A Monumental Divide: Finding a Balance between Hurting and Healing
by Corinne Ebner HN 300: Art, Politics & Social Justice (Dr McEvoy-Levy) 11 March 2019 There is often a cruel irony involved with memorializing tragedy, in that memory is a very divisive subject. Something that is supposed to symbolize healing and community becomes the center of argument, whether over its very existence or the details of its design or both. Who or what should we remember, and why are we remembering them? Who gets to decide what is highlighted and what is left behind? Most importantly, how can we recall tragedy without glorifying it? These and many other questions have all been tackled, with varying degrees of success, by the creators of memorial museums and monuments, including the Holocaust Museum and the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.; Monument Avenue in Richmond; and the many Civil Rights Movement museums and memorials in Selma and Montgomery. Any memorial is, by definition, fraught with tragic history, and this makes it difficult for its creators to appease all interests in a given situation. This is one of the reasons that any “healing” that comes from memorials is only superficial or simply a first step toward future peace; while memorials can increase visibility and knowledge about an event or person and even evoke powerful reactions from visitors, it should not be their goal to heal entire populations of their past afflictions, especially when their existence is so often born of conflict. One of America’s most famous memorials, the United States Holocaust Museum, neatly encapsulates the struggles around the creation of collective cultural memory. Conceived by the Carter administration and finally opened during Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Holocaust Museum was the site of heavy debate before its design was finalized, with political pressure to emphasize the Jewish victims and create an alignment at odds with the people who wished to commemorate all victims at the center of the discussion. Everyone had different opinions on what was accurate and what would be offensive or problematic, introducing the issue of conflicting memory. Whose memory was actually “true,” and how should it be reflected in the design? Should non-Jewish victims also have a place, even though their home countries were often complicit in systematic genocide? What were the designers “allowed” to do that would acknowledge the respective tragedies but put a positive spin on the U.S.? Here, politics ended up being a huge issue. For the Holocaust Museum, it had a somewhat detrimental effect with the undue emphasis on American military involvement, which for some takes away from the visceral experience of the museum and throws into question the overall accuracy of the exhibits. In the context of healing, it seems almost ridiculous that such a hotly contested space should try to pave over the divides of the past; not only that, but by placing so much weight on the actions of yesteryear, the museum might seem to ignore problems still facing Jewish communities today and the effects that the Holocaust has had on the Israel/Palestine conflict. If the ripple effects of the Holocaust are still going on, how much healing has there really been, and how much has actually been fostered by this memorial? Some memorials, like Monument Avenue and the many Confederate war memorials in the South, exist simply as sites of political contention in today’s climate. Though they may have been created initially as a way to reinstate Confederate officers as war heroes, thereby recovering some of the pride the South had previously felt, it is difficult to imagine that these monuments bring joy or healing even to those they are supposedly “for.” At this point, they convey too much enmity as implicitly racist figures to be viewed with any impartiality. They offer no ambiguity and no means for reflection or critical thought, and they are inevitably tied to the identities of their defenders, who will now go down in history as neo-Nazis, even if people like the statues for other reasons. In this way, the statues may be said to have “allegiances” to the remnants of the Confederate ideology—namely, racism. Therefore, they are actively hurting more than they are healing, defeating the purpose of any memorial, both because and in perpetuation of controversy that surrounds them. By contrast, many of the museums and memorials relating to the Civil Rights movement, including the Equal Justice Initiative’s Lynching Memorial and Legacy Museum, do not profess to actually heal the divisions that brought about the reason for their existence. Likewise, as they are not government-sponsored institutions like many of the more famous monuments, there is very little actual political tension that centers around them. While they are by nature sites of tension, they address instead of circumvent or ignore it, and they invite their visitors to reflect on the aftermath of such tensions. Unlike the Holocaust Museum, they also emphasize their relevance in today’s culture; even though lynching can be said to be a thing of the past and legal segregation no longer exists, many of the effects from this history are still ongoing and have a detrimental impact on the Black community. The Equal Justice Initiative stares this reality down, forcing visitors to ponder these long-lasting effects by asking tough questions about today’s society on the way out of the museum. So, not surprisingly, the main factor in some of the more politically contentious monuments—even those that are not in America—is their sponsorship by the government. With government-funded work, there is always a potential for hidden agendas, and even the most impactful of monuments can fall short due to the atmosphere of tension that surrounds them. In relation to this, it is often problematic to refer to monuments as “healing”—in the long run, what can strategically placed building materials really do for the communities they represent, especially in the context of political divides? Instead, memorials should be seen as catalysts for peace, taking an initiative to start a conversation. With this mindset, the effectiveness of these memorials can be measured in a constructive way, and may have less riding on them that would result in the divisions that render so many superficial. Works Cited Sodaro, Amy. Exhibiting Atrocity. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2018. Print. Comments are closed.
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