painful memories
(1997) by david graeber via anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-painful-memories]
notes/quotes:
In this essay I would like to talk about people who lost everything. Imerina (the traditional name for the northern half of the central plateau of Madagascar) is a place where people attach enormous importance to the memory of their ancestors and the lands on which their ancestors once lived. History, in Imerina, is largely a matter of placing the living in an historical landscape created by the dead. About a third of the Merina population, however, is made up of the descendants of slaves, and in Madagascar, slaves are by definition people without ancestors, ‘lost people’ (obna very) who have been ripped from their ancestral landscapes, left unanchored to any place. These were people who had been literally stripped of history. Even today, almost a hundred years after emancipation, most ‘black people’ (as their descendants are called) remain in a kind of historical limbo, unable to make a real claim to the territories in which they live and are buried.
madagascar.. madagascar love.. mad love take 2
The question I want to ask is: what forms does historical memory take for such people? What forms can it take?
history ness to date for all of us.. has been in sea world.. so to me.. non legit.. and so a cancerous distraction
It has become a commonplace, nowadays, to argue that historical consciousness is ultimately about identity. Memories of the past are ways of defining who one is in the present—and perhaps too, of defining what kind of action one is capable of, of enunciating collective projects (e.g., Connerton 1989; Friedman 1992). Clearly, this would leave the historical consciousness of slaves more than a little problematic. Slaves’ identities were created by events their descendants would not wish to commemorate, events which not only annihilated any link to their previous histories, but left their victims generically incapable of producing new ones. Not surprising then that most descendants tried their best to avoid having to admit to their ancestry. It was embarrassing. Almost all the stories I did manage to cull about the ‘days of slavery’ centered on the insidious means masters used to ritually pollute their slaves—rubbing excrement on their heads, making them sleep alongside pigs— and so destroy their hasina, a word whose meaning in this context falls about halfway between ‘state of grace’ and ‘power.’ The ultimate message was often quite explicit: it was only by destroying their ability to act for themselves that masters were able to keep slaves in subjugation. But it is telling that these were just about the only memories of slavery I ever heard recounted. It was as if, having explained how slaves were rendered people who did not have the right to act, or even to speak, for themselves, there was nothing left to say.
yeah.. need to let go of all that
The experience of slavery could not be directly told, as history, if only because admitting to such a past deprived one of the authority with which to speak. It was inherently shameful. Of course, the feeling that one is not entided to have an opinion, or a history, is a common phenomenon among the dispossessed of any society (Bourdieu 1984). However, what I am going to argue in this paper is that Merina slaves did, in fact, develop a ritual idiom with which to reflect on their history and their condition, and even to speak to others with the voice of authority. It was, perhaps, somewhat veiled and indirect. But here too the ability to speak was inseparable from the ability to act; it was through the very process of seizing the authority to speak that the descendants of slaves, in so many cases, began to take back for themselves the capacity to act as historical agents in their own right, actors as well as narrators, and so perhaps to begin to recuperate a little bit of what they had lost.
It is important to remember that for its victims, the very first thing slavery meant was a complete rupture with everything that had made their lives meaningful: of all the ties of love, kinship, shared experience that had bound them to a home, to parents, friends, lovers, to everyone and everything they had most cared for. It was in this sense too that slaves were ‘lost people,’ alone, in an alien place among people who did not know them
and.. didn’t know selves.. missing pieces
The most obvious symptom of slaves’ placelessness was their lack of proper tombs. .. to guarantee one will not be forgotten, one has to acquire enough land to settle a large number of descendants around one’s tomb. For slaves, all this was nearly inconceivable.
not needed if legit free.. ie: thurman interconnectedness law et al
There is an irony here, because the very difficulty of creating tombs and ancestors meant they came to take on a very different meaning for the descendants of slaves than for the other two thirds of the Merina population. As I have argued elsewhere (Graeber 1995), attitudes of ‘white’ Merina towards ancestors are profoundly ambivalent. *People do wish to be remembered as ancestors when they die; but in part for that very reason, the memory of existing ancestors is seen as an imposition on the living, supported by the constant threat of punishment for lapses of memory or neglect of ancestral restrictions. Memory itself is felt as a kind of violence..t As a result, the famadihana rituals in which the bodies of the dead are periodically removed from the tomb to be rewrapped in new lambamena, have a dual meaning too. **While represented as ways of remembering the dead, their covert purpose is to make it easier to forget them: reducing ancestral bodies to dust so their names can be forgotten; then, locking them inside the tomb. For the descendants of slaves, on the other hand, it was not the pressure of history and memory that was felt as a kind of violence, but the very lack of it, and for that reason, ancestors took on a far more benevolent countenance. It is hard to be certain, but I did find that descendants of slaves were much more likely to insist that ancestors really did provide concrete benefits for their descendants, and I had a strong feeling that, while the form of mortuary ritual was the same, the content was slightly different; that there was an honest piety in ‘black’ attitudes towards the dead often lacking in their ‘white’ neighbors.
*yeah that.. we need to let go of all that..
**to me.. that would only be because none of us to date have been legit free.. black science of people/whales law et al
The community of Betafo, the focus of my own fieldwork which I conducted between 1989 and 1991, consisted of something like 13 settlements and perhaps 400 people, occupying a stretch of rolling country about forty minutes’ walk to the north of the town of Arivonimamo. It was a community divided between the descendants of an andriana, ‘noble,’ descent group, and the descendants of their former slaves. The latter made up about a third of the total population.
One reason the story seemed to strike such a chord with people was that it encapsulated something fundamental about the experience of slaves and their descendants. Perhaps, one can even say, the experience of slavery itself. There are those that have proposed that slaves are by definition human beings who have been wrenched from the society which formed them, the web of social ties which has made them what they are; plunged into a kind of ‘social death’ (Meillassoux 1991; Patterson 1982). From this perspective, slavery as an institution is founded on the destruction of social worlds, and it is in fact the moment described by Raombana, when children are tom from their mother’s arms and families broken apart, which makes a slave a slave.
