SAIDIYA HARTMAN, EVA HOFFMAN, AND DANIEL MENDELSOHN IN CONVERSATION WITH NANCY K. MILLER
NKM: I will ask you all the same first question, and we’ll see what happens from there. What was the impulse to write your book?
EH: Well, the impulse has a bit of a history. I came to the subject in this book quite late. When I started writing my first book, Lost in Translation, the immediate problematic which preoccupied me, and which had preoccupied me already quite a long time then, was the displacement which I actually experienced.1 The displacement of emigration, of coming from Poland to Canada, and being out of a culture, language, etc. and transposing myself into a new one. And I say this partly because I think that memory works from the present, often. So, the narrative, which, in a sense, I was working with then, started with that present, with the present of my actual emigration and the identity which was foregrounded for me then, was the identity of an immigrant, because identity is also not written in stone for any of us, and it can change with different preoccupations, different stages of our lives.
The Holocaust at that point was a given, it was a given with which I had grown up, which was always there as part of my family history and the stories which I heard from childhood on, but it was not until later that I started disentangling it as a particular thread and as a particular aspect of my own history, my generation’s history, and a broader legacy as well. And then the present changed. My parents died, for one thing, and I felt I was losing that palpable link to that past, and also the survivors as a generation were passing on, and there was a sense that the wand of knowledge, of understanding, of that legacy was being passed on to the second generation. At the same time, there was a kind of cultural phenomenon as well—the perhaps not sudden but growing and increasing preoccupation with the Holocaust, which, I think, we’ve all been aware of. And, while this was an improvement, I feel, over the latency period, over the period where the subject of the Holocaust was a taboo, nevertheless, I felt that in this cultural preoccupation there were some dangers of reductiveness and simplification and that, if I wanted to keep the complexity which I’d felt actually in survivors’ stories, that I needed to address the subject at the same time—this was a past which was still not a past for me, it still impinged, and I wanted to find out, to think about the ways in which it impinged on me, it impinged perhaps on the broader second generation, the ways in which the knowledge of the Holocaust was passed on, transmitted, how the second generation’s knowledge differs from the first generation’s. Perhaps I should stop there…
NKM: Despite the difference in generations, it seems logical for Daniel Mendelsohn to follow, because of the Holocaust link.
DM: Well, yes, but I would also say, no. I mean only in the sense that we have very different relationships to the event. Indeed, one of the things I’m always foregrounding in my book is precisely that: how remote it is to me. I’m not the child of survivors. I’m not the grandchild of survivors. The entire thing that made my book possible, I think, is the fact that I have a very oblique relationship to the event itself—in the book I’m writing about what happened to my grandfather’s brother, a man I never knew—so it was always at an angle to me. And that angle is precisely what the book is about: how do you think about the event, or know about the event, when it is actually becoming more and more remote. I think the primary issue that I struggled with in the book was how do you access something that doesn’t belong to you, in fact. It belongs to Eva more than it belongs to me. So that’s what I’m interested in in the book: how do you know about something that isn’t your “property,” so to speak, except in the most abstract possible sense.
I mean, what brought me to write my book wasn’t even a strong interest in the Holocaust per se, but rather a very strong, old interest in family history, which I owe to my very interesting grandfather, a great raconteur and storyteller about the old country, about his family’s past.2 And so already as a young child of ten or eleven I was interested in family history—I vividly remember the family tree I was building when I was twelve years old, making charts on pieces of oak tag, that sort of thing. (And, you know, now, of course, you just have to buy the right software and it comes out very nice and pretty from your printer, but in those days it was quite different!) So I was very interested in genealogy, family history, “the old country”—you know, when you’re the grandchild of immigrants, as I am, people used to talk all the time about the old country. So, anyway, there I was in my teens, making family charts and index cards and family trees, and what frustrated me from a very early age was that there was this entire limb of this family tree that had obviously been cut off. There were these people you could not know about because they had just sort of disappeared, and it bothered me as a researcher—I would say, indeed, that my mentality as a researcher was offended before my mentality as a family member, as a Jew, as a anything else was. I just couldn’t believe that you could not know anything about these people because they had vanished off the face of the earth. But, as we know, nobody just “vanishes off the face of the earth.” Every one of those people had a particular fate, we knew that; but about my great-uncle, Shmiel, it was impossible to know anything, and I was sort of possessed by this mystery from a very early age.
