The Revolutionary Act of Remembrance
thoughts on memory, consumer nostalgia, and monarch butterflies.
In the last few weeks, I took a well-deserved break to recalibrate and think about how I want to move forward in my writing and work. Much of my time was spent trying to find ways to overcome the idea that everything is siloed. Every day, I am surprised at how little we understand relationality. The media is filled with attempts to separate issues, to break the correlations between what happens in one place and another, and so are many of us failing to recognise this.
In my journey, understanding the connection between issues I would have never put together became the door to a whole new world: it is what made me understand intersectionality as a fundamental pillar of feminist work, but also how so many of the issues we face today are connected. It is both beautiful and daunting of a thing, and it may seem overwhelming at times. My attempt here is to make these “big things” seem a little smaller and to infuse them with the necessary poeticism needed to digest them. Poeticism is to systemic issues what sugar was to Mary Poppin’s medicine.
I have been looking into the poetics of relations because I believe that understanding how things are connected changes your perception of the world completely. What does a journalist weeping over a dead son have to do with a private jet? And what does a hungry tree have to do with a wailing mother? The answer is a lot. As I searched for ways to explain these relations, I kept falling into the concept of memory.
During the holidays I was at my mother’s place and I asked her where she had put all the letters her father sent to her when he lived in Venezuela. She handed me a red tin cookie box filled with letters and photographs and said this was the memory box. I flicked through them and romanticised the beauty of slow correspondence, how thought-through the letters were, how much time to process news one could have. Though it seemed like a different time, a lot of the exchanges were similar to ours. One letter from my great-grandmother to her son (my grandfather) told him about the news of their village: how Antonio had left to study in the city, and how Marietta had gotten married to Filippo. Some snarky comments were added too, and I felt at ease smiling at the mundanity of it all.
As I flicked through the letters I came across the photograph which stopped me in my tracks, it was from the end of the 1800s and it depicted a family, three women and one man. When I asked my mother, she said it was the photo of the parents of her grandfather. I stared at the photo for several minutes and then asked myself what it was that I was looking for. It was connection, to see that there were people before me who had fears and suffering, who loved and were impatient, gave me a sense of ease. It is also, unfortunately, an extremely rare thing nowadays to have these memories made material. Most of the photos we take are not printed, they take one moment and we have way too many of them, the preservation of memory and legacy has become somewhat rare. Yet, memory exists all around us. Memory, much like the tendrils of an ancient oak tree, extends beyond mere recollection; it is the essence of continuity, connecting past, present, and future in a delicate dance of interconnectedness.
“A long-lost memory” is a strange thing to say because memories are not lost but rather constantly transformed, or hidden. A canyon is the memory of a river, a mountain is the memory of the sea. I myself am a site of memory, living on a site of memory, within a site of memory. In the womb, my grandmother carried my mother, who carried me.
Memory is a gateway to understanding how tightly connected things are, and in a society that tends to separate us, this becomes revolutionary. So, what of memory in capitalism? What of memory in post-colonialist societies?
In his book Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the age of fast capitalism, Gary Cross argues that while nostalgia has always been a part of life, it now, spurred by a surge in consumer goods around the 70s, primarily revolves around specific things or time windows rather than overall experiences. We search for new things, everything is easily discarded, and so much is now built not to last. Our perpetual search for newness has betrayed the importance of memory in connecting us to what is to come.
I have seen sites of memories commodified, and erased, and I have seen them used as sites of punishment (to remind us of a dark past that must never be repeated). In places where consumerism reigns supreme, it feels like the honoring of ancestors and sites of memory has lost its value. I want us to think of memory as a poetic antidote, to understand the act of remembering as one of resistance to the erasure of our shared history and experiences, a transcending of the confines of a society intent on compartmentalising our existence.
As I was reading Ocean Vuong’s beautiful and heartwrenching novel On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous I was impressed with this passage: “Memory is a choice. You said that once, with your back to me, the way a god would say it,” he writes to his mother. I became almost angry at the notion of memory as a choice, because I have had my heart broken, and known grief, so I wrote down what memory was to me, and found this in my journal:
I don’t think memory is a choice, choices are things you have control over, and memory is like a sandstorm, the grains will get in no matter where you hide.
The next day, I continued reading and found myself in conversation with Vuong’s poetic writing. “You once told me that memory is a choice,” he writes to his mother, “but if you were god, you’d know it’s a flood.”
To me, memory is a broken mirror, it reflects us a thousand times over. A memory is like a constantly mutating virus that lives inside me without my knowing, and then I smell a flower and remember how my father used to tell me stories as we stared at fields of sunflowers, or how my grandmother’s neck used to smell. Or I touch a part of my body and remember many times it has been touched without my permission. Memory is body, it is embodiment. It is the butterfly remembering its caterpillar days. It is seeing your parents dance in the kitchen before greed turned your home into rubble before you encountered the lack of compassion of powerful men who let you drown in what they claim is “their waters”. Memory is the broken link you can’t fix until you learn to open a clean page. Memory is like the sea, it grows as the icebergs of our soul melt into it. Memory is the fate of she who remembers without indifference.
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Thank you for reading today’s essay. Below you can find a curated playlist for this essay, an embodied practice, and some inspiring finds that I came across in the last weeks.