination experienced by Mizrahim, who today make up the majority of the Jewish population in Israel, is often explained as an unfortunate side-effect of a massive project, or the birth-pangs of a new state. It is said to have been merely some insensitivity and unfairness from largerthan-life leaders who were too busy building and fighting and fulfilling a historic mission to worry about welcoming immigrants who were not ready to join the ‘western’ nation in its fight for survival. This reality has been recognised to varying degrees in Israel, though its contemporary repercussions have generally not been. Still, the idea that the Jewish state would commit a crime of such magnitude against Jews who have come to shelter in it from persecution was a traumatic break in the national story. The accusations of a crime tantamount to cultural genocide starkly contrast with the biographical narratives of the state (Steele 2008).12 Such biographical narratives provide a state with its ontological security, a stable sense of itself, which Catarina Kinnvall (2004, 746) defines as ‘a security of being, a sense of confidence and trust that the world is what it appears to be’ to the degree that ontological security is understood to be more important than physical security (Steele 2008, 2) and is vigorously defended. The ‘Yemenite Children Affair’ could be seen as a source of ‘retroactive shame’, in which ‘actors feel anxiety about the ability of their narrative to reflect how they see themselves’ (Steele 2008, 55). Similarly, Jenny Edkins (2003, 12) explains that the function of the polity is predicated on a ‘day to day production and reproduction of the social and symbolic order’. She adds that in cases of breaks in the story, the state ‘moves quickly to close down any openings produced by putting in place as fast as possible a linear narrative of origins’ (Edkins 2006, 107). The Meshulam affair demonstrates how the threat that the narrative of the abductions presented was so severe that it required extreme action. Per Meshulam’s demand, the Cohen-Kedmi Commission was appointed in 1995 and unlike the previous two commissions, it was a state commission of inquiry. In Edkins’ terms, the commission could potentially address the trauma by ‘encircling’ the traumatic space reopened by Meshulam’s actions ‘by a recognition and surrounding of the trauma’ (2003, 16). Instead of the ‘linear narratives’ that cover it with denials 12 The term ‘cultural genocide’ is highly contentious. Still, Novic writes about the forcible transfer of children that ‘So far, these cases have gathered some form of consensus around labelling the process as “cultural genocide”’ (2016, 228).

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and alternative explanation that allow the larger national story to proceed unhindered. The commission was expected to expose the wrongs and to recognise the perpetration of the state and the victimhood of the families. It heard testimonies of family members who detailed the traumatic experiences of child abductions. It also heard from witnesses: nurses, doctors, and other officials who were involved in the abductions, in the process compiling an imperfect, but indicting, ‘box of evidence’. However, the conduct of the commission was controversial (MadmoniGerber 2009, 142–145; Sanjero 2002) as was its conclusion: all of the claims were eventually dismissed by the Cohen-Kedmi commission in its final report. The Commission, which convened for six years, concluded that of the 1053 cases of missing children presented to the committee, other than 33 children whose whereabouts are unknown, all others had died rather than had been abducted. Families were provided with retroactive death certificates and the compiled evidence was placed under a 70-year embargo. This was the ‘linear narrative’ (Edkins 2006, 107) that re-covered the trauma and the ‘box of evidence’ that was locked away became the centre of the next round of activism. In summary, the Meshulam event opened-up space for ‘speaking from within trauma’ (Edkins 2003, 16) and in so doing, it endangered Israel’s sense of ontological security. The violence of the abductions was ongoing and embedded in the state’s refusal to encounter its past crimes. However, the wished-for commission of inquiry produced a ‘linear narrative’ that explained-away the claims of the families, leaving them to languish in their doubts. It was not until 2016 that the trauma of the abductions was reopened, in direct reference to Meshulam’s efforts.

7.5

Back to the Near Past: 2017---Establishing a New Committee of Inquiry

On 30 July 2016, Minister Tzahi Hanegbi gave the following statement on Israeli television about the ‘Yemenite Children Affair’: There was an abduction of many hundreds of children, with malice. Did the establishment know or not? Was it behind it or not? we may never know, but what is happening over the past few weeks and months is that the Israeli public is beginning to understand that this is not a delusion, this is not paranoia… they robbed them, I don’t know where to, but I

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hope that through the materials we could finally understand this tragedy. (Hanegbi in Meet the Press, 2016)

This astonishing statement amounts to an institutional recognition of a state crime and a break with the conclusions of three official commissions of inquiry. It is also directly traceable to the event instigated by Meshulam. In response to his death in 2013, two NGOs, Amram, and Ahim VeKayamin: The Families Forum, began campaigning for the opening of the Cohen-Kedmi Commission files. They gained the support of Rina Matzliah, a journalist and the host of a popular news programme, who featured reports on the abducted children affair and the troubling history of its investigations. The campaign was joined by new MK for the Likud party, Nurit Koren, who headed the ‘Lobby for the kidnapped Yemenite Children’ in the Knesset and worked from within the government coalition. Together they pushed for the release of the papers. In November 2016, Minister Hanegbi appeared on Matzliah’s programme ‘Meet the Press’ to announce the release of the embargoed reports, which were scanned and made public via a searchable website.13 Having consulted the material, the minister was convinced that there was no question about the veracity of the claims and his comment that ‘this is not a delusion, this is not paranoia’ attests to the way in which the claims of the families were previously dismissed in Israeli society. Alongside the publication of the Cohen-Kedmi files, it was declared that a parliamentary commission of inquiry headed by MK Koren will be established, the fourth commission of inquiry in the history of ‘the affair’. Blander (2011) described the institution of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry as ‘a body without authority. Lacking the cooperation of the investigated institutions and due to its limited authority, it cannot conduct a serious and full investigation’. However, as MK Koren explained, the parliamentary context of the committee has considerable advantages: ‘As you can see, I legislate to fix things – I didn’t fight for the committee to be in parliament for nothing, but so we could make changes’ (SC 7/19) and ‘as an MK, I know where the problems are and I propose laws accordingly’ (SC 11/36). 13 Hanegbi himself recognised the efforts by Matzliah, the NGOs and MK Koren when he said: ‘your media struggle and Nurit’s parliamentary struggle and the public struggle of the NGOs together have created a moment of awakening’ (Hanegbi in Matzliah 2016).

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However, despite the promises, the government was reluctant at first to establish the committee. It was only after Koren issued a harsh open letter, in which she openly dissented from the tightly disciplined and shaky coalition government and announced that she will not be voting on the crucial budget law—a drastic measure from a junior member of the ruling party, that the committee was established. One month after the publication of her letter, it was reported that Koren will be heading the ‘Special Committee on the Disappearance of Children from Yemen, East and Balkan’ (henceforward, ‘the Committee’). The title of the Committee is a curious composition of localities that strikes a sour chord in ‘correct’ Hebrew.14 Importantly, this was the distinct title given by Meshulam to the affair, denoting that this was not strictly a Yemenite affair, but that it was mostly so.15 This was not a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (PCI), but a temporary parliamentary committee. The differences in the privileges of the two institutions are difficult to ascertain since the terms of the latter are murky and open to interpretation, but in general, the PCI has the same privileges as the regular committee (Blander 2011). The one notable difference is the predetermined time frame, which could be seen as an opt-out clause for the government, although eventually the committee was extended (SC 14/15). While the powers of the committee seem illequipped to tackle the long-denied crime, it was armed with the files of the previous commission, the (wavering) support of the government, access to direct legislative action and considerable public momentum. Madmoni-Gerber (2009) has extensively researched representations of the affair in the media and decried the lack of attention to the proceedings of the Cohen-Kedmi commission and lack of response from both private and state-owned media outlets to demands for publicity to the dramatic testimonies (ibid., 144)—newsworthy stuff that was not reported. This time, the Committee was given plenty of airplay and had made all of its proceedings swiftly accessible online.

14 What makes the combination curious is that the word ‘Balkan’ represents Ashkenazi Jews who were also abducted, albeit in smaller numbers. Much like the Hebrew word ‘Zarfat ’ denotes France, but originally referred to a town in present-day Lebanon, ‘Balkan’ pushes Europe beyond the horizon, somewhere beyond the Balkan Mountains, a provincialisation of the dominant group in Israeli society. 15 According to Molchadsky (2018, 73), this framing is hostile towards non-Mizrahi Israelis.

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On 8 February 2017, the commission met for the first time; in total, it convened 58 times until December 2018, when the government was disbanded. Over the course of its work it made some achievements in terms of legislation and of making information accessible. From the standpoint of the authors, foremost among its achievements was the successful framing of the previous committees as a ‘cover ups’ and the rehabilitation of Rabbi Uzi Meshulam. These processes took place in the context of what some call a Mizrahi renaissance in the Israeli sphere, coinciding with Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing regime that sought to confront Israeli elites. These elites are normally associated with the Labour party, Israel’s Ashkenazi lead hegemonic ruling party from its inception until 1977, which installed the ethnic division of labour. Hence, the critical aspect of the trauma is dislocated in the past, whereas in the present, acknowledgement becomes a process of assimilation into the national frame, this time with what may well be an emergent hegemonic project lead by Likud. However, despite the promising start, eventually the activist groups that initially partnered with Koren accused her and the committee of performing the same function as the previous commissions of inquiry and of becoming complicit in what Meshulam termed: ‘the crime of silencing’.

7.6

The Resolution of Doubts: The Commission at Work

Whether the reason for the committee was the legacy of Uzi Meshulam, the Mizrahi renaissance, or some other structural aspect of Israeli society in the late 2010s, it was clear that something had changed about the politico-cultural landscape that, not for the first time, enabled the opening of the trauma of the abductions. The senior religious figure in the Yemenite community, Rabbi Ratzon Arusi (SC 14/12), could not make it to the inaugural session, so he delivered his statement in a later session, in which he drew on religious rhetoric to frame the work of the committee: There is a Hachem (wise man) from Poland, his name was Rabbi Shaul Nathanzon… he coined a very interesting term: there is no day of joy as the day of the resolution of doubts and there is no day of woe like the day of the existence of doubt. That means, we cannot remain with the existence of doubts. (Arusi in SC 14/12)

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Originally a religious exegesis, Arusi used the saying as an insight into the daily torment of uncertainty about the fate of absent loved and the emotional toll of the abductions on their families. The so-called linear narratives sow doubt, silence personal tragedy and mark it as marginal or even delusion, taking a great personal harm on the families and reinforcing a collective stigma about the Yemenite community. It could be said that Arusi was arguing for an encirclement of the trauma (Edkins 2003), resolving the grid of uncertainty, and dissolving the mist of delusion. The Commission seems to have accepted this prescription. It offered an inversion of the classic balance of power between claimants from marginal constituencies and the authorities by drawing on the emotional intensity of the occasion. The testimonies of officials were bookended by testimonies from family members who witnessed their brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters taken away. These provided the basic metre of the proceedings and reminded the audience of the lingering of doubt. The testimonies told similar stories of deceit and pilferage, of heartbreak and despair, of cover-up and of condescension, of arrogance and disdain. Eleven of the 58 sessions were devoted to testimonies, while most of the other sessions also featured them. Most of the testimonies were from siblings rather than parents, whose generation has largely died out and their voices remain unheard. This makes the process of reclamation complex because the living memory of life in the diaspora is disappearing and the only point of reference is present-day Israel. A general narrative is repeated: parents had babies taken away for minor treatments, either at the camps or in hospitals; sometimes the children were taken by force, other times parents were convinced that their children should stay in care for their benefit, only to be told when they returned to visit or collect them that their children had died and had been already buried at an unknown location. Their protestations, in response, were ignored. The testimonies of relatives are heart-rending and they tell similar stories: ‘On Saturday evening my father called to see what was happening, they said “it’s alright, you can come and visit on Sunday.” On Sunday he came, they told him “he died.” “Where is the body buried?” “we buried it, you can go.” He was so naïve, my father, he told us all the time “in the land of Israel they don’t lie to Jews, impossible.” He came home and told our

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mother “he is dead.” I was a little girl, mother’s crying and the sorrow on her all these years don’t let go of me. She would not stop crying… wherever she went she would just cry and be sad and kept asking my father “are you sure?”’ (The testimony of Yona Meron, SC 41/18) In the morning, we came to get Shams back, Shams was not there, she died. We already buried her. My father was shocked – impossible, my daughter was healthy, she couldn’t have died. This couldn’t be. I want to see my daughter now. We buried. I want to bury her myself. I want you to bring me my daughter. They said: we already buried her. Where did you bury her? There was no answer. They did not want to answer us. (Testimony of Rachel Keti’i, SC 6/20) I’m speaking about my brother, who disappeared in 1950, he was ill, they took him to a Hadassah hospital in Tel Aviv and told my father ‘go home, come back tomorrow’, the next day he came…and there isn’t a child. Where is the child? Dead… ‘We buried him, go home.’ So he went home, he was naïve, he did not believe such a thing could happen and he went home. They sat Shiva and everything, time passed, my father passed away, and when the Yemenite children affair exploded with Rabbi Uzi Meshulam we got into… we said, maybe ours too? (Testimony of Ruth Cochavi, SC 3/25)

The media followed up on some of the testimonies and findings and published investigative pieces that corroborated the general narrative, while focusing on high-profile cases. Meir Korach, a Yemenite activist, reflected on the change in public attitude and the sense of openness to the previously ignored stories. He explained it through the idea of the ‘She’at Ratzon’, a religious phrase that signifies the likelihood of prayers to be answered, now meaning a shift in what some social scientists may call a ‘structure of opportunity’: ‘we are now in a ‘time of willing’ because this whole story used to be totally denied. Today, public opinion… understands and values… thirty years ago they said it is crazy and unreasonable’ (SC 31/20). Importantly, Korach makes the distinction between being labelled delusional and being believed. The Committee was chaired by Koren, while civil society representatives and families of the abducted children joined in on the questioning of government officials. Overall, the forum of the committee was lively and its live broadcasts had produced useful inputs from the audience. In the 9 May 2017 session (SC 9/2), chairwoman Koren revealed that after the

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previous discussion, the committee received an e-mail that would have been useful for questioning the witness in real time. She then implored viewers to participate by calling in or sending e-mails. At almost 600 points, the protocol bears a quote attributed to ‘A call’. These calls are brisk, cynical, moralistic, and at times humorous, like the calls of the second-line or of a Greek choir. When Hadara Shilo asks in exasperation, ‘I’m 72 years old, how long will be? It’s always: committee committee committee committee, I will get to the afterlife knowing nothing’, the ‘call’ answers: ‘there they will know’ (SC 2/29). When Shlomo Geheresi is reluctant to name an official associated with the abduction of his brothers, the call is ‘say the name’ (SC 6/25). When chairwoman Koren updates the commission about the progress of a biometrical repository that may make possible reunifications, the call is ‘there is hope yet’ (SC 7/25) and when an official makes a questionable claim, a member of the audience retorts with a direct rebuke: ‘you know me… I met you… several years ago. I want to contradict what was said here’ (SC 10/12). Despite having no legal measures to fight non-cooperation as the state commission did, the commission was sensitive to attempts to withhold information from it, and leveraged the media echo that admonitions would carry. MK Koren used her podium to address Zionist organisations that are not state institutions and are under no legal obligation to show. whoever is listening now: Hadassah (Women’s Zionist Organisation of America), Naamat (Labour’s women’s organisation), The Women’s International Zionist Organisation (WIZO), these were children’s homes, these are non-governmental organisations, I am asking here, we called them to be present in the first discussion we held on the subject and they did not show up, and I’m calling on them to show up the next time we will summon them. I am not only calling them to come, I am calling on them to send to us any document that pertains to the affair, that deals with the children, where did they arrive, where they were transferred to, I am asking them to bring everything to the committee. This is the time, this is a She’at Ratzon. (SC 7/40)

WIZO, which managed ‘babies’ homes’ for neglected infants, was the commission’s prime target. Evidence suggested that children were given for adoption from within these homes,

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I called in WIZO, every debate we have we call in WIZO and they refuse to come. To me this says Darshani.16 When an institution that held all of the children, does not come, this means it is withholding information. The committee manager spoke to the WIZO spokesperson and what she said was very severe. She said they had made the documents publicly available over the internet. We asked where? She did not know. She said it is out in the open, that there were committees and they supplied them with whatever they requested and they did not find anything. I want to say that they did not give anything and committees did not request anything. (SC 10/2)

And, in the same session: I want to say that WIZO, after so many calls and phones and addresses to make sure they come – did not arrive. Their absence is disrespectful to the Knesset and its committees, we will not allow them to dodge us. We will ask our questions and address their international management. It cannot be that such an important and meaningful institution, which had possession over the children, does not come to the debate and answer our questions. (SC 10/36)

On 28 November 2017, the chairwoman revealed that a session will be devoted to WIZO. When the day came, there was some excitement. Even veteran activist and former mayor Yigal Yosef, whose sister was abducted, could not hold his excitement, ‘In the many years I have been involved in this matter, this is the first time I meet human figures from WIZO and to me WIZO is a black box. Most of the affair surrounds this secret, this black box called WIZO’ (SC 37/15). However, when the day came, the black box turned out to be empty. WIZO’s representatives did little other than pass the buck to the state. Sarit Arbel, WIZO’s CEO stated: ‘I cannot explain or apologise for what has occurred in the past, I represent the current management in WIZO’ (SC 37/22); she did explain that any decision about the transfer of children would have been made by state authorities (SC 37 /3) and that ‘this is a period that our employees who worked then are no longer with us, our ability to investigate this matter

16 Darshani is a common turn of phrase in Hebrew that stems from religious Jewish hermeneutical practice. It literally means ‘Drash me’, Drash being the explication of the connotative rather than a denotative meaning.

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is limited’. When a direct call to interview former employees was issued, it was ignored (SC 37/32). The underwhelming encounter was not at all surprising. WIZO’s institutional memory, which consisted of faulty medical records of children that were under its auspices will not likely reveal how and where these children were taken. Even if they did, the Commission was not the right forum to investigate those trails. This was an early sign of the limitations of the committee—being branched with the Knesset, it had an important influence in terms of representation, but despite Koren’s promises, it had little to show for in operational terms, at times posturing more than prodding; soon enough, the excitement that marked the commencement of the committee’s gave way to frustration.

7.7

Cover-Ups

Perhaps the major achievement of the Special Committee was to bring about and to sustain a discursive ‘time of willing’. It was less about making discoveries than about legitimising and amplifying previously ignored voices. Foremost of these discursive achievements was the delegitimation of the Cohen-Kedmi Commission and the rehabilitation of Meshulam. The abundance of public inquiries was often used as evidence for the lack of wrongdoing, while Meshulam was used as proof of the delusional quality of the accusations. The argument was that if three commissions came back empty-handed, and if the case was promoted by a cult-leader, surely there is something wrong with the accusation. This narrative is not restricted to public discourse; as we have shown above, recent studies that touch on the affair also make this argument (Inbari 2017; Molchadsky 2018). Other than these two ‘structural’ readjustments, the new committee and its media echo seemed to have the effect of revising the societal ‘stock of stories’. In this function, it resembles the Jerusalem Eichmann Trial (1961). In her report about the trial, Hannah Arendt criticised its theatricality and lack of soberness and integrity in terms of justice (the majority of the witnesses did not have anything to do with Eichmann and his role in the extermination of European Jewry), but completely missed its social formative role in reclaiming the silenced voices of the victims while confronting the perpetrator. Felman explained that testimony requires almost entirely and solely an addressee willing not only to listen but also to make sense of the testimony and to integrate it into

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a story (Felman and Laub 1992). As we shall see in the final section of this chapter, the collapse of the commission can be traced to conflicts regarding the manner in which this integration will take place and the degree to which the linear narratives would be bent out of shape. The problems with the Cohen-Kedmi Commission were known before the newly released documents. Already in 2002, Israeli jurist Boaz Sanjero (2002, 48–49) described the approach of the committee as lacking an ‘epistemology of suspicion’. It barely scratched the surface in its questioning of witnesses, it refrained from utilising its legal powers when faced with uncooperative witnesses and it did not question the destruction of relevant archives while the investigation was ongoing. The Cohen-Kedmi Commission’s final report was a refutation of the idea of an organised abduction (Sanjero 2002, 49, 59). The commission preferred documents over testimonies and when discrepancies in the text were dismissed as the product of a confused institutional procedure, whereas documents that supported the claim that children had died, rather than been given to adoption, were taken as reliable (Sanjero 2002).17 The un-embargoed material revealed the loose knots that the commission used to tie its ‘linear narratives’, and the new committee used these revelations to attack the Cohen-Kedmi Commission. Chairwoman Koren often referred to all the previous commissions as ‘cover-up commissions’ (SC 1/7; SC 2/3; SC 6/3; SC 7/22; SC 9/9; SC 10/2; SC 16/24) and in the interim summary she made on 20 June 2017, the anniversary of Meshulam’s death, she elaborated on the previous commissions’ failings, Again and again we are amazed to find that a lot of information was available to the commissions but was not treated properly, thoroughly or professionally. Investigators accepted the verity of documents without verifying them, did not interrogate things thoroughly and we have also found contradictions in their conclusions, including the names of the missing children… it appears that there is no choice but to call for the annulment of the conclusions of the Kedmi commission and to allow the families to reopen the debate on their family members. (SC 14/4)

17 The report of the commission stated that: ‘in contrast to the position of the Parents, the commission gives its full trust to the documentation of the deaths of the “missing”. Moreover, objectively [bold letters in original], the scale of the “disappearance” is limited to those babies whose fate is still unknown’ (Cohen-Kedmi Commission 2001, 292–293).

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Koren then repeated the call for annulment in the Knesset plenary and her call was reflected by minister Hanegbi, who explained the rational for the additional committee headed by Koren: they said: we had committees, why do we need another one? There was Shalgi, there was Bahlul-Minkowski and then Cohen-Kedmi. What good would another committee do? I said: Look. This is not just another committee, this is the committee. Because none of the other committees dealt with the truth – they dealt with keeping the truth at bay. (Knesset 2017)

Other than fighting previous ‘cover-up commissions’, the special committee openly sought the rehabilitation of Meshulam (SC 5/19; SC 7/21; SC 10/19; SC 12/17, SC 32; SC 13/44; SC 14/1), as well as the institutionalisation of his commemoration (SC 21/13; SC 28/30). These goals were pursued both as future projects, as well as in the very practice of the committee, which marked the date of Meshulam’s passing and used the occasion to present its interim summary. The anniversary of his death in 2017 was marked in the Knesset with fiery speeches by government officials declaring their support to the efforts of the Yemenite community representatives. This was followed by a large demonstration in which committee representatives participated. Just as important, the Committee adopted Meshulam’s methodology for its work. His was no longer the last act of a desperate man, but the opening chapter for investigation and reckoning. By ‘methodology’, we mean his prescription of the ‘dual criminality’ of the Yemenite children affair—of the act of abduction and the silence of those complicit, or as he termed it: ‘the crime of silencing’ (SC 27/11). The cultural background we have sketched above illustrates clearly that the telling of the stories of abducted children was curtailed by a certain ‘atmosphere’ in which the drama of the encounter between a powerless population and a powerful state was easily dismissed.

7.8

Into the Stock of Stories: Two Kinds of Truths

During an early session of the committee, Jamal Zahalka, a Palestinian MK from the joint Arab list expressed his unflinching support of the inquiry as well as his unquestioning belief in the testimonies, but he also gave out a warning about the Committee’s goals.

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I think you are looking for the archaeological truth here, this is important, very important… but much more important is the historical truth, the historical truth that the manner in which Yemenite children were treated stemmed from the cultural political conception in Israel, which is against the orient and against poverty… to my regret, things have not changed. (SC 8/29)

The archaeological truth would uncover the bureaucratic mechanisms and the institutional norms that enabled the systematic abduction of children. Doubts would be resolved as a matter of too much power in the wrong hands, a major glitch in the system of immigration absorption. Conversely, the historical truth will recognise that the system as a whole practised an overarching ideology that enabled the re-allocation of children, much as it enabled the relocation of their parents. Zahalka suggested to re-historicise the case and to place it within the wider context of orientalism and colonialism, which suggests a common ground with the Arab case in Israel–Palestine as a whole (SC 8/29). He integrates identity politics with class and socio-economical tensions while referring again to poverty, meaning that poverty and the Orient go together historically because of the actions of the west. In other words, the trauma was now present, but how will it be integrated into the narratives of the state? Will it be encircled or run over by apologetic narratives? Over time, the committee’s initial momentum was lost and the group of activists that initiated the opening of the Cohen-Kedmi documents openly broken with Koren and the committee. The NGO, Amram, revealed that there have been negotiations with the Prime Minister’s office about the official recognition of the abductions as a state crime, but that Koren and her committee have functioned as a disruptive alibi. Shlomi Hatuka, chairman of Amram accused Koren of using up her position as chairperson of the high-profile committee to tilt negotiations in favour of the government. He accused Koren of suggesting that the state would apologise to the families but would refrain from using indicting terminology (Hatuka in Riklis and Na’aman 2018). This was an instance of the archaeological truth that Zahalka warned about (SC 8/29). As part of the negotiations, activists and the representatives of the aggrieved families put together a draft declaration that they expected the Prime Minister to make that sets up their plan for redress. It stated that, ‘The state of Israel takes responsibility over the affair and declares its full commitment to do all it takes to address the wrongs towards the families

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and to mend the raptures in Israeli society’ (ibid.). The declaration sets out five steps, both symbolic and substantial. First, the state will annul the conclusions of the various commissions of inquiry. Second, the state, in consultation with the representatives of the Yemenite community, will lend considerable support to education and commemoration of the affair. Third, a new committee with privileged access to adoption documents will further the investigation. Fourth, compensation will be paid to families, and fifth, the government will actively facilitate the speedy conclusion of the project through further legislation (ibid.). The statement also indicates that families felt that the time has come to scale up the efforts. They were opting for a ‘historical truth’, one that rearranges existing narratives and accepts that the fault for past crimes falls on the state rather than on some rogue institution, problematic figure, or outdated practice. Alongside the publication of these guidelines, the families expressed their dissatisfaction with the efforts of Koren to both soften their demands and pressuring them to compromise, while Hatuka attacked the committee directly: For almost a year and a half Nurit Koren’s committee is working without hardly doing anything, and now there will be an extension of six months. Sorry, did I say nothing? The committee does do one thing: it evaporates the struggle, it gives institutions the possibility to reject approaches from families because there is a committee. For a year and a half now and now six months more of redundant debates, some of them repeat what the NGOs or journalists have already discovered. Why do we need a committee or deliberations for? It is clear that there were abduction and that the establishment and the organisation are not doing anything. (Hatuka in Riklis and Na’aman 2018)

The framing of Koren as an establishment lackey may be unfair, given her actions during the Committee, but her purported actions reflect her response to Zakhalka’s warning: ‘Not only the Kibbutzim built the state, there were immigrants who worked very hard and I want to restore their lost honour’ (SC 8/30). In other words, Koren’s idea of recognition was not the recognition of crimes and the instigation of redress, but a recognition within the context of the ‘linear narratives’ of the state, writing a role to Yemenite community as Zionist pioneers rather than the victims

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of Zionism and offering an appendiceal historical redress (Ben Yehuda 2017).18 This chapter began with Meshulam and it also ends with Meshulam. The anniversary of his death in 2017 was marked by a sense of coming deliverance and joint efforts by representatives of the families and the government, but Meshulam’s 2018 Yarzeit (memorial) saw a large demonstration in front of the Prime Minister’s residence against the committee and the government. While the activists chanted, security guards unfurled a large black curtain that covered the view to the prime minister’s house on Balfour Street. By the next year, the most prominent investigative TV programme in Israel (Hamakor 2019) expressed doubts over the claims of the families and the activists in a way that was unimaginable the year before. It seemed that for now, the time of willing has ended.

References Amir, R. (2014). Transitional Justice Accountability and Memorialisation: The Yemeni Children Affair and the Indian Residential Schools. Israel Law Review, 47 (1), 3–26. Amir, R. (2015). Killing Them Softly: Forcible Transfers of Indigenous Children. Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal, 9(2), 7. Ben-Dor Benite, Z. (2013, January 27). The Clown from the Bermuda Triangle: On Uzi Meshulam Z”L. Haoketz. Ben Yehuda, O. (2015). “Shalosh Efsharuyot, Shalosh Traumot” [Three Traumas, Three Prospects: On Mizrahi Literature]. Theory and Criticism, p. 25. Ben Yehuda, O. (2016, July 13). “Yehudim Korbanot shel Yehudim” [Jews Victims of Jews]. Haaretz. Ben Yehuda, O. (2017, July 12). “Shi’ur Betzionut etzel Haver Haknesset Zakhalka” [A Zionist Lecture by MK Zakhalka]. Haaretz.

18 Zahalka argued that this appendiceal integration into the existing Zionist story of success follows an orientalist worldview that characterises the way in which the Yemenite community is allowed to accumulate cultural capital in Israel in general. He gave the example of the ‘the smallest street in Jerusalem’ named after the Jewish Yemenite King Dhu Nowas, in contrast with the commitment of current minister of culture in Yemen to commemorate the grandeur of Yemenite Jewry as an integral part of Yemenite cultural memory, despite the current small number of Jews in Yemen (SC 8/29).

