Forgetting Stories from the Islands, Jeju and Calauit

• Main Author: Ritumban, Raymon D
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: Calauit Safari Park; defensive and complicit forgetting; Jeju April 3 incident; Martial Law; mnemocide; Arts and Humanities; Asian History; History; South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/english-faculty-pubs/204; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/english-faculty-pubs/article/1204/viewcontent/04_S4_Raymon_Ritumban.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

The traumatic experiences of people from peripheral islands are susceptible to mnemocide. Such erasure of memory is facilitated by “defensive and complicit forgetting,” which, according to Aleida Assmann, leads to “protection of perpetrators.” My paper reflects on the vulnerability of traumas from the islands to mnemocide by looking into [1] the massacre of communists and civilians on Jeju Island, South Korea in 1948 as described in Hyun-Kil Un’s short story “Dead Silence” (2017; English trans.) and [2] the eviction of residents and indigenous people from Calauit Island, Philippines for the creation of a safari in 1976 as imagined in Annette A. Ferrer’s “Pablo and the Zebra” (2017). In “Dead Silence,” I direct the attention to how to the execution of the villagers–witnesses to the death of the communist guerillas–is a three-pronged violence: it is a transgression committed against the innocent civilians; an act of “erasing traces to cover up” the military crackdown on the island; and, by leaving the corpses out in the open, a display of impunity. In “Pablo and the Zebra,” I second that both residents (i.e., humans and animals) experience post-traumatic stress because of their respective displacements; thus, the tension between them has got to stop. Curiously, while it concludes with a reconciliatory gesture between an elder and a zebra, no character demanded a reparation for their traumatic past per se. Could the latter be symptomatic of a silence that lets such violence “remain concealed for a long time?"