Esentially, Gustav Herling-Grudzinski’s prose style exhibits a subtle, almost unnerving quality at its core. The acclaimed Polish émigré’s calm sense of presence/absence on the page seems to be guided by an instinct for metaphor (and allegory) that curiously renders his work more, rather than less, intimate, in its effect on the reader. This 'manly poetics' is particularly poignant in Herling-Grudzinski’s detailed account of life in the vile gulag system of imprisonment under Soviet rule, titled A World Apart (first published in English in 1951).

In what is considered by many, on both ends of the critical divide, the first great book to emerge from the Gulag, Herling-Grudzinski recounts the eighteen months he spent in the secret Soviet camp system, through which almost twenty million people lost their lives.

We ask: What was Herling-Grudzinski’s crime?

Before the beginning of the Second World War, Herling-Grudzinski was a stanch anti-Nazi activist, a commitment which led to his subsequent arrest by the N.K.V.D. (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) as soon as the Soviet Government signed a treaty with Hitler. The twenty-year-old future writer was then sentenced to five years of hard labor in a gulag near the Artic circle. Fortunately, he was released after almost two years (he was assigned to join the Polish forces under Soviet control that fought against the Nazis), managed to escape through Persia (present-day Iran) to England, where he reconnected with the Polish government in exile.

Consequently, A World Apart documents the deferral of basic civil liberties under a government-led brutality, in some fashion similar to the vial policies enacted by the Third Reich. However, the relevance of Herling-Gruzinski’s work does not solely lie in the historically-specific revelation of the events described, but in the way the author-participant chose to portray them. Often compared to Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz and Fydor Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead, due to its shockingly vivid and thorough account of life in a prison camp, Herling-Grudzinski’s work possesses a distinct resonance that is both engaging and repelling. The spiritual aggravation and bedeviling alienation that plague Herling-Grudzinski’s ailing companions draw the reader in, making it difficult and yet irresistible to follow, to partake, to try and to understand.

How are we to understand something so belittling to mankind by mankind, in the name of freedom and protection for all?

I am not certain that we can ever understand the essence of why these atrocities were/are administered. Nonetheless, reading Herling-Gruzinski’s diaresque recounts of reality at its most trenchant is the requisite first step towards reaching into our mutual (infamous) history, noting how it ironically intertwines with our “liberated” present, finally realizing that facts do not simply occur in space and time, but that they constitute the outcome of people’s decisions, choices made, lives lived.

Struggling to find an appropriate and thoughtful way of approaching Imre Kertész’s first-person narrative, the novel Fateless, I am reminded of my initial response to it - an unnerving mixture of wonder, stupor and too-powerful-for-words excitement, both to the novel’s content and the writer’s knack for imaginative reportage. I am lost for words, mostly because I am embarrassed to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the understated humor of Kertész’s fifteen-year-old narrator as he recounts for the readers the malaise of the everyday banality of the concentration camp system, reflecting on this particular nature of elemental survival as the far more “memorable” one than the impossibly difficult juggling-act of the survivor’s return and integration within the “normalicy” of a “liberated” society.

What has made my sensibilities more susceptible to Kertész’s style lies perhaps in the temptingly unsettling quality of his narrator’s language(s); the physical reality of the camp life is constantly juxtaposed to the recollected memories of his previous, pre-camp existence with a keen sense for textual cinematic purity. The voice of the young George Koves negotiates for his audience a space in between, that is to say, the niche of life that we all strive to claim, our untempered with, intact private self, as he engages our participation within the story of his growing up amidst devastation and human carnage, unfolding step by step the gradual events of his interrupted young adulthood. Yet, to say that we fully identify with his experiences would be to miss the mark; we are historically removed from the events surrounding the Holocaust and the post-World War II communist driven realities. However, Imre Kertész’s narrative technique flirts with the idea of a common ground. By creating a textual artifact whose language abridges the powerful dismissal of moral responsibility and guilty conscience surrounding the events of the Holocaust and the Gulag, in a way, Kertész allows for these events to finally have a homeland, even though it is one existing in the realm of literary (non)-fiction. Thus, when we encounter the on-the-surface ubiquity of Kertész’s final lines, we should not fail to recognize their telling simplicity: life is a series of events, whose acknowledgement in their entirety is the first step towards mutual understanding and fateful existence.

Memory is often embodied in objects – memorials, texts, talismans, images. Though one could argue that such artifacts operate to prompt remembrance, they are often perceived actually to contain memory within them or indeed to be synonymous with memory. No object is more equated with memory than the camera image, in particular the photograph. Memory appears to reside within the photographic image, to tell its story in response to our gaze.

Marita Sturken

I was asked recently, in an informal conversation with a colleague, if I remembered the events surrounding the fall of the Slobodan Miloshevic regime in Yugoslavia, in October of 2000. As I found myself searching for a meaningful answer (one beyond the cliché phrase: Yes, of course I do. I was there. I saw it all!), I found myself uttering the following string of broken thoughts: I remember that day, October 5th 2000, quite vividly; actually, what I remember the most are the photographic images that I took of that day; in a way, these images form my memories of that revolutionary day, these photos are my memory of those historic moments. Hearing myself say this, I began to think about the implications of my statement.

Can an image, such as a photograph, represent the equivalent of a memory of those times? How can a still image caught in time shape our personal memory of past occurrences, and at the same time, how can it affect the way we structure our distinct cultural narratives? If so, to what extent does a photograph obfuscate the boundaries existing between one’s history and one’s cultural memory?

An emphasis on photographs as providers/disclaimers of memory, personal as well as cultural, constitutes an integral part of Milan Kundera’s work, particularly in two of his most acclaimed novels to date, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). Both novels open with sequences that are closely tied to photographic images of historical events and/or historical figures. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera revisits a crucial moment in twentieth-century Czech history, i.e., he tells us of the circumstances surrounding Klement Gottwald’s 1948 public address which announced the beginning of a new chapter in Czech history, namely the founding of Communist Czechoslovakia. We are told that the day was a rather cold one, and since the new Communist leader was hatless, his comrade, Vladimir Clementis, graciously lend him his own fur hat. We are also told that this moment of kindness set amidst the greater historical spectacle was captured in a photograph, one that every child ‘memorized’ due to the tireless efficiency of the Communist party’s propaganda bureau. However, a paragraph later we are cautiously reminded of the power of technology as we learn about Clementis’ fatal end, only four years after the seminal photograph was taken. (Since he was accused of treason, Vladimir Clementis’ presence in the 1948 photograph was made obsolete; he was ‘taken’ out of the frame, thus removed from history by the same devoted workers of the propaganda bureau. Kundera tells us that the only signifier of his past presence in cultural history was the borrowed fur hat adorning Gottwald’s head.)

