“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”
- Anne Carson
Is memory sentient? A living entity? A force? It certainly isn’t only past. It’s now and in the future, too.
Memory breathes with us. It blooms like mushrooms in fertile soil after the rain of our tears soaks our ecosystems. Here, there, and everywhere, sprouting up from the deep dark.
Big feelings seem to be the conduit to memory, the trail guiding us along the path of every milestone that felt like this recently, or years ago, or even in another lifetime. Grief, joy, love, awe, wonder, terror, pain, heartache take me to memory.
When I place my head against the pillow or against the Earth, when I quiet the thinking mind’s near constant churning, I hear memories. Memories of what was and could be. Memories dreaming. Memory is the portal to infinite dimensions not only forward and back, but up into the cosmos, down into the underworld, out to other realities.
Memory has weight. Heavy, sinking, gripping. Memory drags us under and we come up battered and bruised. Memory is light. Delicate, precious, fragile. It flutters on the wind like the translucent wing of a bee whose body gave way after so much labor, like fine silk grazing our cheekbone, like the faintest outline indicating what was once here then scattered into the breeze. Memory is transient. Memory trickles and floods. Memory is an echo, a ripple, a spiral. Memory doesn’t depend on fact or evidence, but it is activated and stimulated and fueled by those things.
Memory is dangerous. Memory is haunting. Memory is healing. Memory is liberating.
I think about cell memories often. Like, I don’t have cell memories of life outside the patriarchy or white supremacy or antisemitism. My lineage stretching back to the oldest link never lived beyond those shapes. But then I remember, actually, I do, because memory is as ancient and as future as I can possibly conjure, and I do remember (on some level, somewhere, maybe in my dreams) when people were free and will be again.
“All of us have ancestral memories of what it’s like to live connected, interdependent lives. We may be cut off or too far away from those traditions to claim them, but we can listen to our needs, our longings, and through ritual, rite, and practice build a way of being in the world that honors and makes tangible our connections to one another, to nature, and to spirit.” - Mia Birdsong, How We Show Up
Humanity has tumbled with memory since the dawning of civilization because memory is a critical component of human coherence or lack thereof. We are unified and we are fractured by memory. Families, societies, relationships, nations that disagree about memory are plagued with struggle. Memory can remake the world a million times. We know elephants and monkeys and ravens and parrots and dolphins remember, and it is part of their familial coherence too. One day I hope we better understand their memories, as they seem to get along better than we humans do.
Memory is one of my closest friends and allies right now, as I write a book, as I heal trauma - both mine and my lineage’s, as I invest in evolving and maturing relationships. This week, memory is weaving threads together through systemic oppression in the following ways:
Stealing memory
Co-optation/appropriation
White supremacists/neo-Nazis/far rightwingers, etc are harvesting other peoples’ memories like vampires sinking their teeth into the bodies of the oppressed to hypocritically claim "co-vicitimization". This potent term comes from Frank Usbeck, curator for the Americas at the State Art Collections in Dresden and former professor of American Studies at the University of Leipzig in Germany, featured here. Examples:
The claim that vaccine mandates are the new holocaust, that the vaccine passport is the new Jude star, and that government sanctions to promote collective protection are a ticket to the gas chamber.
The claim that nationalist movements are parallel to/aligned with Indigenous struggles for land defense. In other words, to prevent invasion, dispossession, and "replacement" from threats (migrants, anyone that’s not white) violence is justified as a defensive, protective strategy of “homeland”.
These mutation of white supremacist rhetoric to claim themselves as victim is theoretically foolproof. As in, who could argue that Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse or Black Elk or 56 million indigenous people in "America", or 6 million Jews (/14 million others killed in the Holocaust -- often omitted, obfuscating that actually 20 million people were murdered by the Nazis) in Europe were wrong to resist their persecutions?
They see how inventing kinship with the Jewish or Indigenous (Native American) experience of genocide is much more potent than "supremacist" rhetoric. “We aren't perpetrators or predators of white supremacist violence, we're actually victims, too.” The man that massacred my hometown of El Paso in 2019 leveraged this precise language in the manifesto he published before murdering dozens.
False equivalence
Jan Grabowski chronicled another wave of Holocaust revisionism in the New York Times. Poland is re-writing its history, shifting focus from one of eager complicity in the Holocaust to one of heroic pride by commemorating the handful of Poles that disobeyed the Nazis to help the Jews. The distortions to make this leap are shocking and disturbing. Poland is currently erecting monuments nationwide to honor such individuals, but the truth is these gestures of “helping” Jews were inseparable from exploitation and extortion. For example, Grabowski described a new monument being erected outside the concentration camp Treblinka to honor a man who was shot for giving water to Jews locked in cattle cars stalled outside the camp. But generosity was not the primary motivator. Jews were not met with compassion as they waited in the sweltering heat, in the grip of extreme dehydration, they were met with cruelty. The Polish youth arrived with water, but at a high price: gold or cash. If you're unaware, Jews often didn't know exactly where they were going when they were rounded up by Nazis, and often carried with them their most cherished possessions. As described in a prior post, even Viktor Frankl sewed his precious manuscript into the lining of his jacket, burned at Theresienstadt. One Polish worker-escapee, Abram Jakub Krzepicki, described horrific scenes of Jews pleading with the Poles, handing over fistfuls of money for a mere half cup of water.
