Bridget Conley, *Memory from the Margins: Ethiopia’s Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum*. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

This monograph poses an intriguing question: "What role does memory play during a political transition?" By exploring Ethiopian history, transitional justice, and academic fields that deal with memory, museums, and trauma, Bridget Conley reveals a rich narrative filled with global, transnational, national, and local influences, all centered around a small museum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia—the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum. This analysis comes from various perspectives: neither the Ethiopian situation nor the process of memorialization is typically at the forefront of transitional justice debates, and within Ethiopia, the history of the Red Terror is frequently ignored in current political discussions. From these complex perspectives, traumatic memory surfaces as a multifaceted social and political force. The roles, meanings, and constraints of memory become clear through the unique interactions among memory advocates, survivor-docents, and visitors. Memory from the margins proves to be impactful in how it disrupts rather than creates new community forms.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Hello. Welcome to the Dialogues and International History Podcast. I am your host, Ari Barbalat, and today I'm honored to engage in a dialogue with Bridget Conley regarding her recently published book, Memory from the Margins, Ethiopia's Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum, published in Ham, Switzerland, by Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. This monograph asks the following question: What is the importance of memory during a political transition? By drawing on Ethiopian history, transitional justice, and scholarly disciplines that engage with memory, museums, and trauma, the author unveils a complex narrative of global transnational national and local influences as they converge in the tale of a modest medium in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the Red Terror Martyrs, Memorial Museum. This analysis is derived from various margins. Neither the Ethiopian case nor the act of memorialization is a primary focus in transitional justice discussions, and within Ethiopia, the history of the Red Terror is often overlooked in contemporary political contexts. From these layered margins, traumatic memory emerges as an ambiguous social and political force. The contributions, meanings, and limitations of memory become apparent through the distinct interactions between memory advocates, survivor docents, and survivors. Memory from the margins is revealed to be powerful in how it disrupts rather than constructs new forms of community. Bridget Conley is research director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher Graduate School of Global Affairs at Tafts University. She was previously research director for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museums Committee on Conscience. Bridget, it's an honor to be in dialogue with you today.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

All right, thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

To begin, can you kindly tell us about yourself and describe your personal relationship to this field of study in general and to this particular book in particular?

SPEAKER_00 2:45

Yeah, so as you noted, I worked with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum previously, and I was there from 2001 to 2011. So 10 years, and it was my first job after my PhD. And um it's an obviously an extremely powerful um museum, a powerful organization to work with. And um when I left that museum, I wasn't sure that I would work on memorialization again, but I was part of a project through World Peace Foundation, where I work now, where we went to the um Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, to the, which is also where the African Union has its headquarters, uh, for a project on how the African Union might incorporate a memorial to human rights. And the idea behind this project was that it would form a memorial to several different episodes, although the exact form and shape was being developed. It included the Rwandan genocide, the South African transition, um, and slavery. And there were experts from across the continent from those institutions and those those um and countries, and the slavery one was in Senegal, Gori Island. Um and then because it was also held in Ethiopia, and because of the um the proximity of a prison to the African Union campus, the Red Terror, the period of the Red Terror, was also considered as one of the African historical events that could be memorialized. That project never came to fruition in the shape of a particular memorial or museum, but it was my first encounter with Ethiopia's memorial museums when I toured the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum. And I found it really intriguing. Um there is a lot that was reminiscent of memorial museums that I'd seen elsewhere, but there were also some features that I thought were really innovative and really powerful. And um, so I went back after the official tour. I went back on my own to take a second look, and I was speaking with a man who worked there. His name is Frey, and he is a survivor of violence from that time period. He was a young man during the Red Terror, uh 1974 to 76. Um actually, sorry, I just gave you the wrong dates. 74 is when the Emperor Heli Selassie was um overthrown. The actual terror is basically 1976 through 1977 and largely ending then in 78. Um, so I went and I I spoke with Frey at the end of the tour that he gave me. And as I went to leave, um, I said something that I think a lot of people feel at the end of spending time with survivors, and particularly survivors who work in institutions dedicated to the memory of violence, they have experienced, um, you know, you don't quite know what to say. Um, I think even people who like myself who've spent careers working on these issues, when you meet someone whose life has been fundamentally um altered and forever altered by the experience of violence, it's you know, words just always feel inadequate. Um so I turned to him and I said, you know, it must be very difficult to work here, but very rewarding to be part of educating and making sure that the memory isn't lost. And he looked at me and said, No, I hate working here. It's the only place I could get a job. And it was really shocking and really jarring, and it it was at odds with um what I had heard from Holocaust survivors who worked or volunteered often at the Holocaust Museum, and from what I had heard elsewhere from other memorial museums, and it stuck with me, and that was really the start of this project um was this question of then why is he here, right? How does he come to be here? How does that museum come to be where it is? And what is what is the potential for change? What were the potenti the limitations on this man's life, but also the the accomplishments that he'd been able to achieve through his work? And and it just stuck with me. And so when I had the opportunity to go and do more research on the museum, I jumped at it. Um, and it was really, it was really motivated not by a theoretical position um or uh you know a sort of major thesis statement or a hypothesis of the museum. It was really provoked by curiosity to try to understand better what Frey had told me.

SPEAKER_01 8:34

How does your research advance our understanding of trauma?

