Memory and In Memoriam

This is about memory and forgetting. There are excellent reflections and writings on this paradox of “forgetting (in order) to remember”, such as Collective Memory (1922) by M. Halbwachs, or his mentor Henri Bergson´s Matter and Memory. More recently, or at least since 1972, Endel Tulving, an Estonian neuroscientist, has called our attention to episodic memory as relatively recent in evolutionary origin and as unique in humans. The theme had a special significance to me as a historian all along my active professional life, but more so now as a senior citizen. 

These reflections may interest all those who are approaching the realm beyond time and are increasingly prone to forget as a result of physical debilities, without suffering any stroke or Alzheimer’s disease. They may consciously or unconsciously choose to erase parts of their memory to exculpate themselves and exorcise some ghosts from their past. 

Memory and forgetting play a fundamental role in the construction of the collective as well as individual identities. It is from hearing what others kept telling us, already as newborn babies and too young to understand what they said, foundations are laid for our self-identity, beginning with acquainting the newcomer as belonging to a caring family and a community.

Historiography is a continuous reworking or redistribution of the memory of the elites, who deconstruct the continuum presented by the previous elites. There is therefore a war of memories as historical processes throw up new elites, in keeping with Pareto’s definition of History as a cemetery of elites, or as implied in the concept of bourgeoisie in the Communist Manifesto (1848) by Marx and Engels, who described the bourgeoisie as a its own grave digger.

Memory is always selective, and never an accumulation of all the registers of the past. What covers the gaps is the autobiographical narrative as a continuum, filling in the black holes along the route. Memory is a totalizing and teleological exercise, which converts the casual and chance-events into meaningful events in the context of individual or community interests. Memory in History helps to build a narrative with a start and an end determined by the narrator.

Memory as commemoration is aimed not just to remember the past, but to transform it so as to complete what was left unfinished or mishandled by the previous generation or generations. In this sense historiography is not completely different from the artistic imagination. It is always a representation of the real past. It is precisely the memory gaps of the past narrators that serve the new narrators to put the past at the service of a new generation and its shapers. It is a re-presentation that gives a future to the past, unifying its various past phases by sewing them with new symbolic and cultural values.

Memory is relevant in our individual lives and in the society as a link between the past, the present and the future. It is more important for the construction of the future than in cultivating the past for its own sake. The plurality that fragments contemporary societies makes such a continuity difficult, if not undesirable. The marginalized minorities feel no pride in a past that led them to the present and does not promise a better future. 

For individuals who are approaching the end of their life’s span, memory no longer holds the same attraction or necessity as a tool for survival and growth as in their youth and active adulthood. In the old age it becomes a mere support to hang on to, fearing the likelihood of being forgotten and one’s inability of doing anything to prevent it. It is this impotence to dictate one’s own “In Memoriam” that presents itself as a specter, kindly mitigated by nature through loss of memory or limitation of consciousness preceding death. 

Memory and “In Memoriam” represent the beginning and the end of our lives. While collective and individual memory helps building individual identity along our life’s span, the anticipation of “In Memoriam” can turn into an agony (derived from Greek root meaning battle) for someone who is a prisoner of identity and is unable to say good bye to memory that sustained it. The Indian advaitic philosophers reflected on this and transmitted their wisdom as “tattvamasi”, meaning “thou art that”. Bhagvad Gita too instructs to practice Nishkama karma or action without desire, as the secret key for liberation from self. 

I beg to share with my readers a personal experience of letting go of the past. It was a past of two most productive decades of my life spent in founding, nurturing and getting the Xavier Centre of Historical Research (at Miramar and Alto Porvorim) recognized as Ph.D. research centre for History by the Goa University. Even before I had conveyed to my superiors my intentions to abandon its direction and move out, I undertook a month-long exercise of self-liberation. 

Every time I went out and returned to the Institute, I would stop for a few minutes outside the gate and look at the building and its surroundings as something strange and new to me. It had the desired effect: When I left, it was not a wrenching experience. I saw it as a most positive decision to let the Institution grow, without seeking to be like a banyan tree under which nothing grows. 

(Teotonio R. de Souza is the founder-

director, Xavier Centre of Historical 

Research, Goa (1979-1994).