Places of Traumatic Memory. A Global Context - Amy L. Hubbell Et Al.

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
MEMORY STUDIES
Places of
Traumatic Memory
A Global Context
Edited by
Amy L. Hubbell
Natsuko Akagawa
Sol Rojas-Lizana
Annie Pohlman Sol
Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies
Series Editors
Andrew Hoskins
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK
John Sutton
Department of Cognitive Science
Macquarie University
Macquarie, Australia
The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends
that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to
that of memory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we remember it’; changes
in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory;
panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination
with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of
trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed to
an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirty years.
Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect
what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This
groundbreaking new series tackles questions such as: What is ‘memory’
under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for
its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theo-
retical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination?
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14682
Amy L. Hubbell • Natsuko Akagawa
Sol Rojas-Lizana • Annie Pohlman
Editors
Places of Traumatic
Memory
A Global Context
Editors
Amy L. Hubbell Natsuko Akagawa
School of Languages and Cultures School of Languages and Cultures
Faculty of Humanities and Social Faculty of Humanities and Social
Sciences Sciences
The University of Queensland The University of Queensland
Brisbane, QLD, Australia Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Sol Rojas-Lizana Annie Pohlman

School of Languages and Cultures School of Languages and Cultures
Faculty of Humanities and Social Faculty of Humanities and Social
Sciences Sciences
The University of Queensland The University of Queensland
Brisbane, QLD, Australia Brisbane, QLD, Australia
ISSN 2634-6257 ISSN 2634-6265 (electronic)

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies
ISBN 978-3-030-52055-7 ISBN 978-3-030-52056-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4
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Preface
This volume explores the connections between memory, narrative and

place across multiple cultural contexts. The book brings together fourteen
original analyses of sites of trauma and the representation of traumatic
memory through a wide range of sources and different scholarly lenses.
The chapters explore cases from across six continents to examine the con-
nections between texts, testimonies, film and the physical spaces where
trauma was experienced or is commemorated.
This volume arises from presentations made at a workshop at The
University of Queensland in July 2018. First, we would like to thank all
the participants at this workshop; presenters came from around the world
and around Australia to take part. Second, we would like to thank the
contributors to this volume who offered their papers for publication and
who have worked intensely with us to edit and develop their work. Third,
we would like to thank the School of Languages and Cultures for their
support of the workshop and the volume through a Strategic Research
Initiative Fund grant.
In the course of the workshop and the production of this volume we
have received assistance from several research assistants, including Jenny
Barnett, Jorien van Beukering, Isaac Bennett, Imogen Pozzi, Dzmitry
Pravatorau and Michael Brunott. We have also received assistance in
reviewing the volume from three external referees and we thank them for
their feedback and advice, which we hope has strengthened the book.
v
vi PREFACE
Lastly, we thank the team at Palgrave Macmillan and, in particular,

Mala Sanghera-Warren and Bryony Burns, for assisting us along the way
with the production and finalisation of the manuscript.
Brisbane, QLD, Australia Amy L. Hubbell

Brisbane, QLD, Australia Natsuko Akagawa
Brisbane, QLD, Australia Sol Rojas-Lizana
Brisbane, QLD, Australia Annie Pohlman
Contents
1 Acknowledging Trauma in a Global Context: Narrative,

Memory and Place 1
Amy L. Hubbell, Sol Rojas-Lizana, Natsuko Akagawa,
and Annie Pohlman
Part I Memorial Spaces 13
2 Long Tan, Coral-Balmoral and Binh Ba: Remembered,

Unremembered and Disremembered Battlefields from
Australia’s Vietnam War 15
William Logan
3 ‘Difficult Heritage’, Silent Witnesses: Dismembering

Traumatic Memories, Narratives and Emotions of
Firebombing in Japan 37
Natsuko Akagawa
4 No Place to Remember: Haunting and the Search for

Mass Graves in Indonesia 61
Annie Pohlman
vii
viii Contents
5 The Visitor’s Gaze in the Museum of Memory and

Human Rights in Chile 83
Sol Rojas-Lizana
Part II Sites of Trauma 107
6 Remembering World War I in Australia: Hyde Park as

Site of Memory109
Nina Parish and Chiara O’Reilly
7 Sites of Memory, Sites of Ruination in Postcolonial

France and the Francosphere133
Charles Forsdick
8 ‘The Most Intimate Familiarity and the Most Extreme

Existential Alienation’: Ilse Aichinger’s Memories of
Nazi-Era Vienna157
Geoff Wilkes
9 Black Skin as Site of Memory: Stories of Trauma

from the Black Atlantic175
Jarrod Hayes
Part III Traumatic Representations 195
10 Humanitarian Journalism and the Representation of

Survivors of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Mass Violence197
Tiania Stevens
11 Remembering the 5 July 1962 Massacre in Oran, Algeria219

Amy L. Hubbell
12 Cultural Practices as Sites of Trauma and Empathic

Distress in Like Cotton Twines (2016) and Grass between
my Lips (2008)241
Dennis-Brook Prince Lotsu
Contents ix
13 Screen Memories in True Crime Documentary:

Trauma, Bodies, and Places in The Keepers (2017)
and Casting JonBenet (2017)263
Bonnie Evans
14 Chile 1988: Trauma and Resistance in Pablo

Larraín’s No (2012)285
Marguerite La Caze
Index309
Notes on Contributors
Natsuko Akagawa is Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland.

She researches heritage discourse, politics and practice in a global context
and is Series General Editor for Routledge Research on Museums and
Heritage in Asia and a member of the editorial board for Museum History
Journal. Her recent books include Heritage Conservation and Cultural
Diplomacy (Routledge 2015), Safeguarding Intangible Heritage
(Routledge 2019) and Intangible Heritage (2009). She is an Expert
Member for International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS),
International Scientific Committee on Intangible Cultural Heritage for
ICOMOS, a member of the International Council of Museums (ICOM)
and a member of International Committee of Memorial Museums
for ICOM.
Bonnie Evans is a PhD candidate at the School of Communication and
Arts, University of Queensland, with research interests in crime and hor-
ror genres, screen corporeality, film feminisms, and documentary. Her
doctoral thesis concerns the relationship between embodiment, feminism,
violence, and genre in recent film and television.
Charles Forsdick is James Barrow Professor of French at the University
of Liverpool. He has published on a range of subjects, including travel
writing, colonial history, postcolonial and world literature, and the memo-
rialisation of slavery. Recent books include The Black Jacobins Reader
(Duke University Press, 2016), Toussaint Louverture: Black Jacobin in
an Age of Revolution (Pluto, 2017) and Keywords for Travel Writing
Studies (Anthem Press, 2019). Between 2016 and 2018, Forsdick led
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
an international project, with partners in France and Australia, on

‘“Dark Tourism” in Comparative Perspective: Sites of Suffering,
Sites of Memory’.
Jarrod Hayes is Professor of French Studies at Monash University in
Melbourne, Australia. His research is situated at the intersections of
French postcolonial studies and queer theory. He is the author of Queer
Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb (Chicago, 2000), and his
Queer Roots for the Diaspora, Ghosts in the Family Tree was published by
the University of Michigan Press in 2016. He co-edited, with Margaret
R. Higonnet and William J. Spurlin, Comparatively Queer: Interrogating
Identities across Time and Cultures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). His
current project is titled Reading across the Color Line: Racialization in
the French.
Amy L. Hubbell is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of
Queensland where she teaches French and Francophone literature and
culture. Her research is focused on trauma and memory of the Algerian
War represented in literature and art. She is author of Hoarding Memory:
Covering the Wounds of the Algerian War (2020) and Remembering
French Algeria: Pieds-Noirs, Identity and Exile (2015) and has co-edited
several volumes including The Unspeakable: Representations of Trauma
in Francophone Literature and Art (2013) and Textual and Visual Selves:
Photography, Film and Comic Art in French Autobiography (2011).
Marguerite La Caze is Associate Professor in philosophy at the University
of Queensland. Her publications include Ethical Restoration after
Communal Violence (Lexington, 2018), Wonder and Generosity: Their
Role in Ethics and Politics (SUNY, 2013), The Analytic Imaginary
(Cornell, 2002), Integrity and the Fragile Self, with Damian Cox and
Michael Levine (Ashgate, 2003), the edited collection Phenomenology and
Forgiveness (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018) and articles on
ethics, politics, and aesthetics and the work of a range of European phi-
losophers. She held an Australian Research Council (ARC) Australian
Research Fellowship (2003–2007) and an ARC Discovery grant
‘Ethical restoration after communal violence: a philosophical account’
(2014–2018).
William Logan is Professor Emeritus at Deakin University and fellow of
the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. He was formerly UNESCO
Chair of Heritage and Urbanism at Deakin University, member of the
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Victorian Heritage Council and president of Australia ICOMOS. He

has undertaken UNESCO and ICOMOS missions to Bangladesh,
China, Laos, Pakistan and Vietnam. He has published extensively on
cultural heritage, particularly in relation to human rights, peace and
security; war remembrance, commemoration and memorialisation;
heritage in cities and urban planning; World Heritage; Vietnamese
and other Asian heritage.
Dennis-Brook P. Lotsu is a doctoral candidate in the School of
Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland. He has a Master
of Philosophy in Communication Studies from the School of
Communication Studies, University of Ghana; Bachelor of Arts degree
from the University of Cape Coast, Ghana; and a Post-Graduate Diploma
in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education from the University of
Education, Winneba, Ghana. His research interests are in violence and
trauma representation in African cinema and literature, gender and media
studies, visual culture, cultural phenomenology and strategic
communications.
Chiara O’Reilly is the Director of the Museum and Heritage Studies
program at the University of Sydney. Her research examines cultural insti-
tutions (Galleries, Science Museums and Social History Museums) to
critically consider their history, contemporary role and how their function
changes over time. Her research has been published in the Journal of the
History of Collections, Museum Management and Curatorship and Museums
& Society and she recently co-authored with Anna Lawrenson The rise of
the must-see exhibition: Blockbusters in Australian Museums and Galleries
(Routledge, 2019).
Nina Parish is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the
University of Stirling. She works on representations of difficult history, the
migrant experience and multilingualism in the museum space. Between
2016 and March 2019 she was part of the EU-funded Horizon 2020
UNREST team working on innovative memory practices in sites of
trauma including war museums and mass graves (www.unrest.eu).
She is also an expert on the interaction between text and image in the
field of modern and contemporary French Studies. She has published
widely on this subject, in particular, on the poet and visual artist,
Henri Michaux.
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Annie Pohlman teaches Indonesian at The University of Queensland,

Australia. Her research covers Indonesian history, comparative genocide
studies, torture and gendered experiences of violence. She is author of
Women, sexual violence, and the Indonesian killings of 1965–66 (2015), and
co-editor of a range of volumes on mass violence in Southeast Asia.
Sol Rojas-Lizana teaches Spanish and Cultural Studies at the University
of Queensland. Her areas of research are Discourse Studies in connection
with issues of power, discrimination, memory and trauma from a decolo-
nial perspective. Her work has been published in Journal of Pragmatics,
Critical Discourse Studies, Forensic Linguistics, and Languages in Contrast,
among others. She published The Discourse of Perceived Discrimination:
Perspectives from Contemporary Australian Society (Routledge, 2019).
Sol is also the co-author of the historical Graphic Memoir Historias
Clandestinas (2014) which is currently being made into a film.
Tiania Stevens’ research focuses upon the testimonies of Bosnian Muslim
survivors of concentration camps and questions how both journalists and
journalism can engage ethically and empathetically with the stories survi-
vors have to tell us. Tiania trained at The University of Queensland, com-
pleted a Master’s degree in War Studies at King’s College, University of
London, and has previously worked as a reporter in Bosnia, South Africa,
the Middle East, and the UK.
Geoff Wilkes is a Senior Lecturer in German Studies at the University of
Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. He has published on the novels of
Hans Fallada, Irmgard Keun, Vicki Baum and Bernhard Schlink, and
translated single works by Fallada and Keun, and four works by Ilse
Aichinger (The Greater Hope, Film and Fate: Camera Flashes Illuminating
A Life, Improbable Journeys, and Kleist, Moss, Pheasants).
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 Sennintsuka in Osaka stands on the now peaceful riverbank

where thousands were buried. (Source: Author 2020) 42
Fig. 3.2 The handmade kimono of a 7-month old child donated to
Tokyo daikushu sensai shiryo centre by her 94-year old mother
62 years after she had lost her to the flames. (Source: Author
2018)49
Fig. 4.1 A man standing and pointing into the landscape, Grobogan
regency, Central Java. (Posted on Facebook, 19 February
2018, photograph by Pak Bedjo [used with permission]) 63
Fig. 4.2 A sinkhole in the Gunung Sewu karst region, Central Java.
(Photo by author) 67
Fig. 4.3 Two local men pointing into the landscape, near Kradenan,
Central Java. (Posted on Facebook, 21 February 2018,
photograph by Pak Bedjo [used with permission]) 74
Fig. 5.1 Room ‘Absence and Memory’ at the MMDH
(Archive MMDH) 95
Fig. 6.1 View looking over Hyde Park North, 1937, City of Sydney
Archives: A-00006639 115
Fig. 6.2 Tony Albert, Yininmadyemi Thou didst let fall, 2015,
Installation view, Hyde Park, Sydney, Australia.
Image courtesy of the artist and City of Sydney 124
Fig. 10.1 The media interview survivors of Srebrenica’s genocide
inside the warehouse where thirty-five coffins in Potočari
warehouse await burial on 11 July 2018. (Photo by author) 200
xv
xvi List of Figures
Fig. 10.2 Fikret Alić standing behind barbed wire at Trnopolje

concentration camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina, video footage
taken on 6 August 1992 by ITN News. (Photo published in
Time magazine, 17 August 1992) 205
Fig. 10.3 Fikret Alić posing behind a fence in the same position
he was photographed/filmed on 6 August 1992 by ITN
News. (Photo by The Sun, 31 July 2012) 212
Fig. 11.1 Hamani denies involvement in the massacre. Film still,
Algéries, histoires à ne pas dire (Lledo 2006) 227
Fig. 11.2 Naïri and Kheïr-Eddine discussing communal separation
in the tunnel. Film still (Lledo 2006) 228
Fig. 11.3 Kheïr-Eddine standing in the ruins of La Calère. Film
still (Lledo 2006) 230
Fig. 11.4 Tchitchi looking at the iconic Port of Oran. Film still
(Lledo 2006) 232
Fig. 12.1 Tuigi externalising the trauma of becoming a trokosi.
Film still (Like Cotton Twines 2016) 251
Fig. 12.2 The razor blade, framed in a close shot to evoke empathic
distress. Film still (Grass between my Lips 2008) 254
Fig. 12.3 The motionless body of Tuigi after the procedure.
Film still (Like Cotton Twines 2016) 255
CHAPTER 1
Acknowledging Trauma in a Global Context:

Narrative, Memory and Place
Amy L. Hubbell, Sol Rojas-Lizana, Natsuko Akagawa,

and Annie Pohlman
In all cultures, all languages, and all places, humans suffer trauma. The
ways in which we remember and acknowledge that experience, however,
often depend on the tools individual cultures provide. This book examines
the complex relationship between trauma, memory, place, and narrative in
diverse global contexts. We examine the stories told about the places—real
or imagined—where trauma has been inflicted, the types of traumatic sto-
ries that we are able to tell in certain places, and also how confrontation
with place shapes the memories of trauma. We focus on how traumatic
memory is articulated in diverse and decentred cultural contexts in an
effort to understand how trauma resounds beyond specific cultures. Rather
than being quieted, traumatic memory, both individual and collective,
from survivors, witnesses, readers, viewers, and tourists, is amplified in the
spaces where trauma is recounted and memorialised. We examine a range
A. L. Hubbell (*) • S. Rojas-Lizana • N. Akagawa • A. Pohlman

The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
e-mail: a.hubbell@uq.edu.au; i.rojaslizana@uq.edu.au; n.akagawa@uq.edu.au;
a.pohlman@uq.edu.au
© The Author(s) 2020 1

A. L. Hubbell et al. (eds.), Places of Traumatic Memory,
Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_1
2 A. L. HUBBELL ET AL.
of narrative forms including fiction, documentary film, memorial muse-

ums and monuments, and survivor testimony, from places across six con-
tinents to analyse how narratives of traumatic memory are shaped in, and
by, those places.1
To contextualise the diverse forms of memory explored here, in our
case studies we embrace the paradigm shift occurring in the social sciences
that uncovers and celebrates local and marginalised knowledges. Following
this line of thought, we draw attention to the importance of understand-
ing trauma within its contested contexts, sites or places, and how the
movements and transactions between places shape our memories and the
narratives we produce. In this first chapter, we introduce each of the con-
tributions and the contexts, which span places in Asia, Australia, North
and South America, the Pacific, Africa, and Europe, in an effort to make
peripheral experiences visible. The authors in this book examine a breadth
of narrative forms and variously take up intimate, hidden, collective and
media-driven stories that attempt to memorialise traumatic events.
Trauma, Memorial, Narrative, and Place

Trauma results when violence cannot be accommodated, happens sud-
denly, and is re-experienced in unexpected and uncontrolled ways (Caruth
1996, p. 2). The traumas addressed in this volume are both broad-reaching
incidents embedded in cultural memory such as slavery, wars, dictator-
ships, and genocide, and intimate events such as domestic violence, mur-
der, and torture. To cope with the unpredictable nature of trauma, victims
have long been encouraged to narrate their experience as a way to restore
and control traumatic memory. Jeffrey C. Alexander explains in ‘Toward a
Theory of Cultural Trauma’ that dealing with broad-reaching traumas
requires ‘finding—through public acts of commemoration, cultural repre-
sentation, and public political struggle—some collective means for undo-
ing repression and allowing the pent-up emotions of loss and mourning to
be expressed’ (2004, p. 7). In other words, narration is only part of the
process of recovery; acknowledgement needs to take place for healing and
resolution. In the case of traumatic events that shape national history,
memorials and artistic representations are symbolic forms that accommo-
date painful memory.
Memorial in this book refers to a place dedicated to the commemora-
tion of traumatic memories. Some authors make the distinction between
1 ACKNOWLEDGING TRAUMA IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT: NARRATIVE… 3
memorial as the specific location where atrocities were committed, and

sites of memory as places dedicated to their remembrance. We have left
the definition wide as each case brings forth situated understandings of
place. In some cases, memorials are ‘sites of conscience’ because they
promote the historical perspective of the marginalised and victims, show-
ing what official history would not address. Sometimes imagined sites are
created and imbued with memory because no marker can be found to
articulate specific acts of trauma. In other cases, a physical space gives vis-
ibility to memories of extreme suffering, sometimes within the framework
of national discourses of the past, and at other times within small com-
munities where memorials are created and maintained by locals. Memorials
provide a location for public acknowledgement, as they attempt to con-
tain, reconcile, and repair indelible wounds. Memorials and memory
museums in this sense stand in the gaps where trauma occurred by
offering a physically defined space to an often non-specifically situated
location of terror. These sites provide space for reflection on the experi-
ence of suffering, they can coherently frame trauma, and can be visited in
ways that evoke understanding and raise awareness of past injustice now
situated in present discourses (see, for example, Young 1993, 2016;
Bicknell et al. 2019).
As some of the authors in this volume explore, memorials and memory
museums preserve traumatic history with both short- and long-term
objectives. First, they aim to recognise the human right to memories
which are often denied to persecuted people. As part of the systemic effort
of subjugation and to justify the use of violence, their memories were
sometimes ignored, denied, or distorted. On a fundamental level, these
traumas happened because of the belief that the ultimate expression of
sovereignty resides ‘in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live
and who must die’ (Mbembe 2003, p. 11). The second objective of
memorials is to symbolically ‘compensate’ the victims and survivors, by
honouring the memory through tribute and visibility. In the long-term,
these sites seek to involve people who were not directly affected by the
trauma, those engaged with what LaCapra calls ‘secondary memory’
(1998, p. 20), calling them to commit in the construction of a just and
pacific society that promotes a solid culture of human rights (Estévez
2018). Acknowledging trauma is foundational to that goal. This volume
seeks to examine the ways in which memorials can engage individuals to
collaboratively raise visibility of suffering.
The narratives we examine take many forms, from the guest books in a
memory museum (Rojas-Lizana) to the direct recorded testimony of sur-
vivors and witnesses, both first- and second-hand accounts of the horrific
(Pohlman, Akagawa, Wilkes, Hubbell, Evans, Stevens), as well as fictional
accounts of historical and personal traumas (Hayes, Lotsu, La Caze).
Sometimes those accounts are raw and unfiltered, fragmented and barely
comprehensible, and at other times, there are rehearsed, repeated, and
crafted accounts that relate both accepted national versions of historical
traumas and minor personalised accounts that would otherwise be over-
looked. Sometimes trauma is fictionalised or artistically represented
through literature or film so that truth can emerge publicly, at other times,
documentary and journalistic genres’ painstaking attempt to report the
horrible ‘truth’.
This volume explores diverse spaces in which trauma was experienced
and remembered, from national, geographical, and cultural contexts.
These are tangible places (a tunnel which once separated Arab and
European quarters in Oran), scenes of historic traumatic events (sites of
colonisation, prisons, and slavery), or places that have been expunged or
have been deliberately made inaccessible (a forest where a massacre
occurred, or a city rebuilt after its destruction by bombings). Spaces may
be represented only as ruinous monuments and leftover markers of what
used to be (a mountain of rubble where houses once stood), yet some-
times those spaces are repurposed to reflect on the history contained
within them (a memorial in a city centre). They may be places to which
returns can be made and are in themselves the embodiment of traumatic
memory. They may also be places that exist only in memory or places that
stand in for inaccessible locations. Some of these spaces are transformed by
their visitors (memory museums made into pilgrimage sites). Sometimes
space is a poetically or visually evoked encounter in literature, film, artistic
work, or performance. Place in all such forms activates memory in survi-
vors and witnesses and has the potential to transmit such memory to oth-
ers. Place can both amplify and dissipate the memory of trauma.
Pierre Nora conceived of ‘lieux de mémoire’, as the places ‘where mem-
ory crystallizes and secretes itself’ (1989, p. 7); however, these places are
constructs, ‘created by a play of memory and history,’ ambiguous sites
that come to be invested with ‘a symbolic aura’ (1989, p. 19). While crys-
tallised forms of memory are examined in this volume, the places of mem-
ory studied are not static locations. They are transforming, growing, and
adapting to the discourses emerging around them. They do not arise from
the disappearance of memory but from the urgent and obstinate presence
of trauma. Sites of memory in this study do not only serve as places of
remembrance, but also as sites that validate, denounce, compensate, and
fulfil a duty to honour the victims. These sites contain divergent and con-
tested memories that are not always shared by the imagined communities
within which they are inserted.
Visibility and Acknowledgement, Ruins, and Right

to Memory
Recognition and acknowledgement in the interdependent relationships of

traumatic narrative, memory, and place are central to this volume. By rec-
ognition, we address the political question of who may make claims to the
experience and memory of trauma within particular sites. Recognition and
acknowledgement emerge through monuments, markers, images, and
preserved testimonies that can be disseminated or experienced by those
who do not encounter the trauma first-hand. Within the often highly con-
tested interstices between personal or community claims to traumatic
memory, and the larger memorial cultures of societal symbolic and politi-
cal significance, there are manifold struggles over whose trauma can be
seen and whose cannot. These tensions are frequently situated at sites
where physical ruins remain, whether visible or hidden.
At the heart of this relationship between traumatic narrative, recogni-
tion, acknowledgement, and visibility is the inherent claim of testimony.
As Margaretta Jolly clarifies, ‘what initiates the transformation of story
into testimony is the context of claim. This claim may be general, appeal-
ing for recognition or empathy, or it may be specific, setting out a crime
or abuse, something for which judgment and justice are required’ (2014,
p. 10). Testimony—in oral, textual, artistic, or other forms—creates an
affective and ethical dialectic between traumatic narrative and reception,
that is, an acknowledgement and recognition of trauma. It is this claim,
indeed demand, for a response which defines the inherently political
speech acts of bearing witness to and giving testimony about traumatic
experience (see Coady 1992; Lackey and Sosa 2006; Bufacchi 2013;
Moran 2018). There is always, therefore, either an explicit interlocutor or
audience for such speech acts, whose empathetic engagement is sought
(LaCapra 2001; Gilmore 2003). This demand for engagement and
acknowledgement, however, is fraught; it requires the reader/listener to
move from the position of voyeur or tourist, to a position of obligation, to

bear witness, to respond to this interpellation in some way (Harlow 1987;
Beverley 1989; Oliver 2001, 2004; Dussel 2013). Indeed, the claim for
acknowledgement highlights the fundamental establishment of a social
relationship in the act of giving testimony; the relationship founded
through witnessing and the ‘response-ability’ that witnessing demands
(Oliver 2001; see also Moore and Swanson 2018).
Testimony’s ability to claim recognition and acknowledgement of
trauma, however, is very much exposed to the politics of whose pain is or
can be visible, and whose is not. Some stories and images may traverse
transnational networks of sympathetic and engaged audiences around the
world to have powerful impacts on public opinion, or persuade distant
spectators to give time or money, or to demand redress; most do not. As
Gillian Whitlock (2014, p. 89) explains, these networks rely on a very
‘fragile affective economy’ (see also Whitlock 2007). Networks of human-
itarian benevolence driven by momentary pity or compassion rarely move
beyond spectatorship of others’ pain; at the end of the day, spectators
remain disinterested (Whitlock 2014).
Judith Butler’s work on whose lives are ‘grievable’ (Butler 2004, 2009)
helps to illuminate the vicissitudes that traumatic narratives encounter in
their claims to make visible the lives and stories of others. For Butler, while
all lives are precarious and vulnerable, only certain lives ‘will be highly
protected, and the abrogation of their claims to sanctity will be sufficient
to mobilize the forces of war. Other lives will not find such fast and furious
support and will not even qualify as “grievable”’ (2004, p. 32). When
examining which lives are ‘grievable’, Butler (2004, p. 20), echoing Fanon
(1963), asks the revealing question of who counts as human?
By exploring cases from across the globe, this volume provides a new
examination of how the local context always shapes the memory and nar-
rative of trauma. At the epistemological level, the visibility and acknowl-
edgement of marginalised memories challenge several aspects of
mainstream approaches to memory in Western societies (Maldonado-
Torres 2008; de Sousa Santos 2014). These memories rescue and pro-
mote a view of history from the victims’ perspectives (Pohlman, Akagawa,
Rojas-Lizana), highlighting everyday experiences and showing what main-
stream history ignores.
Despite very specific and localised memories of trauma, memorial cul-
tures are shaped by similar forces globally. There is something uniquely
human across all cultures, regardless of the political context, in the way
that suffering endures in memory, remains embedded in place, and is

transmitted to those who care to see or hear it. The analyses presented in
this book show us that, whether through community-made memorials to
victims of fire-bombings in Japan (Akagawa), or the memory of the
Gestapo headquarters in Vienna (Wilkes), or the efforts to reconstruct a
massacre at the end of the Algerian War (Hubbell), the constant question
remains of who can claim traumatic experience, which narratives are able
to emerge, and among those, which are heard and memorialised.
Volume Overview
In this volume, different places in which trauma has been experienced, and
a variety of forms in which memories of trauma have emerged, been sup-
pressed or re-imagined are considered in relation to a broad range of geo-
political contexts. In Part I, ‘Memorial Spaces’, the contributors are
particularly concerned with highlighting the central role of place in con-
texts that emphasise the nexus between memory and politics. In Part II,
‘Sites of Trauma’, the authors investigate physical and imagined sites of
trauma that attempt to give shape to individual and collective traumatic
memory. Part III, ‘Traumatic Representations’, emphasises the impor-
tance of narrative forms, primarily film and journalism, that memori-
alise trauma.
Part I: Memorial Spaces

The four chapters in Part I explore examples in Vietnam (in relation to
Australia), Japan, Indonesia, and Chile. In each of these cases, significant
traumatic episodes have taken place but the physical sites of traumatic
memory have been intentionally ignored or denied (Logan, Pohlman); or
where the partial memorialisation of traumatic memory has only recently
been possible (Akagawa, Rojas-Lizana). These chapters are particularly
interested in political constructions of collective traumatic memory and
the ways individual and grassroots memory have challenged official state
narratives to provide places for remembering. As Akagawa emphasises in
the case of the decimation of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians
in World War II, individual traumatic memory of such events is not forgot-
ten even when its expression is constrained by authorities’ intent to shape
different national narratives. Local memory centres provide physical space
where survivors and witnesses can relive—or find relief from—their
traumatic memories. Similarly, Rojas-Lizana examines visitor responses to

the Museo de la Memoria (Museum of Memory) in Chile to explore how
visitors do or do not share the traumatic memory of others. Both chapters
point to the power of individuals’ traumatic memories when access to
public spaces is made available, to challenge dominant national narrative.
In Indonesia, as Pohlman reveals, sites of trauma are clearly remembered
by survivors and witnesses despite the fact that these locations, and any
public memorialisation, continue to be suppressed and declared non-
existent. Logan examines a transnational case of suppression, where the
national narrative in one country has been used to deflect attention from
the traumatic memories experienced in another. In each case, asymmetri-
cal power relations have determined the recognition of the existence of
places of traumatic memory.
In Part I, each study explores elements of visibility and acknowledge-
ment which emerge through the ‘obstinate memory’ and the consciously
political ‘memory work’ of everyday people whose direct and inherited
experiences were previously negated or ignored. In some cases, this is due
to limited or non-existent legal justice regarding the crimes committed by
dictatorships. Pohlman documents contemporary efforts by Indonesian
survivors to locate and document the sites of mass graves of victims of the
1965 ‘political genocide’. Similarly, in discursively exploring the visitor
book of the Museum of Memory, Rojas-Lizana finds that everyday people
transform their interaction with the Museum into moments of reflection,
healing, and conversation with the victims whose bodies have never been
found. Akagawa shows how official and international discourse centred on
the atomic bomb have marginalised the local memory of trauma. The
emergence of visibility and acknowledgement aims at exposing injustices
and atrocities, and at finding closure for victims, survivors, and to some
extent, even perpetrators. When unacknowledged, these traumas remain
an open wound affecting a communities’ ability to coexist harmoniously.
The chapters in Part I evidence the development of resourceful and resil-
ient ways of interacting with places of memory, informing areas of research
that have remained relatively unexplored in global discussion.
Part II: Sites of Trauma

How can trauma be represented and acknowledged in ways that lead
towards healing rather than harm? Sometimes art fills that role, as in Jarrod
Hayes’ study of Moi, Tituba, sorcière noire de Salem (I, Tituba, Black Witch
of Salem) by Caribbean author Maryse Condé in the context of recent

political debate on race in the United States. Here we see that sometimes
centuries must pass before the horror can be accommodated, but the
effects of cultural trauma endure and will be embedded into our current
politics until a time when those wounds can be sufficiently confronted.
Hayes examines how black skin itself has become a site of trauma, long
silenced, recently highly mediatised, and not yet healed. History and art
coalesce in Condé’s work to account for the suffering of those who did
not matter and could not speak during slavery and its aftermath.
Geoff Wilkes approaches this question by engaging with Ilse Aichinger’s
highly personal accounts of Austria’s role in the genocide of the Jews dur-
ing the Holocaust to examine representations of place across time. Wilkes
demonstrates how Aichinger’s memory of Nazi-inflicted trauma remains
embedded in the city long after the horrors have ceased and remains
apparent to those who have survived. Aichinger herself turns to watching
films, acknowledging that the art of cinema is the best way for her to
remember and pay tribute to those who did not survive the Holocaust.
Parish and O’Reilly examine physical reminders of trauma in the form of a
site dedicated to the official remembrance of World War I in Australia, and
to show how the seemingly ‘settled’ nature and narrative of these official
sites in fact open up spaces for contention. In the case of Australia, they
show how official discourse regarding World War I has rendered other
conflicts within the country invisible. Forsdick’s contribution extends this
insight by examining how established state-sanctioned memorial practices
can generate or sustain tensions in the afterlives of empires. Drawing on
the example of two reminders of the nineteenth-century colonialism, he
shows how from such ruins alternative narratives can emerge, associated
with new critical and poetic approaches to the traumas of the colonial past.
Part III: Traumatic Representations

In Part III of this book, contributors consider how the unrepresentable
pain of trauma and unspeakable memories can emerge through the artistic
process, whether it be by filming characters in the shadows or from behind,
or depicting ruins while individuals recount memory that does not coin-
cide with what is shown on the screen, or through fragmented narratives
interspersed with other languages, gaps, or voids. Film, photography, and
writing can all be employed to represent what has remained hidden in the
shadows, while ostensibly exposing what can be seen and witnessed. This
is the resistant ‘visible invisibility’ often represented by haunting and ruins

in literary and visual texts (Hochberg 2015) when place in its present form
is insufficient to contain horrific memory. Through the visual representa-
tion of ruins, we see what is often called unspeakable. In documentary,
initial witnesses of trauma reconfigure the events, seeing ghostly re-
enactments on a now devastated landscape, while the listener struggles to
imagine these traumas in a place that no longer resonates with what it
once was. By contrast, in writing, trauma can be represented as absolute
truth in journalism and autobiography or as invention—though some-
times historically accurate.
The dilemma of telling the story of mass trauma to a broader commu-
nity and respecting individual privacy is one that arises in writing as well as
in documentary filmmaking. Stevens questions the ethics behind journal-
ism practices which sometimes unwittingly re-inflict trauma on survivors
who testify to atrocities, in specifically examining the case of the Bosnian
genocide in 1995. In Hubbell’s examination of a documentary explora-
tion of a past massacre, we also see the re-traumatisation of those who
testify and the fear of exposure the witnesses must face. Stevens critically
questions the reduction of victims to unidimensional survivors without
consideration of their past and present contexts, calling on journalists’
practice to recognise more fully the reality of what it is to live a life after
atrocity. This would humanise all participants and help with their healing.
In addition to the ability of place to amplify trauma, the chapters in this
section consider the question of who ‘is allowed’ to testify, and for whom
are these traumatic stories being told. Each study focuses on a narrative
given by a person deemed capable of speaking and worthy of being
recorded and disseminated. Lotsu’s chapter on violence against women in
Ghanaian cinema questions the role of director Leila Djansi, as distributor
of this history. A native Ghanaian living and working primarily in the
United States with a broad distribution network, her work reaches well
outside Ghana which raises the question of who forms the audience for
these testimonials. In Hubbell’s chapter, the witnesses who testify about a
massacre choose to not say, not remember, or not be filmed remembering
or speaking about the 1962 murders they witnessed or sometimes only
heard about; each witness questions to whom can and should these stories
be told. In Evans’ study of the filmic representations of Jon Benet Ramsey’s
murder in 1996 and the murder of Sister Cathy Cesnik in 1968, we see the
privileged position of narrative given to the spectacular murders of a child
beauty queen and a nun in the US. These individual narratives were so
compelling that they garnered a huge amount of media coverage at the

time of the events and inspired two films released in 2017. La Caze exam-
ines how trauma is represented in the film No (2012), a fictionalised
account of the 1988 plebiscite on Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. La
Caze proposes that the opportunity to acknowledge trauma through the
media was sacrificed in favour of a narrative of promised happiness in order
to convince people, despite their fear, to vote ‘no’ to the continuation of
Pinochet’s rule.
All chapters in this volume remind us that only some are able and
allowed to speak. The silenced ones, those who did not survive, can only
be accounted for through imagined, reconstructed accounts created by
witnesses—loved ones or strangers—who remember those who are
silenced by trauma. Not all can be heard and inevitably some, if not many
or most, will be forgotten. It is in part our goal to understand how those
who suffered can best be acknowledged so that those horrors are not
reproduced.
Note
1. This volume arose from a symposium held at The University of Queensland
in July 2018 with support from the School of Languages and Cultures
Strategic Research Fund.
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PART I
Memorial Spaces
CHAPTER 2
Long Tan, Coral-Balmoral and Binh Ba:

Remembered, Unremembered
and Disremembered Battlefields
from Australia’s Vietnam War
William Logan
The past few years have seen a burgeoning of studies about how difficult
events in the past have been remembered and memorialised, or forgot-
ten—even deliberately disremembered—and their physical marks on the
ground left to disappear. As Keir Reeves and I remarked in our edited
book Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with ‘Difficult Heritage’ (2009,
p. 1), ‘Most societies have their scars of history resulting from involve-
ment in war and civil unrest or adherence to belief systems based on intol-
erance, racial discrimination or ethnic hostilities’. The scope for research is
vast, varied and complex.
Some war events, notably battles and prisoner of war camps, fit this dif-
ficult category. This chapter focuses on the former, prompted by field
observation that some battles and battlefields take on iconic status to one
W. Logan (*)
Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
e-mail: William.logan@deakin.edu.au

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_2
16 W. LOGAN
side of the conflict or the other and play a vital and continuing role in the
reconciliation and other international relations between former belliger-
ents, while others are simply relegated to the past. In order to explore the
reasons for this, my chapter looks at battlefields from the Vietnam War
(1955–1975), where Australian troops directly engaged enemy forces—
the Viet Cong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA). A minor ally of
the United States in that war, Australia stationed its troops in Phuoc Thuy
Province with the role of securing the eastern advances to Saigon (today’s
Ho Chi Minh City), against incursions by the VC from their main base at
Minh Dam on the coastal peninsula to the east and the 33 NVA Regiment
based in the north of the province.
Several battles between Australian and enemy troops occurred, helping
to make Vietnam a country that has more than its share of scars of history.
Among these, three battles have been selected—Long Tan, Coral-Balmoral
and Binh Ba—because of the different ways in which they have been
accepted into the Australian national narrative. The Battle of Long Tan
has come to represent the whole Vietnam War for most Australians,
whereas the Battles of Coral-Balmoral and Binh Ba are largely forgotten—
indeed disremembered in the latter case—even though they were probably
more important in terms of military outcome. The chapter aims to explain
this divergence in remembrance by considering how the commemoration
and memorialisation processes operate, who leads the processes, and for
what purposes.
The chapter is based on a variety of sources and methods. These include
the analysis of war writings by former combatants and others over the
almost 50 years since Australia joined the Vietnam war, and a project I led
on the theme of ‘Australians at war’ for the Australian Department of the
Environment and Heritage that involved focus group discussions in
Canberra and Melbourne (Logan et al. 2005). My field observations in
Phuoc Thuy Province provided other data, as did the interviews I con-
ducted over the past decade with some of the actors, both Australian and
Vietnamese, and both in Australia and Vietnam, including some of the 30
or so Vietnam veterans now living in and around Vung Tau, the principal
town in the area. The chapter also draws on two of my other works on
Vietnam: one written with Professor Andrea Witcomb dealing with Long
Tan and issues of reconciliation and historical justice (Logan and Witcomb
2013); and the other focusing on heritage-management issues at Dien
Bien Phu and Long Tan (Logan 2016).
2 LONG TAN, CORAL-BALMORAL AND BINH BA: REMEMBERED… 17
The chapter also builds on my earlier discussion of key concepts in the

Australians at War Thematic Study and an article on bushfires in Victoria
that was published in a special ‘catastrophes’ issue of the journal National
Identities in 2015. That article seeks to understand how the processes of
commemoration and memorialisation operate in relation to bushfires.
Clearly there are similarities between bushfires and war as catastrophes,
including in the Australian instance how they contribute to the construc-
tion of national identity. The article starts by noting that:
Dealing with the suffering caused by catastrophes, whether they are wars,
genocides or terrorist atrocities, tornadoes or floods, usually involves mov-
ing beyond individual memories to some form of collective commemoration
and memorialisation of the human and environmental loss that has occurred.
Laying to rest the bodies of the victims and remembering their lives in eulo-
gies and obituaries are common immediate responses; in the longer term,
annual services, pilgrimages and the writing of books are common forms of
commemoration, while epitaphs, cairns, shrines and other monuments are
erected to memorialise the dead or the event and place in which they died.
(Logan 2015, p. 155)
Thus, commemoration is how nations and other collectives deal with the
trauma caused by catastrophes and sometimes commemoration activities
are conducted at the place where the catastrophe occurred. Memorialisation
follows when particular sites of commemoration are selected for the erec-
tion of physical reminders of human loss and trauma. Since there are often
few physical structures left after battles and bushfires that might serve as
aides-mémoire to a forgetful public, memorialisation usually means the
creation of new monuments.
Memorialising Long Tan

The story of the August 1967 battle has been retold in many places.
Briefly, Long Tan was a small village surrounded by rubber plantations
and close to Nui Dat where the Australian Task Force arrived in May 1967
to set up its base. The villagers had been driven out by the Americans
(Burstall 1993, p. 70). The Australians had scarcely landed in Vietnam
when the battle occurred—essentially a surprise affair, the result of a Viet
Cong ambush in a rubber plantation. Seven regular soldiers and 11
National Servicemen were killed; 16 died instantly (15 in the rubber plan-
tation, 1 in another ambush at a nearby bridge) and 2 died later in
18 W. LOGAN
hospital. All the casualties were repatriated and, since Australia has no
national cemetery (unlike Arlington in the USA or Fréjus in France), they
were buried in their own states. The men were aged 19–22 years.
In the years following the Battle of Long Tan, many of the Australian
troops fell into a desperate silence and depression, a condition that wors-
ened for many on their return to Australia when they received hostile
treatment from some elements of the public and a perceived belittling by
the national government and the Returned Soldiers’ League. However,
some took action by taking recourse to processes of commemoration and
memorialisation. During his unit’s second tour of duty in 1969, Sergeant
Major James Cruickshank of the 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment
(6RAR) decided to erect a cross on the Long Tan battle site to pay tribute
to the 18 comrades who had perished. The cross was raised in the middle
of the rubber plantation in time for the third anniversary of the battle on
18 August 1969.
The original cross was subsequently removed and effectively lost for
20 years. Although the Australian and Vietnamese accounts of its recovery
differ, it ended up in the Dong Nai Museum in Bien Hoa, a city north of
Saigon (Logan and Witcomb 2013). A replacement cross was made for
the Long Tan memorial site. The original cross was loaned to the Australian
War Memorial from August 2012 to April 2013 after which it was returned
to the Dong Nai Museum. I return to the story of the cross later in the
chapter.
Unremembering Coral-Balmoral
The second battlefield case study is Coral-Balmoral named after two Fire
Support Patrol Bases that were less than five kilometres apart and 20 kilo-
metres north of Bien Hoa. The battle here was fought intermittently
between 12 May and 6 June 1968 and was, according to the Australian
War Memorial, Australia’s ‘largest, most sustained and arguably most haz-
ardous battle of the Vietnam War’ (AWM 2018). A combined force of
over 2500 Australians and New Zealanders was involved, initially in
response to North Vietnamese attacks on the Coral base and later on at
Balmoral. A combination of infantry, tanks, artillery and mortars repelled
the enemy, but not before 26 Australian soldiers were killed—11 on the
first night of fighting—and 100 wounded. More than 300 North
Vietnamese soldiers perished.
The battlefield has reverted to rubber plantations (McKay 2003,

pp. 158–59). Despite the battle’s length and toll of dead and wounded,
there is nothing at the site today to show for Australia’s engagement here
other than a few bomb craters among the trees. The battle itself is simply
unremembered. On the other side, however, the Vietnamese government
constructed a large monument in honour of the Viet Cong ‘martyrs’
where Coral used to be located.
Disremembering Binh Ba
Binh Ba is five kilometres north of Nui Dat, located on what, in 1969, was
designated Route 2 (now National Route 56). It was a small rubber plan-
tation village of around 3000 farmers and plantation workers (O’Neill
1968, pp. 30, 66; McKay 2003, p. 103). The road system was well laid out
and lined with about 40 carefully maintained houses. There were also a
school and a Catholic church (Elias and Broadbent 1980). The area was
officially, if not very effectively, under the control of the South Vietnamese
army—the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARNV)—whose post was
half a kilometre to the north.
It is unclear what strategy, if any, lay behind two Australian armoured
vehicles being fired upon as they passed through the village on the morn-
ing of 6 June 1969 (Ekins 2012, pp. 211–13). But it led to an Australian
intervention ‘to destroy the enemy in Binh Ba’ (Ekins 2012, p. 213).
Australian infantry, armour, and helicopters of the 5th Battalion, Royal
Australian Regiment (5RAR), were called in to prosecute Operation
Hammer, as the Battle of Binh Ba was officially known. They fought a
much larger force comprising NVA Regiment 33 and VC on 6 June with
clean-up operations on 7 and 8 June. This proved to be the largest tank
battle since World War II. There was also sustained close-quarter house-
to-house fighting. Ekins (2012, p. 213) notes that ‘None of the Australians
had any experience in street fighting in towns, and they faced the opera-
tion with reluctance’.
The NVA/VC strategy clearly failed and at least 107 of their soldiers
were killed, six wounded and eight taken as prisoners of war, while another
28 male villagers were detained (Ekins 2012, p. 224). It is claimed that the
NVA and VC soldiers were disguising themselves in civilian clothes taken
from the abandoned houses, so they could mingle with the villagers and
escape (McKay 2003, p. 111). In fact, most village men were farmers by
day and VC soldiers by night. On the Australian side, by comparison, the
20 W. LOGAN
casualties were light: one killed and ten wounded (McKay and Nichols
2001, p. 212). The grossly disproportionate death tolls and some difficult
questions raised concerning the Australian troop’s actions, which I will
explain later, have led to Binh Ba being actively disremembered.
Australian State Involvement

The role of the Australian state in memorialisation and commemorative
practices in the case of Long Tan was embedded in the complex diplo-
matic context that prevailed in the aftermath of the Vietnam War (Logan
and Witcomb 2013, p. 265). By the time of Australia’s withdrawal from
Vietnam in 1971 there was a growing consensus that Australia had a heavy
responsibility for what had happened to the Vietnamese people. This
began to influence foreign policy regarding Vietnam under Australian
Labor Party Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam (1972–1975). Whitlam’s
government established diplomatic links with Vietnam, opening an
embassy in Hanoi in 1973—one of the earliest Western embassies in the
city—and permitted South Vietnamese refugees to enter Australia.
To an extent, this sense of atonement cut across political lines and
Whitlam’s policies were continued by his successor, Malcolm Fraser, prime
minister of the conservative Liberal–Country Party coalition (1975–1983).
Fraser was later to explain in his memoirs that ‘we’ve just got an ethical
obligation. We were fighting alongside these people in Vietnam’ (Fraser
and Simons 2010, p. 420). Fraser therefore increased support for refugees
and backed Vietnam’s admission into the United Nations in 1977. Later,
when Labor was re-elected under Prime Minister Bob Hawke (1983–1991),
foreign aid to Vietnam was restored. In his memoirs, Hawke explained his
thinking on this:
Australia had been party to the emergence of the present turmoil. … On

coming to government I believed we owed it to the people of the region and
to Australia to play a positive role in attempting to secure a saner future.
(Hawke 1994, p. 223)
Similarly, the ALP government under Paul Keating (PM 1991–1996)

increased economic aid in 1992, adding education and training packages
to the mix as well as urban planning and heritage protection in Hanoi
(Logan 2020).
Connections between local Vietnamese and Australians were increasing

in other spheres, too. Of particular importance in the bridge-building pro-
cess was the Australian Vietnam Volunteers Resource Group (AVVRG), a
non-governmental organisation established in 1990 (Logan and Witcomb
2013, p. 262). Working with the Vietnam Union of Friendship and the
Long Dat District People’s Committee, it undertook several projects
needed by the local community, such as an orphanage, kindergarten, med-
ical centre, and dental clinic. In 2002, AVVRG representatives and
Australian consular personnel were invited by the Vietnamese authorities
to a ceremony where the management of the Long Tan site and the cross
was officially handed over to the AVVRG. Thus, the AVVRG, rather than
the consulate, became ‘official keeper of the cross’ (ADCC n.d.). This
arrangement seemed to work well for both sides: for the Australian gov-
ernment, it avoided the necessity of official negotiations and red tape,
while it also avoided putting the Vietnamese government in the difficult
situation of ceding control of this piece of territory to a foreign state.
Vietnamese State Involvement

Vietnamese veterans of the battles and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam
have, of course, different motivations for wanting to remember the war
and the three sites of battle. Vietnamese commemoration of dead NVA
and VC soldiers occurs at state-run war cemeteries and a few memorial
sites, including Binh Ba. The main place for memorialising the Viet Cong
is, however, at Minh Dam, site of the VC’s secret base in the Long Hai
hills on the peninsula east of Vung Tau. Added complexity stems from the
fact that the Vietnam War was both an international and a civil war.
Shadows of the civil war continue to be felt today because the winning side
still controls the reunified state. The national government enforces adher-
ence (at least publicly) to the state’s official narrative, fails to recognise
officially that losses occurred on both sides of the civil war, and refuses to
grant the supporters of the southern Republic of Vietnam the right to
memorialise their war dead (Nguyen-Vo 2005, p. 160; Schwenkel 2006,
p. 71; Logan and Witcomb 2013, p. 271).
Unsurprisingly, the Vietnamese government is very sensitive about for-
mer enemies having formal memorials on its soil. This was well under-
stood by Australia, an internal diplomatic communication in 2002 from
Australia’s Hanoi embassy to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
in Canberra advising that:
22 W. LOGAN
Australia’s handling of the issues will continue to require a deft touch for
some time to come. The Vietnamese side appears happy to continue
permitting Australian access to the site as long we maintain a low-key, largely
unofficial, and above all respectful approach. (DFAT 2002)
As previously noted, in 2002 the non-governmental AVVRG had been

permitted to organise commemorative ceremonies at Long Tan. After fur-
ther discussions, the local Vietnamese authorities in 2006 allowed the
Australian Consulate-General in Ho Chi Minh City to take charge of cer-
emonies on behalf of the Australia government. In fact, Australia’s mili-
tary attaché based in the Australian Embassy in Hanoi did most of the
organisation, with AVVRG providing the on-the-spot caretaker in the
form of Graeme (‘Breaker’) Cusack, former 1st Platoon Commander
6RAR who has lived in the area since 2004. But although the AVVRG
looks after the site, the local Vietnamese police still control access to it.
The ceremonies were permitted, however, only under a set of protocols
designed to limit proceedings tightly. No medals or uniforms were to be
worn (although this was relaxed from 2007), no flags were to be raised or
displayed, no music was to be played, and any speeches had to be low-key
and short. Groups visiting the site could not be larger than 20–30. Visitors
were required to obtain a permit from the local police. Tour companies
were therefore unable to engage in largescale tourism at the site and per-
manent signage could not be put up to interpret the site’s significance.
Despite these restrictions, the number of visitors at the two ceremonies
grew to more than 600 by 2015, suggesting a looming need to renegoti-
ate the protocols.
At Coral-Balmoral, as at Long Tan, Australians wanting to visit the
battlefield must also obtain formal approval at the local police station.
Visitor numbers are few as there is little for Australians to see and no cer-
emonies are conducted. Similarly, there is no Australian memorial at Binh
Ba and few visitors. By contrast there are regular Vietnamese veteran
reunions at Binh Ba in a well-maintained memorial compound containing
numerous epitaphs, a Temple to the Martyrs where the names and home
villages of the dead NVA soldiers are inscribed on memorial walls, and a
mass burial place that is covered these days with flowering plants forming
the Vietnamese star. In 2011 I went to the memorial compound with a
local Vietnamese guide, Khong Quoc Thuan, to observe not only the
place but also his interpretation of it. He recalled (or perhaps had heard)
that Vietnamese newspapers in 1969 expressed outrage about the ‘Ba
Binh atrocities committed by Australian soldiers’, especially the burial of

the Vietnamese dead in a mass grave, although he conceded that this was
probably necessary because the climate and wartime context made speed
necessary.
The official interpretation given in the compound’s meeting room,
however, does not portray the site as one of defeat but one of honourable
sacrifice. The mass grave at Binh Ba has been identified as a highly impor-
tant heritage site by the Vietnamese authorities and is carefully managed.
In fact, most of the bodies in the mass grave have been returned to war
cemeteries or family plots in the North. The only Australian presence at
the site is references on plaques to ‘Uc’ (Vietnamese for ‘Australia’) as ‘US
running dog’ and a few unofficial letters by and photos of visiting
Australian veterans pinned up in the meeting room. The letters express the
hope for reconciliation, peace and harmony.
Fitting the Battles into Australian and Vietnamese

National Narratives
Long Tan
Vietnam’s Long Tan gradually became caught up in the nation-building
efforts of successive Australian governments. Prime ministers have taken a
personal lead in this, seeking to shape, or more properly, reshape the
nation in their favoured mould (Logan and Witcomb 2013, p. 267).
Tapping into popular sentiment in favour of honouring fallen soldiers—
always in foreign lands and seas in Australia’s case—prime ministers have
made numerous visits to battlefields over the last 20 years, setting up
memorials and encouraging pilgrimage tourism: John Howard at Gallipoli
and Long Tan, Paul Keating at Hellfire Pass on the Thai-Burma Railway,
Kevin Rudd at Kokoda in Papua-New Guinea, Julia Gillard in Korea, and
Tony Abbott at Villers-Bretonneux on the Western Front.
Australian governments have had a particular long-standing interest in
Anzac Cove at Gallipoli, a World War I Turkish site that has acquired leg-
endary status not only for the battle’s huge death toll but also because of
the way in which Australians (and New Zealanders, hence ‘Anzacs’) were
seen to have displayed key qualities of their national character, notably
mateship and determination. Australian governments, aided by the mili-
tary services and veteran bureaucracy in Canberra, have fitted Long Tan
24 W. LOGAN
into this Anzac mould. An ABC News item at the time of the Long Tan
Day on 18 August 2016 brings a David and Goliath interpretation to the
forefront in its banner heading ‘The battle of Long Tan: How 100
Australian soldiers held off 2000 Viet Cong’, before going on to assert
that it ‘could have been an Australian military disaster, but it is instead
remembered as a decisive victory’ (ABC News 2016). Such bravery was
rewarded by the bestowal of Long Tan battle honour in 1983 to the 3rd
Cavalry and Royal Australian Regiments (Ekins 2012, p. 815).
On the Vietnamese side, Australia’s memorialisation of the Long Tan
battle was accepted because it helped attract Australian development aid
and business investment. To have allowed foreigners to celebrate a victory
over the Vietnamese on Vietnamese soil would not, however, have fitted
with the story of the war that the government and military want remem-
bered. So, instead, they portrayed Long Tan as their victory—‘a death
blow to the mercenary expeditionary army’ (Ho 1995, p. 280), that
proved the VC had the ‘resilient fighting spirit to defeat any enemy, under
any conditions’ (Nguyen 2002, p. 183).
Coral-Balmoral
The Vietnam Battle Honours Committee also decided in 1983 to award
the Coral-Balmoral battle honour to the Royal Australian Regiment
(RAR), the 1st Armoured Regiment and the 3rd Cavalry Regiment.
Twenty-five years later, in 2008, the Honour Title ‘Coral’ was awarded to
the RAR’s 102nd Field Battery. For the fiftieth anniversary on 13 May
2018 a commemoration service was held at the Australian Vietnam Forces
National Memorial on Anzac Parade in Canberra. An article by David
Ellery in the Canberra Times giving background to the service included
the sentence:
Even after almost four weeks of intense fighting, which had resulted in some
of the worst Australian losses of the war, the diggers were still able to dis-
cover a common humanity when they came face-to-face with their wounded
and captured North Vietnamese Army (NVA) opponents. (Ellery 2018)
Photos showed Australian soldiers treating the wounds of captured VNA

men who seemed to be little more than boys. Although there were more
than ten times as many Vietnamese as Australians killed, and many buried
in mass graves, it has been possible to absorb the Battle of Coral-Balmoral
into the Australian narrative of the noble warrior.
Binh Ba
Even though the Binh Ba battle honour was awarded to the same regi-
ments in 1983, the Battle of Binh Ba could not be fitted into the Anzac
legend. It seems to have been much more complex and more detailed
analysis is needed in order to explain why, if it was a more militarily signifi-
cant battle than Long Tan, it is ignored in the annual calendar of Australian
military celebrations and almost unknown among the Australian gen-
eral public.
Remembrance of the Battle of Binh Ba was muddied in mid-1980 when
the Nation Review and an ABC Nationwide current affairs program raised
the possibility that there were unnecessary civilian deaths in the rather
heavy-handed attack on Binh Ba village. The story was picked up by the
Melbourne newspaper, The Age, under the banner ‘Veterans deny massa-
cre’ (Elias and Broadbent 1980). The Nation Review claimed that 50–100
men, women, and children had died in the battle. There is ‘mounting
evidence’, it said, ‘to suggest at worst it was a massacre and at the very best
an almighty army overkill. The tanks went in about midday and shot
everything that moved in the village’ (cited in Elias and Broadbent 1980).
This line of criticism was followed up by Terry Burstall in Vietnam: The
Australian Dilemma (1993, pp. 213–17), where he comments on the
inconsistency in the stated numbers of enemy killed and the lack of a pub-
lic record on the amount of weapons and equipment captured. Relying on
an American report, he suggested that many of the dead may have been
unarmed civilians (Burstall 1993, pp. 213–14).
The Nation Review and The Age articles and the ABC report led to
questions being asked in the Australian parliament. They received an angry
response from Vietnamese veterans, many of whom seem to have gone
into a state of denial that continues today. When the first histories of
Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War appeared, they left out these
accusations. The prominent website of the Australia Day Commemoration
Committee, which oversees Anzac Day events in Queensland as well as
looking after the interests of veterans, still has an article on Ba Binh writ-
ten by ex-Vietnam colonel, Arthur Burke. Entitled ‘D-Day 25 years on—
The battle of Binh Ba’, the article seeks to retrofit Binh Ba into a story of
glorious military actions: ‘Twenty-five years after the Allied landing at
Normandy on 6 June 1944, another military force also crossed a start line
and advanced into history at the small rubber plantation village of Binh Ba
in South Vietnam’ (Burke n.d.). Burke portrays some of the horror of the
final day of battle, but it is largely a picture of wrongdoing on the other
26 W. LOGAN
side. No mention is made of the alleged atrocities wreaked by the

Australians on civilians or of the burial of the dead soldiers in a mass grave
in front of the primary school.
The final volume of the official history of Australia’s involvement in
Southeast Asian conflicts from 1948 to 1975 includes a brief paragraph on
‘atrocity claims and counterclaims’ at the end of 30 pages on Binh Ba
(Ekins 2012, pp. 210–40). It acknowledges that the dispute has ‘persisted
virtually to the present day’ and quotes one veteran, Frank Frost, as saying
that ‘there is no evidence to suggest that Australian forces knowingly
killed unarmed civilians, let alone conducted a “massacre”’ (Frost 1987,
p. 121). There is no analysis of the evidence and yet, in the last line of the
caption to a photograph (Ekins 2012, p. 225), the author concludes that
‘The publication of images like this appeared to lend weight to later
unsubstantiated allegations that the action in Binh Ba involved the delib-
erate massacre of innocent villagers’ (Ekins 2012, p. 225).
Changing Times
In contrast to Australia’s commemoration and memorialisation at Long
Tan, the Vietnamese chose to remember their battle dead away from the
battlefield in cemeteries and family homes, although an urn to hold prayer
sticks was set up in front of the cross in 2002. Two recent actions, how-
ever, have had a major impact on Australian commemoration at the Long
Tan memorial site and suggest that the Vietnamese authorities are starting
a process of disremembrance of Long Tan from their own side.
The fiftieth Long Tan anniversary service planned for 18 August 2016
was cancelled at the last minute on orders from Hanoi and a ban on official
ceremonies was instigated that seems to be continuing. The cancellation
was initially met with outrage from many veterans and their organisations
and apparently Prime Minister Turnbull made top-level contact with
Hanoi to seek reconsideration (Broinowski 2016). Australia’s official
response was necessarily muted and Veterans’ Affairs minister, Dan Tehan,
could do little more than acknowledge that ‘While disappointing, we
respect Vietnam’s right as a sovereign nation to determine the nature of
commemorations held on its soil’ (The Guardian 2017). The Vietnamese
relented to the extent of allowing a small group to meet quietly at the site,
but without uniforms, medals or music.
The second recent event suggesting the Vietnamese now want to disre-
member Long Tan was the Vietnamese government’s gifting of the origi-
nal Long Tan cross to Australian War Memorial in November 2017
(Hunter 2017). The decision was taken in the lead-up to the APEC sum-
mit meeting that was about to take place in Vietnam’s port city, Danang
(Scott 2017), but was kept secret for a month, one online source quoting
the AWM director, Brendan Nelson, as saying that this was due to the
sensitivities around the issue (Seniors Newspaper 2017).
These events suggest that for the Vietnamese, Long Tan as an Australian
memory site is no longer useful. Other mechanisms now exist to ensure
good trade links and the Long Tan battle story does not fit the Hanoi
government’s narrative. It is more useful to sweep it under the carpet,
another move to eliminate the bitter past of the Vietnam War and, most
importantly, its civil war elements. This is like the Vietnamese govern-
ment’s longstanding and still unwavering policy of denying special ceme-
teries, memorials and regiment-labelled headstones to soldiers who died
fighting in the southern army. These policies are open to interpretation:
critics say they represent a denial of human rights; others say they are nec-
essary to create a unified nation. They aid forgetting, which does allow
people to ‘live their lives and overcome nostalgia for the past or a crippling
loss’ (Benton and Cecil 2010, p. 17).
On the Australian side, by contrast, Long Tan is not to be forgotten.
The Australian Prime Minister (2015–2018), Malcom Turnbull, wel-
comed the return of the cross as ‘a great act of generosity’ (Scott 2017).
Since official Long Tan Day services now take place only in Australia, at
the national parliament and Australian War Memorial, it may be that the
main service will take place at the latter where the cross now stands. A few
lone voices, such as that of Terry Burstall, have tried to show how
Australian actions at Long Tan were ‘much more brutal and repressive’
than generally pictured (1993, p. 73). Richard Broinowski, former
Australian Ambassador to the Social Republic of Vietnam 1983–1985,
tried to expose the ‘unedifying aspect of Australian military culture—a
compulsive need to glorify the deeds of the Australian digger, sometimes
beyond accuracy’ (Broinowski 2016). Like Burstall, Broinowski argues for
better balance in the story of Long Tan. Certainly, Australian soldiers were
brave and fought professionally against daunting odds and they tried to
save the South Vietnamese from communist aggressors, but, he says:
What many of them did not know, or chose to ignore, was that the centre of
South Vietnamese power was just as anti-democratic as the North. It was
corrupt, controlled and manipulated by an outside power, and the locals
were sick of being herded into strategic hamlets and shot at or bombed
when they refused to stay there. (Broinowski 2016)
28 W. LOGAN
He sees it as inevitable that the Vietnamese government would react

against the growing numbers, pomp, and commercialisation of the
Australian services at the Long Tan memorial site and withdraw its support.
Conclusions
Divergence in Remembrance
The three battlefields have been remembered in different and changing
ways. Until 2016 Long Tan was the focus of Australia’s commemoration
and memorialisation for the whole of its engagement in the Vietnam War.
Of course, conducting commemorative services on Vietnamese soil had
always portrayed arrogance and insensitivity on Australia’s part and it was
inevitable that it would be rejected at some point by the Vietnamese gov-
ernment. While the replica memorial cross still stands at Long Tan and
remains the setting for small, unofficial gatherings on Anzac Day and
Long Tan Day, the future of these on-site ceremonies is now unclear.
Certainly, the principal Long Tan commemoration services will be held in
Canberra. By contrast, and notwithstanding the belated 50th anniversary
service in Canberra in May 2018, Coral-Balmoral remains largely unre-
membered. Binh Ba, meanwhile, is disremembered, the Australian gov-
ernment and its military and veteran affairs advisors having chosen not to
become publicly involved in commemorative activities at the controversial
site, leaving any commemorative visits to individual veterans. Until the
truth about the Battle of Binh Ba is settled through more detailed research,
it will remain an uncomfortable event in both Australian and Vietnamese
remembrance of war.
Battlefield Significance
The case studies in this chapter show that two types of significance—mili-
tary and emotional—are particularly relevant in explaining how each bat-
tlefield is remembered. Given the ultimate loss of the United States and its
allies in the Vietnam War, none of the battles fought by Australian soldiers
in Vietnam had great military significance. At most they held back the
enemy, slowing its advance towards the victory that came eventually with
the fall of Saigon in 1975 (Ekins 2012, p. 696). Even so, the iconic Battle
of Long Tan seems to have been less militarily significant than Coral-
Balmoral and Binh Ba. It was an unexpected event and not a strategic
manoeuvre, on Australia’s side at least; indeed, the detailed personal

account given by Terry Burstall (1986) shows it to be a reflection of the
early chaos of Australia’s intervention in the war. The Battle of Coral-
Balmoral, which had more casualties on both sides, at least led to enemy
withdrawal from the area. Similarly, at Binh Ba the enemy suffered such
heavy losses that they were forced to leave the province temporarily.
Although Australian forces did encounter enemy units in the remaining
war years, the Battle of Binh Ba marked the end of large-scale clashes
(Ham 2007, p. 484).
Emotional significance seems to be more important in relation to bat-
tlefields. When asked to identify the most important places associated with
the theme, the Australians at War Thematic Study focus groups most
readily named battlefields and related sites such as prisoner of war camps
(Logan et al. 2005, p. 68). To them it was clear that the overseas sites of
active fighting between Australian and enemy forces provided the most
traumatic, life-changing experiences for the large number of Australians
directly engaged in war. Not all of the impact was negative: for many men
and women, war service meant going ‘abroad’ for the first time, experi-
encing foreign environments and cultures, as well as the exhilaration of
meeting the challenge. However, there were also the extreme stress associ-
ated with fighting, the pain and humiliation of imprisonment, and the
grief resulting from the loss of comrades.
In relation to the three Vietnam War battlefields, however, it is fair to
say that because of the vastly smaller death toll, they have not left as large
an emotional scar on the Australian nation as have Gallipoli and the
Western Front from World War I, or, indeed, the Thai-Burma Railway
from World War II. Even so, the loss of lives is always an emotional trigger
for veterans, their families and descendants. Visiting battlefield and related
sites today therefore produces powerful emotional responses from those
men and women whose war service is linked to them (Logan et al. 2005,
p. 68). Moreover, once commemoration activities commence, a battlefield
can take on a life of its own regardless of military importance of the battle
itself, Gallipoli being the prime example, and regardless of the number of
fatalities, as at Long Tan. Their incorporation into official and popular
interpretations of Australian national identity, often mythologised, such as
the Anzac legend, facilitates this process and strengthens the subsequent
impact on political decision-making and social, cultural and economic
developments (Logan et al. 2005, p. 71).
30 W. LOGAN
Commemoration and Memorialisation Processes

