Tarnished memory: ‘Emily’s Story’ and my family tree

Abstract

What kind of memory-work is generated in settler nations when historians, archivists and television producers shed light on the family tree? What happens to the faithfulness, or reliability, of memory when we imagine the past through compelling figures and scenes that resonate with childhood memories? Why do we need our ancestors, our close relations, to be good, to be better than the history we inherit from them? At stake here, for memory studies, is not the familiar set of tensions between historical truth, empathetic unsettlement and unreliable memory, but the relation between memory, recognition and imagination, or what Terdiman calls the bipolar vocation of memory: ‘to remain focused on the facts and simultaneously to spin off into fantasy’. To probe memory’s bipolar vocation in the decentring of settler subjectivity in Australia, this article begins with the interplay of memory and recollection provoked by ‘Emily’s story’, recounted in McKenna’s award-winning book, Looking for Blackfellas’ Point. It then turns to chastened recognition and the otherness of the past in the Australian version of the UK television format, Who do you think you are? It concludes with Ricoeur and the positing of incognito forgiveness as an alternative to the exoneration of our close relations from the barely hidden crimes of the past – foundational crimes that trouble the politics of reconciliation in settler-colonial nations.