Talking to the Girls. Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Abstract

George Santayana famously said that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The issue with this statement is that it is predicated on the fact that everybody shares one past. The collection under review reminds us that the past is not only communal but individual, as its strong subtitle suggests: “intimate” meaning “innermost,” affecting the very core of a person's being. What emerges from these pieces is that the composition of any community sharing experiences is fluid in synchronous and longitudinal ways.Edvige Giunta and Mary Anne Trasciatti have assembled the best type of anthology. It offers a “collection of blossoms,” as the Greek term indicates, with a clear set of goals revealed in each piece. In the introduction, “Talking to the Girls,” Giunta and Trasciatti define their volume as “a multivoiced text . . . embod[ying] the voices of a large and diverse community that has recognized and acted on its ethical responsibility to the memory of the Triangle [Shirtwaist Factory] workers” (15): the 146 mostly recent Italian and Jewish immigrants (123 women and girls, 23 men) who died in a fire that occurred on March 25, 1911.1 They also identify what the volume is not: “Although historical and archival research is not outside the purview of this book, we invited our contributors to be guided by their own visceral relationship to Triangle” (17). Moving away from the illusion that our scholarly and pedagogical pursuits are rigorously and necessarily separate from our life experiences, the texts (essays, poems, memorials) here gathered connect the present to the past and to the future, because history and teaching are personal and individual as well as representative of and interstitial among groups. “Talking to the Girls,” an excellent choice of a title, implies a familiar, colloquial way into the human side of the problems that may lead more deeply into the heart of the matter than statistics and graphs, however valuable.This volume offers a corrective to what Giunta and Trasciatti have called “pernicious amnesia” (12), stemming from specific political and ideological roots, of the history and stories of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. One does not encounter the word “pernicious” often and rarely outside the medical phrase “pernicious anemia.” The editors’ phrase is effective because it underscores the physical element tied to this type of amnesia, consisting in the erasure of bodies in specific work conditions. The 17 pieces gathered here make inroads against this amnesia, bringing back stories and bodies and connecting them to our existence. They are arranged in five parts, devoted to “Witnesses,” “Families,” Teachers,” “Movements,” and “Memorials.” The epilogue, “Listening to Kalpona,” offers the testimonial of Kalpona Akter, “founder and executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity” (279). Akter has been at the forefront of efforts to improve working conditions in twenty-first-century sweatshops in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Rounding out the volume are two appendices, one dedicated to “The Literature of the Triangle Fire” (295–99) and the other, “Contributors Reflect on Their Processes” (301–10), replacing the usual list of colleagues’ bio-bibliographies.All these elements add up to a formally innovative, highly effective, and emotionally charged volume that lays bare the price that the fire exacted on the families and communities of the many victims, through the decades. It also situates the fire in connection with immigrant communities, labor legislation in the United States, women's movements in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the significance of private and familial memory and public memorials.To this reader, the most striking sentence in the entire volume indicates its importance and the necessity of continuing to educate our communities about their past. In Chapter 3 (“The Triangle Factory Fire and the City of Two Who Survived”) Ellen Gruber Garvey asks, “What do immigrants know of the events that preceded their arrival in a new land?” (73). For this immigrant, the answer was “very little,” despite a university degree that included studying the history and culture of the United States. The work of gathering stories to make and tell history is never finished because our communities are ever changing, and the past is likewise fluid.Santayana, who arrived in America from Madrid at age 8, also said that history is “assisted and recorded memory.” Giunta and Trasciatti's volume is an apt reminder of our responsibilities toward our past, present, and future communities.