Uncouth Reflections

Fenster writes:

We are always reminded that we must remember the past.  True that, but it is still a slippery formulation.  Remember how?  And is it always good to remember, in all ways and under all circumstances?

You can in fact make an argument for the value of historical forgetfulness.  Should the Capulets forever war with the Montagues?  Shiite with Sunni?  Hatfield with McCoy?  When does one need to take the maxim “bury the hatchet” seriously?  And how do you do it, what with all the baying of your kin calling for you to always remember?

And what of the push for reconciliation with respect to conflicts like the one between Tutu and Hutsi?  Is reconciliation a kind of forgetting, or a special kind of remembering?  Or is it both, entwined in a dialectical fashion?  Is it OK to forget, but only after first remembering in some deep way, as in the stages of grief?

I don’t know the answers but I suspect the issue is complicated, more complicated than the one dimensional way we like to treat these things in the public arena.

Consider the death of Nelson Mandela.  That prompted a series of important and interesting discussions of his particular genius at getting South Africa past retribution to some other, imperfect but way preferable, place.  That involved a lot of forgiveness, and the press has been correct in celebrating that.  But the expression is, as I recall, “forgive and forget” . . . forgiveness does imply a particular kind of forgetting, too. But while we cherish forgiveness, its suspect sibling forgetfulness often seems harder to embrace.

Consider too the film 12 Years a Slave.  Sonny Bunch (related to Honey?) wrote recently that, far from contributing to reconciliation, the movie has been “driving people batty.”  He quotes from an article in The Atlantic by Enuma Okoro:

Seeing the movie was hard. But the truth is I had developed my own race problem before the film was even released. And when I look back I see that it has largely come from the slow and painfully growing suspicion that I’m primarily a check-mark in the lives of so many well-meaning, educated white people. Black educated friend: check. African conversation partner: check. Black woman of safe but uncommitted romantic exploration: check. Black articulate friend I can introduce to my family: check. Black internationally reared cultural elite I can relate to without leaving my comfort zone: check. Black emotionally safe friend with whom I can make “black jokes” in the name of familiarity: check. The list could go on.

Is this historical remembrance of a good kind?  Does it push us past the past, to a point where it is safe to let go?  Or is it picking at a scab?

I dunno.  I don’t know Ms. Okoro, and it would help to know her to know.  Maybe her friends are superficial.  Maybe she is, and takes the movie as a wake-up call urging her to give up childish things and take up her rightful place with her people.

But I will tell you where my money is: that she probably actually likes her friends, and that her friends like her.  That if her antennae are sensing things, this has less to do with racism than it does race.  And that she may well pay a personal price for mistaking a siren’s song for a wake-up call.