On Coronavirus, Memory and Repair with Guest Speaker Prof Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University) - Covid-19 Pandemic Anniversary Special

Hello, I'm Paul Lee Worthy, welcome to the Connecting Memories Podcast. I hope you enjoy the show. Hello, the Connecting Memories Podcast was launched in response to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and the lockdowns that ensued in many countries around the world. The podcast sought to provide scholars interested in memory, both those already involved with the Connecting Memories initiative and those new to it, with a virtual space to engage with each other's thinking. The popularity of the podcast proved the desire for such a space and so we're back with more episodes and more guest speakers. Ahead of a new series that will be released later this year, today's podcast is one of two extended specials to mark the two-year anniversary of the pandemic. Indeed, today, March 11th, 2022, it is two years since the World Health Organization declared that the outbreak of a novel coronavirus known as coronavirus disease 2019 or COVID-19 constituted a global pandemic. Across the two episodes, we'll hear leading memory studies scholars talking about memory in the specific context of the pandemic. In one of the specials, Professor Astrodale will be talking about coronavirus and collective memory. In the other, Professor Mariana Hirsch will be telling us about a memory project launched this year in New York City in response to the coronavirus pandemic and its fallout. On this episode and delighted to welcome Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Mariana Hirsch. Welcome to the podcast, Mariana. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. As listeners from past series will know, on the Connecting Memory's podcast, I talk to leading academics about memory. Memory is a key word in contemporary culture. Memory is frequently invoked, not least in academic research across many disciplines. Across those contexts, it is often used to mean very different things. As well as asking my guest speakers to share some of their latest work with us, I ask each of them, what does memory mean in the context of their research? Whose memory do they study? And how? The format of the show remains unchanged with each episode consisting of three parts. In the opening segment, I ask my guest speaker to say a little bit about what memory means to them and how they approach its study. In the second section, my speaker will give a shortish talk or micro lecture, presenting some of their latest research, and in the final part of the podcast, I'll get the chance to ask a few questions about their talk. And with that, it's time to introduce today's guest speaker. Mariana Hirsch gained her BA, MA and PhD from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She taught at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire for many years, where she co-founded the Women's Studies Program and became full professor in 1989. In 2004, Professor Hirsch moved to a chair at Columbia University in New York. Since 2009, she has been William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, where she is also a professor in the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. Professor Hirsch is one of the co-founders and a past director of Columbia's Center for the Study of Social Difference and its Global Initiative, Women Creating Change. Additionally, she is co-director alongside Professor Andreas Husson of the Columbia University Seminar on Cultural Memory. She is a member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences and a former president of the Modern Language Association of America. She has served as editor of the PMLA, the MLA's Journal, and is on the editorial or advisory boards for a number of important journals, including memory studies, contemporary women's writing, and 20th century literature. Her monographs include the hugely influential family frames, photography, narrative and post-memory, which was published with Harvard University Press in 1997, and the generation of post-memory, writing and visual culture after the Holocaust, which appeared with Columbia University Press in 2012. Other monographs include the prize-winning The Mother Daughter Plot, Narrative Psychoanalysis Feminism from 1989, and Ghosts of Home, the afterlife of Chenovits in Jewish Memory from 2010, which was co-authored with Leo Spitzer. Most recent niches published school pictures in Liquid Time, Re-framing Difference, which was co-written with Leo Spitzer and published with the University of Washington Press in 2019, and co-edited imagining everyday life encounters with vernacular photography, which appeared with Stidal and was the winner of the Paris Photo Aperture Foundation's Photography Catalog of the Year Prize in 2020. Professor Hirsch has co-edited more than 10 volumes of which I will limit myself to mentioning only gender and cultural memory, co-edited with Valerie Smith in 2002, rights of return, diaspora, poetics and the politics of memory, co-edited with Nancy K. Miller and published in 2011, and women mobilizing memory, which was co-edited with Isha Gul Altenay, Maria Jose Contreras, Jean Howard, Banu Caraca, and Alisa Solomon, and appeared with Columbia University Press in 2019. As well as the many monographs and edited volumes, Professor Hirsch has contributed by my count around 85 book chapters and journal articles that treat a vast range of topics, though focal points in her work include gender, feminist theory, and women's writing, stateless imaginaries, family narratives and photography, and memory studies, especially second-generation memory of the Holocaust and the transmission of memories of violence across generations. Thanks so much for joining me on the Connecting Memories podcast, Mariana, I'm absolutely delighted to welcome you to the show. It's a pleasure to be here. So to get us started, I'd like to begin with the same questions that I ask each speaker on the Connecting Memories podcast. Could you please tell us a bit about your research, how you came to study memory, how memory features in your work, and how you approach the study of memory. So let me begin by saying that I was trained in literature and comparative literature specifically, and I turned to feminism just as I was finishing my graduate training and began teaching. As a feminist scholar, I became particularly interested in examining the family as a site of the development of gender formation and hierarchy of heteronormativity, but also of genealogy and generation. In my book, The Mother Daughter Plot, I explored how the novel and how narrative structures more generally