Remembering Seonjeong Yi Lebrun: Mourning with narratives of care

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyunji Kwon
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Comfort Women ◽  
World War ◽  
Participatory Action ◽  
Unexpected Death ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
Self Study ◽  
New Form ◽  
Imperial Japanese Army ◽  
Second World

It is hard to coherently narrate traumatic memories as they are intensely emotional and fragmented. I created this narrative inquiry in the hope of enacting care and performing mourning for the unexpected death of Seonjeong Yi Lebrun (1983–2017). Seonjeong was a Korean-born art education researcher in Canada whose work exemplified how artistic approaches to narrative evoke empathy and connectivity. Her research spanned arts-based self-study to participatory action research about comfort women (Korean sex slaves for the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second World War). In performing mourning for Seonjeong through examining her research, I endeavour to have my research possibly initiate a new form of arts-based collective care for her, comfort women and those suffering from other forms of trauma.

scholarly journals “Making Nonsense of the Little Categories”: Slaughterhouse-Five and The Memoirs of a Survivor as autobiographical science fiction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Georgia Hight
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Living Room ◽  
World War ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Southern Rhodesia ◽  
The City ◽  
Second World

<p>Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) are both novels that blend autobiography with science fiction. In a review of Vonnegut’s Mother Night, Lessing writes that he “makes nonsense of the little categories”. The same applies to Lessing. These two novels live in the porous borders between genre—between fiction and non-fiction.  Vonnegut writes that he can’t remember much of his experiences in the firebombing of Dresden in the Second World War. The war novel he writes about them has a protagonist who is “unstuck in time”. I frame my discussion of Slaughterhouse around problems of temporal and narrative ordering. Through use of fractured time, repetitions, and the chronotope, Vonnegut finds a way to express his missing and traumatic memories of the war.  Lessing’s memories are of her early childhood in Persia and Southern Rhodesia. These memories are warped, claustrophobic, and difficult to articulate. Like Slaughterhouse, Memoirs fractures time and space. I organise my discussion of Lessing’s novel around the latter, focusing on a literalised porous border: her dissolving living room wall. Borders and portals between spaces in Memoirs blend the dystopian, science-fiction world of the city with the world of Lessing’s memories; dreams with reality; and the static with the dynamic.  I pose several answers to the question of why science fiction and autobiography. A shared occupation of the two authors was a concern for the madness and dissolution of society, and science fiction engages in a tradition of expressing these concerns. Additionally, Vonnegut and Lessing use the tools of a genre in which it is acceptable for time and space to be warped or fractured. These tools not only allow for the expression of memories that are fragmented, difficult, and half forgotten, but produce worlds that mirror the form of these personal memories.</p>

scholarly journals Coping with traumatic memories: Second World War veterans' experiences of social support in relation to the narrative coherence of war memories

2009 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
KAREN J. BURNELL ◽  
PETER G. COLEMAN ◽  
NIGEL HUNT
Keyword(s):  
Social Support ◽  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Narrative Coherence ◽  
World War ◽  
War Veterans ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
War Experiences ◽  
Second World

ABSTRACTThis paper reports a qualitative study that used narrative analysis to explore how social support helps many armed-services veterans cope with traumatic memories. The analysis was carried out on two levels, that of narrative form (level of narrative coherence), argued to be indicative of reconciliation, and narrative content (themes of social support), which allowed exploration of the types of social support experienced by veterans with coherent, reconciled and incoherent narratives. Ten British male Second World War veterans were interviewed regarding their war experiences, presence of traumatic memories, and experiences of social support from comrades, family and society. Different patterns of support were qualitatively related to coherent, reconciled and incoherent narratives. Veterans with coherent narratives were no less likely to have experienced traumatic events than those with reconciled or incoherent narratives, but they reported more positive perceptions of their war experience and of the war's outcomes, more positive experiences of communication with family in later life, and more positive perceptions of societal opinion. The results are discussed in relation to how veterans can be supported by family and friends to reconcile their traumatic memories, thus to lessen the burden in later life when vital support resources may be unavailable.

scholarly journals ‘Comfort Women’ and the politics of responsibility

2012 ◽  
pp. 89-93
Author(s):  
Gyunghee Park
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Exploitation ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Sex Industry ◽  
Korean Women ◽  
Comfort Women ◽  
World War ◽  
Japanese Military ◽  
Second World ◽  
Sense Of Shame

Japan’s brutal military occupation of Korea from 1910 until the end of the Second World War is generally remembered as a period of grave injustice which has defined a large part of what it means to be Korean. Though the list of crimes is vast, today it seems that one of the most barbaric offences committed at the time was the formation of ‘comfort stations’ – a euphemistic term used to describe the sexual exploitation of mostly Korean women by the Japanese military and government. After a decisive end to Japan’s military conquest of control over the Asia Pacific with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, former ‘comfort women’ were silenced for over half a century by a deeply systemic sense of shame. Korean patriarchy pressed many survivors to hide their plight or even back into different sectors of the sex industry. However, South Korea’s democratization in the late-1980s ...

scholarly journals The Image of the Second World War as a Factor in the Formation of Contemporary European Identity

2020 ◽  
Vol 100 (7) ◽  
pp. 199-206
Author(s):  
Yuri Denisov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Steady Increase ◽  
European Identity ◽  
Past Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Common ◽  
Second World

The image of the Second World War is one of the most significant images of the past for the European identity. The purpose of this study is to analyze its potential for the formation of the modern European identity as a supranational construct. The ambivalent nature of this phenomenon is revealed. The image WWII contains a sufficiently powerful unifying impulse. It is determined by the uniting role of the colossal tragedy, the common misfortune that befell Europe in the middle of the past century, its integrational significance for the joint efforts to build a single European community in order to prevent the recurrence of these events. Nowadays, this momentum is realized through the preservation of European memory, the institutionalization of anniversaries, the broadcast of the memory of the war in the process of intergenerational communication in the functioning of the institutions of education and cultural environment as a whole, the articulation of traumatic memories in the political discourse. At the same time the author demonstrated that, the image of WWII has a serious deconsolidating element for the common European identity. It is caused by contradictions in the European collective memory. The new technological revolution that has engulfed Europe, accompanied by a steady shift of communication practices into cyberspace and the emergence of the phenomenon of cyber-memory, changes the mechanisms of representation and reception of the war image. The Global Network facilitates a steady increase of both the means for the representation and visualization of the image of the past, making it more interactive, multimodal, multifaceted and simplified. The number of actors of memory politics, who take part in the formation of the European identity, or rather ‒ of an unlimited set of identities has been growing.

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