The idiom, Those Who Forget The Past Are Doomed To Repeat It, is thrown around a lot. It’s an oft-banked opening to many a journal article about a commemorative date or breach, a fail-safe reprimand with matured acceptance in political speeches, and an easy conclusive point to open an undergraduate essay argument up to further implication and significance. Really, though, George Santayana’s oft-quoted statement has become something of an excuse.
The traditional commemorative dedication, In Memory Of, shares, in many instances, the same problem as Santayana’s idiom: passivity. When something is dedicated In Memory Of, it is a conclusion to that which is remembered; it says, We Have Done Our Duty and Remembered This. Countless studies draw similar conclusions from various memorial case studies, suggesting that this dedication is often a close (or attempt thereof) on discussion and an imposition of finality. An erected statue to X shows that we have remembered and cared for it for time immemorial, no further act on memory necessary. It encourages and, crucially, excuses, subsequent inaction. Santayana, by referencing the act of forgetting in absentia of its inverse, remembering, provides similar encouragement. Interestingly, Santayana dooms not the active act of forgetting, but the finality of having already forgotten. Though an implicit proviso of encouragement to inaction (and one reliant on a deliberately closed reading on my part), his prioritisation of that which is forgot over the persistent, active struggle of/with remembering allows the documented use and reuse of his statement as an excuse for its users’ failure to engage with the latter. By reprimanding the memory of others already lost, the statement’s use excuses one’s own passivity in struggling with the mess of actively remembering.
 |
| South African Memorial at Delville Wood. Source: Author's Own |
When I visit a memorial I choose one name and emphasise their story throughout my visit. Trying to picture what the person (and indeed people) behind this name went through, what they felt, what they saw, is a means of actively engaging with memory: it forces active remembering, displacing the passivity of forced silence as you will (read: kid) yourself into thinking that you won’t forget this when you leave the space of deliberately defined commemoration. At Auschwitz six years ago, it was a small religious community pictured and hanging on the walls of a nearby church; they reminded me of my own church community, placing them, and by extension myself, in the act of remembering. In the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in France this summer, pillaged and destroyed on 10 June 1944 by a Nazi German Waffen-SS company, it was a 22-year-old girl named Yvonne, murdered in said pillage; she was (approximately) my age, and she forced me to picture my own life transposed in her situation. In the fields by Delville Wood commemorating its losses of WWI, also this summer, it was 22-year-old Private France; like me, in age and nationality, but what had he been forced to face here that I never would?
I started this habit accidentally, and subconsciously. It was only when I came upon the picture hanging in that church by Auschwitz that I could make some semblance of sense about what I had just seen, finally able to relate to it and, only because of this, begin to feel some of its emotional weight. Auschwitz stunned and it confounded before this picture, but it didn’t hurt in a guttural, visceral and very real sense until I’d moved my church community and myself into its memory.
The idea of collective memory is heavily debated and oft argued to lack ontological weight on the central basis that memory relies upon emotional recollection and hence can never be more than individual, in its true sense of being. Yet what this precludes is the possibility that emotional recollection does not exist in temporal (or indeed spatial) stasis and can extend, through the help of relationality or personalisation, beyond the direct individual experience of a particular event to individual experiences of similar events, emotions or situations that can be drawn in parallel with the aforementioned, isolated event. That is: individuals, collectively, can actively remember (read: have a memory of) an event they themselves may not have experienced (in the same way or at all) by relating that event to something that they have experienced and therefore transpose the two in a sort of palimpsest that triggers an affective cognitive relationship with it (read: memory). Amongst other narratives, my memory of the Holocaust is informed by the emotional relation I made between the senseless loss of a particular Jewish community and the value I hold of my church community in an active palimpsest that triggers its recollection as a want to prevent it both from happening again and being forgotten.
Pioneering work by Alison Landsberg around the idea of Prosthetic Memory, the term she gives to the aforementioned palimpsest and triggered affect, speaks to the problem of passivity encapsulated by Santayana’s idiom. Santayana condemns ‘Those’ who forget the past to repeat it, crucially abstracting the responsibility for memory from oneself to unnamed, collective Others; it’s not Us who are to blame, so, by simple extension, it’s not our responsibility to remember. After all, the logic goes, it’s not Our memory. And anyway, if it’s not our memory, how can we even remember in the first place? This is why personal narratives, individualisation, stories, experiences, names, ages, et cetera are so fundamentally integral to actively remembering and, therefore, the prevention of forgetting and repetition of the past. Do you remember your seventh birthday just because you know that it happened in the past and you commemorate the same event annually? Or because something particular happened then and you still relate emotionally to it, in some (perhaps changing) capacity? The value of stories and names like Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, Corrie Ten Boom and Primo Levi amongst countless others is testament to the power of personalisation against the passivity of memory, of and beyond the Holocaust.
It is hence crucial for those engaged with memory work to engage with memory in the active tense, remembering those whose immediate memory they are concerned with and thus as collective individuals. In a practical sense, a start is, where possible, identifying individuals and stories of events within memorial work, whether this entails publishing biographies or memoirs, including plaques of information and pictures on buildings or animated features in museums. More urgently, it also entails considering the more immediate past and its ongoing repetition. Whilst the power of Aylan Kurdi’s name and the image of his body washed ashore sparked outrage, political action and attention, the refugee crisis persists and his name all but forgotten. What role could remembering stories of the last significant refugee crisis in Europe and our indignant cries of Never Again! play in negating its persistence?
No comments:
Post a Comment