The duty of remembrance
A population without memory is like a person who is not of sound mind: he/she can be led anywhere. Hand-in-hand, with a smile; or with stentorian, frightening orders. Anywhere, anyway. Exactly like persons. For this reason memory must be cultivated scrupulously and intelligently. In order to keep the sense of what it is, and what it has been, alive. In order to understand, every day, the meaning of the words that are told and of the values that are referred to. In order to stand in History with dignity and awareness. In order to really choose where to go, and how.
Contemporary society seems indeed to be engaged in a perennial fight against memory. They tend to crumble it down, or to make an evanescent material of it. The mass of information we receive constantly tries to chase yesterday’s information away. Or it emphasizes it, doubles it. It builds dramas or collective euphories for us, for a shorter or longer time. Then it abandones them, unmindedly, ready to build other dramas – fake or true – and other euphories – genuine or phoney. Now and then, it fishes an episode, a character, out of the immense repository of what has happened, and it transforms it into the matter of fictionalized memories – however meritorious. But the amount of “happened” abandoned, deemed to oblivion, is endless. Not to speak about the information which follows political criteria, which is moved by ideological worries, claiming and trying to change the past. About when a memory of what “did not happen” is delivered to us.
Nevertheless, the very social antibodies are weak. If the oral narration disappears from families, everything becomes more difficult. Generations over generations got to know the past through stories, oral narration. Sometimes, thanks to direct knowledge of the adults or elders, passed over around fireplaces or in barns at night where people gathered to get warm. Sometimes, by means of legendary elaboration, such as in popular songs or poems or in street theatre. Even recently, the history of the Resistance against Nazism, not known in school (where the school programmes stopped at World War I), was handed down through family tales. Nowadays, the same thing happens to the story of the violence which stroke the republican Italy again and again, in more or less wide and intense ways, from terrorism to the mafia (or the camorra, or the ‘ndrangheta).
Shots of TV on memory, but all too often, oblivion and public silence, born from indifference, or worse, from unmentionable complicities. Memory has then become the resource of the powerless, of the offended, of the victims, to give everybody another chance to read history, not only that of the areas dominated or devastated by criminal power. But also not to feel like rightless ghosts, forced to wander in a totally private dimension of sorrow.
The purpose carried out in Italy by an association such as Libera has had, and still has, something revolutionary: in a society which forgets, repeating the names of the killed, every year, in a public place, in front of crowds of citizens, more and more numerous. Drive them like nails in the moral body of a nation which would better to without the duty of remembrance, as mourning is not suitable to life, and because living should be joy, a fake joy perhaps, built upon the authentic – and even greater because “lonely” – pain of minorities chosen by fate as the scapegoats of collectivity. Hundreds and hundreds of names to remember with respect and consciousness, starting points for new commitments, for less accommodating analyses of reality.
This goes for Italy. But it also can go, today as well as tomorrow, in an Europe where criminal power is expanding, league with each other, ready to exert violence when and where they can, or view as useful or as necessary. In an Europe where new illegal trades, starting from human trafficking, prepare – or count already – silent victims of extorsions and of the perversions of the wealth culture.
Europe, which did already measure against the duties and harshnesses of memory after the Holocaust, must get ready to watch and remember. In order to know, every day, which values to believe in, and which road it wants to go.
