Postmemory Essay

1149 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Personal narrative essays on trauma

Society, time, and experiences shape memories. The children and grandchildren of trauma survivors often feel anxious when they discover and discuss their relatives’ traumatic experiences; however, no amount of storytelling or photographs can effectively restate the traumatic events the victims experienced firsthand. As a result, younger generations cannot accurately grasp the experiences yet attempt to connect to their elders’ memories as a way to prevent the atrocities from being forgotten. Postmemory allows for younger generations to preserve the memories of trauma without personally witnessing the atrocities. Marianne Hirsch who introduced the term postmemory calls it, “the experience of having one’s everyday reality overshadowed by the memory of a much more significant past that one’s parents lived through” (Abu-Lughod 79). While many of the children and grandchildren of the survivors of Nakba still encountered struggles and challenges, none of their conflicts compared to the expulsion of the older generation from Palestine in 1948. For this essay, I will address the responsibilities younger generations assume as a result of postmemories. Introduction to Postmemory Hirsch describes postmemory as “a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through …show more content…

This may include visiting the location where the event occurred. When Abu-Lughod’s father visited Jaffa for the first time since his late teens, he realized that he had a surfeit of knowledge he was ready to share with his children. Abu-Lughod recalls, “The peculiar thing that happened when my father returned to Palestine was that his memories now became the guide to a living history and a real place” (80). His memories no longer lived in the past; rather, as he began sharing more information with his daughter, his tales returned to the

Show More
Related

  • Literary Analysis Of Ida Fink's The Table By Ida Fink

    1196 Words  | 3 Pages

    Ida Fink’s work, “The Table”, is an example of how old or disturbing memories may not contain the factual details required for legal documentation. The purpose of her writing is to show us that people remember traumatic events not through images, sounds, and details, but through feelings and emotions. To break that down into two parts, Fink uses vague characters to speak aloud about their experiences to prove their inconsistencies, while using their actions and manners to show their emotions as they dig through their memories in search of answers in order to show that though their spoken stories may differ, they each feel the same pain and fear.

    Read More

  • Post Traumatic Stress and the Brothers' Relationship in The Red Convertible by Louise Erdrich

    1241 Words  | 3 Pages

    The reality that shapes individuals as they fight in war can lead to the resentment they have with the world and the tragedies that they had experienced in the past. Veterans are often times overwhelmed with their fears and sensations of their past that commonly disables them to transgress and live beyond the emotions and apprehensions they witness in posttraumatic experiences. This is also seen in everyday lives of people as they too experience traumatic events such as September 11th and the fall of the World Trade Center or simply by regrets of decisions that is made. Ones fears, emotions and disturbances that are embraced through the past are the only result of the unconscious reality of ones future.

    Read More

  • Understanding Memory: Deciphering the Brain's Mechanism

    2026 Words  | 5 Pages

    The article “How Our Brains Make Memories” explains how traumatic events and the memories they hold can become forgotten over time. Karim Nader recalls the day that two planes slammed into the twin towers in New York City and like almost every person in the United States he had vivid and emotional memories of that day. However he knew better than to trust his recollections of that day because he was an expert on memory. He attended college at the University of Toronto and in 1996 joined the New York University lab of Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist who studies how emotions influence memory. Fast forward to 2003, Nader is now a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, where he says “his memory of

    Read More

  • Sexual Assault of Native American Women

    1464 Words  | 3 Pages

    Native Americans have undergone a horrific past of genocide, discrimination, forced acculturation, miscommunication, and misunderstanding. They were frequently dehumanized and stripped of basic human rights. Treated as “savages” they were herded into areas of confinement and robbed of their language, culture, and way of life. In many instances of genocide, experts have noted a type of historical trauma that may be passed down through families, known as generational trauma. While the potential effects of this concept are not proven, the stories, images, and memories of thousands of Native Americans continue to be shared with their children, thus perpetuating, and never forgetting the pain and embarrassment that their people have experienced.

    Read More

  • Children of the Holocaust

    985 Words  | 2 Pages

    Remember Me? Holocaust Children Talk of Survival. Dir. United States Holocaust Museum. Perf. Nathan Kranowski. Xfinity Video. Comcast. Web. 08 Mar. 2015. http://xfinity.comcast.net/video/remember-me-holocaust-children-talk-of-survival/2085065960

    Read More

  • Essay

    668 Words  | 2 Pages

    “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Harper Lee identifies many charcters in the beginning of this book. She was very descriptive of all the characters in the beginning of the book. Each character was described from Scout’s point of view. Throughout the book, Lee lets the reader see some of the characters in their natural environments. They are still written through Scout’s eyes, but instead of passing by them on the sidewalk, Scout is in their home sitting with them, or hearing personal stories about them. Three of these characters that Scout points out specifically are Jem Finch, Aunt Alexandra, and Tom Robinson.

    Read More

  • What Makes a Total War?

    1562 Words  | 4 Pages

    “The generation of 1914” often refers to those who came of age during WWI, and because of the war were robbed of their youth. While this term is a useful expression of a collective experience of universal sacrifice and suffering during the war, the term “generation” fails to recognize the unique experiences of the different genders, races, and classes. Women, soldiers, both officers and enlisted, and colonial forces, like Senegalese soldiers, experienced and remembered the war differently from each other. Therefore, using a broad, general term like “ the generation of 1914,” discounts these individual and minority group experiences, which obscures a collective memory of WWI.

