From: BBC News (29 Jan 2010)
Memory-related quote: "'Even if his body isn't found, in some respects his memory is even more alive now. By researching what sort of person he was, we now know much more about him,' Mr Parker says."
The lost soldiers of Fromelles
By Peter Jackson
BBC News
The first of the remains of 250 World War I soldiers found in France are being reburied with military honours after painstaking efforts to identify them. How do you put the right name on a headstone after so long?
When the first chipped and battle-scarred bones were excavated from a muddy field in northern France last May, the story of the forgotten battle of Fromelles began to emerge.
The remains of 250 British and Australian soldiers had lain undiscovered for 93 years since falling on the Western Front.
Boots, purses, toothbrushes and other personal artefacts lay amongst the twisted skeletons at Pheasant Wood, offering partial clues about the men's identities.
But it is the unique genetic codes within these remains that offer the best chance of putting names to each unknown soldier.
So far, more than 800 UK families who think they may have lost a relative at Fromelles have given DNA samples, but many will be disappointed.
The man whose job it is to help identify the soldiers says it is like finding a needle in a haystack, albeit with a very good metal detector.
"The problem with DNA that's been in the ground for 90 years is it degrades in quality and quantity," says molecular geneticist Dr Peter Jones.
"If it's a very acidic site, there's no chance of DNA at all because acids attack DNA rapidly. If it's dry and arid like in a desert, you get good DNA. If it's wet, less good."
The remains extracted from Fromelle's muddy burial pits have produced small but workable amounts of DNA, says Dr Jones. The teeth, which preserve well because they are encased in enamel, give by far the best samples.
"The hardest part is finding the right families and getting them to come forward... you can have good DNA profiles, but no family to match it up to."
Although 250 bodies have been recovered from the graves, it's thought about 1,500 British and 5,500 Australian troops fell in the battle, making it all the harder to match.
And when it comes to matching DNA samples across several generations, Dr Jones says the methods are far from perfect.
Unlike the seven "markers" used for more exact matches on the National DNA Database, he only has two at his disposal - the Y (paternal) and mitrochondrial (maternal) profiles.
"If we had the children of the soldiers, we could use the same markers as the DNA database. But because we are three generations away, the markers get diluted out through each mother and father."
Families searching for their ancestors have been asked to give maternal and paternal samples - preferably two each - using a simple cheek swab.
The DNA results will be added to the anthropological, archaeological and historical information to try to get positive identifications.
Families will be told sometime after March, once the remains of all 250 soldiers have been buried. Their final resting place will be a new war cemetery nearby, the first to be built in 50 years.
The £3m project, funded by the British and Australian governments, is overseen by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
Waiting for news will be Richard Parker, 47, who has spent 25 years trying to retrace the footsteps of his ancestor Leonard Twamley. His father's uncle was just 19 when he volunteered for the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. Six months later, the 20-year-old died at Fromelles.
"He was an ordinary working class lad from Coventry working in a cycle factory, who gave his life because it was considered his patriotic duty to do so."
Although interested in Len's story since his 20s, Mr Parker did not know he was killed at Fromelles until an amateur historian contacted him last year.
Since then he has made a pilgrimage to the French village with his father, who supplied DNA, along with Len's surviving nephews and nieces.
"Even if his body isn't found, in some respects his memory is even more alive now. By researching what sort of person he was, we now know much more about him," Mr Parker says.
"My grandmother died without knowing where Len was buried... this would bring proper closure to a family tragedy that goes back 95 years."
Unknown soldiers
The bodies that remain untraceable will be buried with a headstone marked simply "Known Unto God".
Dr Jones fears many will suffer this fate. He estimates the final number identified to be up to 100, but more likely tens.
Even if there is a DNA match, it may not necessarily be the right family because some DNA profiles are relatively common.
Adoptions, women who married and changed names, and paternity issues can also throw a spanner in the works. Other families simply die out.
But a match can be made through cousins, nephews or nieces on the family line. So if a family is missing a paternal link, they can trace the soldier's father, grandfather or brother, then locate their living relatives.
Dr Jones says one family went back seven generations on the maternal side then came forward five to find a suitable relative.
Forensic anthropologist Professor Margaret Cox says the team is so reliant on DNA matches as 90% of British enlistment records were destroyed in the Blitz.
And the painstaking methods of extracting and cataloguing remains have been refined at the scenes of genocide and war crimes in Rwanda, the Balkans and Iraq.
As at those sites, the bodies recovered gave clues to their fate - in this case, fractured bones showing damage from machine guns, rifles, mortar shells and shrapnel. But they were buried in deep graves with order and respect.
"You try not to imagine what it was like, it makes it difficult to do our work," she says, adding that this is easier said than done at times.
What brought the tragedy home were the artefacts - the inscribed bibles and lucky charms.
For her, the two most poignant came from Australian soldiers. The first was a small lucky charm in the shape of a boomerang, to symbolise returning home.
The other was the return half of a railway ticket from Freemantle to Perth, intended for the soldier's journey home to his family.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8473444.stm
Published: 2010/01/29 12:05:37 GMT
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Saturday, January 23, 2010
The Legacy of the Pinochet Dictatorship
The opening of a new Museum of Memory for victims of the Pinochet regime and the surprising election of a right-wing president have put Chile at the top of the "Americas" headlines in the NYT. The following article chronicles the justice-seeker Ana González, and talks about a recent TV DNA campaign to help families locate the remains of their loved ones who "disappeared" during the dirty war. This quote, from the end of the article, is worth highlighting: "'I don’t want my great-grandchildren to inherit the placard and the picture hanging on their chest,' she said, her eyes welling up for a moment. But, she said, 'How can they ask us to forget and turn the page, when the consequences for entire families and generations have been so terrible?'"
For those interested in seeing the videoclip to which the article makes reference, I've posted it below (it is in Spanish, but I've translated to English the words that appear on the screen):
"If you are the family member of a person who disappeared during the military dictatorship, a simple blood sample can help identify the remains located thus far and those yet to be identified. National campaign. Blood samples taken free of charge. Results confidential."
From: The New York Times
January 23, 2010
The Saturday Profile
A Serene Advocate for Chile’s Disappeared
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
SANTIAGO, Chile
ON the morning of April 30, 1976, Ana González and her husband, a Communist Party member named Manuel Recabarren, were in a rush to get out of the house.
It was the third year of the murderous Chilean dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Two of the couple’s sons, Luis Emilio and Manuel Guillermo, along with Luis Emilio’s pregnant wife, Nalvia, had failed to return from work the evening before. Ominously, their 2 ½-year-old son had shown up later that night crying on a neighbor’s lawn.
Mrs. González was eager to get to her job at the water company to ask her manager for an advance on her pay and temporary leave, so she could look for her children. But she volunteered to stay behind to look after another grandson while her husband searched.
“You go ahead, and I’ll come later with the child,” she said.
She never again saw her husband, or her sons and daughter-in-law, nor did she hear a word about their fates. All four are believed to have been “disappeared” by the Pinochet regime, which came to power in a bloody 1973 coup that claimed the life of Chile’s Socialist president, Salvador Allende.
In the 34 years that followed, Mrs. González transformed her outrage and grief into a tireless advocacy for answers about the estimated 3,000 people who were killed or disappeared under the Pinochet dictatorship from 1973 to 1990.
She participated in hunger strikes and sit-ins during the Pinochet years, pushed judges to investigate suspected atrocities and traveled to the United States seeking to pressure Chile’s military government to release information about the missing.
Her broad face and sad eyes — and the way photographs of her loved ones often hung from her neck — became emblematic of Chile’s long struggle to unearth the truth. Beyond her courage, Mrs. González’s soothing voice, cutting sense of humor and unrelenting optimism helped break through the indifference of the many Chileans who were unaffected by the years of violence, human rights leaders said.
“They never thought that a woman, a housewife who didn’t know anything, not even where the courts were located, would take up the battle cry,” said Mrs. González, now 84, in an interview in the same modest home on Santiago’s outskirts where she lived with her husband and children. Faded pictures of her missing family members still hang in the dining room.
Last year, her grandmotherly image landed on posters and in television advertisements as part of a government campaign to link DNA samples from family members with the scattered remains of presumed victims of the regime’s torture centers.
In the posters and TV ads, Mrs. González, her gray hair pulled back into her signature bun, is reaching out with a red flower as men and women from younger generations stand behind her.
“Today, there are many bones that need to be identified so that one day families can mourn their losses,” Mrs. González said.
The new campaign was part of an effort by the departing president, Michelle Bachelet, herself a torture victim of the military regime, to revamp a DNA-matching program that previously had misidentified remains.
The campaign Mrs. González participated in — “You live in us, we carry you in our blood” — urged Chileans who lost loved ones during the regime to submit DNA samples that experts could then match with unidentified remains. So far, only six victims have been identified, but the government expects to announce more matches soon, officials say.
MRS. GONZÁLEZ was born in a small town in the far north of Chile. Her mother, who had been widowed with six children, married a railroad worker, and Mrs. González was one of their two children.
When she was 11 years old she took a trip to Santiago and ended up staying, living with an aunt and uncle in their house with a dirt floor and an outhouse.
Her uncle regularly bought El Siglo, a Communist Party newspaper, and Mrs. González would try to read it. At school, a classmate talked about Spain under the dictator Franco and the Spanish resistance. “I began to hate Franco,” Mrs. González said.
Her parents later moved to Valparaíso, outside Santiago, and Mrs. González joined them for a time, later returning to Santiago as a teenager. Then one day when she was 16, a young man invited her to a meeting of the Young Communists. “I discovered a new world at that meeting,” she said. “I loved it.”
It was among the Young Communists that she met the love of her life, Manuel Recabarren.
They were married in 1944. Over the years they had six children, and remained active in the Communist Party.
After Mr. Allende was elected in 1970, Mr. Recabarren headed a local Committee of Provisions and Prices, which distributed food. After the coup in 1973, the military disbanded the committees, which had been headed nationally by Alberto Bachelet, the future president’s father. As a former committee head, however, Mr. Recabarren was a marked man. So, too, were the three relatives who were snatched, all of whom were Communist Party members.
The day after her husband disappeared, Mrs. González found an anonymous note at her home that left little doubt that he had been seized by the regime.
“Go to the Vicaría de la Solidaridad,” the note read, referring to a human rights organization set up by the Roman Catholic Church. It was where everyone went for help once their loved ones vanished. Later, survivors of the Villa Grimaldi torture center said they had last seen her husband there in August 1976.
To this day Mrs. González feels blessed but sad to consider what might have been. “If the child and I had left with my husband that day, I also would have been disappeared,” she said, dragging deeply on a cigarette.
Instead, Mrs. González began to organize with other families of the disappeared, holding demonstrations that the Pinochet security forces would break up.
But Mrs. González was never intimidated. She continued to organize protests, including hunger strikes at churches, embassies and the offices of the Red Cross and the United Nations.
“SHE was on the front lines, showing tremendous courage,” said José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director for Human Rights Watch. “Without her courage, more people probably would have been disappeared, and the national attention to this would have been close to zero.”
Mr. Vivanco said that Mrs. González symbolized something else. “She represents the voice of somebody with no hatred,” he said. “She talks about her case and human rights in Chile in a calm, serene way. She has been able to speak to many Chileans who never suffered in the dictatorship or who publicly supported the repression.”
Mrs. González remains active in human rights affairs and said she was working on a book about her life. She ran the large red beads of her necklace through her hands as she thought back on her campaign for the missing.
“I don’t want my great-grandchildren to inherit the placard and the picture hanging on their chest,” she said, her eyes welling up for a moment.
But, she said, “How can they ask us to forget and turn the page, when the consequences for entire families and generations have been so terrible?”
Pascale Bonnefoy contributed reporting from Santiago.
For those interested in seeing the videoclip to which the article makes reference, I've posted it below (it is in Spanish, but I've translated to English the words that appear on the screen):
"If you are the family member of a person who disappeared during the military dictatorship, a simple blood sample can help identify the remains located thus far and those yet to be identified. National campaign. Blood samples taken free of charge. Results confidential."
From: The New York Times
January 23, 2010
The Saturday Profile
A Serene Advocate for Chile’s Disappeared
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
SANTIAGO, Chile
ON the morning of April 30, 1976, Ana González and her husband, a Communist Party member named Manuel Recabarren, were in a rush to get out of the house.
