Francesca Beddie, ‘Light on Dark Tours’
 
The Weekend Australian, July 30-31, 2005
 
Maria Tumarkin emigrated from the Soviet Union to Australia as a teenager in 1989. She has since gained a PhD on sites of trauma, the subject of this book, but Traumascapes is no academic tome. It is a sophisticated account of a journey to places and books, to thoughts and people. And it reveals an impressive command of English that eschews the jargon of academe, incorporating instead the lyricism of Tumarkin’s native Russian.
 
Tumarkin engages the reader in a psychological, anthropological and emotional survey of places where horror has struck. She visits Berlin, Sarajevo, Port Arthur, Shanksville, Bali and Moscow in person; and Dachau, Hiroshima and ground zero in New York through other people’s accounts. These are her “traumascapes” and they are “much more than physical settings of tragedies: they emerge as spaces where events are experienced and re-experienced across time”. Early on, Tumarkin sets down parameters. ‘I am not interested in terrorism as such – not in this book anyway – but in some of the places marked and transformed by it’, she says.
 
I tried to go along with this structure, relegating the causes and consequences of terrorism to the back of my mind, but it was impossible to divorce myself from this central issue of out time, especially when, as Tumarkin says, traumascapes are ‘a scar tissue that now stretches across the world.’
 
‘They have become part of the culture of the modern world, multiplying at a range that seems impossible to register’, she says. ‘I want to know if and how memorialising these places, in whatever way, cannot just help alleviate the pain but also avert the terror. Why do these traumascapes not serve as warnings to our leaders and their enemies about what happens when they succumb to fighting terror with more terror.’
 
Tumarkin is forthright about the cliches and sentimentality surrounding some sites but also finds plausible explanations for the kitsch they attract. The placement of a teddy bear can symbolise the final parting from a body never recovered from the rubble. And, she argues, the phenomenon of dark tourism – modern pilgrimages to battlefields and the sites of terror attacks – is not mere ghoulishness. Such visits ‘allow thoughts and feelings to crystalise, to find their right pitch and their singular expression.’
 
Shanskville, Pennsylvania, where Flight 93 crashed on September 11, 2001, is the calmest of Tumarkin’s traumascapes, a place where you can escape the fashion for excessive public outpourings of grief and contemplate the consequences of terror, for the families of those in the plane, for the American community, for oneself, for the world.
 
Tumarkin’s considerations of the Bali bombings is important. It draws out cultural differences in reactions to tragedy. After the attack, the Balinese performed rituals to cleanse the Sari club site of evil and to release the souls of the dead. Once this was done, the area was no longer contaminated; it could acquire a new purpose. For them, it requires no memorial, something many Australians would like to see.
 
Although there is much to be taken from Tumarkin’s stories of Moscow and Sarajevo, she is too connected to these places to offer the clarity of insight she does elsewhere. In Sarajevo, she is angry with the international community for letting the siege happen; in Moscow, she reveals a deeply ingrained hatred of the state. She rails against the Russian government for its secretiveness, its contempt for the dead and their families.
 
This is not a morbid book. It provokes us to think about violent death and how we cope with terror. It wants to start a conversation. This may begin with one of Tumarkin’s conclusions – that we need to face death as a presence rather than an absence – but must then lead into a discussion that avoid the belligerence and dogmatism that dominate most commentary on terrorism we hear at present.
 
←