were determined by the idea of family, and that is by notions of childhood, by notions of subject formation, of development and generation. And I was interested in how each of these was gendered. And as I continued this feminist work on family narratives, I became to realize that in the late 20th century, and I would say now also in the 21st, though with the different medium, family narratives are often visual and specifically photographic. I came to realize that family photos shape family memories, but that only certain aspects of family life are photographed. It's a genre that's very much circumscribed and conventional. And I realized that in order to account for the power that these utterly conventional images, family photos hold for many of us, I had to read memoirs and novels that discussed and that included photographs. And I had to study the work of photographers who either took pictures of their own families or who reframe family photos, conventional family photos to comment on the genre. And so I would say that it's really family photography that brought me to memory. I started writing about my own family photos because I needed to understand how, well for me, little square pieces of paper with jagged edges could carry with them whole worlds from the past, for my own past, but also from a past that preceded my birth. And I realized that this wasn't only a familial past. I realized that the families both embedded in shape by social and political forces and memories and by generational questions. In my case, these images came from a lost world, from a pre-World War II and pre-Holocaust world of Jewish Central Europe where my family survived the Second World War has Jews. So the photos I studied that had come down to me, I realized also opened only a very small window into a world that had been transmitted to me very powerfully in many different ways. The knowledge that was both fixed in these little photos and unfixed from these small black and white images, unfixed by the stories and behaviors that my parents exhibited, was often more vivid than my own childhood memories I found. I somehow felt as though I remembered their world and the photos actually helped me do that. The Second World War and the Holocaust had an enormous shaping influence. not only on my own life but on my imagination, on the boundaries of my imagination of what life was and what it could be for me. I had, it had to do with stories that I was told with behaviors I learned, with fears and dreams and nightmares, as you can imagine, with the ways that even my body felt, it had to do with the future that I was able to imagine as well. So this personal entry into memory came to shape the kind of work on memory that I was going to pursue. A lot of my thinking about memory starts with the personal but it's, my writing has been hybrid and in almost all my articles and books, I write from the personal but I combine the personal and the scholarly so I guess I would call that my methodology. I theorize from the personal but also I've looked to writers and scholars and artists to help me understand how memory works and also to theorize from their work. So I would not separate theory and writing but I and art practices, I draw theory from art practices and from my own work and the other way around. I guess I take us now to the late 1980s when all of this came to gel for me and was actually quite a ways into my career. I didn't start, I didn't start with memory at all. And it was when I read two important books and very interestingly, these are two books that are now being banned by a number of school districts in the United States who feel that their children, that the children their educating should not be reading them. And this is Art Spiegelman's graphic memoir of his parents survival in Auschwitz, Mouse and Toni Morrison's beloved, a novel about the multigenerational transmission of enslavement. So in both cases, the traumatic fast was transmitted with such force to descendants whose lives came to be dominated by events that they did have not themselves lived. But it became a kind of memory and it was personal, it was emotional, it was effective, but it was a familial, communal, collective and generational. And then I sort of felt like I needed a term to explain what I was experiencing, what I was finding in my discussions with others from my generation, but also from these books. And the term that I came to was post-memory. And so it was memory and post-memory and not actually history that helped me understand how the past is transmitted and lived in the present, how it points to the future. And how it continues to shape the present. And I think that's why these books are being banned because this past has not been dealt with properly. And it feels like it's intruding on the present and shaping the present. So I would say memory as opposed to history captures the intimate embodied even visceral dimensions of the past. That's why I find it helpful. It captures the transmission of the past in intimate setting like home and the family. It's a kind of, I guess one could say a history from below. And collective and cultural memory brings forward the story's experiences of those who might have been left out of grand historical narratives. Narratives and these stories contest and they complicate those narratives and their hegemony. And that's one of the, was one of the attractions. For me, these are small stories. They're effectively felt and transmitted, but they add up to a more textured, a more granular, maybe more inclusive, but still always also in complete version of the past. So for me, one of the attractions of memory and memory studies is its interdisciplinary or I guess I would say it's post-disciplinarity because in order to really understand how memory works, whether individual or cultural, you of course need history, right? Because we're studying the past, but also you need psychology, you need sociology, you need anthropology, you certainly need literature in the arts, but you need museology, you need politics, and you need to study or to know how social difference gender sexuality, class and race function to structure the transmission of the past, how power functions to silence certain stories and to highlight others. Memories I found became the basis of group identity and of group belonging. So when I started this work in the late 1980s and 1990s, when I started to read about post-memory at that moment, we were at the end of the Cold War or so we thought, we were at the moment when the survivors of the Holocaust were aging and their children wanted to begin collecting their stories and the research stories that was made possible by the