The Dance of Time

The dance of time: quick time, slow time; quick, quick, slow. I’m fascinated by the times of history. Evil usually takes time to prepare and to grow, but then often only instants, minutes to inflict, and then again a lifetime or more to heal. This seems to be part of the tragic of human nature and human existence. A massacre, rape, violence, horror in all its many forms… Time does not heal of itself.
I recall meeting a Swiss journalist in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, after the withdrawal of the Serb army. Serbs and Kosovars had been living together for generations, for hundreds of years, perhaps not with any great affection, but living as neighbors, she said, sharing the same schools, landings in apartment buildings, often going to each others’ marriages, sharing birthdays. And then a slow poisonous rise of nationalisms, and suddenly Serbs were turning on their Kosovar neighbors, telling them to leave, now, within minutes, with what they could carry. A certain level of tolerance destroyed in hours that may take generations to heal, to restore. And the enemy was not a faceless unknown, had a first name.
Some in the United States have been marking the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War (1861-1865), the War Between the States. Time has not healed all those wounds. Started in the capital of the Confederacy, Richmond, a program called Hope in the Cities, believes that participating in the ritualized recognition of historical sites and events can lead to reconciliation between polarized groups or individuals.
Proud of its history as a birthplace of democracy, a more recent telling of the story has acknowledged that Richmond was also second only to New Orleans in the domestic slave trade market, served as the capital of the Confederacy and was a leader of Massive Resistance to integration. In the first half of the 19th century as many as 300,000 people were sold in the city’s auction houses and transported to plantations in the Deep South. Within 30 miles of Richmond Union and Confederate armies fought 43 major battles and suffered almost 25% of the entire Civil War’s casualties.
Richmond is a city that continues to grapple with the legacy of its past. In 1993 Hope in the Cities led a broad-based coalition of citizens in a first ‘Walk through History’ making Richmond the first US city to publicly and formally recognize its racial history. For the first time, white and black came together to mark significant sites. These include Manchester Docks where Africans disembarked from slave ships and Lumpkin’s Jail where families were torn apart and ‘sold down the river’. This sustained work of healing painful racial history has continued. The American Civil War Center, also in Richmond, is the United States’ first museum to interpret the Civil War from Union, Confederate, and African American perspectives (see: http://www.tredegar.org/). The slow healing of unhealed history…
Almost everywhere we look, we see the same needs to heal the past. A holiday in Crete brought me face to face with first ethnic cleaning of the 20th Century, with tens of thousands of Greeks leaving lands where they’d lived for generations, crossing with Turks leaving Greece, after the 1919-22 war. Another holiday in Spain, or to be more precise, Catalonia, and an encounter with the Spanish civil war (1936-39). Half a million dead; tortures, massacres, some blessed by figures of the Roman Catholic Church… It is only now that Spaniards are starting to look at this terribly painful past more openly, and discovering mass graves, seeking to clarify family histories and losses.
The Irish ‘troubles’ have marked most of my lifetime. It is said that the Irish never forget, but the English never remember. ‘The bottom has a longer memory than the boot,’ said Peter Howard (English author and journalist), meaning that some countries and cultures have been rather on the ‘inflicting pain on others’ end of the spectrum, and others have been on the receiving end!
In some of these situations, some of the victims/witnesses are still alive, and the history still very alive in the present, but there is now a generation of historians less imprisoned in nationalist or partial myths, ready to look at a bigger picture that includes the sufferings of the other side. In the cycles of history, perhaps it is time to start the healing work, and on a second visit to Crete, we saw a discrete sign in one of the ancient towns we visited announcing a meeting of Greek and Turkish historians. We read that some Turkish historians are starting to take a look at the Armenian genocide, that some Turks are publicly and painfully discovering their Armenian blood and roots.
There are the tides of History with a capital H. And yet, and yet, an instant of decision on a personal level can free us from past chains that hold us. An apology, a healing act, or simply a unilateral decision, can free us as individuals. Many of us have had such instants of choice and change. Kairos (καιρός) is an ancient Greek word meaning the right or opportune moment. The ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos and kairos. Chronos refers to chronological or sequential time, is quantitative, measured in months, years, centuries. Kairos signifies a time in between, a moment of indeterminate time in which something special happens. It has a qualitative nature, marks a time for change, an instant of decision. The right time is now.