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Ben Yehuda, O. (2019). Ma’abara: Mizrahim Between Shoah and Nakba. In B. Bashir & A. Goldberg (Eds.), The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (pp. 249–273). New York: Columbia University Press. Blander, D. (2011). Cross-examination: On the make-up, Status and authority of Parliamentary Commissions of Inquiry. The Israel Democracy Institute. Available: https://www.idi.org.il/articles/8954. Accessed 16 October 2020. Chetrit, S. S. (2009). Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews. Routledge. Cohen-Kedmi Commission. (2001). Report of the Cohen-Kedmi Commission, investigation files of the Cohen-Kedmi commission regarding the Yemenite children. Jerusalem, State of Israel, 2001. Israel State Archives. https://www. archives.gov.il/yco [Hebrew]. Davidovitch, N., & Margalit, A. (2008). Public Health, Racial Tensions, and Body Politic: Mass Ringworm Irradiation in Israel, 1949–1960. The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 36(3), 522–529. Edkins, J. (2003). Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edkins, J. (2006). Remembering Relationality: Trauma Time and Politics. In D. Bell (Ed.), Memory, Trauma and World Politics Reflections on the Relationship Between Past and Present (pp. 99–115). Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Felman, S., & Laub, D. (1992). Testimony: Cries of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Taylor and Francis. Fisher, W. (1987). Human Communication as Narration. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Galai, Y. (2017). Narratives of Redemption: The International Meaning of Afforestation in the Israeli Negev. International Political Sociology, 11(3), 273–291. Hamakor. (2019, December 19). Season 18, Episode 9, The Abduction of the Children of Yemen. Available at: https://13tv.co.il/item/news/hamakor/sea son-17/episodes/ep07-1977243/. Accessed 17 Feb 2020 (Hebrew). Hever, H. (2015). To Inherit the Land, to Conquer the Space: The Beginning of Hebrew Poetry in Eretz-Israel. Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik (Hebrew). Inbari, M. (2017). Uzi Meshulam and the ‘Mishkan Ohalim’ Affair. Israel Studies Review, 32(2), 21–42. Khazzoom, A. (2003). The Great Chain of Orientalism: Jewish Identity, Stigma Management, and Ethnic Exclusion in Israel. American Sociological Review, 481–510. Kimmerling, B. (2004). Immigrants, Settlers, Natives: The Israeli State and Society Between Cultural Pluralism and Cultural Wars. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, (Hebrew). Kinnvall, C. (2004). Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the Search for Ontological Security. Political Sociology, 25(5), 741–767.

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Khoury, E. (2006). Gate of the Sun. London: Vintage Books. Knesset. (2017). Plenum 243 of the 20th Knesset, 20 June. Available: http://onl ine.knesset.gov.il/app/#/Player/PEPlayer.aspx?ProtocolID=64843. Accessed 16 October 2020. Lincoln, B. (1989). Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacIntyre, A. (2001). The Virtures, The Unity of a Human Life, and the Concept of a Tradition. In L. P. Hinchman & S. Hinchman (Eds.), Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences (pp. 241–264). Albany: State University of New York Press. MacIntyre, A. (2007). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Madmoni-Gerber, S. (2009). Israeli Media and the Framing of Internal Conflict. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Matzliah, R. (2016, October 29). Meet the Press. Available at: https://www. mako.co.il/news-channel2/Meet-the-Press-q4_2016/Article-70e97ab05711 851004.htm?sCh=5fc06603e7478110&pId=25483675. Accessed 4 June 2019 (Hebrew). Molchadsky, N. G. (2018). From “Missing” to “Kidnapped”: Israeli Commissions of Inquiry and the Framing of the “Missing Children Affair”. The Public Historian, 40(4), 64–90. Novic, E. (2016). The Concept of Cultural Genocide: An International Law Perspective. Oxford University Press. Perliger, A., & Pedahzur, A. (2009). Jewish Terrorism in Israel. New York: Columbia University Press. Ram, U. (1995). The Changing Agenda of Israeli Sociology: Theory, Ideology, and Identity. Binghamton, NT: State University of New York Press. Raz-Krakotzkin. (2005). Zionist Return to the West and the Mizrachi Jewish Perspective. In Ivan Kalmar & Derek Pensler (Eds.), Orientalism and the Jews (pp. 162–181). Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press. Riklis, T., & Na’aman, Y. (2018, June 18). Enough for the Government Foot-dragging and the Torture of Families: An Interview with Shlomi Hatuka. Haoketz. Available at: http://www.haokets.org/2018/06/18/ ‫המשפחות‬-‫ולעינוי‬-‫הממשלתית‬-‫לסחבת‬-‫די‬/?fbclid=IwAR1hF64gXp–iky2AwD84r7F 02crEqBc85RzgA6mKcnUZtJQu3AToLVot9E. Accessed 2 Feb 2019. Sanjero, B. (2002). When There Is No Suspicion There Is No Real Investigation. Teoriya Vebikoret, 21, 47–76 (Hebrew). Shafir, G. (1996). Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Vol. 20). University of California Press.

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Sharon, S. (2017). The Dialectic between Modernization and Orientalization: Ethnicity and Work Relations in the 1950s Lakhish Region Project. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(4), 732–750. Shohat, E. (1988). Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims. Social Text (19/20), 1–35. Smoocha, S. (1993). Class, Ethnic and National Cleavages and Democracy in Israel. In U. Ram, (Ed.), Israeli Society: Critical Perspectives. Tel Aviv, Breirot Publishers, (Hebrew). Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the Subaltern Speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (pp. 271–313). Basingstoke: Macmillan. Steele, B. (2008). Ontological Security in International Relations Self-identity and the IR state. London: Routledge. Swirski, S. (1981). Orientals and Ashkenazim in Israel: The Ethnic Division of Labor. Haifa: Notebooks of Research and Criticism (Hebrew). Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015). Canada’s Residential Schools. The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Available: http://nctr.ca/reports.php. Accessed 16 October 2020. Weiss, M. (2001a). The Immigrating Body and the Body Politic: The ‘Yemenite Children Affair’ and Body Commodification in Israel. Body & Society, 7 (2–3), 93–109. Weiss, M. (2001b). The Children of Yemen: Bodies, Medicalization, and NationBuilding. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 15(2), 206–221. Yiftachel, O. (2006). Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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CHAPTER 8

The Commemorative Continuum of Partition Violence Kelsey J. Utne

‘(A survivor of the 1947 holocaust)’

With this parenthetical identifier, K. Hussan Zia of Toronto signed their letter to the editor in January 2009, in which they recalled the violence, disease, and displacement that marked their memories of coming to newly independent Pakistan. Zia opines that, for those who lived through Partition, the lack of any remembrance at the former site of the Walton Refugee Camp is ‘a matter of great shame’, in The News International, an English-language daily newspaper with wide readership among the Pakistani diasporic communities (Zia 2009). At the location which once hosted the Walton Refugee Camp in Lahore, there are no plaques, no stone tablets, no pamphlets detailing the historic role of the space. The nearby hospital that provided services for refugees has no available records relating to the health of the refugees or the conditions in the camp. Now Zia felt an added sense of erasure at discussions to close the small Walton

K. J. Utne (B) Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 O. Otele et al. (eds.), Post-Conflict Memorialization, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54887-2_8

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Airport—the former refugee camp and airstrip where Muhammad Ali Jinnah first arrived in a newly postcolonial Lahore—to make way for new commercial developments (Alam 2009; The News International 2014). How was Zia to grapple with the persistent and selective forgetting of the tumult which marked the end of the British India and the emergence of two new postcolonial states? In South Asia and around the world, survivors and their descendants live with an absence of formal commemoration of the loss and trauma of Partition, even though it has become an inescapable reference point in political, religious, and familial stories. Memories, experiences, and historical events belong to the colonial era and the postcolonial era—but so too do they belong to a categorization of either ‘before Partition’ or ‘after Partition’. This emphasis on an event’s temporal proximity to Partition is boldly reified in recently developed public history initiatives: digital oral history archives. As a means to better understand the trajectory of Partition historiography, this chapter examines the progression and developments that have led to digital oral history initiatives, such as the 1947 Partition Archive and Citizens Archive Pakistan projects. Narrating the extreme acts of violence that surrounded the partitioning of India and Pakistan at the end of colonial rule evades both historians and nations. As comprehension continues to deny the limits of credulity, scholars aiming to articulate ‘the truth of the traumatic, genocidal violence’ have declared Partition a ‘limit-case’ and impossible to narrate (Pandey 2001, 45–46). They create epistemological distance by converting the history of Partition itself into a history of its causes and origins. They have localized it as an inexplicable and freak event standing outside of historical comprehension. Contrary to the remembrance and guilt which has been so prominent in Holocaust commemoration and historiography, many have suggested that the impetus to forget the trauma of Partition is integral to the future of the region’s cohesion and the unity of its nation states (Pandey 2001, 60; Young 1993; Young 1988). Drawing on Partition scholarship, research on the split of East and West Pakistan in 1971 has similarly revealed the importance of considering the frameworks within which public memory operates. The established narratives of the war for Bangladeshi independence contain carefully constructed silences which are reaffirmed and reproduced at many sites of memory (Saikia 2011). The silences of both Partitions are perpetuated particularly among instances of open and public secrets in which ‘war heroines’ (a euphemism for sexual assault survivors)

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exist in community memory within a framework of weakly veiled scorn (Mookherjee 2006). The resulting refusal to confront the perpetrators of violence or to take ownership of the lived experiences of survivors is tightly bound with the concurrent avoidance of memorialization.

8.1

The Partitioning of India and Pakistan

After nearly 200 years of British colonialism and decades of nationalist agitations, on August 15 1947 newly independent India and Pakistan emerged on the world stage. Lord Mountbatten’s brief tenure as Viceroy gave way as Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah assumed leadership of two separate and sovereign postcolonial states. Announcements in June of 1947 that independence would commence in 1948 were shockingly amended with an expedited deadline less than three months away. In addition to celebration and triumph, the independence of India and Pakistan represents one of the most traumatic experiences in modern history as millions of people uprooted and countless died in stunningly violent clashes (Khan 2007; Zamindar 2007; Talbot and Singh 2009). Partition narratives have historically emphasized the supposed randomness of the violence, the frenzy of uncontrollable rioters, and roving criminal elements. Doing so reinforces a sense of uncontainable chaos, thus ensuring Partition as an inexplicable and unpreventable event. However, recent scholarship suggested a different story in which groups of people conspired, negotiated cooperation from railway employees, slaughtered refugees, and then looted their bodies. The reframing of these attacks to convert them into the inexplicable began early—in police reports that would describe them in institutional records as ‘“a communal riot” by the “unknown,” nameless, people’ (Chattha 2011, 137). This presentation of the violence conveniently allows the community and individual citizens to overlook their own complicity in Partition violence and deaths. Unfortunately, though, it has largely persisted in most critical scholarship and memory studies of Partition. This has been bolstered by an emphasis on individual personal experience. In South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission the ‘privileging of individual stories placed the location and site of traumatic history at the personal level […] did not do enough to account for the institutional context of apartheid that organized power and enabled structural violence’ (Saikia 2011, 6). So too, in Partition memory projects, emphasis largely remains on individual experiences and

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losses. Consequently, societal structures that enabled violence and primed communities for violent clashes avoid examination. In some cases, the ‘need to forget’ materializes as a sentimentalized and glorified pre-Partition past, in which wholesome communal harmony is remembered (Das 2000, 67). This framing is often an instance of the communities involved enlisting ‘prescriptive forgetting’, wherein postconflict communities employ selective remembering as an active choice to restore societal cohesion and live together after a period of violence (Connerton 2008, 61–62). Such a practice runs counter to the commonly held assumption that remembering is a virtue, while forgetting is always a failure (whether personal or collective). Additionally, it may also reveal a historiographical awareness of the role of authorship in sculpting community identity and memory (Dhavan 2009). Remembering and forgetting are rarely happenstance. They can be, at times, as intentional as erecting a bronze statue.

8.2 (Not) Memorializing Partition: Missing Memorials and Avoidance Unlike the Holocaust, most Partition narratives lack a readily defined good side and bad side. We cannot easily point to Nazi perpetrators and their marginalized victim groups, among them Jews, homosexuals, and the disabled. On the community level, both Hindus and Muslims committed acts of astounding violence upon the other at the time of Partition. Many acts of violence were carried out by and against complete strangers, as in the case of the attacks on train cars of fleeing refugees. Hindus bound for India found themselves targeted, as well as Muslims bound for Pakistan. Some attacks were ostensible retribution for violations both real and imagined (Das 2007, 123). Organized groups lay in wait before committing coordinated assaults upon total strangers, selected strictly based on their presumed religious identity and direction of travel (Chattha 2011, 133). Survivors from both sides have recounted grotesque scenes of train cars arriving at stations filled with mutilated corpses.1

1 The horror and brutality of these train attacks have become an iconic reference point in cinema and literary works grappling with Partition, one of the best known being Khushwant Singh’s novel 1956 Train to Pakistan.

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Refusing relocation did not translate into safety from the violence. Many individuals and families insisted on remaining in their ancestral homes and villages, rather than uproot their entire lives on the premise of religious identities translating into new postcolonial national identities. Despite intentions to proceed with life as normal, they witnessed their own neighbours, colleagues, and employees turn on them. During Partition, the face of the perpetrator was not always that of a stranger and experiences of displacement could occur within one’s home town (Sarkar 2009, 196). And finally, family members engaged in acts of violence against one another. In particular, men took the lives of women and children in their own households as a preventative measure, believing that otherwise worse acts would be committed by others. Hindus and Muslims were both the perpetrators and the victims. Consequently, any memorial to the victims of Partition in India would face the dilemma of recognizing the suffering of each side alongside maintaining accountability. There is little precedence in the study of commemoration in the modern era for this dual acknowledgement, wherein neither community had been more or less aggrieved than the other. The geographic scale of Partition was immense. While certain areas did experience more tumult than others, it impacted every corner of what is now India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The violence was not confined to specific battle zones or border skirmishes, as has predominantly been the case in the repeated wars between India and Pakistan which have followed.2 The violence of Partition infiltrated mundane spaces. It occurred along rural roads and on trains. In villages and cities. In homes and on the streets. Correspondingly, the victims of Partition were not soldiers in combat or similarly organized units. Burials and cremations were private affairs, and, when it was possible, families dealt individually with their own dead. There are not major collective burial or cremation grounds specific to Partition. Even thousands of miles from the subcontinent, during World War I, Indian casualties are commemorated collectively at UK sites where Muslim soldiers were buried and Hindu and Sikh soldiers were cremated (Ashley 2016). But the victims of Partition were largely unremarkable, merely members of the public without notable affiliation. Just as the violence during Partition permeated across 2 Jammu-Kashmir is the primary exception to this rule of postcolonial military conflict between India and Pakistan. For insight into the way the experience of violence permeates life in the disputed territory, see Robinson (2013).

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the region, so too did the final locations of dead bodies. The absence of spatial specificity makes it all the harder to select a physical site for a monument to Partition. The Indian and Pakistani postcolonial governments were grossly unprepared for the massive migrations and wide-scale violence of their new citizenry. Normally, the commemoration of major traumatic events in the twentieth century is the prerogative of the state. However, formal state recognition of the trauma of Partition risks admitting the states’ failure to maintain a monopoly over violence and, potentially, even complicity. At best, the officials of the new governments were first caught entirely off guard, then ill-equipped to respond appropriately and assert order over independent states for whose existence they had fought. At worst, there were officials who actively participated or otherwise facilitated attacks. Neither instance would be amenable to a young, recently decolonized state in the midst of defining itself and reiterating its legitimacy in both domestic and international spheres. Institutional recognition of the need to mark the transition of 1947 has sought safer alternatives. South Asian governments accomplished this predominantly through commemorating the anti-colonial nationalist movement and its ‘freedom fighters’.

8.3

Commemorating Independence Sans Partition

Public ceremonies, historic sites, and museum exhibits manage to simultaneously remember the time during which Partition occurred, while carefully skirting around Partition itself. These alternative memories attempt to fill the void where Partition experiences ought to be commemorated. Annual and daily commemorations which are rooted in temporal specificity gain purchase through repetition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983, 1; Menon 2013, 10). The more times they are enacted reliably and consistently, the more potent their power to articulate a trauma-free narrative. Likewise, the presentation of historic houses, significant sites, and museums produces nationalist histories which omit the corpses and bodily trauma of Partition. Only three types of deaths are appropriate in the postcolonial public history: founding figures (most prominently Jinnah, Nehru, and Gandhi), anti-colonial freedom fighters (such as Bhagat Singh), and the war dead (particularly those lost in conflicts between India and Pakistan).

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Annual observances in both countries celebrate the founding of the postcolonial states and the end of the colonial era, while avoiding Partition itself. Marking the transition of power and the myth of achieving ‘freedom at midnight’, to this day Pakistan celebrates its independence on August 14 each year, while India observes August 15 as its national birthday. But early in its postcolonial history, India chose to relegate this Independence Day to minor status as a national holiday. The government established January 26 as Republic Day, which involves considerably more fanfare. The latter date distances boisterous and patriotic celebrations from the mourning trauma strongly associated with the lead up to and aftermath of August 1947. The date also creates a sense of historical continuity to two occasions from the nationalist movement, in 1930 and 1950, from which it derives more positive associations (Roy 2007, 70). January 26 corresponds to no particularly memorable day in 1947 or 1948 in the nation’s history. In contrast to the unbridled violence which marked the historical partitioning of India and Pakistan, a sanitized version of Partition occurs daily at the Atari-Wagah border crossing. At sundown every day, the border closing ceremony re-enacts a controlled and violence-free division of the two countries, during which crowds on either side pile into bleachers to shout nationalist slogans and cheer as soldiers lower their respective flags and close the gates with military precision and nationalist pomp. The ceremony is premised on the moment of rupture when the colonial era ended and the postcolonial began. Whereas in 1947 many citizens of British India were opposed to Partition (or were unaware of its occurrence entirely), at the Atari-Wagah border ceremony, when the gates close the two nations are reified with the enthusiastic endorsement and support of the lay public. In their roles as what Jisha Menon calls ‘citizen viewers’, they not only affirm their consent as observers, but further become wholly complicit participants to the division of India and Pakistan (2013, 40). The Atari-Wagah border ceremony rewrites the history of Partition daily by enacting an imagined ideal split that is cleaned, organized, and blessed with the heartfelt support of the public. Residences of important individuals also feature heavily in the preservation and presentation of public memory. Though Jinnah spent the majority of his professional career based in Bombay, he relocated (briefly) to what would become Pakistan’s first capital city and city of his own birth: Karachi. His life is immortalized in the Qaid-e-Azam House, in which he lived from 1944 until his death in 1948, and which passed to

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his sister Fatima Jinnah until her death in 1967. The nineteenth-century home is one of three historic residences of the revered ‘Great Leader’ that lie within Pakistani borders. Wazir Mansion (officially called the Qaid-eAzam Birthplace Museum) also lies in Karachi, while the remotely located Qaid-e-Azam Residency, where Jinnah spent his final days, is in a resort town outside of Quetta. As a rejection of the nation-state Jinnah helped to create and the narrative of Pakistani identity, Baluchi secessionists attacked the Qaid-e-Azam Residency in 2013 (Shah 2013). The home in which he and others discussed plans for Partition and the creation of Pakistan, however, lies in India in Bombay and thus outside Pakistani state jurisdiction. For over thirty years India, Pakistan, and Jinnah’s surviving relatives, have engaged in a protracted legal battle over ownership rights, despite the house being formally willed to Fatima. Members of India’s BJP government have called for the demolition of the house which signifies, both the failure of the Indian nationalist movement to create a single, unified postcolonial state and all that resulted (Bose 2017). Historic sites maintained in India mute the tragedy of Partition and the discontent. They instead evoke a similar triumphalism, made possible only under the leadership of figures like Gandhi and Nehru. Most prominently among these stands Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi. Established as a museum shortly after Nehru’s death in 1964, the site includes the Teen Murti House in which Nehru lived during his tenure as prime minister of postcolonial India.3 While in Delhi, tourists from India and around the world also visit Gandhi Smriti, where Gandhi lived when in Delhi. Within its groundsstands a pillar at the site of his assassination. In Gandhi’s home state of Gujarat, a public trust preserves and maintains the ashram Gandhi operated until beginning his famous salt march in 1930. All three sites refer to Partition in terms of the fracturing of India and the deep disappointment of Nehru, Gandhi, and other Indian nationalists.4 By framing Partition in strict terms of valiance, this narrative implies that Partition’s violence could have been avoided were it not for the call to create Pakistan. Blame is discreetly avoided. The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre Memorial in Amritsar evidences that deaths need not be of elite individuals or soldiers in combat to warrant 3 The name Teen Murti literally means ‘three statues’ and refers to three bronze soldiers standing sentinel around a monumental stone pillar, honouring the contributions and sacrifices of Indian Army soldiers during World War I on behalf of the Allies. 4 Author visit to Teen Murti, Gandhi Smriti, and Sabarmati Ashram, 2012 and 2013.

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remembrance. In that public park, British soldiers under the direction of Brigadier General Reginald Dyer opened fire on civilians, gathered to protest the colonial abuse of wartime powers to suppress the nationalist movement. The massacre claimed hundreds, injured many more, and became the ultimate example of British oppression in South Asia. In the months and years that followed, the vernacular print industry ensured wide distribution of eyewitness accounts and songs of mourning.5 Unlike the violence of Partition, the British play the distinct role of antagonists in the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. Though one may debate the extent to which Dyer, individual officers and soldiers, and the entirety of the colonial infrastructure shared responsibility, commemoration of the site fits into a narrative more amenable to the Indian state. And indeed, well before resettling the last of the refugees or sorting out the administration of evacuee properties, the Indian government established the Jallianwala Bagh Memorial through an act of parliament in 1951. As the official casualty count from the massacre remains unknown, so too do the identities of every victim. Despite such ambiguity, the postcolonial state ensured their commemoration, and in 2009 bestowed upon them the official designation as ‘freedom fighters’ (Buncombe 2009). Politicians and lay public alike embrace Jallianwala Bagh as a critical juncture in the region’s history and path towards independence, but one without the same complications enmeshed in Partition. Administrators in both countries have created further intellectual distance between certain historic sites and their role in Partition. As violence escalated in 1947, many Muslim families in the Delhi area sought safety in Purana Qila, Humayan’s Tomb, and other sites under the Archaeological Survey of India’s (ASI) jurisdiction. In these historic sites of Delhi’s many pasts, refugees first sought temporary sanctuary, but many lived there for years. Many ultimately left India, even if they had originally intended to return to their homes once stability returned (Rajagopalan 2016, 143). In the decades that followed, the ASI’s administration of these sites muted their role in the story of Partition. Hindu nationalists spearheaded ASI excavations at Purana Qila in the 1950s, thereby obliterating much physical evidence of refugee occupancy. Interpretive signage and publications at these sites detail their historical

5 Notable examples include Biharilal Agarval’s

Jagannath Prasad’s

(1922) and (1920).

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significance—excepting any mention of refugees or Partition.6 Though Hindus and Sikhs also were among those who sought refuge in the impromptu camps, their very necessity highlighted a perceived failure to resist the call for Pakistan. Whereas Indian sites erase the refugee experience, Pakistani sites emphasize the victory of Pakistan’s founding and the patriotic sacrifice of refugees from India. The very existence of the country embodies more than the triumph over centuries of colonial occupation, an aspect of the narrative which India embraces as well. In Pakistan, it represents an additional triumph over Indian and Hindu nationalisms; over the idea of single secular postcolonial state. Consequently, Pakistan incorporates refugees in the story of 1947 limitedly, by focusing strictly on the concept of displaced Muslims fleeing India. For over twenty-five years, the Bab-e-Pakistan Foundation has aspired to build an ambitious memorial complex on a portion of the Walton Refugee Camp site, space until recently utilized by the Pakistani Army, Punjab Police, and Punjab Boy Scouts Association. Proposed by General Zia in 1985, the project aims to commemorate ‘the valiant fighters in our cause who readily sacrificed all they had, including their lives, to make Pakistan possible’ (Hassan 2016; Bab-e-Pakistan 2015). If ever realized, the complex will include a mosque, library, museum, auditorium, art gallery, and a 164-foot tall memorial. In the Lahore Museum, the Pakistan Movement exhibit narrates the ‘struggle for freedom of the Muslims of India’ over British colonialism, from Tipu Sultan to the uprising of 1857, through to the earliest years of Pakistan. A handful of photographs depicting migrants from India represent the only reference to Partition. The image captions explain that these are individuals fleeing an unsafe Hindu India, arriving at last in the only homeland for South Asian Muslims: Pakistan.7 The migration is unidirectional. The exhibit is mute to the existence of Hindus and Sikhs who travelled in the other direction, or remained in place. It makes no mention of violence and the death of over one million South Asians. In place of these uncomfortable facts, Pakistan emerges as a teleological safe haven for Muslims who were not safe in India—conveniently omitting that the abrupt creation of two separate states helped create the circumstances under which migration became an imperative.

6 Author visit to Purana Qila and Humayan’s Tomb 2013. 7 Author visit to Lahore Museum 2014.

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Silences and Scholarly Interventions

Early Partition historiography emphasized the high politics of elite decision-makers among the upper echelons of the Indian National Congress, Muslim League, and British colonial government (Hodson 1969; Qureshi 1965; Sayeed 1968; Bahadur and Johari 1988). These histories focused largely upon the years and political movements leading up to independence and Partition in a quest to locate its origins and (dis)place blame (Talbot and Singh 2009, 24). With the fiftieth anniversary of independence in 1997, scholarship turned a critical eye to the personal experiences and consequences in individual lives of Partition rather than chasing an explanatory chronology. This body of scholarship exchanged political machinations for the personal memories of the non-elite, with particular consideration to the experiences of women and marginalized minorities. The first rounds of Partition oral history research emerged from a political climate in which the previously latent spectre of communal violence had reasserted itself. The anti-Sikh riots of 1984 and the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodha in 1992, brought into harsh perspective that Partition’s clashes between different religious communities were neither merely outliers, nor constrained to that particular historical juncture. These scholarly works were borne out of personal experiences and a need to grapple with the tensions of the late twentieth century. Many in South Asia are haunted by memories of parents, grandparents, and great grandparents—memories that are not their own, and yet they identify deeply with the loss of homeland (Butalia 2000; Saikia 2011, 69). Dissatisfied with histories of high politics, they sought to locate the lived experiences of Partition outside of state archives. Among the first major oral history projects on Partition, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin’s Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (1998) revealed that many interviewed women placed distinct value in the act of ‘remembering to others’, often for the first time (1998, 18). Breaking the silence and sharing their experiences allowed them to become part of the formal history record. Whereas the Jewish community employs a discourse of victimhood to instill horror, sympathy, guilt, and promises of deterrence against future threats, Indians and Pakistanis have not embraced this same approach. Doing so would undermine the way these communities understand and define themselves as capable of protecting the nation. This articulation manifests in the ability to protect women, endowing them as the

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custodians of tradition, national honour, and the future of the nation (Sarkar 2001; Sangari and Vaid 2010). After all, as Paul Brass notes, the label ‘martyr […] has a much more positive ring than that of victim’ (2006, 18). Among Sikhs, acknowledging community vulnerability or the capacity for unprovoked violence against civilians runs directly counter to historical constructions of Sikh identity and values. Roles with assertions of agency dominate, while victim experiences, particularly sexual violence, are sources of shame. In some circumstances, the role of perpetrator becomes permissible, acceptable for circulation within the community, because perpetrators’ actions make claims about a community’s dominance. Thus, memories of heroism circulate widely, while those of victimhood are selectively forgotten. This forgetting may be prescriptive in that it aids the post-conflict (and possibly altered) community in maintaining unity (Connerton 2008; Gellner 1987). In South Asian communities, the loss of ‘honour’ following the assault and sexual violence of women damages community and family ties. When these violations are acknowledged, women have been ostracized by their own communities (Butalia 2000). Forgetting can be a means of survival.

8.5

The Digital and Diasporic Turns

Neither sanitized nationalism nor omission has proven sufficient to memorialize Partition. It was too momentous an experience for too many people. In the last 15 years, multiple digital oral history projects have grown out of a new imperative. Rather than being driven by a sense of reflection or a need to grapple with the persistence of communal violence in contemporary South Asia, they operate under a sense of panic: Partition survivors are dying (Sengupta 2013). As repositories for historical knowledge (in this case, that of their own lived-in experiences), they are constricted by the limitations of human mortality. These projects are motivated by the same urgency faced by the Shoah Foundation and other Holocaust oral history projects. The archives are established by individuals to whom the loss of these lived experiences is personal, as these are the memories of their grandparents’ generation. Their professional backgrounds range from physics to film production, but they are united by a common vision to ensure the world never forgets Partition’s tragedies. Almost 70 years after the actual events of Partition, young South Asians seek to reconnect with this perceived moment of rupture.

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Shortly after visiting the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in Japan, Guneeta Singh Bhalla founded the 1947 Partition Archive. Then a postdoc researcher in physics at UC Berkeley, Singh Bhalla and others were troubled by the fact that ‘There was no memorial for the partition […] there wasn’t the same kind of knowledge about it’ as existed for Hiroshima and the Holocaust’ (Perlman 2011; Viswanathan 2006). She felt private citizens and civil society must take on the responsibility to preserve memories, commemorate experiences, and create non-state archives. Consistent with the experiences of scholars researching in the 1990s, the interviewees she spoke with often shared their stories for the first time (Sengupta 2013). The 1947 Partition Archive is simultaneously articulate and nonspecific when it comes to locating its members and their relationship to Partition. The organization’s mission statement describes itself as a ‘people-powered non-profit’ dedicated to ‘documenting, preserving and sharing eye witness accounts from all ethnic, religious and economic communities affected by the Partition of British India’ (1947 Partition Archive 2015). It describes its members as ‘concerned global citizens committed to preserving this chapter of our collective history’. Though personal experiences played heavily in the establishment of the organization (Singh Bhalla discusses in interviews her grandmother’s stories of fleeing Lahore for Amritsar during Partition) and the South Asian diaspora community is most prominent in lists of board members, donors, and volunteers, neither the mission statement nor the ‘About Us’ description locate the project within the South Asian community or within the larger diaspora in North America. Whereas the 1947 Partition Archive avoids association with a single nation or community, the Citizens Archive Pakistan collects interviews that are ‘in a dialogue on national identity’, specifically Pakistani identity (The Citizens Archive of Pakistan, n.d.). Pakistani journalist and filmmaker, Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, founded the project in 2007 in response to a recurring point of inquiry among her colleagues: how did we get where we are as a nation?8 The organization’s flagship programme, the Oral History Project (OHP) emphasizes memories of personal experiences and memories of ‘the early days of Pakistan’. Following the demographic questions, interview questions ask about specific major events regarding the establishment and politics of the Pakistani state. 8 Interview by author at the Lahore office of Citizens Archive Pakistan October 13, 2014.

