Trahison des Mémoires

In my master’s thesis, which was written in late 2016 into early 2017 and was in the field of theology, I coined an expression called trahison des mémoires, “treason of memories.” It was a snowclone of trahison des clercs, the concept of disloyalty to the principles of serious thought by a society’s intellectual or cultured classes. With trahison des mémoires, my idea is that memory, especially publicly-held memory like the institutional memory of a country or a religion, can be twisted and weaponized in ways that do great harm to the people holding onto the memory. I was not so much interested in political or sociological harm—looking at cultural memory through that framework is old hat—as in emotional and interpersonal harm. In the thesis I introduced this concept as part of a discussion of (and I am both dating myself and outing myself as an irremediable dweeb here) the 2001 anime Noir, one of whose main characters is trying to piece together the circumstances of her parents’ murders.  When she finally does remember—or, in point of fact, when she finally is provided with other people’s memories concerning—the killings, she wishes she hadn’t.

            I was interested in looking at how early, or transgenerational, memories of cultural and religious practices can lead to mental states about as bad as those associated with watching one’s parents get whacked. I’m not convinced in retrospect that I had a ton to say about this; my thesis ended up much less systematic, more meandering, and frankly more postmodern than I went into it hoping it would. Even so, that is what I used the term to mean and, if I am allowed to toot my own horn on this, I do think that “treason of memories” captures certain things about this experience that more common terms like generational trauma or cultural baggage do not. It often really does feel very much like being betrayed, stabbed in the back, attacked in the dark, by something about one’s family or one’s culture that ought to be a font of strength and comfort.

            My family came to North America in the first decade or two of the twentieth century, mostly from either the Italian Mezzogiorno or an area of Eastern Europe that has variously been under Lithuanian, Polish, Austrian, Russian, or Nazi German sovereignty over its long and violent history. Some of the Eastern Europeans were Jews, others Gentiles; the exact genealogical admixture has never struck me as particularly important, mostly since it’s no longer possible to reconstruct. Neither, for that matter, has the question of whether the Gentiles were ethnically Polish or Lithuanian or Russian or Belarusian or whatever else; there is an anecdote from a pre-World War I British diplomat related in Bini Adamczak’s Relational Revolutions in which the diplomat, speaking to ordinary inhabitants of the part of Europe in question, runs through several wordings of a question about ethnic and national identity before finally being told that “all governments are a plague on the earth and it would be for the best if the Christian peasantry were left to attend to their affairs in peace.” Remove the word “Christian,” or add the phrase “or Jewish” after it, and you get the attitude towards nationalism that I’ve long assumed almost all of my ancestors on that side of my family held.

            Looking at my family history this way insulates me from the current treason of memories happening on an operatic scale in Ukraine and Russia. There are other treasons, however, with which it helps much less. There is a story that I often tell about my great-grandfather, a story that I heard myself from my elderly aunt. My great-grandfather’s name was either Paweł Turówski, Павел Туровский, פאולוס טוראָווסקי‎, or Paul Turowsky, depending on your thoughts on various Eastern European nationalisms. He spent most of his life in the Springfield, Massachusetts area following a short stint in the Canadian nickel mines after his flight from Europe. Pogroms had been involved, probably, given the timeline, those that followed the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. When my aunts, who are much older than my mother, were growing up just after World War II, they would visit their grandfather each Sunday after Mass and he would give them a nickel and a cup of chicken soup apiece—but he would always answer the door with a butcher knife in hand, before seeing to his satisfaction that it was just his granddaughters, and not the Cossacks come for him again.

            That butcher knife feels aimed through the dark at my own back whenever I try to take a sympathetic look at the sufferings of the Cossacks themselves, and, for that matter, whenever I try to think with compassion about the antisemitic views that my grandfather developed over the course of his own life. It is possible that these views were developed in opposition to his father, but also that his father instructed him in them himself as part of some twisted ploy at assimilating. In any case it made it easier for him to marry my grandmother, the descendant of long lines of Campanian peasantry and guttersnipes who passed down curiously bright copper-colored hair, difficulty moderating food intake, and a strong tendency to develop serious neuralgias in early adulthood. Once or twice I’ve pictured my grandfather and great-grandfather going at each other like Arthur and Mordred in the Rackham illustration of the Battle of Camlann, but then, there can’t have been too much resentment at the time of that wedding, because there were several bridesmaids from my grandfather’s side, that is the Eastern European side, of the family.

            I have a friend with whom I once had a serious fight over her observation that my grandfather “betrayed the Jewish people” by marrying my grandmother. I know enough about American Judaism and the difficulties it has had withstanding intermarriage and assimilation that I was not surprised by this opinion of hers, but I still objected to her saying it. I did not only object for the obvious moral reason that one simply does not say that sort of thing about a friend’s dead grandfather, but also for the factual reason that in reality the betrayal of the Jewish people had happened at least a generation earlier, maybe longer.

