War & Virtual War - 2004 Conference Programme Session 7

Session 7: Identity, Memory and Conflict Resolution
Chair: Dorothea Flothow

War Survivors’ Fractured Identities in Hiroshima mon Amour
Brigitte Le Juez
School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

War survivors can suffer from a certain loss of memory and/or an incapacity to articulate their experience. Both these symptoms of trauma can be either permanent or temporary. The personal experience of the survivor, set in a particular cultural context, can also lead to a national identity crisis (a crisis in the individual’s sense of his/her national identity). In this paper, I would like to examine how this question has been represented in one well-known cinéroman, Hiroshima mon amour.
I wish to examine the role of testimony, and the literary and visual devices used by Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais, the writer and director respectively of Hiroshima mon amour, to represent the different natures and effects of testimony, whilst also looking at the historical context of the film.
The perspective of Hiroshima mon amour revolves around a personal experience, around the testimony of a survivor of the Second World War in Europe. The same survivor travels to Hiroshima and discovers that suffering is universal. Amongst the first sequences of the film are images of the physical evidence of the devastation of war either evoked or plainly visible on human bodies.
The film, made in 1958, examines the short but intense and compelling encounter between a Japanese man and a French woman who, through the emotions triggered by this encounter, recall a personal trauma suffered during World War II in the French town of Nevers. This trauma is directly related to the attitude of her compatriots at the time of the liberation of France, and to the death of her lover, a German soldier killed by a sniper. The film finds her twelve years later, in Hiroshima, where she is acting in a film. The Japanese man was a soldier away from Japan at the time of the bombing, and was thus spared. His entire family, however, was killed. He is, therefore, interested in listening to the testimony of a civilian war-crime witness, while she needs to tell her testimony. Their common pain at the war crimes they either witnessed or of which they were, directly or indirectly, the victims, is what brings them close together. Her story becomes the articulation of what has been, until now, inexpressible.
She describes what was done to her by the people of Nevers, alternating direct and indirect speech, a device denoting her own mental numbness generated by the traumatic pain she suffered: ‘They shear my hair carefully, all of it. They think it is their duty [...] Someone says she should be paraded through the town.’ She seems to have been more or less oblivious to the injustice done to her then, because her thoughts were focused principally on the death of her lover. She repressed the trauma, and her mourning remained to be undergone.
There is a double irony in the temporal indications concerning the woman’s grief: it spans the time of the liberation of France, whilst her own liberation, represented by her departure from Nevers and her arrival in Paris, coincides with the bombing and the news of the bombing of Hiroshima. It is precisely because Hiroshima remains, for her, synonymous with extreme pain, the kind she suffered to the point of near-madness, whilst other people were celebrating their victory as they perceived it, that she seems to have detached herself totally from her national identity, especially from the renewed sense of national identity that generally springs from the liberation of one’s country. Describing the evening of the day of the cropping of her hair, she says: ‘La Marseillaise is being sung all over the town. Darkness falls. My dead love is an enemy of France. [...] My father’s pharmacy is closed because of the disgrace. I am alone. Some people are laughing. In the night I make my way home.’ She clearly expresses here the total break between herself and her compatriots, the avenging crowd responsible for her predicament, and also the distance between herself and the geographical and political contexts of her situation. She describes what goes on and what she does without feeling, walking in Nevers like a lost soul.
Although the nationalities of the characters are underlined throughout the film, the notion of national identity is clearly questioned here. The French woman has become rootless, and identifies with all the victims of war in the world, without any distinction of nationality. The film in which she acts is a film about peace. She tells the Japanese man that it is not a French film, but an ‘international’ one. She plays a Red Cross nurse in the film, a role which develops her own statelessness.
Duras and Resnais complement each other perfectly in this film. Duras deals with the different horrendous events which may cause trauma in times of war, such as xenophobia, murder, and specific treatments like that of women having been denounced at the end of the war for their relationships with Germans. Resnais, through his unique filming technique, establishes a parallel between Hiroshima and Nevers, thus conferring a unity upon completely different places and situating trauma within a cultural context. Duras and Resnais fuse together two times, past and present, two places, France and Japan, and two stories, thus representing the universality and the timelessness of cultural trauma and crises in identity for war survivors.
At the time the film was made, 1958, France was, as both victim and perpetrator of war atrocities, far from having dealt with all its World War II demons, and was in the process of dealing with new ones, those of the war of independence in Algeria (which lasted from 1954 to 1962). It is worth noting that the Battle of Algiers took place in 1957, the year given by Duras for the story, and that Duras joined the Comité des intellectuels contre la poursuite de la guerre d’Algérie, an anti-war committee whose rallying call was precisely the refusal to condone the oppression of the Algerian population carried out in the name of France. Let us remember, also, that the war in Indochina had ended in 1954, only shortly before the film was made, and that Duras would have been particularly sensitive to it, since she was born and had grown up in Indochina.
By enabling us to sympathise with one exemplary experience of war trauma, Duras and Resnais addressed difficult social and historical issues, and, at the same time, encouraged new ways of considering our moral responsibility towards recognising and helping the sufferers of such trauma.

Memory and Conflict Resolution in Northern Ireland
Agnes Maillot
Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

The conflict in Northern Ireland has resulted in the loss of over 3,600 lives. A further 40 to 50 000 people are estimated to have been injured, which translates into a large number of "secondary victims". This relatively high level of violence has strengthened the divisions that already run deep in Northern Ireland. Therefore, healing the trauma, addressing both issues of guilt and blame, one the one hand, of victims and perpetrators, on the other, and recognising that both sides were subjected to intense suffering, constitute a fundamental part of the conflict resolution. In that respect, the peace process in Northern Ireland cannot only be focused on the "political" or "institutional" dimensions, but has to address the crucial issue of how to deal with the past, and what mechanisms can be put in place in order to work towards the goal of reconciliation. The objective of this paper is two-fold: first, to analyse the manner in which the memory of the conflict has been constructed within both communities, pointing to the divergent approaches taken on fundamental issues such as the causes of the conflict, guilt and victim-hood. The paper will then discuss the different mechanisms that have been put in place, by governments, organisations or individuals, to come to terms with the past. This will lead to a discussion on the possible way forward in Northern Ireland regarding reconciliation.