*Sorry, I decided to do a post since the comment section does not allow me to post any picture.
The Post " On Place and Memory: Berlin, Scars and Social Memory" is very thoughtful and
reminds me of " le monument des martyrs" (the monument
of the martyrs) in Cote D'Ivoire, my country of origin. As shown in this post, Germany
purposefully erected historical monuments and places for the society to not
forget the dark pass of the Hitlerian period and somehow prevent the story from
repeating itself. In my country, the regime of the former president Laurent
Gbagbo built “le monument des martyrs” for commemorating the death
of thousands of people killed during the protestation of his election in 2000. The
goal of this monument was to remind the Ivorian society of the horror of armed
conflict, but the political campaign built around this monument connected it to
the victory of the former president Laurent Gbagbo in the collective memory of
the population. Cresswell (p. 90) in his argumentation was right, effectively
the question of which memories are promoted and which cease to be memories is a
political question. What was once a commemoration for the dead of the post-election
crisis in 2000 became a symbol of the ruling party’s victory over the others. This
idea was so prevalent that after his arrest in 2011 during the second post-election conflict, the partisans of the new president Alassane Ouattara destroyed the
monument of the martyrs as a symbol of the fall of the old regime. The fact
that this monument was created after an armed conflict and destroyed after one unfolds a tragic irony and show the failure of an all society.
After: image 2012
https://eujournal.org/index.php/esj/article/download/9945/9414
(The link is in french)
Very interesting, especially your reflection on "The fact that this monument was created after an armed conflict and destroyed after one unfolds a tragic irony and show the failure of an all society." I think it goes to show how even memory narratives in public spaces can be re-configured or re-possesed by other narratives (the party that won), and then, again, by the next winners (the ones who destroyed it! Which makes you think how unstable, dynamic, and changing can those memories and narratives in public spaces can be as power forces struggle to appropriate the decisions of memories and the meanings.
ReplyDelete