We Say “Never Forget”

We say “Never Forget.”

 

What we mean, I believe, is “never forget what they did to us.” That to forget is to betray—to betray the dead, to betray the living who remember the dead, to betray those in the future who, remembering the dead, will be asked to sacrifice themselves for the promise that we’ll never forget them. That to forget is to betray the obligation to remember, to become an alien within our own family and community. But never forgetting also means forever clinging to the inhumanity and guilt of the perpetrators, even as we cling to the humanity and innocence of the victims, and holding them close to each other, like the poles of two magnets trying to fly apart in opposite direction, with all the energy we can muster.

 

I am remembering the eight years I lived with the 9/11 Memorial, which is meant to never forget the names of those innocents killed on that day, and designing the museum beneath it, where the narrative—the chosen narrative of the event—is enshrined underground. I remember the debates, the wars raged openly in conference rooms and secretly in offices and quiet, fleeting asides, about the nature of the narrative to which we would design. I remember the claustrophobic feeling of its narrowing over time, from a living back-and-forth among different perspectives to an obligatory, flattened recitation of perpetrators, victims, and heroes that would merge the truths of the day with myths forged in the burning, hot anger that followed, molded by the circularity of a mourning process kept perpetually in motion by the “obligation to remember”—as well as the obligation to forget the retaliation that created an equal but opposite narrative in other cultures and other hearts far away from us.

 

Remembering in this flattened way is an easy path to righteousness and toward the cleansing of our own unclean histories and our own unclean imaginings and deeds. Even though holding so tightly onto what Vamik Volkan calls our “chosen traumas”—cultural memories of past atrocities—causes the muscles holding them to cramp painfully, it seems to me this cramping pain is easily borne when compared with what is required for a true reckoning with difference and the vindictive side of our humanity when turned against those we call inhuman. To never forget is to selectively remember only the thing that is our chosen trauma and to forget the other’s traumas, the other’s losses, the other’s pain.

 

I met a woman recently at a community meeting about new jails that are being planned in New York, a project I’m involved with. She works with traumatized children, six years and younger, playing with them and helping them to learn to play with other children and to feel joy in their young lives because she believes the only way to keep them out of jail and out of trouble when they’re sixteen years old is to be with them now. Standing still amid a slowly circulating crowd, she told me her son had been murdered a year before—shot in the head by another young man at a party. When I asked her how she felt approaching the upcoming trial of the young man who murdered her son, she told me she just wanted to hear the young man out, to understand who he was and why he’d done the thing he’d done. “Sending him to prison for the rest of his life,” she said, “would just destroy two families instead of one, and what good comes of that?”

 

I don’t believe she will ever forget her son or the yawning emptiness that his death so clearly leaves within her. But what struck me deeply about what she said was that she did not seem to hold her own pain above the pain and intergenerational trauma she is quite sure the boy who shot her son must have experienced and be experiencing still. She chooses to remember both her own pain and his.

 

Speaking with her reminded me of an article I had read nearly twenty years before, when I was working in South Africa on the Freedom Park, a national memorial and museum in Pretoria. I was new to the idea of restorative justice, the underlying premise of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose mantle the Freedom Park had officially taken up. A woman whose son was among a group killed by the death squad run by Eugene de Kock, who had been known by the nickname “Prime Evil,” was quoted as saying that after attending De Kock’s testimony at the TRC, she had chosen to forgive him. If forgiving him could restore his humanity, she said, and in the process help her to restore her own humanity, well then, she was willing to do it.

 

I do not believe that this woman, either, will ever forget the son she lost or the pain of losing him. Yet she is not telling us, in this public act of forgiveness, “Never Forget.” She understands that loss alters us and stays with us forever. Instead, she is telling us to remember that her humanity, like ours, depends on doing what we can to hold and restore the humanity of others.

 

The problem with traumatic loss is that it cannot be forgotten. Cannot even easily be placed in time so that it will cease to be an ever-present simulacrum of reality. I am coming to the idea that Never Forget is directed in a constraining way toward those inside these events. It is a command: Never Forget what happened to us. Of equal significance, it’s directed outward toward everyone else with a different purpose: Never Forget what happened to us.

 

In this light, Never Forget is neither a wish to hold onto our own memories nor an entreaty for us to be witnessed. It demands unending attention and deference. It is simultaneously a tool for future claims of ethical righteousness, a preemptive strike meant to render future challenges to our retaliatory actions fatally toxic to those making them, and a shield meant to prevent those of us behind it from building empathetic links to those on the other side, who hold other views. Never Forget maintains a split between identifications with the trauma and all other possible identifications. It is a wedge that divides us from them.

