Structures of Forgetting

A recent article on the preservation of rotting structures, in order to freeze their historical reference (ostensibly for posterity), reminded me of a critical/creative paper I wrote for a seminar in 2001. We were asked to read Mike Davis' _City of Quartz_ and to think about how a city's buildings can create a legible roadmap for one's memory. Not only do buildings serve as sights/sites that trigger and preserve memory, but also more concretely figure as signposts for navigating a city (turn left at the BofA, or, my old house used to be upstairs from that Dunkin' Donuts). As such, buildings preserve memory and render a cityscape legible. I decided to look at it in terms of rural buildings and memory. I assessed the role of buildings in my mother's family's home town, Clendenin, WV. Because of a continuum of poverty in the aread, buildings were either temporary structures (double-wides, etc.) or permanent structures were no longer taken care of and were crumbling or had for the most part deteriorated. Many folks who leave this area, never to return, as my grandmother did, attempt to rescript their lives, to erase memories of child abuse, poverty, racial strife, etc. My grandmother was one of these people.

At our family reunion back in 2000, my aunt drove me around town and pointed to grassy spots where a house or trailer once was. I began thinking of this in relation to my grandmother's stories about her youth and how strongly they contrasted with the stories I slowly learned about what her life really looked like as a child. According to my grandmother, she was raised a southern belle, replete with spot-on etiquette and a silver spoon in her mouth. She was white as the day is long and though, she admitted to not living on "snob hill," she certainly painted a picture of a comfortable middling class. I heard these stories growing up and knew that she expected me to be a "lady" (yes, you can all snort and spit out whatever's in your mouth). What I have since learned is that the house she lived in as a child had dirt floors. Her mother made their clothes out of flour and potato sacks; not able to afford a doctor, she made home poultices and lost more than one baby to disease. Not only was my family poor, but they were not verifiably white. My grandmother has hot Lenape Delaware and Shawnee blood in her, and everyone in town knew this. Isolation and poverty abounded and was perpetuated, her father was arrested for murder and while he was in jail, his wife (my grandma's mom) became pregnant with another man's daughter--not the stuff of southern belle fantasies.

As my aunt drove me around town, pointing to brick remnants, empty grassy plots, and dump sites; these phantomed, residual scaffolding upon which my family's history was (according to Davis) supposed to hang, I realized that it was precisely the landscape that allowed my grandmother to perpetuate, both in her own head and to her progeny, the lies she created about her early life. It was because the buildings were falling apart or completely gone, thereby rendering the town illegible and unnavigable, that she was able to restructure her life into a nostalgic picture of what never was.

The Slate article on rotting buildings and the desire to preserve them in a paradoxical moment of both capturing their fast slide to ruin and yet preventing it points to a nostalgia for the "olden times." These buildings serve as what once was: revered, rosied, and reminders of whatever monument they were intended to commemorate. Yet, in the instance of my family's homes and Clendenin's legibility ("that's where the house was," "I think we go this way...I can't tell anymore"), the nostalgia is for what never was, and it is allowed by the ruination of where my grandmother was raised.

The Slate link: http://www.slate.com/id/2129660/nav/tap1/