We all experience an imperative to remember. What does it mean to remember? Memory is a debt that we owe to the dead. It has been said the dead always live until they are forgotten by the living. Often painful memories come to haunt us. They provoke us and seek our responses. They make us want settle our scores from the past. The past does not wait to be uncovered. It being an affective past, it calls us to remember. It is living in our present. Hence, it is given to us or comes to us in our living present. Present becomes inundated with issues, questions, losses, traumas and pains of the past. Past, therefore, is a huge socio-collective archive. We are drawn to remember that past that affects and even afflicts us the most. Goa has recently witnessed how our tragic past was being racked up to produce political capital with an apparent intent to bring pain to a section of societies. It was almost a victim of the past who was once again victimised and called to answer for the ills of the colonisers.
Martin Heidegger teaches us that past is never done with us even if we wish to be done with it. Paul Ricouer offers us a way of ethically remembering, forgetting and forgiving the past and thus enables us to deal with the past that refuses to die. This resolution of the past enables us to ignite hope and work to build a new future. Thus, while Ricouer shows us the ways of hoping for a new beginning, Heidegger cautions us that those modes of expressing hope cannot fully capture or recapture the past as a unified vision for the future. This is why we have to ethically choose to remember and forget. The past is never fully dead but is always open for new possibilities of being in the world. It is by creating a sense of loss in the present that the past obligates us to remember it. It is obligating us as having been to which we have a belonging and harbours within it a promised future where the loss it thought to be recovered. This is why we often find ourselves looking back to our past to find new ways of being in the world. There is a special bearing to the other of the remembering self in all forms of remembering. Every remembering of the past opens ways of being with the other. Some of this ways may be conflictual while others may be harmonious. What we are facing in India as well as Goa is a remembering of the past that is increasing the decimals of conflicts in our society. We have the dharma to remember aspects of our past that will produce harmony and peace. We have the dharma to forget as well as forgive the past that robs our peace today.
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How we respond to the call of the past will constitute the kind of society that we build. Remembering transforms our understanding of the other and adds a different configuration for communal existence. Remembering therefore, constructs new forms of sociality and community. Remembering our broken past breaks our society. The fact that some painful past events are brought to public memory, we can see how Hindu/Muslim divide is rising in our society. Therefore, the act of remembering places great responsibility on us. This is why Ricouer talks about our ethical responsibility of forgetting and forgiving our past. Ethics come into play when we are tempted to hold the other responsible for the wrong doings of the past that may not have direct links with the villains of the past.
We cannot become heroes by villainising innocent. If we choose this path, there is nothing to choose between the villains of the past and the neo-villains of the present.
Unfortunately, we seem to be moving in this direction. Our memories are policed and we are facing a politics of public remembering that is dividing our society.
The growth of social media has unleashed a politics of public remembering. Hence, it is essential to scrutinise how this remembering represents our past and how it is employed to sustain identity politics. Politics of pubic remembering is connected to powers that be. It is the power elite that selects the forms of remembering and sets up the political discourse in our society. Goa saw this when the loot of the Portuguese rule was hurled irresponsible but it did not gather moss. This is why it is important to understand how a powerful resource like memory is exploited to read history from the privileged location of an elite.
The politics of public remembering often uses memory to image a particular reading of the past to further a vested interest. We need to be critical and cannot simply submit to this play with our social memories. We have to recognise and confront this foul play. There are many peaceful ways of arriving at our past. We do not have to run away from the fault lines of complex past nor have we to be ashamed of its dark sides. We have the challenge to embrace and deal with the shady sides of the past. The politics of public remembering is a politics of distraction. It takes our attention from real issues of the day. This is why we have the challenge to resist it and not to be swayed by it.
The relationship between memory, history and archive has opened new ways of engaging with social power and social subordination. We have to sustain our academic in social memory studies so that we can subvert grand narratives of history as well as resist grand standing of political forces that use and abuse our memory to gain votes and notes. This is why Gyandra Pandey rightly says, ‘Political power entails control of the archive and the memories.’ Responsible remembering makes us members again.
(Fr Victor Ferrao is an independent researcher attached to St Francis Xavier Church, Borim)
