History

The three most unlikely sentences of my life:

My father in law fought at Guadalcanal.
Fresh out of high school, my husband's uncle worked on the Manhattan Project.
As a child my mother in law used to play with Shirley Temple.

History isn't history - it's close and palpable.

By contrast my own history seems bleached, leached, and empty.

Is it the massive documentation of the Americans in WW2, the doccos, the movies, the books and doccos and movies about the development and invention of the atomic bomb (which is the final image of that war, not the bombing of London or Dresden, nor the piled and walking skeletons of the camps)?

Is this bleach of memory another facet of empire, anything local overwritten by the Cold War and its genesis at Almagordo, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the vivid nuclear nightmare of forty years - my own nightmare since the Korean War?

Is it the goddam silver screen, and our theatres bought and closed and replaced by chains and contracts for American films, American tv product dumped overseas, another massive cultural overwriting...

Or is this fading into white created by being far away, on the southern edge of the Pacific, never a major actor in the world's great events (disasters though they be), a colony of another, previous empire of dominant images, with a colonial past we don't dare remember?