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These include memories of major speeches, riots, Jinnah’s death, and wars with India. By specifying certain categories of events as subjects of interests, there is a potential to produce a particular arc of the national narrative of Pakistan—specifically one that will ‘instill pride in Pakistani citizens about their heritage’. Unlike the 1947 Partition Archive, Citizens Archive Pakistan is not thematically focused on Partition. However, given Partition’s pervasive influence in the lives of Pakistanis, the OHP places Citizens Archive Pakistan on the forefront of Partition memory and memorialization in Pakistan.9 Although nongovernmental organizations, neither Citizens Archive Pakistan nor 1947 Partition Archive is immune to state pressures. The broad scope and titles of CAP projects reflect the sensitive nature of remembering Partition experiences within the confines of South Asia. Their web content (as recently as August 2017) and a 2010 museum exhibit at the Mohatta Palace Museum in Karachi navigate the taboo subject under the thematic heading ‘Birth of Pakistan’ in place of any mention of Partition.10 Based in the United States and drawing extensive support from global diasporic communities, on the surface the 1947 Partition Archive eschews alignment with any single postcolonial state’s preferred narrative. However, geographic remoteness does not remove an active need for the support of the Indian and Pakistani governments, who issue or deny the visas for documentary visits to South Asia to record further interviews. Thus, the programmes walk a tightrope, on which they simultaneously confront institutional silence and must operate within permissible political parameters. Public involvement is essential to the vision of these commemorative initiatives. Building on social media infrastructure and collaborative digital resources such as Wikipedia and Kickstarter, both projects utilize crowdsourcing. Instead of creating more ‘citizen viewers’, as described by Jisha Menon, digital archives create ‘citizen historians’ (1947 Partition Archive 2015). They invite the whole of the global South Asian community to become active contributors in the (re)production of Partition memory. The organizations welcome individuals who express an interest 9 Conversation with Furrukh Khan, professor of Postcolonial Studies at Lahore University of Management Sciences, September 9, 2014. 10 A similar project by CAP on the 1971 war, in which East Pakistan seceded and became independent Bangladesh, acknowledges political and personal cleavages reminiscent of 1947.

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in interviewing family members, friends, and neighbours. The approach is dual purposed. In the race against the clock, the more people who are involved and in more locations, the more robust and comprehensive the archival collection. In addition to increasing the organizational capacity to conduct interviews, it imbues volunteers with a sense of ownership. They become invested in the project and its success. There is a growing peer group to this collaborative digital model for diasporic South Asian history, including the Sindhi Voices Project, the South Asian American Digital Archive, India of the Past, and, most recently, Harvard’s Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute’s Partition Stories: Collection and Analysis of Oral Narratives. Is digital commemoration sufficient? It may be better than nothing at all, but public discourse indicates that it fails to wholly satisfy. It is remarkable that so many decades have passed without a single physical memorial site to an event that is reliably compared to the Holocaust, which itself is marked by memorials around the world, major museums in the United States and Germany, and carefully preserved concentration camps (Pandey 2010). These physical sites have become pilgrimage sites by allowing for wordless, visceral mourning and remembering. While the oral history archives preserve memories for posterity, they remain intangible. Even their most ardent proponents articulate long-term plans to use the collected materials to create a Partition Memorial Museum that is akin to the Holocaust Memorial Museum or the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in Japan.11

8.6

Conclusion: A Partition Museum at Last?

After 70 years, the world’s first Partition Museum opened its galleries to the world on August 17, 2017 in Amritsar, India.12 Like its predecessors, this commemorative project by the Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust (TAACHT) carefully eludes sensitive nationalist politics by focusing on individual human stories and experiences. Exhibits highlight individual recollections and personal items carried by refugees: a wedding sari, a toy box, a property deed, a pocket watch. The Museum is creating its

11 Visit to Lahore office of Citizens Archive Pakistan October 13, 2014 (Perlman 2011). 12 Parts of the museum technically opened in October 2016, but the grand opening of

all of its galleries was not until August 2017.

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own oral history collection, but is facing the increasing scarcity of Partition witnesses which has already placed pressure on its peers. Although TAACHT does not crowdsource the oral history interviews themselves, it actively solicits requests and suggestions for potential interviewees (The Partition Museum, n.d.). It is unclear whether the Museum has partnered with pre-existing projects like Citizens Archive Pakistan or 1947 Partition Archive. Neither was mentioned on its web content, which does credit Amity University (a private university based in Uttar Pradesh) as supporting its oral history recording, and the London School of Economics’ South Asia Centre as providing academic advisement. The new museum marks a turning point in the commemoration of Partition. Whereas commemorations such as the Atari-Wagah border ceremony and exhibits at the Lahore Museum elide Partition’s traumas, the Partition Museum intends to showcase the violence that characterized Partition. The museum’s CEO and trustee of TAACHT explained the need for the museum: ‘If you look at any other country in the world, they have all memorialized the experiences that have defined and shaped them […] yet this event that has so deeply shaped not only our subcontinent, but millions of individuals who were impacted, has had no museum or memorial, 70 years later’ (Scroll.in 2017). The new museum is a watershed moment in the commemoration of Partition; the culmination of decades of demands. But will it be enough?

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Hoffman, E. (2004). After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust. New York: Public Affairs. Jalal, A. (1995). Conjuring Pakistan: History as Official Imagining. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 27 (1), 73–89. Khan, Y. (2007). The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. New Haven: Yale University Press. LaCapra, D. (2001). Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Menon, V. P. (1957). The Transfer of Power in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Menon, J. (2013). The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan, and the Memory of Partition. New York: Cambridge University Press. Menon, R., & Bhasin, K. (1998). Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. New Delhi: Kali for Women. Mookherjee, N. (2006). “Remembering to Forget”: Public Secrecy and Memory of Sexual Violence in the Bangladesh War of 1971. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 12(2), 433–50. Nora, P. (1989). Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Representations, 26, 7–24. Pandey, G. (2001) Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Pandey, G. (2010, August 14). Missing Memorials to the Victims of Partition. BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-10951466. 1947 Partition Archive. (2015, January). Collect Stories. http://www.1947parti tionarchive.org. Perlman, C. (2011, April 27). Archive Documents Oral Stories from Survivors of India’s Partition. The Daily Californian. http://archive.dailycal.org/printa ble.php?id=112974. Qureshi, I. H. (1965). The Struggle for Pakistan. Karachi: University of Karachi. Rajagopalan, M. (2016). Building Histories: The Archival and Affective Lives of Five Monuments in Modern Delhi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Robinson, C. D. (2013). Body of Victim, Body of Warrior. Berkeley: University of California Press. Roy, S. (2007). Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Saikia, Y. (2011). Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sangari, K., & Vaid, S. (Eds.). (2010). Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History. New Delhi: Zubaan. Sarkar, T. (2001). Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism. New Delhi: Permanent Black.

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Sarkar, B. (2009). Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sayeed, K. B. (1968). Pakistan: The Formative Phase. London; New York: Oxford University Press. Scroll.in. (2017, August 15). India’s First Partition Museum to Open in Amritsar This Week. https://scroll.in/latest/847339/indias-first-partition-museum-toopen-in-amritsar-this-week. Sengupta, S. (2013, August 13). Potent Memories from a Divided India. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/14/arts/potent-mem ories-from-a-divided-india.html. Dawn, Shah, S. A. (2013). June 15. http://www.dawnnews.tv/news/101430. Talbot, I., & Singh, G. (2009) The Partition of India. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. The Citizens Archive of Pakistan. (n.d.) Accessed 6 Feb 2015. http://www.cit izensarchive.org/about-us/. The News International. (2014, June 27). SC Moved Against Plan to Acquire Walton Aerodrome Land. Accessed 14 May 2017. https://www.thenews. com.pk/archive/print/510970-sc-moved-against-plan-to-acquire-walton-aer odrome-land. The Partition Museum. (n.d.) Request an Oral History. Accessed 2 Sept 2017. http://www.partitionmuseum.org/get-involved/request-for-oral-history/. Viswanathan, R. (2006). Need A Partition Memorial. Accessed 1 June 2014. http://ram.viswanathan.in/2006/08/need-partition-memorial_21.html. Young, J. E. (1988). Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (1993). The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press. Zamindar, V. F.-Y. (2007). The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. New York: Columbia University Press. Zia, K. H. (2009‚ January 8). The Camp at Walton. The News International. https://www.thenews.com.pk/archive/print/154798-the-camp-at-walton.

CHAPTER 9

Absent Bodies, Present Pasts: Forced Disappearance as Historical Injustice in the Peruvian Highlands Eva Willems

9.1

Introduction

Societies all over the world develop transitional justice strategies to face the legacies of civil war and dictatorship. Remembrance is a central feature

This research was made possible with the financial support of the Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO). My gratitude goes to the members of the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team (EPAF), in particular Gisela Ortiz and Percy Rojas for facilitating my entry into the community of Yachay; to my research collaborators Alicia Noa, Gabriela Zamora, and Karina Barrientos for their valuable work and their important contributions to the research; to the villagers of Yachay for their hospitality and willingness to collaborate; and to my colleagues of the research line meta- and public history at Ghent University for their valuable comments on drafts of this text. E. Willems (B) Center for Conflict Studies, Philipps-Universität, Marburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2021 O. Otele et al. (eds.), Post-Conflict Memorialization, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54887-2_9

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of these strategies.1 The International Center for Transitional Justice states that ‘Victims of human rights abuses cannot forget, and states have a duty to preserve the memory of such crimes’ (ICTJ, n.d.b). However, a closer look at the local realities of post-conflict societies makes clear that remembrance is not always self-evident. During the Peruvian civil war (1980–2000) over 15,000 people were forcibly disappeared by the army, the Shining Path, and other armed groups. According to the United Nations International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, ‘enforced disappearance is considered to be the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty (…) followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law’.2 Remembrance as a way of dealing with the legacies of mass-violence gets an extra problematic dimension in cases of forced disappearance: How to mourn without a grave? How to remember the unknown? The legacies of forced disappearances demonstrate the paradox that according to Paul Connerton goes together with forms of repressive erasure, as ‘the requirement to forget ends in reinforcing memory’ (2011, 41). This chapter will start with a brief historical overview of the Peruvian civil war and of the specific context of forced disappearance in Yachay, a small district with a high number of disappeared in the central Andes 1 According to the International Centre for Transitional Justice, ‘Transitional justice refers to the ways countries emerging from periods of conflict and repression address large scale or systematic human rights violations so numerous and so serious that the normal justice system will not be able to provide an adequate response’. Transitional justice measures may include criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations programs, gender justice, security system reform and memorialization efforts (ICTJ, n.d.a.). 2 Article 2 of the Convention defines enforced disappearance as a crime committed by ‘agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State’. Article 3 however states that ‘each State Party shall take appropriate measures to investigate acts defined in article 2 committed by persons or groups of persons acting without the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State and to bring those responsible to justice’ (United Nations General Assembly 2006). In the Peruvian context, a broad interpretation of these definitions is used, considering enforced disappearance a crime committed by both the state forces and the Shining Path. Law N°30470 on the search of persons who disappeared during the period of violence 1980–2000, approved by Peruvian congress in June 2016, defines a ‘disappeared person’ as ‘any person whose whereabouts are unknown by his relatives or of whom there is no legal certainty of their location, as a consequence of the period of violence 1980-2000’ (Ley n°30470 2016).

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region of Ayacucho.3 By drawing on ethnographic field research among family members of the disappeared in this village, I will then explore two different aspects of dealing with forced disappearance as a legacy of mass-violence. First, I will focus on the process of remembering the disappeared. During the yearly ‘Day of Memory’, when Yachay commemorates its victims of the civil war, relatives of the disappeared are confronted with the absence of remains and proper burial sites. As such, the presence of the violent past is enacted through the absence of the bodies of the disappeared. I argue that this absence influences the process of mourning as it might prevent relatives from separating the violent past from the present and future. Secondly, I will suggest that the absence of acknowledgment of the Peruvian state toward the relatives of the disappeared is part of a larger historical injustice based on, among other factors, socioeconomic exclusion, and that the lack of commitment of the state to search for the disappeared can be understood as an injustice of the past that lasts in the present. By examining these two forms of absence—the absence of remains and the absence of acknowledgment—I will consider the potential of the search for the disappeared (including exhumation, identification, and reburial) as a transitional justice mechanism to achieve recognition for past violence and present citizenship. I claim that on the one hand, the dead bodies of the past can have an emancipatory potential for their relatives in the present and future as the process of finding, identifying, and reburying can respond both to the absence of remains as to the absence of acknowledgment. However, following the premise that non-recognition or misrecognition might inflict harm or be a form of oppression, many risks are involved.4 The relation between the state and its citizens is complex and finding the appropriate balance between the humanitarian approach and the focus on criminal justice in the search for the disappeared has proven to be very difficult. If the process is not carried out properly, it can be a constant reminder of injustice rather than leading to social justice. It therefore holds the risk of re-victimizing groups that experienced processes of historical injustice and of disregarding ongoing structural violence in the present.

3 Due to privacy reasons, the names of the village and of the respondents in this chapter are pseudonyms. 4 For a discussion of this premise and its origins, see: Taylor (1994).

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Yachay lies like a bowl in the middle of the Andes landscape, at a four to five-hour drive from Huamanga, the capital city of the Ayacucho region. Situated at 3800 meters AMSL,5 the village is enclosed by rounded mountain peaks that change colors from sand-brown during the dry season to all shades of green as the rain sets in. I entered the village for the first time during a heavy rainy season in 2012. At that time, I was a master student volunteering with the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team (EPAF) and we were doing preliminary research to identify possible burial sites.6 The road was not yet paved, and the usual derrumbes or mudslides made us stay in Yachay instead of traveling on to more distant communities. During the day, I was delighted by the peace and the beauty of the village, especially after having spent most of my time in the chaotic metropole of Lima, but at night I felt like I was thrown right back into the gruesome history that I had been reading so much about and I could not sleep. There is almost no twilight in the Andes and complete darkness falls abrupt, marking the relentless separation between day and night—something that I never really got used to. Yachay was the first village in the countryside of Ayacucho that I ever visited and at that moment, I could not imagine that I would go back dozens of times. The findings in this contribution are based on ethnographic field research in Yachay conducted in 2014 and 2015 over a period of eleven months. The data consists of 33 semi-structured interviews with villagers, complemented with many informal conversations and observations during significant activities such as the annual Day of Memory, the annual harvest festival, the exhumation of a mass grave with victims of the civil war, and follow-up meetings with relatives. All the interviews were recorded, and the transcriptions were coded in NVivo.7 The data gathered during informal conversations and observations was mostly written down in fieldnotes, or in some cases, also recorded with the consent of the informants and transcribed.8 During my fieldwork, I was based in 5 Above main sea level (AMSL). 6 The Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team (Equipo Peruano de Antropología Forense,

EPAF) is a Peruvian NGO based in Lima and dedicated to the search for the disappeared in Peru and other countries. See: http://epafperu.org/en/. Accessed 20 Mar 2017. 7 NVivo is a software tool for organizing and managing qualitative data. 8 These data are in the footnotes referred to as ‘field recordings’ when it concerns public

events involving a group of people, or informal conversations in the case of individual informants.

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Huamanga from where I traveled back and forth to several communities, often accompanied by one of my research collaborators: Alicia Noa, Gabriela Zamora, and Karina Barrientos. Their main task was to translate from Quechua to Spanish during interviews with informants who did not master enough Spanish, but they also provided important practical and psychological support throughout the research process. The length of my stays in Yachay varied from four to ten days. Apart from these field trips that I undertook independently, I also accompanied the EPAF on their field trips that mostly had the purpose of doing preliminary research or following up on exhumations of mass graves. Due to the fact that my first contacts in the village were established through my collaboration with the EPAF, I would, in the beginning, often be seen as an NGO-worker rather than as a researcher. Nevertheless, the level of confidence that they had already established made it a lot easier to find an entry into the community and throughout the course of my fieldwork, I became increasingly seen as a separate actor as I spent more time in the community by myself.

9.2 The Peruvian Civil War (1980–2000) and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2001–2003) In 1980, the Shining Path started a violent revolutionary campaign in the central Andes region of Ayacucho.9 Intellectuals at the University of Ayacucho, led by Professor of Philosophy, Abimael Guzmán, founded the radical Maoist splinter group of the Peruvian Communist Party (PCP). The Shining Path gained followers by spreading its ideology through socalled ‘popular schools’ that were installed in many of the peasant villages in the highlands of Ayacucho and by recruiting fighters among the local population.10 Their aim was to overthrow the Peruvian state by initiating

9 The full Spanish name is Partido Comunista del Perú - Sendero Luminoso (PCP-SL). The PCP-SL originated as a separation of the Peruvian Communist Party. Ayacucho is one of Peru’s 24 regions, located in the central Southern part of the country in the heart of the Andes mountain range. The capital of the Ayacucho region has two names: the homonymous Ayacucho and the more locally used Huamanga. 10 Villagers, including women and young children, were obliged to attend the ‘popular schools’ (escuelas populares) where Shining Path militants taught Maoist-communist ideology and recruits received military training to start the armed struggle (Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación 2003a).

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a violent people’s revolution. The limited presence of the state in the rural areas and the poor socioeconomic conditions eventually provided a fertile soil for the radical ideas of the Shining Path. However, as the movement’s violent nature became clear to the local population, some began to oppose its presence. By the time the Peruvian army decided to intervene in 1982, the situation had already escalated into a complicated civil conflict marked by multidirectional violence, often fought between ‘intimate enemies’ (Theidon 2013, 461).11 The Marxist-Leninist Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) started its own revolutionary struggle in addition to the Shining Path while the population organized itself in self-defense patrols to cope with increasing insecurity. In 1992, the authoritarian government of President Alberto Fujimori succeeded in capturing Abimael Guzmán and dismantling the Shining Path’s party leadership. As there was no central authority anymore, the movement started to fall apart and the frequency of their violent interventions diminished significantly. Fujimori succeeded in depicting himself as the vanquisher of the Shining Path, which helped him to legitimize political repression and human rights violations as part of the ‘struggle against terrorism’. In 2000, the large-scale corruption of Fujimori’s government came to light after which he fled to Japan. A transitional government was installed to prepare new elections, which resulted in the presidency of Alejandro Toledo. Following the Latin American examples of Argentina, Chile, El Salvador and Guatemala, Peruvian human rights organizations started to push for the set-up of a truth commission. From 2001 to 2003 the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) investigated the events of 20 years of civil war on the basis of around 16,000 testimonies. The final report of the TRC estimated that 70,000 Peruvians had been killed or disappeared between 1980 and 2000 (CVR 2004, 17). The Shining Path was held accountable for 54% of the casualties, the state forces for 37% (CVR 2004, 18). The native language of 75% of the victims was Quechua or another indigenous language (CVR 2004, 23), and 40% of the victims fell in the rural region of Ayacucho, one of Peru’s poorest areas (CVR 2004, 18). These numbers made clear that ethnic, cultural,

11 Kimberly Theidon uses this term in the context of the Peruvian civil war to refer to the fact that the conflict was characterized by violence between neighbours, families, villagers, i.e., former friends that became ‘intimate enemies’ (2013, 461).

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and socioeconomic factors played a key role in the presence and dissemination of the violence. When the Peruvian army was sent to Ayacucho in 1982, after two years of violence, many of the soldiers were not so keen on protecting people whom they considered inferior. Moreover, because the Shining Path initially had a lot of supporters among the rural population, the army did not differentiate between peasants and members of the Shining Path, which resulted in the extrajudicial killing and disappearance of many innocent civilians (CVR 2004, 20).

9.3

Forced Disappearances in Yachay

Yachay is an example of a peasant community located in the heart of where the civil war between the army and the Shining Path would rage. The village was first infiltrated by the Shining Path whose members killed the local authorities and commenced forced recruitments. Due to the Shining Path’s rapid and immersive take over, the military perceived Yachay as a stronghold of subversion. Between 1981 and 1982, the Shining Path took complete control over the community’s organization, designating it as a ‘liberated zone’ (EPAF 2012, 23). Although forced disappearance is a war tactic that in Latin America is mostly associated with state forces, it is necessary to specify that in Yachay, and in the context of the Peruvian civil war in general, there are different types of forced disappearance. The disappearances committed by the Shining Path come in the form of forced recruitments: villagers were kidnapped and forced to fight with the armed group. Of those who survived because they escaped or were released, some never returned to the village out of fear for revenge by the military. The final resting-place of those deceased in battle is often unknown. The forced disappearances committed by the Shining Path were rather a ‘side effect’ of the type of warfare used by the armed group. On the contrary, the military used forced disappearance as a deliberate strategy to install terror and erase evidence of mass human rights violations (Baraybar 2009, 29). On suspicion of being part of the Shining Path, villagers were arrested and detained in the nearby military bases. During this detention, most of the prisoners were severely tortured and several of them were also executed. After the execution, the bodies were burned, buried in mass graves, or thrown off the mountain cliffs. In most of the cases, every trace of the detainees is missing since the moment of arrest. Relatives who went to the

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bases to ask for their family members were denied any additional information and were often mistreated themselves. All kinds of tactics were used to make it hard to trace prisoners back or to identify corpses. Detainees were, for example, exchanged between different military bases; they were forced to swap clothes, and corpses were often unrecognizably mutilated or burned (Baraybar 2009, 35). Due to these tactics that were used to generate confusion, it is still unclear how many Peruvians were victims of forced disappearance during the civil war. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the Public Ministry, and the EPAF estimate that the number fluctuates between 13,000 and 16,000 persons that are still missing today.12 These ill-defined numbers reflect the typical characteristics of the crime of forced disappearance. Although it is hard to express in absolute numbers, Yachay seems to have suffered a significantly higher number of disappeared than other surrounding communities. Of the 77 cases of the district of Yachay investigated by the TRC, 24 cases make explicit mention of forced disappearance, of which seven cases were committed by the Shining Path and 17 by the armed forces.13 At least 65 villagers were disappeared in the two nearby military bases between May 1983 and September 1984 (EPAF 2012, 50).14 Apart from the villagers who were disappeared and whose last restingplace is still unknown, there is also a considerable group of villagers who were buried in clandestine graves. Due to the emergency situation, it was often impossible to arrange a proper burial in the cemetery, because people were buried secretly out of fear for reprisals by the army or the Shining Path, or because the perpetrators forced the villagers to bury the victims at the place of execution.15 Many of these graves are located in the most desolate corners of the highlands, hours away from the village. 12 All these institutions manage different lists with diverging numbers. One of the priorities for facilitating the process of search is to bring together all existing information in one database. This will be done by the International Committee for the Red Cross in collaboration with the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights (United Nations General Assembly 2016). 13 This means there could be other cases that include forced disappearance but that not explicitly mention it. One case can relate to several persons (CVR 2003a). 14 Forty percent of the disappearances committed by the state forces in Ayacucho occurred in 1983 and 1984 (CVR 2003a, 86). 15 Burying victims from one side or the other would often be perceived as a sign of collaboration or treason.

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Until 2011, the TRC and the Peruvian NGO Commission for Human Rights (COMISEDH) located 4052 presumed clandestine graves in the Ayacucho region, containing the remains of approximately 8660 victims (COMISEDH 2012, 74).

9.4 Mourning in Absence of Bodies: ‘the Disappeared Exist, but They Are Not Here’ The disappeared exist, but they are not here. They find themselves beneath the earth or beneath the inclement rain, they are hungry like us, they feel the cold, they feel the heath, they watch us, but we cannot see them, they talk to us but we cannot hear them. They wonder about their future, a never-ending present.16

The high number of disappearances has had a notable impact on the socioeconomic fabric of post-conflict Yachay. Due to the gendered aspect of forced disappearance—most victims were men—women started to assume new roles in community life during and after the conflict.17 Kimberly Theidon has described how ‘widows, perhaps more than any other group, embody the contradictory effects of war’ as they balance between victimization and empowerment and question expected gender positions (2013, 144). During fieldwork, ‘the women of Yachay’ became an often-used concept for my research collaborators and me, as we spent endless hours sitting on the pavement at the corner of the main square, listening to the stories about their disappeared husbands and sons. The large presence of women symbolizes the absence of the disappeared, an absence that at the same time takes the form of a kind of omnipresence. As such, the disappeared have become a social category of villagers that ‘exist but are not there’ (EPAF 2012, 29). The widows form the living

16 Own translation of original citation: ‘Los desaparecidos son, pero no están. Se encuentran bajo tierra o bajo la lluvia inclemente, tienen hambre como nosotros, sienten frío, sienten calor, nos miran, pero no los vemos, nos hablan pero no los escuchamos. Se preguntan sobre su futuro, un presente que no acaba nunca’. Jose Pablo Baraybar in EPAF (2012, 15). 17 On the changing role of women in community life after the civil war and the influence of human rights discourse, see: Yezer (2013). Anthropologist Arianna Cecconi (2013) also mentions this gendered aspect in her research on representations of the war in dreams.

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counterpart of the disappeared and together they form a new group in society that did not exist before the war. Berber Bevernage remarks that several scholars have detected a (nonexclusive) link between the pre-occupation with ghosts or spirits and post-conflict contexts (2012, 88). Be it mere coincidence, but translated from Quechua, ‘Ayacucho’ literally means ‘corner (cucho) of the dead/souls (aya)’. Doing field research in Ayacucho indeed means to be constantly confronted with the presence of the dead. Their ghosts are perceived as taking part in daily life and can inspire both fear and confidence. For example, one woman in Yachay described how, while hiding in the puna 18 during an attack of the Shining Path on the village, she performed a ritual to calm down her sheep that were upset by the presence of ghosts who were wandering around after the massacre.19 In her ethnography on representations of the Peruvian civil war in dreams, Arianna Cecconi describes the nightly visits of the ghosts of the disappeared in the dreams of their relatives, often providing information about their whereabouts (2013, 179). Bevernage states that the ‘spectral presence’ of the disappeared can be understood as ‘the irrevocable past and its ambiguous “presence” in the present’ (2012, 87). For Bevernage, ‘the spectral presence’ challenges the notions of the absent and distant past that are dominant in modern Western historical thinking (2012, 87). Indeed, the absence of the dead bodies of the disappeared contrasts sharply with the vivid presence of their souls in popular imagination. This liminal existence of the disappeared at the verge of life and death brings us to the question of mourning and remembrance, which clearly manifests itself during the yearly Día de la Memoria (Day of Memory), an initiative that was set up in 2012 by the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team, the Association of Relatives of Victims of the Sociopolitical Violence of Yachay and the municipality. Every year in June, Yachay commemorates its victims of the civil war. As going to the cemetery is one of the central activities of the Day of Memory, relatives of the disappeared are confronted with the absence of remains and proper burial sites. 18 Apart from their houses ‘downtown’, most villagers in the Andes of Ayacucho also have smaller stone houses in the highlands (so-called estancias, litt. ‘places to stay’). They spend a lot of time herding cattle in the puna, as the highlands are commonly referred to in Quechua and Spanish. The puna also became an important refuge during the civil war when villages were attacked by the Shining Path or the state forces. 19 Interview with Elsa, Yachay, 02.05.2015. Fieldnotes, Ayacucho, December 20, 2015.

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The lack of a physical space to mourn differentiates the disappeared from the dead (EPAF 2012, 35). Relatives of the disappeared have repeatedly stated that they do not want to participate in the commemoration because they have no place to bring flowers or light candles: ‘I don’t go. Why would I go if he is not there? Those who bury [their dead] there, they go, I don’t go. Why would I be going? For nothing’,20 and ‘There is no place to bring flowers. […] So, nothing, we don’t bring anything’.21 In order to create a place to mourn, representatives of the relatives started asking the municipality to put a big cross for the disappeared at the cemetery.22 After several years of requests by the villagers, the cross was inaugurated on the Day of Memory in 2015. However, instead of putting the cross at the cemetery located at the outskirts of the village, the mayor decided to put the cross at a more visible spot in front of the catholic church at the main square. This decision caused much dismay with the family members, who want the disappeared to be part of the cemetery.23 ‘Mister Mayor, fulfill your promise! […] That cross must be at the cemetery, so that if we go there, we can also leave flowers. For those who have niches, we can leave the flowers there; for those who don’t, we are going to leave them at the cross. We have to have a proper cemetery!’24 The rite of burial does not just differentiate the dead from the living (Cecconi 2013, 173). It also dignifies them as human beings, instead of being ‘thrown away like animals’—as it is often stated by family members. To be deprived of the ability to bury the dead is a fundamental characteristic of the state of emergency caused by the war. ‘At that time, you would bump into a corpse over here, and another one over there, and another one a bit further being eaten by a dog. It almost didn’t

20 Own translation of original citation: ‘Yo no voy. A qué voy a ir si no está allí? Los que entierran allí si van, yo no voy. Para que voy a ir? Por gusto’. Interview with Elsa, Yachay, May 2, 2015. 21 Own translation of original citation: ‘No hay dónde llevar flor. (…) Entonces nada, no llevamos nada’. Interview with Isabel, Yachay, March 5, 2015. 22 Fieldnotes, Día de la memoria, Yachay, June 26, 2014. 23 Field recordings, Día de la memoria: inauguración de la cruz, Yachay, June 26, 2015. 24 Own translation of original citation: ‘Señor alcalde eso que sí cumple! (…) Esa cruz

que sea en el cementerio, cuando nosotras también vamos para dejar nuestra flor. Si de alguno de nosotros tenemos el nicho llevamos ahí, y de los que no tiene van a dejar en la cruz. Debemos tener un cementerio formal’. Field recordings, Día de la memoria: inauguración de la cruz, June 26, 2015.