There were, it’s important to remember, also practical problems at that time to the kind of research I subsequently did in order to write my book. In those days—I mean, the mid-1970s, the early 1980s, when I was furiously working on family history—there was still the Iron Curtain, so you couldn’t easily do the kind of research that I subsequently did, research that involved extensive travel in Eastern Europe, in former Soviet territories, and extensive, very open, and direct interviewing of local residents about the war. So it all seemed very impossible to get at, back then—the mystery of “what happened to Uncle Shmiel,” as we used to say in my family.
And then, of course, the world changed, the Soviet Union fell, travel was easier—and there was also an explosion of information on the Internet, Jewish genealogy Web sites, and so forth. But why it was, precisely, that at the age of forty, in the year 2000, I suddenly thought, “Oh, now I have to go find Uncle Shmiel,” I really couldn’t say. I wish I had some lovely story to tell you about what it was that spurred me. Maybe it was turning forty—actually, I sometimes do think that may have something to do with it. You know, at a certain point in your life, you realize that there’s more of it behind you than in front of you, and before you go into the part that’s left you need to make your peace with the part that came before. So maybe it was that.
NKM: You’ve provided a perfect segue for Saidiya.
SH: As I listen to Eva and Daniel speak, I am reminded that it is critical to think about these experiences comparatively, while never forgetting the ways in which they are distinct. We can think comparatively about the experience of loss, but we also have to contend with the incommensurability between the histories we’re describing. In my case, it was the absence of documentation and the paucity of slavery’s archive regarding the experience of the captives that determined the hybrid form of Lose Your Mother.3 Writing the book had everything to do with the form in which the dead returned to me.
In The Lives of Infamous Men Foucault notes that the dead, and specifically the infamous, the subaltern, and the exploited, return to us in the very form in which they were driven out of the world.4 So the dead returned to me as numbers, as ciphers, or with names tossed off as crass insults and jokes. My challenge was how to tell a story about this incredible effacement and disfiguration of personhood. When thinking about the slave trade, its status as “an event” is troublesome; after all, we are talking about an experience of war, and captivity and predation, which lasted for over four hundred years. The paradox of captivity and enslavement is both its remoteness, in that I’m the fifth generation out of slavery, and its proximity, less because of what’s transmitted across generations in terms of memory than in the forms of structural violence and dispossession that continue to make that history pertinent to the present. So how can I then write all of this as a narrative? How do I write a story about the long durée of a nonevent about objects, commodities, and cargo? Or reconstruct lives with scraps from the archive? At the same time, I didn’t want to write a story that was solely a metadiscourse about history or that settled for invoking the unspeakable as the justification for an aborted narrative. I did not want to make an instrumental connection between the past and the present, but instead to suggest that the Atlantic slave trade was formative of modernity and that slavery is a dimension of the present that we’re still living. My journey along the slave route is a device, a vehicle for posing a relation between our age and an age that many of us think of as the past, but which many of us live as the time of the present. The reverberations of slavery can be discerned in contemporary forms of dispossession that are so immediate and unceasing that you can’t even begin to think about memorialization, because people are still living the dire effects of the disaster. All of these concerns about time, eventfulness, the life world of the human commodity required a hybrid form, a personal narrative, a historical meditation, and a metadiscourse on history.
It also required me to be the receptacle for foreclosed and prohibited emotions—rage and grief and disappointment. Who wants to carry all that? Who would volunteer for such a task? Novelists, artists, but few scholars. So I had to kind of carry all that rage, grief, and disappointment in order to articulate the relationship between the past and the present. Affect was essential to a critical reading of the archive.
NKM: I guess we might say the book is a journey, but that each of you also made a journey. I’m wondering how you see the difference between the kind of research that you can do now on the Internet, what you can discover in archives and documents, and what happens when you actually go there. Perhaps you can address this decision to return and whether the word return is appropriate. How much is fueled by the needs of research? Is there some other kind of drive that takes over from that? How does the actual journey become inscribed in the book?