On the other hand, the photographic images that preoccupy Kundera the narrator in the opening lines of The Unbearable Lightness of Being are not directly linked to recent Czech history; they are black-and-white portrait-photographs of Adolph Hitler. He comes across these still images as he leafs through a book on Hitler; almost instantly, the photographs evoke within him a sense of longing for the days of his now-forgone childhood. Nonetheless, immediately within the next paragraph, Kundera the narrator explains this rather unusual way of triggering one’s past memories: “This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.” As in the case with the Gottwald photograph and its impact on the formation of Czech consciousness, so does this instance of re-memberance upon a photographic image explore the various ways through which totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century (Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s grip on the Soviet Union and its ‘Satelite States’) control the power of technology (a camera image) wielding a nation’s cultural memory.

The Kundera scholar Hana Píchová discusses the role photographic documentation plays in the production of cultural memory as it relates to the author’s conceptualization of the relationship existing between memory and forgetting. In her book, The Art of Memory in Exile: Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera, Píchová examines Kundera’s personal investment in this visual interplay by focusing on two distinct practices behind Kundera’s treatment of photographic images in both The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Píchová traces a link between Kundera’s “expansion of topic and scope” in the latter of the two and “a deeper and more far-reaching exploration of the subject of photography.” Píchová then continues to attest that -

Although in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting the treatment of photography is restricted to the discussion of the photograph’s function, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being both the role of the person behind the camera and the consequences of capturing a frozen moment of reality on film are included within the purview of the narrator’s panoramic gaze. These photographic issues are juxtaposed with the ongoing philosophical reflections about remembering and forgetting and are especially emphasized in the novel’s pivotal scene: the scene that depicts the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, a crucial event that not only motivates the main protagonists’ physical and emotional upheavals but also sets the cameras clicking.

The cameras click as the Czech ‘warriors’ confront the invader’s formidable troops, creating a troubling and unexpected sense of unease: how does one ‘fight against’ an ‘army of pointed lenses’? Kundera situates his narrative tread within these dissembling events, positioning one of his four main characters in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tereza (the professional photographer) on the brink of “staring death in the face”. Tereza’s week-long photographic binge comes as a result of her being influenced by two opposing forces, that of ‘lightness’, which in turn tends to one’s personal needs and wants, and that of ‘heaviness’, which looks after the safe-keeping of one’s cultural history. The camera replaces Tomas as Tereza’s ‘significant other’ during these seven days of searching for personal appeasement and historical retribution. As Píchová points out, “while Tereza is framing the outer world, history in its making, she is also taking aim at an inner, personal world in which she is experiencing for the first time an unknown sense of self-worth and meaning.”

Regrettably, the exhilarated sense of self is of a transient nature: Tereza’s ‘equilibrium’ is shattered together with her nation’s dreams of a different, better reality. Therefore, Tereza’s identification with her nation, her culture, her country and its territory comes as no surprise; she ‘battles’ the Soviet tanks ‘armed’ with her camera trying to capture for posterity a momentary part of Czechoslovakia’s cultural and historic life:

She shot roll after roll and gave about half of them, undeveloped, to foreign journalists (the borders were still open, and reporters passing through were grateful for any kind of document). Many of her photographs turned up in the Western press. They were pictures of tanks, of threatening fists, of houses destroyed, of corpses covered with bloodstained red-white-and-blue Czech flags, of young men on motorcycles racing full speed around the tanks and waving Czech flags on long staffs, of young girls in unbelievably short skirts provoking the miserable sexually famished Russian soldiers by kissing random passersby before their eyes. As I have said, the Russian invasion was not only a tragedy; it was a carnival of hate filled with a curious (and no longer explicable) euphoria.

As a character who grasps for life through her dreams and dream-like visions, Tereza’s inclination towards viewing the world through image-spanned segments make her work unlike any of the other photographing ‘warriors’. Píchová comments on this truthful quality of Tereza’a craftsmanship by observing that Tereza “captures reality as [it] is with her artistic eye, searching “behind the scenes,” unveiling the truth.” According to Píchová, Tereza’s need for truthfulness in her life and in her art, is exhibited through the way she approaches her work; instead of developing most of the rolls herself, thus having the opportunity to “beautify or reconstruct the pictures or choose the best of them,” Tereza hands the undeveloped rolls to foreigners, who will then take them outside Czechoslovakia, to places and people that might not harm them in any way, allowing for history to be portrayed the way it had happened.

As a matter of fact, Tereza’s photographs, those few that she manages to carry with her as she and Tomas cross into Switzerland, are appreciated for their unique sensibility while at the same time they fail ‘to live up to their potential’; in other words, the West had already lost interest in the Soviet ‘intervention’ on the streets of Prague, so Tereza’s faithful photography and her ‘candid images’ are forced to join in on “a long chain of forgetting…stripped of their context and meaning, their life span is even shorter than that of the political event they happen to depict.”

Ironically, the same photographs that liberated Tereza’s spirit, and gave her a power of self, constituting a testimony of her struggle to prevent the ‘airbrushing tactics’ of the diligent hands of the propaganda bureau from ‘working their magic’ (which, in the case of Vladimir Clementis’ image proved quite a ‘handful’), reclaim their political potential once Tereza returns to Czechoslovakia, thus reuniting the images with their context. However, in the totalitarian reality of post-1968 Prague Spring Czechoslovakia, as Píchová shrewdly remarks, “these documents of violence against a helpless people now serve to implicate not those who committed the violence but those who were its victims.” Even though she finds out that none of her own work had been used by the government to rob people off from their sense of self, manipulating the same cultural memory she had been striving to record, Tereza no longer views her ‘liberator’ (“the mechanical eye”) with the same innocent gaze: “It was a picture of a young man grabbing another man by the throat and a crowd looking on in the background. “Collaborator Punished” read the caption. Tereza let out her breath. No it wasn’t one of hers. Walking home with Karenin through nocturnal Prague, she thought of the days she had spent photographing tanks. How naïve she had been, thinking they were risking their lives for their country when in fact they were helping the Russian police.”

This volatile futility of a photographic record of a historic event/person when ‘read’ out of context is not far from Kundera’s own (purposeful) re-casting of the Klement Gottwald-Vladimir Clementis’ 1948 image, as found in the opening sequences of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. It appears that Kundera the novelist has misappropriated the circumstances of the pivotal scene from Czechoslovak post-World War II history. Recent archival research has proven the existence of the infamous photograph; however, there is no ‘recollection’ of the comradely gesture: no fur hat was either borrowed or lent. (In her examination of Kundera’s ‘mischievous storytelling’, the critic Hana Píchová quotes the work of Jindřich Toman who, in turn, has shown how Mr. Kundera’s re-telling of the historical event is rather on the imaginative side, i.e., “in 1989, the Czech journal Kmen once again reproduced the original photograph depicting the birth of communist Czechoslovakia. Here Gottwald appears in a fur hat, and right next to him stands the smiling Clementis sporting an elegant hat. It does not appear as if anybody is giving away anything at all, or that Clementis ever possessed a fur hat.”)

