The materiality of conflict memory: Reflections from contemporary Italy

Abstract

The process and project of rememory (after Toni Morrison’s Beloved, 1987) may be linked with a politics of hope – to exorcise, to move on, to empower; rememories are emergent ‘sites of feeling’ capable of triggering bodily reactions and emotional responses. This article takes stock of some emergent traces of post-conflict materialities that can be explored through storytelling, in this case, of the civil war between fascists and anti-fascists in Italy during the Second World War (1943–1945). The author reflects on the cathartic capacity of rememory through two wartime storytelling ‘experiments’. In a town square, the Surviving Thing is the handed-down memory of two executions, one on each side, haunting the place but without physical in situ traces of those acts. In 2014, veteran fascists and anti-fascists and their descendants re-enacted violent episodes on both sides that had left no visible or tangible traces. They used spatial clues in archival photographs, triangulating the traces to conjure up spectral geographies of death on both political sides, to ‘get closure’. In another example, a Surviving Thing is present as a physical object (a letter) without mnemonic trace. In 2012, an ex-partisan paid tribute to unsung heroes of the local resistance by writing an open letter that commemorated their bravery. While also looking for closure (or perhaps an opening up?), she wrote to dispel the oblivion to which history banished the boys’ actions – to fill an absence with an affectual presence. The well-thumbed sheet is thus animated in the moment of witnessing through a loving act of rememory. The two post-conflict sites reveal something of the affectual and cathartic capacity of traces that survive and those that do not. Overall, rememories perform intangible affects that frame the nuanced social legacies of conflict, while the ‘experiments’ embody the centrality of storytelling to the material culture of post-conflict societies.