Carol Bergman

When does memory begin? What memory is it that I seek? And where, on the thin border between memory and history, can I remember myself?

-Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces

I am writing this blog post as the results of the German election are tabulated. The ultra-right ADF did well; they and might have done well without the endorsement of America's ultra-right government. Even to use these words in relation to the American government is new, and it's a shock. Thankfully, the weather is warming, ever so slightly, but it is warming. Just to stand around in the sunshine with friends after a long walk and talk seems both healing and necessary. These prolonged conversations are essential for me right now and I must make time for them, not rush away, I tell myself. Reassurance surfaces: "Not every improvement made over the decades will be denounced or eviscerated," someone says. "How can it be when substantial changes are now so firmly embedded in our lives? We have changed, we cannot go back. So let us celebrate and consolidate what has been accomplished thus far," someone else says.

A portfolio of "progressive" accomplishment, what an interesting idea. 

My first contribution to the portfolio, an event in my neighborhood on Saturday, February 22:

It was still cold and icy underfoot, the sky clear and cloudless, as a small congregation of New Paltz citizens gathered to commemorate the lives of two slaves, Anthony and Susanna, who had lived in the cellar of a stone house, and "self-emancipated," meaning they had  tried to escape, and were recaptured. They had been purchased by the colonial settler, Louis DuBois in 1673, one of the first recorded purchase of slaves in Ulster County. Their spirits, and those of many other enslaved Africans, haunts Historic Huguenot Street, the surrounding village, and counties.  The descendants of the 12 "patentee" families still live here and have been slow to acknowledge that their wealth and status was built on the backs of slaves, or that the narrative of tours and signage should be updated. Changes have accrued slowly over the years, and then more rapidly  when the Dr. Margaret Wade-Lewis Black Cultural Center, in partnership with Historic Huguenot Street, initiated a respectful collaboration sharing historical research and co-sponsoring some events.

Up first on the stage, Kara Augustine, Director of Public Programming at Historic Huguenot Street. In the past, she said, if you walked from one end of the street to the other, you would not have known that slaves lived here. It was an inaccurate depiction of New Paltz history that required correction.  

I could hear a gasp as one or two onlookers seemed taken by surprise at the depth of acknowledgement in this admission. In and of itself, it was an historic moment, an amplification of the  brass "stepping stone" memorial  to Susanna and Anthony.

Up next, Kate Hymes, Ulster County's 2023 Poet Laureate and the Vice President of The Margaret Wade-Lewis Center, performed a "libation," and a Bishop offered a Christian prayer.

A man beside me mumbled, "It was all so long ago. What does it matter now?" and turned away.  But most of  the audience was moved and lined up to place cowrie shells on the stones, a silent gesture of goodwill.

The memorial was inspired by the Stolpersteine Project, initiated by the German artist Gunter Denig in 1992  to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust—Jews, homosexuals, the physically and mentally disabled, and others—denoting where they lived and worked. As of June 2023, 100,000 Stolpersteine have been laid in Germany.  These stones are literally called "stumbling stones," and are placed directly in the way of traffic as a reminder of the Nazi past and the individuals who were murdered.  There's a stone in front of my father's childhood home in Wiener Neustadt outside Vienna with the names of my murdered relatives. Though it's a strange sensation to know it is there, I am grateful to have a sensation, to be a living descendant of a genocide. Let others stumble onto this stone and ask, "What happened here?" 

Anthony and Susanna's memorial is not directly underfoot; it is off to the side. But the docents at Historic Huguenot Street  will undoubtedly point then out on their tours. a significant gesture of reconciliation. As research continues apace, and descendants of the Huguenot Street slaves are identified, it is hoped that they will gather in this sacred space to honor their forbears.

What serveth a man if he gain the whole world and lose his immortal soul.

