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Vulnerable Children, Disposable Mothers: Holocaust and Stolen Generations Memoirs of Childhood

2008; Routledge; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14484520802386535

1751-2964

Rosanne Kennedy,

African history and culture studies

Abstract In recent years, historians have pioneered comparative research on the Holocaust and colonisation in Australia. This article seeks to demonstrate that a comparative reading of Stolen Generations and Holocaust memoirs can generate unique and challenging insights into the affective, material and psychological legacies of the assimilation of children across racial and ethnic divides. By placing Sarah Kofman's memoir, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, into dialogue with versions of the Rabbit Proof Fence narrative, the article considers how the gendered trope of suffering mothers and vulnerable children has been used to mediate the trauma of childhood assimilation, and reveals aspects of this legacy that remain unspeakable in Australia. Keywords: trauma memoirmaternal tropecomparative trauma studiescultural memory Acknowledgements For comments on previous drafts of this article, I would like to thank Kate Douglas, Gillian Whitlock, Sue Andrews, Jeanette Hoorn and Rosemary Jolly. For inviting me to present this work and generously engaging with it, I would like to thank Mark Phillips, Ruth Phillips, Barbara Gabriel, and their graduate students in Cultural Mediations at Carleton University; the Centre for Research and Teaching on Women at McGill; and the audience at the 'Testimony and Witness' conference at the Australian National University. Notes 1. For discussions of Kofman's memoir in relation to her philosophy, see CitationDeutscher and CitationOliver; Oliver; and CitationChanter. 2. Suicides often prompt a re-reading of an author's earlier works in light of this final act; on Kofman's suicide, see (Robson 616-617), (Deutsche and Oliver 8) and (CitationDobie vii-xiv). 3. The late psychoanalyst Dori Laub has argued that, to stop acting out a traumatic event, the survivor needs to integrate the memory fragments into a narrative, which will aid survival. He maintains that the therapeutic process of the 're-externalization of the event can occur and take effect only when one can articulate and transmit the story, literally transfer it to another outside oneself and then take it back again, inside' (CitationFelman and Laub 69). He proposes that Holocaust survivors 'needed to tell their story in order to survive' (Felman and Laub 78). 4. My account is indebted to Golasan. 5. The claim that 'stolen generations' testimonies penetrated the heart of non-Indigenous Australia in the way other Indigenous issues had not is frequently repeated. At the tenth anniversary of Bringing Them Home at Parliament House, Canberra, on May 27, 2007, an Indigenous speaker commented that unlike other Aboriginal issues, the 'stolen generations' had generated intense empathy among non-Indigenous Australians 'because everyone has a mother … and everyone has been a child.' Author's personal observation. 6. I have explored some of the diverse ways in which non-Indigenous Australians have responded to stolen generations testimony in CitationKennedy 2004. 7. See the essays in CitationCurthoys and Docker, and CitationMoses. 8. I may be regarded as doing violence to Kofman's text by reading it in a context so foreign to her own interests, but I believe this is one of the possibilities generated by a transnational Holocaust memory discourse – that is enables comparisons that may not seem 'appropriate' but that may produce new insights. 9. Since I am primarily concerned with reading Kofman's memoir in an Australian context, where the English translation is more readily available than the French original, I have quoted from the English. 10. Barbara CitationCreed reads Jedda retrospectively as a 'stolen child' narrative, which presents for viewers today the uncomfortable issue of whether the white 'adopting' mother had any right to remove baby Jedda from her people and raise her as a 'white' child. 11. For a powerful analysis of the position of the beneficiary in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, see Schaffer and Smith. 12. Pilkington (2002) has also published a memoir of her childhood and early adulthood, her unlearning of internalised racism, and her journey to Jigalong to find her family. 13. As D'aeth observers: Both films are based on non-fictional accounts … of traumatic events that were founded on survivor testimony … they are both survival stories that take place against a backdrop of non-survival … escape stories that confound a more general condition of imprisonment. Each film also seems conditioned by the expectation that they are bringing their respective traumatic events to "the world" and present themselves implicitly as representative of a multitude of similar stories. 14. For a range of views on the film's sentimentality, see CitationBirch; CitationPotter and Schaffer; and D'aeth. Collins and Davis argue that the ending of the film positions spectators as witnesses to Indigenous trauma. 