Years in the shade

[starlady]

The atomic bomb dubbed "Little Boy" was dropped on the city of Hiroshima sixty-five years ago today. That is only one of the atrocities of the Asia-Pacific Wars that should not be forgotten; there are many others that already have been, or are in danger of becoming so, and ephemere recently wrote this post Patalim about one of them (warning: graphic descriptions of violence): 

Freedom is not forgetting. And forgetting is not freedom. Look at what the loss of our memory has done to us. Look at it, and ask me whether we are better off acting as if the atrocities of the wars and colonizations never happened, as if we have no need for vigilance because the exertion of political and economic will of a foreign power over us cannot happen again, as if we have learned the lessons of the past so thoroughly we will be sure to fight for our rights and the rights of our people to speak and live free, as if we have so fully realized all the evils and all the complexities of power differentials and the abuse of wealth and the exploitation of resources and knowledge and people that we can now equip ourselves to fight against it, as if we recognize the importance of having and claiming our identities and our dignity and the burden and glory that is our history, as if we no longer stumble through the debris and ruin of so many broken institutions and fault ourselves for our own weakness and our own brokenness and the fact that we are not as good and wise and wonderful and wealthy as our former colonial masters. Look at it. Look at how well we have erased the graves, how so many of us go about our daily lives as if there are not more of us being killed every day, how we continue blithely on, the struggles our parents and grandparents and ancestors suffered through mere footnotes in the pages of our books, certainly things that no longer matter in this progressive story of the Philippines in 2010. Look at it, and go on. Ask me.

I don't want to erase this blood staining my legacy. I don't want to forget, as if it never happened. I don't want to keep coming across, "I didn't know the Philippines was a U.S. colony!" as if I do not bear the damage of American occupation written in my nerves and across my tongue. I don't want to see "deathmarching" used as a verb, the same way I deplore how "imeldific" is used as an adjective -- as if history were an erasable thing and words slipping into common parlance an apology or a healing of all these wounds. I don't want people to go on using this in a misguided attempt to remove the blood in it, because forgetting is what gives the evil behind this more power, by allowing the word to go unchallenged and slip under the veneer of acceptability, lightness, cheapening, banality. I don't want the atrocities of war to become equated with mundane things.

Words have power, and history is a story made up of words that we tell ourselves, and what we put in and leave out of the story shapes how we remember what happened. Forgetting and trivializing what happened, and willfully so, is not the way to a better world; it is the way to a world in which such events as the Bataan death march and the atomic bombings of Japan are more likely to be repeated. And that is not a world to be desired.

Other posts, some with more background and context; I recommend all of them: 
troisroyaumes, here
lanning, here
glass_icarus, here
manifesta, here
megwrites, here

Comments

[corneredangel.livejournal.com]

Forgetting and trivializing what happened, and willfully so, is not the way to a better world; it is the way to a world in which such events as the Bataan death march and the atomic bombings of Japan are more likely to be repeated. And that is not a world to be desired.

Except, it's impossible to remember Everything. And maybe even not particularly desirable. Any one thing is not equivalent to any other thing. So, people have to pick and choose what they remember. In Russia, yes, the slogan has always been "No-one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten." But that *has* to refer to Our war, not to others' wars.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Yes, there is definitely that--but I think that here in the States we are encouraged to forget too much. And there's a difference too between working through the past and moving on from there versus just willfully deciding not to think about it.

[outou.livejournal.com]

I'd be shocked and saddened if (http://ephemere.dreamwidth.org/profile)ephemere (http://ephemere.dreamwidth.org/) doesn't become a published author, if she isn't already. She's an incredibly moving and forceful writer, not even taking into account how often she is simply right.

I feel ashamed for not posting anything myself today (it's still difficult for me to write bilingual posts, but that's not a decent enough reason, especially since I'm still leaving comments in English), and hope that I can get something out by Sunday. It's the last week of the Language Schools, and we've got...homework, but noticeably less homework!