SPEAKER_00 8:38

So I'm not sure. Like there is a theme of trauma. I mean, there there has to be, right? I mean, there's no um you're dealing with this kind of history. Um, it just de facto is traumatic. And so it's um it's embedded in the history and in the work. I didn't try, and again, like I said, it wasn't a heavily theorized, it isn't a heavily theorized text. Um I think so. I learned from and I built on some theories of trauma. I looked a little bit at um Kathy Carruth's work on trauma, um, also on torture in particular, work like Michel Foucault and Elaine Scary. Um there's been a lot of work on arguing or debating whether or not the terms of trauma, how it applies to especially non-Western societies, um, and is it are there assumptions embedded within it that, you know, have um that limit its applicability as a concept? Um, I don't go deeply into that. Um, you know, there's other debates about whether and looking prioritizing trauma as a response to severe episodic violence detracts our attention away from the kind of structural violence of long-term injustices like colonialism. Obviously, Ethiopia was not colonized, but the colonization of Africa nonetheless influences Ethiopian history, impacts it. I was more interested in the ways in which we can understand, we can we can learn from trauma studies about what trauma does to the kind of moralizing lessons that people often assume are uh come from an encounter in a memorial museum. And for me, what was interesting was, and again, this is memory from the margins, right? So this is not the predominant story of Ethiopian history. Um, it's a distinct pocket within that history. Um, but part of what trauma does in very layman terms on an individual psychological uh level is it's an event that cannot be incorporated into your sort of self-narrativization, right? It's an event that exceeds our capacity to um to manage and control. And so it's a disruptive force. And obviously, people do find ways. There's lots of ways in psychology that and lots of experimental ways beyond that, um, in which people are able to make sense of traumatic past. So I'm not saying it's a it's a closed door, but the structure of trauma is that it doesn't fit in within the narrative of the present. It's a disruptive force. And part of what I wanted to argue in this book, what I learned through the process of doing the research, is that exposure to traumatic histories, so periods of extreme violence, such as that of the Red Terror, are similarly very difficult to incorporate into narratives of the state, of the society, of democracy, um, which is often what they have been assumed to be able to do, for good or for bad, right? Some people will argue that these traumatic histories end up reifying grievances and making the the work of democracy, of compromise more difficult. On the other side, people argue that being able to air these historical traumas gives people a space to reflect on the limits of the way that often minorities have been treated in the past. My argument is somewhat more um takes a slightly different path in saying that the traumatic impact of the tour, right, of the exposure to this history does not point us necessarily in one direction or another. It's a disruptive force. And the question is always, what do people do with that disruption? Having gone through a museum tour and being exposed to traumatic history, especially in this context where you're being guided by people who have themselves survived it. And so they also bring their traumas to it. And some of them manage it quite well, and others, I think, struggle much more. Um, and so there are all these layers of difficulty of, you know, with within the guide, within the history that's being conveyed, within the presence in this case of what I would call traumatic artifacts, right? So exhumed skeletal remains. And they don't resolve neatly. And I think that was the main point that I wanted to get across. And I think the main contribution, if there is one, to trauma studies, is that it has the idea, especially memorial museums, um, that they resolve either into grievance or into democratizing trends, is that we cannot take either for granted. There's a disruptive moment in that encounter when it works and works well, but there is no control ultimately over the way individual visitors or groups of visitors resolve that tension. So it becomes a um, ideally, and I think this is the best that these museums can do, that disruptive factor or an or an insertion of uncertainty. Um, and people make sense of that in many different ways, building on the frameworks for making sense of the world that they bring with them to the tour.

SPEAKER_01 14:48

What questions does your study ask? How does it go about probing them?

SPEAKER_00 14:53

So the first one, as I noted, was just um what is life like for someone who works day to day inside their worst memory. And so that was the focus on the docents, the survivor docents. And docent is not a term used widely in Europe or elsewhere. Um, it's really in the American museum context, um, you know, someone who's an expert who guides people through a museum and sort of helps facilitate the learning experience. Um, and the survivor is obviously someone who has that direct experiential uh knowledge. And so it kind of puts these two terms at odds with each other. So that was the first question, right? Is what is life like? How how does how does Frey, how do his colleagues make sense of that tension within their careers and their personal lives? But once they started working at the you know, working into trying to research and and understand the museum, the other questions, um, and there are several, was just sort of a very basic one. How did this museum get created? What were the forces, um, the examples, the models, the artifacts, and the key figures who contributed to its creation? What did they try to do? Um, what in the end, what were some of the debates they struggled with? And how did those debates shape the final form of the museum? And then at a slightly larger level, I also was curious to think about those influences on the creation of this museum in conversation with presumptions about the way memorial museums have been created in other contexts. Um, and there's been, you know, the field has of memory studies and particularly around memorial museums. There have been a lot of debates about the role of what precedence, and like often the Holocaust is cited as a major one in terms of the development of memorial museums, but certainly they were not the first. And there are many around the world that predate um Holocaust memorialization in particular. Um, so to try to understand what we can say about how this museum, what does this museum, what insights can it give us to that urge to memorialize through museum form, which is something that we see more broadly. Um and then uh another question, um, we sort of uh um was also more broadly thinking about transitional justice. And so, how do we understand the place of museums in the context of transitional justice, societies going through transitional justice? In this case, the transition from a uh military regime to one ostensibly um that took the form of democracy, largely one-party democracy for many years, um, but uh not a military regime in any case.

SPEAKER_01 18:04

Can you introduce listeners to the Red Terror Marchers Memorial Museum?