Long Tan and Binh Ba tell a tale, not of site significance in the usual way
the heritage profession has come to use the term in the heritage profession
(see, for example, Australia ICOMOS 2013), but of agency. This was
agency at the level of individuals in the case of Long Tan—Australian sol-
diers taking action themselves rather than waiting for others, in particular
governments, to take the lead. Inevitably, Australian governments and
their agencies were drawn into the story at Long Tan, although preferring
to operate quietly and often through unofficial agents. This appears to be
a common process, repeated at Dien Bien Phu, the second of only two
foreign memorials in Vietnam, where a small French memorial was initially
erected on the initiative of a single soldier, Foreign Legionnaire Rolf
Rodel, but where eventually the French government was drawn into the
main caretaker role (Logan and Nguyen 2012, p. 48). Individual agency
also led to the building of memorials to dead soldiers on the Thai-Burma
Railway (Witcomb 2016) and at Kapyong from the Korean war
(Ziino 2014).
With the Australian state taking charge of memorialisation at the site,
the Long Tan battle could be fitted into the Anzac legend and the pattern
set at Gallipoli could be followed in which its soldiers were portrayed as
the victims of war. Long Tan was a baptism of fire, the new boys barely
landed in Vietnam. By contrast, by mid-1969 when the Battle of Binh Ba
took place, the Australian Army in Vietnam had reached its peak strength
of almost 7000 personnel (Ekins 2012, p. 195). Long Tan was able to be
used by politicians, government agencies, and veterans’ groups in ways
that Coral-Balmoral and especially Binh Ba could not. The Long Tan bat-
tlefield came to play a vital role in reconciliation with Vietnam and in other
international relations between the former belligerents, including trade.
By contrast, there had been no commemorative actions by individual sol-
diers at either Coral-Balmoral or Binh Ba and the Australian authorities
have seen no advantage in starting any.
The processes of remembrance and forgetting are often politically
motivated and commemoration and memorialisation activities can be used
to support government nation-building goals but also for point-scoring
between rival political parties. Australian prime ministers have often taken
a leading role in promoting commemoration and memorialisation at bat-
tlefield sites. Other ministers followed suit, leading one Vietnam veteran
to complain publicly that ‘These “commemorations” all too often turn
into a celebration and more particularly one long photo opportunity for
politicians’ (cited in Daley 2011).
The media play a major part in promoting the commemoration pro-
cess. There are countless newspaper articles and television news reports,
documentaries and drama series about the Vietnam War and they exert a
clear influence on popular attitudes and political decision making. War
sells, and one reason given for the unremembrance of Coral-Balmoral was
that it was not sensational enough to have captured media attention: the
battle was seen as ‘no big deal’ in the strategic sense and casualties were
light (Mills 2018). But even when the media saw war stories selling news-
papers or advertising space, they could never fully convey the horror expe-
rienced by soldiers who fought in the battles in Vietnam, and reporters
have faced criticism from Daley (2011), Broinowski (2016), and others
for falling back on clichéd and jingoistic renditions of events.
The Future?
The meaning of wartime events is very often contested and ‘for com-
memorative events the level of contestation may be very high and difficult
to resolve’ (Frost and Laing 2013, p. 1). Australian historian of war, Bruce
Scates (2013, p. 4), observes that scholars call all warscapes ‘active sites of
memory’ that are open to interrogation and interpretation by different
groups and different generations. How will the passage of time affect the
commemoration and memorialisation of the battlefields, indeed of the
Vietnam War itself? It is clear that there are ‘still today important differ-
ences within Vietnam, as well as within France, the United States and
Australia, towards what should be commemorated and memorialised and
why and how’ (Logan 2016, p. 219). Nevertheless, Vietnamese veterans
of the southern army and the Viet Cong seem to have formed a modus
vivendi allowing them to get on with daily life. These carriers of memory
are, however, ageing and passing away, which may ease reconciliation pro-
cesses in Vietnam (Logan and Witcomb 2013, p. 273). The Vietnam War
is ancient history for today’s young generation—and it is important to
bear in mind here that half of Australia’s population and three-quarters of
Vietnam’s were born since the war ended.
Benjamin Morris (2011, p. 27) has said that remembering and forget-
ting are not in opposition to each other but are both needed. David
Lowenthal (1999, p. xi) claims that ‘To forget is as essential as to keep
32 W. LOGAN
things in mind, for no individual or collectivity can afford to remember

everything. Total recall would leave us unable to discriminate or to gener-
alise’. In relation to post-World War II Germany, Andreas Huyssen (1999,
p. 192), says there can be too many memorials, making it easier to forget
the past. This fits nicely with Rodney Harrison’s concern that there is too
much ‘heritage’ today, which has the effect of debasing the currency
(Harrison 2013). This may make Australia’s unremembrance of Coral-
Balmoral and disremembrance of Binh Ba seem sensible, pragmatic
responses to the multitudinous calamities of the Vietnam War.
But the question remains: what is lost when we forget? Or, as Scates
(2013, p. 264), put it: what is forgotten when we remember war? We for-
get that there were far more Vietnamese than Australian casualties in all
three battles as, indeed, the Vietnam War as a whole. Are some lives worth
more than others—or are we just tied into a nationalistic caring for one’s
own more than others? Broinowski’s call for a better balance in the way we
regard Australia’s engagement in Vietnam and war generally is relevant
here. Of course, let’s remember lives lost, but also let’s emphasise the hor-
ror and inhumanity of war and the role of governments in them. It is too
easy to send soldiers to fight in foreign fields; it is much harder to curb
jingoism in public forums and the arms industry, both of which make war
possible. As I noted in relation to bushfire catastrophes (Logan 2015,
p. 17), the focus on building memorials and commemorative activities at
them can divert us from the more fundamental question of why they—sol-
diers in war zones, residents in bushfire prone areas—were there in the
first place.
Acknowledgements This chapter grew out of an Australia Research Council-

funded project entitled ‘Australian Heritage Abroad: Managing Australia’s
Extraterritorial War Heritage’ conducted in collaboration with Professor Andrea
Witcomb and Dr Bart Ziino, both of Deakin University, and Professor Joan
Beaumont of the Australian National University. I thank ‘Breaker’ Cusack and the
Australian veterans interviewed, as well as Khong Quoc Thuan for filling in the
Vietnamese side of the battlefield stories. I thank, too, Dr Peter Bille Larsen at the
University of Geneva and the participants in the Places of Memory: Narrative and
Trauma workshop at the University of Queensland for their valuable comments on
earlier drafts.
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tage’, Routledge, London, pp. 1–14.
Logan, W & Witcomb, A 2013, ‘Messages from Long Tan, Vietnam:
Memorialisation, reconciliation and historical justice’, Critical Asian Studies,
vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 255–78.
Logan, W, Beaumont, J, Ziino, B, Smith, A, Balderstone, S & Donkin, J 2005,
Australians at war thematic study of heritage places and discussion of national
listing criteria and thresholds, Report to Department of the Environment and
Heritage, Canberra, Deakin University, Burwood, Victoria.
Lowenthal, D 1999, ‘Preface’, in Forty, A & Küchler, S (eds.), The art of forget-
ting, Berg, Oxford, pp. xi–xiii.
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Unwin, Sydney.
McKay, G & Nichols, G 2001, Jungle tracks: Australian armour in Vietnam, Allen
& Unwin, Sydney.
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of the battle of Coral-Balmoral, ABC Radio Melbourne, 13 May, viewed 19
June 2018, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-13/50th-anniversary-
of-the-battle-of-coral-balmoral-vietnam/9722722.
Morris, B 2011, ‘Forgetting: An overview’, in Anheier, H & Isar, YR (eds.),
Heritage, memory and identity, Sage, London, pp. 27–28.
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(1930–2000) [History of the party division, army and people of Long Dat dis-
trict (1930–2000)], Cong Ty in 27/7 [27 July Printing Company], Ho Chi
Minh City.
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Journal, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 157–75.
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1966/67, Cassell Australia, Melbourne.
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Cambridge University Press, Melbourne.
Schwenkel, C 2006, ‘Recombinant history: Transnational practices of memory
and knowledge production in contemporary Vietnam’, Cultural Anthropology,
vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 3–30.
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for weeks’, ABC News, 6 December, viewed 30 June 2018, http://www.abc.
net.au/news/2017-12-06/operation-to-take-back-cross-of-long-tan-
kept-secret-for-weeks/9231422.
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7 December, viewed 30 June 2018, https://www.seniorsnews.com.au/news/
cross-long-tan-returned-war-memorial/3284629/.
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March, viewed 2 July 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/
mar/17/long-tan-anzac-commemoration-ruled-out-by-vietnam.
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sented to the Australians Heritage Abroad: Managing Australia’s Extraterritorial
War Heritage symposium, Deakin University, Melbourne, 12–13 June.
CHAPTER 3
‘Difficult Heritage’, Silent Witnesses:

Dismembering Traumatic Memories,
Narratives and Emotions of Firebombing
in Japan
Natsuko Akagawa
Prelude
Memories of the blazing inferno that engulfed the residential streets of
many cities in wartime Japan, indiscriminately taking away loved ones, are
still fresh in the minds of survivors today. As one now senior survivor
recalls:
If you still had your child’s body, it was better. Some mothers were carrying
bodies of children on their backs without neck [head], arms or legs—not
knowing the state they were in, that their child had perished. Everyone was
in a state of numbness, lost in abstraction; eyes were blank and empty as if
N. Akagawa (*)
e-mail: n.akagawa@uq.edu.au

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_3
38 N. AKAGAWA
souls were wiped out from their bodies. This is what you call a devastating
inferno … It was a living hell. (Anonymous testimony [Author’s translation])
The urban landscape we see in the major cities of Japan today, including
the Kobe, Osaka, and Tokyo metropolis, are in fact embedded with trau-
matic memory. The extent of the destruction occasioned by the firebomb-
ing air raids of Japan’s cities can hardly be imagined today. Civilians,
including children, experienced the inferno and were confronted by the
swollen, charred and dismembered bodies of loved ones and neighbours
scattered around in front of their eyes. For people who experienced these
atrocities, the memories of these events continue to torment them. For
them, the ‘place’, their hometown and neighbourhood, continues to act
as a silent witness to these events and to the memory of the people who
lost their lives there. It was a place enveloped in flames that swallowed
people and everything that people had held dear. Many of the lost lives
buried beneath the contemporary urban landscape of most major Japanese
cities have yet to be identified, commemorated and properly buried
according to traditional Japanese rites.
For the civilians who experienced the firebombing air raids of their
hometown, the sense of place, of a hometown, is coupled with conflicting
emotions. Along with the memory of a warm, happy childhood, they are
haunted by what they describe as an ‘unimaginable horror’, the experience
of ‘a living hell’ when their life-world was ‘turned upside-down’ and their
‘heart ripped apart’. However, for this generation of survivors and their
immediate family members, these memories are also entangled with feel-
ings of guilt. There is the immediate and overwhelming guilt of not hav-
ing been able to save those who were killed. At the same time, they
experience the welling up of emotions of agony of having survived them-
selves, where loved ones had not, and of having been unable to provide
them with appropriate forms of burial. They are haunted by a growing
sense of urgency around their sense of responsibility for transmitting their
memories of their experience to new generations of post-war Japanese,
and to the citizens of the world, and of guilt that they have not, or could
not, execute this responsibility adequately. Beyond their sense of personal
responsibility and guilt, has been the need to come to terms with the dif-
ficult politics of national victimhood, and national guilt; of remembering
what was inflicted on their country, and of having had to face the igno-
miny of the suffering their nation inflicted, but as well, a sense of the
injustice of the national wartime domestic regulations imposed upon them.
3 ‘DIFFICULT HERITAGE’, SILENT WITNESSES: DISMEMBERING TRAUMATIC… 39
It is this complexity of entangled emotions that adds to the trauma and

agony of Japanese survivors and witnesses that has been largely silenced,
that is now seeking public expression. Alongside this, there is the strong
motivation to convince the world of the need to avoid war, or more
emphatically, for there ‘never’ to be war again. This is about the story of
individuals who have carried the memory and the burden of these events
for their entire life. Accounts of the traumatic experience of civilians of the
firebombing air raids of Japanese cities are still largely absent from histo-
ries of the Asia-Pacific war. Where the fate of Japanese civilians is addressed,
this tends to highlight the also devastating nuclear bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. Notably commemorated at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial
Park and Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome), this is often pre-
sented as a subset of a broader international post-war/Cold War discourse
of nuclear disarmament. Moreover, focussing on the nuclear bombing has
had the effect of side-lining both national and international attention to
the trauma of the earlier, year and a half-long fierce firebombing air raids
of most of Japan’s major cities between February 1944 and August 1945
(Osaka Kokusai Heiwa Centre 2013, p. 66). This is even though, in the
case of one of these firebombing air raids of Tokyo on 9–10 March 1945,
it has been estimated that ‘no previous or subsequent conventional bomb-
ing raid ever came close to generating the toll in death and destruction’
(Selden 2007, p. 10). This one event was, in the words of General Thomas
Power, ‘the greatest single disaster incurred by any enemy in military his-
tory’ (Selden 2007, p. 7; see also Schaffer 1985, p. 131).
This chapter examines the complex, entangled emotions that consti-
tutes multiple layers of sensibilities that include, trauma, guilt and agony
of civilian survivors and witnesses that have had been largely silenced and
which remain underexplored in the international context. The chapter
also examines the emergence of public spaces dedicated to exhibiting the
memory of the traumatic experience of the wartime urban firebombing air
raids of Japan’s cities. I draw attention to the significance of the community-
initiated, grassroots nature of this phenomenon and the variety of tangible
and intangible forms that the narratives of memory are taking in these
community-based resource centres and museums. I discuss how these
spaces for the narration of trauma enable the transmission of the multiple
layers of sorrow and guilt that constitute personal trauma to construct a
collective memory of these events. Finally, I show how emerging spaces
for the narration of trauma enable the transmission of personal trauma and
guilt, and simultaneously engage with what I call the ‘authorised narrative
40 N. AKAGAWA
discourse’ of the post-war Japanese nation. An ‘authorised narrative dis-

course’, I argue, is a form of power developed over time reflecting the
interests of a nation, or groups within a nation, that supports their posi-
tion of dominance. This entails the construction of political and ethnic
hierarchies of power domestically and internationally, which then influ-
ences and translates how events are narrated internationally and within a
nation. It is this authorised version of the past which the now once silenced
witnesses are seeking to broaden.
Dismembered Bodies: Urban Destruction

and Civil Causalities
Until today, the precise number of civilian deaths caused by the firebomb-
ing air raids of more than 208 Japanese cities, of which 80 were the target
of particularly heavy bombing, is unknown (Osaka Kokusai Heiwa Centre
2013, p. 66). In 2014 the Tokyo Shimbun (newspaper), citing the Tokyo
Daikushu Sensai Shiryo Centre reported an estimate of around 410,000
firebombing-related deaths nation-wide (Tokyo Shimbun 2015). These
firebombs, or shoidan in Japanese, were specifically designed and tested in
the months preceding their delivery for their effectiveness to burn Japanese
urban civilian residences basically made of timber and paper (see also
Fedman and Karacas 2012). It is thought that destructive firebombing air
raids of cities left about 15 million inhabitants (out of a total pre-war
national population of 72 million) homeless, and unknown thousands of
children orphaned. These traumatic events were followed by the dropping
of two nuclear bombs, on the city of Hiroshima that directly claimed a
further estimated 140,000 dead (Hiroshima heiwa kinen shiryoukan
2017a, p. 41) and the city of Nagasaki that saw the immediate death of at
least 70,000 people (Nagasaki Genbaku Shiryokan n.d.). However, the
precise number who died immediately, and the thousands who died sub-
sequently from the effects of this sequence of bombings, remains unknown.
Consoling Spirits and Commemorating Souls

In Japan, it is customary for monuments of commemoration to be erected
as a way for Japanese people to honour the dead and to provide a place to
console the souls of those who died. During the war, due to the sheer
number of casualties occasioned by urban firebombings, in most cases
burial had to be performed in any way that was possible with the limited
resources available at that time. In some cases, family members, if they
were fortunate enough to be able to identify the bodies, were able to

undertake cremation by themselves. However, in the chaos and with the
enormous number of victims occasioned by the bombing, thousands of
bodies had to be hastily buried often without appropriate ceremony.
Some attempt was made in Tokyo in 1948 to address this need to remem-
ber the deceased. Some bodies of firebombing victims that had been tempo-
rarily buried in approximately 90 locations across the Tokyo city area, were
disinterred and placed in the Tokyo Ireido (lit: Tokyo hall for consolation of
souls) (Tokyo Ireikyokai 2012). Elsewhere in Tokyo, a statue of the jizo
(guardian deity of children) and a ‘Memorial for the victims of air raids’ was
erected by a private person in 1950 in Itabashi ward. However, this hardly
addressed the extent of the losses where in one of the most shocking occa-
sions, on the night of 9 March 1945, 300 American B29 bombers dropped
500,000 cylinders of napalm and petroleum jelly that instantly burnt alive
more than 100,000 people (Yamabe 2011; Tokyo Shimbun 2015).
For survivors, many of them children and young adolescents, the task
of collecting bodies and attempting to arrange appropriate cremation and
burial was immense. A brief insight into this moment is provided by per-
sonal testimony. One woman, who at the time was a 14-year-old student,
writes how she and her fellow students, ‘waited for the dawn of August
15th [1945]. We were weak but tried very hard to gather our strength to
pile up the vast number of charred bodies on to the truck to be cremated
elsewhere’ (Kawada 1983, p. 78).
Mr Higashiura Eiichi, then 16 years of age and currently the president
of Sennintsuka Association, recalls the moment when US military aircraft,
gliding low over the area of a park where hundreds of people had taken
refuge, fired at them repeatedly with their manual machine guns. They
were mostly women, children, and the elderly from the neighbourhood,
including a group of female students working at a local garment factory.
Mr Higashiura and some others managed to escape being shot by running
and diving into ditches, but others were not so lucky. He describes how
later he saw countless, literally thousands of dead bodies floating in the
pond of the park and in the nearby Yodo River, a scene he can never forget
(Sankei Shimbun 2015). It is estimated that over one thousand people
died that day, many of whom were then quickly cremated at the riverbank
and buried there (Sankei Shimbun 2015). In 1946 Mr Higashiura’s father
personally engraved a ‘sennintsuka’ (‘monument for the thousand’ here
implying a monument to commemorate and rest the souls of 1000 vic-
tims) on one of the stones in his garden to commemorate and rest the
42 N. AKAGAWA
Fig. 3.1 Sennintsuka in Osaka stands on the now peaceful riverbank where thou-
sands were buried. (Source: Author 2020)
souls of these air raid victims from his neighbourhood (Fig. 3.1). This act
became the basis of an important place for remembering and is now used
as the main monument to console the souls of the victims of firebombing
air raids and associated mass killing by machine guns that took place in this
area of Osaka.
Mr Higashiura’s account of his and his father’s experience resembles
stories told to me by my relatives during my childhood. One of whom, six
years of age at the time, was walking to school, and he remembers being
specifically targeted several times by a rain of bullets fired from the manual
machineguns operated by US military aircraft pilots. People, including
children, had been told to dive into a ditch or hide in the bushes if they
were being targeted. A common characteristic of the way this wartime
generation recounts their childhood memories is the way they switch to
using the present tense as they recall the past, as if they have been trans-
ported back in time.
Although annual memorial services to commemorate victims of aerial

firebombings did begin to be held in Tokyo by the 1950s (Nihon terebi
2018), it was not until the 1970s that more elaborate forms of public rec-
ognition of these events, in the form of memorial monuments, began to
become evident. When memorials did finally emerge, it was initiated by
local individuals and grass roots, community, and citizen groups rather
than by official municipal or government agencies (Yamabe 2011). While
the earlier urban aerial bombings that targeted civilians had of course not
been forgotten, it is evident that this has not received the attention in
Japan accorded to the victims of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.
The earliest memorials for consoling souls that now exist in greater
numbers in urban Japan, date from the mid-1980s, and can be seen today
in the corner of parks or on private properties. Amongst the most notice-
able is the ‘Memorial for consoling the souls of Tokyo Air Raids victims’
erected in 1986 in a part of Sumida Park in Taito ward. It marks a place
where many people were provisionally buried after the Tokyo air raids of
10 March 1945. In 1994, another memorial, the ‘Great Kanto Earthquake
and Tokyo Air Raids Victims’ Memorial to Console the Souls1 was erected
in Tokyo near where hundreds of deceased bodies had been washed down
and piled up near the mouth of Sumida river in Minato ward. The follow-
ing year in 1995, the ‘Toshima-ward Air Raids Victim Mourning
Monument’ was erected in Minamiikebukuro Park for the victims of the
air raids in Toshima ward. According to the interpretation board, approxi-
mately 70% of the city ward’s 161,000 residents were either killed, heavily
injured, and/or lost their home. That memorial marks the place where
truckloads of bodies had been brought for mass burial. Another important
memorial is the Tokyo kushu giseisha o tsuito shi heiwa o kinen suru ishibumi
(Memorial for Great Tokyo Air Raids Victims and Pray for Peace
Monument) erected in 2001 next to the Tokyo Ireido (Tokyo hall for con-
soling the souls) within Yokoamicho Park in Sumida ward. As with other
urban memorials to the deceased, an essential element in imbuing them
with their spiritual significance as places for the commemoration of souls
is the participation of people in their erection. In the case of 2001
Tokyo kushu giseisha o tsuito shi heiwa o kinen suru ishibumi this gesture
took the form of financial donations as people responded to a call by the
Tokyo no dai kushu giseisha o tsuito shi heiwa o negau kai (Association for
memorial to Tokyo victims of air raids and a wish for peace) (Tokyo
Ireikyokai 2012).
44 N. AKAGAWA
Collecting, Remembering and Narrating

The most notable early public account of the firebombing air raids emerged
in the early 1970s in the form of collections of personal stories intended
to document the firebombing air raids of Tokyo. In 1970 the writer
Saotome Katsumoto, 12 years of age at the time of the bombings, founded
the Tokyo daikushu o kiroku suru kai (Association to Record the Tokyo Air
Raids) and began to actively collect testimonies and other documentation
in relation to the Tokyo air raids. In 1971, he published a book, Tokyo
daikushu showa 20 nen 3 gatsu 10 ka no kiroku (Tokyo Airraid: Record of
10 March 1945), based on interviews he had conducted with air raid sur-
vivors and in 1973–1974 he produced the four-volume Tokyo daikushu
shi—sensaishi (History and Documentation of Tokyo Great Air Raids), a
comprehensive account of the event published by a major publisher in
Japan. Later he established the Tokyo daikushu sensai shiryo centre. Today
Saotome continues his mission to make public the experience of the civil-
ian firebombing with lectures and writing (Tokyo Daikushu Sensai Shiryo
Centre n.d.).
Around the same time, another writer, Nosaka Akiyuki, who was
14 years of age at the time of the bombings, wrote a semi-biographical
novel Hotaru no haka (English title: Grave of the Fireflies). Published in
1967, it was awarded the Naoki Prize in 1968. Based on Nosaka’s mem-
ory of his experiences during the war, the novel recounts the story of two
survivors, an orphaned brother and baby sister, struggling to survive in
wartime Kobe and Nishinomiya (Hyogo prefecture, located to the west of
Osaka Prefecture). In 1988, by which time the circumstances of firebomb-
ing had attracted more public attention, the novel became the basis of an
animated film by Studio Ghibli directed by Takahata Isao.2 As a child,
Takahata had experienced and survived air raids and wartime devastation
in Okayama (a prefecture bordering Hyogo prefecture) and this is reflected
in the way the events are depicted in his animated film. Shown around the
world to international acclaim, the film depicts the traumatic experience of
ordinary people in Japan who lived through the total devastation of the
physical and human urban environment occasioned by the air raids that
had constituted their everyday life.
As these examples suggest, the memory of the horror and tragedy of
the firebombing has remained vivid within the community and central to
the history of the memorials that have been established as the result of
active community participation. This has also involved conducting cere-

monies to console the spirits of the victims. Most of these are small local
monuments and not necessarily limited to commemorating the victims of
the firebombing alone. In each case, the histories of the memorials also
testify to the reluctance of authorities to respond to this expression of the
shared remembered grief felt by local citizens. Moreover, it has only been
towards the end of the twentieth century, and more particularly since the
early years of the present century, that the history of the experience of
firebombing has gained wider public attention in Japan or recognition in
the form of official memorials to the dead. This has now gained pace and
at the time of writing, 62 memorial monuments in relation to civilian vic-
tims of war can be identified throughout Tokyo alone.
In part, this growing phenomenon of memorialisation can be inter-
preted as a consequence of the age profile of the survivors of these events.
Their concern to ensure that the memory of suffering as a result of the
1944–1945 firebombing air raids would be made known to coming gen-
erations has led to the gradual transposition of an individual trauma into a
broader collective memory (Tumarkin 2013). Beyond what can be
regarded as the more personal significance of the memorial, however, is
also the more recent public representation of memory in special purpose
museums and ‘memory centres’. Facilitated by the adoption of newer
curatorial practices and technologies, the changing nature of the way
memory is exhibited in museums has had a significant impact on the way
the past is presented and transmitted.
For the ones ‘left to live’ after the war, museums have performed a role
as places where the memories can finally be opened for public viewing. For
some people, this has been a way to find closure. Not knowing what had
happened to family members and loved ones, or of knowing the horror of
their passing having witnessed their dismembered and ruined lifeless bod-
ies, has continued to haunt them. They have also felt a sense of guilt for
not having been able to save them or offer appropriate rituals of farewell
to console the spirits of their loved ones. In addition, anger at the lack of
recognition by the government has contributed to the continuing persis-
tence of the remembered trauma.
While the past had continued to trouble the survivors, the responsibil-
ity they felt to leave behind tangible evidence of their memories had
weighed increasingly upon them. In the random everyday objects that
constituted surviving fragments of the lives of their lost family and friends,
they have found reminders of the moments of the horror of that war
46 N. AKAGAWA
experience. It is through the emotive power of these objects and in the

many visual, written and oral forms of testimony in which they invested
their memories later, that a public and tangible narrative of their memories
could be conveyed to others, years after the event.
A ‘Forgotten Holocaust’ or the ‘Good War’?

Although it is clear that survivors and witnesses had never forgotten what
Fedman and Karacas (2012) refer to as the ‘extreme domicide’ or ‘urbi-
cide’ perpetrated between early 1944 and August 1945, until relatively
recently public remembrance of these events has been limited in Japan.
There has been what Dower has called an ‘abnormal interlude of silence’
(Dower 1995, p. 294). The relatively recent attention these events have
received in Japan and internationally reflect a gradual dismantling of what
I call the ‘authorised narrative’ that is widely shared around the world.
This can be partly ascribed to a gradual lessening of the international sen-
sitivities surrounding this history.
In Japan, the commemoration of the civilian victims was initially pro-
hibited during the Allied occupation (Hiroshima Heiwa Kinen Shiryokan
2017a, p. 43). Post occupation, after 1952, as will be discussed below, the
Japanese government continued to suppress public commemoration of
these civilian victims in its efforts to unify the Japanese nation around an
official commitment to a national, post-war ‘peace narrative’. Within
international (Allied) discourse, this ‘forgetting’ or ‘disremembering’ can
be ascribed to what Fedman and Karacas (2012) suggest has been the
persistence of ‘resilient narratives of “the Good War”, the attention given
to the atomic bombings […] and a general unwillingness to tackle unset-
tling moral questions about the intentional large scale targeting of civil-
ians’ (Fedman and Karacas 2012, p. 307). When the fate of Japanese
civilians has been addressed internationally in reference to the nuclear
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this too has been conditional. In the
justificatory discourse of the ‘Good War’, the nuclear bombing continues
to be presented, for example, most recently by Schwabe (2015), as having
‘saved American lives’, a justification that subsumes a justification of the
preceding firebombings of civilians. Such justification of the civilian bomb-
ing has involved an ‘interconnected set of linguistic and visual representa-
tions’ in which Japanese cities were envisioned as ‘an abstract enemy space
[…] largely stripped of humans’ that denied the existence of the ‘Japanese
civilian body’ (Fedman and Karacas 2012, p. 314). The recent referencing
of the concept of ‘genocide’ and the labelling of the aerial bombing of

Japan’s cities as a ‘forgotten holocaust’ (Selden 2007) suggests that equat-
ing the horror and deliberate inhumanity of these acts with the Jewish
holocaust may begin to change this ‘Good War’ discourse.
Personal and Collective Remembering:

Recognising Victimhood
In Japan, the long absence of public remembering of the history and expe-
rience of firebombing air raids is also linked to an official focus on both the
atrocity of atomic bombing and peace narrative. This occurred almost
immediately after the war, notably with the establishment of the Hiroshima
Peace Memorial Park and Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku dome).
The memorials became both a national and international reference to a
broader post-war discourse of nuclear disarmament and international
peace. That discourse emphasised the ‘victimhood of the Japanese peo-
ple’, at the same time it identified ‘the country’s exceptional status […] as
“the only nation ever to have been atom-bombed”’ (Imahori 1985, cited
in Orr 2001, p. 1). Important as this was, the symbolic ‘sharing’ of the
Hiroshima Peace Memorial with an international public was also a way for
two difficult historical memories to be addressed (Miyamoto 2011). While
it enabled the Japanese state to ‘pay respect to those who suffered atroci-
ties perpetrated by the Japanese government during the war’, it was also a
way to ‘evade the imputation of responsibility’ for the ‘unimaginable suf-
fering’ experienced by its own citizens (Miyamoto 2011, p. 2; Saito 2006).
At the same time, it allowed the Japanese emperor’s response to the
extraordinary event of the US atomic bombing in declaring an end to war
to be represented as ‘a heroic sacrifice’ constituting Japan’s contribution
to world peace (Igarashi 2000, p. 28). In summary, Igarashi argues, the
official narrative sought to provide healing for the Japanese nation by
‘render[ing] understandable the experiences of the atomic bomb’ and
enabling the nation ‘to cloak [its] defeat in the guise of a strategic neces-
sity and concern for humanity at large’ (Igarashi 2000, p. 20).
This complex resolution of competing internal and international dis-
courses in relation to the conclusion of the Asia-Pacific War constituted
the foundational narrative for modern post-war Japan (Igarashi 2000). It
was kept in place by the importance of Japan’s reliance on the US alliance
48 N. AKAGAWA
at the end of the war and by what has been interpreted as a ‘stalemate in a
fierce, multi-vocal struggle over national legacy and the meaning of being
Japanese’ (Hashimoto 2015, p. 9). The apparent silencing of personal nar-
ratives of victimhood and the maintenance of a pacifist identity acted to
obscure Japan’s own wartime actions—or at least act as an atonement for
it. This ensured that a public narrative of personal Japanese suffering could
only gain official support where it coincided with this pro-peace image of
Japanese identity. It represented Japan’s ‘long defeat’ (Hashimoto 2015).
In the ‘narrative of progress’ that accompanied Japan’s subsequent swift
rise to economic success, the wartime suffering was seen as ‘the origin of
[the prosperity of] post-war Japanese society’ (Igarashi 2000, p. 167). A
crucial consequence of this evolving narrative in post-war Japan was the
official disremembering of the traumatic experience of the catastrophic
events of 1944–1945 and a suppression of the sense of victimhood associ-
ated with it. Although there were signs that modern Japan’s foundational
narrative was beginning to unravel by the late 1960s (Igarashi 2000; Saito
2006), this received little official encouragement. What appears, therefore,
as an increase in unofficial community-based presentation of personal
traumatic experience can be seen as a manifestation of a gradual and rela-
tively recent national willingness to broaden the foundations of a Japanese
identity.
The noticeably recent development of locally focused, community-
initiated, museums, public and private ‘memory centres’, community
halls, public spaces and schools, has been devoted to the display of per-
sonal forms of remembrance (Fig. 3.2). They give expression to the indi-
vidual emotional dimensions of the memory of that traumatic experience,
accentuated by innovative curatorial practices. In some cases the individual
buildings themselves can contribute further to the affective power of what
is exhibited.
This growing public recognition and ownership of personal memories
represents the development of a ‘social construction of meaning’. In such
circumstances, Hirschberger (2018) suggests, individual memory is trans-
formed through processes of remembering, selection and reinterpretation.
It involves, amongst other things, ‘a sense of collective self that is trans-
generational’ and that promotes a ‘sense of an historic collective self’
(Hirschberger 2018, p. 2). In the formation of this ‘historic memory’,
museums have played a crucial role as repositories of personal memories
and as spaces via which transgenerational transfer of memory can take
place (Williams 2017). Memorial museums, Williams (2017, p. 2) argues,
Fig. 3.2 The handmade kimono of a 7-month old child donated to Tokyo dai-
kushu sensai shiryo centre by her 94-year old mother 62 years after she had lost her
to the flames. (Source: Author 2018)
‘are at the forefront of imagining how visitors’ senses, thoughts and con-
sciousnesses can be activated to produce meaningful encounters’ to con-
struct shared memories. In particular, the more recent curatorial emphasis
on the personalisation of exhibits, also evident in Japan, has involved what
Williams defines as ‘the popularisation of a cosmopolitan “grief culture”’
(Williams 2017, p. 2). This has specifically ‘heighten[ed] the emotional
drama’ of visitors’ experience, within which ‘tragic events form powerful
moments of solidarity’ (Williams 2017, p. 2). It reflects a specific museu-
mological discourse advocating a shift in their traditional role as exponents
of ‘authorised narratives’ (see above for my definition of ‘authorised nar-
rative discourse’). In transforming into ‘rarefied platform[s] for authentic
experiences’, (Williams 2017, p. 10) museums may be seen as taking on a
‘therapeutic dimension’ as they ‘increasingly frame themselves as agents of
social rehabilitation in the aftermath of violence’ (Williams 2017, p. 11;
50 N. AKAGAWA
see also Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996; Logan and Reeves 2009;
Arnold-de Simine 2013).
The gradual localisation and personalisation of the public remembering
of wartime firebombing evident in Japan since the 1980s exemplifies this
healing power. My recent visits to several locally instigated memory cen-
tres have revealed that they increasingly involved a practice of engaging
survivors to act as volunteer guides. In sharing the memories of their
wartime childhood with visitors, their live unscripted narration dramati-
cally enhances the capability of such spaces to emotionally engage the visi-
tors. More directly than any other means, these interactions act to both
confirm the memories of other war generation visitors and to emotionally
engage the identity of the later Japanese generations and of international
visitors. Simultaneously physically present as live ‘representatives’ and as
‘living memories’, they enable the immediate intimate and person-to-
person transmission of affect, engaging the visitor directly with the emo-
tion of the memory of trauma. Tumarkin emphasises the importance of
such methods in the narration and transmission of personal memories of
trauma since they ‘take cognition (and emotion) out of the head at the
same time as they “mess up” structural accounts of collective memories
with bodies, feelings and experience’ (White 2006, p. 326, cited in
Tumarkin 2013, p. 318).
Museumising Urbicide: Representing Trauma,

Representing Place
Community involvement in the remembrance of civilian wartime experi-
ence of urban bombing has naturally not been entirely absent in Japan. In
relation to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this can be
dated from 1952 with the opening of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and
Memorial Park. In 1955, an associated Peace Memorial Hall was estab-
lished to house a collection of materials donated by Hiroshima residents
following public appeals that had included a nation-wide appeal for chil-
dren to tell their experiences (Hiroshima Heiwa Kinen Shiryokan 2017a,
p. 114). In conjunction with this, an associated volunteer ‘A-bomb
Materials Collection Support Group’ was formed to develop the task of
collecting objects to expand the exhibition highlighting the impact of the
atomic bombing (Hiroshima Heiwa Kinen Shiryokan 2017a).
Increasing popular local and foreign visitor interest in the growing col-
lection of personalised testimonies to the catastrophic atomic bombing led
to the construction of a new Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, opened
in 1994. Further public appeals by the museum, notably in 2002 when,
‘fifty-seven years after the atomic bombing the average age of the hibaku-
sha was over 70’, added a further 1338 drawings (Hiroshima Heiwa Kinen
Shiryokan 2017b, p. 5). The Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum established
in 1996 adopted a similar process to collect personal memories of the
bombing of that city. The increasing emphasis on accumulating records of
personal memories at the officially sanctioned Hiroshima and Nagasaki
peace museums had slowly opened the door to a broader expression of
Japanese victimhood within a framework of commitment to a narrative of
international peace. This gradual democratisation of the official national
peace narrative facilitated by changes in the curatorial processes developed
at Hiroshima is increasingly the focus of international visitor interest and
is influenced by museum practice abroad. These developments undoubt-
edly contributed to the growing momentum in Japan’s many other cities
to remember victims of firebombing air raids and provided the model for
these centres of memory.
Narrating the Trauma of Aerial Firebombing

Many more Japanese experienced the effect of the napalm and petroleum
jelly bombs during the one and a half years of relentless bombing of the
country’s cities than directly experienced the atomic bombing. Indeed,
the dark history of Japanese civilians’ experience of war on the home front
can be said to have commenced in 1938, inflicted by the Japanese govern-
ment with the passing of the National Mobilisation Law (Hiroshima
Heiwa Kinen Shiryokan 2017a, p. 14). This law imposed on all Japanese
citizens a war economy which progressively restricted and reduced their
access to the basics of everyday life. It was increasingly reinforced and
promoted by slogans such as ‘extravagance is the enemy’ and ‘do without
until we win’ (Hiroshima Heiwa Kinen Shiryokan 2017a, p. 15), and
coincided with the loss of male family members through military conscrip-
tion. By 1944, with the beginning of air raids, food, clothing and other
everyday essentials were already in short supply and much of the male
working-age population was deployed overseas. This left an impoverished
civilian population, consisting overwhelmingly of women, the young and
52 N. AKAGAWA
the elderly, to experience the increasing hardship of everyday life as well as

the impact of the firebombing air raids.
As a consequence, the majority of the generation of contemporary wit-
nesses and survivors of the firebombing were children, women and grand-
parents. It is their memories that now constitute the public displays in the
emerging localised ‘memory centres’. Amongst the private institutions I
visited during a recent field trip to Japan is the Tokyo Daikushu Sensai
Shiryo Centre (Centre for the Tokyo Raids and War Damage). Located in
Koto ward, a ward within Tokyo Metropolitan area that in the 1940s was,
and now still is, one of the most densely populated downtown districts of
the city, it disproportionately experienced the impact of the firebombing.
Its location as a site of a public space of remembrance is, therefore, most
appropriate. As mentioned above, this district had already seen the estab-
lishment of an ‘Association to Record the Tokyo Air Raids’ in 1970, which
had the aim of ‘actively collect[ing] artefacts and documents detailing the
extent of these air raids and war damages’ (Tokyo Daikushu Sensai Shiryo
Centre n.d.). In the late 1990s, the aims of this private organisation were
transformed in line with the broader trend outlined above. It redirected its
focus to the construction of a purpose-built exhibition and memorial cen-
tre that was completed in 2002.
While the Centre announces its commitment to the authorised national
narrative of ‘pass[ing] on knowledge to future generations and to stimu-
late interaction of peace-loving individuals’ (Tokyo Daikushu Sensai
Shiryo Centre n.d.), the primary aim of this Centre is the collection of
information as an educational centre for ‘Remembering the Great Tokyo
Air raids’. For this, it employs an expanding network of volunteers to
undertake an ongoing process of collecting the fading memories of the last
years of the war. Since 2006, the Centre has embarked on a more formal
program of research and the publication of books, guides and newsletters.
The Centre’s motto, ‘Striving for Peace in the future by communicating
the horrors of war’ (Tokyo Daikushu Sensai Shiryo Centre n.d.), effec-
tively links the specific remembrance of local traumatic memory to the
established national discourse advocating world peace. One notable prac-
tice has been its emphasis on oral narrative. This involves encouraging
older residents of the Koto ward and elsewhere from Tokyo who lived
through the difficult time of war, to become involved in face-to-face inter-
action with children. This has become an important element of its educa-
tional mission to promote a generational transfer of the memory of a
traumatic past (Tokyo Daikushu Densai Shiryo Centre n.d.). Apart from
specific children-related displays of the impact of firebombing on children

and children-focused events and seminars, its emphasis on children is sym-
bolised by the Children’s World Peace Statue.
To assist visitors’ understanding, the Centre employs volunteers who,
like the elegant person who accompanied me during my visit, are local
people who directly experienced the wartime bombing themselves.
Without intruding in the visitors’ interaction with displays, when asked
they are able to provide a first-hand account of what they have experi-
enced. In graphically describing what they had witnessed and depicting
the trauma in a face-to-face context, the intertwined emotions of hope-
lessness, sadness and guilt that they have lived with become clearly evident
and a meeting with such individuals can be overwhelming. One cannot
leave such centres without also gaining a sense of the broader message of
peace that these calm and cheerful survivors have a mission to transmit.
Another memory place in Tokyo initiated by local citizens and sup-
ported by the local municipal government is the Sumida Kyodo Bunka
Shiryokan (Sumida Regional Cultural Resource Centre). This exhibition
space opened in 2003 and similarly reflects this relatively recent phenom-
enon of increased public interest in the transmission of traumatic wartime
memories. Representing the experience of local residents, a public collec-
tion of visual evidence of the impact of the Tokyo firebombing air raids
also began in the early 2000s. An exhibition was inaugurated after a public
appeal in 2003 which resulted in 123 people offering around 300 paint-
ings depicting their wartime memories to the museum (Sumida Kyodo
Bunka Shiryokan 2005). Importantly also, this initiative came from the
local community rather than local, prefectural or national levels of govern-
ment, and thus can be regarded as another example of the emerging grass-
roots movement to make public and pass on memories in the hope that
the next generation can learn from the past. Like the collection in the
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the paintings on display here are the
work of ordinary people, who may never have made drawings or paintings
before. They depict a wide range of situations and events reflecting Tokyo
residents’ personal memories of their experience of the firebombing.
Although a small space, here too, visitors are overwhelmed by the power
of these evocative depictions and the personal testimonies that accom-
pany them.
In Osaka, an important memory space is the publicly funded Osaka
Kokusai Heiwa Centre (Osaka International Peace Centre). From humble
54 N. AKAGAWA
origins as the Osaka Heiwa Kinen Shiryoshitu (Osaka prefecture pray for
peace war document room), it opened in 1981 occupying a small room in
the Osaka Prefectural Social Welfare Centre (Osaka Kokusai Heiwa Centre
n.d.). Since then, this institution has progressively expanded in both phys-
ical size and aims and it opened in its present form and location in 1991.
As of 2017, the centre had attracted 2 million visitors. Representing a
‘memorial to Osaka air raids victims’, central to its activities is the ‘collec-
tion, preservation, maintenance and exhibition of materials on war and
peace’ and the dissemination through publications and seminars and
information (Osaka Kokusai Heiwa Centre n.d.). It is structured to take
the visitor through displays that go beyond a depiction of the firebomb-
ing. The exhibition consecutively represents life during the war period,
from 1937 to beyond 1945, and includes the era of post-war reconstruc-
tion and presentations on world peace. Displays also include depictions of
the life of children and their contribution to the war effort through their
involvement in labour activities. By including these, it draws heavily on the
personal memory of what are now the senior members of the local com-
munity. The entire exhibition space is redolent with personal memories of
the local experience of the firebombing expressed through collections of
objects, drawings, photographs and texts.
Nevertheless, when the Osaka International Peace Centre was recently
reconstituted (2014) and reopened in 2015, it came with a renewal of the
official narrative of world peace (Osaka Kokusai Heiwa Centre n.d.). At
the opening of its inaugural Peace Osaka Exhibition it was stated that:
Even now, war and conflict persists in the world. In the past, our country
also caused tremendous damage and suffering to many people in the war,
especially the people of the Asian countries. It also lost many precious lives
as the only atomic bombed country. Only knowing about the misery of
warfare and experiencing it, will not ensure that peace will come. What is
required is that each and every one of us think about what is peace, what to
do for it, and what we can do, and realise what we can do now. (Osaka
Kokusai Heiwa Centre 2015)
As Osaka is a city that experienced firebombing rather than atomic bomb-

ing, this represents another example of a local institution incorporating
into its local mission and resources the established national message of
world peace first projected at Hiroshima. Thus, its aim is:
To remember the victims of the air aids in Osaka, pray for peace, collect,
preserve and exhibit information on the war experiences of the people of
Osaka centring on the air raids and the misery of war; to develop respect for
peace in order to nurture a rich heart in the next generation that wishes for
peace; to contribute to world peace. (Osaka Kokusai Heiwa Centre n.d.)
Reflection
Common to these and the many other ‘memory centres’ that have been
created in urban Japan to remember the history of the death and destruc-
tion caused by firebombing air raids, are the testimonies of survivors. It is
these, whether as written or spoken, or in the form of starkly simple draw-
ings, that embrace the museum visitor with their powerful emotive affect
and demand their engagement. As the foregoing has shown, the public
expression of the memories of the witnesses to these events has been a
relatively recent phenomenon. Opportunity for these individuals to speak
had long been denied both by the dominant international and national
‘authorised narrative’ and by the resultant absence of public spaces to
voice alternative histories. But equally, as these witnesses themselves attest
to, silence was a result of the psychological scars left by their traumatic
experience. The trauma they carried in their memory as survivors or as
recipients of memories transmitted through multiple bonds of emotional
attachment to the victims and the survivors had prevented people from
speaking. In recent decades, these obstacles have been progressively dis-
mantled. As noted above, the passing of time has been a relevant factor,
with the aging and gradual disappearance of the generation of witnesses
and survivors adding a sense of urgency to record this history. Globally,
the ‘legitimation’ of trauma as a real psychosocial condition, underscored
by the curatorial practices of modern museums, has, as it were, given per-
mission, also in Japan, for individuals to give public testimony of their
traumatic memory. Far from challenging the older commitment to peace,
the journey towards being finally able to testify as survivor and witness has
provided an alternative and more persuasive justification for a commit-
ment to it.
The relatively recent and growing phenomenon of local community-
based remembering of the firebombing air raids of Japan’s cities reflects a
growing social recognition of the significance of the personal trauma it
gave rise to. Initially silenced and ‘put aside’, over time the cumulative
emotional force of this widely experienced personal trauma has come to
56 N. AKAGAWA
construct a broader social narrative to command its public ownership as a

collective trauma. Trauma, as Fassin and Rechtman (2009, p. 20) have
stressed, ‘is both the product of an experience of inhumanity and proof of
the humanity of those who endured it’. In Japan, a carefully constructed
post-war narrative has ultimately failed to paper over the essential human-
ity expressed in the suffering of millions of its citizens. Described as a
‘forgotten holocaust’ (Selden 2007, p. 10), evidence of the destruction
and death inflicted by the wartime aerial bombing had essentially lain bur-
ied under the concrete achievements of Japan’s post-war reconstruction.
It is now being unearthed through the retrieval of the traumatic memories
of those who experienced these events. Collated in public peace centres, a
social memory is being assembled through its representation in a variety of
narrative forms and objects. Their powerful emotive force provides the
means that allow visitors to resource centres and museums to connect to
the victims’ traumatic past.
Memory is ‘[m]ultilayered and hybrid at the boundaries of psychology
and culture, the individual and society’ (Albano 2016, p. 33). It is inevita-
bly subject to ‘historical remembrance and global resonances’ as well as
‘mental processes and technologies of recording’ (Albano 2016, p. 33). In
Japan, the growing number of peace museums and centres curating the
personal memories of the trauma of the fire and atomic bombing of
Japanese cities reflects this multilayered interaction between individual
and society, the personal and collective memory, as mediated by a variety
of interpretative methods and forms of narration. This public embrace of
a narrative of personal suffering reflects a gradual shift from an interna-
tionally focussed ‘peace message’ to a contested perception of national
victimhood. Rather than the years allowing memories to be put aside or
suppressed, the growing attention to the memorialisation of personal war-
time trauma appears to be gaining greater attention. With it emerges a
more detailed and more uncomfortable historical knowledge.
In disseminating this social memory, the personalisation of a ‘difficult
history’ in Japan, as elsewhere, is being mediated by museums. Globally,
museums as ‘repositories of memories within culture’ (Albano 2016,
p. 34) are ‘being transformed into forums for memory communities and
for the communicative memory of eyewitnesses to historical events’
(Arnold-de Simine 2013, p. 12). Through representation in simple draw-
ings or a few simple sentences, or in the experience of meeting with ordi-
nary people, the survivor volunteers, in public memory spaces, large-scale
horrific historical events are amplified to isolated, personalised instances.
In this way, they allow the visitor to more readily share vicariously the
personal emotion of traumatic experience. These ‘dynamic processes of
conscious and unconscious retrieval [of memory]’ (Arnold-de Simine
2013, p. 12), in Japan and elsewhere, are undoing ‘authorised national
narratives’ to reveal the nation’s dissonant heritage. History has been
reluctant to allow them to speak but today, as Fassin and Rechtman (2009,
p. 22) suggest, ‘the role of the trauma survivor […] once merely a victim,
has become a witness to the horrors of our age’. How long can this remain
silent or silenced?
Reflecting on his own role in the firebombing strategy in a 2003 docu-
mentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
directed by Errol Morris, former US Secretary of Defence Robert
McNamara recalls his conversation with Curtis LeMay, the key architect of
the US bombing strategy, acknowledging ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all
have been prosecuted as war criminals’. McNamarra continues (Morris
2003, 42.5–43.5 minutes):
And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say, aye, we were behaving as war
criminals.
[…]
LeMay recognised that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his
side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral
if you win?
This chapter is dedicated to all those who have suffered from the flames.
Notes
1. Great Kanto Earthquake, 1 September 1923.
2. In 2005, in time to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of World
War II, his novel provided the basis of a live-action TV drama by Nippon TV.
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CHAPTER 4
No Place to Remember: Haunting

and the Search for Mass Graves in Indonesia
Annie Pohlman
This chapter considers the politics of social memory in contemporary

Indonesia by exploring the search for the mass graves of those murdered
during the mass killings of communists in 1965–1966. There are thou-
sands—potentially tens of thousands—of mass graves across the country
that hold the remains of an estimated one million people (Cribb 2001;
McGregor et al. 2018). During these purges, the Indonesian army and
co-opted civilian militias captured and killed men, women, and children
because of their suspected communist sympathies, dumping their bodies
into pits, ravines, and rivers. Indonesia has never come to terms with these
killings: these places are unmarked, and their dead cannot be mentioned
in a country which still celebrates their murder (Wieringa 2019). Yet the
dead are not quiet: each of these mass graves is an open secret to nearby
locals, and most of these places are haunted.
In a country where there is no place to remember or commemorate the
dead of 1965, I focus on the work of two men, Pak Bedjo and Mas Aris,1
who are attempting to map the locations of the mass graves. Both belong
A. Pohlman (*)
e-mail: a.pohlman@uq.edu.au

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_4
62 A. POHLMAN
to a non-government organisation, a survivor network called the YPKP

1965–1966, or the Foundation for Research into the Victims of the
1965–1966 Massacres, and it is through the various branches of this foun-
dation that they locate these graves. As they travel around the country,
they photograph the gravesites they find and the people who lead them to
them, and then post these photographs on their Facebook pages.
Most of the photographs taken by Pak Bedjo and Mas Aris take in a
range of sites: an open field, trees along a riverbank, a small clearing in a
forest, an old water tower, even an old gravesite, overgrown with plants.
Sometimes a bare patch of ground is the focus of the photo, with unre-
markable grass and earth taking up the entire frame, or a dirt path running
between rows of palm trees. Some of the photographs show two or three
old men standing or moving around in these otherwise empty landscapes.
Some of these are of the men, lined up together, standing posed for the
photographer to capture them as a group. Usually when these men appear,
however, they are pointing towards places in the landscape (e.g. Fig. 4.1).
To discuss the search by Pak Bedjo and Mas Aris for the mass graves of
1965, I first sketch a brief account of these massacres and the memory
politics of the military regime which perpetrated them. I then examine the
consequences of the dead’s ‘bad deaths’ and the interruption of necessary
mortuary rituals. As told through the testimonies of survivors and victims’
relatives, the bad deaths have created haunted, uncanny sites (angker):
they are affective places where the dead are felt as a ‘seething presence’
amongst the living (Gordon 2008, p. 200). In the second part of this
chapter, I turn to the spectre of these mass graves in the contemporary
Indonesian socio-political landscape. Specifically, I discuss the search for
these mass grave sites by the two men who, over the past few years, have
travelled across different parts of the archipelago to document their
locations.
Their search for the dead of 1965 is one that follows and creates traces
of memory. They create the Facebook posts as evidence—as efforts for
truth-telling—in the face of ongoing impunity and enforced political
amnesia about the anti-communist massacres of 1965. The photographs
showing a clearing in a forest, or a riverbank, are where the dead lie; the
bare patch of earth is what lies between the photographer and the remains
of those for whom he searches. As the survivors and direct witnesses to
these massacres pass away, their search has become an urgent attempt to
collect as much evidence, and as many mass grave locations, as they can in
the time they have left. Lastly, I reflect on this search for the dead and the
4 NO PLACE TO REMEMBER: HAUNTING AND THE SEARCH FOR MASS… 63
Fig. 4.1 A man standing and pointing into the landscape, Grobogan regency,
Central Java. (Posted on Facebook, 19 February 2018, photograph by Pak Bedjo
[used with permission])
seeming impossibility that they will ever be recovered, their bad deaths
meaning they will never be at rest.
A Cold War Massacre and Indonesia’s Cult

of Anti-Communism
The many thousands of mass graves are the remains of a political genocide
of the Cold War, the human residue of an atrocity gone almost unnoticed
on the world stage, but profound in its effects on Indonesian society
(Stroud 2015). An attempted coup in the capital, Jakarta, in the early
morning of 1 October 1965 set into motion the Indonesian military’s
established plans to wrest power from then President Sukarno and to take
over the state (Melvin 2018). General Suharto, who was in charge of the
64 A. POHLMAN
army unit based in the capital that put down the coup attempt, took com-
mand of military forces and staged his own coup.
Suharto blamed the 1 October attempted coup on the military’s main
rival for political power, the mass-supported Indonesian Community Party
(known as the PKI, Partai Komunis Indonesia). He and the Army’s upper
echelons mobilised the country’s military, sidelining Sukarno and civilian
government, and carried out a pervasive propaganda campaign against the
PKI. This propaganda portrayed the PKI and its supporters as treacherous
‘betrayers’ of the nation (Drakeley 2007). More than that, communists
were depicted as dangerous, sometimes supernaturally evil beings who
were a direct threat to their neighbours, spreading a popular fear and incit-
ing violence against them (Wieringa 2002; Pohlman 2014). The
Indonesian Army recruited and armed militias across the country and
together they killed between 500,000 and one million men, women, and
children because of their alleged ‘communist sympathies’ and imprisoned
an estimated 1.5 million others in detention camps, where many died from
torture, disease, and forced labour (McGregor et al. 2018).
Suharto established a military-backed regime, the New Order, which
remained in power until 1998. Throughout the New Order, the regime
used the spectre of a potential communist resurgence to justify and legiti-
mise the military’s role in civilian affairs; in essence, the military had saved
the country from the evils of communism, but they could never let down
their guard, lest the PKI return and overthrow the nation (Heryanto
2006). As such, the regime maintained tight control of this official narra-
tive surrounding the events of 1965. Survivors of the massacres and con-
centration camps, and their family members, had numerous restrictions
placed on their movement and other freedoms, and were subject to social
surveillance and stigmatisation because of their communist background
(Southwood and Flanagan 1983).
Now more than twenty years after the fall of Suharto, the anti-
communism of the New Order lives on. As Miller (2018) has documented,
anti-communist discourse has survived and morphed during the so-called
‘Reform’ era of democracy (1998–the present), to become a powerful tool
of hard-right and neo-fascist groups who use this discourse to attack more
liberal groups or agendas. These same hard-right groups also use anti-
communist rhetoric against survivors of the 1965 purges and their advo-
cates, sometimes attacking them through violent means, such as by
burning down their premises or with physical assaults and intimidation
(see Amnesty International 2017). Speaking about 1965 in Indonesia
therefore remains a risky business: those who do are vulnerable to attacks

and intimidation from such groups (Pohlman 2013b).
Now more than fifty years on since these massacres so fundamentally
shifted the socio-political and cultural landscape of Indonesia—and
reshaped its polity—there is yet to be an opening up of this dark period in
the country’s history.2 Certainly there will not be an open reckoning with
this history within the lifetimes of those who directly experienced, perpe-
trated, or survived these massacres, if ever. In this way, Indonesia is a clear
example of a country whose leaders choose not to deal with the past: not
to investigate past wrongs; not to condemn perpetrators of mass atrocity
crimes; not to apologise for crimes committed by the state; and not to
provide survivors and victims’ families with any measure of justice, let
alone redress or reparation.
Despite these seemingly insurmountable hurdles, and in the face of
direct threats and intimidation, survivors and their advocates continue
their ‘memory work’ of recording testimony by survivors and witnesses,
and commemorating those who suffered and died (see McGregor 2017).
This memory work is in direct opposition to, and attempts to refute in
consciously political ways, the New Order’s hegemonic narrative celebrat-
ing the massacres; a narrative in which communist supporters, because of
their alleged evils, deserved their just and brutal punishment (Pohlman
2016). The search for the mass graves of 1965 carried out by the YPKP is
a critical part of this work. In the search for these graves, for places where
the dead may lie (however unquietly), survivors such as Pak Bedjo and Pak
Aris are seeking not only evidence of atrocity, they are seeking places as (to
be/act as) witness for atrocity, as places of historical truths which refute
the State’s version of Indonesia’s history. The memory work to be done
at, and through, these mass graves sites is therefore partly this explicit
political claim to truth-telling. But this memory work is also about recov-
ery: to recover, and rehabilitate through memorialisation, the many hun-
dreds of thousands of anonymous dead whose bad deaths mean they can
never rest.
Bad Deaths and the Haunting of Mass Graves

‘These places are almost always haunted (angker), you understand?’
explains Pak Bedjo, ‘People won’t go near them, or past them, they
wouldn’t dare’.3 Pak Bedjo and I are sitting in a café in Jakarta: Pak Bedjo
is the leader of the largest victims’ organisation in Indonesia, the YPKP,
66 A. POHLMAN
and is one of the two men from this organisation who have been investi-
gating and mapping the locations of mass grave sites. Pak Bedjo has
patiently been answering my questions for about an hour by this point,
telling me about their investigations, how they organise them, and about
some of the places they have been to and the people they have met over
the last few years.
The word he uses to describe the graves is angker, a Javanese term that
means a range of states and emotions in English: ghostlike, uncanny, and
terrible, but with inflections of meanings related to what is sacred and/or
taboo, perhaps even enchanted. There are also definite associations with
feelings of discomfort and fright (Wessing 2006). This is not the first time
someone has used this word with me to describe mass graves and the dead
of 1965: indeed, over the past two decades while conducting interviews
with survivors of this period, some have taken me to grave locations, and
told me about the spirits that haunt them.
On one such occasion, a man who was a survivor of the camps in
Yogyakarta, on the south coast of Java, rode with me on the back of his
motorbike for about an hour to the middle of a tree plantation. The man,
Pak Karto (a pseudonym), stopped near the edge of a very large sinkhole:
approximately 30 or 40 metres across and deep enough that I could not
see to the bottom, it was a collapsed doline (or sinkhole) in the limestone
underground cave system that runs for miles in that part of Central Java.
As we stood there, Pak Karto explained how, for night after night between
late 1965 and early 1966, truckloads of detainees had been brought to the
site from a nearby camp and executed en masse: the victims were forced to
the edge of the sinkhole, and then they would either be shot or have their
throats cut, and then their bodies would fall into the hole. An under-
ground river that flowed through the bottom of the cave system then car-
ried their bodies out to the ocean on Java’s south coast (Fig. 4.2).
Standing on the edge of the site where thousands had been murdered,
Pak Karto explained that this place was angker. This was the first time I
had heard this term, and so I asked him what it meant. He explained that
the spirits of those killed remained sometimes, that they stayed (tetap),
lingering near the edge of the hole because they were somehow the
remains (sisa) of what had happened there. He also explained that this
place was therefore always quiet (diam) because people stayed away.4 This
was not the last mass grave site that survivors took me to, nor was it the
last time these sites were described in similar terms: the dead seemed to be
tied to the places where their bodies lay or to where the violence against
Fig. 4.2 A sinkhole in the Gunung Sewu karst region, Central Java. (Photo
by author)
them had been done, and the sense of haunting was tangled up with their
having some kind of left-over residue in this world. Pak Karto and I stayed
at the sinkhole for about an hour that day, while he told me stories of how
people had been murdered there. At the end, he told me that it was time
to go; we had stayed too long already.
More than a dozen years later as I sat across the table from Pak Bedjo,
I wanted to know how his journeys to different parts of the country to
find the mass graves from 1965 had led him to these haunted places. I
asked Pak Bedjo if people who live near these gravesites believe they are
haunted, and why. He paused for a moment and then answered, ‘Haunted,
yes. For most people I would say, though, these are places which also need
to be respected, like a kind of sacred place, almost like a spiritual (suci)
place’. He explained that these places were usually avoided, and that this
avoidance was partly about fear but also about respect (hormat).
68 A. POHLMAN
The fear and respect associated with the dead, and with the places
belonging to the dead, are familiar. Indonesia is one of the most ethnically,
culturally, and religiously diverse nations in the world, yet there are many
similarities between the rituals and observances for the dead which I have
witnessed across different parts of Sumatra and Java, the two main islands
where I have conducted fieldwork (see Pohlman 2015). In most of these
contexts, local traditions are heavily influenced by Indonesian Islamic cus-
toms, themselves the product of hundreds of years of syncretic accretion
between local religious cultures and Islam (Laffan 2003). Making a trip to
the gravesites of loved ones and ancestors, for example, is part of Ruwahan
(the period leading up to the fasting month, Ramadan) observances; one
might also make a pilgrimage at this time to the tombs of saints or particu-
larly powerful dead people. Called nyadran, these pilgrimages are done to
make offerings, scatter flowers, repair tombs, and do the prayers, Quranic
recitations, and other rituals necessary to show respect to the dead and, in
turn, to receive their blessings (Woodward 2010).
Nyadran and similar rituals to show respect to the dead are part of a
multitude of such observances across different parts of Indonesia, which
are an important part of managing tangible and intangible actors and envi-
ronments. Within the customary practices associated with the living and
the dead across many cultures in Indonesia—Islam-influenced or other-
wise—there are countless rituals, offerings, and other observances that are
carried out in order to manage relations with ancestors, spirits, special
kinds of spirits or otherworldly creatures, and sometimes deities
(Chambert-Loir and Reid 2002). For many of these cultures, ‘the total
community comprises not only the living but also the dead’ (Schärer
1963, p. 142); without the proper observance of these rituals for the dead,
these relations cannot be maintained, and this can mean potentially dire
consequences for the living (Garrard-Burnett 2015).
Mortuary rituals are a critical part of these customary observances for
maintaining relations between the living and the dead. Ceremonial rituals
are an important part at all times when particular cycles or changes must
be observed, and all involve the dead/ancestors in some way: at birth,
death, circumcision, marriage, harvest and so forth (on Java, see Pemberton
1994; Wessing 2006; on Flores, Allerton 2009). Death marks a critical
and often dangerous point in the cycle: as the body and the soul separate,
the soul’s safe passage to the land of the dead must be taken care of, lest it
wander and potentially contaminate others or stray too far. The corpse and
its passage over time to complete decay are also dangerous to others; the
smells of decaying flesh, and any fluids from the corpse, must be guarded
against lest they also contaminate others (Hertz 1960; Siegel 1983).
A ‘bad’ death can come in many forms and have different consequences.
Death by unnatural means, particularly a violent death, or a death caused
by sorcery or other supernatural interference, can create a disturbance in
living–dead relations (Barraud and Platenkamp 1990; Schröter 1998).
The consequences of a bad death and the upset/disorder of these relations
can be grave. Without the safe passage from death to the land of the dead
(and thus to become an ancestor), there is the potential for the spirit to
become malformed and evil. The suanggi of North Maluku and a similar
variant, the o tokata of Halmahera, are some examples of malevolent spirits
‘of the dead whose danger is associated with the deceased’s incomplete
transformation into an ancestor spirit’ (Bubandt 2014, p. 84). Such crea-
tures feed off the living and are consumed by greed, anger, and malicious
sexual desire; ‘often this dangerous and intermediary status between the
living and the ancestors is related to violent death and the lack of proper
ritual transformation through a burial ceremony’ (Bubandt 2014, p. 84;
see also Platenkamp 1988). Burial ceremonies, mourning rites, and other
observances at certain points following a person’s death are all necessary
to see that the soul completes the journey to the land of the dead and that
the flow of relationships between the living and the dead are maintained;
without such rituals, blockages and disorder can occur (Fox 1973; Schröter
1998). A bad death does not always result in the spirit becoming stuck, or
malformed, but the risks of such would-be interruptions/disorders are
treated seriously because of their potentially calamitous consequences for
the whole community.
In stories told about the haunting of mass graves from 1965, the unnat-
ural and violent deaths of the people murdered often tie their spirits to
these sites. Pak Bedjo’s explanation that the mass graves are both haunted
and respected (or even sacred) places is therefore a familiar one, as are the
stories which he then recounts about particular mass graves being inhab-
ited by those who were killed there.5 Such places are inherently powerful
because of the violence done there and the haunting by the residue of the
souls attached to these locations. As ghosts or spirits, the dead who haunt
these mass graves are described in many ways: sometimes as vengeful or
malevolent, sometimes as highly benevolent and able to bestow blessings
upon those who seek them, at other times as mischievous. Pak Bedjo’s
stories of mysterious phenomena occurring at gravesites are also similar to
those that I have heard from other survivors over the last two decades. For
70 A. POHLMAN
example, one story that he tells about a bulldozer stopping for no reason,
because the spirits at the grave outside Medan did not want to have their
ground disturbed, is similar to stories I was told years earlier about motor-
bikes cutting out if driven too close to mass graves in West Sumatra.6
Above all, the haunting of the 1965 mass graves is connected to the
violence that was done in those places. While the violence perpetrated may
continue to be justified, and even celebrated, by many in Indonesia, there
is no denial that the violence itself was brutal and that those who were
murdered died ‘bad’ deaths. There is also no question that the places
where these bad deaths were perpetrated will forever be haunted by the
dead, particularly as the proper funerary rituals were never performed for
them (Ida Bagus 2012). In most parts of Indonesia, the locations of mass
graves are an ‘open secret’ (rahasia umum) (Roosa 2016). The grave loca-
tions—as with the violence of 1965–1966 more generally—are rarely spo-
ken about openly, and yet most local community members will know
where they are, and avoid them. Such public secrets are critical for under-
standing what must be known but never articulated. As Michael Taussig
askes, ‘Yet what if the truth is not so much a secret as a public secret, as is
the case with the most important social knowledge, knowing what not to
know?’ (1999, p. 2, emphasis in original).
The bad deaths of the hundreds of thousands murdered after 1965
mean that they will never lie quietly. They haunt the locations where they
were murdered, but they also haunt Indonesia’s past and present, unset-
tling current-day social and political life as an unrelenting reminder of past
injustices and a demand for accountability. As Leigh Gilmore explains, the
trauma of 1965 turns ‘history into haunting’ so that the dead ‘erupt from
[their] manageable confines’ and ‘are no longer persons who lived in the
past, but angry, bitter, and mournful ghosts’ (2001, p. 82).
For sociologist Avery Gordon, this eruption of the dead into the pres-
ent, the haunting by the dead, is felt as a ‘seething presence’ for the living
(2008, p. xvi). As Gordon explains, haunting is ‘an animated state in
which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known […]
Haunting always registers the harm inflicted or the loss sustained by a
social violence done in the past or being done in the present and is for this
reason quite frightening. But haunting, unlike trauma by contrast, is dis-
tinctive for producing a something-to-be-done’ (2011, p. 2). It is pre-
cisely this ‘something-to-be-done’ which drives those who would break
the silence that surrounds and guards the violent history of 1965. For
survivors such as Pak Bedjo and Mas Aris, the search for the mass graves
from this period is therefore intimately tied to their wider struggles for an
open and honest acknowledgement of the harm done, and reparations
made to restore the dignity of both survivors and the dead.
Evidence, Truth-Telling, and the Search

for Mass Graves
About a week before meeting Pak Bedjo, I met Mas Aris, who is his col-
league from the YPKP and who helps with the search for mass graves. The
first question I ask him is how many mass graves the two men have mapped
over the past few years. More than 220, he tells me; a year or so before,
they had mapped around 100 graves, but they have worked hard over the
past year, and so the total had more than doubled.7 I ask how many graves
he thought there might be across Indonesia. Thousands, he replies,
maybe more.
The work by survivors to locate and document the mass graves of 1965
began almost immediately after the New Order government fell in 1998.
At first, the hope was that some graves might be exhumed, and the remains
potentially identified, so that they could be returned to families for proper
reburial. In November 2000, one of the founders of the YPKP, the late
Ibu Sulami Djoyoprawiro, led an exhumation of one grave located in
Situkup forest, outside the mountain town of Wonosobo in Central Java.
Recruiting the help of a forensics expert, and working with local commu-
nity groups, the exhumation itself went well (McGregor 2012). Many
survivors and their family members from the area attended the exhuma-
tion, even though they did not believe any of their loved ones were buried
in that grave. As Katharine McGregor reflects, this first exhumation had
strong ‘symbolic importance’ within the survivor community; ‘the open-
ing of this grave represented the first opportunity to witness evidence of
the atrocities in which they had lost family members’ (2012, p. 243). The
following year when it came time to rebury some of the remains exhumed,
however, the YPKP members and the other survivors gathered for the
ceremony were violently attacked by local ultra-conservative Islamist
groups, and many of the remains were destroyed (McGregor 2012). While
there have been a small handful of exhumations of other mass graves since
then, these have been done very quietly, to avoid similar attacks by right-
wing and Islamist groups.8 The hope that any large-scale effort might be
made to exhume and identify remains has long since been abandoned.9
72 A. POHLMAN
For the survivor groups which formed in the wake of the fall of authori-
tarianism in 1998, locating mass grave sites has nevertheless often been a
part of their truth-seeking activities (McGregor 2012; Pohlman 2013a).
The YPKP, which is the largest of these groups and which has local
branches of survivors scattered across the archipelago, has collected infor-
mation about grave locations for nearly two decades as part of their work
to identify victims of the killings and mass detentions, much of this data-
gathering done through their testimony-based programs with survivors.
In the 2000s and 2010s, these organisations run by survivors and their
advocates, like the YPKP, have sometimes used places where mass killings
were perpetrated, or the locations of mass graves, to hold commemora-
tions. These commemorations temporarily mark out the spaces where vio-
lence is known to have occurred.10 Often prayers, mourning rituals, and
other observances are performed by victims’ families for their loved ones
whose remains lie in places which are almost always unknown. Less than a
handful of these places have any kind of physical marker to lay claim to
these sites: the only one that officially marks a mass grave is in the forest
near the village of Plumbon in Central Java (Wieringa 2019). The Plumbon
marker was only laid in 2015 after extensive consultation with local reli-
gious and village leaders.11
Some survivors and their advocates have also created books, photogra-
phy exhibitions, short documentary films, and websites which highlight
the places where massacres occurred, or grave sites, or concentration
camps (see Bräuchler 2009; McGregor 2009; Pohlman 2013a, 2016).
Such documentary and creative materials draw heavily on survivors’ testi-
monies to reconstruct ‘true’ histories of these locations; true in the sense
that they foreground the stories and suffering of victims in order to dis-
place what are described as the ‘silenced’ or hidden histories of these places
(membungkam kebenaran).12 The language of these materials is firmly that
of uncovering hidden crimes, truth-seeking, and truth-speaking as a con-
sciously political act, against the state’s official version of events (see
Pohlman 2016).
Twenty years on, the original survivors of 1965 are rapidly disappearing
and, with them, many of the groups which they formed in the late 1990s
and early 2000s. When I had the opportunity to interview Pak Bedjo and
Mas Aris about mapping the graves, and about how they post some of
their investigations on their Facebook pages, I also asked about their
renewed impetus for this work. After all, the YPKP has been collecting
information from survivors for two decades, but the majority of their mass
grave investigations have happened only in the last few years. In separate
interviews, both men responded that it is vital that the ‘evidence’ (bukti)
be collected and preserved, while those who can find it remain. Both
emphasised that, as the direct witnesses are passing away, time is run-
ning out.
There is also a broader context for their renewed emphasis on mapping
the grave locations. In late 2015, to mark fifty years since the start of the
massacres, a large group of survivors, Indonesian and foreign academics
and advocates joined together to hold the International People’s Tribunal
for 1965. Due to security reasons, the Tribunal was held in the Netherlands
where the panel of judges found the Indonesian state guilty of a long list
of crimes against humanity (Wieringa et al. 2019). In response, the
Indonesian government was moved to hold a ‘National Symposium’ on
1965 in April 2016, which included more than 200 people from the gov-
ernment and military as well as from survivor groups (McGregor and
Purdey 2016). Nothing came of the symposium; it turned out to be yet
another facile gesture made by the current administration towards ‘resolv-
ing’ past human rights abuses. The then Coordinating Minister for
Politics, Law and Security, Luhut Panjaitan (a retired Army general), made
the administration’s position clear when he stated that the government
would not apologise for the killings and expressed his doubts over the
number of people killed; after the Symposium he stated that ‘until today,
we’ve not found one mass grave’ (BBC Indonesia 2016, my translation).
Provoked by this statement, Pak Bedjo and others from the YPKP com-
piled a list of mass grave locations that they had mapped up until that
point; in early May 2016 he gave a list of 122 mass grave locations across
Java and Sumatra to the National Human Rights Commission (Wieringa
2019).13
While Pak Bedjo and his team at the YPKP had certainly already been
carrying out the work of locating mass graves, the April 2016 symposium
seemed to spur an increased level of activity. By the following year, Pak
Bedjo began posting more regularly about their mass grave investigations
on his personal Facebook pages, as well as on the YPKP website. By the
end of 2017, he and Mas Aris were regularly posting photographs and
sometimes short videos of gravesite locations, documenting their travels
and the people they met. The photographs show the mostly empty land-
scapes of the graves: forest plantations, open fields, ravines, and riverbanks
where unknown numbers of victims were put in the ground. Others are of
old men pointing to empty places in these landscapes. The photographs
74 A. POHLMAN
also focus on the faces of the old men and women in the local area who
have led Pak Bedjo and Mas Aris to these graves, or told them stories
about the killings in that area. In their online posts, Pak Bedjo and Mas
Aris often give short quotes from these local people’s testimonies, high-
lighting the parts of their stories that describe where and how the killings
were perpetrated. Most of these old men and women are survivors from
the local area, while some of the men are former perpetrators, or those
who helped the military and militias, such as by digging pits to hold bod-
ies. The man on the left in Fig. 4.3 was a 12-year-old boy when his father
was imprisoned in 1965; the man on the right was detained for his alleged
communist connections.
In my interviews with Pak Bedjo and Mas Aris, I asked them how they
go about setting up their investigations, and about finding the ‘bukti’ (evi-
dence) of the gravesites. These two men from the YPKP are by no means
Fig. 4.3 Two local men pointing into the landscape, near Kradenan, Central
Java. (Posted on Facebook, 21 February 2018, photograph by Pak Bedjo [used
with permission])
the only ones trying to locate the mass graves of 1965; local groups make
some smaller-scale attempts to find graves from time to time, and they also
often make their discoveries available online.14 As Pak Bedjo explained,
‘We’re fortunate in that the YPKP has a vast network, branches in the
towns and regions and they’re the ones who know [where the graves are]’.
He then gave a list of examples of gravesites they had visited over the past
year. He explained that, within a particular region, the local YPKP survivor
group always invites him to come, ‘They want us to come, to find these
places.’ In my interview with Mas Aris, he also emphasised how they work
with local survivors at each location, coordinating their investigations with
the locals so that everyone is included.
When they go to a region, as Mas Aris explained, they start by meeting
with the members of the local YPKP branch, often holding some kind of
forum for survivors in the area. These forums are a critical part of their
inclusive strategy, but they are also used by Pak Bedjo and Mas Aris as
ways to communicate and disseminate information. As Mas Aris clarified,
the forums allow them to hand out publications (such as the YPKP’s own
publication, ‘Our Voice’ (Soera Kita), but also others related to 1965),
and to let people in the regions know about their programs. Pak Bedjo
also talked about the information that he shared with survivors through
these forums, particularly about the LPSK (the Witness and Victim
Protection Agency) program, which is a limited government compensa-
tion scheme that offers some eligible victims of past human rights abuses
access to health care. In the days following the forum, one or two of the
locals then take them to the mass graves.
Aside from disseminating information and making efforts to include
victims and their families from each of the local areas that they visit, Pak
Bedjo and Mas Aris both also strongly emphasised what they described as
the restorative function of these trips. For Mas Aris, he said quite directly
that their searches for mass graves were really about keeping up peoples’
spirits, so that the survivors and their families do not ‘lose hope’ (putus
asa). Their searches were of course about mapping the graves, but they
were also about ‘trauma healing’.
In our interview, I responded to this by asking Mas Aris if he thought
that was something that the local survivors got out of their search. He sat
and smoked for a moment then explained that some people were looking
for answers, looking for where their loved ones might be buried, while
others were just looking for hope. Through his work with Pak Bedjo and
the YPKP, he said, he hoped that their mass grave searches helped people
76 A. POHLMAN
to find hope. I then asked him why he got involved in these searches.
Again, he paused then explained that he had to, he had to do something
that would be useful, that would help victims. After someone tells their
story, he explained, opens up about what happened, this helps other peo-
ple to tell their story too. Without opening this history up, that space will
always be closed. He finished his explanation by stating baldly that the
state will never do it, so we have to. I asked him if Pak Bedjo felt the same
way: Pak Bedjo is never going to stop, Mas Aris said, he will work until he
dies. A week later when I meet with Pak Bedjo, my strongest impression is
that Mas Aris is right.
Conclusion: No Place to Remember

