How history is told: memory and discourse
What if you have to tell the history of your country in ten minutes from now ? C’mmon, let’s do a quick mental exercise. If you need help, I’ll give you: think about the starting point and the final point; divide your narrative in coherent and distinct sections, preferably under the same criteria; for each section choose your main actor, not people necessarily, but also events, traits, organizations, etc; in case of you wanting refine you story, you may elaborate the causes of each section and its done, there it is a particle of national memory that sums up with another millions.
And what is “memory” exactly ? Whe is understood as Historical Memory is the process of past reconstruction without the historiography critical rigor. No doubts, the History, as human science, is the main — or it should be — memory source, but no the only one, because there are many other des/information channels that, involuntary or interested, help to build it.
How memory is built ?
Aristóteles defines memory as a set of “mental images” of our casual sensitive impressions captured in the past; a mix of verbality and literally images.
Think in a blanc board: each remembrance of a certain thing is one brushstroke that draw the whole memory. Besides, each time these remembrances are replayed, the painting is reinforced and, on the other hand, if the don’t, the paiting fade away. Furthermore, other people can remind you new things and add a new brushstroke in the board, as you too, as an artist that changes along the time, resignifies past experiences and add new tone to the painting.
Its possible to separate the memory in two groups: individual and collective. They aren’t immiscible, on the contrary, it’s possible that they both feed themselves in a retroinfluence.
Meanwhile individual memories exist without external support, because they are linked in our own identity, collective memories need periodic stimulus, produced in context of affective community capable of generate situations that would bring this memories to surface.
“It is necessary that this reconstruction happen based on common date or notions found both in our espirit as in the others, because they pass unstoppably from one to another reciprocally, what is only possible if they belong to the same society.”
(HALBWACHS, 1990, p. 34)
For instance, think about your favorite class from school. The remarkable facts were shared with your friends during the whole year and possibly after that too, maybe still even today. However, its normal that teachers doesn’t fit inside a significative affective community with their classes, causing a gradual forgetfulness. While we can recognize many of our teachers years later with ease, they rarely remember our name.
How memory may build the reality ?
Frequently, our knowledge about a certain historical event needs to be rebuilt, almost in their totality, by testimonies, i.e, when a person recalls their memories to describe something.
This task becomes especially defiant when encompasses traumatic episodes, like war and genocides, in which the witness suffer such huge violence that your observation and comprehension capacity are compromised. There are some people who states that episodes like Holocaust are “events without witness”, because those who spoke about it made through it more safely. Those who touched at the bottom, didn’t come back.
Besides the impossibility to have all the witness, those who survived has to cope with the shock of returning to the “real world”. Gradually the horror memories gains contour of absurd and the person starts to doubt about themselves: “Was that what I saw ?”. How to narrate the inenarrable.
“And from the early days, however, it seemed impossible to us fill the distance that we discover between the disponible language and that experience that we still was realizing. We barely start to talk and we suffocate. Even to us, what we had to tell started to look unthinkable.” (ANTELME, sobrevivente do Holocausto, 1957)
Before this vulnerability, the opressor finds a way to erase their your crimes, taking advantage of the “irreality” in that expecional situations. Locals and documents destruction , victim silencing, anisty to the guilties, artificial narratives. There many ways to neggate the inconvenient true.
But its not necessary to reach an extreme situation to verify a dispute for the collective memory — the clash of narrative happens all the time. The historician may pursuit the true and prime for imparciality and objetivity, but its also their duty to ask: to who my history serves ?
“To become lord of memory and forgetting is one of the big worries of classes, groups, individuals who dominated and dominate historical socities. The forgetting and silence reveal these manipulation mechanisms of collective memory.” (LE GOFF, 1990, p.368)
A reflexive hobby
Once one get used to investigate the memory mechamisms, there is no comeback. Your mind start to analise each fancy discourse in your timeline or television. What term is being used? Discover or conquest? Republic proclamation, Counterrevolution, Impeachment? Or there is a coupe right there? Who are listening? Who supports and reproduces it? These are some questions that remains in ones head.