At Exodus as the Door of (No) Return

Abstract

Charting Paths and MapsIn wake of elections in United States-elections during which many issues were raised and debated, including race and ethnicity, migration and immigration, gender, masculinity and sexual assault, nationality and religion, ability and disability, exceptionalism and decency, healthcare and trade, criminal justice reform and police violence, environmental justice and income inequality, and so on-poets and political pundits; scholars, teachers, students, and clergy; psychologists and counselors; comics and playwrights have been working hard to sense of it all. As I tried to argue after Michael Brown's shooting death, some practiced routines of communal responses to traumas of deadly, racial animus are sadly becoming predictable: a funeral service where Bible is read and referenced in search of hope and justice; and a legal process that rehashes old, old question of equality before law and experience of that equality-if and when it comes-as a posthumous credo to console weary hearts of victims. How that debate is formulated locally and globally is particularly poignant when specific bodies are always seeking and asking for justice, oftentimes feeling hollow from having witnessed how justice itself is executed in dead bodies lying motionless on streets or in coffins.1As I have interacted with many thinkers and students, I have found myself returning to Jan Assmann's concept of mnemohistory as a useful trope for grappling with mental, physical, political, and emotional exhaustion that comes with activating distinct kinds of memories and traumas and losses and hopes and institutionalizing them through a public ritual (read: election process). Grounded in a history-of-religions approach to biblical studies, Assmann's concept deploys methodological insights from literary and narrative theory, along with Freudian psychoanalysis on trauma and Halbwachsian social theories on structures of memory. A subfield of historical studies, mnemohistory is, in its most simplified formulation, reception theory applied to history.2 The hermeneutical vehicle that carries this theory is cultural memory-understood as probing depths of time and phenomenological archive of human existence; it is distinguishable from other forms of memory (e.g., bonding memory) by encompassing the age-old, out-ofthe-way, and discarded events of past. In other words, cultural memory includes heretical, subversive, and disowned.3But does it mean to institutionalize noninstrumentalizable, heretical, subversive, and disowned? And constitutes heretical and in terms of content and process of identity formation? In other words, how have acts of racial violence in United States and around world contributed to assessments of is heretical and is not? These questions of endangered belonging; of racialized history, politics, religion, and culture strike me from multiple directions, often not in isolation but in tandem. This multipronged force of community fragmentation and formation, forged in response to violent genealogies to which my identity is linked by force of political history or of narration or of education or of religious heritage or of membership and citizenship, compels me to make hermeneutical moves that grapple with twin experiences of alienation and erasure and their rootedness in history and storytelling.In her captivating book A Map to Door of No Return, Dionne Brand remembers when, as a thirteen-year-old, she tried to help her grandfather remember what people we came from. They worked through a few possible African ethnic names but settled on none. That unresolved search and conversation, on this side of Atlantic, opened a small space in Brand and, over time, came to reveal a tear in world. In Brand's words:I would have proceeded happily with a simple name. …