THE ART OF REMEMBERING: MEMORIES AS A WAY TO RESIST CENSORSHIP

In the book “Ellis Island” the French novelist Georges Perec in his poetic and intricately personal manner shares a story of a very particular place – an 11-hectare plot of land in the Upper New York Bay that, despite its size, played a big role in the lives of more than 10 million people. In the late 18th – early 19th century, it was the first earth immigrants who travelled from Europe in search of a better life stepped on. However, before being allowed to move on to the States, they had to pass inspection and medical checkups – the procedures held on Ellias Island.

During this primary registration, many newcomers, as Perec notes, changed their first and last names to adopt different identities, as they were about to start their lives anew in a place they approached as paradise-like. That was how “Adam became Adams, Goldenburg – Goldberg and Gold – Goldstein,” the writer concludes. Such a conscious and in a way forced act of cancelling, or “forgetting”, of one’s origin had to do with a number of reasons among which was the desire to become invisible in the freshly chosen world, to sound more “English” and thus – attract less attention and evoke fewer questions.

But not only for personal motives can memories – individual or collective – be (self-)censored or erased. And not only pursuing the goals of safety or linguistic convenience. Unfortunately, human civilization knows many examples, when the subjects of forced memory censorships were entire languages, entire nationalities, entire decades of countries’ histories. Too well do we remember book burning raids held in 1933 by Nazi soldiers. Too short are, however, the memories of Putin’s regime supporters that initiated the “denazification campaign” as a pretext to destroy the Ukrainians – the nationality for decades called “brotherly”.

Memories do make an important instrument of control. In the long term, what and how we (are made to) remember shapes our collective understanding of history. Ideological memory censorship might lead to the names of traitors and tyrants magnified and those of poets and artists let slip.  

My home country Belarus is widely known as having lost every fourth citizen in the WWII – a war often described in the region as “Great Patriotic”. In Minsk, there is a new museum dedicated to this historical period and the capital itself has an overwhelming majority of streets named after the war heroes. At the same time, another fact – that of massive executions of more than 10,000 Soviet war prisoners and civilians aged 5 to 50 were kept in a concentration camp and killed near the village of Drozdy in the Minsk vicinity is something Lukashenko’s regime does not want to admit. Until now, this tragic place of memory has not been properly immortalized by a memorial, and a mass grave looks like an abandoned wasteland with a lonely tractor at times delivering fertilizers across the disturbed ground.

Another example of a place of the fight for the right to remember is Babi Yar – a Kyiv ravine where the largest mass-murder executed under the auspices of the Nazi regime and its Ukrainian collaborators occurred. In the course of two days, on 29-30 November 1941, 33,771 Jews were killed there – the massacre later followed by 100,000 – 150,000 more victims: Jews, Romanis, Ukrainians… Now the site is made into a public park, where, as the writer Katya Petrovskaya in her book “Maybe Esther” puts it, a “Tuborg” beer stall sits next to the monument to killed children. “Leisurely running joggers, boys playing football, men sipping beer at the bench, retirees collecting empty bottles – an ordinary urban metabolism,” she reflects while visiting Babi Yar herself. Is this what collective amnesia might look like in today’s world?

However, “uncomfortable” statistics of the Holocaust are not the only historical facts that risk getting erased from the collective memories of some nations. Under the Soviet occupation, with religion proclaimed as “the opium of the people”, numerous places of worship were either destroyed or changed into civil buildings all around the USSR. In Yerevan, Saint Paul and Peter Church built in the 5th-6th centuries and recognized as the oldest in the Armenian capital was demolished in 1930 to make room for the “Moscow” cinema on Abovyan Street. The same was the fate of Katoghike Holy Mother of God Church – put down to make way for residential quarters and a linguistic institute at the Sayat-Nova Avenue.

Subjected to memory censorship are also places of worship spontaneously formed by people themselves as a genuine attempt to remember – in the case of today’s Belarus, the victims of the totalitarian regime. “People’s memorial” of chancel lamps, posters, photographs, and flowers was created by Minskers at the so-called “Square of Changes” to commemorate 31-years-old Roman Bondarenko, kidnapped and murdered by plainclothes policemen in November 2020. The young man went down to protect from vandalism a backyard mural – a symbol of the resistance against Lukashenko’s seize of power, – and got brutally attacked by the gang, which then dragged him into a minivan. Later he was found in the hospital, in a coma, with numerous traumas incompatible with life.

