Cultural Amnesia: Memory, Trauma, and WarAuthor(s): Janice HaakenSource: Signs, Vol. 28, No. 1, Gender and Cultural Memory (Autumn, 2002), pp. 455-457Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175727Accessed: 08/05/2009 14:39

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S I G N S Autumn 2002 I 455 S I G N S Autumn 2002 I 455

lethal impulses of a masculinity shored up by a homophobia that is also a disavowed identification? And is this only about "sexuality"?

Department of Literature

Department of Women's Studies

University of California, Santa Cruz I

Cultural Amnesia: Memory, Trauma, and War

Janice Haaken

hile I was doing research in Guinea in the summer of 1999, a village woman informed me of a legend told throughout West Africa. "It is not good to send your children to America," she said, "for in America,

they bury Africans in shallow graves." Long after returning to the United States, this image of Africans buried in shallow graves haunted me. As a

metaphor the image evoked American amnesia over slavery and colonial

exploitation-the refusal to mourn and make reparation over America's part in the massive suffering of third-world peoples. After returning home with

my videotaped interviews of women in refugee camps, I was caught between the impulse to forget and a moral mandate to find a means of representing the experiences of women who had entrusted me with their stories. Among other dilemmas, I struggled with how to avoid the colonizers' habit of extracting resources from the third world and producing them in the West. Much like other raw material, trauma stories are open to a wide range of interpretations and social uses, including exploitive ones.

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, feminists confront difficult questions of how to frame victim/perpetrator relations in a way that goes beyond moral out- rage and simple gender dichotomies. A related issue concerns the limits of trauma theories that overlook the ways in which accounts are socially influenced as opposed to emerging in situ from horrific events.

By definition, traumatic events overwhelm existing meaning systems. But this very disruption of normalcy invites storytelling as people attempt to make sense of what has happened. The hypnotic power of the im- ages-bombings, corpses, the palpable horror of those on the scene-may

lethal impulses of a masculinity shored up by a homophobia that is also a disavowed identification? And is this only about "sexuality"?

Department of Literature

Department of Women's Studies

University of California, Santa Cruz I

Cultural Amnesia: Memory, Trauma, and War

Janice Haaken

hile I was doing research in Guinea in the summer of 1999, a village woman informed me of a legend told throughout West Africa. "It is not good to send your children to America," she said, "for in America,

they bury Africans in shallow graves." Long after returning to the United States, this image of Africans buried in shallow graves haunted me. As a

metaphor the image evoked American amnesia over slavery and colonial

exploitation-the refusal to mourn and make reparation over America's part in the massive suffering of third-world peoples. After returning home with

my videotaped interviews of women in refugee camps, I was caught between the impulse to forget and a moral mandate to find a means of representing the experiences of women who had entrusted me with their stories. Among other dilemmas, I struggled with how to avoid the colonizers' habit of extracting resources from the third world and producing them in the West. Much like other raw material, trauma stories are open to a wide range of interpretations and social uses, including exploitive ones.

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, feminists confront difficult questions of how to frame victim/perpetrator relations in a way that goes beyond moral out- rage and simple gender dichotomies. A related issue concerns the limits of trauma theories that overlook the ways in which accounts are socially influenced as opposed to emerging in situ from horrific events.

By definition, traumatic events overwhelm existing meaning systems. But this very disruption of normalcy invites storytelling as people attempt to make sense of what has happened. The hypnotic power of the im- ages-bombings, corpses, the palpable horror of those on the scene-may

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2002, vol. 28, no. 1] ? 2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2003/2801-0025$10.00

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2002, vol. 28, no. 1] ? 2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2003/2801-0025$10.00

456 I Roundtable

blind us to the psychological and political processes shaping the construc- tion of the story.

The widespread currency of posttraumatic stress disorder in framing the responses of New Yorkers-or America in general-to the September 11 attack is itself a symptom of cultural amnesia in that it narrowly focuses on concrete dramatic events while neglecting context. The idea that planes can become bombs, that the fabric of daily life may become inflammatory, is not destabilizing as a result of the terrorists' attacks alone. The "post- traumatic" responses are intimately related to "pretraumatic" currents in U.S. society. The concept of a syndrome obscures the social symbolic uses of trauma imagery and how dramatic events become the focal point for more ambiguous anxieties. Unlike the chronic suffering of daily life, such as overwork, alienating work, low wages, or poor health, acute episodes break through the numbing threshold of unresponsiveness to suffering in U.S. society. At the same time, they may reinforce hysterical modes of

storytelling-a reliance on dramatic, emotional accounts to communicate distress.