SPEAKER_00 18:10

Yeah, so the museum was um conceived, created by an association of survivors and family members of victims of the Red Terror, which again, as I noted, happened in the 1970s. The museum was not created until um the early 2000s. There were precedents along the way, um, but the museum itself didn't open until 2010. Um, that's when it opened to the public. The process of creating it took quite some time, um, from you know, gathering the resources to well, coming, you know, dealing with the debates about what did this association want to do, um, deciding what they wanted to do, getting the land, the artifacts, and the funds to create it. The museum, um, and if listeners want to look up what it looks like, there are many photos of it online. Um, the architects, the man named Fossil, and Ethiopia people uh you often will just go by by one name that they don't have family names the way we do. Um, and it's structured within a modernist building. The core memorial or museum part is housed in what looks like uh um a large black stone sort of jutting into the ground. And then there are series of smaller um structures attached to it that reflect the the a lighter shade, a light brown of the wall behind the museum space. Right. So it's both of its environment and also with a museum structure, it looks like a very um heavy and weighty interruption of that larger landscape. It starts by telling the story of uh, it starts actually with the juxtaposition of a famine, a 1972 famine in in northern Ethiopia, and the um the celebration of Emperor Hale Selassie's 80th birthday at the same time. And so you have this incredible juxtaposition of wealth and celebration and destitution. And it was the opposition of those two factors that played a critical role, not the only, but a really critical role in spurring on the revolution that would see Selassie overthrown and then the military regime take power, and then the contestation that resulted in the Red Terror. From there, the museum then um sets up the patterns through that early time period after, so after 1974, as the military takes power, and then you have lots of protest and counter-protest and efforts to determine the shape of the country hotly debated and increasingly violent. Uh the military regime is violent immediately. As soon as it takes over, it kills 59 ministers. Um, but they try to, there's sort of an amorphous period at the beginning where they're trying to figure out how they're going to rule. Um, but nonetheless, it becomes increasingly violent. And then the period of the Red Terror, which is inaugurated by the head of the military regime, um, is um he throws Mengistu, he throws a bottle that had red blood, it's paint, um, onto the square, which is the same square where the museum is. And um he he basically announced. Is the Red Terror. And that's a period which the government unleashed local forces, but also used state forces to decimate the political opposition. And that part of the museum, they have many photographs, they have some artifacts of the increasing signs of violence on the streets, in the prison systems, in mass graves. And they have a wall in this section as well of all these faces of people who were killed during this time period. They also have a model that shows some of the forms of torture that were carried out against many people who were arrested. And the hallway has a slightly downward slant. And then there's a space at the end of this period telling this history of the terror that opens into a room where they have a collection of human remains, some of which are identified and others of which are not identified. And that's where the main narrative of the museum ends. One thing I would also note is they have some very powerful artwork, paintings. Ethiopian Eastern Orthodox faith has a long tradition of icon painting and in contemporary terms a very rich and vibrant art scene as well. And some of the artists and artists also became involved in creating artwork for the museum. So that's a very powerful and also very vividly colorful and a largely black and white presentation of history.

SPEAKER_01 24:06

Under what circumstances did the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum come into existence? Can you tell the story or stories?

SPEAKER_00 24:14

Yeah, so there were several factors. The most compelling, and when I talked to the woman, a woman named Nunu Sege, um, who was really a crucial person for creating it, she says that it was the human remains. That was what moved her. Um and these were remains of people who'd been killed during the terror. And it's really important also to note that the military regime not only killed people, they also uh would uh punish people for showing any sign of grieving or mourning. And so the history of this time period was locked down. The military regime remained in power until 1991. So it's a long time from when the violence happens to when people can speak about it. Once people are able to speak about it, um, you had instances particularly of family members following leads to mass graves where they thought that their loved ones might have been interred, again, decades later, and doing impromptu exhibitions. There were some professional exhibitions, but at these mass grave sites, littered around Addis Ababa, which is where my work focuses and where history, our historical study so far, knows the most about this time period. Um, and of these human remains, some were identified, right? If someone had an ID card in their pocket or you know, some other really distinguishing feature, but many of them could not be identified. Um, DNA identification was just starting to be used. It would end up being used much more in Bosnia and Kosovo. Um, there's been incredible work that's been done in Latin America as well, in Guatemala, um uh in Peru. But in this case, they didn't have the funds or the means and the international support for um identifying remains. So Nunu told me that she had lost a brother. He'd been killed uh during the Red Terror, and she felt like it had shortened her mother's life. Her mother never recovered, and um, they never recovered his remains. And so there was a choice made by this association to uh provide a home for some of these remains, right? So um to say, you know, we don't know if this is our loved one, but we know that they were killed for the same reason, and so we will take these remains and and house them in some way. But they didn't quite know at the beginning what would be the best way to provide a home for the bones. Um, in Ethiopia, there are um many people who are Eastern Orthodox, there's other forms of Christianity, there's a large Islamic community, and there are also other more traditional religions that people adhere to and spiritual systems. And so it wasn't clear that there'd be any single appropriate, you know, um, religiously sanctioned burial ground. And so they thought that a memorial museum could provide uh the right space. There were debates about whether there should just be a memorial or whether it should be a memorial museum. And um, in those debates, um, ultimately the view of a memorial museum won the day. Um, largely because of that gap where no one had spoken about this history. The people who knew about it um wanted to make sure that even though it had been really lost and pushed into a silence for decades, they wanted to try to create a mechanism where younger people could learn about that history. And so a memorial doesn't quite do that, right? It marks space, but it doesn't provide that educative um background framework, uh, you know, for for people to come and learn about the history. So that was how they decided on a memorial museum. I also argue that there's a certain logic, I call it duridical, like a legal logic, that um becomes more popular during this time period and helps frame and make sense of periods of violence. And by that I mean people were increasingly starting in the 1990s, um, using legal frameworks and legal processes, as we would later see with um, you know, South Africa or the creation of, you know, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, or the international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and subsequent um trials and legal uh um you know court systems, courts elsewhere. There's a way of telling a story of history. And you had it also uh just back up one moment within human rights narratives as well, right? The idea that there are laws that nations have signed up to. And when those laws are violated, that um there needs to be a recovery process that really um foregrounds the suffering, the experiences of victims. And that will help make sense and help people move through. So memorial museums have slightly they have very different techniques for telling history, but that narrative, right, of documenting harms, of telling history from the viewpoint of those who are victimized, um, and then of making assumptions about what that airing of history will do. Obviously, in a legal tribunal, you're looking at accountability, which is generally reduced to incarceration. Um, and that has not proven to be a particularly um powerful, I don't think, um, mechanism. Others would argue with me. Um, right, whereas in a museum, you have that narrative structure, but the answer is a permanent site that is open to the public for educational purposes, right, versus criminal accountability. So these were these were some of the major forces. Now, they were also able to um claim ground at the center of Addis Ababa, Mescal Square, where the the famous speech that inaugurated the Red Terror occurred um in February of 1976. And um, because there was a memorial stone that had been placed there. So there was a precedent, right? There was, it's it had gone, it had faded into the um sort of the everyday passage uh through that square. It was not a very big presence, but nonetheless, it provided the logic for having and a and a sort of claiming ground, you know, a sort of foothold for the museum activist to be able to argue that they should be able to build a museum on a particular location. So it's those material objects, right? A stone that marks a space, bones uh that needed a hallowed ground to be held in. Um, it's a way of seeing the world and of making sense of violent history. Um and then also uh a moment in Ethiopia's history where they were also building several other museums. And so there were models within the country that people were familiar with that made a museum seem like a logical answer to what to do with this history.

