Iris Chang & The Other
MEMORY & IMAGINATION(a)
I was flipping through the last pages of The Economist the other day and saw a face I thought I recognized, or remembered from somewhere. And I did, from the back of a book cover. It was Iris Chang, and the article said she had died. on November 9th, at age 36.
It is now six years to the week when I finished reading her book “the Rape of Nanking.” The book is one of few to fully chronicle the killing and pillaging of the citizens of the city of Nanking, China, by the Japanese army in four months of 1937-38. It is asserted that 80,000-380,000 people were killed (give or take History’s astounding 'margins of error'). However, it is the nature of the brutality with which this was carried out that no one in China has ever forgiven Japan for; much of Japan refuses to acknowledge that in fact it ever happened.
How is it that such divergent truths exist. The history texts are literally written differently in these different countries. But I tend to think that what the books say isn’t simply a cause, as much as it is a symptom. Sociologist Evitar Zerubavel writes, “Far from being a strictly spontaneous act, remembering is governed by social norms of remembrance that tells us what we should remember, and what we should essentially forget.”
History seems to be fundamentally the embodiement Collective Memory.
Chang wanted her work to be a medicine for these symptoms of collective amnesia.
...
It was shock and dismay to read that this amazing author had died not only so young, but apparently by her own hand. The Economist reports that she had presently been working on a book about the Bataan Death March, and that in researching for it “the stories had been affecting her,” in a way that significantly contributed to her recent and severe depression. As speculative - and perhaps sensationalistic- as that sounds, I can’t see how it wouldn’t be true. How could anyone delve so deeply into atrocity and not have rattled the middle of the middle of their bones.
I remember writing a paper in college about massacres during the Chinese civil war in the 1920’s. I remember that during that time I couldn’t even read the newspaper at the kitchen table without starting to cry. It was ridiculous. Obviously that shallow spring puddle of a term paper doesn't compare to the ocean you would have to dive into, and swim in for years, in devoting your life to writing books on these subjects.
How is it that even in never experiencing these kinds of events, that these secondary experiences so filtered can still leave such thick and purple marks on us we aren't fully able to handle them? It has something to do with empathy, and empathy's connection to and dependence on imagination. Maybe it is that we are humans, maybe we have brains that are large enough to be too large. Our ability to imagine “the unimaginable” is beyond vast. This much is clear.
IMAGE & IMAGINATION(b)
Of course, one critical aspect to both memory and imagination in the last 150 years of world life finds its home in the reality of the photographic image. Not only is there facsimile of a true and actual moment in a photo, but there is a signifier like a pointing finger that tells us to imagine what is possible in reality. Such photos have mattered in the understanding and memory of the Rape of Nanking, as with other wars & genocides.
It is because of this certain heavy talent for Memory, Imagination, and photographic documentation, that some facts about our ways of being feel so cruelly absurd. I was lucky to see the film “The Fourth World War” the other day in Chapel Hill, on T.'s invitation. One scene illustrated the connection of the anti-IMF protest in Argentina with the general anti-government movements related to the years of the “Dirty War,” --that time in the 70’s when tens of thousands were “disappeared” in that (and many other) South American country.
The mothers of the disappeared still come to the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. They march, They sit. They bang pots, and they hold up the photos of their children the government disappeared. Photos as the document of memory; as the symbol of possibility that is now lost possibility. but maybe never completely.
In the film, a mother at the microphone speaks to the crowd, stating in a cracking voice that she is "the Other," not unlike the hundreds of Other people the government deems as such, and so abuse. There is no Other to her, that is not also herself. In this way she refuses to let the Other exist, and the notion to find legitimacy. And how could the all those soldiers in the military so easily Other those young men and women, just their same age, that they kidnapped and killed over those years. Or the Japanese soldiers do what they did in Nanking.
Isn’t that also the Imagination? I am afraid of this thought. But as much as Imagination lets us empathize with people and events far or past, it seems that it also has a remarkable capacity that lets us imagine that the very people in front of us aren't people anything in the way we are people. How else could human life simultaneously mean so much and damn little to us, at every very same moment? It seems too easy.
