Postmemory Essay

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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

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