Remembering and Misremembering: Marking Time with Michael Jackson and Crissy

Fall of 1983: We were running out to the playground. Crissy had her boom box in her hand and we scoured the playground for a place to ourselves—but not too far away from others. We did want to be noticed. So we found a place on the jungle gym. She balanced the boom box on the top of the bars and pressed play. There was the music and then that voice to remember. “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” waved through the air. We laughed and jumped around to the music. The warm fall air, filled with the smell of dried leaves, lingered around us as we danced and played.

June 25-6, 2009: When I heard that Michael Jackson was dead, I was sitting at Atomic with Angela. We were talking about our research on Guatemala. I didn’t believe it at first. I looked at the CNN headline and just sort of thought it was a joke. I still don’t really believe it’s true to be honest with you. Part of me wants it to be a big publicity stunt for his great comeback. As I write this, though, it brings back lots of memories of growing up. I’ve been in an '80s nostalgia mode these days, so this just tipped me over the edge.

Remembering December 2, 1983: Crissy, and I eagerly awaited the world premiere of the “Thriller” video. Crissy was my best friend in the 5th and 6th grade. She was my first best friend. I remember being excited that the video would premiere on Friday Night Videos because my family did not have cable. Having it on Friday Night Videos meant that I could actually see the video for the first time when the rest of the country saw it for the first time. It was a time to celebrate, because not only was the video premiering, it was also less than a week before my birthday. For the occasion my parents let me invite Crissy over to spend the night.

That night has been significant for me—and not just because we watched “Thriller” for the first time. I was in the sixth grade and my family and I were living in the farmhouse in Defiance, Missouri. It is a house full of terrible memories, but that night—that night was one of the best nights I had in that house. I had a wood stove in my room and I remember that it was nice and warm—so toasty. Our firewood supply was often touch and go and luckily we had enough before our next trip into the woods. (Yeah, it was the sole source of heat for us.) So Crissy and I spent the evening doing all those things girls typically do. It was rare for me, because I almost never invited friends over to my house. My father was just too unpredictable with his drinking to trust bringing friends over. But this was an exception. It was near my birthday and it was Michael Jackson. I took the risk.

We had so much fun that night. Crissy and I played games, did each other’s make-up and hair, gossiped about the boys we liked at school, and, of course, talked about how awesome the video was going to be. By the time Friday Night Videos came on, we were poised with our popcorn—nearly ready to jump out of our skin with excitement. We watched it on the small tv in my room, because we wanted to digest it by ourselves, without parents. Crissy loved Michael Jackson. It was on the playground out school that I first heard Thriller. We were in our own little world when we listed to it at recess. When I would go to her house, she would pull out her album, opening it up to look at the full-length photo of Jackson that lay within it. White suit, cool hair. As the album played on her turntable, we would read the sleeve over and over again—memorizing the lyrics and all the acknowledgments.

June 25-26, 2009: So I’m sitting here listening to Larry King Live with all the famous people talking about the life of Jackson and their experiences with him. It’s strange, but I get frustrated with these obsessive tributes to famous people who die. It makes me feel disconnected from my own emotional responses to those figures. It becomes less and less meaningful as the news shows try to capture the moment as it is happening. There is no time to mull things over, to let yourself digest, not only the person’s death, but what such an event means to your own life. And it is an event. Michael Jackson was not just another person, his image was no longer his own. And if any of you are like me, you build your memories around those images, those events. Like it or not, popular culture is a marker for all of us. It reminds us of our immortality. It provides a way for us to remember events in our own lives—events that might otherwise melt away into the recesses of our minds. Oh, how I am a product of the 1970s and 1980s.

Without the marker of Thriller and the video’s premiere, I might not still remember the deeper things that were going on in my life in that period between 1982 and 1984. Or at least I would never be able to remember that time with the mixture of joy, bitterness, dark humor, and hope that currently defines those years for me. At same time, I find myself creating a narrative around big events, even if they don’t exactly align in real time.

Misremembering December 8, 1980: Here is how I always tell the story of what happened the day that John Lennon died: It was my birthday and we were living in the farmhouse. I threw a big birthday party with most of the girls from my class. I remember my mom glued to the television that evening, crying. I felt sad for my mom and sad that Lennon was dead. I just knew something big was happening even if at that moment I was more consumed with my friends and the drama of being a young girl than the news reports.