It was the third year of the murderous Chilean dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Two of the couple’s sons, Luis Emilio and Manuel Guillermo, along with Luis Emilio’s pregnant wife, Nalvia, had failed to return from work the evening before. Ominously, their 2 ½-year-old son had shown up later that night crying on a neighbor’s lawn.
Mrs. González was eager to get to her job at the water company to ask her manager for an advance on her pay and temporary leave, so she could look for her children. But she volunteered to stay behind to look after another grandson while her husband searched.
“You go ahead, and I’ll come later with the child,” she said.
She never again saw her husband, or her sons and daughter-in-law, nor did she hear a word about their fates. All four are believed to have been “disappeared” by the Pinochet regime, which came to power in a bloody 1973 coup that claimed the life of Chile’s Socialist president, Salvador Allende.
In the 34 years that followed, Mrs. González transformed her outrage and grief into a tireless advocacy for answers about the estimated 3,000 people who were killed or disappeared under the Pinochet dictatorship from 1973 to 1990.
She participated in hunger strikes and sit-ins during the Pinochet years, pushed judges to investigate suspected atrocities and traveled to the United States seeking to pressure Chile’s military government to release information about the missing.
Her broad face and sad eyes — and the way photographs of her loved ones often hung from her neck — became emblematic of Chile’s long struggle to unearth the truth. Beyond her courage, Mrs. González’s soothing voice, cutting sense of humor and unrelenting optimism helped break through the indifference of the many Chileans who were unaffected by the years of violence, human rights leaders said.
“They never thought that a woman, a housewife who didn’t know anything, not even where the courts were located, would take up the battle cry,” said Mrs. González, now 84, in an interview in the same modest home on Santiago’s outskirts where she lived with her husband and children. Faded pictures of her missing family members still hang in the dining room.
Last year, her grandmotherly image landed on posters and in television advertisements as part of a government campaign to link DNA samples from family members with the scattered remains of presumed victims of the regime’s torture centers.
In the posters and TV ads, Mrs. González, her gray hair pulled back into her signature bun, is reaching out with a red flower as men and women from younger generations stand behind her.
“Today, there are many bones that need to be identified so that one day families can mourn their losses,” Mrs. González said.
The new campaign was part of an effort by the departing president, Michelle Bachelet, herself a torture victim of the military regime, to revamp a DNA-matching program that previously had misidentified remains.
The campaign Mrs. González participated in — “You live in us, we carry you in our blood” — urged Chileans who lost loved ones during the regime to submit DNA samples that experts could then match with unidentified remains. So far, only six victims have been identified, but the government expects to announce more matches soon, officials say.
MRS. GONZÁLEZ was born in a small town in the far north of Chile. Her mother, who had been widowed with six children, married a railroad worker, and Mrs. González was one of their two children.
When she was 11 years old she took a trip to Santiago and ended up staying, living with an aunt and uncle in their house with a dirt floor and an outhouse.
Her uncle regularly bought El Siglo, a Communist Party newspaper, and Mrs. González would try to read it. At school, a classmate talked about Spain under the dictator Franco and the Spanish resistance. “I began to hate Franco,” Mrs. González said.
Her parents later moved to Valparaíso, outside Santiago, and Mrs. González joined them for a time, later returning to Santiago as a teenager. Then one day when she was 16, a young man invited her to a meeting of the Young Communists. “I discovered a new world at that meeting,” she said. “I loved it.”
It was among the Young Communists that she met the love of her life, Manuel Recabarren.
They were married in 1944. Over the years they had six children, and remained active in the Communist Party.
After Mr. Allende was elected in 1970, Mr. Recabarren headed a local Committee of Provisions and Prices, which distributed food. After the coup in 1973, the military disbanded the committees, which had been headed nationally by Alberto Bachelet, the future president’s father. As a former committee head, however, Mr. Recabarren was a marked man. So, too, were the three relatives who were snatched, all of whom were Communist Party members.
The day after her husband disappeared, Mrs. González found an anonymous note at her home that left little doubt that he had been seized by the regime.
“Go to the Vicaría de la Solidaridad,” the note read, referring to a human rights organization set up by the Roman Catholic Church. It was where everyone went for help once their loved ones vanished. Later, survivors of the Villa Grimaldi torture center said they had last seen her husband there in August 1976.
To this day Mrs. González feels blessed but sad to consider what might have been. “If the child and I had left with my husband that day, I also would have been disappeared,” she said, dragging deeply on a cigarette.
Instead, Mrs. González began to organize with other families of the disappeared, holding demonstrations that the Pinochet security forces would break up.
But Mrs. González was never intimidated. She continued to organize protests, including hunger strikes at churches, embassies and the offices of the Red Cross and the United Nations.
“SHE was on the front lines, showing tremendous courage,” said José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director for Human Rights Watch. “Without her courage, more people probably would have been disappeared, and the national attention to this would have been close to zero.”
Mr. Vivanco said that Mrs. González symbolized something else. “She represents the voice of somebody with no hatred,” he said. “She talks about her case and human rights in Chile in a calm, serene way. She has been able to speak to many Chileans who never suffered in the dictatorship or who publicly supported the repression.”
Mrs. González remains active in human rights affairs and said she was working on a book about her life. She ran the large red beads of her necklace through her hands as she thought back on her campaign for the missing.
“I don’t want my great-grandchildren to inherit the placard and the picture hanging on their chest,” she said, her eyes welling up for a moment.
But, she said, “How can they ask us to forget and turn the page, when the consequences for entire families and generations have been so terrible?”
Pascale Bonnefoy contributed reporting from Santiago.
Resenting the Past
Just because it happened some 60 years ago, doesn't mean the past is dead and gone.
From: BBC News
German Heligoland islands still a minefield for Britons
Germany's Heligoland islands were part of the British empire in the 19th Century - but they were used to test British bombers after World War II and a vast explosion in 1947 caused massive destruction. Resentment still lingers, as Tom Blass discovered.
I was fighting off the cold with beer and bratwurst when my friend Judy suggested I speak to the boys in blue. Three men in uniform were nursing gluhwein in a corner of the makeshift bar that was really no more than a tent.
Crime is not one of the waves lapping at Heligoland's shores. The last murder - a crime of passion, apparently - took place more than 200 years ago. Few of the 1,600 inhabitants even bother to lock their doors.
But if not the Bronx, this small fog-bound candidate for the lost city of Atlantis still harbours secrets.
At midnight, Judy's son Sven and I were getting on like a house on fire. Two hours later, it was our conversation that was getting heated. Between slugs of vodka, the 30-something Metallica fan began to vent his anger at what the British had done.
From: BBC News
German Heligoland islands still a minefield for Britons
Germany's Heligoland islands were part of the British empire in the 19th Century - but they were used to test British bombers after World War II and a vast explosion in 1947 caused massive destruction. Resentment still lingers, as Tom Blass discovered.
I was fighting off the cold with beer and bratwurst when my friend Judy suggested I speak to the boys in blue. Three men in uniform were nursing gluhwein in a corner of the makeshift bar that was really no more than a tent.
Crime is not one of the waves lapping at Heligoland's shores. The last murder - a crime of passion, apparently - took place more than 200 years ago. Few of the 1,600 inhabitants even bother to lock their doors.
But if not the Bronx, this small fog-bound candidate for the lost city of Atlantis still harbours secrets.
In fact, it turned out that my new drinking companions were not policemen after all, but a crack team of bomb disposal experts flown in from Schleswig-Holstein on the mainland.
"Busy day?" I asked.
In reply, I got a cold, but curious stare. Then one of the trio broke into a slow smile. "Two British bombs," he said. "Tomorrow we will send you the bill."
The other drinkers, Judy included, roared with good-natured laughter and there was another round of gluhweins, eiergrogs and schnapps. The joke, it seemed, had made everybody's day - and nudged away a degree or two of frost.
But it was more than just the usual Anglo-German banter.
Devastating blast
For eight decades, Heligoland, seized during the Napoleonic Wars, was an unlikely outpost of British Empire in the North Sea.
But Germans still came. Tourists flocked here to swim and flirt while "dangerous" intellectuals pitched up to escape prison and the censor. A charming, bucolic touch was added by the islanders themselves, their quaint customs and their ancient dialect.
But in 1890, it all came to an end when the British government, as part of a colonial swap with Germany, traded Heligoland for the island of Zanzibar.
This delighted the German Kaiser, but outraged Queen Victoria who said "next we'd be giving up Gibraltar" and that she thought it was a "bad business".
So did the Heligolanders. Their idyll rapidly became a fortress and while the tourists still arrived on the steamer from Hamburg, the halcyon days were over. But grimmer changes were to come.
Erich Kruess, the island's archivist, was 13 when, on 18 April 1945, the Royal Air Force launched a sortie of 900 bombers. He remembers later emerging from a bunker into a cratered moonscape and being evacuated to Hamburg by ship. He, like all the other islanders, would not be able to return for another seven years.
He finds it hardest to understand what the British did in 1947. They decided to destroy the Germans' war-time U-boat pens and set off a huge explosion codenamed Big Bang.
This caused massive devastation. Buildings all around were destroyed, and a plume of smoke was sent spiralling high into the sky.
For another four years, the British used it as a testing ground for their bombers. It was even touted as a good place to test H-bombs until attention turned to the Bikini atoll.
Now only the newness of the houses and the broken bricks extruding through the turf give any hint of the scale of destruction.
His mild tone of voice belying any evident outrage, Erich says: "We were not even at war then. The British built Heligoland. Some of us had British passports and we never supported Hitler."
Much as he mourns for the buildings, he also grieves for the loss of a social fabric which had remained strong even in the years of exile. He fears the present generation cares little about the island's history. As a result, the islanders have become strangers to one another, he says.
Resilience
But the young beg to differ. In fact, they complain about the way that everybody on the island knows everything about everyone.
Even at Krebs nightclub it was clear that the youth contingent, however bleary-eyed, does feel engaged with the island's past.At midnight, Judy's son Sven and I were getting on like a house on fire. Two hours later, it was our conversation that was getting heated. Between slugs of vodka, the 30-something Metallica fan began to vent his anger at what the British had done.
"They tried to destroy us. But look - Lang Anna is still standing!" notionally pointing towards the guano-clad pillar of rock which is to the island what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.
Sven's friends gave a chorus of approval before reverting to a dance-floor the size of a dustbin lid. "Heligoland will always be German!" one shouted as a parting shot.
"What you have to understand about Heligoland…" said Sven. Then the diatribe juddered to a halt, overtaken by the vodka.
The island, I was learning, was a minefield in every sense of the word. "Is it hard work disposing of these bombs?" I asked the man from Schleswig-Holstein.
He sipped his gluhwein thoughtfully. "Yes," he said, "because they lie well hidden, close to the surface. Anything can set them off."
Or anyone, I thought. Anywhere. And I ordered another bratwurst to fend off the chill.
How to listen to: From Our Own Correspondent
BBC Radio 4: Saturdays, 1130. Second weekly edition on Thursdays, 1100 (some weeks only)
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Spielberg to produce documentary series on WTC rebuilding
The re-building of the Twin Towers has already generated a great deal of controversy -- what the design should look like; what sort of structure it ought to be; what the memorial component might entail; whether or not to rebuild at all; whose design ought to prevail, etc. etc. Now, Hollywood director Steven Spielberg will be following the reconstruction process in a new TV documentary series. The structure, previously called "Freedom Tower" (some other time, I will reserve a post just for this name!), is slated to be completed in 2013, so stay tuned for further posts on this front. I've included a few recent YouTube videos that illustrate the current state of the site (second video includes rather Hollywood-esque soundtrack):
From: BBC News
Spielberg to make Ground Zero doc
Oscar-winning director Steven Spielberg is to produce a TV documentary series on the rebuilding of New York's World Trade Center, to be shown in 2011.
Rebuilding Ground Zero will chronicle the engineering and building of the skyscraper being built on the site of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers.
It will also pay tribute to those who died in the 11 September 2001 attacks.
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg said the series would tell "a compelling story of remembrance and renewal".
He said Spielberg's involvement as executive producer would ensure "the story will be brought to life for people around the world for generations to come".
The Science Channel series will use 3D, time-lapse cameras, computer modelling techniques and other methods to chart the construction of One World Trade Center.
Formerly known as the Freedom Tower, the 1,776 foot (541 meter) skyscraper will be the tallest building in the US.