SPEAKER_01 32:33

What kinds of people constitute the typical visitors to the Red Terror Martles Memorial Museum?

SPEAKER_00 32:41

Yeah, so um the by the time I went, so again, I said it opened in 2010. I did most of my work there in 2016, 17. Um, and so I went through they have um the museum um staff told me that they have um they have several different um sort of categories of visitors. Um are international people who are just asking, you know, we're here for various tourism or business in Ethiopia, and the museum is listed as a place to go. And, you know, they said those people may have actually no idea about the history. Um, they just start looking for museums. Um, you have another group, which is people who are directly impacted, so survivors or loved ones. Um, and you know, there's a large Ethiopian diaspora, so some of these people may also not live um nearby. They may come back in summers to visit family. Um and then they also then have sort of what we would just call the general public, um, people who are Ethiopian and visiting for any number of other reasons. But they said it's on page they were getting initially they got around 70,000 visitors in the first years, and that sort of leveled out to about 35,000 a year, um, of whom the vast majority, um, 86% in the beginning, although it had reduced to 65% by 2015, were Ethiopian, right? So people who who are at least of the country. And over that same time, international visitors had risen from 6% initially to 28% of total visitors. Um, one thing for an American audience, they did not have a culture in their schooling of visiting museums like we do here. And so they don't get that kind of school group uh uh bump in visitation, which a lot of museums in the US do.

SPEAKER_01 35:01

Can you say something about the value of Survivor Dawson's testimonies on the narration of history? What is the importance of Survivor Dawson's testimonies in shaping historical narratives? Can you say something about the conceptual, theoretical, and philosophical questions that arise when thinking about the testimony that they report and convey?

SPEAKER_00 35:25

Yeah, so as I said, there's a narrative structure to memorial museums that in all the ones I have seen, and I'm trying to spin through my head, I don't think there are any that don't do this, but that really try to valorize and foreground the experiences of people who have been victims of violence and telling history. And it's one of the major differences. If anyone's been to a war museum, that is not the story. You'll get personalized accounts of soldiers, right? But it's it's there, people who have at least in theory, not that all soldiers do, but in theory, some agency and some ability to protect themselves. Uh, what memorial museums um invariably do is capture people who have been subjected often to political violence, um, but not entirely. Um so victims' voices, survivor voices are central to the perspective of the of an exhibition narrative of a memorial museum. And this is not unproblematic. And this is where you know you asked for for some of the theoretical grounding. Um, so there are some people who have argued very strongly that the power of the memorial museum is its ability to create empathetic links with the visitor that enables them to see history from the side of people who have been victimized. And that would produce uh uh denunciation of violence, right? That that's the logical structure, right? Empathy to denunciation of violence. And then you get to the never again sentiment, which is is one that's widely seen at museums. Others have argued, though, that victims' voices, even though they are extremely important, um, no serious thinkers would dismiss them, but that they are limited, they are one view of history, and that sometimes in valuing one view of history, you can minimize the complexity of events for people who live through time periods, um, and in some ways therefore romanticize. And I don't mean that, you know, in the in a um make it seem positive, but make history seem simple and straightforward. Um and and then also demonize perpetrators, um, in which case then we can fail to understand the causes at times, right? If we if we want to understand complex violent histories, we have to take in multiple perspectives. That doesn't mean accept all points of view as equally valid, but at least endeavor to understand them so that the lessons we draw from history can be um can reflect the complexity of lived experience. So those are some of the views um, you know, within within the literature on on memorial museums and on victimization as the central narrative thrust of of how they function. Um yeah, does that does that answer the question?

SPEAKER_01 39:01

Generously.

SPEAKER_00 39:02

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 39:04

What insights are presented here regarding the phenomenon of re-traumatization?

