Remembering/forgetting hunger: towards an understanding of famine memorialisation

Abstract

Although famines have historically claimed millions of lives, they are rarely publicly remembered through monuments, commemorative events or museums. This article investigates the apparent silence around famine memory by asking if there is something about famines that makes them less ‘commemorable’ than other mass-atrocities, and in which circumstances famines become the object of public memorialisation. Bringing together a rather fragmented literature on famine memory, the article outlines seven ways that famine memorialisation is impeded or made possible. First, it draws attention to the divisiveness of famines and their lack of clearly defined heroes and perpetrators. Second, shame and culpability shape how individuals and states talk – or keep quiet – about hunger victims. Third, earlier commemorative traditions and other traumatic events can inspire or crowd out famine memory. Fourth, for famines to be officially remembered, a break with the past tends to be necessary. The article also, fifth, discusses how famine memory can be used to construct national unity, or, sixth, instrumentalised in domestic and international politics. Finally, it highlights the role of activism and memory projects from below. While famines may not easily lend themselves to public commemoration, political contestation, nation-building or civil society initiatives can enable their memorialisation.

Keywords:

• famine memorialisation
• memorials
• silence
• nation-building
• shame
• violence

Introduction

Between the high-rise buildings of southern Manhattan, people can pay a visit to a somewhat unexpected memorial. Being one of a myriad of monuments that nowadays dot urban landscapes, the Irish Hunger Memorial is shaped as a half-acre elevated piece of land. It takes its visitors on a path through a recreated slice of Irish countryside, complete with an original 1800s stone cottage and native grasses and wildflowers. Since its inauguration in 2002, the monument has honoured the around one million who died in the 1845–1852 Great Famine, while highlighting the history of Irish immigration – ships from Ireland once landed close to where the memorial now stands – and linking Ireland’s historical trauma to contemporary global hunger (Mark-Fitzgerald 2013, 257ff). It is not only its design that is exceptional but also the fact that the monument commemorates victims of hunger, rather than more spectacular deaths caused by war or terror.

Public commemoration of traumatic events has a long tradition, and difficult pasts have increasingly come to be seen as important parts of a society’s cultural heritage (Logan and Reeves 2009; Macdonald 2013). However, although famines have claimed the lives of unfathomable numbers of people, they are rarely the objects of official memorialisation (de Waal 2018b, 24; see also al-Qattan 2014; Yang 2012a). The piece of Irish land in New York City and the numerous monuments dedicated to the Great Irish Famine are an exception to the silence that otherwise surrounds historical hunger crises, as are memorials to the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine. Other major events of mass-starvation remain largely absent in public or state-led commemorative efforts. The perhaps most striking example is China’s Great Famine of 1959–1961, which with its 35–42 million deaths is believed to be the world’s deadliest famine ever (Weigelin-Schwiedrzik 2003, 41). Likewise, more recent cases of mass-starvation in countries like Ethiopia, South Sudan and Somalia have not been the focus of public commemoration.

The memorialisation of famines – or the lack thereof – illustrates how, often, certain victims of atrocities are recognised and collectively commemorated while others are written out of the official narratives of the past. It is widely recognised that political actors use the memory of violence, loss and victory selectively for political purposes (Kubik and Bernhard 2014; Malinova 2021; Mink and Neumayer 2013; McDowell, Braniff, and Graham 2014). When it comes to the victims of large-scale, and often human-made, hunger crises, the lack of widespread and public memorialisation except in a few cases, again raises questions about what suffering and loss count and which lives are grievable (cf. Butler 2004, 34). Such questions are even more urgent as we witness an increase in hunger globally and a mounting risk of new famines (FAO et al. 2022).

This article aims to analyse the obstacles to, and the circumstances that enable, public memorialisation of famines. The first section sets the context by conceptualising famines as violence, discussing memory work and describing the research process and material. The main part of the article is organised around seven themes. The first three discuss factors that tend to make famine memorialisation difficult: narrative challenges, shame and competing traumas. The final four focus on circumstances that nevertheless make memorialisation of hunger possible: a break with the past; nation-building; the instrumentalisation of the past in domestic and foreign politics; and, finally, memory activism and initiatives ‘from below’.

The article contributes new knowledge by bringing together an otherwise fragmented literature on how societies remember famines and by constructing a framework which helps us understand why and when famine atrocities are publicly remembered – or not. So far, scholarly work on famine memory has mostly taken the form of single case studies (for exceptions, see Wemheuer 2009; de Waal 2018a; Richter 2020; Corporaal and de Zwarte 2022), with an overwhelming focus on Ireland and Ukraine. This article is a first attempt to systematically, and with a global perspective, inquires into what hinders and enables the memorialisation of famine violence. It contributes to scholarship on famine memory and to efforts to better understand memorialisation – or forgetting – of atrocities that have hitherto been marginalised in both public commemorative efforts and academic research (see Rubin 2019). Ultimately, knowing more about why and how starvation is remembered, or silenced, may help us to more constructively engage both with the discourses around and real problems of present-day hunger crises.