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frighten us anymore, it was almost normal. It is so painful to have lived that moment’.25 In many cultures worldwide, and also in the specific context of the Peruvian Andes, this dignification can be achieved by performing the necessary rites of passage that constitute ‘a transfiguration into a new mode of existence for both the dead and the living’ (Rojas-Perez 2013, 162). Arnold Van Gennep (1960) has pointed out that funeral rites are above all rites of transition and incorporation. Their purpose is twofold, as they concern both the incorporation of the deceased into the world of the dead as well as the reintegration of the bereaved into society (Van Gennep 1960, 146). According to Van Gennep, ‘the living mourners and the deceased constitute a special group, situated between the world of the living and the world of the dead’ (1960, 147). The condition of inbetween existence at the verge of life and death is thus not only reserved for the disappeared, it can also strike the bereaved. As Van Gennep states, ‘in some cases, the transitional period of the living is a counterpart of the transitional period of the deceased’ (1960, 147). The funeral as rite of passage that brings an end to this transitional period therefore concerns both the disappeared and the bereaved. As long as the disappeared cannot be incorporated into the world of the dead, their relatives run the risk of being forced into an inhumane condition of never-ending mourning. During my fieldwork in Yachay, relatives of the disappeared repeatedly stated that burying their loved ones would help them to live in peace (‘encontrar paz/vivir tranquilo’).26 Thus, the mechanism of dehumanization of indigenous peasants that was used by the state forces to justify torture and disappearance continues to operate in the post-conflict time on another level. As long as the disappeared are not buried properly, they and their bereaved are deprived of an essential component of their human dignity (EPAF 2012, 25). Facilitating the process of mourning, for example by constructing the cross, 25 Own translation of original citation: ‘Tu caminabas en ese tiempo, te encontrabas con cadáver en ese tiempo, más allá otro, más allá que está comiéndose el perro. Ya no era, ya no era miedo ya era casi normal. Es tan doloroso haber vivido ese momento’. Interview with Juan, Yachay, May 4, 2015. 26 Fieldnotes, Día de la memoria, Yachay, June 26, 2014; Field recordings, Día de la memoria: inauguración de la cruz, Yachay, June 26, 2015; Field recordings, Día de la memoria: romería al cementerio, Yachay, June 26, 2015; Fieldnotes, exhumación Yachay, Yachay, May 6, 2015; May 7, 2015; Interview with Isabel, Yachay, May 3, 2015; among others.

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can be a way for the relatives of the disappeared to achieve recognition for the injustices of the past, as well as an attempt to separate the past from the present in order to turn the permanent condition of ‘absence’ into a historical condition of ‘loss’ and grant breathing space to the future (LaCapra 1999, 716).

9.5 Mourning in Absence of Acknowledgment: The Disappeared Are Here, but They Do Not Exist Dominick LaCapra situates absence on a transhistorical level, while situating loss on a historical level. Converting absence into loss means defining the loss as an historical event that can be dealt with: ‘In this transhistorical sense absence is not an event and does not imply tenses (past, present, or future). By contrast, the historical past is the scene of losses that may be narrated as well as of specific possibilities that may conceivably be reactivated, reconfigured, and transformed in the present or future’ (LaCapra 2001, 49). Locating the bodies to provide them with a proper burial is a way of defining the loss and facilitating the process of mourning (LaCapra 2001, 69). Indeed, as completing the necessary rites of incorporation in the absence of the bodies of the disappeared proves to be problematic, many relatives still cherish the desire to find the remains of their loved ones. However, the search for the Peruvian disappeared has faced many difficulties since the recommendations made by the TRC in 2003. As the Public Ministry focuses on criminal justice rather than on the humanitarian aspect of finding, identifying, and returning the remains, progress has been very slow. To initiate an exhumation of a burial site, relatives have to start a judicial process. In most of the cases however, there is not enough evidence to punish the perpetrators—which is precisely one of the characteristics of forced disappearance—and the case is closed. Consequently, relatives oftentimes end up without remains, without answers, without any form of justice.27

27 See also: CVR, ‘Capítulo 2.3: Plan Nacional de Intervención Antropológico-Forense’, in: Informe Final, TOMO IX: Cuarta Parte: Recomendaciones de la CVR, Hacia un compromiso nacional por la reconciliación, passim. For an analysis of the TRC’s involvement with exhumations of mass graves and the related tensions between the TRC and the state institutions, see: Rojas-Perez (2015). According to the EPAF, in 2015 around 3200 bodies were exhumed of which approximately 1830 were identified. However, the Ombudsman Office has more than 12,000 documented complaints concerning missing persons, and

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In Yachay the search for the disappeared faces similar problems. In May 2015, a team of the Public Ministry arrived for the exhumation of a clandestine grave containing a man, three women, and two small children who were executed in 1984 by the army for providing food to members of the Shining Path. Fellow villagers were forced to dig the grave. The alleged location of the grave was in the middle of the puna at 4400 meters AMSL, a 45 minutes’ drive, plus two hours walk, away from the village. As the relatives were displaced during the conflict and now live in Lima, they traveled for around 18 hours to get there. However, locating the exact spot after more than 30 years in the desolate landscape of the highlands is not at all self-evident and the team of the Public Ministry gave up after two hours. Even though their mission was officially planned to take two days, the team sat down and let the relatives randomly dig around and look for bones. There was no psychosocial support provided; on the contrary, the relatives were openly mocked by some members of the team. After one more hour the team left, leaving the desperate and disappointed relatives behind. There was no mobile phone reception, as is the case in most remote parts of the highlands, and the transport back to the village was only arranged for the following day. The relatives thus decided to spend the night in tents in the middle of the highlands near the supposed grave, which proved to be a troublesome experience for some of them. As soon as the night fell, one of the relatives started worrying about the jarjachas , who in the Andes of Ayacucho are believed to be the ghosts of the condemned that wander around the puna in search of revenge on the living. He also expressed to me the fear that members of the Shining Path might still be ‘walking around’ and attacking at night.28 That night went by without much sleep, as the relatives kept telling stories about their youth and the drastic changes caused by the war. The landscape of the puna that contained their peaceful childhood memories, has since the war and the displacement to Lima become filled with fear and danger. When we returned to the village the next day, the atmosphere was

the Victim Register (Registro Único de Víctimas, institution created after the TRC where people can testify and claim reparations) more than 16,000 (EPAF, n.d.). 28 The members of the Shining Path are often referred to as ‘those who walk at night’ (in Quechua: tuta puriqkuna), a term that according to anthropologist Kimberly Theidon is linked to the fear of jarjachas. Jarjachas are ‘humans who take on animal form as part of their divine punishment’ and have ‘glowing eyes and hideous teeth’ (Theidon 2013, 215).

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tense and emotional as the relatives felt dispirited and frustrated.29 To make matters worse, one of the relatives, who suffered from diabetes, got very ill and did not survive the journey back to Lima. The consternation among the family made some of the younger relatives who had stayed in Lima propose that it was better to stop the search, as they felt it was only causing more grief.30 However, the other family members were determined to find the remains and upon returning in August they succeeded in localizing the grave, after which the Public Ministry came back to do the official exhumation in September.31 The remains were recovered, but it took more than a year before they were finally given back to the relatives on November 11, 2016. During a collective ceremony in Huamanga, 58 remains of victims of different cases in the region were returned.32 After the ceremony, the family members transported the coffins with the remains to Yachay, where they were buried in a mausoleum constructed by the municipality.33 The lack of a proper policy of the state to find the disappeared is not merely a consequence of the enormous challenges this task involves. I suggest that one of the root causes of the limited advance in finding the disappeared lays in the absence of acknowledgment of the injustices of the past by the state toward the family members. This absence of acknowledgment is not only based on the lack of recognition by the state for its own responsibility in the crimes, which in many cases takes the form of pure denial. It is part of a larger historical injustice that still defines power relations in contemporary Peruvian society and consists of systematic socioeconomic exclusion and racism toward the indigenous peasant population, who are often regarded as second-class Peruvians and hence denied full citizenship.34 So to speak, the Peruvians who disappeared in 29 Fieldnotes, exhumación Yachay, Yachay, May 6, 2015; May 7, 2015. 30 Whatsapp personal communication, May 9, 2015. 31 Fieldnotes, exhumación Yachay, August 11, 2015. Fieldnotes, reunión familiares fosa Yachay, Lima, August 27, 2015. 32 Whatsapp personal communication, November 11, 2016. See also: ‘Ministra Pérez

Tello participó en entrega de restos de víctimas de terrorismo’ (La República 2016). 33 Whatsapp personal communication, November 11, 2016. 34 In June 2009, protest from indigenous people in Bagua against oil exploitation in the

Amazon was violently oppressed by the state forces, which led to more than 70 deaths. After the incident, President Alan Garcia declared that the indigenous people were ‘no first class citizens’. This is a striking example of discrimination from the state toward its

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the highlands are there but they do not exist, they are the missing who are not missed. They are part of a population group that for many other Peruvians is negligible. Once again, the injustices of the past last in the present, in the form of lack of serious commitment by the state to search for the disappeared. This is a critique primarily directed at the state policies, not toward the individuals working for the state about whom I do not aim to make any generalizations. Frustrations about the state policies also exist among the personnel working for the public ministry as they are often obstructed from properly carrying out their job due to a lack of means and commitment of the higher authorities.35

9.6

The Role of the Dead in Achieving Social Justice in the Present

What is at stake in the process of mourning for the disappeared goes beyond mere bereavement customs or rites of passage, and involves a bigger dimension of mourning for historical injustices that, according to Connerton, entails two types of suffering that are often closely intertwined: suffering that results from extreme conditions such as war or genocide, and suffering as a consequence of structural experiences of oppression (2011, 16). The TRC recognized structural socioeconomic exclusion and racism as one of the fundamental causes for the escalation of violence in Ayacucho (CVR 2003b). Moreover, Isaias Rojas-Perez has pointed out how the TRC recognized that ‘the possibility of a democratic political community is tied to the problem of how Peruvians are able to remake their relations with their dead by bringing the latter back into mainstream society as legal subjects (victims), cultural subjects (persons to be properly buried and mourned), and historical subjects (persons whose history is not to be forgotten)’ (2013, 189). Indeed, the search for the disappeared in transitional justice processes—including exhumation, identification, and reburial—can help survivors who have faced processes of structural exclusion to achieve both recognition for past violence and present citizenship. The dead bodies of the past thus have an emancipatory potential for their relatives in the

own citizens. (Original citation: ‘Estas personas no tienen corona, no son ciudadanos de primera clase’.) (La República 2011). 35 Fieldnotes, exhumación Yachay, Yachay, May 6, 2015; May 7, 2015.

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present and future. As the process of finding, identifying, and reburying can respond both to the absence of remains as to the absence of acknowledgment, the bodies do not only hold the potential forensic evidence for legal justice, they can also play an important role in achieving social justice in the form of recognition. As stated by LaCapra, to make the shift from ‘absent’ to ‘lost’ bodies is crucial, as historical losses can be ‘at least in part compensated for, worked through, and even to some extent overcome’ (2001, 65). Being caught in the permanent condition of absence can cause ‘melancholic paralysis’ as the distinction between past, present, and future gets blurred and mourning becomes impossible (LaCapra 2001, 64, 69). Facilitating the process of mourning as a form of ‘socially engaged memory work’ can help survivors to separate the injustices from the past from the present, instead of seeing them as a precondition for the future (LaCapra 2001, 66). The search for the disappeared as a transitional justice mechanism is, however, a double-edged sword. If the process is not carried out properly, as seen in the example of Yachay, it can be a constant reminder of injustice rather than leading to social justice. Therefore, the failure of the process of search for the disappeared holds the risk of re-victimizing groups that experienced processes of historical injustice, and of disregarding ongoing structural violence in the present. Both the example of the Day of Memory and the exhumation in Yachay make clear how the relation between the state and the survivors is highly complex when it comes to achieving recognition and justice for the disappeared. At the Day of Memory, during the ceremony at the cemetery, the mayor expressed the lack of recognition by the state, while at the same time suggesting the villagers themselves did not take enough initiative to denounce the crimes: How much would I have liked the Minister of Justice or the state to come [to the day of memory] to get to know this reality. Yachay is the most affected [village] of this region. Terrible, indelible things happened here. In the other [surrounding] villages they denounced in due course the massacres that happened, but here, we didn’t denounce what happened. That was the big weakness.36

36 Own translation of original citation: ‘Cuánto me hubiera gustado que venga Ministro de Justicia o el estado para que conozcan a esta realidad. Yachay es el más afectado a nivel de esta zona. (…) Acá ha pasado cosas graves imborrables. En allá en su debido

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However, in an earlier intervention during that same ceremony, one of the villagers lamented the lack of knowledge about the juridical procedures in the search for the disappeared: We don’t know anything about the law. How are we supposed to understand? That’s why I say we need an adviser that can take care of the whole process. And it will probably take a long time, it is a process, it is not easy. But sometimes it is as God says: “it takes a long time for justice to arrive but it will arrive”. […] If we don’t have any legal support we won’t achieve anything, we will go on year after year as we are now.37

In the case of the exhumation, the relatives were forced by the state to take justice in their own hands as they were told to localize the grave by digging for the bones themselves, which in fact is illegal. Responding to the initial objections of the relatives, the public prosecutor who was in charge stated that the mandate of the public ministry was to exhume the remains, but not to localize the grave.38 This contradiction—how to exhume a non-localized burial site?—demonstrates very clearly the Kafkaesque situation the search for the Peruvian disappeared has become. The state with its ‘drifting’ and overly bureaucratic judicial apparatus claims the ownership of the search for the disappeared on the one hand but paralyzes the process by neglecting its responsibilities on the other.39 It is in this complex context that human rights NGOs have been lobbying to establish a new legal framework that tackles the problems that surround the search for the disappeared. On the 26th of June 2016, in the last month of government of President Ollanta Humala, the law oportunidad han anunciado que ocurrió matanza, mientras acá no hemos anunciado todo lo que pasó. Eso fue la gran debilidad’. Field recordings, Día de la memoria: romería al cementerio, Yachay, June 26, 2015. 37 Own translation of original citation: ‘Nosotros no sabemos de los leyes. ¿Cómo podemos entender? Por eso digo que esté un asesor para que él pueda gestionar todo este proceso. Y probablemente es un largo tiempo, es un proceso, no es fácil. Pero a veces como dios dice “la justicia tarda pero llega”. Si no tenemos una asesoría legal no vamos lograr nada, repitiera año en año en la forma que estamos’. Field recordings, Día de la memoria: romería al cementerio, Yachay, June 26, 2015. 38 Fieldnotes, exhumación Yachay, Yachay, May 6, 2015. 39 Deborah Poole uses this image of a ‘drifting state’ in explaining the relation between

peasant communities and the state in (among others) Ayacucho, describing how legal cases ‘seem to drift more or less aimlessly from one office to the next, before finally being returned, unresolved and often years later, to their points of origin’ (Poole 2004, 42).

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on the search of persons who disappeared during the period of violence 1980–2000 was finally approved by the congress (Ley n°30470 2016). By December 2016, under the new government of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, the law resulted in the design of a national plan for the search for the disappeared, coordinated by the Ministry of Justice (Ministry of Justice 2017, 9). Both the law and the plan focus on the humanitarian aspect of the search for the disappeared by putting the rights of the relatives center stage. The plan states that ‘all the teams that are involved in the process of finding missing persons must first and foremost ensure that no further harm is done to the victims’ (ibid.). According to the plan, following a humanitarian approach means ‘to orient the process of search in a way that it has a reparative effect for the families, without this implying encouraging or hindering the determination of criminal responsibility’ (ibid.). This humanitarian approach that puts the ‘innocent victim’ center stage has been criticized for its potential depoliticizing effects. Survivors run the risk of being stripped from their political agency and the structural causes that led to the violence and last in the present might be neglected (Azevedo 2016, 46). Finding the appropriate balance between the humanitarian approach and the focus on criminal justice indeed proves to be very difficult, especially in communities where intimate enemies face each other and the distinction between victims and perpetrators gets blurred. Maintaining a fragile coexistence is often a necessity in communities where socioeconomic conditions force survivors of ‘intimate violence’ to live together. In Yachay, one of the soldiers that served in the nearby military base during the war still lives in the village. It is generally assumed that he can provide crucial information for localizing the corpses of those who disappeared in the military base. More than wanting him to be prosecuted for possible crimes, the relatives want him to break the silence in order to possibly find the remains of their loved ones.40

9.7

Conclusion: Opportunities and Pitfalls of Searching for the Disappeared

Between 1980 and 2000, over 15,000 Peruvians were forcibly disappeared in a civil war that was fought along structural ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic divides. In this contribution, I have shown that mourning

40 Interview with Isabel, Yachay, March 5, 2015.

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is an essential aspect in achieving recognition for the injustices of the past and restoring human dignity in order to turn toward the future. In Yachay, dozens of villagers were forcibly disappeared either by the Shining Path or by the state forces. To this day, their bodies are missing, but their ‘spectral presence’ is a constant reminder of the violent past. During the Day of Memory, being confronted with the absence of the bodies for the relatives often means to be forcibly stuck in the presence of the past. Performing the necessary rites of passage can be decisive in overcoming this inhumane condition of never-ending mourning. Therefore, locating the bodies of the disappeared can be a form of ‘socially engaged memory work’ that enables the bereaved to turn the permanent condition of absence into a historical condition of loss that can be worked through (LaCapra 2001, 66). The search for the Peruvian disappeared runs along similar divides that characterized the civil war and contemporary Peruvian society. As long as the disappeared of the highlands are not considered as equal citizens by the state, they will not be properly searched for. This is a missed opportunity, as the dead bodies of the past can have an emancipatory potential in helping survivors that have faced processes of structural exclusion to achieve both recognition for past violence and present citizenship. The potential pitfalls of the process are, however, not negligible. Finding the appropriate balance between the humanitarian approach and the focus on criminal justice has proven to be very difficult due to the complex relation between the state and its citizens on the one hand, and among survivors of ‘intimate violence’ on the other. When it is not carried out properly, the search for the disappeared therefore holds the risk of revictimizing groups that experienced processes of historical injustice, and of disregarding ongoing structural violence in the present. The findings in this chapter are based on the particular case of the village of Yachay in Peru, but similar dynamics are at stake in other postconflict societies that have to deal with the legacies of forced disappearance. Especially in contexts characterized by structural socio-economic exclusion of certain (indigenous) population groups, the relation between survivors and the state tends to be highly complex. In-depth empirical studies of local post-conflict contexts should be considered in order to make well-informed recommendations for future design and implementation of transitional justice strategies (such as the search for missing persons) and fully explore the opportunities and pitfalls of searching the dead bodies of the past, for the present and future life of survivors of historical injustices.

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References Azevedo, V. R. (2016). Restoring the Dignity of the War’s Disappeared? Exhumations of Mass Graves, Restorative Justice and Compassion Policies in Peru. Human Remains and Violence, 2(2), 39–55. Baraybar, J. P., et. al. (2009). Desaparición Forzada en el Perú. El aporte de la investigación forense en la obtención de la evidencia probatoria y la construcción de un paraguas humanitario. Lima: EPAF. Bevernage, B. (2012). History, Memory and State-Sponsored Violence: Time and Justice. New York: Routledge. COMISEDH. (2012). Los muertos de Ayacucho. Violencia y sitios de entierro clandestinos. Lima: COMISEDH. Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación (CVR). (2003a). Informe final, TOMO II. Lima. Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación (CVR). (2003b). Informe final, TOMO VIII. Lima. Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación (CVR). (2004). Hatun Willakuy. Versión abreviada del Informe Final de la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación. Lima. Cecconi, A. (2013). Cuando las almas cuentan la guerra: sueños, apariciones y visitas de los desaparecidos en la región de Ayacucho. In P. Del Pino & C. Yezer (Eds.), Las formas del recuerdo. Lima: IEP. Connerton, P. (2011). The Spirit of Mourning: History, Memory and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. EPAF. (n.d). Una política para la búsqueda de personas desaparecidas. http://epa fperu.org/una-politica-para-la-busqueda-de-personas-desaparecidas. Accessed 14 Sept 2016. Equipo Peruano de Antropología Forense (EPAF). (2012). De Víctimas a Ciudadanos. Memorias de la Violencia Política en Comunidades de la Cuenca del Río Pampas. Lima: SINCO Editores. ICTJ. (n.d.a). What Is Transitional Justice? www.ictj.org/about/transitional-jus tice; www.ictj.org/sites/default/files/ICTJ-Global-Transitional-Justice-2009English.pdf. Accessed 16 Feb 2017. ICTJ. (n.d.b). Truth and Memory. www.ictj.org/our-work/transitional-justice-iss ues/truth-and-memory. Accessed 16 Feb 2017. LaCapra, D. (1999). Trauma, Absence, Loss. Critical Inquiry, 25(4), 696–727. LaCapra, D. (2001). Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. La República. (2011, July 2). Conozca las “patinadas” verbales de Alan García. https://larepublica.pe/politica/553595-conozca-las-patinadasverbales-de-alan-garcia/. Accessed 16 Feb 2017. La República. (2016, November 11). Ministra Pérez Tello participó en entrega de restos de víctimas de terrorismo. http://larepublica.pe/politica/820581-

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ministra-perez-tello-participo-en-entrega-de-restos-de-victimas-de-terrorismo. Accessed 16 Feb 2017. Ley n°30470. (2016). Ley de búsqueda de personas desaparecidas durante el período de violencia 1980–2000. http://tbinternet.ohchr.org/Treaties/CED/ Shared%20Documents/PER/INT_CED_ADR_PER_25074_S.pdf. Accessed 15 Mar 2017. Ministry of Justice. (2017). Plan nacional para la búsqueda de personas desaparecidas (1980–2000). https://www.minjus.gob.pe/wp-content/uploads/2017/ 01/Plan__busqueda_personas_desaparecidas.pdf. Accessed 13 Feb 2017. Naciones Unidas Asamblea General (NUAG). (2016, August 15). Informe del Grupo de Trabajo sobre las Desapariciones Forzadas o Involuntarias sobre su misión a Perú: observaciones del Estado. A/HRC/33/51/Add.4. https:// acnudh.org/informe-del-grupo-de-trabajo-sobre-las-desapariciones-forzadaso-involuntarias-mision-al-peru/. Accessed 28 May 2020. Poole, D. (2004). Between Threat and Guarantee: Justice and Community in the Margins of the Peruvian State. In V. Das & D. Poole (Eds.), Anthropology in the Margins of the State. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rojas-Perez, I. (2013). Inhabiting Unfinished Pasts: Law, Transitional Justice, and Mourning in Postwar Peru. Humanity, 4(1), 149–170. Rojas-Perez, I. (2015). Death in Transition: The Truth Commission and the Politics of Reburial in Postconflict Peru. In F. Ferrándiz & C. G. M. Robben (Eds.), Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights (pp. 185–213). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Taylor, C. (1994). The Politics of Recognition. In C. Taylor, et. al. (Eds.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (pp. 25–73). New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Theidon, K. (2013). Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. United Nations General Assembly. (2006). International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. A/RES/61/177. https://treaties.un.org/doc/source/docs/A_RES_61_177-E.pdf. Accessed 1 Feb 2017. United Nations General Assembly. (2016). Informe del Grupo de Trabajo sobre las Desapariciones Forzadas o Involuntarias sobre su mission a Perú: observaciones del Estado. A/HRC/33/51/Add.4. https://documents-dds-ny. un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G16/146/72/PDF/G1614672.pdf?OpenEl ement. Accessed 2 Feb 2017. Van Gennep, A. (1960). The Rites of Passage: A Classic Study of Cultural Celebrations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Yezer, C. (2013). Del machismo al macho-qarismo: derechos humanos en un Ayacucho desmilitarizado. In P. Del Pino & C. Yezer (Eds.), Las formas del recuerdo. Etnografías de la violencia política en el Perú. Lima: IEP/IFEA.

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Fieldwork Sources Fieldnotes, Ayacucho. December 20, 2015. Fieldnotes, Día de la memoria, Yachay. June 26, 2014. Fieldnotes, Exhumación Yachay, Yachay. May 6, 2015; May 7, 2015. Fieldnotes, Reunión familiares fosa Yachay, Lima. August 27, 2015. Field recordings, Día de la memoria: inauguración de la cruz, Yachay. June 26, 2015. Field recordings, Día de la memoria: romería al cementerio, Yachay. June 26, 2015. Interview with Elsa, Yachay. March 2, 2015. Interview with Isabel, Yachay. March 5, 2015. Interview with Juan, Yachay. March 4, 2015. Whatsapp personal communication, May 9, 2015; November 11, 2016.

CHAPTER 10

Restoring the Human Dignity of Absent Bodies in Colombia Sandra M. Rios Oyola

10.1

Introduction

Proper burials and funerary rituals are a luxury in times of war. Bodies are disappeared, concealed in mass graves or destroyed with the purpose of hiding the truth about human rights abuses, as well as destroying the memory of an entire group of people. The relatives of those who died in massacres or in extrajudicial killings, and whose bodies were disposed in mass graves, are affected by the impossibility of conducting proper burials, which also affects the process of grieving. The desaparecidos and the massacres that occurred during civil wars have become icons of the violence in Latin America. The effects of this type of violence for the surviving victims are many, it disrupts the process of grieving, the social transformation of communities and the possibility of bringing accountability to perpetrators. Victims do not fully know the truth of what happened to the disappeared, which in some cases enhances the permanent search for truth, an exhausting and often hopeless task.

S. M. R. Oyola (B) The Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 O. Otele et al. (eds.), Post-Conflict Memorialization, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54887-2_10

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In that context, exhumations are seen as the preferred mechanism to empower families and to re-dignify the victims (Dreyfus and GessatAnstett 2015; Henderson et al. 2014). The recognition of human dignity that comes with a proper burial is commonly accepted and the obligation to dispose of the dead respectfully is part of the Geneva Conventions.1 However, the legal path that leads to exhumations can be a very lengthy process that involves multiple risks of re-victimization such as misidentifying the remains, reviving the trauma, or exposing the relatives to new threats against their safety (Robin Azevedo 2016). Exhumations are also more difficult in situations where populations have been forcefully displaced and armed actors continue to have inherence in their home villages, where the bodies are buried. This chapter argues that transitional justice offers several tools that can contribute to the restoration of human dignity of the absent bodies beyond or complementing exhumations. It explores how mechanisms such as reparations, memorialization, and truth commissions can contribute to the dignification of the victims with absent bodies. Additionally, grassroots groups of victims have developed tools to deal with the absence of proper burials and the absence of their relatives’ bodies. This chapter investigates some of the main arguments about the impact of the absent bodies and absent burials for human dignity. It questions the mechanisms used for the restoration of human dignity of absent bodies according to the three different notions discussed below.

10.2

Human Dignity in Transitional Justice

Human dignity is related to the idea that there is an intrinsic and equal worth in being human. Human dignity is a concept used to advance competing interpretations and adjudications of human rights, jurisprudence, and philosophy (Düwell 2014; Kateb 2011; McCrudden 2008; Misztal 2013; Nussbaum 2008; Rosen 2012; Waldron 2012). Possibly one of the most influential definitions of human dignity has been written by Immanuel Kant in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785); Kant argues that ‘the incomparable dignity of human being derives from the fact that he alone is “free from all laws of nature, obedient only to those laws which he himself prescribes”’, being the most 1 ‘In 1995, for example, Colombia’s Council of State held that the deceased must be buried individually subject to all the requirements of the law, and not in mass graves. Colombia, Council of State, Administrative Case No. 10941 (ibid., § 456)’ (ICRC 2017).