opening of archives that had previously been inaccessible, say, in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. So memory and the past in that moment of transition became a space reckoning. If there was to be a future, if we were going to be transitioning from apartheid, from the Cold War, did we not need to understand and acknowledge the crimes of the past? And for me that exploration seemed to be a work of repair, a work of critique, a work that could aim at social destabilizing the inequities and the inequalities that past had brought to us. I came to ask, what are the power structures that animate forgetting and erasure of certain stories and certain lives? And memory studies promised to offer ways to redress these acts of forgetting and to enlarge the historical archive. So that's really a beginning of a response to your question. - Fantastic, thank you so much for that, Mariana. And now we're going to hear more from Professor Hirsch, as she presents a talk entitled "Act of Memory and Repair in a Suspended Present, New York City 2022." - Why did the end of the 20th century lead to an obsession with memory? Why does urge to look back and to research the past? In his landmark 1995 book, "Twilight Memories," marking time in a culture of amnesia, Andreas Hussin explains that the crisis of the ideology of progress and modernization has forced us to revise theological views of history. Losing faith in progress Hussin argues, we turn to the past. For some time, this turn provided a means to critique and to enlarge the present, to contest official histories and to make space for suppressed or for forgotten voices that might enlarge the historical archive. One of the basic tenets of memory studies, in fact, is that memory is always fundamentally in the present. We do not recall the past, but we create the past we need today. In the last decades of the 20th century and the beginning decades of the 21st, that present has been shadowed by the aftermath of traumatic histories that haunted and that demand to be worked through. And also, of course, by present-day crises that have felt like forms of traumatic return by continuing wars by genocide, by refugee crises, by state-sanctioned violence, by pandemics, and so much more. It's thus that the conception of time as a form of traumatic return has in large part displaced earlier linear temporalities that moved toward progress and futurity. But, of course, this shift came with its own problematic implications. I recently had the occasion to study and to practice cultural memory in the context of several transnational interdisciplinary working groups and to participate in memory notebooks and in conferences in numerous locations around the globe. Inspired by feminist, queer, and decolonial ideas about time and memory, and by commitments to social justice, some of these groups have offered guidance on how the focus on trauma and its inexorable after-effects can be reimagined in ways that can be useful. They've proposed multiple nonlinear temporalities that acknowledge past violence and its traumatic legacies, even while making visible acts of resistance, refusal and non-learning that open thresholds for new beginnings and possible futures. Without denying the magnitude of traumatic loss, these communities have been keen to build practices and discourses of justice, of care, mutual aid, and repair. Practices that aim to resist the unforgiving return of trauma and to create different memories to pass down to future generations. Today, however, the COVID-19 pandemic has given these questions about trauma, time, and memory a very different valence. In this present moment, vulnerable in its own specific ways, we have to account for an undefined, and maybe not. undefineable temporality. When the future seems so contingent and so uncertain, does it still make sense to focus on progress or the future, or for that matter, on the past and dramatic return? When the present is a time both of suspension and of unremitting emergency, can the past offer guidance or critique? What is the place of memory at a moment when we are still in the midst of a pandemic with unpredictable variants and surges? And what does memory, what does memory studies as a field do now? In the wake of the multiple losses that the last two years have brought, there is of course so much that needs to be marked and memorialized. Acknowledgement and commemoration are necessary steps in the work of collective action and repair. Individuals and families have been engaged in mourning for two years now, but the work of communal, national and global remembrance is actually just beginning. This global moment of momentous loss and failure and of shared vulnerability requires its very own commemorative paradigms. It does not seem as though the past can use fully guide us here. Individuals, families and communities are living with the losses they've suffered, even as they are still urged to keep a safe distance from each other, and even as they're unable to gather, more in process and organize together. What in fact does togetherness even mean? What does community mean when the virus has revealed radical economic and thus also health-related inequalities in our social landscapes? How in these circumstances can we rebuild or actually how can we build sustainable communities? And how can we work toward and demand social justice and repair? How can we account for how can we bridge the gap between the depths of personal and familial loss and the magnitude of collective communal, national and global loss, all unevenly and unjustly distributed? These are some of the questions that my colleagues and I were asking ourselves in the spring of 2021 when we believed the pandemic would soon be over and that we would be urged to return to our so-called normal lives. But did we want to return to what previously was deemed normal we asked ourselves? Did we not first have to create a space in which we would acknowledge not only the losses of the past but the inequities that produced them? These questions seem particularly urgent in New York City where I live and work and in the areas of upper New York City where my university, Columbia, is located. Together, Morningside Heights, Harlem, Washington Heights and the South Bronx comprise one of the most diverse parts of the city with an enormous range of educational, income, health and life expectancy among its population. With large black Latinx, immigrant and undocumented populations and tenuous connections to a sustainable infrastructure, these communities have suffered massive illness and death as well as devastating loss of homes, businesses, work and opportunities. Women in particular have