The silent violence of hunger: understanding famine memorialisation

Hunger has caused hardship and loss to human societies since time immemorial, and continues to do so today, not least in the wake of armed conflicts, a global pandemic, expanding authoritarianism and climate change (FAO et al. 2022). In terms of death counts and suffering, famines have been – historically and more recently – of a similar or greater magnitude than war, terror and genocide atrocities. Like political violence, famines are human-made, i.e. caused by people’s actions – or lack of actions (Tyner 2018; de Waal 2018b). Commenting on the upsurge of large-scale starvation since 2017, de Waal noticed that ‘[i]t is the readiness to see human lives as expendable in pursuit of other political and military goals that is the common factor in the resurgence of famine’ (de Waal 2018a, 7).

This article understands famines as a type of violence or mass-atrocity. One reason is that they kill and harm people to such a large extent. If we only consider violence to be intentional acts by identifiable actors, we obscure the many ways in which people are impaired by their structural position or by deeds (or passivity) that may be unintentional, and where the causal chain between perpetrator and victim is difficult to trace (cf. Galtung 1969; Tyner 2018). By conceptualising famines as violence, we highlight their preventability and the responsibility of power-holders, while also stressing that famine victims are as worthy of public grieving as victims of other forms of mass-violence.

Interestingly, the ‘forgetting’ of famines takes place during an ongoing memory boom, which over the last decades has brought increased attention to the role of ‘difficult heritage’ for national identity, tourism and economic development (e.g. Macdonald 2013; Logan and Reeves 2009). The intense commemoration of the Great Irish Famine at its 150th anniversary in the 1990s (unlike at its 100th) may be interpreted as riding on – and contributing to – this memorialisation wave (see Ó Gráda 2001). Most historical famines, however, have not been rescued from oblivion. Inevitably, what societies remember tells us more about the present than about the past. As Trouillot (1995, 16) writes: ‘in no way can we assume a simple correlation between the magnitude of events as they happened and their relevance for the generations that inherit them through history’.

What past events end up being officially memorialised and how is determined by a messy and infinite process of memory making, shaped by various actors and by structural ­constraints. Irwin-Zarecka (1994, 13) notes that ‘to secure a presence for the past demands work – ‘memory work’ – whether it is writing a book, filming a documentary or erecting a monument’. Memory work requires resources and is thus closely related to power. Which events, places and heroes that are deemed worthy of honour and remembrance may be contested and shift over time (Trouillot 1995). Since the rise of the nation-state, traumatic pasts have been key ingredients for the construction of the ‘imagined communities’ of nations (Anderson 1983; Malinova 2021). Certain historical narratives can be instrumentalised by power holders, but dominant narratives are also reinterpreted and challenged by memory activists or everyday practices ‘from below’ (Gutman and Wüstenberg 2022).

Remembering and forgetting are closely connected, for individuals and societies (Turner 2006; Edkins 2003). Connerton (2008) argues that forgetting can have multiple purposes. It can take the form of ‘repressive erasure’, but it may also help victims of conflict and trauma to live together peacefully. Similarly, Mannergren Selimovic (2020) shows how silences after violence can be both disabling and enabling; they can result from a lack of power or freedom to speak or serve as coping strategies for the victimised.

This article is a product of several years of exploratory research aiming to understand when, why and how famine violence is publicly remembered – or forgotten. A major task has been to gain an overview of what is known about famine memorialisation; where and when it happens, who takes the initiative, and what forms it takes. Apart from the well-­developed scholarship on the Great Irish Famine, covering its memorialisation through museums, monuments, literature, folk memory, etc., the literature on famine memorialisation is relatively limited. Consequently, my strategy was to try to find all possible scholarly work on this topic. I used databases and search engines,¹ but also reference lists and conversations with other researchers. As the ambition was to conceptualise and gain an overview of famine memorialisation, I confined my study to secondary sources available in English. For each famine, there is potentially an abundance of local language literature, primary sources, persons to interview and, in some cases, monuments or other markers to visit and events to observe. I leave that for scholars carrying out in-depth case studies. For transparency and further readings, the works consulted are listed in an appendix to this article (See supplementary material).

This literature gave me an understanding of the memory work carried out to publicly remember famines, but also – indirectly – the lack of such work. I began seeing patterns and sketched out ideas of the apparent obstacles and enablers of famine memorialisation. To develop those thoughts, I turned to conceptual literature, primarily from the memory studies field. Inspired by Connerton’s influential piece on forgetting, I organised my ideas into seven themes. For lack of space, I do not reference all texts that informed each theme; instead, I selected those that provided clear and well-formulated illustrations. The framework that I developed should not be understood as the firm and final result of a rigidly structured and replicable study, but as a suggestion of how we can understand the obstacles to and possibilities for famine memorialisation more systematically. I invite other scholars to build on, develop and challenge my ideas in the continued pursuit of knowledge about this topic.

The focus of this article is on famines and other instances of starvation where numerous people have died of hunger or related causes during a specific time period (cf. de Waal 2018b, 17). Endemic hunger – although clearly relevant to the discussion of which lives are grievable – thus falls outside the scope of this study. To what extent and how disasters involving sudden death or destruction due to accidents or forces of nature are publicly remembered is also a question worth further investigation elsewhere.

While memorialisation can be broadly defined as something that is done – privately or in public – to make people remember something or someone (Irwin-Zarecka 1994), I focus on public memorialisation. This embraces monuments, museums and memorial events, but also less obvious commemorative forms like documentation, artwork, publications and public debates (cf. Kirschenbaum 2006). Memorialisation can be done by state and non-state actors, locally, nationally and globally.

