ABSTRACT
The aftershock of traumatic events, both in individual lives and in the lives of the community, take time to register and to shape personal and theoretical responses. Often it takes time for those who have been most immediately involved to emotionally acknowledge what they have lived through, and allow the resonances to take shape within personal and cultural narratives. Often there are unresolved tensions between what individuals might remember for themselves and the attempts of the larger community to gather these memories into a collective representation. Within these in-between liminal spaces – that Victor Turner recognises can sometimes ‘be described as a futile chaos – there is ‘not by any means a random assemblage but a striving after new forms and structure, a gestation process’. In this way he acknowledges the need for a creative pause, as Nietzsche understands it, to give time for memories to find their shape and for people to ‘make sense’ of the disruptions they have lived through. As Turner puts it, ‘The cosmology has always been destabilized, and society has always had to make efforts, through both social dramas and esthetic dramas, to restabilize and actually produce cosmos’ (1985: 300-1).1
