What I Did on My Summer Vacation

- By Jim Hicks

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

Of the dozens of posts I’ve written in the years since the magazine added this blog to its website, this is the first that has worked its way through three working titles. Having just returned from a grueling, difficult, and—I believe—essential two weeks at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC (USHMM), as a participant in a Mandel Center research workshop on “Literary Responses to Genocide in the Post-Holocaust Era,” it won’t surprise anyone that the other titles were less light in tone. “On Speaking (and Not Speaking) about Genocide,” for example.

If I were a prayer, I would petition for one thing above all: that the world never see another two weeks where the subject of these USHMM discussions would again resonate so directly with the news we heard each morning. As it turned out, in the public forum for the workshop participants last Friday, an audience member prefaced her response by alluding to this convergence. In listening to us summarize our work over the past two weeks, she said that she simply couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d been hearing about the news that day: “And, of course, you must already know what I’m going to say next.” To tell the truth, I couldn’t tell what was coming . . . at least three or four topics came to mind. She was thinking of Ferguson.

Perhaps no other scholarship was more inspiring, more useful to us, than Michael Rothberg’s call for “multidirectional” rather than “competitive” memory.

Our workshop was composed equally of specialists in Holocaust Studies and those like myself, people who have principally studied, taught, and written about other catastrophes of the post-Holocaust era. As dryly academic, even odious, as such terminology may appear, the best label one can put on the work of our group is probably “Comparative Genocide Studies.” To begin at all, one first needs to find, as Rothberg urges, a way to think comparatively, not competitively. When Ferguson is on fire, when the US President speaks of genocide in a speech about authorizing airstrikes in Iraq, when Chris Gunness, spokesperson for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, breaks down in tears over the suffering in Gaza, and when the wars in Ukraine, Syria and Sudan find little airtime at all, any talk pitting one atrocity against another opposes nothing.

No one looks to scholars in the humanities for suggestions on public policy, nor should they. Even though the USHMM discussions defined it in the broadest possible sense, and the mix did include personal memoir, photography, sculpture, film, and popular culture, our panel investigated “literary” responses to genocide, not the political choices made by individuals or states, or even, in any direct sense, by history. Yet in her Fruits of Sorrow, Vicky Spelman gives an eloquent reading of the former slave Harriet Brent Jacobs’s memoir, and also offers a strong argument for the power of literature.

For Spelman, great writing like that of Jacobs teaches compassion, fine-tuning the nonsufferer’s response, giving us “growing awareness of the details of the sufferer’s being and situation.” There are many things that could and should be said about Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s “Running Orders,” a poem that has burned through cyberspace in the past few weeks; at the very least, we must acknowledge its power in precisely Spelman’s terms. The intimacy of address in this poem is simply excruciating. When I introduced the poem during our workshop discussions at the Holocaust Museum, we didn’t get very far into it, but a whispered comment from the colleague to my left did prompt yet another working title for this blog post. “Nice try,” she said.

Over the two weeks, we read the work of many Holocaust scholars; for now I’ll cite only one more, an essay by Naomi Mandel on “Rethinking ‘After Auschwitz.’” Mandel begins, as many others have, with Theodor Adorno’s most famous dictum, that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Mandel is not alone in arguing against a rhetoric of the unspeakable, or in urging Holocaust Studies scholars, along with poets, to address precisely what is most difficult, most silent, in this post-Holocaust era. What her essay does do differently, however, is return to Adorno, in order to think through what the German social philosopher said and why. In doing so, Mandel reminds us what prompted Adorno’s statement: his urgent sense that “poetry after Auschwitz is directly complicit with the culture that produced Auschwitz” and that “the essential barbarism inherent in poetry after Auschwitz ‘corrodes’—or contaminates—‘even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today’’’ (Adorno, cited by Mandel, 221). Her essay argues that, “If a rhetoric of the unspeakable marks the limits of our knowledge with silence [. . .] breaking this silence extends or effaces these limits, [. . .] foregrounding [the] investments and assumptions that have perpetuated a rhetoric of the unspeakable in Holocaust discourse for nearly half a century” (215).

Thinking of Mandel, the last working title I came up had an even sharper edge. I wondered if I should perhaps call it “On Perpetrator Testimony and the Unspeakable.” You see, in a state that believes itself democratic, citizens are responsible for the actions of their leaders. More to the point, as a Coetzee protagonist puts it: “The generation [. . .] to which I belong, and the next generation, and perhaps the generation after that too, will go bowed under the shame of the crimes that were committed in their name.” I’m not just talking about Ferguson here, though there certainly is that. Elsewhere, any reality-based observer will understand that the political conditions clearing the path for ISIS were created by the US, in its war of choice and aggression. And, as for Gaza, we not only have now provided both political cover and financial support for three offensives in six years, we’re currently resupplying the weapons. Yet when you read this blog post, even in its most self-critical moments, do you hear in it a familiar sort of obfuscation and equivocation, the very shape shifting and special pleading that we have come to expect from perpetrator testimony? Much of the world will, and it should. As Chris Gunness himself has said, “My tears are irrelevant.”

On stage at the Holocaust Museum, Alicia Partnoy, a workshop participant and former political prisoner, a survivor of the 1976-83 dictatorship in Argentina, closed our session by reading a poem. Her Ars Política calls for “a verse stripped of all manipulation / and adornment / so that no one can say . . .  that nothing remains / for us to say.” I was honored to be included in this workshop; in fact, there is no institution in DC that I respect more than the USHMM. For this very reason, I stand with Alicia, Naomi, and Lena.