Knitting Knots of Memory: Weaving Activism and Commemoration

I visited the Statue of Peace in Hamden, Connecticut on February 7, 2025. I wrapped a scarf around her neck—one that I had knitted from January 18 to February 6. In Korea, or in major cities like Los Angeles in the United States or Berlin in Germany, Comfort Woman statues are focal points for events, art exhibitions, and various forms of activism. People adorn these statues with flowers and wreaths in the summer, and scarves, hats, socks, blankets, and gloves in the winter. These statues always receive attention, care, and public engagement.

However, statues like the one in Connecticut, located in a restricted private space, largely unpublicized, with a small Korean population and little support from the local Korean community, remain quiet and still in their places. Yet, this statue exists somewhere in the memory of all Koreans—whether in the minds of those who built it, those who care but cannot easily tend to it, those who are indifferent, and even those who oppose it. These “knots of memory” (Rothberg, 2010) of ‘comfort women’, woven and intertwined, collectively sustain the presence of this statue.

Knots of memory “suggests that knotted in all places and acts of memory are rhizomatic networks of temporality and cultural reference that exceed attempts at territorialisation (whether at local or national level) and identitarian reduction. Performances of memory may well have territorializing or identity-forming effects, but those effects will always be contingent and open to resignification” (Rothberg, 2010, p. 7). As thousands and millions of knots come together to create a single piece of fabric like a scarf, the Statue of Peace embodies thousands and millions of intertwined memories—each knot a fragment, each loop a testament to remembrance.

Rothberg, M. (2010). Introduction: Between memory and memory: From Lieux de mémoire to Noeuds de mémoire. Yale French Studies, (118/119), 3-12.