Remembering relationality

Jenny Edkins

pp. 99-115

in: Duncan Bell (ed), Memory, trauma and world politics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Abstract

Memories of traumatic events can be seen, to borrow Toni Morrison's phrase, as a "thread thrown" between the dead and those who survive: to hold the dead in our arms is an impossible gesture of solidarity and compassion in the face of "the wit of eternity".² What is being remembered, or perhaps more accurately re-constituted, is relationality, that radical interconnectedness that has been so shockingly betrayed in and through the violence of trauma. In one sense, it seems that it is not so much death that is traumatic as survival, or at least survival in the face of particularly brutal or incomprehensible deaths. Morrison's poem reminds us how those killed on 11 September disappeared. No remains were found: those who died became nothing more, or less, than "ancient atoms". They became dust, breathed in by their fellow New Yorkers.³ Earlier in the poem she reminds us how by the time her words were composed the deaths of 9.11 had already become entangled in talk of "nations, wars, leaders, the governed and the ungovernable … armour and entrails". She seeks to "freshen" her tongue, "abandon sentences crafted to know evil — wanton or studied; explosive or quietly sinister; whether born of a sated appetite or hunger; of vengeance or the simple compulsion to stand up before falling down". Instead she addresses the dead in terms of a relationality that has nothing to do with "blood", "a false intimacy" or "an overheated heart". It is a relationality in the face of death's "gift of unhinged release".⁴