The Poetics of Postmemory: The Afterlife of Memory in the Wake of War and Flight

Abstract

Focusing on postmemory, the memories of the third generation of Estonian refugees in Sweden today, tracing remnants of family tales in the aftermath of World War Two and the flight from Estonia to Sweden in 1944, this paper analysis the concept of ‘afterness’ in memory work and the role of imagination in rendering memories legible and visible. Framed as witnesses of the master narrative of history, a narrative focusing the chain of events, establishing the has-been of this after, these family tales are constantly confronted with the demands of truth seeking. Yet the life of postmemories in the aftermath of devastating events is often a puzzle of fragmented memory traces that requires an imaginative investment in order to interweave different layers of memory and fragments into a tale of postmemory’s life with an after. Placing the lived experience of the afterness between life and imagination, postmemories witness history as a Benjaminian living act of recognition of the has-been in the on-going while disputing the testimony they are bearing witness to by using imagination, an act of playfulness, despite the event. A poetics of the afterness, of postmemory’s lingering between fact and fantasy, bringing the lived experience to the fore through the ambivalences added by memory’s being with an after.