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Inherited Displacement and Relational Remembering in Once My Mother by Sophia Turkiewicz

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Women’s Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing ((PSLW))

Abstract

This chapter explores, through the examination of Sophia Turkiewicz’s documentary Once My Mother, the mechanisms of recovering memory in the multifaceted context of displacement. It concentrates on a specific mode of relational remembering, offering critical reflection on memory transmission in the situation of a fractured mother-daughter relationship and disconnection with the motherline. In the context of a masculinized Australian culture and migration narratives, it thus offers a particularly valuable gender-specific perspective on memory. The concept of postmemory provides a theoretical framework for the analysis, but it is expanded to take account of troubled intergenerational relations as well as an endangered memory of Soviet crimes.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Investigating intergenerational reconstructions and representations of the past, rather than traumatic experiences of the first-generation, I do not engage with trauma theory, but use the notion of postmemory to theoretically frame the discussion. As some of the critics of Hirsch’s concept insist (e.g. Long 2006), postmemory and trauma theory are critical tools that should be used separately to analyse different research questions.

  2. 2.

    Anders’ Army, named after General Władysław Anders, was the Polish Armed Forces created inside Soviet Russia in 1941 as a result of re-establishing Polish–Soviet relations after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. It was composed of the Polish prisoners of war released from Soviet camps. In 1942 it was evacuated from the Soviet Union through Iran to Palestine, where it was passed under British command. General Anders agreed to provide protection to families, women, children, war orphans, and non-ethnic Poles (i.e. Jews, Belarusians, and Ukrainians considered by the Soviets illegible for recruitment) during their journey out of the Soviet Russia.

  3. 3.

    Neumann reports that initially single women over the age of 40 were not accepted to Australia at all (2004, p. 32). For more details on the Eastern European women’s displacement and life in Australia, see Kwapisz Williams (2014b).

  4. 4.

    Sickness in a family is a common impulse prompting the need to record a story and give testimony to experiences; see, for example, Lena Einhorn’s Nina’s Journey (2005), the story of Einhorn’s mother who suffered from cancer after surviving the Second World War in Eastern Europe.

  5. 5.

    To support her argument she recalls an interview she conducted for the Kresy-Siberia Foundation with a survivor of a German forced labour camp whose family were victims of the UPA massacres and who confessed that ‘in 50 years nobody had EVER asked him where he came from and what his history was’ (Pacewicz 2016). Indeed, Turkiewcz herself admits that ‘My mother’s whole world opened up when I found the Kresy-Siberia Foundation, set up specifically to research, record and remember the Poles deported to Siberia’ (qtd. in George).

  6. 6.

    Depending on the peculiarities of one’s situation, one can talk about ‘absent memory’ (Fresco 1981), ‘mémoire trouée’ (Raczymow 1986), counter-memory (Lourie et al. 1987), ‘heteropathic’ (Silverman 1996) or ‘prosthetic memory’ (Landsberg 2004).

  7. 7.

    The concept of postmemory has been notoriously criticized for what Ann McClintock characterized as an ‘almost ritualistic ubiquity of “post-” words in current culture’ (1992, p. 85). Hirsch (2008) herself acknowledged problematic nature of the term. See also Sarlo (2005).

  8. 8.

    Translation from Hirsch (1996, p. 659).

  9. 9.

    It has been reported that in the Lusaka camp the refugees ‘played football with local British, were free to walk in and out of the camp and could go to public places in the city, like the cinema’ (Sandifort 2015; Piotrowski 2004, p. 10).

  10. 10.

    This fact becomes important in the context of a masculinized and anglicized Australian culture, and particularly within migration narratives usually featured as male stories (see Kwapisz Williams 2014a).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ANU Centre for European Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    Katarzyna Kwapisz Williams

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  1. Department of Interdisciplinary Research, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iasi, Romania

    Simona Mitroiu

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Kwapisz Williams, K. (2018). Inherited Displacement and Relational Remembering in Once My Mother by Sophia Turkiewicz. In: Mitroiu, S. (eds) Women’s Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96833-9_6

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