5 - An “Heroic Village”

Summary

If it is commonly acknowledged that representations of the past are central to the symbolic constitution of national consciousness, the relationship between collective history on the one hand, and memories based on personal experience on the other, is a vexed one, even when a coercive state is responsible for the production of history. Perhaps it is wise to adopt Rubie S. Watson' cautious statement when she writes: “it is important that we do not credit the socialist state and its agents with too much power or its citizens with too much boldness” (Watson 1994, p. 2). People are not mere passive receivers; nor are they constantly resisting. Homi Bhabha sees the relationships between individuals and the nation' narrative through a dual lens, or in his words, in “doubletime”. The people are the “historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy”, but they are also

the ‘subjects’ of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary presence of the nation-people to demonstrate the prodigious, living principle of the people as that continual process by which the national life is redeemed and signified as a repeating and reproductive process

(Bhabha 1995, p. 297).

It is precisely this duality that allows individuals a space for contesting the official representation of the past, which claims to configure the imagining of the national community. Elizabeth Tonkin argues that people are both subjects and agents in the account of memory and the constitution of history. Social conditions and political rhetoric mould identities; yet, individual subjectivity is not entirely dominated by the social, or by the actions of the nation–state. Personal and social identities are clearly intertwined; however, people have a margin for criticism and self-reflection. She states: “[…] oral accounts no less than written ones can be means of comment and reflection, in which different pasts are conceptualised, and, often, contradiction and failure admitted” (Tonkin 1992, pp. 130–31). In other words, totalizing narrations of national history are not themselves homogenous. They serve as a framework, the content and bounds of which may be re-presented by people.