If memory, particularly social memory, is attached to a place—to sites in
their ‘physical’ and ‘non-material’ manifestations (Nora 1989)—then, as
Hoelscher and Adlerman explain, these ‘geographies of memory’ need
both the material markers and ‘the bodily repetition of performance and
cultural display’ in order to survive (2004, p. 350). Without the physical
markers, the memorials, the museums, and the rituals and commemora-
tions that accompany them, where is there a place to remember? Or,
rather, can social memory live on without place?
When considering the politics of social memory in contemporary
Indonesia, the New Order’s narrative celebrating the murder and impris-
onment of millions remains a powerful instrument of rule, even two
decades on from the end of that regime (Trouillot 1995). Though always
contested, even during the regime (particularly by its many victims), the
cult of anti-communism, and its concurrent justification for military rule,
remain strong in Indonesia (Heryanto 2006). If anything, this cult grows
stronger as time goes on. While in the immediate post-New Order period,
a social space opened for alternate versions of history to be told, as neo-
fascist and militarist groups have grown more powerful over the last few
years, this discourse regains strength (Miller 2018).
If we look for the physical markers and the rituals of social memory in
Indonesia, they are almost exclusively those created and policed by the
military regime. The existing monuments are to the military victors who
saved the country from the evil communists who deserved what happened
to them. The rituals enact a hegemonic historical narrative that celebrates
the military’s heroism. Small stones placed in forest clearings by families of
the dead to mark the mass graves of those murdered seem so insignificant
by comparison.
Where, then, is there a place to remember the victims of 1965? Are the
open fields, riverbanks, and ravines—the photos of which are made as ‘evi-
dence’ of the atrocities which happened in those places—the places where
memory of the dead might survive? In their search for, and photographic
documentation of, the mass graves of 1965, Pak Bedjo and Mas Aris and
their fellow YPKP members are working to create as much of this evidence
as they can in the time they have left. But Pak Bedjo and Mas Aris are both
old men, and the survivors and witnesses who lead them to these graves
are all old too. They do not exhume these graves, and they do not place
physical markers in the landscape so that they might be found by others at
a later date. What they are creating are Facebook posts with pictures of
empty landscapes and old men and women. In a country where there is no
place to remember, these photographs of their search for mass graves are
what will remain when they are gone.
Yet the dead of 1965 will never rest and, through their seething pres-
ence amongst the living, they claim a place for remembrance. Communities
are made up of the living and the dead, and the bad deaths of those mur-
dered during 1965 mean that they will continue to upset and disturb the
living in their midst. Thus, until there is a recovery of the dead of 1965,
physically or spiritually, there will be no peace for the living.
Acknowledgements This chapter is part of a larger research project entitled How

Does Torture Become Normal? Indonesia’s New Order Regime, 1965–1998, by
under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Early Career Researcher award
(Project Number DE170100619).
Notes
1. ‘Pak’ is a polite honorific for an adult man in Indonesia, ‘Ibu’ for women.
‘Mas’ is also a respectful term for a man; the use of ‘Pak’ with Pak Bedjo
and ‘Mas’ with Mas Aris indicates that Pak Bedjo is the elder. Both men
have reviewed this chapter and agreed to have their real names used. Both
gave permission for pictures from their Facebook pages to be reproduced,
though the exact URLs for these are not given, to protect their privacy.
Sadly, Mas Aris passed away in July 2020.
2. In the first few years after 1998, there was a small opening up around 1965
(Stoler 2002, p. 642). This more liberal period of discussion, however, did
not last (see, ICTJ & KontraS 2011).
78 A. POHLMAN
3. Interview with Pak Bedjo, in Indonesian, recorded with permission,

Jakarta, 17 April 2018. All quotes are my translations.
4. Field notes from this unrecorded interview with Pak Karto (a pseudonym),
Gunung Sewu, October 2005.
5. In some ways, the places of violent death across cultures share some simi-
larities; within this volume, see Rojas-Lizana, Hubbell, and Akagawa.
6. For example, Ibu Titiek (a pseudonym) told me a story years ago about the
spirit of a woman murdered at one gravesite. This woman’s spirit stops the
engine of motorcycles passing near the gravesite and tells the rider not to
disturb the grave. Once she has delivered her message, the motorcycle’s
engine will start again. Interview with Ibu Titiek and Ibu Lani (also a
pseudonym), together with Yenny Narny, West Sumatra, September 2005.
7. Unrecorded interview with Pak Aris, detailed notes taken with permission,
West Java, 14 April 2018. On 3 October 2019, Pak Aris posted the latest
infographic on his Facebook page, outlining the locations (by province) of
the graves the YPKP had mapped up until that point, a total of 346
mass graves.
8. For example, one grave at Luweng Tikus was exhumed by the Kasut
Perdamaian Foundation in 2002, see ‘Foundation Probes Blitar
Massacre’ (2002).
9. For a discussion on a remarkable series of workshops undertaken in 2013
and 2014 in the Central Java capital, Semarang, which explored and com-
memorated sites connected to 1965 in that city, see Eickhoff et al. (2017).
10. In my interview with Pak Bedjo, he mentioned examples of these com-
memorations run by the YPKP, such as at Pemalang, Central Java, in
August 2017, which hundreds of mourners attended.
11. A video of the ceremony in June 2015 can be viewed on YouTube, see
Yunantyo (2015). Some gravesites do have small markers laid by local sur-
vivor groups, such as in the forest near Brati village in Kayen, Pati, Central
Java; a local TV station covered the marker, see Cahaya TV (2016).
12. One example is the documentary created by two such organisations,
ELSAM (The Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy) and PAKORBA
(Association of Victims of the New Order) about the Bacem bridge out-
side Solo in Central Java; available on YouTube, see ELSAM and
PAKORBA (2014).
13. After reviewing this chapter in August 2018, Pak Bedjo emailed me the list
of 122 gravesites which he gave to the Commission in 2016. The list names
the locations of the graves, the estimates of how many people are buried at
each and, for some, the names of the victims.
14. The Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) has also recently docu-
mented a film being made about a mass grave location in Cilacap, Central
Java, see AJI (2018).
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CHAPTER 5
The Visitor’s Gaze in the Museum

of Memory and Human Rights in Chile
Sol Rojas-Lizana
Memory Museums have proliferated in the last twenty years (Lennon and
Foley 2000; Milton 2018). Their aim is to create and spread awareness,
acknowledgement, and action by emotionally engaging visitors with the
past (Arnold-de Simine 2013; Crooke 2019). They also function as agents
of social healing (Williams 2017), to promote reflection on human cruelty.
Considering the benefits that a deeper understanding of visitor experience
may bring to the exhibit’s aims, research on Museum visitor’s experience
is still limited (Noy 2008, 2009; Infante Batiste 2015; Gensburger 2017;
Rainoldi et al. 2018). In this chapter, I examine the visitor book entries
from the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (MMDH, Museum
of Memory and Human Rights) in Chile from 2015 to 2016 to study the
impact the Museum had on visitors and the connection between the
book’s discourse and the aim of the Museum. I begin by contextualising
Memory Museums in Latin America, as well as explaining the background
of the MMDH. I then describe the function and purpose of the visitor
book, with reference to the research done on these materials. Following a
S. Rojas-Lizana (*)
e-mail: i.rojaslizana@uq.edu.au

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_5
84 S. ROJAS-LIZANA
discussion of methodology, the chapter examines the content created by

participants in the visitor book’s entries from a discourse analytical
perspective.
The analysis shows that most visitors engaged positively with the narra-
tive and space of the Museum, since most comments reproduced the
speech acts of thanking and congratulating. Reflective comments and
emotions emphasised the national importance of having a place of mem-
ory for remembering, healing, and learning. The fact that the Museum is
not only about atrocities, but includes large sections on resistance and
struggle, seems to contribute to this highly positive experience.
Memory Museums in Latin America and Human

Rights Museums
Memory Museums (MMs) and Memorials in Latin America refer to a
period of history marked by the Cold War and consequent interventions
by the US in the region that engendered state violence against civilian
populations (Andermann 2012). Human rights and the rights of victims
are an intrinsic part of these places of memory, in which giving visibility
and seeking repair and justice are intimately connected to the discourse of
‘Never Again’ (Lazzara 2011). These museums are, thus, different from
those museums in the US, Europe, and other westernised nations, which
focus primarily on remembering ‘tragic national histories’ (Milton 2018,
p. 134), or war commemorations (which ultimately aim to justify war).
Moreover, the wounds that are remembered in most Latin American MMs
are still fresh, and victims and perpetrators are ‘walking in our midst’.
Another characteristic shared by these MMs in Latin America is their con-
troversial existence. Their perspective has faced opposition from an impor-
tant (right-wing), sector of the population who do not agree with the
memories that are commemorated in these places (Sohnlein 2018).
More and more MMs are including the term ‘human rights’ into their
titles worldwide (Carter 2013; FIHRM 2018). This frames their objec-
tives: namely, to document the abuse of human rights and educate about
human rights issues (Purbrick 2011; Carter 2013), which in turn sets the
expectations of their visitors. These museums base their terminology on
the United Nations’ ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ of 1948,
without tackling the current debate on their validity and universality (de
Sousa Santos 2002, 2015; Stern and Straus 2014). In the case of the
5 THE VISITOR’S GAZE IN THE MUSEUM OF MEMORY AND HUMAN RIGHTS… 85
Memory Museum in Chile, adopting this ‘cosmopolitan’ view has helped

the Museum to protect and justify its existence to the right-wing views
that oppose it.
Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Chile

Forty-seven years have passed since the military coup that drastically
changed Chile, and the collective trauma is still raw and unresolved as
Chilean society struggles to articulate the experience. Families are divided,
there is fear in social relationships, and a tacit consensus of ‘not talking
about it’ is still common (Frei 2018; Cárdenas Castro et al. 2019; see also
documentaries Special Circumstances 2007; Ulises’ Odyssey 2014).
Despite the vast evidence of the massive systematic human rights viola-
tions committed during the civic-military regime (1973–1989), confes-
sions and declarations of repentance remain scarce, and there are many
people and institutions that deny or justify these violent times (Hite and
Collins 2009; Lazzara 2016; Simón Salazar 2017). Representing a diffi-
cult past within the context of a society where the elite (and owners of the
media) do not acknowledge it is no easy task. Disputed memories emerged,
as evidenced by the articulated opposition against the existence of
Memorials, and the MMDH was contested even more because it was an
official, government-funded initiative (Hite and Collins 2009; Infante
Batiste 2015; Opotow 2015). In August 2018, the MMDH experienced
renewed criticism from sectors linked to the (right-wing) government;
however, the response in defence of the Museum was so massive and
immediate that the Minister of Culture had to resign his post (Dorfman
2018; MMDH 2018b, c).
Inaugurated in 2010, the MMDH is not a Memorial Museum since its
location is not the specific lieu where atrocities were committed (there are
over two hundred memorials in Chile, most of them inaugurated this cen-
tury). Unlike other Human Rights and MMs, the MMDH was sponsored
by the state during the first government period (2006–2010) of the social-
ist Michele Bachelet (MMDH 2018a), who, along with her family, had
been a victim of the dictatorship. It was built in response to the recom-
mendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions of 1991 and
2004, which called for the need to contribute to the reparation process
(Rettig Report 1996; Valech Report 2004; MMDH 2018a).
The MMDH has three clear goals: first, to collect, preserve, and exhibit
historical documentation about the civic-military dictatorship that
86 S. ROJAS-LIZANA
confirms the seriousness of its human rights violation; second, to pay

homage to the victims of political repression; and third, to cover contem-
porary human rights issues. As a result, the Museum expects to ‘contrib-
ute to making the culture of human rights and democratic values into the
ethical fundament shared by all Chilean culture and society’ (MMDH
2018a, para. 1), and to ‘empower our claim of NEVER AGAIN’ (MMDH
2011, p. 12, emphasis in original). For the visitor to have an embodied
experience, its interactive architecture, which occupies an entire block in a
lower income neighbourhood in Santiago, was designed with the purpose
of provoking reflection on individual and collective memory (Estudios
America n.d.). Luminosity and transparency were emphasised as a meta-
phor for not hiding the past, present, and future of the nation (Lazzara
2011). As Carter (2013, p. 325) claims, ‘concepts of reparation and jus-
tice are core to the spatial, aesthetic, and programming practices of this
museum’.
Experiencing the MMDH
With some exceptions (e.g. Kelly 2007), most research on the visitor’s
experience at museums1 are quantitative and have taken the form of sur-
veys (with a recent addition being eye tracking recording), applied before,
during, and after the experience (Purbrick 2011; Gensburger 2017;
Rainoldi et al. 2018). This material is important to inform the planning
and designing of the exhibits and spaces, but it does not qualitatively
explore the visitors’ experiences. There are approximately a dozen publica-
tions concerning the MMDH in terms of its exhibits, its creation, and
political discourse, but there are very few studies about its visitors. Violi
(2014) studied the strategies the Museum used to involve its visitors,
while Infante Batiste (2015) examined the interaction between visitors
and guides in the construction and performance of memory and history.
The MMDH has audience studies publications (e.g. MMDH 2016, 2017,
2018d), which quantitatively characterise the visitors through the infor-
mation provided by the reception desk, the visitor book, and social media.
These audience reports state that in the 2015–2016 period, 315,892
people visited the museum, 30% of which were recurrent visitors (MMDH
2016, 2017). This high number of revisits, which increases each year
(MMDH 2018d), suggests that visitors felt the experience was positive
and wished to connect more deeply with the material (Opotow 2015).
Regarding age range, 53% of the general public attending were young,
varying between 15 and 29 years old. 59% of the visitors were from Chile,
but over a hundred other countries were represented, headed by Brazil
(23%), the US, Argentina, and Germany. 54% of visitors were female
(MMDH 2016, 2017).
Visitor Books in Museums and the Visitor Book

at the MMDH
The presence of the visitor book (VB) in museums is relevant for several
reasons. It provides a space for spontaneous engagement and reflection, as
well as for the unburdening of emotions before leaving the place (Noy
2008). This book is a ‘transformative communicative medium [that] facil-
itates a shift from impressions to expressions’ (Noy 2008, p. 185, emphasis
in original). It is placed near the exit, and this strategic location of ‘still in,
but about to leave’, appeals to a moment of decision in the visitors without
imposing itself (Kavanagh 2000). There are several studies on visitor
books in museums, covering museums in countries such as Israel, Greece,
Algeria, Japan, Lithuania, and Germany (Stamou and Paraskevolpoulos
2004; Macdonald 2005; Noy 2008, 2009; Chen 2012; Coffee 2013;
Isaac and Budryte-Ausiejiene 2015; Alcalde 2017). This investigation is
the first qualitative study of the visitor book at the Museo de la Memoria y
los Derechos Humanos in Chile (see also Rojas-Lizana 2019b).
The visitor book at the MMDH is a black book located at the reception
area, which is both the entrance and exit of the Museum. It does not fol-
low the traditional organisation of guest books (Noy 2009) that contain
columns for name, date, and place of origin before the space dedicated to
the comment. In this guest book, visitors are not required to leave any
identity marker and the pages are blank, so the person can write (some-
times draw), with total freedom of space. Identity markers can only be
deduced from the discourse in the entries. The Audience Reports for 2015
and 2016 (MMDH 2016, 2017), the years I researched, state that the VB
registered 1024 comments in 2015 and 762 in 2016. Most of those who
stated their nationality were Chilean, followed by Brazilian. The third reg-
istered country was the US for 2015 and Argentina for 2016.
The MMDH has generously provided me with the transcribed com-
ments for the visitor book for the years 2015 and 2016, in the form of
1786 Excel entries. These entries had columns for date, name, nationality,
comments (in the original language: mainly Spanish, followed by
88 S. ROJAS-LIZANA
Portuguese, English, Italian, and French), and their classification in the

speech acts of gratitude, congratulations, suggestion, and thought/reflec-
tion. Every comment in the book was transcribed; some comments were
stated as ‘illegible’, but names and any other writing were still included in
the transcription (MMDH transcribing personnel, pers. comm., 18 May
2018). I have translated all entries quoted in the analysis into English.
This study of language in use adopts an integrationist approach to
Discourse Analysis that combines the principles of Critical Discourse
Analysis (CDA) with organisational and analytical tools from Speech Acts
theory (Austin 2000) and Cognitive Linguistics (Rojas-Lizana 2019a).
My CDA methodological organisation utilises the basic trichotomy struc-
ture identified by Wodak (2011) and Reisigl and Wodak (2001) as the
following: content and topics, discursive strategies, and linguistic means.
Visitors are not passive in their interaction with a museum as they bring
their own ‘active meaning-making’ (Macdonald 2005, p. 119). I begin
this analysis by examining the diversity of addressers (those writing the
entries) and addressees (those to whom the writing is addressed), mani-
fested in the visitor book, given that their backgrounds and ideologies are
key to their response to the Museum exhibits. I then analyse the ‘what’ of
the visitors’ discourses, centring on the speech act of gratitude and the
emotions involved in the visitors’ experiences to explore how the narrative
and memory proposed by the Museum affect their entries and which func-
tions and aims are highlighted in their discourses.
The Addresser in the Visitor Book of the MMDH

The 2015–2016 VB shows that most entries are personal, but a few entries
are made in the name of a family or institution. Many entries are not
signed, but some addressers sign with appellatives that highlight (and con-
textualise) their positioning; that is, they consider it important to state
their status, in the context of this Museum, to give sense, and perhaps
strength, authority, and validity to their entry. Thus, we find entries signed
with ‘daughter of political prisoners’, ‘detained and tortured’ (Sample 4),
‘I, grandson of disappeared people’, ‘your mamá’ (Sample 14, see also
Sample 6). Other addressers reveal details that help their identification
more indirectly and even leave their contact details. I have identified four
general groups within the entries. As a typology, each of these groups
highlights specific motivations to visit the MMDH connecting them to
their situated realities: Chilean young people, victim-survivor, Latin

American and Spanish foreigners, and foreigners from other countries.
Chilean Young People Without Direct Memory of the Period

Young people between 15 and 29 years old constitute the most numerous
group of visitors. In 2000, the recent Chilean traumatic past started to be
addressed in the national curriculum for years six and eleven to understand
and explain history and to form conscious citizens (Infante Reyes 2015).
Consequently, high school students regularly visit the MMDH with their
teachers. This type of addresser sees the Museum as a place of learning and
understanding what they consider to be a distant past. They normally
manifest feeling moved and grateful for the experience, as well as feeling
empathy for the victims.
Sample 1
We learnt in depth. We place ourselves in the others’ shoes. The stories
reached our hearts. We are grateful that the Museum is cost-free because it
contributes to the learning and knowledge about our old Chile. As new
generation, we want to end Human Rights’ abuse. We will fight for a better
Chile. (June 2015)
Sample 2
I leave with a lump in my throat. Not having lived the dictatorship first
hand, I was able to understand a bit more the stories of my family who did
live and suffer that period. Thank you for the memory. (September 2015)
Although young people did not live through the period, they expressed
a strong connection to the events since they were able to ‘place themselves
in the other’s shoes’, which typically defines ‘empathy’. The depth of the
effect is usually expressed with metaphors that connect emotions with
body parts: ‘reached our hearts’, ‘a lump [lit. knot] in my throat’, ‘first
hand’ [lit. in my own flesh]. Another common effect in this group, as
Sample 1 shows, is to express a commitment to strive for a better society
and reflect on themselves as agents of social change. Sample 2 is an exam-
ple of learned memories through intergenerational transmission, but there
are many samples acknowledging complete ignorance about this part of
history.
90 S. ROJAS-LIZANA
Victim-Survivors
The category ‘victim’ contains prototypical and radial elements (Taylor
2002); that is, at the centre of the category are those who are considered
more representative than others. Victimhood here has a concentric mean-
ing: starting from those who died, then the tortured, imprisoned, and
exiled, their relatives, those who were part of the resistance, and those
who endured. Many of the entries specified their position within this cat-
egorisation. Depending on their experience, victims attended the Museum
to remember/relive their memories and/or to honour and ‘find’ their
fallen ones. Survivors volunteer their testimony sometimes, which is also
found in Chen (2012), in relation to Hiroshima survivors’ comments.
Entries by relatives from younger generations manifest that they were not
aware of the full scale of the experience until they visited the MMDH (see
Sample 2).
Sample 3
… this memorial reopened my wound as I remembered my past and the
past of Chile that my parents and sister also endured. I am grateful for the
information for the new youth who do not believe much in the past. I hope
this is never repeated again. (December 2016)
Sample 4
I was here remembering all the difficult and dramatic moments I experi-
enced and was involved in since the day of the fascist coup. I was here with
my daughter, wife and granddaughter; I take with me a beautiful memory.
Detained and tortured. (June 2015)
Sample 5
I am very moved for finally bringing myself to come to the Museum.
Memories surface of things that I would not want to have happened. As a
girl, I lived the horror committed differently, mainly because my father was
detained in the National Stadium and my heart aches when I see the images.
Thanks for building a place like this; a country without memory is noth-
ing … I long to know what happened to my father. However, I trust that I
won’t die without learning the truth. (September 2015)
Sample 6
Really good to have found my great-grandfather. It was a very hard expe-
rience. I hope this is useful to everyone to understand this situation. A
million thanks for finding him, my name is Mariana XX and I am 18 years
old. (November 2015)
In these Samples of different types of victims, those who witness the

period include the words ‘remember’ (recordar) or ‘remind’ (recordarme),
which are emotionally associated with ‘bringing something back to the
heart’. Unlike the first group, many of these visitors were reluctant to visit
(‘bring myself to come’), saw it as a duty, and experienced mixed feelings
(see section ‘Emotions’ below). However, all of them manifest, through
the speech act of gratitude and other markers, that the experience was
ultimately positive (‘beautiful memory,’ ‘a million thanks’). The exhibits
seem to allow them to ‘work’ their pain and heal.
Foreigners from Latin America and Spain

Forty one percent of visitors in 2015–2016 were foreigners. Visitors from
Latin America and Spain tended to empathise deeply and often manifest
total understanding because their country went through a similar experi-
ence (mostly Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Spain, see also Sample 17 from
Iran). They visit to learn, to compare (declaring the MMDH a ‘model/
example’ to follow), and to pay homage to the victims. Those in this group
comment more on the architecture, praising the space and the feelings it
produces. These types of comments may be related to having had the
experience of visiting other places of memory, which has been labelled
‘dark tourism’ (Lennon and Foley 2000; Lill 2017).
Sample 7
As a Colombian, today I felt that which so many innocent Chileans lived
during 17 years […] I am happy Chile has recovered its collective memory
so that this is not repeated. In Colombia, we are in default. (May
2015, Colombia)
Sample 8
Chile my dear: Neighbour of our Argentina, who is also impregnated
with histories of pain, absence and state terror. Thank you Chile for this
Museum of Human Rights […]. (July 2015, Argentina)
Sample 9
In memory. All my respect, admiration and prayers to all who died for
freedom, equality and justice. (October 2015, Brazil)
Sample 10
It has been a striking experience. A visit difficult to endure for the emo-
tions that it provokes. [There is] parallelism with what happened in Spain in
92 S. ROJAS-LIZANA
1936. You can have a Museum of Memory; in Spain, 75 years after the
events, it is not possible [for there to be] a museum of this kind. (August
2015, Spain)
These visitors often address the Chilean people directly in their entries,
manifesting their admiration for rescuing their collective memory. The
phrase ‘in memory’, which was used in several entries, establishes a con-
nection to pilgrimage in the reasons to visit the Museum (Lennon and
Foley 2000). Most visitors from Brazil and Spain express their wish for a
Memory Museum for their own country, as they consider it a healing tool
that would contribute to both reconciliation and coming to terms with
their ‘hidden’ past.
Foreigners from Other Countries

The comments by these visitors reveal that they come to learn or because
they are just passing through a ‘(dark) touristic attraction’. A few entries
manifest astonishment, as they knew little or nothing of this part of
Chilean history. The speech acts of congratulating and thanking are com-
mon in these entries.
Sample 11
Very informative and interesting museum, I feel like I have learn a lot
about Chile. (June 2015, England)
Sample 12
Muy interesante. It was a very enlightening experience and I really liked
the displays. Thanks for the nice experience. (June 2015, US)
Some entries praise the content using mild or neutral words such as
‘nice’ or ‘interesting’, and tend to leave practical comments behind, mani-
festing no emotional engagement with the exhibit. Visitors from the US
tend to acknowledge the responsibility of their government for these his-
torical events (see Sample 19). Interestingly, their gratitude relates to
thanking for ‘allowing’ them to learn about Chilean history, as if they were
intruding in a private matter. These visitors also thank the MMDH for the
contrast of feelings it triggered (see section ‘Emotions’ below). This may
be because they expected solely to witness the horror of the period, as is
assumed from dark tourism locations (Lill 2017). Instead, they found that
the exhibits celebrate the struggle that led to the end of the dictatorship,
hence promoting feelings of hope, pride, and happiness. The discourse of

these visitors implied a sense of relief at this inclusion. As Dorfman (2018,
para. 7) writes:
At every step, the museum emphasises that the sacrifice of the victims was
not in vain. Room after room […] they assure us that the rebellion that cost
so many lives was part of a great resistance that would finally defeat
Pinochet’s dictatorship. This sign that there is hope—that there is meaning
behind so much pain and loss—, is something that must be valued, as it is
not often achieved.
The Addressee in the Visitor Book

The addressee in the VB also shapes the content of the comments. Most
entries address the Museum (and its personnel), to congratulate and thank
it for the exhibits and for being the keepers of memory. There are entries
addressing Chile or the Chilean people (coming from foreigners, see
Sample 8), as well as President Bachelet, who is thanked for her key role
in creating the MMDH, and ‘compañeros’, calling them to action in search
of justice. There are several entries addressing the victims. Consider the
following:
Sample 13
Always in our memory, our memories and our heart. Honour and glory
for you, dear Goyo (Luis Muñoz Rodriguez). The tyrant snatched your life
away one day in January 1975 […]. So that Never Again […]. Today, as
always, I felt your blessing. (August 2015)
Sample 14
My son, my dear, we all remember you, always. You will always be in our
memories. With love, your mamá. (November 2015)
Sample 15
It is so very moving; it is something indescribable what I feel. There was
never justice and there will never be forgiveness. A tight embrace and all my
respect for you brothers and sisters, compañeros, who gave your life for n
othing,
who were murdered [by] cowards and those miserable fucks. (January 2016)
Sample 16
Pepe, here I leave the letter you wrote to me over 44 years ago. I see you are
in a very beautiful place. May all remember your revolutionary spirit […].
94 S. ROJAS-LIZANA
You told me that I was the most beautiful thing you were leaving in Paris. I
came for that reason. Neither forgive nor forget. (November 2016)
These addresses give the MMDH a function that connects with its goal
of paying homage to the victims; however, this goal is extended to adopt-
ing a function usually reserved for cemeteries. That is, offering ‘the pos-
sibility of, and a context for, memorializing a particular individual [that is]
the identity of the deceased can be enshrined in the site’s internal order’
(Rugg 2000, p. 262). The Museum in this case acts as a place of pilgrim-
age and healing where people ‘visit’, ‘talk to’, or ‘pay respect’ to the vic-
tims, many of whom cannot have a grave because their remains have not
been found. In that sense, the visitor is claiming control over the space, as
families claim it over graves in a cemetery. All these entries are signed with
full names2 (including both surnames in Spanish), which suggest a testi-
monial character. Entries wrote ‘in memoriam’ (Sample 9), have a similar
aim. Likewise, Noy (2008), reports that the visitor book in his study con-
tained entries addressing those who died in the war. The promotion of this
function is strengthened by the presence of candles at a space of reflection
in front of a wall with the victims’ faces (see Fig. 5.1). This imitates the
Latin American tradition of the ‘animita’, which consists of shrines in
places of violent death where people attend to remember and ask protec-
tion and favours from the victim (Ojeda Ledesma 2011). A similar func-
tion is played by people visiting graves in Indonesia (see Pohlman, this
volume).
The Entries
The visitor book shows us that the MMDH did not only bring new knowl-
edge, but it triggered a series of reflections, speech acts, and emotions that
evidence the powerful effect of this place of memory. For reasons of space,
I will only centre on the speech act of gratitude, and afterwards examine
the emotions evidenced in the entries, as they are strong indicators of the
powerful effect the Museum had on the experiencers.
Speech Acts: Gratitude

In order of frequency, the MMDH triggered the speech acts of thanking,
congratulating, wishing, reflecting, suggesting, testifying, promising, and
regretting. Many entries contained more than one speech act. Gratitude
Fig. 5.1 Room ‘Absence and Memory’ at the MMDH (Archive MMDH)
was the most common speech act encountered (222 entries explicitly
expressing gratitude), which was also the case of Isaac and Budryte-
Ausiejiene’s (2015), study. This is not surprising as the genre of ‘visitor
book’ in the context of MMs and Memorials lends itself to this function.
Sample 17
Thank you for creating this powerful space to commemorate this power-
ful moment of history. My family from Iran gained a lot of emotion upon
entering this museum because they went through a revolution under the
Islamic republic of Iran […] each death under the hands of Pinochet com-
memorates the death of my parents’ many friends and siblings. (January
2016, Iran)
Sample 18
[…] As the daughter of a tortured person at the Air Force Base in Cerro
Moreno, it is deeply emotional to go over this Museum. My father passed
away in 2005 but, in this way, I feel that I can reconnect with him and his
past, which is also my story. Thank you very much! (May 2016)
96 S. ROJAS-LIZANA
As shown in Samples 17 and 18, the thanking circumstances vary

depending on the story behind the addresser, but the reasons can be sum-
marised in two themes: making the collective memory of the period visible
(Samples 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 21), and honouring the victims (Samples 5, 6, 18,
22). Visibility makes the period real to the new generations and brings
recognition, validity, help, and hope to people, as the MMDH is as much
about atrocities as it is about resistance and struggle.
Emotions and Emotional Memory

Visits to MMs are known to be emotionally charged, as many of these
museums are perceived to aim at producing feelings of empathy and com-
passion in trying to convey how it feels to have the victims’ experiences
(Violi 2014). Given that emotions are short-lived responses (Nawijn and
Fricke 2015), the VB is an excellent method of capturing the emotions
triggered while the experience is still ‘fresh’. The expression of emotions
dominated the discourse of the VB. Many of them were very intense, par-
alleling other studies on visitors’ experiences in traumatic sites (Chen
2012; Nawijn and Fricke 2015; Isaac and Budryte-Ausiejiene 2015).
Interestingly, emotions such as hatred and despair were rare in the com-
ments (but see Sample 15). This is relevant because common arguments
against historical memory are that remembering would promote hatred
and division, and two of the comments made by people who hold a ‘mem-
ory of salvation’, argued that the Museum’s existence and exhibit incite
those feelings. Memories as salvation remember the dictatorship as saving
the country from chaos, and the human rights violations as necessary in a
‘state of exception’ to bring the country back to order (Stern 2010). This
type of memory contests the MMDH’s, which is a ‘memory as rupture’
(Stern 2010; Infante Batiste 2015). Table 5.1 shows some of the lexical
items and metaphors used to describe emotions, grouped in three clusters:
The Museum triggered positive and negative emotions and memories,
which resulted in a positive outcome. The most frequent describer in the
cluster Discomfort was ‘pain’, referring both to the pain of the victims and
the pain of the addresser as they experienced the Museum. ‘Shame’ and
‘guilt’ referred only to addressers and were rare, only present in five of the
nearly two thousand entries. The cluster Admiration and delight referred
to the experience in relation to the exhibits and to the place itself. Visitors
expressed admiration (foreigners), and pride (nationals), for the people’s
struggle and bravery, and for the Chilean people’s capacity to overcome.
Table 5.1 Clusters of emotions as expressed in the visitor book of the MMDH
(2015–2016)
Discomfort Admiration and delight Conflicted
feelings
Pain, sadness, shocking, Gratitude, respect, pride, appreciation, Indescribable,

striking, fear, tears, congratulation, inspiring, pleasing, sad, haunting
repudiation, helplessness, hope, good, exciting, amazing, but inspiring;
hopelessness, shame, guilt, impressive, encouraging, wonderful, with a tight
bad, atrocious, disturbing, beautiful, delight, wonder, intense, heart but happy;
sorrow, terrible, horror, moving, open the mind, touched my terrifying but
terror, haunting, shivering, heart, fraternal embrace, marvellous, exhilarating at
difficult, dramatic, anguish, extraordinary, jealousy, unforgettable, the same time;
open wound, brutal, so essential, super, strength, faith, love, shocking but
much, too much, tears of instructive, revitalising, rewarding, inspiring at the
outrage, lump in the throat, courage, fascinating, enjoyed, same time; grey
soul breaking, touches admiration, powerful, integrity, but hopeful;
every part of the body and happiness, light, balm, necessary painful but
soul, dark, overwhelmed, Referring to the place: pretty, special, hopeful; deeply
ugly, stormy, sinister, bitter, fantastic, wonderful, beautiful, saddened but at
hell, terrified, evil, lies, stunning, belissimo. spectacular, lovely, the same time
injustice, insult, marvellous, good, incredible, super, grateful; sad
penetrating, horrifying, pleasant, gorgeous, monumental, history but it
breathless, treason interactive, artistic offers a light of
hope; terribly
marvellous
place; beautiful
although very
hard; marvellous
and sad at the
same time;
beautiful and
heart-rending;
Although the
pain is still alive
and my feelings
trample on each
other … thank
you for making
us remember.
Very sobering
and sad, but I’m
glad I visited
Most frequent are highlighted

98 S. ROJAS-LIZANA
The word ‘necessary’ (experience) was repeated many times, written in the
context of an adversative, as in ‘painful but necessary’.
Although many entries included negative and positive feelings within
the comment itself, the cluster ‘Conflicted feelings’ is separated from the
others to mark that addressers were aware that these feelings were compet-
ing. This is expressed in discourse by the expression ‘at the same time’ or
‘conflicted feelings’ and placing negative and positive lexical items close
together. In most cases, the positive followed the negative feeling, which,
cognitively, marks a recovery as a metaphor for time; that is, the negative
feelings came first and the positive after (Allot 2013). Sadness and hope
were the most common. Another discourse marker that showed a positive
outcome was expressing gratitude after or before expressing mixed
feelings.
Sample 19
Fantastic museum! Sad, haunting, but also inspiring that in the end the
people triumphed. I am only sorry for the role my country played in the
cause. Gracias por la lucha continuar. (June 2015, US)
Sample 20
I don’t like that this Museum exists, I don’t like having this information
before my eyes. I don’t like having to be moved to tears every time I come. I
don’t like to recognise myself before this brutal memorised history. But
please, don’t ever cease to exist and to show us what we were […].
(September 2015)
Words reinforcing a sense of duty in the visitor are common in the

entries. The sense of moral duty and the need to have this painful reminder
are considered necessary to progress as a nation and to pay tribute. Body
metaphors referring to these emotions were abundant in an effort to con-
vey emotional intensity and connect with feelings of empathy and solidarity.
Transformation and Catharsis
In some cases, these extreme feelings seem to produce a transformation in
people who did not have a direct memory of the time, and even a sense of
catharsis (intense emotional release), in visitors who had experienced
the period.
Sample 21
You leave this place a different person, you are not the same any more. When
you have remember with such clarity the wound of Chile that we must never
forget, because if so we run the risk to repeat again this bitter history […].
Each child must know the history of its country; it is a national duty.
Beautiful and heart-rending. Thank you. (February 2016)
Sample 22
I finally dared to come. I was very scared of not being able to contain the
tears and the pain of seeing the history of my country exposed, which is the
story of myself, my parents, and of all. However, I could do it, and I feel
happy. Thank you for the work you do. (March 2016)
Sample 23
Very moving. Those of us who lived this period but did not ‘get involved’
feel that we ‘failed’ all those who suffered and disappeared. I ask God this
does not happen again. ‘Forgive me’ (‘Perdón’). (July 2016, emphasis
in original)
The transformation is expressed in the metaphor of the Museum as a

container (Sample 21) that transforms people into something better
through the act of remembering and learning, not forgetting. Sample 22
(and Sample 5) is an example of catharsis marked by reluctance, fear, and
release expressed in ‘I feel happy’ and the speech act of gratitude. I con-
sider Sample 23 a cathartic act because publicly asking for forgiveness
involves deep tension and release. This person probably felt much better
about themselves after writing this confession. Notice the ambiguity of the
speech act: this person may be asking for forgiveness from the victims,
alive or dead, or from the whole country.
Conclusion: Beyond Memory and Place

Visitor books in the context of Memory Museums are evidence of the
impact that the experience triggers in the audience, as well as indicating
whether the museum’s aims are achieved. This analysis shows that, at a
personal level, the experience triggered several speech acts, headed by
‘gratitude’, and emotions that depended on the type of visitor performing
them. That is, Chileans, foreigners, witnesses, direct or indirect victims all
engaged in different emotional dispositions (Maturana and Dávila 2015),
with their Museum experience. However, the entries show a common
thread that the MMDH had a constructive effect on these visitors, since
100 S. ROJAS-LIZANA
even when declaring conflicting feelings, comments would end with a

positive reflection that revealed a sense of hope, commitment, healing,
and coming to terms. Furthermore, declarations of hatred and despair
were scarce. It seems that, among other reasons, this success points at the
fact that the museum exhibits are not only about the atrocities but about
the resistance, solidarity, and the struggle that led the people to overthrow
the dictatorship.
At the level of general reflection, visitors valued this place of memory
for being a testimony and proof of a historical past that was (and still is)
constructed as non-existent. Many foreigners’ comments declared the
MMDH a ‘model’ against impunity that should be followed by other
countries. Comments stressed that acknowledging history and the suffer-
ing of direct and indirect victims was essential to avoid the repetition of
human rights violations. The MMDH is therefore understood in the con-
text of civic engagement and a commitment to the Never Again stance
(Rojas-Lizana 2019b).
The discourse of the MMDH has been criticised in academic literature
and conservative media for its omissions. These include contextualisation,3
the US government’s involvement in the coup and repression, not naming
perpetrators, not criticising the slow pace of legal justice, treating political
opponents exclusively as victims, and presenting a conciliatory account
(Lazzara 2011; Andermann 2012; Frei 2018; Violi 2018). In its contro-
versial creation, the MMDH also had disagreements with NGOs and the
AFDD (Group of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared); however, this
was scarcely reflected in the comments. It seems that, at least in the VB,
whatever was missing or omitted was overshadowed by the way the
MMDH gives visibility to a moment in history in which human rights
were systematically violated.
There are two facts that could be regarded as limitations in this study.
First, the corpus offered irregular background information. Second, there
were very few negative comments (although there were many respectful
suggestions). There were nine comments of dissent, refusal to engage with
the exhibits, or challenging the proposed narrative. This is unusual in
comparison with other visitor studies (Chen 2012; Coffee 2013), which
found dissent, especially in state-sponsored museums (of which the
MMDH is one). The absence of negative comments is not necessarily
because the Museum is ‘preaching to the converted’. Infante Batiste’s
work on the MMDH (2015) found that visitors who challenge the
Museum narrative and the type of memory it promotes were common,
which was corroborated by the MMDH personnel in personal communi-

cation.4 These visitors engage in articulated discussions with other visitors
and guides, but it seems that they chose not to express their disagreement
in the visitor book.
The discourse found in the visitor book 2015–2016 addressed the first
two objectives of the MMDH.5 The first objective, to archive and docu-
ment the violation of human rights during the civic-military dictatorship,
was tackled in the many comments that thanked and congratulated the
Museum for existing as a place where historical records are kept and dis-
played. The MMDH’s building is presented in a way that promotes
research, as it intersperses investigation material throughout its exhibits.
Its archival status is also in display, as it dedicates two floors to library/
centres of visual and written archival material opened to the public.
The attainment of the second goal of extending respect and dignity to
the victims was manifested in the great number of comments that used the
book to reflect, pay homage, solidarise, empathise, and address the vic-
tims. This was especially powerful in the case of the disappeared. Survivors
and other victims also used the space to face their own traumatic memo-
ries, as many entries offered testimonio (Beverley 2004), or evidenced
cathartic discourse. The question of how the MMDH contributes to rec-
onciliation can also be addressed with regard to this corpus. Reconciliation
is a process, and as such must pass through several steps, the first being to
acknowledge this memory of rupture. Many of the entries recognise this
as key to healing their trauma and to building a better nation.
The Museum’s audience reports stated that not only does the number
of visitors increase every year, but that the number of recurrent visitors
increases also; of these, 30% visited a second, third or fourth time in the
period studied (MMDH 2016, 2017, 2018d). Although the Museum
organises events that would attract repeat visitors, this high number of
revisits does point to a successful place of memory in which visitors go to
reflect and to connect with the material in a deeper form, as stated in sev-
eral of the corpus’ entries (see, for example, Sample 20). The analysis of
the visitor book has evidenced that the cultural public institution of a
Memory Museum plays an important role in the construction of collective
memory and contributes to individual and collective healing, and the
national reconciliation processes.
Dedication I dedicate this work to David Dungay and Muhammad al-

Durrah, always in my obstinate memory.
102 S. ROJAS-LIZANA
Acknowledgements My sincere gratitude to the Museo de la Memoria y los

Derechos Humanos and its personnel: Jo Siemon, Head of Education and Outreach,
manager of oral archives Walter Roblero, Beatriz Águila, and María Luisa Ortiz,
Head of Collections and Research. Thank you to my colleagues of the SLC
Memory and Trauma Research Group.
Notes
1. For an overview of the literature on museum visitor studies, see Hooper-
Greenhill (2006).
2. As in Sample 6, identifiers are not included out of respect for the writers.
3. Victims and human rights professionals were against this contextualisation,
arguing that no context justifies the violation of human rights, and that the
museum’s function is to show what happened with irrefutable evidence, to
promote the social commitment that these violations are not repeated,
under any circumstance (see Javiera Parada’s letter (27/06/2012) and
Enrique Palet’s letter (25/06/2012) to the newspaper El Mercurio).
4. Personnel from Audience Studies at the MMDH confirmed the identifica-
tion of a number of visitors who have a memory as salvation and therefore
criticise the museum’s perspective. (Beatriz Águila, Pers. comm. 19
May 2018).
5. Exhibits on contemporary issues on human rights have their own visitor
book placed outside the exhibiting room. However, a number of comments
reflected on the fragility of human rights and the importance of raising
awareness on young people on social issues, especially in connection with
the indigenous Mapuche people.
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PART II
Sites of Trauma
CHAPTER 6
Remembering World War I in Australia:

Hyde Park as Site of Memory
Nina Parish and Chiara O’Reilly
In 2018, as recorded on a plaque at the entrance, a grandson of Queen

Elizabeth II, Prince Harry, opened the revamped Anzac War Memorial in
Sydney’s Hyde Park, echoing the original opening in 1934 by the Duke of
Gloucester. Why was it seen as relevant that a member of the British royal
family should make this gesture as part of World War I centenary com-
memorations? What does this moment of memory and diplomacy politics
tell us about Australia today? As a nation-founding myth, great impor-
tance and political capital have been given in Australia to events during
World War I such as the Gallipoli Campaign and this significance has been
in turn maintained and reflected in the funding attributed to centenary
commemorations by the Australian government. In this chapter, we study
and compare a number of the memory modes and messages present at
N. Parish (*)
University of Stirling, Stirling, UK
e-mail: n.l.parish@stir.ac.uk
C. O’Reilly
University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW, Australia
e-mail: Chiara.oreilly@sydney.edu.au

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_6
110 N. PARISH AND C. O’REILLY
federal, state, and local levels to understand how traumatic memories of

World War I are articulated in contemporary Australian society and what
they contribute to discussions around Australian identity today. The focus
of our chapter will be the commemoration of World War I as exemplified
by Hyde Park in Sydney, and the different memory messages presented in
this site, for example, the Anzac War Memorial and Tony Albert’s monu-
ment Yininmadyemi Thou didst let fall. Drawing on theories about differ-
ent memory modes developed and tested by the European Union funded
research project, Unsettling Remembering and Social Cohesion in
Transnational Europe (UNREST), we contend that the more settled
World War I memory narratives, if articulated in an agonistic fashion,
could have the potential for opening up debate around the difficult and
traumatic histories that have taken place on Australian soil.
The Politics of Commemoration in Australia

As Marilyn Lake and others have long pointed out, in Australia, the Anzac
commemorations are a politically driven ‘authorised’ tradition (Lake
2006; Lake and Reynolds 2010; Beaumont 2013; Clark 2017). This
authorised tradition is borne out by the significant investment made by
the Australian government in World War I centenary commemorations
(Daley 2018; Harris and Commonwealth of Australia n.d.), with journal-
ists suggesting that Australia spent more than any other participant in the
war (McPhedran 2015). These funds have been dispersed by federal and
state governments, ranging from high-profile funds released to national
cultural institutions to support for small-scale community projects. Over
the four years of centenary commemorations, the Anzac Centenary Public
Fund supported ‘77 arts and cultural projects’ (Australian Government
2018, p. 11) to honour local and national memories of World War I. Small
projects were also funded in each federal electorate to support community
projects, such as the restoration of local honour rolls, war memorials, and
other events or activities by local community groups (Australian
Government n.d.). The handcrafted poppy project (Berry n.d.) is one
local initiative that captured imaginations and even took on national and
global significance. At the other end of the scale, the federal government
constructed a dedicated extraterritorial museum in France, which opened
in April 2018: the Sir John Monash Centre at the Australian War Memorial
(Villers-Bretonneux). All these initiatives were marked by a solemn sense
of celebrating a continued history of remembering the dead and an
6 REMEMBERING WORLD WAR I IN AUSTRALIA: HYDE PARK AS SITE… 111
ongoing celebration of the Anzac spirit, which continue to be politically

authorised as a core part of modern Australian identity.
An important question for remembering World War I in Australia is
how best to commemorate events that happened in distant places. The
trauma inflicted on civilian lives by mass loss—Inglis and Brazier suggest
one in two Australian families were affected (1998, p. 93)—in battles
fought to support the British forces on the other side of the world was
made worse by the impossibility of traditional grieving rituals as many
bodies were lost on the battlefields and the dead were not repatriated dur-
ing the war. The Australian landscape is dotted with memorials—New
South Wales has more than 2000 (NSW Government Office for Veterans
Affairs n.d.)—while some list battle sites, most list the names of those who
fought or died. These local monuments are significant official sites of
memory that position traumatic loss in communities and ‘stand in for the
absence of bodies after World War One, a war fought elsewhere, out of
sight of most who would do the mourning for loved ones whose remains
lay in battlefields or foreign graves’ (Ashton and Hamilton 2008, p. 2).
The physical sites of the battles, the distant soils where Australian soldiers
fought and are buried, have similarly become places of pilgrimage, a jour-
ney to places such as Villers-Bretonneux which has in recent years become
a quasi-rite of passage for young Australians (Scates 2002, 2007; McKenna
and Ward 2007). Scates, in response to the work of McKenna and Ward
(2007), on this dark tourism, wrote of the profound challenge that it rep-
resents for historians: ‘How do historians, well aware of the waste, immo-
rality, and the futility of the Great War, respond to what McKenna and
Ward have called the “sanctification” of its memory?’(Scates 2007,
p. 313). In addition to its political elevation and instrumentalisation, Lake
(2006) discusses the military influence on commemorations of World War
I, suggesting the damaging effect that this can have on the work of
historians:
Historians have now enrolled in the pilgrimages as guides and interpreters

and joined the publishing bonanza that is war commemoration. For the
time being at least, it would seem that history—as critical practice—has been
disarmed. (p. 57)
These challenges are central to understanding how World War I com-

memoration is articulated and experienced in Australia, be it in the
‘authentic’ battlefield experience or memorials constructed on the other
side of the world by grieving communities, alongside the political and

military significance.
The range of World War I commemorations in Australia, from the offi-
cially sanctioned to more grassroots efforts, is striking. The listing of
names, as part of the remembering of people lost, and the traumatic
absence of physical sites locally linked to the loss, continues to resonate
and demonstrates the important continuation of memory work as an activ-
ity with local meaning and significance. However, although there is no
doubt that the sacrifices of those who served, were injured, and/or died in
World War I and other conflicts should be commemorated, the homoge-
neity of those being commemorated is to be noted. What about the names
which did not make it on to the honour boards? What about the memories
of those who chose not to volunteer to fight in World War I, of those who
voted against conscription in referenda in 1916 and 1917, of those who
returned to Australia transformed both physically and mentally, trauma-
tised by what they had experienced? It seems that different perspectives
that may trouble and disrupt official accounts are hidden from sight in
many of these narratives, and examples are rare. As McKenna writes, ‘Like
all national myths, the myth of the Anzac simplifies the past. We see the
Anzacs as we need to see them: an army of innocent, brave, young men
who were willing to sacrifice their lives so that we might “live in freedom”’
(2010, p. 111). Using the memory modes explored on the UNREST
project, we argue that unsettling the Anzac myth by introducing radical
multiperspectivity and deep contextual knowledge will help to engage
with memories of World War I in a productive way for contemporary
Australian society.
Agonistic Memory
Drawing on the three ethico-political modes of remembering discussed by
Cento Bull and Hansen (2016), many of these official and local accounts
of World War I in Australia share characteristics of the antagonistic and
cosmopolitan memory modes. Antagonistic memory posits conflict as a
moral struggle without nuance or ‘grey zones’ between good and evil,
between them and us, between heroes and villains, conceiving the ‘other’
as an enemy to be destroyed. It does not consider the suffering of victims
or perpetrators; rather it vilifies deserters and insubordinates and glorifies
human sacrifice in the pursuit of patriotism. In many ways, this memory
mode resonates with the ‘Australian cult of the Anzac’ (Lake 2006), and
what the honour roll and poppy projects stand for: a celebration of the
Australian heroes who gave their lives for their country. But if we look a
little closer, particularly in the work of local community-based projects, a
focus on individual experience reveals suffering and recognition of the
meaninglessness of war. The efforts made by local history groups (for
example in Ashfield, a suburb of Sydney) (O’Connell 2019), to trace the
names of former students who fought in World War I recorded on school
honour boards and to find out more about these individual stories, map
the past loss onto present-day experiences. Schoolchildren can relate to
and empathise with these young men and their suffering as their names are
called out next to theirs or because they lived on the same street as them,
thereby bringing these stories closer to home. This underscores the rele-
vance of the work done to remember and record local loss and engages in
what could be described as cosmopolitan memory practices. This memory
mode highlights the futility of war to ensure we learn from traumatic
events in the past so they will never happen again.
However, Cento Bull and Hansen argue that cosmopolitan memory
and its message of never again is no longer enough in a political context
where extremism is drawing on antagonism to fuel its cause. They put
forward the concept of agonistic memory, drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s
writings on agonism (2000, 2005), as an alternative memory mode able to
redress the balance. Agonistic memory relies on radical multiperspectivity
to deconstruct the hegemonic memory regime and to (re)construct alter-
native democratic imaginings, including subaltern narratives; it seeks to
give voice to victims but also to perpetrators, bystanders, and traitors:
[T]hey [victims] can also be remembered as subjects with a collective, as

well as an individual, political voice and agency. Indeed, it is often this politi-
cal agency as well as the historical context and power struggles that turned
many into victims and many others into perpetrators, bystanders, spies or
indeed ambivalent figures. If we are to avoid the risk that the demythologiz-
ing of those who used to be heroes turns into their demonization, leaving
open the possibility that they are re-appropriated as heroes by antagonistic
and anti-democratic political movements, we need to promote a kind of col-
lective memory that re-instates the social and political agency of those who
became victims, on one hand, and re-humanizes the heroes-now-turned-
perpetrators, on the other. (Cento Bull and Hansen 2016, pp. 394–95)
Agonistic memory provides context for conflicts to develop a deeper

knowledge and understanding of what social and political conditions led
to violent conflict and mass perpetration. Furthermore, it endeavours to
go against hegemonic interpretations of the past and the present, and in so
doing to re–politicise relationships to the past. As demonstrated and as
would be expected, there is evidence of the antagonistic and cosmopolitan
memory modes in Australia’s engagement with commemorations of World
War I. What then of agonistic memory practices? Let us turn to Hyde
Park, the site of a number of different memorials and monuments, to
explore these ideas further.
Hyde Park as Site of Memory: Commemoration,

Leisure, and Protest
Hyde Park is a green space in Sydney, on the land of the Gadigal people of
the Eora nation. This landscape includes key monuments dedicated to the
commemoration of World War I: the Emden Gun (1917), the Archibald
Memorial Fountain (1932), the Anzac War Memorial (1934; renovated
and reopened in 2018), and Tony Albert’s war memorial Yininmadyemi
Thou didst let fall (2015), as well as lesser-known monuments like the
Oddfellows Memorial (1921), making it the most important space in New
South Wales (NSW) for World War I commemoration. This importance is
clear from the pivotal role the Anzac War Memorial plays in commemora-
tive rituals such as the annual Anzac Day service on 25 April and the
November Remembrance Day service. Yet the park is more complex, as
the oldest park in Australia (Clouston Associates 2006, p. 1), it is also a
treasured green space in the heart of an urban environment. How then do
these different monuments function in Hyde Park? Which memory modes
are at play here? (Fig. 6.1).
In an article about Hyde Park, the Botanic Gardens and the Domain in
nineteenth-century Sydney, Hoskins compares parks to museums, discuss-
ing their role in civic and behavioural education (Bennett 1995):
Parks were not only healthful resorts, they contributed to the ‘moral enlight-
enment’ of the population. Like museums and expositions, which indeed
they often accommodated, parks were public spaces that operated as ‘exhi-
bitionary complexes’ communicating social codes and gaining popular
acquiescence to those codes. Self-regulation and surveillance was an impor-
tant part of this process. The regulations passed down for the Botanic
Fig. 6.1 View looking over Hyde Park North, 1937, City of Sydney Archives:
A-00006639
Gardens, the Domain and the Centennial Park by 1889 included the specific
request that visitors ‘bring under the notice of the director any breach of the
same coming under their observation’. (2003, p. 11)
Parks were and still are places where people can watch others to regulate
their behaviour as citizens. The City of Sydney Council manages Hyde
Park and attempts to balance its diverse use and long history as a site of
political significance and symbolism (Clouston Associates 2006, p. 1). As
an open environment, Hyde Park serves as a site for recreation, festivals,
and commemoration but also for public protest with many demonstra-
tions occupying the park. These functions are central to interpreting the
park in terms of Pierre Nora’s arguments for lieux de mémoire; as sites
where ‘memory crystallizes and secretes itself’ (1989, p. 7). Here, these
memories and traces of history coalesce in the network of historical monu-
ments but also play out across the physical landscape of the park, especially
its position amongst the built environment and its diverse public usage, all
of which establish this memoryscape as one of Sydney’s most significant
sites of memory. We situate our own examination of Hyde Park in the
postcolonialisation of sites of memory initiated by Etienne Achille, Charles
Forsdick, and Lydia Moudileno:
[…] involving recognition of the colonial dimensions—latent or more

overt—evident in such locations and phenomena, but also applying a critical
lens that acknowledges the continued practices of stage-management and
control associated with their inclusion in official narratives and memory
practices. (2020, p. 12)
The highly structured internal layout of Hyde Park, designed by landscape

architect Norman Weekes, was described as an example of the ongoing
tension between the formal and informal traditions of landscape
architecture:
Once the venue of keen sporting rivalries, Hyde Park is now the vortex of
more subtle, if no less heated strife. On its greens-ward rages, to use archi-
tectural parlance, the battle of the styles, formalism, and informalism.
(Brown 1934, p. 44)
This description stresses the colonial use of the area for sport but omits a
longer history of Indigenous occupation. Weekes, however, did incorpo-
rate Aboriginal place names into his design: Boongala and Gwandalan,
and prior to the Archibald Memorial Fountain, the meeting point of the
avenues was called ‘Birubi Circle’. Tellingly, particularly in relation to the
surrounding streets and area, these names were not used.
The geographical location of Hyde Park and the names of the roads
that surround and go through it add further layers to the colonial power
narrative developed by this site of memory. Many of these streets are
named after royalty (Prince Alfred Road) or prominent and controversial
historical figures (Macquarie Street), and thus the streets themselves map
white settlement and control. Along these streets are markers of European
settlement, education, and culture. College Street includes the elite pri-
vate boy’s school Sydney Grammar (1832), and the Australian Museum
(1827), which is opposite the Catholic Cathedral St Mary’s (1821).
Macquarie Street is the embodiment of white colonial history, featuring
closest to the park St James Anglican Church (1820), the NSW Supreme
Courts (1822), Hyde Park Barracks (1817), and the Lands Titles Office
(1912–13). A statue of Macquarie, the Governor of NSW from 1810 to
1822, was installed at the beginning of this street in Hyde Park in 2013,
to little critique but has since sparked debate (Moore 2013; Daley 2017;
Kidd 2019). This sculpture surveils his street and shares the intersection
with sculptures of Prince Albert (1866) and Queen Victoria (1888). Not
only are the streets which line the park home to essential parts of Sydney’s
history and cultural identity, the overlay of names and these sites frame the
park within an antagonistic landscape of colonisation, leaving little or no
trace of the violent struggles that characterise the colonial past and its
traumatic memories.
An agonistic counterpoint to the surrounding mapping of colonial set-

tlement and order is found in the monument to the Great Irish Famine
(1999), by Hossein and Angela Valamanesh (‘Irish Famine Memorial’
n.d.). This understated installation faces Hyde Park and breaks through
the wall of Hyde Park Barracks to interrupt the colonial power narrative of
the adjacent streets and buildings. Its spareness and simplicity allude to the
famine, the dislocation of immigrants’ stories and their link to the Barracks
where many female Irish immigrants fleeing the famine began new lives in
Australia. A table traverses the wall, never whole until visitors ‘rely on
memory to complete the image’ (‘Artist’s Vision’ 2018). The glass panel
inserted into the wall blocks access but allows glimpses through the wall,
sandblasted with the names of Irish women immigrants in ‘faint and fad-
ing’ text indicating ‘the frail and inconstant nature of memory’ (‘Artist’s
Vision’ 2018). Here, in contrast to the historical monuments dedicated to
World War I in the nearby Hyde Park, the imperfect, fragile work of mem-
ory, its partiality and gaps, is brought to the fore in an artistic work which
foregrounds working-class female voices and stories generally omitted in
colonial narratives. It thus offers a more complex record of the past, which
is also present in Albert’s war memorial, which we will return to later in
this chapter.
Hyde Park is punctuated with monuments that record people and
events deemed worthy of commemoration and demonstrating in some
instances how local context can shape the memory and narrative of trau-
matic events. The oldest, the Thornton Obelisk, dates from 1857, and is
a monument to an early Mayor of the city. Many of the sculptures are of
European historical figures; prominent monuments are situated in each
half of the park to the British explorer James Cook (1879) and the NSW
legislator William Bede Dalley (1897), while others like the Sandringham
Gardens are a memorial to King George VI.1 The northern end of the park
includes a significant sculptural monument: the Archibald Memorial
Fountain, a gift from J. F. Archibald with links to World War I. Archibald
was a prominent journalist and publisher who gave the fountain by
François Sicard to the city as a monument to the associations between
France and Australia and World War I (Anon 1932). The gesture of friend-
ship is central to the function of the Fountain as a memorial, which
although initially proposed for inclusion in the Royal Botanical Gardens
was incorporated into Weekes’ designs. Inspired by classical myths, the
Fountain is dominated by the figure of Apollo, ‘who represents the Arts’,
a fan of water radiating all around him. On a lower level, three groupings
can be seen based around the figures of Diana ‘standing for poetry and
harmony’, Pan representing ‘the good things of the earth’ and Theseus
who stands for ‘sacrifice for the public good’. The Fountain thus symbol-
ises the bonds formed in battle, with no overt military references, and
stands as a monument that looks to peace (Anon 1932, p. 9). This sub-
stantial gift to the city of Sydney was unveiled on 14 March 1932, and the
absence of overt references to the recent war was remarked upon by Mr.
Kelly, representing the donor’s estate:
Perhaps some people […] might have preferred this memorial to be of a

more military character. I think that the sculptor has been wise in making it
symbolical, not of the war where these brave French and Australian soldiers
fell, but rather of the peaceful and enlightened ideas for which they gave
their lives. (Anon 1932, p. 9)
The Fountain, in its symbolism and lack of direct reference to what was a
recent war, avoided controversy; its abstraction offered a grander, more
hopeful and ultimately cosmopolitan vision. It can be viewed in the con-
text of the different international discourse—peace and universal brother-
hood—that dominated the 1930s. It sought to enact the very specific
requests of its benefactor, described at the unveiling ceremony as a ‘cham-
pion for the freedom of thought and the free play of intellectual forces’,
who ‘feared that Australia, as a country of primary industries might degen-
erate into a condition of chronic intellectual stagnation’ and who aspired
through his gift to make a contribution to the intellectual and artistic life
of Sydney (Kelly, cited in Anon 1932, p. 9).
The central avenue connects the Archibald Memorial Fountain to the
formal landscape of memory in the southern end of the park defined by
the Anzac War Memorial which opened two years later in 1934. These
two monuments dominate the park but are not the first monuments to
World War I; they are predated by the Emden Gun. This monument was
unveiled on 21 December 1917—the same year that the Imperial War
Museum opened in London—by the Lord Mayor of Sydney in front of
thousands of people. A gift from the federal government, the council
erected the gun to commemorate in clearly antagonistic terms the ‘destruc-
tion of the German raider Emden by HMAS Sydney’ (Sydney Morning
Herald 1917, p. 12). This battle was the first wartime action of the
Australian naval forces and was reported in great detail to Australian audi-
ences by Charles Bean, who at the time was an official war correspondent
and became the official historian of the war, playing a crucial role in the
establishment of the Australian War Memorial (AWM) in Canberra (Bean
1914, p. 10; Inglis n.d.). The east face of the monument records the
names of those killed in action while the north face lists the officers on
board the ship. The official speeches at its unveiling further emphasise the
antagonistic nature of this monument, celebrating it as ‘a trophy of war—
won by the youngest navy in the world’ and establishing the local navy in
the colonial hierarchy as ‘worthy to rank with the great and glorious par-
ent—the British Navy’ (Sydney Morning Herald 1917, p. 12). The same
press report, however, draws attention to the complex politico-historical
context by underlining how the ceremony happened just one day after the
second rejection of conscription by the Australian population, a vote that
was highly divided along political and sectarian lines. The Navy Captain
present at the unveiling, Captain John C. T. Glossop, received a standing
ovation and is recorded as speaking ‘with considerable emotion’:
It is with very mixed feelings that I am taking part in this ceremony. You all
know a great referendum has taken place. What can be my feelings on the
subject. You have again decided on ‘No’ (Voices: Not yet, not yet) Do you
still refuse to reinforce your men at the front? (Voices: No, no) By your
votes yesterday you decided ‘No’. If everyone in my ship did as he liked,
how would I get on in action? (Sydney Morning Herald 1917, p. 12)
The fact that this relatively modest memorial opened during a period of
heated debate is lost today and there is little acknowledgement, here or
elsewhere, of the significant divisions the failed referenda left on Australian
society. Furthermore, the Emden Gun’s prominent position as a site of
memory is especially important when considered in relation to a press
report from 1931. It was used by a group of officers from HMAS Sydney
to commemorate the German sailors’ deaths, by placing a wreath at the
memorial, in the presence of the German Consul, with plans for the wreath
to be taken back to the German city of Emden ‘as a gesture of sympathy
from the Australians’ (Sun 1931, p. 5). The group then walked to The
Cenotaph and placed a wreath for Australian sailors. This gesture was a
broadly cosmopolitan memory act, acknowledging loss and the individu-
als on both sides of the conflict. This layer of history is also missing in the
current presentation of the gun, which as an antagonistic war trophy offers
little attempt to recognise broader context. This gap could be filled by
introducing some of these more complex agonistic narratives which
engage with the Emden Gun in a way that would acknowledge battle but
also unsettle any simplistic hero/victim narrative, thereby presenting a
fuller, more critical engagement with the past.
The Anzac War Memorial