...
Put another way...
Recently photos of Navy SEALS with Iraqis homes they had raided, were found on the web, at a site called www.smugmug.com. As CNN reports:
“One man lies on his back with a boot on his chest. A mug shot shows a man with an automatic weapon pointed at his head and a gloved thumb jabbed into his throat…What appears to be blood drips from the heads of some. A family huddles in a room in one photo. Other pictures show debris and upturned furniture…The woman who posted them told the AP they were on the camera her husband brought back from Iraq…”
And what is it about the nature of our Imagination's ability to Other that allows the wife of the soldier to say, with absolutely no apparent trace of irony, that:
“She was upset that a reporter was able to view the album, which includes family snapshots.”
Isn't this also an instance of Imagination's power? The soldier and his wife are documenting. They creating the collective memory with plenty of Imagination(b) and hardly none of Imagination(a). Her family snapshots seamlessly together with those of an Iraqi family whose home has been raided and are sitting on the floor bound, on smugmug.com. And somehow she and we can - and regularly do - imagine there is nothing too strange about this, because somehow these families aren't even similar in whatever fundamental ways that would and could matter. Whatever Imagination does and is, it is a moral capacity.
How How is one to understand this? Is there anything here capable of understanding? Is this possibly anything similar to the nature of the questions Iris Chang faced in doing her work, multiplied by powers of ten? I don't know if the terrible power of imagination let her Other herself to the point that she could do what she did to herself. But the relevatory and positive capacities of her imagination are also now gone, as are all the future memories that she was to have. and I can't see how this isn't a tragic loss.
I know I am in equal parts reckless with memory, imagination, and the photographic image - and this post is maybe only evidence to that point. But this is avoidable. It has to be. to believe it is possible to treat Memory, Imagination, and the Image in a way that makes how we now create Others more and more unteneble. That that place does have a beginning.
I was flipping through the last pages of The Economist the other day and saw a face I thought I recognized, or remembered from somewhere. And I did, from the back of a book cover. It was Iris Chang, and the article said she had died. on November 9th, at age 36.
It is now six years to the week when I finished reading her book “the Rape of Nanking.” The book is one of few to fully chronicle the killing and pillaging of the citizens of the city of Nanking, China, by the Japanese army in four months of 1937-38. It is asserted that 80,000-380,000 people were killed (give or take History’s astounding 'margins of error'). However, it is the nature of the brutality with which this was carried out that no one in China has ever forgiven Japan for; much of Japan refuses to acknowledge that in fact it ever happened.
How is it that such divergent truths exist. The history texts are literally written differently in these different countries. But I tend to think that what the books say isn’t simply a cause, as much as it is a symptom. Sociologist Evitar Zerubavel writes, “Far from being a strictly spontaneous act, remembering is governed by social norms of remembrance that tells us what we should remember, and what we should essentially forget.”
History seems to be fundamentally the embodiement Collective Memory.
Chang wanted her work to be a medicine for these symptoms of collective amnesia.
...
It was shock and dismay to read that this amazing author had died not only so young, but apparently by her own hand. The Economist reports that she had presently been working on a book about the Bataan Death March, and that in researching for it “the stories had been affecting her,” in a way that significantly contributed to her recent and severe depression. As speculative - and perhaps sensationalistic- as that sounds, I can’t see how it wouldn’t be true. How could anyone delve so deeply into atrocity and not have rattled the middle of the middle of their bones.
I remember writing a paper in college about massacres during the Chinese civil war in the 1920’s. I remember that during that time I couldn’t even read the newspaper at the kitchen table without starting to cry. It was ridiculous. Obviously that shallow spring puddle of a term paper doesn't compare to the ocean you would have to dive into, and swim in for years, in devoting your life to writing books on these subjects.
