Conference Review
Memory Maps: Image, Place, and Story
Summary Abstract
Memory Maps is a creative work-in-progress: interdisciplinary, participatory and interactive. It links creative writing, art, criticism and scholarship to explore ideas of place, and so responds to cultural, social and environmental concerns in a distinctive and novel way. Originating at the University of Essex (UoE), the memory mapping now embraces the whole of East Anglia. The CRASSH event reflected these regional links, as several local organisations collaborated: the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) at the University of East Anglia (UEA), Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, as well as UoE.
(The ongoing Memory Maps work can be seen on the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) website.
The conference gathered together a shining constellation of speakers who work with place and memory from different and often unusual angles and in a wide variety of methods and media – artists, photographers and composers as well as writers. The one common denominator, as one speaker pointed out, was that everyone taking part walks – that is, moves into landscapes and cities to discover things at first hand, close up. Some speakers are the brightest figures in this literary form in its contemporary guise: Iain Sinclair, Richard Mabey, and Rebecca Solnit – she came from San Francisco via Iceland, where she was in a writer’s retreat.
The dominant issues explored included: the nature of Memory itself and its relations with imagination; the ethical and political implications of such memoir/fictions; the role of visual and written materials in defining the stories of the past, and their connections to national folklore and the historic dangers of ethnic exclusivity; translations between languages, cultures and societies; and ways of living in an ecologically fragile world.
The ‘convivium’ was packed to capacity for two days’ effervescent showing and telling, with much responsiveness from the audience.
Conference Review
As Memory Maps is a project that explores the writing of place and has a special interest in Essex and East Anglia, it was very apt and fruitful that the event was coordinated by CRASSH in Cambridge. The centre’s collaboration with the University of Essex, where the Memory Maps project is based, is most valuable to UoE and its collaborators in BCLT at UEA. The event was a great success from that point of view, as well in many other ways, and several participants expressed a hope that it would become an annual gathering. Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge also joined in, and the closing evening of the event took place in that inspiring house, followed the next morning by a walk led by the sparkling local historian Jon Harris along the Backs, and closing with a writing workshop when the participants could roam the collections in the house. The whole event thus drew much material from the history and artistic riches of the region, from fens to gipsies, non-conformist sects to occult chalk drawings, as many speakers created their own ‘memory maps.’ This form of writing arises through walking landscapes, cities, suburbs and wastelands,and involves conveying them in images in different media as well as words. The point of the conference was to illuminate the character and significance of these activities, their relations with each other, and their wider implications. The two and a half days were arranged in some way to map the contours and landmarks in this inspiring emergence of a literary genre that crosses the boundaries between sciences and humanities, memoir and fiction, poetry, politics, and psychology. Many celebrated walker-writers took part (Rebecca Solnit; Iain Sinclair; Robert Macfarlane; Richard Mabey; Patrick Wright). It is in the nature of the genre that their angles of approach and their work are distinctive and highly individual. Some papers were carefully composed on the page in advance; others were impromptu reveries. Almost every talk was of remarkable high quality: inspired, funny, learned, original. The audience was extremely attentive, asked good questions on the whole, and the buzz of excitement from the start very strong and maintained to the end.
Each panel was designed to explore a specific, different aspect of Memory Maps as a form. The role of stories in the life of places and of the people who live in them was inspiringly explored in the opening session. Rebecca Solnit (author of Wanderlust, Savage Dreams, A Field Guide to Getting Lost et al.) spoke about her plans to create an atlas of San Francisco, her home town, which would be generated by the personal knowledge of all the different groups with the local population, including migrants, runaways, and children, in the manner of an illustrated souvenir handkerchief. In the evening Rebecca also gave a reading and the event, which took place in Newnham, was very well received; the passages she chose showed her supreme mastery of this imaginative form, which involves day-dreaming, aesthetics, browsing, and rich fugues of association.
