Memory, “Rememory,” Duppies, and Time

ABSTRACT

How do we negotiate time in the present and hold hope for the future, when the literature of your history, of ancestral traumas housed, unmetabolized, in our bodies, has not as yet been narrated into consciousness? What mediating factors might enable us to negotiate historical and recent loss and, furthermore, facilitate mourning? In this essay, I consider the initial and continued impact on me of first listening to, then re-reading, Adrienne Harris’ evocative presentation, and later publication of, “You Must Remember This” (2009). These revived experiences shepherded me into reflecting spaces, particularly regarding the significance of ghosts, or duppies, as they are referenced in Jamaican culture. Are duppies, in the cultural collective, empowered as links and potential mediators between past and present – as keepers of ancestral secrets that, if newly learned, or “rememoried,” might facilitate subjective and relational transformation? In this regard, the voices of Toni Morrison and Stewart Hall offer contemplative possibilities.

This article is referred to by:

Après Coup of “You Must Remember This”

It was my distinct honor to sit in that Toronto ballroom where Adrienne Harris presented an earlier version of this paper. And, as I again engage her work, I am transported into the very experience I had then, of being read – seen into – of having long dormant memories called up – memories profoundly linked to my recently lost mother, whose enduring, unmourned, sadness for the tragic loss of her young husband, when I was still in infancy, has all my life been my internalized, unmetabolized companion, assiduous in its tailoring of my I: of what, that is, defined “me,” and what “not me.” These experiences inform my particular engagement with this essay, with specific focus on time, and on memory. It is important, also, that I locate myself in cultural context: I write from the perspective of a Jamaican migrant to the U.S., where my identity became immediately equated with race. But my Jamaican-ness remains foremost in my experience as a cultural being. In my growing-up years, “duppies” (ghosts), were a given and critical aspect of our daily lives. Stories about duppies appearing unexpectedly were told, especially in the dark of night, as a way, on the surface, at least, for grownups to “enlist” aid in securing their children’s good behavior. But, very importantly, duppies also afforded linkage between past and present. They were time travelers, these duppies, who knew all things upon this earth, and were, thus, imbued with the power to shape, and to change the lives of the living. My child mind was as terrified of duppies as it was mesmerized by their possibilities, by their realities, their “realness.”

What was my fascination? Afterwardness, Harris (2009) proposes, “evokes the paradox in temporal experience, the sense of being in more than one time zone, of being haunted … Traumatic states are lived in double time … Trauma is simultaneously in the past and about to happen” (p. 12). I could not have named it then, of course, but my child body knew it well. Something about an entity imbued with power to bend time, to twist its presence and its trajectory into the future, back to its past and again into its present and its trajectory into the future, captivated my developing selfhood. And, in my very complicated experience in the ballroom during Harris’ presentation, and now, in my second reading of her published paper, Afterwardness embedded itself, unbidden, into my now; and, as I now “rememory” and engage the fullness of my existence in, and across, time, and space, I am less shamed by my ghostly companions – of having them at all - including my very real rememberances in that ballroom scenario, of my father’s visiting footsteps (confirmed in real time by my mother) on the floorboards of our drawing room. I was three years old then – afraid, but wishing to see the form of my Daddy, who existed only in my imagination and in my longings.

Jamaican duppies are endemic to our cultural identity. What narratives, in our historically colonized minds, do we imagine are integral to the condition of being a ghost – our ghost? American author, Toni Morrison (1984), her focus turned more broadly toward cultural memory, writes that, “[m]emory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was – that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way” (1984, pp. 385, italics added). Might our fascination with ghosts represent, paradoxically, unconscious, yet deliberate, strivings toward connections with ancestral foundations from which, in geography and in name, we were torn in epic acts of evil and imposed trauma, with no safe place where to lay our burdens from loss and pain, no safe place of weeping for the deadness of our new, enslaved, beginnings? An unconscious element of omnipotent control is implied in these “deliberate” strivings. However, even at this wider cultural level, is the experience of omnipotence sufficient to effect transformation? As Harris (2009) makes clear, omnipotence is “a brilliant and always partially doomed strategy, leaving much unmetabolized and therefore … much that is ungrieved” (p. 9). Still, if our duppies are our transcendental, umbilical connections to a history lived as unmetabolized loss, might they, in our unconscious, play an important, mediating, role, as elements in and of themselves, with which to re-negotiating time, and memory, and, therefore, to effect transformation? Duppies as mediating forces? Though he did not address ghosts directly, some validation of this conjecture might be gleaned from the writings of Jamaican British sociologist, Stuart Hall (1990). Hall addresses the mechanisms in culture that promoted Jamaicans’ coming into knowledge of ourselves as raced, formerly enslaved, and descendants of Africa:

This profound cultural discovery … was not, and could not be, made directly, without “mediation” (my italics). It could only be made through the impact on popular life of the post-colonial revolution, the civil rights struggles, the culture of Rastafarianism, and the music of reggae – the metaphors, the figures, or signifiers of a new construction of “Jamaican-ness” … this is Africa, as we might say, necessarily “deferred” - as a spiritual, cultural, and political metaphor (p. 231).

How do we reimagine and reshape the past in our present if we do not know it? On this, there is relevance in, and much insight to be harvested from, Tony Morrison’s analysis of time and memory Listen to Sethe’s response to her daughter, Denver, who has just caught a glimpse of her mother’s historical trauma, rendered present in the ghostly form of Sethe’s murdered daughter, Beloved, (Morrison, 1987/2004, pp. 43–44), who appears to be praying next to Sethe:

“What were you talking about?” Denver inquires.

“I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. … Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. … But it’s not. … Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. … ”

“Can other people see it?”

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. … ”

“If it’s still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies.”

“Nothing ever does.”

Sethe reorients us as to the dynamic nature of time and “rememory.” Harris, too (2009), discusses the dynamics of afterwardness, Beautifully, and powerfully, she offers that, “[t]he reorganizing of temporality can jumpstart mourning, or in the opening of psychic space that arises in mourning, temporality and history are reordered” (p. 13). Does Sethe mourn? The final scene is revelatory. In a moment of tenderness, she sits with Paul D who, wanting “to put his story next to hers” (p. 322) declares, “Sethe, me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow” (p. 322).

A final observation: If, as Morrison proposes, “nothing ever does” die, this suggests that the divisive character of our current socio-political environment is constituted of dissociated and displaced traumas of American history that have long taken up residence within us and lived there, unmetabolized, and fueling our perceptions of ourselves and of the different Other. How can we, psychoanalysts, engage with our fellow citizens to ameliorate shame? Are our theories on attachment and trauma, on transference, countertransference, and enactments applicable to this moment? I do not have all answers. But, since I hope, or more importantly, believe that we must act, I thought I would ask. “We [all] need some kind of tomorrow.”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cleonie White

Cleonie White, Ph.D., is faculty and supervisor at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology. She is Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor at New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She sits on the Editorial Board member of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and is an Associate Board member of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. A co-founder of the Study Group on Race and Psychoanalysis at the White Institute, Dr White is also a member of Black Psychoanalysts Speak and was a participant in the film, “Black Psychoanalysts Speak”. Her writing and publications are in the areas of trauma and dissociation, race, class, the immigrant/foreigner Other, identity, and creativity in psychoanalysis. Dr White maintains a private practice in NYC.