Memories of War: Micronesians in the Pacific War

Chapter 2. Cultural Memories and the Pacific War

20 Scholars have written volumes on the importance of memory. They point out that our experience of the present is largely based on, or even embedded within, our knowledge of the past. While knowledge of the past is not unchanging, they argue, it nevertheless helps to keep us oriented. But what is a memory? Our commonsense notion of memory is an individual’s experience of some thing or event, acquired in the past, stored in the mind, and available for future retrieval. Recent research, however, challenges this “file drawer” model of memory. It seems that there is more to how we remember than the simple storage of lived experience. MEMORY For one thing, when we speak of memory as simply an individual’s recollection of past events, we are expressing familiar, but culturally limited, assumptions about time. Western thought tends to objectify and quantify time in a linear way. In the Western viewpoint, only the present can be known with certainty ; the past lies behind us, and the more distant it is, the less confidently it can be known. This is a reasonable way to organize ideas about time, but it is not the only one. Cross-cultural research suggests other understandings of time.1 Pacific Islanders’ understandings of time have recently been explored by several indigenous writers. Tongan scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa suggests that some Pacific Islands cultures do employ linearity in their notion of time, most commonly Chapter 2 CULTURAL MEMORIES AND THE PACIFIC WAR cultural memories 21 Japanese tank remnants on Pohnpei, with research assistant Antolin Gomez. (Photo by Suzanne Falgout) in genealogies. Yet their linear notion of time is neither evolutionary nor teleological as is that of the West; rather it is more ecological, sequential, and circular .2 Some Austronesian languages locate the past in front and ahead, with the future behind and following. Hau‘ofa quotes Hawaiian historian Lilikala Kame‘eleihiwa: It is interesting to note that in Hawaiian, the past is referred to as Ka wa mamua, “the time in front or before.” Whereas the future, when thought of at all, is Ka wa mahope, or the “time which comes after or behind.” It is as if the Hawaiian stands firmly in the present, with his back to the future, and his eyes fixed upon the past, seeking historical answers for presentday dilemmas. Such an orientation is to the Hawaiian an eminently practical one, for the future is always unknown, whereas the past is rich in glory and knowledge. It also bestows upon us a natural propensity for the study of history.3 22 chapter 2 Hau‘ofa gives additional support for this Austronesian concept of time, which he describes as circular, and for the heightened importance of the past in the Tongan and Fijian languages that he speaks. The past then is going ahead of us, leading into the future, which is behind us. Is this then the case of the dog chasing its tail? I believe so. From this perspective we can see the notion of time as circular. This notion fits perfectly with the regular cycles of natural occurrences that punctuated important activities, particularly those of a productive and ritual/religious nature that consumed most of the expanded human energy in the Oceanian past and still do in many parts of our region today. This is ecological time. That the past is ahead, in front of us, is a conception of time that helps us retain our memories and to be aware of its presence. What is behind us [the future] cannot be seen and is liable to be forgotten readily. What is ahead of us [the past] cannot be forgotten so readily or ignored, for it is in front of our minds’ eyes, always reminding us of its presence. The past is alive in us, so in more than a metaphorical sense the dead are alive—we are our history.4 This sense of the past as an essential part of the present is also expressed by one of today’s leading Pacific Islands authors, Albert Wendt of Samoa, in the prologue to his poem “Inside Us the Dead.”5 Inside us the dead, like sweet-honeyed tamarind pods that will burst in tomorrow’s sun, or plankton fossils in coral alive at full moon dragging virile tides over coy reefs into yesterday’s lagoons. MEMORY AND CULTURE Another shortcoming of the perception of...