Comment

Stan Grant
The trauma of reconciliation

In his novel Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s protagonist, Saleem Sinai, is “mysteriously handcuffed to history”. His destiny is indissolubly chained to his country, India.

Rushdie has said he wanted to pose the question: do we make history or does history make or unmake us?

Sinai, Rushdie writes, believes everything that happens, happens because of him. According to Rushdie, Sinai believes “history is his fault”.

Rushdie considers it an absurd notion. Having just participated in yet another Reconciliation Week, I would suggest Saleem Sinai may be wiser than his author.

Indigenous people are certainly expected to own history, which is imbued with a redemptive power that is itself absurd.

Reconciliation, for its noble intent, as a project of justice or meaningful recognition, lacks moral depth.

It is a nebulous concept, absent political or legal gravity. Recall that the project of reconciliation emerged four decades ago, as the Hawke government’s attempt to achieve consensus in the absence of a previously pledged treaty.

Hence, serious constitutional or legal reform to recognise extant Indigenous expressions of sovereignty, augmenting and strengthening the sovereignty of the Crown, have eluded us. In its stead is a performative space of tea and biscuits, hearty goodwill and therapeutic “truth-telling”, which, while laudable and temporarily refreshing, is inevitably unserious and unsatisfying.

As Saleem Sinai knew, the problem is history. We misunderstand history if we consider it folklore or memory.

We invest history with a weight of truth it simply cannot carry. History is not history.

History is an entirely modern invention that proffers the past as a promise for the future.

Historian Reinhart Koselleck said that in modernity even the future is historical.

Time is the engine of modernity. To be modern is to enter a rupture in time, to begin anew. The twin founding events of enlightened modernity, the American and French Revolutions, established a new human in time.

In France the clock was reset. The French Revolution was a triumph of the will over nature. The Enlightenment sought to marry reason to the scientific revolution. It sought to place human destiny firmly in human hands.

Hitherto, the soul had primacy over the mind. Now humans were free to explore the dimensions of thought. History was the answer to the questions posed by science that sublimated religion.

Aleida Assmann, in her book Is Time out of Joint?, tracks the emergence of a new story of time. She writes that, “As the time of physics was being cleansed of all human values, experiences and cultural values, a concept of historical time … began to emerge.”

In the absence of God, Hegel saw history as the flourishing of the human spirit. Hegel defined history not as the location of events in time, but as the progression of freedom.

Hegel set us on a journey of time towards a utopia, a unity and zenith of human possibility.

To Hegel, history was a “slaughter bench, upon which the happiness of nations, the wisdom of states, the virtue of individuals were sacrificed”.

Hegel’s wager was that history would wash us clean of our bloodshed. We would be redeemed in history. It has proved a dangerous idea, one that has been appropriated to justify the gas chamber and the gulag.

Hegelian historicism has proved unsustainable, living as we do in the shadow of potential nuclear destruction, environmental degradation, technological alienation and a progress whose open road is littered with human debris.

Political scientist Michael Allen Gillespie concludes that “each step toward prosperity is also one step nearer annihilation – our increasing ability to please ourselves has been matched only by our increasing ability to destroy ourselves”.

A glance at our world reveals that history does not release its grip. Rather, that grip tightens. Humans face redundancy. Hegelian recognition becomes a struggle for power.

Allen Gillespie says, “we today have no cosmology or theology to fall back upon that we can give meaning to our lives. God is dead or at least distant in our moment of need, and nature is a mere mechanical causality whose only end is entropy.”

In short, we are subject to the laws of the universe. Those laws dictate that states move from order to disorder. Hegel had it the wrong way around.

So where does this leave us in Australia?

Reconciliation is caught in the Hegelian conceit. Reconciliation is posited as a pathway to healing and unity. Yet as T. S. Eliot wrote, time is no healer, the victim is no longer here.

This recent Reconciliation Week recalled the words of an Australian figure to match Eliot, David Mowaljarlai. The late Ngarinyin poet, philosopher and mystic wrote: Once I was past and future, now I am only the present, the moment, today and it is hard to bear with no past, and no future.

Mowaljarlai felt trapped in time, rendered a historical being, unable to bear a history that captured him in an endless today, a history that never opened to the future.

It is echoed in the lament of Crow Native American chief Plenty Coups, who saw the buffalo vanish from the plains. “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground,” he said, “and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.”

British scholar Jenny Edkins calls this trauma time.

Trauma time, she explains, is a time of betrayal. It is not only that something catastrophic has happened; it is that trust is broken, not just in our fellow humans but in the universe itself.

“Time,” she writes, “no longer moves unproblematically from past through present to future. In a sense, subjects only retrospectively become what they already are. They only ever will have been.”

That last sentence – “only ever will have been” – is one of the saddest written.

Reconciliation invites reliving the trauma. It expects the traumatised to perform the rupture of time for the good of the nation. This is a cruel imposition.

The nation seeks absolution through ritualised truth-telling in the service of political time, a linearity predicated on us “moving on”. How often do we hear the exhortation “get over it”?

As the nation seeks redemption in reconciliation, for Crow the buffalo still lie dead on the plains, for Mowaljarlai there is no past, no future.

We need to think again about terms such as reconciliation, rights, identity, sovereignty, recognition.

These are Hegelian ideas, inseparable from the coercive linear time of the nation state.

These modern shibboleths are located in notions of collective memory or collective identity that we imagine as inviolate and yet are only very recent. They had no place in a world before history.

This is a new dialect of politics and rights that promises liberation through a historically mediated truth. In practice it resembles a Tower of Babel, many speaking but few understanding.

This is not to diminish truth-telling as a cathartic process. It is a brave response to the callous silence of history’s “victors”. That it is a burden carried by Indigenous people who bear history’s weight makes it an extraordinarily generous gift.

Reconciliation is also impactful at a personal level. We meet each other where we are and who we are, in all our diversity. To find ourselves in the stranger is the fulfilment of our shared humanity.

As a political project, however, reconciliation has proved futile. At best it is gestural and practical. Truth-telling is not the locus of justice. Indeed, it is its substitute.

We should be mindful of Kafka’s warning of “a cage in search of a bird”. We step warily into history. It is like holding shattered glass. Truth-telling will not release us from history; it is in fact the very ground of history itself.

To be laden with history, to be historicised beings unable to make any appeal to humanity and decency other than a reference to the past, is to be trapped in Mowaljarlai’s unbearable present.

The state offers the absolution of historical time. The only reconciliation to be found is the reconciliation of forgetting.

There is no future in the past. The key that unlocks one cage may just open another.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 7, 2025 as "No future in the past".

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