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important prescription the idea that you always treat people not simply as a means, but at the same time as an end. The notion of human dignity is used to understand the value of human life and its uniqueness, which means that it cannot be exchanged, replaced, or lost. Human dignity appears in international humanitarian law as the moral justification for the definition and protection of human rights. Human dignity is linked to several, and sometimes competing, rights such as freedom, autonomy, liberty, physical integrity, and basic material needs, such as the right to housing, food, or work (Rao 2008). The field of transitional justice and reconciliation has incorporated the idea of human dignity, although mostly uncritically, through three dimensions. The first one corresponds to a notion that justifies the protection of human rights; the second one is as a principle that influences the mechanisms used for its protection; and the third one is through the influence of ‘politics of dignity’. In the first case, the notion of human dignity is considered to be the foundational normative category in international human rights. According to Pablo de Greiff, human rights should be at the core of the transitional justice agenda in order to prevent the fragmentation of society and foster reconciliation (De Greiff 2013). The notion of human dignity is used to denounce grave violations against human dignity such as the dehumanization caused by torture and rape, but it also provides an umbrella for the recognition of ill-treatment of victims who have been marginalized, stigmatized, or denigrated. The identification of these actions that go against victims’ human dignity, although they are not defined as a grave human right violation, can contribute to understanding the complex legacy of long-term conflict and systematic violence. The inclusion of human dignity in transitional justice is influenced by the language of international humanitarian law; victims’ dignity is an assertion found in the UN General Assembly in 1986 (GA Res 41/120) and in numerous international, regional, and domestic human rights instruments. Prominently, it can be found in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (2002) that mandates the Court ‘to protect the safety, physical and psychological well-being, dignity and privacy of victims’ and in the Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power (1985), which also states that victims should be treated with compassion and respect for their dignity. These principles are also reaffirmed by the Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International

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Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law (2005). In the second case, the notion of human dignity is used as a principle that influences the development of legislation and mechanisms that could protect human dignity. In the case of transitional justice mechanisms, they include measures that can contribute to the restoration of human dignity after its violation through grave human rights violations, but also through less clearly defined harms. The protection and restoration of human dignity are considered to be paramount in the policies of reconciliation, transition, and peace (Rosoux and Anstey 2017). For example, policies of memorialization and truth commissions have been generally understood to acknowledge past wrongdoing, to officially recognize the harms suffered by victims and to restore their equal status as citizens. Similarly, trials often act as a form of reaffirming victims’ equal worth and recognizing them as fellow citizens and human beings (Haldemann 2008). The restitution of property is seen as a form to return not only physical property to victims but to restore their sense of ownership, stability, and dignity (Atuahene 2014). In the case of restitution of property, Bernadette Atuahene has introduced the term, ‘Dignity taking’ to describe ‘when a state directly or indirectly destroys or confiscates property rights from owners or occupiers whom it deems to be sub persons without paying just compensation or without a legitimate public purpose’ (2014, 3). Atuahene considers dignity restoration to be ‘the compensation that addresses both the economic harms and the dignity deprivations involved’ (2014, 4). She argues that this is the result of combining reparations and restorative justice. But in the case of the disappearance of bodies, their desecration or the prohibition of funerary rituals, the return of the bodies might not be sufficient for the restoration of victims’ dignity. The integration of other forms of reparation and measures of satisfaction is required. Finally, in the third case, ‘politics of dignity’ comprise dignity as an umbrella claim for the recognition of rights by disenfranchised groups. This use of the notion of dignity is rooted in historical, economic, and political demands of excluded people demanding equality and social inclusion. The restoration of human dignity can be seen as a flagship among emancipatory and social movements (El Bernoussi 2015), a vehicle that creates empathy and brings together the dispossessed in their fight for freedom, equality, and basic resources (Alhassen and Shihab-Eldin 2012; McCrudden 2013). In the Latin American context, the claim for dignity

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can be found among a variety of groups that demand justice and recognition of their rights, such as peasants’ groups, women’s, LGBT’s groups and has been linked to resistance.

10.3

The Human Dignity of Absent Bodies

Douglas Davies, a renowned scholar of death studies, argues that the dignity of the dead is related to ‘the very fact that human bodies bear life itself’ (2005, 60). However, funerals are not only the result of the transcendental awareness of our mortal condition, but they are an opportunity for the living to pay homage to the dead. The dignity of the dead is an extension of the dignity they had when they were alive; they are a tribute and a recognition of the dignity of humans. Accordingly, Atiemo (2013) considers that it is possible to identify the dignity of the living person by the type of recognition that they receive when dead. Atiemo proposes that: ‘A study of burials and funeral rites is important to help determine how a society regards categories of human beings. By observing and analysing the way communities bury different categories of human beings, one may arrive at a particular society’s concept of what makes a person properly human’ (2013, 135). For instance, according to traditional religious practices in Ghana, people who were considered evil, such as rapists, adulterers, murderers, witches, and wizards, but also those who had been born with deformities, were denied of decent burials. This exclusion can be interpreted as the ultimate disenfranchisement from the community of living, but also the community of dead. Furthermore, the religious prohibition of funerary rituals for those who had engaged in unacceptable behaviours can be observed as a denial of a person’s dignity, a statement that rejects that the deceased belongs to the same category as the other humans. Heretics and witches burnt at the stake ‘was in itself the final symbol of degradation, of removing from society those deemed to pollute it’ (Davies 2005, 69). The absence or prohibition of funerary rituals can be used as a tool for humiliation of the deceased and of those who survived her. The lack of funerary ritual is considered an offense because there are religious and cultural expectations about the treatment of the corpse; the lack of funerary ritual or the ‘desecration’ of a corpse breaks a taboo. This means that the absence of funerary rituals or the disappearance of bodies would lead to the humiliation of those who could not satisfy the cultural and religious obligations, but also it would prevent the recognition of the dignity

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and equality of those who perished, a dignity that would place them in a common place with other human beings. Hence, the direct relation of funerary rituals to the dignity of the dead is, in the first place, in terms of the equal status of the dead, who should receive recognition as other human beings do. Second, it affects victims in terms of the ability of the living to fulfil a cultural and religious norm, a sense of obligation for their relatives or friends. Preventing a funeral, destroying or desecrating a corpse, and disappearing the body aim to deny the equal status of the deceased victim, and disempower the surviving victims. In the case of civil war, conflict, and authoritarian regimes, the bodies that do not receive a proper funeral belong to those who actively defied the regime and joined the opposition, but also to civilians who were targeted due to their ethnicity, class, gender, political affiliation, or other form of identity. In those cases, the prevention of proper burial of victims fulfil several functions. Ferrándiz and Robben (2015) have documented that the disappearance of bodies has been used to redefine the victory over the territory, the political incapacitation of the opposition, and represent the power of the dictatorship over death and life in the cases of Argentina and Chile. Disappearance, together with torture, was used to break the basic sociality of individuals and generate a larger effect on the structure of society. In the aftermath of the dictatorship, exhumations, the discovery of mass graves, and the confessions of perpetrators revealed the extent of the atrocity, but did not overcome the clashing of narratives about what had happened in the past. According to Robben ‘these returning intrusions from an unmourned past, the emotional responses they summoned forth, and the political debates and public protests they provoked, were the unmistakable characteristics of a society that had not yet come to terms with the massive trauma in its recent past’ (2005, 350). In the post-dictatorship Argentina, the institutional mechanisms of the transition were not sufficient for overcoming the psychosocial impact of the legacy of violence. Hence, exhumations are an important component in the restitution of dignity and in the process of reconciliation, but it is not enough by itself. In the case of the prevention of funerary rituals, this practice is associated with damage to a person’s human dignity because these violent practices are not limited to the destruction of the body, but they also include the moral worth of the person and the spirit of the community as well. Preventing the performance of funerary rituals is far from

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being a collateral damage of war; rather, it is a premeditated act oriented towards the spiritual destruction of social groups, particularly of ethnic groups with bonds socially constructed through rituals (Brewer 2010, 22). This is a practice of cultural annihilation that took place, for example in Guatemala, where only a third of the survivors received proper burial. According to the Recovery of Historical Memory (Recuperacion de la Memoria Historia—REMHI) project in Guatemala (Vol. 1, 1998), the Guatemalan Army gave precise instructions for hiding the locations of the bodies after their murder; the military personnel were instructed to bury the bodies of the victims as fast as possible in order to prevent their burials to be used as subversive, agitation, or propaganda work. Garrard-Burnett (2015, 185) argues that ‘the scorched-earth campaign that left so many tens of thousands of Maya dead or presumed dead posed a special set of metaphysical problems’; the lack of proper funerary rituals prevented the Maya survivor communities to establish relations with their dead. This practice was subordinated on some occasions by a strategy of exemplifying terror, used to teach others the consequences of noncompliance with the regime. In the case of Guatemala, under Rios Montt, the practice of selectively forced disappearances was replaced by largescale massacres. Contrary to the disappearances, ‘any family member who survived were left with no doubts about what had happened’ (GarrardBurnett 2011, 89). However, as it occurs in the case of genocide, there are not lessons to be learnt that could save future victims from the fate of extermination. In those cases, the prohibition of funerary rituals does not aim to prevent more people to subvert the regime, but it is used as a tool for humiliation, taking a person’s dignity away and humiliating those who survived her. According to Margalit, ‘Even in war we are required to treat humans with basic dignity. Humiliation is the denial of that, and cruel humiliation is the severe case of denying humans the moral status of human beings’ (2010, 132–133). Denying the other’s dignity makes the continuation of violence easier; ostensibly the act of dehumanization makes the killing easier. More than a demonization of the other, it was its dehumanization that made possible the genocide in Rwanda. Pio, a killer in the Rwanda genocide claimed ‘We no longer saw a human being when we turned up a Tutsi in the swamps’ (quoted by Aguilar 2009, 21). Similarly, in her research of the barbaric practices of mutilation of corpses during the Colombian conflict, Uribe claims that these practices facilitated committing massacres because they allowed neglecting the victims’ humanity and dignity: ‘Those who

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carry out the massacres have before them strangers who do not belong to their world, archetypes of the unspeakable: physically close but spiritually distant’ (2004, 95). In sum, the sabotage or prohibition of proper funerary rituals is a mechanism employed to deny the dignity of the victims, increase the humiliation of the deceased and surviving victims, and facilitate further extermination of a group of people by dehumanizing them. The remaining question is whether this process can be reversed, if victims whose bodies have been disappeared or destroyed can regain their dignity as the language of transitional justice argues, and if that is the case, how this can be achieved and what are the challenges for that. In order to advance some possible answers to these questions, the next section focuses on the Colombian case and the efforts to promote the dignification of victims.

10.4 The Restoration of Victims’ Dignity in Colombia The conflict in Colombia started in the late 1950s, with the creation of communist guerrillas and extreme right-wing illegal paramilitary groups. It has been fuelled by the financial incentive of the drug trade, private security companies, and security forces with a long record of human rights violation. The rural regions of Colombia, which are distant from the capital center, have been particularly affected by the violence. There have been 2087 massacres between 1983 and 2012. In addition, 5.7 million people have been forcibly displaced and 220,000 civilians have been murdered. At the same time, a very diverse and high number of peacebuilding initiatives have existed in the country (Bouvier 2009, 2013). In 2005, the paramilitary groups initiated their demobilization after negotiations with former President Alvaro Uribe. In that context, several transitional justice mechanisms were created, among them the Justice and Peace Law (2005) and later, the Law of Victims and Land Restitution (2011). In 2012, President Juan Manuel Santos started a peace dialogue with the FARC guerrillas, which was finally signed in 2016. Despite the several attempts at peacebuilding and conflict transformation in Colombia, violence has not ceased yet. In recent years, hundreds of social leaders, union leaders, and peasant leaders of land restitution have been murdered, threatened, and abused. According to the Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), 389 aggressions against

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social leaders and human rights defenders occurred in 2016 (OHCHR 2017). Furthermore, the OHCHR reported that the disproportionate effects of the conflict on indigenous and Afro-Colombian population has not been improved. According to the Colombian think tank, Centro de Recursos para el Análisis de Conflictos (Resource Centre for Conflict Analysis or CERAC) most of the murder and threats against social leaders are not the result of the traditional actors of the armed conflict in Colombia (Restrepo 2016). Instead, the action of right-wing paramilitary groups, and new cohorts of them also known in Colombia as Criminal Bands, are responsible for this violence. It has been reported that the number of victims of the Colombian conflict since 1985 have been five million. There is not an exact number of the disappeared in Colombia but the government’s Victims’ Unit registers more than 45,000 victims of forced disappearance, while the Institute for Forensic Medicine presents a number of 111,588 victims missing, with more than 22,000 of them being classified as forced disappearances (Haugaard and Bouvier 2016). Colombia has implemented several transitional justice mechanisms, including trials to members of illegal and official armies, amnesties, historical memory commissions, and reparations, which have been created through two main laws. The Justice and Peace law 975 (2005) followed the peace agreement between the paramilitary group the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia and the Uribe government in 2003 (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia), and the Victims and Land Restitution Law 1448 (2011). Article 4 of the Law of Victims and Land Restitution (2011) establishes that the principle of dignity, according to the constitutional mandate, shapes the participation of victims and respect to their rights. It also establishes that the value axiological ground of the rights to truth, justice, and reparation is the respect to the integrity and honour of the victims. Additionally, the Colombian government has promoted satisfaction measures that involve preserving and dignifying the memory of victims, and to carry dignifying events out. Article 139 establishes that the government should develop actions that will re-establish victims’ dignity. Two central institutions have been created after these laws, the Unit for the Attention and Integral Reparation of Victims (Unidad para la Atención y Reparación Integral a las Víctimas )—in short, the Victims’ Unit, and the National Historical Memory Center. They have addressed the restoration of victims’ dignity as one of their main goals. Among other activities, the Victims’ Unit engages in returning the human remains of

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victims to their families, and the Historical Memory Center, supports local memory initiatives, as well as document and disseminate a narrative about the conflict that explains the reasons for emergence of the conflict. The Victims’ Unit attempts at restoring victims’ dignity under three mechanisms: the psychosocial accompaniment, representation, and material response. The psychosocial component of dignity has been developed by the Victims’ Unit in their goal of operationalizing the concept of dignification and recognition of victims. The process of responding to victims’ needs, such as in the process of giving the human remains of victims to their relatives, should be done with dignity. According to the Article 139, Law 1448 (2011), symbolical reparations or satisfaction, aims to have a public impact to build and recover the historical memory, the recognition of victims’ dignity, and the reconstruction of the social fabric: It states the satisfaction of the rights to truth, justice and reparation. It includes the possibility of individual and collective grief in those cases that were not possible due to threats. They aim to re-create the death rituals with dignity. These measures [seek to] reestablish the individual dignity through the recognition of the suffering of the grieving people, but they also have a collective orientation (…) they bring to the present the memory of past violence in a sense that recognizes social responsibility. (Article 170, Decree 4800, 2011)

According to Lina Rondón in an interview with the author,2 the process of dignification is crucial for the whole process of reparation. In the case of exhumations, known as the ‘Dignified Transfer of Human remains’, the accompaniment to victims, as well the dignified conditions of the placement of the remains are of equal importance. It is vital to incorporate the history of these families into the events of what happened. Lina Rondón argues that, the goal is to give meaning not only to the finding of the body but to what these families have done in order to find them, to what they have done in order to cope. The psychosocial scheme includes dignifying phone contact, psychosocial accompaniment during the transfer, and then everything that seems to be logistical but that is arranged in such a manner that helps to 2 Lina Rondón Daza is a psychologist and adviser to the general direction of the psychosocial attention team for the Victims’ Unit. 15 September 2016, Bogotá.

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structure the person. It is a dis-structuring moment, and the purpose is to give structure to the mess.

Similarly, the Historical Memory Center aims to provide some form of symbolical reparation through the memorialization of victims (Riaño Alcalá and Uribe 2016). The purpose of the Center was initially to find the truth of the events that occurred, but their path has evolved to include the dignification and recognition of victims. They do not only document the events that happened, but aim to restore the broken social fabric of communities through the strengthening of local initiatives of memory. For instance, they work with traditional funerary singers in Bojayá and they support the casa de la memoria, a grassroots museum and site of memory in Granada. According to Andrea Garzon, adviser to the National Historic Memory Center, in an interview with the author in 2016, the focus of the documentation and recovery of memory is the victims, not the perpetrators. This change of focus was the result of the Victim’s law in 2010 and 2011, and the component of truth and reparation of the Law 1424. Finally, the material aspect of dignity is perhaps the most contested and refers to the material reparation of victims, including the administrative (economical) reparation. And judicial reparation (when the fault of the state can be proven) there are also collective reparations, land restitution. This is one of the most contested aspects because some victims consider it against their dignity to receive money in recognition of their deceased victims. This is perceived by many of them as blood money, an effort to silence victims and in many cases, divides communities and creates resentment.

10.5 The Process of Dignification of Victims with Absent Bodies Two victims’ testimonies of their experience of conflict during the early 2000s can help us to understand the psychological and social consequences of the victimization of absent bodies. The first testimony belongs to a victim of the massacre of Bojayá, an Afro-Colombian municipality in which over 100 people perished during a confrontation between the FARC guerrillas and the AUC paramilitary in 2002 (Rios Oyola 2015). Civilians were seeking refugee inside the San Pablo Apostol church, when an explosive launched by the FARC reached the church, which had been

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used as a shield by paramilitary soldiers. The second testimony is part of an interview with the author that took place in Granada, Antioquia in September 2016. In Granada, during the 1990s and early 2000s over 400 were murdered, 128 were disappeared, and over 15 mass graves have been found. Rosa Chaverra was a victim of the massacre of Bojayá; her testimony reflects the multiple ways in which victims were affected. Her case provides an insight in the consequences of the destruction of the bodies during the massacre, since this woman lost her parents, nephews, cousins, uncles, aunts, and brothers. In addition, six of her eight brothers were displaced to Quibdó with their families and one of her sisters was permanently injured in the massacre. She says: I have seen my dad and my mom in my dreams, and I ask them what they wanted because I saw them upset. And they answered to me, ‘oh darling, I am very hungry’, and that was because she [my mother] did not eat, since the armed groups entered. She did not eat anymore, so she left very hungry. I ask her about my dad, and she points over there, he is working, and then I wake up, and then I can sleep no more. The next day I tell my dream to one of my neighbours, and he tells me that I should pray for them, because they are people that were gone without praying [funerary rituals]. I did not see where my parents were when they killed them; the truth is that my brother went to search for them to bury them. He did not find them; the grave was open and they had to close it again empty. The truth is that I don’t know where my parents are because my brother did not find them… because my parents were like minced meat. And that makes me very sad; not being able to bury my parents is too much pain for me. (Rosa Chaverra’s public speech at the Forum ‘Bojayá una década después ’ at the National Museum of Colombia, Bogotá, 27 April 2012).

Rosa’s relatives’ bodies cannot be retrieved in an exhumation.3 Her grief is enhanced due to the impossibility of proper funerary rituals for her relatives. She and her brother made a grave that was closed empty when they did not find the bodies to bury. She feels a sense of obligation to her parents that could not be satisfied. Victims’ grief is enhanced by the 3 An official exhumation of the rests of the victims of the massacre of Bojayá took place in May 2017.

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conditions of the deaths of their relatives. The lack of funerary rituals takes from them the possibility of creating narratives that articulate their grief. In a different regional conflict, the second testimony refers to the violence experienced by the peasant communities of Granada, Antioquia. Gabriela is a leader from ASOVIDA, a local victims’ organization working on the local memory museum. She experienced the violence of the conflict in the early 2000s. She explains the violence in the region as a result from the competition over the territory by the paramilitary and the FARC guerrillas: There were many mothers who had to let their children’s corpses be eaten by the vultures. The terror repressed their love, and they could not work through their grief… There were two people who helped to recover the bodies, the ambulance driver and the dumper driver… they challenged the armed groups in order to collect the bodies. God protected them to let them tell their story. They would bring the bodies to the cemetery. And in the cemetery, they would wait one, two, up to three days for the relatives to recognize the corpses. Many people knew their relatives were there, but they did not go to see them. For instance, my brother was disappeared by the paramilitary; I never went to recognize a body, but I asked the gravedigger who knew my brother to let me know. Many people could not bury their dead, because of fear. There were risks for them, for example, the paramilitary used to watch over the cemetery to see who would come to recognize the corpses. There were many victims that had nothing to do with that. (Interview with the author, September 2016).

Gabriela was not able to find the body of her brother due to terror, while Rosa could not access the bodies. In Bojayá, the timing of the first non-official exhumation, done without proper tools or legal process, was postponed due to the ongoing conflict in the region. It was only 15 years later that an official exhumation took place. In both cases, the impossibility of developing proper funerary rituals enhances grief and pain. In Bojayá, victims refer to the mala muerte, as a consequence of the lack of proper funerary rituals, meaning the repetitive dreams of the deceased that torment victims (Rios Oyola 2015, 143–146). Theidon describes similar effects among victims in Peru, as does Eva Willems in her

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chapter in this volume, wherein the victims live haunted by the memory of atrocity that leads to negative emotions that cause spiritual and moral confusion (Theidon 2013, 45). The disruption of the funerary rituals in a certain way means a rupture between the community of the living and the dead. In Granada and in Bojayá, victims have preserved the memory of the deceased through rituals, museums, and sites of memory. Victims create transformative initiatives that respond to the violation of the human dignity of the deceased victim and of the threat against their own dignity.

10.6

Conclusion

The process of dignification in the absence of proper burials for victims is mainly observed through the exhumation of human remains and their return to their relatives in proper ceremonies. However, in many cases of massacres where the bodies have been destroyed, or in cases of ongoing violence, where it is not possible to identify the remains, other forms of dignification have been created, through institutional transitional justice efforts, and by the local communities who have been victimized. Exhumations are an institutional form of recognizing a victims’ dignity. This form of dignity restoration focuses on the loss that affects the victims’ relatives. In order to guarantee a dignified process, the grief that accompanies the process of exhumation should be respected, done in privacy and not as a spectacle. In Bojayá during the ceremony of exhumation, members of the community refused the presence of media that would document their grief, which they considered to be ‘a wound that was opened again’ (Consejería DDHH 2017). In a similar fashion, Robin Azevedo criticizes the exhumation campaigns in Ayacucho, which followed mediatized patterns and ‘the spectacularization of these acts of “restoring dignity” to the exhumed remains’ (2016, 44). In cases when exhumations are not sufficient, not possible or the body of the victims has been disappeared, alternative forms of dignification have been sought. Social memorialization and truth-seeking mechanisms are the preferred path to recognize the dignity of the lost ones. These strategies have been conducted by institutional efforts such as the Historical Memory Center, as well as by local victims’ associations such as the Nunca Mas museum in Granada and the many memorialization efforts through rituals, songs, and dance in Bojayá (Rios Oyola 2015). Finally, the absent bodies disempower surviving victims because they feel that they are not able to carry their duties towards their deceased

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relatives. This disempowerment becomes an affront against their dignity, not only a violation of the dignity of the deceased victims. Hence, the politics of dignity, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, could be helpful for understanding what steps can be taken in order to restore victims’ dignity. Judith Butler argues that grief can be a political force if it is moved beyond the individual melancholia (2004). Grief as a resource for politics allows us to understand what counts as ‘grievable’ for society. In other words, the expression of grief in the public arena has the potential of creating a cultural extension and psychological identification with victims of violence. Grief can also help to mobilize victims’ feelings related to the violation of their dignity and bring them to the public arena. Dignity as a claim that mobilizes victims and articulates their feelings of social disenfranchisement has been seldom reflected on transitional justice mechanisms. Misztal (2013, 106) argues that dignity can be understood as ‘the call for social justice’ or the redistribution of recognition. In Colombia, this perspective has been integrated by acknowledging that it is in the act itself of demanding rights that victims can find their dignity restored. For instance, the Dignified Transfer of Human Remains’ mentioned before, includes an important mention to the work that victims have done in trying to find the fate of the bodies of their relatives. Similarly, acts of memorialization emphasize not only the violation of the human rights, but the agency of victims engaged in resisting violence. However, a broader perspective of the politics of dignity should include transformative mechanisms of reparation that respond to the demands of the victims.

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Kateb, G. (2011). Human Dignity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Margalit, A. (2010). On Compromise and Rotten Compromises. doi:10.1515/9781400831210. McCrudden, C. (2008). Human Dignity and Judicial Interpretation of Human Rights. European Journal of International Law, 19(4), 655–724. https://doi. org/10.1093/ejil/chn043. McCrudden, C. (2013). In Pursuit of Human Dignity: An Introduction to Current Debates. In C. McCrudden (Ed.), Understanding Human Dignity (pp. 1–58). Oxford: British Academy. Misztal, B. A. (2013). The Idea of Dignity: Its Modern Significance. European Journal of Social Theory, 16(1), 101–121. https://doi.org/10.1177/136843 1012449237. Nussbaum, M. (2008). Human Dignity and Political Entitlements. In A. Schulman (Ed.), Human Dignity and Bioethics: Essays Commissioned by the President’s Council on Bioethics. President’s Council on Bioethics. OHCHR. (2017). Annual Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the Situation of Human Rights in Colombia (No. A/HRC/34/3/Add.3). Rao, N. (2008). On the Use and Abuse of Dignity in Constitutional Law. SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 1144856. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1144856. REMHI, Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica—Informe Proyecto Interdiocesano. (1998). Guatemala: Nunca Más. Tomo 1 Capitulo Primero, Las Consecuencias Inesperadas de La Violencia; Tomo 2 CAPITULO TERCERO. http://www.odhag.org.gt/html/TOMO2C3.HTM. Restrepo, J. (2016, March 23). Violencia Política En Colombia: Creciente y Cada Vez Más Selectiva. CERAC—Centro de Recursos Para El Análisis de Conflictos. http://blog.cerac.org.co/violencia-politica-en-colombia-crecie nte-y-cada-vez-mas-selectiva. Riaño Alcalá, P., & Uribe, M. V. (2016). Constructing Memory amidst War: The Historical Memory Group of Colombia. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 10(1), 6–24. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijv036. Rios Oyola, S. M. (2015). Religion, Social Memory, and Conflict: The Massacre of Bojayá in Colombia. Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Robben, A. C. G. M. (2005). Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Robin Azevedo, V. (2016). Restoring the Dignity of the War’s Disappeared? Exhumations of Mass Graves, Restorative Justice and Compassion Policies in Peru. Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2(2), 39–55. https://doi.org/10.7227/HRV.2.2.4.

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Rosen, M. (2012). Dignity: Its History and Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rosoux, V., & Anstey, M. (2017). Negotiating Reconciliation in Peacemaking: Quandaries of Relationship Building. Cham: Springer. Theidon, K. S. (2013). Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Uribe, M. V. (2004). Dismembering and Expelling: Semantics of Political Terror in Colombia. Public Culture, 16(1), 79–95. Waldron, J. (2012). Dignity, Rank and Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 11

The Wandering Memorial: Figures of Ambivalence in Hungarian Holocaust Memorialization Alexandra Kowalski

Throughout Europe, Holocaust monuments are evidence of the ‘memory work’ (Nora 1984) accomplished on a continent that once bred genocide (Kucia 2016), continuing five decades of mobilization around memory of the Shoah globally (Levy and Sznaider 2006; Alexander 2009; Eder et al. 2017). As a ‘genre’ of public work, Holocaust museums and memorials emerged immediately after the war (Marcuse 2010). Their numbers started growing from the 1970s on, as the Holocaust became a mobilizing concept for transnational Jewish organizations (Alexander 2009), and received new impetus in the past decade in the wake of UN’s creation of an International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust in 2005 (OSCE-ODIHR 2015, 4–6). The recent controversy about the expression ‘Polish death camps’ and its criminalization by Polish law in February 2018 were painful reminders

A. Kowalski (B) Central European University, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 O. Otele et al. (eds.), Post-Conflict Memorialization, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54887-2_11

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that the symbolic territories of Holocaust remembrance are still shifting— and are likely to keep shifting as political illiberalism and nationalist closure gain new legitimacy globally. As Young’s (1993) study pointed out, Holocaust memorials are best understood as manifestations of ambiguity and ambivalence, at the intersection of national needs, frames, and ideologies on the one hand, and of transnational models and activism on the other. Taking inspiration from this and other classical studies of Holocaust memorials in Germany, Poland, Israel, and the US (Olick and Levy 1997; Hansen-Glucklich 2014), this paper reflects on the difficulties of genocide memorialization in Hungary. Hungary partly followed the international trajectory of Holocaust memorialization in Eastern Europe (OSCE-ODIHR 2015), but is also characterized by historical specificities that put the difficulties of ‘negative’ memorial work in bold relief. Europe’s consensus on Germany’s guilt in the Holocaust provides solid ground everywhere for denial and avoidance of self-examination (Laczó 2018). From Hungary (Kovács 1994; Gyáni 2016) to Poland (Szarota 1996) and France (Rousso 1994), the narrative of national victimization is powerful and plays an important role in stifling honest memory work. Poland, Hungary, and other countries of Eastern Europe share a particularly intense history of denial and forgetting under socialism (Ziarek 2007; Laczó 2019; Gyáni 2016). Hungary’s early history of governmental collaboration and anti-Semitic policies, however, makes the pressure of the historical record perhaps stronger there than in other countries—especially the ones, like Poland, that can claim large human losses to war, occupation, and deportations. The first numerus clausus laws were successfully passed in the 1920s, and a series of discriminatory laws further stripped Jews from civil rights between 1938 and 1941. Hungary was an ally of Germany’s from the onset of the war. Deportations of non-Hungarian Jews started as early as 1941, long before the formal occupation of 19 March 1944. Mass deportations of Jewish nationals ‘only’ started in March 1944, and many Hungarian historians stress that the Horthy government delayed the process till May 1944, but the rapidity with which rural communities were eradicated (in a mere three months), all under the watch of local Hungarian authorities and in the absence of an occupation force worthy of the name, makes for a particularly uncomfortable historical truth (Cole 2003). The organization of Budapest Jews’ murder by confinement, execution, labour, and marches in the following fall and winter is mostly

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Hungarians’ responsibility—especially of the fascist Arrow Cross, in power after October 1944 (Komoróczy 1995; Braham 2000). A major goal of the Hungarian government’s support to Hitler’s Germany, under the rule of Admiral Miklós Horthy, was to bring the ‘Great Hungary’ (territories lost to the treaty of Trianon in 1920) back together. The history of the ‘Great Hungary’ motif and of the nationalist territorial claims it represents is deeply enmeshed with the history of anti-Semitism. The master narrative of defeat that hinges metonymically on the motif of the Great Hungary makes for an endless lament over the alleged ‘tragedy of Trianon’ for which Jews are partly blamed. This connotative web of powerful tropes (Jews, tragedy, Trianon, loss, Great Hungary) makes a ‘code’ that still structures much of contemporary political discourse. The entanglement of territorial nostalgia and anti-Semitism is constitutive of the Hungarian nation as it emerged from the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I. It is still to this day constitutive of Hungarian nationalism. As suggested by András Kovács (2016), Holocaust memory and historiography are caught in the intricacies of historical debates on the ‘tragedy of Trianon’ and the Horthy period that followed, and their symbolic web of nostalgias, resentments, and anti-Semitism. I argue here that the difficulties of Holocaust memorialization illustrate this insight. They are a phenomenal manifestation of a historical truth that is at once glaring and continually blurred. The powerful cultural code of Hungarian victimization structurally prevents clarity on the subject. This chapter analyzes the workings of this code on Holocaust memorials in Budapest, and specifically its production of ambiguity and ambivalence. Besides territorial resentment, a second historical specificity is the presence of a large and diverse community of survivors and their descendants, which sets Hungary apart from the rest of an otherwise ‘virtually Jewish’ Eastern Europe (Gruber 2001). In an apparent paradox, continued Jewish presence has perpetuated Jews’ symbolic invisibility in the public sphere, on an assimilationist model of belonging that has defined the community’s existence since the nineteenth century (Gluck 2016). If the ‘Jewish revival’ of the 1990s and 2000s may have made Jewishness somewhat conspicuous recently (Mars 2000; Vincze 2010), the semiotics of Holocaust memorials analyzed in this chapter suggest that invisibility still defines Jewishness in Budapest today. The wandering memorials studied in this chapter constitute one of the forms of this relative but continued invisibility—an invisibility continued by other means than sheer silencing.