Work on the building officially began in 2006 and is scheduled to be completed in 2013.
Rebuilding Ground Zero will be produced by the Science Channel, a division of the Discovery network.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/8460887.stm
Published: 2010/01/15 10:39:06 GMT
Hacer clic aquí para leer la noticia en español
From: BBC News
Spielberg to make Ground Zero doc
Oscar-winning director Steven Spielberg is to produce a TV documentary series on the rebuilding of New York's World Trade Center, to be shown in 2011.
Rebuilding Ground Zero will chronicle the engineering and building of the skyscraper being built on the site of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers.
It will also pay tribute to those who died in the 11 September 2001 attacks.
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg said the series would tell "a compelling story of remembrance and renewal".
He said Spielberg's involvement as executive producer would ensure "the story will be brought to life for people around the world for generations to come".
The Science Channel series will use 3D, time-lapse cameras, computer modelling techniques and other methods to chart the construction of One World Trade Center.
Formerly known as the Freedom Tower, the 1,776 foot (541 meter) skyscraper will be the tallest building in the US.
Work on the building officially began in 2006 and is scheduled to be completed in 2013.
Rebuilding Ground Zero will be produced by the Science Channel, a division of the Discovery network.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/8460887.stm
Published: 2010/01/15 10:39:06 GMT
Hacer clic aquí para leer la noticia en español
On Teaching Memory
As I stated in the initial post to this blog, I am teaching an honors seminar on memory this semester (which begins on Monday). At my institution, only first-year honors students may register for the class, but it is later opened to all honors-eligible undergraduates. There are three seminars offered this semester, on a variety of topics. Professors may choose to teach the course one day a week for the entire semester, or two days per week, with the class ending at midterm. Due to the thematic nature of our class, I chose to offer the seminar twice a week. The class is only a one credit hour course, and we will have just two hours per week together. Still, I am absolutely thrilled to be teaching this class (in fact, I volunteered to do so).
I have just completed the course syllabus, and I would like to share that document with anyone who might be interested. Please feel free to comment, suggest additional readings, or share pedagogical insights if you have taught any of these, or similar, texts. I'd be more than happy to read your remarks and respond to them here.
One of the challenges I encountered in planning the syllabus was the sheer volume of material that is available out there regarding memory and amnesia. We always have to choose texts carefully for classes we'll be teaching, but especially when the course is going to be so brief. As I state in the course description, I opted to focus less on the traumatic historical events themselves -- that is, what happened -- and more on how those events were (and are) remembered, both by survivors and subsequent generations. Interestingly, I thought I would dedicate a rather large portion of the class to the Spanish Civil War, because that is what my research is in. However, in the end, the syllabus kind of took on its own life, and we'll spend a decent amount of time on 9-11. Perhaps, this is only natural. I just received a copy of Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers, and I also re-watched Man on Wire over break.
In any case, I'll be reporting on the class from time to time here. Students may also have the opportunity to post articles and commentary on this blog.
I have just completed the course syllabus, and I would like to share that document with anyone who might be interested. Please feel free to comment, suggest additional readings, or share pedagogical insights if you have taught any of these, or similar, texts. I'd be more than happy to read your remarks and respond to them here.
One of the challenges I encountered in planning the syllabus was the sheer volume of material that is available out there regarding memory and amnesia. We always have to choose texts carefully for classes we'll be teaching, but especially when the course is going to be so brief. As I state in the course description, I opted to focus less on the traumatic historical events themselves -- that is, what happened -- and more on how those events were (and are) remembered, both by survivors and subsequent generations. Interestingly, I thought I would dedicate a rather large portion of the class to the Spanish Civil War, because that is what my research is in. However, in the end, the syllabus kind of took on its own life, and we'll spend a decent amount of time on 9-11. Perhaps, this is only natural. I just received a copy of Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers, and I also re-watched Man on Wire over break.
In any case, I'll be reporting on the class from time to time here. Students may also have the opportunity to post articles and commentary on this blog.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Book on Art and Memory
Contemporary Art and MemoryImages of Recollection and Remembrance
Joan Gibbons
I.B. Tauris, January 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84511-619-4, ISBN10: 1-84511-619-4,
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches, 344 pages, 30 b/w illus.,
Description: Contemporary Art and Memory is the first accessible survey book to explore the subject of memory as it appears in its many guises in contemporary art. Looking at both personal and public memory, Gibbons explores art as autobiography, the memory as trace, the role of the archive, revisionist memory and postmemory, as well as the absence of memory in oblivion.
Grounding her discussion in historical precedents, Gibbons explores the work of a wide range of international artists including Yinka Shonibare MBE, Doris Salcedo, Keith Piper, Jeremy Deller, Judy Chicago, Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Christian Boltanski, Janet Cardiff, Bill Fontana, Pierre Huyghe, Susan Hiller, Japanese photographer Miyako Ishiuchi and new media artist George Legrady. Contemporary Art and Memory will be indispensable to all those concerned with the ways in which artists represent and remember the past.
Joan Gibbons is Senior Lecturer at the University of Central England in Birmingham and Course Director, MA Contemporary Curatorial Practice. She is the author of Art and Advertising (I.B.Tauris).
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Documentary Film: "Man on Wire"
I recently had the opportunity to see Man on Wire (2008, dir. James Marsh) for a second time, the award-winning documentary film which chronicles the exploits of Philippe Petit, who walked between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974.
As a child, I was fascinated with stories of daredevil acts, like the guy who rode over Niagara Falls in a barrel and came out alive, or Harry Houdini's exploits to break out of chains underwater. I am not old enough to remember Philippe Petit's stunning, illegal high-wire act, but I was able to visit the Twin Towers just one year before 9-11 (though I never went inside). It truly boggles the mind to contemplate what it meant to walk, essentially on air, not once, not twice, but eight times back and forth in the two hundred or so feet between the towers. And to lie down, and look down, as Petit did!
Perhaps the most extraordinary feat of Man on Wire is the complete omission of any direct reference to 9-11. While the director has stated that he did not include 9-11 on purpose -- "Why burden this beautiful story with the ugliness of that?" -- a 2008 review of the film in the Times Online (U.K.), questioned whether this film about a high-wire daredevil may actually be the "best 9/11 work of art so far" (see "Is Man on Wire the most poignant 9/11 film?"). Again, what is not stated, or what remains silent, is a powerful driving force of this film. We will discuss this movie further here after we view it for class.
As a child, I was fascinated with stories of daredevil acts, like the guy who rode over Niagara Falls in a barrel and came out alive, or Harry Houdini's exploits to break out of chains underwater. I am not old enough to remember Philippe Petit's stunning, illegal high-wire act, but I was able to visit the Twin Towers just one year before 9-11 (though I never went inside). It truly boggles the mind to contemplate what it meant to walk, essentially on air, not once, not twice, but eight times back and forth in the two hundred or so feet between the towers. And to lie down, and look down, as Petit did!
Perhaps the most extraordinary feat of Man on Wire is the complete omission of any direct reference to 9-11. While the director has stated that he did not include 9-11 on purpose -- "Why burden this beautiful story with the ugliness of that?" -- a 2008 review of the film in the Times Online (U.K.), questioned whether this film about a high-wire daredevil may actually be the "best 9/11 work of art so far" (see "Is Man on Wire the most poignant 9/11 film?"). Again, what is not stated, or what remains silent, is a powerful driving force of this film. We will discuss this movie further here after we view it for class.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Documentary Film - "A Generation Apart" (1984)
I am in the final stages of planning for the honors seminar course on memory and historical trauma that I am teaching this semester. One of the films I have been considering is "A Generation Apart," which was originally produced in 1984, but re-released on DVD in 2007. If I do end up using this film in class, I will do so in conjunction with a discussion of postmemory. I am really surprised that I did not come across this film earlier, during research for my dissertation (I'm sure I must have read about it, though I never saw it). The film is not a documentary masterpiece, but I do believe it is a valuable text with which to look at the particular challenges facing second-generation descendants of Holocaust survivors (and perhaps, by extension, descendants of other historical traumas). Director Jack Fisher interviews his parents, Auschwitz survivors, and his older brother Joe in an attempt to understand how the direct, lived experience of the Holocaust, as well as its intergenerational transmission, have affected his family. A Generation Apart also includes poignant interviews between the director's friend Shelley and her mother Mary, who survived Bergen-Belsen. There are obvious moments of tension between parents and children, and between the siblings as well. Of particular note is the segment in which the Fisher brothers address one another regarding the importance of the Shoah in their everyday lives.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Contained Memory Conference (New Zealand)
This just in. . .
Contained Memory Conference 2010
The conference seeks to bring together multidisciplinary perspectives in a discourse on contained memory. While memory is understood to be integral to the constitution of the self, it works in concert with external repositories of memory ranging from personal mnemonic objects to collective, social, and public memory residing in community traditions, artifacts in museums, and archives, including electronic and other recording systems. Memory is embodied in intergenerational rituals and practices and intangible forms of storytelling, song, and performance, as well as in natural elements and the physical memory forms of monuments and memorials.
Although there are distinct ways of thinking about or containing memory, the edges of containment are porous, enabling encounters between different expressions of memory. By encompassing a wide variety of ways of conceiving memory through different cultural and theoretical orientations and disciplinary backgrounds, it is hoped this conference can build a nexus of contained memories. Papers may originate from a variety of knowledge sources including (but not limited to): anthropology, archeology, art history/criticism, communication studies, cultural studies, customary knowledge, ethnography, film/video studies, fine/visual art, history, geography, landscape architecture, literary theory, material culture studies, memory studies, museum studies, musicology, neuroscience, neuropsychology, performance/theatre, philosophy, photography, psychoanalysis, psychology, rhetorical studies, sociology, and visual culture studies.
Possible Contained Memory sessions:
The Land / Earth / Landscape
— The expression of memory in personified land and landscape features; cultural erasure and renaissance
— Diaspora: the threat of memory loss following migration and the preservation of intergenerational memory expressed physically through photographs, diaries, and artifacts, and the intangible or ephemeral qualities of dance, theatre, and songs from “home”
— Sites of trauma
— Genealogy / whakapapa
Containing public memory
—Museums, records, archives, memorials, oral histories and mnemonic devices
—Transmission, preservation, mutability of memory
Rituals of memory
— Enacting / performing of memory “acts”
— Mimetic performance
— Narratives, mythology / folklore, and cosmologies
Site / Space / Time
— Bodily memory expressed through performance and ritual
— Interaction between the present and the past
Memory and the senses
— Phenomenology of the senses
— Music / sound
Autobiography
— Externalization of personal memory in art forms
The human mind
— The nature of memory and the definition of self; cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology
— Psychoanalysis; forgetting as a means of suppressing trauma or facilitating cultural destruction, annihilation, or oblivion
— Trauma, dementia, the mutability and fragility of memory
— The mind and digital memory
Because of the geographic location of the conference it is envisaged that some papers will respond to contained memory in Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific.
Conference Venue:
Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa, Tongarewa
55 Cable Street
Wellington 6011, New Zealand
+64 4 381 7000
www.tepapa.govt.nz
Abstracts due: 30 April 2010
Contained Memory Conference 2010
The conference seeks to bring together multidisciplinary perspectives in a discourse on contained memory. While memory is understood to be integral to the constitution of the self, it works in concert with external repositories of memory ranging from personal mnemonic objects to collective, social, and public memory residing in community traditions, artifacts in museums, and archives, including electronic and other recording systems. Memory is embodied in intergenerational rituals and practices and intangible forms of storytelling, song, and performance, as well as in natural elements and the physical memory forms of monuments and memorials.
Although there are distinct ways of thinking about or containing memory, the edges of containment are porous, enabling encounters between different expressions of memory. By encompassing a wide variety of ways of conceiving memory through different cultural and theoretical orientations and disciplinary backgrounds, it is hoped this conference can build a nexus of contained memories. Papers may originate from a variety of knowledge sources including (but not limited to): anthropology, archeology, art history/criticism, communication studies, cultural studies, customary knowledge, ethnography, film/video studies, fine/visual art, history, geography, landscape architecture, literary theory, material culture studies, memory studies, museum studies, musicology, neuroscience, neuropsychology, performance/theatre, philosophy, photography, psychoanalysis, psychology, rhetorical studies, sociology, and visual culture studies.
