1989

Three friends and I have been working on a conference about the concept of the '90s' since January or so. Since we started - out of little more than a desire to somehow work through what it meant to grow up in the final decade of the century and trace that experience back to other 'final decades' - I've been noticing a cultural fascination with 'end times'. That's not quite the right phrase - though eschatology is there too; we (and yes, I'm speaking a bit generally... we-the-Western-media) put so much significance into a system that we created, investing it with superhuman - extraordinary - power. Anyway, in the final year of the first decade of the new millenium there is certainly an apparent anxiety/interest in the last decade of the 20th century. 1989 is in the media constantly right now - I wonder if 1990 will be next year.


The Berlin Wall came down in 1989; I played tennis; Tiananmen Square and my birthday nearly coincided - I was 12; Khomeini announced the fatwa on Salman Rushdie; I worried about going to high school; I saw Batman and Ghostbusters 2 while staying near Penetanguishene; on December 6, Marc Lepine shot and killed 14 women at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal; I remember being afraid, and I remember not being afraid. That was my introduction to the '90s - my 1989; so very aware of me and growing into an awareness of the vastness of the world that was not-me but still me. The '90s were the first decade I remember being conscious of - I had calculated by the time I was about 13 that I would be old enough to celebrate New Year's eve, 1999, with champagne (the best use I could think of for my rudimentary maths skills). I remember 1988 with particular clarity because of the Calgary Olympics, Meech Lake, and the 'notwithstanding clause' - I had a teacher who thought these things (rightly) relevant for middle-school history lessons. I was primed by 1989 to be/come a citizen of the world that would be better, kinder, and friendlier (Bush I took office in 1989 too). The '90s were, in many ways, already and always going to be a conscious decade - a decade conscious of itself as a decade, a historical moment that was always ready with headlines, reactions, and responses to things that had, somehow, already happened. The century ended in 1989 - the '90s were another time, a time just out of time and we were always already out of time.


I'm writing about mourning and witnessing right now - in the 18th century. But I keep coming across these events and emotional/cultural states in newspapers, television, and the internet (cultural burial ground where nothing stays dead - or ever was dead): we are obsessed with mourning - with the act of memory and with the loss of memories. As though the promise of celluloid and photography and (now) digital recording - to preserve - to protect from decay - has become empty; what to do with these images that do not speak. How can we be responsible to the past that is only just the past? Can we historicize something without losing its singularity - without rendering it an event like other events? Does the process of remembering at a cultural or social level mean the negation of individual stories?

Are we beyond history as a 'post-postmodern' society (or are we 'post-postmodern'? I've come across that term in print for the first time recently - I'm not sure about it)?

All of this began in my head as I read this memoir of Tiananmen. I wonder if the British Academy reads my blog and if this will make them favour our bid - or just throw it out in despair of my horrible prose and sentimentalising... oh well.