            (Lots of people seem to think that Judaism and Christianity, or even specifically Judaism and Catholicism, are either naturally allied and sister religions, or naturally inimical and opposed. People argue over which is true. Both are silly and wrong. The fact that many antisemitic ideas are theological nonsense even in very conservative Christian thought has not stopped them from influencing countless Christians, even Popes, even otherwise good Popes. Neither has persecution of Judaism by Christian governments always and in all places stopped Christians from being good neighbors to Jews, and learning from them. There would have been ways for my grandparents to have built a life together that did not involve this self-enmity and self-rejection on my grandfather’s part, and yet those paths were not taken.)

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Some of the most detailed stories I’ve ever heard about these people came in a specific conversation with my aunts and uncle three or four years ago when my mother and I visited them on Cape Cod. It was the most freewheeling conversation either I or my mother had ever had with some of the other people involved, in particular with my mother’s oldest sister. I learned that evening as the sun set pinkly behind Follins Pond about everything from the dubious paternity of my grandfather’s oldest sister— Paweł/ Павел/ פאולוס /Paul’s wife having, most likely, abruptly married him after being abandoned by the man who got her pregnant—to the crime family that used to and possibly still does control the Town of Agawam.

            What’s remarkable, looking back on this conversation, is that no point in it did I think holy shit, why is she telling us this? or anything of the kind. These conversations happen sometimes; people open up. It does not always feel like getting stabbed. There are similar reminiscing conversations that I have had with members of my family that did feel like getting stabbed; one such example is a conversation that I had with my mother years after the fact about a visit to a Buddhist temple on a trip to Japan in 2013. It was a visit that made a profound impression on me and that I have been meaning to write something cogent, insightful, and vital about ever since; my previous attempts to do so embarrassed me and I am not going to try to rectify that now in service to this particular point. (The very first thing I wrote about it, a long, typed-up diary entry headed “The Distance between the Devoted and the Devout,” has the advantages of freshness and of a title of which I’m still very proud.)

            The temple is Bōdai-ji, on top of a mountain whose name my best friend loosely translates Mount Doom, and the festival, which happens in the high summer, is called the Inako Taisai. At this festival blind spirit mediums or necromancers called itako set up booths in front of the temple in which they, actually or purportedly, contact the souls of the recently deceased, including miscarried or aborted fetuses. The practice is in probably-terminal decline due to diminished need for and interest in this sort of specialized life path for the blind. Supposedly the decline is also in part due to skepticism both from the Buddhist religious establishment—which of course has its own set of funerary practices, including, again, after miscarriage or abortion—and from secular Japanese people, but in 2013 it still seemed pretty packed.

            My reminiscing with my mother involved, among other things, her reminding me that our visit to the Inako Taisai, which I remember positively for a lot of reasons, also involved me getting overwhelmed by the crowds, or the summer heat, or both, and running off and irritating someone my mother was talking to, someone who had been looking forward to going to an Inako Taisai all her life. Me being who I am, I reacted to this conversation with a sense of deep shame, embarrassment, and even guilt—had I ruined something that this other woman had been looking forward to for decades? Probably not, especially since most older Japanese people tend to expect Westerners to behave in bizarre and jarring ways to begin with. Even so, it was apparently enough to give my mother herself mixed feelings about the excursion, which made my own very positive memories feel a little inappropriate, selfish, misguided. That sort of perseveration is elevated and exacerbated, I think, by the fact that the Inako Taisai is a well-known—in some circles—and well-attended event. Feeling as if I may have somehow damaged, in however minor a way, an established corpus of social, cultural, and religious memory, gives me the feeling of being betrayer as well as betrayed.

            Something feels melodramatic about looking at these kinds of memories as if they are knives in the dark, so let’s put them to bed as something more moderate, calmer, more contained. Homeopathic dilutions, maybe, of the kinds of violent memories that my grandparents and great-grandparents contended over with themselves and with one another. These memories have an undertone of violence to them only because they affected members of my family about whom I care deeply, or else because for an autistic person there is always an undertone of violence to any faux pas that one might conceivably be punished socially for having made. Add to that the guilt, for any morally reasonable person, of thinking of oneself as a victim in a low-stakes situation, and the Inako Taisai memory falls into place and becomes understandable at least to myself.

            So much for the 2013 Inako Taisai, which in spite of this qualm I do still think very well of as a ceremony and as a moment in my life. So much also for the family that ran my relatives’ childhood liquor store—note the wording—and latterly the Agawam School Board. What about working on these memories in a reparative way the way one can do a reparative reading of an old and, as they say, “problematic” book? I have already touched on this idea and want to make a more extended case for it.

