Postmemories
Being the second generation of migrants of the 1947 India - Pakistan Partition, I have heard the horrors of the 1947 Partition from my mother since my childhood, stories that left me with deep scars and led my way into this research. I never experienced catastrophic migration in person, what I have are the Postmemories (memories of others that feel like one's own) of the Partition. My exploration and the consequent manifestation of the underlying Postmemories and my compulsion towards creating artworks showing the sufferings and chaos guided me to study my family’s history of the 1947 Partition, searching for the answer to my question that I cannot stop asking: In what way can creative practice give form to sufferings caused by Postmemories – shared and personal?
In this journal I explore Postmemories as the starting point for my research. Postmemories are memories of a chaotic and traumatic past that the second-generation never experienced themselves, they only hear the tragic stories from their parents and grandparents; these are not their own memories but are Postmemories which have been transferred to them in the form of stories. Marianne Hirsch first used the term ‘Postmemory’ in the early 1990s, and since then she has been trying to “define and refine” it. Hirsch was born in Romania just after WWII and has worked closely on the second-generation memories of the Holocaust survivors (Postmemory). Hirsch writes,
“Postmemory describes the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma or transformation of those who came before to events that they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviours among which they grew up. But these events were transmitted to them so deeply and effectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (2019: 172).
Being the second generation of migrants, I am left with Postmemories. I never experienced the catastrophe of the 1947 Partition but I have heard stories. I can visualise all of the horror stories which I heard from my mother and family. It feels like I have been there and have experienced the feelings of agony and suffering myself. Stephen Frosh explains these feelings in his article ‘Postmemory’, “[……] for what is being remembered is not the event but the feeling or sensation: the unknowable something that is communicated through the parent’s enigmatic message is primary […...]” (2019: 162). I have listened, imagined and mapped the stories of the Partition as images; with deep colours and as films; with strong impact. Hearing the stories repeatedly from my family, I remember, reimagine, and reconstruct the Postmemories as if I have been through the trauma.
Hirsch elaborates in her article ‘Past Lives’ that, “[….] theirs is a different desire, at once more powerful and more conflicted: the need not just to feel and to know, but also to re-member, to re-build, to re-incarnate, to replace and to repair” (Hirsch 1996: 661). Hirsch refers to the second generation of Holocaust survivors (“their”) that their “desire” to know is more powerful than their parents/grandparents because they not only want to know the stories of the past but also feel them and to “re-member, “re-build” and “repair” the Postmemories.
I investigate personal and shared Postmemories of the 1947 Partition through Autoethnography to find a way out of the horrible memories of the catastrophic past, perhaps by creating artworks as a way to release the deep trauma.
Bibliography
HIRSCH, Marianne. 2019. ‘Connective Arts of Postmemory’. Analecta política 9(16), 171–6.
HIRSCH, Marianne. 1996. ‘Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile’. Poetics today 17(4), 659–86.