Memory or the act of recalling is a constant struggle for my overloaded mind. With so much to recall (including all the pin-codes and passwords) the ratio of action to the amount of information received quickly spirals downward (Neil Postman). In this context of data smog, I am constantly sipping cups of Gingseng tea hoping that that the herb will improve my ability to re-member. Not that everything I have encountered is necessarily what I wish to re-member. I suppose with maturity I have now perfected the art of being able to recall events, names, places and peoples selectively. Yet, this is not an act that I can always control. At times I am at the mercy of the very act that takes over and work in its own surprising, creative and complex ways. “Wavering memories”, as Derek Walcott wrote may be one way to put it – but not fully.
This was the case quite recently when I received an invitation from one of my former congregations in the Curacao (where I lived and worked for four years [1995-1999]), to write a short impressionistic piece on my time in that community. I was amazed to find how easily the juicy and positive stories started to roll off the keyboard of my computer – as if time had rolled back and it was happening right before me. I even started to make connections with earlier events and narratives in my life in Guyana, Grenada, Jamaica, Netherlands and now in England. I could not help thinking that my presence in the communities where I lived and worked was purely incidental. What actually mattered were the lives of the people who departed from the Church after the benediction.
For one whose “home” is always elsewhere and who straddles multiple and religious identities the act of re-member-ing or re-calling is as important as it is complex and ambivalent. What we remember, why we remember and how we remember point to the complexity related to the act of re-member-ing and our humanness. There are those who would contend that when you lose access to the past, the present becomes confusing and the future disorienting. I would not wish to dispute this. Yet, as a member of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora access to that past – given colonial history – remains elusive. For me it has remained largely in the imagination – one that I can construct with multiple layers and for diverse situations. Hence, there is no confusion about present and future. There are, in fact, vistas of exciting, adventurous and “limbonal” possibilities that counter notions of fixed and pure identities and histories.
We (Caribbeans) may be “history’s afterthought” with “origins that range from the most disparate places…” [Derek Walcott, Tiopolo’s Hound (2000)]. Why not? After all, as the story goes, God chose what is insignificant, foolish and ‘looked down upon’, to shame the wise and powerful. This is worth re-member-ing. For the “act” of re-member-ing is at the heart of the Christian life. It is “constitutive of faith itself and not a mere elaboration of beliefs already held” [Don Saliers, Worship and Spirituality (1996)]. It is something we do when we gather not only in church and around the eucharistic table – but also when we gather for meals, wherever that may be, and when we tell the stories or narratives that constitute that of the faith community and our own lives. In our present day context where we are programmed only to remember the last 48 hours, the act of re-member-ing becomes a necessary, urgent and subversive piece of work that ought to energise us to reverse such and other dominant trends in our lives. For our struggle against dominant and excluding power is that of “the struggle of memory against forgetting” [Milan Kundera].
This was the case quite recently when I received an invitation from one of my former congregations in the Curacao (where I lived and worked for four years [1995-1999]), to write a short impressionistic piece on my time in that community. I was amazed to find how easily the juicy and positive stories started to roll off the keyboard of my computer – as if time had rolled back and it was happening right before me. I even started to make connections with earlier events and narratives in my life in Guyana, Grenada, Jamaica, Netherlands and now in England. I could not help thinking that my presence in the communities where I lived and worked was purely incidental. What actually mattered were the lives of the people who departed from the Church after the benediction.
For one whose “home” is always elsewhere and who straddles multiple and religious identities the act of re-member-ing or re-calling is as important as it is complex and ambivalent. What we remember, why we remember and how we remember point to the complexity related to the act of re-member-ing and our humanness. There are those who would contend that when you lose access to the past, the present becomes confusing and the future disorienting. I would not wish to dispute this. Yet, as a member of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora access to that past – given colonial history – remains elusive. For me it has remained largely in the imagination – one that I can construct with multiple layers and for diverse situations. Hence, there is no confusion about present and future. There are, in fact, vistas of exciting, adventurous and “limbonal” possibilities that counter notions of fixed and pure identities and histories.
We (Caribbeans) may be “history’s afterthought” with “origins that range from the most disparate places…” [Derek Walcott, Tiopolo’s Hound (2000)]. Why not? After all, as the story goes, God chose what is insignificant, foolish and ‘looked down upon’, to shame the wise and powerful. This is worth re-member-ing. For the “act” of re-member-ing is at the heart of the Christian life. It is “constitutive of faith itself and not a mere elaboration of beliefs already held” [Don Saliers, Worship and Spirituality (1996)]. It is something we do when we gather not only in church and around the eucharistic table – but also when we gather for meals, wherever that may be, and when we tell the stories or narratives that constitute that of the faith community and our own lives. In our present day context where we are programmed only to remember the last 48 hours, the act of re-member-ing becomes a necessary, urgent and subversive piece of work that ought to energise us to reverse such and other dominant trends in our lives. For our struggle against dominant and excluding power is that of “the struggle of memory against forgetting” [Milan Kundera].