 

From this perspective, forgiveness, as a form of forgetting, carries both the real peril that we become vulnerable once again to the perpetrator, and the psychic peril of losing the separation between their evil and our goodness. To never forget is thus to deny, in perpetuity, the humanity of those who have committed wrongs against us; to never forgive lest we be confronted with a glimpse of their humanity, or worse, of our own inhumanity reflected in their upturned eyes. In denying their humanity it seems to me we run the risk that we abandon our own in order to harden our grief into brittle walls of grievance that separate the cherished pain inside from the disavowed evil outside. I wonder if we aren’t instead imprisoning ourselves within these walls even as we seek to use them for safety, keeping the never-forgotten part of ourselves, that we tell ourselves is sacred and pure, safe from all the other parts that we fear are tainted, sullied, rotted.

 

If this is true, then how much does our never forgetting create for ourselves a narrowing of who we are or believe ourselves to be? To what degree is this narrowing an act of energic efficiency that preserves our self—the self we choose never to forget—in a living union with the unchanging dead that forecloses a return to the riskier but more vibrant company of the living?

 

I don’t believe others have the right to diminish the traumas we have experienced, or we those of others. At the same time, we have to ask ourselves, it seems to me, whether any of us do humanity a service by rallying around the cry of Never Forget when that cry means we should never forget precisely those things that prevent us from knowing the traumas that others have experienced, perhaps even at our own hands—the ways that our good may have been their bad, or could become so, even without our knowledge or consent.

 

If you read psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s account of her years interviewing de Kock during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, you will expose yourself to the intense, conflicting feelings she experienced as she came to know him as a human who had done inhuman things, believing in the necessity of his acts to preserve his people. Through her vivid writing, you will feel tangibly her recoil after having once spontaneously reached out to him, in the interview room at the prison where he was held, to touch his hand, and the intense self-searching that this single, momentary act engendered for years thereafter. She did not forget his acts but over time she chose to recognize, as well, the possibility that he could grow beyond that part of himself that had been fused to those acts and the beliefs that made them possible—that he could see that on the other side of the brittle walls that separated the righteousness of his cause from the imagined darkness of those he was fighting was the darkness within himself that he had cast outside and had murdered again and again and again while he was torturing and killing people.

 

The choice never to forget has a defensive function in the aftermath of horror that is easy to comprehend and all too easy to accept as natural and inevitable. But the final question I wish to ask is whether it is adaptive: will it accomplish the task of protecting the victim, or does it simply create the illusion of protection? As an imperative, “Never Forget” carries immense moral and ethical suasion, yet its absolutism—its utter insistence on primacy—is a profound and potentially blinding obstacle to repair. When it becomes a justification for violence that gives the other new reason to never forget what has been done to them, does is it not also become an instrument for the perpetuation of trauma, generation after generation, in an unending spiral of death? How can we imagine bringing an end to this except through a retreat to delusional imaginings of omnipotence? And in our deepest human hearts, do we really want to be the omnipotent destroyers of other human beings?

 

We are mostly powerless to stem the tide of violence, of revenge, of inhumanity when all these things have been called into action, particularly when some on both sides see advantage in calling up the chosen traumas that will foment conflict. Those attempting to bridge are cast as naive, weak, or traitorous. Terrible sufferings, grossly lopsided or perhaps mutual, become an unavoidable consequence. Even while this is happening, shame at our own acts—and our own powerlessness—mingles with the raw exuberance of hatred of the other in a catalytic hardening of opposing positions.

 

And yet.

 

And yet I have seen, in the past months of working in the contested ground of one of the largest jail systems in the United States, how groups thought to be at war with each other harbor not simply an expected, sometimes searing antagonism toward each other but also a wish for reconciliation as well, each hoping furtively to be humanized by the other. An officer says of those in custody, “They’ll make a weapon out of anything; you have to treat them like children.” Moments later, he reflects: “If I made just one bad decision, I could be there myself.” A man awaiting trial, who has been incarcerated many times, expresses the difficulties the jail staff face with a story about an officer who unexpectedly needed to stay on duty, with nobody to pick her daughter up from day care. “She just sat there and cried.” In these momentary flashes, hardened positions are capable of softening, particularly when those who are present feel they have been seen and heard, their anxieties held and acknowledged. These fleeting identifications, revealing a degree of empathy that I find breathtaking, tell me that openings already exist among people thought to be incapable of seeing each other as human, that seeds of mutual recognition are already present, longing to be nurtured.

 

Perhaps the thing we should never forget is that only the rarest of us are wholly inhuman or wholly humane. That while the risks of opening ourselves to the possibility that the other possesses humanity are real and often perilous, the risks of not doing so are even greater. Perhaps the thing we should remember is that humanity is already present in each of us, in all its myriad forms, with the possibility of being awakened or quashed, nurtured or snuffed out. The choice before us, it seems, is which among those possibilities we seek to make real.