The Dead Return • Repeated Violence in the Destruction of Mass Graves of Those Executed in the 1960s

According to reports, the Iranian government is deliberately engaged in erasing traces of the burial of victims of executions in the 1960s. The destruction of mass graves of those executed is not only the elimination of evidence of massacre, but constitutes a repeated crime against the minds of the survivors.

Beyond historical distortion, the destruction of these collective graves ruins the memory of the dead and the peace of mind of the living, and deprives the survivors and the deceased of the opportunity to perform proper death rites and mourning—rights as fundamental and basic as the right to life—with a violence as severe as the massacres themselves.

In Sophocles’ play Antigone, the famous Greek tragedian writing before Christ, Antigone’s brother is killed in a rebellion. Antigone wishes to bury him. But the ruler prevents it. The woman protests and attempts to bury her brother, but by the ruler’s order she is buried alive in a cave. A prophet visits the ruler and warns him, asking him to leave the dead in the grave and bring the living out of the grave. He reluctantly does so, but when they arrive too late, they find that Antigone has hanged herself.

In a more contemporary play, Hamlet, William Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, another element becomes the focus of attention. The ghost of Hamlet’s father appears to the Danish prince and informs him of his dishonorable murder and the betrayal committed against him, and asks him to avenge him. Until justice is served, the father’s spirit will not rest.

Jacques Lacan’s interpretation, the French psychoanalyst and philosopher, of these two recent plays is very illuminating. In response to the question of why the dead return, he answers simply and clearly: because they have not been properly buried. Regarding Hamlet’s father, although his body was buried, the truth of his death remained hidden; he was a victim.

But from a theoretical perspective, why is the performance of mourning and burial rites considered so important? Let us return to Lacan. “Not being properly buried” in the French philosopher’s words is a key phrase and does not only include the deceased but extends its effects to the survivors as well. Performing proper mourning and death rites serves several functions: it provides the possibility of releasing fear and pain arising from loss, it gathers the survivors in paying respect to the dead, and through these two, the acceptance of loss becomes possible. Thus, mourning and death rites in the symbolic system of human relations maintain their ancient characteristics: the role of mediator for the transfer of souls from the world of the living to the world of the dead.

In Antigone, as burial is delayed, we encounter a different kind of transfer. In fact, the death of the brother who has passed away is symbolically transferred to the form of the living sister, because by preventing burial, she dies from excessive grief and anger.

In the families and relatives of victims of executions in the 1960s, the tragedies of Antigone and Hamlet seem to be combined. They have been prevented from attaining two rights: neither have they been able to perform proper mourning rites and burial for their deceased—the most basic right, knowledge of where the deceased are buried, has been denied them—nor have they had access to the possibility of justice in the criminal and legal sense to address the deaths of the murdered.

Based on this approach, one can say that the survivors of executions in the early decades of the revolution, and indeed any other bereaved person of this kind, while alive experience the weight of death. They continuously live the death of their loved ones.

Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher, emphasizes the importance of the symbolic aspect of burial ceremonies in the form of “remembering the deceased through living in memories.” Performing funeral rites enables the continuation of the dead’s existence through the memories of the living. While the return of the deceased (for example, Hamlet’s father’s ghost) means that they have been unable to find their place in the text of tradition and human relations. Žižek writes that two extremely traumatic events in the twentieth century, the Holocaust and the Gulag, are undoubtedly examples of the return of the dead in our time. “The ghosts of the victims of those two events as ‘living dead’ will not leave us alone until we properly and appropriately perform their funeral and burial rites, until we incorporate their death trauma into our historical memory.” (p. 51, Enjoy Your Symptom)

We see another horrifying example of forcefully incomplete death rites in the famous 2011 documentary Nostalgia for the Light. In this film about the buried victims during Pinochet’s dictatorship and their survivors, Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán presents two narratives simultaneously in the Atacama Desert in Chile. In one, he depicts astronomers’ efforts in large observatories in this high region searching for light from celestial bodies that died millions of years ago. In the other, he recounts the efforts of Chilean women to find even the slightest remains—a fingernail, a hair, a bone fragment—of the bodies of their loved ones who disappeared decades ago in the driest desert in the world. They do not know what happened to the victims, where exactly their remains are, and therefore are deprived of even the minimum conditions for mourning. They live in the past and the past lives in them.

Paul Ricoeur, the French philosopher, in confronting the wounds of memory and historical traumas, addresses two concepts: memory and forgetting. He considers preserving the memory of victims’ suffering to be a duty. But he also emphasizes a certain type of forgetting (in the sense of acceptance) whose prerequisite is mourning rites. In Ricoeur’s words, if mourning is not properly performed, the bereaved cannot distance themselves between themselves and what they have lost, between themselves and their wound; they will become one with it and will continuously repeat it.

Furthermore, individual memory of the deceased must become part of collective memory. If this wound is not recognized as valid by the collective or a significant part of it, the wounded person will not fully overcome the experience of mourning.

This is how the destruction of the graves of those executed is not only the elimination of traces of massacre, but constitutes a repeated crime against the minds of the survivors. If in those executions bodies were deprived of life, in this one minds are victimized under the pressure of the presence of the dead who are still alive, who have not found their proper place in the minds and memories of the living, who have not been properly buried according to rites. Simultaneously, they attempt through these actions to prevent individual memory wounds from becoming collective memory wounds. They employ the same method of removing names and traces against the wounded memory and conscience of the victims’ relatives in order, in Ricoeur’s terms, to erase the victims’ history and legitimize the executioners’ narrative.

Rouzbeh Moayeri

• Sources
– Memory, History, Forgetting: Paul Ricoeur’s lecture in Tehran at the Institute of Wisdom and Religions, 1994 on the website http://ohwm.ir, and also the journal Dialogue, issue eight, pages 48-59
– Enjoy Your Symptom, Slavoj Žižek, translated by Maziar Eslami, Saleh Najafi, Rakhsh-e No, Third Edition, 2013, Tehran

Source: DW