What was the incentive for such a play with Czech cultural memory? Is this slight re-imagining of Czech history issued as a cautionary warning? Is Kundera the novelist teaching us a lesson about our twentieth-century tendency to forget without questioning the meaning of this rather harmful practice?

I would like to believe that Kundera’s playfulness with the Gottwald-Clementis 1948 photographic image serves as an example of the author’s unceasing quest for a narrative re-examination of ‘truth’ and ‘truthfulness’. For cultural memory, in this case Czech cultural memory, to stay abreast of the imposed, futile forgetfulness of a totalitarian regime, it is up to us, up to our consciousness, to keep it at bay. Still images can be quite imposing both through their silent claim on ‘the actual past’ and our simultaneous willingness to embrace this claim without questioning, at face value. They ‘help’ us blur the boundaries existing between the image of a historical event and a historical event as an image, between cultural memory and cultural fantasy, between life re-membered and life dis-membered. In order to keep this in mind, we need the ‘pronounced stillness’ of a narrative’s “questioning form”, such as Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Through the art of fictional re-memberance, Kundera not only exposes the piercing superficiality of a totalitarian ‘agenda’ but also reasserts the power of “a narrative tradition characterized by questioning” in the making and preservation of cultural memory. At the end, what we truly get out of Kundera’ narrative play with the multiple meanings behind photographic images is the ability to see ‘how we see our past’ while questioning our present. He doesn’t offer a clear-cut answer as far as photography (as an instrument for documenting life in history) is concerned; nonetheless, as the critic Píchová aptly points out, in her study of Kundera’s novelistic work, it is the questioning of formulaic acceptance, not the certainty of one’s answer, that counts. As long as we can question our personal memory, we can allow our cultural selves to become a part of a memory’s victory over forgetfulness.

In 1945, the renowned Polish writer Zofia Nalkowska became a member of the Home National Council, which led to her direct involvement in the proceedings of the Main Commission for Investigating German War Crimes. Nalkowska, who lived throughout the German occupation of Poland in Warsaw, forced to move from place to place (finally finding shelter in the corner of her sister’s studio), found the testimonies of the survivors she interviewed, the atmosphere of the sites she visited, the minutes of the court hearings she attended, too powerful to be orderly recollected as a part of legal documentation left amongst other stacks of moldy paper. As a result of what she saw, heard, partook in, she wrote a slim volume of sparse and near-parabolic narration, titled Medallions (Medaliony, 1946), an artfully documented work of poignant representation and heightened moral searching.

The seven minuets, only a few pages long, and the concluding summation, are told by Nalkowska’s author-narrator with a deliberate maximal simplicity, freed from the burdensome commentary accompanying other works of documentary fiction. Nalkowska’s observer-interviewer is present all throughout these accounts, assuming the role of the distanced looker-on, jotting things down, posing questions, but never herself uttering a terse phrase, a comment of any sort. This narrative technique allows for the shattering depiction of the Nazi crimes (for example, the story remembered through “Professor Spanner”) and the renderings of those who managed to survive the non-discriminative “selection” of the extermination camps (as in “The Visa”) to come full circle: Nalkowska’s documentary prose brings forth an attempt to grasp the unfathomable moral sense of the events described, as it looks into the pitfalls of evil. “People dealt this fate to people” reads the volume’s epigraph. As readers we cannot but return to these simple words associated with great pain, perhaps even stunned disbelief. I feel that as we proceed with our humanity in this brave new millennium, Nalkowska’s words of caution may be the most instructive lesson we can receive.

In the preface to the English edition of his novella The Bass Saxophone, titled “Red Music”, Josef Škvorecky gives an elated, fresh, hopeful definition of the meaning of jazz. He writes: “ Its essence is far more elemental: an élan vital, forceful vitality, an explosive creative energy as breathtaking as that of any true art, that may be felt even in the saddest of blues. Its effect is cathartic.”

Reading the increasingly poetic prose of Škvorecky’s Bass Saxophone, I felt the truthfulness of the author’s initial claim. His first \-person narration draws us in, hooks us indefinitely, inspiring us to follow the jazz-initiation adventure of his unnamed alter ego, amidst the setting of the Nazi-occupation of the Czech lands. From the moment they first meet, the out-of-this-world instrument and its future player, we sense that their adventure will be one of passion, surrender, transgression, perhaps even betrayal. Feeling the instrument against his body, the self-pronounced ‘novice’ engages in a painstaking relationship with a demanding mistress: ‘I stood there, a little slumped, and I saw myself in the mirror of the dressing table…immersed in a sea of shimmering particles, the unreal light of the grotesque myth, like a genre painting…Just a young man with bass saxophone.”

Throughout his hero’s remonstrations, structurally given in a series of causally connected inner monologues, interrupted here and there with the occasional dialogue, Škvorecky’s lines read like notes out of a music score: there is the solo, struggling to make itself heard, slowly joining in the big band’s accompaniment, striving for a (near) perfect resolution, striving for appeasement. And when he stops himself from asking why they, the disgruntled and physically grotesque ensemble of German musicians, were in need of him, exactly him as their replacement player, we are reminded again of youth’s need to persevere, especially in times of great challenges and unspeakable tragic events. He, the young bass saxophone aficionado tells us in plain black and white, the simple language of youth: ‘I was seventeen, eighteen, later on in my life I wasn’t as noble, I pretended to hear intonations. But this time I accepted and I didn’t question; they had a reason.” Even after he is abruptly dismembered from his ‘fellow’ players, he cannot believe the incredulity of his situation. It seems to have all been a dream, one larger than life, definitely greater than the tradition and gossip tales circulating around his Kostelec.

What is “the unattainable message of music”, i.e., what part in its deliverance has he played, will he play? Is music the only universal language? Can music, particularly jazz as such a free form, abridge our differences and facilitate our mutual sense of respect and understanding?

After finishing Škvorecky’s tribute to the creative spiritus movens of life as he sees it, I would like to agree with his almost too-idealistic portrayal of human engagement and artistic unification.

However, a question begs, if we are to agree that such re-inscription of art as not only endurance but also a force of appeal will finally prevail over the baseness and cruelty of a totalitarian regime, what are we to make of narratives such as Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, or Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz? The ubiquitous events of the Nazi Concentration camps as described by these two camp survivors do not leave room for art’s, music’s symbolic power of final victory. But then again, people, survivors, individuals undergo different experiences even though they may be the victims of similar circumstances. It is the plurality of their narrative voices which allows us to begin to understand both the pain and the moments of joy of their respective struggles under a dehumanizing system of government. After all, Škvorecky’s youthful prose reminds us of the necessity for such a plurality in form and idea.

