dear Alan, Ana, and all
I am very sorry if I tried, unsuccessfully, to combine a great respect for the
seriousness of the issues raised here, the lived experience reported here by
you Ana in memory of the time of incarceration and torture, and for example
Alan when you talk about the dying
I think I am here trying to discuss with myself the value of my
memory. It took me 32 years to write the book about the time on jail
about torture and my own story. But before these book I wrote and
published nine other books, fiction, short stories, two novels. In
none of those books I adressed
On Thu, 4 Oct 2012, Maria Damon wrote:
Is there then (I'm sort of assuming the answer is yes, but asking anyway in
order to make it part of the fabric of the conversation) a way in which
lamentation is also critique as well as community self-constitution, as in
Lamentations?
Maria, I
For me the lament is a kind of collective catharsis, as the mourning
itself. I has been in Palestine several times and see and listened to
the collective mourning of the women when some of their relatives or
friends are killed or buried, a kind of powerful roaring, not the
claiming not the
I wish I was there to witness it...
I think collective catharsis could be the very foundation of the political
community of citizens.
On Oct 4, 2012, at 1:51 PM, Ana Valdés wrote:
For me the lament is a kind of collective catharsis, as the mourning
itself. I has been in Palestine several
which Lamentations are you refering to?
(not Martha Graham's Lamentation?)
Book of Lamentations in English
All Sandy and I are/were on about, I think, is the silence and the
obdurate that occurs in relaton to severe pain; I'm thinking for example
of my mother shortly before her death,
While aware of some of the lamentations explored by artists such as Martha
Graham (who is not my favorite although I have a great respect for her) -- what
I am working towards is a connection with the older, before now, before any
specific time, lamentation. My dancer actually took me to
Yes, when I mentioned Lamentations, I meant the Hebrew Bible. Old.
Grieving for ones city, ones polis, ones people. Also, it seems that
this is *not* where you were going, Monika, a sense of grief over ones
own possible complicity, real or imagined... remorse.
On 10/4/12 5:55 PM, Monika Weiss
yes, if I understood you correctly Maria, you say that I am not trying to work
with grief over ones own complicity or remorse. I am more invested in the
notion and symbolic power as well as real experience of communal grief -- this
is what oppressive systems fear most -- the symbolic power of
I think mourning and lament are related to the ceremonies of the
death. When I did my research as anthropologist I travelled to Mexico
and did a fieldwork in Yucatan, the old Maya empire. Their funerary
pyramids, specially in Palenque, were very similar to the Egyptian
pyramids. Many scenes
mourning, lament, are acts, they're intended, they're cultural
expressions - as long as one can mourn...
but what happens when mourning, lament, end, not through desire
but because the unspeakable becomes manifest - i think this is
where celan comes in for example, or the spaces in jabes'
The nearest I was from a massgrave was Jenin, 2002, people were eerie
silent around the hole wich was Palestine's ground zero. Under the
hole were dismembered people, restaurantes blown in pieces, ashes,
bones, lonely shoes.
I wrote some texts from there, http://www.this.is/jenin
In the total
Ana, thank you for this and for the site. I've spent some time with it; as
with Monika's work, it's overwhelming.
I have never had these experiences; I've been shot at, but from a
distance. My own grief is sourceless in a sense, and selfish.
I do understand about the silence. And the
Dear all
thank you Monika for your text/introduction to your understanding of the system
of lament, and public lament as performative and political act in public
domain
-- this is richly evocative and will have to go back to your writing after
looking at some of your work (the slides, and
Dear Johannes, as I wrote in my answer to Alan, I am sad I don't have
a clue how to avoid these ads in my text, I guess this is the prize to
pay for a free digital hosting :(
I am now poor as a mouse :) moved back from the First World with all
it's glamour to the non glamorous and poor Third
Hi Ana,
I had the same feeling and wrote about it to Alan
By the way, can't wait to hear more from you as part of this discussion.
Monika
Sent from my iPad
On Oct 3, 2012, at 2:13 PM, Ana Valdés agora...@gmail.com wrote:
Dear Johannes, as I wrote in my answer to Alan, I am sad I don't have
Dear Johannes and all,
Zygmunt Bauman's concept of garden is mentioned by him in his Modernity and
Holocaust - which actually reads better in Polish, Nowoczesność i Zaglada. I
often talk about it in my own writings because it feels still very important
today. The idea is that we are like
HI Monika I checked the links you post and they were stunning
beautiful, as the cry of the mourners in the Greek tragedies. By the
way a group of Uruguayan former political prisoners, many of them my
former comrades, put together a beatiful piece called Antigona
Oriental. It was a contrast between
Re - weeds - terms like 'weeds' and 'pests' and 'vermin' are very
problematic - they reflect only the speaker, not the spoken-for who often
is placed in the position of a Lyotardian differend, unable to speak,
blotted out. Whenever I hear them, I cringe...
==
blog:
In Bauman's writing the weeds are what Agamben, and to some extend Zizek,
call Homo Sacer (such as G. Agamben Remnats of Holocaust and Zizek's
Violence). The idea of silencing is very important to me, which is also
related to disappearing, to making disappear. Lament, which otherwise we could
Thank you Ana for those words. I would love to know more about the Antigona
Oriental.
p.s.
Yes, we have lived through torture since time immemorial but with the
Declaration of Human Rights and other international institutions, we had hopes
for progress in that area. So, I don't subscribe to
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