Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa

Chapter 5: Haunted Heritage: Visual Display at District Six and Robben Island

Urban landscapes are densely textured places where both material and immaterial traces of the past cling stubbornly to the social fabric, refusing to fade into obscurity. The meaning of a place depends in large measure upon the residues of memory that are embedded there. The thickness of these memory-traces indicates the lingering presence of unresolved tensions and unrealized hopes for the future.1 “Haunting” is a useful metaphorical device for calling attention to how it is that certain places instill a sense of possession, absence, and loss in the urban landscape.2 The sense of the spectral presence of those who are not physically there is a ubiquitous feature of the phenomenology of place. As Michel de Certeau put it, “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can ‘invoke’ or not.”3 To varyingdegrees,city-sitesareinhabited—thatistosay,possessed—byghostly spirits that “we cannot see but whose presence we nevertheless experience.”4 AsKarenTillhasnoted,urbanlandscapesaresaturatedwith“hauntedplaces” that “simultaneously embody presences and absences, voids and ruins, intentional forgetting and painful remembering.”5 Making places that commemorate, honor, remember, mourn, question, and forget enables custodians of memory (whether amateur or professional) to mark social spaces as “haunted sites” where they “can return, make contact with their loss, contain unwanted presences, or confront past injustices.”6 5 Haunted Heritage Visual Display at District Six and Robben Island 109 110 haunted heritage The spectral presence of people and events linger on in particular places well beyond the time they vanished from the site.7 Returning to these “haunted places” conjures up memories of what once was and what might have been— or perhaps memories of what never was but what one might have wanted to have been. As locations where private memories and public histories intersect , places of memory give shape to powerfully felt absences, to trauma and loss,andto“theirdesiretoremainconnectedtothatwhichisnolongermetaphysically present” but continues to have an important symbolic presence in everyday life.8 Memory-markers encrypt the past: they hold onto that which is experienced as a powerfully felt absence. These places of memory indicate collective longing for something extinguished from the past and that no longer exists.ToparaphraseAveryGordon,ghostsarespectralfiguresthroughwhich something lost can be made to reappear before our eyes.9 Seen in this way, the spectralpresenceofthosewhoarenotphysicallytherehelpstoconstitute the specificity of historical sites.10 The preservation of sites of trauma constitutes a kind of “topographical writing,” or writing of history into landscape. Haunted places evoke strange, uncanny moods. The spectral figures that inhabit these places are more symbolic place-holders than literal apparitions.11 Haunted sites find ways to “speak the unspeakable”—about shared trauma and bereavement, imprisonment, displacement, separation, and loss.12 Likehauntedsites,“traumascapes”areadistinctivecategoryofplace.These physical settings of tragedy acquire a surfeit of meaning as sites of mourning and remembering. Transformed by the suffering that indelibly marks them as haunted, these places are sites of pilgrimage that “compel memories, crystallize identities and meaning, and exude power and enchantment.”13 When the experience of loss becomes bound to specific physical locations, these places enter into the public domain as sites of shared grief and commemoration . Inscribing stories into landscapes of memory provides a means for preserving historical memory of trauma and loss. In their distinctiveness and resonance, these sites evoke other places and other stories, providing “the enduring, tangible imprints that suffering and loss leave behind.” Traumascapes demonstrate that the past is always unfinished business, “never quite over.”14 Yet as unstable sites, they can just as easily radiate melancholy as they can trigger a cathartic experience that provides a release from the burdens of haunted heritage 111 a traumatic past.15 While they can play a vital role in enabling mourning, traumascapescontributetoshapingmeaningsandinterpretationsofthetragic events inscribed in them.16 What distinguishes the memory of trauma is the fragmented reception of thepast.Siteshauntedwithatraumaticpasthaveanunsettled,andunsettling, “spectralquality”aboutthem.17 Thisspectralqualitygivesrisetoseveralquestions : To the extent that particular sites are able to contain memory, how do places of trauma testify to history? If sites of memory are by nature dynamic and contingent, how can a sense of an authentic past be preserved at a particular site without creating a false unity between historical time and the actual event? Addressing these questions requires that we approach the spatiotemporality of trauma in terms of a logic of hauntings, absences, and voids.18 Visualizing Heritage: The District Six Museum Perhaps more than any other site in the post-apartheid city, a...