Having established some of the points of departure, we now turn to the first theme and a discussion of how narrative challenges can restrain famine memorialisation.

Narrative challenges

Memorialisation selectively draws on events in the past to construct stories or representations of what happened. While the past is shaped and renegotiated in the present, what actually happened (or is believed to have happened) makes up the historical ‘material’ used for this construction. ‘[T]he nature and structure of ‘available pasts’ constrain commemorative opportunities in the present’, Brubaker and Feischmidt (2002, 740–41) conclude from their study of commemoration politics in Eastern Europe. If there is too little of ‘the stuff of which myths are easily made’, they contend (2002, 737), it is more difficult to effectively reshape and use the past for contemporary needs. Ochman (2020, 179), investigating how Poland recently recovered the memory of the 1920 Battle of Warsaw, finds that memory entrepreneurs had a ‘rich historical material to work with’; the battle offered ‘visionary commanders-in-chief, heroic teenage volunteers, inspirational priests and ancient enemies’. Certain historical occurrences are thus, it seems, better suited than others for dramatisation, veneration and commemoration.

Regarding Ireland, Mark-Fitzgerald remarked that ‘the imprecise nature of the Famine’ and ‘its lack of central characters, linear narrative, heroic episodes or key dates’ made it rather unfitting for commemoration (Mark-Fitzgerald 2013, 61). Violence, which is structural, rather than direct, can indeed be ‘imprecise’ (cf. Galtung 1969), and famines often lack a clear start and finishing point (Ó Gráda 1999, 37).

Another challenge is their lack of heroes. Starvation is ‘uniquely demoralising […] for its victims’, as de Waal (2018a, 8) argues, adding that ‘the ultimate perpetrators are remote, while the indignities and cruelties are intimate and immediate’. According to Ó Gráda (2001, 129), ‘[t]he charity and solidarity that bind communities together are strengthened for a while, but break as the crisis worsens: hospitality declines, crime and cruelty increase, as do child abandonment and infanticide’. During famine, many people are both victims and victimisers, as hunger forces them to make painful choices about who to feed and who to let die. Otherwise unacceptable behaviour like begging, theft and prostitution may become unavoidable. Those who survive are thus often anything but heroes. Ó Gráda (2001, 121) emphasises that ‘the impact of the Irish Famine was unequal and divisive. A disaster that struck the poor more than the rich and that pitted neighbour against neighbour is hardly promising material for a communal, collective memory’. Survivors of China’s Great Famine echo this, stating that ‘everybody took care of himself’ and ‘everybody was a thief’ (Wemheuer 2010, 191; Xun 2013, 271). Similarly, stealing, abandoning those in need and other selfless acts during periods of hunger have led to silence among survivors of the 1944–45 famine in Vietnam and Mozambique’s famines in the 1980s and 90s (MacLean 2016; Igreja 2019).

When war and famine happen simultaneously, war heroes tend to be commemorated and those fighting hunger forgotten. In Lebanon, during the First World War, around 200,000 starved to death (Akerman 2018). However, in the public narratives of the war, ‘starvation plays second fiddle to the resistance and tragic execution [in 1916] of the “martyrs”’, who unlike the famine victims are publicly mourned (al-Qattan 2014, 722). ‘[F]amine itself resists or lacks the coherence of narrativity’, al-Qattan (2014, 731) contends. The fact that war tends to be considered something out of the ordinary, while hunger is in many parts of the world ‘normal’ and to be expected, may also play a role here (see Åkesson and Månsson 2024).

Kelleher, in her work on Ireland’s Great Famine and India’s 1943 Bengal Famine, shows that famine victims depicted in literature tend to be women; the mother failing to feed a starving child is a recurring image. This ‘feminization of famine’ is also manifested in the ways emaciated, often naked, female bodies are scrutinised in famine accounts. Such gendered representations often attribute passivity to the famine victim and depoliticise hunger (Kelleher 1997). The fact that death comes slowly and in private, rather than suddenly, spectacularly and in public spaces, also limits the ‘stuff’ available for constructing captivating stories for commemorative purposes. Is mass-starvation, thus, a type of violence that is more prone to silencing? The central role of famines in Ireland and Ukraine’s national narratives suggests that the lack of linearity, blurred lines between victims and victimisers and absence of heroes can be overcome. In Ireland, the emigrant embarking on the hazardous trip to successfully arrive and settle in North America is one hero who figures in famine memorialisation, while the landlord who evicts the hungry poor is framed as the villain (see Mark-Fitzgerald 2013; Kelleher 2002; Ó Gráda 2001). Literature on the famine that killed around 200,000 in Finland in the 1860s stresses the courageousness of the Finns, who battled against hunger and deprivation. In 1892, history-writer Meurman depicted the famine victims as ‘the nation’s martyrs, almost equal to soldiers who have fought and died for their country’, Forsberg (2017, 46) notes. The Siege of Leningrad, which resulted in at least 670,000 deaths – many of starvation – during World War II, did not lack drama. The blockade made ‘a compelling story of steadfastness and heroism’, and efforts to preserve its memory were on their way already before the siege ended (Kirschenbaum 2006, 1, 8).

