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Commentary - Wrestling with the Angels of History

Memory, Symptom, and Intervention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2014

By
Laurence J. Kirmayer
Edited by
Devon E. Hinton  and
Alexander L. Hinton
Laurence J. Kirmayer
Affiliation:
McGill University
Devon E. Hinton
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Alexander L. Hinton
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
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Summary

[...] The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them-selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

May 1978 (Forché, 1981, p. 15)

Introduction

The opening quote from Carolyn Forché’s documentary poem The Colonel, drawn from her experiences in El Salvador in the late 1970s, confronts us with the terror and absurdity of mass atrocities. Living in the aftermath of war, with perpetrators still in power and only a fragile order restored, how can memory contain the horror and the loss? Must survivors turn away from the past in order to survive? And if silence is required for survival, what becomes of the history needed to provide a moral compass and guide efforts to rebuild a just society? Ears pressed to the ground, can the dead and dismembered hear stories the living are compelled to forget?

The violence described in the essays in this volume is massive not just in its scale or scope – with large numbers of people or whole populations facing terror, injury, loss, and death – but also in its effects, tearing down social structures and rending the fabric of communities, peoples, or nations. As such, the remainders of violence can be seen at the levels of body, self, and society. The responses at each level have their own dynamics, involving physiological, psychological, and social processes that range from the intimate sphere of family systems to the wider arenas of neighborhood, community, nation, and the international networks of global society. These systems are deeply interconnected and we need interdisciplinary perspectives to trace the effects up and down these levels.

Type
Chapter
Information
Genocide and Mass Violence
Memory, Symptom, and Recovery
 , pp. 388 - 420
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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