Memory as a wound in words: on trans-generational trauma, ethical memory and artistic speech

Abstract

In this article, I ask how memory of historical trauma, which spreads across generations and which resists the comfort of linear temporality, familiar ritual and narrative, might feel, and what it might look and sound like. How might the memory of trans-generational trauma be shared and expressed? What could be ethical ways of engaging with the presence of such traumatic experiences? The article explores these questions by looking at how experiences of the womb make possible a sensual re-engagement with painful and unacknowledged historical experiences and so allow for a feminine response or sense of ‘response-ability’ to the presence of trans-generational trauma. It further shows how such a feminine response to trauma is enacted in an artistic speech, which does not strengthen present identities but makes tangible their decomposition. I develop this argument by reading diffractively through a web of conceptual and sensual entanglements, which emerge from excerpts from Karen Barad's quantum theory, Bracha Ettinger's psychoanalytic theory, Joanna Rajkowska's artwork Born in Berlin and my personal presence in the text. The article emphasises the importance of affect as a non-discursive source for the memory of unclaimed traumatic experiences, but it also shows how an embodied recognition of such affects leads to ruptures in discourse and to alternative forms of trauma's presence in speech and thought.