Memory: More Than Recall 137Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman (2008) in Toward Psychologies of
Liberation suggest a present-past-future orientation to time instead of a
past-present-future. Placing the present first they offer a positioning in
which it is in the now that we both struggle to understand the past and
build a future from that understanding. They explore memory as a site of
resistance, in which the past is plumbed for events and the meaning of
those events. Recall in their temporality, is not simply a re-telling but a re-
encounter that establishes spaces for mourning, celebration, accountability
and transformation of harms. An example of this type of memory is public
memorialization. “The iconic objects or images that are brought forward in
such a space activate the memories and affects of individuals while at the
same time maintaining a significance that is collective and historical”
(Watkins & Shulman, 2008, pp. 127-128). An example of memorializing is
the passage of the Reparation Ordinance, addressing police violence, by
the Chicago City Council in 2015 (Kunichoff & Macaraeg, 2017). The
ordinance had several features but included three that dealt specifically
with memory: the creation of a public memorial, the establishment of a
community center for victims, and the creation of a curriculum for public
school students that taught the history of specific events of police violence
in the city. A public memorial, curriculum, and community center engage
what Shulman and Watkins name an “aesthetics of interruption” that stop a
“frozen and forsaken possibility of imaginative understanding and
mourning” (Watkins & Shulman, 2008, p. 129). By refusing erasure and
claiming their memory of police violence in Chicago, even when
interpretation of the events was contested, the impacted community
claimed their history of tragic occurrences as a site of possibility and
resistance. They interrupted the silence that surrounded their histories and
memories and stopped the erasures that had been imposed by systems of
power invested in avoiding accountability. But perhaps most importantly
as Judith Herman (1997) writes, “to hold traumatic reality in consciousness
requires a social context that affirms and protects the victim and that joins
victim and witness in a common alliance” (p. 9). Memories, especially
traumatic ones, require a witnessing that the victim cannot perform alone.
In the case of Chicago, the city may now join with the victims of police