Restoration, Reckoning, and the Realities of Remembering Women

By
    I discovered nothing new in the archives this week. As our final display was due by Friday, history was set. We knew every single thing there was to know about women at Kenyon and were now focusing our efforts on polishing up that narrative. My groupmates and I narrowed down our collection deciding what was best suited for the limited space "Women and Gender Activism at Kenyon" had. We prioritized photos and visuals that didn't ask too much from our viewer; we cut out interesting pieces like "Men at Kenyon" that widened our scope too much; and we formatted our collection so that each piece seamlessly fitted with the pieces around it. As opposed to other weeks which were filled with excitingly showing each other interesting findings from the archives, this week was categorized by our discussions of what may be presented to our peers and what should be returned to the archive and forgotten about. How stressful! It is a daunting task to decide who should be remembered and who is not worth the space. It feels a little unfair. Technically speaking, I am taking this class to satisfy my diversification requirements, and I have been assigned the God-like task of deciding who is worthy of remembrance and who is damned to be forgotten. Because I just so happen to be born in what I call the present (what they would have called the future), I am now responsible for the impossible task of keeping alive all that has come before me. It feels a little unfair. Why is this my job? I don't feel important enough for such an important task. 
    Hazar Yazdiha wants me to come to a reckoning. She wants me to restore a narrative that has not been paid justice and from there begin the project of understanding and repairing the world around me. She looks at the Me Too movement as a powerful example of how change can be brought about by calling to the past with a purpose that changes the impact it may have had at previous points. Women like Anita Hill who were pretty much ignored during their time were being retroactively listened to because of the modern conversations that the Me Too movement brought about. The thoughtful work put in by the women of the Me Too movement was not just repairing the apathy that came from Hill's testimony, but in the process was also bolstering the social reckoning already becoming from newer testimonies. The acts of restoring and reckoning as Yazdiha cites as very important, are inherently intertwined. The act of restoring is necessary for the act of reckoning and the act of reckoning then goes on to further aid more restoration. 
    As we wrapped up our finalized display, I became a little disappointed because I did not feel like our display had restored or reckoned. I did not have such a political goal in mind when working in the archives. I was more intrigued with a snapshot of womanhood at Kenyon: photos and dates of women at the beginning, clippings that prove the existence of an active community, relatable feelings and scenes from decades past. Nothing that enflamed me to go into the world and change it. In the last couple days, I noticed this important lack, more specifically in how our display was hindered by and also aided the historical bias of women and feminism assuming "woman" as non-racial and thus "women" actually being "white women." Rather than rushing to try and uncover what we had missed in the archives, we displayed our white women: minimal restoration, minimal reckoning. In office hours this week, I guiltily admitted that I did not care enough about Doris Crozier to champion her memory's endurance. I think I have pinpointed why I just can not care that much about Doris Crozier. Because all of a sudden since I realized the gaps in our display, I have a great passion to go back to the archives and find the history that was so easy to completely overlook. I understand the restoration that could be done and the reckoning it could cause, and that is the power that Crozier's memory did not have over me. Perhaps if my conception of the present's issues were about "women" (meaning an implied non-racial/white woman), Crozier's memory would be the tool for some reckoning, but as I see the plight of white women like Crozier as not needing a more focused spotlight, it is the lack of more marginalized women that feels more worthy of repairing and reckoning. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Junzo Shono: How We Remember Gambier

By
Image
When I entered the Special Collections room, I had no idea where to start or what to do. We were given large files of several notable Kenyon alumni, and it was overwhelming. Without a clear understanding of the responsibilities we were tasked with, we each selected a different file without giving reason or pause as to who we selected. For one reason or another, Junzo Shono’s name caught my eye. I had never heard of the man, but after taking a class on Japanese Literature last fall, I was curious as to who he was and his involvement with the College. Junzo Shono, an acclaimed Japanese writer, first came to Gambier in 1957, where he spent a year in the College capturing and describing the mundane moments of everyday life (Creel, 2022). He would eventually publish these memories in the form of a novel titled “Gambia Taizaiki” (Sojourn in Gambier. He was born in Osaka, Japan on February 9th, 1921, and studied at Osaka University of Foreign Languages for four years, and later studied at Kyu...
Read more

Archival and Canon Memory: Understanding Our Present Through Our Past

By
Image
  This week, one of the many artifacts my group examined, was an old issue of The Collegian. The main story of this issue was the reconstruction of the Brown Family Environmental Center. This edition of the Collegian was significant because it detailed certain transformations being made to the center that would give it more focus on academics and incorporating student education as a part of the BFEC. For example, the article focuses on the construction of a new building that will operate as a hub for both student labs, as well as environmental education programs for the public, which the BFEC is now well known for. This article is also historically significant as it was written right after the BFEC was renamed to the Brown Family Environmental Center. It is important to examine sources like these, as they offer what the earliest perspectives and actions of what the BFEC were, which is interesting to compare to modern activities of the environmental center. This week we also read an...
Read more

Hope, Suffering, and The Kenyon College Campus Guide

By
Image
  Attached above is a screenshot of “The Kenyon College Campus Guide”, which is a near-comprehensive list of buildings that have belonged to the College and Village of Gambier since 1824. Although my group is curating something about the future of the Hill, our first meeting mainly involved discussions of its past. To this end, we tried to develop a picture of what the Hill physically looked like in the past 100 years by reviewing photographs of buildings, construction plans, and the Campus Guide, which you can see above. If you were to review the entire guide, you’d see that under the name of every building is a description of when it was built, what it was used (or being used) for, and when (if) it was destroyed. In the context of this week’s reading, these descriptions call the terms “communities of memory” and “communities of hope” to mind. According to Bellah et al. (1985, 2011), a “community of memory…tell[s]...stories of shared suffering” and orients us towards “future co...
Read more