Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges for the New South Africa

Chapter 1: The Power of Collective Memory

Collective memory is not at all like a living organism that develops and matures on its own accord in linear time, as present disappears into past. Instead, it is something that is socially constructed and socially situated— notonlyincubatedintheshareddesiretopreservethatwhichisworthremembering but also fashioned in such a way as to connect it to an “eternal present .” Collective remembrance is absolutely essential for connecting the past with the future. Without memory, there is no grounding in the present or ability to imagine the future. It endows past events and persons with historical significance. It enables us to see selectively, and to alter and save what is deemed important to preserve from the past, but it also “inspires emulation in the likeness of the present.”1 In the much-acclaimed novel Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie uses his fictional characters to reflect upon what he calls “memory’s truth.” Memory , he says, has its own special kind of truth. “It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.”2 The idea that memory creates its own truth points to a kind of skepticism often associated with acts of remembrance. “Monuments, festivals, mottoes, oratory,” as William Graham Sumner remarked more than a century ago, “neverhelphistory;theyprotecterrorsandsanctifyprejudice.”3 Morerecently, 1 The Power of Collective Memory 11 12 the power of collective memory in suggesting that “the past cannot be literally construed; it can only be selectively exploited,” Barry Schwartz reiterates this suspicion about the power of memory to remain true to dispassionate objectivity and factual accuracy.4 Filtered through the lens of shared remembrance, collective memory rendersscenes ,events,persons,andactionsthatwereambiguousorinconsistent in historical accounts straightforward and clear. Whereas actual experience is a welter of conflicting images, confusing thoughts, and subjective remembrances , collective memory has the power to simplify the past, constructing coherent stories of heroism and sacrifice, or trauma and loss, which are “brought into line with contemporary circumstances.”5 For these reasons, collective memory is never settled or fixed but is always open to revision and modification.6 It not only has the power to reshape past events; it can create wholly new ones.7 In recounting the past, collective memory relies upon stories that typically “add background details absent from the originals, fabricationsthatbecomefixedrecollections ”endowedwithasociallifeoftheirown.8 Collective memory is everywhere.9 It moves easily back and forth through official, unofficial, public, popular, and vernacular guises. Collective memory appears in the routes of marches or parades, the location and semiotics of muralsandgraffiti,andthestagingofelectionsandpoliticalcampaigns.10 Even morebroadly,thechoiceofarchitecturalstylistics,buildingsites,place-names, and streetscapes become repositories of shared remembrance.11 Although typically unacknowledged, the visual memories of the past are embedded in the physical landscape of walls, gates, and barriers. Memories are also embodiedinparticularplaces ,visualimages,ritualreenactmentsofthepast,personal stories, and casual conversations. Taken together, these “memory texts,” as Annette Kuhn has argued, serve to connect private experiences and public life, and to link personal and social memories.12 Laying Claim to the Past: Acts of Remembrance and Sites of Memory Collective memory, as Omer Bartov has suggested, is “elusive and ambiguous .”13 It is only tangentially related to empirically verifiable truths, but it is a vital ingredient in the symbolic discourse of politics that mobilizes popular opinion and animates a spirit of national identity.14 By conflating remembrance , place, and history, sites of memory render the past comprehensible because they testify to an essential continuity across time. Even the most the power of collective memory 13 durable acts of collective remembrance are located in the “contact zone” between the past and the “eternal present.” Faced with continual destabilization of their original intentions, sites of memory constantly re-create the past in ways that typically reflect “presentist” concerns.15 Looked at closely, it is possible to grasp how the “temporal messages” that emanate from all kinds of memory-markers disrupt and unsettle the linear logic of sequential time, that is, time unfolding from a past “then” to a present “now.” By simultaneously harkening back in historical time and pointing forward to an imagined future, memory-markers enable us to comprehend how past, present, and future are imbricated in every historical conjuncture. It is sometimes the case that the symbolic meanings attached to a particular event can become as significant as the event itself. As David Lowenthal has...