    Read More

  • Intergenerational Trauma Essay

    1045 Words  | 3 Pages

    When faced with a life altering situation although Molly’s characteristics and personality aid her in courageously defying them, the effects of facing this traumatic event will lead to long term psychological repercussions. When severe harm is inflicted on a person’s psyche, it is viewed as an emotional trauma (Levers, 2012). The emotional harm inflicted on Molly’s psyche originates from different dimensions; like her upbringing, her trauma is multidimensional too. As a child of the Indigenous community, whose ancestors and elders were killed violently in inter-group conflicts, and whose children were forcefully removed from families, Molly is would experience intergenerational trauma (Atkinson, 2002). Intergenerational trauma is trauma passed down from one generation to another; as a close knitted community group, the grief experienced by family members of losing their loved ones, would have been transferred across generations (Atkinson,

    Read More

  • Argumentative Essay On Recovered Memories

    1529 Words  | 4 Pages

    Recovered memories of childhood trauma and abuse has become one of the most controversial issues within the field of psychology. Controversy surrounding repressed memory - sometimes referred to as the memory wars – reached its’ peak in the early 1990s, where there was a rise in the number of people reporting memories of childhood trauma and abuse that had allegedly been repressed for many years (Lindsay & Read, 2001). There are a number of different factors that have contributed to the dispute surrounding recovered memories. Firstly, there is an ongoing debate about whether these types of memories actually exist or whether these accusations arose as a result of suggestive therapeutic procedures. In particular, this debate focuses on two main

    Read More

  • Infant Trauma

    1401 Words  | 3 Pages

    Gaensbauer asks the questions: When exposed to a traumatic event, what does the infant understand about what is happening? Does he or she form an internal representation of the experience? Is the experience retained in memory? If so, for how long and in what forms (2002)? Gaensbauer gives several examples of how trauma memory is retained. In one case, an infant as young as three days old was having trouble taking to his mother’s breast. A very aggressive...

    Read More

  • Impact Of Trauma

    1462 Words  | 3 Pages

    Trauma is often seen as an event; however, trauma is actually the impact on a client’s life as a result of an experience (Saunders, 2016.) There are many factors that determine the effect the trauma will have on a person to include: developmental processes, the meaning associated to the trauma, and sociocultural factors (SAMHSA, 2014). Traumatic experiences can cause a person to have an unintegrated state of sensations, feelings, thoughts, behavior, and/ or images so strong they interfere with the person’s normal functioning. This state causes the person not to be able to access memories, sensations or somatic responses necessary to overcome events that are overwhelming, and can be developmentally intrusive (Saunders, 2016). In posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), unintegrated feelings, sensations, and images can become triggered, and the brain reacts with the same feelings of being overwhelmed. These reactions of PTSD are a result of unintegrated memories about a single

    Read More

  • Repressed Memories

    3889 Words  | 8 Pages

    Recently there has been an extreme debate between "false" vs. "repressed" memories of abuse. A false memory is created when an event that really happened becomes confused with images produced by trying to remember an imagined event. The term false memory syndrome refers to the notion that illusionary and untrue memories of earlier child abuse can be 'recalled' by adult clients during therapy. In an increasingly polarized and emotive debate, extreme positions have been adopted, on one side by those believing that recovered memories nearly always represent actual traumatic experiences, for example, Fredrickson (1992) who argues for a 'repressed memory syndrome' and, on the other side, by those describing a growing epidemic of false memories of abuse which did not occur. (Gardner, 1992; Loftus, 1993; Ofshe & Watters, 1993; Yapko, 1994).

    Read More

  • Mariann Hirsch's Postmemory

    1723 Words  | 4 Pages

    Marianne Hirsch introduces to us a new word, postmemory, in her essay "Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy." Hirsch defines postmemory as when a child of a survivor of a cultural trauma remembers stories because of what their parents told them. Hirsch, being a child of a survivor of the Holocaust, has many postmemories from her parents. Postmemory is like receiving a memory from someone else. It's a memory that you did not witness yourself but were told by someone else, and after hearing their memory you feel as if it happened to you. A postmemory is something you may never get to live. Usually, a postmemory is something that happened that is very traumatic and affected many people.

    Read More

  • Pedophilia, and Sexual Offenses

    1615 Words  | 4 Pages

    Mollon, Phil. Remembering Trauma : A Psychotherapist's Guide To Memory And Illusion. London: Whurr, 2002. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 6 Apr. 2014.

    Read More

  • Argumentative Essay On Domestic Violence

    1009 Words  | 3 Pages

    “Children do not forget what they have witnessed. Adults hope that if the violence is not talked about, the children’s memories of the event will disappear. However, young children demonstrate a remarkable capacity for recalling traumatic events. Children’s vivid accounts of violent events stand in contrast to parent’s reports that their children did not see the violence or were unaware of it.”

    Read More

More about Postmemory Essay

Open Document