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Series on Memory, History and Power: The Memory Sewing - alternative history(ies) of the past and present

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Wall of Memories (1994/2015), Rosana Paulino | Source: Paulino’s website

This article is a part of our Series on Memory, History, and Power. Read the Series Introduction here.

Jorge Luis Borges, in his essay Funes the Memorious[i], tells us a story of Ireneo Funes, who, after falling off a horse and hitting his head, starts recalling absolutely everything. This is soon revealed to be a curse: unable to connect with others, the world became intolerable to Funes. From its very title, Borges’ essay is a story about the function of memory. ‘We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left’, says Pierre Nora[ii]. Memory is not the ability to remember everything, but, instead, an acknowledgement that things escape us.

From Borges’ essay, we come to understand that remembering is not an act of accumulating events or sensations. As Funes absorbed literally everything, he was not able to give space to any sort of abstraction. He was unable to imagine. Actually, to keep everything in mind became a heavy curse. Memory requires a degree of abstraction. It demands forgetting, acknowledging that we cannot fully grasp what happened and, with this, understand that it has a fragile matter that necessitates the constant activity of remembering. Memory is, then, an active act of looking for what is already lost and, from that, creating strategies for things not to be forgotten.

In this short essay, I intend to compare memory with the act of sewing: in a delicate exercise of patience, we sew threads until they form a larger fabric, aware of thread’s fragility. Here, we can compare how remembering resembles the ways in which the needle creates connections with other tissues. As the needle aims to connect the tissues together, creating a common piece, memory as well creates a network of elements. In this way, it provides meaning to the world, in other words, it provides a common ground from which we come to understand who we are between past and future.

Here, an interesting parallel can be made to some habits that come from the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé. According to these traditions, people carry with them, in wallets or pockets, a piece of tissue which is embroidered with herbs and spices. This amulet or talisman is called patuá and one uses it for luck and protection. Some of these patuás have a relative’s photo on them.

Coming from black origins, the Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino uses elements from Candomblé religious practices to reflect on Brazilian History, highlighting the invisible threads of colonisation that still endure. In the work ‘Wall of Memories’ (1994), Paulino presents us with 1,500 little patuás, carefully sewn, displayed on a bigger wall, with each one of them having a small portrait of a black person or family.

Paulino’s work represents an inquiry into her own story as embedded in Brazil’s uneasy relationship with its past. She denounces the absence of the black population in the collective imagination of the country’s construction, even though most of Brazil’s population has origins related to the black diaspora. As Paulino delicately reveals, black people are reduced to a marginal place in the public sphere, leading to many forms of oppression and violence in contemporary public policies. Her works, then, make visible those hidden in political communities. Investigating her own identity, Paulino turns to a collective history to understand her marginality as a black woman in the country she comes from and lives in.

As viewers, we become aware of those representations that are actually invisible in the social-political fabric of Brazil. This is an attempt by the artist to use visual arts as an exercise of looking at those black people often ignored in the Brazilian context, interrupting, then, perpetuated colonial exclusions from the political sphere. Paulino literally sewed each one of the patuás, embroidery with pictures of eleven unknown families, but which could be one of her ancestors, as she argues. The point here is that the action of connecting threads allows the artist to fill some gaps in the present, disclosing narratives and illuminating hidden histories and subjectivities. In this way, Paulino uses her lived experience, as someone who has black origins, to metaphorically sew a collective memory, since it belongs to a broader context of political dynamics from where she speaks. By that, I am referring to the black experience that still informs how Brazilian society deals with its violent past and current black population[iii]. With her work, Paulino raises a reflection on racism, colonialism and history. As viewers, we have no option left but to think about these sensitives issues when dealing with our past and present, especially as Brazilians.

Although the Brazilian past is full of violence and exclusion against the black population, Paulino goes back to her ancestors to protect her at present. The patuás, then, represent how she honours their history and how this connects with her lived experience. Here, a traditional linear historiography, where past and future are temporal standpoints of a succession of events, enters into the question[iv]. Actually, dealing with present demands looking at collective memories, since there are different ways of approaching the past, and the past works here as a promise of something soon to be revealed – a redemption, according to Walter Benjamin. Benjamin develops this idea of redemption as a moment of awakening, in which one takes into account other perspectives when looking at one own’s history. This awakening implies being sensitive to the ones defeated in history, namely, those who are easily forgotten when great events are told. To him, history is a constellation, which operates by ‘telescop[ing] the past through the present’[v], allowing ‘the past to place the present in a critical condition’[vi]. In Benjamin’s words, ‘it’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present casts its light on the past’[vii], but that the past has elements that endure in the present.

