The importance of memory
The threads that compose us (01 of 24)
[This post is the first of a series. All posts can be viewed on my website].
“Who am I?” is a question that has always been present on my horizon. Perhaps being a descendant of Europeans in a distant land, or having been a Latin American migrant in as many other even more distant countries, has somewhat complicated my perception of the matter. The point is that, beyond the simple biological answer — I am an individual of the species Homo sapiens, with all that such a thing implies in terms of nature and evolution — , there is no simple answer to my questioning.
Because identity is a gaseous and complex construct. Identity is made, remade, changed, adapted, discarded and reworked, sometimes according to our own convenience. It is not innate: we build it little by little, with the influences we receive from childhood, even inherit, and according to our personal experiences and needs. I am an Argentinean of Italian descent because my first perceptions were those, because I was raised in a family environment with those geographical and cultural traits, because I was taught that way at school. But I am many other things because I myself have added those traits, because I have assumed them, and also, why not, because I have created them and added them to my profile at my pleasure.
In the end, what we are, that shapeless concept we call “identity”, is based on the accumulation of a myriad of experiences and moments, of perceptions and biased memories, which sometimes are not very close to what really happened. All those tesserae, all those threads, form that mosaic (or that fabric) that we know as “memory”. A personal memory, which in turn allows us to build an individual identity.
Now then: the sum or accumulation of all the memories of a human group — of whatever size: a family, a clan, a union, a work team, a peasant community, a nation-state — is the “social” or “collective” memory. One through which we can create our own identity as part of a group.
Or of several. An indigenous, peasant and trade unionist woman, for example, can be the central node of several interpolating (and interpellating) identities, based in turn on a veritable range of personal and group memories interwoven to a greater or lesser degree.
Social memory is a set of extremely fragile elements. Volatile, almost. Sometimes a photograph, a manuscript, a newspaper article, a poster, a book or a drawing give it a certain materiality and, therefore, increase its chances of survival over time. At other times, more often than not, the collective memory is transmitted orally: by word of mouth, from hand to hand. With all that this implies in terms of changes, variations, uncertainties and lack of certainties.
Memory is subjective. Personally, we remember what we want as we want. And collectively, the complexity increases: the memory of the same event may include hundreds of thousands of versions, which sometimes disagree or directly contradict each other. The social memory of an entire ethnic/linguistic group or nation-state is made up of millions of different positions and perceptions — among which common elements that structure the group and give it cohesion are usually sought and rescued.
In addition to laying the foundations for individual and collective identities, memory is the basis of “history”, a subjective account — there are as many histories as there are historians — that tells us “what happened”. Using tangible and intangible memory (but especially the former) as raw material, history constructs a version of past events to explain the what, the how, the when, the where, and the who of the events.
And the why. Which is the thorniest question… and the most subjective of all.
The further back history goes, the less intangible memory (oral tradition, memories) and the more tangible (documents, material heritage) will be used to construct it. And the more likely it is that this tangible memory will have been produced by a minority: those in power, those who can publish books or build monuments.
The construction of identities and histories using social/collective memory is a process that is not without conflict. It is a contested and combated terrain where both vested interests and manipulations, lies, pressures and censorship are present.
The material elements in which memory materializes are preserved — not always complete, not always successfully — in the spaces where knowledge and memories are managed: libraries, archives, museums, galleries, documentation centers… It is not surprising that these spaces are priority targets in a war: it is a process called “memoricide”, through which the aim is to destroy the bases of the adversary’s identity and history, and thus eliminate their motives for fighting. For the ones who forget their past — or cannot remember it, for whatever reason — do not understand their present and cannot build their future.
But this struggle for the control of memory does not always take such an obvious form: it occurs on a daily basis within the same human group, especially on the part of the established powers (governments, media, educational systems…). Those who control memory and, above all, its management — what is kept, what is eliminated, what is seen, what is allowed — control the narrative and, therefore, reality: this is known, this is said, this is kept, this is silenced, this is discarded, this is eliminated.
Entire human groups, along with their memories, identities and histories — generations and generations living, thinking, feeling and remembering — disappeared from reality because of those practices, and today they are not even a faint memory. And it is not always about conquered or subjugated groups: the history of my own great-great-grandparents, poor Italian migrants in Argentina at the end of the 19th century, is practically invisible to records, archives and official History. All I know about them comes from a tiny handful of memories transmitted orally (and deformed, and worn out) over the decades. Nobody talks much about all that “cannon fodder” that arrived in South America huddled in the fourth-class holds of some ship and survived as best they could in the room of some shabby tenement in some Buenos Aires slum. They are “nobodies”. They are “nothing”, and they are treated as such.
Hence the importance of libraries — and archives, and everything else. If information is power, memory can be much, much more. It can turn those “nobodies” into “somebodies”, and that “nothing” into “something”.
And hence the enormous struggle for control of these spaces. Sometimes through direct actions, sometimes through much more subtle mechanisms. If we review the collections of any of our libraries, it seems that the only ones who have produced knowledge are white, scholar men; women, indigenous peoples, Afro communities, and many, many other social groups do not seem to exist there. The same thing happens with archival documents: where are the voices of my great-grandparents, and of all their neighbors in those peripheral neighborhoods of Buenos Aires? Where are their vicissitudes and their struggles, and all their many defeats? Where are the experiences of all those women who gave their lives to raise their families? Where are the “small” stories of all those groups, and of so many others, systematically ignored and invisibilized?
If we take into account that the collective memory of a nation-state, as mentioned above, is made up of millions of perceptions and individual positions, often contradictory, it is also understandable that the powers to be try to take control of the discourse and the story and establish, often by force, a single common memory. One that provides a “national identity” and an “official history”, denying or leaving aside all the other versions, the other perspectives… that become just that. “Others”. In the quasi-epic narrative of heroes, great deeds and characters, triumphs and development, the “others” do not appear. It is as if they never existed: a huge anonymous and invisible mass that lived without living. Like my great-great-grandparents, my great-grandparents, my grandparents? Myself, perhaps?
Despite attempts to control knowledge and memory and their management processes, there are many of us who have understood that these spaces are (or can be) places of plural construction, critical debate, militancy and struggle. Spaces of decolonization and analysis, of openness and exploration, of recovery and elaboration. Libraries, archives, museums and a long and varied “etcetera” are trenches in which to resist, shelters in which to take refuge.
Places in which we can (or should) conserve the strands that compose us. All of them.
Perhaps many do not understand how important those corners — and those strands — are. It’s probably time they begin to.