Moreover, the stories and photos of emaciated children, mass graves and dry landscapes circulated by media and humanitarian organisations (see Moeller 1999) indicate that famines do not necessarily lack attention-grabbing images, symbols and tales. In some famines the causes of suffering are immediate, deliberate and easily discernible, as during a blockade or when authorities confiscated grain from starving peasants in China and Ukraine (Yang 2012a; Applebaum 2017). While wars too can lack linearity, be divisive and demoralising, processes of constructing stories of heroism and victimhood, good and evil, are central to the conflict logic (Jabri 1996).

To summarise, while the nature of famine violence gives us some clues as to why famines are rarely publicly memorialised, their impreciseness and blurred lines between victims and victimiser can apparently be surmounted. We now turn to another obstacle to famine memorialisation: shame and culpability.

Shame and culpability

One of the ways of forgetting that Connerton outlines is ‘forgetting as humiliated silence’, a ‘collusive silence brought on by a particular kind of collective shame’. He takes the example of Germany after World War II where the demolition of cities and lives by the Allied Forces became a taboo that made people ‘fall silent out of terror or panic or because they can find no appropriate words’ (Connerton 2008, 67, 68). Humiliated silence can be the result of repression, but also an attempt at survival. Shame can muzzle the experiences of those defeated in war – and may also be behind the relative lack of memorialisation of famine victims.

Walker discusses the link between shame and poverty, arguing that this understudied emotion is crucial to the dynamics contributing to inequality. Across the world, wealth and spending are important signs of success, while poverty tends to be constructed as a personal failure. Not having enough money – or food – is hence closely linked to shame (Walker 2014, 43, 48) and can make poor – and hungry – people keep up a face of not being deprived to maintain their dignity (Howard and Millard 1997; Walker 2014). ‘I never want to remember the famine years’, one survivor of China’s Great Famine told researcher Xun (2013, 275, 277), while another declared that ‘there was no need for me to talk of those dreadful years’. Xun interpreted this as an attempt to uphold dignity. In Vietnam, for many witnesses to the Great Famine 1944–45, which killed approximately two million people, ‘their survival cannot be separated from intense personal feelings of shame’, often linked to the desperate acts they had committed to evade death (MacLean 2016, 212). Hence, two types of shame may deter people from being outspoken about famine violence: the humiliation linked to poverty and the shame connected to immoral behaviour.

While the sense of failure or guilt work at a personal level, it may also shape reactions at a collective and institutional level. Political leaders may want to mute famine memory to preserve dignity for the nation or state. ‘When facing negative events in the past, there are only three honourable roles for the national collective to assume’, Assmann (2014, 553) argues: ‘that of the victor who has overcome the evil; that of the resistor who has heroically fought the evil; and that of the victim who has passively suffered the evil. Everything else […] is conveniently forgotten’.

During contemporary food crises, not only a lack of data but also unwilling power holders makes international declarations of famine late and rare (see de Waal 2021). The 1984–85 famine in Ethiopia triggered a massive international humanitarian campaign and earned the country a long-lasting image as a symbol of starvation. This did not sit well with Ethiopia’s national identity as a major strategic power in the Horn of Africa, with a glorious history of upholding its independence during colonial times (see Finneran 2008). During the 2021 hunger crisis in the Tigray region, the famine label was avoided for political reasons (de Waal 2021). Humiliation and state sovereignty seem to be closely interlinked, as foreign interventions – military or humanitarian – may undermine both the independence and national pride of the state intervened upon (cf. Koschut 2020). One of the causes of the many hunger deaths in Finland in the 1860s was the ruling elite’s unwillingness to request assistance from foreign countries, as that would amount to a loss of sovereignty (Forsberg 2017, 42).

The euphemisms used when referring to famines in many countries can also be read as attempts by power holders to avert shame and responsibility. In China, the Great Leap Forward famine was referred to as ‘the three years of economic difficulty’ (Zhao and Liu 2015, 44) – a great understatement, given the millions who perished. In North Korea in the 1990s, up to two million people starved to death in what was named ‘the march of suffering’, the ‘economic downturn’ or ‘food downturn’ (Fahy 2012, 231, 232). That ordinary citizens and local leaders were not permitted to talk about hunger and hunger deaths in these authoritarian societies further worsened the crises (see also Manning and Wemheuer 2011, 16).

That hunger is constructed as shameful can hence discourage famine memorialisation as ordinary famine survivors and power holders wish to uphold their own and the nation’s dignity. Next, we discuss how other atrocities and a culture of commemoration can hinder – or enable – famine memorialisation.

Memory culture and competing traumas

As shown, narrative challenges, shame and culpability work towards the silencing of famine memory. However, memorialisation of past traumas is also shaped by relations to other historical events, commemorations and silences. Societies draw on a ‘historically formed repertoire of cultural (mnemonic) forms and themes’, i.e. a collection of official and unofficial memories of the past that appear, for instance, in school textbooks, films, music, public ceremonies and monuments, and from which mnemonic actors construct their narratives (Kubik and Bernhard 2014, 22). Official memorialisation is inspired by, co-opts or takes legitimacy from these earlier recollections. Olick, in his analysis of how German political leaders handled the memory of the end of World War II, shows that memorial events, to a large extent, built on and reacted to earlier commemorations. They provide terms, styles and expectations for subsequent commemorations; in fact, the ‘memory of commemoration’ helps determine what is officially remembered and how (Olick 1999).