In the panopticon reality of a totalitarian regime, the power of fictionalizing a culture’s vision is of essence. Objects disappear, individuals are erased, the totalitarian government continuously exerting its tightening grip over the means of communication, visual and verbal. People are instructed to follow, unquestioningly, the automated choices made for their benefit by the ever-watchful power elite, until their routine has become so internalized that they, in turn, try to persuade themselves about how their ‘linear narrative’ is as individualistically singular as any narrative can be. Everyone is meant to live out “the idyll” of conformity and fear as they proceed to believe in the independence of their actions, in the uniqueness of their efforts. In other words, people living within the confines of a totalitarian system exist as “seen objects” while they strive to ascertain their positions as “seers”. However, no narrative, including the ‘seamless’ textuality of a totalitarian cultural identity, abides thoroughly by the pre-scripted strategy of its author(s). There is always an intermission, an unforeseen discrepancy in the blueprints of the final plan; it could be miniscule, but the size of its impact on the narrative is far greater. Milan Kundera’s deliberately challenging storytelling ways in his 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being reaffirm the power of such an intermission on the pages of European history.

Time and again, throughout the seemingly cryptic structure of his seven part narrative, Kundera the narrator reminds us of fiction’s final laugh, as it exposes the fallacy of a world, a system, a routine whose power lies in its cyclical weightlessness, with no one present to pull the trigger, and yet the empty fields count over a thousand deaths. As Tomas and his wife Tereza go between their subject positions, first as “seen objects”, then as “seers”, they test the foundational irrationality of the totalitarian system they inhabit. Tomas finds his particular niche in the refuge of his professional and extra-marital life: as a surgeon, in a society void of God’s mystical gaze, he is able to recast himself as a powerful agent; as a lover, he is able to be a part of something transient, brief, self-controlled, self-defined. Kundera comments on Tomas’s individualist actions by examining them as complementary elements of one and the same passion, that of being in charge of one’s destiny: “He was not obsessed with women; he was obsessed with what in each of them is unimaginable, obsessed, in other words, with the one-millionth part that makes a woman dissimilar to other of her sex. (Here, too, perhaps, his passion for surgery and his passion for women came together. Even with his mistresses, he could never quite put down the imaginary scalpel. Since he longed to take possession of something deep inside them, he needed to slit them open.)”

On the other hand, his wife Tereza, discovers her sense of self when she discovers photography. Once armed with the power of the “mechanical eye”, her being is no longer just that of a helpless waif, controlled by Tomas, used by her mother in the past. She captures on film the circumstances of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; her still images of these turbulent times give her a sense of empowerment, which allows her an illusionary penetration through the surface of personal and historical forces of oppression as she attempts to build her own sense of weight. Ironically, she realizes that the same photographs that liberated her spirit, and gave her a power of self, have been used by the government to rob off people from their sense of self. Even though she finds out that none of her own work has been employed by the manipulative upper-hand of the regime, she no longer views her ‘liberator’ with the same innocent gaze: “It was a picture of a young man grabbing another man by the throat and a crowd looking on in the background. “Collaborator Punished” read the caption. Tereza let out her breath. No, it wasn’t one of hers. Walking home with Karenin through nocturnal Prague, she thought of the days she had spent photographing tanks. How naïve they had been, thinking they were risking their lives for their country when in fact they were helping the Russian police.”

When the couple leaves the life of the city behind them, seeking refuge in the idyllic milieu of the countryside, they retrieve to their previous status of controlled entities, immersed in mythical need for a shelter, a place of non-existence whose linguistic enchantment bears the final mark of imprisonment. They no longer possess the ability to exert their selfhood; they have willingly surrendered their subjectivity to live out the pretense of the idyllic sphere and its ramifications. In that respect, the totalitarian regime has subdued the power of the individual by exerting its control even over the luminosity of dreams and fantastical retreats, having the individual internalize the need to escape into the translucence of lightness, leaving behind any memory or recollection of social awareness and individual identity. However, Kundera’s narrating style does not disavow the validity of his characters’ futile struggle for self-definition. The novel’s kaleidoscopic vision of narrated reality establishes the story of Tomas and Tereza as a model of man’s inner search for identity, which in the end is perhaps the one way to effectuate our power as historical agents, as citizens, as individuals.

In the prologue to his study of moral life in the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulag titled Facing the Extreme, Franco-Bulgarian theorist Tzvetan Todorov examines the ‘moral acts’ of Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski’s stories about life in Auschwitz. He juxtaposes the ‘real’ experiences of the ‘real’ Borowski at Auschwitz with those of the author’s central character, also named Tadeusz, given that Borowski’s pitiless accounts of life in Auschwitz are told in the first person. Todorov draws his readers’ attention to a clear distinction existing between author and protagonist (we learn that the ‘real’ Borowski behaved quite differently from his narrative self, his commitment to the well-being of others exceeding the realms of mere devotion), since as a theorist he is primarily interested in the implications of Borowski’s narrative choices. By writing himself in the totality of human degradation and corruption that encircled the hierarchical structure of the camp(s), Borowski, according to Todorov, wrote about the horrors of Auschwitz the only way he saw fit/possible: assuming full responsibility “for the worst humiliation that the camp inflicted on its inmates.” Todorov recognizes this narrative choice on the part of the author as an attempt to expose the world for what it is, a battlefield where humanity engages in survival tactics. In other words, Borowski’s recollected and refigured memories fashion a narrative illustration of the principles behind Social Darwinism, which may account for the absence of ‘little acts of heroism’ on the pages of his collection.

What does this historically and socially detached observation encompass? Do Todorov’s assumptions about Borowski’s choice of an engaging narrative strategy truly reflect on the author’s views about the (re)presentation of morality in an artistic project concerned with life in a totalitarian system?

Tadeusz, the central character of Borowski’s photo-texts, continuously negotiates a pitiful and cynical existence as he reaches for a body in the suffocating darkness of the ramp trains, another man’s trinkets, the residue of a turnip soup container. He declares that “the whole world is really like the concentration camp…the world is ruled by neither justice nor reality…the world is ruled by power”, and we get the feeling that here Borowski is not speaking only from his own ‘hands-on’ experience. Which brings me to another set of difficult questions regarding (re)presentation of the Nazi genocide; how do we talk about testimonial narratives, like Tadeusz Borowski’s photo-texts or Primo Levi’s non-fictional prose, if we, ourselves, have not lived through the experiences they recollect?

Furthermore, how does a writer, an artist (re)present the painful reality of Holocaust pre- and post-mortem survived life if he or she has heard it ‘second-hand’? And, how do we then comment on these historically and spatially detached (re)presentations of survivors’ testimonies?

Do we read the artfully recollected accounts verbatim, assuming that they ‘stand in’ for the missing links of Nazi era history, or do we treat them as we would treat other works of novelistic fiction loosely based on auto/biographical material?

Enter Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus. Unlike Borowski, Spiegelman is not a Holocaust survivor; he did not go through the ‘bestiality’ of camp survival tactics. It was his parents, Vladek and Anja Spiegelman, who lived through the camps, the ghettos, the involuntary incarceration. However, his was an existence made possible because his parents did survive the Jewish Holocaust; he was born as a result of their ‘emergence’. In a sense, he is a second-generation survivor; he gets to live with the realization that his birth is tied to his parents’ pain and suffering during the war years. He cannot undo that pain, it is not possible and maybe not even desirable to do so, but what he can do is try and give it a voice, a face, a pulse. Yet the result of his artistic attempt, the graphic memoir Maus, seems to complicate the issue of (re)presentation even further.