Then, the present is a complex constellation assembled by different approaches to the past(s) and this is the reason why the present unfolds into fragmentations and uncertainties[viii]. What is so striking and promising in Benjamin’s philosophical project is the consequence of this fragmented history(ies): it is precisely this struggle of different past appropriations, its uncertainties, that creates a fissure that can make one aware of ones’ own embeddedness in a collective history. With Benjamin, we realise how a linear narrative of history actually contains within itself unknown victims of progress and modernisation. As he states, ‘there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’[ix]. Once one realises this constellation, it breaks with the order of the things, namely, the unique version of ‘History’. This movement is what Benjamin calls redemption: awakening, as an enlightened moment, of the dialectical process that configures the present[x]. Looking at Paulino’s work, one realises that those faces permeate a hidden and troubled history of Brazilian modernisation and colonisation.

Hence, as Benjamin states, ‘articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it “the way it really was.” It means appropriating a memory (Erinnerung) as it flashes up in a moment of danger[xi].’ Against the legacy of oblivion, the patuás from Paulino are a lost treasure of protection, making us aware that memory demands acts of sewing threads that connect us with others[xii]. This is why memory is a fragile matter because we are always at the edge of losing the thread. Still, sewing is all we have left to not forget.

[i] Jorge Luís Borges, “Funes el memorioso,” in Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2007), pp. 583–590.

[ii] Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de Mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p.7.

[iii] Paulino, Parede da Memória (Wall of Memories).

[iv] Nora, Les Lieux de Mémoire, p. 43.

[v] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 741.

[vi] Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989), p. 338.

[vii] Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 462.

[viii] Vivienne Jabri, The Postcolonial Subject (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 15.

[ix] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, v. 4 - 1938-1940. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Others. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

[x] George Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite All: four photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago, US: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

[xi] Benjamin, Selected Writings, v. 4 - 1938-1940, p. 391.

[xii] Jeanne-Marie Gagnebin. História e Narração em Walter Benjamin. (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2013), p. 92.

Series on Memory, History and Power: Introduction

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The fallen Columbus after a group led by American Indian Movement members tore it down in Minnesota, 2020 | Photo by Tony Webster, used under Creative Commons.

Over the last years, we have seen disputes over statues and monuments all over the world. Memorials dedicated to military achievements, war heroes, colonialists and slave traders have been at the centre of debates on the deconstruction of history and the ways some events and national groups have been inscribed in the public space. In 2019, for example, we saw Santiago, the capital of Chile, being occupied by protesters waving the flag of the indigenous Mapuche people. One particular image went viral all around the world: in the photo, dozens of protesters climb a military monument in the centre of Santiago and at the top of the statue, a man raises the Mapuche’s flag, a people that has been under attack in Chile since the arrival of Spanish colonizers, in the 16th century. In South Africa, the campaign Rhodes Must Fall led to the removal of a statue in honour of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town. The withdraw flared up a discussion regarding what to do with other monuments to Rhodes around the country. In 2020, we saw similar scenes being repeated throughout Europe, United States and Latin America, when statues of slave trader Edward Colston, Columbus, Belgian King Leopold II and Portuguese Jesuit missionary Father António Vieira, just to name a few, woke up either, at the bottom of a river, painted in red, headless or wearing signs saying: ‘decolonize’. Such movements intended to problematise what is remembered in the public sphere and how those monuments relate to the way we conceive a country’s history or the history of colonialism and slavery.

‘There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’[i], writes Walter Benjamin on his 7th thesis on the philosophy of History. For some, statues such as those of Colston, Rhodes and Vieira are symbols of civilisation. For many others, they are memories of massacres and genocides, symbols of barbarism. Monuments as, for example, the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, built in the memory of the infant Henry the Navigator – considered the patron of the 16th century Portuguese colonial expansion – represent the memory of the victors, they anchor history the way power wants it seen. That is the reason why, if we take Benjamin’s critique of history as a guide, we need to deconstruct such monuments built by hegemonic historical narratives. And what we have been seeing over recent years throughout the world are precisely such moments of such deconstruction.

That is to say that the debate over monuments and statues should be considered under a broader scope of history, memory and dynamics of power intertwined in both phenomena. In a recent article in the French newspaper Le Libération, Paul B. Preciado described statues as ‘prosthesis of historic memory that remind us the lives “that matter”’. They inscribe on public space the bodies that deserve to be immortalized in stone and metal. ‘Public sculptures’, he writes, ‘do not represent the people, they build it: they depict a national pure body and determine an ideal of colonial and sexual citizenship’. To critique history as celebrated by statues is, then, to critique the construction of the nation state itself. This series analyses both how events and characters are chosen to be marked in a city or a country’s landscape, and how art might disrupt national and imperial ideals, functioning sometimes as a sort of counter-memory.

Series Publication Schedule

  • Part I: Portugal: the return of the colonial war, by Miguel Cardina
  • Part II: Which door to which city? The Vraca Memorial Park and anti-fascism legacy in Sarajevo, by Renata Summa
  • Part III: Indigenous Uruguay: monuments, histories and memories, by Henrique Gasperin
  • Part IV: The Red Atlantic: modernity and markers of discrimination, by Victor Coutinho Lage
  • Part V: The Memory Sewing: alternative history(ies) of the past and present, by Mariana Caldas

[i] Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), p. 256.