had to forego jobs and to do this proportional amount of the work of care and many who could work outside the home did the essential labor that made them vulnerable to contagion. If we get into relatives across the globe, these neighborhoods felt the global effects of the pandemic as keenly as its local manifestations and consequences. The SIP called Memory Project emerged from these insights about the fractured qualities of these proximate and yet divided neighborhoods and I'd like to say a little bit more about this project now. Performance studies scholar Diana Taylor, photographers and artists Susan Micellis and Lori Novak, American and Gender Studies scholar Laura Wexler and I had devoted much of our careers to working with trauma and painful pasts in different parts of the world, most recently in a transnational feminist working group and book project women mobilizing memory. Now we felt the need and actually the responsibility to work with communities in our very own city. We wanted to learn about the networks of mutual aid and care that had sustained them during the pandemic. How could these networks be extended to create a communal space to commemorate and mourn the losses, devise practices of repair and articulate demands for justice? ZIP codes became a visible manifestation of social divisions that needed to be bridged in order for the work of memory and warning to be truly communal. What are ZIP codes? The United States Postal Service had introduced ZIP codes in the 1960's to deliver the mail more efficiently. ZIP actually stands CIP stands for Zone Improvement Plan. But ZIP codes also demarcate rural and urban areas separated by multiple inequalities. We could say that ZIP codes are maps of inequality. Could our project help connect and reanimate these neighborhoods with greater hope and even joy in the wake of or as it turns out in the midst of devastating loss? Whatever reflections I can offer here are very much preliminary. I hope you'll bear with me as I share these thoughts in the midst of our project and in the midst of another wave of the virus, the Omicron variant. On the basis of my research and personal experiences with the legacies of the Holocaust and other catastrophic histories, I've argued that we can actually remember events that occurred before we were born and that these events shape our lives even though we have not witnessed them ourselves. This is an argument about transmission, both intentional and unconscious. About how stories, behavior and art can powerfully communicate trauma to others who are not present. It's the embodied nature of trauma that seems most challenging to transmit. If trauma is lodged in the body, if it challenges language and other symbolic systems, how can it make even the most proximate people understand and feel what it was and what it is like? How can we overcome the isolation that comes with surviving trauma and loss and rejoin community the very basis of healing and repair? It's no coincidence that Bessel of Underculk's book The Body Keeps The Score, originally published in 2014, has recently become a bestseller. Underculk not only shows us how trauma lives in the individual body, but he also maps some roads toward healing that involve embodied practices and community building. His decades-long experience treating traumatized patients focused primarily on survivors of war and child sexual abuse, and thus his findings do not exactly fit the punctual trauma of pandemic bereavement, compounded by the ongoing debilitating effects of racism in justice and inequality that have impacted those who are most vulnerable and affected by COVID-19. Nor does his argument exactly map onto the isolation, fear and vulnerability that continue to mark our suspended pandemic presence. And yet I would say Vanderkulk's reflections on the isolating effects of traumatic loss and on the possible path stored in the visual and communal healing proved very helpful in our thinking. We relied especially on his findings that, lodged in the body, trauma cannot be healed through language or through a talking cure alone. It involves altering the bodily places where pain lives like a parasitic intruder. The body keeps the score investigates the reparative effects of therapeutic techniques ranging from cognitive behavioral therapy to EMDR, acupuncture, massage, yoga, performance and art practices. Some of these practices enable us to do more than to jettison disabling memories so as to move forward. They also make it possible to revise and actually to reconfigure the past to imagine different paths and possibilities. Describing the process of creating structures in which we can relive difficult moments of our past in the company of witnesses who represent and perform characters in our inner lives, Vanderkulk writes and I quote, "In my experience physically re-experiencing the past in the present and then reworking it in a safe and supportive container can be powerful enough to create new supplemental memories, simulated experience of growing up in an attuned affectionate setting where you are protected from harm." In such a safe theater of memory, we can act out and thus transform disabling memories and the places where these memories sit in our bodies. You can transform and heal the very bodies that hold these. memories. This is Van der Kolk's argument and it's been our inspiration. It's been the aim of the zip code memory project to create such a safe and supportive container in our communities. Building a team of workshop leaders, curators, filmmakers, and public humanities and arts graduate fellows, we partnered with local arts and community organizations and invited a group of community members to join us in this project. Over the course of nine months, from fall 2021 to spring 2022, we're all participating in a series of small group workshops and creating public events that address the losses of the pandemic and that also aim to imagine paths of hope. The first two workshops led by performance study scholars and performance artists, George Emilio Sanchez and Maria Jose Contreras took place over the fall. They were based on performance exercises such as those offered by Augusto Boal in his groundbreaking book theater of the oppressed and others. These are as the name of the first workshop indicates rehearsals for change in which participants respond to several initially playful and then increasingly serious prompts to build trust, collectivity, and political awareness and in which they eventually come to confront their responses to COVID-19 directly. In what Boal terms a rainbow of desire a workshop run by George Emilio Sanchez were all each other's materials. We use each other to form