DM: I was doing an event last year with Leon Wieseltier, and he kept saying, “Why do you keep talking about ‘going back’? You were never there before!” Which is clever, but I disagree, because you know, again, when you grow up in an immigrant family, you’re always hearing about the country of origin. So it does feel like going back. I make no apologies for using this term, which everybody tends to use. Certainly if you’re a certain generation of American Jew, people always talk about “going back,” even though it’s not a place you’ve been—it’s a locution that, if anything, goes to the heart of the strong sentimental role that the country of origin plays in the lives of even distant descendants of immigrants. So I don’t see a problem with that, because the sort of imaginary reality of these places is very present to us. I grew up hearing about Bolechow since I was three years old. It felt like a very real place, so I really did feel like I was going back, and in fact—perhaps controversially—when I was in Poland and western Ukraine for the first time, I really did feel like I had come back. It felt familiar—the food was familiar to me, the mannerisms of the people were familiar to me, the way of talking was familiar to me, the things they talked about were familiar. I say “controversially” because that experience of familiarity was not one that I’ve ever had when I went to Israel, where I never have a feeling of recognition, of connectedness. I’ve spoken about this very openly, and it’s gotten me in hot water every now and then—I remember once, when I was on my book tour for The Lost and was doing a talk at a congregation in LA, and a woman stood up and said, “Well, why wasn’t your trip to Israel the climax of your book?” She meant the emotional climax, as if getting to Israel, for a person of my background and interests, had to be the be-all and end-all. And so I replied, “Well, because I wasn’t finished when I was in Israel, I still had to go to three more countries to finish my research,” but it was interesting because she persisted and said, “When you wrote about it, you didn’t feel like that was where you really belonged ?” And I said, “Well, no, not really. When I went to Poland, I felt very much at home. I didn’t feel so at home in Israel, frankly.” So I think that when you make these journeys, you know, you’re recuperating all kinds of complicated things—sentimental, emotional, not necessarily rational. But you go back because there’s a kind of allure that’s exerted by the place of origin. It seems very self-evident to me.
SH: My book was written as an anti-Roots narrative, which means that Roots was the ur-text. Lose Your Mother was both indebted to Haley’s magnum opus and written against it. The path that I was tracing wasn’t the road home, it was a slave route. The language of stranger, rather than of kin, framed my journey. The stranger is the most universal definition of the slave, so in that regard such language was suitable. It was terrible to think about all of those people who had been dislocated and deterritorialized even as they were literally on the African continent and making that journey to the coast. These were the ones that I wanted to claim. Like every oppositional narrative, Lose Your Mother is haunted by the thing it writes against—the desire for home—and, at the same time, I was acutely aware that I would always be outside home. I was trying to give flesh to a social category—the human commodity, the captive, the slave. In doing so, I had to confront the challenge of personal disclosure, narrating an impossible story, personifying a violence masked by abstraction, and performing affect. Certainly, I was stepping into the path that others had traveled and retracing a route; but what distinguished my journey was stepping into the path of dislocated and disposable persons, so there was no ancestral village or kin group that dictated/directed my search. In this regard, I also wanted to shift the terms of a larger set of discussions about diasporic identity.
NKM: And you also tell other people’s stories.
SH: I tell other people’s stories. Stories about captives, people I met in Ghana, family stories that embarrassed my mother. There were also dueling temporal frames: the time of slavery and freedom, decolonization and the civil rights movement. Ghana played a crucial role in both frames. My desire to revisit these times had much to do with dreams of undoing the world order engendered by the Atlantic slave trade. This was also the dream of those never able to return home, the dream of the anticolonial struggle, and the civil rights and black power movement. I don’t know if that seems like an abstract answer; it didn’t feel abstract. I experienced so much pain in the archive and in the course of my journey. I am the progeny of the captive, the slave, the commoner, and it was that particular history, rather than a familial history or an ethnic saga, that I wanted to recount.
NKM: No, not abstract at all. It seems to me that you are talking about the history of a group, rather than your family’s individual history, and it’s a matter of history, not inherited memory.
EH: We have this discourse of memory, the memory of the Holocaust, but even from my proximity, I didn’t actually receive memories of the Holocaust. Memories, more than anything else, are not genetically transferred from one generation to another. We did receive something very powerful. We received the emotional traces of our parents’ experiences or our family’s experiences or our collective experiences, but not memories. I’d like to read briefly from After Such Knowledge, in which I describe this impulse actually to go, to make a journey.