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The always elusive, avoidant presence of Holocaust memorials in Budapest manifests the ambivalence, the ambiguity, and/or the reluctance of an entire nation of Jews and non-Jews vis-à-vis this painful history. It enacts and reflects the collective dilemmas posed by the antinomies, desires, and impossibilities of settling on a common narrative. The wanderings, material and symbolic, of Holocaust memorials in Budapest reflect divides not only between Jews and non-Jews, but also between Jews of widely diverse spiritual horizons, institutional affiliations, and organizational cultures, both from Hungary and abroad. Interestingly, the current resurgence of right-wing populism at the heart of Hungarian politics is rapidly and dramatically changing the symptomatics of ambivalence, and ambivalence itself, into more bifurcated, explicit, and assertive positions. ‘Ambivalence’, in psychology, refers to an internally conflicted attitude moved by mutually contradicting desires and impulses. For our purpose here, ambivalence describes the contradictions at work in the collective representation of the Holocaust in Hungarian public space. Before 1990, Holocaust memorialization was at most discreet, and Holocaust memory in a state of memorial latency or repression. After 1990 and the fall of the socialist regime, new memorials started combining two contradictory impulses: a desire for memorialization and a will to bring up the Jewish genocide in the public sphere, on the one hand, and a reluctance to deal meaningfully with the subject, to inscribe it in relevant or visible social spaces, on the other. As a result, I argue that contemporary Holocaust memorials tend symptomatically to come into being through either one of two forms of displacement: either a symbolic displacement, whereby messages are blurred through unstable or undefined meanings; or material displacement, where the signifiers themselves (the monuments) are made difficult to grasp (to see) because they change place, are exiled, or are placed out of sight. It is the reality of such displacements as signs of an ambivalent collective memory which I seek to capture through the notion of the ‘wandering memorial’. A wandering memorial is a memorial that has not found its place, is out of place, or is otherwise out of the way. The wandering memorials of Budapest belong to a category of lieux de mémoire best described as non-lieux, or non-realms. As a general item, the category is familiar to scholars of genocide (Bensoussan 2004), colonialism and slavery (Gueye and Michel 2017; Forsdick 2014), collective loss (Baussant, forthcoming), and other negative heritages. Like other

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kinds of non-lieux, wandering memorials perpetually oscillate between oblivion and desire (Augé 2004), between emplacement and displacement, presence and erasure. In this chapter, I take the discussion on negative events a notch further by offering a systematic taxonomy that maps forms of silence, denial, and ambivalence—paradoxical forms of memory work that are at once about erasure and remembrance. I identify and specifically discuss five figures of memorial ambivalence in the Budapest case, defining the symbolic geography of Budapest’s Holocaust memory. The first one, the screen memorial, embodies in social space what a screen memory is to an individual’s mind, substituting an inconvenient, original representation for a convenient story or image. The second figure is the ambiguous memorial: a monument whose object is unclear because it is the signifier of multiple signifieds. The third form of memorial ambivalence is the wandering memorial. In the title of this chapter, the expression refers to the symbolic totality of the manifestations I am looking at here. In the segment below, ‘wandering memorial’ refers to a particularly significant, but specific instance of this totality: namely, monuments (or projects) that are physically displaced, misplaced, or pushed around, and that are as a result ‘out of place’. The fourth figure of ambivalence is an insecure type of denial that gives itself away because of its insecurity—it leaves a trace, a vestige, a ruin of the monument that is being denied the status of monument. I call this figure the non-memorial. The fifth and last form is the invisible memorial. A form of denial as well, the invisible memorial is an intentional but reluctant monument that hides in the folds, cracks, and corners of the city. This taxonomy was inducted from an analysis of the biographies of Holocaust memorials in Budapest. Its purpose is to provide an account that captures as many of them as possible. The biographies were assembled through primary and secondary sources, and were complemented through press reviews when needed. I also collected and analyzed discourses about the monuments found in the guide books currently sold in Budapest bookstores, as well as in urban tours focused on Jewish topics—five official ones organized by Mazsihisz, the Hungarian Federation of Jewish Organizations, in and around the Great Synagogue at Dohány Street, and five independent ones organized by three distinct organizations. I focus mostly on Hungarian-language sources, with English language ones used as ‘control’ data. I also draw on a large stock of background information on the history of Jewish heritage collected through several years of research on the (non-)preservation of the old Jewish quarter in contemporary Budapest.

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11.1 Figure of Memorial Ambivalence I: The Screen Memorial If we were to look for an equivalent for the famous 1948 Warsaw ghetto memorial by Rapoport in Hungary (Young 1989), the most likely candidate would probably be the spectacular pillars designed by Alfréd Hajós bearing hundreds of thousands of victims’ names. Its place in the Jewish cemetery at Kozma Street, very much out of sight and out of the central areas, makes its meaning and impact quite different from the Rapoport monument, however. It is striking that the Kozma Street monument gets little visibility in tourist information, and in that sense, it probably qualifies as the first wandering memorial of its kind. Since the inauguration of Hajós’ monument, the only Holocaust memorials were a small set of plaques, the first of which was put up in 1948 on the outside wall of the synagogue, which it says was the location of the Nazi ghetto’s gate. The focus is on the ghetto’s wall; the two plaques in the synagogue area commemorate the liberation of the VII district ghetto by the Red Army. As Cole (2002) notes, the plaques celebrate the saviours, not the victims. The socialist regime was notoriously repressive vis-à-vis expression of identities considered ‘religious’, and silence about the Holocaust naturally (and conveniently) echoed silence about Hungary’s Jewish population, as well as the Horthy era generally. As in Auschwitz II, the first Holocaust commemoration site in Poland, repression operated through a nationalization of the Holocaust that insisted on commemorating ‘all victims’. As Cole (curiously) did not note, the first monumental memorial to Hungarian victims of the Holocaust was the Emanuel Tree, by the Hungarian artist, Imre Varga, erected in 1991 in the backyard of the main synagogue and sponsored by a US NGO established by the actor, Tony Curtis, in honour of his father, Emanuel Schwartz. Although visible from the street through a large, gated opening, it was set on private ground. The Tree is a willow tree, bearing the names of 30,000 victims, a name inscribed on each leaf, their Jewishness represented through the tree’s reversed menorah shape and the symmetrical shape of the biblical tablets. Despite the tree being a memorial to victims, the ‘privatized’ character of the sculpture distinguishes it from the kind of public homage that is Rapoport’s epic monument (Petö 2009) and mimics the original confinement of Hajós’ memorial in an enclosed space normally used for Jewish communal life.

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The other memorials that bloomed in the wake of post-1990 political liberalization in or around the Dohány Synagogue were, as a matter of fact, focused more on saviours than on victims. In this sense, they continued the memorial approach that was dominant before the regime change. The cult of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Budapest Jews and an emblematic figure of the Allies’ presence in Budapest during World War II, is especially conspicuous. A monument to Wallenberg’s memory was placed right next to the Tree, and next to a collective memorial bearing the names of other saviours. On neighbouring Dob Street, a block away from the gates of the synagogue’s garden, a sculpture dedicated to Karl Lutz, Swiss diplomat who also saved Hungarian Jews, was erected in the same year as the Emanuel Tree and extends the presence of the Righteous into public space (Cole 2002). On second glance, ‘righteous gentiles’ cast a long shadow onto the Emanuel Tree itself. Today, the Tree is part of a memorial ensemble inaugurated in 2012 and called ‘Wallenberg Memorial Park’. Tourist brochures generally consider Tree and Park as a memorial totality, subsumming the Tree under the “Wallenberg memorials” category. Although the Tree is clearly dedicated to victims, it was placed firmly under the patronage of the saviours: towering over the tree and part of the monument itself, is a Hebrew inscription celebrating those ‘who save a soul for mankind’, engraved on the otherwise unmarked shape of the tablets. For Varga, the Tree was the second run of an idea already embodied by a statue of Wallenberg he made for the American Embassy in 1986 (Taylor-Tudzin 2011), sometimes referred to as the ‘“old” Wallenberg memorial’ (Pótó 2019), which ended up displaced to a suburb of the city. The constant slippage between the Tree and the figure of Wallenberg in discourses about the memorial park appears irresistible. It is as if the actual referent of the victim’s memorial were the saviour(s). Calling memorials to saviours ‘screen memorials’ draws attention to their function. As screen memories do for an individual psyche, screen memorials substitute a relatively innocuous story or image for a more painful, original one. The story of the Righteous is the part of the Holocaust narrative that non-Jews can identify with. It is also a story that Jews, from Yad Vashem to Steven Spielberg, have actively contributed to make part of popular culture. In the Hungarian context, Jewish organizations embraced it as their own even before Schindler’s List turned the ‘Gentile saviour’ type into a popular hero of Jewish urban tourism, anticipating

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a global spread that would only happen in the second half of the 1990s (Orla-Bukowska 2015; Tóth 2008). Wallenberg’s way to Holocaust memory was paved by another, wellestablished screen memory. After World War II, Raoul Wallenberg’s name signified primarily dissidence and opposition to the Socialist regime, owing to the diplomat’s tragic end at the Soviets’ hands. He was captured by the Red Army when Budapest was liberated, never to be seen again. He is thought to have died in jail in Moscow or in Siberia. His disappearance immediately became a bone of contention between Western powers and the Soviet Union. Wallenberg was thus originally celebrated as a victim— a victim of communist repression. Varga’s master, Pál Pátzay, produced a famous Wallenberg monument after the War, which was taken down by the communist regime in 1948 and disappeared for many years. Varga’s own 1986 statue was not a Holocaust monument but a vindication of the 1948 affront, and a symbol of Hungarian resistance to communism toward ruler János Kádár’s predictable fin de règne (Taylor-Tudzin 2011). It is only in the 1990s that the cult of Wallenberg met again with Holocaust memorialization as a symbol of ‘gentile righteousness’, yet one shrouded in nationalist and liberal legitimacy, doubling also as a symbol of Hungary’s new independence from communist rule. Since then, wrapped in its Wallenberg garb, genocide reaches public space through the loose fence of the synagogue’s backyard, and does so as a replay of old scripts of political emancipation and redemption that for decades have helped the public avoid mourning and atonement. The Hungarian cult of Wallenberg and other saviours operates a manifold substitution. First, it substitutes the story of Jewish victimhood for a story of heroic gentile heroism. Second, it replaces the latter with the traditional nationalist narrative of Hungarian victimhood, of Hungarians as victims of Soviet rule. Finally, it obfuscates the question of national responsibilities in the victimization of Hungarian Jews. The screen memorial saves the nation the pain of dealing with its crime, with its guilt, and with its overblown sense of dispossession.

11.2

Figure of Memorial Ambivalence II: The Ambiguous Memorial

The second type of ambivalent monuments is one for which the object of which is unclear, or that has multiple objects. Several ‘screen memorials’ also qualify as ‘ambiguous memorials’. We saw that the Wallenberg

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Memorial Park, which tour operators also sometimes refer to as the ‘Wallenberg Holocaust Memorial Park’, honours multiple memories: of one saviour, specifically; of saviours, generally; and of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The park, in addition, memorializes all victims of Nazi evil, which is represented as a snake in a monumental stained-glass composition. The park is an ambiguous memorial in the sense that its signifieds are multiple. The Emanuel Tree itself is polysemic, with an inscription about ‘saviours of souls’ that comes to blur an otherwise straightforward homage to victims. Its physical inscription in a ‘Wallenberg Memorial Park’ contributes to the same double-speak effect. The gardens of the main synagogue at Dohány Street host other ambiguous Holocaust memorials. One of them is the ‘garden of heroes’. The area on the left of the Dohány Synagogue is a cemetery—in fact, a mass grave created for a part of the many victims of hunger, cold, or disease in the last weeks of the Jewish ghetto between December 1944 and February 1945. The site was one of three burial grounds designated by police decree as common graves in 1945. After visiting the synagogue, tourists are led in front of this dedicated space. There, trained tour guides tell of the tragedy of life and death in and around the ghetto, at the hands of Nazis and Hungarian Arrow Cross men. They explain that the cemetery was turned into a memorial site dedicated to the victims of the Nazi ghetto, and that its name is ‘the garden of heroes’. On the side of the garden-tomb, against columns that line it and support the roof of a patio, hang photos that illustrate the architectural and memorial history of the garden. At the back of the memorial garden-cemetery, plaques and monuments proliferate: memorials to individual victims, to donors, commemorative re-dedication plaques including a 1985 commemoration of the liberation, and a sculpture memorializing the death marches. At that point, visitors are a bit lost on a walk that has progressively and unexpectedly transformed a cultural site (the synagogue) into a disorderly museum of memorials dedicated to the victims of multiple episodes of suffering, torture, and death with no explicit relation to each other except for the Jewishness of victims and a broad sense of absolute tragedy. When moving past the tombs and the various memorials and plaques at the back of the synagogue, the visitor realizes that the ‘heroes’ of the ‘garden of heroes’ are actually not one, but two. The heroes are not just the dead of the ghetto transfigured into martyrs by an act of memorialization; they are also the Jewish Hungarian patriots who fell during

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World War I, to whom the ‘heroes’ temple’ behind the garden is dedicated... and to whom actually the garden orginally owes its name! The Heroes’ Temple is an idiosyncratic building that is strikingly beautiful in an austere, mausoleum-like way. The square, bright-white synagogue was built in 1931, and dedicated to the Jewish Hungarian soldiers who died in World War I. A characteristic example of symbolic ambiguity, the ‘heroes’ of the garden are of two kinds, as the visitor discovers mid-visit. And so, her confusion, which was already great, becomes extreme: were the ghetto’s martyrs elevated to the status of heroes according to the familiar Zionist model which conventionally celebrates ‘heroism’ while commemorating the Shoah, as she assumed (Zertal 2005)? Or was it so by derivation, because the name was there already, and no one moved to change it? Did the original victims, the national heroes of World War I, withhold their symbolic share of the ‘heroes’ garden’? Or were they, rather, replaced by others, who took their name, as well as a part of their physical space? But then, given the beauty of the little white synagogue, could not the victims now buried in the garden receive full credit for their sacrifice, and be given a name of their own? Were they not worthy of their own space and name? The ‘garden of heroes’ is like a slip of the Hungarian Jewish memory-tongue: it is as if Holocaust victims could not be named for what they are. The juxtaposition of Holocaust memorials with other types of memorials is disorienting enough. The proliferation of memorial objects, plaques, tombstones, dedicated to different events or people, all of it in the absence of a narrative locating the site in the symbolic centre of the Hungarian Holocaust, is profoundly confusing. The various episodes that constitute the Holocaust as a long process of mass extermination (concentration, deportation, death camps, executions, marches) are not explicitly connected to each other as part of one genocidal effort. Tour guides mention atrocities perpetrated by the Hungarian Arrow Cross administration following German occupation, but they do not relate this late phase of the War to prior collaboration with Nazi Germany in the War. They do not connect either the Nazis’ planning of the ghetto in Budapest with prior Hungarian plans, or the Hungarian local administrations’ orderly and efficient execution of countryside Jews’ deportations to death. Memorials around the synagogue are not necessarily ambiguous in and of themselves. They are made ambiguous through their arrangement in space, and through the discourses that frame them for visitors and locals alike. Varga’s Tree, the tombs, the tombstones everywhere, the

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little memorial stones, the death march sculpture: each of these items is rendered individually clear in its intent and reference to one or another episode or aspect of the Shoah. All are moving, some are heart-wrenching, and the general omnipresence of death on the grounds of the synagogue insinuates itself in the visitor progressively and profoundly in the course of a visit, making in the end for a rather haunting experience. And yet, what can be considered a large, multifaceted Holocaust memorial, is one that does not say its name, and seems reluctant to do so. So much ambiguity in the heart of the most prominent Jewish monument in Budapest (the Great Synagogue), in an area that has been known since the nineteenth century as the ‘old Jewish quarter of Budapest’, is significant. The quarter played a unique role in Hungarian Jewish history, as the symbol of a prosperous, peaceful era of civic integration, and as a meaningful witness to the resilience and strength of an ancient cultural settlement (Komoróczy 1995; Perczel 2007). The place was also a nodal point in the history of the Hungarian Holocaust, as the location of the Budapest ghetto between November 1944 and January 1945. The complex planning and incomplete implementation of multiple ghettos in the city was a significant moment in Hungarian and Jewish history (Cole 2003). The intricacies of confinement devices and their planning were a unique feature of genocide in Hungary, as well as, one might add, a paradoxical factor in the survival of the Budapest Jewish community (Perczel 2007; Cole 2002). Anyone attuned to these aspects of Jewish Hungarian history would expect them to be reflected on and memorialized on the site around the Great Synagogue. Instead, the site insidiously perpetuates the stigmatization of what remains, since 1945, a ‘pariah landscape’ (Cole 2002) through ambiguous forms of mourning and commemoration.

11.3

Figure of Memorial Ambivalence III: The Wandering Memorial

‘Wandering’ is the third of our five figures of memorial style. Wandering is the quality of monuments (or projects) that move around because their proponents have difficulties finding them a place in the physical space of the city. They often end up, as a result, ‘out of place’. The Wallenberg memorial, the Lutz memorial, and the Emanuel Tree are all wandering memorials of the 1990s in that sense (Tóth 2008). The most prominent Holocaust memorials of the millenial generation are also, and even more significantly so, wandering ones.

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Among them is the Holocaust Documentation Centre and Memorial Collection (Memorial Centre hereafter), a project proposed in 1999 and built from 2002 on. The space opened to the public in 2004, on Páva Street in the IX district, after years of debates about historiography, curatorial choices, and appropriate location. The first of its kind in the post-war history of Hungary, the centre was inaugurated 60 years after the end of World War II, and 15 years after the fall of socialism. Wandering memorials are often displaced temporally, as well as spatially, and several locations were originally considered for the Memorial Centre, all primarily in the VII district, which has been a popular destination of Jewish tourism and Jewish cultural life in Budapest. The synagogue on Rumbach Szebesztyen Street, one of the three landmark synagogues that make the ‘Jewish triangle’ in the VII district, was a major candidate. It was arguably an appropriate site to host a budding reflection on the Hungarian context of the Holocaust, since Hungarian authorities had used the building as a deportation centre in 1941, long before the 1944 German ‘occupation’ (Komoróczy 1995). Scholars in and outside of the Jewish organization, Mazsihisz, disagreed about the appropriate message. Finally, the Hungarian state and its experts moved their centre out of the Jewish district. The Memorial Centre is now located on the compounds of another synagogue that lost most of its community to the Holocaust, off the beaten paths of both Jewish culture tourism and casual Budapest tourism. According to the official account, the rationale for the Páva Street location is that it lies ‘outside of the traditional Jewish quarter, further emphasizing its national character’ (Holocaust Memorial Center, n.d-a). The formula is revealing and crucial: first, it admits plainly that the nation (its state, its scientists, and its Jewish organizations) was unable to generate a consensual Holocaust narrative. Secondly, it inadvertently provides an explanation for why consensus was (and is) impossible in the first place: by essentializing ‘traditionally Jewish’ and ‘national character’, and pitting these terms against each other, the official discourse frames the relationship between the nation and its Jewish fragments as a zero-sum game that excludes hyphenated identities, as well as the possibility of a mutually constitutive, dialogical process, of a ‘truth and reconciliation’ variety. The covert message contradicts the overt intention, which is to foster ‘dialogue’ and ‘reconciliation’. The displacement of the Holocaust Centre ‘outside of the traditional Jewish quarter’ exposes an entity (the Hungarian nation, represented here by its state) that, in the very moment

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it acknowledges that ‘preserving the memories of the tragedy, as well as reconciliation are a national issue’ (Holocaust Memorial Centre, n.d-b), claims that it will do so on its own, and unilaterally. From this revealing soliloquy on, only one path is open: repetition and the maintenance of the problematic relationship on a symptomatic mode. And so it goes: the Centre’s research program is, the institution says, an investigation of ‘the reasons for [which the Holocaust was] breaking with the Hungarian historical traditions of coexistence’, instead of what in the ‘traditions’ themselves might explain the apparent ‘disruption’—in fact, an outcome of decades of national ambivalence towards its Jewish minority. Another important wandering memorial that arose around the same time as the Holocaust Centre is the Shoes on the Danube, by artist Gyula Pauer (2005), which represents the shoes of Jews marched and shot into the Danube in the fall and winter of 1944–1945 by Arrow Cross commandos. Like the Memorial Centre, Shoes was conceived and implemented with characteristic delays. Pauer started elaborating the concept after hearing of the European Union commemorations for the 60th anniversary of the Holocaust (Taylor-Tudzin 2011). Hungarian authorities passed on commemoration and dispensed with any call for projects. Within a year, Pauer and friends were experimenting with casts of shoes at an isolated location, behind the parliament, on a strip of the Danube banks, insulated from the city by an expressway devoid of pedestrian crossings. A member of parliament who became aware of the project, encouraged Pauer to continue but failed to obtain subsidies or a better location. The shoes remained in their experimental ‘non-place’, thereby keeping the event a ‘non-realm’ (Bensoussan 2004) of Hungarian memory. One might say, then, that the shoes are a case of wandering or displacement through non-placement. Monuments of the 2000s share an assertiveness that distinguishes them from those of the previous decade. Like the Memorial Centre, Shoes deals explicitly with interactions between victims and perpetrators, and it is denotative rather than connotative. Both avoid metaphor, metonymy, allegory, or other symbols that displace meaning through substitute images, as in the Nazi fire-snake stained glass in the synagogue’s garden, for example, the willow tree image, the ‘heroes’ grave-memorial, or the Wallenberg monuments. Connotation, Stuart Hall (1980) famously argued, is an engine of mass ideology production. The 2000s memorials tentatively departed from this ideological mode of production by

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indexing facts. However, displacement hampers full paradigm change, and the Memorial Centre entrenched the impossibility of dialogue between the nation and its Jewish minority. The Shoes honor victims shot in the Danube, but the plaque does not name Jews as the victims except through its Hebrew segment. Moreover, both memorials were maintained in a physical and symbolic periphery of collective memory. Ten years after the creation of Shoes, and owing to the monument’s popularity with international tourists, the municipality finally decided to place a zebra crossing across the expressway nearby, creating a bridge between the memorial and the parliament. Thus, it took ten years of intense transnational circulation of bodies and meanings to re-centre physically and symbolically a site that was long inaccessible. The memory of the monument’s marginality is now lost in the constant flow of visitors that make it one of the most popular urban fixtures in Budapest. The ‘garden of heroes’ is also a wandering memorial, although perhaps in a more complex and intricate way than the two previous examples. This is, first, because it lays in the place of another victims’ memorial that it has not fully replaced. Secondly, it is a product of a rushed and unauthorized (by the community, if not by the state) transfer of bodies. The site was indeed constituted as a memorial through a major transgression of religious rule. The bodies that constitute it are forever breaking the taboo that normally keeps the dead out of the vicinity of synagogues. They are forever out of place. The most religiously sensitive tour guides signal this transgression by calling the location ‘unusual’. As to the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives, it perpetuates, in the very core of historic Jewish Budapest, the exile of Holocaust memory away from Jewish Budapest. Until the permanent exhibition was revamped in 2013, the Holocaust was only briefly evoked and in the most general terms, in one of the last rooms of the exhibition, unrelated to the history of Budapest or to the often-banal objects exhibited in the other rooms. The new permanent exhibition, although more assertive than its predecessors in establishing the long history of Jewish settlement in the Carpathian basin, does not deal with World War II events either. The wandering character of Holocaust landmarks and memorials is another sign of their ‘pariah’ nature. It is not an exaggeration to say that the memory of the Budapest ghetto has been in exile from its historical location in the historic Jewish district of Pest. At the memorials, during guided tours, and in tourist brochures and books, the connection between

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monuments and Holocaust history is tenuous. I have not heard the Holocaust mentioned by name on any of the Jewish culture tours I took. The ghetto is rarely mentioned during tours of the VII district, including the ones with an explicitly Jewish theme. On Mazsihisz’ official synagogue tours, the narrative is missing, though virtually all monuments in the garden are de facto Holocaust memorials. Only one of the five guides I followed (one who was unusually passionate and exceptionally involved in local Jewish affairs) explicitly referenced the Horthy regime’s collaboration prior to the German ‘occupation’, and pointed out the involvement of scores of Hungarians in the Holocaust machinery, including in deportations. All other accounts were at most an alignment of gruesome crimes, rather than a narrative. None of the accounts mentioned another (former) mass grave at Klauzál tér, a non-memorial that serves today as a recreational square yet often haunts historians’ and residents’ discourses about the area (which will be discussed shortly). The intensity of avoidance and silence in the historic heart of Jewish Budapest is simply, in light of history, extraordinary. Independent tours of Budapest with a Jewish theme are equally avoidant, as they resort to the characteristic, euphemistic cliché of mainstream historiography, mentioning ‘the tragedy’, ‘the tragic events’, ‘the war’, or ‘the tragedy of the 20th Century’. Hungarian-language guidebooks (or books about Budapest, more generally) systematically silence the episode, including when dealing with the Jewish district/former ghetto area, preferring to stick to art-historical descriptions of the synagogues. It is striking that web sites and books devoted to Jewish heritage are silent or euphemistic; such silencing often extends to English language guidebooks, although the Jewish quarter is generally better represented in the latter. A major landmark among Holocaust memorials, and a new wandering memorial, has recently surfaced outside the historic Jewish space: the counter-monument at Szabadság tér. This unique memorial marks a new age in Hungarian memorial history. Set in a central area of the capital near the parliament, it consists of a heteroclite gathering of personal objects such as suitcases and jewellery, pictures, stones, deportation documents, and flowers, all direct or indirect references to the deportation, persecution, and killing of half a million Hungarian Jews. The informal display of Shoah memorabilia on the metal fence started spontaneously in 2014, in protest of the Monument to the Victims of German Occupation, commissioned by the right-wing government and commemorating

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‘all the Hungarian victims of Nazi occupation’. The official monument is a large allegorical sculpture representing an angel (allegedly archangel Gabriel) attacked by an eagle (for Nazi Germany). The Monument to the Victims is also, in its own official way, a unique Holocaust memorial. The allegory explicitly peddles the nationalist narrative of Hungarian victimhood, in a way that seeks or pretends consensually to bring ‘all victims’ together in one commemorative gesture. By explicitly representing the official narrative of Hungarian victimhood in public space, and by camouflaging the fact of Jewish victimization inside this narrative, the Hungarian state was converting a repressed, implicit narrative, into official doctrine. Turning a neurotic repression of facts into an overt (and shameless) fact-distortion, Archangel Gabriel flirts with negationism. It is this official memorial policy that the countermonument denounces year after year, bringing together in a historically unique alliance Jewish constituencies that have often been both divided and discrete on the subject of the Holocaust. Even Mazsihisz, which has distinguished itself over decades of resilient, but not too honourably silent, ‘representation’ of Hungarian Jews, protested the Monument to the Victims. Unlike the wandering memorials of the previous decade, the Holocaust counter-monument is wandering by choice. It embraces its out-ofplaceness as the very locus of its meaning: it is out of place because it is unauthorized; it is out of place because it opposes a counter-narrative to official distortions; and yet, it is there, very much in place, in the centre of the city, still standing and even growing, five years and one major vandalization later. The main memorial site remains a web site, a platform for organizing protest events beyond the scope of Holocaust memorialization.