sculptures representing COVID and then we discuss these as a group. One participant sculptor arranges us into several roles a dying person and an attending nurse first and then a barrier of chairs keeps these two keeps these two figures separated from two other figures who are at a distance. These represent the relatives who cannot be with their dying family members. The sculptor tells them to hug and wait. This sculpture is so simple the gestures are almost cliched and yet by acting as co-witnesses to each other's loss we feel that loss in our very own bodies. The familiarity of the gestures helps this identification and projection. We place a hand on a forehead we reach out to those out of reach. As what the scholar Irene Cacandas has discussed as co-witnesses we are there to accompany the person making the sculpture and to bear witness to their feelings. We allow our own feelings to well up and we accompany each other helping to create the space where these feelings can emerge. But as spect actors involve terms we do more. We actually participate in the storytelling and the analysis. We help to act out these arranged scenes rather than simply telling and listening to each other's stories. Our bodies come to inhabit the stories and enable their multi-dimensional expression. We interpret each other's feelings through our own feelings. We help in the coming months to follow these exercises with what Boal envisioned as the more interventionist image theater. Following Boal's conviction that everything is changeable these are exercises that invite us to transform situations. To think of different scenarios and solutions to social problems to imagine change to imagine a different ending. They invite us to stage where we are at the present and where we would like to be and then to perform how we might get from here to there, from the real to the ideal. Play and improvisation enable us to unlearn well-won paths and responses and to rehearse alternatives. They enable us to be open to surprise. That openness to surprise is an especially important in the kind of suspended present we are living now. It means jettisoning the negative anticipatory logic of what Evkosovsky's sedjuic after Melanie Klein calls the paranoid skitzoid position. That is the four knowledge of repeated disaster and the unveiling of hidden forces bent on destruction. For us now during the pandemic these forces aren't any longer hidden. They've come into plain view. Instead of inevitability we need to learn to allow for contingency and potentiality. When trauma returns it intrudes on the present with unaltered frozen fragments from the past but if we rehearse the possibility that the past could have happened differently from the way it happened we can also make space for a future that might be more open-ended. This in fact is the meaning of a rehearsal and perhaps we can think of our COVID present as a time of openness and a rehearsal for change. In the second workshop Akhi here, run by Mariezo Jose Contreras, we build on the scenarios of the first by focusing more closely on our own stories and bodily reactions. This sets the stage for putting those stories next to each others to build a collective narrative of COVID in our neighborhoods. Akhi here is the interior space of the body, the space where we live together with others and the space of the workshop that allows our connection with one another. We gather in a huge room belonging to the cathedral of San John the divine on the upper west side of Manhattan and begin by sharing our stories in our large circle. One by one we light a match and speak to the person next to us for just as long as the flame lasts. What have we lost and learned from COVID? Invariably our words are cut short, some of us don't even have a chance to begin telling anything of substance. As thoughts and feelings well up they are preempted, the match goes out. Memories in that momentary present, it's fragile, it's contingent. At any other time we might say something else altogether, but now our memories are awakened, we begin to tell and we learn to listen. Indeed this is just a warm up for the mapping exercises that follow. As I lie on a large piece of tan paper on the ground and a partner draws the outline of my body with a pink marker, I try to think about how I can represent where and how the pandemic lives in my body. How can I locate my feelings on my body map? How can I make them visible? We all get to work on our maps silently in deep concentration. Our materials are multiple, crayons, markers, glue, spools of multicolored yarn and beads, feathers, it's play but it's very serious. I try various things as I allow some of the feelings and stories that had come up during the match exercise to evolve inside me, but drawing them proves a struggle. I peek at my neighbors beautifully drawn economic body maps, some of them figured out how to zero and on one primary message and to make it beautiful. Mine wants to say too much, why did I choose a silly pink outline? How can I express so much of what I feel without falling into cliche, drawing hearts for love and loss, black clouds for fear and anxiety, flashes for new ideas, droplets for tears? But I think maybe this is not the medium for original forms, but for familiar representations that we can easily share with one another in that room. As I try to fill in the map, love wells up inside me and little hearts start appearing in the chest on my body map and an outside my bodily space for cherished friends and relatives who have been far away. After drawing the third black cloud in my forehead, throat and now my stomach, I remember or rather my body remembers the many walks I took over many months. I feel some ladeness in my feet and allow them to spread little feathers in several bright colors. A few more feathers appear on my shoulders. Can I shed the weight of this moment and allow myself to fly after all? We're all fully absorbed in our bodies and this creation when contrasts us to stop. Our large body maps are hung around the parameters of the room and we now are asked to find three gestures that represent our feelings on the map. Again, any gesture that comes to mind just seems cliched to me. Nonetheless, we practice these gestures, we internalize them and then perform them for each other. We move around the room acting out the feelings we find in each other's maps and then in groups of three, we speak about each of our maps, the choices we made and what they say about our memories of this period. In the words of filmmaker Judith Helfand, we've stepped out of our bodies and looked at them from the outside. Each of us finds that we're now expressing feelings we had never acknowledged