-New Testament, Mark 8:36

I woke up this morning in a fugue state. I was channeling conceptual artist Jenny Holzer in my dreams. Like her textual projections onto buildings, the words expelled from my mouth were in capital letters. I was screaming with an urgency I had not experienced since I participated in the now historic 2017 demonstration in front of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. Then, as now, the news reports were distorted by commentators sanitizing the purpose and  portent of the demonstration. We already knew that Trump was a gangster, that he would try to wreck our democracy, and leave INDESCRIBABLE SUFFERING  in his wake, but the mainstream broadcasters in our midst obfuscated the historical turning point with happy talk and highlighted the counter-demonstration by Antifa, the cameras turned to the drama of the possibility of violent encounter.

American market-driven newscasting is, for the most part what my professors in grad school called "Happy Talk News," and its unseriousness—remember that word from the recent campaign in a different context—is a reflection of an assumption that Americans prefer to be entertained rather than informed. This is a deceptive cover for the market-driven media environment; we are all unwittingly delivered to the advertisers. Sustained in depth conversation is available if we opt for it.  But we must  opt for it.

Even before #47, I made a decision to begin each day listening to British podcasts: BBC, The Guardian, The Economist. I admit I am an Anglophile having lived in London for a decade where I worked occasionally for the BBC as a reporter and wrote articles for The Times Educational Supplement. During those years away from America, my outraged voice muted, my interviewing deepened and became less confrontational, my geopolitical perspective expanded, my writing matured, and so did I. America was no longer the center of my world.

Perhaps my glasses are tinting rose at the moment as I look back at this period of my life. I miss London and my EU friends more than ever. It hurts when they say that they never want to step on American shores again. Like many others, I'm shattered by the consequences of the election, but also determined not to despair. As the news becomes more and more INDESCRIBABLE my morning routine continues: I cut the fruit, make important choices: yogurt or cottage cheese? I add nuts, I write in my journal, I recite a secular prayer: MAY WE CONTINUE TO WORK TOGETHER FOR PEACE, FREEDOM, AND THE RULE OF LAW AT HOME AND ABROAD. AMEN.

My parents had left Haiti in the middle of a thirty-year dictatorship during which most people were being terrorized. A woman or girl being raped or even killed was not all that unusual.

-Edwidge Danticat, All the Home You've Got

If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.

―  Machiavelli, The Prince

When a war starts, if citizens are forced to become soldiers, they learn to shoot a gun and to kill soldiers on the "other side." If they cannot shoot their guns, they run the risk of being killed themselves. Nobody cares whether a soldier enjoys killing other people, it is just a job, or more than a job because as they are killing, they are keeping themselves—and maybe even their family—alive . Women and children are left behind unless they have volunteered to fight, which is glorious and laudable and heroic at times, for example in Ukraine right now. Or women and children are evacuated, or they decide to flee and travel long distances to find safety, either on foot, or in a vehicle of some description, or across a body of water in boats and planes, and they may never return to their homeland, or want to return. Which is my family's story once they took flight from what they always assumed would be their home, but was no longer their home. They were welcomed to the United States as refugees and sent to Wyoming for some reason I cannot find out, and my father—who was already an eye surgeon—worked in a hospital and my mother—who had finished medical school but not done her internship—became a visiting nurse.

That was then and this is now. What we are witnessing in the round-ups and deportations is not just a reckoning with what everyone agrees is  a broken immigration system, and far too many seeking safety in a country that is no longer safe, it is an attempt to redefine what America is, beyond its mythology, and what it will become if the vicious cruelty taking hold is not stopped.

Can you think of a nation that has not been touched by killing in recent years or, at the very least, internal economic strife, or worse?  A nation so peaceful that children have never seen a gun, heard the sound of bombs, or gone to sleep hungry?  Can we include American-born children in this list of formative experiences? What has the cohort in Washington done with their children I wonder?  Have they built fall-out shelters and bunkers to protect them in the event of the final apocalyptic event? Or, bought them bullet proof vests to wear in school? What do they discuss with them at the dinner table? How do they explain the promise of America?

Act like a madman and no one will trust you or dare vengeance, Machiavelli suggested.  

The Prince has taken him at his word.