Traces of Whose History?

For me, Traces of the Trade brought up a lot of questions about personal versus collective history and about claiming responsibility for history - something that shapes our lives but that we had no control over.

Katrina Browne was very interested in exploding the notion that many of us "know" our histories (especially our shameful or onerous histories) as intimately as we think we do. For her, this was initially a question of family history which quickly revealed itself to implicate most (if not all?) white American families of the late 1700's and 1800's. What does it mean to "know" a history? She said multiple times during the film that she had already known something, and yet, not really... for Browne, it seemed that knowing meant getting a fuller picture, though, of course the "full" history would be completely unmasterable to any one person. Knowing history, for Browne and her family members, also included talking about history, bringing it into their daily lives and their personal experiences. They desired to unearth a silence in the family, to hear voices that had been hushed for generations. Where did this desire come from? Certainly, the various family members had sometimes similar, sometimes very different motivations.

I noted at this point, however, that it is the family's and individual's privilege - made possible in a large part through their family history - that made their journey possible. Not everyone can afford to take off from work and family matters to travel around the world for a few weeks. This point made me wonder about what knowledge-seeking with an agenda (be it to defend, vilify, make peace, forgive, or simply understand something of the past) does to the collection and understanding of that knowledge. The different family members went into the trip for different reasons and were expecting different results and information at times. How different would the DeWolf family history have been represented had each of the other family members made the documentary?

Browne also focused on questions of silence, guilt, and denial. Who has the power to silence the history of others and to what extent can a history be unsilenceable? Why would someone pass down the knowledge of a shameful family history rather than burying it with their own memory? What drives our desire to know? And once we do know, Browne boldly asks us, what do we plan to do with that knowledge. Clearly, she chose to share that history. A large part of that, I think, was that she was able to see the contemporary real-life implications that that history had helped to create and she felt driven to somehow try to bring understanding to that. Perhaps this was her idea of reparations, an attempt to repair through understanding, and to reconcile a past, even if only on a small level. Really, though, I think she was asking all of us to delve into and comes to terms with our own histories. If we were all to do so, could we then collectively move forward, with our new understandings toward a better world? Perhaps...

But really, what counts as our own history? Was the history Browne and her family traced really the history of her family? Wasn't it much more the history of the millions of African men, women, and children that were brought into slavery? Is that a history she can claim? It seems some people would reject that notion, as was evident in some of the responses Browne and her family received on their journey, specifically at the festival in Ghana. Where do we draw the lines around "our history" and that of others, when they are so often intertwined?