Reframing the Transitional Justice Paradigm by Jill Stockwell

Author:Jill Stockwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

5.2 How Deep Memory Works

One such writer is Holocaust survivor Charlotte Delbo , who wrote extensively about living with trauma and the ways in which she was unable to integrate her experiences of violence into her life narrative. After returning to Paris from the death camps, Delbo (1995, p. 237) wrote:

My former life? Had I had a former life? My life afterwards? Was I alive to have an afterwards, to know what afterwards meant? I was floating in a present devoid of reality.

In her writing, Delbo explores what it was like, as a survivor of trauma , to live with the challenge of envisioning a future in the midst of the destruction of one’s emotional and cognitive capacities (Brison 1999). Delbo explores her traumatic memories of Auschwitz so profoundly, and in such a way that future readers are able to gain insight into how it was to live through those years of “unthinkable” events—even though those events are ones which “no one really wished to reawaken from the slumber of forgetfulness” (cited in Langer, in Delbo 1995, p. xi). Delbo communicates to us, through her exploration of deep memory , the complex ways in which the past continuously and unexpectedly ruptures trauma survivors’ reconstructed realities. Her concept of deep memory echoes many of the insights of trauma theory , but Delbo’s particular model of traumatic memory, with its emphasis on the survivor’s body, resonates deeply with my own research.

My exploration of the workings of deep memory in this chapter draws primarily on Holocaust literature, and in particular on the work of Charlotte Delbo . By engaging with Holocaust texts, I do not suggest that the field of trauma studies is limited to a selection of Holocaust works. I acknowledge that these texts represent a narrow range of traumatic events and histories, and that some scholars have questioned the uses of the Holocaust as a paradigmatic and universally applicable case study within the field of trauma studies (see Bennett and Kennedy 2003). A global scope of other theoretical works on the politics of testimony and trauma has been engendered in a rich range of contexts, including the Australian Stolen Generations testimonies, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as well as those associated with the Vietnam War, among others. However, I believe the insights and methods deployed to examine the traumatic legacies of the Holocaust can also be productively and meaningfully applied in a context such as Argentina.1 More specifically, I find that the Holocaust literature, particularly the work of Charlotte Delbo , offers me highly imaginative and sophisticated ways of thinking about traumatic memory. Delbo’s work on the Holocaust has been helpful in giving me insight into the phenomenon of “impossible memory” in the oral testimonial encounter within a context such as Argentina. Her writing on the psychic impediments to speaking trauma provides my work with an important framework for engaging with the different layers and levels inherent in the Argentine women’s embodied memories of torture and atrocity .

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