Whereas Borowski decided to portray his chief protagonist as a ‘passive observant’, an accomplice to the annihilation of human life in the camps, and by doing so as a writer subverted the ‘truthfulness’ of his own camp behavior, Spiegelman employs the offerings of visual ‘allegory’ as he weaves in the many threads to his story; namely, he draws the Jews as mice, the Germans as cats, the Polish as pigs, the French as frogs, the Americans as dogs, etc., while picture-telling his father’s and his mother’s story before, during and after the Second World War. It is a useful technique, for the most part, since Maus is a graphic memoir, so the thought process of the reader is sped up while the images and accompanying words are being received. Consequently, we get to see Spiegelman’s characters at the same time we read about them and try to envision them. But not all of his characters are simple animal creatures. For example, while reading through the second part of the Maus epic, particularly in the second chapter titled “Auschwitz (Time Flies)”, we notice that Art is no longer a mouse, i.e., he is a human being hiding behind a mouse mask. The same is true for the other characters appearing early in the chapter; his psychiatrist Pavel, for instance, or the handful of intruding members of the press and ruthless businessmen.

The question beckons then, who is the ‘real’ Art? Is there a ‘real’ Art? Why such a blurring of self when the issue at hand is a graphically rendered (re)presentation of one survivor’s experience?

In her work on Holocaust fiction, Voicing the Void, Sara R. Horowitz reflects on this ‘truthful’ subversive technique behind Art Spiegelman’s artistic work in Maus. Horowitz likens Spiegelman’s graphic choices with those of filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, whose testimonial opus Shoah bears witness to the reality of the Jewish Holocaust not by reproducing this reality (Lanzmann does not rely on archival footage to re-present the Nazi regime) but by letting the complex narrative of his subjects unfold almost ‘naturally’, spontaneously, without the cumbersome use of a staged exposition and/or an off-camera commentary. And yet, both Spiegelman and Lanzmann, according to Horowitz, impose their ‘artistic selves’ on their projects so that they, their respective projects, stand to question the possibility of exhibiting ‘truthful’ (re)presentation through artfully recollected bits of history:

Spiegelman’s and Lanzmann’s respective projects challenge the boundaries between art and history. Where these boundaries blur, they imply that one can think better or at least differently about the events of history. The point is not so much to learn the facts directly from the mouths of survivors as it is to break down the cognitive and emotional barriers that keep the past safely in the past for listeners, readers, and viewers.

Hence, The Shoah comes to life in Spiegelman’s graphic (re)presentation through the relationship Art Spiegelman the son has with Vladek and Anja Spiegelman the parents and Richieu, the brother he never truly had. While grappling with his father’s, Vladek’s, recollected memories, looking for a way to talk about his mother’s absence from their lives and at the same time trying to find out ‘what really happened’ to his parents during the War, Spiegelman arranges his work of (re)presentation so that both protagonists and readers actively engage with the enduring acts of re-membering, re-assessing, re-experiencing. Then, to what extent (if any), is his father’s story, Vladek’s story of surviving the Holocaust, and its (re)presentation in the memoir ‘the story’ of Maus, thus making the memoir a (popular) culture-savvy biographic account of Art Spiegelman’s father’s life-story?

Paul John Eakin, a notable guru on autobiographic (re)presentations, examines this issue of ‘whose story is being told’ in Art Spiegelman’s memoir in a larger work of literary criticism titled How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Eakin reads Maus as a complex collaborative autobiography, since the medium of Spiegelman’s narrative choice for the memoir (namely, that of graphic art) complicates the re-telling of the ‘doubled’ autobiographic acts by exposing in plain sight the step-by-step nature of the collaborative process between the ‘informant’ (Spiegelman’s father, Vladek) and the ‘oral historiographer’ (Art Spiegelman himself). The way Spiegelman has chosen to ‘give the public’ his father’s story, going back and forth between the story of his own relationship to his father and the story of his father’s and his mother’s Holocaust survival, according to Eakin, furthers the entanglement of the presentation of the ‘doubled’ autobiographic acts. Eakin calls Art’s story “the story of the story.” And it is “the story of the story” (that is, Art Spiegleman’s work of narrative recovery) that draws the structure of Spiegelman’s memoir. Therefore, Eakin argues that since there is an emphasis being placed by Spiegelman the author on the “performance [aspect] of the [father-son] collaboration”, the two main narrative threads in the memoir, that of the son and that of the father, “are not offered to us on an equal footing.” In that respect, Eakin sees Maus as Art Spiegelman’s autobiography rather than the memoir of his father’s experiences during the war years.

However, as soon as he makes this claim, in his own analysis of Maus, Eakin, ever the craftsman’s critic, is aware of the oversimplifying undertones to this unilateral reading of the memoir. The nature of the power relations between Art and Vladek is one far from simple and easy. Art’s identity as his father’s biographer but also as his father’s son is challenged almost throughout the piece, perhaps most strikingly in those segments where he is no longer a mouse, but a man pretending to be one. In these instances (most vividly portrayed in the second chapter of the second volume of the memoir), we see Art Spiegelman the artist, sitting over his drawing board, which is ‘conveniently’ suspended over a heap of bodies that we come to recognize as (re)presentations of Holocaust victims, exasperating over the implications of his new-found fame status. He wrestles with various reporters and shady entrepreneurs who want him to assist them in furthering the comodification of his father’s story. Unable to deal with this pressure, he consults with his psychiatrist Pavel, a man with a mouse mask, who does not seem to help him entirely alleviate the built-up guilty conscience for exploiting his father’s memories, but at this point in the narrative, we get the feeling that Art Spiegelman does not desire complete absolution for his ‘sins’. Quite the opposite, his growing awareness that the collaboration was somehow lethal to his father’s crumbling health, that he indeed may have played a decisive role in his father’s passing away, contributes to the memoir’s self-explorative undercurrent. Moreover, the fact that Art Spiegelman the artist feels like a con-artist, a cheap scoundrel exploiting the weak for personal gain and profit, compels us to look at Maus as a probing self-recovery story of Art Spiegelman, the son of Vladek and Anja Spiegelman, Holocaust survivors.