The southern end of Hyde Park, dominated by the Anzac War Memorial
building, is typically reserved for more formal commemorations. The
memorial was designed by Bruce Dellit (Apperly and Reynolds n.d.), in
close collaboration with the English Australian sculptor Rayner Hoff
(Hutchison n.d.), who had served in the war, between 1930 and 1934.
Hoff’s sculptures are integral to the building. Across the exterior, these
sculptures tell ‘in simple and complete detail the story of the men of the
Anzac’ (Elliot 1934, p. 49) while the Hall of Memory and the Hall of
Silence, in the centre, are spaces of contemplation, the starred ceiling hon-
ouring the lives lost. This is given striking visual expression in Hoff’s
‘Sacrifice’ at the centre of the memorial via a space designed to force a
particular focus:
Here, in bronze, growing forth from the bronze paving designed to sym-
bolise the eternal flames of Sacrifice, is the very heart and core of the
Memorial. Here, placed so that all who enter the Hall of Memory must gaze
down upon it, thereby making physical and mental acknowledgement of the
spirit which it symbolises, is a group of sculptures symbolising Sacrifice. […]
There is no pomp, no vain glory, no glamour in this group; rather is there
stark tragedy, grim reality and bitter truth. (Elliot 1934, pp. 49–50)
The soldier in sacrifice is nude, held aloft by the women and children left
behind, thereby making a broader acknowledgement of the cost of war.
The emphasis on sacrifice of the generic individual is further reinforced by
a contemplative Pool of Reflection and terrace space, which are the cere-
monial sites used for key commemorative events on the northern side of
the memorial. This focus, however, tells us little about the broader polit-
ico-historical context of conflict or the stories and agency of individuals.
Through its majestic design, the Anzac War Memorial avoids engagement
with any of the more complicated, traumatic war experiences or memories
of them.
This memorial was one of the last state-dedicated monuments built to
World War I in Australia (NSW Environment & Heritage n.d.) and is one
of the largest and most complex. Its design and function were much
debated, underlining the importance that recognising and remembering
this conflict had for local communities. The monument was thus shaped
by its use as a site of memory but also of support for three ‘returned sol-
dier organisations’. The original construction during the depression was
supported by public subscription and NSW government funding. The
sculptures and very structure of the building articulate ideas of sites central
to the war; niches in the hall of memory are devoted to specific places and
battle zones—Gallipoli, France and Belgium, Egypt and Palestine; New
Guinea and the High Seas and set into the floor of this space are stones
from New Guinea, Flanders, Gallipoli, and Palestine. A sense of place and
idea of the battle are then symbolically visualised in the narrative relief
panels on the outside of the building that evoke scenes from the western
front and Sinai-Palestine. This opportunity for focus and the evocation of
place in effect transpose these different traumatic sites of memory to
Australian soil. Public support was vital to the construction of the memo-
rial and one innovative way of raising funds was the opportunity for indi-
viduals to purchase stars for the dome of the Hall of Memory. An article
in the Sydney Daily Telegraph called this a patriotic duty in somewhat
antagonistic terms, suggesting that:
A star in the dome of the Memorial Shrine is the name of a soldier of New
South Wales; already set with other hundreds of thousands Australian
names, in the firmament of our history. To place one star with the rest is so
little to give; yet, small as it is, it is the opportunity for each contributor once
more to ‘do his bit’ in honoring immortal memories and rewarding the
soldier’s illimitable sacrifice. (Daily Telegraph 1934, p. 60)
This personalisation of the memorial is vital to its function as a site of

memory and is continued in the current building with visitors able to pur-
chase stars to be dropped into the Hall of Silence. These are then collected
by staff and incinerated with the ashes returned to the Memorial. Another
continuation of this legacy is the invitation by the Memorial to ‘purchase
a star’ for the Memorial’s ‘Online Constellation of Honour and Memory’
with patrons invited to leave a ‘message in memory of a veteran’ (‘Buy a
Star’ n.d.). Within the memory framework developed by Cento Bull and
Hansen (2016), these memory practices can be interpreted as promoting
heroic glorification rather than critical engagement with past events.
The recent extensive renovation and expansion project of the memorial

was part of a centenary project. This saw the prominent Australian archi-
tect, Richard Johnson, complete Dellit’s original plans and design a new
underground exhibition and education space. Importantly, the new plans
are embedded into current understandings of Australian pre-settlement
history, which recognise the traditional owners of the land in the observa-
tion that it is located on ‘a traditional gathering place for the Eora People’
(Johnson 2018). This memorial has a core function today to honour ‘ser-
vice and sacrifice’ (‘Anzac Memorial’ n.d.). The upper spaces seek to
encourage a contemplative atmosphere, while the new lower spaces offer
a dedicated exhibition space together with a library and education spaces.
In its latest incarnation, the building continues to serve certain antagonis-
tic ideas of memory initiated by the original memorial but also expands its
interpretive and educational role.
The new exhibition spaces are vital to the ongoing relevance and trans-
formation of the monument. No longer providing proactive support for
veterans, the extension has expanded the opportunity to use the memorial
and exploit the exhibitions as spaces of communication (Belcher 1992;
McLean 1999). In a seemingly more cosmopolitan memory mode, the
current displays include significant amounts of textual information that
explain and offer a context to the story of Australian war and peace service.
The exhibition seeks to contextualise the building, give insight into this
history, and to tell the story of the ‘individuals—sailors, soldiers, medical
personnel and airmen and airwomen—as case studies to put a human face
to the experience of war or deployment on peacekeeping operations and
allow the visitor to make an emotional connection to the exhibition con-
tent’ (‘The Centenary Exhibition’ n.d.). However, the unproblematised
hero narrative continues in a key feature of the display: a diorama of the
Battle of Passchendaele with a particular focus on the NSW-born soldier
Captain Clarence Jeffries, posthumously awarded a Victoria Cross for his
bravery in this action.
The incorporation of a significant new sculptural commission by
Australian artist Fiona Hall is the centrepiece of the new subterranean Hall
of Service. Hall’s artwork is about place but shifts the usual extraterritorial
focus to the local by powerfully incorporating the names of towns where
soldiers enlisted and soil samples from each site. These physical tokens of
sites of memory are positioned next to the names of their source, listing
and embodying places of significance. The display of Australian place
names and soil frames the room’s oculus which is echoed in the floor
where names of key battles are inscribed together with soil from these
sites. This linking of far-off battle and home continues the use of an artistic
piece as central to the function of the memorial and it extends into the
display spaces where 3D printed copies of some of Hoff’s sculptural fig-
ures act as part of the display to introduce the different sections of the
armed forces.
Unsettling Memory Encounters in Hyde Park

Two more recent monuments, a plaque to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and
another more substantial monument by Tony Albert, Yininmadyemi Thou
didst let fall, both unveiled in 2015, complement and complicate Weekes’
design and Dellit’s monument. These new monuments unsettle the mem-
ory work around World War I and colonialism by introducing ideas of the
complexity of memory in Australia, a multicultural nation which has yet to
come fully to terms with the indigenous history of dispossession (Moreton-
Robinson 2003; Yu 2018; Maddison 2019). The Ataturk plaque repro-
duces an oft-quoted speech by Ataturk: ‘Those heroes that shed their
blood and lost their lives […] are now lying in the soil of a friendly coun-
try […] wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and
are in peace’ (1934). It was unveiled by the Turkish Consul General, the
Chair of the NSW Centenary of Anzac Advisory Council and the NSW
Minister for Veterans Affairs, Vincent Dominello. An official initiative, the
memorial was jointly funded by the NSW and Turkish governments and
was described by Dominello as a ‘fitting tribute to the inspired words
delivered by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a leader who captured the generosity
of spirit which has been shared between Australia and Turkey since the
First World War’ (Minister for Citizenship and Communities, Aboriginal
Affairs, Veterans Affairs 2015). Ataturk’s words have been a mainstay in
the story of Gallipoli in Australia, but recent historical research has placed
them in doubt (Stanley 2013; Daley 2015). The discussion around the
quotation highlights the challenges in the commemoration of this period
of history and how it is remembered.
Tony Albert’s monument Yininmadyemi Thou didst let fall (Fig. 6.2),
commissioned by the City of Sydney Council, commemorates the role of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander servicemen and women. It is public
acknowledgement of a hidden history which Albert explains is vital: ‘These
are stories that are written into history: they aren’t represented in our
institutions […] It’s long overdue. It’s confronting. It might ruffle a few
Fig. 6.2 Tony Albert, Yininmadyemi Thou didst let fall, 2015, Installation view,
Hyde Park, Sydney, Australia. Image courtesy of the artist and City of Sydney
feathers, but they are feathers that need to be ruffled’ (Kembrey 2015,
p. 6). The installation is made of four seven-metre tall standing bullets,
and three fallen shells arranged on a stylised bronze boomerang and sur-
rounded with plants used in Indigenous ceremony. It is designed to be an
active site of memory and ceremony, offering space for reflection on the
history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander servicemen and women
and their neglect on return to Australia (Scarlett 2015). The boomerang
base is an integral part of the monument. When Albert discovered how
many soldiers were given boomerangs as tokens for a hoped return, he
decided to incorporate the motif as ‘a kind of final resting place for not
only those still standing, but the spirits of those who never returned’ and
to acknowledge the park ‘as an important contest ground for local Gadigal
people’ (Reed 2015, p. 56). Central to the project is a new historical
awareness represented by groups such as the Coloured Diggers Project,
which started in Sydney with Pastor Ray Minniecon and the Babana
Aboriginal Men’s Group (Oakley 2015; Riches 2016), and campaigned
for a memorial to ensure that the community as a whole acknowledges and
better appreciates the history of Indigenous servicemen and women.
Albert importantly describes his memorial in broadly agonistic terms as
‘not a monument that in any way glorifies war’, but instead ‘uses bold and
evocative imagery to stir strong emotions in visitors’ (Reed 2015, p. 58).
It invites conversation and acknowledgement. This process of historical
meaning-making and memorialisation was honoured when the memorial
was unveiled by the NSW Governor, a former Chief of the Australian
Defence Force, in a speech that acknowledged the prejudice that
Indigenous people suffered on their return from service and suggested
that ‘This public artwork restores Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
heroes to their rightful place in the canon of Australian war history from
which they had vanished’ (Hurley 2015, np).
This combination of art and commemoration is present in many of the
sites of memory in Hyde Park, from the Archibald Memorial Fountain to
the Anzac War Memorial, but Albert’s monument differs in that it relies
on difficult personal symbolism drawn from his family story, as for Albert
the story of his grandfather ‘encapsulates the struggles that other
Indigenous servicemen and women faced’ (Reed 2015, p. 56). This is a
history of loss and ongoing struggle as elucidated in the monument’s
inscription, written by prominent Indigenous woman and scholar
Anita Heiss:
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have always defended their
country. Indigenous Australians are known to have served in the state colo-
nial forces before Federation and have proudly carried on this tradition of
service.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander diggers experienced the horror of
war on the battlefield and many made the ultimate sacrifice. The sad reality
for these veterans was that equality in the country they fought to defend
remained a distant dream.
This memorial on the land of the Gadigal clan pays tribute to all
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have defended our coun-
try—the unsung heroes, our brothers and sisters, our mates.
We remember those fallen.
We honour those standing.
Yininmadyemi Thou didst let fall thus seeks to link past and present, incor-
porating individual stories and acknowledging heroism and the difficulties
for Indigenous servicemen and women when they returned to be accepted
into the traditional stories and practices of commemoration. In asking
what it means to defend ‘our country’, it offers an agonistic counterpoint
to the narratives and types of memory offered by the other sites of mem-
ory across the park and thus invites a renewed discussion about who
should be remembered in World War I commemorations and how. The
openness of its inscription also provokes reflection on other wars and his-
torical moments where Indigenous people’s narratives may not yet be fully
acknowledged. Above all, it makes reference to the silence and invisibility,
in mainstream history and monuments, about the Frontier Wars.
Conclusion
The recent commemorations of the centenary of World War I have rein-
vigorated historical research, community collaboration, and given rise to
significant financial and intellectual investment in the telling and docu-
menting of this history in Australia. The monuments and events discussed
in this chapter represent various modes of memory, mostly antagonistic in
nature, and the ongoing struggle to introduce more perspectives, to
develop broader and deeper contextualisation; in short, to move towards
more cosmopolitan and agonistic forms. In a country formed by traumatic
experiences of colonialism, white settlement, and Indigenous disposses-
sion, the monuments in Hyde Park reveal a history of growing awareness
and a desire to offer more inclusive, nuanced, and critical memories of
World War I. The memory modes on display offer different ways of
approaching and documenting the past; some like the Emden Gun are war
trophies and yet the history of their use for commemorative purposes
reflects a more sophisticated cosmopolitan acknowledgement of the cost
of war. The Anzac War Memorial and Albert’s monument are key memory
sites linked by the increasing role of individual stories in explaining and
reflecting on the complexity of war. They differ in the way they do this,
however: the war memorial retains an antagonistic hero/victim narrative
which glorifies World War I, whilst Albert’s monument opens up a more
ambivalent space with a focus on Indigenous voices which are still largely
neglected in memories of war and difficult history. Hyde Park offers a
grand site of memory while smaller community projects often return to
local and individual stories of loss, echoing the original function of many
of these monuments for Australian communities as sites to remember the

traumatic loss of their sons in often far-flung places.
The politics and discussions about how to commemorate and best serve
the memory of events like World War I are an ongoing subject of debate
in Australia. A recent open letter signed by 80 prominent Australians,
including Paul Barratt, former Secretary, Department of Defence, numer-
ous former senior staff from the AWM including the previous director
Brendon Kelson and historians Marilyn Lake, Stuart Macintyre, Mark
McKenna, Clare Write, and Christina Twomey among others, criticised
the federal government’s decision to spend $498 millions on a refurbish-
ment of the AWM, which includes the demolition of an exhibition hall
built in 2001 to further expand display space. They argue that the spend-
ing is excessive and that the money could be better spent on other cultural
institutions or to directly benefit veterans and their families (‘Opposition
to War Memorial’s $498 Million Extensions Grows’ 2019). It will be
interesting to see how this project develops, particularly as the centenary
of World War I implies that the living memory of these traumatic events is
growing ever more distant.2
Notes
1. The James Cook statue, and how white explorers and settlers are honoured
in Australia, has recently been a subject of debate (S. Grant 2017; Wanganul
Chronicle 2017; Ireland 2018). For evidence of wider discussions in
Australia, see Gilchrist (2018).
2. The authors thank Dr. Kerry Ann O’Reilly for her insights into unofficial
commemorative practices and accompanying us on visits to the Australian
War Memorial in Canberra. Much of this research was carried out during a
visiting research fellowship by Parish to the School of Literature, Arts and
Media at the University of Sydney in July–August 2018.
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CHAPTER 7
Sites of Memory, Sites of Ruination

in Postcolonial France and the Francosphere
Charles Forsdick
The Politics of Colonial Memory

The controversy in summer 2018 around a special issue of the French
conservative weekly news magazine Valeurs actuelles (Values Today) tell-
ingly illustrated persistent divisions in France around questions of colonial
memory and the wider afterlives of empire in the contemporary Republic.
Entitled ‘The true history of the colonies’, the issue performed the ways
in which, in the opening decades of the twentieth-first century, an apolo-
gist and on occasion nostalgic discourse for empire has become engrained
in French public life (‘La vraie histoire’ 2018). In a context of French
republican ideology that actively seeks to deny the ethnic diversity of the
country’s postcolonial populations in the name of universalist identity, a
revisionist ‘take’ on the colonial past has often created a political common
ground that is far from being occupied exclusively by the extreme right.
This particular intervention was, however, exemplary of an ideologically
inflected rereading of colonialism that belongs to a longer and unfinished
C. Forsdick (*)
University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
e-mail: c.forsdick@liverpool.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_7
134 C. FORSDICK
tradition of mourning imperial loss (Marsh and Frith 2010). The cover of
Valeurs actuelles deployed the iconography of interwar pro-colonial propa-
ganda to perpetuate a singularised narrative of colonial expansionism, a
process culminating in the forfeiting of what was dubbed ‘French
Algeria’—this obsolescent and obfuscatory designation is to be under-
stood in the context of France having acknowledged only in 1999 that the
Algerian war of independence (previously classed as a ‘public order opera-
tion’) was actually a war in its own right.1 In the special issue, colonialism
is an ‘épopée’, an epic undertaking, and critical work seeking to understand
the colonial past and discern its continued impact on the postcolonial
present is dismissed, adopting vocabulary that was already common in
Sarkozy’s France, as ‘repentance’.2 The articles in the magazine deploy
more generally a rhetoric of pro-colonial apology that reflects the specifi-
cally French crisis in a so-called coming to terms with the past: there is
increasing evidence of the replacement of any cosmopolitan engagement
with memory with a more antagonistic understanding of the ways that
empire continues to manifest itself in the present (Cento Bull and
Hansen 2015).
The historical and geographical sweep of this issue of Valeurs actuelles
is wide, encompassing the colonies of the ancien régime (including the
trading counters of Chandernagor and Pondichéry, themselves focus of an
acute sense of loss in the context of French expansionism in Asia), and also
sites of the nineteenth-century empire, acquired rapidly under the Third
Republic (1870–1940, a period of colonial expansionism), such as French
Indochina (itself still associated with its original designation, ‘the Pearl of
the Orient’). Điên Biên Phủ, the 1954 battle in which the French were
defeated by the Việt Minh communist revolutionaries, far from being the
humiliation of a declining colonial power unable to see the ethical and
practical illogicality of perpetuating empire in the wake of World War II, is
presented as a ‘tragédie héroïque’ (heroic tragedy), and the colonisation of
Africa is understood in terms of a ‘bilan positif’ (positive balance sheet), a
phrase that often serves as shorthand for the denial or at least marginalisa-
tion of the systemic violence on which the establishment and perpetuation
of empire depended. This whitewashing of history is most evident in dis-
cussions of Algeria, a colony characterised in the magazine by a ‘calm cli-
mate between two communities’, and the issue concludes with an article
denouncing Emmanuel Macron’s campaign-trail claims in 2017 that colo-
nialism was a crime against humanity. A list of lieux de mémoire (realms of
memory) in France dedicated to Harkis and Pieds-Noirs is complemented
7 SITES OF MEMORY, SITES OF RUINATION IN POSTCOLONIAL FRANCE… 135
by a directory of associations representing those ‘repatriated’ following

the Algerian War of Independence.3 The overall impression that emerges
from the special issue is a statuesque, unchanging, unchangeable narrative
of the colonial past, characterised by a firm refusal to acknowledge the
implications of the postcolonial present.
Such politics of revisionism and amnesia, underpinned by the rhetoric
of colonial nostalgia and accompanying accusations against more candid
historians of a self-destructive repentance for empire, is not exclusive to
France, as ongoing debates in the UK and elsewhere about imperial his-
tory make clear (Dorling and Tomlinson 2019). In each country, under-
standing these phenomena is to be integrated actively, however, into the
specific context of colonial empire and its afterlives, and also into that of
the various state-sponsored measures introduced—not least in changes to
educational curricula and the development of clear lieux de mémoire—as
part of any memory work. The imbalance between the hypervisibility in
France of the Second World War and its memorial afterlives—often dubbed
the syndrome de Vichy—and the relatively low visibility of colonial empire
and its contemporary manifestations has been widely commented,4
although these commemorative dynamics have recently been problema-
tised by growing awareness of the interconnections they imply, captured
not least by the concept of multidirectional memory posited by Michael
Rothberg and now—through the translation of his work—increasingly
recognised in France itself (2018 [2009]).
Official interventions in this field, seeking to establish state-sanctioned
memorial practices, have tended towards controversy: most notably, the
23 February 2005 French law on the place of colonial history in formal
education was passed by the French parliament in an attempt to impose on
lycée (high school) teachers (in Article 4, Paragraph 2) a requirement to
teach the positive value of colonialism, in particular in relation to the
French presence in North Africa (see Löytömäki 2018). Following vocal
opposition and accusations of historical revisionism from various educa-
tors and historians, the specific article on ‘the positive role of the French
presence overseas’, notably in North Africa, was repealed by President
Jacques Chirac at the beginning of 2006. On Sarkozy’s election as presi-
dent in 2007 a sustained assault on perceived ‘colonial repentance’ (dis-
cussed above) continued according to a two-pronged approach: the
persistent hostility towards postcolonial migration was complemented by
a rhetoric of paternalism and pro-colonial apology most evident in the
discours de Dakar (Dakar speech) in July 2007, during which Sarkozy
136 C. FORSDICK
claimed ‘the African has not sufficiently entered history’.5 Although

Hollande and more recently Macron have attempted to distinguish them-
selves from such positions, reflecting the ways in which persistent attach-
ment to the colonial past is complemented by its continued condemnation,
it is clear that colonialism retains its status in France as ‘un passé qui ne
passe pas’: a past that will not pass.
The aim of this chapter is to analyse, through the prism of postcolonial
ruination, the wider context of these debates around colonial memory in
contemporary France. It begins with an exploration of the blind spots
relating to the colonial past in one of the most influential French interven-
tions in this field, the multiple volumes of historian Pierre Nora’s Lieux de
mémoire project. I argue that this absence reveals a more generalised fail-
ure to engage with the persistent traces of colonial empire, a process evi-
dent in the postcolonial ruins—of the 1907 colonial exhibition in Paris,
and of France’s overseas penal colonies—studied below. The chapters sug-
gest that there is a need to move away from evidence of state-sponsored
memory practices, whether in legislation or official commemoration, and
to ground the study of colonial memory in physical sites, often those of
postcolonial ruination, where the uneven dynamics of forgetting and
remembering are in evidence. My argument is that it is in such locations
that ‘memory-traces’ of empire (to borrow the term deployed by the
Martinican novelist Patrick Chamoiseau, discussed below) can be dis-
cerned, an evidence of the ways in which the afterlives of colonialism con-
tinue to shape the postcolonial present.
Realms of Memory, Realms of Forgetting

A striking example of this tension between discussions, on the one hand,
of French national and republican memory and, on the other, of the after-
lives of empire is found in the work of Pierre Nora and his collaborators
on ‘realms of memory’.6 Les Lieux de mémoire (1984–1992) has been rec-
ognised by historians, both in France and more widely, as one of the more
influential studies of memory in the late twentieth century. Its reach has
been felt widely across a range of disciplines and sectors, with the memo-
rial paradigm it proposes having been deployed in a number of other
national contexts and also explored in transnational frames (see, for exam-
ple, Kmec et al. 2009). Published in seven volumes over a period of eight
years around the bicentenary date of the French Revolution of 1989, this
collective undertaking has posited a model of rethinking the relationship
between the geography of the nation, history, and memory. The collec-
tion—and in particular the idea on which it is based—has permitted new
readings of the past as it is forgotten, remembered, distorted, refracted,
and variously inscribed in the nation’s collective imaginary. The concept of
the lieu de mémoire has become a widely deployed item of critical termi-
nology over the past two decades, arguably sloganised in its ubiquity, with
little reference to its original usage and to the challenges inherent in its
translation between contexts. Criticism has nevertheless been levelled at
the project from the outset for implying not only an exclusively republican
and ‘hexagonal’ conception of memory, but also a classic, if not narrow,
perception of national memory in which ‘the porosity of “Frenchness”,
the progressive hybridization of any such notion, its ability to be displaced
and transculturated’ are all absent (Forsdick 2009, p. 278).
One of the most recurrent reproaches levelled at Nora’s volumes relates
thus to a very obvious absence—related to this understanding of memory
exclusively in a French national frame—in a project aimed at representing
the heterogeneity and plurality of France’s collective memory and identity,
i.e., the absence of references to empire, colonialism, and postcoloniality,
despite the work’s heavy reliance on sites of memory associated with the
Third Republic. Any sustained exploration of trans-continental and even
trans-Mediterranean expansion into the colonial empire and the outre-mer
(overseas) is largely obscured in Les Lieux de mémoire by the clear method-
ological nationalism on which the collection depends. The entry on the
1931 colonial exhibition at Vincennes—a showcasing of products and
people from throughout the French empire, held in the eastern suburbs of
Paris—is a rare exception. Its author, historian Charles-Robert Ageron,
argued that the event—despite its remarkable scope and scale—had in fact
been subject to postcolonial forgetting and as a result did not qualify to be
understood as a ‘realm of memory’ in its own right (Ageron 1997 [1984]).
This exclusion from the project of any sustained reference to the memorial
legacy of colonialism has been described by historian Gregory Mann as
‘nothing short of fantastic’ (Mann 2005), and for many critics, Nora’s
project has consequently become emblematic of the incapacity and even
deliberate unwillingness of French memorial practices, as discussed above,
to engage with the inherent and increasingly undeniable interdependency
of French history and colonial history (see Garrigus 2000).
Among recent refinements of this postcolonial critique, Ann Laura
Stoler’s Duress analyses Nora’s silence on those lieux de mémoire relating
to colonial empire as an example of what she dubs ‘colonial aphasia’.
138 C. FORSDICK
‘Why’, Stoler asks, ‘was there such ample room to remember the “division
of space” (partage de l’espace-temps) that divided Paris from its provinces
but no reference to that pervasive political distinction that still divides
archival storage, history writing, and popular memory between what was
Outre-Mer (Overseas) and what was France?’ (Stoler 2016, p. 58). She
tracks this silencing—‘neither’, in her view, ‘an oversight nor blindness’—
to Nora’s training in French republican historiography (Stoler 2016,
p. 161),7 and claims to detect in his very first book, Les Français d’Algérie
(1961), a barely veiled contempt for the eponymous subjects of the book,
who are seen in their hybridised identity, both French and Algerian, to
deviate from any benchmark of authentic ‘Frenchness’—and by extension
to permit dislocation of the history of empire from that of republi-
can France.
Stoler’s analysis echoes the commentary of an earlier critic of Les Lieux
de mémoire: in a 2005 essay entitled La Pensée tiède (Tepid Thought),
Perry Anderson had similarly identified a colonial blind spot, linking
Nora’s ‘Hexagonal’ and predominantly monocultural emphases with
political anxieties evident in late twentieth-century France. Describing a
process of selective remembering and of parallel forgetting that systemati-
cally effaces traces of colonial history, Anderson identifies a deployment of
memory practices to underpin an explicitly ideological programme of
national cohesion. He concludes ‘What is the worth of Lieux de mémoire
that forgets to include Dien Bien Phu?’ (Anderson 2005, p. 53),8 alluding
here to the long-suppressed episode of postcolonial humiliation during
the Indochinese War, arguably more absent from French collective mem-
ory than episodes in the Algerian War of Independence. It is now over a
decade since Anderson published this critique: as the discussion above of
the special issue of Valeurs actuelles makes clear, Điên Biên Phủ has slowly
since the 1990s begun to acquire a currency in nostalgic, revisionist and
apologist accounts of colonial empire, and the final battle of the First
Indochina War has, despite its absence from Nora’s collection, indeed
never been subject to complete invisibility—Pierre Schoendoerffer, a vet-
eran of the battle, made a film on the subject in 1992; several bandes dessi-
nées (comic books, most notably Les Oubliés d’Annam by Christian Lax &
Frank Giroud) have been devoted to the conflict; in Viet Nam itself, the
battlefield is a major lieu de mémoire in its own right, with Điện Biên Phủ
a recurrent subject in popular culture (in 2011, it featured in the video
game 7554: Glorious Memories Revived, the title of which refers to the date
of the Việt Minh’s victory over France).
Without expanding to include such postcolonial realms of memory,

Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire project grew organically during the period
of its production, reflecting political changes in France itself. The colonial
silences with which it has been associated have now been increasingly chal-
lenged, and it has become possible to inscribe French national history and
memory within a colonial frame. For instance, notwithstanding the histo-
riographic controversies they generated among right-wing intellectuals
such as Alain Finkelkraut and Eric Zemmour, a number of chapters of
Patrick Boucheron’s best-selling collection Histoire mondiale de la France
(2017)—to which Nora responded critically in an article in Le Nouvel
Observateur—focused actively on colonial histories and their postcolonial
afterlives. Such a shift suggests that, even in France itself, there is an
emerging openness to post-national and transnational understandings of
history and memory. The risk remains, however, that such approaches
move beyond the national, yet omit to follow a postcolonial logic, failing
to take account of its memorial afterlives. These debates have customarily
been understood in France in terms of conflict, i.e., as a continuation of
the war by other (memorial) means (Liauzu 2005). Benjamin Stora, a
leading historian of Algeria who was heavily involved in these controver-
sies, has increasingly called for greater consensus (Stora 2007), an aim that
has become, in the work for a new generation of historians, a search for
‘memorial compromise’ (Melchior 2017). It is in such a context that—fol-
lowing Stoler and others—this chapter takes the concept of postcolonial
ruination to interrogate and attenuate further the notion of the colonial
lieu de mémoire. As such, it suggests, through the analysis of two very dif-
ferent case studies (the first domestic, the second transcolonial and trans-
national), how understandings of the concept may evolve to encapsulate
the dynamics of memory—and to contribute, both in theory and in prac-
tice, to emerging new narratives of the colonial past and postcolonial
present.
Among the Ruins of Colonial Empire

Recent research on postcolonial realms of memory has engaged with
Nora’s original project and sought to address the silences and lacunae on
which its core conception is based (see Achille et al. 2020). Some of this
work takes phenomena originally included as lieux de mémoire, such as the
Pantheon (a mausoleum containing the remains of prominent French citi-
zens) or the tricolour (the French national flag), and seeks to
140 C. FORSDICK
‘postcolonialise’ them and rewrite them into their colonial contexts; oth-
ers identify gaps, and propose supplementary colonial or postcolonial
examples. One exception, discussed above, is the 1931 colonial exhibition
at Vincennes, to which Charles-Robert Ageron devoted his essay in Nora’s
original collection. One of the last remaining permanent vestiges of this
major event is the Musée national (initially Cité nationale) de l’histoire de
l’immigration, formerly the Musée permanent des colonies. A striking
example of palimpsestic manifestations of colonial history in the built envi-
ronment, this museum of immigration is the latest in a sequence of re-
purposing and re-badgings of the building, which have seen the colonial
museum re-baptised as the Musée de la France d’Outre-mer, then in 1960
as the Musée des Arts africains et océaniens, and finally in 1990 as the Musée
national des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie (see Arquez-Roth 2014; Monjaret
and Roustan 2017; Crowley 2020). Contemporary visitors to this museum
are faced on the exterior of the building with the imperialist bas-reliefs by
Alfred Janniot (showing the contribution of the colonies to France), and
inside in the salle des fêtes (festival hall) with the murals by Pierre Ducos de
la Haille (showing the supposedly reciprocal contribution of France to the
colonies), as well as the period tropical aquarium in the basement. There
can be no doubt as to the building’s original purpose, but the experience
is at the same time marked by slippage between this overtly colonial con-
tainer and its would-be postcolonial contents.
Standing in contrast to this site of colonial permanency is the Jardin
d’agronomie tropicale (Garden of tropical agronomy), located at the outer
reaches of the Bois de Vincennes (Vincennes forest), site of an earlier and
more modest staging of imperial propaganda, that of the 1907 exposition
coloniale, and now characterised by overt processes of postcolonial ruin-
ation. What is striking for contemporary visitors moving between this site,
purpose-built for the 1931 colonial exhibition, and the lesser known one
of the 1907 colonial exhibition are the starkly different narratives of post-
colonial memory construction they reveal. On the one hand, the museum
of the history of immigration deploys the techniques of contemporary
museology to elaborate a narrative of population displacement character-
ised by complementary strategies: a conflation of different forms of migra-
tion, in which there is a risk that the socio-historical specificities of colonial
and postcolonial mobility are ground down; a clear teleology, leading to
integration into a seemingly and unproblematically elastic understanding
of French republicanism; and a tendency to attenuate the documentary
with the aesthetic, leading to some uncertainty as to what exactly is on
display (see Sherman 2016). On the other hand, the visitor to the Jardin
d’agronomie tropicale—despite recent partial renovation and stabilisation
of the park—is faced with no such coherently constructed narrative, no
such stage-management of the colonial past for the overt instrumentalis-
ing purposes of the postcolonial present. Wandering amongst traces of the
1907 colonial exhibition (and in particular the replicas of indigenous
structures erected on that occasion, as part of the logic of the ‘human zoo’
around which the site was structured), between the various buildings used
to house the educational and research activity in the field of agronomy still
conducted on the site, amongst the memorials to colonial troops dedi-
cated following World War I (when the site itself was used to house injured
tirailleurs indigènes [colonial soldiers]), the visitor is struck instead by the
systematic neglect of what Robert Aldrich has dubbed a ‘virtual theme
park of French colonialism on the outskirts of Paris’ (Aldrich 1999,
p. 199). The original ‘temple du souvenir indochinois’ (Temple of
Indochinese memory) was destroyed by fire in 1984 (Jennings 2003); the
same fate befell the Congo pavilion, another remnant of the 1907 exhibi-
tion, in 2004; and other structures, such as the Pavillon du Maroc
(Morocco pavilion), today covered in graffiti and slowly falling into dilapi-
dation, provide temporary refuge for the homeless.
Aldrich sums up the complex experience of this palimpsestic site and
the multiple meanings it encloses:
A visitor to the Jardin tropical today sees in the relics of empire reminders of
multiple colonial experiences—research and teaching, exhibitions, the use of
overseas troops in French wars, the continuing work of scientific organisa-
tions. Yet the neglect of this colonial patrimony—by both authorities who
have done little for the gardens’ upkeep and by Parisians, most of whom
hardly know of its existence—suggests not just different memories of empire
but a certain forgetfulness about the colonial past. (Aldrich 2005, p. 67)
Emblematic of these processes of fragmentation, neglect, amnesia, mar-

ginalisation, and ruination are the abandoned sections of the once impos-
ing ‘monument à la gloire de l’expansion coloniale’ (monument to the
glory of colonial expansion), sculpted by Jean-Baptiste Belloc, completed
by Musetti following Belloc’s death, and placed initially in the jardin colo-
nial in 1922. Formally inaugurated at the Porte Dorée in 1931 opposite
the official entrance to the colonial exhibition, it was then moved from
that site in 1949 to the Château de Vincennes and finally transferred back,
142 C. FORSDICK
in 1961 (in the final months of the Algerian War of Independence), to its
original location where, partly overgrown by foliage, it still languishes
today. Originally an allegorical assemblage, the monument was made up of
five elements: a seated French woman representing the Republic; a Gallic
cock, astride a globe; and three women—of Caribbean, African and Asian
origin—representing France’s major colonial possessions. When returned
to the park in the early 1960s, these elements were broken up and scat-
tered, only to be reunited (although not reassembled) in the 1980s. Now
a niche tourist attraction for those seeking out ruins of empire, the statue
has also recently inspired a work by the French-Vietnamese artist Thu-Van
Tran, whose 2017 installation ‘Peau blanche’ (white skin) made plaster
casts of parts of the monument, including the hands and feet of the colo-
nised figures, to signify the manual labour by which the empire was built:
concrete traces of the past are recast in the present as part of the wider
reflection on the afterlives of colonialism that the artist develops in
her work.9
In Dominique Pinon’s terms, the Paris tropical garden—with its ruined
structures from the 1907 exhibition and other traces of the colonial past
in the form of these fragments of statuary—is to be situated somewhere
‘between the charm of ruins and the denial of memory’, suggesting clear
connections between a poetics of dilapidation and the colonial amnesia
with which this has long been associated (Pinon 2005, p. 143). The
emblematic nature of the site is reflected in its deployment as the setting
for a 2017 novel co-written by Thomas Reverdy and Sylvain Venayre in
which it becomes the stage for intergenerational debates between a young
historian and an older novelist about colonial history and its impact on the
present (Reverdy and Venayre 2017). Jardin des colonies (Garden of the
colonies)—a title that, significantly, restores the site’s original name—is
ostensibly an account of discussions around the life and career of Jean
Dybowski, a French agronomist, naturalist, and explorer of Polish heri-
tage who was responsible for founding the original jardin d’agronomie
tropicale. Using an iterative and ambulatory method, the novel not only
provides one of the most comprehensive accounts of the site and the
entangled histories it contains, it also suggests that sites of postcolonial
ruination reflect the memorial excesses of a history subject to official
amnesia. Encapsulating the fragile dynamics of forgetting and remember-
ing, the text provides a context for dialogue between the extremes of nos-
talgia and repentance, making it clear that this marginalised, dilapidated
lieu d’oubli (site of forgetting) is in fact related closely to contemporary
concerns ranging from the rise of multiple forms of extremism to debates

around the future of pro-colonial statuary: ‘The garden retains the eroded,
fragile imprint of a past that is hard to recognize as ours, but it is not its
fault’, the novel concludes. ‘We’re the ones who are worried. We are the
ones who are fragile’ (Reverdy and Venayre 2017, p. 206).
The Postcolonial Memory-Traces of the French

Penal Colony
Among the structures that remain standing in the jardin d’agronomie
tropicale is the pavillon de la Guyane, reminder of the persistent desire—
reflected in such concrete examples of imperial propaganda—to turn
French Guiana into a settler colony and to challenge its reduction in the
popular imagination to a convict destination. Although it does not feature
in Pierre Nora’s original collection, the bagne (penal colony) is the second
(very different) site of postcolonial ruination on which this chapter focuses.
Initially functioning as a metropolitan site of memory, the penal colony is
now primarily associated with the outre-mer (French Guiana and New
Caledonia) and the former empire (Viet Nam). The closure of the peni-
tentiaries in the port cities of Brest, Rochefort and Toulon coincided with
the inauguration of penal transportation to sites in the French colonial
empire,10 and although traces of these institutions in all three cities are
very limited, a number of buildings constructed with convict labour
remain prominent in the urban landscape.
As recent work by Clare Anderson, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, and oth-
ers has revealed (see Anderson 2018), the French penal colonies went on
to form part of what Michel Foucault dubbed a ‘carceral archipelago’, a
network of sites of confinement that is now benefiting from increasing
scholarly attention from a global perspective. This approach is at once
comparative, seeking to explore the convergences and divergences of dif-
ferent regimes of incarceration, but also transnational, highlighting com-
plex transcolonial patterns of transportation, linking for example sites in
Viet Nam with others in French Guiana.11 The impact of penal colonies in
the French empire was extensive, suggesting their entanglement in the
practices and ideologies of expansionism—in his 1938 text Retour de
Guyane, Léon Gontran Damas even describes, in the extreme case of
French Guiana, their persistent and destructive interdependency (Damas
2003 [1938]). Penal establishments functioned in the Maghreb (in the
144 C. FORSDICK
military bagnes known as Biribi) and Indochina (most notably on the

Vietnamese island of Poulo Condore or Con Dao, see Hayward and Tran
2014), but the main locations for transportation (of civil prisoners) and
deportation (or political prisoners) were the multiple sites associated with
French Guiana and New Caledonia. This organised removal of prisoners
to locations far removed from the métropole emerged in the 1850s, within
several decades of the inauguration of the post-revolutionary colonial
empire and in the immediate aftermath of the abolition of plantation slav-
ery. It was to the ancien régime colony of French Guiana that administra-
tors turned first. The transformation of a colonial space into a bagne served
multiple purposes: it allowed removal from metropolitan France of those
considered politically or socially undesirable; in theory at least, it provided
(at relatively low cost) the labour required to develop the infrastructure
needed for the mise en valeur (exploitation) of the colonies; and finally, the
convicts—during and more importantly at the end of their sentences,
when they were subject to a continuation of their punishment known as
doublage—provided the settlers needed to inhabit places designated as col-
onie de peuplement (settlement colony), and became as a result central to a
policy of settler colonialism. In such a context, the introduction of a for-
eign (often French) population has evident implications for indigenous
people, ranging from, on the one hand, intermarriage and the emergence
of a creolised population to, on the other, death and the appropriation of
land. This impact continues to play itself out in the memorial practices
(and often associated amnesia) evident in these postcolonial, post-
carceral spaces.
French Guiana exemplifies the logic of penal colonisation and these
postcolonial afterlives. The object of numerous attempts at settlement, the
colony began systematically to receive bagnards (convicts) following the
1854 decree relating to forced labour. The conditions in French Guiana
were harsh, for convicts, guards, and officials alike, and the mortality rate
as a result high. The loss of life was such that, from 1864, metropolitan
prisoners were sent instead to the newly launched bagne in New Caledonia
in the Pacific, but after the definitive suspension of transportation to
Melanesia in 1897 (the penal colony there would close three decades
later), French Guiana continued to function as a penal colony for another
four decades, receiving civilian transportés, political déportés (including
most notably Dreyfus in 1898, but also a number of dissidents from Poulo
Condore in French Indochina during the 1930s), as well as relégués or
recidivists from France, Algeria, and elsewhere sentenced for multiple

petty crimes.12
The New Caledonian bagne functioned, therefore, for a much shorter
period of only just over three decades, but its impact on this overseas ter-
ritory is still evident, particularly in the durable presence of numerous
public buildings in Nouméa constructed using convict labour as well as in
the ruins still scattered in various states of abandonment elsewhere across
the archipelago. Memorialisation of the institution and acknowledgement
of its foundational role are, however, recent, and the initial reaction fol-
lowing suppression of the penal colony was a sustained process of silenc-
ing, epitomised by the renaming of the island off Nouméa, the île de Nou,
as Nouville, but also reflected in considerations in the 1920s and 1930s of
renaming the whole colony. The bagne was progressively limited to the île
de Nou, until its formal end in 1931.13 Many buildings were then turned
over for civilian use (those in Nouville serve today as a psychiatric hospital
and theatre, and also form part of the university in Nouméa); others were
demolished or allowed to fall into ruin as part of an effort to create a
tabula rasa in the colony. In the 1970s, however, a number of local asso-
ciations began taking an interest in the history of the penal colony, a pro-
cess that was then accelerated following the violence associated with the
rise of Kanak nationalism in the 1980: it was in this context that the
Caldoches, or New Caledonian population of European heritage, began
looking for their own roots not in France but in Melanesia itself, echoing
earlier shifts in Australia relating to convict ancestry (and even a sense of
convict aristocracy). Memories of the penal colony have now become a
major political issue in the territory and one that achieved some visibility
in the independence referendum of 2018—Macron chose, as the symbolic
location for his key speech during a campaign visit to the island, the
Théâtre de l’île, former storehouse of the penal colony on the île de Nou,
‘palimpsestic site’, in his terms, ‘in the image of New Caledonia’, and in
this context a rallying point for republican unity (Roger 2018).
Representations of the bagne in popular culture tend to privilege the
mythology associated with celebrity convicts or political prisoners, or to
perpetuate the idea that bagnards were predominantly metropolitan and
white. There is a particular interest, for instance, in the deportation of
Louise Michel to New Caledonia following the Commune of 1871, or
Alfred Dreyfus to the Ile du Diable in French Guiana. Albert Londres’s
accounts of the Caribbean penal colony have led to an interest in the
French anarchist Eugène Dieudonné, author of L’Homme qui s’évada
146 C. FORSDICK
(1928), now the subject also of a bande dessinée; and more visible is Henri
Charrière, known under his nickname ‘Papillon’, whose autobiography
was popularised in a memorable 1973 film version, starring Steve McQueen
and Dustin Hoffman, and directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, remade by
director Michael Noer in 2017.
What these widely distributed representations tend to downplay is the
presence in the penal colonies of prisoners from other colonies, convicted
of civil offences or deported for political reasons (with this distinction
often erased), and subject to transcolonial displacement. For the bagne to
be explored in all its complexity as a postcolonial lieu de mémoire, it is
essential for more attention to be paid to these entanglements and to the
extent to which the bagne—almost exclusively so in the case of Poulo
Condore in Viet Nam—operated as a site of anti-colonial resistance.
Concrete recognition is increasingly apparent in contemporary heritage
practices: long left in a state of decay, the camp Crique Anguille in
Montsinéry-Tonnegrand (commonly known as the bagne des Annamites),
which functioned for Indochinese political prisoners in 1930s French
Guiana (with many sent here from Poulo Condore), has recently been
restored and made accessible as a site that combines penal heritage with
more ecological pursuits—solitary confinement cells and the foundations
of toilet blocks remain, although most vestiges have disappeared as a result
of the temporary nature of buildings on the site (see Dedebant and
Frémaux 2012); perhaps more strikingly, locations associated with Algerian
prisoners in New Caledonia have been subject to increased attention, most
notably those around the town of Bourail, where there is notably a grave-
yard known as the cimetière des Arabes (Arab cemetery) in which civil (and
some political) prisoners and their descendants are buried.14 Memorial
activity relating to ‘Caledoun’ (the Arabic word for New Caledonia) has
increased considerably, with a major exhibition at the Institut du Monde
Arabe in 2011 (Barbançon and Sand 2013), and local associations have
established links with Algeria. A particularly striking example of this is to
be found at the cimetière des déportés (Communards’ Cemetery) on the Ile
des Pins, a site customarily associated, in parallel with the well-known lieu
de mémoire of the mur des fédérés (Communards’ Wall) at Père Lachaise
cemetery in Paris, with French republican memorialisation of the Paris
Commune as a number of Communards are buried there, but where the
presence of Algerian déportés from the same time is now also commemo-
rated, reflecting the entanglement of narratives in these postcolonial lieux
de mémoire.
The afterlives of these histories have also been explored in Francophone

literature, a medium which can be seen to have played a vanguard role in
transforming the bagne into a site of postcolonial memory, countering not
least the white French convict narrative constructed by texts such as
Charrière’s Papillon. The Algerian rebels deported to New Caledonia in
the 1870s constitute a particularly striking example, with Mehdi Lallaoui’s
Kabyles du Pacifique (Lallaoui 1994) providing a meticulous reconstruc-
tion of their itineraries and stories (Lallaoui 1994). The very different
experience of Algerian convicts deported to French Guiana has also
attracted fictional attention in Mouloud Akkouche’s Cayenne, mon tom-
beau (Cayenne, my tomb) (2001), the account by a narrator of French-
Algerian heritage of a transgenerational quest, in the 1980s, to uncover
details of his late father’s convict past (Akkouche 2001). Parallel recent
developments in contemporary heritage practices relating to the bagnes of
the former French empire have been considerable, most notably in French
Guiana and New Caledonia, where the sites have become part of a wider
focus on penal heritage. In the former, an emphasis on ecotourism and the
economic reliance on the Centre Spatial Guyanais (Guyane Spatial Centre,
responsible for key penal sites such as the îles du salut) eclipsed for many
years the development of any active memorialisation of the penal colony,
although the recent inauguration of the impressive ‘centre d’interprétation
de l’architecture et du patrimoine’ (interpretation centre of architecture
and heritage) in the Camp de la Transportation at Saint-Laurent du
Maroni suggests a new development of interest in the area (see Redfield
2000). In the former, where the politics of local identity have more actively
foregrounded questions relating to the legacies of the bagne, the develop-
ment of penal heritage sites is more advanced although often dependent
on the input of community organisations. Fort Teremba, for example,
near Bourail, has been restored and operates as a tourist destination reveal-
ing the co-existence of ethnic groups in New Caledonia; in Nouméa, the
association Témoignage d’un Passé are developing plans for a permanent
Musée du Bagne in the former bakery of the penal establishments in
Nouville; but the sites on the Ile des Pins—with the exception of French
republican cimetière des déportés—continue to undergo a steady process of
postcolonial ruination.15
148 C. FORSDICK
Conclusion
These two very different examples, illustrative of the diversity of cases of
postcolonial ruination that merit further exploration, reveal that the after-
lives of empire cannot be understood in terms of stable, linear, homogenis-
ing concepts such as ‘legacy’.16 Exploring the deliberate obfuscation of
traces of the French penal colony in both French Guiana and New
Caledonia, Ann Laura Stoler’s Duress, cited already at the opening of this
chapter for its critique of Nora’s Lieux de mémoire, includes an extensive
exploration of the institution in the context of wider penal and colonial
archipelagos. Noting the ambiguities of the word ‘colony’ embedded in
the term ‘penal colony’, Stoler sees these places as part of a ‘protean
archive […] constituted by a spread of disparate and related documents of
island and landlocked colonies that stretched across the coercive and cura-
tive carceral and humanitarian globe’ (Stoler 2016, p. 80). The emphasis
in Stoler’s work is on revealing the transnational interconnections that
colonial historiography has often ignored. She seeks to highlight entan-
gled histories and think through the ways in which they are associated
with sites that may be seen as sedimented palimpsests in their own right.
The ‘protean archive’ that Stoler identifies stretches across the world colo-
nised by the French to include a range of locations in France and its for-
mer colonies discussed above. In connecting these locations and histories,
Stoler foregrounds the processes of postcolonial ruination and the various
modes of contemporary curation at the heart of this chapter: ‘At issue is at
once the uneven sedimentation of debris and the uneven pace at which
people can extricate themselves from the structures and signs by which
remains take hold’ (Stoler 2016, p. 346). Central to Stoler’s Duress is an
interest in ‘not what is “left” but what people are “left with”’ (Stoler
2016, p. 348). This shifts the attention away from seemingly static colo-
nial legacies or vestiges towards a more dynamic, creative, and affective
acknowledgement of what Stoler calls ‘the tangibilities of empire as effec-
tive histories of the present’ (Stoler 2016, p. 378).
The ruins of the bagne or the jardin d’agronomie tropicale provide a
forceful illustration of the vulnerability, impermanence, transition, loss,
and decay associated with postcolonial afterlives of empire—and indeed
with heritage sites more generally (Desilvey 2017). At the same time,
however, they encapsulate Stoler’s idea of persistence, that is, of what
those in the postcolonial present are ‘left with’. As such, these sites link
directly to the controversies over tensions in the processing of the
persistence of empire with which this chapter opened. To maintain a spe-

cific focus on penal colonies, these forms of persistence are particularly
apparent in the work of Patrick Chamoiseau who, in a 1994 photo-essay
produced with photographer of German-Algerian origin Rodolphe
Hammadi, reflected in a French Guianese context on the implications of
entangled histories, complex inter- and intra-colonial transportation flows,
and more generally the multi-directional memories as well as multi-layered
sites to which they give rise (Chamoiseau and Hammadi 1994).17 Central
to Guyane: traces-mémoires du bagne (French Guiana: memory-traces of
the penal colony) is the Camp de transportation at Saint-Laurent du
Maroni and the île Saint Joseph off Kourou, key sites in the French
Guianese penal colony discussed in more detail above. Chamoiseau and
Hammadi claim, however, that sites such as this are best approached not
through the lens of Nora’s work, as places of colonial memory (which is to
say, as part of a formally (re)constructed and acknowledged heritage, a lieu
de mémoire), but in relation to what they call in their title postcolonial
‘memory-traces’. Drawing on the work of both Glissant and Derrida, the
term recognises the present’s continued links to the past, and the co-
existence of entangled memories and converging itineraries in the
Americas.
Although the book is based on a critique of the memorial landscape of
the territory, the emphases of its text-and-image-based analysis pre-empt
the forms of postcolonial ruination to which Stoler would later allude. In
his glosses on Hammadi’s images, Chamoiseau associates the ruins of the
residual Guianese penalscape with a form of memorial tangibility that
reveals the persistence of the colonial bagne and its constraints in this
often-marginalised part of the francophone Caribbean. He also detects in
these ruins of empire the existence of marginalised postcolonial forma-
tions that provide the potential—in Stoler’s terms both ‘creative and criti-
cal’—to narrate other silenced histories and to imagine alternative futures
(in this case informed by his own notion of Creoleness). He seeks, in a
process of postcolonialisation, to ‘reinvent the notion of the monument,
deconstruct the notion of heritage’ (Chamoiseau and Hammadi 1994,
p. 15). Writing complements an active attention to the eroded materiality
of postcolonial spaces: ‘Beneath written colonial history it is necessary to
find traces of the stories. Beneath the lofty memory of forts and buildings,
to the unusual places where the decisive stages of these communities took
shape’ (Chamoiseau and Hammadi 1994, p. 15). Chamoiseau refers to a
body of representations of the bagne, but simultaneously seeks to move
150 C. FORSDICK
away from and beyond them in his effort to ‘perceive what these memory-
traces whisper to us’ (Chamoiseau and Hammadi 1994, pp. 23–24).
The ruins of empire are therefore presented by Chamoiseau and
Hammadi not as a lieu de mémoire, but as a lieu d’oubli. The photographs
of ruination that the essayist takes as the trigger for his reflections do not
cater to any desire for ‘ruin porn’ (Lyons 2018), but are cast instead in the
context of a digressively disruptive mode of engagement: ‘And here I am
in these memory-traces of the Guianese bagne, not visiting but wandering,
not strolling but rambling’ (Chamoiseau and Hammadi 1994, p. 43). In
a critically postcolonial approach, Chamoiseau acknowledges that: ‘the
memory-traces of the bagne are broken, diffused, scattered’, but he never-
theless performs in his text a commitment to voicing ‘dominated stories,
erased memories’ (Chamoiseau and Hammadi 1994, pp. 21, 16). Guyane:
traces-mémoires du bagne is rooted in a rejection of many contemporary
representations of sites associated with empire, as well as of the heritage
practices that have often mirrored these. Key to Chamoiseau’s refutation
is a recognition that these interventions into the colonial past, though
situated firmly in a postcolonial moment, reflect the persistence of colonial
assumptions and constraints. His own poetic intervention relating to
French Guiana can be linked to a similar engagement in France itself with
the ruins of the jardin d’agronomie tropicale, both in the fiction of Thomas
Reverdy and Sylvain Venayre or in the artwork of Thu-Van Tran. From the
ruins of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonies emerge alterna-
tive and often more unsettling narratives underpinned by new critical and
poetic approaches.
Notes
1. For a critique of the issue, see ‘Vive la nostalgie coloniale!’ (2018).
2. The term was popularised by Lefeuvre (2006), and also explored in other
prominent essays including Bruckner (2006). Sarkozy’s presidency
(2007–2012) was characterised by growing hostility to populations of
migrant origin, exemplified by his attempt to establish a Ministry of
Immigration, Integration, National Identity, and Co-Development; such
legislative and institutional measures were accompanied by a reassertion of
historical rhetoric that saw colonial expansion as a form of ‘civilizing mis-
sion’, with the result that those critical of the imperial past and its contem-
porary manifestations were increasingly accused of being unnecessarily
‘repentant’.
3. See Nora (1984–1992). The harkis were indigenous Muslim Algerians

who served as auxiliaries in the French Army during the Algerian War of
Independence from 1954 to 1962; pieds noirs were settlers of European
origin who lived in Algeria under French rule, many of whom who returned
to Europe after Algeria gained independence.
4. Anne Donadey evoked, for instance, the ‘Algeria syndrome’
(Donadey 1996).
5. On Sarkozy’s speech, see Ba Konaré (2008), Chrétien (2008), and Gassama
(2008). A robust response to the establishment of this ministry is provided
in Glissant and Chamoiseau (2007).
6. Les Lieux de mémoire has appeared in numerous translations, including a
selection of essays published in English, Realms of memory: The construc-
tion of the French past edited by Pierre Nora and Lawrence Kritzman and
translated by Arthur Goldhammer for Columbia University Press, and
Rethinking France: Les Lieux de mémoire edited again by Nora himself with
the translation overseen by David P. Jordan for Chicago University Press.
7. A similar argument is made by Shepard (2006).
8. On forgetting Indochina, see Edwards and Jennings (2019).
9. For details of Thu-Van Tran’s work, see https://thuvantran.fr/.
10. On the history of the French penal colonies, see Toth (2006).
11. For an exemplary illustration of such an approach, see Patterson (2018).
12. On the functioning of the penal colonies in French Guiana and New
Caledonia respectively, see Sanchez (2013) and Barbançon (2003).
13. On the closure of the penal colony in New Caledonia and its afterlives, see
Petit-Quencez (2016).
14. On the role of cemeteries at penal heritage sites, see Forsdick (2008).
15. On penal heritage in New Caledonia, see Petit-Quencez (2016).
16. The concluding section of the chapter draws in part on my article on the
representation of the bagne in Francophone postcolonial literature
(Forsdick 2018) and in particular on its discussion of the work of Patrick
Chamoiseau and Rodolphe Hammadi.
17. For more sustained studies of the work from the perspective of memory
and trauma studies, see Silverman (2010) and Stafford (2008).
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CHAPTER 8
‘The Most Intimate Familiarity and the Most

Extreme Existential Alienation’: Ilse
Aichinger’s Memories of Nazi-Era Vienna
Geoff Wilkes
Introduction
Ilse Aichinger was one of the most celebrated German-language authors
after the Second World War, receiving critical acclaim as well as numerous
awards, most notably the Prize of the 47 Group (an association of German-
language writers) in 1952 and the Grand Austrian State Prize in 1995. In
particular, Aichinger was one of the first post-war German-language
authors to write from direct experience about Nazi anti-Semitism, starting
with her novel The Greater Hope (Die gröβere Hoffnung) in 1948.
Ilse Aichinger’s connection with Vienna originated in her birth there in
1921. Although the family moved to the provincial city of Linz shortly
afterwards, Ilse, her twin sister Helga, and their mother Berta returned to
Vienna in 1927 following Berta’s divorce, and lived with Berta’s mother
Gisela. After the Nazis took over Austria in 1938, Ilse’s classification under
G. Wilkes (*)
e-mail: Geoff.wilkes@uq.edu.au

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_8
158 G. WILKES
their anti-Semitic policies as a Mischling ersten Grades—what she called

‘half-Jewish’ (2003, p. 73)1—saved her and Berta from death, though not
from civil conscription, persecution, and privation. Ilse’s sister Helga and
Berta’s sister Klara were able to emigrate to England before the war, and
survived, but Gisela and her children Erna and Felix were deported in
1942 and were numbered among the more than 65,000 Viennese Jews
who were victims of the Holocaust (Uhl 2016, p. 242).
Ilse Aichinger left Vienna in 1950, returned in 1988, and remained
until her death in 2016. In an interview given in 1990, she says that
Vienna is now the only place where she feels able to write:
[Interviewer:] Can you write everywhere? Does where you are at a particular
time make no difference to you?
[Aichinger:] No. It suddenly became quite clear to me that I need Vienna.
As they say: When you get older, you’re drawn back. Now I think I need
Vienna very much. (Fässler 2011a, p. 60)
Six years later, Aichinger tells another interviewer that it is her past in
Vienna, for both good and ill, which has brought her back to the city:
I can only live in Vienna. I’d like to die in Vienna too. […] It’s the city I was
born in. All the terrible things, but also all the wonderful things, which I’ve
experienced are connected with this city. The Austrian author Ruth Klüger
once wrote a fabulous sentence: ‘Vienna is the city I didn’t succeed in escap-
ing from’. (Fässler 2011a, p. 107)
The ambivalence of Aichinger’s feelings about Vienna is aptly summarised

by Simone Fässler as a combination of ‘the most intimate familiarity [and]
the most extreme existential alienation’ (2001, p. 73).
In this chapter, I explore how Aichinger remembers the Vienna of
1927–1950, and particularly the Nazi-controlled Vienna of 1938–45, not
only in the interviews she gave after her return, which are part of the vol-
ume Nothing At All Need Remain: Interviews 1952–2005 (Es muss gar
nichts bleiben: Interviews 1952–2005), but also in two volumes which she
published in 2001 and 2005, respectively, namely Film and Fate: Camera
Flashes Illuminating A Life (Film und Verhängnis: Blitzlichter auf ein
Leben) and Improbable Journeys (Unglaubwürdige Reisen). These latter
works are collections of short pieces, many of which are reprinted from
other publications, especially the Vienna newspaper The Standard (Der
8 ‘THE MOST INTIMATE FAMILIARITY AND THE MOST EXTREME… 159
Standard), and as the pieces are somewhat eclectic in genre and topic—
including autobiographical and biographical essays, analyses of films and
still photographs, commentaries on historical and current events, and
transcripts of a speech and an interview—I concentrate on texts in which
Aichinger discusses memory generally and her recollections of Vienna spe-
cifically. This chapter begins by outlining Aichinger’s scepticism about the
legitimacy of public memory of Nazi genocide and other catastrophes,
and about the robustness of remembering as an individual mental process.
I then turn to Aichinger’s descriptions of how, this scepticism notwith-
standing, numerous locations in Vienna prompt powerful memories of
trauma (though sometimes also of consolation, solidarity, and resistance),
and to her sense that the Nazi past which she recalls remains present in,
and continuous with, contemporary Austria. I conclude by discussing the
significance which Aichinger accords to the cinema, including her idea
that watching films is the most appropriate way for her to remember and
honour ‘those who disappeared’ (2003, p. 71).
Collective and Individual Memory

Aichinger repeatedly criticises the terminology, popular representations,
memorials, and state-sponsored mourning associated with the Holocaust
and other traumatic events. Perhaps most notably, she rejects the term
‘Holocaust’ itself (which is used in German as well as in English), dismiss-
ing it in her acceptance speech for the Grand Austrian State Prize as ‘an
absurd designation which obscures and falsifies instead of defining’ (2003,
p. 23). Aichinger reiterates and clarifies her objection to the word
‘Holocaust’ when an interviewer in 2001 suggests that the television mini-
series of that name is concerned with ‘historical memory’, and she retorts
that historical memory ‘is made up of individual memories, after all. All
the people who died have their own memory. I don’t want the word
Holocaust either. It obscures’ (Fässler 2011a, p. 183). Aichinger’s suspi-
cion of the terms used to characterise Nazi-era Austria extends to the word
‘victim’ (Opfer), which in an interview from 1996 she says has been appro-
priated by individuals who tolerated anti-Semitic persecution:
I’d like to remove the word ‘victim’ from general usage, not only as it applies
to me. Many Austrians, many Viennese, felt that they themselves were vic-
tims of obscure historical processes. They didn’t understand that a lot of
160 G. WILKES
things had happened beforehand which they witnessed, and which in part
they caused. (Fässler 2011a, p. 90)
In her acceptance speech for the Grand Austrian State Prize, Aichinger
argues that not only individuals but also the post-war Austrian and German
states avoid historical responsibility for their genocidal pasts, deprecating
former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s oft-quoted distinction between
the generation of the perpetrators and those granted ‘the gift of being
born afterwards’ (2003, p. 23). In fact, Aichinger thought about empha-
sising her viewpoint by declining the government-sponsored Prize (Berbig
2011, pp. 56–57), but ultimately decided to accept it as a kind of symbolic
restitution for those who had suffered, as she explains in an interview
in 1996:
After the war my mother was given 10,000 shillings for the loss of her apart-
ment and her [medical] practice—to say nothing of her relatives, who all
died. That’s disgraceful. Helmer, who was Interior Minister at the time,
once commented on the issue of compensation: ‘I’m in favour of drawing
things out’. I accepted the Prize on behalf of the people for whom things
were drawn out rather too long. I didn’t accept the money as a prize for
anything I’d achieved, but as something those people are entitled to. (Fässler
2011a, p. 105)
She further arranged for the ceremony conferring the Prize to include
readings from the letters of Sophie and Hans Scholl, members of the anti-
Nazi resistance group ‘The White Rose’ who were executed in 1943
(Berbig 2011, pp. 55–56).
Aichinger’s reservations about the post-war Austrian republic’s attitude
to its Nazi history are paralleled by her comments on the formal memori-
als of the Nazi era. In a reminiscence entitled ‘The Quay, 1944’, which in
part describes where the headquarters of the Vienna Gestapo once stood,
she refuses to accept that the ‘small stone, a kind of gravestone, [which]
memorialises the victims’ there signifies any kind of genuine coming to
terms with the past, because ‘[i]t’s all become history now, a story, you
might also say’ (2003, p. 53). Similarly, Aichinger notes in a piece called
‘Museum Landscapes for Murders’ that a district in Vienna now known as
the ‘Museum Quarter’ previously contained the temporary housing which
the Nazis established for the people who were subsequently deported on
the ‘death transports’ (2007, p. 111). She then recalls a former
schoolmate who was taken on one of those transports and suggests that
the contemporary museums are inadequate to her memory: ‘Perhaps it
might be worth making the trip to the new Museum Quarter after all, in
order to look for her. But she hasn’t needed quarters since as long ago as
1942’ (2007, p. 112). And in ‘Official Mourning and Cable Railway
Tragedy’, in which Aichinger responds to a catastrophic accident in the
Austrian mountains in November 2000, she disdainfully compares the
proposed official commemorations to chocolates which are produced for
sale at Christmas:
[U]nanimity is now prescribed; on all sides, people are assiduously droning

the words ‘official mourning’! But: Each of the victims died alone. […]
Identifying with absurd conditions and sufferings presupposes solitude: In
contrast, the official mourning proclaimed on the occasion of 160 skiing
tourists’ agonising deaths is like the Father Christmas which is wrapped in
silver paper, and hollow inside: more commercial activity. (2003, p. 168)
While Aichinger makes no explicit link anywhere in this piece to ‘official

mourning’ about the years from 1938 to 1945, she does reinforce her
view of the Austrian state’s unwillingness or inability to properly com-
memorate mass tragedy. Incidentally, she also develops the idea that his-
torical memory ‘is made up of individual memories’ not only by
emphasising that ‘[e]ach of the victims died alone’, but also by suggesting
that appropriate engagement with extraordinary trauma ‘presupposes
solitude’.
Aichinger’s scepticism about collective memory and public memoriali-
sation is complemented by her conception of an individual’s remembering
as a fluid, contingent, fleeting, and contestable process. This probably
finds its clearest expression in Aichinger’s essay on Jean-Luc Godard’s film
Histoire(s) du cinéma, in which she praises Godard’s collage-like tech-
nique for taking ‘the opportunity to let thoughts submerge, and resurface
again in ever-new images. That enables your own memories to do as his
do, to come again and to go again’ (2003, p. 105). When her thoughts on
Histoire(s) du cinéma prompt memories of conversation with a friend and
her grandmother when Aichinger was a primary-school child, she empha-
sises how one memory follows unbidden upon another:
While I’m writing that down, I remember that grandmother’s hat and scarf,
I remember the quiet Third District [of Vienna]. And I remember the little
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girl’s voice […]. She died when she was twenty. And the child she had
brought into the world died with her. (2003, p. 106)
Aichinger is particularly attached to the idea that an individual’s memory

has a fugitive quality: she characterises it as a ‘zephyr’ (2003, p. 107) and
compares remembering to the game of flicking stones ‘[on]to the water so
that they’ll jump across it’ and then vanish (2003, p. 70). She says twice in
almost the same words that ‘Memory shatters easily when you try to mas-
ter it’ (2003, p. 69) and that ‘Memory shatters easily when you try to
organise it’ (2003, p. 103), and also quotes verbatim from an earlier book
in which she wrote that: ‘Memory doesn’t comprehend itself to the end’
(2003, p. 105, see 1987, p. 14). This last comment prompts the idea that
the moment when memory seems to be complete is the moment when it
is least reliable: ‘As soon as [memory] comprehends itself, it’s in danger of
succumbing to itself, its courses, datings, erroneous conclusions: its chro-
nology’ (2003, p. 70).
It is worth noting here—if more for aesthetic than for analytical rea-
sons—that Aichinger’s views about the ephemerality of individual mem-
ory are reflected in the conditions under which some of the pieces discussed
in this chapter were produced, printed and reprinted. As Fässler points out
in her foreword to Improbable Journeys, Aichinger often wrote while sit-
ting in Vienna’s historic Café Demel, composing by hand, and using what-
ever piece of paper was available, on which she might add notes about the
food and drink she had consumed or her appointments for later in the day
(Fässler 2007, pp. 7–8). Much of what Aichinger produced in this way was
intended for the relatively impermanent medium of the Vienna daily The
Standard, but even when Fässler and Franz Hammerbacher collected
some pieces for more lasting publication in Improbable Journeys (Fässler
2011b, p. 264), they included photographs of Aichinger’s original and
rather scrappy-looking manuscripts, written on—among other things—
advertising postcards, a used envelope, a crossword-puzzle magazine, a
paper carrier bag, a menu and an entry form for a cooking competition
(Aichinger 2007, pp. 30, 56, 58, 76, 94 & 174).
Vienna and Memory
Aichinger’s notions about the contingency of personal memories do not
prevent her writing powerfully about her own experiences in Nazi-era
Vienna. Unsurprisingly, most of those writings are profoundly negative,
and many also emphasise a negativity which persists to the present day.
‘The Quay, 1944’ is a good example of this; notwithstanding the clear
invocation of the past in the title, the piece is largely concerned with the
continuing effect of what Aichinger experienced in the 1940s. In the first
paragraph, she mentions two long-established public buildings of cultural
and historical significance on Vienna’s kilometre-long Franz Joseph Quay,
the Urania Centre and the Rossauer Barracks, before explaining that to
her the Quay ‘seems to consist solely of the square occupied by the Vienna
Gestapo’s building and its dependencies’ (2003, p. 53), which is Morzin
Square. This last location has an obvious historical importance, but it is
also significant to Aichinger personally because after she and Berta were
forced out of Gisela’s apartment in 1938, they spent several years in lodg-
ings allocated to them next to Morzin Square. The next paragraph shifts
the focus to the ‘ordinary’ Viennese during those years, who Aichinger
says were so untroubled by the deportations of supposed enemies of the
state that ‘eventually the Gestapo hardly bothered to wait for the coming
of darkness’ to remove them:
They’re going where they belong, they’ll do some work at last. That’s what
I heard as the uncovered trucks, actually cattle trucks, drove across the
Sweden Bridge with those who were destined for deportation. (2003, p. 53)
Later paragraphs describe persecutions and privations which Aichinger

and her mother experienced, but I would suggest that her key point is the
shadow which Vienna’s Nazi past still throws over the city. ‘The Quay,
1944’ begins with the words: ‘Pure desolation fills the air there. Darkness
seems only temporarily held at bay’ (2003, p. 53), and the final paragraph
reveals that Aichinger ‘avoid[s] this neighbourhood’ (2003, p. 55), to
this day.
Whereas ‘The Quay, 1944’ has a deliberate quality—opening with the
summary comment about ‘[p]ure desolation’, then nominating the two
buildings which mark the Quay’s extremities before proceeding to
Aichinger’s recollections of the former Gestapo headquarters—another
piece called ‘Semolina-Dumpling Soup from Morzin Square’ describes
how memories of Nazi-era Vienna come to Aichinger unbidden. She
begins by recounting how, after a late evening at the cinema, she and her
friends felt like some semolina-dumpling soup. Aichinger then explains
that, given the late hour, the soup was only available at petrol stations,
‘and the closest petrol station was the one at Morzin Square, near the
164 G. WILKES
former headquarters of the Vienna Gestapo’ (2007, p. 159). This prompts

further references to how ‘[w]e lived next to Morzin Square for six full
years’, and ‘to those who were taken to the Vienna Gestapo’ (2007,
p. 159), but here again Aichinger is particularly concerned to emphasise
the abiding emotional impact of the Gestapo state, the way it ‘sticks in the
mind’ so that she still ‘see[s] almost too clearly’ (2007, p. 160), what she
has suffered and lost.
As these two texts indicate, the former Gestapo headquarters is one of
the key sites of memory in Vienna for Aichinger. This is so much the case
that her continuing distaste for the area expresses itself in merely inciden-
tal comments, for example when she writes about going to a specialist
bookseller called ‘Satyr Film World’ and remarks purely in passing that the
shop is situated ‘next to the still-cheerless Marc-Aurel-Straβe’ (2003,
p. 175), which is a street leading to Morzin Square. Another key site is the
Sweden Bridge, which Aichinger mentions not only in ‘The Quay, 1944’
(as described above), but also on several other occasions both in Film and
Fate and Improbable Journeys, and in interviews. As she explains in her
acceptance speech for the Grand Austrian State Prize, it was at the Sweden
Bridge that Aichinger saw her own mother Berta’s mother and siblings for
the last time, when they were deported on a ‘windy day in May’ in 1942:
‘[the day] ended with the transfer to a death camp. The hope remains that
this was Minsk, or the greater hope that they were shot on the journey’
(2003, p. 20).2 Yet another site with negative and continuing connota-
tions is the accountant’s office in Elisabethstraβe to which Aichinger was
assigned to work in 1942, and because of which she still avoids that neigh-
bourhood too, as it ‘radiate[s] an almost unbearable kind of utility and
profit even now, a penetrable impenetrability which only starts to dissipate
many hours later and some streets further away’ (2003, pp. 46–47).
Aichinger’s distrust of the ways in which Austria remembers its fascist
past and her undiminished revulsion against some locations which she
associates with Nazi-era Vienna are occasionally complemented by sugges-
tions that anti-Semitism is inherent in Austrian culture. I would argue that
‘Semolina-Dumpling Soup from Morzin Square’ makes such a suggestion
in its startling juxtaposition of the regional culinary specialty
(Grieβnockerlsuppe in the original German text) with Nazism, which
implies that both are equally and typically Austrian. In ‘The Quay, 1944’
Aichinger intimates her fear of contemporary anti-Semitism when she
elaborates on her comment that the Gestapo victims’ fate is now only ‘a
story, you might […] say’: ‘Stories can be told again. And not only told
again’ (2003, p. 53; emphasis added)—that is, they can also be enacted
again. And in a piece first published in June 2000 commemorating the
death of the author Ernst Jandl, Aichinger links historical fascism and
present-day xenophobia in Austria quite explicitly, presumably at least
partly in response to the nationalistic Freedom Party of Austria’s entry
into a federal coalition government a few months before. Aichinger first
recalls how in 1938 the chairs in Vienna’s Volksgarten park:
were inscribed in white with “For Aryans Only”. This inscription still flashed
out into the dark after the Volksgarten had closed. For those who weren’t
allowed to enter anymore anyway, the nights were becoming darker.
(2003, p. 113)
She then adds: ‘These days the words on the chairs would be “Foreigners
Out”’ (2003, p. 113).
Some of the sites in Vienna which Aichinger recalls have more positive
connotations. The most important is the Jewish section of the Central
Cemetery, which is entered by Gate 4, and is where Aichinger’s maternal
grandfather is buried. As she explains in an essay prompted by Orson
Welles’ 1949 film The Third Man (which is set in Vienna shortly after the
Second World War and features the Central Cemetery prominently):
‘During the war, we sought out Gate 4 as often as possible. Park benches
and the benches on the ring-road were “for Aryans only”’ (2003, p. 200).
In this essay, Gate 4 was not only a place of refuge, but also of minor resis-
tance against the Nazis’ anti-Semitic regulations on the occasion when:
A Jewish goat-herd drove some—presumably also Jewish—goats past the

cemetery. He was carrying his blue jacket over his shoulder, with the Jews’
star covered. ‘I can’t pin it on my skin’, he said quite cheerfully, ‘the goats
don’t wear one either’. (2003, p. 200)3
Another place of refuge was the Swedish Mission at No. 16 Seegasse, where
Aichinger and other young people came together ‘before sleep and before
night’ under the guidance of a charismatic deaconess they called Lillemor
(‘Little Mother’), finding comfort in her talk of ‘their Protestant Seegasse
God, his protection and his sure guidance, granted to everyone in their
own way’ (2007, p. 138). And another place of rebellion was the spot at
one end of the Reich Bridge where the so-called Schlurfs gathered, the
nonconformist youths who exhibited their disdain for the Nazi regime by
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listening to swing jazz, and who expressed sympathy when they met racial
‘“outlaws”’ (2007, p. 54), such as Aichinger. The site in Vienna with per-
haps the most positive connotations is the small apartment in the suburb
of Hernals where a friend called Melly Welzl gave shelter to Aichinger and
her mother immediately after the war, and where ‘in the early mornings,
while Melly […] and her husband were still asleep on the floor—because
they had given up their bed to us—I sat at her little white kitchen table
and started writing The Greater Hope’ (2007, p. 57).
Unsurprisingly, each of the memories just described has an admixture
of pessimism or defeat. After recalling the Central Cemetery of her Nazi-
era experience and of Orson Welles’ post-war film, Aichinger suggests that
the present-day mourners who adjourn to the pub contemplate ‘the disap-
pointment with the persistent mediocrity of political institutions which
was revealed to us after the war’ (2003, p. 202). At the end of her piece
on the Swedish Mission in Seegasse, Aichinger chooses three of Vienna’s
bridges to exemplify what remained after the Mission closed down in
1941—‘Only the bridges stayed, for the moment, where they were: the
Sweden Bridge, St Mary’s Bridge, the Peace Bridge’ (2007, p. 139)—
evoking firstly the deportations which continued unabated, secondly the
inability or unwillingness of Austria’s Christian churches to do much
about them, and thirdly and ironically the violence of the Nazi regime.
Aichinger refers to the ‘Schlurfs’ in a piece devoted partly to the
‘Viennabikes’—the bicycles which can be rented by tourists and city com-
muters in Vienna, but which are frequently destroyed or thrown into the
Danube—drawing a fairly tenuous, but entirely contemptuous, contrast
between the dreams which were engendered by the rebelliousness and
solidarity of the ‘Schlurfs’ (dreams which ‘weren’t demolished, and
couldn’t be taken from you’) and the destruction of ‘today’s poor
Viennabikes’ (2007, p. 54), at the hands of the Viennese, who are ‘born
vandals’ (2007, p. 53). Even the piece about the apartment in Hernals,
which speaks of the ‘greater hope’ of those who survived the Nazi regime,
devotes as much attention to someone who did not survive the anti-
Semitism of the Soviet regime: the author Isaac Babel, ‘who was a Jew
and—to name another category for those whom Stalin condemned to
death—“a Bohemian” [and] was arrested in Odessa, and on 27 January
1940 he was shot’ (2007, p. 55).
Although Aichinger’s memories of the years 1927 to 1950 sometimes
extend beyond Vienna—most notably to London, which she and her
mother visited for the first time for a few months in 1947–1948—these
memories have the same dark undercurrents as her recollections of the