Remembering conflict: the two Great Wars

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By Louis Mignot:

War as a phenomenon hangs in the public consciousness, something that has become all the more apparent as we approached the centenary commemoration of the First World War. All wars are characterised by violence and loss of life, but the First World War has come to represent the experience of soldiers worldwide. This is evinced in the poppy; the flower that grew in Flanders has now come to symbolise remembrance for soldiers who have fought in all wars. It is significant, however, that the public do not seem to commemorate conflicts from before the First World War to the same extent. For example, the Napoleonic Wars - the original ‘Great War’ - have, apart from ongoing academic interest, faded from public consciousness. The question should be asked; will the First World War’s impact on the public consciousness fade in the face of later conflicts?

‘The Great War’

There can be no doubt that the First World War was horrific, bloody and, indeed, global in its profound impact on society. With approximately nine million deaths spread across all sides throughout the four-year conflict, there is an obvious, direct and indirect, impact on the population to this day. Many families will have distant relatives who fought, or indeed died, in the First World War. Yet, the number of deaths cannot be the only causal factor behind the conflict’s continued vivid remembrance. The Napoleonic wars were, whilst longer, exceedingly costly in terms of lives. For instance, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, marking the end of the Napoleonic Wars proper (the bi-centenary passing in 2012), was exceedingly bloody; of the 422,000 soldiers that marched into Russia, only 10,000 returned.[i] This is a staggering loss, taking place over a very short time period: six months of combat against a spectral Russian enemy and the deadly Russian winter. The bi-centenary of the 1812 campaign was marked by receptions at the Russian Embassy to mark the ‘Patriotic War’ and by a series of scholarly articles, amongst other things. Now, whilst this is a commemoration, there is far less profundity. This is by no means unjustified: the First World War is, in chronological terms, much closer to the modern day and was, arguably, the start of a new phase of warfare; the industrial war.

The chronology of the conflict must be a factor contributing to the level of its commemoration. Yet, there is more to it than simple timing. If this were the case, then the Second World War would surely supersede it in terms of commemoration. The fact that the First World War is seen as a turning point in history, coming near the start of the 20th Century, involving millions of combatants and using new, increasingly brutal and efficient weapons marks it out in the consciousness of many people to this day. This is perfectly demonstrated by the Poppy Campaign; the campaign aims to raise money for serving soldiers, but its iconography is rooted in the First World War; this conflict has been held up as the epitome of war’s impact on society, making it the perfect symbol for an appeal for serving soldiers.

Will this trend continue?

Whilst there have been numerous conflicts since the First World War, only the Second World War seems to have gained similar levels of commemoration. There seems to be an implied ‘ranking’ of conflicts in the public consciousness; the title ‘world war’ sets up the First and Second World Wars on a par – they come to be seen as the epitome of what negative impacts war can have, and therefore something to avoid. Despite this, the Second World War has not superseded the First in terms of its impact in the public consciousness; people view the Second World War as almost a bi-product of the First. That is, students at GCSE level in the UK learn of the Treaty of Versailles, how Germany was humbled and, indeed, humiliated by its terms, leading to economic decline and the rise of Adolf Hitler. As a result, the First World War retains its mantle as the ‘first’ of the industrial, ‘new’ wars; it remains one of the turning points in history. Whilst the Second World War has its own horrors and is rightly remembered for the fight to stop them, this trend will likely continue.

Some may argue that as the last combatants of the First World War have passed on, the war will lose its continuing significance and commemoration. Yet, the First World War is rooted in our architecture; the cenotaph, the memorials at Thiepval (amongst others), school children take sobering tours of the battlefields, and learn of the horrors of the war. Moreover, films and television shows continue to be made about the conflict; classics such as ‘Paths of Glory’ and ‘Blackadder’ followed by more recent productions like ‘Joyeux Noelle’ and ‘Our World War’ keep this conflict in our minds, albeit in a simplified and somewhat detached form. As the centenary approaches, new articles will be written, new television programmes will be produced, all adding to the existing work on the subject, inciting new debate – most recently over the pre-existing view that the generals were to blame for the losses of the war. As a result, the First World War will, for a significant time to come, be remembered with the same levels of profundity as current commemorations. Whilst wars of the previous centuries may have lost some of their lingering impact, none of them rival the First World War for its continued effect on everyday life. As is clear from the centenary commemoration of the First World War, the conflict retains its profound impact on the national consciousness, and, even after those who experienced it first-hand pass on, the experience of the war will remain in the public consciousness.

 

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Louis Mignot is a second year undergraduate student at King’s College London reading War Studies and History. You can follow Louis Mignot on Twitter @LouisMignot.

 

NOTES
[i] Frank McLynn, Napoleon, a Biography, (London: Pimlico, 1998), p. 375.