To understand whether and how famines are memorialised, we thus need to consider other traumas. Famine memory, apparently, can take inspiration from the commemoration of other atrocities, but it may also be crowded out by it. In Finland, more recent national traumas have shaped the general commemorative culture. The 150th anniversary of the 1860s famine was marginalised by the 100th anniversary of national independence and the 1918 civil war (Kraatari and Newby 2018, 119). In Ireland, 1945 marked the centennial of the Great Famine, but also of the death of famous writer and nationalist Thomas Davies. The Davies commemoration took centre stage, while the famine received limited attention (Crowley 2007, 60).

In many societies, mass-starvation is only one of many, often entangled, tragedies endured by the population. China has been named a ‘land of famines’. Before the mass-starvation caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward policies 1959–1961, the country had gone through numerous famines with death rates in the millions (Manning and Wemheuer 2011, 3). Unlike these famines, other traumatic events are officially commemorated with museums, memorial days and monuments, e.g. the 1937–1945 Japan-China war and major earthquakes (see Denton 2015). This ‘layering’ of different memories at a societal level is also mirrored in the experiences of individual victims. Based on interviews with witnesses to the Great Famine, Wemheuer notices that ‘[i]n the memories of the villagers, the famine is not an isolated event, but often linked to other disastrous experiences such as the Cultural Revolution or the corruption of today (2010, 194).

That many famines occur in a context of war and repression makes it difficult – if not impossible – to disentangle them from other types of violence. This also complicates famine memorialisation. Many famine-affected countries, especially in the global South, have also suffered from – and continue to suffer from – war, terrorism, repression, natural hazards and new periods of severe hunger. That famines in Somalia, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere are not officially commemorated may hence be explained by a ‘crowding out’ and ‘mixing up’ of famine memory with memories of other mass-atrocities. This may also explain why the Irish famine has been extensively memorialised in the Republic of Ireland, but less so in Northern Ireland, where the Troubles received more attention (Holt and Mahoney 2020, 80; Mark-Fitzgerald 2013, 158).

While memories of other traumas can impede memorialisation of famines, they can also inspire it. Over the last decades, a global memory culture has developed, in which the memorialisation of difficult pasts is seen as necessary to avoid new mass-atrocities (cf. Assmann 2014). In particular, the Holocaust has emerged as a ‘cosmopolitan memory’; a trauma that defines not only the history and identity of the Jews but also of humanity at large (Levy and Sznaider 2002). The ‘memory of commemoration’ thus has both national and transnational reference points. Rothberg (2009, 3) proposes the concept ‘multidirectional memory’ to capture how memory is ‘subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing’. For famine memorialisation, this cross-referencing is evident in the connections made to the Holocaust in Ukraine’s use of the term Holodomor (Himka 2013, 419–21; Dietsch 2006), and by those seeking to revive the memory of mass-starvation in Persia in the 1910s (Edalati and Imani 2024). Kazakhstan’s 1930s famine has been largely unpoliticised and silenced, despite its death toll of around two million (Sharipova et al. 2020, 1). However, recent interest in commemorating it is inspired by famine memorialisation in Ukraine (Richter 2020, 488).

Having concluded that famine memorialisation is shaped – and sometimes overshadowed – by the memory of other traumatic events, we now turn to an important precondition for public famine memorialisation: a break with the past.

Breaking with the past

Often, memorialisation is enabled by, or framed as, a break with the past. In his modern history of hunger, Vernon (2007) traces a discursive shift during the 1900s where hunger ceases to be treated as an inevitable fate or fault of the poor themselves, to instead be perceived as a failure unbefitting of modern society. Placing hunger outside the developed self may also enable its commemoration. After the Great Famine, poverty and hunger continued to plague Ireland for over a century. The 1990s commemoration boom came after drastic economic developments that made Ireland a ‘Celtic Tiger’ and hunger a tragedy of the past (Mark-Fitzgerald 2013, 62). Commemorations repeatedly stressed Ireland’s identity as a developed country, able to both identify with and assist starving countries in the global South. In Lebanon, al-Qattan (2014, 723) points to the lack of a clear end to starvation as one reason why the First World War famine was excluded from public memory. Also in Sub-Saharan Africa, the famines of the last decades occurred in places where hunger is not a traumatic past to memorialise, but a present reality and future threat.

In China too, the continued hardships that famine survivors faced may have contributed to silencing the past. One of Xun’s interviewees expressed, ‘For me, the famine only ended in the 1980s. It was only then that I stopped feeling hungry’ (Xun 2013, 279). While China has largely left extreme poverty behind, the Chinese Communist Party remains in power, making state-led memorialisation unthinkable. As Yang (2012b) commented: ‘a full exposure of the Great Famine could undermine the legitimacy of a ruling party that clings to the political legacy of Mao, even though that legacy, a totalitarian Communist system, was the root cause of the famine’.

Indeed, regime change often paves the way for memorialisation of difficult pasts (Malinova 2021). New ruling elites can reclaim lost national heritage to build legitimacy for themselves. The period just after a transfer of power is thus often characterised by ‘intensive memory production’ (Ochman 2020, 177). An obvious example is Ukraine, which, after independence in 1991, revived its suppressed history. The 1932–33 famine became central to Ukraine’s national identity and disassociation from the communist past (Dietsch 2006; Kas’ianov 2011; Törnquist-Plewa and Yurchuk 2019). In India, recent debates over Churchill’s responsibility for the Bengal famine contribute to the re-interpretation of, and break with, the colonial past (see Mukerjee 2011).