Seegasse Mission or of Hernals. Aichinger’s pleasure in her memories of
London is particularly apparent in the stream of images in passages such as
the following, from a piece entitled ‘In Praise of England’:
And I still imagine myself back in Madame Tussauds Wax Museum, in

Westbourne Court near Paddington Station, see the smooth, wet tracks six
storeys below, beneath the apartment my sister lived in after the war, remem-
ber the Edgware Road, and later Hornton Street, the Lyon’s Corner Houses
and the sea fog which often seeped in between all the cracks. I remember the
front gardens with the hydrangeas and tulips, often quite late in the year.
(2007, p. 72)
And the purpose of this visit was to reunite with Helga and Klara, and also
with the broader Jewish community of pre-Nazi Vienna represented by
‘Finchley Road, which some people called “Finchleystrasse” even back
then, because so many emigrants already lived there’, and by individuals
such as author and later Nobel laureate Elias Canetti (2003, p. 135). But
the reunion of those who survived necessarily recalls the absence of those
who did not. In the sentence immediately following the long quotation
from ‘In Praise of England’ above, Aichinger also remembers:
the many dark and mid-grey clothes which our mother’s elder sister had
stored for our grandmother on a clothesline in her room at a pension. Our
grandmother never came back, and ‘Auntie’ never asked about her again
either. (2007, p. 72)
Thus London, with the clothes stored by Klara, is linked to Minsk, ‘the
Belarusian capital’ (2007, p. 72), where her mother and siblings were
murdered, much as Helga’s London-born daughter evokes the grim past
as well as the brighter future, given that she came into the world ‘in 1942,
the year in which our relatives were deported from Vienna’ (2003, p. 135).
The Cinema and Memory

Although Aichinger mentions various sites (such as Morzin Square and
the Sweden Bridge) repeatedly in her recollections of Nazi-era Vienna, her
most prominent theme by far is the cinema, in the sense of specific places
where films are shown, specific films, and also the particular experience of
168 G. WILKES
watching films. Indeed, Fässler argues with reference to some earlier texts
that cinemas have now ‘replace[d] […] churches as points of orientation
and places of destination’ in Aichinger’s ‘topography of Vienna’ (2011b,
p. 217). Aichinger first developed her passion for films as a child living in
Gisela’s apartment at No. 1 Hohlweggasse, where the nearby Pheasant
Cinema originated ‘a fever […] which hasn’t abated to this day’ (2003,
p. 69). She continued to attend the cinema during the Nazi rule in Austria
and maintained her interest for the rest of her life, explaining to one inter-
viewer in 2003 that ‘I go to the movies up to four times a day’ (2007,
p. 185), and to another in 2001 that she is a regular at the Burg Cinema’s
weekend screenings of The Third Man, partly because Helga has a walk-on
role in that film: ‘So I see her again […] every Sunday’ (Fässler 2011a,
p. 151).4 Aichinger’s writings about the cinema in The Standard encom-
pass directors and actors as diverse as Fritz Lang, Leni Riefenstahl, Jean-
Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Luchino Visconti, the B-movie director William
Castle, Gillian Anderson, Humphrey Bogart, Eddie Constantine, and
Laurel and Hardy. She even comments on the characteristics of particular
cinemas, for example on what she sees as the soullessness of modern mul-
tiplexes (2003, p. 175), the cliquishness of the elderly clientele at the
Bellaria Cinema (2003, pp. 17 & 75), and the extraordinary discomfort of
the seats at Vienna’s Film Museum (2003, pp. 108, 125, 160 & 197).
Aichinger’s memories of cinema-going in Vienna between 1927 and
1950 include some positive experiences. The first piece in Film and Fate
describes the daily routine before 1938 of her movie-loving aunt Erna,
who would study ‘today’s, tomorrow’s and the day after’s program’
(2003, p. 11), every afternoon, and generally opted for the Pheasant
Cinema, which was so draughty that ‘you could catch your death there’
(2003, p. 13), but which also offered the prospect of matinée idol ‘Iván
Petrovich, wearing uniforms which were a bit too tight, play[ing] Russian
or White Russian officers’ (2003, p. 12). The cinema was no less attractive
to Aichinger herself, for example when she and Helga saw a film at the
Scala Cinema called The Governor, which was set in Eastern Europe: ‘[W]e
liked the eastern landscape, the horses too. And the film sky up above’
(2003, p. 75).
Inevitably, however, Aichinger’s recollections of the cinema cannot be
divorced from her memories of Nazism. This is partly because she associ-
ates going to films with significant events in her life between 1938 and
1945, for example when she notes that she and Helga saw The Governor
the evening before Helga ‘fled forever to England, on a Kindertransport
organised by the Quakers’ (2003, p. 74), in July 1939, or that ‘I was […]
at the cinema on the day the Second World War began’ (2003, p. 15). But
in particular, Aichinger’s experience of the cinema is intertwined with the
destruction of her family, and of the Jewish community more generally.
Thus, she remarks that the landscape in The Governor which she and Helga
‘liked’ was putatively ‘the German living space demanded by Hitler in the
East’ (2003, p. 75), and by extension the site of notorious concentration
camps. And she comments mordantly that while Erna worried about how
‘you could catch your death’ at the Pheasant Cinema, in fact ‘[d]eath
caught her, together with my grandmother, after they were deported to
the extermination camp in Minsk’ (2003, pp. 13–14).
In this context, the cinema assumed a new and vital significance for
Aichinger, offering both a physical escape from the streets of Nazi-era
Vienna and an imaginative escape from the horrors being perpetrated in
them, becoming a place where ‘you dived beneath the surface, […] on a
brief journey around the world, which saved you until the next one’
(2003, p. 198). Aichinger particularly emphasises the cinema’s crucial
existential role as a refuge from the material dangers and psychological
travails of her Mischling status when she recalls that:
I wouldn’t have needed the sign ‘Jews Forbidden’ to make my addiction to

the cinema, even to Nazi cinema, even more intense. We were still allowed
to enter cinemas anyway, as we were only half-Jewish. And I didn’t identify
with either Judaism or Christianity, both seemed equally alien to me, formed
by fear and causing fear. The cinema was my salvation. (2003, p. 73)
But this refuge was not always proof against the realities of genocide.
Aichinger is well aware that ‘Nazi cinema’ was an instrument of propa-
ganda and mass distraction, noting that although ‘[f]or six years’ until the
very last days of the war ‘Goebbels had ensured that [the major German
studio] Ufa’s films didn’t disappear’ from Vienna:
Rather a lot of other things did disappear, whole apartment buildings,

bridges, the stony allotments on the edges of the canals, and also the Jews’
stars and the people who had pinned them to their overcoats. (2003, p. 199)
And in undoubtedly the most chilling passage in the texts discussed in this
chapter, Aichinger remembers how Gisela’s, Erna’s and Felix’s fate was
170 G. WILKES
invoked ‘some months’ after their deportation when she arrived late at a
cinema, and a sympathetic cashier said:
‘The picture has already begun, but you can still get in.’ And added more
softly: ‘I suppose you know what happened to your relatives?’ I replied: ‘I
can imagine it’. ‘We can’t imagine anything’, the woman said. ‘What hap-
pens seems new to us every time’. I got into the film without much trouble.
But the picture which really mattered was too blurry. (2003, p. 20)
The cinema cannot provide ‘salvation’ here.

In Film and Fate, Aichinger explains that from very early childhood she
‘felt […] my own existence was an imposition’, and that she attempted to
escape this imposition by pursuing ‘what was fleeting’ (2003, p. 65), first
by reading, writing and drawing (2003, pp. 65–66), and then by
‘collect[ing] […] cinemas, which were more fleeting and more abiding
possessions at the same time’ (2003, p. 74). She adds that: ‘What usually
happens at the cinema is disappearing. The landscape of film is simultane-
ously a refuge and a place of distance from one’s own person, of separation
from it’ (2003, p. 74).5 Aichinger’s metaphor of watching films in Nazi-
era Vienna as ‘div[ing] beneath the surface’ is therefore consistent with
her lifelong equation of the cinema and ‘disappearing’; and this equation
also applies to her interest in film after her return to Vienna in 1988. For
Aichinger extends the idea of ‘disappearing’ to her relatives and to the
victims of Nazi genocide as a whole by elaborating on a famous line from
The Third Man: ‘“Born to be murdered” […] should be translated as
“born to disappear”, and not only in the case of my own family’ (2003
p. 71). She then suggests that in ‘going to the cinema’ in later years, she
demonstrates a kind of solidarity with her own and others’ families because
she creates ‘a clumsy reproduction of how those who were murdered dis-
appeared’ (2003, p. 71).
In two interviews from 2001, Aichinger suggests further that watching
films is an appropriate mode of remembering when she describes the cin-
ema in the terms—contingent, antithetical to chronology, fluid—in which
(as I outlined above) she describes memory. Thus ‘the cinema disappears
at every moment’ (Fässler 2011a, p. 192), and:
Film destroys chronology, there’s blackness between the images. Memory

doesn’t work chronologically either: I watch a film, absolutely in the
resent—then sentences surface which I heard seventy years ago in our

p
grandmother’s apartment in Hohlweggasse. (Fässler 2011a, p. 174)
Sigrid Nieberle notes one such moment at which chronology is destroyed,

when a scene at a formal ball in Luchino Visconti’s Il Gattopardo makes
Aichinger think of an inn outside Linz in her childhood (see Aichinger
2003, p. 109) and speculates that the scene and the memory are both
‘precursors of a “doomed society”’ (Nieberle 2001, p. 137). To this I
would add another famous line in the The Third Man, when the pragmatic
British officer played by Trevor Howard tells the naïve American author
played by Joseph Cotten to ‘[l]eave death to the professionals’, which
prompts Aichinger to ask:
But isn’t it precisely the ‘professionals’, who are practised in sending other
people to a place which they have absolutely no intention of seeking out
themselves, who understand the least about the murderous details which
they have invented? (2003, p. 200)
Conclusion
Despite her great suffering in Nazi-era Vienna, and her pungent criticism
of how the post-war Austrian state deals with its fascist past and with con-
temporary anti-Semitism, Aichinger felt unable to live or to write any-
where but in Vienna during the last decades of her life. Notwithstanding
her view of individuals’ remembering as a fluid and contestable process,
Aichinger’s Film and Fate, Improbable Journeys, and interviews given after
1988 offer powerfully expressed memories of Vienna’s Nazi past again
and again. Her consciousness of that terrible past pervades the city: it is
present at numerous sites of historical and individual significance, it
emerges incidentally during even such mundane activities as visits to a
petrol station or a bookshop, and it intrudes upon recollections of places
other than Vienna itself. This recalls some of the fundamental observa-
tions in the scholarship on trauma generally and on the Holocaust specifi-
cally, such as Cathy Caruth’s suggestion that the ‘story of trauma’ is ‘a
kind of double telling, the oscillation between […] the story of the unbear-
able nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its sur-
vival’ (Caruth 2016, pp. 7–8), and Saul Friedlander’s remark that even
decades after the Holocaust, ‘the best of literature and art dealing with the
Shoah’ fails to ‘offer any redemptive stance’ (Friedlander 1995, p. 255).
172 G. WILKES
In relation to the preoccupation with films, Christine Ivanovic argues

that ‘the mimetic gesture with which Aichinger […] characterises her visit
to the cinema as an attempt to disappear herself’ recalls the ‘attempt to
repeat and work through which Freud considered the necessary condition
of overcoming traumatic experiences’ (2011, p. 176). There is further
evidence of this in Aichinger’s proclivity for ‘going […] to the same film
as many as six or seven times’ (Aichinger 2003, p. 14): While she says that
she likes to do this if the film shows ‘snow falling, or the landscapes of
England or New England, or of Northern France, to which I am almost
equally well disposed’ (2003, p. 14), the example she then gives is Louis
Malle’s Au revoir les enfants, and she describes the scene in which a
Catholic priest and the Jewish children he hid in his school ‘are taken away
from the classroom by the Gestapo’s thugs’ (2003, p. 14).
Interestingly, Au revoir les enfants is the only well-known film (or tele-
vision series) dealing explicitly with the Nazi genocide which Aichinger
mentions in any detail. In the three volumes I have analysed in this chap-
ter, she discusses—to take one example—Laurel and Hardy repeatedly and
sometimes at length (see 2003, pp. 94–97; 2007, pp. 146–49), but she
says little or nothing about what I would loosely term ‘Holocaust films’
such as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah or
the television miniseries Holocaust, which have attracted considerable pop-
ular and scholarly attention. The role of the cinema in Aichinger’s pro-
cesses of remembering seems to reflect an idiosyncratic combination of
personal-psychological and situational factors: the example of her aunt
Erna, the urge to escape her sense of ‘existence [as] an imposition’ which
predated the even greater threat to existence in the years 1938–45, the
fact that during those years a darkened cinema auditorium was one of the
few places (perhaps the only place) where her ‘half-Jewish’ status was
obscured, and her belief that the ‘disappearing’ involved in watching a film
somehow replicates ‘disappearing’ during the fascist genocide. From Ilse
Aichinger’s particular perspective, the act of visiting a cinema can in itself
be a way of remembering Nazi-era Vienna, an experience of memory
which operates independently of ‘Holocaust films’.
Notes
1. With the exception of Caruth’s book, Friedlander’s chapter and Uhl’s article
(which are cited once each), all primary and secondary sources cited in this
chapter are in German. All translations from German are my own. Although
I have published translations of all the texts by Aichinger which are cited
here, in the interests of consistency, all page references to those sources are
to the original German texts.
2. For similar references to the Sweden Bridge, see Aichinger 2003, pp. 59–60;
Aichinger 2007, p. 67; Fässler 2011a, pp. 108 & 113.
3. For similar references to the Central Cemetery, see Fässler 2011a, pp. 46, 63
& 163. A cemetery also plays a major role in the third chapter of The Greater
Hope, ʻThe Holy Landʼ (pp. 52–80).
4. Vienna’s Burg Cinema (Burg Kino 2018) has held regular screenings of The
Third Man since 1980, and at the time of writing is showing the film every
Tuesday, Friday and Sunday: see Fässler 2011b, p. 238; and https://www.
burgkino.at/movie/third-man viewed 29 August 2018.
5. For similar references to existence as an imposition, see Fässler 2011a,
pp. 111, 202 & 220; for references to the urge to disappear see Fässler
2011a, pp. 109, 140 & 154; and for references to film and ‘disappearing’
see Fässler 2011a, pp. 156 & 179.
References
Aichinger, I 1987, Kleist, Moos, Fasane, 2nd ed, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag,
Frankfurt am Main.
Aichinger, I 2003, Film und Verhängnis: Blitzlichter auf ein Leben, 2nd ed, Fischer
Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main.
Aichinger, I 2007, Unglaubwürdige Reisen, 2nd ed, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag,
Frankfurt am Main.
Aichinger, I 2012, Die gröβere Hoffnung, 12th ed, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag,
Frankfurt am Main.
Berbig, R 2011, “20. März 1996”: Ilse Aichingers unveröffentlichter Initialtext
zum Spätwerk, in Ivanovic C & Shindo S (eds.), Absprung zur Weiterbesinnung:
Geschichte und Medien bei Ilse Aichinger, Stauffenberg Verlag, Tübingen,
pp. 51–64.
Burg Kino (Vienna), viewed 29 August 2018, https://www.burgkino.at/movie/
third-man.
Caruth, C 2016, Unclaimed experience: Trauma, narrative, and history, 2nd ed,
Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.
Fässler, S 2001, Die Orte, die wir sahen, sehen uns an, in Aichinger I, Kurzschlüsse:
Wien, 2nd ed, Edition Korrespondezen, Vienna, pp. 65–78.
Fässler, S 2007, Vorwort, in Aichinger I, Unglaubwürdige Reisen, 2nd ed, Fischer
Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, pp. 7–12.
Fässler, S (ed.) 2011a, Es muss gar nichts bleiben: Interviews 1952–2005, 2nd ed,
Edition Korrespondenzen, Vienna.
174 G. WILKES
Fässler, S 2011b, Von Wien her, auf Wien hin: Ilse Aichingers ‘Geographie der
eigenen Existenz’, Böhlau, Cologne.
Friedlander, S 1995, Trauma, memory, and transference, in Hartman GH (ed.),
Holocaust remembrance: The shapes of memory, 2nd ed, Blackwell Publishers,
Oxford, pp. 252–63.
Ivanovic, C 2011, Masse. Medien. Mensch: Ilse Aichingers bioskopisches
Schreiben, in Ivanovic C & Shindo S (eds.), Absprung zur Weiterbesinnung:
Geschichte und Medien bei Ilse Aichingeri, Stauffenberg Verlag, Tübingen,
pp. 173–84.
Nieberle, S 2001, ‘Ilse Aichinger im Kino des Verschwindens’, in Herrmann B &
Thums B (eds.), ‘Was wir einsetzen können, ist Nüchternheit’: Zum Werk Ilse
Aichingers, Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg, pp. 127–46.
Uhl, H 2016, ‘From the periphery to the center of memory: Holocaust memorials
in Vienna’, Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 221–42.
CHAPTER 9
Black Skin as Site of Memory: Stories

of Trauma from the Black Atlantic
Jarrod Hayes
When one thinks of sites of memory in relation to slavery, one often thinks
of slave-castles-turned-memorials, as in Elmina or Cape Coast in Ghana or
Gorée Island in Senegal …, or perhaps the Memorial to the Abolition of
Slavery in Nantes, France. Yet, in a 1989 address, Toni Morrison decried
the lack of memorials for slaves in the US:
There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to sum-
mon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves; nothing that
reminds us of the ones who made the journey and of those who did [not?]
make it. There is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park
or skyscraper lobby. There’s no 300-foot tower. There’s no small bench by
the road. (Morrison 1989)
Inspired by these remarks, in 2006 the Toni Morrison Society launched

the Bench by the Road Project, which has now placed at least 20 benches
across the world (BRP 2018). It is interesting that the Society chose one
of the less ‘monumental’ options that Morrison listed, but perhaps the
J. Hayes (*)
Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia
e-mail: jarrod.hayes@monash.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_9
176 J. HAYES
anonymity of a bench serves as a reminder of the many names of slaves,

whose patronymics have frequently been lost to history. In other words,
these benches may serve as memorials to forgetting as much as to
remembering.
Should one visit Salem, Massachusetts, one might very well see another
monument composed of stone benches, benches inserted into the inner
side of a stone wall enclosing a park. These benches, however, are by a
graveyard, not a road, and they memorialise those executed during the
Salem witch trials between 1692 and 1693. One woman tried for and
convicted of witchcraft (but not executed and therefore not memorialised
in Salem) was Tituba, who was also a slave. In Danvers, Massachusetts
(once known as Salem Village as opposed to the town of Salem just men-
tioned), one may nonetheless visit the excavated remnants of her master
Samuel Parris’s parsonage, but what remains of the memory of Tituba as
both a slave and someone accused of witchcraft? It is not that she has been
totally erased from the archive; the transcripts of her trial testimony
remain. Yet Elaine G. Breshaw writes of ‘Tituba’s low profile in the history
books’ and ‘the dearth of useful, direct information about her’ (1996, p.
xx) and even details how fictional rewritings of Tituba’s story have erased
the fact that she was an Amerindian (probably an Arawak) in favour of
making her an Afro-Caribbean (see also Hansen 1974; Garane 1995;
Jalalzai 2009).
In her 1986 novel Moi, Tituba, sorcière … Noire de Salem [I, Tituba,
black witch of Salem (Condé 1992)], Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé
as well creates her own slave memorial of sorts, by writing a mostly fic-
tional account of Tituba as a slave of African origins who left barely a trace
on the historical record.1 In Condé’s version, Tituba is the daughter of
Abena, an enslaved Ashanti woman raped by an English sailor during her
transport to Barbados. After Abena is executed for resisting her subse-
quent master’s sexual advances, this master chases Tituba off of his planta-
tion, after which she is raised by an older Nago woman named Man Yaya,
who also trains her in the traditional medico-magical healing arts and the
ability to communicate with the dead. When as a young adult, Tituba
takes up with a slave named John Indien, his owner Susanna Endicott
forces them to get married, which makes Tituba her de facto slave. Then,
after an illness that she suspects Tituba caused, Susanna sells both John
Indien and Tituba to Samuel Parris, who takes them to the village of
Salem, Massachusetts, where Tituba will be caught up in the witch trials.
Readers of Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible will remember Tituba,
9 BLACK SKIN AS SITE OF MEMORY: STORIES OF TRAUMA… 177
to whom he refers as a ‘Negro slave’ (p. 8), yet who receives significantly

fewer lines than the other women characters. Nonetheless, if Miller used
the Salem witch trials to write a parable of sorts about the anti-communist
witch hunts of 1950s America, in this chapter, I will argue that Condé
deploys the witch hunt, which creates the difference named by the accusa-
tion and labelling of ‘witches’ as a metaphor for racial naming as a form
of scapegoating.2 Physically tortured during her interrogation, Tituba alle-
gorises the racialisation of slaves and their descendants by marking black
skin (by marking skin as black) as a site of traumatic memory. I would thus
like to think through Pierre Nora’s concept of ‘site of memory’ rather dif-
ferently by taking the unusual step of a thought experiment that asks what
kinds of critical analysis can result when one considers black skin to be a
site of traumatic memory.
While potentially offensive in its implied reification—a reification that is
the proper of racism—such an analytical move holds out the possibility of
new ways of analysing this reification, which Frantz Fanon (1967) origi-
nally described in 1952 as the very epidermisation that produces black-
ness.3 In other words, since the period of slavery, racism has inscribed
blackness onto the skin of those it racialises, who through this very process
are marked with racial difference. Through a work of historical fiction,
Condé rewrites a traumatic moment in the history of both slavery and
racialisation, itself a moment already rewritten by Miller in his own ver-
sion. Condé’s repetition of the trauma she retells, I will argue, parallels the
repetition required for the production and reproduction of racial differ-
ence. According to Homi K. Bhabha (1994), the stereotype is the ‘major
discursive strategy’ of colonial discourse, a strategy that ‘vacillates between
what is always “in place”, already known, and something that must be
anxiously repeated … as if the essential duplicity of the Asiatic or the bes-
tial sexual license of the African that needs no proof, can never really, in
discourse, be proved’ (p. 66). Furthermore, this historical event that
Condé memorialises is itself already a repetition of previous traumas within
the histories of slavery and racialisation, ‘its repeatability in changing his-
torical and discursive conjunctures’ (Bhabha, p. 66), and since as long as
there is race, this repetition continues after the publication of Condé’s
novel, it can also help us read recent political history along similar lines.
Black skin, in short, is the site where slavery is remembered, its effects
repeated and reproduced in the repeatability of the stereotype allegorised
by Condé. In the US, since abolition, practices such as segregation, mass
incarceration, racial profiling, torture (referred to euphemistically as
178 J. HAYES
‘police brutality’), and police murder with impunity have not only contin-
ued this process of ‘epidermisation’ but also reinforced it, thereby repeat-
ing and reproducing the foundational violence of slavery within the history
of its aftermaths. Torture is thus one means of inscribing race on the body
it helps to racialise in a manner similar to the way, described by Monique
Wittig (1992, pp. 43–44), in which gender is written onto bodies:
‘Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and
violently shaping it’. And for Wittig, we remember, it is less the case that
gender is inscribed onto an already-sexed body; rather, this gendered and
gendering inscription also marks the body as sexed—sex, that very sign of
the biological. In sociology, for Colette Guillaumin (1972, p. 3, my
trans.), race as well works as a signifying system: ‘Race will not appear
there as biological reality, but rather as biological form used as SIGN’.
Tituba Questioned
Such signs are inscribed onto Tituba’s body when she is ‘questioned’ in
the following passage:
‘Confess that this is your doing, but that you did not act alone and denounce
your accomplices! Good and Osborne and the others!’
‘I have no accomplice, since I have done nothing.’
One of the men sat squarely astride me and began to hammer my face
with his fists, which were as hard as stones. Another lifted up my skirt and
thrust a sharpened stick into the most sensitive part of my body, taunting
me: ‘Go on, take it, it’s John Indian’s prick’. (Condé 1992, p. 91)
The word questioned is in scare quotes above, because in this passage, one
may see a connection with work on more recent colonial encounters, such
as Henri Alleg’s (1961) La question, which recounts its author’s imprison-
ment and torture by French colonial authorities in Algeria. This work, in
its very title, also reminds us that, in French, the word question can be a
euphemism for torture itself. We may remember the experience of Djamila
Boupacha, presented by Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi (1962),
which also highlights the intersectional relation between colonial and sex-
ual violence. Boupacha’s experience is later reflected as institutionalised in
work by sociologist Marnia Lazreg (2008), and historian Joshua Cole
(2005), the latter of whom goes further to consider torture as a productive
encounter of mutual recognition and dependence in which each position
requires the other for its self-definition. In relation to these theorists of

torture, Condé further emphasises the intersectionality of race, gender,
and sexuality that comes into play in the racialisation of black skin, an
intersectionality this chapter will revisit below.4
Cole’s title, ‘Intimate acts and unspeakable relations: remembering tor-
ture and the war for Algerian independence’, speaks volumes about the
question of la question in its emphasis on the intimacy that defines the
relation between torturer and ‘victim’ as well as the unspeakable acts that
bind and bound them—acts about which, by the way, Condé is also quite
willing to speak. Cole describes ‘torture’s family romance’ (2005, p. 131)
and argues that it defines its ‘participants’ in relation to and against one
another (p. 130). There is also an intimate relationship between torture
and naming; torture writes as well, literally inscribing onto flesh marks of
trauma that signify the name of race. This intimacy recalls that of the
Hegelian master-slave dialectic, indeed recalls the intimacy forced on
Tituba by her interrogators, itself recalling and repeating her mother’s
rape at the hands of her masters that resulted in her conception. That the
intimacy characterising France’s major colonial encounter of the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries in North Africa recalls another, earlier
encounter in the Caribbean, one shaped by the Atlantic triangle, will be far
from the last repetition that not only defines black skin as a site of trau-
matic memory but also re-enacts the very trauma remembered.
The Place of Slavery

But what does torture have to do with place? Certainly place is quite
important in Condé, since Tituba moves along various places in the African
diaspora, from Barbados, to America, and back to Barbados.5 By retracing
the Black Atlantic triangle through the voice of an Anglophone Caribbean-
born slave and, in so doing, remembering the very places between which
forced migration served as the foundation for the slave trade, Condé
rewrites the Salem witch trials as a Francophone writer, thereby offering a
view of Anglo-American slavery and racialisation. Whereas one might
think that Nora’s (1984–1992) notion of a site of memory denotes a more
literal place than black skin would as a generalised concept, in his collec-
tion most examples are not truly places in the geographic sense. For exam-
ple, one would be hard pressed to think of Proust’s madeleine—to which
an entire chapter is devoted (Compagnon 1992)—as a place, even though
it is very connected to memory. The chapter on ‘Vines and wine’ (Durand
180 J. HAYES
1992) is more obviously about the ‘place’ of wine in the French imaginary,
its ‘mythology’ as Roland Barthes (1957) would put it.6 Even actual places
like monuments for fallen soldiers (Prost 1984) are less about the actual
sites one might visit than, again, the ‘place’ occupied by the memorialisa-
tion of the dead in a nationalisation of French identity. A number of critics
have commented on the dearth of sites of colonial memory in Nora’s col-
lection (see, for example, Blanchard et al. 2005, pp. 16–17; Mann 2005,
p. 412, and Forsdick in this volume); slavery is one such notable absence,
and France’s colonial violence in Algeria is another. This chapter thus joins
others that attempt to fill that void.
Condé as well has commented on Nora’s notion of a ‘lieu de mémoire’
(see Tayeb-Khyar 1991, p. 357), and Elisabeth Mudimbé-Boyi (1993,
p. 755) has written, ‘Tituba, in reconstructing one individual’s story, also
allegorizes the collective history of the Caribbean. History here conflates
into literature, and the text reveals itself as a lieu de mémoire …’, after
which she goes on to quote Nora himself. In what Kathleen Gyssells
(2006, p. 79) calls Tituba’s ‘incipit’, Condé further memorialises the sex-
ual violence of slavery in the very first sentence of the novel: ‘Abena, my
mother, was raped by an English sailor on the deck of Christ the King one
day in the year 16** while the ship was sailing for Barbados. I was born
from this act of aggression. From this act of hatred and contempt’ (p. 3).
These three sentences are worth considering in detail. The first sentence
should be read in the French original, because the published translation
changes its syntax: ‘Abena, ma mère, un marin anglais la viola sur le pont
de Christ the King, un jour de 16** alors que le navire faisait voile vers la
Barbade’ (Condé 1986, p. 15). The first word, her mother’s name, as well
as the apposition ‘my mother’ are actually the direct object of the first
sentence; they are then followed by its subject, ‘an English sailor’, fol-
lowed this time in a more conventional word order by the sentence’s
verb—‘rape’. The African subject, the colonised subject, thus comes into
being in the novel not as a subject but as an object, and the action that
object-ises, object-ifies the colonised subject is that of rape. The place of
that objectification through rape is ironically christened, Christianised in
what is also perhaps a reference to the very Christian king in whose name
Africans are enslaved, their labour extorted, in the name of king and coun-
try. In the second sentence, the narrator herself comes into being as well,
is born out of this objectification through rape. The first passage quoted
above thus repeats this opening rape, which it recalls, and associates this
rape with the interpolation that invents the black subject (again not quite
a subject but an object) whose subjectivity is denied even as it is being
called into being. Again, this female, black subject comes into being
through an intersectional violence that is both colonial and sexual. And if
this violence operates by penetrating the body and its skin, it nonetheless
leaves its mark on the body’s surface as the sign of race.
Furthermore, if Hegel defined his own dialectic in part through the
relation between master and slave, to understand what I would like to
develop as a kind of subject-object dialectic—interpolating a subject into
being only to deny her subjectivity through objectification—I suggest that
we turn to an essay by Sharon Marcus (1992, p. 386) titled ‘Fighting bod-
ies, fighting words’, which argues against the notion that ‘rape has always
already occurred and women are always either already raped or already
rapable’. Instead, she proposes what she calls a ‘rape script’, through
which ‘we can see rape as a process of sexist gendering which we can attempt
to disrupt’ (p. 391). In her view, ‘Masculine power and feminine power-
lessness neither simply precede nor cause rape; rather rape is one of cul-
ture’s many modes of feminizing women’ (p. 386). And here is where the
rape script comes in: ‘A rape act thus imposes as well as presupposes
misogynist inequalities; rape is not only scripted; it also scripts’ (p. 386).
The rape script thus precedes the rape, which also contributes to writing
it. It therefore functions in parallel with the Law of gender as theorised by
Judith Butler (1990). Because the Law is determined by the corpus of
gender performances, although individual performances are determined
by this Law, they also contribute to it and can thus introduce excess and
parody, which can shift the Law itself.
In the scene from Tituba, however, something quite specific goes on: it
is not just that the torturers/rapists attribute to her a desire for the rape;
they also displace their own agency in the act onto a black man. Historically,
rumours of sex between black men and white women served as the excuse
for lynching, often accompanied by castration; such acts of racial terror
were thus justified by a rhetorical inversion or reversal of the very kind of
institutionalised rape with which Tituba begins. In fact, Tituba contains a
reference to precisely this kind of violence when Man Yaya explains why
she has taken so long to arrive after being summoned by Tituba: ‘I was at
the other end of the island, comforting a slave whose husband died under
torture. They whipped him. They rubbed hot pepper on his wounds and
then they tore off his penis’ (p. 29). Here we may already see the begin-
ning of an iterability of the rape script, itself a repetition of the iterability
through which blackness is stamped onto bodies in the process of
racialisation.
182 J. HAYES
Branding Flesh as Black

This iterability is also an important component of the repetitive nature of
racist trauma, and if the diasporic moves that Condé re-enacts result in a
multidirectional narrative, remembering racist trauma often occurs along
multidirectional pathways as well. This reading therefore pursues a few of
these pathways, such as the more recent historical example of the re-
inscription of slavery onto the racialised body of Haitian Abner Louima,
arrested and assaulted in 1997 after he intervened in a fight outside a
Brooklyn nightclub. His assault culminated in his being raped in the pre-
cinct and included the forcible insertion of a broken broomstick into his
rectum (CNN 1999; Chan 2007). As a result, his ‘sphincter was torn’ and
he had ‘a punctured bladder and a severed colon’ (Brenner 1997).
Afterwards, when he was taken to the emergency room, ‘officers told the
Jamaican nurse that he had been injured in a homosexual episode’ (Brenner
1997). Read alongside Condé, this example parallels Tituba’s interroga-
tion in the reversal of agency it reproduces. As in many cases of police
torture, initially it was Louima who was charged with assaulting police
officers; this case was unusual in that the bodily harm resulting from his
rape was attributed to his own homosexual desires. In another example of
such an iterability, the title of an article about a police rape in France
speaks for itself: ‘Man “raped” with police truncheon was “accidentally
sodomised when his trousers fell down”’ (Hartley-Parkinson 2017). Let
me also point out that the instrument of Louima’s rape/torture, a broom-
stick, that tool of women’s frequently unpaid labour par excellence, is also
often considered to be the witch’s favourite mode of transportation. In
short, in attributing their sexual assault to Tituba’s own desires, her inter-
rogators attempt to efface their own agency in stamping race onto
her body.
The repetition and reproduction of violence that Condé helps readers
understand does not end with the specific parallel of Louima’s torture and
rape. This incident occurred during the administration of former mayor
Rudolph Giuliani, ‘an early Trump supporter’ and ‘top candidate for sec-
retary of state’ (Phillip 2017), who was ‘named … as an informal advisor
on cybersecurity’ by Donald J. Trump when he was still president-elect
(Phillip 2017). Giuliani was well known for his policing policies, charac-
terised by a crackdown on minor infractions, the so-called broken-windows
approach, and he became, so far with impunity, an accomplice of the
crimes for which Trump was impeached. Trump himself is certainly no
stranger to the witch hunt. He has repeatedly claimed that he is the victim
of one, and he regularly engages in the kind of reversal of agency described
above. He has claimed that every crime of which he has been accused was
actually committed by someone else, and his repetitions of the sorts of acts
that Condé theorises do not end there. He is on tape bragging about sexu-
ally assaulting women. He called for the execution of the ‘Central Park
Five’—African American and Latino men falsely accused of assault and
rape—even after they were exonerated by DNA evidence. His family’s real
estate business was sued by the federal government for racial discrimina-
tion. He inaugurated his most recent political career by asserting that
Barack Obama, the first African American president, was not actually an
American citizen by birth and was therefore ineligible for the presidency.
These examples highlight not only the reiteration that turns sites of mem-
ory into sites of trauma but also the very productiveness of trauma itself in
gendering and racialising bodies. One further example of revisiting a site
of traumatic memory in the continuing re-inscription of slavery and its
aftermaths in the US is worth mentioning. Ronald Reagan’s first stop after
securing the Republican nomination in 1980 was Philadelphia, Mississippi,
the site of a murder of three civil-rights activists by members of the Ku
Klux Klan in 1964 with the participation of local law enforcement. While he
failed to mention the only thing Philadelphia, MS, is famous for, Reagan
did voice his own support for ‘states’ rights’. Regarding race in US history,
one consequential states’ right has been the ‘right’ to maintain legalised
slavery. The fight over this one was the Civil War. Another was the ‘right’
to maintain Apartheid-like social restrictions or segregation in the Jim
Crow South. Around the time of the 2016 Democratic Convention,
which marked the beginning of the general-election campaign, Trump
sent his own namesake (repetition in the form of a proper name), Donald
Trump Jr., to the very same town where the latter supported keeping the
‘Confederate’ flag, badge of honour of white supremacists, some of whom
his father would later call ‘very fine people’. Both Reagan’s visit and
Trump’s reiteration of it also repeat Nixon’s so-called Southern Turn,
which capitalised on Southern white resentment against desegregation to
revive support for the so-called Republican Party, now republican in name
only. And Nixon’s Southern Turn repeats the defeat of Reconstruction
shortly after the Civil War, which saw the initial rise of white supremacy in
the form of the Ku Klux Klan.
Such recent examples of repeating racist trauma bring us back to the
question of repetition in Condé, the repetition of la question as torture.
184 J. HAYES
And the repetition in question is of the very opening lines we have just
examined. Tituba, the ‘strange fruit’ of the opening rape,7 becomes for
her mother a kind of memorial, a site of memory of the racialising gesture
that literally gives birth to Tituba as a character and subject (racialised as
object):
Although the color of my skin was far from being light and my hair was
crinkly all over, I never stopped reminding my mother of the white sailor
who had raped her on the deck of Christ the King, while surrounded by a
circle of obscene voyeurs. I constantly reminded her of the pain and humili-
ation. (p. 6)
Whereas the previous citation repeats the proper name of the ship on
which Tituba’s mother was raped, let us now examine a subsequent repeti-
tion that comes in a passage in which Abena refuses to repeat the novel’s
opening scene by stabbing her master when he attempts to rape her. So,
the penalty for refusing her master’s reiteration of the novel’s opening
racialising rape is death here, and in the scene in which her execution is
carried out, this reiteration is carried out through a repetition of the very
language in which the episode is narrated:
They hanged my mother.

I watched her body swing from the lower branches of a silk-cotton tree.
She had committed a crime for which there is no pardon. She had struck a
white man. She had not killed him, however. In her clumsy rage she had
only managed to gash his shoulder.
They hanged my mother.
All the slaves had been summoned to her execution. Once her neck had
been broken and her soul had departed, there rose up a clamor of anger and
revolt that the overseers silenced with great lashes of their whips. Taking
refuse in one of the women’s skirts, I felt something harden inside me like
lava; a feeling that was never to leave me, a mixture of terror and mourning.
They hanged my mother. (p. 8)
The refrain ‘On pendit ma mère’ (Condé 1986, pp. 21–22) [‘They hanged
my mother’] occurs three times and thus repeats the extrajudicial hanging
of a slave, itself repeated after abolition in the form of lynching, itself
repeated not in accusations of sexual harassment as US Supreme Court
Justice Clarence Thomas claimed in his confirmation hearings in 1991,
but in police murders and the police officers absolved of the crime of com-
mitting them.
Tituba Tried, Tituba Named

Speaking of judges and judgement, Tituba’s trial, including the offi-
cialised and institutionalised performances by which she is convicted of
being a witch, also officialises and institutionalises her being named as a
witch, even if her first naming as such is carried out (albeit in jest) by her
husband John Indien:
‘Ow! What are you doing, little witch?’

He was joking, but it made me think. What is a witch? I noticed that
when he said the word, it was marked [entâché] with disapproval. Why
should that be? Why? Isn’t the ability to communicate with the invisible
world, to keep constant links with the dead, to care for others and heal, a
superior gift of nature that inspires respect, admiration, and gratitude?
Consequently, shouldn’t the witch (if that’s what the person who has this
gift is to be called) be cherished and revered rather than feared. (p. 17)
The same naming that occurs through rape and torture in other passages
is carried out here within the institution of heterosexual marriage, just as
the previously free Tituba is enslaved through her heterosexual marriage
to a slave, an enslavement that is also punctuated with her baptism and
becoming-Christian. Furthermore, the word ‘entâché ’ (Condé 1986,
p. 35), translated here as ‘marked’, but which can also mean ‘stained’, not
only represents what supposedly already exists, a referent that Tituba
nonetheless calls into question, but it also stains; it stamps an invented
reality onto the one it names.
Tituba repeats her challenge to the name and category of witch in a
conversation with Susanna Endicott, the woman who becomes her mis-
tress and owner after she marries John Indien: ‘“Weren’t you brought up
by a certain Nago witch called Mama Yaya?” “Witch,” I stammered.
“Witch? She took care of people and cured them”’ (p. 26). Later in the
novel, she elaborates on her surprise at being associated with the appella-
tion of witch: ‘Why in this society does one give the function of witch an
evil connotation? The witch, if we must use this word, rights wrongs,
helps, consoles, heals’ (p. 96). In these passages, Tituba suggests a way of
understanding racist labelling already asserted by Fanon (1952, p. 75),
who in Peau noire, masques blancs, writes:
It is the racist who creates his inferior.

186 J. HAYES
This conclusion brings us back to Sartre: ‘The Jew is one whom other
men consider a Jew: that is the simple truth from which we must start … It
is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew’. (Fanon 1967, p. 93)
Throughout Fanon’s text one notices an engagement with the work of

Jean-Paul Sartre (esp. 1954), who further remarks, ‘If the Jew did not
exist, the anti-Semite would invent him’ (Sartre 1965, p. 13). If for Sartre,
therefore, the anti-Semite creates the Jew, and for Fanon, the racist invents
the Black, in Tituba the witch is a creation of the Puritan. The racialising
re-inscription of slavery onto black bodies is therefore double, both physi-
cal and existential. And as every (former) student of US literature knows,
the Puritan founds the US and US identity; for Condé, therefore (and she
hardly differs from consensus here), slavery founds America.
The Evils of Race

In a later passage, Tituba even connects the above two passages by con-
necting the two moments/places/sites of memory where they occur,
Bridgetown, Barbados, and Salem, Massachusetts: ‘In Bridgetown Susanna
Endicott had already told me she was convinced that my color was indica-
tive of my close connections with Satan’ (p. 65). The allusion here, to a set
of theological associations with skin colour, is first made earlier in the
novel when her second master catches her during an intimate moment
with John Indien:
It was Samuel Parris. When he observed our position, a little blood filtered
into his wan cheeks and he spit out venomously: ‘I know that the color of
your skin is the sign of your damnation, but as long as you are under my roof
you will behave as Christians. Come and say your prayers!’
We obeyed. Goodwife Parris and the two girls, Abigail and Betsey, were
already on their knees in one of the cabins. The master remained standing,
lifted his eyes to the ceiling and started to bray. I couldn’t make much out
of his speech, except for the oft-heard words sin, evil, Satan, and
demon. (p. 41)
Tituba here heightens the relevance of Sartre’s theorisation of antisemi-

tism: ‘Anti-Semitism is thus seen to be at bottom a form of Manichaeism.
It explains the course of the world by the struggle of the principle of Good
with the principle of Evil’ (p. 40). Yet this Evil is not one that pre-exists
anti-Semitism, since ‘[t]he anti-Semite has cast his lot for Evil so as not to
have to cast his lot for Good. The more one is absorbed in fighting Evil,
the less one is tempted to place the Good in question’ (p. 44). One could
go further, therefore, and assert that the anti-Semite invents Evil (as s/he
invents the Jew) to assert the value of Good. Likewise, in Condé, the
white Puritan thus creates the identity of black, of witch, of witch as black,
and of black as witch.
Condé strengthens Sartre’s contribution to the theorisation of racialisa-
tion in still another way. After her trial, Tituba is required to pay for her
stay in gaol. Samuel Parris refuses to provide this money (and she obvi-
ously has none of her own), so at first, she is rented out as a cook. In the
end, she is resold to a Portuguese Jew in the shipping trade named
Benjamin Cohen d’Azevodo, who fled religious persecution first to
Holland, then to Brazil and Curaçao. She uses her powers to allow him to
communicate with his dead wife, and they end up becoming lovers. After
at first refusing to grant Tituba her freedom (he cannot stand the thought
of losing his wife again), he finally does so after all nine of his children are
killed in a pogrom, which he sees as divine retribution for his initial refusal,
and Tituba returns to her native Barbados. The novel thus brings into
embrace—both literally and figuratively—the histories of the African dias-
pora (in the form of the slave trade) and the Jewish one (in the history of
the Reconquista and Inquisition), both linked through the history coloni-
sation of the New World. (Both the Reconquista and Christopher
Columbus’s first voyage occurred in 1492.) Through Benjamin’s history
lessons about the oppression of Jews, Condé engages in a kind of com-
parative study of diasporas as embodied by both Tituba and Benjamin.
One aspect of the history of race, racialisation, and racism specific to
France is the role of antisemitism (which, for example, plays a significantly
lesser role in the US, especially after the middle of the twentieth century).
As a result, the Dreyfus Affair is often cited as a key moment in the inven-
tion of race in France. It is, however, much less frequently noted that the
first article of the Code noir (1685), which regulated the treatment of
slaves in the Caribbean colonies, states:
Let us enjoin all our officers to chase out all Jews who have taken up resi-
dence on our islands. We also order the Jews, as enemies of the Christian
name to leave within three months starting from the date of publication of
the present articles, under penalty of the confiscation of body and goods.
(my trans.)
188 J. HAYES
Given the violent stamping of race onto racialised bodies analysed above,
it is worth mentioning other aspects of the Code noir, which regulates
punishments such as whipping, the amputation of ears, and branding with
the fleur-de-lys (remember Tituba’s own experience of torture). It outlines
the conditions under which the death penalty can be applied but forbids
individual masters from killing slaves on their own without involving the
legal system. It also forbids them from ‘torturing’ slaves but not from
whipping them. Torture (amputations, branding) is thus neatly clarified as
belonging to the institution of slavery, not the idiosyncrasies of individual
owners. In short, far from originating in the Dreyfus Affair, the links
between antisemitism and the racialisation of black bodies go back to the
beginnings of the French slave economy.
The Blush of Race

Returning to the passage in which Samuel Parris catches Tituba and John
Indien in the act of lovemaking, one finds another hint of how Sartre and
Fanon’s reading of Sartre can enrich this reading of Condé and may fur-
ther understand how racialisation invents whiteness as it imposes black-
ness. This hint is one of a disturbance in the white self (‘un peu de sang
filtra sous ses joues blêmes’ (Condé 1986, p. 71) [‘a little blood filtered into
his wan cheeks’ (p. 41)]. Embarrassment? Arousal? Regardless, white
blood moves (in the sense of both dislocation and the provocation of an
affective response) in response to black desire. Perhaps this blood (blood
has long served as a metaphor for race) moves as a result of envy. A certain
paradox thus appears: if racialisation works through abjectification,8 it can
also work through a desire that would seemingly contradict the abject.
Condé hints at such a desire one Sunday as the Parris family prepares for
Sabbath service, when upon arriving at church, Tituba remarks a certain
complicity among all the village girls: ‘They were dying [“elles brûlaient
d’envie” (Condé 1986, p. 124)] to roll on the ground too and to attract
everybody’s attention. I felt that at any moment they would fall into a
trance as well’ (p. 76). In this sexually repressed society, the performance
of demonic possession offers the possibility of release by more sublimated
means. Again, a comparison with Sartre is in order, for he, too, examined
the role of desire in anti-Semitism, also linked to its Manichaean character:
‘Manichaeism conceals a deep-seated attraction toward Evil’ (p. 45).
Furthermore, this desire is sexual in nature: ‘[O]ne of the elements of his
hatred is a profound sexual attraction toward Jews. His behaviour reflects

a curiosity fascinated by Evil’ (p. 46). And of course, Fanon would echo
Sartre’s intersectional understanding of the role of sexuality in anti-
Semitism in his own theorisation of the racist invention of a black hyper-
sexual masculinity.
Another passage in Condé, only a bit later, strengthens this reading by
offering further clues as to the desire that ‘possesses’ the Parris girls:
‘Undress them!’
She had to obey. I won’t linger over the difficulty she had in undressing
the girls, who writhed about like a worm cut in two and screamed as if they
were being skinned alive. She managed, however, to finish the job and the
girls’ bodies emerged, Betsey’s perfectly childlike, Abigail’s nearing adoles-
cence with her ugly tuft of pubic hair and the rosy rounds of her nipples. Dr.
Griggs examined them carefully despite the abominable curses Abigail
showered him with, since she had begun to pepper her screams with the vil-
est of insults.
Finally he turned to Samuel Parris and solemnly declared: ‘I can see no
disorder of the spleen or the liver nor congestion of the bile or overheating
of the blood. In a word, I can see no physical cause. I must therefore con-
clude that the evil hand of Satan is upon them’. (pp. 80–81)
Exposing the girls’ bare skin to a puritanical medical gaze constitutes a

means by which scopophilia can likewise satisfy a repressed desire. It is
thus less the case that congress with the devil represents the threat of an
outside breaking in than that the devil (with the witch as his human com-
panion) is always already inside as the object of a puritan desire that must
be repressed in the constitution of white Christian identity.
In other words, the racialised Other is internal to the racialising Self as
Bhabha theorised in relation to the colonial subject. According to him, the
colonial subject encompasses both the position of coloniser and colonised,
not because they are identical or there is no power differential between the
two, but because each is defined in relation to the other, each is internal to
the other, just as in the relation between torturer and victim: ‘It is not the
colonialist Self or the colonized Other, but the disturbing distance in-
between that constitutes the figure of colonial otherness—the white man’s
artifice inscribed onto the black man’s body’ (p. 45). If this artifice is
characterised by what Bhabha calls ‘colonial mimicry’, ‘the desire for a
reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the
190 J. HAYES
same but not quite’ (p. 86), the reverse side of the coin of mimicry is men-
ace: ‘The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from mim-
icry—a difference that is almost total but not quite—to menace—a
difference that is almost total but not quite’ (p. 91; emphasis added). And
racial otherness as menace is founded upon stereotype, which as already
stated at the beginning of this chapter, is ‘something that must be anx-
iously repeated’ (p. 66), something that ‘needs no proof, can never really,
in discourse, be proved’ (p. 66). In other words, the stereotype ‘works’
according to opposing moves. It claims to assert that what it claims is so
obvious as to need no proof. Yet it can never be proven, only repeatedly
asserted. It claims to need no proof, yet must be repeated as if its very
repetition somehow pulls proof out of thin air. Thus, ‘it is the force of
ambivalence that gives the colonial stereotype its repeatability’ (p. 66),
which is the ambivalence that makes of the stereotype a self-contradicting
endeavour.
Samuels Parris’s blush therefore offers a hint of the intimacy that con-
nects torturer and victims in Cole’s account, a hint of the desire that con-
stitutes the other side of the coin of the abjection that is more commonly
recognised as the proper of racism. At the site of traumatic memory that is
black skin, the racist and the racialised then meet in a violent embrace, a
kind of kiss of literal death when it occurs in its most extreme form. If the
self-proclaimed victim of the witch hunt can turn out to be the hunter, the
creator of the label that scapegoats the witch as a metaphor for the racist’s
racialised other, memory then functions here as a repetitive act whose
reiteration is the very mechanism by which the stereotype operates. One
could also say that fundamental to this rememoration is a simultaneous
forgetting (another other side of the coin, like self to other, torturer to
tortured, racist to racialised, coloniser to colonised, and abject to desire),
a forgetting of the productive character of the stereotype as repetition.
Perhaps then the sites of traumatic memory worked through here can
offer occasions for an alternative or counter-memory, one that remembers
not just the violence of the trauma itself but also the symbolic violence
enacted through the very repetition that is the memory of trauma remem-
bered without an acknowledgement of memory’s productive character,
productive here in the sense of reproducing the difference of which the
original trauma serves as a kind of origin.
Notes
1. On Condé as a slave narrative, see Gyssells (2006, pp. 70–71); Glover
(2011, p. 99); White (2013); Simmons (2014).
2. On Condé’s rewriting of Miller, see Garane (1995); Gauthier (2010);
Roszak (2014); Collins (2015); Sullivan (2017, pp. 73–76).
3. On the relation between Fanon and Condé, see Waddell (2003, p. 154).
4. On intersectionality in Tituba, see Waddell (2003, p. 159). Tamiozzo
(2002, p. 134) discusses the relation between Condé and Gloria Anzaldúa,
an early poet and theorist of intersectionality.
5. On Tituba as a diasporic text, see Thomas (2006); White (2013).
6. On the postcolonial possibilities of Barthes’s notion, see Achille and
Moudileno (2018).
7. This expression repeats the title of a Billy Holiday song about lynching.
When Tituba is finally hanged at the end of the novel after fomenting a slave
rebellion in her native Barbados, she states, ‘Autour de moi, d’étranges arbres
se hérissaient d’étranges fruits’ (p. 263). [‘All around me strange trees were
bristling with strange fruit’ (p. 172).] See also Thomas (2006, p. 103).
8. Compare with the passage in which Susanna Endicott instructs Tituba: ‘But
you will leave the cooking to me. I cannot bear to have you niggers touching
my food with the discolored, waxy palms of your hands’ (p. 21).
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PART III
Traumatic Representations
CHAPTER 10
Humanitarian Journalism
and the Representation of Survivors
of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Mass Violence
Tiania Stevens
Journalists bear witness both to the horrific acts of which human beings
are capable, and the remarkable strength we possess in the face of such
events. Journalism practice possesses an unavoidable ethical dimension,
not simply due to its role as a witness to human strength and weakness,
but also due to the ease with which journalism is capable of inflicting dam-
age on those it represents. This is a difficult issue for journalists to face. In
this chapter I argue that, in some cases, journalistic representation inad-
vertently re-traumatises survivors of mass violence despite its often-
laudable intentions. Journalists can also ignore the significance of the
places of traumatic memory for survivors. These places often have deep
meaning in the difficult and repeated negotiation these people conduct
between past and present, memory and forgetting, and trauma and recov-
ery. As I shall demonstrate, in the worst of these cases, such representation
can entirely separate survivors of mass violence from the hard-won reality
T. Stevens (*)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_10
198 T. STEVENS
of their rebuilt lives. In this chapter I examine one journalistic approach,

humanitarian journalism, which attempts an empathetic engagement with,
and representation of, survivors of mass atrocities. I focus on stories about
the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and its aftermath, and how ele-
ments of humanitarian journalism might be incorporated into journalism
practice.
I first examine Bunce et al.’s (2019) view of humanitarian journalism
and contrast it with an example of journalistic practice that has a pur-
ported ‘humanitarian’ intent, but which causes harm to the person it rep-
resents. As both a scholar of journalism and an experienced reporter, I
frame the core value of journalism, both as a discipline and a practice, to
be humanitarian. I then turn to Time magazine’s 1992 front-page photo-
graph of Fikret Alić, standing emaciated in front of barbed-wire at
Trnopolje concentration camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and discuss the
nearly three-decade impact this image has had on him. I use an example of
one British tabloid newspaper’s treatment of Fikret following his release
from the camp and ask: despite its laudable intention to act as a means for
witnessing both horror and human strength, how, and why, does the
media sometimes serve to further traumatise its subjects? In the final part
of the chapter, I suggest adjustments to journalism practice, including in
the representation of its subjects, which might lessen some of its harmful
effects.
Day-Tripping into Srebrenica’s Painful Past

The difficulties concerning the media’s representation of survivors of mass
violence is rarely more visible than at the mass burial event that takes place
each 11 July in the small mountain enclave of Srebrenica, Bosnia and
Herzegovina. Over the past 23 years, Srebrenica has been a subject of
international media focus due to the 1995 genocide by the Bosnian Serb
forces of over 8000 men and boys. Forced onto buses outside the former
United Nations (UN) Dutch base in Potočari, these people were driven
off for execution. More than 1000 victims are still missing. Every year, on
11 July, the bodies of those found during the previous year are interred
(Wagner 2008; see also Stover and Peress 1998).
Over the years, I have received numerous invitations from returnees to
Srebrenica and survivor organisations to attend these interments, and I
have consistently turned them down. The easy excuse to give for this was
that my research was focussed on other areas of the country. The
10 HUMANITARIAN JOURNALISM AND THE REPRESENTATION… 199
substantive reason, however, was the discomfort I felt at the idea of being
present at such a personal, painful event. When I imagined myself watch-
ing mothers finally burying their sons, over two decades since they lost
them, I could only feel that I would be ‘day-tripping into someone else’s
nightmare’, to borrow British war correspondent Anthony Loyd’s (1999,
p. 36) description of his own experience of too-intimate contact with the
pain of others. Each 11 July, Srebrenica plays host not just to the families
of the recovered victims of the genocide, and to the wider Srebrenica dias-
pora, but to politicians, the world’s media, and gawping backpackers.
By chance, my fieldwork took me to Srebrenica in the early part of July
2018. The invitation on this occasion came from Maja, who out of fear of
reprisals, asked for her name and job title to be withheld, and being already
in Srebrenica, I felt unable to politely decline. And so I found myself
standing in the rain with a group of others, awaiting a truck carrying the
remains of 35 newly identified victims of the genocide to arrive from
Sarajevo. The burials were scheduled for the following day. When the
truck arrived, dozens crowded around it to help unload the coffins. I fol-
lowed the crowd to the dilapidated warehouse into which the coffins were
being carried. Here I saw something that made me reassess my view of the
media’s role in these annual burials. I saw a female journalist approach a
weeping mother who had waited 23 years to bury her child. The journalist
knelt over the tiny coffin and pushed her microphone into the elderly
woman’s face (Fig. 10.1).
This scene raises important questions not simply about the nature of
journalism practice in general—the mechanics of how one obtains a
story—but more importantly about the nature of humanitarian journal-
ism. My immediate reaction to this was disgust at the intrusion of the
reporter into the elderly woman’s grief. Yet the difficulty of this scene, and
particularly the role of the media, is surely far more complex than my first
response suggests. The reporter’s actions in kneeling over the coffin were
undeniably crass. The microphone was undeniably an intrusion. Yet the
event was a public one and, more to the point, the issue—acts of genocide,
the mass murder of our fellow humans, including children—undeniably is
a humanitarian one. Journalists face tremendous ethical difficulties, par-
ticularly when their work pertains to highly emotive, strongly humanitar-
ian issues such as conflicts and their aftermath. They are required to
negotiate between the crucial journalistic values of detachment and objec-
tivity and the powerful humanitarian claims made on them by individual
stories. The difficulty in such cases is all the more acute when those stories
200 T. STEVENS
Fig. 10.1 The media interview survivors of Srebrenica’s genocide inside the
warehouse where thirty-five coffins in Potočari warehouse await burial on 11 July
2018. (Photo by author)
encapsulate the urgency and importance of the practice of journalism

itself. The key is to do so without exacerbating the pain of people already
wounded and represent the occasion in a way that does not inflict further
violence upon them.
The dilemma for survivors, such as teenager Maja, whose father and
grandfather, more than 20 cousins, and her best friend were forced onto
buses outside the UN base at Potočari and driven away to be killed, is their
difficult relation with the media. On one hand, Maja describes the pres-
ence of media at the annual burial and memorial as ‘our window to the
rest of the world’; on the other, she is conflicted, ‘I would not say that we
are happy about [the media], but also we know that it is the best way to
tell the rest of the world about what happened to us here’.1 When the
media and diaspora leave Srebrenica following the end of the annual mass
burial and memorial, Maja says she feels ‘empty … we are a good story
in July’.
In short, I realised that I was witnessing the first stages of the annual
media spectacle at Srebrenica. But I also realised that the news media,
particularly journalists concerned with humanitarian journalism, needed
to be there. The reporters were adding to the historical record of experi-
ence, and survival, of tragedy. The Srebrenica memorial gives survivors a
voice, however small, as they negotiate their contemporary life and come
to terms with what it is to share their testimony and live in a community
of shared trauma (Ahmed and Jackie 2001, p. 2). Therefore, how can
stories about the post-war lives of survivors of mass violence be repre-
sented empathetically in journalism practice, in what Dawes describes as
‘humanitarian story telling’ (2007, pp. 8–12)? Can humanitarian journal-
ism suggest ways to avoid harming the subjects of journalism’s stories?
The Scope of Humanitarian Journalism

According to Dawes (2007, p. 10), news media’s representation of survi-
vors of mass violence habitually ‘filter out certain kinds of reporting’,
removes them from their present context and presents them as victims of
the past. The published narrative, which may even include edited extracts
from the person’s own testimony, is built solely around what Nigerian
novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009, p. 1) describes as ‘a single
story [and] if you show people as one thing, only one thing, over and over,
that is what they become’. The way survivors’ stories are represented and
disseminated by the media can have serious consequences when those we
202 T. STEVENS
set out to give a voice to are misrepresented or underrepresented.

