“Forbidden Memory” Un-erases The Cultural Revolution

The young woman in the photograph is intent, concentrating. Is her face set in resolve? Or is there doubt behind her eyes?

It’s 1966, in Tibet, and she’s a member of the Red Guard — the soldiers charged with submitting the people of Tibet to China’s horrifically destructive Cultural Revolution, and in the process, erasing history.

Yet here’s a photograph of it, making history. It’s part of Forbidden Memory, a fascinating exhibit of photographs by Tsering Dorje, a soldier in the Red Army who took pictures of the Cultural Revolution as it was happening, offering a very rare glimpse into one of the darkest moments of the 20th century — a glimpse that curator William Frucht, on Wednesday, could use to help students from Audubon Street’s Atlas Middle School explore cultural memory, how repressive governments sometimes try to erase it, and how it can be preserved and maintained.

Forbidden Memory runs at City Gallery on Upper State Street through Oct. 27.

Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution lasted from 1966 until Mao’s death in 1976. It was a recommitment to Mao’s principles of radical Communism, which involved widespread political purges. Conservative estimates of the death toll stand at about a half a million; higher estimates range easily in the millions. Economic, educational, and cultural activities ground to a halt, and Mao’s regime sought essentially to erase history and cultural memory through the destruction of cultural artifacts.

Dorje was 13 in 1950, when China invaded his home country of Tibet. ​“Tibet thinks of itself as a separate country,” Frucht explained to the Atlas students, but ​“China doesn’t think Tibet should be a separate country any more than we think Florida should be.” Dorje’s father encouraged Dorje to join the Red Army at 13, which he did.

He got his first camera at the age of 17. ​“He obviously becomes quite good at it,” Frucht said. It was 1954, the same year the Dalai Lama left Tibet and went into exile. When the Cultural Revolution started, he was a mid-level officer and ​“has pretty unbelievable access. It seems he was able to go wherever he wanted.”

Most of the photographs in the exhibit are from the fall of 1966, in the first few months of the Cultural Revolution. In Tibet, that meant Mao ​“imposing a set of beliefs” — extreme communism — ​“on a place that has a long tradition of doing things a different way,” Frucht said. ​“The effort is to completely destroy anything with a semblance of the past.” As the Red Army razed monasteries by the hundreds (by 1976 only eight remained) and ransacked holy sites in an effort to stop the practice of Buddhism, Dorje documented it all. He even trained his camera on ​“struggle sessions,” in which people were publicly humiliated and beaten.

Forbidden Memory, was partly about ​“how differently people can think,” Frucht said. ​“This exhibit is about a time and place when what people thought was normal were things we would just find horrifying.”

Dorje’s remained an avid photographer for his entire life, and his images survived as negatives and prints. He died in 1991. His daughter, Tsering Woeser — a writer and poet in China — took some of her father’s photographs to Lhasa and was able to identify a lot of the people in the images, and find out what happened to them. She put together over 300 of her father’s pictures for a book, Forbidden Memory, which was published in Taiwan in 2006. Frucht learned about the project in 2017 when it was proposed as a book for Yale University Press, where Frucht is an editor. Yale passed on the book (it will be published next year in the U.S. by Potomac Books), but Frucht — who is also a photographer — was hooked by the images. He worked with Woeser to create the exhibit now at City Gallery.

And on Wednesday, students from Atlas, Neighborhood Music School’s middle school, had a chance to see what it was all about.

The Atlas students arrived already knowing the outlines of the history of the Cultural Revolution. They had talked about cultural memory and how it is preserved and destroyed. Part of what makes Dorje’s images so fascinating was the simple fact of their creation and survival — that, as an officer, no one prevented him from pointing his camera where he wanted to point it, and then, that the negatives and possibly prints survived the Cultural Revolution to stand as an intimate document of a violent historical campaign that had, as part of its mission, the erasure of documents.

Which led Frucht to an interesting facet of Dorje’s images. Among the many faces in the photographs, ​“very often there’s someone who isn’t really with the program.”

That included the young woman in the photograph at the top of this article. ​“She was a Red Guard,” Frucht said. ​“She looks very committed here.” But on her trip to Lhasa, Woeser.discovered that ​“after a few years of being in the Red Guard she became a devout Buddhist.” The woman died in the late 1990s. ​“She had a lot to answer for,” Frucht said.

Among these were the sacking of the Jokhang in Lhasa in 1966. The Jokhang’s importance to Tibetan Buddhism is akin to St. Peter’s in Rome for Catholic, Frucht said. It was built in the 7th century AD and many of its artifacts dated from that time.

“This is what the Red Guard did to it,” Frucht said, pointing to one of Dorje’s photographs. They brought its artifacts in the Jokhang’s central courtyard and destroyed them.

Along with the physical destruction, Frucht continued, there was ​“personal destruction.” The woman in the picture was being made to carry her possessions and a box used to weigh grain on her back in a ​“struggle session” meant to humiliate her. She and her husband (pictured near her) were aristocrats and social leaders; in time all of their property was confiscated.

Similarly, Dorje Phagmo, a reincarnated female lama, returned from exile in India and was initially considered a patriot — only to be subjected to struggle sessions of her own. ​“She thought that she was immune from this,” Frucht said. ​“The hat she’s wearing is a sacred object, a hundred years old.” The surrounding mob first stripped it of its pearls and other valuable decorations (before this picture was taken). They next day, the hat was burned.

“Sometimes what they did was worse” than humiliation, Frucht added. In one case, a jailkeeper with a reputation for cruelty was subjected to a struggle session. They forced him to eat a ball of thorns that did damage to his stomach. He suffered for years and eventually died of his injuries.

Frucht noted that Dorje avoided taking pictures of Chinese people. ​“Most of who he’s concerned with showing are Tibetans — what Tibetans did to each other” as they were swept up in the Cultural Revolution. ​“Many of the people who participated were locals who believed in socialism.”

But not everyone did. The Atlas students spread out across the gallery, examining the photos, looking for the people who maybe weren’t so sure that what was going on was right. They asked questions. Of the woman in the photo at the top of the article: ​“Why did she want to be a Red Guard? Was she forced or was she willing?” The photographs allowed for a richer, more complex story, not only about the depredations of the Cultural Revolution, but about resistance to it — and, in the end, the futility of trying to erase history for good.

“Today, there is still almost nothing that shows the Cultural Revolution,” Frucht said. ​“But now we have this.” He mentioned that a few other stashes of photographs have been found. What else might still emerge, to bring these forbidden memories to light?

Forbidden Memory runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through Oct. 27. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.