The island that we would like to forget

Gorée is an island of Dakar, the capital of Senegal. It is sadly famous for being one of the places from where boats depart for the slave trade, and because in the island still exist one of the trading houses for slavery: the Maison des Esclaves (House of Slaves). The first house dates back to 1536. This building dates back to the Rue Saint Germain 1780 and is the last slave house to date in Gorée.
Similar to many other mansions of the time, was composed of a European-style residence on the first floor and a warehouse of goods and slaves on the ground floor.
Much of daily life took place in the courtyard, where slaves were provided with domestic activities at home and where you place the trade: merchants and shoppers haggled from the balcony.

The domestic slaves lived on the ground floor, where they were also stored the goods and where the cells were slaves of trafficking. Men, women and children were packed in separate cells, chained, waiting to be weighed and cataloged by the physical characteristics and ethnic backgrounds, only to be embarked for a voyage without return to the Americas.
For three and a half centuries, people were tracked, hunted down, ripped out of their native land like the roots of time. It is on this brutal deportation of millions of black people that most of the New World built its political, economic and social foundations. The separation was not only from their country but also from their relatives, in fact the father went to Louisiana in the USA, the mother headed for Brazil or Cuba, the child to Haiti or the West Indies. The separation was total. The slaves was divided in many small cells and then weighed, because the value of a slave was misurated in his weight which should not be less than sixty kilograms. If not, these men were placed in cells to be fattened, like geese.
The House of Slaves was reconstructed and opened in as a museum in 1962 largely through the work of Boubacar Joseph Ndiaye, who was a tireless advocate of both the memorial and the belief in that slaves were held in the building in great numbers and from here transported directly to the Americas.
Since 1978 Gorée island and its House of Slaves was named as one of UNESCO World Heritage site, and is also a part of UNESCO Slave Trade Archives.
Despite the academic controversy, in wich was debated the real historical importance of Gorée island in the slave trade, the museum is a real site of memory, in wich you are totally surrounded by the terrifying and very long story of slavery.

Scrolling photos of the virtual tour of the museum, I was particularly horrified by a picture depicting La Porte Du Voyage Sans Retour (The Trip From Which No One Returned), called also The Door Of Sorrow, because from there the slaves say farewell to Africa. In fact, and this is the most terrifying part, the slaves could try to escape from the island, while waiting the loading, but they could not go far since they were either shots by the guards or devoured by the sharks. The presence of sharks can be explained as simply weak or sick slaves were thrown into the sea, and this attracted the sharks.

As conclusion I am attaching pictures of this door, which need no comments, I think.

Ground Zero: Memory sites in the focus of architecture

The dealing with memory sites poses many important questions, most prominently how to process what has happened? And in connection to that, what to do with the site on which a traumatic event has taken place? Should it be left untouched, as a reminder for following generations? Or should it be converted into a museum? Another opinion may even be that its traumatic past should be left behind and it should be transformed into something that points towards the future. These questions and the different answers given to them, not only give us indications of how to deal with the memory site, but also allow insight into how people chose to cope with traumatic events. In this context, the examination of Ground Zero is very interesting. After 9/11 there was a debate, of what and how to do with the site. A competition was set out and the project of Daniel Libeskind won. He is also the author of another important object in respect to this consideration, the Jewish Museum in Berlin (on which Sara Tanderup has written in the forum discussion: http://moodle.ucl.ac.uk/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=68910). 
As he himself states: "When I first began this project, New Yorkers were divided as to whether to keep the site of the World Trade Center empty or to fill the site completely and build upon it. I meditated many days on this seemingly impossible dichotomy. To acknowledge the terrible deaths which occurred on this site, while looking to the future with hope, seemed like two moments which could not be joined. I sought to find a solution which would bring these seemingly contradictory viewpoints into an unexpected unity.” (http://www.daniel-libeskind.com/projects/show-all/memory-foundations/) The project with which Libeskind tries to accomplish this unity is very complex. Here I would like to refer shortly to two aspects of it: Firstly, the fact that he leaves the space in which the Twin Towers were standing empty. Thus, he leaves a negative of what was previously standing in this space, to always remind us of what has been there and what has been lost. But he also includes gardens into his project. He explains this decision as follows: "The sky will be home again to a towering spire of 1776 feet high, an antenna Tower with gardens. Why gardens? Because gardens are a constant affirmation of life. A 1776 foot skyscraper rises above its predecessors, reasserting the pre-eminence of freedom and beauty, restoring the spiritual peak to the city, creating a building that speaks of our vitality in the face of danger and our optimism in the aftermath of tragedy. Life victorious." Thus, Libeskind uses the possibilities of architecture to bring the commemoration of the past and a look towards future together at this memory site. 