11.4 Figure of Memorial Ambivalence IV: The Non-memorial The fourth form of ambivalence is closer to denial and sheer repression, than the types of ambivalent admissions examined above. Unlike the unapologetic silencing of the socialist period, however, what I call here the ‘non-memorial’ betrays itself through its insecurity. The non-memorial is a trace, a vestige, a ruin of a monument that could or should have been a memorial, yet is being denied the status of monument. The non-memorial denies commemoration while imperfectly erasing the truth or ignoring

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reality. It is a vestige of the truth; it is also the vestige of a controversy, of a disagreement about the truth. Its state of dilapidation bears witness to the victimization it unintentionally memorializes, and to the unfinished political process that should have turned the involuntary monument into an intentional one. Dilapidation is the claim itself—a repressed claim for the site’s status as a site of neglected, problematic realm of memory. The nonmemorial’s signification as a memorial is denied, yet it stands precisely as a representation of its own negation. Several non-memorials stand out—I will discuss three. Two are discrete and tangible architectural vestiges: the Rumbach Sebestyén street synagogue, and second, the ghetto wall. The third one is an unmarked historical place that lives in peoples’ memory and left a scarred, uneven landscape behind: the former cemetery at Klauzál tér. The Rumbach Sebestyén synagogue is a major monument of architectural history designed by the Viennese Art Nouveau architect, Otto Wagner, completed in 1872. It is also one of the three architectural pillars of the ‘Jewish triangle’ of Budapest (the Jewish district) as defined by historian, Géza Komoróczy, in the early 1990s. Although the myth according to which the ‘Rombach’ was the property of the Status Quo Ante community, one of three historic Jewish Hungarian congregations which was dispelled (Haraszti 1993; Komoróczy and Miller 2018), the Wagner building did host a conservative segment of the reformed Jewish community more or less continuously until 1961, and it remains today one of three major historical synagogues of the so-called old Jewish district of Pest. Its construction bears testimony to an age of formal equality and great hope for Hungarian Jews. The building was used as a detention centre in 1941, when the Hungarian government, as part of its collaboration with Nazi Germany, rounded up non-Hungarian Jews to send them to the Galician territories it controlled in the East. At least 18,000 individuals were ultimately murdered as a consequence. The synagogue was brutally ransacked and sacred furniture and objects destroyed, but the space continued to be used for weekly religious service during the ghetto period. Although it seems to have been used by survivors after the war (Komoróczy and Miller 2018) the synagogue’s status suffered from the community’s decimation and its further decline in the decade that followed the liberation. Half of all Jewish survivors who stayed or returned to Budapest after the war left the country in the aftermath of the 1956 Revolution, if not immediately after the war. Rumbach was vacated after it lost its rabbi to emigration in the late

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1950s, and has since been left empty and unused. Of the past 58 years, 30 have been spent in discussions about its possible future renovation and uses. Since March 2018, it has been converted into a community house and cultural centre, part community—and part religious building— a renovation overseen by Mazsihisz, its owner, and financed by public funds. Sold to a state-owned property developer in 1988, it has been the object of intense negotiations and complex bids, symbolic and financial, for its renovation and appropriation by both Jewish and non-Jewish individuals, and by both Hungarian and international organizations. Although the complex story of these competitive attempts cannot be retold in detail here (cf. Komoróczy and Miller 2018), it is important to recall their extremely protracted character. Whether one considers liberation (1945), the building’s vacation (1961), or the state’s initiative (1988) as a point of departure, the time-lag is spectacular in light of the cultural and art-historical value of the building which is particularly uncontroversial, especially in the double context of booming tourism and of the ‘Jewish revival’ that propel urban growth in the area since the late 1990s. It is in the context of these debates over the ownership, use, and function of the Rumbach Synagogue, that the possibility of its use as a memorial centre was examined, and finally rejected in favour of a ‘displacement’ of the Memorial Centre off-centre, to Páva Utca. Collective inability to decide on the fate of such a major architectural landmark can perhaps not be entirely attributed to ambivalence towards a site of painful memory. Divisions among the Jewish community of Budapest, as well as the importance of the stakes, economic and cultural, of the renovation, also explain delays. The fact remains: for three decades, in spite of its conspicuous art-historical value, the site has been a scar in the landscape of a dense tourist area, an unmended hole in the landscape of Jewish Hungarian memory. One can note, also, the conspicuous silence that surrounds the history of the building during the war and the ghetto period. Guide books, Hungarian or English, systematically fail to mention the roundup of 1941 and intentional deterioration of the building, or to grapple with its puzzling state of lasting disrepair. A plaque placed in the 1990s was the only sign of commemoration to be found in or about the site until recently. The plaque did not point out that the Hungarian government was the perpetrator—impersonal agents are always the subjects of verbs in

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these public descriptions. We do not know what will be the place of Holocaust history in the new building and cultural centre, and how the 1941 deportations will be represented if at all, but it is difficult to ignore that the plaque has been removed from the facade for the time of the renovation work. Until today, even Jewish culture websites1 consider Wagner’s building entirely under aesthetic categories rather than as a landmark of Jewish Hungarian history. The only exception in this silence is found in a recent guidebook authored by young Hungarians and published under the title, Jewnior Guidebook—The Pocket Guide to Budapest’s Jewish Quarter (2013), which devotes four pages to memorials, including one to the Rumbach events of 1941. The Jewnior Guidebook also mentions the ghetto wall. Until the last standing piece of the wall was destroyed and suddenly rebuilt in 2008, the ghetto wall was a non-memorial according to the definition proposed above. Not much was generally left of a wall built in haste in 1944, often with perishable materials such as wood. One stone segment was still standing though, tucked in a courtyard on Király Street, a major historical thoroughfare of the Jewish quarter. The segment was identified around 2000, through government-sponsored architectural surveys. Discussions about conserving it started around 2004, when the civic organization OVÁS! mobilized for the preservation of historic heritage in the area. The wall (and its vestige on Király Street) was mentioned as an important memorial object in a 2007 UNESCO report on the state of preservation of the neighbourhood (under its watch as part of the World Heritage ‘buffer zone’). The wall portion was finally destroyed by renovation work before being rebuilt in a ‘nicer’ fashion (new stones, with some design and colour scheme matching those of new condos around). Two memorial plaques were added: on the wall itself, inside the yard, the text focuses on the history of the ghetto and its wall; on the building façade outside the plaque draws attention to the wall inside, and to the recent struggle for its ‘preservation’. In the last phase of this memorial’s biography, the non-memorial became an invisible memorial. In the first example (the Rumbach synagogue), the non-memorial was the vestige of a public controversy in which it was proposed, then rejected, as official memorial. In the second example (the wall), the nonmemorial was valuable for a minority of preservationists who advocated 1 See for example https://web.archive.org/web/20130522223832/http://jewish.hu/ view.php?clabel=zsinagogak.

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for its preservation through surveys, historical research, and alternative guidebooks. The third and last example exists partly in historians’ work, but mostly in an oral tradition that is passed on and keeps a haunting memory alive. Klauzál tér is a square that occupied a central place in the social and commercial life of the Jewish district. The public park was used as a cemetery during the winter 1944–1945. The bodies were transferred to a regular cemetery after liberation of the ghetto, but they still inhabit the descriptions of residents, a few alternative tour guides, and Hungarian Jews who know the history of the place, and who often connect its history to that of the collective grave near the synagogue. Although the two graves were different in nature and function, death joins them on peoples’ minds. Etched in the collective memory of the neighbourhood, Klauzál tér is a ghost memory hidden in an unkempt but popular park and playground loved by families, dog owners, Roma teenagers, and homeless people in a touristy part of the city. Surrounded by landmarks of living Budapest Jewish culture (the restaurant Kádár, the bookstore and café, Masszolit), it is an unmemorialized, but haunting symbol of death and of the ghetto. Conceptualizing and identifying non-memorials calls for a degree of counterfactual thinking. It requires imagining what could, or should have been, that is not. This is not about projecting desires onto reality. There is method to the counterfactual history that is proposed here. It is about mobilizing historical knowledge of the historical conditions that objectively made some outcomes likely or possible. It is also about listening to voices that are not represented in official discourse. This list of non-memorials is by definition an open one.

11.5 Figure of Memorial Ambivalence V: The Invisible Memorial Our fifth and last type of ambivalent memorial is the invisible memorial. Like the non-memorial, the invisible memorial is a symptom of denial. Unlike the non-memorial however, which owes much to internal conflicts, unsettled controversies, and unclear volitions of the body politics, the invisible memorial is an ‘intentional monument’. It is one that is intentionally hidden in the folds and cracks of the city. The original ‘invisible memorial’ is a monument located in Saarbrücken, Germany, which draws attention to the ubiquity and invisibility of Jewish cemeteries. Invisible memorials are a memorial genre illustrated

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in Budapest in 2015 by the List of Names in Mortar Memorial on the grounds of Eötvös Lorand University (ELTE). List of Names is another recent counter-memorial that overtly opposed the government’s boisterous Monument to the Victims. It consists of a list of names of victims inscribed on thin plaques of copper inserted in the mortar between the bricks of a building’s walls (Kállay 2015). Continuing the Hungarian ‘tradition’ of not naming Jews and of commemorating ‘all victims’ of a generic ‘tragedy’, List of Names is dedicated to ‘all the university’s victims of deportations’. The aim of the monument was to create a university-wide community through a shared sense of victimhood. For this reason, it doubles up as an ‘ambiguous memorial’. It is significant from the standpoint both of this monument’s intention and of its critique, that first, it should be an invisible memorial, unlike the Szabadság tér monument; and second, that it strictly replicates the ‘all (Hungarian) victims’ ideology. Ideological repetition does not happen for a lack of reflexivity in this case, it should be stressed; it is on the contrary the result of an intense collective debate in which this position became the dominant one. It reflects, in particular, the deliberate choice of a large segment of the Hungarian Jewry, represented by the intellectual Péter György in the debates about the List, to leave identification up to individuals rather than project a Jewish identity, ethnic or religious, onto them. It reflects a dominant position in a divided Jewish community. Among other symbolic features, this position excluded the use of Hebrew on the monument alongside Hungarian, English, and Braille (György 2015; Kállay 2015). The transnational ‘stumbling stones’ (Stolpersteine) project is only in appearance similar to the ELTE monument. Conceived in Cologne by an artist from Berlin and exported to multiple locations, including Budapest, the stumbling stones are also an invisible memorial in some way. Like ELTE’s List, it is inserted in the urban fabric in places where it was not meant to be. While the List of Names hides between bricks on a university campus, however, the stumbling stones literally stand ‘in the way’. Although relatively invisible as ‘monuments’, the stones cannot be ignored and were not meant to be hidden—quite to the contrary. Their location in the most public of public spaces, sidewalks, lifts the secrecy that is built into the concept of the invisible monument, a secrecy that replicates the non-committal hesitations of the first generations of Holocaust monuments.

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Another comparison may be drawn with the Yellow Star Houses (Csillagos Házak) project. Yellow Star Houses is a mapping project that memorializes a confinement and concentration technology unique to Budapest: the reassignment of Jewish families to designated ‘Jewish’ buildings. The Open Society Archive mapped the locations of the buildings, and made the map public online. When residents agree to it, the project entails marking facades with a plaque. The project is similar to the stumbling stones in that it documents the geography of genocide. It is more traditional in that it consists of placing plaques on walls. It is also less visible because it is contingent upon the agreement of numerous residents whose sympathy with the project varies greatly (as opposed to a municipal or governmental authorization in the case of the stumbling stones). The Yellow Star Houses exist in virtual online space; and only on a small number of facades. Their invisibility is not a fully intentional outcome, in the same sense as it is for the List of Names. One cannot say it is completely involuntary or contingent either, however, since the set up that produces invisibility is a device that was designed and crafted with purpose. A page of the cultural site welovebudapest.hu devoted to ‘moving monuments’ to look for on Holocaust remembrance day does not take note of the Yellow Star houses. The ghetto wall post-reconstitution also qualifies as an invisible memorial. The reconstructed remnant of the wall stands in a private courtyard behind a solid wooden gate that is most often closed. Petö’s idea of ‘privatized memory’ applies even more literally than it does for the Wallenberg memorial, other memorials of the first generation, or for ELTE’s List, which are visible or freely accessible from the street. For visitors informed of the ghetto wall memorial’s presence, a small window in the ancient door allows for a peak at its ochres and red colours, at about a 50-metre distance from the eye. Motivated visitors can wait until someone with access enters or exits the gate. Recently, an imposing, monumental map of the ghetto cast in iron was placed on a wall of Dohány Street, defying the customary invisibility of the ‘pariah’ memory. Borrowing a technique used by the Loeffler brothers, the architects of the Kazinczy street synagogue in 1912, the wall was built at an angle, creating a simulacrum of a miniature plaza breaking the monotony of the street front without completely disrupting the alignment of facades. A few photos tucked and lit under glass lenses were inserted at specific addresses on the map, giving visitors glimpses of everyday life and death in the Jewish quarter and ghetto.

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The map is surrounded by Hebrew inscriptions printed in the concrete wall, lights blinking softly, and other decorative, religious marks. A text in three languages (Hungarian, English, and Hebrew) summarizes the history of the 1944 ghetto and draws attention to the martyrdom of Hungarian Jews. Although it is difficult to overstate the monument’s uniqueness among all the Holocaust memorials of Budapest discussed in this chapter, especially considering its size, its place in public space, and the assertiveness of its message, this monument retains elements of the previous examples’ invisibility: it is owed to a private initiative (Chabad-Lubavitch’s) and located on a private wall; it is tucked between two ordinary facades of a nondescript block, and it stands on the very edge of the Jewish quarter, off the paths of ordinary tourists. The monument received so little publicity that one of the most prominent activists and preservationists of Jewish heritage, a person well-acquainted with Budapest and its Jewish monuments, discovered it at my invitation only three years ago. The memorial’s dissonant features, it must be stressed, reflect the marginal standpoint of a transnational organization that is now supported by a foreign government (Israel), which has frequently been in open conflict with local organizations and views on many issues concerning Jewish representation in public space since 2004. Most recently, Chabad has aggressively been supporting Hungary’s far-right government’s memorial project of a new Holocaust Memorial Centre, the House of Fates. The project is opposed by virtually every other Jewish organization in and outside of Hungary. In its endeavour to grow ideological roots worldwide, Chabad seems to bet on political support to compensate for a lack of local Jewish support, whether from native Orthodox groups, or from the large majority of reformed and secular trends (Gruber 2014). It is remarkable, generally, that the monuments that are most blatant and aggressive in their denotation of the Jewish ordeal, such as the one just discussed, are often recently constructed and foreign-based. Another notable example of such memorial work was the Shoah Cellar, operated by an Israeli entrepreneur until financial and other conflicts with local Jewish organizations (including his landlord on Wesseleny utca, the Mazsihisz) shut it down in the fall 2018. The Shoah Cellar dealt with the Hungarian story of the Shoah through the life of Hannah Szenes. With a story line directly borrowed from the Zionist repertoire of Israeli nationalism, the Shoah Cellar offered an amateurish, historically inaccurate picture of the Holocaust which was much decried by local organizations

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and historians. Although the Cellar had no impact on local debates on the Holocaust due to its notorious historical inadequacy, it was for the few years it existed a remarkable dissonance in a Hungarian landscape that otherwise entirely silenced any coherent narrative about the Holocaust.

11.6

Conclusion

This taxonomy of Hungarian non-lieux illustrates the complexity of a collective memory that is at one and the same time about telling and not telling the truth, remembering and forgetting the irreparable, inscribing and erasing traces. Three general points might be drawn from the case of Budapest Holocaust memorials as it was analyzed here. They delineate an agenda of further research and theorizing that could not be fully completed within the bounds of this chapter. The first, and main point, is that repression and forgetting do not come in one form and are not easily opposed to ‘memory’. They often appear through multiple shades of ambivalence that embody complex social relationships, and express multiple interests and positions at a given historical juncture. Collective memory is a social relation—a theoretical point that is not new in and of itself, but that negative memorials, as characterized instances of ancient or current symbolic conflict and controversy, put in bold relief. In fact, sites of memory are probably best understood as vestiges of ancient struggles involving multiple participants grappling at once with each other and with the relationship itself. The lines of struggle have chances to run through dominated groups themselves, making them sites of ambivalence that are homological to the national polity as a whole. A closer relational analysis of Holocaust debates or Jewish heritage in contemporary Hungary would probably reveal such homological divides in the communities, cultural or discursive, that bear these debates. The second point unfolds from this agonistic view of collective memory, and is of a more methodological nature. The fact that memorials, their forms, contents, and place in social space are traces of the social struggles that begot them, suggests that an ‘archaeological’ approach to memorial sites, focusing especially on their materiality, is particularly adequate for reaching the dialogical meanings that constitute these sites, and ultimately the social relations themselves that engendered these meanings. This methodological point is about the need for neo-materialistic approaches in memory studies, especially in studies of negative memory.

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The third, and last point, is about the relevance and potential of an agonistic-materialistic approach to cultural and political history more generally. The taxonomy of Holocaust memorials offered here might be translated into a history of what I would like to call Hungary’s ‘Horthy syndrome’, taking inspiration from Henri Rousso’s (1994) study of the ‘Vichy syndrome’ in France. A syndrome in Rousso’s sense is a set of symptoms of a ‘past that does not pass’ (1994), of symbolic forms that symptomatically express the reality of a responsibility that is resisted, rejected, and silenced. The memorials’ stories told in this chapter suggest, among other things, that the Horthy syndrome might have evolved through at least three phases: an age of repression and silence pure and simple (the socialist period); an age where repression was carried on by other means, through various forms of symbolic and physical displacement (the post-socialist era), and finally, an age where ambivalence is on the brink of resolving itself in a polarized struggle, provoked by the brash distortions of an illiberal, conservative government (since 2010). The systematic study of syndromes, of their structure and of their contents might take research on collective memory to new comparative-historical grounds. Acknowledgements While the author is solely responsible for the contents of this chapter, the text greatly benefitted from the work and feedback from several scholars and students. Thanks are due especially to Michael Miller and László Munteán for their generous and attentive readings, comments, and corrections. Grateful thanks to Greta Szüveges and Borbála Klacsmann for their expert assistance with Hungarian sources; to Kata Varsányi and Márton Szarvas for help with field work. Thanks to Olivette Otele, Luisa Gandolfo, and Yoav Galai, the editors, for their suggestions and work on the text.

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Kovács, A. (1994). Changes in Jewish Identity in Modern Hungary. In Jewish Identities in the New Europe (pp. 150–160). London and Washington, DC: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Kovács, A. (2016). Hungarian Intentionalism: New Directions in the Historiography of the Hungarian Holocaust. In R. L. Braham & A. Kovács (Eds.), The Holocaust in Hungary: Seventy Years Later. Budapest: CEU Press. Kucia, M. (2016). The Europeanization of Holocaust Memory and Eastern Europe. East European Politics and Societies, 30(1), 97–119. Laczó, F. (2018, January 29). The Europeanization of Holocaust Remembrance. Eurozine. Laczó, F. (2019, April 17). Holocaust Survivors, Hungarian Regimes, and the European Project. Hungarian Spectrum. Levy, D., & Sznaider, N. (2006). The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Marcuse, H. (2010). Holocaust Memorials: Emergence of a Genre. The American Historical Review, 115(1), 53–89. Mars, L. (2000). Anthropological Reflections on Jewish Identity in Contemporary Hungary. In A. Kovács (Ed.), Jewish Studies at the Central European University (pp. 157–169). Budapest: CEU Press. Nora, P. (1984). Lieux de Mémoire. Paris: Gallimard. Olick, J., & Levy, D. (1997). Collective memory and cultural constraint: Holocaust myth and rationality in German politics. American Sociological Review, 921–936. Orla-Bukowska, A. (2015). Remembering Righteousness: Transnational Touchstones in the International Classroom. In A. Petö & A. Thorson (Eds.), The Future of Holocaust Memorialization: Confronting Racism, Antisemitism, and Homophobia Through Memory Work. Budapest: Tom Lantos Institute/Central European University. OSCE-ODIHR. (2015). Holocaust Memorial Days: An Overview of Remembrance and Education in the OSCE Region. Retrieved from https://www. osce.org/hmd2015?download=true. Perczel, A. 2007. Védetlen örökség. Unprotected Heritage. Budapest: Varoshaza/City of Budapest. Petö, A. (2009). Privatized Memory? The Story of Erecting the First Holocaust Memorial in Budapest. In N. Adler et al. (Eds.), Memories of Mass Repression: Narrating Life Stories in the Aftermath of Atrocity. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers. Pótó, J. (2019). Raoul Wallenberg-Szobor. Retrieved from https://www.kozter kep.hu/~/49/raoul_wallenberg_szobor_budapest_varga_imre_1987.html. Rousso, H. (1994) The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Szarota, T. (1996). Wojna na pocieszenie. Gazeta Wyborcza, 6.9.1996.

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Taylor-Tudzin, J. (2011). Holocaust Memorials in Budapest, Hungary, 1987– 2010: Through the Words of the Memorial Artists (Unpublished Master’s Thesis). Central European University, Budapest. Tóth, E. F. (2008). Walking the Jewish Past? The Effects of Tourism on the Interpretations of the Budapest Jewish District (Unpublished Master’s Thesis). Central European University, Budapest. Vincze, Z. K. (2010). About the Jewish Renaissance in Post-1989 Hungary. In L. O. Vasvári & S. Tötösy de Zepetnek (Eds.), Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Young, J. E. (1989). The Biography of a Memorial Icon: Nathan Rapoport’s Warsaw Ghetto Monument. Representations, 26, 69–106. Young, J. E. (1993). The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press. Zertal, I. (2005). Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ziarek, E. P. (2007). Melancholic Nationalism and the Pathologies of Commemorating the Holocaust in Polannd. In D. Glowacka & J. Zylinska (Eds.), Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish–Jewish Relations After the Holocaust. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

CHAPTER 12

Afterword: Mourning, Memorialising, and Absence in the Covid-19 Era Olivette Otele, Luisa Gandolfo, and Yoav Galai

As we close this volume, life under the pandemic has foregrounded various coping mechanisms that include individual and collective efforts to remember or forget pain. How each community experiences those events and emotions vary greatly. As the death toll rose in Britain, the mourning processes took on new turns. The ritual of burial that had been

Betty Campbell’s statue, which will be proudly located in the centre of Cardiff. O. Otele (B) Colonial History, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] L. Gandolfo Department of Sociology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK e-mail: [email protected] Y. Galai Department of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 O. Otele et al. (eds.), Post-Conflict Memorialization, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54887-2_12

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denied to families and friends because of social distancing rules created a void and a longing for forms of togetherness. Britain decided to open its doors and came onto the streets and doorsteps to bang pots and pans, and clap to honour healthcare professionals working for the National Health Service, as well as to remember those who lost their lives saving others. The ritual started in New York and Italy, with people clapping while others shared their artistic productions (music and ballet, among others) to alleviate the pain of grief. As the weeks went by, the weekly activities resulted in a sense of community that brought to the surface the kinetic power of memory when the body is in motion. We remember with our body and our rituals connect these moments with sound and place, thus creating unique memory-soundscapes. In this context, the uniqueness was moments of togetherness during the pandemic, and banging pots and clapping has become a symbolic, and a literal, site of memory. The rituals and the narratives that accompany these events often evolve, as new meanings are added to these practices. The inability of the British government to present satisfying reasons for the delay to go on lockdown, or for not joining the European Union (European Commission 2020) personal protective equipment (PPE) scheme that would have prevented the virus spreading more rapidly, and potentially could have saved many health professionals,1 was in striking contrast to the narrative of togetherness mentioned above. Two very distinct and even competing narratives linked to absent bodies in the public imaginary, and a celebratory performative ritual was present. Clapping for ‘health heroes’ became a ritual shared by all, including politicians and the royal family. Togetherness was relayed by the media through video clips that slowly turned into a very British gesture. It was about Britain’s ability to allegedly ‘take it on the chin’,2 as much as it was the United Kingdom’s capacity to overcome adversity, as it did during the World Wars. It was also

1 In 2014, Britain joined the EU Joint Procurement Programme, but under the Brexit withdrawal agreement, Britain was still able to take part in the joint programme until 31 December 2020. 2 This is a reference to an interview given by the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, when he suggested that there were various theories that needed to be seriously considered. One of them was that people should be prepared to accept that the virus must be allowed to spread (‘herd immunity’), and that the population would simply ‘get it over and done with’ or ‘take it on the chin’ (Vaughan 2020).

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another instance of the country’s Dunkirk moment,3 where the process of erasure of the roles of those who had contributed to these ‘war efforts’ were absent. Absent black, brown, LGBTQ+ and disabled bodies and the impossibility to mourn on the one hand, and the celebratory aspect of the British ability to ‘keep calm and carry on’ on the other, contrasted with the exclusion of those deemed to be on the margins or neglected, as the Grenfell and Windrush (Gentleman 2019) scandals, and its plethora of deaths related to the ‘hostile environment’ (Goodfellow 2019) have demonstrated—even when they, too, were dying while saving lives. The British people were not all in this together, it seemed after all. Performing Britishness4 during the pandemic was echoed by street parties organised for VE Day5 in May 2020. As it was revealed, those parties broke social distancing rules and excluded parts of the British people; as several testimonies revealed on social media, this was particularly the case for those with links to the former colonies. Clapping had become politicised and weaponised by those who wanted an end to the lockdown, and by those who saw it as a way to satisfy the masses.6 As we are writing the last pages of this volume, England is easing its lockdown, while Scotland and Wales are refusing to follow Westminster’s path, and scandals over government officials, aids, and politicians’ inability to follow the government advice further split public opinion about the narrative of togetherness behind the Thursday night ritual. Against this backdrop, we have entered a Godot-esque situation where hope and examples of gross negligence are at play; all the while we are waiting for the vaccine, and in all likelihood will ‘carry on’ amidst the new normal of life under the pandemic. There is, however, a danger in carrying on, as well as an opening to continue silencing issues that need addressing. As the virus gained pace, the murder of George Floyd directed attention to the long-term practice of brutality that in the preceding months took the lives of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. The unfolding of the Black Lives Matter protests beyond the United States prompted, to a degree, a reflection on 3 This is a reference to patriotic stances that emerged in several parts of the country when the movie Dunkirk was released in 2017. 4 Associating clapping with Britishness was an argument used by far-right supporters. 5 Victory in Europe (VE) Day is a national day of commemoration that is marked

annually in the United Kingdom (as well as across Europe) on 8 May since 1945. 6 Echoing the piece on commemoration practices, see: Otele (2015).

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the fact that the roots of those injustices connected with a reluctance to confront the past in a meaningful manner. As the initial protests increased across the United States, the ensuing movements took a localised turn in Europe: in Scotland, the death of Sheku Bayoh in Kirkcaldy the previous year was foregrounded, after the 31-year-old trainee gas engineer and father of two was detained on the street and knelt on by six officers, which resulted in 23 injuries and, soon after, Bayoh’s passing. In Paris, the murder of Cédric Chouviat, and the sudden and violent arrest of an unnamed (at the time of writing) black woman outside a train station in Aulnay-sous-Bois, both in June 2020, evoked earlier cases: Adama Traoré in 2016, and the brutal sexual assault of Théo Luhaka in 2017. These tragedies are a few of many that have unfolded in recent years, and are occasionally followed by moments of mass consciousness, a lull, and later, another (often brief) public awakening. While the absences and erasures in this volume occur over a longer period, the protests of 2020 present ruptures that could break the silence around contemporary injustice and the legacy of violent histories. While conversations regarding confederate and colonial monuments and street names have occurred over the years,7 attempts to act on these calls are gaining momentum. From the statue of Christopher Columbus at the Minnesota State Capitol to Edward Colston in Bristol, and the soon-to-be removed Cecil Rhodes statue at Oriel College in Oxford, the empty plinths present a visual challenge to the skewed historical accounts and the complacency that veils national accountability for past atrocities. The images of the vacant plinths, now inscribed, reconstituted, and problematised, have stimulated a discussion that reveals the deep reluctance to accept the truth about how our institutions, cities, and countries were constructed. Against this backdrop, cityscapes are being read anew through the earlier work of, for example, Joshua Kwesi Aikins, whose coauthored Straßennamen mit Bezügen zum Kolonialismus in Berlin (Aikins and Kopp 2008) logged over 70 streets in Berlin and detailed their colonial ties. Building on this Aikins has campaigned for a decolonisation of the public space, an endeavour that has been successful and is ongoing. In Britain, the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slaveownership at University College London provides an interactive map that 7 Including the Rhodes Must Fall (2015–), Black Lives Matter (2013–), Faidherbe Doit Tomber!, and Coordination Action Autonome Noire movements, and the Association Internationale Mémoires et Partages (1998–).

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details houses and institutions where slave owners lived for various durations (Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership 2020), while the art of Alberta Whittle highlights how Scotland is ‘sitting in a place of colonial amnesia’ and calls for an acknowledgement that ‘Scottish cities are built on the bodies of black and brown people’ (MacNicol 2019). More recently, in her seminal book, African Europeans: An Untold History (2020), Olivette Otele challenges the assumption that the African and African European communities are a relatively new addition to the continent; in contrast, there is a rich and intricate history that has been omitted from public discourse and the history books at all levels of education. While many of the chapters in this volume allude to conflict and post-conflict societies, a significant conclusion is that silences, erasures, and absences suffuse our every day, whether we are in Scotland, France, or the United States. In response, 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. For the contributors in this volume, absence has shaped how communities negotiate the historical narratives that emerge from past and ongoing violences, as well as how mourning and grief is practised. In each case, absence is caused by erasures that are enacted in various ways, including the omission of truths, as in the contributions by Olivette Otele, Luisa Gandolfo, Alexandra Kowalski, Kelsey J. Utne, and Yoav Galai and Omri Ben Yehuda, or the language that brings power to one community, while taking from another, as discussed by Andrea Zittlau, Eva Willems, and Sandra M. Rios Oyola. At other points, the absence is physical: the desaparecidos whose bodies are yet to be recovered; the empty seats in Johanna Mannergren Selimovic’s account of Haris Pašovi´c’s Sarajevo Red Line, and Manca Bajec’s retelling of the memorial ceremony at the Omarska camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina. As we move through the global experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, the loss continues, at times connecting with existing patterns of disappearance as in Ecuador in May 2020, when the bodies of those who had succumbed to the virus gradually disappeared from the hospital in the port city of Guayaquil (Zabludovsky, May 5, 2020), evoking earlier desaparecidos . At other times, death draws attention to how we memorialise, and as the numbers rise, how we talk about individuals, bodies, and mortality is as much subject to inequality as the acts of memorialisation (or the lack thereof).

