War and conflict are too impactful to be forgotten, even if they aren’t talked about and burrow down into the subconscious. In my memory project, I looked at this idea in relation to my family’s experience of World War Two and explored the consequences of silencing pain.
Thinking about this in relation to a broader social context in which marginalized groups of people experience the ongoing ramifications of the wars waged against them, I’ve begun to consider not only the importance of remembering pain but the power of it. In an essay on the traditions of anti-colonial resistance in Turtle Island, Nick Estes writes about how the centuries of struggles experienced by indigenous and colonized peoples have generated a “deep radical consciousness … that co-create liberated spaces and communities of freedom, past and present.” Remembering shared struggle unites communities in their fight for justice.
Engagement with these memories is also the duty of those unaffected by such wars. Ignorance breeds complacency. The impact of documentaries exposing silenced parts of the past are testament to this. Watching 13th deepened my horror and helped to increase my understanding of the extent of the racial injustice entrenched in the U.S. The documentary Blackfish on the maltreatment of orcas at SeaWorld triggered a movement and legislation in several states banning whales in captivity. Engaging with the pain and inhumanity of wars initiated on humans and nonhumans can galvanize us to change the environment that fosters this.
I believe this speaks to a basic level of connection and empathy between all things. We are all connected. There’s one life force running through us all. At a deep level we care about each other. But the calculus of power underlying the system we live by has atomised us into a web of separate classes and groups and bubbles, held together by selective forgetting. By forgetting the suffering of some we resign ourselves to an inhumane system.
What remembering conflicts has the power to do is restore what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls an “infrastructure of feeling.” It is how we reckon with infrastructures that maintain inequality, destructive mythologies, and the war on the poor. There is a lot of suffering caused by conflicts to remember. But we must remember them before we act. Memory turns into movement. The memory of war, rather than war, is the locus for social change.
References
Estes, Nick. “Freedom is a Place: Long traditions of anti-colonial resistance in Turtle Island.” Versopolis, 2020.
https://www.versopolis.com/times/reportage/842/freedom-is-a-place
Gilmore, R. W. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2007.
