Medium Post #3
Prior to reading In the Wake by Christina Sharpe, I really only knew of the word wake in the context of boats and water. Understanding how a wake can permanently disrupt a body of water, I had some idea of the direction and metaphor that Sharpe would take. I thought that Sharpe would mention how slavery left a wake that is still being felt today- which she did. However, Sharpe’s ideas of “living in the wake” as well as her pinpointing the literal wake left by bodies in the Middle Passage were unexpected, but still very poignant and valid. I really had no expectations going into listening to Episode 4: Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments Launch. I had no familiarity with Hartman, nor did I feel that the descriptor gave away any content of the episode besides the time period and general subject matter of Hartman’s book.
Both materials overlapped heavily, and quite honestly, you could take one statement from each piece and give a ten-minute speech on its implications. As a potential Art History major and a student in Introduction to Museum Studies, there was one statement on the 20th page of In the Wake that I found incredibly applicable to my studies. Sharpe writes, “Just as wake work troubles mourning, so too do the wake and wake work trouble the way most museums and memorials take up trauma and memory.” Meaning, that if we memorialize an event or collective trauma, it then becomes part of the past, and what does that mean if this event is still ongoing? If this issue has current repercussions?
Sharpe even raises the question of the United States not having a slavery museum; does this mean the US recognizes that slavery is ongoing, or are we unable to recognize the atrocities we’ve committed. Oddly enough, this week in my Museum Studies class, we read part of Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence by Amy Sodaro. This book dives into this particular sect of memorial museums. Even more applicable, Sodaro raises the point of memorial museums being used as a marker for Western legitimacy, a marker of democratic reform. Meaning, for example, in countries like Cambodia and Argentina , former detention sites are now places of memorial and learning. Sodaro argues that without these testaments to their past, the United States would continue to see these nations as violent and misguided, preventing them from aligning themselves with us. By this same logic though, if the United States doesn’t have a museum or memorial commemorating slavery, does that mean we are not democratic enough? Does that make our government authoritarian and cruel by nature? I mean, if there wasn’t some type of Holocaust memorial in Germany, that would raise eyebrows. By Sodaro’s logic, the United States has yet to “address” slavery- even to meet its own standards of democratization, which in some ways Sharpe is arguing, too.
Still, Sharpe questions the why behind Sodaro’s reasoning. Why are we obsessed with “coming to terms” with history? Sharpe argues that “coming to terms” with something just means moving past it. This was kind of a shocking statement to me, but a true statement nonetheless. It is helpful to think of coming to terms on a personal scale to understand what Sharpe is saying. If an individual is trying to come to terms with a traumatic event, they are essentially rewiring the way they think about things into a more concise, less-triggering iteration of what they’ve been through so they can live their life without interruption. Now, this is fine on a personal level, but when dealing with collective trauma, things can’t be watered down and swept under the rug, so people feel better. We cannot “come to terms” with slavery and its wake, we should not be able to, nor even want to try to reconcile what this nation has done- it is past that point. Instead, as Sharpe argues, it is addressing the past as it pertains to the present that will make some sort of progress. I guess some questions I have are: Should we have a slavery museum and/or memorial? How do we honor memory, or even “come to terms with the past” in an appropriate way?
#relg102