SPEAKER_00 39:11

Yeah, so as I said, there's this five men who at the time, I'm sure it has changed since, um worked at the museum. That's a very small group of people to draw any conclusions, so it's just anecdotal what I can say about them. But all four of them had um very different ways of talking about the challenges of working at the museum. Um Frey, who, as I said, sparked the entire project, told me that he hates working there. And that he um if he could work somewhere else, he would. Um, he all of them actually were arrested as teens from who came out to protest on May Day in 76. They were called out on the street by the political party because they thought that the regime wouldn't attack um younger, younger people, you know, teens. And it did. About a thousand people were killed that day, and students were arrested. But one of the impacts of being arrested and incarcerated for the for several of these men, not all of them though, so and I'll I'll hit that, was that they lost the opportunity to go to college. Um, they were also, um, even once they got out of prison, which happened while the military regime was still in power, their opportunities for educational advancement or professional advancement uh were curtailed. Um, and so those were the sorts of things that Frey had experienced. Um and while he felt his opportunities were were cut short because of the terror, in a way where his worst memory became his strongest credential for this job, which is a really um horrifying thing to think, right? That you would have to live day in, day out um exposed to your worst memories and try to communicate them to people who, you know, museum visitors are not always um primed and ready. They're usually respectful for my experience, but um it's hard work. It's really hard work. Um, but there were others. There's another name in uh Member who who also didn't really want to talk about it, but he became emotional when asked about his experience. Um and then there were two others who had come to work more recently, those two were there the longest amount of time. And one of them had been a school teacher, so he'd gone on to have a career after his and he was arrested by the military regime. He had a career, he had success, and he had chosen to take in a job, to take a job at the museum. And I think that sense of agency and decision making um made that experience different for him versus those who felt like they didn't have agency. Nonetheless, he said that it was difficult at times. Um, so did the other person who was newer to the staff. He said, especially when he first started working, he started having nightmares again. But with time, he was able to approach the museum as a museum, not as a sort of cage of his own traumatic memories. Um, if we think though about other contexts where survivors uh take center stage, so like trials, there is some evidence in comparative studies that court proceedings are extremely traumatizing and also um uh they're out of the victim's control, right? A victim's testimony has to work like any other testimony in a court system. People are not interested in that context and their full experience or what it meant to them. They're interested in stories that can be verified in order to prove whatever a prosecutor needs to prove to convict someone accused of crimes. And so, even though survivor testimony can be very important, that context is not about survivors, right? It's about a legal proceeding. And so if you think of the difference between a museum and a legal proceeding, obviously there are many. Um, but at least in that memorial museum setting, people are coming with interest and care to hear what the survivor has to say. Like there's not another point that is actually. One of the primary points. And so, you know, in the book, I talk about, I talk with some other survivors who work at museums and look at some other studies in the context of studies of survivor testimony in legal proceedings. And it seems like on the uh, and again, it wasn't in depth. My pool of people I spoke with was probably, you know, a handful. Um, but there is at least the possibility for survivors to exert more agency over what parts of their story they tell, when they tell it, what they leave out, um, and how they make sense of it. And that memorial setting, which I hope would be more empowering than in a legal setting when you're really reduced to uh what use your testimony has for someone else's purpose. And it may align with your own purpose, right? But it's still not about your story.

SPEAKER_01 45:02

How can your research bring the fields of museum studies and trauma studies into conversation?

SPEAKER_00 45:08

So they're already in conversation and have been for quite some time. There's a pretty rich um body of research around particularly memorial museums, but also I would say around museums dedicated to um uh or that make have within their collection artifacts that belong to communities that have been traumatized. And there I'm thinking you know, in our context, obviously Native American um artifacts, what we would call artifacts, and I think I think indigenous people, depending on what the object is, think of them very, very differently. Um and so some of that discussion happens around cultural patrimony, um, not trauma. And I think it probably would be helpful to add a trauma lens to that, those discussions. And it it has been done in memorial museums, though, I think there's um there's a rich discussion of the intersection of trauma and museums. Um and I think my study adds to that by adding an example that had not previously been studied in scholarly literature.

SPEAKER_01 46:26

On pages 172 and 173, you write as follows. These warnings should be heeded in any analysis of a memorial museum, but they fail to constitute the full picture. Quote unquote empathy does describe the memorial museum's intended emotional connection that is posited as the foundation of both appreciation of history and the construction of a new ethical community in the present. In aiming towards this goal, however, institutions do not necessarily embrace the depoliticization or decontextualization of history. Memorial museums evoke emotion through historically based narratives. The degree of privileging emotional connection versus historical complexity cannot be stated at the level of the genre, but only examined institution by institution. At the Red Terror Memorial Martyrs Memorial Museum, Survivor Dobson's foreground the experience of the exhibition's primary protagonist, the activist movement. The Survivor Dawson's own personal stories play a role in eliciting engagement and empathy from the visitor, but not solely in terms of a sentimentalized bridge to the history. Red Terror Martyr Memorial Museum Survivor Dawsons do not ask a visitor to see the history through their own experiences. Rather, they present a social political history that provokes an emotional response through the depiction of the suffering of those who died with the survivor dawson's eyewitness experience serving to bolster the veracity of the core historical narrative. They do not linger over their own story, but reference it as a matter of fact, like a footnote to the larger unfolding story. Can you elaborate on this passage?