The day after Bondarenko’s death, Lukashenko claimed his own version of the tragedy saying that the young man was drunk and died because of a fight – the claim refuted by medical evidence publicly provided by doctor Artem Sorokin. However, the “memory police” did not wait long to react: the medical practitioner got arrested and taken into custody, and Katerina Borisevich, a journalist who wrote a truthful article about the case, was given a half-year’s sentence. The “people’s memorial” was dismantled by the public utilities – chancel lamps, notes, and flowers were buried at the Northern Cemetery.

The importance of personal memories preservation in the challenging times of repressive regimes, information wars and the domination of “truthiness” became a subject matter of the art and documentary project “The Art of (Not) Forgetting” I started in the winter of 2021. Its idea had to do with the collection of most resourceful (1) and most painful (2) memories people were eager either to forever remember or to forget. By photographing the project participants and preserving their stories, I wanted to show that we are the only agents to who has the right to claim ownership of our own past.

In order to resist memory censorship and avoid collective amnesia, we need to take care of our memories using the means available to us – sharing our recollections with the close ones, creating our own resourceful “places of commemoration”, and taking care of our future by documenting the present.

Hanna

(–) It probably happened on August 13 or 14, oh, no, — for sure, it was on 13. I came to the emergency hospital to visit my friend who got there after Okrestina detention centre. I was together with his mum and what I saw there, of course… those livid bruises, he had all his face bruised… his entire body was covered in bruises. And he showed us only a few of them… while his eyes and all his movements, it felt as if he was about to run away. As if at any moment he was ready for further attacks and beatings! Actually, it was rather hard, extremely hard even to look at this… at his scared look and eyes unable to focus on something, and he was… I felt as if every single muscle sensed that something bad might happen at any moment and he would have to respond. And that swollen eye of his, all was so scary… I would like to forget about it! I wish it had never ever happened! But back then I was looking at him realizing that similar things had occurred to many other people. While staring at him, I saw others… Everyone who had to experience those awful things.    

(+) About a week ago, I came up with an idea for a new book which I got extremely excited about! I do not remember myself ever feeling so inspired and motivated to work. It is going to be non-fiction which requires me to interview people. I remember I couldn’t sleep before the first meeting, I would wake up at night and I wish the interview would start soon. I felt so excited! 

Before the next interview, I slept for about three hours: I failed to fall asleep, either. I kept on writing something, making up questions, and turning someone’s interview into a text. And now, every time I listen to people sharing stories I get so inspired, that something inside me kind of clicks! I am full of energy! And I feel like I am about to stop doing anything else but this! I want to remember it and get back to this feeling of fascination — not only with the idea, but also with people, their lives, stories, the world, wonderful experiences, and human power! Being fascinated with life and the world! 

Inga

(–) It’s difficult to pick out the first memory because I do not want to forget even the worst ones. All of them are connected with traumas, nevertheless, for some reason, I would like to keep them… 

I would like to share the memory of the episode when my sister and I got detained — the moment when taking advantage of her stress, one of the policemen offered her a hand. I mean, I told her, “Veronica, hold my hand — everything’s alright!” and he also reached out, and she, having no time to realize what was going on, was about to accept it. I quickly stopped her but it was so painful. The scene itself. It was scary. And mean. And I am eager to… forget such moments of repulsive ferocity.  

As for the emotions, it was like… as if kind of… horrible. Not because of that monster, but rather because of the terror of that simple gesture, of how, in certain circumstances, a hand might mean something totally different. It felt awful.   

(+) My good memory is also connected with the latest events. I remember us during the Minsk protests, on the second Sunday of August, moving from Minsk Hero City Obelisk to the Flag Square that nobody had ever reached before.  