But that story is now all mixed up for me. The timing is all wrong. As I was reflecting on the date of when I watched “Thriller” with Crissy, it didn’t jibe with my memory of events during our time living in the farmhouse. If it was 1983 when I was sitting there with Crissy, watching “Thriller” and John Lennon died in 1980—the day of my 9th birthday, then that means we were not living in the farmhouse. We were living in the mobile home in Bonne Terre, Missouri. But that memory is so vivid. So clear. I see my mom on the couch in the living room in the farmhouse, crying and pacing. I see myself watching her from the doorway leading into the living room, leaving my friends in the back rooms on occasion in order to check in on her. It is so tangible, so real.

It was one of those dependable memories—until today, June 25-26, 2009. The story is no longer possible and it blurs into the many memories of that time in my life. Those memories are like helium balloons floating in the sky. They float and fluctuate, some fly away out of sight, some bump into other memories. Most are not attached to solid ground and I try to catch their strings to grasp onto something—anything that has coherency. But I find myself making and remaking those stories. Clumping events together that I know did not happen together in real time. All those memories of moving back and forth between California and Missouri are one big streak of movement with anecdotes making pock marks along Interstate 70. And then the years between the trailer in Bonne Terre and the farmhouse in Defiance merge, conflate, and push there way in and out of my consciousness.

Remembering December 2, 1983: After watching the video and talking about the dancing, the storyline—just completely dissecting each moment of the video, we got ready for bed. We stayed up, talking into the night about almost everything. It was the first time I felt I had a real friendship, that I had let the walls of my secret world down to share with somebody. Up until that time, I never really had a close friend. I just lived in my own world, which consisted largely of books. That night was the first time I ever told anybody that my dad was an alcoholic and that he was prone to fits of rage. She, then, shared with me her own struggles at home. I do not feel comfortable revealing those struggles, but suffice it to say, it made me realize that I was not alone. Although I would retreat into my shell about a year later when our friendship dissolved (it just couldn’t survive the transition from grade school to junior high), that moment was an awakening. It opened up something inside of me. It is a soft memory that rests outside of the many jagged and sharp memories that define that time in my life.

June 26, 2009: I keep looking at the dates of my life in Missouri, calculating the years and where I was living and when. It is messy. My memory of that time is full of mistakes and errors. I keep leaping for a string to attach at least one memory to solid ground. I’d like to think that the “Thriller” night is one such memory, but who knows. Right now, though, I don’t care. It is real. And it is me. It is how I can (and want to) mark the trajectory of my life. And I will take Crissy and Michael Jackson with me in this memory journey.

Walking...Meandering

I could see him walking toward me in the distance. He was stumbling up the road. It was clear he was drunk even from several blocks away. He would walk straight for a few steps, then veer to the right, catching himself and straightening out his gait. As he crossed the street, I was worried he would get off course again and walk into the middle of the street, but he didn’t. He kept getting closer to me, stumbling and swerving. I had a momentary pang of nervousness, like I wanted to find an alternative route to walk. I’m not sure why entirely. But I realized it was not only impossible to change my course at that point but I felt terrible that I was treating this poor man like a pariah and diminishing his humanity with each glance to find a way out of interacting with him. And I knew I would have an interaction with him. I seem to attract the attention of inebriated older men. It’s never a scary thing, but it is always awkward and uncomfortable for me.

Like the time in Buffalo when I was walking to a local café one morning. My boyfriend was with me, but that didn’t matter. The man came directly up to me and started telling me about how he was just released from jail. Basically incarcerated for being drunk in public and having nowhere to go. You see, I seem to inspire conversations with these men about their lives and struggles. So I listen. He told me that I looked like a kind person and he kept telling me he was glad he ran into me, thanking me for listening to him and giving me a hug. He smelled of alcohol and stale cigarettes. He wanted nothing from me except for me to listen to him.

