Forests of Memory

In Kościół, when people talked about nature they were generally talking about the woods.

In the town, as in most of this region, forests are busy, integrated parts of the community.

Yet the woods are also places of multiple and overlapping ‘shadow sites’.

When they talk about shadow sites archaeologists are, strictly speaking, referring to the manner in which slight differences in ground level cast shadows so that when viewed from the air the site reveals traces of its past, the shadows marking out trenches or walls no longer visible when one simply glances at the landscape. Shadow marks rely not only on the position of the archaeologist, but also on the conditions on the day, the time of the

Image 4.4

year, and so on. They lay bare the multiple pasts, movements, and transformations of a landscape. The biophysical landscape of Eastern Poland is a site of contestations over space, and such competition is a dynamic factor in the production of physical space.

The shadow sites of the forest are particularly potent as local people are constantly visiting and using the woods. People still use wood to heat their homes

throughout the long winters. Even during the summer people put aside timber to dry and you can see the carefully tended woodpiles stacked in artistically complex loads to the side of nearly every house in the town. It is an environmentally sound method of heating:

timber is plentiful, cheap and requires less transport than any of the other fuel options available, and also leaves a smaller carbon footprint.

The forest is firstly a resource for local people. Therefore, when they discuss the woods they are also discussing wayfinding and other skills of orientating oneself in the environment and making use of it (Ingold 2000). These skills include the ability to know which spot along the river has the best fish, which mushrooms are dangerous to eat, which timber must be removed, which sections of the forest are largely left alone, and which sections are managed. The forestry services in Eastern Poland are run at a local

government level, and most employees are from the area immediately surrounding where they work. It is steady employment and even when logging is forbidden, the employees are

Image 4.5

kept busy removing deadwood⁴ and patrolling for illegal logging. The woods are owned by the local government, but most people in the town pick mushrooms and herbs in them, fish along the river and treat them as common land.

Despite the close relationship between forest and town, the woodsespecially those further from the townare treated with a particularly guarded respect. There is,

occasionally, an atmosphere in the forest that is totally unlike the bucolic community air I describe at the start of this chapter. There are multiple paths in the forest of varying lengths. Many are so overgrown they reveal themselves only in the winter or autumn when the trees are barer than usual. Taking the wrong path can lead one deep into the trees, where there is near total silence, especially in winter. It is an uncomfortable feeling of hyperawareness and anxiety, where the threatening aspect of the imposing trees is heightened. After I myself had had this feeling, I described it to some of my respondents and I was relieved to find that they had had the same experience, often when they were quite young and still learning about the forests. Yet it also became clear that even having known the woods their whole lives my respondents still experienced a sense of unease stealing in occasionally as they made their ways through the woods. Sometimes the feeling was not associated with losing a sense of place in the forest but with coming upon one of the many pasts active in the production of the landscape.

There are mild differences in terrain throughout the forest but a sudden change, such as a long or deep hollow or a sharp short incline, often indicates an old foxhole or sanger. Both foxholes and sangers are military earthworks; the first is a hole dug to accommodate at least one person and to shield them from view or gunfire, the second is a low raised fortification constructed with stones or soil to shield a person when digging a foxhole is impossible. The forest is dotted with these, from as far back as the Russo-Polish war of 1831; discovering a foxhole or sanger as you walk through the forest thus becomes an unsettling memorial of war and death. The association appears more pertinent still because none of these hiding spots has remained untouched; in each subsequent struggle that followed the war of 1831 old foxholes were rediscovered, re-dug, and reused. The foxholes and sangers are a good example of the complex hidden histories of this area that I discussed in Chapter One. They invoke the official history of conflicts, but they also rely on local knowledge of the type of fighting that took place in the region’s forests, which helps us understand why these particular forms originating in military intervention in the landscape are here. Partisan warfare has always been the primary means of fighting in

4 Deadwood is a nesting and breeding spot for a type of beetle that attacks tree bark.

these forests (Prusin 2010). The foxholes and sangers also indirectly conjure more recent memories of violence in the forest or personal memories of trauma.