The role of language in stories was emphasised in Macfarlane’s original account of the islanders of Lewis and their struggle to prevent a giant wind farm from destroying the ‘brindled moor’. He handed out a remarkable glossary of peat terms in Gallic (later, these returned in a poem written by one of the participants in the writing workshop at Kettle’s Yard). The theme of cross-pollinated language was taken up with bravura rhetoric by Sahayl Saadi (a Glaswegian of Pakistani origin), whose own writing includes elements of Farsi, Urdu, Scots etc. He was the first speaker of the event representing a dominant theme of the Memory Maps event: the crossings, diasporas, and exchanges that have formed every place. This developed further on the second day, with perspectives from photography (Grace Lau on images of the Chinese); music (Hazel Marsh on gipsy songs), Patrick Wright (on Stanley Spencer on a visit to China talking about Cookham), and Bernardine Evaristo who gave a fine talk about her autobiographical fiction, which explores her own complex, multi-stranded ancestry.
A panel ‘Soundscapes’ closed the first day with the composer Ilona Sekacz talking most sensitively about music and place, and the poet George Szirtes giving an enthralling reading of his libretto for Wymondham Abbey, his local church, on the little river, the Tiffey (‘little Tiffey, squiffy Tiffey’). Both these speakers were memorable and much loved and acclaimed by the delegates.
Under the title ‘Embodied Knowledge’ on the second day, Memory itself became the issue. Charles Fernyhough, writer and psychologist, usefully discussed the brain, where memory does not exist as a separate faculty at all, and cannot be distinguished from imagination. The work of Susannah Radstone on the crucial need to attend to the ways memories are formed, moving from personal to public and collective, was read in her unavoidable absence by me (not an ideal way to present someone’s work, but Radstone’s warnings are of vital importance). Grace Lau’s archive of historical Chinese images, showing tortures, foot-binding, and the kowtow, revealed the way public images burrow into personal images: that is the way we ‘remember’ the Chinese. Her own photographs, which she then showed, wittily reveal the artifice and conventions involved in making images at all. Though this was the most theoretical and dry of the sessions, it was penetrating, as it refined the distinction between historical truth and personal forms of memory work in any medium. Amanda Hopkinson, addressing directly the translation and other literary processes used by W.G. Sebald examined closely this genius loci of Memory Maps.
Memory Maps as a literary form has clearly evolved from nature writings, conservationist and social reform campaigns, and ecological awareness, and this strand was explored provocatively and brilliantly by Richard Mabey, the great naturalist, who commented caustically on the new word ‘stewardship’ and declared himself against management of land, especially of beechwoods. Jules Pretty evoked his walk along the East Anglian coast, complete with box of beachcombings. Ken Worpole later spoke with his customary passion and persuasiveness about the hidden histories of idiosyncrasy, survival strategies, collective action, voluntary associations etc. etc. in Essex alone, and emphasised the relation of Memory Maps writings to community and identity in a utopian, political sphere. George Szirtes’s reading of his poem, Tiffey Song, was truly enthralling and offered to us a songline and a poem-map in the full expressive beauty of the form.
The concern with belonging, diaspora, and translation, very much at the forefront of BCLT’s research, returned very strongly on the second day, represented by talks with farflung focus, including Joy Gregory on her work on a lost language of the Bushmen in the Kalahari.
The different speakers took three different approaches in the main:
In one group, each of them created a new Memory Map, often an inspiring instance of the genre, weaving a story out of discoveries about a certain place, making highly imaginative and entertaining connections, and writing it in witty, dreaming, savoury language as appropriate.
A second cluster reflected and commented on their own methods and on the task of Memory Mapping, analysing the implications, meanings and purposes of the genre itself. They threw light on the project and moved us towards a fuller definition of the form.
A third cluster talked directly about their own work, with a presentation of ongoing research (these were more conventional conference papers); they broadened the scope of Memory Mapping’s interests and their insights helped enriched the conversation.
The evening event at Kettle’s Yard drew about 40 people, The house with its astonishing collections offers in itself an astonishing archive and a living stimulus to new memories. The evening began with readings by Tamar Yoseloff from the anthology she edited for Kettle’s Yard; Fiona Sampson and Ruth Padel then read, the latter a stunning long meditation which flew with passion and power from the Buddhas in the collection to the repressive regime in Burma.