Possible Contained Memory sessions:
The Land / Earth / Landscape
— The expression of memory in personified land and landscape features; cultural erasure and renaissance
— Diaspora: the threat of memory loss following migration and the preservation of intergenerational memory expressed physically through photographs, diaries, and artifacts, and the intangible or ephemeral qualities of dance, theatre, and songs from “home”
— Sites of trauma
— Genealogy / whakapapa
Containing public memory
—Museums, records, archives, memorials, oral histories and mnemonic devices
—Transmission, preservation, mutability of memory
Rituals of memory
— Enacting / performing of memory “acts”
— Mimetic performance
— Narratives, mythology / folklore, and cosmologies
Site / Space / Time
— Bodily memory expressed through performance and ritual
— Interaction between the present and the past
Memory and the senses
— Phenomenology of the senses
— Music / sound
Autobiography
— Externalization of personal memory in art forms
The human mind
— The nature of memory and the definition of self; cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology
— Psychoanalysis; forgetting as a means of suppressing trauma or facilitating cultural destruction, annihilation, or oblivion
— Trauma, dementia, the mutability and fragility of memory
— The mind and digital memory
Because of the geographic location of the conference it is envisaged that some papers will respond to contained memory in Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific.
Conference Venue:
Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa, Tongarewa
55 Cable Street
Wellington 6011, New Zealand
+64 4 381 7000
www.tepapa.govt.nz
Abstracts due: 30 April 2010
The Disappeared - Novel on the Cambodian Genocide
From: The New York Times
January 10, 2010
Love in the Time of Genocide
By DALIA SOFER
THE DISAPPEARED
By Kim Echlin
235 pp. Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic. Paper, $14
Kim Echlin’s novel “The Disappeared” contains many elements that might doom a lesser book: the deaths of multiple characters (among them the narrator’s baby); an unabashedly effusive love story; a mix of first- and second-person narration; and, as a setting, the bones and ashes of the Cambodian genocide, which claimed approximately 1.7 million lives between 1975 and 1979. Yet the book manages to be spellbinding.
When the narrator, Anne Greves, first meets Serey, the Cambodian man who will remain the object of her desire and unflinching love for decades to come, she is a 16-year-old high school student in Montreal who frequents smoky blues clubs in the company of older girls. Serey, a math student five years her senior and the long-haired, exotic lead singer of a band called No Exit, catches her attention. The two talk, then kiss, and the rest, as they say, is history — though in this case it is truly history: a love story spanning decades and geographies, involving some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.
Absence is an initial magnet between the two. For Serey, who is in exile in Canada because the borders of Cambodia have closed, the absence is that of his family, from whom he has had no word for four years. Hanging on to their photograph and to the final, yellowed telegram from his father, Serey carries “a survivor’s pinprick of despair” in his eyes. That his band is called No Exit is no coincidence — Sartre’s play of that name, of course, supplied us with the saying “Hell is other people.” For Anne, the absence is that of her mother, who was crushed by a truck on an icy road when Anne was 2, and also the emotional absence of her kind but inattentive father, an engineer and maker of medical prosthetics, with a penchant for calm and order. “He believed that if he worked hard enough I could be shaped like a mechanical limb,” Anne says. But this turbulent teenager is anything but mechanical, and the sexual desire and eventual love she feels for Serey is raw and unfettered. “I never felt any forbiddenness of race or language or law,” she says. “Everything was animal sensation and music.”
The Cambodian border eventually opens and Serey leaves Montreal — and Anne — to find his family. Eleven years later, believing she has spotted him on television at a political rally, Anne buys a ticket to Phnom Penh and sets out to find him. And she does.
There is something of Marguerite Duras in these pages, something of the lust between the young Western girl and the Asian man that drove novels like “The Lover” and “The North China Lover.” But while Duras focuses mostly on desire, Echlin focuses on absolute love — physical desire coupled with the need to know everything about the beloved, to follow him even to the grave and beyond. For Anne, knowing Serey means trying to understand Cambodia, with all its dire secrets. As Serey says to Anne’s father during a brief, uncongenial meeting, “My country is my skin.”
Echlin captures the beauty and horror of Cambodia in equal measure. “The smell of the River Bassac,” Anne says, describing her first day in Phnom Penh, “meltwaters from distant mountains tangled into humid air and garlic and night jasmine and cooking oil and male sweat and female wetness. Corruption loves the darkness.” Of the killing fields, she writes: “Depressions in the earth overgrown with grass. Stupas of skulls and bones. The sky.” And later: “We watched two small boys catching frogs in the gullies of the fields, running past paddy and sugar palm and cloth and bone. The grass had done its work.” Most memorable is the lingering stench of death: “People startle at cigarette smoke and rotting garbage and gasoline,” Echlin writes, “surrogate odors of torture and dead bodies and bombs. A bad smell makes them jump.”
It is fitting, then, that when Anne presses Serey to reveal his nightmares, or to say what he has been doing in Phnom Penh, he deflects her with a compliment: “You smell so good.” Despite their love, these two are still foreign to each other. Borders persist. Boundaries can be stretched only so far. Anne, not of Cambodia, does not carry its smell. She is both savior and outsider, at once revered and reproached. The same can be said of the foreign aid workers, who speak of democracy but are impotent to change anything. “Foreigners come and bark but everything just keeps going the same way,” Serey says.
Worse still are the backpackers, who “drifted through Phnom Penh, explored sex and skulls and temples, talked about going to the beaches in the south for New Year’s.” Much has been said of the banality of evil. Here we are made to think of the banality of indifference.
But if Echlin makes note of the indifferent, her novel is anything but. Love and death pulsate through its pages, interlaced. When Anne speaks of her first kiss with Serey, she writes, “I remember . . . the touch of your hand against my skull.” Not her head — her skull. In Anne Greves’s world, everything is felt to the bone, even love. Her most tender memory of her father involves the study of anatomy, “his strong fingers tracing the lines of muscles and bones on my small foot.” In Phnom Penh, the traced bones become all too real: she meets a man whose job is to count the dead, opening mass graves to “release the bones.” And she befriends a woman called Grandmother Fertilizer, who during the Pol Pot era made fertilizer from human ashes.
It is amid such decay that Anne and Serey conceive their baby girl, who arrives into the world stillborn (this information is revealed early on) — another addition to the list of the disappeared: mothers, fathers, former leaders, all vanish into the “line between life and death.” Later, addressing Serey, Anne says, “I am afraid you will disappear and no one will remember your name.”
This novel is her memorial to him, and to the “nameless missing.” The second-person narrative is apt here, as it is a very specific “you” — the “you” of song lyrics. In Montreal, Serey sang to Anne of love and longing. This novel is Anne’s song to him.
Briefly, near the book’s middle, Echlin loses this specific “you” and slips into the generic instead, directly asking the reader to imagine the horrors of Cambodia. This device is distracting, turning a mesmerizing ballad into a history lesson. On a few other occasions the prose loses some of its control, the list of atrocities sounding like a United Nations manifesto.
But these faults detract little from this exquisite novel. Early on, when a young Anne complains to her father about having no mother, he tells her, “Think of yourself as a solitaire, . . . the philosopher’s stone.” And like the philosopher’s stone, she creates alchemy. She permits what has been unsaid to be said, and what has been nameless to be named at last.
Dalia Sofer is the author of the novel “The Septembers of Shiraz.”
January 10, 2010
Love in the Time of Genocide
By DALIA SOFER
THE DISAPPEARED
By Kim Echlin
235 pp. Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic. Paper, $14
Kim Echlin’s novel “The Disappeared” contains many elements that might doom a lesser book: the deaths of multiple characters (among them the narrator’s baby); an unabashedly effusive love story; a mix of first- and second-person narration; and, as a setting, the bones and ashes of the Cambodian genocide, which claimed approximately 1.7 million lives between 1975 and 1979. Yet the book manages to be spellbinding.
When the narrator, Anne Greves, first meets Serey, the Cambodian man who will remain the object of her desire and unflinching love for decades to come, she is a 16-year-old high school student in Montreal who frequents smoky blues clubs in the company of older girls. Serey, a math student five years her senior and the long-haired, exotic lead singer of a band called No Exit, catches her attention. The two talk, then kiss, and the rest, as they say, is history — though in this case it is truly history: a love story spanning decades and geographies, involving some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.
Absence is an initial magnet between the two. For Serey, who is in exile in Canada because the borders of Cambodia have closed, the absence is that of his family, from whom he has had no word for four years. Hanging on to their photograph and to the final, yellowed telegram from his father, Serey carries “a survivor’s pinprick of despair” in his eyes. That his band is called No Exit is no coincidence — Sartre’s play of that name, of course, supplied us with the saying “Hell is other people.” For Anne, the absence is that of her mother, who was crushed by a truck on an icy road when Anne was 2, and also the emotional absence of her kind but inattentive father, an engineer and maker of medical prosthetics, with a penchant for calm and order. “He believed that if he worked hard enough I could be shaped like a mechanical limb,” Anne says. But this turbulent teenager is anything but mechanical, and the sexual desire and eventual love she feels for Serey is raw and unfettered. “I never felt any forbiddenness of race or language or law,” she says. “Everything was animal sensation and music.”
The Cambodian border eventually opens and Serey leaves Montreal — and Anne — to find his family. Eleven years later, believing she has spotted him on television at a political rally, Anne buys a ticket to Phnom Penh and sets out to find him. And she does.
There is something of Marguerite Duras in these pages, something of the lust between the young Western girl and the Asian man that drove novels like “The Lover” and “The North China Lover.” But while Duras focuses mostly on desire, Echlin focuses on absolute love — physical desire coupled with the need to know everything about the beloved, to follow him even to the grave and beyond. For Anne, knowing Serey means trying to understand Cambodia, with all its dire secrets. As Serey says to Anne’s father during a brief, uncongenial meeting, “My country is my skin.”
Echlin captures the beauty and horror of Cambodia in equal measure. “The smell of the River Bassac,” Anne says, describing her first day in Phnom Penh, “meltwaters from distant mountains tangled into humid air and garlic and night jasmine and cooking oil and male sweat and female wetness. Corruption loves the darkness.” Of the killing fields, she writes: “Depressions in the earth overgrown with grass. Stupas of skulls and bones. The sky.” And later: “We watched two small boys catching frogs in the gullies of the fields, running past paddy and sugar palm and cloth and bone. The grass had done its work.” Most memorable is the lingering stench of death: “People startle at cigarette smoke and rotting garbage and gasoline,” Echlin writes, “surrogate odors of torture and dead bodies and bombs. A bad smell makes them jump.”
It is fitting, then, that when Anne presses Serey to reveal his nightmares, or to say what he has been doing in Phnom Penh, he deflects her with a compliment: “You smell so good.” Despite their love, these two are still foreign to each other. Borders persist. Boundaries can be stretched only so far. Anne, not of Cambodia, does not carry its smell. She is both savior and outsider, at once revered and reproached. The same can be said of the foreign aid workers, who speak of democracy but are impotent to change anything. “Foreigners come and bark but everything just keeps going the same way,” Serey says.
Worse still are the backpackers, who “drifted through Phnom Penh, explored sex and skulls and temples, talked about going to the beaches in the south for New Year’s.” Much has been said of the banality of evil. Here we are made to think of the banality of indifference.
But if Echlin makes note of the indifferent, her novel is anything but. Love and death pulsate through its pages, interlaced. When Anne speaks of her first kiss with Serey, she writes, “I remember . . . the touch of your hand against my skull.” Not her head — her skull. In Anne Greves’s world, everything is felt to the bone, even love. Her most tender memory of her father involves the study of anatomy, “his strong fingers tracing the lines of muscles and bones on my small foot.” In Phnom Penh, the traced bones become all too real: she meets a man whose job is to count the dead, opening mass graves to “release the bones.” And she befriends a woman called Grandmother Fertilizer, who during the Pol Pot era made fertilizer from human ashes.
It is amid such decay that Anne and Serey conceive their baby girl, who arrives into the world stillborn (this information is revealed early on) — another addition to the list of the disappeared: mothers, fathers, former leaders, all vanish into the “line between life and death.” Later, addressing Serey, Anne says, “I am afraid you will disappear and no one will remember your name.”
This novel is her memorial to him, and to the “nameless missing.” The second-person narrative is apt here, as it is a very specific “you” — the “you” of song lyrics. In Montreal, Serey sang to Anne of love and longing. This novel is Anne’s song to him.
