Memory work

Abstract

Like individuals, communities maintain records of their self-definition, creativity, constructions of the past and the future, and experiences of suffering – either in texts or in memories. However, there are domains that the textual cannot enter. These domains remain mnemonic or memory-driven and cover some of our intimate relationships, private hatreds, traumatic or life-altering experiences, dreams and encounters with the sacred. These memories constitute a secret self in all cultures, but some cultures are entirely mnemonic. They usually occupy no space in our knowledge systems and in our visions of the future and survive as inaudible stories of human potentialities and creativity, suffering, exploitation and violence. Following Freud's idea of dream work, one can call the vicissitudes of collective memory, its “distortions,” condensations and “secondary elaborations,” memory work. The memory of the world has been diminished by the dismissive attitude towards the memory banks of the silenced and the marginalized, which survive outside the known world of knowledge or in its interstices. These dismissed memories wait for appropriate moments to return as a form of resistance, to outmanoeuvre the certitudes of policy elites, official histories and familiar canons of scholarship.