In the political choreographing of the war on terrorism, Muslim men are cast in the role of the "bad" patriarchs and the United States in the role of the "good" protectors, the guardians of women's freedom. This is an old melodrama under patriarchy, based on what psychoanalysts call

splitting, or separating the world into all-good and all-bad categories. Projective identification is an elaboration of this defensive splitting, where

disturbing feelings of destructiveness within the self or the group are kept at a distance by projecting the "bad" onto an external other.

Feminism, no less than other political formations, may engage in forms of splitting and projection in maintaining a sense of goodness and group cohesion. The casting of men as violence prone and women as peace oriented does not take us very far into the complex determinants and

dynamics of war. Western feminist campaigns also may inadvertently sup- port neocolonial forms of domination if representations of male "sav-

agery" are stripped of their wider context, including how more remote

players are implicated in the suffering. By decontextualizing male violence, the role of U.S. foreign policy and international capital in generating the massive suffering on display remains on the periphery of our vision.

At the direct point of violent contact, perpetrator/victim relationships are viscerally unambiguous. The further one moves from "ground zero," however, the more complex and murky the picture becomes. Under con- ditions of crisis, it is difficult to hold this wider picture in view, particularly as graphic images in the media hypnotically fixate on the bad boys on the

S I G N S Autumn 2002 1 457 S I G N S Autumn 2002 1 457

ground. Victimized women and children are introduced as silent props, present to vivify the barbarism of dark men cast as threatening other.

Western feminists are not responsible for this racist melodrama. But we do carry some responsibility for breaking the hypnotic trance, a de- lirious state that becomes particularly acute during epidemics of war fever.

Department of Psychology Portland State University I

The War of the Fathers: Trauma, Fantasy, and September 11

Susannah Radstone

ell before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it was already commonplace to suggest that the twentieth century would be "remembered as the century of historical trauma."' On

this account, the twentieth century emerged as a century'marked by events of previously unimaginable "nature, scope and implications."2 From the

perspective of "trauma theory," such events short-circuit (defensive) sense-

making capacities. Instead of passing through processes of narrativization and memory making, they pierce those defenses, lodging in the mind or in the culture as the shrapnel of traumatic symptomatology. This view is contestable on two grounds: on the claims that it makes for the unprec- edented impact of events of the recent past and on the theory of trauma that it associates with the impact of catastrophic events.

To speak of September 11 in the context of trauma prompts analyses of the hidden wounds etched on cultural memory by these attacks. But trauma

proposes a passive, "acted-on" victim or culture whose wounds become the focus. According to trauma theory, the impact of catastrophic events blocks free association, that creative process through which experience, memory, and fantasy are woven into the texture of a life-or a culture. Trauma theory

Suzette A. Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women's Life Writing (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1998); see also Hayden White, "The Modernist Event," in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 17-38, esp. 20-22.

2 White, 20.

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2002, vol. 28, no. 1] 0 2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2003/2801-0032$10.00

ground. Victimized women and children are introduced as silent props, present to vivify the barbarism of dark men cast as threatening other.

Western feminists are not responsible for this racist melodrama. But we do carry some responsibility for breaking the hypnotic trance, a de- lirious state that becomes particularly acute during epidemics of war fever.

Department of Psychology Portland State University I

The War of the Fathers: Trauma, Fantasy, and September 11

Susannah Radstone

ell before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it was already commonplace to suggest that the twentieth century would be "remembered as the century of historical trauma."' On

this account, the twentieth century emerged as a century'marked by events of previously unimaginable "nature, scope and implications."2 From the

perspective of "trauma theory," such events short-circuit (defensive) sense-

making capacities. Instead of passing through processes of narrativization and memory making, they pierce those defenses, lodging in the mind or in the culture as the shrapnel of traumatic symptomatology. This view is contestable on two grounds: on the claims that it makes for the unprec- edented impact of events of the recent past and on the theory of trauma that it associates with the impact of catastrophic events.

To speak of September 11 in the context of trauma prompts analyses of the hidden wounds etched on cultural memory by these attacks. But trauma

proposes a passive, "acted-on" victim or culture whose wounds become the focus. According to trauma theory, the impact of catastrophic events blocks free association, that creative process through which experience, memory, and fantasy are woven into the texture of a life-or a culture. Trauma theory

Suzette A. Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women's Life Writing (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1998); see also Hayden White, "The Modernist Event," in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 17-38, esp. 20-22.

2 White, 20.

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2002, vol. 28, no. 1] 0 2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2003/2801-0032$10.00