Briefly, near the book’s middle, Echlin loses this specific “you” and slips into the generic instead, directly asking the reader to imagine the horrors of Cambodia. This device is distracting, turning a mesmerizing ballad into a history lesson. On a few other occasions the prose loses some of its control, the list of atrocities sounding like a United Nations manifesto.
But these faults detract little from this exquisite novel. Early on, when a young Anne complains to her father about having no mother, he tells her, “Think of yourself as a solitaire, . . . the philosopher’s stone.” And like the philosopher’s stone, she creates alchemy. She permits what has been unsaid to be said, and what has been nameless to be named at last.
Dalia Sofer is the author of the novel “The Septembers of Shiraz.”
Saturday, January 9, 2010
The Re-Writing of Terror
As the labels of this blog suggest, I have thus far spent considerably more time posting on news from other countries regarding memory, amnesia and politics, while giving domestic news less coverage. There is no secret motive here. On a daily basis, I listen to, watch and read news from the U.S. Of course I am keenly interested in what goes on in this country, but I am even more intrigued by the news coming out of the international press (international news can often be hard to come by or superficially-treated in the mainstream U.S. media). I believe it is essential -- a duty, even -- for every citizen, in any country, to familiarize him or herself with current events, from a variety of perspectives. Part of understanding one's own country comes from observing and reflecting upon how that country is perceived abroad.
As a rule, I do not believe in political apathy. I think it is dangerous, or at least irresponsible, for those living in a democratic society to proclaim "not to care" about politics. Cynicism about today's political landscape is understandable; however, refusing to be informed or to reflect upon current debates because it is easier to do so is simply unacceptable! I can say this now, but I am rather ashamed to admit that when I was 18, I actually recall telling my parents I did not want to vote, because it was my "right" not to do so. My parents tried to drive home the point that voting was a privilege not afforded to everyone, and yet, in my teenage mind, it seemed easier to just "opt out" of politics. The first election I voted in was 1992. Yet it was really after 9-11 that I began to make politics a part of my daily life.
Perhaps because I have made the study of memory a part of my life as well, I am even more drawn to stories such as those that follow this introduction. Each of these reports suggest a bold, blatant - and, what is worse, initially uncontested -- erasure of one of most traumatic events in American history, 9-11. Such stories merit serious attention, and demand an explanation, regardless of one's political ideology.
Let's begin with the more recent story. Yesterday, on the TV program Good Morning America (see video below), former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani claimed, in conversation with George Stephanopoulos, that "we had no domestic attacks under Bush. We've had one under Obama."
According to an article in the Boston Herald, Giuliani later told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that he misspoke. Stephanopoulos, a former political adviser under President Clinton and a veteran television news analyst, was later raked across the coals for failing to press Giuliani further. A report that appeared yesterday in the New York Times, however, focused less on the absurdity of Giuliani's claim, and more on "Stephanopoulos's red face."
I find Giuliani's statement less troubling for what he says, and more for what he doesn't. Just a few posts ago, I spoke about the construction of amnesia in the film The Headless Woman. In the television appearance, Rudy Giuliani actively engages in a revision of 9-11. In fact, it might be better to call this "revision" a non-vision. Spanish historians have argued, in recent analyses of revisionist movements in Spain, for a more suitable term; I agree that "revisionism" is a misnomer, for most revisionists do not seek to "re-vise" or "re-view" the past, but to erase an existing narrative and replace it with an earlier one, or to forge a new tale entirely by appropriating and manipulating existing narratives.
In the video clip, Giuliani -- significantly, for better or worse still the "face" of 9-11 for many Americans (he is still often referred to as "America's mayor") -- omits the naming of 9-11 entirely, opting instead to reference the fatal shooting rampage at Ford Hood (Texas) in November. Here, Giuliani counts on putting fear back in operation: under Obama, we are not safe, under Bush, we were. Giuliani's statement suggests, thanks to what he does not say, that 9-11 did not happen while George W. Bush was president. Giuliani, criticized by many on both the left and right for appropriating 9-11 for personal political gain, has here determined that 9-11 is "that which shall remain nameless." Giuliani's spokeswoman tried to patch over the mess by issuing a statement that the former mayor was "clearly talking post-9/11 with regard to Islamic terrorist attacks on our soil." If that is the case, how do we explain the utter absence of 9-11 from the discussion?
One might say that perhaps we are taking the idea of "amnesia" or forgetting of 9-11 too far with regard to the Good Morning America video. And yet. . .just a few months ago, we witnessed an even more abhorrent statement, also issued in the wake of the Ft. Hood attacks, by former Bush White House spokesperson Dana Perino.
In an appearance on Fox News, Dana Perino stated: "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term."
Although Giuliani and Perino are Republicans, people in all political parties in this country ought to be deeply disturbed by their remarks, which are historically, factually incorrect statements! George Stephanopoulos, and the Fox reporters interviewing Perino, ought to be held accountable as well for allowing their interviews to proceed after their interviewees made such ludicrous statements. Yes, it is critical to make clear that 9-11 did happen under George W. Bush -- Stephanopoulos, the Fox anchors, and whoever else involved had an obligation to assert that information, publicly, at the moment -- not in a statement issued after the fact. By refusing to acknowledge 9-11, and by establishing the idea that domestic attacks "did not happen" under the previous president, Giuliani and Perino effectively wipe clean the slate of the past. They almost seem to be readying the landscape for a re-writing of 9-11, a time in which they might claim, as Mary Matalin does below, that 9-11 was "inherited" from the previous (read: Clinton) administration:
There are many, many other troubling stories about the re-construction of 9-11 in our current political environment. I would like to end with this quote from Marc Howard Ross, in the book Understanding September 11. Ross's chapter, titled "The Political Psychology of Competing Narratives: September 11 and Beyond," reminds us that we must not only look at what a narrative says but what it doesn't say:
As a rule, I do not believe in political apathy. I think it is dangerous, or at least irresponsible, for those living in a democratic society to proclaim "not to care" about politics. Cynicism about today's political landscape is understandable; however, refusing to be informed or to reflect upon current debates because it is easier to do so is simply unacceptable! I can say this now, but I am rather ashamed to admit that when I was 18, I actually recall telling my parents I did not want to vote, because it was my "right" not to do so. My parents tried to drive home the point that voting was a privilege not afforded to everyone, and yet, in my teenage mind, it seemed easier to just "opt out" of politics. The first election I voted in was 1992. Yet it was really after 9-11 that I began to make politics a part of my daily life.
Perhaps because I have made the study of memory a part of my life as well, I am even more drawn to stories such as those that follow this introduction. Each of these reports suggest a bold, blatant - and, what is worse, initially uncontested -- erasure of one of most traumatic events in American history, 9-11. Such stories merit serious attention, and demand an explanation, regardless of one's political ideology.
Let's begin with the more recent story. Yesterday, on the TV program Good Morning America (see video below), former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani claimed, in conversation with George Stephanopoulos, that "we had no domestic attacks under Bush. We've had one under Obama."
According to an article in the Boston Herald, Giuliani later told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that he misspoke. Stephanopoulos, a former political adviser under President Clinton and a veteran television news analyst, was later raked across the coals for failing to press Giuliani further. A report that appeared yesterday in the New York Times, however, focused less on the absurdity of Giuliani's claim, and more on "Stephanopoulos's red face."
I find Giuliani's statement less troubling for what he says, and more for what he doesn't. Just a few posts ago, I spoke about the construction of amnesia in the film The Headless Woman. In the television appearance, Rudy Giuliani actively engages in a revision of 9-11. In fact, it might be better to call this "revision" a non-vision. Spanish historians have argued, in recent analyses of revisionist movements in Spain, for a more suitable term; I agree that "revisionism" is a misnomer, for most revisionists do not seek to "re-vise" or "re-view" the past, but to erase an existing narrative and replace it with an earlier one, or to forge a new tale entirely by appropriating and manipulating existing narratives.
In the video clip, Giuliani -- significantly, for better or worse still the "face" of 9-11 for many Americans (he is still often referred to as "America's mayor") -- omits the naming of 9-11 entirely, opting instead to reference the fatal shooting rampage at Ford Hood (Texas) in November. Here, Giuliani counts on putting fear back in operation: under Obama, we are not safe, under Bush, we were. Giuliani's statement suggests, thanks to what he does not say, that 9-11 did not happen while George W. Bush was president. Giuliani, criticized by many on both the left and right for appropriating 9-11 for personal political gain, has here determined that 9-11 is "that which shall remain nameless." Giuliani's spokeswoman tried to patch over the mess by issuing a statement that the former mayor was "clearly talking post-9/11 with regard to Islamic terrorist attacks on our soil." If that is the case, how do we explain the utter absence of 9-11 from the discussion?
One might say that perhaps we are taking the idea of "amnesia" or forgetting of 9-11 too far with regard to the Good Morning America video. And yet. . .just a few months ago, we witnessed an even more abhorrent statement, also issued in the wake of the Ft. Hood attacks, by former Bush White House spokesperson Dana Perino.
In an appearance on Fox News, Dana Perino stated: "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term."
Although Giuliani and Perino are Republicans, people in all political parties in this country ought to be deeply disturbed by their remarks, which are historically, factually incorrect statements! George Stephanopoulos, and the Fox reporters interviewing Perino, ought to be held accountable as well for allowing their interviews to proceed after their interviewees made such ludicrous statements. Yes, it is critical to make clear that 9-11 did happen under George W. Bush -- Stephanopoulos, the Fox anchors, and whoever else involved had an obligation to assert that information, publicly, at the moment -- not in a statement issued after the fact. By refusing to acknowledge 9-11, and by establishing the idea that domestic attacks "did not happen" under the previous president, Giuliani and Perino effectively wipe clean the slate of the past. They almost seem to be readying the landscape for a re-writing of 9-11, a time in which they might claim, as Mary Matalin does below, that 9-11 was "inherited" from the previous (read: Clinton) administration:
There are many, many other troubling stories about the re-construction of 9-11 in our current political environment. I would like to end with this quote from Marc Howard Ross, in the book Understanding September 11. Ross's chapter, titled "The Political Psychology of Competing Narratives: September 11 and Beyond," reminds us that we must not only look at what a narrative says but what it doesn't say:
Narratives can be analyzed in several ways. Of great significance to an analysis is what a narrative includes and excludes. Often opposing parties' narratives do not directly contradict each other. Rather, opponents draw on distinct metaphors, emphasize different actions, cite clashing motivations, and communicate opposing affect to such an extent that it is sometimes hard for a naive observer to recognize that the narratives protagonists offer are often describing the same conflict. On the surface level, narratives are stories about the unfolding of events. At a deeper level, they reveal something about the motivations and reactions of the parties. . .(304).
Friday, January 8, 2010
Documentary Film: "In Search of Memory"
Next on my list of movies to see, this documentary, "In Search of Memory." I know so little about the science of memory, but really, doesn't Memory Studies encompass the cognitive realms of memory as well? It boggles my mind just to say neuroscience, and yet, I am fascinated by studies that show the brain on fire with thought! I first read about this film in the New York Times, and then, on my favorite documentary film blog Memoriando (usually in Spanish, with the occasional English post). Those two articles follow.
From: New York Press
"Memory is everything. Without it, we are nothing," says Nobel Laureate Neuroscientist and Columbia professor Eric Kandel in Petra Seeger's documentary film In Search of Memory. The film premiered to a full audience on the Upper East Side last night at the 92nd Street Y. Though largely centered on Kandel's own memory of the Holocaust and his personal narrative, the film's larger message tied memory—in both the scientific and sociological sense—to the larger scope of humanity.
In Search of Memory's introductory scenes begin through the rainy windshield of a moving car. Already, notions of nostalgia and selective memory incarnate as the audience squints to distinguish the urbanscape through which Kandel drives. The film, inverse to Kandel's life, begins in New York City and works backwards—like memory—to his hometown Vienna, Austria.
Throughout the film, the audience learns that Kandel's impassioned search for memory finds its roots in his experience growing up in the WWII era in Austria. His interest in neuroscience began with a foray into European history; initially, Kandel wanted to study history to understand motives of humans in times of war. In response to this ambition, his high school European history teacher encouraged him to look into neuroscience instead. If he wanted to understand motives, the teacher advised, he would have to examine humans and their intentions on a very basic cellular level.