Nonetheless, at this juncture in my many readings of Maus, I cannot say that I have come to a bullet-proof understanding of the memoir and all of its (re)presentational implications. The more I return to it, the more overwhelming its form and context seem to be. If indeed Maus is first and foremost the story of artist Art Spiegelman’s self-recovery, then to what degree do we consider Vladek’s story, that is to say, Spiegelman’s (re)presentation of Vladek’s story, to be a truthful account of a survivor’s tale, similar to perhaps that of Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz? But again, what do we mean when we call someone or something ‘truthful’, how are our memories shaped, what do we ‘leave out’ and what do we ‘put in’ as a result of our exposure to the media’s coverage of historical events? The Holocaust occurred at a time in human history when our technological advances had not yet reached the level of today’s ‘perfection’; there are still photographs depicting the Allies’ liberation of the camps, there are also minutes of film documenting these rescues by the British forces, for example, but our understanding of the camps’ horrors is mostly shaped by the narratives of survivors, published in autobiographic or novelistic format, as documentary prose or even poetic inscriptions. The language of the Holocaust has also been based on an absence rather then a presence. More than half a century after the reality of the Nazi genocide, the Holocaust historian Berel Lang informs us that no adequate decision has been reached regarding the issue of ‘linguistic inscription’ for the people who were incarcerated through the Nazi concentration camp system, and almost terminated as a result of its devastating tactics:

When the camps were liberated, beginning in late 1944 and then in 1945, the headlines of the New York Times spoke about the “slaves” discovered in them who were still alive. But the first [Nazi] pair of these terms – Stücke [pieces] and Figuren [fragments] – are indictments of the speakers who use them. And the second and third of those mentioned are, more simply, false: prisoner implies a penal system of some sort, with procedures of judgment and punishment, at the very least of a prison intended to contain or keep the prisoner, and slaves implies that it was the labor these people provided that was a condition of their existence.

The inaptitude of our post-Holocaust language to address the plain facts of Holocaust life suggests that the events surrounding the Jewish Holocaust are somehow out-of-the-ordinary, never before witnessed by the diligent eyes of human history, thus proving to be out of language’s reach. Accordingly, when ‘talking about’, ‘writing of’, ‘re-membering’ this incongruous event, people, artists, survivors are compelled to seek the help of recollected patches of self-memory; these luminal clusters of present-day past re-memberances, where absence and presence take turns, where the historical self undergoes a painfully unavoidable self-invention, offer a way to begin to understand the post-Holocaust life while beginning to comprehend the fragmented semblance of the survivors’ narratives. On that note, Maus is a graphic memoir which seems to follow in this tradition of fragmented testimonials; however, the ability of the text to move us, to inform us, to make us aware does not solely rely on its incorporation of a ‘survivor’s tale’ but on Art Spiegelman’s distinct way to picture-tell us how this tale became an unalienable part of his own life.

Constructing a cultural identity is as easy as mastering the nuances of a foreign language while traveling to the country of its origin on an eight-hour flight. There are gifted individuals among us who may be able to carry out this task in less than eight hours. Fortunately or not, they are few in number. For the rest of us, the process of constructing our cultural ‘selves’ is the journey of a lifetime, struggling to position/inscribe ourselves within a culture that is no longer (re)presented as monolithically uniform.

I have always been interested in the relationship language and memory partake on in the making/unmaking of narrative ‘voices’, especially if their ‘historical counterparts’ had been denied existence, had been ‘shoved under the rug’ so to speak. In view of that, it seems to me that both hooks’ narrative technique and Whitman’s poetic dictum ask of their readers to question persistently the presence of a selfhood and its positionality inside an individual, within a community, amidst a social practice, or in a text. Their writing beckons us to investigate further how ‘gender’ and ‘race’ as latter-day social categories shape language and memory, how they influence a subject’s discursive life, how they help ‘bear witness’ to the construction of a self. One of the reasons why I decided to journey with the “Genders in America” seminar at the University of Leeds' School of English is tied in with my own understanding of this evocative process; namely, I would like to continue investigating the correlative link that exists between ‘engendered language’ and ‘racialized memory’, particularly when a subject’s social life cannot be clearly conveyed.

In that regard, I wonder how successful the cultural ‘translation’, ‘(re)claiming’ of a silenced self could be once it becomes an integral part of the public’s narrative? What are we to make of its (the silenced self’s) re-done identity? How do we approach its study?

Examining one’s own history and tradition in isolation only produces additional endocentric theories of ‘the self’ and ‘the nation’ (that the self belongs to), something that no scientist of the past creating in the present for the future should concede to. America has long been perceived by the outsider’s inwardly gazing eye as a human ‘melting pot’, a place where different races, various ethnic groups, are to experience a liberated life in a constant pursuit of private and communal happiness. America does exhibit the demographics of a fairly rounded (re)presentation of the world’s races, ethnicities, classes, gendered identities. And it may, therefore, be perceived as the perfect battlefield for their redefinition and refiguration, particularly when the case of gender and race is at stake.

Conversely, the solidification of this myth has been challenged by recent American Studies scholarship which rejects its contextual fundamentalism, proposing instead a demystification of the ‘shared culture’ image, so that once marginal/insignificant/irrelevant voices carry out the now dehierarchizized and denaturalized investigation of the ‘national culture’ as a fragmented whole. Working within/through separate trajectories of American Studies scholarship, Houston A. Baker, Ramón Gutiérrez, Kevin J. Mumford, K. Scott Wong, George Lipsitz, Barry Shank, Mark Hulsether, José David Saldívar, to name but a few, deconstruct the traditionally accepted notion of America as a unified, monolithic national culture. Their theoretically informed studies evaluate the intricate relationships existing among landscape, people and technology in the American experience, ascertaining the importance for continuous re-assessment and re-development of these relationships and their subsequent relational effects within American Studies scholarship as it, in turn, strives to engage in in-depth analyses of culture concepts and culture studies. In this respect, hooks’ work of historical recovery and Whitman’s verses of engendered nationhood offer the scholarship a revisonary way to approach the study of America’s ‘fragmented nationhood’; to (re)claim silenced voices is to be in a world where academic predications connect with separate human experiences, while at the same time weaving out a fluid nexus of relations and transactions that actively engage their subjects.

Let us examine Whitman’s “Drum-Taps” (1865). The poems in the chain offer an unnerving, singular portrayal of war. The war in question is not one of mythical proportions; quite the contrary, the poet tends to the reality surrounding the events of America’s Civil War (1861-1865). Whitman treats this war as a tangible ‘civic ritual’, that is, a political space where concerns about national identity and cultural aspirations are confronted with all-too-palpable anxieties regarding gender and sexuality, which in turn, proves challenging to the nineteenth-century paradigmatic way of thinking about foundational/relevant cultural values and beliefs. His project, therefore, appears to be a dialectal one. Amidst the portrayal of America and its lands as the ultimate battlefield, the poet evokes themes of individualism, self-actualization, and the acquisition of power, while presenting the contingent impact of the soldiers’ communal identities on their war-time ability to transpire these themes. With the poems unfolding, Whitman’s direct account of America’s Civil War continues to interrogate the notion that war/wartime violence validates itself as a necessary civic act (albeit one of devastating results), a needed dispensation ‘to rescue’ the American soul from encroaching destruction. Soldiers on both ends of the North-South divide are seen to be sacrificing their lives ‘to save’ America for posterity. While performing out their civic duties, even though their immediate beliefs/concerns may come across as conflicting, oppositional, the soldiers are granted a unique right to form lasting bonds of friendship, often culminating in expressions of valiant same-sex affection.