to anyone even to ourselves. We had simply not had the space of the time to do so. We returned to the body maps one more time, asked to stand wordlessly in front of one that expresses feelings that speak to us and then were asked to stand in front of one that expresses feelings to which we aspire. I look around me and find so much pain in that room, so much fear and so much loss. So much vulnerability but also openness and willingness to let others in. I search for a map that's lighter, less tortured, and yes, here is a map of a woman's shape with flowing gold-color hair and a fluid pink dress seemingly dancing. I stand in front of it hoping to borrow some of that joy. Enter we gather its small groups for one more mapping exercise tracing the spaces in the neighborhood where we each spent the pandemic on a printed map of New York City. For some it was their apartment, a park, an occasional trip to the grocery store. For others it was work or school, commutes on subways and buses, visits to doctors and hospitals, visits to cemeteries. For others yet, highways out of the city to relatives or second homes. We part the stores and businesses that are closed, the convivial spaces we miss, and we tell each other stories of loss and of learning. What are the paths of loss? Where are the paths of hope? Can our neighborhoods be transformed and reanimated in the wake of so much hurt? The CIP Code Memory Project followed these two workshops in December with a public gathering for COVID on the steps of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. It included moving testimonials around the Peace Fountain and a candlelight walk, and it concluded with a beautiful performances by the St. Harlem Choir and La Musa that filled this space with black and ureba Caribbean traditional music. A highlight of the gathering was a display of postcards made by participants and other community members responding to two prompts. What have we lost and learned from COVID, and how can we heal and grow together? Like the Body Baps, the postcard project elizes the revelation and exposure of intimate feelings to others. We made them during the workshops at home or together with others during Instagram postcard making sessions. Again, I'm struck by the dearth of language and symbolic means with which to express so much that I carried through the COVID period so much that I'm carrying still. What have we lost? Hope, trust, safety, a sense of open-endedness, confidence in our institutions? What did we learn or what are we learning still? The value of friendship and togetherness of the work of care, the need to fight for justice, and vision repair, are longing for connection. Some of these simple phrases are repeated across the many postcards, each with its own images and iconography, a collective narrative begins to emerge. A course of voices that were and are still waiting for COVID-19s who can listen and echo, a series of stories that reverberate together to produce a collectivity in a community, even as the images and words are being articulated. Additional workshops are now following in the spring of 2022. They include storytelling in the form of writing, spoken word, photography, and collage. Soon, when it gets warmer, we will accompany each other in memory walks through the neighborhoods, telling each other about the people and places we lost, marking the loss, and telling each other also about the places and people who sustained us, whom we want to honor. And we focus this time not so much on memory and acknowledgement, but truly on justice and repair. Although now, as we're still suffering from a new outbreak, we don't know when in-person events can safely take place, we do know that the community we're building is all the more important in sustaining us all through the suspended present. What is the significance of this memorial work and why is it necessary? Cannot lead to justice and collective repair. As I think about this, I turn to between vengeance and forgiveness, the legal scholar Martha Minnow's 1999 book, "Consurning Transitional Justice Practices," following the brutal wars, genocide, and totalitarian regimes, including South African apartheid, that dominated the 20th century. Again, the parallels are not fully adequate, but they still resonate for me. While Minnow addresses the needs of direct victims and survivors of mass violence and historical trauma, we are concerned here with the compounding effects of social and egalitarian equality and injustice during more recent global catastrophes like the COVID-19 pandemic. For victims and survivors of historical catastrophe, Minnow argues, "Repair needs to include two things; one, a venue to tell their story and be heard without interruption of skepticism; and two, a commitment to produce a coherent if complex narrative about the entire nations or, we might say, the entire communities trauma and the multiple sources and expressions of its violence." In combination, these two reinforce one another. Each individual's story helps to shape a larger history by providing it with detailed depth and nuance. And in turn, each story is enhanced and given broader meaning through its contextualization within a larger historical matrix. When these stories are not heard and not worked through in their near aftermath, they will continue to haunt survivors and generations to come. Unlike transitional justice projects across the globe, we are not in an aftermath, but an extended and vulnerable moment of transition and at the midst of a seemingly unending emergency. Through the Zipcode Memory Project, we're creating a safe and caring space where individual and collective stories don't just receive an attentive and sympathetic hearing, but where they can be co-created, articulated and collected. This is just one act of historical repair in one neighborhood in one city. A rehearsal for change, it's nevertheless a necessary part of building a longer ongoing communal process of imagining justice. Thank you so much for that, Mariana. What a fantastic project. Thank you for sharing it and your thoughts on it with us. In your talk, you said that Zipcodes became a visible manifestation of social divisions that needed to be bridged for the work of trauma and mourning to be truly communal. I have two questions here. Firstly, a bit of context, perhaps. How did the Zipcodes become the visible manifestation of social divisions? And secondly, is it essential that the work of trauma and mourning is communal? Oh, those are two great questions. Thank you. The history of Zipcodes in the United States, I mean, they're postal codes. And they were set up in the 1960s to deliver the mail more efficiently. But the geography