And so begins Eric Kandel's legendary career in neurobiology: In his sensitive efforts to discover the science behind motives and map the physical locations of the id, the ego and the superego in the human brain, Kandel finds himself at the intersection of psychology and neuroscience. More specifically, he discovers the physical differences between short-term memory and long-term memory and the process by which short-term memory transforms into long-term memory. These findings ultimately lead to his Nobel Prize.
Instead of focusing strictly on the complexity of Kandel's research, however, Seeger presents short and simple segments of the neuroscientific data with Kandel's memories of Austria, clips from the Holocaust and Kandel's present day activities. Through Kandel's remarkably simple explanations of memory vis-a-vis neuroscience, even those with no scientific background are able to understand the complex structure of the memory as it travels and grows in the brain. Simple physical constituents of memory such as the synapses, the neuron, and the axon are explained as they relate to the memory.
Seeger's style, or almost lack thereof, is without intruding or contriving and, as such, the audience is given a candid look into this scientist's memory and his opus as Kandel remembers it. And because of Kandel's powerful charm and energy, the science-less and more personal aspects of the documentary add an engaging and often comical texture to this very delicate quest for memory and remembrance. The most memorable part—that which changed my brain's synaptic structure—is perhaps the colorful visualization of that very process. I was able to watch with wonder as something as seemingly figurative as short-term memory physically transformed and grew into long-term memory.From: The New York Times
January 8, 2010
Total Recall: A Journey From Vienna to Brooklyn and the Center of the Brain
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: January 8, 2010
It’s not often that you are invited to spend an hour or two in the presence of a Nobel Prize winner, and “In Search of Memory: The Neuroscientist Eric Kandel,” Petra Seeger’s new documentary, offers an especially gratifying opportunity. The film’s subject won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research into the workings of the brain. He is particularly interested in how, at the cellular level, the mind stores and sorts various stimuli and turns them into long- and short-term memory.
For Dr. Kandel, whose laboratory conducts experiments on mice and snails, memory is one of the keys to human identity. Our mental patterns of recollection and learning have been grist for much philosophical and literary speculation, to which Dr. Kandel, a deeply cultured and thoroughly civilized man, pays sincere respect. And though he is preoccupied with physical processes, he is also aware of just how mysterious and complicated their implications and results can be.
Ms. Seeger, a German filmmaker who occasionally appears on screen with Dr. Kandel and his family, gives only a sketch of his ideas and discoveries, but the basic information about axons, synapses and neurons is presented clearly and with enthusiasm. “In Search of Memory” is finally more concerned with the scientist than with his science, and in his particular memories rather than his insights into memory as such. This is hardly a criticism, since Dr. Kandel is an unusually engaging person with a pretty amazing biography.
The camera follows him on visits to Vienna, where he was born, and to Brooklyn, where he lived after fleeing the Nazis in the late 1930s. His accent and temperament are an almost perfect amalgam of the two places: a refined, intellectual disposition forged in Sigmund Freud’s hometown and inflected by the scrapes and strivings of life in the borough of immigrants. He speaks German precisely if at times a bit haltingly and peppers his English with Yiddish words. He laughs easily, and though a prodigious talker — we see him lecturing and also holding forth in the laboratory and at a family Seder — he seems like a good listener as well.
As its main title (shared with Dr. Kandel’s 2006 memoir) suggests, “In Search of Memory” is more concerned with exploration than with comprehensiveness or conclusions. At 95 minutes, it necessarily lacks the sweep and detail of the book, which was more than 500 pages, and occasionally tries to compensate with awkward re-enactments of events from Dr. Kandel’s childhood. But it is an engrossing portrait all the same, a generous introduction to someone worth knowing, who knows an awful lot.
IN SEARCH OF MEMORY
The Neuroscientist Eric Kandel
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Written and directed by Petra Seeger; directors of photography, Robert Winkler and Mario Masini; edited by Oliver Neumann; released by Icarus Films. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. In English and German, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. This film is not rated.
On Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza)
For some time now, I have been wanting to see La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman), directed by Lucrecia Martel. I had seen Martel's previous two films, La niña santa (The Holy Girl) and La ciénaga (The Swamp), and each had left me with a strange sense of unease. La ciénaga, in particular, made me feel disturbed, even sick. But I was willing to give Martel another shot with La mujer sin cabeza after reading favorable reviews in the Spanish press. La mujer sin cabeza was selected for Cannes in 2008, and was co-produced in part by the Almodóvar brothers (not that Martel needed their help, I might add). It is, in my view, the best of the three Martel films I've seen thus far. I found it challenging, enigmatic and, as usual, a masterpiece of sound. In addition, La mujer sin cabeza relates on many levels to my scholarly interests in memory and trauma.Martel was born in Argentina in 1966 and is part of the so-called "New Argentine Film." In the DVD extras, Martel refutes this categorization, stating that she does not even identify herself as a filmmaker, much less as a filmmaker of a particular generation. However, she does acknowledge the recent developments in Argentine film and attributes the surge in production - at least in part - to a kind of cultural gap created by the military dictatorship (1976-1983).
When it comes to Argentine film, I have to confess that I am most familiar with works about the dictatorship and its aftermath -- La historia oficial, Cautiva, Los rubios, Nietos: identidad y memoria, etc. Martel's La mujer sin cabeza does not deal in any specific way with the dictatorship, and yet there are clear reference points to this dark period of Argentine history throughout the film. I have chosen to write about La mujer here because it is all about memory and amnesia, on both a collective and an individual level.
As with Martel's other films, La mujer takes places near Salta, Argentina, the northwest corner of the country, where the director was born. The landscape is largely rural, and there is a significant emphasis on social class differences. And, as Martel comments in an interview, here, race is also a factor. Once again, we enter the world of the upper middle class and are treated to the sort of banal issues that permeate their everyday imaginations -- getting their cars washed, their hair dyed, their bodies massaged, and their yards landscaped.
The film's protagonist is a bleach-blonde dentist named Verónica, or Vero. Vero is married to Marcos, in what seems to be a relatively loveless, joyless relationship. Vero and Marcos's daughter is in Tucumán, studying law. Though Vero is often in the presence of family and friends, we get the sense she is quite alone, alienated from herself and others.
La mujer sin cabeza tells the story of Vero's mysterious car accident on the way home from a gathering with friends. When her cell phone rings, Vero, alone in her car, goes to answer it and hits, with force, an object in the road. In the opening scene, we see three dark-skinned (most likely, Indian -- Martel notes Bolivia's proximity to Argentina in the DVD extras) boys playing in an empty canal, and when Vero's car stops, two small handprints mark the window of the driver-side door. Looking in her rearview mirror, Vero notes a dead dog in the road, but we know, and know she knows, that she has collided with something far more grave. The handprints travel with Vero for some time, until, in a daze, she gets out of the car and a heavy, pelting rain begins to hit the windshield (rain, and water in general, course throughout the film)
The film's disorienting opening scenes are just a prelude for what is to come. Viewers are sent hurling into the same oneiric, drifting realm as Vero, as we accompany her from the scene of the accident to a hospital for X-rays, a hotel for a tryst with her husband's cousin Juan Manuel, and her own home. I often had the feeling that I myself had just been hit in the head with a blunt object and was trying to recover a coherent view of the world. The extent of Vero's amnesia was never entirely clear to me -- and I think Martel does this on purpose. It is difficult to discern how much Vero comprehends of what is going on around her, though it does seem that she is unable to recognize familiar faces, names and events in the immediate aftermath of the accident.
María Onetto, who plays Vero, gives a stunning performance. She moves through the world in a daze, as if in slow motion, while people buzz about her, entering her space and leaving her to what appears to be an impending breakdown: Vero has lost familiarity with those around her, but also herself. The way she dresses herself (or does not -- she stays in the same outfit as on the day of the accident for what seems at least a day), smooths her hair, sips a cup of coffee or engages in relations with her husband's cousin indicate a profound disconnect with the body and the self; perhaps, however, these are gestures Vero makes toward normalcy, as she represses the accident and attempts to pick up her life where she left off.
The film's title, which, as some have noted, evokes a horror story (i.e. "the headless horseman," etc.), can also be seen as the profound impact that loss of memory has on the self, on one's identity. Memory is the self, and when it is lost, the self becomes other. Martel demonstrates this in a powerful manner, often introducing Vero with the top of her head literally cut off. There are, in fact, many scenes, in which we struggle to see Vero as a "complete" figure on the other end of the lens. Frames often feel crowded, even "amputated," populated with head shots, as when we observe Vero and her niece's friend riding in the car, and her niece on a motorbike alongisde the passenger window.
While we might assume that Vero's amnesia is an effect of the accident and its traumatic outcome -- a coping strategy (a moral escape route?) as well as a physical repercussion -- as La mujer indicates, others in Vero's circle are quite adept at imposing amnesia upon her, in aiding her with the re-writing of her story (perhaps, it would be better to say with the erasure of her story). As the NYT reviewer, Stephen Holden, noted, it is the men in Vero's life who try to protect her from the truth: "the men in her life have apparently protected her by erasing any evidence of her whereabouts the day of the accident; the car has been repaired."
When Vero at last confesses to her husband that she believes she hit and killed a person, her husband drives her to the scene of the crime, insisting that what she hit was only a dog, and that, as he repeatedly puts it, "you were scared." Yet Marcos later takes Vero's car to the shop and has the damage pounded out, and a series of other "repairs" are also made, in an attempt to expunge the record of the past -- Vero's X-rays disappear from the hospital in which she was treated, and the hotel has no record of her stay. In the end of the film, we witness Vero dyeing her unnaturally-blonde hair to a dark brown, effectively adopting a new persona divorced from her previous life. For Holden, this change is indicative of Vero's "tacit complicity to forget what happened."
Holden sees La mujer sin cabeza as "a meditation on Argentina's historical memory," alluding primarily to the recent dictatorship. Martel herself, though focusing her discussion of the film largely on class issues, does not deny or dispute readings linking the work to Argentina's attempts to deal with its violent past. I am inclined to read the film at least partly about this period as well.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to miss the allusions -- missing bodies; crimes swept under the carpet; perpetrators sharing space with victims' families; even Vero's daughter, who studies law in Tucumán (significantly, Vero's car is repaired here, where some of the worst human rights abuses occurred during the dictatorship). Clearly, La mujer offers a critical take on the sort of stories (and histories) that prevail -- the official stories again -- and those that are swept under the rug. Yet La mujer goes beyond the dictatorship, taking on other sorts of amnesias as well -- such as the sort Vero and her family and friends perpetuate in their treatment of the racial other. Vero kills an Indian boy, and the ghosting of his murder can be read as a kind of induced racial and class oblivion, which allows Vero, Juan Manuel and Marcos --"European" Argentines of the bourgeoisie -- to thrive at the expense of others.
I made an immediate connection between this film and Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist), which just came out on Criterion last year. However, when asked about this link, Martel states that she was unconcerned about any overlap because La mujer deals with the differences between classes, while Muerte de un ciclista tends to focus more on the infidelities within a marriage and tensions among members of the same social class. Nonetheless, both films take up the encounter between a cyclist and a car, and deal with hit-and-run accidents and marital infidelity. Martel notes that in the 1990s, Argentina saw an influx of SUVs, and an increase in accidents between large vehicles and bicycles. She sees this as an obvious entrance point to tackle glaring disparities between upper middle and lower classes.
Ultimately, the film offers no easy resolution. Like the fountain or well discovered under Vero's home at the end of the film, we get the sense that we have only scratched the surface of a dark history that still lies buried beneath an outwardly-stable foundation. A crime remains unspoken, but there are those who know the truth and continue to say nothing.
I would definitely watch this film again -- I think there is much that is probably easy to miss the first time around. If anyone has seen it and would like to comment, please feel free to do so!
