If after a hundred years of colonial quibbling, the past is fragmented beyond recognition and leaves nothing to be remembered in its purity, just stick to your guns and remember the evils done to you and your people. That’s how nations are born. Just don’t forget to forget the evils you and your people inflicted on others.
But never lose sight of the fact that past traumas are borrowed traumas. That is why rather than reopening scabbed wounds to flare up old pains, it is far better to create your own pain and, therefore, your own pleasure. Your own traumas and, therefore, your own convalescence.
Failure to do this will result in mixing up nightmares and mistaking the fears of one generation with those of another.
Whatever you do, do not lose track of where one generation’s anxieties begins and where those of the other ends for fear of forgetting whose dream is whose.
As much as you like to think the contrary, you have not existed from the birth of your world, so take care that in holding on to the past, you are not simply bearing the trash and truths of all the worlds that came before you.
It is imperative that at all times you are aware of what items make up the burden of memories you are carrying into the future.
Most of all, when the past gets too heavy and the burden of continuity sad and weary, remember that you can always ditch the past and its pretensions to historical importance and find an absolute beginning in the dazzling emptiness of the present.
admin August 31, 2010 09:32
Thanks dave for your comment. I am with you on the idea of forgetting the past. It's just that the past has always functioned as a powerful and highly contentious political concept, especially within the postcolonial context. But then the uses of the past cannot be restricted to mere remembering. This I think is kind of what you are concerned about. The question one could pose then is the following: is there any way of thinking about the past beyond the opposing tasks of forgetting and remembering? Or, how do we relate to the past in such a way that it does not hold us back but is also not simply erased like it never happened?