Anthroplogist Paul Connerton [ How Modernity Forgets, Cambridge University
Press, 2009] brilliantly argues that “the locus [of memory] is more important
than the memorial.” The memorial is a
deliberate work, born out of a fear of forgetting. It calls out for attention to its explicit
message. A simple, inattentive glance at a memorial is not enough. Otherwise,
as Connerton, summarizing Robert Musil, says: “nothing is more invisible than a
memorial”. Likewise, memorials conceal
as well as trigger memory, especially war memorials which “conceal the past as
much as they cause us to remember it.”
This is because of the partiality of their representation of the past.
After all, “their image is designed specifically to deny acts of violence and
aggression. They conceal the way they died: the blood, the bits of body flying
through the air, the stinking corpses lying unburied for months, all are
omitted.”
Connerton argues that, on the other hand,
the house and the city street both provide powerful loci of memory. The house is a “memory device” or an
“aide-memoire”, a medium of representation and, as such, can be read
effectively as a mnemonic system.” The
house, or home, is a mnemonic structure that has a certain
taken-for-grantedness until a house-moving or, worse, a fire or war deprives
one of one’s house. Even the furnishings within the home “remind us of the
shared history and the body” , while on a larger scale the city street forms,
over time, “a web of contacts and memories that eventually lead to a web of
public trust.”
 |
| My father's chair |
Allow me two personal examples. Firstly: at
the age of 18 I left the house that I had lived in since shortly after birth.
At the same time I left my family, my city and my country, never to return for
any extended period of time. Over the decades that passed I have infrequently
returned. At each visit I am confronted by an old armchair in the kitchen, made
by my father with his own hands. When I sit on this armchair, even now, despite
its imperfections and discomfort (or perhaps because of these) I am transported
back to the times when, as a teenager, I sat there with Misty, my cat, on my
lap and rooted behind a cushion and under a cushion to find the lose pages of
newspapers that my father had stuck here. This memory comes to me with
immediate force, like a Proustian involuntary memory, and it brings to me the
almost physical presence of my father, who died nearly thirty years ago in that
very room. Such is the power of the house and its furnishings as a locus of
memory. Walter Benjamin [Illuminations, Random House, 20111] would describe the room as having an aura – “If we designate
as aura the associations which, at home in the memoire involuntaire, tend to
cluster around the object of a perception”.
In this particular case, the aura is made stronger because my father
made the old armchair (it is why it is so uncomfortable!) and it therefore
bears what Benjamin calls
“traces”.
Secondly: aged 18, I worked for some time
in southern France, together with labourers who were Irish, Arab, Chinese and
Latin American. Months later I moved to
Paris. One day I was approaching a green newspaper kiosk on Boulevard Saint
Michel, at the point where the broad avenue crests the hill at the large
intersection outside the Jardin de Luxembourg, when I happened to run into a
Venezuelan who I had worked with down south. We stopped and chatted amicably
for ten minutes of so. Now, whenever I am in Paris, which is at least once a
year, and I happen to walk by this intersection (the Luxembourg Gardens are
obviously still there, the cafes and shops have perhaps changed, but the
intersection seems to be as it was then, even the green newspaper kiosk still
remains) I recall running into my Venezuelan acquaintance. Most importantly,
the memory is almost physical – I can almost feel what I felt then, aged 18 –
and it invariably stimulates scores of other memories of happy encounters I had
on the streets of Paris during the late 1970s.
These two examples demonstrate the remarkable importance of the role of place in personal memory. Memory is not simply triggered by place, it is triggered by place because that which is remembered happened in place, was emplaced. We say that events take place. In fact events take place in place. The event takes place within a topography that is sensed, that has become meaningful and that is appropriated by ones identity – not only the event has been lived but the place too has been lived.
Therefore, to lose the place can be
catastrophic, for one’s memory and one’s self-identity. To be unable to return,
as is the case often with political refugees, can provoke profound sadness.
Connerton formulates this well: “As I know my way around the limbs of my body,
as a pianist knows her way around her piano, as I know my way around my own
house, so I know my way around the paths, landmarks and districts of my city”
and to lose one’s way around one’s limbs “is tearfully distressing, an aching
catastrophe” but so too, to lose one’s way around one’s house or city “would be
a defamiliariztion that would shake my very being.”
How greater the catastrophe therefore, for
memory, when an entire social or ethnic group, through forced trans-location,
lose their houses and their cities, the primary loci of their memories, and
instead, find themselves transported to a new, alien world that knows nothing of
their former homes and towns and, furthermore, demonstrates only a profound
disinterest in their past, their experiences and their memories. Such people's memories have been amputated.