Huff suggests that the 1940s famine in Java was not politicised – or memorialised – because Indonesian leaders still in power were implicated. In Vietnam, in contrast, Ho Chi Minh used the Great Famine to mobilise grassroots for his communist revolution. Once in power, he drew on the famine experience to build legitimacy for his rule (Huff 2020, 651, 653; see also MacLean 2016).

Finally, the passing of time itself may enable memorialisation. As the generation who lived through – and was responsible for – a mass-atrocity passes away, memory-making can become possible. Connerton (2008) notes that humiliated silence may be broken by subsequent generations who are not shamed but eager to claim a difficult heritage as theirs. The long delay in putting up memorials in Ireland, where the first famine monument was erected 115 years after the famine (Mark-Fitzgerald 2013, 60), and Lebanon, which got its first famine monument 100 years after the famine (Akerman 2018) – points to this temporal dimension.

Leaving the past behind through economic development, regime change or the passage of time can, thus, enable famine memorialisation; a lack of such breaks risks hampering it.

Building the nation, creating unity

Often, war victories, resistance against foreign occupation, ground-breaking declarations or newborn constitutions are historical reference points used when constructing and celebrating the nation (Turner 2006). Mass-hunger rarely figures prominently in national narratives and commemorative practices. However, when famines are given a prominent place, they tend to be framed as an experience of shared suffering, rather than as divisive and shameful. Although the Great Irish Famine certainly did not affect all Irish equally, memorialisation efforts picture it as a trauma endured by everyone. The use of a collective ‘we’ during the 1990s commemorations established a link between the famine victims and present-day Irish, who were urged to break the silence around their traumatic past (Ó Gráda 2001). In the many memorial efforts, complexities were smoothed over as all Irish were pictured as heirs of famine victims – while, in fact, famine victims were less likely to leave descendants than those who had taken advantage of the disaster (Mark-Fitzgerald 2013, 90; Ó Gráda 1999, 231).

Crowley has suggested that the mid-1990s commemorations were carried out in the pursuit of cultural stability in an Ireland going through rapid transformations. During that period, ‘the old certainties of Irish identity (Nationalism and Catholicism) ha[d] begun to unravel’, generating a need to construct new memories (Crowley 2007, 66). The supposedly shared famine experience became central to the Irish collective identity in a globalised world. The need for historical continuity was also felt among descendants of Irish migrants to North America, something the many memorials erected in places where Irish migrants arrived or settled attest to. For many Irish-Americans, the Great Famine is ‘a creation story that both explains our presence in the new land and connects us to the old via a powerful sense of grievance’ (O’Neill quoted in Kelleher 2002, 267). That the famine marks the birth of the Irish diaspora is another simplification, however, as far from all Irish immigrated to America for that reason. Nonetheless, in the quest for a shared homeland-oriented identity, the famine works as a ‘chosen trauma’ (Crowley 2007, 65), which facilitates intergenerational transmission of identity.

Similarly, the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine, where Stalin’s collectivisation efforts and large-scale grain requisitions killed an estimated four million people, is central to Ukraine’s nation-building project. Here too, the official narrative erases complexities by picturing all Ukrainians as victims and silencing the role of local implementers (Dietsch 2006, 221; Himka 2013, 425). Post-independence Ukraine made the famine a main symbol used to restore national unity (Kas’ianov 2011, 78). If Stalin’s totalitarianism ‘could be represented as the enemy of the Ukrainian people, the problems arising in the course of national and state ‘revival’ could be blamed on the past’, Kas’ianov (2011, 76) suggests. Introducing the term ‘Holodomor’ and campaigning for recognition of it as a genocide of the Ukrainian people further helped in ‘feeding the nation-project’s self-narrative of shared historical experience and victimization’, while also pointing to perpetrators, who could function as ‘inimical ‘others’ against whom the nation is constructed’ (Himka 2013, 428). However, as discussed in the next section, this unity was not without its discontent.

China, which lacked an external enemy on whom to blame its Great Famine, nevertheless attempted to handle famine memory in ways that preserved unity and harmony (Wemheuer 2010, 192). Rui (2024) shows how the central power blamed not only natural hazards but also local cadres, and thus managed to maintain the imagination of an undivided nation striving towards progress, threatened only by misbehaving and traitorous ‘others’ within (cf. Wemheuer 2010; Thaxton 2016, 26).

Finland’s famine in the 1860s has not been the object of state-led commemorative efforts, but it is incorporated into national narratives through textbooks, historiography, literature and newspapers as an ordeal that the Finnish people heroically endured. The famine has been pictured as the result of the cold climate, while the culpability of those in power has been glossed over. ‘[F]rost was a vivid symbol that connected the people to this particular land, the past with the present, and an event from the realm of private memory into a nationally framed myth conceived of as part of the national history’, Forsberg writes (2017, 44). The famine was presented as ‘the inevitable economic birth pains of a new nation’ (Kraatari and Newby 2018, 99). Hence, even though famines are far from unifying experiences as they happen, they can be constructed as such in hindsight, for nation-building purposes.

Instrumentalising the past in domestic and international politics

While the former section highlighted how the revival of a famine past could serve nation-building purposes, this section focuses on its use in political strategising and rivalries. Scholars have noted that elites tend to construct a version of history, which supports their ambitions to gain or hold power (Kubik and Bernhard 2014, 9). In fact, one important reason why certain historical events become collective memories is that they are made use of in oppositional politics (see Ochman 2020, 179).