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As we negotiate the current uncertainty, the memorialisation process vacillates along lines of age, race, disability, and socioeconomic background. The inequalities are perceptible in political responses to the virus, including the language used to discuss the pandemic that has had undertones of conflict (Meretoja 2020; Tisdall 2020): a foe to be beaten, a readying for mass grief, and the valorisation of workers (where soldiers switch with healthcare staff and key workers). A significant reason for this lies in the inequalities that have shaped not only how we move through the Covid-19 era, but also whether the chances of our survival are high or low. In the case of the latter, we can question whether those who have passed are recognised equally? On a deeper level, to what extent is society interrogating the structural inequalities that facilitate inequality in death, mourning, and memorialisation? We are several months into the virus, and while the end point is uncertain, examples of the link between inequalities and absence (including silence, omission, and erasure) continue to arise. In the United States, Memorial Day weekend saw the number of deaths related to Covid-19 touch 100,000, a number that prompted reflections on how to mourn, how to recognise, and how to reckon with the magnitude of loss. For Judith Butler, the moment called for an understanding of the universality of grief, yet also a pause to acknowledge the disparity in terms of vulnerability and inequality: The vulnerable include Black and Brown communities deprived of adequate health care throughout their lifetimes and the history of this nation [the United States]. The vulnerable also include poor people, migrants, incarcerated people, people with disabilities, trans and queer people who struggle to achieve rights to health care, and all those with prior illnesses and enduring medical conditions. The pandemic exposes the heightened vulnerability to the illness of all those for whom health care is neither accessible nor affordable. Perhaps there are at least two lessons about vulnerability that follow: it describes a shared condition of social life, of interdependency, exposure and porosity; it names the greater likelihood of dying, understood as the fatal consequence of a pervasive social inequality. (Butler 2020)

One month after Butler’s interview, the figures continued to tell a story: in the United Kingdom, the BAME rate of death from Covid-19 was ‘more than twice that of whites’, while 63% of the healthcare staff who

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had passed away were black or Asian (Siddique 2020; Cook et al. 2020). In the United States, late May revealed that ‘African Americans have died at a rate of 50.3 per 100,000 people, compared with 20.7 for whites, 22.9 for Latinos and 22.7 for Asian Americans’ (Pilkington 2020). In cities, the combination of respiratory diseases emanating from pollution, overcrowded housing and low-paying-public-facing roles that necessitate travel through the dense streets and public transport, make already marginalised communities the most vulnerable populations. Death clusters along the grooves of marginality, and pregnability echoes a history of depravation. Loss is mostly experienced away from the home, where we are instructed to stay until the disease overpowers us. If it does, we know to go to a hospital, where we either recover, or die, away from loved ones. For the unfortunate ones who succumb to this disease, funerals are often conducted not in the direct presence of families, while some bodies are even buried in mass graves. The very ability to mourn is disrupted. The concept of ontological security challenges the prominence of physical security as the ultimate goal of political communities. Ontological security stems from our trust in ‘the world is as it appears to be’ (Kinnvall 2004, 746) and it is based on a sense of security derived from trusting in an ongoing routine (Mitzen 2006, 347). For many communities, Covid19 breaks with any familiar measure of sociality. For individuals, the threat of the virus is such that it does not immediately interrupt any measure of our routine, but because of the delay of its effect, it makes every action suspect, and any sensory perception unreliable. This means that we cannot trust ourselves to know that we are safe, and we cannot trust others to know that they are safe either. The world is not as it appears to be. We are instead in a state of absolute ontological insecurity and we can only be guided by our personal mythologies. These are homemade collages, assembled from the incessant flow of data on the news, social media, and social networks to which we cling to make sense of the danger outside. On the other hand, we are guided by official ‘nudges’ from the government through various media that are set to move bodies about in order to manage public health as statistical death. Within such a chaotic and ubiquitous mediatisation of life, we cannot but be misinformed, because the assurances that we normally seek will not hold. The absent bodies of the pandemic echo the cases in this volume, but not in a direct way. The deaths due to Covid-19 are not denied by the state, but the state’s failure to lend any meaning to them is an aspect of ontological insecurity. The virus is spread by contagion by members

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of the political community themselves, making it difficult to pin the blame for the disease on outside forces (though some still try, as we saw when Donald Trump attempted to blame China [Sevastopulo and Manson 2020]). For this reason, many states are drawing on images of conflict to explain the pandemic in order to align it with existing experience as yet another external difficulty to overcome that lends a measure of ontological security to the ongoing crisis. Therefore, leaders are now talking about a war with an invisible enemy and about the necessity for extraordinary means. We know, from Renan, that our national political communities are forged in war and conflict, and that there is the imperative to narrate national histories as a heroic epic that is at once a ‘moral conscience’ and a ‘daily plebiscite’ (Renan 1990 [1882], 20). Eventually, the same narrative tradition that rejects difficult histories of perpetration and complicity, now refuses to recognise the structural faults that exacerbate the effect of Covid-19. Against this backdrop, Micki McElya observed how the United States has negotiated its mourning, and questioned, ‘Are these deaths not ‘ours’? […] if we are all warriors, why aren’t the currently more than 86,000 American pandemic dead treated as patriots and honoured for their sacrifices? […] The pandemic dead have received almost none of this, and the omission is significant - even if the dying is still just beginning’ (McElya 2020). The omissions and silence nest within each other, and amidst the uncertainty, attention must be directed towards the individuals, communities, countries, and regions that are absent from the greater conversation about how Covid-19 is affecting society. When the virus abates, the question of how to memorialise will endure. Covid-19 has arrived 122 years after the 1918 Flu, which claimed over 50 million deaths globally. As we close this edited volume in July 2020, the global total for Covid-19 is just over 600,000 deaths. And yet, 122 years on, there are only two memorials to the 1918 Flu: a bench in Hope Cemetery in Barre, Vermont, and a zinc plaque placed next to a war memorial in Wellington, New Zealand (Segal 2020). The limited memorialisation of the 1918 Flu has been attributed to the desire to forget: as Albert Crosby writes, ‘As one searches for explanations for the odd fact that Americans took little notice of the pandemic, then quickly forgot whatever they did notice, one comes upon a mystery and a paradox. Americans barely noticed and didn’t recall - that is exasperatingly obvious’ (2003 [1989], 322–323). The inability to recall echoes Mannergren

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Selimovic’s reflection on Paul Connerton’s ‘hegemonic forgetting’, and her observation in this volume that, ‘There is little space for the ambiguities and fine-tuned mechanisms of grief, dignity and co-existence in hegemonic accounts of the past, which often seem driven by an opposite ambition to close the ambivalence and mask presence of absence’. And yet, steps are being taken to unmask the presence of absence, the unknown names, and the named people who we did not know. Over the Memorial Day weekend, The New York Times ’ front-page listed the names of the 100,000 people who had succumbed to Covid-19 in the United States. Their electronic version went further: as the mouse scans the screen the tiny, animated people light up and details appear above their head: [move right ] ‘Black N Mild, 44, New Orleans. Bounce D.J. and radio personality’; [move left ] ‘Laneeka Barksdale, 47, Detroit. Ballroom dancing star’; [move down] ‘Romi Cohn, 91, New York City. Saved 56 Jewish families from the Gestapo’, and so the page unfolds and the multitude of lives lived is revealed in one and two line briefs (The New York Times, May 24, 2020). As Casey Cep writes, ‘Such is the perverse mathematics of tragedy: the staggering specificity of any one life lost; the overwhelming obscurity of lives lost’ (Cep 2020). In the same month, the #NamingTheLost initiative invited those who wished to commemorate to participate in a 24-hour global vigil on 20 May, 2020. Organised by ‘people who have been impacted by Covid-19 and/or those in pastoral roles who have been called to support others in grief’, the event extended to the bereaved who had lost loved ones in the United States and beyond (#NamingTheLost 2020). The motivation for the event went deeper than a need to focus on a date of remembrance: it provided a response to ‘the lack of collective mourning during the Covid19 crisis [that] has left many feeling even more isolated and alone - and created a gap in the public conversation about what is at stake and who is suffering at this time’ (ibid.). Streamed online, the vigil urged individual forms of mourning: a candle could be lit offline and the vigil observed for one hour; for others, the vigil could be left and returned to, or attended in its entirety. Before the date, the bereaved were urged to submit the names of those they had lost and during the commemoration, the names were read and observers urged to reflect on each name as it was announced. Among the names were essential workers, yet the initiative emphasised the need to honour the names of those ‘we do not yet know’, because ‘[a]ll of their memories are essential to us’. Although the year is still in flux, there is a chance to avoid the mask being placed on the absence; to prevent the

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omission of names, and to grieve everyone equally, as #NamingTheLost, and the plethora of initiatives described in this volume, demonstrate. 31 July 2020

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Index

A Abolition, 36–38, 40 abolitionists, 39 Absence, 3, 7–10, 16–20, 22, 24–31, 39, 49, 55, 56, 59, 67, 68, 70–72, 76, 78, 87, 88, 92, 96, 113, 140, 152, 156, 173, 179, 180, 183, 185, 187, 190, 196, 199, 208, 214, 222, 244–246, 249 Acknowledgement, 7, 10, 16, 24, 26, 29, 48, 121, 136, 155, 162, 245 Afrophobia, 35, 36 Agency, 18, 19, 27, 57, 88, 90, 153, 162, 189, 209 authorship, 154, 165 Al-Akhal, Tamam, 83–87, 89, 91, 97 Alshaibi, Sama, 86–91, 97 Ambivalence, 16, 27, 214–217, 225, 228, 230, 236, 237, 249 American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), 8, 56, 59, 68–70, 72 Amnesia, 9, 30, 49, 245

historical amnesia, 9, 43, 51 Anthropology, 18, 56, 58–60, 65, 71, 77, 171, 174, 180 Anti-colonialism, 156 Archives. See Oral history Art, 15, 16, 27, 29–31, 57, 66, 77, 81, 83, 84, 114, 154, 160, 229, 245 Atari-Wagah border, 157, 166 Auschwitz, 70, 218

B Bangladesh, 152 Bangladesh Liberation War (1971), 152, 164 Belonging, 40, 42, 43, 50, 83, 215 Bodies, 7–11, 17–20, 25, 31, 46–49, 51, 56, 62, 63, 65, 67, 70, 71, 76, 77, 82, 83, 85, 86, 88–93, 95, 96, 102, 134, 137, 153, 156, 173, 177, 180, 183, 186, 187, 190, 195, 196, 198–202,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 O. Otele et al. (eds.), Post-Conflict Memorialization, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54887-2

253

254

INDEX

205–209, 226, 232, 242, 243, 245, 247 Bojayá, 205–208 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 101, 103, 245 Sarajevo, 245 Boundaries, 31, 40, 92, 95, 107, 114 Buildings, 5, 8, 17, 18, 20–22, 26, 81, 104, 106, 110–112, 115, 132, 222, 224, 229–231, 233, 234, 244 Burial sites, 173, 174, 180, 183, 188. See also Death burials, 11, 183 C Chabad Lubavitch, 235 Children, 25, 28, 45, 46, 66, 73, 84, 96, 120, 121, 123–130, 132–135, 137–144, 155, 175, 184, 207 Chile, 9, 56, 65, 67, 71, 72, 176, 200 Christian missionaries, 60 Citizens Archive Pakistan, 152, 163–166 Closure, 6, 16, 31, 40, 58, 214 Coexistence, 24, 27, 189, 225, 249 Colombia, 5, 11, 196, 202, 203, 206, 209 Colonialism, 144, 153, 159, 160, 216 triumph over colonialism, 160 Commission for Human Rights (COMISEDH) (Peru), 179 Communalism, 154. See also Violence Covid 19, 245–249 D Dance, 70, 72, 208 Dark tourism, 36, 44, 50 Death, 4, 5, 25, 46, 47, 63, 88, 107, 120, 121, 123, 133, 134, 142,

143, 146, 153, 156–158, 160, 162, 164, 180, 182, 185, 199, 200, 204, 207, 213, 221–223, 232, 234, 241, 243–248 corpses, 154. See also Bodies Denial, 19, 24, 56, 88, 102, 108, 120, 125, 132, 185, 199, 201, 214, 217, 228, 232 Desecration. See Exhumations; Human dignity Día de la Memoria (Day of Memory) (Peru), 180 Diaspora, 163–165. See also Migration Dignity, 19, 20, 24, 27, 190, 196–205, 208, 209, 249 Displacement, 67, 75, 76, 80, 81, 84, 86–88, 91, 93, 151, 155, 159, 161, 184, 216, 217, 224–226, 230, 237 Hindu nationalism, 160. See also Nationalism homeland, 160 material displacement, 216 national, 164. See also Nationalism Partition Museum (Amritsar), 165. See also Museums refusing relocation, 155 symbolic displacement, 216 Disposal of the dead, 155. See also Burial sites cremation, 155

E Embodiment, 7, 76, 85, 96 Emotions, 7, 76, 78, 83, 84, 93, 95, 208, 241 guilt, 152, 161 horror, 154, 161 scorn, 153 shame, 151, 162 sympathy, 161

INDEX

Erasure, 7, 19, 24, 38, 42, 43, 50, 61, 77, 88, 89, 151, 172, 217, 243–246 Ethnography, 48, 49, 70, 180 Ethnonationalism, 21 Exhumations, 173–175, 183–188, 196, 200, 204, 206–208 Exile, 75–77, 81, 85, 88, 89, 91, 93, 95, 96, 115, 116, 125, 226 F FARC, 202, 205, 207 Forced disappearance, 172, 173, 177–179, 183, 190, 201, 203 desaparecidos (Colombia), 195, 245 Forgetting, 20, 21, 25, 36, 154, 162, 214, 236 forgetting as failure, 154 hegemonic forgetting, 27, 249 prescriptive forgetting, 109, 154, 162 selective forgetting, 152. See also Memory Four Faces of Omarska, 103, 105, 109, 110, 115 Fujimori, Alberto, 176 G Gandhi, Mahatma, 156, 158 assassination site, 158 Gandhi Smriti (Delhi), 158 Garden of heroes, 221, 222, 226 Genocide, 7, 56, 61, 68–71, 128, 132, 152, 186, 201, 213, 214, 216, 220, 223 geography of genocide, 234 Ghana, 199 Ghetto wall, 229, 231, 234 Grief, 27, 76, 78, 84, 85, 185, 204, 206–209, 242, 245, 246, 249. See also Mourning

255

Guatemala, 11, 176, 201 H Hajós, Alfréd, 218 Halaby, Sophie, 81–84, 89, 91, 97 Hatoum, Mona, 91–97 Haunting, 161 ghosts, 68, 232 hauntology, 68, 69 phantoms, 65 revenants , 68, 69 spectres, 68, 69 Heritage, 157, 159, 164, 165 historic sites, 156, 158, 159 local, 36, 37, 41 midnight, 157 national, 8, 36, 37, 49, 236 National Trust, 45, 47, 51 welsh, 37, 38, 41, 47, 50, 51 Heroes, 21, 114, 219, 222, 225, 242 heroism, 162 Hindus, 154, 155, 160 Hiroshima Peace Memorial, 163, 165 Holocaust, 7, 17, 20, 70, 151, 152, 154, 163, 165, 213–228, 231, 233–237 holocaust survivors, 20, 126 Shoah, 213, 222, 223, 227 Shoah Foundation, 162 Honour, 162 Horthy, Miklós, 214, 215, 218, 227, 237 Humala, Ollanta, 188 Human dignity. See also Humiliation dignification, 196, 208 dignity of the dead, 199 dignity restoration, 198 politics of dignity, 197, 198 re-dignification, 196 Humiliation, 11, 199, 201, 202 Hungary, 214–216, 218, 220, 223, 224, 235–237

256

INDEX

Hungarian nationalism, 215

I Identity, 154. See also Pakistan, Pakistani identity; Wales, Welsh identity national identity, 163 religious identity, 154 In-betweenness, 8 India. See also Indian National Congress Babri Masjid (Ayodhya), 161 BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), 158 Bombay (Mumbai), 158 Delhi, 158, 159 Hindu nationalism, 160. See also Nationalism Indian nationalism, 158–160. See also Indian National Congress; Nationalism Indian nationalists, 158. See also Indian National Congress Indian soldiers. See World War I Jallianwala Bagh Massacre Memorial (Amritsar), 158 Muslim League, 161. See also Pakistan Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (New Delhi), 158 religious identity, 155 Teen Murti House (New Delhi), 158 Indian National Congress, 161 national identity, 155. See also Nationalism International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), 108 Invisibility, 215, 232, 234, 235 Israel, 5, 76, 80, 120–133, 136, 137, 144, 146, 214, 235

J Jamaica, 44, 45, 48 Japan. See Hiroshima Peace Memorial Jarjachas , 184 Jinnah, Fatima, 158 Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 152, 153, 156–158, 164 Qaid-e-Azam Birthplace Museum (Karachi), 158 Qaid-e-Azam House (Karachi), 157 Qaid-e-Azam Residency (Quetta), 158 K Kant, Immanuel, 196 Klauzál tér, 227, 229, 232 Knowledge production, 37, 48, 152, 163 Kuczynski, Pedro Pablo, 189 L Lahore Museum, 160, 166 Landmark(s), 77, 78, 81, 224, 226, 227, 230–232 Landscape, 18, 31, 49, 62, 75–84, 91, 95–97, 136, 174, 184, 223, 229, 230, 236 Lieux de mémoire, 216 non-lieux de mémoire, 216 Liminality, 8, 24, 30, 31 List of Street Names in Mortar, 233 Loss, 4, 6, 8, 10, 11, 15–17, 20, 25, 27–29, 31, 50, 72, 76, 78, 80, 84, 89, 92, 115, 152, 154, 161, 162, 183, 187, 190, 208, 214–216, 245–247 Lutz memorial, 223 M Map(s), 32, 60, 103, 217, 234, 235, 244

INDEX

Martyrs, 21, 162, 222 freedom fighters, 156, 159, 160 Mass graves. See Desecration; Exhumations Materiality, 165, 236 corpses, 156. See also Death obliteration of physical evidence, 159 physical site(s), 165. See also Memoryscape Mazsihisz, 217, 224, 227, 228, 230, 235 Memorabilia, 46, 227 Memorialization, 7, 8, 11, 38, 111, 153, 159, 162, 164, 166, 245, 246, 248 digital commemoration, 165 lack thereof, 151, 163, 165, 166 Memorials, 158, 160 ambiguous memorials, 217, 220, 221, 233 official memorials, 228, 231 screen memorials, 217, 219, 220 wandering memorials, 215–218, 223–228 Memory, 154, 162 contested memory, 30, 205 cultural Memory, 47, 85, 96 intergenerational memories, 161–163 invisible memory, 31 memory work, 153 negative memory, 236 non-memory, 229, 231 post-memory, 50, 96 preserving memories, 163. See also Preservation remembering as virtue, 154 selective remembering, 154. See also Forgetting Memory politics, 17–21, 30 Memoryscape, 21, 22, 29, 31

257

reluctant sites of memory, 9, 36, 37, 45, 49, 51 sites of memory, 35, 36, 39–41, 152, 156, 160, 205, 208, 236, 242. See also Space demolition of, 158. See also Space destruction of, 161 residences as sites of memory, 157 Memory work, 8, 16, 21, 26, 27, 29–31, 88, 213, 214, 217 informal memory work, 31 socially engaged memory work, 187, 190 Migration, 156, 160 Militaries, 21, 155, 157, 175, 177, 178, 189, 201 Mnemonic, 108 Monument(s) counter-monuments, 114, 227, 228 intentional monuments, 232 involuntary monuments, 229 pillar, 158 reluctant monuments, 217 Most Mira. See Bosnia and Herzegovina Mourning, 4, 5, 9, 11, 16, 20, 36, 50, 55, 72, 83, 88, 126, 157, 159, 165, 173, 180, 182, 183, 186, 187, 189, 190, 220, 223, 241, 246, 248, 249. See also Grief Museums, 8, 9, 21, 55–59, 61, 63, 65, 68–72, 91, 156, 158, 160, 164–166, 205, 207, 208, 213, 221, 226 American Museum of Natural History (New York City), 8 Museo Nacional de Historia Natural (Chile), 68 Music, 29, 130, 159, 242 singing, 28

258

INDEX

Muslims, 154, 155, 159, 160 Muslim soldiers. See World War I N Nakba, 86–88, 96, 97, 125, 129 Narratives, 2–4, 8–10, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 26, 27, 29, 31, 36, 39–44, 46–51, 55, 56, 59, 68–70, 75–80, 85, 89–92, 95–97, 107, 108, 121, 124–126, 130–133, 137, 138, 141, 142, 144, 145, 152–154, 156, 158, 159, 164, 200, 204, 207, 214–216, 219, 220, 222, 224, 227, 228, 236, 242, 243, 245, 248 contested narratives, 11 counter-narratives, 157, 158, 160, 228 oral narratives, 107 Nationalism, 156, 157, 159, 161, 162 nationalist history, 156, 157 nationalist politics, 165 Nation-building, 6, 17, 25, 26 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 153, 156, 158 Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (Delhi), 158 Noncombatants, 155, 162 Nostalgia, 1, 56, 76, 95, 154, 215 O Omarska, 10, 101, 102, 105, 106, 110–112, 114, 115, 245 Prijedor, 101, 102, 115 Trnopolje, 101, 102 Oppression, 4, 10, 11, 19, 39, 69, 129, 159, 173, 186 Oral history, 4, 38, 39, 163, 165, 166. See also Oral History Project (OHP) (Pakistan); 1947 Partition Archive citizen historians, 164

crowdsourcing, 165, 166 digital oral history, 152, 162, 164 ‘remembering to others’, 161. See also Agency Oral History Project (OHP) (Pakistan), 163, 164 OVÁS!, 231 P Pain, 4, 9–11, 24, 31, 46, 85, 106, 206, 207, 220, 241, 242 Pakistan, 160. See also Walton Refugee Camp Bab-e-Pakistan Foundation, 160 Karachi, 157, 164 Lahore, 163–166. See also Walton Refugee Camp Lahore Museum, 160 Pakistani identity, 158. See also Nationalism Quetta, 158 Palestine, 5, 75–77, 80, 81, 83, 85, 86, 88, 89, 91–93, 96, 97, 128, 144 1947 Partition Archive, 163, 164, 166 Partition of India and Pakistan (1947), 152, 153, 157, 160, 161. See also India; 1947 Partition Archive Pašovi´c, Haris, 15, 28, 245 Patriotism, 26 Pátzay, Pál, 220 Pauer, Gyula, 225 Performance, 16, 22, 28, 29, 48, 49, 55, 56, 66, 70–72, 111, 200 Performativity, 108 Perpetrators, 5, 6, 26, 107, 108, 141, 153–155, 159, 162, 178, 183, 189, 195, 200, 205, 225, 230 complicity, 153, 156 organized groups, 154 villains, 29 Peru, 174–176, 207. See also Yachay

INDEX

Peruvian Civil War (1980–2000), 10, 172, 175 Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 176 Plaques, 45, 101, 218, 221, 222, 226, 230, 231, 233, 234, 248 Poetry, 28, 29, 41, 79, 82, 87, 89 Popper, Julius, 61–64, 71 Power, 3, 6, 8, 11, 19, 31, 49, 51, 56, 57, 67, 69, 70, 76, 79, 81, 86, 88, 90, 96, 97, 110, 114, 130, 135, 137, 142, 144, 153, 156, 157, 159, 185, 197, 200, 215, 220, 242, 245 Preservation, 40, 42, 157, 217, 231, 232 preserving memories, 165. See also Oral history Puna, 180, 184 R Race, 41, 42, 246 racism, 2, 36, 185, 186 Rapoport, Nathan, 218 Reconciliation, 57, 69, 102, 107, 113, 197, 198, 200, 224, 225 Recuperacion de la Memoria Historia (REMHI) (Guatemala), 201 Refugees, 41, 87, 88, 116, 125, 129, 151–154, 159, 160, 165, 205. See also Walton Refugee Camp Regreso de los Espiritus, 56, 70–72 Repression, 80, 172, 176, 216, 218, 220, 228, 236, 237 Resistance, 20, 21, 25, 31, 48, 64, 67, 90, 115, 199 Restorative justice, 198 Rituals, 6, 10, 31, 65–67, 71, 111, 180, 201, 204, 208, 241–243 funerary rituals, 11, 199–201, 207, 208 Ruins, 21, 102, 217, 228

259

Rumbach Szebestyén street synagogue, 224, 229 Rwanda, 5, 201 Rwanda Genocide (1994), 201

S Saviours, 218–221 Scars, 17, 18, 30, 230 Schools, 41–43, 51, 87, 102, 104, 128, 175 curricula, 43 London School of Economics, 166 Seacole, Mary, 51 Selk’nam, 8–10, 56, 60–73 Serbia, 110, 111 Settlers (European), 48, 61, 70, 71 Shammout, Ismail, 84 Shining Path, 172, 175–178, 180, 184, 190 Shoah Cellar, 235 Sikhs, 160, 162 anti-Sikh riots (1984), 161. See also Violence Sikh identity, 162 Sikh soldiers. See World War I Silence, 3–5, 7–9, 16, 19–22, 24–27, 29–31, 55, 82, 93, 106, 107, 127, 137, 143, 152, 158–161, 164, 189, 205, 217, 218, 227, 230, 231, 237, 244–246, 248 Singh, Bhagat, 156 Slavery, 9, 35–40, 43, 44, 48–51, 216 Soldiers, 158. See also War dead Soviet Union, 220 Space, 151, 158. See also Displacement geographic remoteness, 164 spatial specificity, 156 Spomenik (The Monument Group). See Bosnia and Herzegovina; Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001) Stigma, 131, 137

260

INDEX

Stories, 2–4, 7, 19, 22, 23, 26, 27, 36–43, 46, 47, 50, 51, 57, 60, 66, 69, 81, 91, 101, 106, 107, 114, 121, 126, 128–133, 137, 138, 141–143, 146, 152, 153, 159, 160, 163, 165, 179, 184, 207, 217, 219, 220, 230, 235, 237, 245, 246 Stumbling stones (Stolpersteine), 233 Survivors, 6, 8, 10, 11, 17, 29, 96, 115, 151–154, 162, 186, 187, 189, 190, 201, 215, 229 Szenes, Hannah, 235

T Temporal disturbances, 30 The Emanuel Tree. See Varga, Imre The Righteous, 219 Time, 1–3, 6, 9, 10, 17–19, 21–23, 25–27, 38–40, 45, 47, 49–51, 56–58, 60, 62, 66, 67, 70, 71, 79, 80, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89, 91–97, 102, 105–107, 112, 119, 120, 124, 126, 128, 135–141, 144–146, 156, 161, 163, 174–176, 179–182, 187, 188, 195, 197, 202, 225, 230, 231, 236, 244, 245, 249 sundown, 157 temporal, 8, 17, 18 temporal conflicts, 30 temporal proximity, 152 temporal specificity, 156 Toledo, Alejandro, 176 Touch, 18, 29, 85, 93, 141, 246 Tourism, 158, 219, 224, 230 Guide books, 230 pilgrimage sites, 165 Traces, 20, 21, 24, 26, 31, 38, 57, 69, 77, 177, 178, 217, 228, 236

Transitional justice, 19, 171–173, 186, 187, 190, 196–198, 202, 203, 208, 209 Transitions, 18, 77, 78, 83, 93, 94, 108, 120, 156, 157, 182, 198, 200 Trauma, 4–11, 18, 20, 27, 29, 31, 36, 44, 50, 51, 55, 84, 85, 87, 88, 96, 111, 120, 125, 130, 132, 133, 136, 137, 144, 152, 156, 157, 166, 196, 200 symbolic trauma, 50 Trebevi´c, 22 Truth, 6, 38, 101, 113, 131, 143– 145, 152, 172, 176, 195, 196, 198, 203–206, 208, 214, 215, 224, 228, 229, 236, 244, 245 Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRC), 9, 10, 128, 175, 176, 178, 179, 183, 184, 186 Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 176 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa), 153 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Yugoslavia), 109 Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, 176

U Uribe, Alvaro, 201–203

V Varga, Imre, 219, 220, 222 Victimhood, 19, 133, 161, 162, 220, 228, 233 re-victimization, 173, 187, 190, 196

INDEX

victims, 19, 159, 162, 220, 228, 233 Violence, 3, 5, 8, 9, 15, 17, 19–21, 24, 25, 29, 31, 62, 64, 70, 72, 93, 107, 108, 110, 120, 122, 129, 133, 151–160, 162, 166, 172, 173, 176, 177, 180, 186, 187, 189, 190, 195, 197, 200–204, 207–209, 245 communal violence, 153, 154, 161, 162 sexual violence, 162. See also Women

W Wales Bangor, 45 Butetown History and Arts Centre, 37, 41 Cardiff, 37, 39 Penrhyn Castle, 8, 36, 43–45, 51 Welsh identity, 41 Welshness, 40–42, 44

261

Wallenberg, Raoul, 219–221, 223, 225, 234 Walton Refugee Camp, 151, 160 War dead, 152, 156 Wells, Nathaniel, 37 West Indies, 39, 44, 45, 48 Williams, Charlotte, 37, 39 Witnesses, 155, 159, 163, 166 citizen viewers, 157, 164. See also Agency Women, 155, 161, 162 war heroines, 152 World War I, 155. See also War dead Hindu soldiers, 155 World War II, 4, 38, 102, 219, 220, 224, 226 Y Yachay, 171–175, 177–180, 182, 184, 185, 187–190 Yassin, Deir, 78, 87 Yellow Star Houses (Csillagos Házak), 234 Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001), 108