As a result, the ‘civic ritual’ of wartime violence in Whitman’s “Drum-Taps” ascertains a cathartic actualization for the American self (as in the soldiers’ self-actualization). It severs the social constraints otherwise placed on the relationship existing between ‘the nation’ and ‘the citizen as a subject’ within the overtly visible terrain of policed sexuality and desire confounded in the reality of American life. In that respect, Whitman’s depiction of American citizenship in the long poem as well as in other corners of Leaves of Grass, captivates an act of (if not historical recovery, which is the case with hooks) poetic inscription; the poet ‘claims the power of silences’ by using the immediacy of wartime violence to ‘speak of’ shared practices and symbols that are denied to the (re)presentations of national identities. Thus, “Drum-Taps” constitutes a dynamic site of poetic inquiry into the nature/nurture of American citizenship, gender and social power. Writing of the debilitating effects that war exerts on the American land, Whitman calls upon the power of the actuality of wartime experiences, and how they prove to challenge the dominant culture’s patriarchal stagnancy by exposing the staged fallacy of its discourses and their claim on the American self.

Following a similar vein, cultural theorist bell hooks examines the hitherto historical recording of African American women’s struggle to claim the right of citizenship and all the confounding restrictions that go with it. Ain’t I a Woman, her historically-specific analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American social relations, (re)presents not only an act of agency, but also of translation from private experience to public narrative. As a cultural theorist and a black feminist, hooks scrutinizes the effects normative (re)presentations (such as white is good, black is bad, black women are culturally inferior, white women are true women, etc.) have had on American individuals’ lifestyles. According to hooks, their enactment as dangerous abstractions (whose influence needs to be accounted for if a social group the individual belongs to, for example, black women, is to effectively manage the irreconcilable tensions that surface as a result of its interactions with other social groups) threatens to recognize the reality of people’s day-to-day existence and their experience of oppression along multiple, intersecting, and competing axes:

In America, white racist ideology has always allowed white women to assume that the word woman is synonymous with white woman, for women of other races are always perceived as Others, as de-humanized beings who do not fall under the heading woman. White feminists who claimed to be politically astute showed themselves to be unconscious of the way their use of language suggested they did not recognize the existence of black women. They impressed upon the American public their sense that the word “woman” meant white woman by drawing endless analogies between “women” and “blacks”.

Whiteness is a contesting site of inquest for hooks; it is a ‘civic ritual’ not too dissimilar to Whitman’s inference of America’s Civil War as one such political space. Hooks approaches whiteness treating it as a tangible social construct, with its rules and regulations, employed by white men and white women in America’s white supremist patriarchal power structure in order to create a political space where racial/gender status is used to grant and/or deny citizens certain (internationally) recognized civil liberties (for instance, access to good public education, professional training, nurturing and affordable health care system, housing opportunities in once uni-racial neighborhoods, stable paying jobs, etc.).

Writing about African American women and their silenced history, hooks works through the social category of gender, since this category characterizes a significant component in/for the presentation of her subjects’ existence as racially marked citizens. Fellow social historian and feminist critic Joan W. Scott has also examined the postmodernist conception of gender, as one of the more recently added categories of social discourse. In “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” Scott outlines the main postulates a historian like herself attributes to the social category of gender. Rejecting the fixed and stagnant quality of the man/woman binary opposition when approaching gender in social terms, Scott defines gender “as a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and… a primary way of signifying relationships of power.” This unique position which gender assumes as a social category allows hooks to relate to it, through her work, as a means of decoding the meaning of ‘racialized citizenship’ in American society, and at the same time, a way to bring forth a scholarly initiative, which will then help others understand the complex connections existing among various forms of social interaction within the confines of America’s patriarchal order:

If women want a feminist revolution – ours is a world that is crying out for a feminist revolution – then we must assume responsibility for drawing women together in political solidarity. That means we must assume responsibility for eliminating all the forces that divide women. Racism is one such force. Women, all women, are accountable for racism continuing to divide us. Our willingness to assume responsibility for the elimination of racism need not be engendered by feelings of guilt, moral responsibility, victimization, or rage. It can spring from the heartfelt desire for sisterhood and the personal, intellectual realization that racism among women undermines the potential radicalism of feminism. It can spring from our knowledge that racism is an obstacle in our path that must be removed. More obstacles are created if we simply engage in endless debate as to who put it there.

Furthermore, hooks’ work creates a platform for today’s cultural theorists, enabling them to engage and combat the unspoken acceptance and affirmation of culturally determined roles, imposed on people’s individuality by various mechanisms of compliance (governmental decisions, communal practices, tradition and gossip). Accordingly, hooks ‘reclaims the silences’ of American slavery, American patriarchal social structure, American Civil Rights policies, American feminist thought, by recovering the silenced history of a minority group that has struggled to ascertain the basic rights of American citizenship.

Hence, the cultural criticism of bell hooks and the cultural poetics of Walt Whitman encourage us to reevaluate constantly our own definitions of humanity, of a self, of a voice, of a consciousness. Their work propels us to question the tools we employ to (re)present humanity in a segregated world, through the now distinctive categories of race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, which stand to mark our furthering apart rather than coming together as one, one great world of plenty. They ask of us to rethink the way(s) we celebrate the differences and/or the universalities of our traits.

Do we allow for a comparative approach, or do we work within a specialized field, and from time to time compare notes with the other teams? Do we generalize based on a number of case studies, or do we allow for an interdisciplinary approach, and if we do, do we give the right of way to the literary or the social sciences? Do we interrogate the categories themselves as they are being defined or reshaped by our findings or do we allow for a fluidity of dialogue between them?

In the wake of ‘the changing times’ of present-day life, when most people turn to mass-produced metaphors, images, archetypes (in other words, commodified cultural indicators), in order to find valediction for their choices, their struggles, their unsheltered existence within a global(izing) mass-culture, Whitman’s nineteenth-century verse and hooks’ twentieth-century black feminist scholarship put forward alternative creative responses to the devastating impacts of nationally-bounded citizenship. They demonstrate the value of unstable, decentered ‘sites of memory’ that engage citizens in a multi-vocal discourse, listening and commenting on each other’s different views and understandings. They demonstrate the value of gendered interpretation of racialized subjects (and vice versa) when confronting age-old arguments of racial superiority, biological determinism, and a hegemonic sexual regime. The ‘(re)claimed silences’ of their respective works demonstrate the unflinching diversity, enlivening complexity, and unquestionable beauty of American engendered identities.

