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May 13, 2005/Iyar 4 5765, Volume 57, No. 37
As we bear witness
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
It's that time of the year.
A time infused with remembrance, spanning the full breadth of historical experience, the full panoply of emotion.
A trio of holidays follows one upon the other, Yom Hashoah to Yom Hazikaron to Yom Ha'atzmaut, enjoining us to commemorate the victims of the Shoah, the fallen in Israel's wars, the founders of the Jewish state.
Such is our history, such is our legacy, the insistence not only to remember but to animate those memories so they resonate across time and space.
And so we ask, What does it mean to remember, to bear witness?
In a classroom at Arizona State University in Tempe, a group of students grapples with that question and uncovers new ways to glean meaning for the future from the past.
They read selections from writers who turn to powerful words and artful structures to confront the world and make it resound with their outrage and protest.
And they are goaded to find their own words, craft their own stories, create their own clamor
They are students in a course titled "The Poetics of Bearing Witness," taught by fiction writer Melissa Pritchard, director of ASU's graduate creative writing program, and poet Cynthia Hogue, who holds the Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry.
Hogue writes in a recent e-mail that she and Pritchard sought to inspire students to look at the world around them "with the same kind of intense attention and resonant consciousness that one brings to the act of witnessing."
She had become familiar with the term "witnessing" through Yale's Holocaust survivor program.
And so the students deal with racism, sexism, materialism, anti-Semitism. They confront war and peace, catastrophe and cataclysm. And they share their writing with one another, gently critiquing word and form, intent and content, gently pushing one another to consider what others are saying, thinking, feeling.
They find a remarkable nexus of words, thoughts and feelings that yields new understanding, newfound compassion.
"We wanted to find ways for our students to speak out, think through, address issues that are usually kept outside the classroom," writes Hogue.
And they did.
Through their reading and writing, the students looked at the atrocities of the Shoah, the pain of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the reality of religious and racial discrimination in the United States.
I was privileged to be a student in the class, perhaps the only Jew, perhaps one of the few burdened with a preconceived perception of what it means to bear witness and the heavy weight of responsibility to remember.
I came away with a deepened understanding of what the term connotes, and how vast and far reaching is the human obligation to attune our senses, to heighten our sensitivities to the turmoil and turbulence in the world around us.
See, hear, speak, write, do, our professors exhorted.
And we will remember.
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