Rich's poem "Amnesia" expresses the feminist viepoint that
history erased from collective memory the role and identiy of women throughout time.
Rich asserts this was done by removing and/or not including documentation of women's
contributions to culture, society, and history. Although, some women of extraordinary
renown, like Madame Curie, are included in the documents of history. Rich expresses this
ideology in her essay "Resisting Amnesia: History and Personal
Life."
One of Rich's feminist theses is that historical amnesia has
robbed women of the ability to "create things differently." As she writes in
Ana Historic:
they took your imagination, your will to create
things differently
The story
elaborates upon this further when Rich writes that this omission of women's roles and
contributions has overloaded collective feminine cognition so none can bear to remember
the past:
under the role or robe was no one ... they erased
whole parts of you, shocked them out, overloaded the circuits so you couldn't bear to
remember
These ideas, (1)
stolen imagination and creativity and (2) an intolerance for remembering are echoed in
the end of "Amnesia":
still, why
must the snow-scene blot
itself out
the flakes come down so fast
so heavy, so
unrevealing
over the something that gets left
behind?
One of Rich's central
points is that feminists need to be looking for the resistance from women throughout
history that maintained a continuity to the survival of women's
imagination:
to be looking ... for the greatness and sanity of
ordinary women, [who] collectively waged resistance ... better than individual heroines
... [for] continuity of women's imagination of survival, .... ("Resisting
Amnesia")
This feminist idea
of a collectively waged resistance is hinted at in "Amnesia" when the poetic speaker
says:
every
flake of snow
[...]
adding-
up, always adding-up to the
cold blur of the past
But first there is the picture of the
past
simple and pitiless
...
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