Opinion: Memories of the World

Pramod K Nayar What ostensibly distinguishes the human race from other species is its incessant need to preserve its memories in art, literature and prosthetic devices. The glories of ancient kingdoms, the devastations of wars, the achievements of scientists are recorded with the presumption that later generations will want to know these details of their […]

Pramod K Nayar

What ostensibly distinguishes the human race from other species is its incessant need to preserve its memories in art, literature and prosthetic devices. The glories of ancient kingdoms, the devastations of wars, the achievements of scientists are recorded with the presumption that later generations will want to know these details of their ancestors.

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2022 is the 30^th year of UNESCO’s ‘Memory of the World’ (MoW) project. MoW creates an ‘MoW Register’, to which people from around the world send entries. From India, the MoW Register lists the archives of the Dutch East India Company, several Sanskrit texts, the Tarikh-e-Khandan-e-Timuriyah and Tamil medical manuscripts.

Collective memory as property?

MoW is aware that memories have ethnic ties, and these communities can rightly claim the memories as ethnic property, as the critics Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz have argued. So the MoW states: “Cultural sensitivities, including indigenous communities’ custodianship of their materials, and their guardianship of access will be honoured. Private property rights are guaranteed in law.”

Claims and counter-claims will emerge because memories define individual and collective identities. Indeed, as we know from efforts to whitewash, redact and manipulate the historical record, cultural memory morphs at some point into ‘national memory’, defined for the purpose of crafting a national identity: we belong to the nation where X king lived, Y fought for freedom, and so on.

In similar fashion, the identity of survivors, refugees and victim-communities rests upon the collective memories that are collated and framed by the cultural frames of the community’s modes of recall. Cultural trauma embodied as memory becomes, as the critic Ron Eyerman argues about African Americans, a means of identity-formation, although not the only one.

We have, of course, now reached a stage of competing victimhood, with communities claiming traumatic memory as a signifier of identity.

Cultural Memory

For obvious reasons one of the first thematic within the MoW project was a CD-ROM of the Radzivill Letopis (also known as the Konigsberg Chronicle), an illustrated text dating back to the 13^th-15^th centuries outlining the origins of the European people, and a massive Latin American newspaper project.

Thus, MoW is the documentation, in multiple formats, of cultural memory. It declares as its vision: “The world’s documentary heritage belongs to all, should be fully preserved and protected for all and, with due recognition of cultural mores and practicalities, should be permanently accessible to all without hindrance.”

The MoW believes that heritage belongs to humanity as a collective and should be accessible to, but also the responsibility of, all. Take two recent examples from the MoW: First, the discovery of a 12^th century mosque beneath an existent one in Mosul. UNESCO’s ‘Revive the Spirit of Mosul’ to restore and repair the mosque destroyed in the conflicts became the centrepiece of international collaboration.

Second, the UNESCO’s recent report documented how:

“UNESCO World Heritage forests in 257 separate sites, absorbed the equivalent of approximately 190 million tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere each year, comparable to roughly half the United Kingdom’s annual CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels.”

This demonstrates a genealogy of climate change and the role of historic forests.

MoW contributes to a global cultural memory. The media theorist Marita Sturken defines cultural memory as a “Field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history […] a field of contested meanings in which [people] interact with cultural elements to produce concepts of the nation…”

That such memories can show fractures of a culture is a truism, because after all what counts as evidence and memory is itself the site of contestation.

Contests in Memory

MoW and such projects cause us to ponder: what are the frames in which a member of community X interprets an artefact or document from another? What would count as acceptable evidence? Do the ruins of a temple beneath a synagogue ‘prove’ prior rights of a community? At what point do we stop digging – when we find the temple ruins, or do we go further down? When/if we go further down and discover a pagan sacrificial site, would we then hand over the site to those identified as ‘original’ inhabitants (the pagans)? Who can authoritatively determine that once we have discovered ‘our’ cultural roots, we need not go further because then we run the risk of finding another set of artefacts from another culture?

An instantiation of such questions appears in Saidiya Hartman’s footsteps-travel account, Lose Your Mother. Tracing the slave route out of Ghana, Hartman discovers that several Ghanians do not want to preserve their memories. This is not only because the current generation is a descendant of slaves but also because the Ghanaians had sold their own countrymen and women into slavery. One man tells her defensively:

“we were the middlemen, but others introduced us to the trade …those who sold the slaves are dead or have gone away … those who remain here, are the descendants of slaves”

In other words, the quest for our true origins may throw up details we would rather not know about because these details will give a different origin story! Archaeologists dig for specific memories that bolster a certain exclusionary identity and intentionally myopic historians write whited-out accounts with their pens.

Speaking of different forms of digging, the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney writes in one of his most famous poems:

Between my finger and my thumb   

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

 ———————————————-

the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

 

Heaney cautions us that the pen is as effectively dangerous as a gun and just as some men may dig for certain kinds of memories, so can poets. All the more reason why it is imperative that we understand what we dig for, and what may emerge.

MoW tells us that memories are never exclusive, they are shared, co-produced, messy – there are no pure origins.  And it is better that way.