The State, the Writer, and the Politics of Memory (original) (raw)
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Reading History Against the State Secret
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Abstract This paper reads Carlos Soto Román’s “Chile Project: [Re-classified],” a documentary poem that remediates declassified state documents as an ambivalent form of witnessing bureaucracy and state violence. Soto Román “re-classified” – that is, redacted – a forty-five-page selection of documents from the CIA dossier on Chile that was nominally declassified by the US Government in the wake of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. Soto Román’s intervention renders the documents almost entirely unreadable, a gesture which refuses to grant the archival records the status of official history. This gesture denies the witnessing contained in the documents while also witnessing the documents on behalf of a reader who cannot. In this unusual configuration of poem-as-witness, the paper argues, Soto Román instructs a reader elsewhere, to counter-histories of survival and resistance which are incommensurable with the version of history claimed by the US state. The paper further claims that the redaction can be read as an invitation to consider the “document” as a particular cultural object and media format in which history is written and unwritten, forged and contested, filled with noise and silence. To conclude, the paper posits that poetry, defined as a specific readerly approach to the conditions in which a text is made, provides a critical framework for considering the document as a dynamic interface and therefore history as an ongoing site for both domination and resistance.
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A normal textbook on modern world history often unfolds itself with the history of Monarchs, Queens, Knights, and major revolutions in European History, like Glorious, French, restorations, World wars, etc. All these episodes are dominantly mapping our minds to understand what is happening in the world. In these narratives, we barely find a name of a country like Haiti which once challenged the major power of the world, the French power, which is nonetheless important in its own right. But the major history writings, or the historians when they were writing history with some selected facts and narrating them as they are the sole important actors or the movers of history, they silenced some histories too. And these silences are found with the narratives which had lived experiences, which traveled through oral narratives, stories, etc, which had a direct experience with the actors of the fact. The association of historical writing with the creation of hegemony and power is an evident phenomenon despite the never-ending 'subjective' and 'objective' ways of doing history debate. One of the important functions of history has been to provide legitimacy to those who are in power. It is done through a selective narrativization of events from the past in a way which suits the convenience and knowledge system of the dominant ideology or those in power. Michel- Ralph Trouillot’s work ‘Silencing the Past’ is also an attempt to look at the processes which create the power discourses and declare themselves to be the 'mainstream' while cautiously ignoring the contradictory details.
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