The protesters decided to take that route for the first time, and it felt like something very emotional and scary, and suddenly I realized there were so many of us around. There was an unusual part of the road which was going up a bit: while marching you expect kind of seeing the sea in a while. So, we kept on walking and the sea did unfold in front of us — the sea of people. Overwhelmed, happy, and excited, I said to the guys, “Lift me up!” and they put me on some building block on the edge of the road, so I could better see what was going on. So I stood, much higher, like in a famous “Titanic” scene! So extremely touching and magnificent. This whole situation is about human bravery.   

Every person who crossed that part of the road, that little slope, experienced the same feelings — they saw the sea of people in front. And none of those walking behind knew about it. It was very beautiful… and pivotal. What a nice memory! 

Kseniya

(–) The first story has to do with violence… violence that occurred at an early age and triggered a lot of other stuff. 

(+) The second memory is about intimacy, which for a long time I failed to feel due to that episode of violence and then it… at some spiritual level, not tactile, still appeared, revealed itself – and somehow I experienced it as something warm… significant, discovering this moment for myself… to allow yourself…. to trust. The recollection is rather about one encounter, about a hug, which made it possible to realize that there was mutual understanding, there was trust and the desire to show, to express it. At the level of sensations.  

Olga

(–) I want to forget the feeling of anxiety, fear crawling up my shoulder blades, being high on adrenaline, and the feeling of being wounded and crushed – all of them haunting me since August 2020. As I’d written this sentence, I suddenly realized I don’t want to forget anything because these feelings and memories are part of a large and exciting story, the end of which we are bringing closer with our unconditional belief in changes and our actions here and now. 

(+) My second memory brings together a composite image of my happy moments of travel, in my conscious living through simple things that have become more precious in current hard conditions: every glass of sparkling wine with people dear to me somewhere in the Mediterranean, sunsets and sunrises in the mountains, feet tired of walking after the endless exploration of cities, all the morning coffees in a new favourite spot just around the corner from the apartment we were renting, the smells of new plants and impressions of the random faces of strangers. 

Nadya

(–) The first memory — something I don’t want to recall – is connected with… the loss of the loved ones. Three people come to my mind at once: first of all, of course, my mother… then my brother and grandmother. And for me… it’s even hard to actually remember these moments because I am, somewhat unconsciously, turning them off. And the more distant in time these events get, the more my memory erases them, but this very first contact with death, when you just learn about it… in some… “processed” form, when a person is prepared and so on, and when you face it when it happened, the memories can be… quite scary… Your mind blocks them very quickly, and it is difficult for me, in general, to recall something now, but I know that there might always be something that would brighten these memories back. 

Initially, it was easier for me to remember the moment of facing my mother’s death, because I… this situation is the most recent one… and its image is still strong and close. As for the others — about my grandmother and brother — they are already… I do not immediately recall them because, at a conscious age, I decided to erase the memories of those episodes. Right away. And now they rather belong to the sphere of the forgotten. 

(+) It’s funny that the brain… in response to this request has reproduced something meaningful. At first, I thought that such memory should also be associated with something very important — important and pleasant at the same time. When, for example, the situation in my family was different. Something, say, from my childhood. But gradually a completely different image appeared, which, as I understood, I do recall very often. And it does not have to do with any relationships or people, but with a certain very life-affirming feeling. 

It happened when I had just entered the university choosing Art as my major and, on a spring day, was going to take an exam — I don’t remember well now, but I know I was carrying my tablets and drawings to my Professor’s studio. By coincidence, it was the first time I actually found myself in an artist’s studio, in the House of Artists on Surganova Street.  

And for me this very moment of spring, me carrying my artworks, and the emerging understanding of myself as an artist. Future seemed to be unfolding in front of me! No longer imagined, but alive, real, and I was a part of it heading off to some very exciting place. I was already in that communication. A mixed feeling of spring, life, my future, something very strong and young… a very intense sense of life and the ease of its perception, all my plans related to creativity and creation. I realized I was about to find and explore my own path, and it was no longer something imagined — it was already there with me. The sense of my path — and I was moving along it with the spring blossoming around. It is important not to lose this memory so that its vitality will always remain with me. 

Olga Bubich

The photos from the project “The Art of (Not) Forgetting” 


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