When heartwarming hero/savior stories glaze over state violence, even if they accurately recount events unlike the Polish monuments to predators, the carnivorous constructs that create "heroes", "saviors", and dare I say "good samaritans" to begin with leverage altruism and hyper-individualism as distractions, another veil shielding the dystopian reality that demands revolution, not a million dollar cup of water in a drought. At scale this looks like charity instead of solidarity, billionaire-run "foundations" instead of equitable wealth re-distribution.
“A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.” – Mark Twain
What I am grappling with here is what it means to balk under the burden of memory, to steal memory, to deny memory. I've long known that white supremacy, state violence, abuse, etc is perpetuated by forced forgetting. Burn books, burn bodies, burn memories. Traumatize the living so completely that making memories and/or making meaning from memories becomes harder -- i.e. when we're exhausted and anxious and stretched thin, positive memory is a luxury and plagued memory is an inevitability.
But I also don't want to linger in this space of traumatizing, sensitizing relationship with memory for too long. It's not how I started this piece and it's not where I'm going. I wanted to contextualize some thinking around this to say: memory is important. Memory is accountability. There are few things more essential to disrupting white supremacy, the patriarchy, and systems of oppression than the memory of survivors, of living legacies of that survival because the more we remember the less we cycle in the trauma of eternal return.
Freeing memory
Two things are moving me deeply right now in this regard.
Protecting the intimacy, humanity, and animacy of memory
First, how do we engage with memory as a sentient co-creator? How do we collaborate with the force of memory not as something we must archaically maneuver or painstakingly labor over like a chore or hold with tremendous fear, but with expansive possibility? What does it look like to leverage the latest technology to advance our ability to heal, repair, recover, and co-dream? If oppression continues to evolve in sinister ways, so can liberation in potent ways. But it's complicated and nuanced, and I am so grateful to the historians and technologists devoting themselves to understanding the Transatlantic Slave Trade as a profound example and model of what could be. In this article by Jamelle Bouie, he explores the breakthroughs brought forward by SlaveVoyages, and the importance of protecting the intimacy and the humanity of memory. This really deserves a full read because it's not for me to try to mediate - I just won't do it justice. From the piece:
“I am not a historian of slavery because I want to spend my time understanding massive moments of spectacular violence. I actually want to understand tiny moments of violence, because that’s what I see as adding up to a kind of numbness — a numbness of empathy, a numbness to human interconnection.” – historian Jennifer Morgan
I think ultimately if memory can bring us closer to our honest humanity, as described above, it can serve all of us, even and importantly the predator/oppressors.
"Hope is memory that desires" – Balzac
Memory as cultural production
Second, what is the cultural work being done right now to feed our cell memories with vitality? What I mean is, I see so many gestures toward rehydrating, re-animating, re-stimulating, re-lubricating ourselves, our lineages, our cultures with new life force through creativity and emergence. I see us re-membering the magic and medicine of what was forced to live dormant to survive, what was woven and folded and knitted into braids and fabrics and soils and cells in secret, subtle, subterranean ways waiting for the right time to burst forward. I see so many people taking courses, building skills, telling stories, singing songs that couldn't for decades or centuries. I see us waking up, opening the door to memory, weaving memory stories together of past and future. I see us refusing to be defined by other people's stories about us, but claiming the animating force of our ancestral brilliance that runs wild rivers in our bones and blood and through our communities.
In other words: My people are not our worst memories. My family is not its worst memories. I am not my worst memories.
What I'm doing here and in my work generally is precisely that. I'm turning my memories, my family's memories, my culture's memories into compost. I'm turning graves into gardens.
Memory is a seed. Memory is a prayer.
“You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places to make room for houses & liveable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that… Like water, I remember where I was before I was straightened out.” - Toni Morrison
~
I know this is a long post today but I'm going to close with an intimate poem I wrote last week on this topic:
The past is a wound. The past is a world I enter like I'm trespassing, haunted by memory, yearning for meaning. I'm told to get out and move on. The life you dream of is so far away from here. Don't look back. But if I could just understand, make sense, tie threads, find breath, stop the bleed, patch the hole. I could get free. I could. Just move forward. If you come here you'll get burned, you don't want to see the carnage, the lies, the way we had to get by. To get by we did our best. Don't hold our feet to the fire. Don't rip up the floorboards, dig up the Earth, you don't want to see the wreckage, the cruelty, the way we had to survive. To survive we did our best. Don't come back, just be blessed. The life you seek is so far away from here. Anywhere but here. The past is a wound. The past is a world I enter bravely, guided by memory, searching for healing.
Next week I have something deeply meaningful to share with y’all. I’m looking forward to it, and I’m beyond grateful to you for being here.
With love,
Rachel
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“My people are not our worst memories. My family is not its worst memories. I am not my worst memories…I'm turning my memories, my family's memories, my culture's memories into compost. I'm turning graves into gardens.”
You are their wildest dreams. And you are creating the language and the lens for collective healing that is so desperately needed.