Downman and Ubayasiri (2017, p. 169) argue that humanitarian journal-
ism ‘for the most part, is based on good intentions … but sometimes good
intentions don’t translate into good practice’. While working ‘against a
backdrop of diversity, vulnerability and complexity’, Downman and
Ubayasiri (2017, p. 169) suggest reporters are burdened with a great
responsibility to report fairly, accurately and with care when too often they
are untrained in the complexity of humanitarian journalism. They further
suggest that this lack of knowledge can have a catastrophic impact on a
survivor’s well-being and ‘in a worst case, can lead to the media inflicting
their own trauma on those affected by human rights abuses’ (Downman
and Ubayasiri 2017, p. 169). As such, humanitarianism journalism is not
merely a focus on humanitarian issues but a practice in support of them.
However, such an interpretation of the role of humanitarian journalism is
far from being universally accepted.
Bunce et al. (2019, p. 2) offer a general definition of humanitarian
journalism, namely ‘the production and distribution of factual accounts of
crises, events and issues relating to human welfare’. They then distinguish
two different approaches to this general conception of journalistic activity:
(1) Humanitarian journalism as a subset of traditional journalism, in which
one reports factual accounts relating to ‘humanitarian issues’; and (2)
Humanitarian journalism as a subset of the tradition of humanitarianism,
meaning such journalism ‘aims to alleviate suffering and improve human
welfare’ (Bunce et al. 2019, pp. 2–3).2 The key to this second approach is
that of action and intent on the part of the journalist. The intent is to help,
to ease the suffering of those one reports upon. This is journalism as a tool
for direct, positive intervention in the world, rather than the mere factual
reporting on the state of it. As Bunce et al. (2019, p. 3) point out, this
second approach ‘places humanitarian journalism under the broad
umbrella of advocacy journalism that includes movements such as peace
journalism and solutions journalism: journalism that aims to improve or
progress social wellbeing’. Bunce et al. (2019, p. 2) make a number of
cogent observations about the complex and highly contested nature of
humanitarian journalism: ‘Both of its key concepts—“humanitarianism”
and “journalism”—can be controversial, with definitions that have evolved
over time and that vary across cultures and organisations’. For example,
what focus should the work of humanitarianism take? They posit, ‘Some
argue that a crisis must be an urgent emergency [that is, in contrast to a
chronic problem, such as poverty] to count as a “humanitarian issue”,
others believe it is their responsibility to address the root causes of human

suffering’ (Bunce et al. 2019, p. 2). These issues are complicated when
humanitarian journalism is considered. Bunce et al. (2019) point out that
while humanitarianism tends to think of itself, among other things, as
striving to get at (in order to alleviate) the truth of a situation, many jour-
nalists are wary of the notion that the discovery of truth (as something
objective and untouched by bias or perspective) is even possible.
The concept of journalism as a form of humanitarian advocacy both
seems strongly ‘correct’ to those moved by the suffering of others and
potentially extremely dangerous to journalists concerned with maintaining
professional integrity. The distortion of facts must be avoided at all costs,
no matter how emotionally affecting or ethically urgent the topic. The
danger of such involvement by the journalist in the ‘human’ nature of
their stories is highlighted by former BBC reporter Martin Bell’s notion of
the ‘journalism of attachment’. For Bell (1995, p. 128), journalists who
advocate for a ‘cares as well as knows’ practice discern the moral core of a
situation, and act in favour of those considered to be oppressed and
afflicted. In Bell’s (1995) view, reporters have a moral obligation to distin-
guish between those actors who are victims and those who are the perpe-
trators and, if necessary, to take sides. The humanitarian, advocacy-led
model of journalism that Bell (1995) offers risks alienating those striving
to work within the ethical bounds of journalism practice. It also risks
breaking the ethical codes set up to prevent those in the field getting too
close to those who are desperate for help. Shaw (2012, p. 26), who advo-
cates for journalists to document war crimes and support, or act as, witness
testimony, risks alienating those working within the ethical bounds of
journalism practice. Rather, Shaw’s description of humanitarian journal-
ism is a contrast between traditional journalism that is deficient in ‘promot
[ing] public knowledge and understanding of issues and a broader human
rights approach to reporting’ (2012, p. 2). Shaw’s latter point (2012, p. 2)
clearly evidences camp survivors like Fikret Alić, who finds himself caught
between his desire for privacy and the pursuit of a normal life and a need
to bear witness to the camp system in which he was incarcerated during
the 1990s in Bosnia. However, in my view, the representation of Fikret’s
story is a damaging one. It appears not to have alleviated his suffering and
in fact, Fikret arguably is trapped in the role of ‘victim’. The journalists
may have thought they were approaching Fikret’s story in humanitarian
terms, but in practice the effect has been to undermine that ambition by
increasing pain and presenting a distorted account of Fikret himself.
204 T. STEVENS
Still Not Free: Fikret Alić and the Imprisoning

Nature of Journalistic Representation
In their own way, the post-war, post-concentration camp experiences of
Bosnian Muslim men are as challenging to understand as their wartime
struggles. Certain survivors seem to have an ambiguous, conflicted rela-
tionship with their past, and with the media’s portrayal of that past.
Compounding this difficult relation between past, present and future in
the lives of survivors is their representation by the media, which often
portrays them solely through the lens of the past. For survivors of mass
violence, a valuable part of the process of rebuilding their lives and looking
to the future is, paradoxically, bearing witness to their experiences during
wartime. As a vehicle for such witnessing, proponents of humanitarian
storytelling advocate giving survivors of mass violence a voice, to present
testimony. Others argue from different positions. Despite championing
humanitarian storytelling, Whitlock (2015) warns that the implications
for those journalists who do this without due consideration for survivors
have the:
Power to create spectators of suffering who engage empathetically with ter-

rible events. It generates compassion and benevolence and elicits donor sup-
port. At the same time, it can be called to account for the part it plays in
representing communities and people as inhabitants of a ‘developing world’,
and as subjects of ‘distant suffering’ offered for western benevolence and
spectatorship. (2015, p. 110)
Perhaps nowhere did Whitlock’s Western benevolence and spectator-

ship receive as much attention as the image splashed across the front page
of Time magazine, showing Fikret Alić standing behind barbed wire inside
Trnopolje concentration camp in Bosnia in 1992 (Fig. 10.2). It was he
who British Guardian reporter Ed Vulliamy (1994, p. 104) described as
having a ‘xylophone rib cage’. Reporters, including Vulliamy, gained
access to Trnopolje camp and were filmed interviewing prisoners. News
reports following their visit suggest that a number of prisoners were killed
after risking their life to speak to the media. Dawes (2007) notes that
reporters at Trnopolje that day made choices that are not uncommon but
still might ‘mark the extreme end of the ethical spectrum … if there was
any moral anxiety it derived from the fact that there were real bodies
Fig. 10.2 Fikret Alić standing behind barbed wire at Trnopolje concentration
camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina, video footage taken on 6 August 1992 by ITN
News. (Photo published in Time magazine, 17 August 1992)
206 T. STEVENS
behind the words, specific people who could feel exposed, ashamed,
exploited’ (2007, p. 187).
This image of Fikret was originally part of 11 seconds of British ITN
video footage taken on 6 August 1992. It was subsequently turned into
a freeze-frame grab. The image’s trajectory, from the camp to the front
cover of Time magazine within days of it being taken, also inadvertently
demonstrates how otherwise laudable journalistic practice can have a pow-
erfully negative effect on those who are caught up in that representation.3
The media’s use and interpretation of the photograph helped to high-
light the atrocities taking place in BiH at the time. However, while the
image became world famous, Fikret Alić, the man at its centre, did not.
Looking much older than his 22 years, Fikret’s image was captured when
he was at his lowest point, stood skeletal behind barbed wire. Yet he was,
and is, a survivor of Bosnia’s war. Nonetheless, his life has become fused
to this image, seemingly bound forever to this minute slice of time, itself
extracted from a mere 11 seconds of footage. Sontag (2003) argues that
since the aim of a photograph is to capture a moment in time, all photog-
raphy may be thought of as an act of fixation, the preservation of a minute
slice of experience from the oblivion it would otherwise pass into. That is,
Sontag (2003, pp. 70–71) cautions: ‘Harrowing photographs do not
inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task
is to understand. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs, do
something else: they haunt us’. Liss (1998, p. xi) also warns not to step
too far into the ‘realm of ghosts and photographs’, as they can ‘inevitably
trespass into the sites and traces of death, of lives effaced, of genocide’.
However, Kozol (2014, p. 26) disagrees and counters that trespassing into
someone else’s pain is sometimes inevitable and that there is moral value
in taking photographs of victims, such as Fikret, and that often images of
suffering are the only access for outsiders.
There are other images of emaciated and starving men taken that day
that could have been used by the media to represent the war. Yet it was this
image, published around the world, that turned one man’s private suffer-
ing into a public spectacle of human degradation. Time and News Week ran
with the image on their front pages. The English word ‘spectacle’ is
derived from the Latin specio, meaning ‘I look at’ or ‘I observe’. For a
person already suffering from some of the worst acts humans can inflict
upon each other, Fikret’s personal and private agony was turned into a
spectacle, something for all to look at. His image became an image of
human pain in general, a spectacle returned to over and over. Hesford

(2011, p. 16) suggests that a ‘spectacular’ image does not warrant intru-
sive staring but a carefully considered analysis of the ‘construction of the
conditions that individuate, immobilize, and separate subjects, even within
a world in which mobility and circulation are ubiquitous’. When employed
as a tool in the journalist’s effort to bring to light crimes of profound grav-
ity, photography’s preservative action has unparalleled value as a means of
documenting evidence before its perpetrators can erase it. Yet, for all the
arguable moral importance of this kind of documenting of injustice, pho-
tographic journalism is also capable of injuring the very people it aims to
protect. This potential injury is encapsulated by the haunting image of
Fikret with which those consuming news media in 1992 would be familiar.
The Spectacle That Is Fikret Alić

I met with Fikret in July 2015. If I had passed him on the street, he would
be hard to recognise. He is no longer the emaciated man who was thrust
in the media spotlight more than two decades ago. As we talked, he
refused to look up. His face stayed firmly staring at the tiled floor. Yet
there was in him a determination, even defiance, to tell his story. But this
was not the story of the camps but of his life following his release from
Trnopolje. Sitting with Fikret, it is easy to view him through the lens of
camp victim. That was all I knew about this man before I interviewed him
in person: he was the man behind the barbed wire. But Fikret is so much
more than that, because Fikret survived. Thousands did not. Today, Fikret
wants you to know that he is someone other than an image:
The biggest issue is that everyone’s calling me a symbol, but I don’t under-
stand what it means to be the symbol. I thought, the symbol was someone
would bring peace to this country. As far as I can understand, there is no
peace in this country, with thousands of dead, thousands of photos. For me,
that’s no symbol, but a disgrace for people they are turning into the symbol,
without changing a single thing.4
Fikret says he carries the feelings of fear, apprehension and relief with
him. The media’s repeated presence in his life only helps to highlight what
he feels is his loss of freedom. Once the media left Trnopolje camp, Fikret
went into hiding in the camp. The attention he received from the media
was enough, he said, to cost him his life. When the journalists left
208 T. STEVENS
Trnopolje, Fikret did not. His incarceration continued. He had no knowl-

edge that an image of his emaciated body had found its way onto the front
pages of some of the most famous magazine covers and newspapers in the
world. He did not know that the image had sparked a debate on the
atrocities being committed in BiH and the lack of action taken by world
leaders. Fikret’s image raised memories of the Nazi concentration camps
with the words Never Again splashed across newspaper headlines. He
recounts how nine men at Trnopolje were killed for talking to the journal-
ists on this day. Fikret was essentially used as ‘an equivalent form of voice-
less speech’ to represent other victims of the Bosnian War (Zelizer and
Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2014, p. 131). The image thereby became a kind of
silent voice with every publication of the photograph. Yet while Fikret’s
image took on a career trajectory of its own, Fikret the man, was fighting
to stay alive. During an interview with Ed Vulliamy a few months after his
release from Trnopolje in November 1992, Fikret spoke about the impris-
oning effect of the photograph: ‘I hated seeing the picture of myself. I
couldn’t believe I had been through that and survived and was now free …
I am disappointed to see that picture and to be able to say that I am a free
man’ (Vulliamy 1994, pp. 203–4).
The nature of the image of Fikret was therefore, from the outset, com-
plex: produced from laudable, arguably ‘humanitarian’ intentions, it also
wounded the man it represented. Fikret had no control over the use of his
image. Bull (2010, p. 121) argues that the media will take a photograph
and fit it ‘into predetermined narratives of attack, victims, enemies, and
retaliation, the meanings of each picture being directed according to the
story required at any given moment’. The photograph of the prisoners at
Trnopolje looked as if they were penned behind a barbed wire fence and
the international media seized the symbolic image that Taylor argues was
‘frame grabbed’ at the time as an emotive way to back claims that Bosnian
Muslim men were being held in Nazi-style concentration camps (Taylor
1998, p. 61). The headlines (7 August 1992) of UK publications the Star
and Daily Mirror headlines both used the words ‘Belsen’, while the Daily
Mail’s headline was ‘The Proof’ that Europe was witnessing atrocities not
seen since World War II. The UK Times was less definite in its caption:
‘Behind barbed wire: emaciated and despairing inmates of the camp at
Trnopolje, Bosnia, are offered solace by a visiting television crew’. The
Times accused the Serbian forces of executions and beatings in its prison
camps, which the Serbs were accused of trying to keep secret. Vulliamy’s
front- and back-page report in the UK Guardian did not focus on Fikret,
instead concentrating on the ‘starvation and human rights abuses being

inflicted on the captured’.
As I interview him in 2015, Fikret is sitting down, eyes gazed at the
floor, talking about the photograph that turned him from an ordinary man
into a spectacle. Interestingly, Fikret describes the image as ‘disrespectful
to survivors’.5 The photograph is used over and over again by the media,
as a kind of shorthand for ‘the war and the atrocities committed in the
former Yugoslavia’. The effect of this, argues Zelizer (1998, p. 209), is
that the ‘atrocity behind the image is effectively depoliticized. The picture
becomes the evidence of the general human condition. It accuses nobody
and everybody.’ The context is lost, along with the man whose image the
photograph bears.
As I ask Fikret to consider the impact of that photograph nearly 20 years
after it was taken, he struggles to make eye contact. He does not want to
talk, but eventually he does. ‘Obligated’ is the word he uses to describe his
relationship with the news media. He speaks with regret: with ‘a pain in
my belly’, he says. It is plain that his relation to the news media is at best
conflicted. Mostly, he says, he wants freedom—freedom from the image,
which he also knows is responsible for a great deal of good in the world:
As long as the world is the way it is with torture and war, that picture will
always be with me, as long as there is hate and hell in the world, I will love
that photo because it is a sign of what people go through, but as long as
there is hell that picture will haunt me.6
Although physically free from the camp, Fikret the man is not. He was,
and is, living with two identities: one the living man of today and tomor-
row, for whom the camps are a piece of his past, two, the timeless Fikret
of the ITN image, the Fikret of Time magazine. He is a victim of that
image, just as he was a victim of the Serbian forces and the wider conflict;
‘as cameras do, this click of the shutter froze a moment in history’ (Chong
2000, p. vii).
As much his actual appearance changes, Fikret will forever be emaciated
and incarcerated. The two identities of Fikret are not fully or coherently
separable. The ITN image has a weight and power all of its own. For these
survivors, witnessing appears to be an unavoidable aspect of their post-
conflict lives. Like many individuals who lived through the war in the
former Yugoslavia, Fikret feels a strong need to bear witness to his experi-
ences. This need involves him in a complex and seemingly painful relation
210 T. STEVENS
to his past. Fikret is torn between his dislike and regret of the image and
his desire not to fully escape from the past so that he might still bear wit-
ness to and honour those who perished in the camps. Fikret’s image
embodied the violence unleashed on thousands of military-age men who
were incarcerated in Bosnia’s camps. The photograph revealed the exis-
tence of the camps and the inhumane treatment of the Muslim men and
women held in them. However, the photo also demonstrates the extent to
which a single image is capable of turning an ordinary human being into
an involuntary spectacle of agony.7
In Fikret we perhaps see the general dilemma faced by many witnesses
of atrocity. We see these people’s complex relation to the past as well as to
the news media which helps them bear witness. Following the end of the
war in 1995, the world’s media left Bosnia. From this point, news editors
instead chose to publish the image of Fikret to reference ethnic cleansing
or other historical events in Bosnia, as well as human rights abuses around
the world (Taylor 1998, p. 61). Sontag (1977, p. 14) claims that to take
the photograph of another person is to ‘violate them, by seeing them as
they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never
have; [photography thereby] turns people into objects that can be sym-
bolically possessed’. It is not difficult to see how this claim might describe
the effect it had on Fikret. With his private suffering seized by the camera
and purveyed worldwide as a symbol of Europe’s regression into barba-
rism, it is tempting to interpret this image as one of violation par excel-
lence. This violation arguably extends to the tendency photography has, as
Webber (1995) claims, to foster the belief that the viewer enjoys privileged
access to that which is represented. The act of taking photographs of
atrocity, argues Webber (1995, p. 10), encourages the viewer to ‘ignore
the medium of representation and assume that it gives us unmediated
access to the past’.
We are tempted to assume that the photograph has seized and pre-
served a reality we have an unproblematic access to, rather than—as is in
fact the case—capturing only one facet of a reality, as much internal as
external, and entirely unreachable by any lens. Photographs, however,
‘[are] plagued by the usual ills’ affecting every other artefact in the world:
‘they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold, they are
reproduced’ (Sontag 1977, p. 4). This recreation seems particularly prob-
lematic. The issue with Fikret the image is that Fikret the man is unable,
even more than two decades after his release, to escape that day in the
camp, he is fused to the photograph and, as such, is tied to time, which
Taylor (1998, p. 62) accuses photography of: ‘bearing the work and death,
pausing to freeze, mummify [and] corpse-ify whatever body they capture
or pose’. Rather than containing the full thickness of lived reality, photo-
graphs are merely ‘neat slice of time’ (Sontag 1977, p. 17). And, in Fikret’s
case, that time does not change. Insofar as he is an image as well as a living
man, he remains forever the man behind the barbed wire (Zelizer 1998,
p. 211).
The problem of photography as a medium capable of inflicting damage
on those it represents goes to the heart of the risks inherent in the practice
of humanitarian journalism. The British tabloid, The Sun, recently returned
to Fikret’s story in a manner that ensured it became a darkly perfect illus-
tration of Sontag’s argument regarding a person’s ‘symbolic possess[ion]’
by the media. The Sun is not known for its humanitarian coverage; occa-
sionally, however, they support humanitarian journalism causes in a broad
sense, including the Help for Heroes charity which provides support to
service men and women. At the time of writing The Sun is also running a
campaign to raise awareness of male suicide, the You’re Not Alone
campaign.
The Sun newspaper’s attempt to recreate the camp image was, accord-
ing to Zelizer and Tenenboim-Weinblatt, essentially ‘a thin slice of a larger
event’ (2014, p. 133). The photograph shows not just the potential dan-
ger of how an iconic image can ‘loom too large in a society’s view of the
past’ (2014, pp. 132–33), but how journalists, purportedly acting with
‘humanitarian’ motives, can achieve quite the opposite (Fig. 10.3).
The recreation of the iconic image in 2008 by a British tabloid photog-
rapher signals Fikret’s ongoing exploitation and objectification. Juxtapose
the two images and there is no better example of Fikret’s continued
‘imprisonment’ by the Time magazine image than having him return to
the past and pose for a photograph that recreates everything that was bar-
baric. Sliwinski (2011, pp. 121–22) suggests that ‘one’s imagination has
the capacity to animate the scene’. In this context, particularly with The
Sun’s juxtaposition of this image with its Time magazine ‘original’, the
viewer is encouraged not to view Fikret as the successful survivor of atroc-
ity, but again simply as a shorthand for torture and abuse. The effect of
this photograph of Fikret is to strip him of the dignity of survival. The
great achievement of having rebuilt his life after release from the camps is
instantly discarded. The Sun’s image returns him immediately to his past,
re-attaching him to his ‘parallel life’ as an image of atrocity. And all this is
done under the purported direction of a certain ‘humanitarian’, ‘human
212 T. STEVENS
Fig. 10.3 Fikret Alić posing behind a fence in the same position he was photo-
graphed/filmed on 6 August 1992 by ITN News. (Photo by The Sun, 31
July 2012)
issue’ practice of journalism. For The Sun’s photographer, Peter Jordan, to

pose Fikret in the same manner and location as he stood in 1992 was
effectively to ‘participate [again] in [Fikret’s] mortality, vulnerability [and]
mutability’ (Sontag 1977, p. 15). It maintains him as the prisoner of an
image; it is the opposite of a humanitarian act. Rather, Fikret is not only
returned to the place of trauma, his memories of that time are retold over-
and-over again through the journalists’ own biased narrative. Immense cau-
tion must be exercised whenever news media actors attempt to intervene
in situations of human drama and suffering, situations that invariably are
extremely complex, unstable, and easily inflamed. There are reasons why
ethical guidelines are in place to protect those most vulnerable from being
misrepresented, for the vulnerable are easily damaged further, regardless
of the good intentions of the journalists involved. Shaw’s description of
humanitarian journalism suggests that a deficiency exists in ‘promot[ing]
public knowledge and understanding of issues and a broader human rights
approach to reporting’ (2012, p. 25). Yet this approach does not consider
the broader concerns of crossing ethical lines to report atrocity. The asser-
tion that humanitarian journalism is only possible when it is reported with
a ‘human touch’ (2012, p. 25), risks retraumatising and isolating those
persons already damaged. Fikret is one such person:
That photo didn’t change anything in my life. To this day, I regret being in
that photo. Everyone around the world thinks that the fact I’m in the photo
means I’m living off that photo. I have nothing from that photo. Everything
I have in life, I got through my own work. And that photo, it’s just a photo
of tortured people everybody turned their backs on.8
Conclusion: Forgotten Voices in the One

Story Narrative
Journalism of advocacy is laudable in intent and potentially catastrophic in
effect. The use of images of human suffering is fraught with difficulty for
sufferers and journalists alike. Journalists reporting on conflicts or crises
are under extraordinary pressure to document stories in a fair and unbi-
ased way, while simultaneously listening to strangers tell stories of suffer-
ing and trauma. Someone who has not reported on war is unable to
appreciate fully the immense effect (and toll taken) on the journalist who
listens sometimes to hours of testimony documenting violence and viola-
tions (Downman and Ubayasiri 2017, p. 169). There will always be times
when the boundaries of ethical reporting become blurred. This chapter
does not criticise those journalists who feel a moral obligation to act when
witnessing or learning of inhumane treatment. Nonetheless, the practitio-
ners of journalism (and in concert with them, scholars of the profession)
must find reliable means to avoid damaging the profession and undermin-
ing confidence in the reporting of deeply important issues through an
appearance of bias.
The example of the journalistic re-imprisoning of Fikret Alić can serve
as a case study in how, and to some extent why, humanitarian journalism
can go astray from its original, laudable motivations. Journalism betrays
both its subjects and itself when it retraumatises the traumatised and effec-
tively imprisons those now ‘free’. Sontag’s (1977, p. 14) ‘symbolic
possess[ion]’ by the media is an illustration of how Fikret’s narrative is
used by the media as ‘the single story [narrative which] robs people of
their dignity and emphasises their difference rather than recognising the
214 T. STEVENS
similarity between people’ (Adichie 2009). More so, Adichie (2009), rec-
ognises the importance of a full narrative of the person’s story, not just a
back story of traumatic memories. In Fikret’s case, ‘the single story
create[d] [a] stereotype, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they
are untrue. But that they are incomplete. They make one story become of
the only story’ (Adichie 2009). Hariman and Lucaites, quoted in Zelizer
and Tenenboim-Weinblatt (2014, p. 131), argue, ‘you cannot take a pho-
tograph of the past. This simple fact alters the relationship between journal-
ism and collective memory. Journalism may be the “first draft of history”’.
Journalists are too often constrained by their (and their industry’s) con-
cern for a narrative which is dramatic, spectacular and—to use the ver-
nacular of the industry itself—‘sexy’. The obvious objection to such a
focus is that it risks a slide toward the sensational. The more important
point, however, is that focusing on the spectacular risks a lack of concern
for, even an ignoring of, the banal, mundane and undramatic problems of
human beings. Yet these problems are usually the predominant concerns
of most survivors. War and famine, concentration camps and political
oppression are important issues, but arguably no less so than mental health
problems, suicide, a lack of confidence in the justice system, suspicion of
journalists and news media, and the kind of isolation and despair that
results from ineffectual social and political systems. The journalism of
humanitarianism and advocacy fails its own principles when it allows itself
to overlook those who struggle daily with such problems.
When dealing with traumatised individuals, the ethical concerns are
even greater. The scene I witnessed at the annual Srebrenica burial event
is a case in point. The story was a profoundly humanitarian one: genocide
is of urgent concern to all human beings. Yet the way the journalist
approached the woman, kneeling across her child’s coffin to poke a micro-
phone into her face, was offensive, as likely to produce a rejection and a
desire never to speak to the press as it was to ‘get the story’. Just as with
the case of Fikret Alić, this was, for me, an instructive moment. The jour-
nalist is time and again required to make a decision whether or not to
intrude into the pain or privacy of their subjects. Ultimately, this is a
judgement call that is unique to each situation. The decision must be
made when an action amounts to an intrusion, and when it does not. In
fact, such in-the-moment decision-making only highlights how vital is the
ethical and professional training given to journalists (Downman and
Ubayasiri 2017, p. 169). The point about intrusion is, of course, apposite
to both the example of the bereaved woman at Srebrenica and the case of
Fikret Alić.
Finally, as exemplified by the ‘imprisoning’ nature of the Time maga-
zine image of Fikret Alić, the representation of the subjects of journalism,
whether in word, image or any other form, must never be the occasion for
further harm or the distortion of the truth the subject wishes to convey.
This is, of course, an axiom for all journalism, but as The Sun’s representa-
tion of Fikret proves, it is an axiom at least occasionally overridden. This
final point connects to the three previous points. A finished story can
sometimes be a violation of privacy or a distortion of the truth. The con-
text in which the subject recounts their story returns them to their past
trauma—as with the case of Fikret, stood topless outside his former place
of torture and confinement—and can inflict further trauma, or rob the
subject of their dignity in some manner. And sometimes, precisely like
with Fikret, with his struggles with mental ill-health, cynicism toward the
national and international systems of justice, and so on, the story itself is
not a spectacle or a drama, but no less an issue of deep ‘humanitarian’
importance.
Dedication For my daughter Molly who supported me during the writing

of this chapter and who wants to be a journalist, telling the stories of those
who are unable to do so themselves. I’d also like to thank Dr. Annie
Pohlman who during the toughest moments of writing this chapter could
always make me laugh.
Notes
1. Interview with Maja via Facebook Messenger, recorded with permission, 9
November 2018.
2. A similar point is made by Dawes (2007, p. 7), who suggests that there are
two types of people who report stories, those who listen and are content to
document storytelling, and those who feel compelled to act on what they
see and hear.
3. The Trnopolje camp was established by the military and police authorities of
the Bosnian Serb forces, centred on the village of Trnopolje, near Prijedor
in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Between 4000 and 7000
inmates (Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats) were detained there at any one time.
The camp also operated as a base for the mass deportations of captured
216 T. STEVENS
persons. Mistreatment of the prisoner population was widespread and noto-

rious. Numerous instances of murder, torture and rape have been recorded.
4. Interview with Fikret Alić, recorded with permission, Kozarac, 7 July 2015.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Google searches of the terms ‘Bosnian atrocity’, ‘Bosnian camps’, ‘Bosnian
genocide’ immediately return Fikret’s image. Type in ‘Omarska’, a camp in
which Fikret was not even incarcerated, and his image on the front cover of
Time magazine appears, as well as taking the third, fourth and fifth spot on
the top line of results.
8. See Note 4 above.
References
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in the picture, Simon & Schuster, London.
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University Press, Manchester.
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Macmillan, London.
CHAPTER 11
Remembering the 5 July 1962 Massacre

in Oran, Algeria
Amy L. Hubbell
Oran, the second largest city in Algeria, is often remembered by its former
French inhabitants for its sweeping views from Mount Murdjadjo down to
the Mediterranean port with the beautiful Fort and Chapelle de Santa
Cruz overlooking the city. The city was the major settlement for Spanish
immigrants during the colonial years and at one point there were more
Spanish-speaking residents than French (Stora 1991, p. 31).1 It is also
known as the city with the most Jewish influence in Algeria (Lakjaa 2008).
As Abdelkader Lakjaa explains, ‘The city was actually reconquered so
many times that it offers insight into the process of reappropriating spaces
which took place in all Algerian cities’ (Lakjaa 2008).2 The numerous lay-
ers of influence are visually still present in the city. For example, the
Cathédrale du Sacré-Coeur (now a public library) still acknowledges the
city’s strong Catholic and French roots. While under French colonial rule,
Oran was deemed ‘the model colonial city, or the most European Algerian
city in Africa’ (Lakjaa 2008). However, while Oran has been idealised for
A. L. Hubbell (*)
The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, Australia
e-mail: a.hubbell@uq.edu.au

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_11
220 A. L. HUBBELL
its European roots, another gruesome history is only recently coming to

the surface. The city’s palimpsestic past, which had been neatly unified in
images, now reveals traumatic histories embedded within those layers.
In 2012, during the commemorations of the 50th anniversary of
Algerian Independence, numerous books were published in France about
the seven-year war (1954–1962). Among the autobiographies, historical
and pictorial texts, is a corpus exploring the bloody ending of the war—
the period between the Evian Accords (18 March) and Independence (5
July 1962). During these three and half months, the majority of Algeria’s
nearly one million French citizens fled to France. The historic details
about the events surrounding the end of the war are continually debated
in public, and personal memories remain murky. One of the most famous
French historians on Algeria, Benjamin Stora states, ‘History is still a bat-
tlefield’ (Stora and Quemeneur 2010, p. 2): despite the progressive open-
ing of French archives, access is still limited, massive amounts of sources
remain un-inventoried, many documents were lost between the two coun-
tries during and after decolonisation, and in many cases, Algeria would
need to maintain the archives in question. When historical research is
hampered, individual testimony leads the way (Banat-Berger and Noulet
2000); yet those who experienced traumatic events often have incompat-
ible memories. Further complicating the memory of the war is the inabil-
ity for the French to access sites of memory in Algeria and the lack of
memorial spaces in which to grieve those who died. Despite these limita-
tions, the stories from the end of the war are being intensely pursued and
published, and the various ‘warring parties’ still fight to have their version
of events, and what they perceive as the real version of the past, accepted
into national discourses. With no physical space for reconciliation or
mourning, for either the French or the Algerians, memory comes to rest
in writing and film.3
The debated war stories are situated in the larger framework frequently
called France’s ‘Memory Wars’ (‘La Guerre des Mémoires’).4 Amar
Guendouzi in ‘Contemporary Algerian francophone fiction, trauma, and
the “war of memories,”’ explains that the Memory Wars resulted from a
long silence on the Algerian War for Independence followed by the French
memory laws in the 1990s and 2000s.5 These laws, which sought to
overtly acknowledge France’s colonial past, subsequently created ‘an over-
flow of remembrance’ (Guendouzi 2017, p. 236), which was complicated
by traumatic experience and the various identity groups and political affili-
ations of those who remember. In addition to the heated debates about
11 REMEMBERING THE 5 JULY 1962 MASSACRE IN ORAN, ALGERIA 221
the memory of the Algerian War in France, inside Algeria the memories
also remain unreconciled. The diverse communities in colonial Oran expe-
rienced the war in different ways, and for those who left Algeria in 1962
or thereafter, their memories are further interrupted.
While the disputed representation of events is not limited to one spe-
cific region in Algeria or to one date, in this chapter I attempt to under-
stand the representation of the end of the Algerian War by examining a
massacre of Europeans in Oran on Algerian Independence Day. Though
the Oran massacre was not discussed openly for nearly fifty years, which is
indicative of the way Algeria has generally been remembered in France,
since 2011, the debate surrounding the massacre has been heated and
public. Despite conflicting versions of events, there are numerous uncon-
tested facts about what transpired leading up to and during the killings on
5 July 1962:
• Oran was the most European city in Algeria, with the least influence
from the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN, National
Liberation Front).
• From 1961 onward Oran was a stronghold for the Organisation de
l’Armée Secrète (OAS, Secret Army Organisation), the covert French
paramilitary organisation that fought to keep Algeria French even
after Algerian independence. The OAS committed terrorist attacks
on civilians and public figures throughout the end of the war.
• Numerous OAS attacks occurred in the three months between the
Evian Accords and Independence, many Muslims were killed, and
the community was terrorised.
• Between the ceasefire and Independence, numerous Europeans
(regardless of political affiliations) went missing, and there are few
survivor accounts to shed light on what happened to them.
• On Independence Day, shots were fired during a public celebration
parade. The Algerians thought they were under attack from the OAS.
• From about 11 am to 4 pm that day, Europeans were rounded up
and killed, though the number of dead ranges between 30 and 5000.6
• A large number of French military troops were in Oran but ordered
not to respond. New recruits were locked in the barracks because
Algeria was now under the control of the Algerian army.7
In the accounts I have examined, the above facts are not denied. However,
the number of deaths varies enormously depending on who tells the story.8
222 A. L. HUBBELL
This massacre is also allegedly known about by everyone from Oran and
yet unofficially forbidden to share in Algeria. Algerian film director Jean-
Pierre Lledo has called it an ‘absolute taboo’ (Lledo 2006).
For this study, the corpus was limited to Jean-Pierre Lledo’s documen-
tary film Algérie, histoires à ne pas dire (Algeria, stories that shouldn’t be
told) (Lledo 2006),9 his book of the same title (Lledo 2011), a petition
for the official recognition of the massacre (“Pétition internationale: 5
juillet 1962 à Oran” 2012), and debate in the press derived from Lledo’s
op-ed in the Huffington Post in 2013. Through these texts, I attempt to
uncover how forbidden truths can be revealed through survivor and wit-
ness narration of this traumatic event in documentary. I also explore how
remembrance can occur or is interrupted when the sites of trauma are no
longer accessible by those who suffered.10
Memory Wars
The debate over historical facts is nothing new, but when it comes to the
Algerian War, a lot is at stake. Many of the participants on both sides of the
Mediterranean are still alive, and national identities have been created and
sustained based on the way the war has been remembered. The French
history of Algeria has largely been written by its former French inhabit-
ants, collectively called the Pieds-Noirs.11 When I began researching the
community in the 1990s, their heavily nostalgic memoirs were routinely
sold as history in bookshops, and it was rare to find anything written about
French Algeria from an Algerian perspective (Hubbell 2015b, p. 22).
Benjamin Stora was one of the few authors producing academic studies of
France’s past in Algeria and he eventually dominated the field. Now that
more than fifty-five years have passed since Algerian independence, the
older generation of Pieds-Noirs has passed away12 and the children who
grew up in the war (Lledo and Stora included) are grappling with how to
account for the daily violence they witnessed. Without the guilt of colonial
history on their shoulders, they explore the violent past more freely, but
national discourse and personal identity still stand in the way. In the case
of the history of French Algeria, frequent claims are made that the truth is
censored and suppressed, but the perception of truth is shaped by trauma.
The Oran massacre is one of the most recent in a long series of massacres
during the war to be explored. Previous massacres such as the 17 October
1961 killing of between 40 to 200 Algerians in Paris during a peaceful
demonstration (Ramdani 2011), and the Massacre in Sétif, Algeria in
1945 have been studied in academic and popular culture works since the
early 2000s.13
In his article, ‘Remembrance, Trauma and Collective Memory: The
Battle for Memory in Psychoanalysis’, psychiatric expert in trauma Werner
Bohleber works through what he calls ‘the colonization of the past by the
present’ (Bohleber 2007, p. 333). He explains the Freudian view of mem-
ory in which our recollection of the past is always formed from a present
perspective, and ‘In this conception of memory, the discovery of real
events disappears from view’ (p. 333). Truth in several psychiatric models
of memory has become obsolete because memory has gaps which we fill
with new narrative explanations acquired in the present (p. 336). For
Bohleber, the problem is that historical reality cannot be overlooked, but
memory, especially traumatic memory, does not operate on fact. Traumatic
memory is especially difficult because:
Traumatic memories can exercise a distressing power and intrude violently

into the present life context without being transmitted with it. Trauma is a
brute fact that cannot be integrated into a context of meaning at the time it
is experienced because it tears the fabric of the psyche. This creates special
conditions for its remembrance and retroactive integration in present expe-
rience. (Bohleber 2007, p. 335)
According to Bohleber, there is no empirical evidence to support the accu-

racy or ‘reliability of autobiographical memory’ (p. 336). Traumatic reality
and its horrors elicit defensive responses that can overpower remembrance
(p. 347). The fact that someone lived through a traumatic historical event
does not mean that the memory of it is connected to reality. Instead, his-
torical facts sometimes fill in the gaps in the narrative. In Lledo’s docu-
mentary of the Oran massacre, the reconstruction of a gapped past happens
through oral testimony captured at the sites of trauma in documentary
film, but also through the inherent repetitions that occur in pre-interview-
ing witnesses, filming, editing, transcribing, and commenting, in which
Algerian-born filmmakers and authors heavily participate.
In a documentary that tracks down witnesses to past horror in an
attempt to establish historical fact, it is uncertain that truth can be an out-
come; yet, truth is exactly what Lledo is trying to expose. Dierdre Boyle
in ‘Trauma, Memory, Documentary’ positions trauma documentary as
hybrid, ‘neither fiction nor fact, but something in between’ created often
by ‘non-Western filmmakers who creatively mine the crack between one
224 A. L. HUBBELL
reality and the other’ (2010, p. 156). In Algérie, histoires à ne pas dire,
Lledo films Algerian witnesses at sites of memory as they recount events
that happened forty-five years earlier on those locations. Often the wit-
nesses repaint the scenes they lived during the war while the reality of what
is shown in the film is quite different. This rupture between present place
and recollection of that site comes through strongly in the film.
In Transcultural Cinema, David MacDougall usefully underscores the
importance of these absences in memorial film work. He states, ‘Although
films of memory often claim legitimacy as a way of salvaging first-person
experience, they rarely address slippage in the memories of their infor-
mants. At the very least, signs of absence place memory in the context of
forgetting, and define the past by its irreducible distance from the present’
(MacDougall 1998, p. 32). Absence in the film:
Not only asks us to query first-person testimony but to look at empty roads
and fields where atrocities took place and search them for what happened
there. We look in vain for the signified in the sign. In this constant reitera-
tion of absence we are brought to the threshold of one kind of knowledge
about history. In the failure of the sign we acknowledge a history beyond
representation. (MacDougall 1998, p. 236)
In some instances, in Lledo’s film, the locations align with memory and a
place will seem unchanged despite the decades that have passed: a tree or
park bench remains exactly where it was before independence and this will
stun the witness.14 In other cases, the sheer absence of markers is equally
troubling. In those cases, the past is made present through words, but
recognition falters and becomes disputed.
Lledo became a leader in the movement to open the archives surround-
ing the 5 July 1962 Massacre in Oran, but when he made this film, he was
only beginning to interrogate this memory. While the reality of what hap-
pened in Oran is perhaps unknowable so many years later, the fact that the
truth behind the massacre is being hotly pursued today demonstrates that
the war survivors, victims, and witnesses, as well as their children are
attempting to reconcile unconnected fragments into a coherent narrative.
As recently as June 2018, survivors of the Oran massacre have debated
how the events should be remembered in documentary film as each one
seeks to create a coherent narrative of the trauma they witnessed.15 But
when those interrogating the past are the ones who lived through the
trauma, can truth be an expected outcome?
Oran: Stories that Shouldn’t Be Told

In Algérie, histoires à ne pas dire, Lledo is only heard as the narrator, but
his own historico-political position cannot be overlooked. Lledo, a French
Jew who remained in Algeria after independence, grew up in Oran in a
strong communist and pro-independence family but left the city in 1957
(Lledo 2013a). He was exiled from Algeria during the Algerian civil war
in 1993 and his departure greatly marked him. He explains that the choice
to stay in Algeria after 1962 meant denying a part of his identity and a part
of Algeria’s past (Lledo 2011, p. 13). In this film, Lledo wanted Algerian
men of his generation to conduct an investigation of their fathers’ struggle
while keeping in mind the fundamental question: ‘would we be up to the
task of casting a critical eye on them, of seeing and even more importantly
saying the simple truth?’ (Lledo 2011, p. 14). Lledo’s film had been
funded by the Algerian government, but it was never shown in Algeria.
According to Lledo, he and many of those who appeared in the film were
blacklisted by the Algerian Ministry of Culture and the film was censored.
Lledo posed a threat to national history: ‘The building rests upon an offi-
cial story. Questioning that story is tantamount to threatening its founda-
tion’ (Lledo 2011, p. 11).
When it came to Oran’s past, the focus of the fourth part of his film,
Lledo had intended to show a harmonious city where Europeans (both
Spanish and French), Muslims and Jews lived together in a specific neigh-
bourhood called La Marine, now Sidi El Houari (Lledo 2013b). What he
uncovered, though, was a memory of the massacre that could not be
silenced. In an article in the Huffington Post, Lledo writes:
I found out early on that something terrible had happened on 5 July 1962 in
Oran where I no longer lived since 1957. Only my father’s pro-independence
and communist ideals, which were also passed down to me, stopped me
from wanting to know more, and caused me to actually conceal it from
myself. Mitigating circumstance: I lived in Algeria until 1993, and this sub-
ject like others was taboo. (Lledo 2013a)
As narrator in this documentary, Lledo sets up his own relationship to this

massacre while filming a landfill with hundreds of seagulls pecking at it in
the fog: ‘The July 5, 1962 dump, Petit Lac is to me, as well, the dump of
all mass graves. From this war. And before this war. The dumps of all wars.
An absolute taboo for many in Oran, what happened that day weighs on
226 A. L. HUBBELL
them, to this day, like a curse’ (Lledo 2011 p. 81). Lledo then explains
that the sense of guilt is palpable each time this date is discussed among
Algerian civilians who witnessed the massacre, and his childhood friend
Kader Smaïn has gone so far as to state that Algerians are still paying the
consequences of this event today (2011, p. 82).
To access the memory of the Oran massacre, Lledo follows a young
Algerian theatre producer, Kheïr-Eddine, born well after independence in
1976, who sets out to know the real truth about his city by talking with
older community members. For Kheïr-Eddine, 5 July 1962 is, first and
foremost, the date of Algerian Independence, but also, ‘the departure of
the French … and also, we also killed those who stayed’ (Lledo 2011,
p. 81). He knows this because an unnamed female in his family went to
Petit Lac on that day to celebrate with her Algerian flag and she saw bodies
being thrown into the lake. This story has remained with Kheïr-Eddine
and has plagued him:
We didn’t learn that in school. Young people today know the history they
were taught in school is false. They’ve been lied to. But they don’t know the
truth, either. I’m going to Sidi El Houari, right near my house. I have so
many questions eating away at me. Questions about history, memory …
The truth, the real truth. (Lledo 2006)
Through interviewing people who were in this neighbourhood on 5 July

1962, Kheïr-Eddine hoped to understand what really happened. But he is
met with silences, refusals, hints, contradictions, and a heavy amount of
translanguaging between Spanish, French and Arabic, making it some-
times difficult for him to understand.
The investigation follows several men who lived in Sidi El Houari,
known for its peaceful cohabitation among the communities. The first
participant named Hamani speaks primarily Spanish causing Kheïr-Eddine
to state, ‘I don’t understand a thing! If you speak to me in Spanish …’
(Lledo 2006). Hamani switches to French to recount a beautiful co-
existence in the highly diverse and poor neighbourhood where the
Spaniards outnumbered the Arabs. Kheïr-Eddine responds in Arabic;
Hamani answers in French, then Arabic and Spanish again, sometimes in
the same sentence. Kheïr-Eddine brings the subject to Spaniards being
killed at Independence. Hamani confirms ‘Yes, that’s true, it happened’.
Hamani tells Kheïr-Eddine in Arabic and French that he was in charge of
150 scouts during the Independence parade. He heard on their way back
Fig. 11.1 Hamani denies involvement in the massacre. Film still, Algéries, his-
toires à ne pas dire (Lledo 2006)
to the neighbourhood that the OAS was shooting people. Hamani con-
fides in Kheïr-Eddine, ‘But, I am going to tell you something, hey? From
19 March back in ’62, the OAS killed more than they should have. Well,
then there was 5 July, it isn’t good what they did …’ Kheïr-Eddine asks for
clarification, ‘Sorry, Father, are you telling me that here, on 5 July, the
OAS killed …’ Hamani interrupts, ‘No, not 5 July! Then, it was the Arabs
who, it seems, killed the French Algerians’ (Lledo 2011, p. 85). Hamani
softens this progressively by saying, ‘That’s all I know’, ‘That’s what they
say’, ‘it seems’, and in French, ‘I wasn’t there. I was with the scouts’
(Fig. 11.1).
The second participant Naïri continues the story of a diverse and poor
community that peacefully cohabited in Oran. Naïri walks through Sidi El
Houari recreating verbally what it was like before the war for Kheïr-
Eddine. He says, ‘we got along amazingly well’ and ‘we lived together
until 1961’ when an unnamed ‘small event’ divided the community
between Europeans and Muslims and the tunnel that connected La Marine
and Sidi El Houari was closed off. While Naïri and Kheïr-Eddine walk
through the dividing tunnel, Lledo films them from different angles, jux-
taposing darkness and light ahead and behind them. At moments, their
bodies block all light. Naïri recounts that when the tunnel was reopened
228 A. L. HUBBELL
Fig. 11.2 Naïri and Kheïr-Eddine discussing communal separation in the tunnel.
Film still (Lledo 2006)
three days before independence in 1962, real social healing and reunion
occurred (Fig. 11.2).
For Naïri, personally in Sidi El Houari, nothing happened on 5 July, yet
he recognises the wound of the date: ‘July 5 ruined everything’, he says in
French. He continues in Arabic, ‘it’s because of us’. While nothing hap-
pened in Sidi El Houarai, in the city there was a massacre. When Naïri uses
the word genocide, Kheïr-Eddine asks him to explain. Naïri responds
again in Arabic, ‘Yes, I say it! They cut throats, they killed. On the Place
d’Armes, it was dreadful. They killed Europeans. Voilà’. As the men walk
through the tunnel, the work of memory is foregrounded. Kheïr-Eddine
was not yet born and Naïri was a schoolboy. As we see the alternating light
and dark and hear Naïri talk about what he has heard over time, we cannot
ignore that forty-five years have passed to shape the way the past is remem-
bered, and this amount of time can influence the perception of a second-
ary witness or the recipient of post-memory where the gaps are plentiful.
Historical facts, national stories, family stories, all intercede with the way
the past is remembered and reordered, and the wound still sticks out in
unexpected and uncontrolled ways.
Naïri takes Kheïr-Eddine to La Calère where the Europeans had lived
to show him where he was born. Kheïr-Eddine is stunned: ‘That’s La
Calère? You mean, that’s where La Calère was [because there’s nothing
there]’. Naïri confirms, ‘There is nothing but a hill’ (Lledo 2006). Lledo
does not take the camera off of the participants who try to imagine what
was there before. The scene shifts to Kheïr-Eddine talking with an elderly
couple about what happened in the La Calère neighbourhood and again
La Calère is not shown. Instead the camera focuses on the man and woman
looking out to the distance and describing to Kheïr-Eddine the way it used
to be. The man explains, ‘All this wasteland used to be inhabited’ (Lledo
2006). While the man claims, ‘With time, it fell into ruins’, his partner
responds firmly, ‘No! They were demolished. They destroyed the houses.
Houses with owners! They broke everything! The State destroyed them!
Houses were occupied. People ran out weeping. They were sad, some
died’. The two presumably lived the same events but recount them and
remember them differently. While the woman speaks of destruction, her
husband looks off in the distance and attempts again, ‘They were falling
into ruins!’ ‘No, they were destroyed!’ his wife responds (Lledo 2006).
Both witnesses describe the hotels and restaurants that were there before,
while on the screen, we only see the witnesses recreating the past for
Kheïr-Eddine who visibly tries to make sense of the story. Like MacDougall’s
conception of absence, Dylan Trigg’s study of ruins and sites of trauma
resonates in this scene. Trigg proposes that ‘sites of trauma articulate
memory precisely through refusing a continuous temporal narrative’
(Trigg 2009, p. 87), and the spatio-temporal discontinuity of traumatic
memory is best represented in ruins. When faced with a ruin, the ‘reality
of the traumatic event is not reinforced in this encounter, but instead
trembles as an incommensurable void is given a voice between the viewer
and the place’ (p. 99). On the screen the ruins function like the memory
that is contested, argued, altered and obscured through multiple lan-
guages, but nonetheless spoken by each of the participants.
The elderly woman goes on to recount a very personal traumatic mem-
ory on 5 July. She states that she was near the Jewish cemetery in Ville
Nouvelle, the site of many killings, when the Mujahideen (Algerian libera-
tion fighters) arrived. She was pregnant, had a miscarriage that day, and
was taken to the hospital. That miscarriage spared her from seeing any-
thing. Her husband picks up the story lamenting that if there had not
been such mayhem and killings ‘July 5, 6, 7, whatever. They [the Europeans]
wouldn’t have left. They would have stayed! They would have stayed
under Algerian independence. They would have stayed with us!’ (Lledo
2006). The couple recounts the departure of the Europeans with much
230 A. L. HUBBELL
Fig. 11.3 Kheïr-Eddine standing in the ruins of La Calère. Film still (Lledo 2006)
sadness: ‘We cried. We were sad. We lived happily, we grew up together’

(Fig. 11.3). With that admission of regret, the viewers are finally shown
Kheïr-Eddine from behind, walking through the rubble on the hill top,
looking out at the surviving parts of Oran, visibly past its former glory, and
then the film opens to a view of the well-preserved Fort and Chapel of
Santa Cruz, an iconic image of European presence in Algeria.16
After Kheïr-Eddine interviews this couple, he speaks with an ex-FLN
fighter, Abdelkader Zahaf, who claims to have killed for the cause. Zahaf
explains that Sidi El Houari was a calm refuge for the revolutionary leaders
because of its diversity, and he accuses the OAS of breaking ties between
the Algerians and Spaniards and provoking the retaliatory campaign of ‘no
pity’ against all Europeans in 1961. As for Independence Day, when
Kheïr-Eddine asks about Europeans being killed and thrown into the
pond at Petit Lac, Zahaf states, ‘I was there’. He explains that when the
OAS fired on someone in the parade, the Arabs lashed out, attacking all
Europeans: ‘Big or little, they took them to the pond and killed them. It
was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Once the bullet hit the pus, it
was disaster for Oran’ (Lledo 2006). When Kheïr-Eddine asks if Zahaf saw
this happen, the man says he didn’t see a thing that day. ‘No, I was in Sidi
El Houari. Nothing happened there’. Before ending the interview, Zahaf

surprisingly says:
I can’t talk about what happened in front of the camera. It would be

overwhelming.
Kheïr-Eddine: What happened?
Zahaf: It would damage our honour. (…) I’ll tell you if you stop shooting.
Lledo’s voice then intercedes as the scene ends: ‘But will Kheïr-Eddine
ever uncover his “real truth”?’ (Lledo 2006)
The last interview in this sequence is with a well-known local dancer

named Tchitchi who is now confined to a wheelchair. As he rides around
in a van with Kheïr-Eddine, Tchitchi nostalgically recounts his happy
youth in Oran and then the destruction of La Calère. He paints his memo-
ries of what was over the landscape he sees in front of him. Finally, Tchitchi
addresses the massacre first insisting he did not leave the neighbourhood
and that he saw nothing with his own eyes (‘I heard like everyone. But I
saw nothing’). Then he recounts a round-up of twenty to thirty (a number
immediately increased to over thirty) Christians on 5 July in the building
where he lived, some who were his friends. He insists that no one was
harmed. But Tchitchi’s memory is fading. He both can and cannot remem-
ber where he was, the names of people or the places where they were held.
The film ends when Tchitchi is reunited with friends from his youth and
fades out with women singing in Spanish at the festive gathering. Tchitchi
is in tears overlooking the sea. In a 2013 op-ed published in the Huffington
Post promoting a petition to open the archives on the events of 5 July in
Oran, Lledo states that when he filmed Algérie, histoires à ne pas dire, he
had hoped to discover that the diverse neighbourhood of La Marine, was
an exception and that no one was killed. But when Tchitchi recounted the
round-up of Europeans, he rendered the unspeakable. Lledo interprets
this: ‘During our first meeting, he silently put his hand on his throat. In
front of the camera, he stammered and contradicted himself several times
in a few minutes … So, there was no exception in La Marine’ (Lledo
2013b) (Fig. 11.4).
232 A. L. HUBBELL
Fig. 11.4 Tchitchi looking at the iconic Port of Oran. Film still (Lledo 2006)
Truth, History, Documentary

In 2011, Lledo published his film scenario Algérie, histoires à ne pas dire.
The film had been financed by the Algerian government, but then cen-
sored in Algeria. The interdiction of forbidden stories mandated that they
be told in another format. Acclaimed Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal
expresses his view of the risks involved with truth-telling under dictatorial
governments in the preface to Lledo’s book:
And what is this truth that we hide so well in Algeria (…) It is not a speech,
it is not official history, it is not a screen, it is the truth, facts in their naked-
ness (…) Jean-Pierre has told his truth and I share it, and others should do
as much. We would like to hear them, to hear their stories that shouldn’t be
told; the others, the stories to be told, we know them already. (Lledo
2011, p. 10)
In 2012–2013, Lledo spearheaded the petition to open the French and

Algerian archives for an international inquest which would finally allow
the victims’ families to mourn properly (“Pétition internationale: 5 juillet
1962 à Oran” 2012). Despite over 10,000 signatures, the archives are not
all available.17 Lledo’s subsequent Huffington Post article sparked brisk
debate in the press with Benjamin Stora and other historians. Lledo stated
that the events were erased from national memory in Algeria and because
of the quasi silence around this massacre, ‘There is absolutely no “memory
war” (the hobby horse of the official historian Benjamin Stora who is espe-
cially quiet on this subject)’ (Lledo 2013a).18 Benjamin Stora wrote a
counter argument in the Huffington Post chastising Lledo for diminishing
the histories published since 1993. Stora, though acknowledging that the
massacre merits more attention, contends that Lledo has offered ‘a hemi-
plegic history that is only interested in a single category of victims’ and
that if the events are not put into context we cannot ‘really write the his-
tory nor come to a true reciprocal recognition of all the dramas that
marred this war’ (Stora 2013).19 Though the argument between these two
ended in the press, the representation of this massacre continues to be
debated in academic works, social media and documentaries today.
Conclusion
What is the real truth about 5 July 1962 in Oran and how can we know?
Is it through a carefully crafted documentary whose path surprised even
the director, though he claimed everyone from Oran knows about the
massacre? Is it through other documentary films which contain graphic
survivor accounts about the events they witnessed that day?20 How can the
diverse communities that once lived in Oran reconcile their memories to
represent the traumas that divided them? What happens when long years
of exile, political goals and national discourses intervene with memory? In
this context, can we know the true story? In a proposed law brought to
the French National Assembly on 27 September 2017 to recognise the
Oran massacre, journalist Georges-Marc Benamou is cited as saying, ‘the
5 July massacre in Oran seems to be a clandestine event, debated, imag-
ined, and for which only the survivors can replay the memory. No defini-
tive historical study. No real investigation. Few books. No plaque, no
official government commemoration’ (Trastour-Isnart et al. 2017). The
proposed law underscores the marked contrast between this massacre and
François Hollande’s 2012 official recognition of the 17 October 1961
massacre of Algerians in Paris. Though the claim remains that little has
been done to study this massacre, I would contend there is a large corpus
of historical and testimonial work; the problem is rather that documentary
and history cannot appropriately satisfy the need for public commemora-
tion. Without a tangible space in which to share traumatic memory and
234 A. L. HUBBELL
devastating loss, survivors and witnesses begin contesting individual

accounts represented in film and print (see Hubbell 2018).
In Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, Paul Antze and
Michael Lambek try to understand how performative memory attempts
‘to recall the truth about literally “unspeakable” events’ but, ‘Memory is
invoked to heal, to blame, to legitimate. It has become (…) a site of strug-
gle as well as identification. Memory has found a prominent place in poli-
tics, both as a source of authority and a means of attack’ (Antze and
Lambek 2016, p. vii). It is precisely the connection between this particular
memory and community identity of two countries that went to war, that
hinders truth in this instance. As long as there is no access to the site of
memory for a large number of those who witnessed trauma, the memories
will remain unreconciled. Even as Lledo struggles to share the untold and
conflicting stories in Algeria, he tries to underscore a common narrative
through interviews with Algerian men of his generation: traumatic killings
of Europeans occurred in Oran on Independence Day. As in many trau-
matic events, Lledo found people willing to speak, but the reception is
often difficult. When his film was censored in Algeria, some participants
feared reprisals. Bohleber explains: ‘The confrontation … with the
immense crimes, the unspeakable horror, and the immeasurable suffering
of the victims, threatens to overwhelm remembrance and instigates avoid-
ance strategies and a reluctance to know among those not affected’ (2007,
p. 347). As we have seen through the contentious debates surrounding
the 5 July 1962 in Oran, the massacre cannot be and is not denied, but as
long as there is no space for commemoration and reconciliation, the con-
flict between memory and the truth behind the trauma will endure.
Notes
1. Spanish settlers started arriving in 1509 and maintained sporadic control
until the Turks arrived at the end of the eighteenth century (Lakjaa 2008).
Lakjaa explains that though there were 263 years of Spanish influence, the
Jewish settlements in Oran go back to 1391 when the Jews fled persecu-
tion in Spain, Andalousia, and Grenada. This moves the Spanish presence
earlier than 1509.
2. All translations are my own except for portions of the film Algérie, histoires
à ne pas dire, which is subtitled in English.
3. Written and spoken testimony and historical texts about the Oran massacre
were primarily published from 2006 to 2013 and include a public debate
in the press between Pierre Daum, Jean-Pierre Lledo, and Benjamin Stora
among others. Historical texts include books by Guillaume Zeller, Guy
Pervillé, Jean-Monneret, and Jean-Jacques Jordi. While Monneret, Jordi,
Lledo, and Stora were born in Algeria, Pervillé, Daum, and Zeller were
born in France. Zeller is the grandson of André Zeller, a French General
who fought to keep Algeria French in the ‘putsch des généraux’ (‘generals’
coup’) in 1961 and was imprisoned for his actions. Daum is a controversial
author who has long been writing books and articles that attempt to
debunk the decolonisation stories from Algeria. In 2012 he published an
article in Le Monde Diplomatique in which he interviewed an unnamed
elderly ex-Armée de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Army)
fighter. See also Daum’s 2012 book Ni valise, ni cercueil (Neither suitcase,
nor coffin, 2012). Pervillé is a French professor of history whose academic
career solely concentrates on Algeria. Stora is the most prolific historian on
Algeria and president of the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration (National
Museum of the History of Immigration) in Paris.
4. In 2008, 46 years after the war ended, scholars such as Eric Savarèse began
calling for the Memory Wars to end in L’Algérie dépassionnée: Au-delà du
tumulte des mémoires (Savarèse 2008), a volume to which Stora
contributed.
5. The memory laws began in 1990 with the Gayssot Law to outlaw the
denial of crimes against humanity and the Taubira Law of 2001 to recog-
nise the slave trade as a crime (Guendouzi 2017, p. 237). The most infa-
mous memory law appeared in 2005 demanding that the positive aspects
of colonialism be taught in French schools. Guendouzi rightly states this
law triggered ‘cries of outrage among historians and other intellectuals on
both sides of the Mediterranean’ and was later repealed (p. 236).
6. According to a 6 July 1962 article in the Swiss paper, Le Journal de Genève,
allegedly 30-some people were killed (French and Algerians). The only
confirmed details were that the shooting started a little before noon at
Place Foch amongst a huge excited crowd. The newspaper stated that the
numerous journalists and other witnesses present were ‘incapable of reli-
ably stating how it started’ (‘L’Origine des fusillades d’Oran’ 1962). Jean
Monneret puts the number of dead at 3000 (Monneret 2006), but Jean-
Jacques Jordi in Un Silence d’Etat uses the archives to document 700
Europeans killed and many others missing. Jordi’s number is reproduced
in Oran, le 5 juillet 1962 (Pervillé 2014). Recently Benamou stated that
the official French government number of dead was 20 and historians have
verified 700. See ‘La France doit reconnaître le massacre d’Oran’
(Bruyas 2018).
7. General Katz, often referred to by Pieds-Noirs as the Butcher of Oran,
commanded the French troops and was under orders by President Charles
236 A. L. HUBBELL
de Gaulle to not engage. Multiple sources report that 18,000 French

troops were present, and many accounts exist from the soldiers who were
locked up during the massacre. Since 2013, a narrative has progressively
emerged that the attack on Europeans was carefully planned and coordi-
nated by the Algerians; it had nothing to do with the OAS who had already
fled Oran by Independence, and the French government knew about the
attack but did not want the war to start back up; see Bruyas (2018).
8. In Un Silence d’Etat (A National Silence) Jordi cautions, ‘only the enlight-
ened confrontation between diverse written archives and individual testi-
mony will allow history to approach the truth of the disappearance of
Europeans in Algeria’ (2011, p. 11). Similarly Pervillé (2014) argues that
truth comes from diverse sources: ‘Contrary to what certain naïve people
might think, when we are looking for historical truth we must, on the
contrary, research the broadest possible variety of opinions, authors and
sources that we use, because if we can finally state that authors of different
opinions manage to agree on such facts, we can then conclude that we are
looking at an authentic event’.
9. Lledo’s official English title for this film is ‘Algeria, Unspoken Stories’, but
Lledo and his participants demonstrate that traumatic memory is spoken.
It is the reception which remains problematic. In view of this, I have opted
to translate the title as ‘Algeria, stories that shouldn’t be told’; see
Hubbell (2013).
10. See Akagawa’s chapter which demonstrates how memorial museums allow
visitors to participate and create meaningful experience while constructing
shared memory. With many massacres, there is no place of remembrance
where mourning and consciousness of the events can be reconciled.
Consequently, experience depicted in art becomes the only space where
memory can be contested by survivors and witnesses.
11. Eric Savarèse states that the academic work on the Pieds-Noirs should be
read with caution because it is primarily written by the Pieds-Noirs them-
selves (Savarèse 2002, p. 27). While some claim that the Pieds-Noirs are
overly protectionist of the past, and others believe those who intimately
know Algeria should write its history, during the ‘wilful silence’ after the
Algerian War through to the 1990s, the Pieds-Noirs were among few who
published about Algeria.
12. Ashplant, Dawson, and Roper propose: ‘As public recognition of the trau-
matic experiences undergone by survivors of war has increased, so the age-
ing of those who lived through the wars of the early and mid-twentieth
century has added an urgency and poignancy to the endeavour of collect-
ing their testimony and reflecting on its significance’ (2000, p. 3). Urgently
safeguarding a history ‘in peril’ is a primary goal of the Pieds-Noirs today.
However, in order to preserve one version of the past, one must be agreed
upon, and ‘new accounts’ of the past are constantly arising.
13. According to Ramdani (2011), the initial reported number of dead was 3,
but now it is believed at least 200 were killed in Paris on 17 October 1961.
See also Cole (2006). An estimated 1020 to 45,000 died in the Sétif upris-
ing in 1945, which has long been depicted in historical and popular texts.
See, for example, Alistair Horne’s early history work, A Savage War of
Peace (1978).
14. For an in-depth study of how Pied-Noir exiles experience physical return
to the sites of their childhood, see Hubbell (2011).
15. Members of the French Cercle Algérianiste National Facebook Group
engaged in a heated debate on 18–19 June 2018 after participating in the
documentary Oran, le massacre oublié (Oran, the forgotten massacre) by
Georges-Marc Benamou and Jean-Charles Deniau, which was screened in
Nice on 5 July 2018 and later aired on France 3 television (Benamou and
Deniau 2018). Members contested the ways events should be remembered
and who was responsible for the massacre. At the advanced screening, his-
torians Jean Monneret and Jean-Jacques Jordi presented historical research
(‘Le film “Le massacre d’Oran” relance la quête de vérité’ 2018; Projection
du film sur le massacre du 5 juillet 2018).
16. I extensively studied the nostalgic representation of the Chapelle de Santa
Cruz; see Hubbell (2015a).
17. It remains unclear if the archives were destroyed, at least partially, by the
OAS in June 1962 (Guignard 2015).
18. Lledo believes the attacks were coordinated by the FLN to scare the French
citizens away (2011, p. 17).
19. This response was published 15 days after Lledo’s and signed by other
personalities. Stora acquiesces that the massacre should be studied histori-
cally but not from a partisan perspective that mocks history (Stora 2013).
20. See La Valise ou le cercueil (Cassan and Havenel 2011), which contains
graphic survivor accounts from ten witnesses in Oran on 5 July 1962.
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Français et des Algériens dans la guerre, Les Arènes, Paris.
Stora, B 1991, La Gangrène et l’oubli: la mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie, La
Découverte, Paris.
——— 2013, ‘Ne pas instrumentaliser les massacres du 5 Juillet 1962 à Oran’,
Huffington Post, 20 November, viewed 28 November 2017, <https://www.
huffingtonpost.fr/benjamin-stora/oran-massacres-1962_b_4302102.html>.
240 A. L. HUBBELL
Trastour-Isnart, L, Tabarot, M, Verchère, P, Pauget, É, Brochand, B, Ciotti, É,

Deflessell, B & Diard, É 2017, Proposition de loi visant à reconnaître le massacre
de la population française à Oran le 5 juillet 1962, <http://www2.assemblee-
nationale.fr/documents/notice/15/propositions/pion0187/(index)/
propositions-loi>.
Trigg, D 2009, ‘The place of trauma: Memory, hauntings, and the temporality of
ruins’, Memory Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 87–101.
CHAPTER 12
Cultural Practices as Sites of Trauma

and Empathic Distress in Like Cotton Twines
(2016) and Grass between my Lips (2008)
Dennis-Brook Prince Lotsu
Over the last four decades, trauma has had particular resonance with
scholars who study personal and collective memory of survivors of the
Holocaust, genocide, and other atrocities of magnified public proportions
(see Caruth 1995; Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 1995; El Nossery and
Hubbell 2013; de Bruyn 2014; Goodall and Lee 2015; Nikro and Hegasy
2017). Images, testimonies, and narratives that bear witness to the
‘unmentionability’ and inaccessibility of such trauma have since been
investigated and documented, with a special focus on the unspeakable
burden of personal and collective memory of trauma on survivors
(Radstone 2000; Guerin and Hallas 2007). In the same way, visual repre-
sentations of the experiences of the traumatised and the distress of wit-
nessing trauma have also been identified to have the capacity to make
D.-B. P. Lotsu (*)

School of Languages and Cultures, University of Queensland,
Brisbane, QLD, Australia
e-mail: d.lotsu@uq.net.au

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_12
242 D.-B. P. LOTSU
viewers share in and identify with the pains of victims. This chapter seeks
to understand cinematic articulation of the violence and trauma embed-
ded in the performance of two African cultural practices and the capacity
of their cinematic presentation—narrative content and aesthetic medium—
to evoke empathic distress in the audience. I highlight the ways in which
mainstream entertainment cinematic representations of female genital
cutting/mutilation/excision (FGC/M/E)1 and Trokosi (deity servitude)
elicit empathic response from the audience. I begin with a brief ontologi-
cal exploration of FGC and Trokosi and their ideological challenges. This
is followed with a brief overview of the affective, phenomenological, and
cognitive conceptualisations of empathy in cinema. I then conclude with a
reading of Leila Djansi’s Like Cotton Twines (2016) and Amardeep Kaleka’s
Grass between my Lips (2008).
The Context of Female Genital Cutting/Mutilation

and Trokosi
Female genital excision—‘partial or total removal of the female genitalia

or other injury to the genital organs for non-medical reasons’ (OHCHR
et al. 2008, p. 1)—and Trokosi are two fiercely contested African cultural
practices that have found their way into international and global emanci-
patory discourse since the 1960s and 1980s respectively, for their infringe-
ment on the rights and freedoms of girls and women.2 FGC involves an
alteration, usually the excision of the labia minora and or majora.3 Across
the world, it is estimated between 150 and 200 million girls and women
have undergone the procedure, out of which 91.5 million are in Africa
(UNICEF 2016).
Trokosi, on the other hand, is a cultural, religious, and crime-control
practice observed among the Dangme, Fon, and Ewe ethnic groups in
West Africa: Ghana,4 Togo, Benin, and Nigeria. It is believed to have orig-
inated in the seventeenth century as a spiritual form of atonement.5 The
general scholarly and advocacy definition of Trokosi entails the act of fami-
lies offering their female children, usually virgin girls, to fetish priests6 to
serve at shrines as an act of atonement (Rossi 2016; Gyurácz 2017). The
girls are given to the gods to appease them for crimes committed by family
members—parents, relatives, or clansmen—or as ‘gifts’ of appreciation for
a divinity’s magnanimity (Akyeampong 2001; Archampong 2010; Bastine
2012). However, ‘once given to the priest, a girl becomes his property,
12 CULTURAL PRACTICES AS SITES OF TRAUMA AND EMPATHIC DISTRESS… 243
forced to carry out domestic task[s]’, and is subjected to ritual and sexual
servitude at her first menstrual cycle (Mistiaen 2013), as the priest sym-
bolically ‘consummates’ her marriage to the gods.7 After years of service at
the shrine, trokosis may be released, but many are stigmatised and ostra-
cised, making it practically impossible for them to survive the aftermath of
their ordeal or secure life partners (Ben-Ari 2001; Howusu 2016). Despite
the criminalisation of FGC and Trokosi in Ghana, girls continue to be
secretly circumcised and admitted as trokosis.8
The framing of FGC and Trokosi as human rights and developmental
concerns or as forms of cultural expression present a significant challenge
to their eradication. To Western feminists and human rights activists, these
practices are a ‘mutilation’ of the body, an attempt aimed at depriving
women of an essential aspect of their femininity (sexual and sensual capac-
ity and autonomy)—a ‘mutilation’ of her potential to self-actualisation
(Jolly et al. 2013). Contrarily, cultural relativists interpret FGC and Trokosi
as forms of cultural expression, and for this reason anti-excision campaigns
are considered forms of ‘cultural imperialism’ aimed at neutralising indig-
enous cultures and subduing cultural identity (Asomah 2015; Mende
2018). One of the dangers of the human rights’ perspective, which ines-
capably characterises most documentaries on the subject-matter,9 is the
lack of contextual specificity or what Marilyn Frye (1983) terms ‘arrogant
perception’. This perspective, Frye notes, typifies the approaches taken by
Western media, feminists, and human right activists when presenting
themselves as saviours of African women, who are always already reified as
passive victims of African societies already reified as patriarchal. For
instance, Stanlie M. James (1998), in a critique of Alice Walker and
Pratibha Parmar’s documentary film, Warrior Masks (dir. Walker and
Parmar 1993), points to Western feminists’ ‘horrified [and] condemna-
tory responses to practices’ of FGC (p. 1034). As James observes, Walker’s
project, though ‘imbued with sympathetic perspective’, runs the ‘uninten-
tional consequence of “othering” or marginalising the very people she
wishes her audience to support’ (p. 1032), and, thus, runs the risk of elid-
ing the social significance and cultural values of the practice.10
Grass between my Lips11 chronicles the struggles of a pubescent girl,
Rakia, who, at her coming of age, drops out of school, is betrothed to a
man thrice her age, and must, as custom demands, be circumcised before
her marriage to her husband. Recounting the sudden eruption of Rakia’s
traumatic memory of her sister’s genital excision and subsequent death,
the film’s narrative and visual style immerse the audience in Rakia’s world
244 D.-B. P. LOTSU
as she experiences memory surges of the past, which do not only feed her
trepidation about the practice but also build in her a strong aversion to
excision. Scheduled for her initiatory excision, Rakia manages to flee,
thanks to her grandmother and classmate.
Like Cotton Twines,12 however, presents accounts of FGC and Trokosi,
the violence and trauma embedded in their performance, and their sexual
exploitation of girls and women. It chronicles the struggles of another
pubescent girl, Tuigi, and the attempts of an African-American volunteer
teacher, Micha Brown, to save her from being given to serve in a shrine.
At puberty, Tuigi begins to experience the harsh realities of being a girl in
a society where the female-child is either commoditised through marriage
or made a bonded servant to gods. Tuigi, unlike Rakia in Grass between my
Lips, is abducted and made to undergo genital excision at puberty.
However, when her father, Yema, kills a fellow hunter whom he mistakes
for game, he, as custom demands, offers his virgin daughter to the gods in
atonement for his crime. From thence, Tuigi’s education and life come
under threat as she is raped, forced to perform labour and ritual servitude,
and finally dies in childbirth.
FGC and Trokosi are not subjects that would normally be considered
suitable for an entertainment medium such as cinema outside the docu-
mentary realm, where the link to an external reality is one of the funda-
mental principles of the genre. Yet, tales of these practices are integrated
into the fictional films under consideration here. While these are inte-
grated into a mainstream and conventional narrative context to give the
films a broader appeal, the films in no way shy away from mirroring the
harsh reality of these practices. This, I argue, is done not simply to shock
the audience as would be the case in many films in which such graphic
depiction of violence is present, but, on the contrary, to instigate a very
specific kind of relation to the viewer that heightens empathic affect at the
same time as it positions the spectator in a specific kind of relation to what
is depicted on screen, thus placing a burden of ethical responsibility
on them.
The Ethical and Affective Turn in Cinema