In Ukraine, the revival of famine memory not only forged unity, but also became a vehicle for political contestation. With the Left dominating parliament in the 1990s, the opposition used the country’s totalitarian past to depict ‘the Left and a portion of the ruling political elite as heirs of Lenin and Stalin and blaming them for the sorry state of Ukraine both past and present’ (Kas’ianov 2011, 74). There were also regional divides: many people in southeastern Ukraine and Crimea – areas inhabited by many Russians – did not support an official narrative that pictured Stalin and the Soviet Union as villains (Kas’ianov 2011, 75). Memorialisation and genocide recognition efforts were intensified during periods of heightened political struggle (Kas’ianov 2011, 76, 80). Post-independence Kazakhstan, on the other hand, saw stable rule by a former first secretary of the communist party, who stifled any opposition. In a system with no political contestation, the Soviet past – including the famine – was not politicised (Richter 2020).

In Ukraine’s case, history was also instrumentalised in international politics. ‘Ukraine remembers, the world recognizes’ was the slogan of a still ongoing state-led campaign to gain international recognition of the famine as a genocide against Ukrainians (Kas’ianov 2011, 86). The genocide discourse can be understood as a strategic narrative, which draws a clear line between innocent victims and malevolent perpetrators, and links contemporary Russian threats against Ukraine to earlier atrocities. ‘[P]ositioning Ukraine collectively as a victim of genocide in the past would confer a sense of historical innocence on Ukraine as a country today, which could be translated into political capital in a geo-political struggle’, Irvin-Erickson (2017, 137) argues. The 2022 Russian invasion both overshadowed and revitalised the memory of the Holodomor. Kazakhstan, conversely, has had geopolitical and economic interests in maintaining good relations with Russia – an important reason why its political elite has hesitated to pursue famine memorialisation and genocide recognition (Richter 2020, 477; see also Kundakbayeva and Kassymova 2016).

Competition and conflict both domestically and internationally can hence politicise a famine past and encourage its memorialisation. So can initiatives ‘from below’, as discussed next.

Memory activism and local initiatives

Over the last few decades, we have seen ‘the erosion of the central authorities’ dominant position in constructing commemorative practices’, at least in many democracies (Ochman 2020, 177). This opens up for other actors to organise, push for or inspire public memorialisation. An example from Ireland illustrates how memory activists can organise and enable public famine memorialisation: In 1958, Jack Sorensen from Cork constructed a 16-metre steel cross and erected it at Carr’s Hill, which had been a poorly managed graveyard for famine victims during the 1800s. The illuminated cross could be seen from the city, and thus drew the despised and subsequently forgotten burial place ‘into public consciousness’ and challenged its ‘relegation to the fringes of social memory and care’ (Mark-Fitzgerald 2013, 111). Sorensen got help from only his friends and covered the modest costs for materials himself. His memory project was conceived and executed before the emergence of the discourse on the need to memorialise mass-atrocities. In 1997, however, the memorial was incorporated into the official efforts to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Great Famine, as local organisations renovated the site and put up two stones – one of which was dedicated to the memory of Sorensen himself (Mark-Fitzgerald 2013).

Many of Ireland’s, by now, hundreds of famine monuments were enabled by a combination of efforts by local enthusiasts and state-sponsored initiatives. The civil society organisation Action from Ireland (Afri) was highly influential in mobilising famine memory. In 1988, Afri organised its first ‘famine walk’ – an annual 18 km hike along a route that a group of starving people took in 1849 in a desperate attempt to secure relief. Afri also encouraged and shaped the Irish government’s massive memorialisation venture (Mark-Fitzgerald 2013, 70). Afri and other development organisations connected Ireland’s past of mass-starvation to solidarity with people affected by contemporary hunger – a discourse picked up by state representatives. As the memorialisation enthusiasm of the 1990s has subsided, Afri continues to hold its famine walks, linking the Irish famine experience to present-day concerns over climate change and social justice (Afri 2020).

In China, which lacks official famine commemorations, there are also memorialisation initiatives ‘from below’. In 2004, a local farmer in Henan province put up memorial stones naming the 71 villagers who died in the 1959 ‘food crisis’. ‘The reason I built the memorial stones is so that the young people in our village will know about what happened, and they will never follow the same path again’, the farmer, Yongkuan, told. ‘Some villagers helped me to build them. We paid for them out of our own pockets’ (quoted in Xun 2013, 274).

Other spaces for commemoration have emerged with the fast development of social media. Zhao and Liu (2015) argue that China’s microblogging service, Weibo, is a communicative sphere where people can share memories that are publicly suppressed or marginalised. A debate about the Great Leap Forward Famine started in 2012 when a known communist party journalist told his around 230,000 Weibo followers that very few people had starved to death during 1959–1961. This triggered an outburst of responses, where people contested the statement, referring to documents, government statistics, academic work, news reports, memoirs and stories from their own families. The controversy challenged the official labelling and silencing of the famine, while making information about it available. One Weibo user established an online monument to the Great Famine, which was, however, quickly taken down by Weibo (Zhao and Liu 2015, 46). The debate also spread to offline media, and people continued to collect names of famine victims to commemorate them.

