Zatzman
memory and migration workshop proposal: The performance of Memory
Belarie Zatzman, ph.d
York University
Focusing on issues of post-memory and Holocaust education through the fine arts, this paper describes a narrative inquiry project which acknowledged the rupture between what is absent and how we might recall and represent it in contemporary Canadian classrooms. How do we move toward the performance of memory with youth as co-creators, when we must be awake to the act of staging histories “both remembered and not remembered, transmitted and not transmitted”1? How do we address personal and public memory in the aesthetic space made available by arts education? In juxtaposing historical events against their experience of becoming, we can begin mapping the migration of memory in order to help shape the kind of relationship young people establish with the historical past. From particular historical sites or events, to the reflexive, embodied, aesthetic experience of the participants, this paper highlights ways of illuminating and questioning “difficult knowledge” (Britzman 1998) through the fine arts, while supporting students’ sense of agency and shared authority in re-telling and remembering.
In designing aesthetic practices of remembrance in the present, we face both the specificity of time and the collapse of time as a way of knowing. How can our drama work “capture the aesthetic of memory, its instability and its contingency”?3 “Wrapped in Grief” –an Arts Education project—responds to these questions about the performance of memory by articulating a process for constructing and rehearsing our own identities among the narratives of others, present and past. Contemporary research examining memory and memorial underscores the fact that in provoking history as an act of remembrance for a new generation we are narrating a sense of self. The paradox of re-telling these personal and public histories is that we are playing out that which cannot be represented. In this sense, drama education offers an aesthetic frame that allows us the possibility “to be the story and to repeat its unrepeatability.”4
“Wrapped in Grief” was produced with youth between the ages of twelve and sixteen years old. As a Holocaust memorial project, it was designed as a scaffolded pedagogy in which historical contexts become the foundation informing the migration of memory. First, young people created tableaux to locate particular events during the Holocaust; for example, Kristallnacht (9-10 November 1938), the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (19 April-16 May 1943), the book burnings of 10 May 1933, and the White Rose movement (public demonstrations against the Nazi regime by a network of students and faculty in Germany, 1942-43). The second stage of this arts education project asked participants to work on the identification of loss in their own lives, in juxtaposition to the historical archive with which they had been presented. “Wrapped in Grief” culminated in the staging of a mise en scene of memory, in which the young people fashioned large-scale sculptures as an artifact of their experience of memorial.
The aesthetic frame that circumscribes the design of this “Wrapped in Grief” structure is threefold, and it takes up the challenge of staging history by (1) creating narrative relationships between diverse texts—autobiographical, legal, documentary; scripts, photographs, visual art forms; diary, memoir, survivor testimony; (2) exploring the relationship between the range of source materials and the students’ personal and artistic reflections about them through writing, images, improvisation, tableaux, movement, scene study,
or visual art activities; and (3) considering our relationship not only to the Holocaust, itself, but to how it shapes our lives in the present. As such, “Wrapped in Grief” stands as one in a series of arts education projects I have produced in which youth are invited to theorize their lives in performance as acts of retrieval.
Because the aesthetic frame of my practice is necessarily self-reflexive and situated,5 I asked students to keep journals about the development of their drama and Holocaust work as a way of recording their in-depth and perceptive efforts to face “difficult knowledge.”6 I wanted to create opportunities for our students to take ownership of the knowledge they had constructed, to question, and to deepen their engagement with issues about the Holocaust, both historical and contemporary. For me, the performance of memory necessarily locates the participants’ sense of identity along a negotiated continuum of self/other, personal/public, process/ product, past/ present, and local/ national. After James Young, I have benefited from the profound insight that “the facts of history never `stand’ on their own—but are always supported by the reasons for recalling such facts in the first place.”7 I am also acutely aware of the aesthetic relationship between content and form. As I have noted elsewhere, “the recognition that what we choose to tell, to whom we choose to tell it, and indeed, how we choose to tell it, all matter.”8 Accordingly, the cultural production of memory in my work demands a self-conscious shaping of both form and content as an inherent feature of the aesthetic frame. In staging history as a narrative way of knowing, I am compelled to ask how we represent ourselves in the text. How do we find form for representing our participants’ storied lives in storied ways?9 The performance of memory in this project was designed to support the students’ sense of agency and shared authority in the re-telling and remembering.
This is particularly significant given that in crossing generational boundaries we are addressing relational issues between time past and time present. Marianne Hirsch speaks directly to this concern when she distinguishes “post-memory from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection.” Post-memory identifies the experience of “those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generations.”10 In addition, post-memory has come to signal a “space of remembrance” more largely wrought, in which empathy and imagining carry us toward remembering the suffering of others. As collaborative co-creators of the aesthetic space of “Wrapped in Grief,” we migrate across these postmemory landscapes of history with young people, excavating their knowledge and experience, foregrounding their sense of social justice and action, their efforts to attend to previously unknown, forgotten, hidden, and/or silenced narratives. Further, in the performance of memory, I am interested in the students’ agency, not only in the telling of their own or received narratives, but also in the witnessing and enabling of stories staged across fluid margins—an aesthetic frame in which both fact and fiction illuminate truth, each in their different forms.