That everybody died; that my parents survived by dint of my father’s resourcefulness and my mother’s fatalistic fearlessness; that there were people in whose hands one could place one’s life, and others who set vicious dogs on humans: Those were the givens. More than for our parents, the Holocaust, for us, was the paradoxical fundament…
It was, however, an irony attendant on this that, although we postwar children were the closest to wartime events in time and in primal feeling, we were the furthest removed from their grounded, worldly—that is, political, social, historical meanings. This, I think, is a crucial distinction: that whereas adults who live through violence and atrocity can understand what happens to them as actuality—no matter how awful its terms—the generation after receives its first knowledge of the terrible events with only childish instruments of perception, and as a kind of fable…
How, then, are we to understand those earliest meanings, the contents of what was passed on? At first, it was not rational interpretation, or information, or anything like memories; for even if survivors could recollect their stained spots of time precisely, such things cannot be passed on like some psychogenetic endowment. The attic in my imagination, to give only the most concrete example, probably bore no resemblance to the actual attic in which my parents were hidden.5
So, in a sense, you know the impulse for my journey was to give concrete reality to this imaginary—that really was the main impulse. Part of the impulse behind this book was to place these fragments of childhood knowledge and the family knowledge and a family experience within the broader history.
SH: On that note, I would say that I too had the impulse to translate numbers and ciphers into flesh and blood and to document the existence of those made objects and commodities. But, I had no personal repository of memories to work with.
DM: I mean I think you raise a really interesting issue, which is rather sensitive. But, you know, there has been such a cult of a sort of memory, right? “We must remember,” “the moral duty to remember,” “never forget,” you know—all of it. To which I always respond, “I have news for you. You can’t remember what didn’t happen to you.” Is false remembering better than willed forgetting? I’m sometimes not so sure. So, I think this fetishization of always remembering and never forgetting betrays an artificial and, I think, potentially damaging cultural approach to what memory is really supposed to be about. Obviously, there is value in memorializing events from the past, enshrining them in history, and so forth. The Romans had a very good word for this, which is co-memorate, which is something different from the weird, you-are-there emphasis on mass, shared “memory.” I have to say since I wrote my book I’ve been to a million Yom HaShoah events, and I’m always trying, in an ornery way, I suppose, to make this point. Everybody says “Oh, yes, we’re going to remember forever”; but, well, I’m sorry, but you can’t “remember.” There is an important distinction to be made between remembering, which is individual and concrete, and commemoration, which is public and symbolic, and I think it needs to always be made. And I’d say that the very thing that underlies my book and some of the other books we’re talking about here—the impulse to go back to give concrete reality to an (as it were) mythic or narrated reality that you grew up hearing about, or some historical event you’ve learned about in books—derives its significance precisely from the fact we can’t, we don’t, “remember.” People who remember don’t need to go back. People like me need to go back to Bolechow, my family’s town, precisely because I didn’t have anything to remember; its reality for me had to be constituted by the journey. Quite often the survivors never go back. They remember enough. They don’t need to know what it looks like or sounds like or feels like or smells like or whatever. I think it’s very important to remember that memory is individual, you know, you can’t remember things that didn’t happen to you. And that creates a space, I would say, for the kinds of books, precisely, that we’ve written, which are about a kind of reclamation which is not a memory because it can’t be memory. It’s something else. I’m not sure I know what the word for it is, but I think it’s something distinct, and the distinction, I think, is important.
NKM: The three of you have used words like real, concrete, tied to place, and, Daniel, you gloss the implications for your quest of the word specific toward the end of your book. I want to ask you-about the moment, Saidiya, when you go to the prison or you’re standing on the coast, and when you’re there in this tiny town, Eva, in Poland. As readers, we have an almost cinematic experience. Was there a found moment in the book for you, or a found moment in your experience, and is that kind of before and after produced by the going and seeing?