Names and Memory

Lowenthal, in "The heritage crusade and the spoils of history", tells us about the advantages or disadvantages of recalling the past. One of the things that seem clearly said there is that "Heritage passions impact myriad realms of life today. They play a vital role in national and ethnic conflict, in racism and resurgent genetic determinism, in museum and commemorative policy, in global theft, illicit trade, and rising demands for repatriating art and antiquities" (introduction, xiv). Although the differences between history and heritage, today we can say that, if in one hand we seek to forget the past, in other we are searching for remember it because maybe we "imagine it to embody lost values or creeds which, if only we could recover them, would cure all our present worries" (http://www.historynet.com/book-review-the-heritage-crusade-and-the-spoils-of-history-by-david-lowenthal-bh.htm). But if forgetting could bring us some positive view for the future, in the sense that we could start a new and better life, it seem pertinent to me remind Louis Carrol's Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. There is a time in the book when Alice is taking a walk, alone, when, suddenly, gets to a forest where any creature is capable of remember things, it is, anything. She finds a Fawn and "it (it, because it could not be possible to Alice, or anyone, remind any name and, therefore, suspect) looked at Alice with its large gentle eyes, but didn’t seem at all frightened". The remarkable thing here is that when the Fawn decides to take Alice out of there, trying to get into a place where they can remind who they were, and introduce themselves, they are friends and sympathize with each other: "So they walked on together though the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice’s arms. ‘I’m a Fawn!’ it cried out in a voice of delight, ‘and, dear me! you’re a human child!’ A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away a full speed". Till that time the two of them - those different creatures, Alice and the Fawn - were developing a nice relationship, but since they remember they're name-nature everything falls apart. Memory and past have deconstructed what once have been positive and possible - a relationship between two different creatures. The thing here is that if it could do like this, if we could forget names (and names carry meanings) things would be, surely, different. But the problem seems to be related with the way things happen: first we have things and, then, they're names.

'What's your first memory?'

One of the things that stuck with me through England, England was Martha's 'first memory, her first artfully, innocently arranged lie' (page 4). She remembers being in the kitchen with her mother, who is singing while she cooks. The narrator goes on to say that 'even today when Martha turned on the radio and heard anything like 'You're the Top' … she would suddenly smell nettle soup or frying onions, wasn't that the strangest thing? - and that was another, 'Love Is the Strangest Thing', which always meant the sudden cut and seep of an orange for her'.

What interested me is the connection between music and smell, the way memories are able to both draw upon and move across senses, even link together at times. For me these two senses bring the most vivid memories. I feel that photographs are something of a false friend; I used to always take my camera with me to concerts and found that I would not remember much of the concert as I was paying too much attention to taking photos. In some ways I feel that photographs present a more constructed memory, with your feelings and recollection being swayed by what is framed in the picture. Smells and sound paint a much broader picture to me, and through them I can remember a certain event far more easily.