Yet it is not always a specific spot or physical change that prompts such memories.

There are memories in the forest that have no particular place, that emerge from a general knowledge about the people who dwelt or died in the woods. This is part of what Küchler describes as landscape as memory rather than landscape that is remembered: ‘landscape as implicated as template in the process of memory work’ (1993, 85). The ‘constellation of processes’ called the forest (Massey 2005, 141) includes the stories and emerging

histories of lost Jewish graveyards, reclaimed by the tree roots and low growing ferns, the

‘Kolonia’⁵ that used to fill the clearings dotted throughout the space, and the partisans (from all sides) digging their own graves at gunpoint. All of these things are remembered, but not preciselyno one can locate them in specific spaces or material objects. Part of the non-locatable place called the forest is the impression of loss, horror, and history unspoken. This is an area infused with memories, despite the fact that no one knows exactly where the particular events occurred.

In a recent Focaal special issue Haukanes and Trnka open by discussing the

‘memory boom’ that formed a large part of post-socialist studies (2013, 4), while Pine closes the issue by posing the question of what comes now for post-socialism as the members of a second generation are born with no direct memories of the socialist period (2013). This is an important question, and I think that the writers in the Focaal issue address it well by looking at generational differences and re-examining the role the ‘past’

plays in the wider temporal life of the people. Haukanes and Trnka see in the ‘dynamic interplay between what is remembered and forgotten’ a way of understanding what kind of futures people imagine, and are allowed to imagine (2013, 3). They look again at nostalgia, a much-used word in post-socialist studies, and see not just memory but a way of reckoning time. Boym has dissected nostalgia’s duel role as a longing for the past and dream of the future in Russia (2001). Here, however, the authors turn to Berdahl’s account of the former GDR, in which, she demonstrates, a longing for the past can be a comment on current politics and moralities (1997). In this instance, however, I am more interested in nostalgia as a way of reckoning and punctuating time. For some an idealised past allows for the politics of the future (Boyer 2010). For others the idealised past is forever

relegated, so perfect that it is the ‘realm of the impossible’; and therefore nostalgia can be a way of consolidating the current political status quo (Creed 2010, 42; Boym, 2001). Yet as people come up with new ways of reckoning time through memory so does the state,

5 Small settlements of up to three houses, or families named after the nearest town.

and Haukanes and Trnka caution that the ‘hegemonic state narratives’ of memory ‘invoke specific modes of reckoning time that join together states and citizens’ and permeate even those opposing modes of reckoning time (2013, 7). Like Benjamin’s epochs, each dreaming the next and thus revising the past, this way of conceiving memory ties it to time and the political project of nation-building. Remembering and forgetting in the forest is not only a spatial project; it is also about the way that memory is organised, reformed, retold, and politicised in time. This means that remembering, in this case as in many others, is as much about the future and the present as it is about the past (Pine 2013).

During my fieldwork I wanted to talk about memory and the forest, but it was hard to find people who were willing to engage with me on this topic. My respondents skilfully bypassed direct questions about partisans or the life of the forest, but sometime addressed these topics in other ways. I was often told stories about the forest that began with ‘My father told me…’ or ‘I knew a man who told me when he was a child…’ These stories offered valuable insight into the chronotope of forest memories, the unique expression of time and space they hold (Bakhtin 1981, 84). This chronotope also identifies the manner in which people represent the past, and their moral attenuation toward it (Bloch 1996;

Lambek 1996). These stories were memories that extended beyond individual lifetimes and defined the person in relation to past generations (Bloch 1996, 229), they were

memories located in places and events that spanned generations, much in the same way as Hirsch’s post-memories (1997). Thus they were a way for my respondents to represent themselves in the past; and as Bloch points out, it is incorrect to ‘ignore how people represent themselves in history, because it is, to a certain extent, in terms of these representations that they will react to revolutions, migration or colonial conquests …’

(1996, 230). Thus the stories of the forest gave an insight into the ways that people

mediated between their personal memories and morals and the memories and histories of the public world (Bloch, 1996; Lambek 1996).

