The Art of Acknowledgement

On June 23, 1985, a bomb exploded on Air India Flight 182 off the coast of Ireland while en route to Delhi from Montreal, killing 329 passengers and crew, most of whom were Canadian. That same day, two baggage handlers were killed when a bomb intended for another Air India flight exploded on the ground in Tokyo’s Narita International Airport. Chandrima Chakraborty, Amber Dean, and Angela Failler, editors of Remembering Air India: The Art of Public Mourning, lament that, despite the devastating loss of life, Air India “remains a little-known, little-remembered event in Canadian public memory” (xiii), a disaster overlooked because of systemic racism and a deplorable understanding of who lives a life worth mourning. Responding to this oversight, the volume makes visible in its material and written form both marginalized and official texts around the Air India bombings: in the case of the former, unacknowledged stories of profound grief, and in the latter, speeches and testimonials that are difficult, if impossible, to locate in the public record. Making texts physically and palpably present is but one way this collection enacts an ethics and art of acknowledgement.

The volume’s signal contribution is its impact as assemblage, as polyvocal archive. Understanding public memory and mourning as multivalent, it brings together expert witness experience, scholarly articles, full-text public address, visual art, fiction, poetry, and a description of bharatanatyam dance. These textual refractions encourage what Roger Simon (2005) calls an attitude of “remembering otherwise” and provides space for different forms of truth-telling, especially from those who endured and continue to endure pain, not only because of the Air India disaster, but also because their country failed to acknowledge them as fellow citizens in that pain. To cite but one example, former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper called Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi on the day of the bombings to offer condolences for what he perceived as another nation’s loss, a response in keeping with a general consensus that these racialized Canadians were foreign and that the political strife behind the attack involved Hindus and Sikhs in a country far away. The collection refuses such white settler mythologies and pushes back against official versions of the Air India bombing, which marshal terms that support state interests and reproduce reassuring narratives of Canadian moderation, multiculturalism, and civility.

Remembering Air India speaks to audiences whose concerns coalesce around questions of “what constitutes meaningful forms of remembrance, reconciliation, or redress” and how one might understand “the ethics and politics of coming to terms with violent pasts and racial histories of community and national identity” (xxii). These inquiries summon a wide readership. The book is necessary reading for public memory scholars working in the fields of cultural studies, history, rhetoric, political science, film, literature, human rights, and museum studies. Those in Canadian studies will find a carefully considered treatment of Canadian myth, strategic state-sponsored responses to disaster, and public discourse. The collection addresses artists and activists whose contributions are acknowledged as a valid form of public record. Most meaningfully, relatives of those killed in the Air India bombing as well as members of the broader Indo-Canadian and South Asian communities may identify with the collection’s meditations on mourning, which constitute what Ann Cvetkovich, with reference to another text, calls “an archive of emotions” and “one of trauma’s most important, but most difficult to preserve, legacies” (204).

The volume is comprised of five sections: Remembering in Relation, A Nation Outside of History, The Political Apology, Creative Archive, and finally, Personal Loss, Collective Grief. The first cluster of texts understands the Air India disaster in connection with other events across time and space, specifically the Komagata Maru disaster of 1914, when a ship carrying hundreds of Sikh men wanting to settle in Canada sat in Vancouver’s harbour for two months, only to be turned back to sea amidst general suspicion and hostility. Amber Dean’s essay argues that current state-sponsored rhetorics of...