Memory, Narrative, and Forgiveness: Perspectives on the Unfinished Journeys of the Past
Edited by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and Chris van der Merwe
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Expected Date of Publication: 2009
Book Description
Memory, Narrative, and Forgiveness: Perspectives on the Unfinished Journeys of the Past brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars and explores the relation between trauma and memory, and the complex, interconnected issues of trauma and narrative (testimonial and literary); memorialisation and the changing role of memory in the aftermath of mass trauma; mourning and the potential of forgiveness to heal the enduring effects of mass trauma; and transgenerational trauma-memory as a basis for dialogue and reconciliation in divided societies.
The inspiration for the book is the work of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the efforts in South Africa to come to terms with a traumatic past through the language of engagement and dialogue in a spirit of reconciliation. The TRC was the first truth commission to hold public hearings where both victims and perpetrators told their stories of gross human rights violations and the traumas suffered and committed in the era of apartheid. Since the TRC completed its work and published its report, the South African TRC model has been replicated in more than a dozen countries as an alternative approach to prosecutorial justice in order to help groups and societies heal the wounds of the past. The authors go well beyond the TRC and address a wide range of historical events to explore the possibilities and the challenges that lie on the path of reconciliation and forgiveness between victims, perpetrators and bystanders in societies with a history of violent conflict and unspeakable injustice. The book covers a wide range of social psychological, philosophical, political, literary and historical contexts and deepen understanding of the ways in which lessons from the TRC might be developed and usefully applied for societies and groups of victims, survivors, perpetrators, beneficiaries of systematic injustices and their descendants to come to terms with the past and its intergenerational effects.
The chapters are grouped broadly around the themes of individual and collective trauma, lessons from the South African TRC and potential application of the TRC model, literary and testimonial narratives of trauma, and forgiveness and reconciliation after mass trauma. Read together, the chapters provide readers with a cohesive, theoretically well-grounded and engaging analysis of the impact of traumatic memories in the personal and communal lives of survivors of trauma, how narrative may be creatively applied in processes of healing trauma, and how memory and remembering trauma can be used to restore moral balance to societies ravaged by trauma, to break the cycles of intergroup hatred and to ensure that yesterday’s victims do not become today’s perpetrators.