U.S. Trailer (which does not do the film justice, though it does have some quite favorable review quotes):
Spanish trailer (unfortunately, no subtitles provided, sorry!):
Thursday, January 7, 2010
New Book on Film and Memory
Cinema, Memory, Modernity
The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema
By Russell J.A. Kilbourn
Price: $95.00
* ISBN: 978-0-415-80118-8
* Binding: Hardback
* Published by: Routledge
* Publication Date: 27th May 2010 (Available for Pre-order)
* Pages: 313
About the Book
Since its inception, cinema has evolved into not merely a ‘reflection’ but an indispensable index of human experience – especially our experience of time’s passage, of the present moment, and, most importantly perhaps, of the past, in both collective and individual terms. In this volume, Kilbourn provides a comparative theorization of the representation of memory in both mainstream Hollywood and international art cinema within an increasingly transnational context of production and reception. Focusing on European, North and South American, and Asian films, Kilbourn reads cinema as providing the viewer with not only the content and form of memory, but also with its own directions for use: the required codes and conventions for understanding and implementing this crucial prosthetic technology — an art of memory for the twentieth-century and beyond.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction: Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Return of Memory as Film 1: No Escape from Time: Memory and Redemption in the International Postwar Art Film 2: The ‘Crisis’ of Memory: ‘Traumatic Identity’ in the Contemporary Memory Film 3: ‘Global Memory’: Cinema as Lingua Franca and the Commodification of the Image 4: The Eye of History: Memory, Surveillance and Ethicality in the Contemporary Art Film 5: ‘Prosthetic Memory’ and Transnational Cinema: Globalized Identity and Narrative Recursivity in City of God Conclusion: Remembering to Forget: The Catachreses of Modernity Notes Bibliography Index
About the Author(s)
Russell J.A. Kilbourn is Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University.
The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema
By Russell J.A. Kilbourn
Price: $95.00
* ISBN: 978-0-415-80118-8
* Binding: Hardback
* Published by: Routledge
* Publication Date: 27th May 2010 (Available for Pre-order)
* Pages: 313
About the Book
Since its inception, cinema has evolved into not merely a ‘reflection’ but an indispensable index of human experience – especially our experience of time’s passage, of the present moment, and, most importantly perhaps, of the past, in both collective and individual terms. In this volume, Kilbourn provides a comparative theorization of the representation of memory in both mainstream Hollywood and international art cinema within an increasingly transnational context of production and reception. Focusing on European, North and South American, and Asian films, Kilbourn reads cinema as providing the viewer with not only the content and form of memory, but also with its own directions for use: the required codes and conventions for understanding and implementing this crucial prosthetic technology — an art of memory for the twentieth-century and beyond.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction: Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Return of Memory as Film 1: No Escape from Time: Memory and Redemption in the International Postwar Art Film 2: The ‘Crisis’ of Memory: ‘Traumatic Identity’ in the Contemporary Memory Film 3: ‘Global Memory’: Cinema as Lingua Franca and the Commodification of the Image 4: The Eye of History: Memory, Surveillance and Ethicality in the Contemporary Art Film 5: ‘Prosthetic Memory’ and Transnational Cinema: Globalized Identity and Narrative Recursivity in City of God Conclusion: Remembering to Forget: The Catachreses of Modernity Notes Bibliography Index
About the Author(s)
Russell J.A. Kilbourn is Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University.
The Children of Fascist Parents
In Germany, there is an entire sub-genre of "second generation" literature, which includes works not only by and about the children of Holocaust victims, but by and about the children of Nazi perpetrators. In Spain, the context with which I am most familiar, it is difficult, if not impossible, to recall memoirs written by the children of Francoist parents (not that the experiences of the children of Nazis and the children of Francoists are necessarily comparable). In recent years, the focus has really been on the victims of the Franco dictatorship and their descendants -- and with good reason. I am still waiting to read Esther Tusquets's Habíamos ganado la guerra (We Had Won the War), but from what I have heard, this memoir is one of the few to address openly a childhood in the heart of a pro-Franco family of the Catalonian bourgeoisie.
A recent BBC report addressed the children of "Blackshirt women." I wish I could have heard the broadcast, but unfortunately, it is only available in the U.K.
Blackshirt women's children live with shame
By James Maw
Presenter, Mother Was A Blackshirt
Children of Blackshirt women, who joined Oswald Mosley's pro-Nazi British Union of Fascists, often feel that they have had to live with the burden of the guilt and shame caused by their mothers' fascist sympathies.
When I was 11, I was taken by my mother to visit her birthplace in Kennington, London.
As we walked around my mother showed me where the air-raid shelters were during the war, but then she began telling me about the Blackshirt meetings.
At 11 it did not mean much to me but it has played on my mind ever since.
I decided to reopen the case of how the Blackshirts attempted to recruit my mother.
It led me to question how many British women supported Hitler during the war, and what was their fate?
"I could have ended up in prison," my mother said.
And many of these women did.
Now aged 88, my mother told me about the ink factory she worked in as a young girl.
"At first I was packing ink, it was horrible.
"There I met Primrose, nobody liked her, but she invited me home.
"I met her family and I fell for it - they were trying to get me to be a Blackshirt."
Inflammatory speeches
In documentaries about the Blackshirts, the pictures I have seen are only of men, marching in the streets in their paramilitary uniforms.
I knew about the daughters of the aristocracy, like Diana Mitford who married Oswald Mosley, but I had not realised that young girls, like my own mother, could have been sucked in too.
But speaking to the historian Julie Gottlieb (author of Feminine Fascism) I was surprised to learn that the first fascist political organisation in Britain was actually founded by a woman.
"It was called the fascisti, then changed its name to the British Fascists and it was founded... in 1923, by a Miss Rotha Lintorn-Orman," she told me.
Until then the most prominent political movement for women had been the Suffragettes.
One of the most influential Suffragettes was Norah Elam, who was in charge of propaganda and imprisoned for making inflammatory speeches on women's suffrage.
Sent to Holloway prison in 1914, she shared a cell with Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the British Suffragettes.
But Norah Elam was imprisoned again during World War II, this time with Diana Mosley, wife of the fascist leader.
Like me, Norah's granddaughter and great-granddaughter Angela and Susan McPherson have been on a quest to find out more about their family's history.
They knew little about the colourful past of their granny Norah.
"It was a bit of a shock," they told me. A bit of a shock indeed.
'Battle of the shirts'
But women like my mother were not interested in politics, as Norah Elam was, so was it the comradeship or merely the appeal of the smart uniform that was the attraction?
Julie Gottlieb described the Blackshirt uniform as "a great marketing tool, and an incredible draw particularly for the youth. Some historians call this period the battle of the shirts".
The party grew and even children were recruited to support Hitler's ideology.
Diana Bailey, as a young girl in Bognor Regis, remembers her mother and father in their Blackshirt uniforms.
"We were told to paint slogans on the walls with 'Britain Awake' and 'Perish the Jews'. I was nine years old," she said.
Francis Beckett's mother Anne was also a young working woman, like my mother.
Anne was sent along to Mosley's headquarters by the Pitman's Shorthand temp agency to work as a secretary.
"She wanted to be an actress but she made what she said was a dreadful mistake, she learnt shorthand.
"Pitman's sent her to Black House, HQ for the Blackshirts. She found it exciting.
"She was never a racist but worked amongst racists," Francis Beckett said.
It was at fascist headquarters that Anne joined the Blackshirts and met and later married one of the Blackshirt elite, John Beckett, Francis's father.
John was sent to prison with Oswald Mosley during the war - and his family spent the rest of their lives living hand to mouth.
A former Labour MP, John Beckett should have taken his place in the post-war Attlee government. Instead, he worked as a night watchman for Securicor.
Seeing how easily Francis's mother had become a Blackshirt, I asked my mother if something similar had happened to her, with her factory workmate Primrose and her fascist family.
"They were talking about these meetings - I thought they had got me there for a reason.
"They were talking about Mosley, so after this I left, and later gave in my notice at the ink factory," she said.
So after all these years I can stop imagining my mother sitting in the rows of a mass meeting, 'sieg heiling' their leader and being hauled off to Holloway Prison.
But in talking to these families I can see how life could so easily have been very different for my family.
Diana Bailey continues to live with the consequences of her parents' actions - and says she will never lose her feelings of guilt.
"When Richard Dimbleby went into Belsen I felt the guilt of the whole of the world, I felt utterly responsible for what happened in those camps, because I did write 'Perish the Jews' on walls, it is something I will never get over."
Mother Was a Blackshirt will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Monday 4 January at 1100 GMT.
Or catch-up afterwards on BBC
(UK only).
Story from BBC NEWS
A recent BBC report addressed the children of "Blackshirt women." I wish I could have heard the broadcast, but unfortunately, it is only available in the U.K.
Blackshirt women's children live with shame
By James Maw
Presenter, Mother Was A Blackshirt
Children of Blackshirt women, who joined Oswald Mosley's pro-Nazi British Union of Fascists, often feel that they have had to live with the burden of the guilt and shame caused by their mothers' fascist sympathies.
When I was 11, I was taken by my mother to visit her birthplace in Kennington, London.
As we walked around my mother showed me where the air-raid shelters were during the war, but then she began telling me about the Blackshirt meetings.
At 11 it did not mean much to me but it has played on my mind ever since.
I decided to reopen the case of how the Blackshirts attempted to recruit my mother.
It led me to question how many British women supported Hitler during the war, and what was their fate?
"I could have ended up in prison," my mother said.
And many of these women did.
Now aged 88, my mother told me about the ink factory she worked in as a young girl.
"At first I was packing ink, it was horrible.
"There I met Primrose, nobody liked her, but she invited me home.
"I met her family and I fell for it - they were trying to get me to be a Blackshirt."
Inflammatory speeches
In documentaries about the Blackshirts, the pictures I have seen are only of men, marching in the streets in their paramilitary uniforms.
I knew about the daughters of the aristocracy, like Diana Mitford who married Oswald Mosley, but I had not realised that young girls, like my own mother, could have been sucked in too.
But speaking to the historian Julie Gottlieb (author of Feminine Fascism) I was surprised to learn that the first fascist political organisation in Britain was actually founded by a woman.
"It was called the fascisti, then changed its name to the British Fascists and it was founded... in 1923, by a Miss Rotha Lintorn-Orman," she told me.
Until then the most prominent political movement for women had been the Suffragettes.
One of the most influential Suffragettes was Norah Elam, who was in charge of propaganda and imprisoned for making inflammatory speeches on women's suffrage.
Sent to Holloway prison in 1914, she shared a cell with Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the British Suffragettes.
But Norah Elam was imprisoned again during World War II, this time with Diana Mosley, wife of the fascist leader.
Like me, Norah's granddaughter and great-granddaughter Angela and Susan McPherson have been on a quest to find out more about their family's history.
They knew little about the colourful past of their granny Norah.
"It was a bit of a shock," they told me. A bit of a shock indeed.
'Battle of the shirts'
But women like my mother were not interested in politics, as Norah Elam was, so was it the comradeship or merely the appeal of the smart uniform that was the attraction?
Julie Gottlieb described the Blackshirt uniform as "a great marketing tool, and an incredible draw particularly for the youth. Some historians call this period the battle of the shirts".
The party grew and even children were recruited to support Hitler's ideology.
Diana Bailey, as a young girl in Bognor Regis, remembers her mother and father in their Blackshirt uniforms.
"We were told to paint slogans on the walls with 'Britain Awake' and 'Perish the Jews'. I was nine years old," she said.
Francis Beckett's mother Anne was also a young working woman, like my mother.
Anne was sent along to Mosley's headquarters by the Pitman's Shorthand temp agency to work as a secretary.
"She wanted to be an actress but she made what she said was a dreadful mistake, she learnt shorthand.
"Pitman's sent her to Black House, HQ for the Blackshirts. She found it exciting.
"She was never a racist but worked amongst racists," Francis Beckett said.
It was at fascist headquarters that Anne joined the Blackshirts and met and later married one of the Blackshirt elite, John Beckett, Francis's father.
John was sent to prison with Oswald Mosley during the war - and his family spent the rest of their lives living hand to mouth.
A former Labour MP, John Beckett should have taken his place in the post-war Attlee government. Instead, he worked as a night watchman for Securicor.
Seeing how easily Francis's mother had become a Blackshirt, I asked my mother if something similar had happened to her, with her factory workmate Primrose and her fascist family.
"They were talking about these meetings - I thought they had got me there for a reason.
"They were talking about Mosley, so after this I left, and later gave in my notice at the ink factory," she said.
So after all these years I can stop imagining my mother sitting in the rows of a mass meeting, 'sieg heiling' their leader and being hauled off to Holloway Prison.
But in talking to these families I can see how life could so easily have been very different for my family.
Diana Bailey continues to live with the consequences of her parents' actions - and says she will never lose her feelings of guilt.
