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The Column I Owe Navkiran Khalra
Three years ago I wrote that memory work was a fading craft. A daughter's search for her father in Punjab shows me how badly I misread the shape of grief.
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Elias Papadopoulos
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I want to start by admitting what I got wrong.
In a column I wrote three years ago — I will not dignify it with a link, because the piece has aged badly enough that I would rather it be quietly buried under newer work — I argued that the generation of children whose parents disappeared into the long undocumented violence of the late twentieth century were, by and large, moving on. I did not say it that crudely, of course. I dressed it in the vocabulary of my trade. I wrote about 'the closing of the memorial cycle', about how the second generation, the ones who had been small when the disappearance happened, were folding their inheritance into private ritual rather than public claim. I wrote that the archive of grief was contracting, not expanding, because the political conditions that had once made truth-telling feasible had narrowed everywhere at once — in Argentina, in Sri Lanka, in the Balkans, in Punjab. I wrote, in a sentence that now embarrasses me, that memory work was becoming a craft practiced by fewer and fewer hands.
This week, Al Jazeera published an interview with Navkiran Khalra, the daughter of the Sikh activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, who was abducted and killed thirty years ago after documenting mass cremations of young men by Punjab police during the counter-insurgency years. Her father's work — the cataloguing of names, the walking from village to village, the ledger-keeping of people the state had insisted did not exist — was the reason he was disappeared himself. She was a child then. She is now a woman in her forties, still, in her own phrase, searching for truth. A recent film has drawn her father's life back into public view. She is speaking, at length, on the record, three decades in.
I read the piece twice, and then I opened the old column of mine and read that too, and I sat with the discomfort of a writer who has been proven wrong by exactly the person he was writing about.
What did I get wrong? I want to be precise, because a vague apology is worse than none.
I mistook the visibility of memory work for its volume. In the years I was watching, the public performances of grief — the anniversaries, the tribunals, the monuments unveiled by presidents — were becoming rarer. I read that scarcity as decline. But the work Navkiran Khalra describes is not performance. It is the daily, unglamorous labour of holding a name in place against the pull of institutional forgetting. It happens in kitchens, in lawyers' offices, in the margins of court filings that no wire service will ever cover. My mistake was to measure memory in the units journalism can see. What survives is not what gets photographed.
I also mistook political narrowing for personal narrowing. It is true that the conditions under which state violence can be publicly accounted for have grown harsher almost everywhere. But the daughters and sons of the disappeared did not narrow with the political weather. They waited. Some of them waited thirty years, and are waiting still, and will use whatever aperture opens — a film, an interview, a court date, a stranger asking the right question — to push the name back into the light. I confused the shrinking of the stage with the exhaustion of the actors. They were never actors. They were relatives.