Cinema projects virtual worlds that engage viewers’ emotions, extend
their imaginations beyond their immediate confines, and question their
beliefs, values, and assumptions. It possesses the capacity to evoke forms
of ethical experience that might initiate transformation of our worldview
and values. The ethical turn in cognitive and phenomenological film the-
ory in the last two decades ‘stresses the particular affective nature of film
spectatorship’ that highlights the ‘perceptual and sensorial engagement
with film … as a moral ground to connect reality and other’ (Choi and
Frey 2013, p. 1; see also Sinnerbrink 2016). Central to this ethical turn is
the focus on the cognitive, affective, and embodied dimensions of film to
bridge the gap between the self and the other in what has been variously
theorised as empathy, sympathy, emotional engagement, identification,
and perspective-taking (Smith 2003; Carroll 2013a; Stadler 2013).13 Here
I focus on empathy, a critical facet of ethics in cinema, broadly categorised
as cognitive awareness of another’s feelings or affective/embodied experi-
ence of what another person feels (see Plantinga 2009; Carroll 2013b).
Empathy for fictional characters can evoke altruistic impulses that in a way
enable viewers to put themselves in their shoes. To this effect, Dominic
McIver Lopes argues that ‘seeing and imagining seeing both trigger empa-
thy’ in viewers because pictures enable ‘empathy-affording experiences’
which do not differ from ‘extra-pictorially empathy-affording experiences’
that are engendered when viewers witness events face-to-face (2011,
p. 121).
While some theorists like Barker (2009) understand empathy as affec-
tive mimicry, emotional contagion, or other gestural and structural quali-
ties shared by films and their viewers, film phenomenologist, Vivian
Sobchack, considers empathy as ‘central to any understanding of the con-
nection between ethics and aesthetics’ and ‘the question of the limit
between the body and the world’ (2004, p. 286). Ann E. Kaplan (2011),
on the other hand, advances three forms of empathic response to images
of catastrophe and characters’ emotions. The first instance of audience
empathic response to images of catastrophe, she notes, is a vicarious
trauma—a ‘response in which the viewer is shocked to the extent of being
emotionally over-aroused’ or where ‘a catastrophe may be so strong and
personally painful that the individual turns away, or thinks distracting
thoughts, unable to endure the feelings aroused’ (2011, p. 256). Empty
empathy is a transient and transitory empathic emotion; ‘that is, what starts
as an empathic response gets transformed into numbing by the succession
of catastrophes displayed before the viewer’. On the contrary, witnessing is
a ‘response that may change the viewer in a positive pro-social manner’
(p. 256). Though these scholarly frameworks are by no means exhaustive
of the interdisciplinarity of film and ethics, they are instructive in advanc-
ing our understanding of the ways through which the films instigate an
246 D.-B. P. LOTSU
intersubjective relationship between the viewer and the fictional agents

and the visual presentations of FGC and Trokosi.
FGC and Trokosi as Sites of Trauma, Memory,

and Empathic Distress
Like Cotton Twines and Grass between my Lips are exemplary of the poten-
tial of fiction to successfully re-create traumatic events and produce effects
that closely mimic reality and engender empathy in spectators. Through
different narrative and aesthetic strategies, the films foreground the trauma
and violence embedded in the performance of FGC and Trokosi. The
psyche and bodies of the victims who undergo circumcision or witness its
devastating blow become, like sites of memorialisation and remembrance,
places where victims return unconsciously to relive the traumatic past.
Grass between my Lips, for instance, foregrounds the materiality of the
trauma of witnessing FGC through dreams and flashbacks. The film opens
with Rakia, the protagonist, as she lights a lantern in a room as a thunder-
storm threatens. As she adorns herself with a trinket from her deceased
sister, Alima, she recalls, in a voice-over narration, her early childhood and
Alima who dies as a result of post-circumcision complications. As she
recounts:
[The] last time it stormed like this, my sister passed away. She was the one
[who] named me Rakia … the only mother I knew because our mother died
giving birth to me. My sister passed away from the cuts … cuts made during
the ceremony. This is how it was always known to me, as a ceremony. But
now, I know it as something different. (Grass between my Lips 2008)
Here Rakia’s trauma is recalled to the present with an immediacy that

disrupts temporality as the organising principle of the mind and emotions.
The voice-over narration sets the tone for the narrative and re-calibrates
viewers’ perceptive and emotive repertoires to FGC, while aligning view-
ers with the protagonist. The viewer is introduced to Rakia and the con-
flict of genital excision as she re-experiences the past as a mental emergence
stimulated by the trinket. This trauma which she experiences as a child
‘refuses to be represented as past, but is perpetually re-experienced in a
painful, dissociated traumatic present’ (Leys 2000, p. 2).
In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and
History, Felman and Laub (1992), underscore the mind’s ability to bear
witness to trauma in a manner that the psychic mechanism prevents survi-

vors from internalising the trauma. Felman and Laub observe that the
mind defensively blocks the traumatised from an instantaneous assimila-
tion of the trauma—a form of self-preservation from the shock. The
repressed trauma is stored in the unconscious and subsequently erupts
involuntarily. By evoking memories of Rakia’s bond with her deceased
sister, Alima, and the latter’s excision, the film provides a mechanism
which enables viewers to make ‘embodied value judgment or appraisal’
(Carroll 2013a, p. 45), of Rakia’s values so as to affectively align with her
later decision not to undergo the excision. Nonetheless, while remember-
ing functions as one form of viewers’ affective identification with the
trauma of Rakia, the visual and sound design in this sequence also provide
another dimension of empathic identification. The crash of thunder while
the subject is framed in a visually claustrophobic space (underexposed
close-up and medium shots of Rakia in a dimly lit room), and her epiph-
anic enunciation, ‘But now, I know it as something different ,’ create an
aura of mystery and gloom. While this atmosphere induces Rakia’s remem-
brance and, as it were, causes her to recount these events to the spectator,
it also casts gloom over the spectators and makes them imagine Rakia’s
loss in such a way that an intersubjective link is created between her and
the spectator.
The aesthetic medium of Grass between my Lips further highlights
encounters central to the function of personal traumatic memories in con-
temporary conceptions of bearing witness to trauma. Goodall and Lee
(2015), focusing on the relationship between experiential trauma, narra-
tives, and memorialisation, point to trauma’s ‘connections to personal
experiences’ which are typified ‘by violent and incoherent sensory replay,
often accompanied by a sense of pointlessness that the individual finds
overwhelming and disabling … sudden and involuntary’ (pp. 2–7). As
observed in the film, Rakia’s repressed memory of FGC intermittently
erupts as she witnesses others across time undergo similar experiences.
The first of such instances occurs through a flashback when Rakia, on her
way to the stream, witnesses a mother comforting a freshly excised girl in
one of the houses. The flashback scene juxtaposes different moments of
temporal referents in which the narrative activates her traumatic memory
of her sister’s post-excision haemorrhage and anguish. This sudden erup-
tion of traumatic memory re-awakens in her a non-conforming attitude
towards the practice; she chooses to flee rather than undergo excision.
248 D.-B. P. LOTSU
As she approaches puberty, Rakia develops intense anxieties and fear of

menstruation and genital excision, which are fuelled by her self-awareness
of the socio-cultural environment where ‘when [a] girl is old enough to
give birth, she is old enough for marriage, and with every marriage comes
a dowry’ (Grass between my Lips 2008). Culturally, virgin girls are consid-
ered the proud possessions of their families because they present an oppor-
tunity for higher dowries. As such, parents in FGC practising societies,
‘circumcise [their daughters] with good intentions’ (Dellenborg 2004,
p. 81), to signal their readiness for early commodification for marriage;
parents usually dread girls whose menstruation delays. Indeed, in Like
Cotton Twines, Tuigi’s father, Yema, could not conceal his annoyance at
Tuigi’s delayed menstruation. Eventually when the long-awaited news is
delivered to him, he sarcastically retorts: ‘Finally. Other girls became
women at a much younger age. She chose to keep us all waiting’ (Like
Cotton Twines 2016). In the event a girl decides to rebel against genital
excision, the only option is to lose her virginity before her first menstrual
cycle. Rakia’s awareness of this is foreshadowed in moments of haunting
prolepsis. In a dream sequence in which she illusorily attempts to compro-
mise her virginity with Masai, her classmate, she wakes up to the manifes-
tation of her menses. The next morning, as she washes the blood-soaked
clothing in a bucket of water, she experiences yet another flashback to the
actual cutting procedure of her sister, where spectators witness the blood-
soaked cloth, razor blade, and entire excision process of Alima. Indeed,
Rakia’s decision to abscond (with the help of Masai and Babani, her grand-
mother) and avoid the initiatory excision and subsequent marriage to
Baba Aloa is chiefly influenced by memories of her traumatic past.
The conflation of memory in a past-present-future meld enables the
fictional agent to navigate her present circumstances with the hindsight of
memory of the past. The sporadic memory surge of Rakia, for instance,
produces anxieties and aversions that shape her attitudes to FGC. The past
trauma, hence, becomes ‘a mode of both inhabiting and initiating social
exchange aimed towards engaging political cultures and sensibilities’
(Nikro and Hegasy 2017, p. 11). Through the reliance on the memory of
the past, the narrative takes the audiences through the residues of Rakia’s
experience of genital excision, all the while allowing for an experiential and
subjective immersion into the world of the protagonist. Through the
opening voice-over narration and subsequent eruptions of repressed trau-
matic memory, the film offers an intersubjective mode that cues spectators
to imaginatively share in Rakia’s distress.
Djansi’s Like Cotton Twines, on the contrary, engenders intersubjectiv-

ity between the self (the viewer) and the other (fictional characters)
through the overt display of character emotions. The narrative provides
moments that enable viewers to experience the emotional distress of the
characters in a much more affective and embodied manner. The first
instance of viewer emotional distress occurs within the context of Tuigi’s
capture and circumcision. As she is seized at night for her excision and
later given as a trokosi, Tuigi makes impassioned pleas to her mother,
Ajovi, to save her, but the latter, who herself was circumcised, refuses to
help. Viewers expect Ajovi to exhibit a sense of shared victimhood, which
often attends to collective memory and identity with past trauma, by pre-
venting her daughter from undergoing the same traumatic experience.
Ajovi’s lack of compassion for Tuigi elicits spectators’ disapproval; instead
of evoking viewers’ sympathy for Ajovi, as in the case of Babani in Grass
between my Lips who intervenes for Rakia, the scene makes spectators
uneasy with Ajovi’s neglect of Tuigi.
Subsequently, Tuigi expresses disappointment in her mother’s seem-
ingly consistent unsupportiveness when she questions her: ‘Are you really
my mother? Did you really give birth to me? You never stand up for me,
not even when I was circumcised’ (Like Cotton Twines 2016). The display
of hysteria14 during this exchange, reduced to mother and daughter vent-
ing their frustration by repetitively throwing oranges at each other,
arouses, in two ways, what Kaplan terms vicarious empathy—‘response in
which the viewer is shocked to the extent of being emotionally over-
aroused’ (2011, p. 256). Firstly, the act captures the unbearableness of
their emotional distress; the psychological anxiety associated with both
latent and manifest trauma of deity servitude. The repetitive act demon-
strates the level of their hopelessness. Secondly, viewers respond affectively
to Tuigi’s emotional distress and experience frantic worry as to why, for
the second time, Ajovi could not intervene. This points to differences in
the contextual framing of excision in both films. Whereas excision in Grass
between my Lips is framed as an initiatory practice with hesitant partici-
pants, in Like Cotton Twines, it is characterised by brute force and abduc-
tion. Djansi deploys this strategy to get the viewers to judge Ajovi and
question her complicity, and that of other women who help to perpetuate
these practices in the name of tradition. It also helps heighten viewers’
abhorrence to FGC and Trokosi and arouse viewers’ pity for the conditions
of the victims, while interpolating the viewers to share in the helplessness
of the characters.
250 D.-B. P. LOTSU
Spectators are further drawn into the narrative through the mecha-
nisms of Tuigi’s involuntary recall of trauma and other visual techniques—
framing, visual composition, and editing. As the narrative unfolds and
Tuigi must atone for Yema’s crime at the shrine, Ajovi becomes contrite.
In a consolable tone, Ajovi embraces Tuigi and informs her of the immi-
nent predicament. She then entreats Tuigi to be a strong girl. This encoun-
ter is presented in a flashback: the past (the previous night’s discussion
between Tuigi and Ajovi about the former’s imminent servitude at the
shrine) and the present (Tuigi’s recall the next morning while she is the
classroom). The visual composition shows her face in a close-up, which
focuses in on the tears welling in her eyes. She occupies the foreground of
the frame, while the other pupils inhabit the background. The shot of
Tuigi’s teary, red eyes helps convey the gravity of her emotional agony and
aversion to the idea of serving at the shrine. This visual composition, once
again, evokes what Ann E. Kaplan terms vicarious trauma. Out of the
viewers’ earlier identification with Tuigi as a victim of circumstances and
subsequent depiction in states of absentmindedness, Djansi succeeds in
appealing to the audience to vicariously experience the anger and self-pity
of Tuigi’s distress. Viewers become angry at society’s complicity in such
egregious abuse of girls through circumcision and Trokosi. Thus, seeing
tears flow down Tuigi’s cheeks as she goes through life-altering moments
outside her control evokes spectators’ frustration as all attempts to save
Tuigi fail. By focusing on Tuigi’s face, while de-focusing the other pupils,
Djansi gives visual prominence to Tuigi’s trauma in a way that invites the
audience, as it were, to empathise and identify with Tuigi’s acute emotions
of despondency (see Fig. 12.1).
Moreover, in the days following the news of her impending servitude
to the gods, Tuigi’s demeanour changes from a cheerful and vivacious girl
to a pensive and lachrymal young woman: Tuigi is often submerged in a
state of perplexity and isolation at school as she bears the shame and bur-
den of her imminent slavery to the gods. The fact that Tuigi’s trauma of
being a trokosi is often beyond her capacity to share with others calls to
mind Stephen Pattison’s observation that ‘if shame becomes a constant
experience … a dominant mood or character trait,’ then the ‘deeply
shamed or shame-bound person is trapped, self-rejecting, paralysed, pas-
sive and often depressed’ (Pattison 2000, p. 7), as is the case of Tuigi and
Rakia whose inability to articulate earlier witnessed trauma, later experi-
ence an overwhelming memory eruption.
Fig. 12.1 Tuigi externalising the trauma of becoming a trokosi. Film still (Like
Cotton Twines 2016)
Positioning Viewers as Witnesses to Trauma through

Disquieting Visuals
The narrative of Like Cotton Twines further interpolates viewers in a way
that positions them as witnesses (ethical beings) to trauma rather than
spectators (mere observers or voyeurs). This changes the relation specta-
tors have with events depicted on screen because witnessing images of
trauma and catastrophe, according to Kaplan (2011), occurs with ‘a deep
and enduring identification with what the victims in the case feel’ (p. 271).
It occurs when the audience takes ‘responsibility for injustices … or actu-
ally doing something about injustices’ so as ‘to change the kind of world
where injustices, of whatever, is common’ (p. 276). To demonstrate how
witnessing functions in the context of the films, we fall once again on the
intercut scene in which Tuigi recalls, while in the classroom, her mother’s
recount of the Trokosi practice. This scene assumes a much more political
and symbolic function within the framework of witnessing. In this scene,
Djansi frames Tuigi looking slightly off-screen (see Fig. 12.1), so that she
does not directly address the viewers with her gaze or emotions. By fram-
ing Tuigi this way, Djansi symbolically makes Tuigi’s emotional distress
that of other fictional characters (Micha Brown and one of the teachers,
252 D.-B. P. LOTSU
Sarah, the first of the fictional agents to bear witness to Tuigi’s trauma)
and the audience; by extension the larger society. No longer is trauma
personal and private, but public (the scene is set in the public space of a
classroom) as it transcends the realm of the individual to the collective in
a manner that ‘the act of bearing witness … constitutes a specific form of
address to the other’ (Guerin and Hallas 2007, p. 10). In the 1 minute 23
seconds duration of the flashback scenes, 30 seconds of which Tuigi’s
involuntarily recalls the news of her impending servitude at the shrine,
Tuigi’s intense emotions remain muted, but for the tears that uncontrol-
lably roll down her cheeks. This demonstrates Caruth’s position that trau-
matic experiences ‘[are] not wholly possessed, fully grasped, or completely
remembered events’ by its survivors (Caruth 1996, p. 124). Instead,
trauma survivors embody trauma’s untold burden and victimisation, just
like Tuigi who bears the trauma of FGC, and is traumatised by both the
thought of serving as a trokosi and her mother’s failure to protect her
from it.
By introducing this mode of personal trauma narrative into mainstream
entertainment cinema, Djansi and Kaleka manage to connect individual
narratives to a large-scale socio-political project that places an ethical
demand on the larger society, as demonstrated in the collective attempts of
the fictional characters at liberating Tuigi and Rakia. As Tuigi commences
her duties at the shrine, she is prevented from continuing her education,
as are all trokosis. But, Micha Brown, to whom Tuigi recounts her trauma,
secretly tutors and prepares her for her entrance examination; a benevo-
lence which subsequently results in the termination of his volunteering
when he clashes with the school authorities. After Micha’s departure, the
Trokosi priest prevents Tuigi from sitting for the examinations and a col-
lective revolt ensues. Sarah, her fellow teachers, and students collectively
protest for Tuigi’s release to enable her to write the exams. Similarly, in
Grass between my Lips, Babani and Masai help Rakia elope on the night of
her excision. By these acts of intervention, the films and their narrative
agents open ‘up space for witnesses who did not directly observe or par-
ticipate in the traumatic event’ (Guerin and Hallas 2007, p. 12), of FGC
and Trokosi to bear witness to their havoc. As Kaplan puts it, the act of
witnessing functions as a form of mobilisation of the ‘consciousness of
large communities, [but] instead of intensifying the desire to help an indi-
vidual in front of one, witnessing leads to a broader empathic understand-
ing of the meaning of what has been done to the victims, of the politics of
trauma being possible’ (2011, p. 276). The collective intervention of
these fictional agents equates them to political activists who acted against
the injustices of FGC and Trokosi in the 1990s while pointing to such
activism as one of the ways by which society can reform and eradicate such
practices. By juxtaposing the traumatic past of the characters with their
present predicament and projecting into the future by way of a consoli-
dated activism, Djansi and Kaleka seem interested in dismantling the deep-
seated socio-cultural beliefs of Ghanaians about FGC and Trokosi. Their
decision to depict the conditions of the victims is therefore not simply to
shock viewers but to initiate a deeper interrogation of the realities of FGC
and Trokosi and create awareness in society.
Though the failure of Micha Brown and the Canadian aid worker,
Allison Dean, to rescue Tuigi exudes what Kaplan terms empty empathy,
owing to their outsider/Western ‘arrogant perception’ which creates a
false identification (imagining an experience of pain that they have no
chance of ever experiencing), and a radical disidentification given the
Othering of the victims of FGC and Trokosi, I argue the opposite. Thus,
the films’ intersubjective interpolation of viewers to the condition of the
victims dismantles the challenge of Othering as raised by Frye (1983) and
James & Robertson (2002). Because, when we see the victims through an
empathetic lens, we ‘cross boundaries of class, nationality, race, and gen-
der’ (Nussbaum 1996, p. 51) to see the strange as familiar and that which
is familiar as strange. Empathy then becomes an essential ingredient to
ethical and intercultural understanding as we connect our humanity to
others’ irrespective of our cultural differences.
Aside from drawing on personal traumatic memory of the fictional
agents, Leila Djansi and Amardeep Kaleka further deploy disquieting visu-
als that heighten viewers’ empathy to the distress of the victims. The exci-
sion implements (razor blade and knife), which occupy visually symbolic
positions in both films, are presented with maximum aesthetic value that
evokes horror, cruelty, anguish, and pain often inherent in FGC (see
Fig. 12.2). The imagery of a razor blade is appropriated as a purposeful
and barbaric weapon that causes physical and emotional trauma to its vic-
tims. Psychologically, the razor blade symbolises the traumatic memories
of past sufferings. Rakia, for instance, experiences explosive memory of the
blood-stained razor blade used in the excision of her deceased sister.
Rakia’s haunted dreams, fears, and anxieties about FGC and her subse-
quent decision not to undergo the procedure emanate from her experi-
ence of this weapon on her deceased sister. The razor blade leaves enduring
psycho-emotional scars that traumatise its victims and observers of
the trauma.
254 D.-B. P. LOTSU
Fig. 12.2 The razor blade, framed in a close shot to evoke empathic distress.
Film still (Grass between my Lips 2008)
The semiotics of the razor blade is important in the conceptualisation

of FGC as mutilation. Unlike the professionalised and medicalised con-
notations of the scalpel used for corrective FGC, the razor blade denotes
crudeness, danger, and unsafeness for two reasons. First, a razor blade’s
lack of a safety handle limits the proximity between its user and victim
thereby narrowing the field of view during excision and increasing the
chances of irreparable damages to the vaginal area of the circumcised.
Secondly, using a razor blade exposes both the circumciser and the cir-
cumcised to risks of contracting infections. Like Alima, Tuigi undergoes
FGC at puberty, but with a knife sterilised by the spittle of the circumciser,
which, though it might look a bit exaggerated, does make the razor knife
connotatively point to the abject condition of the circumcised. Such visual
representations are shocking and distressing to the viewers in a way that
relates to Kaplan’s vicarious trauma (2011, p. 270). Not only are the
images emotionally over-arousing, but the embodied abjection they evoke
also provides ‘an affective basis for ethical dealing with others’ (Gibbs
2010, p. 202). The successive alternation of shots from the team of cir-
cumcisers, the anguished face and other body parts of the victims, the
circumcision instrument, and concoctions in calabashes15 heighten view-
ers’ distress and increase viewers’ feelings of hopelessness and despair at
the victims’ traumatic experiences.
Equally, the excision scenes (in close-up shots) reveal the full anguish
and horrendous physical and emotional injuries exacted on the victims.
For instance, as the viewers’ gaze travels with the camera as it lingers on
the motionless and haemorrhaging body of Tuigi and settles on her blood-
soaked thighs (see Fig. 12.3), viewers are not positioned as voyeurs to the
image of excision but as witnesses who are vicariously traumatised by the
goriness of the visual and the sheer inhumanity of the act. The graphic
depiction of the blood-stained cloth and razor blade in Grass between my
Lips and the razor knife, blood-soaked clothes and thighs of Tuigi in Like
Cotton Twines provoke the sensibilities of viewers, to the point of evoking
anger in viewers to the trauma created by these practices.
In this way, Kaleka and Djansi’s weaponised razor blade and knife,
close-up shots of blood, anguished countenances, and teary eyes do not
only problematise and capture the generality of the practice of FGC, but
they also barbarise and present African cultures as sites of trauma and ata-
vistic acts.
Fig. 12.3 The motionless body of Tuigi after the procedure. Film still (Like
Cotton Twines 2016)
256 D.-B. P. LOTSU
Conclusion
The power of these films to evoke the emotions of spectators lies in their
contemporary re-creation of the traumatic harshness of FGC and the
Trokosi practice. The narrative content and aesthetic medium provide dif-
ferent moments that corporeally engage viewers’ empathy to the distress
of the victims and intersubjectively place an ethical burden on the viewers.
The disquietude and abjection of the images of excision, distress of deity-
servitude, and emotional incontinence of the characters engender vicari-
ous distress in the viewers. This produces a moral understanding and
self-reflexivity that enables viewers’ engagement with the victims’ suffer-
ing. The filmmakers connect viewers in a mind-body empathetic meld to
the violence, trauma, and emotions of the characters. The empathy evoked
then plays an important role in breaking down viewers’ stereotypes and
inclinations to Othering, by allowing viewers to see the suffering of others
as universal human phenomena. By so doing, the films underscore the
potential of images and narratives of FGC and Trokosi to elicit vicarious
trauma and other embodied emotions in the audience when re-enacted
on screen.
Also, because these practices are entrenched in the ethos of cultural
practices, it has become important for the filmmakers to go beyond simply
representing the traumatic experiences, as is done in documentaries, to
imbue the fictional characters with traits that reflect their common human-
ity to help circumvent the habituation of the practices in a way that impacts
on the attitudes and perceptions of viewers. More so, by undertaking the
telling of these narratives, Leila Djansi (2016) and Amardeep Kaleka
(2008) demonstrate that violence, trauma, and their resultant effects do
not only reside in the usage of overt vigorous force but are contained in
cultural practices that point to universal human suffering which can only
be overcome if we see victims as ourselves, and not as Others.
Notes
1. In this article, I adopt the term female genital cutting or excision, a much
more neutral, non-partisan, and ideologically decoloured variant, for the
ritual practice of female genital removal/operation instead of the
semantically deceptive variant—circumcision—or the pejorative option—
mutilation. I avoided the notion of ‘circumcision’ for two reasons.
Pragmatically, the mechanics of female genital cutting is no way compara-
ble to the male counterpart where only the foreskin is removed. Also,
within the context of the films, the Akan and Ewe variants, ‘twa’ and ‘tsò’
respectively, used by the narrative agents denote ‘cutting’ instead of muti-

lation or circumcision. I later address, albeit briefly, some of the challenges
and dangers with these political variants.
2. FGC is also practised in some ethnic groups in the Middle East and Asia.
However, it is rather prevalent on the African continent for various ethnic,
religious, and cultural reasons, with Somalia, Djibouti, Guinea, Egypt,
Eritrea, Mali, Sudan, and Sierra Leone being the most endemic. Isolated
cases are also reported in Europe, Australia, and North America, particu-
larly among migrants from countries where the practice is still prevalent.
See UNICEF (2016).
3. Depending on the extent of tissue removal, the WHO has identified four
types: clitoridectomy, excision, infibulation, and other. According to the
WHO, of all these types of circumcision, infibulation—the removal of part
or all of the external genitalia and stitching or narrowing of the vaginal
opening—is the most dangerous.
4. In a recent BBC News coverage, Brigitte Sossou Perenyi, a former trokosi
whose freedom was paid for by an American philanthropist, returned to
Ghana to confront her parents and seek understanding into the century-
long tradition, and why she was given out in atonement for a crime she did
not commit; see BBC (2018).
5. The practice is known by different names across the West African coast. In
Ghana, variations such as Trokosi, Woryokwe, Troxorvi, or Fiashidi exist.
Among the Fons of Benin and Togo, for instance, the practice is referred
to as Voodoosi or Vudusi. Ontological perspectives on the practice are con-
tained in Botchway (2008). In the context of this chapter, Trokosi refers to
the practice of atonement with virgin girls, while trokosi refers to a person
offered to a shrine in atonement for offences committed by her family.
6. The term ‘fetish priest’, though derogatory, refers to revered traditional
diviners who perform rituals with money, liquor, animals, and in some
places, human slaves—trokosis. The fetish priests, the leaders of the Trokosi
system, are considered the mediators between the living (in some cases the
dead) and the gods; a virtue by which their pronouncements are consid-
ered unquestionable by the living.
7. These girls are practically raped under the guise of religious and spiritual
symbolism. In the event of conception, the child fathered by a priest is
subject to the discretionary use of the priest—often exploited sexually and
physically, see Wiking (2009).
8. Aside international conventions, Ghana’s 1992 Constitution and other
statutory provisions like the 1998 amendment to the Criminal Code 1960
(Act 29), the criminalisation of other harmful cultural practices—child
betrothal and widowhood rites (1998), female genital mutilation (FGM)
(1995), child abuse (1998)—and the Domestic Violence Act, 2007, Act
732 protect against gender-based violence.
258 D.-B. P. LOTSU
9. Recent documentaries like The Cut: Exploring FGM (2018), Cut: Exposing
FGM Worldwide (2017), and Trokosi (2014), treat FGM and Trokosi as
developmental issues, often without local specificity. By abjectifying these
practices, they also paradoxically abjectify the women who have undergone
such procedures and, again, reify them as always already mutilated, which
as well implies a ‘mutilated’ subjectivity or agency. Leila Djansi’s Like
Cotton Twines (2016), for instance, falls victim to some of these ideological
accusations. However, since this is not the focus of this chapter, I would
reserve such for later exploration.
10. Stanlie M. James and Claire Robertson (2002) explore these debates in
their edited volume Genital cutting and transnational sisterhood: Disputing
US polemics, and how the Western feminist representations often deny
agency to African women, ignore their role in cultural institutions repro-
duced in part through FGC, and refuse to acknowledge the necessary lead-
ership role they can play in any debate, discussion, or campaign as regards
the possible transformation or elimination of the practice.
11. Grass Between My Lips is a Master of Arts Thesis film written and produced
by the Ghanaian-American filmmaker Leila Djansi but directed by
Amardeep Kaleka for the Film and Television Department, Savannah
College of Arts and Design (2008). Available at <https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=FSMPo1MEgoA>.
12. This is one of Djansi’s overtly political films. Its critical exploration of cul-
turally contestable issues positions her as political filmmaker. Filmed in the
Volta Region of Ghana, the home of the Trokosi practice, the film was
screened in the regional capital, Ho, after its theatrical release.
13. Although there are significant variations in the theorisation of spectatorial
affective engagement with fictional characters and the modalities of its evo-
cation, scholars recognise the relationship between film, spectators, and
context to modulate pro-social behaviour.
14. Hysteria, in this context, refers to the physical manifestations (anguish,
helplessness, frustration) of unconfronted traumatic memory of genital
cutting (Freud and Breuer 1895).
15. Calabashes, made from the fruits of the white-flowered gourd or what is
popularly known as long melon or Tasmanian bean, are receptacles or
utensils typical of many West African households.
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CHAPTER 13
Screen Memories in True Crime

Documentary: Trauma, Bodies, and Places
in The Keepers (2017) and Casting JonBenet
(2017)
Bonnie Evans
Introduction
In 2017, in the wake of the recent wave of popularity surrounding true
crime narratives, two true crime documentaries were released on Netflix,
each of which examined the reverberations through time of the unsolved
murder of a long-dead female victim: The Keepers (White 2017) and
Casting JonBenet (Green 2017). However, the ways in which each docu-
mentary constructs these lingering reverberations of trauma differs sub-
stantially, as seen from the opening scenes of each documentary. The first
of these, The Keepers, is a seven-part documentary series, directed by Ryan
White, which investigates the 1969 murder of Sister Cathy Cesnik, a nun
who taught at Archbishop Keough High School in Baltimore, Maryland.
B. Evans (*)
e-mail: bonnie.evans@uq.net.au

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_13
264 B. EVANS
It opens on an interview with investigative journalist Tom Nugent in his

cluttered, dimly lit attic, where he has stored all his files relating to his
1990s investigation into the murder. He is filmed walking amongst over-
flowing boxes, rifling through them, showing the camera his newspaper
articles covering the case. Towards the end of the interview he notes that
47 years after the murder, the case remains unsolved, ‘and we all go on day
after day, and the boil continues to swell, and the people who were injured
most deeply continue to struggle and suffer, and the public continues to
ask “what happened?”’. He continues: ‘But these clues to what it was lin-
ger on in a place like this attic. Those objects hold that energy and they
twist and turn you in the wind, and you start asking what was–? What is
the past? What was it?’ Nugent’s words bring forth the sense that material
places, things, and people hold traces of past events; that trauma lingers
and reaches from the past into the present.
The second true crime documentary, Casting JonBenet, a feature docu-
mentary which takes as its subject the notorious 1996 murder of American
child beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey, was released in the same year, but
opens remarkably differently. The first shot of the documentary is a static
line of chairs facing the camera, up against a non-descript plywood wall—a
placeless place, lacking all specificity. A little girl in a pageant costume,
dressed to mimic JonBenét Ramsey, runs forward into shot, and takes a
seat, followed by another, and another, until eight girls wearing the same
costume sit together on the chairs, talking to one another. The next shot
is of one of the girls walking up to a microphone, and still dressed as
JonBenét Ramsey, she asks the off-screen filmmakers, chillingly, ‘Do you
know who killed JonBenét Ramsey?’ Unlike the corporeal, material speci-
ficity of body and place that characterises The Keepers, Casting JonBenet, in
immediately introducing a blank set, and multiple actors playing the same
role—the real, and deceased, JonBenét Ramsey—foregrounds a far more
unstable relationship between place, body, and memory. These moments
reveal both the documentaries’ mutual interest in traumatic events, but
also their different treatment of both the representation of these events as
present in memory, and as related to place.
In this chapter, I explore the relationship between trauma, bodies, and
places in the true crime documentaries The Keepers and Casting JonBenet,
through analysing moments of memory on screen where the traumatic
past is remembered, resurfaces, or is reconstructed. I have used the term
‘screen memory’ in the title of this chapter primarily to refer to memory
as represented or enacted on cinematic or televisual screens, in a film and
13 SCREEN MEMORIES IN TRUE CRIME DOCUMENTARY: TRAUMA, BODIES… 265
television studies context (such as in Berry and Sawada 2016). However,

as film scholar Dijana Jelača (2016) notes, the term ‘screen’ has multiple
meanings, several of which are relevant to the discussion of memory and
trauma. Jelača (2016, p. 12) writes that her use of the term ‘dislocated
screen memory’ borrows from Freud’s notion of ‘screen memory’, which
is a memory that stands in for a suppressed memory, where certain memo-
ries act ‘as screens for unwanted, more troubling, or complicated recollec-
tions’ and may have been ‘altered by the mind in order to mediate or
accommodate some aspects of more troubling, repressed memories’.
However, these do not function only to conceal. In his 2009 book Michael
Rothberg (p. 3) argues that, rather than conceptualising memory as com-
peting for attention with other memories, we should consider it multidi-
rectional, ‘as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and
borrowing; as productive and not privative’. Rothberg (2009, p. 12) con-
siders Freud’s notion of screen memory to function multidirectionally,
and points out that ‘the displacement that takes place in screen memory
(indeed, in all memory) functions as much to open up lines of communi-
cation with the past as to close them off’. Whilst Rothberg (2009) con-
ceptualises screen memory as individual, in contrast to his focus on
multidirectional collective memory, a 2013 special issue of the International
Journal of Politics, Culture and Society (Freeman et al. 2013, p. 1) argues
that the concept of screen memory may also be mobilised in collective
terms, ‘to both conceptualize and trouble contemporary notions of social
memory’. Furthermore, Freud’s notion of screen memory may have par-
ticular relevance to cinema, and as Jelača (2016, p. 13), goes on to say:
We might deploy Freud’s screen memory as an analytic that may illuminate

the relationship between the cinematic screen and traumatic memory, or,
rather, illuminate something about the dynamics of cinematic memories as
both revealing and concealing, authentic and inauthentic at the same time.
Here Jelača points to the potential use of the term ‘screen memory’ to
describe how memories, as represented on screens, may also function as
screens, both hiding and indicating traumatic memory. My use of the term
throughout this chapter seeks to foreground this relationship between
traumatic memory, both individual and collective, and the cinematic
screen, particularly their shared, multidirectional capacity to both conceal
and reveal the past.
266 B. EVANS
In both documentaries, one inciting traumatic event reveals other, hid-

den traumas in the lives of those around it, the effects of which linger in
bodies and places. Cathy Caruth (1996, p. 4) writes that ‘trauma is not
locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but
rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was pre-
cisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later
on’. In his phenomenological discussion of place and trauma, Dylan Trigg
(2012, p. 22) similarly uses the language of haunting, arguing that the
past emerges in the present through the trauma site, or as he describes it,
the ‘ruin’, which houses ‘what is absent: in effect, a non-memory’ and that
‘the ruins occupy the spectral trace of an event left behind, serving to tes-
tify to the past through a logic of voids, disruptions, and hauntings’. In
her chapter of this book, Annie Pohlman also invokes the notion of haunt-
ing to describe trauma sites, specifically the mass graves of those murdered
in Indonesia’s anti-Communist purges; her interview subjects believe that
the sites are haunted by the spirits of those buried there. My use of the
term here, in line with Trigg’s, is more metaphorical, but similarly invokes
a conjunction of bodily feeling and memory, the sense of trauma’s physical
presence in places. In this chapter, I explore the ghostly presence of trauma
in these documentaries, arguing that their investigation of traumatised
bodies and places results in the materialisation of traumatic memory as an
important screen presence in recent true crime documentary.
Contemporary True Crime Documentary

and the Scene of the Crime
The true crime documentary has recently experienced a burst of main-

stream popularity amongst Anglo-Western audiences, beginning with The
Staircase (de Lestrade 2004) and reaching cultural prominence with
widely seen American examples such as The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of
Robert Durst (Jarecki 2015) and Making a Murderer (Ricciardi and
Demos 2015). These documentaries, and contemporary true crime narra-
tives generally, represent a point where trauma discourses and contempo-
rary popular culture intersect. True crime has been described by Jean
Murley (2008, p. 2), not as a genre, but instead as ‘a multifaceted, multi-
genre aesthetic formulation, a poetics of murder narration’, melding the
conventions of many genres, such as documentary, crime fiction, thriller,
horror, and trauma cinema. However, in 2016, documentary scholar
Stella Bruzzi (2016, p. 250) asserted that contemporary true crime texts,
such as documentaries and podcasts, whilst diverse in their styles and top-
ics, loosely constitute a new genre in that they ‘share common concerns
around the law and how it can be represented, the truth, evidence and
miscarriages of justice’. In dealing with murders and other crimes, these
documentaries are inherently concerned with traumatic events, and the
memories of those events. Cultural theorist Mark Seltzer (2007, p. 35)
locates the appeal of true crime in what he terms ‘wound culture’, which
he defines as ‘the public spectacle of torn and private bodies and torn and
private persons,’ where distinctions between private and public are radi-
cally eroded. Drawing on Seltzer’s idea of ‘wound culture’, Anita Biressi
(2004, p. 405) argues that in attempting to represent the unrepresent-
able—trauma, memory, and fear—true crime documentary ‘renders pri-
vate trauma knowable via public narratives’. But this revelation is not done
in the realm of the present; the true crime documentary always refers
backwards, to the event and to memories of it. These documentaries, to
use Annette Kuhn’s term, seem to engage in a type of memory work.
Kuhn (2002, p. 4) states that, although the past is gone, it is not entirely
lost to us, and ‘the past is like the scene of a crime: if the deed itself is
irrevocable, its traces may still remain’.
In true crime texts, the traces of the past are often connected to the
notion of place. In relation to this, Seltzer (2007, p. 3) writes that ‘true
crime is premised on an inventory of the aftermath and a return to the
scene of the crime’, suggesting that place, the ‘scene of the crime’, is cen-
tral to the project of true crime. Similarly, Stella Bruzzi (2016, p. 253)
remarks that within the contemporary true crime documentary genre,
there is a persistent theme that ‘returning to the site where an event, in
particular a traumatic event, occurred will bring both subjects and audi-
ences closer to understanding what “really happened”’. Bruzzi’s state-
ment demonstrates the depth of linkages in these documentaries between
bodies, places, and memory in explorations of traumatic events, but also
reveals the investigative role of these explorations—the hope that the past
can be both known and resolved. However, this does not seem to be
entirely the case in The Keepers and Casting JonBenet; though these docu-
mentaries both may investigate their central crimes, their explorations of
traumatic memory exceed the evidential value of the recollections, incor-
porating elements that give these screen representations of memory an
experiential quality.
268 B. EVANS
Caruth (1996, p. 4) states of trauma that it ‘is always the story of a
wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality
or truth that is not otherwise available’. In the following discussion, I look
at the different ways that these two true crime documentaries address
spectators in screening the story of the wound, engaging with, as Trigg
describes, a logic of voids, disruptions, and hauntings. This chapter will
explore each documentary in turn, drawing out the complex interrelations
and oppositions in their treatment of the intersection between trauma,
memory, and place.
The Keepers and Trauma’s Ghostly Materiality

The Keepers, in its investigation of the 1969 murder of Sister Cathy Cesnik
in Baltimore, explores specific, meaningful places, and their connections
with bodies, in order to reveal the traumatic events surrounding the mur-
der and the memories that linger in the minds of those involved. These
places range from the personal to the institutional—from the forest, to the
grave, to the school, to the houses, to the streets of Baltimore city itself—
and are shown in contemporary footage and reconstructed in re-
enactments. The documentary follows a number of investigator figures,
including the amateur sleuth duo of Cesnik’s former students, Gemma
Hoskins and Abbie Schaub, and freelance investigative journalist Tom
Nugent, as they explain the case and the evidence and investigate Cesnik’s
murder. The documentary reveals not simply information relating to
Cesnik’s murder but also the existence of several other, related, traumatic
events. This includes a possible connection between Cesnik’s murder and
the murder of another woman in the area around the same time, Joyce
Malecki. Importantly, it also explores the possibility that Cesnik’s murder
was related to sexual abuse being perpetrated against the students at
Archbishop Keough High School, the all-girls Catholic school she taught
at, by Catholic priests Father Joseph Maskell and Father Neil Magnus.
The documentary interviews several women who allege that they were
abused by Father Maskell and other priests at the school. Among them,
the most prominent interviewees include Jean Wehner and Teresa
Lancaster, the two formerly anonymous plaintiffs (Jane Doe and Jane Roe,
respectively) in an unsuccessful 1990s lawsuit against the Baltimore
Catholic Church, in which they alleged that Maskell had abused them.
Several students attest to Cesnik’s likely knowledge of the abuse, and the
documentary suggests she was killed as a result of her attempts to
intervene. Wehner’s testimony of recovered memory is particularly key in

the documentary, in that she claims that as a teenager she was led to
Cesnik’s body and threatened with a similar fate should she reveal the
abuse she was suffering. These traumatic memories, as revealed in inter-
view, are juxtaposed in the documentary against material alleging a culture
of permissiveness surrounding sexual abuse in the Baltimore Catholic
Church. Additionally, the film explores statutes of limitations in the legal
system for historical sexual abuse. These moments thus serve to reveal
both personal suffering and systemic problems in the criminal justice sys-
tem and in the Catholic Church.
Meaningful sites have special significance in the documentary and are
visited by the camera (without an on-screen figure), by investigative fig-
ures such as Hoskins and Schaub, or by witnesses and interviewees, who
are filmed walking through and physically inhabiting these important
places. One such instance involves Gemma Hoskins, who meets with
James Scannell, a retired police officer who attended the scene where
Cesnik’s body was found. Scannell leads Hoskins, amateur investigator
Alan Horn, and the camera crew to the isolated, wooded site where
Cesnik’s body was found, and the documentary contrasts archival photo-
graphs of the crime scene with the contemporary footage—in both, it is
snowing. A long overhead shot of the scene begins the sequence, and
Scannell leads them to where the body was found; his descriptions of the
day he found the body are supported by crime scene photography. The
absence of Cesnik’s body at the site—and its deliberately blurred presence
in the crime scene photography shown in the documentary—conceals the
site’s traumatic history whilst simultaneously evoking it. This empty space
functions, to use Freud’s term, somewhat as a ‘screen’, in that it both
conceals and indicates traumatic memory. Patricia Violi (2012, p. 37),
writing about memorial museums, states that ‘trauma sites exist factually
as material testimonies of the violence and horror that took place there’,
and that visitors experience the indexicality of these places as ‘traces of the
past, imprints of what actually happened there’ (Violi 2012, p. 39). The
documentary gives spectators access to this experience, showing Hoskins’
reaction to the site but also, in lingering shots of the landscape, construct-
ing viewer as both visitor and witness. Similarly, the documentary follows
Don Malecki—the brother of another woman who was killed around the
same time, Joyce Malecki—to the side of the road, by the forest where
Malecki’s body was found. As Pat Malecki, another brother, describes
identifying her body at the crime scene, the camera ventures into the
270 B. EVANS
forest, pulling close to the lush greenery of the foliage, advancing on the
banks of the river where her body was found. The documentary cuts
between Pat, archival photography of Joyce when she was alive, crime
scene photography, and the present-day forest as he describes the sight of
her face that day as the only memory that he has of her, that ‘it never ever
goes away’, that it is ‘just like it was yesterday’. Biressi (2004, p. 407)
notes that, in true crime documentaries, repeated shots of the landscape
‘constitute a form of psychic topography’ and ‘landscape becomes imbued
with meaning—in this case memorials for traumatic events’. In The Keepers,
these lingering shots of the forest similarly evoke the traumatic past.
On the one hand, these sequences aid the explanatory aim of the docu-
mentary in conveying spatial information to spectators. However, this
does not account for all of the footage included in the documentary;
Hoskins mentions that it was meaningful for her to go to the site where
Cesnik’s body was found, and the lingering shots of place details give no
relevant evidential information. What emerges from these moments is a
sense of experience. Violi (2012, p. 39) writes that when people visit
memorial museums constructed on the actual location of historical trauma:
Visitors know they are in the very place where terrible events occurred, and
this knowledge contributes to a complex, multifaceted perception of it.
Visitors not only see something of this terrible past, they also imagine that
which cannot be seen.
If we replace the word ‘visitor’ in her account with something like

‘spectator’ or ‘viewer’, this spectral description becomes applicable to the
spectatorial experience of viewing footage of trauma sites, where specta-
tors are given to imagine how these places, from their appearance on
screen, would feel if they were also visiting the site, and to imagine the
spectral presence of trauma that resides in these places. Furthermore, the
materiality of the images brings a sense of the physical presence of these
places to the screen. It forcefully insists on the reality of the image, and
thus the reality of past trauma that lingers in the contemporary world,
which these empty spaces simultaneously erase and signify.
The documentary also uses interviews prominently, where participants
share information, but also memories and personal experiences. Although
they do not physically visit sites of trauma, the interview presents testi-
mony of trauma in new places that come to enable trauma’s fragmented,
incomplete expression. They materialise trauma by linking it indexically to
material bodies and places, which, as documentary scholar Bill Nichols

(1994, p. 4) notes, ‘authenticates testimony now about what happened
then’. The Keepers includes interviews with law enforcement, and family
and friends of Cesnik and Malecki, but the most prominent interviews are
those with former students of Archbishop Keough High School, where
Cesnik taught English. Many describe, graphically, the abuse that they
allege that Father Maskell and others perpetrated against them while they
were students at the school in the 1960s and 1970s. Of all the victims of
abuse interviewed in the documentary, the most significant and lengthy
interviews are those with Jean Wehner, the woman who claims that she
was led to Cesnik’s dead body as a teenager, and who has previously been
known to the public only as ‘Jane Doe’. The second episode of the docu-
mentary is primarily composed of interviews with Wehner and the episode
opens with the revelation of her identity, using close-up shots of body and
place to establish an intimate visual language throughout the segment.
The sequence begins with close-ups of a tree outside a house, swaying in
the wind, followed by a woman’s hands, arms, and body (but not her
face), which are seen making tea, boiling a kettle on the stove top, and
rummaging in the kitchen cabinet. The rhythms of everyday life, of the
home, are filmed in close-up which temporarily preserves the woman’s
anonymity, but also creates intimacy given their location in the home, a
private place. The doorbell rings, and investigative journalist Tom Nugent
arrives at the home to interview her. When the woman goes to answer the
door, we see the kitchen and the dining table where they will later sit.
These moments set the scene for the coming interview, but also situate
spectators as part of this homely scene, as materially imbricated within the
intimate spaces of her home. Nugent begins interviewing the woman in
her home, and during the conversation her identity is revealed, showing
her face and naming her as Jean Wehner. Before the revelation of her iden-
tity, however, the camera lingers on the woman’s hands clutching each
other on the table, wrinkled with age, cutting to an extreme close-up of
the woman’s eyes and nose, and then back to her hands.
These moments establish an intimate visual style, with focus on both
place and body, body-in-place, that continue throughout Wehner’s many
interviews, and in interviews with others who experienced sexual abuse at
the school such as Teresa Lancaster (the plaintiff ‘Jane Roe’ in the law-
suit). Tanya Horeck (2007, p. 144) notes that in the Nick Broomfield
documentary Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003), extreme
close-ups of Wuornos are presented in order to provide evidence of her
272 B. EVANS
monstrosity, but also are offered as ‘indicators of traumatic experience’.

Close-ups of Wehner similarly offer the face and its expressions, and the
voice of the interviewee, as bodily evidence of trauma. They magnify the
intimacy of testimony, allowing audiences to, as Horeck (2007, p. 144)
states of the close-ups of Wuornos’s face in interviews, read ‘her face as a
“text”’. But beyond evidence, these images also embody ‘haptic visuality’,
a phrase Laura U. Marks (2000, p. xi) coins to describe a visual
style that foregrounds that ‘vision itself can be tactile, as though one were
touching a film with one’s eyes’. Marks (2000, p. 130) writes that ‘senses
that are closer to the body, like the sense of touch, are capable of storing
powerful memories that are lost to the visual’, and Wehner’s testimony of
bodily trauma and recovered memory seems to reflect these notions that
bodily memory may surpass a visual memory. The camera work expresses
this idea in the use of close-up shots of hands, glasses, and faces, which
fragment the body but also invite an embodied position of spectatorship,
a tactile response.
Janet Walker (2005, p. 19) characterises trauma cinema as films which
deal with ‘traumatic events in a nonrealist mode characterised by distur-
bance and fragmentation of the film’s narrative and stylistic regimes’, in
opposition to Hollywood realist films. Walker (2005, p. 190), argues that,
rather than being satisfied with straightforward documentary representa-
tion, or concluding that the traumatic past is unrepresentable, trauma cin-
ema instead ‘conveys the fantasy elements of memory and the
historiographic frailty of physical properties through an aesthetic that is
fragmentary, sensory and abstract’. Walker’s aesthetic characteristics of
trauma cinema—fragmentation, disruption, and self-reflexivity—echo the
fractured and uncertain quality of trauma memories. The Keepers focuses
these aesthetic techniques of fracture on the body and the home, through
the use of camera work that both segments the body and draws tactile
attention to its parts and their actions, which seem to affirm the veracity of
the spoken testimony. This testimony can thus be theorised as not only
verbal, but bodily, revealing the repressed past and the lingering effects of
trauma as a kind of bodily haunting. These intimate revelations are enabled
by the intimacy of Wehner’s and other victims’ homes as interview sites,
which, in their humble everydayness both renders their testimonies shock-
ing and attests to their authenticity. Wehner’s testimony given in her home
evokes for spectators a sense of the spectral presence of the trauma that
remains, decades after the events.
This kind of relationship to the past, the attempt to make subjective

place memory a material presence, is mirrored by the documentary’s use
of re-enactment sequences. Re-enactment sequences in The Keepers
entirely lack narrative structure or dialogue, and are stylised in black and
white, matching the black and white photography and video footage of
the school students shown throughout the documentary, the colouring
creating a visual connection between the reconstruction and the past cap-
tured in the photography. The school environment is restaged in the
scenes of empty corridors (with the audio of a bustling school hallway
played over top), or in an approximation of Father Maskell’s office. Close-
ups of objects in the space are similar to those within the interview spaces,
and given that people are missing from the scenes, they are seemingly
designed to evoke a bodily feeling and aesthetic experience of place, whilst
drawing attention to the elusive past captured in the images.
Michael Mayerfeld Bell gives a useful account of the phenomenology of
place using the metaphor of ghosts, the sense of a haunting, in order to
describe the material, emotional, and bodily experience of places. Bell
(1997, p. 813) writes that ‘ghosts—that is, the sense of the presence of those
who are not physically there—are a ubiquitous aspect of the phenomenol-
ogy of place’. These shots of Maskell’s office reconstructed—close-ups of
a pair of glasses, for instance—seem to evoke not simply the look of a
place, but its felt quality, the ghostliness of past presences, and in this case,
of the traumatic events that occurred. Mark’s notion of haptic visuality
seems also to animate this imagery, the experiential sense of place empha-
sised by this visual language of tactility. Such re-enactments have an affec-
tive function, as Nichols (2008, p. 88) discusses, in that they ‘vivify the
sense of lived experience’ in the events discussed, making ‘what it feels like
to occupy a certain situation, to perform a certain action, to adopt a par-
ticular perspective visible and more vivid’. These re-enactment sequences
make it possible to feel into the events and places; to imagine the physical,
bodily sensations involved, the sensory and emotional experiences.
Additionally, many re-enactments in The Keepers include people, espe-
cially those which accompany the testimony of trauma in interviews, such
that audio of trauma testimony overlays the re-enactments; the people in
the re-enactments remain, always, silent, and their faces are obscured. The
re-enactments are impressionistic and fragmentary, perhaps because the
detailed re-enactment of sexual abuse of young girls would be confronting
and ethically fraught, but additionally, this has the effect of mimicking
traumatic memory. Rather than faithfully re-enacting events, these
274 B. EVANS
re-enactments seek to resurrect the past places, feelings, and bodies in

their re-enactment of memory. As mentioned, the actors do not speak or
show their faces, and the effect of these absences is that viewers are able to
insert with their imagination the correct faces, which have become familiar
in the documentary through its use of interview and family photography.
The most prominent presence in the re-enactments is Wehner, who is
played by a teenage girl, around the age she would have been in the events
discussed, who wears a school uniform and has the style of long straight
hair that spectators have already seen in school photography of Wehner.
The re-enactments feature flashes of Wehner walking through a corridor,
or opening a door, or entering a church; these small moments may or may
not link exactly with the oral testimony overlaid onto the segment. These
re-enactments also seem to function similarly to Freud’s ‘screen memory’,
in presenting small snippets of action surrounding the traumatic event, in
place of the traumatic event, and thus screening off visual confirmation of
the disturbing testimony.
Wehner’s prominent presence in the re-enactments, alongside their use
of close-ups, indicates that these re-enactments do not simply represent
what happened or provide a vivification of a plausible series of events.
Instead, they materialise recollections of interviewees, subjective memory,
and indicate this through the use of greyscale, suggesting pastness but also
their status as traumatic memory. This goes some way towards accounting
for the style of the re-enactments, in that traumatic memory is often
unstable and incomplete (Walker 2005, p. 4). Walker (2005, p. 59) writes
that in films which depict incest trauma, the heroine’s memories are ‘por-
trayed using editorial fragmentation […] and general ambiguity that char-
acterises traumatic memory images’. Re-enactments in The Keepers
similarly create ambiguity, both in their content—for instance, Wehner’s
inability to remember what Brother Bob, another abusive priest she
believes sexually assaulted her, looked like is reflected in the little visual
detail he receives in the re-enactments—but also in their style. The frag-
mented, incomplete, repetitive re-enactments attempt in this way to recre-
ate experiential memories of past times, events, and places. The Keepers, in
contemporary footage and in these re-enactment sequences, suggests the
significance of specific, material places to traumatic memory, and in doing
so, brings traumatic memory to the screen.
Place, Trauma, and Public Memory

in Casting JonBenet
Like The Keepers, Casting JonBenet is similarly about a single murder,

which leads to the revelation of a wider net of trauma. Stylistically, though,
the documentary radically reorganises the formula of the contemporary
true crime documentary as demonstrated by The Keepers. Casting JonBenet
documents the process of casting actors for re-enactments of various
scenes from the JonBenét Ramsey murder case. The infamous case con-
cerns the unsolved murder of six-year-old girl JonBenét Ramsey, of
Boulder, Colorado, on 26 January 1996. After her mother, Patsy Ramsey,
reported JonBenét missing to the police on the morning of 26 January,
JonBenét’s body was found by her father, John Ramsey, in the basement
of the family home. JonBenét had a head injury and had been strangled.
Over the years, aspects of the case have gained significant notoriety, includ-
ing the existence of an unusual ransom note, and JonBenét’s participation
in child beauty pageants. The case was covered extensively by the media,
throwing the Ramsey family, who have maintained their innocence, under
public suspicion for involvement in her murder. In Casting JonBenet, the
actors, who are all from Boulder, Colorado, are interviewed during the
audition process. They reveal their thoughts on the case, their beliefs as to
the guilt or innocence of prominent figures in the Ramsey case, such as
John and Patsy Ramsey, and the ways in which the case interweaves with
their own lives and traumatic experiences. The documentary also presents
several re-enactments of key moments in the case, using a variety of differ-
ent actors cast in each role. As the details of the case are well known to an
American audience, and the case continues to maintain a high profile in
Western media, Casting JonBenet spends little time on overt exposition,
weaving any explanation of the case within the interviews and re-
enactments. This gives the documentary space to explore not simply the
details of the case, but instead, to delve into the way the case has puzzled
and emotionally affected the American public.
The unique premise of the documentary creates the context for Casting
JonBenet’s reflexive treatment of its interviews. The actors interviewed in
the film readily give their opinions about the details of the murder and the
guilt or innocence of the Ramsey family, and many actors reveal some
personal connection to the Ramsey case. Furthermore, several interview-
ees subsequently reveal their own personal traumatic experiences, as
prompted by speculation of the Ramsey case. A woman describes her
276 B. EVANS
history of sexual molestation, domestic violence, and the death of her

children; another woman reveals that her brother was murdered, and that
her parents met with the Ramsey family as parents of murdered children;
a man describes the experience of waking up beside the dead body of his
girlfriend, who had suffered fatal liver failure during the night. Marc
Francis and Linnéa Hussein (2017, p. 35) note about the documentary
that when an actor auditions (for instance) for Patsy Ramsey, the structure
of the interviews and re-enactments constructs a ‘“performative triptych”
of Character/Actor/Person’ that ‘allows audiences to observe three phe-
nomena at once: the indexical residue of the original narrative (Patsy
Ramsey), the interpretative possibilities (Patsy Auditionee), and the recol-
lection of what happened twenty years ago via its felt impact on a particu-
lar civilian (Herself)’. Francis and Hussein (2017, p. 36) note that in
presenting these actors who have been shaped by the murder, and ‘whose
onscreen lives here shape popular memory of the JonBenét murder’, the
film ‘essentially documents how a story is made’. The Ramsey case becomes
in this way a kind of folk or ghost story, an urban myth heavy with mean-
ings that seem to be in excess of its raw events. Goodall and Lee (2015,
p. 5) describe public memory as ‘memory disseminated—even formed—
by these diverse but ultimately compromised sources or institutions and in
a suite of “locations” that might be recognised as constituting various
sections of the public sphere or even various public spheres’. Casting
JonBenet, in its multiple interviews with members of the Boulder city pub-
lic, makes the formation of public memory visible.
The documentary inter-cuts between interviews with different people
(in visually identical settings, sitting in the same place), without on-screen
title cards indicating their names or other identifying information, such
that they almost seem to be finishing each other’s sentences. They share
physical space, auditory and bodily space, and are mostly nameless, which
renders these individual testimonies in some way collective, a choral
arrangement of testimony. Thus, the documentary explores not simply the
isolated traumatic event of the Ramsey case, but rather, the multiple trau-
mas that violence and abuse have left behind, a plurality of traumatic expe-
rience. The blank surroundings or re-enactment sets in which these
interviews occur contributes to this plurality, in lacking the specificity of
interviewees’ individual homes as in The Keepers. Each of the interviewees,
as mentioned previously, is from Boulder, Colorado, the same town in
which the Ramsey family lived. Francis and Hussein (2017, p. 37) write of
these interviews that ‘the meaning of the murder dwells differently within
each actor, becoming entryways into their own past vicissitudes and com-
plicated ties to their community’. Their discussion of the Ramsey case
implicates each person as a member of the same place-bound community
as the Ramsey family, to which they link their own trauma. Thus, what
emerges is an oral history of the Ramsey case, as understood by the town
of Boulder, as woven into the town’s discourse. It is incorporated into the
life narratives of each person within it, together with those people’s trau-
matic experiences, the traumatic past brought powerfully into the present
with the use of the Ramsey case as a framing device. Like in The Keepers,
Casting JonBenet chronicles an inciting traumatic incident, an outbreak of
violence, which is the catalyst for the revelation of other traumas, unre-
lated but for thematic resonance. These traumas of Boulder come to char-
acterise the place, to haunt it, and to express the pain of its residents.
These multiplicities are also present in the film’s re-enactment
sequences. The very word re-enactment may suggest its link to trauma; it
is the ‘re’, the repetition, the notion of ‘again’ that characterises its onto-
logical mode. If in interviews, trauma haunts the bodies and places on
screen, then re-enactment forms its ghostly apparition. Re-enactments
effectively make material the traumatic events long passed, using actors
and sets in place of the historical people and places. Bruzzi (2016, p. 270)
writes that re-enactments in true crime documentary ‘are not just about
looking again; they are concerned with discovery, unravelling and re-
examining’. This quote suggests the investigatory function of re-
enactments as a way to uncover new knowledge from existing information.
Casting JonBenet seeks not to persuade viewers of a particular set of events,
or to explain evidence. The multiple versions of each re-enactment, culmi-
nating in a final sequence where multiple versions of Christmas night at
the Ramsey house play out intercut with each other and eventually, on the
same soundstage, open up interpretations rather than present a single
dominant one. I suggest that the use of re-enactments in Casting JonBenet
seeks not to uncover the truth of what happened to JonBenét Ramsey, but
instead to explore the multidirectional layers of memory and trauma that
surround public memory of the case, and the ways that these memories of
traumatic events may linger in communities, through performance.
In Casting JonBenet, re-enactments deliberately and reflexively con-
front the conventions of cinematic realism and the re-enactment itself.
Through using multiple actors for each role, the documentary draws
attention to the constructedness of its re-enactments. As Francis and
Hussein (2017) note, in Casting JonBenet, the auditioning segments
278 B. EVANS
require actors to slip between performing and interviewee modes, creating

what they describe as a performative triptych, such that the separation of
performance and person breaks down. However, this does not homoge-
nise the performances and, in fact, in viewing several versions of the same
re-enacted sequence, what becomes clear is the depth of difference
between the performances, the varying ways that grief, guilt, and culpabil-
ity are imagined and performed by each actor in relation to the events,
which present real (of which there is a verifiable record, such as interview
notes or television broadcast) and hypothetical scenarios. In these varying
repetitions, the sequence points to the unresolvedness of the narrative, the
many possible truths. This plurality displaces the Ramsey narrative from its
original events and referents, expressive of both the trauma of JonBenét’s
murder but also the multiple experiences with trauma that the actors have
had. The ‘performative triptych’ is in this way not only a question of role,
as Francis and Hussein (2017) focus on, but also of body. Discussing re-
enactment, Nichols (1994, p. 4) describes a ‘body too many’ problem, in
which the actors whose bodies we see on screen ‘are also ghosts or simu-
lacra of others who have already acted out their parts’. Linked to this
concept, Nichols (2008, p. 74) describes in re-enactment ‘the uncanny
sense of a repetition of what remains historically unique’, and notes that in
this case a ‘specter haunts the text’. The re-enactments in Casting JonBenet,
rather than mitigating this ‘body too many’ affect, seem intended to inten-
sify the haunting. This is most central in the main performance, a montage
in which the many iterations of the Ramsey family and potential murderers
act out various hypothetical scenes in the life of the Ramsey family. These
scenes take place before and after the murder and comprise many different
narratives of how the murder could have played out, the multiple potenti-
alities of the past laid bare for spectators. Lacking a single coherent narra-
tive, the focus shifts towards the bodies, faces, and sounds of the
performances, the affective qualities of the performances expressing trau-
ma’s bodily feeling itself. This sequence transitions to one in which all of
the various iterations of the Ramsey family play their roles in the same
space—the Ramsey house set—at the same time. The many pairs of John
and Patsy cry and fight, a cacophonous, heteroglossic, contradictory dis-
play of performances. The shot cuts backwards—spectators can now see
the camera that has taken the previous shots, and the Ramsey house set in
its entirety with the soundstage beyond it. The sight of the house as a film
set reinforces the performative and reflexive aspects of the image, and
underscores the spectrality of the images, their ghostly displacement. In
this re-enactment, the Ramsey house comes to incorporate all possible

versions of the Ramsey family’s traumatic event, but more so, all of the
actors and the traumatic events that have shaped their lives. Their perfor-
mances both show several versions of the Ramsey narrative, and contain
emotions and actions we may intuit, express, or act out other memories,
other lives.
What seems to be re-enacted here is both public memory of the murder
case and the personal traumatic memories of actors, as spectators may
imagine they can glimpse through the performance. Indeed, this reading
is implicitly suggested by testimony within the documentary, such as actors
mentioning that they would ‘draw on’ a certain life experience during the
acting process. In one such example, an actress auditioning for the role of
Patsy explicitly refers to this dynamic between acting, truth, bodies, and
trauma, which I quote here in full:
It’s hard for me, sitting here talking about it as myself. To not just—I mean,
I’m holding back weeping over the loss, you know. Because I myself have
lost three children so I—I know what that feels like. So when that woman
[Patsy Ramsey] looked in the camera or was talking to Larry King or who-
ever she was talking to or sitting in that interrogation room, she was, she
was, you know—and this is coming from an acting point of view, someone
who believes that in order to act, you tell the truth, you know, you look in
the camera and you tell the truth. You believe, you commit, you—you are
that person, you are 100% there. Committed. When she was there—to me,
it was the poorest acting job—one of the poorest acting jobs I’ve ever seen
(0:53:11–0:54:19).
This statement seems to encapsulate the documentary’s central con-

cern: the relationship between acting, truth, bodies, and trauma. The
actress begins with a statement of how her personal traumatic experience,
that of losing three children, affects her emotional relationship to the case.
She makes a judgement about Patsy’s guilt (as is common throughout the
documentary) by reference to her philosophy on acting, implying that
Patsy’s public performances of innocence were poor because acting relies
on telling the truth. These two aspects of the statement, when viewed in
conjunction with her performance as Patsy in the montage, seem to invite
the understanding that her performance is in some way inflected by ‘truth’
or by the lived experience of trauma.
280 B. EVANS
Walker (2005, p. 20) writes about Errol Morris’s documentaries that

these films are about ‘how the past is difficult, but perhaps not impossible
to know’, and that their use of re-enactment and heightened stylisation
presses ‘this epistemological concern’, suggesting that these re-enactments
express the difficulty of constructing stable narratives when dealing with
knowledge and memory. In her discussion of The Thin Blue Line, Errol
Morris’s 1988 documentary about a man falsely convicted of killing a
police officer, Linda Williams (1993, p. 12) describes the self-reflexive
qualities of re-enactment, stating that the documentary:
is acutely aware that the individuals whose lives are caught up in events are
not so much self-coherent and consistent identities as they are actors in
competing narratives.
For Williams, the expressionistic and temporal qualities of re-enactment,

and its capacity to represent different versions of the same events, demon-
strate the instability of the narratives that it dramatises. These statements
can be easily applied to a film like Casting JonBenet, where the inaccessibil-
ity of the past is heightened by trauma, which renders memory even more
a fractured, unreliable thing than it always is already. But Casting JonBenet
goes further than The Thin Blue Line, or indeed other recent true crime
documentaries, in its cultivation of narrative instability through re-
enactments, for it appears to posit these narratives as not necessarily com-
peting for truth status, but as existing temporally and geographically in
concert with each other, alongside each other. Unlike in The Thin Blue
Line, in Casting JonBenet, the knowability of the past is less important
than how the past is remembered.
What is re-enacted is not, like in The Keepers, the traumatic memory of
one person through the body of another—instead, what is made visible in
both content and form is both the public memory of the murder case, and
its intersections with private traumatic memories. These memories are
bound together by the city of Boulder as a figure of place memory—but
unlike The Keepers’ construction of memory as embodied and placed,
Casting JonBenet creates a sense of disembodied displacement. Casting
JonBenet’s multiplicity of performance precludes narrative closure, the
many fragmentary narratives of the JonBenét case layered on top of per-
sonal testimonies, acted out on a soundstage, bodies standing in for bod-
ies in places standing in for places. Bruzzi (2006, pp. 153–54) writes that
in some documentaries ‘repeated use is made of performance, not as a
means of invalidating the documentary pursuit but of getting to the truth

each filmmaker is searching for’ and in Casting JonBenet, these multiple
performances seem to perhaps illuminate some unknown aspect of the
Ramsey’s story, but equally conceal it. The documentary screens public
memories of the original traumatic event in order to extend outwards—to
explore the nature of traumatic memory itself.
Conclusion
I began this chapter with a reference to Trigg’s (2012) conception of phe-
nomenological place, where the past emerges at trauma sites through a
language of voids, disruptions, and hauntings. A similar language also
applies to cinematic representation of trauma, as Walker reminds us with
her work on trauma cinema: a language of fragmentation, abstraction, and
appeals to sensation. These kinds of fragmentary hauntings, as I have
explored, appear throughout both The Keepers and Casting JonBenet,
expressed differently by each documentary. The Keepers brings traumatic
place memory to the screen through close-ups and lingering shots of
places and bodies, and through expressive re-enactments of memory.
Casting JonBenet similarly uses interviews and re-enactments to screen
traumatic memory, but instead of the communal traumas of The Keepers,
these are memories of several different traumas as experienced by a com-
munity, personal and collective, epitomised by JonBenét Ramsey’s murder
and materialised in the multiplicity of testimony and performance. In both
true crime documentaries, contemporary footage allows glimpses of the
traumatic past in the material present, and re-enactments make fragmen-
tary memory visible and material. Additionally, in both documentaries the
construction of memory as placed or displaced is highly central to their
representations of traumatic memory. Not all true crime documentaries
have such extensive interviews with victims, revisit trauma sites, or use re-
enactment to screen memories or potentialities, and thus this chapter does
not account for all texts in this genre; indeed, many do not significantly
explore trauma, instead focusing on constructing arguments for the inno-
cence of the convicted or the injustice of the criminal justice system. This
chapter does, however, suggest true crime’s capacity to meaningfully rep-
resent trauma through the felt, experiential memory of place, and in doing
so, materialise traumatic memory on screen.
282 B. EVANS
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pp. 813–36.
Berry, M & Sawada, C (eds.) 2016, Divided lenses: Screen memories of war in East
Asia, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu.
Biressi, A 2004, ‘Inside/out: Private trauma and public knowledge in true crime
documentary’, Screen, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 401–12.
Bruzzi, S 2006, New documentary: A critical introduction, 2nd edn,
Routledge, Oxford.
Bruzzi, S 2016, ‘Making a genre: The case of the contemporary true crime docu-
mentary’, Law and Humanities, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 249–80.
De Lestrade, J 2004, The staircase, streaming video, Canal+ and Netflix.
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Green, K 2017, Casting JonBenet, streaming video, Netflix.
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mentary’, Film Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 9–21.
CHAPTER 14
Chile 1988: Trauma and Resistance in Pablo

Larraín’s No (2012)
Marguerite La Caze
The Chilean film No (2012) portrays a response to trauma oriented to

ending the Pinochet civic-military dictatorship (1973–1990) through
using the concept of happiness as a form of resistance.1 The film’s narrative
concerns the 1988 plebiscite on whether Pinochet should stay as the presi-
dent for eight more years—the ‘Yes’ or ‘Sí’ vote—or hold democratic elec-
tions—the ‘No’ vote. I focus on how the film represents the transformation
of that experience of the trauma of the Pinochet dictatorship into the idea
of happiness. No is a fictionalised account of the television campaigns for
the 1988 plebiscite that plays with the historical drama genre by incorpo-
rating large portions of archival footage—around thirty per cent of the
film’s two-hour running time and by using film and cameras that would
have been used at the time (Lyttelton 2013). According to the film, the
initial idea of the ‘No’ campaign was to condemn the abuses of the dicta-
torship by showing images of torture and brutality and the resulting
trauma and negative emotions. However, as the film shows, this approach
M. La Caze (*)
e-mail: m.lacaze@uq.edu.au

