The gift of memory and forgetting

The video commemorates the unveiling of the Hyarima statue in 1997 and the Carib presence as well as much of the cultural history of Arima.

Apart from inducing nostalgia through images of parades, activities such as river limes and the memory of the Santa Rosa festival, this video also underlines a fact that I often reference, which is that there are still communities in Trinidad and Tobago who feel intense bonds and that these feelings transcend time and even immediate space.

Of course these sentiments are fuelled by often hazily remembered anecdotes, or as in the case of the Carib community, are held together by myth, broken records and the continuity of such natural history as herbal medicines, cures, the knowledge of plants and animals and rituals and foods such as cassava bread.

But what really binds the Arima community is shared memory.

When Armians meet, invariably they tell stories of the past and the dial and the savannah or Calvary hill and in particular we remember names and families. We all have our stories and it is this act of sharing these sometimes hazily remembered events that makes us feel that we are part of an undying tradition.

Coincidentally this week, I read an interesting article in The Irish Times written by psychotherapist Padraig O’Morain. According to O’Morain, the act of eclectic choice of memory and its reconstitution is what forges the true bonds within relationships and even family relationships.

While all memory is subject to change, it is the act of sharing a reconstructed memory of events that creates longstanding friendships.

Part of the issue is the act of forgetting.

Forgetting is a wonderful gift. It allows us to forgive, for if we remembered everything we would become insane. So forgetting is a beginning process. But forgetting also entails burying part of the past.

The bonding of families and communities often hinges on this act of burying particular versions of events or specific details.

Through this process as a group we re-construct or “re-member” an event that occurred or more specifically an idea of the past. These reformations are the bonds that actually forge intense group identities.

We see this in families, in particular where there are age gaps, where one set of siblings may remember the same event in completely different ways from the other, and may forget many of the details others remember. The reconstruction and forgetting is what truly binds the group.

This kind of eclectic memory may also lead to various forms of cultural supremacy or the creation of hierarchies through the creation of myths. This is so even, or in particular, in our acts of social and cultural reconstruction.

The story is told of Africans brought into Jamaica through the Middle Passage who yearned to return to Africa. The idea of Africa became an intense myth that has in fact been chronicled in films such as Cuban filmmaker Tom?s Guti?rrez Alea’s The Last Supper or in books such as Dionne Brand’s Map to the Door of No Return.

African slaves retained an idea of their origins and this yearning became attached to the image of flying back even after death to their home. Some, it seems, actually managed to return, no one knows how, and reached Zimbabwe.

Having arrived back to the mother country their descendants then proceeded to create another myth of return, this time to Blackrock in Jamaica. So memory is a tricky and unstable thing and subject to the vicissitudes of time and circumstance.

Memory and narrative are important in all our relations. But yes, so is forgetting. Part of the issue of reconstruction is in fact the need to forget. This may be as a result of hurt or trauma or a pain that is unbearable. Living with pain and hurt makes life unbearable. So we choose consciously or unconsciously to edit our memory bank.

Narrative retelling then becomes essential in the act of psychological healing. Psychotherapy entails retelling the story from many perspectives and peeling back the many layers of fiction and narrative so that we can uncover something that comes close to the truth.

I remember another psychotherapist, Micheal O Regan, who ran the Eckhart Centre in Dublin for many years telling me of his therapeutic approach in dealing with trauma and various forms of psychological illness. This included mechanisms for enabling the patient to tell his story over and over again. This form of narrative re-telling slowly uncovers the cause of the illness or the psychological block.

Many writers have sought through literary means to do this, including the poet Kamau Brathwaite who rewrites and reshapes poems over and over again seeking to enter the labyrinth of memory and in particular his sadness at the death of his wife.