"When Richard Dimbleby went into Belsen I felt the guilt of the whole of the world, I felt utterly responsible for what happened in those camps, because I did write 'Perish the Jews' on walls, it is something I will never get over."
Mother Was a Blackshirt will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Monday 4 January at 1100 GMT.
Or catch-up afterwards on BBC
(UK only).
Story from BBC NEWS
On Turkish-Armenian Relations
From: The New York Times
January 6, 2010
A Family Tree Uprooted by a 60-Year-Old Secret
By DAN BILEFSKY
ISTANBUL — Fethiye Cetin recalled the day her identity shattered.
She was a young law student when her beloved grandmother Seher took her aside and told her a secret she had hidden for 60 years: that she, the grandmother, was born a Christian Armenian and had been saved from a death march by a Turkish officer, who snatched her from her mother’s arms in 1915 and raised her as Turkish and Muslim.
Her grandmother revealed to her that her real name was Heranus and that her biological parents had escaped to New York. Heranus, Ms. Cetin learned, was just one of thousands of Armenian children who were kidnapped and adopted by Turkish families during the genocide of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1918. These survivors were sometimes called “the leftovers of the sword.”
“I was in a state of shock for a long time — I suddenly saw the world through different eyes,” said Ms. Cetin, now 60. “I had grown up thinking of myself as a Turkish Muslim, not an Armenian. There had been nothing in the history books about the massacre of a people which had been erased from Turkey’s collective memory. Like my grandmother, many had buried their identity — and the horrors they had seen — deep inside of them.”
Now, however, Ms. Cetin, a prominent member of the estimated 50,000-strong Armenian-Turkish community here and one of the country’s leading human rights lawyers, believes a seminal moment has arrived in which Turkey and Armenia can finally confront the ghosts of history and possibly even overcome one of the world’s most enduring and bitter rivalries.
She already has confronted her divided self, which led her from Istanbul to a 10th Street grocery store in New York, where her Armenian relatives had rebuilt their broken lives after fleeing Turkey. (Many of the Armenians who survive in Turkey today do so because their ancestors lived in western provinces when the killings occurred, mostly in the east.)
The latest tentative step toward healing generations of acrimony between the two countries took place in October on a soccer field in the northwestern Turkish city of Bursa, when President Serzh Sarkisian became the first Armenian head of state to travel to Turkey to attend a soccer game between the two countries’ national teams. In this latest round of soccer diplomacy, Mr. Sarkisian was joined at the match by President Abdullah Gul of Turkey, who had travelled to a soccer match in Armenia the year before.
“We do not write history here,” Mr Gul told his Armenian counterpart in Bursa. “We are making history.”
The Bursa encounter came just days after Turkey and Armenia signed a historic series of protocols to establish diplomatic relations and to re-open the Turkish-Armenian border, which has been closed since 1993. The agreement, strongly backed by the United States, the European Union and Russia, has come under vociferous opposition from nationalists in both Turkey and Armenia.
Armenia’s sizeable diaspora — estimated at more than seven million — in the United States, France and elsewhere is alarmed that the new warmth will be misused as an excuse to forgive and forget in Turkey, where even uttering the words “Armenian genocide” can be grounds for prosecution. Also threatening the deal is Armenia’s lingering fight with Azerbaijan, its neighbor and a close ally of Turkey, over a breakaway Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan.
The agreement — which has yet to be ratified in the Turkish or Armenian Parliaments — could have broad consequences, helping to end landlocked Armenia’s economic isolation, while lifting Turkey’s chances for admission into the European Union, where the genocide issue remains a key obstacle.
But Ms. Cetin argued that the most enduring consequence could be helping to overcome mutual recriminations. She said Armenians have been battling the collective amnesia of Turks, who contend that the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I was bloody and that those Armenians who perished were victims of that chaos.
“Most people in Turkish society have no idea what happened in 1915 and the Armenians they meet are introduced as monsters or villains or enemies in their history books,” she said. “Turkey has to confront the past but before this confrontation can happen, people must know who they are confronting. So we need the borders to come down in order to have dialogue.”
Ms. Cetin, who was raised by her maternal grandmother, said the borders in her own Muslim Turkish heart came down irrevocably when that grandmother revealed her Armenian past.
Heranus, she said, was only a child in 1915 when Turkish soldiers arrived in their ethnically Armenian Turkish village of Maden, rounding up the men and sequestering women and girls in a church courtyard with high walls. When they climbed on each others’ shoulders, Heranus told her, they saw men’s throats being cut and bodies being thrown in the Tigris River, which ran red for days.
During the forced march toward exile that followed, Heranus said she saw her own grandmother drown two of her grandchildren before she herself jumped into the water and disappeared.
Heranus’s mother, Isguhi, survived the march, which ended in Aleppo, Syria, and went to join her husband, Hovannes, who had left the village for New York in 1913, opening a grocery store. They started a new family.
“My grandmother was trembling as she told me her story,” Ms. Cetin said. “She would always say, ‘May those days vanish never to return.”’
Ms. Cetin, a rebellious left-wing student activist at the time of her grandmother’s revelation, recalled how confronting Armenian identity, then as now, had been taboo. “The same people who spoke the loudest about injustices and screamed that the world could be a better place would only whisper when it came to the Armenian issue,” she said. “It really hurt me.”
Ms. Cetin, who was imprisoned for three years in the 1980s for opposing the military regime in Turkey at the time, said her newfound Armenian identity inspired her to become a human rights lawyer. When Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, was prosecuted in 2006 for insulting Turkishness by referring to the genocide, she became his lawyer. On January 19, 2007, Mr. Dink was assassinated outside his office by a young ultranationalist.
Ms. Cetin published a memoir about her grandmother in 2004. She says she purposely omitted the word “genocide” from her book because using the word erected a roadblock to reconciliation. “I wanted to concentrate on the human dimension. I wanted to question the silence of people like my grandmother who kept their stories hidden for years, while going through the pain.”
When Heranus died in 2000 at age 95, Ms. Cetin honored her last wish, publishing a death notice in Agos, in the hope of tracking down her long-lost Armenian family, including her grandmother’s sister Margaret, whom she had never seen.
At her emotional reunion with her Armenian family in New York, several months later, “Auntie Marge” told Ms. Cetin that when her father had died in 1965, she had found a piece of paper carefully folded in his wallet that he had been keeping for years. It was a letter Heranus had written to him shortly after he had left for America.
“We all keep hoping and praying that you are well,” it said.
Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.
January 6, 2010
A Family Tree Uprooted by a 60-Year-Old Secret
By DAN BILEFSKY
ISTANBUL — Fethiye Cetin recalled the day her identity shattered.
She was a young law student when her beloved grandmother Seher took her aside and told her a secret she had hidden for 60 years: that she, the grandmother, was born a Christian Armenian and had been saved from a death march by a Turkish officer, who snatched her from her mother’s arms in 1915 and raised her as Turkish and Muslim.
Her grandmother revealed to her that her real name was Heranus and that her biological parents had escaped to New York. Heranus, Ms. Cetin learned, was just one of thousands of Armenian children who were kidnapped and adopted by Turkish families during the genocide of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1918. These survivors were sometimes called “the leftovers of the sword.”
“I was in a state of shock for a long time — I suddenly saw the world through different eyes,” said Ms. Cetin, now 60. “I had grown up thinking of myself as a Turkish Muslim, not an Armenian. There had been nothing in the history books about the massacre of a people which had been erased from Turkey’s collective memory. Like my grandmother, many had buried their identity — and the horrors they had seen — deep inside of them.”
Now, however, Ms. Cetin, a prominent member of the estimated 50,000-strong Armenian-Turkish community here and one of the country’s leading human rights lawyers, believes a seminal moment has arrived in which Turkey and Armenia can finally confront the ghosts of history and possibly even overcome one of the world’s most enduring and bitter rivalries.
She already has confronted her divided self, which led her from Istanbul to a 10th Street grocery store in New York, where her Armenian relatives had rebuilt their broken lives after fleeing Turkey. (Many of the Armenians who survive in Turkey today do so because their ancestors lived in western provinces when the killings occurred, mostly in the east.)
The latest tentative step toward healing generations of acrimony between the two countries took place in October on a soccer field in the northwestern Turkish city of Bursa, when President Serzh Sarkisian became the first Armenian head of state to travel to Turkey to attend a soccer game between the two countries’ national teams. In this latest round of soccer diplomacy, Mr. Sarkisian was joined at the match by President Abdullah Gul of Turkey, who had travelled to a soccer match in Armenia the year before.
“We do not write history here,” Mr Gul told his Armenian counterpart in Bursa. “We are making history.”
The Bursa encounter came just days after Turkey and Armenia signed a historic series of protocols to establish diplomatic relations and to re-open the Turkish-Armenian border, which has been closed since 1993. The agreement, strongly backed by the United States, the European Union and Russia, has come under vociferous opposition from nationalists in both Turkey and Armenia.
Armenia’s sizeable diaspora — estimated at more than seven million — in the United States, France and elsewhere is alarmed that the new warmth will be misused as an excuse to forgive and forget in Turkey, where even uttering the words “Armenian genocide” can be grounds for prosecution. Also threatening the deal is Armenia’s lingering fight with Azerbaijan, its neighbor and a close ally of Turkey, over a breakaway Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan.
The agreement — which has yet to be ratified in the Turkish or Armenian Parliaments — could have broad consequences, helping to end landlocked Armenia’s economic isolation, while lifting Turkey’s chances for admission into the European Union, where the genocide issue remains a key obstacle.
But Ms. Cetin argued that the most enduring consequence could be helping to overcome mutual recriminations. She said Armenians have been battling the collective amnesia of Turks, who contend that the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I was bloody and that those Armenians who perished were victims of that chaos.
“Most people in Turkish society have no idea what happened in 1915 and the Armenians they meet are introduced as monsters or villains or enemies in their history books,” she said. “Turkey has to confront the past but before this confrontation can happen, people must know who they are confronting. So we need the borders to come down in order to have dialogue.”
Ms. Cetin, who was raised by her maternal grandmother, said the borders in her own Muslim Turkish heart came down irrevocably when that grandmother revealed her Armenian past.
Heranus, she said, was only a child in 1915 when Turkish soldiers arrived in their ethnically Armenian Turkish village of Maden, rounding up the men and sequestering women and girls in a church courtyard with high walls. When they climbed on each others’ shoulders, Heranus told her, they saw men’s throats being cut and bodies being thrown in the Tigris River, which ran red for days.
During the forced march toward exile that followed, Heranus said she saw her own grandmother drown two of her grandchildren before she herself jumped into the water and disappeared.
Heranus’s mother, Isguhi, survived the march, which ended in Aleppo, Syria, and went to join her husband, Hovannes, who had left the village for New York in 1913, opening a grocery store. They started a new family.
“My grandmother was trembling as she told me her story,” Ms. Cetin said. “She would always say, ‘May those days vanish never to return.”’
Ms. Cetin, a rebellious left-wing student activist at the time of her grandmother’s revelation, recalled how confronting Armenian identity, then as now, had been taboo. “The same people who spoke the loudest about injustices and screamed that the world could be a better place would only whisper when it came to the Armenian issue,” she said. “It really hurt me.”
Ms. Cetin, who was imprisoned for three years in the 1980s for opposing the military regime in Turkey at the time, said her newfound Armenian identity inspired her to become a human rights lawyer. When Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, was prosecuted in 2006 for insulting Turkishness by referring to the genocide, she became his lawyer. On January 19, 2007, Mr. Dink was assassinated outside his office by a young ultranationalist.
Ms. Cetin published a memoir about her grandmother in 2004. She says she purposely omitted the word “genocide” from her book because using the word erected a roadblock to reconciliation. “I wanted to concentrate on the human dimension. I wanted to question the silence of people like my grandmother who kept their stories hidden for years, while going through the pain.”
When Heranus died in 2000 at age 95, Ms. Cetin honored her last wish, publishing a death notice in Agos, in the hope of tracking down her long-lost Armenian family, including her grandmother’s sister Margaret, whom she had never seen.
At her emotional reunion with her Armenian family in New York, several months later, “Auntie Marge” told Ms. Cetin that when her father had died in 1965, she had found a piece of paper carefully folded in his wallet that he had been keeping for years. It was a letter Heranus had written to him shortly after he had left for America.
“We all keep hoping and praying that you are well,” it said.
Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.
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