Does history repeat itself? Or are its repetitions only penance for those who are incapable of listening to it? No history is mute. No matter how much they burn it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth. Despite deafness and ignorance, the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is. The right to remember does not figure among the human rights consecrated by the United Nations, but now more than ever we must insist on it and act on it. Not to repeat the past but to keep it from being repeated. Not to make us ventriloquists for the dead but to allow us to speak with voices that are not condemned to echo perpetually with stupidity and misfortune. When its truly alive, memory doesnt contemplate history, it invites us to make it. More than in museums, where its poor old soul gets bored, memory is in the air we breathe, and from the air it breathes us. To forget forgetting: the Spanish writer Don Ramon Gomez de la Serna tells a story of a fellow who had such a bad memory that one day he forgot he had a bad memory and remembered everything. To remember the past, to free us of its curse, not to tie the feet of the present but to help the present walk without falling into the same old traps. Up until a few centuries ago, the Spanish word for “remember” also meant “wake up,” and it’s still used in that sense in some rural parts of Latin America. A memory that’s awake is contradictory, like us. It’s never still, and it changes along with us. It was born to be not an anchor but a catapult. A port of departure, not of arrival. It doesn’t turn away from nostalgia, but it prefers the dangers of hope. The Greeks believed memory was the sister of time and the sea, and they weren’t wrong. --Eduardo Galeano
Posted on: Tue, 17 Jun 2014 02:53:00 +0000
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