a beautiful piece... brings up memories of my visit to the holocaust museum in DC as a child. i don't cry easily, but the miniature scale models of gas chambers and the pile of shoes from children murdered in the camps brought me to tears. i don't know how to describe the feeling other than deep threads of ancestral memory reaching back across decades, as if inscribed on the genes i inherited from my russian jewish family. learning about genocides in a classroom allowed me to detach from them, to intellectualize them and trick myself into forgetting they were real. in the museum, i fused with the historical trauma of my people in a way that i never had before, and i try to return to that memory whenever i am reading about the holocausts in Gaza and Congo and Sudan. i have to combat the urge to detach, because it makes me feel like these ongoing atrocities are completely beyond my control, like we exist in different worlds, and that's simply untrue.
Thank you for this—your reflection is powerful. That moment of fusing with history, of feeling it in the body, is exactly what I hoped to surface. Detachment feels safe, but remembering connects us. We carry these threads forward—for our people, and for others.
Excellent piece! Museums are brilliant ways to breathe, celebrate and grieve the lives of others. I was overwhelmed when saw the thousands of stones at the Apartheid Museum in Joburg representing the thousands of miners who toiled underground in pursuit of the gold metal. There was so much that moved me. Blessings
Museums are incredibly powerful. The names on the plaques read as people but the pieces let people feel closer to their stories felt better than scripture. It is important that such raw feeling has a place in the telling of stories, and doubly important that we listen to them all. Ugh Marley, this is a really good piece.
I often think about truth hidden in plain sight. And this piece so eloquently describes how the framing of a story excludes and erases so many truths. I love this piece and can also see your imagined museum. Let’s make it and the tree at its center a reality. Well done Marley.
So brilliant! Thank you!
Thank you for enjoying the work! So glad it spoke to you.
a beautiful piece... brings up memories of my visit to the holocaust museum in DC as a child. i don't cry easily, but the miniature scale models of gas chambers and the pile of shoes from children murdered in the camps brought me to tears. i don't know how to describe the feeling other than deep threads of ancestral memory reaching back across decades, as if inscribed on the genes i inherited from my russian jewish family. learning about genocides in a classroom allowed me to detach from them, to intellectualize them and trick myself into forgetting they were real. in the museum, i fused with the historical trauma of my people in a way that i never had before, and i try to return to that memory whenever i am reading about the holocausts in Gaza and Congo and Sudan. i have to combat the urge to detach, because it makes me feel like these ongoing atrocities are completely beyond my control, like we exist in different worlds, and that's simply untrue.
Thank you for this—your reflection is powerful. That moment of fusing with history, of feeling it in the body, is exactly what I hoped to surface. Detachment feels safe, but remembering connects us. We carry these threads forward—for our people, and for others.
Excellent piece! Museums are brilliant ways to breathe, celebrate and grieve the lives of others. I was overwhelmed when saw the thousands of stones at the Apartheid Museum in Joburg representing the thousands of miners who toiled underground in pursuit of the gold metal. There was so much that moved me. Blessings
Museums are incredibly powerful. The names on the plaques read as people but the pieces let people feel closer to their stories felt better than scripture. It is important that such raw feeling has a place in the telling of stories, and doubly important that we listen to them all. Ugh Marley, this is a really good piece.
I often think about truth hidden in plain sight. And this piece so eloquently describes how the framing of a story excludes and erases so many truths. I love this piece and can also see your imagined museum. Let’s make it and the tree at its center a reality. Well done Marley.