Memory Through the Looking Glass

Teaching Talk Dr Nazia Amin

Memory is often viewed as a vast archive of information, experiences and feelings. The speaker commences the talk by exploring this conventional conceptualisation of memory as a museum to preserve the past. Furthermore, this preserve is not merely a conservation but enables us to consciously know and make sense of ourselves. This talk takes a detour from the musealized notion of memory towards looking at it through a psychosocial lens. The speaker introduces the idea of collective memory, taking two traumatic collective experiences from the past - the partition and the holocaust. Using these two examples, the speaker explores the function of memory as one of haunting.

Deviating from this archival nature of memory, the speaker proposes the nature of memory as being constructed among people; hence the notion of collective memory is introduced. 

Collective memory consists of all the cognitive processes that take place at the level of the social and cultural. The questions about the nature of oneself in relation to the social and political contexts also come under the gamut of collective memory. French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs introduced the notion of collective memory in collective meaning-making in 1992. Collective memory consists of the shared pool of memories held by a group of people, narration of oral narratives, cultural nuances, remembrances, and instances of political trauma which rewind the story of who we are as people. In this direction of enquiry, the speaker poses the question of whether collective memory is suggestive of the concept of a collective mind. This notion of a collective mind enables individuals to think and align together, giving collective meaning consciously and unconsciously.

There can be several collective memories that can create dissonances. How do they deal with these conflicting memories? The speaker refers to the book The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India written by Urvashi Buttalia (2000). In this book, the author brings to the foreground the forced silencing of partition memories because of the profound discomfort in retrieving them. The author attributes the communal violence between Hindus and Muslims to the repetition of partition and the refusal to accept what partition was due to the discomfort it brings to the individual. Thus, the author claims that a collective memory of partition does not exist. This memory then finds other ways of disrupting through communal violence. This is one line of thought about the conflicts between these communities. Ashish Nandy, a renowned political psychologist and Urvashi Buttalia collectively argue that if we reckon these memories, then they would not outburst with the violence that they did. Furthermore, they take the example of the 1984 assassination of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi which triggered the agonizing memories of partition in the minds of those who moved to India in 1947 to exemplify their argument. The speaker refers to these arguments to contend that the past never leaves us but we can put it to rest rather than silence it.

The speaker goes on to outline the relation between traumatic memories and undergoing the processes of defensive forgetting, the “haunting” nature of memories and memory work. The notion of defensive forgetting is essentially the process of forgetting as a wish to forget. Remembering is what has the potential to make the past the past. Not letting go of certain traumatic memories leads to some identification as a victim. For example, Germany has had a violent past as perpetrator, and this arises primarily from the Holocaust. The collective memory of the horrors of the Holocaust is manifested through a formal commemoration rather than violence through museums and remembrance days. However, the speaker cautions of excessive memorialisation fostering a sense of victimhood, that distorts our relationship with the past. 

The speaker takes the discourse in a new direction by discussing how to amend the relationship that we have with the past through memory work. Navigating these memories involves individual memory and collective healing. Memory work refers to providing adequate space to reflect and recollect individual and collective memories through everyday life. This can be done through ordinary, humbler acts of remembering by communities. Memory work allows us to alleviate the discomfort from the retrieval of traumatic memories, paving the way for reconciliation with the past. This enables us to establish a positive dialectic between reproduction and representation of memories, which furthers our understanding of ourselves as individual and collective repositories of these memories.