I think some of it comes from my penchant for walking. No matter what city I’ve lived in, I am compelled walk around it as much as I can. I make sure I don’t just view where I live from the false security of the car. You miss a lot about a city when you just drive through it. When you walk a city, you take in a lot of subtle undertones that make the city what it is. You are forced to interact with other people, animals, nature, the buildings—even if it is for just a moment. These interactions taught me how to feel out people and figure out when it’s okay to smile and say hello as I pass and when it’s better to just look straight ahead toward my destination. You learn a lot about yourself in those moments.

So this man kept walking toward me and I was struggling for the best way to pass him. Do I make eye contact and smile? Do I look at the ground and pretend to be in my own head space? I think I was struggling because on my walks in Fargo, I have not had to face this type of situation. I know it sounds strange, but it was out of context. It was a Sunday morning. It was Father’s Day and here was this older man walking toward me visibly under the influence of alcohol. You see, this town is good at hiding its problems with alcohol and homelessness. You don’t really see homelessness in Fargo unless you really look for it. It’s the only city I’ve lived in that didn’t have a visible homeless population. And it’s not because homelessness doesn’t exist here. I think that is the misconception. Instead, I think the homeless population is marginalized and rendered invisible by a city that misunderstands what homelessness is and who is affected by it.

It’s unclear if this man was homeless, but I could not help but wonder what kind of life this man lived. And what led him to this moment when our paths crossed. I know a lot of strange things led me to that moment, so I can’t even begin to imagine the circumstances that led to his presence that morning. To see this man was out of context for me in Fargo and it immediately transported me to other moments, other walks in other cities when there was dynamic public space with a variety of characters and individuals that would enter and exit my life.

Working at Bulldog News on University in Seattle was always an experience with the local homeless community. One older gentleman would come in regularly. He was probably in his 70s. I can still see his face. Thick white whiskers all over his face. Long eyebrows with eyes sparkling and glistening as he spoke to me. His face had deep wrinkles and you could see how the sun and dirt had darkened his face and neck. His clothes were stained and worn and he usually had a stale and pungent odor. He had a shopping cart overflowing with newspapers and books that he would push around. He would park the cart at our door and ask me to watch it for him. He would then browse all the political magazines for the evening. He never bothered me. Often I would work the night shift with only one other person—the barista. So, he would talk to me at length about various political conspiracy theories. You could tell this man had one of those brilliant minds that disconnected him from ‘normal’ life--whatever that means. He would never answer my questions about his life. He would only talk about politics and his current quest for a book or information. He always reminded me that looks are deceiving and you cannot judge a person by their appearance. I would see him often as I walked to work or school or wherever I happened to be going. Even after I left the job at the newsstand and started working at the university library, I would see him there, coming in on the cold wet days to read. I’m not sure if he knew I was the same person from the newsstand but we would still talk politics and about various theories he had about the government.

As the man came closer to me and we were about to pass, I looked at him and smiled. I realized it was the appropriate response. Nothing about him made me feel I should worry. But then I noticed he was saying something to me, so I removed my headset and stopped. He looked at me and said, “You are beautiful.” I had no idea how to respond, so I just thanked him and told him to take care. Again, the awkwardness was there, but it was only for a moment. He continued on his path and I went on mine. As I walked, I looked back to see him still stumbling and swerving.

I continued on, realizing how much I missed living in a city that afforded me various opportunities for interactions with people outside of my small social sphere. But then I also realized I, too, am responsible for my insulted day-to-day life. It’s not just Fargo. It’s also this life that I’ve created in Fargo and the place I am in my life. I miss taking chances with strangers and being reminded of the diversity of life out there. It’s too easy to create a protected world in this small community. It is too easy to make excuses for myself, worrying about what image I’m supposed to project as a professor at a university. I miss the moments in which I felt the freedom of nothing to lose and everything to gain. As I passed that man, the heaviness that marks my small world became too oppressive to ignore. And all I wanted, as I walked on and finally stopped looking back at him, was to allow the walls I built around my world to shatter, releasing the pressure and density of my fears into the expansiveness of this open flat plain in which I live…. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” –Kris Kristofferson

Reading My Way Through Guatemala....

