A Guilted Age: Apologies for the Past PDF
Preview A Guilted Age: Apologies for the Past
A GUILTED AGE A GUILT ED AGE APOLOGIES FOR THE PAST Ashraf H. A. Rushdy TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS Philadelphia • Rome • Tokyo TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122 www.temple.edu/tempress Copyright © 2015 by Temple University—Of The Commonwealth System of Higher Education All rights reserved Published 2015 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rushdy, Ashraf H. A., 1961– A guilted age : apologies for the past / Ashraf Rushdy. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4399-1321-5 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4399-1322-2 (paper : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4399-1323-9 (e-book) 1. Apology—Political aspects. 2. Restorative justice. 3. Reparations for historical injustices. I. Title. BF575.A75R87 2015 302'.17—dc23 2015007949 The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992 Printed in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Amgad CONTENTS Preface ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 1 The Guilted Age 17 2 Political Apologies I 38 3 Political Apologies II 61 4 Historical Apologies I 79 5 Historical Apologies II 98 6 The Metaphysics of Undoing 117 7 The Concrete Past: Memorials 145 Conclusion 169 Notes 181 Index 207 PREFACE C onsider these four scenes from four continents. We begin with Africa. The Acholi people in Northern Uganda have a ritual called nyono tong gweno. Literally translated as “stepping on the egg,” the rite was originally understood as a purification ritual for travelers returning home, as a way of cleansing the impurities from beyond, that was essential for the health of the individual and the community. The Acholi have other rituals for purification that are also meant to provide vari- ous forms of reconciliation, including moyo kum (cleansing the body), moyo piny (cleansing an area), and gomo tong (bending the spear). The core belief about these rites of conflict resolution, writes James Latigo, is that they pro- vide a forum for the wrongdoer to acknowledge and accept responsibility for the harm and then remake “relations of trust and the restoration of social cohesion” through “the act and process of forgiveness.” Recently, the Acholi have implemented the full range of these rites in a more concerted and wide- spread way to welcome back to the community those child soldiers who were abducted to serve in Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army. After brushing against the branch of a pobo tree and then stepping over a pole, Charles Otim, for instance, who had been abducted eighteen years earlier when he was sixteen, addressed the village chiefs: “I ask for your forgiveness. We have wronged you.” In other cases, those seeking forgiveness and permission to return to the community step on an egg as a symbol of cleansing. What used to be a rite for creating reconciliation between individuals and within fami- lies has now become a ritual for the thousands of former members of Kony’s x | PREFACE Army who have accepted the government’s offer of amnesty and must be forgiven to return to their communities and their lives.1 Let us now turn to Europe. In an address in 2001, Pope John Paul II made a statement to the bishops of the Greek Orthodox Church in which he begged God to forgive the sins that the Catholic Church had commit- ted against the Greek Orthodox Church. These events, he noted, “have left deep wounds in the minds and hearts of people to this day.” He then speci- fied one event in particular—“the disastrous sack of the imperial city of Constantinople” by the Catholic warriors who were seeking a secure path to Jerusalem for the Fourth Crusade. This event of 1204, the pope believed, still resonated in a powerfully destructive way: “To God alone belongs judg- ment, and therefore we entrust the heavy burden of the past to his endless mercy, imploring him to heal the wounds which still cause suffering to the spirit of the Greek people.” This “healing” is necessary, the pope perorated, “if the Europe now emerging is to be true to its identity, which is inseparable from the Christian humanism shared by East and West.” Two years before the pope’s address, an informal group of four hundred Christians completed what they called the Reconciliation Walk, in which, from 1996 to 1999, they traced the exact path and chronology of those who had set off nine hundred years earlier on the First Crusade (1096–1099). Arriving in Jerusalem on the nine hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the Crusaders, they offered religious leaders in the Old City framed statements of their apology for the Crusaders’ slaughter of Jewish and Muslim inhabitants of the Holy Land.2 Let us next consider America. On January 14, 1993, at Sand Creek, Colorado, a group of congregants gathered to commemorate the slaughter of the Native Americans that occurred on that site in 1864, when a large regi- ment of the Colorado Territory militia killed a peaceful village of Cheyenne and Arapaho people. The leader of the congregation led the group in con- fession and prayer and then directed them as they sought “forgiveness in the presence of the Lord” and from the Native Americans gathered for the occasion. He described how “one woman stretched herself out in the sand, touching the feet of an Indian pastor; deeply ashamed she wept for the lost generation that was cut off in this place.” At the end of the day, the congrega- tion took communion together and then walked in pairs to where the dead had been placed by the creek. The leader poured out the remainder of the communion wine to commemorate the spot where blood had been shed.3 Finally, let us go down under to Australia. In memory of the white settler nation’s history of oppression of the Aboriginal peoples, and especially in the wake of the government-sponsored removal of Aboriginal children from their birth families (the so-called “stolen generations”), Australian citizens formed
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