Identity, Memory, and Monuments: problematics of referentiality

Abstract

Honoring a person or an event, public monuments interrupt geographical landscapes and point to a temporal past asking us to stop, to look, and to engage memory. They invite reveries as the word, monument, derives from the Latin word monēre, meaning ‘to remind.’ In effect, they occupy public spaces asking for private thoughts that problematize a referentiality dependent on identity. An analysis of Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Facing It,” based on viewing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., illustrates the way monuments offer a phenomenological space for an individual’s transformation. Yet in addition to an interiority the poem captures, the monument itself reifies politically official and unofficial messaging, an ambivalence that further muddies the referentiality it reifies because it privileges one cultural identity over others. The theories from the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, the psychoanalyst Jacque Lacan, and the literary critic Cathy Caruth provide the framework for investigating the loss and the gain from the construction and the removal of monuments.

Keywords

• public monuments
• trauma
• bachelard