The past is a foreign country

We live not only in a place, but also a time. 

I never understood, truthfully, (and despite extensively quoting it in drafts and redrafts and final drafts of essays and my undergraduate dissertation; wherever memory was concerned), David Lowenthal’s line: ‘the past is a foreign country’. Until I put time and place together as adjuncts: suddenly both were inhabited and necessary to identity, fundamental to it. You cannot abstract the past from time: history without time is absurd, nonsensical, and memory without the backbone of temporality ceases to exist. Similarly, any notion of the future without reference to time simply isn’t ‘the future’. The shared temporal reference core to both concepts is the present: the origin of the axes of time (that is: coordinates (0,0)) from which we read the graphs of past and future. As such, time, like identity itself, is a matter of alterity: that which something is defined against and is itself defined against something else, never an abstract independent. I am in the present because I am not in the past; that is the past because it is different to now, lived in the tense that is occupied; this is the future because it is different to now, vacant of experience. I am who I am because of my past and that which is my future. We are who we are because this is our past and this is our future. 

We are a country that shall defend our island, whatever the cost shall be, we shall fight on the beaches and we shall never surrender. We are a county whose heritage is mining. We are a city of learning and academic excellence, the names of scholars more numerous than the faces hanging in our great halls. I am a ‘90s kid, because I understand this set of niche cultural references those born in the 2000s could never ‘get’. The various claims made on time in these examples are fundamental to the identities they list at various spatial scales, from nation to individual body.  

But Lowenthal’s line is more particular, and implicates the greatest complexity of time: memory. ‘The past is a foreign country’. A foreign country, the OED will tell you, is a country of which one is not a citizen. In other words, it is a country to which you do not belong, by implication do not have rights (or responsibilities) in and/or to that are constitutionally bound, and therefore cannot, formally, identify with or know in whole. Lowenthal is hence suggesting that the past, fundamentally because it is not the present (read: that which you inhabit, belong to, know), can never be known, understood or owned in whole, if at all. The parallel between time and place in the sense of knowing and belonging is interesting, successful in drawing attention to their common integrity to identity, but it is too conscious of the formal and therefore limited without qualification. 

What Lowenthal implies by his line is that memory is self-contained. If memory is self-contained, it is inevitably lost and cannot successfully be sustained through transmission between times, peoples or places. Because the past is a foreign country, only those to whom the past is not a foreign country contain memory of the past: its citizens. Citizens of a time know it as those to whom it was never a present can never do so: as familiar, affective, personal(ised), relevant. They claim rights from and responsibilities to it. In the same way, I cannot say to know anywhere that is not the UK or South Africa as home; and only those who have lived in the UK or South Africa can similarly know them as home. If only those to whom the past is not a foreign country contain memory of the past, then that memory (in whole) dies with them. 

And yet, there are ways to know a foreign country even if it is not as familiar as one’s own country. Foreign language lessons can teach the vernacular and grammar of a foreign country; guidebooks, travel shows, novels and films can show its contours and meanders, as foreign travel shows you its sounds and smells; one can come to know and talk to those who live, or have lived, there as their home. In the same way it is possible to know the past. Equally, and importantly, citizenship is an emphasis on the formal, ignoring or marginalising that which is informal and hence the plural complexity of belonging. Just because I am not a citizen of a country, does not mean that I do not know it in some capacity.

The idea of memory as self-contained taps into a school of thought, strong in psychology and supported among others by Freud, that suggests memory is individual, period. It cannot be collective, nor transgress the lines of direct social relation. Ergo, there is no such thing as social memory. What this presupposes is a restrictive definition of ‘memory’. For example: what are nation states founded on if not common, collective memory? Can they exist without such a base? Does the validity of this ‘memory’ matter, or dictate whether it can be considered memory? If the past is a foreign country, period, this does not mean that no attempts are made to know it, or identities grafted upon and from it, or multiple different understandings possible and indeed more accurate than one (‘a foreign country’; ‘the past’). 

If memory is individual, the past that it contains is foreign to all but the person whose memory is being considered. Consider the notions of affect and empathy, however: relating that which is foreign to that which is familiar, thus personalising the former. As burgeoning work in the fields of ‘post-memory’ and ‘prosthetic memory’ suggests, it is therefore possible for the memories of one person or social group to be passed on to others through affective, interactive mediums like film, museums, literature and testimony. Alison Landsberg’s term for the result, prosthetic memory, indicates that it is not the same as memory but approximates it in its affective force. There is hence potential for collective memory, and a necessity to scrutinise what we mean, and can mean, by ‘memory’. 

We can visit foreign countries, no matter how adverse the boundaries of visas, passports and borders, and we can know them in some capacities. If the past is a foreign country, this doesn’t exclude us entirely from its time.

Olivia Laing’s new novel, Crudo, takes the relation of time and space as one of its central motifs, if not structures. It calls on the fact that now, perhaps more consciously than for a while (though we have always been so in the particular adage, ‘post-war’), we live not only in a place, but a time. The rise of far-right politics and nationalisms amidst a domino of unexpected elections, the waves of responses to those carrying refugees from war, poverty and conflict from one shore to another, and the post-truth-fake-news calls echo what has become something of a common eyes-held-low, knees-turned-inwards and finger-crossed-behind-back admission: George Santayana’s line that ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. If the past is a foreign country, a blind-eye has been turned to its familiarities. If the past is a foreign country, more effort is needed to collectivise its memory.