            There are particular events in my childhood that I and other relatives remember different versions of, like the Agawam stories and the Inako Taisai story, but also remember in uniformly benign or positive ways, unlike the Inako Taisai story, of which memories are mixed, and the Agawam stories, which all concerned are just glad to have survived in more or less one piece. For example, I remember going to see the Lord of the Rings movies as a child with my mother and in one case my aunt when they were coming out; I remember the same about the Harry Potter movies. Both sets of memories are excellent; in my very early childhood I disliked both movie theaters and fantasy stories, but after a few years of the 2000s fantasy-action-adventure-blockbuster milieu I loved both. (The monocultural MCU juggernaut has ruined a lot of this sort of thing for me now, of course—another knife, another dark night, another spot on my back.) My mother also remembers both sets of movies very positively. Yet her Harry Potter-related memories are more salient and vivid for her than are her Lord of the Rings-related memories, whereas for me it’s the other way around. Part of the difference might be that several of the Harry Potter movies were released in theaters around her birthday, in late November.

            Remembering the salience of these movie watches differently from how my mother does is, of course, no kind of betrayal at all. I bring it up more to point out that the reparative potential in “misremembering” isn’t entirely disconnected from the way reminiscing already works for most people anyway. Who among us has not had many rounds of good-natured banter with friends and family about things like this? “No, no, it really happened like this.” Then someone else says “No, it happened like that; remember?” Then a third person says “Well that isn’t how I remember it.” These kinds of arguments actually reinforce our memories and reinforce our relationships. Just recently, in connection with getting my mother’s permission to write about the Inako Taisai episode, I had a conversation much like this with her. We agreed on the point I made above, that nobody going to something like this after wanting to for many years is going to let their time at it be ruined by an autistic foreign stranger having a meltdown because it’s hot out. So clearly the reparative quality of reminiscence can take the sting even out of the Dickinsonian “goblin bee” of trahison des mémoires. This actually does happen in Noir; the character I coined the term to describe is never happy about the fact that her parents were whacked, but she is able to engage in some sort of repair and atonement through having it out with the scumbag who ordered the hits and the brainwashed victim-perpetrator who executed them.

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Another memory of a debate over memories with my older relatives—a memory that might eventually come back and stab me itself, for all I know!—also comes to mind here. This is another utterly benign one, even benevolent in the sense that I look back on both the debate itself and the memory about which we had it fondly. My aunt and uncle and I discussed my very earliest memory, in which my uncle picks me up in his arms in his living room in a midcentury ranch house in West Springfield, Massachusetts, and spins me around while an old record player plays a big band tune. For some reason we all agreed that it was one of those record players that only plays one prerecorded song or program of music, and yet none of us agreed on what the song in the memory actually was. I remember it as “Sing, Sing, Sing,” the Benny Goodman piece that is probably a plurality of people’s first point of reference for big band music. My aunt remembers it as “Begin the Beguine,” a Cole Porter song, probably, in this kind of anecdote, being played by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. My uncle remembers it as “the Russian boat song,” by which he means a wartime Glenn Miller arrangement of the “Song of the Volga Boatmen.”

            Other memories like this might be relatively easy to resolve, but in this case my aunt, my uncle, and I all have good reason to have remembered best what song it was! My uncle owned the record player; my aunt, who is a little younger than my uncle, has the clearest memories of that period of time, 1995 or so, in general; I have the strongest emotions about the memory, since it is my earliest.

            Because we all had occasion to remember this memory the best, and yet all remembered it differently, the conversation actually shored up the bonds between us and reinforced, I believe, our importance to one another. In this way trahison des mémoires can be reversed so that the memory that is seemingly betraying one can in fact be a deep cover agent on one’s behalf. A public memory involving a national or intergenerational harm, like my great-grandfather’s memories of the pogroms, might be more difficult, or even impossible, to reverse in this way, and yet even in those cases I think that future generations can look back on their—on our—ancestors with a view to resolving and redeeming their experiences. Sometimes the best way to deal with betrayal is to meet it with a refusal to betray. “Trust, but verify,” as Ronald Reagan said, quoting, allegedly, a Russian proverb. Verifying, by implication, should not damage the trust overmuch. We can see that we have been stabbed and yet meet that violence with a decision to accept our memories and the purity of our feelings about them nonetheless. A knife that enters one’s back and stabs one through the heart can also, in different hands, be a tool that keeps a whole family or a whole society fed, safe, and warm.

Postscript

A few other, very specific knives thrown at my back in recent days, all of which had, in some way, a medicinal and consoling function: Florence and the Machine’s new album Dance Fever, which is named after early modern “dancing plagues,” which are in turn written about in similar terms to the nerve disease of which most of my female-line ancestors died. The too-pale lights of this year’s fireflies in unmowed grass in mid-June dusk. The Memory Alpha page for John Masefield. A whole cache of old yearbooks dredged up in my closet, showing the most 2000s fashion and graphic design choices imaginable, people I have not thought about in decades, and high school crushes of whom, in some cases, I still think as beautiful. A photograph of me as a child, in a Baltimore Orioles cap, draping myself over a railing with a smile on my face and the skyline of Manhattan in the near distance, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center jutting out over it all; the photograph is dated June 30, 2000.