I remember that I used to always read whilst listening to music. When I was 10 or 11 I read Philip Pullman's The Northern Lights, and now if I put on the album that I was listening to regularly when reading this book I can recall quite a lot of the details of that time. This is not always the specific words, but more the feel of those nights, things like where and how I was sat, what I was drinking, the time of year. More recently I have found that I am unable to separate an album from a book I was reading a few years ago because I would listen to it on repeat. Certain tracks will bring to mind passages or events from the book and I find it impossible to detach them into individual entities. Yet without the music I can barely remember the book at all.

It fascinates me that certain smells or sounds can trigger a memory. I am prompted to remember events from when I was 5 or 6 with the right trigger, the right song or taste. However, I do not know if these are 'true' recollections or just another 'artfully, innocently lie' to keep my childhood always happy and forever sunny. What examples of other memory triggers are there, and what senses do they arouse?

Childhood memories

The Persistence of Memory (1931), Salvador Dalí

I have the tendency to linger in the nostalgia of my childhood memories. Besides reading the diaries I have kept for years and gazing at photographs of me as a child, I often think about particular moments of my childhood. Those recollections puzzle me sometimes, I do get the feeling that those are memories of memories of memories and so on (like Martha did), still, I went through live hammering on a few memories without even knowing why I keep coming back to them.

Of these moments I have neither a photograph nor an account in any of my old diaries, and I always turn to my mother in order to validate them. I tell her of a childhood memory I have and wait for her confirmation that in fact it happened. I don’t even know why her confirmation is so important to me, I mean, it still could have happened without being an important memory for her to retain. And this brings me back to my puzzling question: Why did I retain them then, when there were important things that happened to my family of which I have no recollection at all? And why does it appear to be important to me to feel that they really happened?

Martha Cochrane says that she can’t remember her first memory. Being her definition of a first memory “a solid, seizable thing, which time, in its plodding, humorous way might decorate down the years with fanciful detail (…) but could never expunge” (Page 3), we can understand from this that even if we do claim to recall our first memories the actual event was probably a very different thing from the one we remember, like Martha’s memory of playing with the jigsaw on the kitchen floor, a memory that is described as “her first artfully, innocently arranged lie” (page 4)

We can thus think about this: Are all of our memories false memories? Are they all the product of the testimony of others, of fertile imagination or of just the urge to justify our present actions or present ideologies with some sort of root? If there is any truth to the statement: “Childhood was remembered in a succession of incidents which explained why you were the person you had turned out to be” (Page 242), then it is quite safe to agree that all of our memories are fallacious. And like Primo Levi avowed, “the memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features”.

And from this another question might arise: If a person can construct a false memory, can a whole nation do so as well? As an attempt to answer this question we may consider the episode of the divergence of opinion between Martha and her Spanish friend, Cristina, about Sir Francis Drake. Martha as an English girl believed Sir Francis Drake to be “an English hero” and a “Gentleman” (Page 7), although Cristina perceived him as a “pirate” (page 7). This episode alone speaks in favor of a construction of Historic memories based upon the way a country wishes to be kept in History and preserved in Time.

“History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.”

Percy Shelley

Bokononism, or how to invent happiness

"All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies."
Books of Bokonon, 1, 1

As Hobsbawn explains "Inventing traditions...is essentally a process of formalization and ritualization, characterized by reference to the past, if ony by imposing repetition." So, to invent a tradition what we need is repetition that refers to the past, invented or not.
This process, as Hobsbawn says, "It is presumably most clearly exemplified where a 'tradition' is deliberately invented and constructed by a single initiator, as for the Boy Scouts by Baden-Powell."

This exctracts reminds me to an interesting book by Kurt Vonnegut, "Cat's Cradle", in wich the idea of inventing tradition by a single initiator is well explained. In this book one of the main theme is the religion of San Lorenzo, wich is called Bokononism, from the original creator, Bokonon, born Lionel Boyd Johnson. Bokonon washe way the natives pronounced his family name. With Earl McCabe, his partner in ruling the island, he estabilished Bokononism, as a means to help the poor islanders escape their miserable reality by practicing a simple religion.