of the United States is incredibly segmented and divided. By affordability and by the availability of education, of healthcare, and of services and goods. And we live in New York City in very proximate neighborhoods that have completely different kinds of availability for these services and goods. And when the COVID pandemic started, one of the things that New York news outlets started doing and actually news outlets across the United States was to track the rates of infection, the rates of eventually vaccination, the rates of death, and to mark those color coded on a map. We have the United States map and then we had the zip code map of Manhattan and greater New York City. And so when I was coming back to New York from Vermont where I spent a lot of the pandemic, I started checking the map. And I was very happy that in 1025 where I lived, it was kind of a pale orange, but really two zip codes away which is only probably a 10 minute walk, the map started getting bright red and dark brown. And those were the neighborhoods from our neighbors who were doing some of the essential work who are delivering the food to people in my zip code who were writing the subway and who could not afford to work from home as many people in my zip code could do. So the visibility was really on that map. And that's what inspired the name of. this project as a primary project because we thought how can we move forward? We thought this would be a post-COVID project, but you know, turned out to be a COVID project. How can we move forward from the very differential effects of this pandemic on the inhabitants of this larger neighborhood without trying to, first of all, mourn the losses, acknowledge the losses, but also acknowledge what led to these losses and through these differential effects. And how would we be able to do that and become one greater community rather than separated into these little spaces? Why does the work of mourning have to be communal rather than individual? It's a great question. Well, we each sit with our own losses, but I think one of the things the pandemic has taught us is how incredibly disabling isolation becomes. I mean, so many people in our neighborhood really have to spend the pandemic by themselves. They came together at 7 p.m. every night, opening their windows and applauding and clanking parts to celebrate the healthcare workers and that created a sense of community, but we each sat on our own screens. And it felt like we were alone in this loss. Of course, you know, it's a global pandemic. And if anything showed the connections, the interconnections across the globe, it's something like contagion. I mean, we are one great big community. If we cannot mark these losses as a greater community, I don't know how we can form a society in which we can move forward in a sustainable way. But we also know the huge political divisions that hide us. And the news media really focuses on these divisions. So we felt that bringing people together to see that they're not alone in their mourning, but that they could be helped by talking about it, by externalizing their feelings, by having listeners, co-ownesses who could acknowledge what it felt like to share. So this is not a support group, right? But it is a little bit like a support group in the sense that people can support each other trying to repair what's been lost. In your talk, you spoke of the necessity of memorialization and of global and local memory work, but suggested that the past cannot serve as a guide in the context of this pandemic. Why not? I think we're at a moment where we just don't know what the future will bring, and that makes it much more difficult to go to the past for lessons or for understanding. At the same time, I think what we're seeing is the very embodied legacies of the past. The reason more people of color died in New York City and in the United States or and actually across the world is because of what they inherited from their ancestors, which is bad health from poverty and from neglect. Levels of education that did not allow them, for example, to work from home. The kinds of housing, communal housing, very crowded conditions that enabled contagion in these communities that are often in migrant communities, often undocumented migrant communities. These are things that come from the past and that influence the very bodily vulnerability that caused these differential effects. We see the effects of the past, but I don't know if we need to understand those effects and what led to them, but can we go to the past for lessons or for understanding? Not really. I think we have to start at this moment. We have to start with seeing the effects of what the past has brought us and then go backwards and also forwards to try to repair some of this damage. You introduced the tantalizing idea that in quote unquote "remembering" pasts that never existed. That is, imagining how events in the past could have played out differently. We open up new pathways and create the possibility of new futures, or at least, and I think your phrase was a more open-ended future. I was wondering if you might say a little bit more about this idea of remembering the past, how it wasn't and the opportunities afforded by doing so. I came to this thought by looking at photographs and that a lot of my work on memory has been sort of based on photography. In my recent book, for example, on school photos, I call authored with Leo Spitzer, we spent a lot of time looking at pictures of children who would not survive to look at themselves. Children and extreme circumstances in the ghettos in the Second World War or in the concentration camps in the United States of Japanese-American children and so on. Children who were endangered. I was very much struck that people looking at the camera at a certain moment in time have a future that they're envisioning. They have hopes, they have dreams. They have fears, of course, but they don't know what will happen to them. How can we retrieve those hopes and dreams and honor them because they're also a part of history? Honor them and allow for pathways that those hopes and dreams might have enabled. So this idea of a potential history, what Ariella Aisha Azulai calls potential history, has become very important for me because it's not a counterfactual history. It's not counterfactual, it could have been. So this idea of what could have been or history in the subjunctive rather than the indicative, as my colleague's idea Hartman writes about this subjunctive or the conditional, what might have been is very important to try to retrieve as well. And it's so pedagogically, I feel like when I teach younger people, the inevitability of things