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_14
286 M. LA CAZE
was altered and combined with more positive material because of a deter-
mination to win the campaign. Instead of repeating the trauma in a ges-
ture acknowledged as futile, the supporters of the ‘No’ vote in the film
take up the challenge to ‘retemporalise and detranslate’ the trauma, to
create the possibility of a new narrative that Kristin McCartney finds in
W.E.B. Du Bois’ (1868–1963) articulation of the importance of slave or
sorrow songs; this possibility of a new narrative is one that must be recog-
nised, taken up, and recounted to be effective (2009, pp. 85–86). No
depicts how a new narrative is created in the context of the Chilean
plebiscite.
In the film, the ‘No’ campaign, headed by René Saavedra, a creative
director in advertising, deploys Aristotle’s idea that happiness is an intrin-
sic value—through the chorus of a catchy theme song, ‘Chile, joy is com-
ing’ [Chile, la alegria ya viene]—and thus the best concept to galvanise a
traumatised nation in favour of change. As I explain, while the campaign-
ers were not directly inspired by Aristotle, the focus on joy [alegría] was
used in the ‘No’ campaign as the first step to happiness [felicidad] on the
understanding that happiness is an intrinsic value. The resistant ‘No’ cam-
paign shown in No portrays a possible future happiness if the regime were
to end through the portrayal of joyful happiness. The narrative of No fol-
lows René from his initial reluctance to direct the ‘No’ television cam-
paign to his enthusiastic and determined pursuit of its success and ends
with his ambivalent return to his advertising agency to work with his boss,
Lucho Guzmán, who directed the ‘Yes’ campaign. While the film has been
criticised for oversimplifying events and omitting the grassroots campaign
to register and mobilise voters (Rohter 2013; Khazan 2013; Peirano
2018), my interest is in the narrative of the film’s representation of the
shift of attention from painful trauma to happiness as a form of resistance.
Rather than seeing the film as a flawed how-to manual for ending dic-
tatorships, my chapter explores the importance of the symbolic transfor-
mation in the film of emotion from a negative past orientation to a positive
future one, and from individual suffering to collective happiness in the
specific context of the Chilean 1988 plebiscite. No uses original footage
from the period and filmic techniques with old film stock in the Academy
ratio and cameras that often blur the new footage with the old, so the film
feels like a memory of that time and place. The director also used individu-
als who were involved in the campaign as actors in order to provide another
link with the period. In another meaning of place, the film’s focus on the
television campaign refers us to television as a locus for resistance to
14 CHILE 1988: TRAUMA AND RESISTANCE IN PABLO LARRAÍN’S… 287
trauma here, by showing how television was able to influence and change
public opinion and responses to past trauma through its use of a positive
narrative. I first centre on how Du Bois’ work provides an understanding
of the way traumatic experience can be transformed into a more hopeful
orientation, an understanding relevant to the 1988 Chilean referendum
represented in No, then on how the concept of happiness is presented as
essential to resistance in the film, and finally I show through the character
of René, the advertising man behind the campaign, the connection
between individual and collective transformation toward happiness and
the future.
Retemporalising Trauma
First, I will focus on the idea of how trauma can be retemporalised and
detranslated, terms McCartney takes from Cathy Caruth (1996) and Jean
Laplanche (1973, pp. 465–73), by linking the past with the future and
developing a resistant culture. For McCartney, detranslation of what is
‘untranslatable’ in trauma begins ‘the unending hermeneutic process of
temporalizing [sic] and narrating the self’ (2009, p. 81). I focus on
McCartney’s interpretation of Du Bois’ work as a precedent for compre-
hending the narrative of hope recounted in No. McCartney shows how
Du Bois articulates forms of identification resistant to the dominant white
symbolic. She argues that Du Bois is able to retemporalise trauma ‘through
the unburial of racial history and race ideals’ (2009, p. 79), in his account
of the sorrow songs. The problem of trauma is one of kinship bonds being
broken, and sorrow songs can be a force for resistance and connection of
the generations. The sorrow songs are the songs of slaves in southern
United States, popularised by the Fisk Jubilee singers from Nashville from
1871, beginning a tradition that continues today. The best known of these
is ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ and Du Bois claims that ‘they tell us in these
eager days that life was joyous to the black slave, careless and happy’
(McCartney 2009, p. 189). While many of the songs speak of trouble and
toil, he holds that ‘Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there
breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things’ (2009, p. 196).
McCartney follows Caruth and Laplanche in thinking of retemporalisa-
tion and detranslation as a ‘struggle to make sense of the remainder of the
enigmatic’ or the fragments of past experience of trauma, such as the sor-
row songs (2009, p. 81).
288 M. LA CAZE
In The Souls of Black Folk (1903/1996), Du Bois broadens analysis of

individual trauma to theorise the oppression of African-Americans and
resistance to it. For him, black Americans have a double consciousness, or
a ‘sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others’, which
engenders a longing to combine this ‘double self into a better and truer
self’ and ‘to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture’ (Du Bois 1996,
p. 7). On McCartney’s reading of Du Bois, double consciousness involves
the disturbance of the capacity to narrate one’s own experiences
(McCartney 2009, p. 80). Part of the history of dispossession and oppres-
sion that creates that double consciousness is the temporal disruption of
intergenerational order (Du Bois 1996, pp. 8–9, 151). Thus, resistance
has to take the form of re-establishing the broken ties to form an identity
through continuity over time and generations, and community between
black and white Americans. While Du Bois describes a different situation
from the Chilean dictatorship, as I will discuss, the torture, disappear-
ances, and murder mark breaks in temporal continuity and in community
solidarity, and the film No dramatises a specific detranslation of those breaks.
The detranslation McCartney focusses on is re-narration of intergen-
erational trauma. The enigmatic refers to a fragmented narrative of origi-
nal loss and is here, for McCartney, the sorrow songs, which are partial
links to a lost past that become ‘vehicles for identification and catharsis
[whereby] Du Bois imagines a counter-force of intergenerational strength
and Black cultural resistance’ (2009, p. 80). Du Bois contends that the
songs are ‘the most beautiful expression of human experience’ in America
(1996, p. 188). The sorrow songs express trauma and loss and also pro-
vide a connection to history, which Du Bois ‘tries to translate into a mes-
sage of hope’ (McCartney 2009, p. 85). Fundamentally, he contends that
the songs must be recognised as a heritage of the whole nation.
Similarly, Paul E. Kirkland argues that ‘Du Bois concludes Souls by
showing the way that the “Sorrow Songs” exhibit a capacity for joy when
suffering is transfigured as art and self-knowledge when aesthetic experi-
ence helps to reveal the character of human longing’ (2015, p. 415). This
suffering transfigured into joy is contrasted with blind optimism, despair
and resignation, and grounded in an experience of the tragedy, disappoint-
ment, and suffering of African-American history (Kirkland 2015,
pp. 432–36). McCartney’s and Kirkland’s focus on Du Bois’ transforma-
tion of trauma into hope and connection is one that is followed in differ-
ent forms by other trauma theorists, and I will return to this point, as
theorising that transformation is essential to interpreting the representa-

tion of the ‘No’ campaign in No.
How individual and collective trauma are related should be clarified
here. Trauma theory developed in the twentieth-century from Sigmund
Freud’s work on individual trauma and also following the two World Wars.
Much research on trauma concerns how people respond to traumatic
occurrences, especially how it affects memory; for example, Susan Rubin
Suleiman shows how Judith Herman and others connect trauma with
repressed memory of repeated traumatic events (2008, p. 277). These
events involve a life-threatening force that makes the person feel helpless
(Herman 1992, p. 33; Brison 2003, p. 39). Others, such as Elizabeth
Loftus and Richard McNally, argue that ‘memories of trauma … cannot be
dissociated or repressed—on the contrary, the more violent the trauma,
the more subjects are likely to remember it, indeed to never forget it even
if they want to’ (Suleiman 2008, p. 279). Suleiman concludes that trauma
is ‘primarily a drama of survival’ with themes stressed by Robert Jay Lifton
such as ‘the inability to move beyond images of death, guilt about having
survived while others died, psychic numbing, lack of trust in the world,
and struggle for meaning’ (Suleiman 2008, p. 280). Trauma can mean a
response to personal trauma or to the trauma of political events.
I examine trauma as a response to the atrocities committed by the mili-
tary in Chile, but in the specific situation depicted in No, where the dicta-
torship is still in power and the trauma is ongoing. The Pinochet regime
in Chile committed atrocities in murdering or ‘disappearing’ thousands of
people (at least 2000), torturing many thousands more (27,000), and
sending many more (200,000) into exile.2 Such experiences create trauma
and affect the emotions and self-identity of victims and survivors and
reverberate throughout society. Philosopher Jeffrey Blustein describes
how the suffering of atrocity ‘is registered in the emotions, memories, and
psychological deficits of victims’ (2018, p. 234). He follows Herman in
seeing the typical response of victims of atrocity as traumatisation.
Nevertheless, the emotions that are experienced are diverse, ranging from
anger and desires for revenge, fantasies of forgiveness, to ‘detached calm’
(Blustein 2018, p. 236). Other emotions felt are ‘fear, alienation, distrust,
hopelessness, guilt, and shame’ and grief (2018, p. 240, 242). Nevertheless,
Blustein observes that an emotion like anger as a traumatised response to
atrocity is different from everyday anger, in being helpless, uncontrol-
lable, and
290 M. LA CAZE
it lacks a definite target and a corrective aim. Moreover, instead of asserting

autonomy and empowering the agent, traumatic anger of this sort subverts
the victim’s autonomy because it lashes out at the wrongdoer in a usually
futile attempt by the victim to regain some measure of control over his or
her life (2018, p. 236).
For these reasons, Blustein argues that such futile anger must be trans-
formed to be experienced as righteous anger or moral indignation.
Presumably, this transformation would involve finding an appropriate tar-
get and aim, being controlled, and having a point.
After atrocities, Blustein’s main example being genocide, people need
to recover agency, especially moral agency. The atrocities in Chile under
the Pinochet regime can be understood as a political genocide, a policide
or politicide (Harff 2003). Steve J. Stern, a historian specialising in mem-
ory and the Pinochet regime, argues that the political project of Pinochet’s
government was ‘policide, an effort to destroy root and branch—perma-
nently—the ways of doing and thinking politics that had come to charac-
terise Chile by the 1960s’ (2004, pp. 31–32). One of the greatest moral
harms to victims of atrocities, Blustein contends, is to their self-respect,
self-esteem, and other related capacities, as victims of atrocities feel
degraded (2018, pp. 238, 249–50). Furthermore, personal autonomy, or
capacities to self-define and self-legislate, which relies on moral autonomy
on Blustein’s account, are undermined by the inability to trust others or
oneself. He adds that a genocide (such as politicide) harms self-respect in
specific ways because it attacks the group and individual and aspects of the
self tied to the practices of the group (2018, p. 250).3 In the Chilean dic-
tatorship and the acts of murder, torture, and disappearances, political
ideals and values associated with communism and socialism were under
attack. Blustein observes that the traumatic experience of being under
attack collectively can create a feeling of community as well as divide that
community.
To recover from the trauma, in Blustein’s view, victims must be able to
‘mourn their loses, including loss of livelihoods, friends and loved ones,
homes, and prestige, and also, fundamentally, a sense of security in the
world and trust in themselves and others’ (2018, p. 239). In her account
of her own recovery from sexual assault, philosopher Susan Brison distin-
guishes between traumatic and narrative memory, the latter being a trans-
formation of traumatic memories (Brison 2003, p. 31; Blustein 2018,
p. 240). Traumatic memories are fragmented and not integrated with
other memories, whereas narrative memories are coherent in themselves

and in relation to other memories, according to Blustein (2018, p. 255).
However, Brison also isolates similarities between the two kinds of mem-
ory, writing ‘Traumatic memory, like narrative memory, is articulated,
selective, even malleable, in spite of the fact that the framing of such mem-
ory may not be under the survivor’s conscious control’ (2003, p. 31). She
argues that our traumatic experiences are always influenced by cultural
meanings and categories. The transformation of memory is a process that
must be effected to recover from trauma, which Blustein sees as recover-
ing cognitive and emotional equilibrium (Blustein 2018, pp. 253–54).
For Brison, telling our narrative ‘to caring others who are able to listen’
enables that transformation (2003, p. 57). Another process required is
overcoming the feeling of ‘acute helplessness’ and loss of personal auton-
omy (Ashwin Budden, cited in Blustein 2018, pp. 243–44).
Importantly, Blustein also examines collective processes of recovery
from trauma. He accepts that communities may dwell on and obsess over
the past in ways that undermine agency, so tempering that approach and
adopting an appropriate mourning will be necessary (2018, p. 257). On a
collective level, that can be done through memorialisation and commemo-
ration.4 Both individual and collective processes are aimed at developing
effective agency. Now I will examine how the film No shows how a focus
on positive affect can construct effective agency and resistance, instead of
a traumatic focus on remembering suffering.
No and Happiness
As I mentioned, No has been criticised for depicting the ‘No’ television
campaign unrealistically, and not presenting the preceding years of activ-
ism (Khazan 2013; Rohter 2013; Peirano 2018). However, I concentrate
on the philosophical ideas that drive the campaign as depicted in the
movie. Director Pablo Larraín describes the film as a ‘strange balance
between documentary and fiction’ and Gael García Bernal, who plays the
protagonist René Saavedra, calls it a ‘fable’ (Rohter 2013) and suggests it
provides ‘a thorough political analysis of the subject’ (Lyttelton 2013). It
forms a kind of trilogy with Larraín’s earlier films Tony Manero (2008),
and Post Mortem (2010), which portray life under Pinochet and the mili-
tary coup itself respectively, and contrasts strongly with more recent works
such as Jackie and Neruda, both released in 2016.5
292 M. LA CAZE
Latin American studies scholar Robert Wells analyses the trilogy along
with Larraín’s first feature film, Fuga (2006), as post-traumatic cinema,
focusing on the ‘visualisation of trauma, male fantasies, and cultural capi-
tal’ (2017, p. 504).6 He allows that the films both act out and contribute
to a working through of trauma, partly through implicating the viewers in
the trauma (Wells 2017, pp. 516–17). Joshua Hirsch defines ‘posttrau-
matic cinema’ as ‘a cinema that not only represents traumatic historical
events, but also attempts to embody and reproduce trauma for the specta-
tor through its form of narration’ (2004, p. xi). Thus, post-traumatic films
‘formally repeat the traumatic structure of the experience of witnessing
the events themselves’ (2004, pp. 3, 19). For Hirsch, Holocaust films and
documentaries such as Night and Fog (1955), Shoah (1985), and Schindler’s
List (1993), play the role of getting the audience to admit the existential
significance of the Holocaust and possibly even to assist in healing the
trauma (2004, p. 162).
No occupies an unusual position in narrating a period of transition.
Larraín originally made a much longer film—four and a half hours—which
had much of the history of resistance in it, but cut it down to focus on the
marketing side, which interested him (Rohter 2013).7 As films tend to, a
complex history is compressed into a short scene or single character. For
example, instead of showing some of the focus groups that led to the posi-
tive approach of the ‘No’ campaign, the creatives ask René’s housekeeper,
Carmen (Elsa Poblete), what she thinks since she represents the people
they must convince. She is concerned about preserving her children’s
employment aspirations and is afraid of change, so is likely to be a
‘Yes’ voter.
The film concentrates on the month of the political advertising cam-
paign for the plebiscite that follows growing resistance against, and inter-
national pressure on, the dictatorship. It follows closely the way that the
‘No’ and the ‘Yes’ campaign had only 15 minutes of screen time each daily
to persuade people to vote their way in the referendum, although of course
the government-sponsored ‘Yes’ campaign had the rest of the airtime as
well, due to its control of television content (Hirmas 1993; Simón 2018,
pp. 42–48). The programmes, Franja de Propaganda Electoral (Official
Space for Electoral Propaganda), were shown late on weeknights (10:45
pm) and at lunchtime (11:45 am) on the weekends.
What happens, as we see in the film, is that instead of repeating the
trauma in images, as is initially proposed, the creatives turn away from
them. René insists that the campaign and programmes must focus on
positive experiences and on what life would be like without the dictator-
ship. This change, as argued for by René, is a pragmatic break in the
remembrance of atrocities to make way for a future where they can be
remembered properly. The Chilean referendum was complicated, as there
was no distance in time from the traumatic events, so it is understandable
that people would want to register their suffering. Like the breaks in con-
tinuity of life for African-Americans through early death, separation of
families, and lack of support for well-being into the future Du Bois
describes, the disappearances and murders in Chile broke kinship bonds
that must be reconnected. While Du Bois is concerned with a holistic
progress of African-Americans in ‘work, culture, liberty’ (1996, p. 12), the
thread of a cultural narrative of hope is important to understand the events
depicted in No. A new narrative must be created to overcome trauma and
transform affect from fear and powerlessness to joy and to centre on the
future rather than the past, and that narrative must be one that can influ-
ence more than half of the population. The idea is that people might not
necessarily feel happiness, but they should focus on a happy future through
images of joyful experiences, like dancing, picnics, and a mime artist.
These experiences might not be culturally authentic, as critics in the film
observe, but they are like fragments of a possible future happy life.
To understand the context of the referendum shown in No, by 1988,
Pinochet had been in power since 1973, Chile had not had an election
since Salvador Allende’s 1970 election, and the opposition campaign had
to register people to vote and convince them to vote ‘No’. The back-
ground is given in a series of titles at the start of the film. Once voters had
registered, it was compulsory to vote; these aspects are not detailed in the
film, as it centres on the television programmes.8 While No can be seen as
promoting the values of the advertising industry or as criticising modern
society, I argue the film shows how the campaign is successful through
concentrating on the philosophical concept of happiness. When the adver-
tising creatives brainstorm ideas for the campaign at a retreat, they arrive
at the concept of happiness by thinking of what could not be bettered,
asking ‘What’s happier than happiness?’ The slogan and catchy jingle used
in the campaign after that discussion is ‘Chile, joy is coming’, as I men-
tioned. The concept involves joy, delight, spring, calm after the storm, a
party—anything associated with happiness. For example, René leaves
baguettes in a picnic scene the campaign is filming despite protests that
baguettes are not typically Chilean, claiming that using the baguettes
‘works’. His idea of happiness is as a universal political concept that cannot
294 M. LA CAZE
be argued against, and he presents it in advertising language. The ‘No’

programmes also discuss abuse and misery, but they do not make them the
focus of the 15 minutes. They also include interviews with ‘No’ voters
and, following interviews with focus groups about the campaign, comedy
sketches, as we see. Wells sees the spectacle of the film, with its blending
of original and new footage, as making it impossible to conceive resistance
(2017, p. 513), but I argue that the discourse of happiness is a discourse
of resistance in this case. I will briefly examine Aristotle’s conception of
happiness to show its distinctiveness.
Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, contends that something worth
pursuing in itself is more complete and unqualified than what we pursue
for the sake of something else. He concludes:
Now such a thing is happiness … for this we choose always for itself and
never for the sake of something else, but honour, pleasure, reason, and every
excellence we choose indeed for themselves (for if nothing resulted from
them we would still choose each of them), but we choose them also for the
sake of happiness, judging that through them we will be happy. Happiness,
on the other hand, no one chooses for the sake of these, nor, in general for
anything other than itself. (1984, 1097a36–1097b7)
Aristotle also considers that happiness is self-sufficient, and so is the end

of action.
The campaigners’ brainstorming session follows a similar train of
thought, although it is not directly based on Aristotle’s ideas. In the ‘No’
campaign, happiness is a form of active resistance to the negative emotions
of fear and anxiety, and the pressure to support the status quo.9 The hap-
piness of the shows, as recounted in the film, must connect to a future of
happiness, without referring to an earlier time before the dictatorship, as
that could remind people of a period of uncertainty or hardship. Of course,
Aristotle is not thinking of the emotion of happiness as such, but flourish-
ing, the well-lived life—eudaimonia—‘as a sort of living and faring well’
(1984, 1098b22–23). However, the ‘No’ campaign must appeal to expe-
riences of joy (alegría), like a picnic in the countryside, dancing, or horse-
riding, to evoke that kind of flourishing, all images shown in the film.10
The positive programmes could be seen as a repression of the traumatic
memories, in their turn from a real past to the desire for an imagined
future, but that interpretation is not borne out because there is reference
to that past.
In contrast, the film has a number of scenes characterising how the ‘Yes’
campaign struggles with Pinochet’s image; should he be in uniform or
civilian clothes? Eventually they decide on civilian clothes as a sign of
democracy and progress, what is shown to be a mistake as, for the first
time, people see him as able to be defeated (International Commission of
the Latin American Studies Association 1989, p. 6). They begin with a
combination of stressing economic success (‘Chile—a winning country’)
and a scare campaign against the ‘No’ and end up parodying the ‘No’
programmes with scenes such as horse riders carrying Soviet flags and
dancers wearing balaclavas.11 The ‘Yes’ campaign also focused strongly on
the past: instead of arguing that it would be good to extend Pinochet’s
government, they warned that economic gains would be lost and chaos
would ensue with a return to the ‘Popular Unity’ coalition. In that way,
they associated ‘Yes’ with the traumatic images René rejects for the ‘No’
campaign. The optimistic note of the ‘No’ programmes’ shots of happy
groups can also be seen as creating a narrative whereby the past can be
connected to the future, and the individual linked to their community, so
in that respect they involve the remaking of the self that Brison (2003)
recommends.
No and the Transformation of the Self
In my view, we should also understand the complexity of the protagonist
René and how he becomes drawn into the campaign to comprehend the
link between trauma and resistance in No. I argue that the narrative should
be interpreted as a transformative one where René’s character and actions
both prompt and track the significant elements of happiness as a form of
resistance. In contrast, reviews of the film have referred to René as a sell-
out (Felperin 2012), apolitical (Toledo 2013; Howe 2015), cynical, and
lacking in scruple (Matheou 2013), neoliberal (Qandt 2016), as having
‘political apathy’ (Dzero 2015, p. 123), ‘self-regarding’ (Dargis 2013), as
being indifferent to democratic ideals (Dzero 2015, p. 130), and so on.
Wells claims that the approach of the campaign ‘is not meant to be cele-
brated, however, but rather exposed as another male fantasy that taps into
and dominates the collective fantasies of others’ (2017, p. 514). He fur-
ther argues that ‘No visualises how traumas were made invisible, and how
this was done in order to “win” and thereby construct a pacifying, neutral-
ising, amnesiac “consensus” for the future’ (2017, p. 515). Other critics
decry the focus on a ‘single heroic individual’ as simplifying and distorting
296 M. LA CAZE
the campaign (cited in Jung 2015, p. 119).12 Irina Dzero, a Latin American
cultural studies scholar, for example, thinks of René as passive and uncon-
cerned with democracy, noting that he does not try to defend himself
when one of the opposition coalition members accuses him of silencing
what really happened (2015, p. 124). Likewise, she sees him as equally
enthused about all his projects, as I discuss.
But could René’s seeming apoliticism as acted by Bernal be itself a fea-
ture of traumatisation, like the ‘detached calm’ Blustein (2018, p. 236)
describes as a consequence of subjection to atrocities? In fact, as the audi-
ence is made aware of, René is no stranger to trauma, since his father was
sent into exile when Pinochet took over Chile. Nevertheless, his character
is an outsider precisely because of that exile, and his advertising profession
is seen as collusive with the regime by the other characters, and that may
help explain his willingness to focus on a positive message rather than on
showing representations of the trauma. Unlike the protagonists of Tony
Manero (2008) and Post Mortem (2010), he is extremely good at his occu-
pation. René is approached by socialist leader José Tomás Urrutia (Luis
Gnecco) for the campaign, and is initially sceptical, like many Chileans
were, arguing that the referendum will be ‘completely fixed’. They want
René to give an external opinion, since he does not want to direct the
campaign, but he begins to get involved and then agrees to run it. René
conflicts with his boss, Lucho Guzmán (Alfredo Castro), when he tells
him that the Americans are with the ‘No’, while Lucho claims the
Americans will remain with Pinochet and works for the ‘Yes’ campaign.
One aspect of trauma can be a reduced affect, first as a self-protection
from a violent regime, and second as a self-protection from exposure to
emotional pain. Blunted affect or emotional numbing and lack of expres-
sion of emotion, especially positive emotions, is known as a symptom of
post-traumatic stress disorder (Herman 1992, p. 42; Kashdan et al. 2007).
This aspect of trauma is subtly represented in the film through Bernal’s
performance. In his review of the film, Omer M. Mozaffar observes that
René ‘speaks in whispers. He rarely smiles’ (2013). He clearly wants to get
back with his former partner Verónica (Antonia Zegers), but when he sees
her with another man, he says and does nothing. Only if we notice his
eyes, can we see, thanks to Bernal’s superb acting, how much suffering he
is enduring. Demetrios Matheou acknowledges that René may have ‘cho-
sen apathy as an escape from a painful past’ but suggests that his character
is ambiguous and his motivations not clear—perhaps he just loved the
challenge of the campaign (2013, p. 101; Dargis 2013). Larraín himself
claims that René ‘is in a deep existential conflict, in doubt about his job
and his partner’ (Larraín, with Palacios 2012b).13 There is meant to be a
mystery about his motivations that leads to reflection on the questions
that arise, so I examine that issue in more detail.
Images of trauma are initially filmed for the ‘No’ campaign and that is
what René rejects. The leftist strategists argue that they want to open up
people’s eyes, raise awareness. He says, ‘Do you want to win?’ and ‘Do
you think you can win?’ and they respond ‘No’ to the second question,
but they think it is important to show the traumatic images. Their mem-
ory of that trauma is clear and detailed, and quickly shown through some
images of tanks, soldiers with guns, and statistics about torture, exile, exe-
cutions, and the disappeared. However, the affect behind those ads could
be seen as the pointless rage that Blustein (2018) outlines. The socialist
coalition members who despise René could have been lost in endless
squabbles, as the ‘Yes’ campaign predicts, if he had not taken over the
campaign. Their reluctance to take the vote seriously and believe that a
‘No’ result will not be honoured, shown in a crucial scene, links back to a
feeling of helplessness as well as lack of trust in the authorities (Blustein
2018, pp. 243, 245). All the members of the opposition felt this way, at
least initially, due to the success of the previous referendum on a new con-
stitution in 1980, and the film represents the coming together of all the
parties, including socialists and ultimately communists as well.
However, the very idea of a ‘No’, like that in the campaign, can be
empowering. As part of her recovery from the trauma of being attacked,
Brison took part in self-defence classes where the women had to yell ‘No!’,
something that was difficult for them to do (2003, p. 14). She connects
this ‘no’ with resistance, maintaining that ‘The “no” of resistance is not
the “no” of denial. It is the “no” of acknowledgment of what happened
and refusal to let it happen again’ (2003, p. 64). Of course, the referen-
dum vote could have been framed the other way, but it was framed as ‘Yes’
for a continuation of the regime, presumably on the assumption that was
likely to be the more triumphant approach. Likewise, Maurice Blanchot
finds refusal to be a powerful political action. He writes:
Those who refuse and who are bound by the force of refusal know that they
are not yet together. The time of common affirmation is precisely what has
been taken away from them. What they are left with is the irreducible refusal,
the friendship of this sure, unshakable, rigorous No that unites them and
determines their solidarity (2010, p. 7).
298 M. LA CAZE
It is the beginning of coming together.

Thus, it is at this level of solidarity with ‘No’—a fundamental refusal of
the dictatorship and Pinochet—that René does his work. Despite intimi-
dation and an inducement to withdraw (an offer of partnership) from his
boss Lucho who is working for the ‘Yes’ campaign, René continues with
the campaign. As I noted, Dzero argues that René does not believe in
democracy or that his motives are at best unclear (2015, p. 122). She con-
trasts the film unfavourably to Antonio Skármeta’s play, El Plebiscito,
which she argues shows a genuine commitment to democracy, unlike the
film. Dzero also argues that working on the campaign had no transforma-
tive impact on René, and that his approach to the campaign is interchange-
able with his work on an ad for a soft drink called ‘Free’ and a soap opera,
Bellas y Audaces (Beautiful and Bold)—a real drink and real soap opera.
She contends that René uses the same pitch—‘What you are going to see
now is in line with the current social context … Today, Chile thinks about
its future’—for a soft drink called ‘Free’ for the no campaign, and for a
soap opera, thus showing that he is completely cynical about the campaign
(Dzero 2015, p. 127).14 This reading seems simplistic, as René’s character
is more complex and motivated in complex ways. The hero’s journey nar-
rative of departure, initiation into an adventure, and return, is closer in its
broad outlines to the structure of the film (Vogler 2007). Furthermore,
the film shows René to be concerned with the principles at stake, since he
discusses the importance of the concept of happiness to the political
future. Moreover, we can see that while René uses the same introduction
about the social context and the future in Chile, each time it has a differ-
ent meaning—the introduction to the ‘Free’ cola in Pinochet’s regime is
ironic, in the campaign for change it is earnest, and then for the soap opera
it is a kind of celebration of success, tempered with some ambivalence, as
René is awkward and hesitant in the final presentation. These differences
can be understood because the audience sees René change over the course
of the film.
Early in the campaign, René’s estranged partner, Verónica, says that the
ads are ‘a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy’; an obvious, if exag-
gerated, reference to Plato’s idea of art as a copy of an object that is a copy
of its form (Plato 1989, 596e–602c). She cannot see why René would
work to validate Pinochet’s referendum, but for him it is there to be won.
But later she changes her mind, saying ‘you are hitting the old man hard’,
and her new boyfriend is wearing the campaign’s signature rainbow t-shirt.
Similarly, René clearly changes as the campaign progresses, in contrast to
Dzero’s claim that ‘Larraín and Peirano [Pedro, scriptwriter] insist that
the campaign has no impact on him’ and has ‘no transformative or educa-
tional impact on the adman’ (2015, pp. 122, 127). Caetlin Benson-Allott
also sees in René a ‘growing disillusionment with his vacuous profession’
(2013, p. 61), a view Fabrizio Cilento repeats (2015). However, while
early on René does not intervene to help Verónica when she is beaten at
the police station, later we see him being drawn in to help her at the dem-
onstration and he is kicked in the stomach and thrown to the ground.15
Furthermore, he accepts the abuse painted in red on his window
[Homeland-peddling Marxist], being followed, and threatened as a result
of his work for the campaign.16
René’s transformation is linked to a collective transformation that is
expressed in the film’s style. Dzero analyses the film as a simulacrum,
where there is no concern about the distinction between the media images
and reality, expressed by René’s set up of a group enjoying a picnic, includ-
ing baguettes, and saying ‘It works’ (2015, pp. 129–30). However, this
interpretation seems not to take seriously enough the way the film draws
attention to its artifice at certain points, as Larraín casts real figures from
the campaign, with their younger versions in the documentary footage,
such as Patricio Aylwin, Chilean president after Pinochet, playing an
elderly politician (Dzero 2015, p. 129; Larraín, with Palacios 2012b). For
Larraín, the actor’s body ‘returns to where it once was. It returns, returns,
and that’s the work of memory. It’s beautiful’ (2012a). He sees these roles
as doing some of the work of recovery from trauma, and as helping others
to avoid making the same mistakes. The presence of the individuals both
evokes their place in the past and reminds viewers of how things have
changed.
Moreover, Larraín immerses the audience in the narrative and reflects
the period by filming on old videotape on an Ikegama camera so that the
archival film footage used and the new film blend together, and uses the
squarer Academy ratio (1.40:1) (Lyttelton 2013). This ratio, in contrast
to the narrower ones used for the grimmer films, can signify an opening
up of the society through collective resistance. No never loses sight of the
distinction between fact and fiction, even if the old footage is not immedi-
ately distinguishable by colour and image quality. Scholars and reviewers
find the bleeding and blurred colours and images to signify trauma or
moral and political ambiguity (Wells 2017, p. 515; Benson-Allott 2013,
pp. 62–63).17 Wells considers that these references could be taken as a
homage to video resistance in Chile and to Alylwin’s Concertación de
300 M. LA CAZE
Partidos por la Democracia (Coalition of Parties for Democracy), a coali-

tion of centre-left political parties which governed Chile from 1990 to
2010.18 The coalition is represented by the rainbow symbol that appears
throughout the film in the show, posters and t-shirts for the campaign,
predating the global use of that flag to represent LGBTIQ struggles.
However, Wells concludes that ‘these tributes are oblique, or better said,
bleak’ (2017, p. 514). Yet these tributes to collective resistance in the form
of original and new video footage and their significance would be obvious
to a Chilean audience.
It is important to the film (and history) that the campaign was a suc-
cess, with 54.7% of Chileans voting ‘No’. At the beginning, most people
were afraid to vote and afraid of a return to socialism. People were scepti-
cal about whether the vote would be accepted, yet they had to support the
vote so that it would be accepted. What is crucial, I think, to the success
of the ‘No’ campaign is not just the shifts to positivity and to the future
but also the shift from individual suffering to collective defiance, which
the ads contribute to as we see in the film. Instead of looking at the trauma
and the negative effects as those of an individual, the campaign focuses on
the shared capacity for happiness, presented in the shots of groups enjoy-
ing the imagined future after ‘no’ wins.19
Nevertheless, the film’s conclusion is ambiguous, since René leaves the
celebration for the plebiscite win with his son, and commentators have
remarked on his ‘muted response’, taken as a sign of quietism (Wells 2017,
p. 515; Benson-Allott 2013, p. 61). I argue that the ending, rather than
depicting cynicism about democracy, depicts the ambiguity and ambiva-
lence of political change.20 Any transition from a dictatorship to a democ-
racy is bound to be multifaceted and have both positive and negative
aspects, so the events of the transition are unlikely to support a one-sided
interpretation. The Chilean transition is variously described as ‘a beautiful,
almost mystic moment of national euphoria, a unique time of people col-
laborating’ (Cronovich 2016, pp. 173–74) or the beginning of the medi-
atisation of Chilean politics (Simón 2018, pp. 67–71). Mediatisation often
refers to the media becoming autonomous from politics and yet dominat-
ing it, whereas Harry L. Salazar Simón (2018) contends that politics and
media/marketing became fused in the Chilean case. One of the negative
aspects of post-Pinochet Chile is the impunity of the Chilean killers, in the
main, which Larraín sees as an open wound (Larraín, in Lyttelton 2013).
He notes that the ending is ‘the wonderful thing, but there’s a bitter taste
at the same time’ because ‘we kept some of the “Yes” in our system, in our
logic’ (Lyttelton 2013; Larraín, with Palacios 2012b). By this he means

the economic logic of capitalism and neoliberalism, which includes the use
of advertising to influence people’s feelings and behaviour. Seeing René
skateboarding through a city street towards the end of the film gives an
impression of joy, although Mozaffar suggests it is a scene of loneliness
(Mozaffar 2013). In the final scene, he is back at the advertising agency
working on the soap opera, an ambivalent presentation on how some
things will stay the same even after the switch to democracy. Furthermore,
in Chile, democracy did not begin overnight after the plebiscite, as the
civic-military rule continued for another eighteen months.
In contrast, there are also signs of hope beyond the winning of the
plebiscite. Verónica and René are united in their care and concern for their
son, Simón (Pascal Montero) and to some extent become united in their
desire for the ‘No’ case to win. Unlike the generations of black Americans
who suffered under slavery and successive forms of oppression, Chileans in
the film are the first generation, although a new generation was starting to
grow up under the dictatorship. René’s son in the film is the future, the
generation that the promise of happiness is held out to. He is only eight
and would have known nothing but the regime, as even a fifteen-year-old
would. Will his generation suffer less trauma? The film No frames the rela-
tion between the generations differently from the other two films in the
trilogy. Tony Manero, set during the civic-military dictatorship, concerns
an ageing Raúl, a dancer who kills with impunity under the cover of the
murderous regime, and is trying to win a Saturday Night Fever (1977)
Tony Manero look-alike context. He stymies the ambitions of the much
younger Goyo, also interested in the same contest, by spoiling his Tony
Manero suit. Similarly, in Post Mortem, concerning the military takeover,
the older Mario, a pathologist’s assistant, is rapidly corrupted by his expo-
sure to the bodies of those murdered in the coup at the hospital where he
works. Rejected by his young neighbour Nancy, who he had been obsessed
with, he murders her and her boyfriend. But in No, René’s youth and even
childlikeness is stressed, as he goes skateboarding, playing with train sets,
and looking after and engaging with his son. Wells suggests he is petulant
because of these activities (2017, p. 514) and Mozaffar that he is ‘a soft-
spoken kid’ with ‘an empty life of toys and opulence’ (2013). However,
while these presentations could be seen as mocking, in the context of the
trilogy, it also implies that in post-dictatorship Chile, youth and the next
generations will have a chance.
302 M. LA CAZE
Conclusion
The possibility of transforming trauma by altering its relation to time and
by creating a new narrative that links the past and future is affirmed by
writers on trauma such as McCartney, Du Bois, Blustein, and Brison. The
film No explores this possibility of a retemporalising and detranslating shift
to a conception of collective happiness in the future rather than simply
focusing on discussions of the atrocities and trauma of the past and present
in the 1988 Chilean plebiscite campaign. Larraín’s mix of archival and new
footage made on old film and cameras, and the use of individuals from the
earlier period playing roles in the film, provide an enactment and embodi-
ment of place and time that enable a connection to be drawn between the
past and present. The film’s depiction of the campaign and the scholarly
responses to it reflect the debates that continue in Chile concerning the
Pinochet regime and the post-dictatorship period. While I have focussed
on the positive philosophical elements of No, the film, the memories of the
campaign, and subsequent developments are all highly contested in Chile
and beyond. In addition, the role of television in the ‘No’ campaign as a
site of resistance is itself challenged by those who stress the prior grass-
roots activism. However, the highlighting of happiness in the film and the
campaign is itself a form of resistance to oppression and the perpetrators
of atrocities as it shifts our affects away from fear, from desire for material
things, and even from comfort bought at the cost of democracy and the
suffering of others. No also shows how happiness brings together a variety
of different political actors in a refusal of dictatorship, a refusal to let the
trauma continue. The transformation of René’s character in the film as he
becomes more engrossed in the campaign shows the importance of shar-
ing in collective resistance. While the ‘No’ campaign in the film and its
success cannot be imitated, as it depends on the specificity of Chile and the
plebiscite, the temporal, affective, and pluralistic approach to resistance is
one that can inspire.
Notes
1. No was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film of the Year Oscar in
2013, won the Art Cinema Award at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival and
many other awards.
2. Dzero cites 3000 people killed and more than 80,000 tortured (2015,
p. 120). Chile had a commission into human rights abuses resulting in
death or disappearance, which delivered The National Commission for

Truth and Reconciliation (Rettig) Report in 1991 and the The National
Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture (Valech) Report in
2004. Thakkar gives figures from the Valech Report as 3225 murdered or
disappeared and 37,055 tortured (2017b, p. 248), out of approximately
10 million people.
3. Feierstein explains how during the Argentinian military dictatorship
(1976–1983) almost any actual or potential criticism or rebellion against
the regime was characterised as criminal subversion (2014, pp. 161–66)
and such subversion was treated as defining of the group subjected to
genocide (2014, p. 29).
4. For example, Chile has a Museum of Memory and Human Rights in
Santiago to commemorate the victims of the civic-military regime. See
Rojas-Lizana, this volume.
5. See Di Stefano (2018) for a comparison of No and Neruda.
6. See Toledo (2013), Jung (2015) and Thakkar (2017a, b) for analyses of
Tony Manero and Post Mortem.
7. Wells acknowledges that ‘Larraín could never tell the entire story’ (2017,
p. 514), Cilento also argues that the film ‘catalyses a larger historical dis-
cussion’ (2015) and Cronovich defends the value of the film as an ‘intro-
duction to the plebiscite’ (2016, p. 166). See Hirmas for an analysis of the
role of television in the campaign as important in reminding viewers of
[social, economic, and political] conditions (1993, p. 82).
8. See Ackerman and DuVall (2000, pp. 296–97) for a discussion of opinion
polls and the background to the plebiscite. There was a long registration
drive from 1980 to ensure that people were enrolled to vote and 92 per
cent of the electorate was registered (Khazan 2013).
9. Khazan’s article details how the positive theme had also been based on
work with focus groups (2013). Hirmas states that the profile of undecided
voters were women and young people (1993, p. 87), as represented in the
film. In contrast, Cronovich says they were women, poor people, and rural
voters (2016, p. 167).
10. It also pointed to a conciliatory mood in another slogan ‘Without hatred,
without fear, and without violence, vote “No”’.
11. Hirmas notes that another slogan was ‘YES. You decide. We continue
moving ahead or we return to the UP’ (1993, p. 85). Unidad Popular, or
Popular Unity, is the coalition of left-wing parties that supported Allende.
12. Jung is an exception in acknowledging the importance of happiness as a
substantial political concept and the creativity of the campaign (2015,
pp. 127–28).
13. Cilento also sees René as going through an ‘anguishing dilemma’ in both
his professional and private life (2015).
304 M. LA CAZE
14. Wells similarly argues that there is no possibility of redemption in Larraín’s

films (2017, p. 504). Simón concurs that it is not clear that anything has
changed between René and his boss after the campaign (2018, p. 54).
15. Qandt’s and Caldwell’s humourless readings focus on René’s first men-
tioning the possible damage to his car (Qandt 2016; Caldwell 2013).
16. René also protects a crucial tape by taking it to the censor, while the others
leave with empty video boxes. This tape is the one censored. See commu-
nication scholar Simón (2018, pp. 110–11), who notes that the only cen-
sorship of the campaign occurred on day 8, when the ‘No’ programme
included testimony from a judge concerning 50 cases of torture. After a
national and international outcry, the Sí campaign self-censored its own
programme the following day.
17. James Cisneros observes that Larraín exaggerates the quality of the video
by allowing rather than controlling blurring and overexposure (2018,
pp. 53–54).
18. Jung notes that ‘Video—U-matic, VHS-C, Hi-8, Super VHS and
Betacam—was central for the development of an alternative “imaginary”
of Chilean society and, later, as part of the audio-visual battle of the 1980s,
as well as the NO campaign’ (2015, p. 120). See Chanan (2013) for an
account of the importance of video to resistance in Chile and other Latin
American countries and the U-matic Project website http://www.prype-
cyoidis.org/umatic for documentaries and other films made on video dur-
ing the dictatorship.
19. It is also referred to in another slogan, ‘We are more’ (Hirmas 1993,
p. 91), which can be seen as a response to the ‘Yes’ campaign’s ‘We are
millions’.
20. Applebaum notes these aspects of the film (2013) and Wells recognises
that Larraín’s films may help viewers to work through the trauma by help-
ing them to see themselves as implicated subjects, as well as acting it out
(2017, pp. 517, 504). See Traverso for a discussion of how Chilean docu-
mentaries since the regime have involved representations that work
through the traumatic memories rather than acting them out (2011).
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Dargis, M 2013, ‘Try freedom: Less filling! Tastes great! No with Gael García
Bernal’, The New York Times, 14 February.
Di Stefano, E 2018, ‘Forms of freedom in Pablo Larraín’s No and Neruda’, Open
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Du Bois, WEB 1996 [1903]. The souls of Black folk, Penguin, London.
Dzero, I 2015, ‘Larrain’s film No and its inspiration, El Plebiscito: Chile’s transi-
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Feierstein, D 2014, Genocide as social practice: Reorganizing society under the
Nazis and Argentina’s military junta, Rutgers University Press, New
Brunswick.
Felperin, L 2012, ‘No’, Variety, vol. 427, no. 3, p. 16.
Harff, B 2003, ‘No lessons learned from the Holocaust? Assessing risks of geno-
cide and political mass murder since 1955’, American Political Science Review,
vol. 97, no. 1, pp. 57–73.
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306 M. LA CAZE
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Index1
A Algeria, 87, 134, 139, 145, 146,

Abject, 188, 190, 254 151n3, 178, 180, 219–234,
abjection, 190, 254, 256 235n3, 236n8, 236n11
Africa, 2, 134, 219, 242 Algerian War (1954–1962), 7, 134,
African diaspora, 179, 187 135, 138, 142, 151n3,
Agony, 38, 39, 206, 210, 250 220–222, 236n11
Aichinger, Ilse, 9, 157–172, 173n1 independence day (5 July
and cinema, 9, 159, 163, 167–172 1962), 220–221
Film und Verhängnis: Blitzlichter auf Algérie, histoires à ne pas dire (book)
ein Leben (Film and Fate (Lledo 2011), 222
Camera Flashes Illuminating a Algérie, histoires à ne pas dire
Life) (2001), 158 (documentary) (Lledo 2006), 222
Unglaubwürdige Reisen (Improbable Alić, Fikret, 198, 203–215, 216n4
Journeys) (2005), 158 Alleg, Henri, 178
and Vienna, 157–160, 162–168, Allende, Salvador, 293, 303n11
170, 171 See also Chile
and writing, 161, 162, 166, Anti-Semitism, 157, 164, 166,
168, 170 171, 186–189
Air raids, 38–45, 47, 51–53, 55 See also Holocaust, the
See also Japan Anzac legend, 25, 29, 30
Albert, Tony, 110, 114, 123–126 See also Australia
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4
310 INDEX
Argentina, 87, 91 Bosnia-Herzegovina

Aristotle, 286, 294 Bosnian War (1992–1995), 208
Australia, 16, 25 genocide, 10, 216n7
ANZAC memorials, 122 See also Srebrenica
Australian war memorials (AWM), Boulder, Colorado, 275–277, 280
18, 26, 27, 110, 119 Burial
history of, 25, 26, 126 burial rites, 68–70
representation of Aboriginal and burial sites, 22, 72, 77
Torres Strait Islanders, 125 provisional burial, 43
Australian Vietnam Volunteers See also Cremation; Mass graves
Resource Group (AVVRG), 21, 22 Butler, Judith, 6, 181
Australian War Memorial (AWM), 18,
26, 27, 110, 119, 127
Austria C
and historical responsibility, 160 Canberra, 16, 21, 23, 24, 28, 119
Nazi annexation of, 157–158 Caribbean, the, 142, 145, 149, 179,
Aylwin, Patricio, 299 180, 187
literature, 180
Casting JonBenet (Green,
B 2017), 263–281
Bachelet, Michelle, 85, 93 Catholic Church, 19, 268, 269
See also Chile Cemeteries, 21, 23, 26, 27,
‘Bad deaths,’ 62, 63, 65–71, 77 94, 151n14
See also Mass graves war, 21, 23
Baltimore, 263, 268, 269 See also Mass graves
Barbados, 176, 179, 180, 186, Cesnik, Cathy, 10, 263, 268–271
187, 191n7 Children
Barthes, Roland, 180 killing of, 187
Battlefield, 15–32, 111, 125, 138 as survivors, 37, 52, 224
Bhabha, Homi K., 177, 189–190 Chile
Binh Ba, 15–32 Chilean referendum, 1988, 287
See also Vietnam (Viet Nam) civic-military regime,
Black Atlantic, 175–190 1973–1989, 85
Black Atlantic triangle, 179 Chirac, Jacques, 135
See also Slavery Christian, 166, 180, 186, 187,
Blackness 189, 231
black skin, 9, 175–190 and Christianisation, 180
and racialisation, 188 Cinema
versus whiteness, 188 as place of refuge, 169, 170
Bodies post-traumatic cinema, 292
and place, 263–281 Civilian casualities, 25, 40–41, 61–65,
as sites of memory/ 204–205, 221, 235
trauma, 263–281 Civil rights activism, 183
See also Blackness, black skin Civil war
INDEX 311
Algerian civil war (1991–2002), 225 Der Standard (The Standard)

American, 183 newspaper, 158
See also War Desire, 69, 126, 143, 150, 182,
Cold War, 39, 63–65, 84 188–190, 203, 210, 214, 252,
Cole, Joshua, 178, 179, 190, 237n13 289, 294, 301, 302
Colonialism Detranslation, 287, 288
colonial empire, 135–144 Diasporas, 179, 187, 199, 201
colonisation, 4, 116, 134, 144, 187 Dictatorship, 2, 8, 85, 89, 92, 93, 96,
harms caused by, 116–117, 126, 100, 101, 285, 286, 288–290,
134–136, 141, 144, 292–294, 298, 300–302,
178–180, 220–222 303n3, 304n18
settlement colonies of, 144 Die größere Hoffnung (The Greater
See also Decolonisation Hope), (Aichinger, 1948), 157
Columbus, Christopher, 187 Diên Biên Phù, 16, 30, 134, 138
Commemoration, 2, 16–18, 21, 24, 1954 battle of, 134
26, 28–31, 40, 43, 46, 72, 76, Disappearing, 72, 170, 172,
78n10, 84, 109–112, 114–120, 173n5, 289
123, 125, 126, 136, 161, 220, See also Argentina; Chile; Indonesia
233, 234, 291 Disremembering, 19–20, 46, 48
Communism, 64, 290 Documentary
See also PKI (Partai Komunis actors’ traumatic memories, 277
Indonesia, Indonesian close-ups, 271
Communist Party) and memory, 223
Concentration camps, 64, 72, 169, re-enactment, 273, 277
198, 204, 205, 208, 214 trauma documentary, 222, 223, 266
See also World War II and truth, 4, 223, 279, 281
Condé, Maryse, 9, 176–180, Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906), 187, 188
182–189, 191n4 Du Bois, W.E.B. (1868–1963),
Conscription, 51, 112, 119, 158 286–288, 293, 302
Coral-Balmoral, 15–32
Cremation, 41
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), 88 E
Crucible, The (Miller, 1953), 176 Education, 20, 114, 116, 122, 135,
244, 252
Emotion
D fear, 289, 294
Daily Mail, The newspaper, 208 freedom, loss of, 207
Daily Mirror, The newspaper, 208 guilt, 53, 289
Dark tourism, 91, 92, 111 happiness, 294
de Beauvoir, Simone, 178 hope of, 97
Decolonisation, 220, 235n3 Empathy
Democracy, 64, 295, 296, 298, 300–302 empathic distress, 241–256
Deportation, 144, 145, 163, 166, in film, 241–256
170, 215n3 England, see United Kingdom (UK)
312 INDEX
Ethnic cleansing, 210 See also Colonialism, colonisation;

Evian Accords, 220, 221 Vietnam (Viet Nam)
See also Algeria Freud, Sigmund, 172, 258n14, 265,
269, 274, 289
Front de Libération Nationale (FLN),
F 221, 237n18
Facebook, 62, 63, 72–74, 77, 77n1, See also Algeria
78n7, 215n1, 237n15
Fanon, Frantz, 6, 177, 185, 186,
188, 189 G
and epidermisation, 177 Gallipoli, 23, 29, 30, 109, 121, 123
Peau noire, masques blancs See also ANZAC legend
(1952), 185 Genocide
Fascism, 64, 76, 164–165, 172 at Srebrenica, 198–200
Female genital cutting/mutiliation during World War II, 47, 158–159
(FGC/FGM), 242–244, See also Holocaust, the; Politicide;
256n1, 257n8 World War II
Film Germany, 32, 87
and empathy, 245 See also World War II
ethical turn in, 245 Gestapo, 7, 160, 163, 164, 172
as form of remembering, 10, 170 Vienna headquarters, 7, 160, 164
Firebombing, 37–57 Ghana, 10, 175, 242, 243, 257n4,
See also Japan 257n5, 257n8, 258n12
First Indochina War Godard, Jean-Luc, 161, 168
(1945–1954), 138 Good War, 46–47
First World War, see World War I Grand Austrian State Prize, 157, 159,
Forgetting, 27, 30, 31, 46, 99, 160, 164
136–139, 142, 176, 190, See also Aichinger, Ilse
197, 224 Grass between my Lips (Djansi
processes of, 30 2008), 241–256
France Grave of the Fireflies, see Hotaru no
antisemitism in, 187 haka (Nosaka 1967), film 1988
and colonial violence, 180 Guardian, The newspaper, 26,
and racism, 187 204, 208
and torture, 182 Guilt, 38, 39, 45, 53, 96, 222, 226,
Fraser, Malcolm, 20 275, 278, 279, 289
See also Australia
Freedom, 64, 87, 91, 112, 118, 187,
207, 209, 242, 257n4 H
Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), 165 Hanoi, 20–22, 26, 27
French Guiana, 143–150, 151n12 See also Vietnam (Viet Nam)
French Indochina, 134, 144 Happiness
INDEX 313
in the Chilean ‘No’ campaign, 285, Humanitarianism, 202, 203, 214

300, 302 Humanitarian journalism
as resistance to trauma, 286 ethics of, 214
Haunting, 10, 61–77, 98, 207, 248, and re-traumatisation of
266, 268, 273, 278, 281 survivors, 197–215
bodily haunting, 272 Human rights, 3, 27, 73, 75, 202,
See also Mass graves 203, 209, 210, 212, 243,
Hawke, Bob, 20 302n2, 303n4
See also Australia Hyde Park, Sydney, 109–127
Healing
collective, 2, 101
of survivors, 8, 10, 50, 75 I
Hiroshima Identity
Hiroshima Peace Memorial collective, 137, 249
(Genbaku Dome) and Park, survivor’s identity, 10, 101,
39, 47, 50 201–207, 214
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Hall/ Indonesia, 63, 65, 66, 68, 72, 73,
Museum, 51, 53 78n3, 290
survivors of the 1945 mass killings of 1965–1966,
bombing, 90 61, 72
See also Japan military, 62–64, 73, 74, 76
Histoire(s) du cinéma (Godard, International People’s Tribunal for
1998), 161 1965, 73
History See also Indonesia
challenges to national International relations, 16, 30
history, 139 Islam, 68
history wars, 125 See also Indonesia
official, 3, 26, 232 Israel, 87
Ho Chi Minh City, 16, 18, 22, 28 I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (Moi,
See also Vietnam (Viet Nam) Tituba, sorcière… Noire de Salem)
Holiday, Billie, 191n7 (Condé 1986), 9, 176
Hollande, François, 233
Holocaust, the
in Austria, 9, 157, 159 J
representations of, 9, 159 Jakarta, see Indonesia
See also World War II Japan
Hotaru no haka (Grave of the Fireflies) Japanese victimhood, 51
(1988), 44 national peace narrative, 51
Hotaru no haka (Nosaka 1967), film Jardin d’Agronomie Tropicale,
1988, 44 140–142, 148
Huffington Post newspaper, 222, Jardin des Colonies, 142
225, 231–233 Java, see Indonesia
314 INDEX
Jingoism, 32 M
Journalism Macron, Emmanuel, 134, 136, 145
advocacy journalism, 202 Malecki, Joyce, 268, 269, 271
and bias, 203, 212 See also Keepers, The (White, 2017)
ethics of, 10, 203 Malle, Louis, 168, 172
peace journalism, 202 Mapping of burial sites, 61, 71–75
and re-traumatisation of See also Indonesia; Mass graves
survivors, 197–215 Mass graves
role in recording testimony, 203 haunting of, 61–77
See also Humanitarian journalism; respect for, 69
Photography See also Indonesia
Massacre, 4, 7, 10, 25, 26, 62–65, 72,
73, 219–234
K McNamara, Robert, 57
Keating, Paul, 20, 23 Mediatisation, 300
See also Australia Melbourne, see Australia
Keepers, The (White, 2017), 263–281 Memorial
Klüger, Ruth, 158 Memorial for consoling the souls of
See also Austria; Holocaust, the Tokyo Air Raids victims, 43
Kobe, 38, 44 to slavery, 2, 175, 180, 183
See also Japan See also Toni Morrison Society
Kohl, Helmut, 160 Memorialisation, 7, 8, 17, 20, 24, 26,
See also Germany 28, 30, 31, 45, 56, 65, 125,
Ku Klux Klan, 183 145–147, 161, 180, 246,
247, 291
processes of, 16–18, 30–31, 125
L Memory
Larraín, Pablo, 285–302 autobiographical, 223
Latin America, 83–87, 91–92 and body, 50, 111, 263–281, 299
LeMay, Curtis, 57 collective, 1, 7, 17, 39, 45, 50, 56,
See also World War II 86, 91, 92, 96, 113, 137, 138,
Lieux de mémoire, 4, 115, 134–139, 159–162, 214, 223, 241,
146, 148 249, 265
See also Nora, Pierre construction of, 7, 86, 101, 140,
Like Cotton Twines (Kaleka 280, 281
2016), 241–256 counter-memory, 190
Lledo, Jean-Pierre, 222–234, 235n3, emotional, 48, 96–98, 291
236n9, 237n18, 237n19 historical, 47, 56, 96, 100, 159,
Long Tan 161, 223
battle of, 16, 18, 24, 25, 27, 28 individual, 1, 7–9, 17, 39, 48, 55,
Long Tan Day, 24, 27, 28 56, 86, 101, 119, 121, 126,
Lynching, 181, 184, 191n7 159–162, 265
INDEX 315
interrupted, 221 Murder

museum/centre, 3, 4, 7, 45, 48, 50, perpetrators of, 61, 178,
52, 55, 83–87, 92, 99, 101 227, 264
national, 52, 84, 101, victims of, 69–70, 167, 187, 276
136–139, 233 See also Massacre
and place, v, 1–11, 48, 53, 84, 90, Musée de la France d’Outre-mer, 140
91, 94, 99–101, 121, 149, 179, Musée National des Arts a’Afrique et
186, 197, 212, 224, d’Océanie, 140
234, 263–281 Museum, 2, 8, 18, 39, 45, 48, 49,
politics of, 7, 61, 62, 76, 109, 127, 51, 53, 55, 56, 76, 83–96,
133–136, 234 98–101, 102n1, 102n3, 102n4,
public, 8, 45, 48, 53, 55, 56, 159, 110, 114, 140, 161, 236n10,
161, 220, 275–281 269, 270
recovered, 91, 269, 272 visitor experiences of, 83
screen, 229, 263–281 Museum of Memory and Human
sites of, 3–5, 7, 27, 31, 65, 76, Rights, Chile (MMDH),
109–127, 133–150, 164, 83, 303n4
175–190, 220, 224, visitor book, 83, 86–94, 97, 101
234, 246–250
social, 56, 61, 76, 265
(transgenerational) transfer N
of, 48, 52 Nagasaki, 39, 40, 43, 46, 50, 51
traumatic, v, 1–11, 37–57, 101, See also Japan
110, 111, 116, 117, 120, 121, Napalm, 51
127, 177, 179, 183, 190, 197, See also Vietnam (Viet Nam)
214, 220, 223, 229, 233, Narratives
236n9, 243, 247, 248, 253, authorised, 39, 40, 46, 49, 55
258n14, 264–267, 269, 273, of memory, 2, 4, 6, 39, 46, 88, 100,
274, 277, 279–281, 290, 291, 110, 115, 117, 126, 140, 247,
294, 304n20 248, 291
See also Trauma narrative discourse, 40, 49
Memory Wars, French (Les Guerres de of trauma, 2, 5, 6, 247
mémoire), 220 National Symposium on 1965, 73
Migration, 135, 140 See also Indonesia
forced, 179 Nazism, 164, 168
See also Slavery See also Austria; World War II
Monuments Netherlands, the, 73
for commemoration, 40, 114 ‘Never again,’ 84, 86, 93, 100,
memorial monuments, 43, 45 113, 208
Mourning See also Holocaust, the
official mourning, 161 New Caledonia, 143–148, 151n12,
rituals of, 72 151n13, 151n15
316 INDEX
New Order (1966–1998), 64, 65, 71, 76 P

See also Indonesia Peace
Nishinomiya, 44 international, 47, 51
See also Japan peace narrative, Japanese, 46, 47, 51
Nixon, Richard, 183 Photography
No (dir. Pablo Larraín, 2012), in documentary, 72
11, 285–302 as evidence, 26
See also Chile and landscape, 73
Nora, Pierre, 4, 76, 115, 136–140, photographic journalism, 207
143, 148, 149, 151n3, 151n6, and spectacle, 206, 207, 209, 210
177, 179, 180 Pieds-Noirs, 134, 222, 235n7,
and lieux de mémoire, 4, 115, 236n11, 236n12
134–139, 146, 148 Pilgrimage, 4, 17, 23, 68, 92, 94, 111
North Vietnam Pinochet, Augusto, 11, 93, 95, 285,
North Vietnamese Army (NVA), 16, 289–291, 293, 295, 296, 298,
19, 21, 22, 24 299, 302
See also Vietnam (Viet Nam) dictatorship of, 11, 285, 298
Nosaka, Akiyuki, 44 See also Chile
See also Hotaru no haka (Grave of the PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia,
Fireflies) (1988) Indonesian Communist Party), 64
Nouméa See also Indonesia
colonisation of, 145 Place
Kanak nationalism in, 145 and body, 264, 267, 271, 281
See also Colonisation and commemoration/
Nuclear bombing, 39, 46 memorialisation, 2, 43
See also Japan and memory, 1–11, 264, 267
Nuclear disarmament, 39, 47 and public memory, 275–281
of refuge, 165
of resistance/rebellion, 165
O significance of, 43
Obama, Barrack, 183 and trauma, 266, 275–281
Objectification, 180, 181, 211 See also Sites of memory; Trauma
Oran, 4, 219–234 Plumbon, see Indonesia
massacre (5 July 1962), 219–234 Police violence, 178, 182, 184
Organisation de l’Armée Secrète See also Torture
(OAS), 221, 227, 230, Politicide, see Indonesia
236n7, 237n17 Post-memory, 228
See also Algeria Potočari, 198, 200, 201
Osaka Prisoner of war camps, 15, 29
fire bombings, 42, 54–55
Osaka International Peace Centre,
39, 40, 53–55 R
See also Japan Racialisation, 177, 179, 181, 187, 188
Othering, 243, 253, 256 Racism, 177, 187, 190
INDEX 317
Ramsey, JonBenet, 10, 264, Sarajevo, 199

275–279, 281 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 134, 135, 150n2
Rape Sartre, Jean-Paul, 186–189
and racism, 177, 187 theory of anti-Semitism, 186
rape script, 181 Scholl, Hans and Sophie, 160
See also Sexual violence See also World War II
Reagan, Ronald, 183 Screen memory, 263–281
Reconciliation, 16, 23, 30, 31, 92, Second Indochina War (Vietnam or
101, 220, 234 American War,
Re-enactment sequences 1955–1975), 15–32
and bodies, 274 Second World War, see World War II
and haunting, 266, 268, 281 Segregation, 177, 183
purposes of, 273 Sennintsuka (monument for the
and traumatic memory, 265, 274 thousand), 41, 42
Refusal, 100, 135, 187, 226, 297, Sexual violence, 178, 180
298, 302 sexual abuse, 268, 269, 271, 273
Remembering See also Rape
community-based remembering, 55 Shame, 96, 250, 289
and film, 10 Sidi El Houari, 225–228, 230–231
processes of, 48, 172 See also Algeria; Oran
of war, 50, 111 Silence
See also Disremembering of collective trauma narratives, 56
Repetition of trauma through memory of personal trauma narratives, 55
and racism, 177, 179, 190 silent voice, 208
Resistance Sites of memory, 3, 5, 31, 115, 121,
collective, 299, 300, 302 122, 125, 126, 133–150, 164,
happiness as resistance, 286, 295 175, 183, 186, 220, 224
individual, 286 Slavery, 2, 4, 9, 144, 175, 177–181,
Retemporalisation, 287 183, 186, 188, 250, 301
Re-traumatisation, 10 racialisation of, 177, 179
Ritual, 45, 62, 68–70, 72, 76, 111, Solidarity, 49, 98, 100, 159, 166, 170,
114, 243, 244, 256n1, 257n6 288, 297, 298
Ruins, 5–7, 9, 10, 136, 139–143, 145, Speech act, 5, 84, 88, 91, 92,
148–150, 229, 230, 266 94–96, 99
Spirits (of victims), 45
See also Haunting; Mass graves
S Srebrenica
Saavedra, René, 286, 291 genocide at, 198–200
See also No (dir. Pablo memorial, 201
Larraín, 2012) Star, The newspaper, 208
Saigon, see Ho Chi Minh City Stora, Benjamin, 139, 219, 220, 222,
Salem (Massachusetts), 176, 177, 233, 235n3, 235n4, 237n19
179, 186 Studio Ghibli, 44
Salem witch trials (1692–1693), 176 animations by, 44
318 INDEX
Suharto, 63, 64 Trauma

See also Indonesia anger, traumatic, 255, 289, 290
Sukarno, 63, 64 collective, 56, 85, 289
See also Indonesia experiential, 247
Sumatra, see Indonesia racist, 182, 183
Sumida Kyodo Bunka Shiryoukan, 53 recovery from, 291, 297, 299
See also Japan; Tokyo repression of, 294
Sun, The newspaper, 211, 212, 215 trauma healing, 75
Survivors trauma theory, 289
as ‘living memories,’ 50 traumatic memory, 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8,
representation of by the media, 198, 37–57, 101, 110, 116, 117, 177,
201, 204 179, 183, 190, 197, 214, 223,
trauma narratives of, 222, 291 229, 233, 236n9, 243, 247,
as volunteers, 50, 56, 90 248, 253, 258n14, 265–267,
269, 273, 274, 279–281, 290,
291, 294, 304n20
T See also Re-traumatisation
Takahata, Isao, 44 Trnopolje concentration camp, 198,
See also Studio Ghibli 204, 205
Testimonio, 101 Trokosi (ritual deity servitude),
Testimony 242–244, 246–253, 256, 257n4,
and bodies, 272 257n5, 257n6, 258n9, 258n12
and documentary, 223, 269 See also Ghana
drawings/paintings as True crime, 263, 266, 267, 281
testimony, 51, 53 documentary, 263–281
oral, 5, 46, 223, 274 Trump, Donald J., 182, 183
Thai-Burma railway, 23, 29, 30 witch hunt, 183
Time magazine, 198, 204–206, 209, Trump, Donald J. (Jr.), 183
211, 215, 216n7 Truth
Tokyo and journalism, 10
Centre for the Tokyo Raids and War and memory, 223
Damage (Tokyo Daikushu Sensai truth-telling, 62, 65, 71–76, 232
Shiryou Centre), 52 Truth and Reconciliation
fire bombings, 7 Commission, Chile
Ireido, 41, 43 in 1991 (Rettig Report), 303n2
Toni Morrison Society, 175 in 2004 (Valech Report), 85, 303n2
and monuments, 175 Turnbull, Malcolm, 26, 27
Torture See also Australia
and racism, 177, 190
and repetition, 183
and slavery, 2, 177, 178 U
torturer, 179, 181, 189, 190 United Kingdom (UK), 92, 135, 158,
See also Police violence 168, 172, 208
Translanguaging, 226 United Nations (UN), 20, 84, 198, 201
INDEX 319
United States of America 203, 206, 209, 210, 213, 214,

civil war, 183 220–225, 227, 233, 234, 236n12
and Jim Crow South, 183 Welles, Orson, 165, 166
UNREST (Unsettling Remembering Whitlam, Gough, 20
and Social Cohesion in See also Australia
Transnational Europe), 110, 112 Witchcraft
Urban landscape, 38, 143 witch hunt, 177, 183, 190
witch trials, 176, 177, 179
Witness, 1, 4–8, 10, 11, 37–57, 62,
V 65, 71, 73, 75, 77, 91, 92, 99,
Veterans, 16, 21–23, 25, 26, 28–31, 197, 203, 204, 209, 210,
111, 121, 122, 125, 127 222–224, 228, 229, 234, 235n6,
Vicarious trauma, 245, 250, 254, 256 236n10, 241, 245–248,
Victims 251–255, 269
compensation for, 75 silenced witnesses, 40
families of, 199 Witnessing, 6, 198, 201, 204, 208,
rights of, 84 209, 213, 241, 245, 246, 251,
victimisation, 252 252, 292
Vienna, see Austria World War I, 9, 23, 29,
Viet Cong (National Liberation 109–127, 141
Front), 16, 17, 19, 21, 24, 31 World War II, 7, 19, 29, 32, 134, 135,
Việt Minh (League for Vietnamese 157, 165, 169
Independence), 134, 138 See also Austria; Holocaust,
Vietnam (Viet Nam), 7, 16, 17, 20, the; Japan
21, 26, 28, 30–32, 138, 143, 146 Wound culture, 267
Vietnam war (Second Indochina War
or American War,
1955–1975), 15–32 X
Villers-Bretonneux, 23, 111 Xenophobia, 165
See also Australian War
Memorial (AWM)
Vulliamy, Ed, 204, 208 Y
See also Journalism Yininmadyemi Thou didst let Fall
(2015), 110, 123, 124, 126
See also Albert, Tony; Hyde
W Park, Sydney
War, 2, 6, 15–17, 19, 21, 23, 24, YPKP 1965–1966 (Foundation for
27–32, 39, 40, 44, 45, 47, 48, Research into the Victims of the
50–52, 54, 55, 57, 84, 94, 110, 1965–1966 Massacres), 62, 65,
111, 113, 114, 118–122, 125, 71–75, 77, 78n7, 78n10
126, 134, 139, 141, 158, 160, See also Indonesia
165–167, 169, 179, 198, 199, Yugoslavia, the former, 209

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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

More information about this series at

Sol Rojas-Lizana Annie Pohlman

ISSN 2634-6257 ISSN 2634-6265 (electronic)

Cover illustration: kundoy / gettyimages

This volume explores the connections between memory, narrative and

Lastly, we thank the team at Palgrave Macmillan and, in particular,

Brisbane, QLD, Australia Amy L. Hubbell

1 Acknowledging Trauma in a Global Context: Narrative,

Part I Memorial Spaces 13

2 Long Tan, Coral-Balmoral and Binh Ba: Remembered,

3 ‘Difficult Heritage’, Silent Witnesses: Dismembering

4 No Place to Remember: Haunting and the Search for

5 The Visitor’s Gaze in the Museum of Memory and

Part II Sites of Trauma 107

6 Remembering World War I in Australia: Hyde Park as

7 Sites of Memory, Sites of Ruination in Postcolonial

8 ‘The Most Intimate Familiarity and the Most Extreme

9 Black Skin as Site of Memory: Stories of Trauma

Part III Traumatic Representations 195

10 Humanitarian Journalism and the Representation of

11 Remembering the 5 July 1962 Massacre in Oran, Algeria219

12 Cultural Practices as Sites of Trauma and Empathic

13 Screen Memories in True Crime Documentary:

14 Chile 1988: Trauma and Resistance in Pablo

Natsuko Akagawa is Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland.

an international project, with partners in France and Australia, on

Victorian Heritage Council and president of Australia ICOMOS. He

Annie Pohlman teaches Indonesian at The University of Queensland,

Fig. 3.1 Sennintsuka in Osaka stands on the now peaceful riverbank

Fig. 10.2 Fikret Alić standing behind barbed wire at Trnopolje

Acknowledging Trauma in a Global Context:

Amy L. Hubbell, Sol Rojas-Lizana, Natsuko Akagawa,

A. L. Hubbell (*) • S. Rojas-Lizana • N. Akagawa • A. Pohlman

© The Author(s) 2020 1

of narrative forms including fiction, documentary film, memorial muse-

Trauma, Memorial, Narrative, and Place

memorial as the specific location where atrocities were committed, and

Visibility and Acknowledgement, Ruins, and Right

Recognition and acknowledgement in the interdependent relationships of

move from the position of voyeur or tourist, to a position of obligation, to

that suffering endures in memory, remains embedded in place, and is

Part I: Memorial Spaces

traumatic memories. Similarly, Rojas-Lizana examines visitor responses to

Part II: Sites of Trauma

of Salem) by Caribbean author Maryse Condé in the context of recent

Part III: Traumatic Representations

is the resistant ‘visible invisibility’ often represented by haunting and ruins

compelling that they garnered a huge amount of media coverage at the

Long Tan, Coral-Balmoral and Binh Ba:

© The Author(s) 2020 15

The chapter also builds on my earlier discussion of key concepts in the

Memorialising Long Tan

The battlefield has reverted to rubber plantations (McKay 2003,

Australian State Involvement

Australia had been party to the emergence of the present turmoil. … On

Similarly, the ALP government under Paul Keating (PM 1991–1996)

Connections between local Vietnamese and Australians were increasing

Vietnamese State Involvement

As previously noted, in 2002 the non-governmental AVVRG had been

Binh atrocities committed by Australian soldiers’, especially the burial of

Fitting the Battles into Australian and Vietnamese

Photos showed Australian soldiers treating the wounds of captured VNA

Brisbane, QLD, Australia Amy L. Hubbell

1 Acknowledging Trauma in a Global Context: Narrative,

Part I Memorial Spaces 13

2 Long Tan, Coral-Balmoral and Binh Ba: Remembered,

3 ‘Difficult Heritage’, Silent Witnesses: Dismembering

4 No Place to Remember: Haunting and the Search for

5 The Visitor’s Gaze in the Museum of Memory and

Part II Sites of Trauma 107

6 Remembering World War I in Australia: Hyde Park as

7 Sites of Memory, Sites of Ruination in Postcolonial

8 ‘The Most Intimate Familiarity and the Most Extreme

9 Black Skin as Site of Memory: Stories of Trauma

Part III Traumatic Representations 195

10 Humanitarian Journalism and the Representation of

11 Remembering the 5 July 1962 Massacre in Oran, Algeria219

12 Cultural Practices as Sites of Trauma and Empathic

13 Screen Memories in True Crime Documentary:

14 Chile 1988: Trauma and Resistance in Pablo

Acknowledgements This chapter grew out of an Australia Research Council-

Dedication I dedicate this work to David Dungay and Muhammad al-