Poetry sustains life. Of this I am certain. There is no doubt in my mind that the pain of poverty whether material or emotional lack can be eased by the power of language. I know this intimately. For in that misunderstood childhood of mine, I found that sanctuary in poetry. It restored me, allowed me to come back from the space of woundedness and sadness to a recognition of beauty.

bell hooks (Wounds of Passion)

Cultural theorist and leading voice of black feminist scholarship, bell hooks dreamt of a life marked by poetry. In her second attempt at an autobiographical recollection of a life lived in the segregated vistas of late twentieth-century American society, Wounds of Passion (1997), she recalls the first time she went to hear African American poet Adrienne Rich read her lines. What she heard, the pain Rich’s engulfing timbre unearthed in her innocent little soul, shattered the preconceived notions she nursed about the possibility of a life lived in poetry. Rich’s words enacted a warning, one that she was unprepared for. Finally, young Gloria Watkins (bell hooks’ given name) was forced to realize how futile her life’s dream had been right from the start – who would want to listen to a black woman’s lines in a society where her existence as a citizen is questioned on a daily basis? And yet hooks did not want to give in on her dream; she understood now, perhaps better than before, the need to reclaim a space within American life so that her poetry and that of other minority voices may be heard and listened to. She had to bring to light a ‘site of memory’ which in turn would allow her to live out her long-awaited life in poetry. Hence, the writing and publication of Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1982).

What began as a graduate student’s project at setting the record straight once and for all, speaking for those who were denied the right of voice and (re)presentation, turned into a foundational text for black feminist scholarship. Hooks’ work of historical recovery took more than a decade to reach an audience but when it did arrive onto the bookshelves of American libraries and bookstores it unleashed the possibility to have black women poets, minority writers, housewives, working class mothers, live a life that is recognized, admitted to, re-membered. Ain’t I a Woman brought to the table a new way of thinking about America, the not-so-beguiling ‘melting pot’ nation of phantasmagoric opportunities for those that have it in them to succeed. Hooks’ recovery narrative tells a different story of the Promised Land’s mythical existence. She treats American citizenship as a highly racialized and gendered (social) project. By examining the various ideological and political strategies that white women reformists employed throughout the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, in order to aver all rights of citizenship for themselves, hooks allows for a broader understanding of the distinct ways through which race and gender discourses engage the dynamics of equality and citizenship in American society, and vice versa:

Every women’s movement in America from its earliest origin to the present day has been built on a racist foundation – a fact which in no way invalidates feminism as a political ideology. The racial apartheid social structure that characterized 19th and early 20th century American life was mirrored in the women’s rights movement. The first white women’s rights advocates were never seeking social equality for all women; they were seeking social equality for white women. Because many 19th century white women’s rights advocates were also active in the abolitionist movement, it is often assumed they were anti-racist. Historiographers and especially recent feminist writing have created a version of American history in which white women’s rights advocates are presented as champions of oppressed black people…In actuality, most white abolitionists, male and female, though vehement in their anti-slavery protest, were totally opposed to granting social equality to black people.

Reading hooks’ work of historical re-memberance, we come to realize that neither ‘race’ nor ‘gender’ as latter-day social categories can stand on their own to (re)present fully the diversity of American nationhood. Letting the silences speak, opening up a forum for a new, challenging discourse on ‘engendered race’, hooks questions the validity of ‘reclaiming a creative space of one’s own’ in the first place. Doesn’t this practice help perpetuate an already too familiar set of elitist activities? Isn’t the exclusivity of a ‘creative space’ a far cry away from the illiterate reality of nameless protagonists (present and past) whose circumstances prevent them from celebrating/actualizing their identities? Not entirely.

Cultural historian Pierre Nora examines the relationship that exists between historical investment and individual memory, offering a reading of ‘historical truths’ and ‘remembered events’ through lieux de mémoire, that is, ‘sites of memory’ which “originate with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory, that we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies, and notarize bills because such activities no longer occur naturally.” Within American social practices, such ‘sites of memory’ appear to be a necessity, a final defense against misrepresentation and unilateral polemics in historical study. As children of history and memory, lieux de mémoire, according to Nora, are unlike any previously encountered type of history, ancient or modern, since contrary to historical objects, they are without a referent in reality. However, Nora is quick to point out that this unique trait does not leave the ‘sites of memory’ without a referent all-together; lieux de mémoire are their own referents. In other words, they constitute a double act: they are “a site of excess closed upon itself, concentrated in its own name, but also forever open to the full range of its possible significations.” Bearing this in mind, hooks’ work of historical recovery filtered through the tools of feminist scholarship, emerges as an example of one such ‘site of memory’; moreover, her poignant implementation of the authority of experience, when dealing with race and gender (re)presentations, unfolds an open-ended set of enquiries that are not meant to be fully resolved.

What are we to make of the ‘silences’ that her work has successfully ‘voiced’? When such silences fall, when they are no longer veiled, what purpose do they serve? Are they really empowering for their lack of previous recognition or for their claim to provide revelatory insight into past historical moments? Could they in turn constitute other ‘sites of memory’ that will help voice the ‘otherness’ of thus far undesirable lifestyles or unwelcomed experiences? Could they speak to one and many?

Ain’t I a Woman, although thoroughly insightful and first of its kind (as far as writings on the condition of African American women’s history are concerned), is not alone in voicing these questions. Silences have provided storytellers with opportunities continuously throughout human history. Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey gain their creative power from the untresspassed silences of antic Greek beliefs; The Old and The New Testament reinforce the mysticism of varied Christian faith(s) by opening up their pages to the silences of God’s ways. And the list goes on. Nevertheless, when it comes to the imaginative investment and creative wits of American artists, none come close to hooks’ explorative style as the poet Walt Whitman.

A strange paring the two may prove to be (and indeed I have often asked myself what it is about their respective work that makes me think of it as being linked by the ‘engendered silences’ of American citizenship); Whitman’s nineteenth-century sentiments of American nationhood appear strikingly out-of-touch when paired up with the life-shattering lessons that hooks’ late twentieth-century work coveys. On the one hand, Whitman’s America is characterized by a prevailing sense of oneness. In “Our Old Feuillage” (1860), America is portrayed as a unifying entity that permeates the multi-social/ethnic/racial commonalities of its citizens. Equally possessed by Northerners and Southerners (even Kanadians!), Whitman’s American identity brings together the diverging and sometimes lethal aspirations of its people; it nullifies the boundaries of race, class, gender that inhabit the reality of American life, so that American citizens are always one and all, united in their belonging to an idea of a belonging. On the other hand, black feminist critic bell hooks does not allow herself such dangerous/anachronistic indulgences. Her America is not a bounded collective identity; her work points to American reality as a set of multiple, shifting, and contingent identities that are in need of recovery, since the white supremist patriarchal power structure, which polices American citizenship and nationhood, disavows the cultural and lawful validity of their existence. Yet, both Whitman and hooks are concerned with (re)presentations of American citizenship. Both writers understand that to (re)present America is to (re)present/theorize identity, belonging, history, culture, and place; and the ‘silences’ of identity, belonging, history, culture, and place; and the ‘reclaiming of silences’- both authorized and subversive – of identity, belonging, history, culture, and place.