How is it that even in never experiencing these kinds of events, that these secondary experiences so filtered can still leave such thick and purple marks on us we aren't fully able to handle them? It has something to do with empathy, and empathy's connection to and dependence on imagination. Maybe it is that we are humans, maybe we have brains that are large enough to be too large. Our ability to imagine “the unimaginable” is beyond vast. This much is clear.
IMAGE & IMAGINATION(b)
Of course, one critical aspect to both memory and imagination in the last 150 years of world life finds its home in the reality of the photographic image. Not only is there facsimile of a true and actual moment in a photo, but there is a signifier like a pointing finger that tells us to imagine what is possible in reality. Such photos have mattered in the understanding and memory of the Rape of Nanking, as with other wars & genocides.
It is because of this certain heavy talent for Memory, Imagination, and photographic documentation, that some facts about our ways of being feel so cruelly absurd. I was lucky to see the film “The Fourth World War” the other day in Chapel Hill, on T.'s invitation. One scene illustrated the connection of the anti-IMF protest in Argentina with the general anti-government movements related to the years of the “Dirty War,” --that time in the 70’s when tens of thousands were “disappeared” in that (and many other) South American country.
The mothers of the disappeared still come to the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. They march, They sit. They bang pots, and they hold up the photos of their children the government disappeared. Photos as the document of memory; as the symbol of possibility that is now lost possibility. but maybe never completely.
In the film, a mother at the microphone speaks to the crowd, stating in a cracking voice that she is "the Other," not unlike the hundreds of Other people the government deems as such, and so abuse. There is no Other to her, that is not also herself. In this way she refuses to let the Other exist, and the notion to find legitimacy. And how could the all those soldiers in the military so easily Other those young men and women, just their same age, that they kidnapped and killed over those years. Or the Japanese soldiers do what they did in Nanking.
Isn’t that also the Imagination? I am afraid of this thought. But as much as Imagination lets us empathize with people and events far or past, it seems that it also has a remarkable capacity that lets us imagine that the very people in front of us aren't people anything in the way we are people. How else could human life simultaneously mean so much and damn little to us, at every very same moment? It seems too easy.
...
Put another way...
Recently photos of Navy SEALS with Iraqis homes they had raided, were found on the web, at a site called www.smugmug.com. As CNN reports:
“One man lies on his back with a boot on his chest. A mug shot shows a man with an automatic weapon pointed at his head and a gloved thumb jabbed into his throat…What appears to be blood drips from the heads of some. A family huddles in a room in one photo. Other pictures show debris and upturned furniture…The woman who posted them told the AP they were on the camera her husband brought back from Iraq…”
And what is it about the nature of our Imagination's ability to Other that allows the wife of the soldier to say, with absolutely no apparent trace of irony, that:
“She was upset that a reporter was able to view the album, which includes family snapshots.”
Isn't this also an instance of Imagination's power? The soldier and his wife are documenting. They creating the collective memory with plenty of Imagination(b) and hardly none of Imagination(a). Her family snapshots seamlessly together with those of an Iraqi family whose home has been raided and are sitting on the floor bound, on smugmug.com. And somehow she and we can - and regularly do - imagine there is nothing too strange about this, because somehow these families aren't even similar in whatever fundamental ways that would and could matter. Whatever Imagination does and is, it is a moral capacity.
How How is one to understand this? Is there anything here capable of understanding? Is this possibly anything similar to the nature of the questions Iris Chang faced in doing her work, multiplied by powers of ten? I don't know if the terrible power of imagination let her Other herself to the point that she could do what she did to herself. But the relevatory and positive capacities of her imagination are also now gone, as are all the future memories that she was to have. and I can't see how this isn't a tragic loss.
I know I am in equal parts reckless with memory, imagination, and the photographic image - and this post is maybe only evidence to that point. But this is avoidable. It has to be. to believe it is possible to treat Memory, Imagination, and the Image in a way that makes how we now create Others more and more unteneble. That that place does have a beginning.
posted by andrew s.yang at Tuesday, December 07, 2004
4 Comments:
This post is suffused with sadness, and I can well understand why. It is a tragic loss and perhaps it is a lesson of the importance of knowing one's own limits--but perhaps Iris Chang did not care about limits anymore.
