For this assignment, I watched the interview with Derrek Brooks, Charlie Brooks Jr.’s son. After talking with Gabriel and reading about the project’s mission, I expected these interviews to be extremely emotional and painful as family members relive the injustice of someone they loved. Although Derrek was emotional at points, overall he was calm and collected throughout the entire interview, which I found surprising because he was talking about the unfair death of his father. To me it appeared that Derrek was discussing his father’s death as something that just happened that he had no control or anger over.
As the interview went on, I found out that he was at a place in his life where he had accepted what had happened to his dad. Derrek stated that his family had suppressed the story of Charlie, and just thought of it plainly as a death in a family rather than a terrible tragedy. Derrek stated that until the Texas After Violence Project had contacted him, he hadn’t spoken about his father in a long time. To get to this point it took time for Derrek and his brother Keith to settle down and process what had happened to them and their father. I was surprised at Derrek’s interview because I expected for him to speak more to the injustice that his father experienced, rather than the memory he currently has of the story and of Charlie.
Watching Derrek discuss the memory of his father and how he thought of his father’s death at the time of it happening made me think of Maurice Halbwachs. Halbwachs discusses the notion of collective memory and discusses how the events in our past and the way we remember them can impact and affect our current selves, and our current perceptions of events that occurred in the past. This relates directly to Derrek’s interview about his late father. Throughout the entire interview, Derrek is constantly stating that his feelings reflect the way he thought about his father’s death at the real time of his death. Halbwachs believed that placing someone back in the place where the memory exists we can understand their viewpoints and opinions on the subject at hand. Derrek stated that his family chose to not discuss or think about Charlie’s death often because it brought up a world of pain, however this interview places Derrek back in that world where he is forced to rethink how he viewed his father’s trial and death. Taking Halbwachs argument into consideration when assessing this interview explained the way that Derrek discussed this traumatic event.