I documented shrines to people in North Philly − here’s what they tell us about grief and trauma

(The Conversation) — I was walking through the Kensington neighborhood in North Philadelphia when I noticed a shrine made from scraps of lumber and old furniture. Empty liquor bottles were arranged inside. A menagerie of stuffed animals, their fur matted by rain and bleached by the Sun, covered the top. “RIP Bug” had been crudely written with black Sharpie across a koala’s chest.

As if in answer to my question – who is “Bug”? – I found a plaster heart nearby, obscured by the weeds. It was set in concrete along with spent votive candles. Inside the heart was a baby’s footprint, the words “In Memory of Bough,” and a photograph of a young man with a dimpled smile wearing a cap and sports jersey.

Over the next few weeks, I returned to the shrine, drawn back by questions about the intensely personal work of public mourning that it performed. How had it come to be on this unremarkable stretch of sidewalk? Who built it, lit the candles, emptied the bottles and placed the stuffed animals?

As a communications professor whose research has focused on collective memory and trauma in the wake of 9/11, I am fascinated by the makeshift memorials that proliferate in Kensington, a neighborhood that has long been at the center of the city’s drug, poverty and violence epidemics.

Over the past seven years, I have visited, revisited and documented dozens of memorials in the neighborhood. Some, like Bough’s, are like altars, while others consist of graffiti, handmade benches, even items of clothing such as T-shirts and trucker jackets.

These memorials are what cultural theorist Mieke Bal calls “acts of memory.” They serve as public expressions of private mourning in response to the traumas and tragedies of everyday urban life.

One of several graffiti tributes to Frances ‘Frannie Girl’ Jackson, who died in 2023, leaving behind five children.
Gordon Coonfield/Kensington Remembers, CC BY-NC-ND

‘Past made present’

People typically think of memory as a purely personal, mental record of the past.

But in his book about the legacy of the Holocaust, memory studies scholar Michael Rothberg challenges this conception. He defines memory as “the past made present,” and he highlights three important points about the social aspects of memory.

The first acknowledges that memory always has a social dimension. That isn’t to say personal memories of traumatic events such as 9/11 aren’t important. Many Americans will recall exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the World Trade Center had been attacked.

But even personal acts of recollection reflect cultural understandings of what should be remembered and why. Consider the rituals associated with commemorating 9/11 – displaying flags and the “Never forget” slogan. It is clear the significance of that traumatic event is more than the sum of our personal memories of that day.

The second characteristic of Rothberg’s definition is that collective memory is really about the present, not the past. “Never forget,” for example, isn’t about remembering the historical details of 9/11, but rather keeping the event’s cultural significance alive in the present. Similarly, shrines, monuments, prayer cards and park benches also keep the memory of loved ones present for those who mourn their loss.

The third characteristic of memory is that it is made. As anyone who has crammed for an exam knows, remembering takes work. Collective memory requires collective work.

For instance, a few blocks from Bough’s memorial is another shrine created in a neighborhood park. It remembers a young man who was shot and killed nearby. In the years since his killing in 2020, the shrine has been repeatedly repaired and renewed with prayer candles and other items. Remembering him is something his friends and neighbors continue to do publicly, together.

Neighborhood memorials like this park bench are a way for residents to publicly express their private grief.
Gordon Coonfield/Kensington Remembers, CC BY-NC-ND

Why collective memory matters

We make the past present together. But why? Why don’t we just forget it, as we often do with unpleasantness – especially when it involves trauma?

One obvious answer is because the past is how we make sense of the present. More precisely, groups use aspects of the past to explain why the present is the way it is, or why it isn’t the way it should be.

Consider the statue of former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo that was removed from Center City in 2020. As a story in The Philadelphia Inquirer explained at the time, the debate around Rizzo’s statue is about which Rizzo will be remembered – the “flamboyant leader who wouldn’t tolerate crime” or the man “who was eager to use brute force to snuff out any hint of unrest, especially in the black community”?

As communication and memory scholars have argued, collective memory is always partial and therefore also partisan. In the case of the Rizzo statue, the conflict is also a contest over whose traumas count as traumas and whose suffering deserves public acknowledgment.

Similarly, many of Kensington’s memorials are linked to traumas and often appear where tragedies occurred. In this sense, they are less like scars than open wounds.

A sidewalk memorial dedicated to Frankie Caraballo, a 33-year-old West Kensington man and father, is just such a wound. The memorial, reportedly created by Caraballo’s family and neighbors, is attached to a street sign on the corner where he was shot and killed, and it calls out for acknowledgment and resolution of his still unsolved killing.

Caraballo’s memorial is one of many such efforts to publicly express private grief, to make present and material the wounds that frequent violence can leave in a neighborhood. Trauma is ordinary in places like Kensington. But as American philosopher Judith Butler asks, does that make these lives any less “grievable”?

Memorials like those to Bough and Caraballo use collective memory to expand our notions of whose traumas matter. As with collective memory of other traumas, they invite us to expand the circle of compassion.

(Gordon Coonfield, Associate Professor of Communication, Villanova University. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)