becoming traumatic needs to be interrupted. The cycles of violence that led us to where we are now need to be interrupted. And one way to interrupt that is through this kind of imagining imagination that we draw from the future of the past. When you were talking on the one hand about pandemic bereavement being compounded by ongoing racism, injustice and inequality. And on the other hand, about the role of co-witnesses and spectators. It calls to mind Michael Rothberg's notion of memory as multi-directional. Has that been a useful lens for you to think about the connectedness of different injustices and the ways of resisting them through memory work? Well, I really like the title of your podcast. You know, I've myself written about connective history and Michael Rothberg's work on multi-directional memory is really helpful. And it's one of the things that I could have mentioned in my introductory remarks. One of my ways of working on memory is to both contextualize specific situations that I work on. But then also try to see their connections to other geographically or temporally more distant histories and situations. So yes, I think it's very helpful in this moment because of what I said about zip codes, which is we're very much divided in these neighborhoods. We live in segregated spaces. And how can we bring our stories together? How can we put them next to each other? How can we understand each other? I think what we tried to create in the zip code memory project is a collective of people who are not already in conversation. For example, we partnered with community organizations and museums and churches that aren't necessarily in conversations with each other because they each have their own constituencies. By bringing our group together, we're opening a space for a dialogue or a conversation that isn't happening in the normal paths of our everyday existence. And in that sense, we're bringing our stories together. We're putting them next to each other and we're creating a space where we can imagine one another's stories because I think the pandemic has also created a kind of commonality that we didn't even know we had, which is based on bodily vulnerability. You mentioned Bessel van der Kolk's ideas about reenacting trauma in a safe space and in the presence of co-witnesses. It struck me how close this idea is to the treatments for a shell shock proposed in the very early days of trauma research where soldiers were encouraged to reenact traumatic battlefield moments in the clinic. Is there a continuity there? Or is this a kind of traumatic return as it were within theory? Or are there in fact significant [BLANK_AUDIO] is across the two contexts. Well, that's very interesting. It's definitely wonderful practice and a number of other people have done very similar kinds of treatment, right, to allow or to encourage the reenactment of the most traumatic moments of a patient's past with a therapist present that, you know, threatened to overwhelm, but that can then be channeled and re-channeled through the therapist's presence. I mean, that's a well-known cure kind of attempt at healing and cure. And I think that totally rests on trauma theory, which is that the past is there congealed into a frozen fragment that is as Charlotte Delbo says in her work encased in the skin of memory. It's really to take it out of that encasement that keeps it safe and allows it not to intrude on the present and to puncture that skin of memory and allow that to come out, to emerge and then to re-cast it through talking about it and through finding a language for it. And Bessel Vanderkulk and Ono Vanderhart wrote a classic article that was in some of the volumes that Kathy Karuth edited in the 1980s about the intrusive past and how to get the past not to intrude on the present in this really kind of violent way. And I think this larger book where Vanderkulk tells us about different kinds of treatment is an offshoot of that earlier idea. So I think they're very, very connected. But of course, in a project such as ours or in the kind of theater games that he floats in his book, we're not therapists. So this is not about a cure. But it is about trying to reimagine the past and enable us to feel that it could have gone differently in the presence of others who help us rewrite the scenarios of the past or reimagine the scenarios of the past and therefore to create new channels and new pathways through which we can move forward. You've spoken about the ways in which memory opens up new pathways offering opportunities to confront injustices and for healing. And your project is a fantastic example of memory as a progressive force. But memory also has a less progressive side. Is it surely not the case that memory also offers limitations, constraints and dangers as well as opportunities for connection and for community? I think that's a great question. I think that those of us who have been building this field that we think of as memory studies in the interests of inclusivity and of social justice have had to become more vigilant about the uses and misuses of memory as a notion around which to organize our thinking and our activism. If memories are lived and reanimated in family contexts and in group contexts and become the basis of group identity and belonging, when that identity is built around past injury, it can certainly be mobilized for reactionary as well as progressive ends and it can serve right wing causes and revive central grievances as much as they can as it can mobilize us to work for social justice. And it's really, really important to recognize that and to see what really negative and even lethal effects that these kinds of uses of memory have had. And I think we're in the midst of memory wars all over the globe. We can see it in the statues that are being torn down, we can see it in the museums that are being built to honor reactionary causes. We can see it in the rehabilitation of figures such as Stalin and Russia. I think we have to be vigilant about how memory comes to be used in the present. I'm afraid that's all we have time for in this special extended episode of the Connecting Memories podcast. My thanks go to today's guest speaker, Professor Mariana Hirsch. Thanks for joining me on the podcast, Mariana, for sharing your reflections with us and for answering my questions about memory. Thanks so much for inviting me with a pleasure. For more information about connecting memories and for news of all future episodes, please visit ConnectingMemories.org. I hope you've enjoyed this podcast and I hope you'll join us again for the next episode of the Connecting Memories podcast series. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.