The Bokononism has many interesting aspects:

-As Bokonon said, it is forbidden. In his idea, in fact, make religion illegal would make even more interesting and exciting practice. Arranging with McCabe that Bokononism be outlawed and eternally persecuted by the government, he went living into the jungle, supposedly hiding.

-All religion, including Bokononism and all its texts, is formed entirely of lies; however, if you believe and adhere to these lies, you will at least have peace of mind, and perhaps live a good life.

-The Books of Bokonon are ever-growing, and Bokonon use the present history to adjust the religion.

-The olny thing sacred to Bokononists is man.

-The creation of a religious language, with many interesting terms that explains the main concepts of Bokononism. For example, the Bokononist says "Busy, busy, busy" to explain how interconneted everything is; "Now I will destroy the whole word..." what a Bokononist says before committing suicide; "Foma" that means harmless untruth, a lie that, if used correcty, can make one a better person. And many others.

The interesting thing is that Bokononism works. The people of San Lorenzo are happier than before, and everybody knows that Bokononism is a lie, but a good one, a foma, and they follow it.

"I wanted all things
To seem to make some sense,
So we could all be happy, yes,
Instead of tense.
And I made up lies
So that they all fit nice,
And I made this sad world
A par-a-dise."

Books of Bokonon, Calypsos, 58

Nottinghamshire will never come back

Just a little introduction. This topic is a real international topic, because the subject was suggested by Ana Romão Alves and the work made by Marta Mankowski and Filippo Bernardi with skyping.

In looking at childhood memories, it is interesting to start from Aleida Assmann’s claim that total recall is impossible: ‘Memory, including cultural memory, is always permeated and shot through with forgetting. In order to remember anything one has to forget; but what is forgotten need not necessarily be lost forever.’ (Aleida Assmann, Canon and Archive, pp.105-106). This quote is important in our investigation, as it highlights the significance of forgetting in the discourse of memory, and thus demonstrates the subjectivity of it. In connection to that the first chapter of Julian Barnes’ novel England, England presents an interesting picture: in Martha’s attachment to the England jigsaw puzzle, and in particular to the county of Nottinghamshire, which she associates with her father. In her memory the little game she played with her father, in which he first hid Nottinghamshire and than later gave it back to her, gains in importance after he leaves. The object of the puzzle becomes a symbol of their relationship and her memory of him. So much so, that when her mother warns her that women had to be strong and could not rely on anybody else, she embarks on what can be seen as a symbolical act of forgetting: each day she leaves one piece of the puzzle in the bus. ‘She did not know whether she was meant to remember or to forget the past.’ (Julian Barnes, England, England, p. 17)

The most significant moment of the Nottinghamshire plot line, however, occurs when she confronts her memory with her father’s. He does not recall their little ritual that played such an important role for her at all, which demonstrates what an important role the notions of perspective and perception play in the formation of memories. ‘While knowledge has no form and is endlessly progressive, memory involves forgetting. It is only by forgetting what lies outside the horizont of the relevant that it performs an identity function.’ ( Jan Assmann, Communicative and Cultural Memory, p. 113) Thus, by forming memories (remembering one thing and forgetting another) we establish our identities, but this mechanism also works in the other direction: because of who we are, one moment is more important to us than to others, and, therefore, this moment will become incorporated in our memory, while forgotten by others. This is exemplified in her father not being able to recall the connection through the piece of Nottinghamshire and her reaction to it: ‘She would always blame him for that [forgetting about Nottinghamshire]. She was over twenty-five, and she would go on getting older than twenty-five […] and she would be on her own; but she would always blame him for that.’ (Julian Barnes, England, England, p. 25)

Nottinghamshire will never come back, just as her relation with her father.

This one of the two blog of the course Memory and Literature in a Globalized Culture.
Mimnésko, the title, is an ancient greek word that means remember.