It is difficult to assess the full implications of such a moment for the historical consciousness of those who passed through it. Rarely do large numbers of people go through a rupture so utter and extreme. It brings to mind Elaine Scarry’s (1985) observation that physical pain empties worlds of their meaning..t In normal life, one is invested in a thousand ways in one’s surroundings, in people, places, projects, things one cares about; so that one’s sense of self expands outwards to imbue and become entangled with a much larger social world. One effect of extreme physical pain, she says, is to empty these investments of all meaning; one’s sense of self collapses into the narrow confines of the hurting body. For that moment nothing and no one else is real. The scene described by Raombana in a way reverses this: the victims are, for the most part, physically unscathed, but as they are lead off from burning villages, most of the men they have ever known lying dead in bloody pools, women and children dragged from each others’ arms; in a matter of hours, the entire universe of social relations in which they have come into being was utterly annihilated. The result, as Raombana’s friend himself observed, was a trauma so intense that no mere physical pain could possibly surpass it..t
All this does not mean that memories of such a moment are likely to become a part of historical consciousness. In fact they are just the sort of events that would not; that one would normally suspect survivors would prefer never to have to talk about. Certainly the memory of them is not preserved in oral histories of the present day. But if for slaves and their descendants, that one moment, when worlds dissolved away, seems to have reverberated endlessly, it is because such experiences did not stop. Dispersal, families drifting apart, people uprooted from their memories: for most, it was repeated with every generation.
In the latter case especially, an image so intimate of a daughter poring over her father or her mother’s head, searching for white hairs to pluck out, evokes a whole world of domestic sentiments: protective affection, the fear of aging and resultant loss, the pain of ruptured domesticity when the woman moves away. The money, officially meant to ‘ask for the parent’s blessing’ for the marriage, can equally be seen, I think, as compensation for that pain. In famadihana the evocation of emotionally-charged memories becomes even more explicit. When one places the corpses of women’s relatives on their laps, the effect is to break the power of women’s most vivid, intimate memories of people that they loved. It evokes that entire world in order to efface it, to free the living from their attachments to the dead.
For women who had been carried into slavery, evocation of such memories could only serve as a reminder of acts of such irreparable violence,..t that the entire world of those memories had been brutally destroyed. It is hardly surprising that the Betsileo woman should have felt such an affinity with the figure of Ranoro. Ranoro was a woman who could not bear to hear her father’s name; the memories it evoked for her would be too painful. It was a story about salt dropped in water, things that could never be brought back together or attain their previous form. In this one case, of course, the story may have taken on a different level of poignancy because the woman possessed by Ranoro believed her father was still alive—at least, in the end she managed to win her freedom so as to try to find him. Though one cannot help but wonder whether the dream of finding her father was really as much a projection of her imagination as Ranoro herself had been.
At this point, let me return briefly to the question with which I began: about stories that can, and can’t, be told.
Students of working-class history have noted that it is relatively easy to cull oral histories of periods of successful strikes, political advances, in which workers had some control of their destiny; much harder for periods of massive retrenchment or defeat. .. They discovered that, indeed, most found it impossible to give any account of their lives since childhood; many found it painful to even try. Instead, they tended to fall back on quasi-ethnographic descriptions—£how we used to do things in the old days’—and anecdotes about their own experience of famous historical events.. t—mainly, of France’s wars. These anecdotes, however, were in almost every case and themselves little images of loss and dispersal: peasants fleeing before unearthly German horsemen, the government fleeing Paris by balloon…. It was as if, having been told all their lives they had no right to speak of or for themselves, they could only do so through the borrowed authority of ‘national’ history..t
hari present in society law et al
Malagasy understandings of what history is, and what gives one the authority to tell it, are rather different. Histories are, indeed, matters of privilege, but they are also intrinsically tied to places—where ancestors lived and are buried, where famous events took place. And there is a very deep-seated feeling that only those who live near a place can really know its history. Even the wealthiest and most powerful descendants of Betafo’s noble families would look mildly irritated when I asked them about the histories of their illustrious forbears, unable to speak about the place because their families had long since relocated to the city. Several ended up referring me to the descendants of their former slaves, who still lived there. In this sense what Vazimba pools provide is not just a way to conceptualize a history of pain and dispersal, but the right to speak of it: after all, most of these pools were in wild places in the valley bottoms, the very places to which slaves too were once exiled.
Even if what they spoke of was, ultimately, their own sense of loss, their own disempowerment, the ability to speak about such things itself opened up possibilities of taking action and beginning to reverse the situation. In the case of Ranoro this was fairly obvious; less so, perhaps, in the case of Rainitaba. But histories keep changing, and Vazimba provide endless possibilities of moving from speech to action.
Just so as to show that anything is possible, let me end by noting that towards the end of the time I was in Betafo I discovered there was another of Rainitaba’s descendants living there. He was one of Razanamavo’s sons, a man in his thirties named Tratra. Tratra too claimed to be a medium. Nobody I talked to took these claims particularly seriously: most considered him a drunken blowhard, and a bit of a buffoon (‘if you really have spirits,’ Armand told me, ‘you don’t go around telling everyone.’) But a few years before he had built a little house near the ruins of Antandrokomby, just a few meters away from the reedy pool Rainitaba is said to have inhabited before he disappeared. He couldn’t afford to be around very often; most of the time, like his mother, he was off looking for work. But it at least suggests the possibility that, were one to come back in twenty years, Rainitaba might have acquired a new and entirely different history.
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be you. 