“Wrapped in Grief” asked students to identify, witness, and perform narratives within the aesthetic space shaped by these intersecting and intertextual processes of inquiry. Consequently, in the performance of memory, we deliberately looked to young people’s everyday storied lives at home and in schools, to the journals in which they had recorded their process of writing themselves into personal and public memory. For example, the intersection between the domestic and familiar vis a vis the extraordinary and incomprehensible is evidenced here in one student’s journal response to the examination of the burning of books as “pre-text”;11 “Where one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people.”12 Her tableaux and role-playing about books, writers, writing as resistance, as well as the sanctioned isolation of a population, all allowed Mac to recognize the rupture of the intimate, material, concreteness of everyday life and to articulate her sense of loss:
I remember anne frank
even what her diary looked like
that red-checkered cover
and I wonder how much the diary gave her the feeling of
ordinary everydayness
to write in it each day
even though nothing about their lives
was ordinary
(or maybe it was too ordinary and everyone around them let it be
ordinary, when they should have been screaming at the top of their
lungs to stop it all)
and I wonder if she felt grief when she had to leave the diary behind
and if she thought about it tossed on the floor when they pulled her
out the door, passed the secret bookcase and down the steps.
I have kept a diary since I was in grade two.
I can’t ever stop writing.
The “aesthetics of everyday life”13 are made manifest in the performance of memory, even as students mediated between past and present. The students’ discovery of embodied learning, both lived and performed, was also highlighted as a dynamic of the aesthetic experience of “Wrapped in Grief.” In juxtaposing historical events against their experience of becoming, “Wrapped in Grief” explored the discovery of loss and grief in gesture and movement.
As memories are recalled, they are reinterpreted and as they are performed, they are unfixed and may be archived in another’s body. Dramatically representing their own and others’ stories is, therefore, to become an archivist, a process which draws on physical memories as well as those that are linguistic and cognitive. This invites a new way of thinking about the body in space and time.14 Nicholson’s notion of the body as archive is particularly resonant here, given that we must too often fill the absent body in this work. In inhabiting others’ stories, and archiving them in the body through performance, “witnessing”—with its requisite obligation to re-tell—becomes part of the participants’ lived experience. “There’s no absence if there remains even the memory of absence. Memory dies unless it’s given a use . . . . If one no
longer has land but has the memory of land, then one can make a map.”15 Through tableaux, improvisation, role-play, and visual art, students were mapping knowledge, physically and metaphorically, all the while giving authority to their lived experiences. The participants’ reflexive writing documented these investigations about how loss and grief might be represented in their own bodies. For example, Edna draws forward autobiographical fragments of memory that help shape the kind of relationship she establishes with the historical past.16 In her reflections on Kristallnacht, she measured “the breaking of glass” against “the breaking of my father’s heart.” Personal memory, loss, and embodied learning were recorded in her journal:
It was October I think
You could smell the trees
and the leaves weren’t high enough yet to jump into and
I think it was a cloudy day all around me
When I got to Mrs. T’s driveway (where we’d always skipped double
dutch when I was in grade 4)
there, across the street, about three houses away from my house
I could see the front screen door.
This feeling just dropped over me and I stopped walking.
It stopped me right there near Mrs. T’s driveway.
I just knew something was wrong.
I remember it kind of in slow motion
My grandmother had died.
My dad was standing at one end of the kitchen near the side door.
He was crying.
I don’t remember what he said, he was talking to my mom, who was
standing near him.
I’d never seen him cry before. Standing there, I knew in my body
what loss was
and I could only watch.
David Booth’s call to “continually remind ourselves of the complex and different contexts that allow us to enter the `as if, what if’ world”17 is important in understanding that this research project was designed around the construction of specific historical contexts, with the intent of supporting thoughtful and critical improvisation, role-playing, art-making, as well as in and out of role writing about the Holocaust. The complexity of this undertaking lies in the recognition that we are working between spaces of documentation and the (im)possibility of knowing. In performing historical events, “Wrapped in Grief” bears witness through arts education, so that like the best curatorial practices, we, too, can “reach tentatively and resonantly across the performative bridge of imaginative projection.”18 Indeed, Richard Courtney addressed “imagining” as “the fundamental operation of the aesthetic.”19 In imagining within an aesthetic frame that claimed absence, impermanence, participation, and context, youth were invited to inscribe not only their questions but the boundaries of this work. For example, in response to the historical context of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising,a young woman named Sam navigated these shifting boundaries and difficult questions as a part of her experience of the memory act itself. Migrating back and forth across the threshold of intimacy and distance—in the shared authority of her post-memory relationship to the Holocaust—she wrote:
I’ve learned that in order for the Warsaw ghetto uprising to take
place, it was the women and children who had to put on that fearless
face and risk their lives, so that the people of the ghetto could fight for
theirs. I am a woman and yet, I am also a child. I am in that in-between
stage, not yet a full woman and not yet done growing up. I have my whole
life ahead of me. I dream about kissing boys, playing games with my friends,
travelling, laughing. I can whine and pout and cry over spilt milk, but I am
also mature and thoughtful, I want to heal the world, I can put on a brave face