SPEAKER_00 48:37

Yeah, so um there's a tendency in some memorial museums to adopt a narrative, and it depends on the history, right? Because obviously different museums are commemorating vastly different histories. Um but to, and so the literature, right? You we can't, that's why I was saying like you have to do this institution by institution. This these trends do not happen at the level of the genre of memorial museum. But Holocaust history plays a huge role in establishing some of the key terms of this field of study and the field of practice of memorial museums. And there the narratives are very strongly that people were targeted not because of anything that they did, but because of who they were, which is absolutely true for the Holocaust. Um scholars though have argued, right, that part of what memorial museums do though is try to then spark empathy with these people who are victimized for no reason. Um and and there have been concerns that you know that too much of that sort of identifying with victims, especially of extreme violence, um, that it can numb visitors. Um, you know, it can be overly emotional to the point where people shut down. Um that there's also a struggle with how do you present that kind of extreme violence. Um, it's very, you know, directly presenting it can almost look, can minimize what it actually was, because we cannot through a leap of empathy um get to the point where an entire uh, you know, for many people, their entire communities, extended families, the people, their neighbors, um, their villages, their farm, like everything was destroyed, right? So it's also a false empathy, um, or it can be. Um, and that sometimes it's just too much to expect from a simple museum tour. Um, and so there's a lot of warnings about sparking empathy, um, you know, and the limits of it, inherent limits, problematic limits. One of the things that's really interesting at the Red Terror martyrs, and I would hit that word martyrs hard for this discussion, Memorial Museum, is that it's a story of political violence where the state went after people not because of their identity, but because of political positions that they chose to take on. Now, they did not choose the violence that the state directed against them. Right. But many of the people who were on the streets protesting were there for a reason. They were there for strongly held beliefs that um that they could be a part of creating a better Ethiopian state. And so that, you know, that almost um pitying, like they were chosen for no reason, doesn't abide in this context. What's interesting though is in the tour, this for all the times I went through and watched tours happening in the museum, um, the survivor docents would speak though from that activist voice, um, which is that it wasn't about them as individuals. It was about a movement in that historical moment to try to create change in the way the state functioned. And so it's a collective address. Um, and they're asking, and so the story is often told it wasn't about me. I was hurt, but it wasn't about me. It was about this collective um experience. Um, and oftentimes when I would see the the docents, the survivors, they wouldn't present themselves as survivors, right? It wasn't not at the beginning in particular. It wasn't, you know, uh um an identity position that was foregrounded their logic for why they were there. They were there to guide you through the museum, and some of them at times would say that they had also experienced, for instance, a particular form of torture, or that they were present the day of uh, especially the May Day massacres. Um, so I think in in that paragraph, that's what I was trying to emphasize. Um, that this was a social political history um that provokes an emotional response because of the extreme violence that was deployed against them. But I think they see themselves as really uh focused on telling a historical story um rather than a personal story.

SPEAKER_01 53:47

Can you comment on the coup attempt in Ethiopia in December 1960?

SPEAKER_00 53:53

Yeah, so that I only mention it um very shortly in the book, um, as part of the history. Um but it's in the studies of Ethiopian history, and there's there's very strong historians um in Ethiopia, and so I I followed their analysis of the role that attempt played. Haile Selassie, the emperor who was overthrown in 74, um, and whose overthrow set in motion the rise of the military regime, um was viewed as you know, an inheritor, a biblical inheritance uh from Solomon, right, and a divine right to rule, um and and really inviolable. And so there was this mythology around um the place of the emperor as you know, I mean, really transcendent, in a way that I have trouble making that leap of imagination to viewing any political leader or monarch from that perspective. But um the attempted coup in 1960 really was uh a moment of awakening for people, right? It was an attempt to change that person. And so it wasn't just changing like a coup, you know, in countries that had seen leaders change rapidly. Um, I mean, Selassie had been in power for decades. And so the idea of a change and and ruler was, I mean, it was revolutionary. It was revolutionary, right? It was a complete change. Um, and and so I think his Ethiopian historians mark that moment as one where people saw, suddenly realized that, like, oh, a change is possible. There are others who want to make it. And within the military, um, it's argued that that also gave them a sudden awareness of how critical their role was in stabilizing and upholding the regime, and therefore in potentially destabilizing it too, right? So it's one of those first cracks in the wall of a system that show change is possible.

SPEAKER_01 56:15

Can you paraphrase the different chapters in this book?

SPEAKER_00 56:19

Um, yeah, so the introduction tries to set out what memory from the margins is. And, you know, the margins are um Ethiopia in relation to discourse on transitional justice, museums, in relation to transitional justice mechanisms at large, like in any context. And then three, the memory of the Red Terror within Ethiopian political memory. So, on all those counts, this museum represents memory that it kind of lurks on the edges of what's considered mainstream thought. So I try to lay that out and arrange it in some history and also the central role of survivors, eyewitnesses in the first chapter. The second chapter then dives into the history of the Red Terror and tries to set up some of the issues that were at stake in the overthrow of the of the emperor, the rise of the military, and the increasingly violent rule of the military regime and introduces then the details of that period of the Red Terror. After that, I go into a time and make sure I get everything in order. Um, after that, then I talk about um transitional influences. So, what were the factors that influenced the idea to create a memorial museum and to create it where it was through uh the survivor organization? The next chapter then talks about it's called the shape of memory, and it's really talking about the way that the museum, um, its physical shape and also its narrative, its exhibition narrative and the influences on um on that narrative. I also provide an overview then of the the the exhibition as well, right? What how does it tell the story? What are its artifacts and techniques? Um, after that, I will talk about the tour as traumatic performance. Um, right, and I think it's very helpful to think of museum tours as a performance. And so you have the guide, you have the artifacts, you have the narrative, and then you have the visitors, and that's what animates that scene. And so the actual tour is really a performance of the interaction of all of those forces. And then the final chapter is very short, um, and then just tries to summarize some of the main um ideas and conclusions from the rest of the book.

SPEAKER_01 59:04

Can you comment on the Amhara People's Martyrs Memorial Monument? Likewise, can you comment on the Tigray Martyrs Memorial Museum and Monument?