“If the past has nothing to say to the present, history may go on sleeping undisturbed in the closet where the system keeps its old disguises.”
— Eduardo Galeano

So, I haven’t written much in the past few days. I’ve felt a bit blank and tentative with my thoughts. This largely because I have been spending time reading about Guatemala’s history. I’ve been consumed by books to try to explain the poverty, the cynicism toward the government, the civil war, the alcoholism, the widespread corruption, the police with machine guns who I was told were largely useless. I want to understand why things are the way they are. I want a context in which to locate my experiences. I suppose that is me typified. Resort to books when I can’t understand what is going on around me. It is a coping mechanism for me. I have no idea what I’d do if I couldn’t bury myself in books. Researching things is like working on a large puzzle, putting pieces together from different books and different stories, and various other sources of information, trying to see the bigger picture. I have an affinity for the discovery process—and the big picture.

Agrarian Reform and Silence
It was after the man in that small warm room at The Dreamer Center finished talking about his experiences in the civil war that questions started to come to me. I wanted to ask much more than I knew I should. One question, though, inspired shared humor between the three people presiding over the talk that day. They exchanged sort of knowing glances that people share when they are asked a question that either has an obvious answer or that reflects the naiveté of the question-asker. Needless to say, I felt silly, because it was a question that was not obvious to me. And I wasn’t asking it naively, although it may have come out that way. I knew the question might not be possible to answer. What I wasn’t expecting was such a certain response.

I asked them if there were people or groups out there currently working against the corruption of the government. Resistance groups or parties? I mean, what I did know about Guatemala at that time was that the civil war was largely between a militant government and militant government resistors.

After a pause, I received essentially the answer of no and that people are too afraid to do such things. This was followed by discussions about how there are high numbers of vigilante-style justice tactics, because the government and police do not truly help its people. The corruption is widespread and everyday folks must take care of themselves. They explained that the peace treaty of 1996 was only paper and very little else. There was also an assessment that civil war is more than likely to break out again. It is only a matter of when. All this leads to contradictions that I couldn’t resolve in my mind and I didn’t feel comfortable pressing the issue. Why were they so quick to say there were no counter groups out there? If they are predicting civil war to erupt again, who are the groups/factions inciting it? Perhaps, these, too, are naïve questions.

But the questions continue to perplex me, especially as I continue to read about the recent history of Guatemala (the last 100 years or so). Currently, I’ve been reading two books, which have been helping me understand a little bit more. Bitter Fruit by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer and Silence on the Mountain by Daniel Wilkinson. These books have given me a few more pieces to the puzzle.

Agrarian Reform: Decree 900, The Agrarian Reform Bill of 1952. This seems to be a significant moment in Guatemalan history and marks both the pinnacle of the October Revolution of 1945 and the descent of its hope. The October Revolution in 1945 ousted General Jorge Ubico and set the stage for a democratic government under Dr. Juan José Arévalo. According to Schlesinger and Kinzer, Arévalo had four priorities for he six year term: “agrarian reform, protection of labor, a better educational system and consolidation of political democracy” (37). Arévalo made great strides in his six years in office, but his larger goals of change—particularly agrarian reform—were left to the next democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz. It is Arbenz who put Decree 900 into the books and it is he who would experience the repercussions of this legislation. The Agrarian Reform Bill set out to redistribute uncultivated lands that were in the hands of a very small elite—including United Fruit Company (U.S. owned). According to Schlesinger and Kinzer, at the time Arévalo took office in 1945, 2% of the landowners held 72 percent of the land (38). So, Arbenz’s goal was to enable Guatemala to move out of its plantation system and into a modern capitalist state. He also wanted to take if from a semi-colonial economy into an independent nation in a way that would raise the standard of living for all folks (see Schlesinger and Kinzer, 52). The upper class and the U.S. was less than happy with Arbenz, though. And his government was not without controversy. The specter of communism would rear its ugly head, giving the U.S. an excuse for intervention. Between the communist fear and the desire to protect U.S. corporate interests in Guatemala (United Fruit Company), the Arbenz administration—with its agrarian reform—was up against incredible odds.

As I read Bitter Fruit, I assumed the time of Decree 900 would be glorified in Guatemalan history as a key moment in which the people would hold on to for hope. The feeling I had as I started reading was that this was a book for people in the U.S. to know our role in the breakdown of the Guatemalan democracy, specifically-- and more broadly, the U.S.’s role in Central American politics. I assumed this history would be well versed in contemporary Guatemala. At this point, I’m not sure if it has been forgotten or it is just not talked about. Two entirely different things.