EH: Well, as it happened, there was a lot there, as it happened it was a very full encounter. There was a danger that we would have missed it entirely because we couldn’t find Załośce, the place from which my parents came, on the map. We almost went to the wrong town. The day was saved by our driver, who was a soccer coach and therefore had very local maps. But, once we found the right place, we did have a very full encounter, and I won’t tell the whole story of it, but part of the fullness was that we found two members of the family which hid my parents, which sheltered my parents, which saved my parents’ lives. And so this was a very moving meeting, a very genuine meeting. I think they were as perplexed by our presence there as we were perplexed by, you know, sort of finding Załośce. But, so this was first of all a human encounter and a very active encounter in which there was a chance to give sort of mutual recognition to each other—and I think the question of recognition is very important and I kept thinking about it as I read Saidiya’s book: the need for the basic recognition, the basic acknowledgment of something. I think that perhaps we children of survivors don’t often think about the other side enough and about the need to recognize them, the life risks that they were taking to rescue those who did survive. As for the place itself, it’s a bit complicated, it seems to me, because I do think that there is a need to sort of locate, locate something, locate the past which you have known about, but which you don’t know. I’m actually thinking about Freud’s formulation of melancholia, a sort of depressive melancholia. He says that mourning in which you knew the object of your mourning can come to an end, but mourning in which you don’t know the object which you have lost cannot come to an end. And, in that sense, the second generation was placed in a kind of melancholic position, a kind of placelessness, a kind of nameless, placeless loss. So, you know, I think that locating something does matter a lot. On the other hand, I didn’t feel this was a return and I think that, like the word memory, return is problematic. One of the reasons it’s problematic is because it creates this aporia, it creates this kind of impossible dilemma in one’s mind in which you think you can reenter the past and know it completely and touch it. That you can touch it, live it, you know, somehow reenter the past. You cannot—there are real limits to how you can know if not what you can know.
SH: I want to extend Eva’s remarks about melancholia by again thinking about the incommensurability of these experiences. For example, there are different forms of melancholia: the melancholia that results from the social foreclosure of certain kinds of grief, that is, the refusal to acknowledge loss. The melancholia produced by the refusal to acknowledge loss or recognize grief has shaped the national discourse on the history of slavery and the slave trade. The slave trade and the centuries-long experience of captivity has actually yet to be remembered, mourned, or redressed. For example, the only people who ever received reparations for slavery were English and French slave owners who received remuneration for the loss of slave property as a result of emancipation in the British colonies and revolution in Haiti. The question of justice remains open in the present, and, because of this, slavery is less the “what happened then” than it is a history that still hurts. This would not be the case had Reconstruction, the first and the second one, been successful. The social order in which we live is shaped by gross inequalities of wealth and human value. In the case of slavery, the issue isn’t the incommensurability between the injury and the available forms of redress but the fact that only the slave owners received reparations. All of these concerns determine the kind of stories that we tell about the past and the way we invoke those pasts to make claims in the present. In short, the crime is still unrecognized in the present.
DM: Just because it’s not recognized doesn’t mean that it’s not what it so clearly is, though! Apropos of this, I just spent a week at the American Academy in Berlin and I found myself getting into one of these loony conversations about what you refer to as “incommensurabilities” with the other visiting fellow that week, Senator Tom Daschle, who’s from the Dakotas. I was giving a lecture that night about my book, and the two of us were talking to the moderator about genocide, and Tom Daschle started talking about Native Americans and what was done to them; and it was very interesting because the moderator of my talk was resisting very strongly the notion that what happened to the Native Americans in the nineteenth century was a genocide comparable to the genocide of the European Jews during World War II. To my mind, the techniques, the technology of genocide don’t have to be identical in order for two cases to be analogous, and I think that quite often the tendency to view European genocides as special and more horrible betray an unpleasant set of preconceptions and prejudices that certainly bear scrutiny if we’re claiming to be interested in genocide in the abstract. I mean it seems, at least to me, very clear that what happened to the Native Americans was a very organized genocide on the part of white people for economic reasons that were, more often than not, justified by cultural and racial prejudices. The fact of genocide, that one group is trying to wipe out another group, in its entirety—whether for economic, racial, or cultural reasons—should not be the most salient consideration, to my mind. Anyway, in Berlin, we got into this big, ostensibly friendly argument, but it just seemed to me that what was at issue—Daschle clearly felt very strongly about this—was that what happened to the Native Americans be recognized as a genocide. The historical particulars are wildly different in the two cases, obviously—the Native Americans and the Jews of Europe—but genocide is genocide. In both cases, a powerful group of aggressors with strong economic and ideological motivations attempted to exterminate, victimize, relocate, and rob another group of people, as the result of a concerted plan, using the most sophisticated technology at their disposal. And if you think the Holocaust is somehow “worse” because the victims are white Europeans who spoke languages you understand and wore fur coats and read novels and newspapers and were modern, recognizable people, then you need to think hard about your own ideologies, it seems to me. This whole my-genocide-was-worse-than-your-genocide thing seems to me to betray a fundamental lack of moral and historical imagination—an essential failure to understand just why genocide in general is an abomination. The very idea that one genocide could be “worse” than another is abominable, as far as I’m concerned.
