Remembering the Disremembered

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Remembering the Disremembered

Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don't know her name? Although she has claim, she is not claimed. In the place where long grass opens, the girl who waited to be loved and cry shame erupts into her separate parts, to make it easy for the chewing laughter to swallow her all away.

It was not a story to pass on.

- Toni Morrison, Beloved

To write history means giving dates their physiognomy.

- Walter Benjamin

For philosopher, essayist and critic Walter Benjamin, history is catastrophe. Standing as he does at the dawn of World War II and reflecting back on the devastation of the First World War, Benjamin sees history stretched out before him and knows that it marches forward, goosestepping over the prone bodies of those who could not keep up with its procession, toward a future that can be no more or no less brutal and devastating than the past has already proved to be. What hope there is rests in humanity's ability to remember the experiences of those crushed under this catastrophic progression and to account for them in the narratives of our traditions. The repository of these disremembered experiences, and the one whose task it is to incorporate them into our present, is the storyteller. The storyteller offers the images which can effectively stop the progression of history and creates a conduit through which the "disremembered and unaccounted for" can convey their experience.

The on-going progression of history continually produces new catastrophes and brutalizes new bodies; thus we are in constant ...

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Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991.

Mobley, Marilyn Sanders. "A Different Remembering: Memory, History, and Meaning in Beloved." In Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Appiah, K. A., eds. Amistad Literary Series. New York: Amistad. 1993.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: New American Library, 1987.

Russell, Sandi. "It's OK to say OK." In Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. McKay, Nellie Y., ed. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1988.

Tiedemann, Rolf. "Historical Materialism or Political Messianism? An Interpretation of the Theses 'On the Concept of History.'" In Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History. Smith, Gary, ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

Wolin, Richard. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

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