Imagine to Remember

In her novel Beloved, Toni Morisson, introduces us to the concept “rememory”, a term of her own creation. Rememory is not recalling a specific set of facts and images but to live a memory again, in mind and body. Rememory is personal and political, individual and ancestral.  The characters in Beloved are haunted by the horrors of slavery, as they try to build new lives the past is never far away. It is always there, when they are alone, or with one another, a heavy thing in the air, it is in gestures small and large, words spoken and words unsaid. And yet it is also the thing that ties, the way in which they hold to themselves and each other. 

Rememory is not defined by our illusion of time; past, present and future, there is only simultaneous weaving and unravelling. It seems to have a will of its own, often unpredictable but never random. Places and objects are also stores of rememory, the land, the sea, the plants and minerals have their own rememories. Rememory seems to me part of a more indigenous worldview, the opposite of the western, the material, that sees mind and body as separated. So different from this way that fails to see the consciousness of rocks and trees and yet believes faithfully in the consciousness of robots and artificial intelligence. A paradigm that talks about the convergence of man and machine yet degrades seemingly at every opportunity the union between the earth and her people, the people from each other and from their own selves.  So here we are, with our megabytes of images, sounds, words, forcing on us new yet increasingly bizarre ways of remembering. Not in the mind or the body, but on a server in some remote unknowable location, where it may exist long after we are gone, all while lacking something very human and essential.