Silence Makes Up the Bulk of My Estate: The Burden of History—Not Then, or Later, but Now

by EILEEN JOY

Insofar as the losses of the past motivate us and give meaning to our current experience, we are bound to memorialize them (“We will never forget”). But we are equally bound to overcome the past, to escape its legacy (“We will never go back”). For groups constituted by historical injury, the challenge is to engage with the past without being destroyed by it. Sometimes it seems it would be better to move on—to let, as Marx wrote, the dead bury the dead. But it is the damaging aspects of the past that tend to stay with us, and the desire to forget may itself be a symptom of haunting. The dead can bury the dead all day long and still not be done.

—from Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History

Who will write the history of tears?
—from Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments

Consider this a very strange [and maybe, disorganized and not altogether intelligible] post in which I cobble together random bits and pieces from my pell-mell reading at present, and finally, from what troubles me of late, especially as regards the historical enterprise [the enterprise, in other words, of historical scholarship, historical writing, “doing History,” and so on and so forth]. In his recent post, “Messages to an Uncertain Future,” Jeffrey wrote,

Can the past speak in a voice of its own? Can meaning travel across a millennium, an epoch, or must meaning always be bestowed by an interpreter? According to linguists, a language becomes “unintelligible to the descendants of the speakers after the passage of between 500 and 1000 years.” Suppose you know that you inhabit a present that will someday, inevitably, become someone else’s distant past. How do you communicate with a future to which you will have become remote history?

As Jeffrey was likely ruminating and composing these questions, but had not yet posted them, I was driving my car from home to school and listening to Terry Gross’s radio interview [on Fresh Air] with Maher Arar, a telecommunications engineer with dual citizenship in Canada and Syria who, due to false information that Canadian authorities provided to the FBI, was arrested during a stopover at JFK airport in 2002 under suspicion [again, based on false information provided by Canada’s federal police bureau, the RCNP] of being a member of Al Qaeda, and then was deported, by CIA plane, first to Jordan and then to Syria, under our country’s draconian policy of extraordinary rendition, where he was beaten and tortured for a year in a Syrian prison, before he was finally released in 2003…[Read the rest at In the Middle]