Whether one finds comfort or fear in the fact, the passage of time is relentless. Time continues onward at the same rate for everyone, ignoring wealth, privilege, and other earthly comforts in its endless forward march.
Yet while our society encourages us to structure our lives in a linear fashion, memory is not exactly chronological. Memories fade and may be reawakened many years later; they may be evoked by sound or smell. Last summer, when boiling kombu to make dashi for miso soup, I immediately recalled the childhood scent memory of my great-grandfather’s kitchen. I had never identified the smell or remembered it before, but smelling it again transported me.
For some of us, ancestral memories weigh more heavily than for others. My brother and I have both separately had recurring nightmares of filthy bathrooms with no privacy for years, with no apparent root cause; when I learned about the partition-less and fetid bathrooms my great-aunt had to use in the internment camps, I wondered if her memories had somehow bled into our dreams. The writer and poet Brandon Shimoda explored the fragmentation of memory with compelling effect in his novel Grave on the Wall; he is dedicating an entire book to the specific subject of the far reach of Japanese American incarceration on descendants’ collective memories.
Counterintuitively, recounting and documenting our memories can often free us to let them go. Maya Angelou famously described her childhood in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; her clear and flowing prose is delightful to read when she writes of happy memories, but the apparent sharpness of her recollections is a double-edged sword — the most traumatizing and horrifying chapters in Angelou’s upbringing are described with bladelike precision. Yet by Angelou’s own account, her memory is incomplete; the trauma she experienced is woven into her memory itself, permanently changing the way she remembers her life.
[Either] I remember — I have total recall — or I have none at all. None. And there is no pattern to the memory, so that I would forget all the good and the bad of a certain time, or I will remember only the bad of a certain time, or I will remember only the good. But when I remember it, I will remember everything about it. Everything. The outside noises, the odors in the room, the way my clothes were feeling — everything. I just have it, or I remember nothing. I am sure that is a part of the sort of psychological problems I was having and how the memory went about its business knitting itself.
I was deeply struck by Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved when I first read it; one of the aspects of the book I found most distinctive was how faithfully it reflects the nebulous way memories tend to hide and reassert themselves. Beloved tells the story of a former slave, Sethe, and her deeply complicated relationship with the past. Morrison presents her plot in fragments, eschewing traditional linear structure for a complex, intertwined style that allows the reader to vicariously experience the horror of the characters’ pasts.
Morrison’s technique of reviving the past in pieces startles the reader and effectively echoes slavery’s haunting impact. Sethe remembers her life as a slave in bursts that evoke post-traumatic stress disorder and evince how deeply traumatizing her life at Sweet Home, the ironically named plantation of the novel, was. The day Sethe’s love interest Paul D arrives, Sethe is going about her usual routine. Then, “suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty” (Morrison 7). The “rolling, rolling, rolling” action recalls a never ending cycle, a cycle that for Sethe involves remembering her past at the most unexpected moments. It also viscerally evokes the feeling of an endless unspooling of memory, a twisted highlight reel of the moments in her life she would do anything to forget.
Sethe doesn’t know what particular “something” reminded her of Sweet Home, but it launches a vivid memory of the horror of “boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world” (6). She is helpless against her memories; the fact that she doesn’t know what triggered her flashback means that she can’t guard herself against another trigger. Sethe is held captive by her past in that she can’t control her memories, and her past memories are vividly connected to her present. Nor is Sethe an isolated case; all of the enslaved people in the novel are terrorized by their pasts. Sethe wishes desperately that she could not “break, fall or cry each time a hateful picture drifted in front of her face. Not develop some permanent craziness…Like Aunt Phyllis, who slept with her eyes wide open. Like Jackson Till, who slept under the bed. All she wanted was to go on” (97). Even if they have managed to free themselves, the formerly enslaved are relentlessly haunted by the numberless atrocities committed against them, as Morrison continually reminds us. Where simply stating this fact might have little impact, Morrison’s technique of reviving past memories suddenly and unexpectedly forces the reader to experience the shock and confusion of such a traumatic past firsthand.
Despite the purportedly non-fictional nature of the history we are taught in schools, over the years I have discovered many revisions that helpfully elide and streamline the American narrative to create a more linear progression. I recall being taught that John Brown, the abolitionist who stormed Harpers Ferry in an effort to raise a revolt — and was subsequently executed — was widely regarded as a nut (and even that he more or less was one). Even today, we often hear that slavery was a complicated issue; moral ambiguity is excused as belonging to the context of its time.
Yet while some of our greatest thinkers and ostensible champions of freedom owned slaves (looking at you, Thomas Jefferson), there are too many clear and principled calls for freedom to be ignored. Some years ago, I was struck by a very moving painting of John Brown on the day of his execution; upon further research, I found an equally compelling letter from Victor Hugo to the London News written in protest of Brown’s death sentence. Though Hugo did not know it at the time, he wrote the letter on the day Brown was executed.
It’s clear how fervently Hugo regarded America as a shining “city on a hill” and Brown a true martyr for its ideals, making this travesty of justice all the more outrageous. He passionately wrote:
It is possible that the execution of Brown might establish slavery on a firm basis in Virginia, but it is certain that it would shake to its center the entire fabric of American democracy. You preserve your infamy, but you sacrifice your glory. Viewed in a moral light, it seems to me that a portion of the enlightenment of humanity would be eclipsed, that even the ideas of justice and injustice would be obscured on the day which should witness the assassination of Emancipation by Liberty…
For—yes, let America know it, and ponder on it well—there is something more terrible than Cain slaying Abel: It is Washington slaying Spartacus!
There is nothing ambiguous or dithering about Hugo’s letter, although it is true he was an extraordinarily principled man. In hindsight, it is shocking to consider that I rarely read primary sources from anywhere outside of the United States in my American history class; our memories of our own actions may be far less reliable than others’ recollections, and it never fails to astonish me that our collective memories of our nation’s history are so very fragmented and variable.
As so often happens, my thinking brings me all the way back to books. For me, reading is the most immediate way to step into another person’s memories; whether they are fictional or factual, I will always find it incredible that we are able to live a thousand lives through the narratives we choose to read. Beloved’s Sethe may be Morrison’s creation, but she represents countless and nameless real women and sets their memories before our eyes. In many ways, a writer’s true work is to immortalize memory and make it tangible; the reader’s much easier task is to merely recall it.
Wonderful! I discovered that my sister and I have the same recurring dream of standing next to towering waves on a beach, but we aren’t in danger of being swept in. Dreams and memories are magical things.