SPEAKER_00 59:16

Yeah, so both of those were memorial martyrs memorial museums that were created in the early 1990s before the uh Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum. And they were created um by uh the Tigrayan and Hara, um, who were two their nations considered Ethiopians consider the country to be a multination um um country. And they were Tigray in particular was the major, composed the major force and the military um um coalition that eventually overthrew the military regime and the Amhara also participated in that. And later, but a slightly different story, so did the Oromo. I'll stay with the Tigray and Amhara um groups. And so after the Retera ended, um the regime was able to consolidate its rule, and they didn't really face any serious opposition until you had the rise of these rural, right? So that was in the capital, right? This is the students, the intellectuals. Then you had the rise of these rural, nationally based um, initially militias and then fully fledged armed forces that eventually formed a coalition to overthrow the military regime. And the leaders in that coalition were the Tigrayans. When the wars ended and they took power, they then created martyrs memorial museums to recognize the people who had been killed in the process of that um that long civil war. And one of the things that they do, both of them do, and those two are very similar, although the Tigrayan one, which I think came first, is a little bit more elaborate in its construction, um, was to wind together the story of this resistance movement as a national movement, right? So, and so they have sections on um, you know, nation building, essentially, like conceptually, culturally, and really honoring the traditions of Tigray and Amharic um um past, together with then this armed group, which then also became a political party. So they're national in that sense, Tigray and Amhara Oromo, they're national museums, but they're also war museums that are concerned with building a modern um version of the people, right? The Tigrayan people or the Amhara people. So in that way, they're very, very curious because they meld together all of those stories through the process of this resistance war. Um and in that way, they're very similar, I think, in logic to a lot of museums that are more national museums, right? Museums of, I don't know, American history or you know, any other history, but combined with the story of war making. So they're like national but also war museums. Um and and so those came first. They were created, um, I don't have the exact dates at the top of my head, but they were created before the Red Terror Museum and opened earlier, right? And the Tigrayan one at least is is much more complex. Actually, so is the Amhara one. The Aroma one never was finished, so they have buildings, they have like a campus structure that was at one point intended to be a museum, but is not used as that now. And then they also have a large uh memorial structure, which is quite imposing. Um, all three of them have memorial structures in addition to meeting spaces, um, archives, and um, and then in in Tigray and Amhara also in Bahadur, um these educational museum sites.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:27

What does the term evoke mean? Can you explain the different meaning of this term? How do you use it? How is your usage similar or different from other approaches?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:38

Yeah, so I draw on work by Susan Sontag and how she talks about evoking violence. Um, and I think that's from regarding the pain of others. Um and it ties to its intended effect, which I discussed earlier, right, of empathy. Um, and so it's not an attempt to explain in detail, although it can happen alongside those more educative, that sort of analytical appeal to the analytical brain. But by evoking the violence of these periods, it's an appeal to the emotional, the empathetic, and to sort of shock the visitor. And it's not always done most powerfully through realistic presentations. In fact, sometimes um you'll see in memorial museums um a real shift to something that's much more metaphoric. Um, you know, you you think of like um presentation of violence. Now, in the Red Terrors Museum, that evocation, right? That evocative um moment um really happens in relation to um they have a model of a form of torture that many people underwent. And behind the model, there's an abstract painting that that is, you know, sort of captures a feeling of distress and um and an unbalance. Um, so I feel like that one particular scene of the museum is designed to evoke the violence, even though it does have a direct representation, which is oddly um it's disconcerting together with the painting as the backdrop for torture. And then obviously the the display of human remains, which is not a show of violence, right? I mean, there could be many, everybody, we all, right, from dust to dust. Um, that's the direction we head. Um, so human remains are not in and of themselves evocative of violence, but in this context, they are, even though they don't show it. And and instead, what you have is you have to sort of marry the history you've seen. With this object, which is more than an object, right? Human remains as they they exist in front of you. And again, it's that cognitive, it's that emotional analytical dissonance that creates a moment of shock, of invoking violence, even though you can't see it, and and of trying to convey the enormity of the events.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:30

On page 209, you write as follows make your reference to visitors' comments. The multiplicity of frameworks referenced in Red Terror Martyr Memorial Museum comments do not suggest a simple regression from a pre-existing homogenized visitor's self-perception transformed through traumatic witnessing into an ethical community. Rather, the performance of the tour engages the internal tensions that compose both. Almost every visitor comment included multiple expressions of response. In so doing, the comments should be viewed not as finished products. The comments are expressions composed as the visit is ending, which capture the process of attempting to make meaning in relation to a marginal memory. Traumatic history interrupts and triggers a visitor's desire to reproduce community by making sense of the marginal memory they have encountered. However, the comment suggests that the process falls short and instead reveals the ragged edges between the frameworks. Can you say more about this?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:57