Silence: I then started reading Silence on the Mountain. I was only part way into Bitter Fruit, but I wanted to understand more than the broader political history. This book is an oral history that tells a story similar to Bitter Fruit, but tells it from the point of those affected by that history. This book provided the human nuances of the Agrarian Reform Bill and the overthrow of Arbenz—and their lasting impact on the country. Wilkinson did much of his research for the book in the early and mid-1990s when the civil war was still going on. The author is an American—a graduate of Harvard.

He met the inspiration for his research, César, while visiting a plantation. César grew up on a plantation and introduced Wilkinson to the Agrarian Reform. According to Wilkinson, university students like César were aware of the reform’s significance on Guatemala. In fact, he told Wilkinson that to understand the war in Guatemala, he needed to understand Agrarian Reform. This was the beginning of what would be a nearly obsessive journey to understand the reform’s impact on plantation workers and other everyday Guatemalans—not just those politically active. César had wanted to write a history of the Agrarian Reform for his thesis in agronomy, but was not allowed to by the faculty at the university. So every time he saw Wilkinson, he would say to him “Go find out what happened with their lands after the Agrarian Reform and you’ll understand the frustration that fueled the war. (9). Wilkinson realized that César was not challenging him, but asking Wilkinson to do the study that he wasn’t able to do himself.

But when Wilkinson went out to talk with people on plantations about Agrarian Reform, nobody seemed to remember it. Getting the vague response of saber (who knows) every time he asked about that time in history. Arbenz appeared to be little more than a footnote in their descriptions. It exemplified collective amnesia—but it was hard to decipher if it was that people didn’t know or didn’t want to speak of that time.

But, I told myself, he interviewed these people during the civil war, so of course many people would be fearful to speak about anything controversial or that might put their families in danger. What about now, though? I remember the folks at that center telling us that people are no longer afraid to speak about the war. But I wonder if they speak of Agrarian Reform. I wonder how they understand and talk about it in relation to the civil war and its aftermath? The students in César’s era knew about it, but what about now?

So many questions. What is the legacy of the silence? As Wilkinson continued, he realized that the silence—or secrecy—of the people was not merely a “necessity, it had been a virtue. And for the first time it occurred to [him] that people who told [him] ‘nothing happened’ had actually taken satisfaction in the exercise of that virtue” (235). I can’t help but wonder if it is a continued virtue. I also wonder if a society that has been built on fear and secrecy for so long can overcome that silence. Can fear be overcome in less than a generation?

Agrarian Reform: But we in the U.S. are fantastic at forgetting, too. And we are often privileged enough to remain ignorant of the things our nation does to enable us to continue to live this good life. For example, what are we willing to remember about our role in the coup that removed Arbenz from office? The demise of Agrarian Reform was not the result of the self-implosion of a corrupt government. Thanks to U.S. intervention, the Arbenz administration collapsed. According to Schlesinger and Kinzer, so did democracy. Arbenz was publicly renounced and humiliated through a variety of propaganda tactics orchestrated by the Dulles brothers under Eisenhower’s presidency. Part of “Operation Success” included ousting Arbenz, replacing him with the U.S. supported "Liberator," Castillo Armas.

Perhaps, it would be comforting to say that the U.S. stayed out of Guatemalan affairs after that, but it did not. Reading Bitter Fruit, all I could think of was the disastrous precedent it set in motion. It seems after that time, the government’s ability to regain stability and the trust of its people never found solid footing. One dictator after the next; one coup after the next. It was disheartening reading the spiraling cycle of violence that followed the demise of the Arévalo and Arbenz era. The military dominated the country and as Schlesinger and Kinzer comment, “the intention of the military leaders was essentially to destroy the political center. Anyone not supporting the regime was almost by definition leftist, and therefore an enemy. The military apparently believed that eliminating the center precluded the possibility of a moderate government, therefore leaving the citizenry the sterile choice between a revolutionary Communist regime and the existing military dictatorship” (251). There was only black and white and no room for the subtle shades of gray that give breath to real life.