15. This scene recalls a scene in Claude Lanzmann's film, Shoah, in which one of the witnesses, Mordecai Polchebank, when asked what he feels about the horrors he witnessed in the Holocaust, responds: "I don't go back there". 16. In marketing the film exclusively through the maternal trope, an opportunity was missed to draw attention to the struggle of Japan's indigenous peoples, the Ainu, who like Australian Aborigines have suffered from oppression, dispossession and child removal. 17. Screening and discussion of Rabbit-Proof Fence with Doris Pilkington, National Library of Australia, 2005. Author's personal observation. 18. Jay Arthur, a curator the National Museum of Australia, has discussed with me the difficulties of telling complex stories of removal, which might be seen to challenge the dominant narrative of traumatic separation (Kennedy 2008). See also Schaffer; CitationHosking. 19. LaCapra argues that an empathic response to victims should not foreclose or become a substitute for 'attempts to work through the past and its losses, both in victims … and in secondary witnesses' (47). See also his discussion on pp. 212-213. 20. Kofman first wrote about the Holocaust and her father's deportation and death in Smothered Words, published in French in 1987. After this text, as Dobie notes, Judaism, anti-Semitism, the Shoah, and autobiography emerged as 'predominant concerns' in her work. Dobie describes Kofman's anti-sentimental approach: "by presenting the events [of her father's deportation] as a set of statistics, she banished the potential for pathos and avoids any attempt to describe or explain. She also underscores the fact that what she is describing is an historical as well as a personal trauma" (xi-xii). 21. CitationRobson offers a compelling analysis of the figure of the vomiting body in Kofman's memoir. 22. On muscular humanitarism, see CitationOrford. The health checks were originally intended as to 'forensic exams' to determine the extent of child sex abuse. In response to an outcry, including by doctors, the health checks were made voluntary, and did not seek evidence of sexual abuse. See Lateline interview with Mal Brough, aired on 20/6/2008, available at: http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2007/s2281522.htm 23. For some of the extensive ABC coverage of the Northern Territory Intervention, see 'Lateline' and 'Breakfast' archives on http://www.abc.net.au, and see Four Corners, 'Tracking the Intervention', broadcast on 5/11/2007, available at http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2007/s2079819.htm, For analysis of and critical responses to the National Emergency, see CitationAltman and Hinkson, and CitationLangton. 24. Pearson used the emotive figure of 'the child huddled in the corner' in an interview with Fran Kelley on Radio National Breakfast, 20 June 2007, at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/breakfast/stories/2007/1956365.htm - 6k - [ html ] - 20 Jun 2007. Tom Calma responded on the same show the following day: www.abc.net.au/rn/breakfast/stories/2007/1956365.htm - 6k - [ html ] - 21 Jun 2007. The figure of the vulnerable child has been taken up by conservative commentators such as The Australian columnist Janet Albrechtson to defend the government intervention plan against charges of 'paternalism' and 'racial discrimination'. 25. I would like to thank Sue Andrews for drawing this article to my attention. 26. Three months later, in an article discussing Howard's shock announcement that, if re-elected, he would hold a referendum to recognise Indigenous Australians in a preamble to the Constitution, The Australian printed the photograph from which the figure of Howard holding the child was cropped. In the photograph, taken in 2005, Howard is visiting a Northern Territory community, and is surrounded by children of all ages. 27. At the October 13, 2007 opening of the 'Culture Warriors' Indigenous art exhibit at the National Gallery of Australia, artist Vernon Ah Kee wore a black T-shirt which read: "I do not bash women": In his talk, he objected to the government's discourse on Northern Territory communities, which positioned all Indigenous men as rapists, paedophiles, alcoholics and wife-beaters. Author's personal observation. 28. In the article accompanying the image, the journalist comments that Judy Atkinson "knows the self-perpetuating nature of the problem [of sexual abuse]. She herself, a Jiman woman from Central Queensland, was sexually abused as a child by a [white?] church official". This important detail reminds readers that perpetrators use positions of authority to gain access to children, and come from outside as well as within Indigenous communities. 29. In an essay on Indigenous male violence, CitationGreer (2008) argues that it is important to treat the 'underlying pathology'. Also see her interview with Fran Kelly on Radio National Breakfast, August 14, 2008: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/breakfast/stories/2008/2334875.htm