Quote from Remembering Women Murdered by Men by the Cultural Memory Group

Anti-Monumental Monuments ...

The critical and theoretical literature on memorializing would classify the event (of remembering Theresa Vince's murder) in Chatham as “countermemory making,” the creation of “anti-monumental monuments” challenging dominant social memory which routinely celebrates the status quo through glorious war monuments, dignified statuary and masterpieces of triumphal architecture. Lynda E. Boose and Maureen Moynagh, among other scholars, have discussed the crucial work of cultural countermemory in keeping alive suppressed stories that nations and societies would prefer to forget: the mass violation of Muslim and Hindu women during Partition, the extermination of Jews by the Nazi regime, the histories of slavery in Canada and the United States, the Bosnian rape camps powered by Serbian nationalist mythology, the myriad other atrocities against human life and social justice which can too easily succumb to “national amnesia” (Boose 2002: 73; Moynagh 2002: 103). In Paul Connerton’s analysis, “control of a society’s memory largely conditions the hierarchy of power”; “the struggle of citizens against state power is the struggle of their memory against forced forgetting” (1989: 1, 15). Creating countermemorials such as these presents major challenges which run the gamut from the personal danger faced by memorial-makers to the risk of a memorial’s design inadvertently facilitating catharsis rather than provoking change. James E. Young has discussed ways in which monuments can enable societal forgetting: “Instead of searing memory into public consciousness ... conventional memorials seal memory off from awareness altogether,” reducing the public to “passive spectators” (Young 1992: 272, 274).

He has traced some German artists’ attempts to construct memorials of the Holocaust that would put “memory in place without usurping the community’s will to remember,” and to discover forms that return “the burden of memory to visitors” (Young 2000: 128- 30, 131). The counter-monuments Young studies are “self-abnegating” in their attempt “to challenge the very premises of their being”; one of them is even designed to disappear, leaving traces of its passing that provoke rather than shoulder the responsibility of remembering (Young 1992: 268, 271).

Only recently have memory studies turned to consideration of the “distinctly feminist
strategies of cultural memory work” necessary for women to become “agent[s] of
memorial transmission” (Hirsch and Smith 2002: 12, 2). Maurice Halbwachs
was the first to argue that “memory is a collective function” which works
symbiotically: groups stitch together collective memories and vice versa, through
“acts of transfer that make remembering in common possible” (Halbwachs 1992:
183; Connerton 1989: 39). When the solidarity-in-the-making is driven by women,
the forging of individual memories into collective memorializing involves overturning
the weight of patriarchal social and power relations, along with other systems of
oppression. Women have created distinctive methods of seizing space in order to
force public remembering, for example in the camps struck next to nuclear military
bases by the women of Greenham Common in England and the demonstrations
against “the disappeared” by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina (Schirmer
1994: 185). Women have forged chains of testimony across generations and national
location, giving witness to the sexualized torture practiced by Pinochet’s regime in
1970s Chile (Kaplan 2002). Women have also sustained annual rituals of
oppositional performance. On December 6, women across Canada organize vigils
to the fourteen murdered women in Montreal on that day in 1989 and to all
women murdered (Bold, Knowles and Leach 2002: 132-44). Every Valentine’s
Day, First Nations women of Downtown Eastside Vancouver lead a performance
of respect, remembrance and protest at the sites where women from the community
have died violently. In Caffyn Kelley’s analysis, this “different kind” of memorializing
opens a “dialogical space” (Kelley 1995: 8) for remembering across differences of
race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and ability while never forgetting how deeply that
power differential “runs through the structures of culture and memory, nature and
history” (11).

Memorializing violence against women involves particular challenges. The great
weight of public discourse denies the systemic nature of femicide. When yet another
woman’s murder is reported, most often it is treated as an aberrant event, the deed
of a pathological individual. How can memorial forms mark the quotidian nature
of violence without losing sense of the horror of each individual act and without
themselves, as cultural forms, disappearing into the everyday landscape? How can
memorializing be participatory, dynamic and respectful of diversity without either
becoming ephemeral or collapsing under the weight of community tensions? How
can it garner the necessary material resources and public space without becoming
entirely contained by the powers of patriarchy? How can it remain identifiably
women-centred without being trivialized with stereotypes of sentimentalism? How
can it enact public political protest without betraying the privacy of the woman
murdered or her friends’ and family’s private grief? In other words, how can feminist
memorializing promote active, resistant remembering which encourages
communities to take responsibility for the systemic nature of gendered violence
while respecting individual trauma and individual accountability?
...