Silence: Wilkinson pursued through the silence he encountered on his journey through Guatemala. He listened to the silence. Allowed the silence to persist. Silence is a significant theme of social trauma. Social trauma is by no means a phenomenon only found in Guatemala. Nor is it something new to me, considering it’s my primary area of research. What was new to me was the way I experienced it when I was in Guatemala. My obsession has been with the Vietnam War and its impact on cultural structures in the U.S. and Vietnam. And I experientially live that impact (at least on the American side). I have only read about the social trauma in places like Argentina, Germany, Armenia, and other nations.

Yes, I visited Germany and several concentration camps, so I went beyond books in that context. But Guatemala was different. Unlike the disconnected tours in the concentration camps, I saw trauma's echoes in ways that have emotionally attached themselves to my conscious/conscience. There was an emotionality that I linked in to. It’s hard to explain, but in some ways it’s like you’re seeing the effects of that past lived out in the lives of the children, mothers, men—all that I was introduced to in Guatemala. And things about those experiences were frighteningly familiar, which made them entirely palpable. As I go back in my mind to those ten days, I think about what wasn’t spoken in the stories we heard. I think about the things I didn’t see when I was there. I’m still waiting for the holes in the puzzle to start to tell another story. Galeano’s quote seems all too relevant: “If the past has nothing to say to the present, history may go on sleeping undisturbed in the closet where the system keeps its old disguises.”

Agrarian Reform: The history between the U.S. and Guatemala needs to be remembered from both sides. Agrarian Reform wasn’t about attacking a particular corporation. It was about a country trying to gain autonomy over its resources. For Arbenz, it wasn’t about taking the land away from the rich and giving it to the poor. It was about creating a viable and sustainable system for his country. But the history of colonization proved challenging to overcome. As Schlesinger and Kinzer comment, the current state of Guatemala (at least at the time this was written) was worse than what had existed prior to the October Revolution. Over 30 years of civil war and political instability wreaks havoc on the economy and culture of a nation—not to mention what it does to its people.

And where do we in the U.S. locate our relationship to Guatemala? As the Dulles brothers were celebrating their victory and Arbenz was humiliated and exiled from his country, what happened to the people? What happened to Guatemalans? And did any of it really matter to Americans?

Silence: I wish I could convey what I gained from these books. It seems all I could really talk about is the content of each book, but there’s more to it than that for me. It’s the books in the context of what I saw when I was in Guatemala. Pieces of the puzzle fitting together, but the articulation not there yet. I wish I could convey the mood and the energy of sitting in a room with a person telling their story, plugging into something larger that is so present, yet inarticulable. All I have right now, though, is the outline of an image. The colors and nuances of the picture are intangible and fluid. And I’m yet again learning how to accept ambiguity as clarity, waiting for the shifting images to tell me something else, something different.

César, Wilkinson’s point of contact, made an important point to him. Wilkinson asked how he was supposed to write the story of this history of Agrarian Reform if nobody could remember or were willing to speak of that time in history. Wilkinson lamented that it wasn’t the same as archaeologists excavating bodies; memories are not tangible. Bodies don’t lie and distort the past. Wilkinson was sure he’d never get the full story. César’s response echoes in my mind, “’forensics never get the full corpse, do they?’ He had a point. What they got was decayed. Sometimes, it had been mutilated beyond recognition. ‘But it still tells them something, right?’” (21) The closest I can come to try to convey this process is when I was interviewing soldiers with PTSD and the dance we would perform as they talked about their war experiences. Often we talked in bits and pieces. We would talk about their job, their duties. We would talk about those duties as a doctor might talk about a surgery. Great detail about the specifics; the feelings behind the actions left silently lingering in that thick surface description of a seemingly sterile task. The story seemingly beyond recognition. But the stories were there if you waited and listened. Really listened. Nothing is ever what it seems.

We tell stories for many reasons. We want to remember. We want to find resolution. We want to be whole again. We want people to know that real life is far more complex than a reform bill or a coup. That lives circulate beneath all of that. People are affected. People have a lot to say—even if they don’t say anything all.

Works Cited:
Schlesinger, Stephen and Stephen Kinzer: Bitter Frut: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Wilkinson, Daniel. Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.