NKM: I wanted to ask you, Daniel, if you would talk about the end of your book, because when I was reading it I felt intensely curious about how the story would turn out, and I was lucky because I was on a very, very long plane ride.
DM: People always tell me that.
NKM: No, it was great!
DM: I get so many e-mails… “I was on a plane…”
NKM: Well, I had been to a conference in Budapest about family photographs and many of the subjects that we’re discussing today. I had brought your book, but the trip wasn’t really long enough. I wanted to save the end for when I wasn’t myself at the end of an exhausting trip. I wanted to see how you were going to pull this off, because to take the reader on this journey—the book itself is a journey—the reader has to go through all the finding and the losing, and then there is the final finding. You say you found what you were looking for and yet that something still is going to elude you. There is always a problem of belatedness in autobiography and especially, of course, in all these stories about other people’s past. I’m thinking about that moment where you know you’re going to finish your book, and you’ve already finished the journey, and what are you going to end with?
DM: Yes—this goes to the heart of an interesting question about the way that a nonfiction narrative like mine has to be both true and also a good story, right? In my case, it’s interesting because I thought I’d finished with all my journeying and interviewing and fact-finding, and so had already written the end of the book—and then, quite unexpectedly, I made a big discovery that gave me so many details and specifics that I’d never dreamed of attaining. What I mean is that I had thought I had found out everything I could, and then, during a second trip to Bolechow that I hadn’t really planned on making, and which anyway was just going to be a quick trip to take a few more photos for the book, by accident I found out a lot more, found the details I’d always hoped for, about my great-uncle’s fate. It was one of those serendipitous things that can happen: I was just in this town for a few hours and I bumped into someone who bumped into someone, and we actually, in that moment, found out the solution to the mystery, which I had thought would be ultimately impossible to solve. So the end of my book happened to me in a funny way. But I wanted to preserve the sense of the total fortuitousness of what had happened, the unexpectedness with which knowledge can, finally, come, and so in the book I kept the original ending, the ending I’d written before I made this great discovery, which I call the “False Ending.” And after that comes the final section which tells of the great discovery. So, you know, the whole book, in some sense, is about the problem of belatedness, of accidentalness… but that’s inevitable when you write about the past, you’re always coming too late because you’re interested in the past and it already happened, if you know what I mean. Everything about the past is already, tragically, “belated.” You can’t win.
NKM: A Jewish joke, I suppose.
DM: Well, but it’s true! You know, so much of my book is about how I made mistakes about the past: I thought I knew something, and I didn’t, or I thought I knew who somebody was and it turned out to be someone much more important than I ever thought, and so on. But that’s inevitable to the writing of the history, because we are not in the past. You know, my favorite line from a novel is the first sentence of The Go-Between, “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”6 And it really is . They speak a different language, the directions to the restroom are different, everything is different in the past, and I think we need to recognize that. It’s just not some transparently available thing, some place that you could get to and see whole if you only did enough research, studied hard enough, asked enough questions, and read enough documents. I think this is a particularly important point to make because we have a fantasy, particularly in American culture, I would say, particularly now, of total recuperability—you know, every emotion, every experience is transparently available to anybody who has the price of admission, basically. And, you know, when you write about these events, events of, let’s say, high and profound trauma to civilization, whether it’s in Europe, whether it’s in Africa, you know, ruined civilizations—when you write about this extent of devastation, most of this stuff is lost, right? You know, the whole joke of my book, so to speak, is that I schlepped around for five years all over the world, from Australia to Scandinavia to Israel to Eastern Europe, and in the end there just wasn’t that much to find—there wasn’t much left. There’s this page in my book where I list all the facts that I learned about my great-uncle and the family in all that time, all those years of schlepping, and it’s exactly one page long—in a five-hundred-page book. We want to believe we can get it all back, but we can’t. So 98 percent is lost, and the recognition that most things in life get lost is crucial, I think, particularly now, in the era of total, endless, transparent availability of everyone to everyone else at every given moment of every day. The idea that one can’t know something is an intolerable idea right now, and I think it’s very important to keep reminding people that most of what happens in the past is unavailable, because it’s in the past. And only the stuff that’s important survives. Or, the stuff that was in the right place survived but most of it’s gone. And that’s the way it’s always going to be.