Yeah. So thank you for pulling that one out too, because I think this is um this is basically comes to my my bigger conclusions for how the memorial functions. So when people create memorial museums, and there's a lot of work that looks at, you know, how do we create these exhibits and and um how do you make them effective and what are visitor responses? Um there's a lot of every, I mean, not a lot of every word, every image, every placement has incredible intention behind it. And and and then there's a lot of speculation about what that intention, how that will produce a certain visitor reaction, right? Because you don't make exhibits so that no one comes. You want these visitors to come through and animate that scene. Almost every comment had multiple ways. So people would say, you know, never again, thank you, museum. They would put it within Ethiopian history. I hope this never happens again. They would channel it through religious sentiment, right? Um, you know, about prayers. Um, some people would put it through political sentiment, but you could see that people were struggling to come to use the frameworks that they had as they entered the museum to try to make sense of what they had seen. And what I wanted to draw attention to was that rather than that making sense process culminating in a very clean, streamlined takeaway where the museum visitor behaves the way they do in our minds when you create um, you know, sort of stereotypical visitor profiles. Instead, um what you had was people struggling to make meaning. And what I wanted to do with this book was to place value on that struggle rather than value on a presumed outcome, right? That there is meaning and difficulty and um importance to struggling to make meaning. What that means is that what you what you know and your frameworks are being challenged. I don't think, though, that a museum exhibit necessarily resolves that struggle. And that's where I think a lot of analysis of memorial museums falls short. They people have often tried to either think that that struggle could be resolved in predetermined ways because of who the visitor identity was, how the exhibit was created, political debates at the time, all of that, right? That that it could be a part of, in the case of transitional societies, for instance, creating democracy as a predetermined form. And what I wanted to say is that it is actually the struggle that is important, not the resolution. And I don't think that comes within the terms of this visit. Visitors bring so many different frameworks with them when they come to make sense of something. And we cannot always anticipate that, rarely, and particularly in a permanent exhibit where those frameworks are constantly changing, right, with each generation or each new political debate or religious concern, right? Their lenses are changing all the time. And so, as we think about why create museums, and this is where I'm willing to put a very uh weaker democratic value. I'm willing to assign that, but not in the sense of going through a memorial museum will make you want to have multi-party elections and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Not a predetermined form, but rather a struggle to make sense that remains open. So I'm willing to say that that struggle to make sense that remains open is a value that is needed in order to have democratic practice. And if we understand democracy as systems that are designed to value those struggles and that change and that openness to rethinking, right? So as a very base, like sort of a foundational concept for what democracy should be, could be. Then I'm willing to say it has a democratic value. But I don't think that that struggle and inability to make sense of traumatic past, right? Memory from the margins, a memory that doesn't seem to have a place anymore in the political landscape of the present, that disruptive value is not going to give you either what those major debates about memorials do, right? It doesn't immediately translate into grievance and vengeance and violence and more violence or intractable political debates. But it also doesn't translate immediately into um, I'll never commit violence. And I believe in X number of political parties in the vote and, you know, really pro forma democracy, you know, checks and balances and blah, blah, blah. Right. And so I think what I'd like to do with this book is suggest that people who are creating these museums are doing valuable work. It is very meaningful work and it is important. But we have to understand its contributions within a much uh bigger framework and one that is less certain about what sort of outcomes people might support as a result of visiting a museum.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:21

As we end our dialogue today, can you tell us where you've devoted your attention since completing this project?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:28

Yeah. Um so while I was writing this book, I lived in a different town than I live in now. And every day when I drove from that town into Tufts University where I work, I had to pass a medium security prison in Concord, Massachusetts. It's since closed, thankfully, because there were not enough people in the Massachusetts prison system. Um and I kept thinking as I was writing about this book and the trauma that the people that I'd met had experienced and the years they had spent in prison. I kept thinking, I should be working on prisons in my country. I should be working in the prison that I pass every single day on my way to work. And towards the end of this project, um, before the book came out, but while I was still writing it, I had the opportunity through um Tufts University has a teaching in prison program, a degree-conferring program. And I had the opportunity to teach in that same prison that I went past every single day. And the first time I taught there was in um, I did lecture like some ad hoc things, but the first semester-long course I taught was in fall of 2019. And I taught this book or like this this museum study as part of it. Um, you know, in part because in the US, our prison systems are disproportionately full of young black men, many of whom who'd been involved in the carceral system from teens, right? They they had life trajectories that resonated with some of these stories, not all of them. Um and that was life-altering for me. So that was fall 2019. Um, COVID hit Massachusetts early in March 2020, and it was horrifying in prison systems everywhere, every single country COVID impacted. Um, and particularly so in the US, where we incarcerate a larger percentage and a larger number of our proportion than, as far as we know, any society in the history of humanity. And now suddenly I had former students who were inside. And so I did a really sharp pivot from working on international human rights issues to studying the way COVID was impacting the prison system in my state in Massachusetts. Um, and that work has been deeply meaningful. And I do feel like I learned a lot, though, from the work that I was able to do on the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum to speaking with and working with and doing investigations of human rights abuses in my own country. And I learned a lot from the activist um in Ethiopia, from the women like Nunu who persevered, or like Harut, another woman whose story I tell, who persevered to make sure that the history wasn't lost. Um, and I think about them often, especially Ethiopia's had another war since then, um, which is too much to go into at the end of this. But um, yeah, so that's the work that I've been doing uh in the last seven years. Uh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:04

As we end today, I'd like to emphasize how grateful I feel for your magnanimity and thoughtfulness throughout the course of our dialogue. I can hardly thank you enough.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:14

Ari, thank you so much for the invitation to speak with you. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:18

Thank you. It was my hallowed honor. As we end today, I'm signing off as Ari Barbellat and your host on the Dialogues and International History podcast. Today I've been grateful to engage in dialogue with Bridget Conley regarding her recently published book, Memory from the Margins, Ethiopia's Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum, published in Ham, Switzerland by Paul Grave Macmillan, 2019. This monograph asks the following question: What is the importance of memory during a political transition? By drawing on Ethiopian history, transitional justice, and scholarly disciplines that engage with memory, museums, and trauma, the author unveils a complex narrative of global, national, transnational, and local influences as they converge in the tale of a modest museum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum. This analysis is derived from various margins. Neither the Ethiopian case nor the act of memorialization is a primary focus in transitional justice discussions, and within Ethiopia, the history of the Red Terror is often overlooked in contemporary political contexts. From these layered margins, traumatic memory emerges as an ambiguous social and political force. The contributions, meanings, and limitations of memory become apparent through the distinct interactions between memory advocates, survivor docents, and visitors. Memory from the margins is revealed to be powerful in how it disrupts rather than constructs new forms of community. Bridget Conley is research director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher Graduate School of Global Affairs at Tufts University. She was previously research director for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museums Committee on Conscience. Thank you wholeheartedly for your time and attention.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:42

Thank you.