There was another connection between memory and the forest. Lambek has discussed memory in terms of social relations, as an intersubjective and dialogical practice that resides in the individual mind and is also created between two or more people (1996, 239). When Lambek meets a friend in Mayotte after five years of distance, one of the spirits that posses her recalls an agreement they made on his last visit, a memory that can only exist in the relationship between the two of them (Lambek 1996, 237). I would add to Lambek’s proposition that memory can exist between human and non-humans, in this case between people and the forest. Shaw (2002) writes of the memoryscapes of violent histories and how they are directly tied to modes of memory (Bloch 1996). She specifically

examines how, in her own research in Sierra Leone, her emphasis on a discursive mode of memory, and on the present, allowed her for a time to believe that the memories of the slave trade were not there. Similarly Cole, working in Madagascar, was surprised that on first encounter the village she was based in revealed little of its complex history of

colonialism. In both cases, it was not until the anthropologists began to examine embodied practice in their divergent fields that they encountered memory. Cole began to see that memory ran under many everyday rituals (‘like a subterranean brook’) and that

examining them allowed her to ‘stumble upon the place where the brook wells up through the earth’ (2001, 281). Remembering, exhuming, referring to, or reforming the underlying everyday memory can be understood as a moral practice (Lambek 1997; Shaw 2001).

When Shaw began to play close attention to the spirits inhabiting the landscape and the rituals people engaged in to protect themselves she began to understand the memories of the slave trade. The memories were not in stories, but in the landscape, or, more

specifically, in the way people lived in a landscape suffused with ‘dangerous invisible presences’ (Shaw 2002, 50).

In my own fieldwork, walks with people in the forest consisted of long periods of silence, punctuated by practical advice, ‘those are no good to eat, see the bright colours’.

Walking also involved avoiding certain paths or pausing in certain spots. More than this, my respondents frequently remarked on how tourists and traders used the forest. They also worried initially about my walks in the woods and the dangerous presences I might encounter. All of these practices and remarks on those practices demonstrated that memories existed in the relationships between people and the woods.

Before ending this section I want to return to the mobile forest. It is important that these memories are evoked in a forest that is changing. This means that residents must formulate their histories in relation to a landscape that frequently undermines or

enlightens them. The forests around Kościół are swampy, and the ground sucks stones and dead wood into itself the closer you get to the Bug. The ground also divulges objects, such as gravestones. In the summer memories in the forest are limited as the abundant foliage conceals many of the objects and paths that contain those memories. Anthropologists working on memory in the landscape often refer to the landscape as a palimpsest (Basu 2007; Huyssen 2003; Shaw 2002). A metaphor more frequently found in other

disciplines,⁶ the term relates to Medieval manuscripts. When vellum was scarce, older pages would have their writing stripped away with the edge of a knife. The pages were turned to a landscape orientation sewn together down the middle and written over. The

6 In Geography, for example. See Rabasa 1993.

writing stripped away was not always gone; rather it often showed through weakly, giving the text a ghostly double quality. I believe we use this metaphor unthinkingly. First, the making of a palimpsest is not simply a process of laying new text on old, but an attempt to obliterate the old because it is no longer needed, and the initial resources on which it was produced are scarce. The palimpsest also emphasises the idea of memory as inscribed, not as a process or set of practices (Massey 2005), thus underplaying the role of practice in memorializing. Finally, in thinking of landscape as a palimpsest Massey points out ‘the things missing (erased) from the map are somehow always things from ‘before’. The gaps in representation … are not the same as the discontinuities of the multiplicity in

contemporaneous space’ (2005, 110). People encounter and create the past and the present dialectically through the moving and changing aspects of Kościół’s physical landscape. The changes in Kościół are open to numerous interpretations depending on the groups of people interacting with the landscape. As tourism becomes an increasingly important part of Kościół’s economy, tourists and tourist boards have a growing stake in the representation and interpretation of the town’s landscape, and thus of the town itself.