Numerous publications also provide evidence of – and thus, to a certain extent, memorialise – China’s Great Famine. Zhi Liang’s widely read novel ‘A starving mountain village’ describes the sufferings and disarray in a village. One reader commented that ‘The three years of famine have always been buried alive in the tombs of the forgetfulness of history’, but with this novel, the author ‘is excavating these tombs of forgetfulness and tracing back the memories of our State and our nation, even though they are difficult memories’ (quoted in Weigelin-Schwiedrzik 2003, 54). Another influential book is Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone, a monument in itself, according to the author: ‘I intended my book to be a memorial to the 36 million victims, but also a literal tombstone, anticipating the ultimate demise of the totalitarian political system that caused the Great Famine. I was mindful of the risks in this endeavour: if something happens to me because I tried to preserve a truthful memory, then let the book stand as my tombstone, too’ (Yang 2012b).

In Lebanon, literature has also served as a space for remembering the horrors of the 1915–18 famine. When there are no monuments for the victims of the famine, al-Qattan (2014, 723) argues, food and the prominent place it has in literature about the hunger years constitute a lieu de memoir and a ‘metaphorical resting place’ for the famine victims. In 2018, a public memorial was erected for the famine; a ‘memory tree’, created by Yasan Halwani. The initiative came from a historian and a writer, who secured support from St Joseph’s University of Beirut, Lebanon’s Central Bank and the Municipality of Beirut (see Akerman 2018).

These examples point to the role of individual enthusiasts, local groups, historians, writers and artists in reviving and marking the memory of famine victims. Additionally, municipalities and the private sector can have an interest in famine heritage as a tourist opportunity. The mobilisation of difficult memories ‘from below’ can challenge official silences about famines and, under some circumstances, even help to alter the dominant approach to the past (cf. Malinova 2021, 5). This was the case when state actors in newly independent Ukraine picked up the narrative pursued by the diaspora in North America of the famine as genocide against the Ukrainian people (Dietsch 2006).

Conclusions

This article has argued that although famines can be understood as a type of mass-atrocities, many factors inhibit their public commemoration. It has pointed to the lack of clear start and end dates, the ‘unspectacular’ and ‘out of sight’ nature of famine violence, and the difficulty in distinguishing between victims and perpetrators. Humiliation, shame and culpability may also deter public commemoration, along with the perception that hunger is not an extraordinary event but a ‘normal’ condition. Moreover, other atrocities experienced by society may crowd out the memory of a famine.

However, these obstacles do not inevitably condemn famines to oblivion. As the examples of the Great Irish Famine and the Ukrainian Holodomor show, the silence can be broken. A rupture, or moving away, from the past appears to be important here, for instance, in the form of regime change or the erasure of widespread hunger. Under some circumstances, a famine past can be useful for leaders who wish to form national unity around a shared trauma, or who seek to instrumentalise history for oppositional politics. It is indeed possible to construct a narrative of past hunger that stresses collective victimhood and contrast it to the (presumed) accomplishments in the present. Leaders can compose a story of national pride and resilience in the face of famine, whether the hunger crisis was caused by an occupying power or the forces of nature, and thus overcome the shame connected with hunger. Initiatives by individuals and groups locally can challenge the official neglect of a famine past, while literature and social media provide alternative spaces for memorialisation. We may conclude that the nature and degree of the obstacles to memorialisation, combined with the opportunities available in each case and during different time periods, determine whether and how famines are publicly remembered.

I consider the framework developed in this article as tentative. Future research can fruitfully apply, reconsider and elaborate it as a whole, or further explore some of the identified obstacles and opportunities. Both comparative and in-depth case studies will be essential for advancing the famine memorialisation research agenda. Especially, more examples from the global South are needed to better understand the absence of famine memorialisation – as well as scholarly work about it – and what resources, political dynamics and initiatives enable it.

Another question to delve into regards the effects and meaning of famine memorialisation for individuals and societies. This article has departed from the idea that a silencing of famine memory is problematic. However, public commemoration efforts are not necessarily a trouble-free solution to the problem of invisibilisation of suffering. Memorialisation, too, can be divisive, captured by elites, or lead to re-traumatisation. When and how memorialisation of mass-starvation is helpful and to whom is hence worthy of further inquiry.

While this article has focussed on famines, there are numerous other types of atrocities that are often – but not always – excluded from public memorialisation. Death and suffering caused by disease, accidents, natural hazards or domestic violence are some examples. What factors hinder and facilitate their public commemoration is a question that still warrants investigation. Meanwhile, large-scale hunger remains a serious threat to people and societies around the world. How victims are remembered, and hunger crises are understood have implications for how responsibility is assigned and accountability sought – and, subsequently, for how we can prevent famines in the future.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the School of Global Studies (SGS) research group on Critical Heritage Studies, SGS’s publication workshop, the participants in the April 2021 workshop on Post-Famine Politics of Memory and Justice, as well as four anonymous reviewers for sharp, constructive and inspiring comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council under grant 2018-03770.

Notes on contributors

Camilla Orjuela

Camilla Orjuela is Professor of Peace and Development Research at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research has focussed on diaspora mobilisation, peace activism, identity politics, post-war reconstruction and reconciliation, famines, memory conflicts and transitional justice.

Notes

1 I used Scopus and Google Scholar, combining search words like memorialisation, commemoration, memory or memorial with famine, hunger or starvation, but also made searches related to specific famines.