Although I didn’t realise it at the beginning this was always a mourning project, on so many levels, personal, collective, historical, and in the context of WWII and the holocaust necessarily fraught and unsettling. When I read Sonia Boué’s wonderful post on The Palette Pages the other day, another aspect of mourning emerged.
Sonia, who trained as an art-therapist, writes about art and healing (and joy) in relation to her project Barcelona in a Bag. She too makes work as a daughter who holds trauma for a father unable to speak of his experiences and losses. In her dad’s case the fact of displacement plays a significant part, away from country and culture, language and communion, acutely painful to a playwright.
We share too a direct knowledge of the far-reaching (within and over generations) toxicities of silence imposed – under Franco’s dictatorship and beyond, under Hitler and in post-war Germany. Both our fathers were on the cusp of adulthood when fascism and war launched them into untried roles and on pathways which irredeemably ruptured their biographies and affect our own.
I can’t but acknowledge once more that our endeavours are different in one fundamental respect: my dad fought on the perpetrators’ side; my investigations have to bear the weight of fascism, the holocaust; I have to measure him (and myself) against its razed landscape. Joy and celebration aren’t what I expect, although I may wish for it. Tiny moments allow breathing space (that he took food to the ghetto, that his aunts refused to join the NSDAP and lost their professions) but this project can hold no joy. And yet …
… I suspect there’s a lot in it for me. Not just because I learn history on an intimate scale. The Third Reich is so far away and ungraspable, that I struggle to connect; it is so close and concrete, that I can’t turn away. And if the truth is harsh and harrowing, silence feels deadening to me. This is part of my legacy. It’s not a gift I would have chosen, but it’s mine. A few posts ago I wrote: there is no room for innocence. What, if anything, might healing mean in this context?
We make memory-work, make memory work to retrieve and somewhat reprieve (in very different ways) our fathers’ hopes (and failings) and regrets. Through our respective processes we, artists from a post-memory generation, are looking for ways – not to break the silence -, but maybe to address it, speak into it. Here is what I mourn today: where Sonia has the play her father wrote (a great source of joy) mine left me no direct expression of his inner self. Without his knowledge I declared two cherished words my heirlooms (see posts #94&107), but regarding the worst time of his life and much of the time before he gave at best hints and intimations, which I conjure up when I pore over copies of the photos from his album; when I do my research; when I try to place him (and myself) in history.
I know (and am glad) that he did speak. Not to me, not to anyone in the family: at a time when it wasn’t the done thing he chose to go into therapy, which gives me a wee sense of pride.
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