EH: Well, yes, we are talking about the function of our books, I actually wanted to make the past the past, to separate myself from the past. Which I think is the task for the belated generations. The past lives in us, impinges on us, and for those who had lived through it, there is no separation from it, probably in one lifetime. But for the second generation, for those who come after, it is not our past, and that needs to be understood. Our distance from it needs to be acknowledged. So I wanted to make the past the past, which doesn’t mean forgetting it or neglecting it or being indifferent to it. It can, I think, happen only after you process it very fully, after you work through it very fully, but, after a while, I wanted precisely to know that there was a distinction between that catastrophic and horrendous and enormous past and the present.
SH: I would say that I share that desire. I would love for the past to be the past. Reconstruction was one attempt to make the past the past. Social movements are also attempts to create ruptures between pasts and presents. However, my book ends on an expectant note, in which the time of slavery is still open, and the question remains when will this become the past? This is less a question of memory or forgetting than it is one regarding the practice of freedom and the possibilities of transformation. The book concludes with this open question rather than with narrative closure, it ends with the narrator listening for a different kind of song.
DM: But I think what you’re saying is both crucial and deeply healthy, in a funny way. And also, I would say, something that a lot of people don’t want to think about, because both of these events, in their ways, are still present enough in the lives of living people—are fairly recent, in a weird way. People are always saying to me, “what can we do so that we’ll never forget this”? And I look at them and I say, “Nothing. No one can remember everything all the time.” I think this is very interesting. These things are recent enough to us that we care about them deeply, and we can’t bear the thought that one day people will be indifferent to them; but they will. It’s inevitable; anything else is a dream. Look, the idea of total memory, total recall of the largeness of the past, is nutty—if you import all of the past into the present, which we increasingly have the technology to do, then you have no room to be in the present. That’s a fact, right? So it’s actually right and healthy for much of the past to slip away, to get streamlined into a form that the present can accommodate. You know, I always say that it’s like the Passover story. In the year 2300 BC or whenever it was, believe me, all anyone could talk about was the enslavement in Egypt, because it had just happened, and boy was that a big deal! Every one of the tens of thousands of Hebrew slaves who made it out of Egypt had a long spiel to tell everyone he knew the amazing things that happened, who he was with, the name of the horrible overseer who whipped him, blah blah blah. And you know what? Now we talk about it once a year for two hours. But that’s a valid model, and that’s healthy. That’s how cultures move into the present. They commemorate in an organized way. We’re not all sitting around saying, “Gosh, was the brick that so-and-so had to schlep up the pyramid heavy!” “Did so-and-so’s camel smell bad!” right?
NKM: I think some people are still finding it heavy.
DM: Right, and they’re in universities, which is where the people interested in that level of detail belong—the historians, the scholars, the specialists. But the culture in general can’t tolerate, has no time for, that degree of specificity. A culture needs a story it can tell once a year to commemorate its history; it doesn’t care whose camel smelled and how heavy the brick was.
SH: But, actually, I have a joke about a Passover dinner. I was with friends at an interracial Passover dinner, and, during the remembrance of the bitterness of slavery, a friend joked that for some of us it’s the bitterness of freedom that we need to commemorate. Here, again, the question arises as to the distinction between that which is being commemorated and the possibilities which are open or foreclosed in the present. I also think that there is hubris involved in the “need to remember,” as if remembering were enough to prevent other crimes.
DM: As it so clearly doesn’t.
SH: Yeah, so it’s…
DM: But what I mean is that, I mean by that joke about, you know, it’s the specialists who are interested in the bricks, the camels, but the culture, in order to progress into its own future, cannot remember all the things that happened in all their enormity and detail every minute of every day or else they can’t have a present.
EH: Can I just quickly say that I’m not suggesting forgetting. I’m suggesting, in a sense, a move from memory to history, a memory with all of its identifications.
DH: Right, but that’s what I call commemoration.
EH: To history, to knowledge.
Notes
This conversation took place during the “Rites of Returns” conference, April 2008.
1. Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation (New York: Penguin, 1990).
2. Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (New York: Harper Collins, 2006).
3. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).
4. Michel Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 3: Power, James D. Faubion, ed. (New York: New Press, 2000).
5. Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005), 15, 16, 34.
6. L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (New York: NYRB Classics, 2002).