Trauma and the Memory of Politics (review)

Edkins has written a provocative book on how traumatic memory is mobilized through various strategies of recall, particularly memorial emplacement in national narratives of heroism, sacrifice, and redemption. Intense remembering too easily turns to intentional forgetting, however, when such toxic memories cannot be contained in traditional memorial forms. Too often, Edkins observes, these narratives "seem unable to get away from rhetorics of state or nation, and they fail to escape the racialisation upon which the genocides, enslavements and famines were themselves based" (171). She worries as well that trauma stories, the moral testimony of witnesses (survivors, for example), are virtually incommunicable, though they must be communicated. This communication requires memorial forms and audiences willing to find, in her words, "ways of encircling the real," ways of introducing the jarring reality of, in her words, "trauma time" (15).

Edkins draws from a compelling variety of memorial sites and expression: British remembrance of Armistice Day, the World War I Cenotaph in London, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Holocaust sites and museums, and tombs of unknown soldiers. She effectively analyzes the immediate post–September 11 memorial landscape of Manhattan, as well as such spaces of protest as the Washington Mall and Tiananmen Square. There is no question that anyone thinking or writing about the cultural function of catastrophe will find Edkins' book useful.

While writing about the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, I, like Edkins, found the "medicalization" of trauma problematical; the insidiously soothing rhetoric of "healing" and "closure" blunts the moral witness that productively complicates orderly narrative. However, her contention that trauma victims have to give up their political voice in order to gain the cultural status of "victim" or "witness" is debatable. No doubt many do, and no doubt they face cultural pressures to do so. But there are many examples of people seared by traumatic events practicing an "active grief" that immersed them in public work. It would have been helpful for Edkins to turn to case studies of Vietnam veterans returning to the public sphere rather than to various theoretical works. She could have complicated the story even more by thinking about some veterans as self-traumatizing perpetrators, as they recount their atrocity tales. Furthermore, is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as ideologically "open" as she thinks? The genius of the site is that visitors can inhabit the space whatever their convictions about the war, but the POW/MIA booths that frame it declare America an innocent victim of the war.

Edkins could also pay more attention to the impact of media in the creation of trauma spectacles that allow people worldwide to participate vicariously and problematically in the "imagined" communities of trauma. Her claim that religion has "declined" and is "only" an "expression of the existence of the social order" is breathtakingly reductionistic. The mobilization of religious mythologies, rituals, and symbols has been essential to nationalistic processes of purification and revitalization. Edkins' smart distinction between normal time and trauma time, the "sacred" status of the survivor-victim-witness and the ineffable quality of his/her testimony calls for more sensitivity to the complex power of religion.