It sounds very JS Millish, but I think this response should be entitled, "A Defense of Imagination," though I certainly don't mean to be argumentative. I actually agree with you about the connection between empathy and imagination and that it is possible for imagination to be utterly disconnected from any empathetic connection with another. I guess I see imagination as essentially amoral--it is simply the ability to see, to understand that which one has not experienced, but that one's imagination is necessarily filtered by experience.
What I disagree with you about is that I really, really do not believe that imagination has ANYthing to do with how those soldiers (or that wife) perceived the iraqi households. It was, rather, a complete lack of imagination.
The ability to distinguish one's self from the Other (and to fear that Other, for this is very much about fear) does not take imagination. Instead, sadly, it is a normative mode of perceiving the world that all humans in some way do. But I don't think it's an instinct so much as a tendency, a reflex that can be unlearned. Perhaps its cause is our distant history--being part of a clan, then tribe, then eventually nation--a protective impulse to protect one's self (and one's kin) from danger. And it has led to our peculiar ability to classify, to create dualities (and perhaps our language subject/object reinforces this tendency somewhat). But it is a tendency that has outlived its usefullness.
Unfortunately, our culture reinforces this perception and fear of the Other. So much of our capitalistic, empire-building culture perpetuates rampant individualism, greed, and disconnection. Certainly, the current Administration perpetuates it. And think about the kinds of brainwarping that goes along in military training. Tendencies to empathy (and I'd argue imagination) are highly discouraged in the military--soldiers are trained to see (and kill) the Other. Add that to a situation where the soldiers are themselves perceived as Others by the Iraqi people (which is a very fair perception on some level), and you've got tremendous forces working on soldiers and on us civilians to not use our heads and our hearts. To act out of fear.
It is precisely our imaginations and our ability to empathize that breaks us out of this creation/fear of the Other, to break out of the boxes our minds have been put in--by our government, by corporate culture, by our own fears. I believe (for to do otherwise would be to succumb to despair) that humans are capable of growing out of this Other paradigm, but the tendency to do so, to empathize needs nurturing.
Sorry to ramble on for so long. Cheers, and, well, be of good cheer,
phaedra
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Phaedra
Thanks for your thoughts. I’m still not settled on what I think, but I think we mainly agree. I wonder if one reason I put forth the idea of othering as an act of imagination is because I want to believe that we naturally have some tacit recognition of our human similarities, or humanity. And that to undo that recognition takes a significant force of imagining -- to think that other people aren’t people just like us in the central ways, even though something innate tells us very different. That the same psychological means by which we can actuate our connection and cohere to some can also disconnect us from some as well, like a car put in reverse. But I don’t know.
I didn’t mean for this post to be overly morose or sad, and apologize if it has that effect. At risk of sounding trite, I just think Iris Chang was remarkable and courageous person. I wanted to acknowledge in some small way the quandry she spent years of hard work trying to get others to acknowledge, but I worried (and worry still) whether perhaps this really wasn’t the way or place to do that. I’m still so unsure how a medium like the internet should be used in this regard....
but thanks again,
and of good cheer,
andy
Andy, I don't think there's anything inappropriate about your attempt to honor Chang's memory. Actually, I think if she could see your post, she'd be happy, for in telling her story in a way you are helping her create a cultural memory or remembrance of the Rape of Nanking. Truth-telling has a lovely tendency to snowball--for now I want to read her books (and I bet others who read your post will feel likewise), and I will see that her books are sold at Internationalist Books.
I think we're trying to do something similar--to see an inherent tendency in humans to empathize, to connect with one another, but we're just using different terminology. I too believe humans automatically recognize each other as kin (racism etc. being learned responses), but there's a counter-tendency to categorize, to create the Other. And while you see that process of negating the Other's humanity as part of imagination, I see it as a different process altogether, one that is permeated by fear.
ciao,
phaedra
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