It is an inspiring story, because Carlos was not a militant, not a soldier of the revolution sacrificing himself for the common good. That makes his gesture all the more significant. Nelson Mandela has explained how “at the very heart of every oppressive tool developed by the apartheid regime was a determination to control, distort, weaken, and even erase people’s memories.” Carlos, thousands of miles from South Africa, was rebelling against that very oppressive tool. If that portrait from the past could emerge from its hideout, if it could share the air and mountains of Chile, if he could show it proudly to his grandchildren, it was because Carlos had refused to forget, he had not burned the picture while the security forces rampaged outside but buried it furtively until it could be recovered. If the carpenter could tell me the story at all it was because he had carried that image inside all those outlawed years, nursed and nurtured it.
An inspiring story, yes, but also sobering.
Memory does not exist in a vacuum. If there had been no justice, if Pinochet had not been made to face judges and answer for his crimes during that year and a half in London, the memory of that carpenter would have remained encapsulated. For the memory to flow out into the open the fear also had to flow out, there had to be a societal space where the portrait from the past could be safe. Memory does not exist in a vacuum. The justice that facilitated the surfacing of those proscribed images and thoughts had itself been the product of many other, more public, more communal memories, thousands upon thousands who staked their existence, many of them losing their lives and certainly their livelihoods, so that people like Carlos would not consign their past to the dust of incinerated history, so that people like Carlos would find, when he escaped from his seclusion, a country that was created by voices other than those with more money and more guns. Again, quoting Madiba: “The struggle against apartheid can be typified as the pitting of memory against forgetting. It was in our determination to remember our ancestors, our stories, our values and our dreams that we found comradeship.” Carlos was eventually able to bring together his private and his public memory because others risked everything in order for a commons of liberation to exist. For one memory of resistance to persevere it needs, therefore, to eventually belong to a savannah of commonality, it cannot prevail against violence and censorship if it does not join a vast archive of other forbidden memories. The case of that carpenter is sobering, no matter how fervently admirable his loyalty, because the very isolation and secrecy of his hideaway also reveals how ultimately precarious any merely inner and covert rebellion can be.
What if the carpenter Carlos had been killed or exiled or lost his house or perhaps been attacked with Alzheimer’s? So many accidents could have blocked that portrait of Salvador Allende from seeing the light. Or worse still, decades hence, someone else, some stranger or maybe even a great-grandchild would have been working on the wall, someone other than Carlos tears out the boards and finds the photo, looks at it wondering why it is there, what unfathomable message it is transmitting from the attic of its mystery? I mention the risks of this further act of forgetting because it seems critical, both in Chile and in South Africa, to urgently ask ourselves how we are to transmit the memory of struggle and resistance, sorrow and hope, to the young, how to transfer something more than a piece of paper, a scrap of celluloid, how to transfer the most elusive thing that needs to be handed on to the next generation: experience. Experience: what it meant to live under apartheid in South Africa, what it meant to survive tyranny in Chile. The photo that the carpenter hid away thus becomes a metaphor for both the endurance of memory and its inevitable state of flux. The photo as an object may be there but the carpenter who once suffered to keep that memory alive will pass. Memory does not exist in a vacuum. Unless it becomes active in the lives of the young, relevant in the lives of the young, it will die as surely as it would have if the security forces had torched the carpenter’s house.
Time, alas, is on the side of death and oblivion.
Nor is relentless time the only problem faced by those who struggle against forgetting. A series of questions about reconciliation percolate from the carpenter’s story. How to reconcile—and I use the word purposefully—how to reconcile the memory of that carpenter with the memory of the men who would burn that photo of Allende, would burn the body and eyes and hands of the man who would remember Allende, how to reconcile his memory with the contrary and powerful and menacing memory of the men who would burn the very shack in which that man lives, burn down the country that is desperate to bring that memory into the open? Enemies remember the past differently. Until they agree in some way on that past, and are able to forge a memory common to both sides, their rivalry will refuse to vanish. That is why Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, with all their flaws and concessions, all the pain they do not expose and all the crimes that may remain unpunished, are an indispensable step in a transition to democracy after a period of systemic violence. These inquiries create a version of history that the majority of citizens and especially their children can access, a story that becomes the inexorable frame of reference for future dialogue and discussions. The narrative in which former adversaries can concur gradually turns into the narrative of the nation itself, a form of collective memory that can persevere beyond the life of its original protagonists, even as we acknowledge that this consensual story far too often leaves out too much of the grief, too many recalcitrant stories, and should be understood as the beginning of a process and not its end.
Because this creation of a shared history through the public airing of a harsh past does not unavoidably lead to true reconciliation. Other steps may be necessary to heal a divided community. Other steps may be needed to reach those who refuse to accept how their own actions have offended our common humanity. Other steps may be vital if we are to keep the past alive for future generations.
Let me revert again to a story, another tale of disputed recollection and even more disputed reconciliation, but more disturbing than the fable of the carpenter and his clandestine portrait of Allende.
I happened to be in Chile in 2006 filming a documentary based on my life, when our nemesis General Pinochet was hospitalized for a heart attack, a stroke from which he would die one week later. I first warily circled to the back of the Hospital Militar where Pinochet was being treated and as I talked to a group of journalists, a woman passed by and insulted me, calling me a dirty communist. I responded with intensity but not aggressively: “Why are you attacking me, ma’am? What have I said or done?” She didn’t answer, swishing away around the corner to the front of the hospital. And there they were, outside the gates of the medical facilities, a group of women, crying out for their dying leader, led by a small, chubby woman, lips thick with lipstick, fingers clutching a portrait of her hero, a litany of tears streaming from behind incongruous dark glasses. There she was, making a pathetic spectacle of herself for all the world to see, defending a man who had been indicted by courts abroad and in Santiago as a torturer, a murderer, a liar, and a thief. And yet, I was paradoxically, inexplicably, uncontrollably moved by her misery. And so, unable to stop myself, I approached the woman, told her how I had mourned Allende and therefore understood that it was now her turn to mourn her leader—but also wanted her to realize how much pain there was on our side.
This sequence of the film is the one that, particularly in Latin America, calls forth the most criticism. How, people ask, could you do that? How could you validate that woman’s grief for Pinochet, honor it as similar to your grief for Allende? How could I extend my sympathy to an enemy who was condoning the misdeeds of Pinochet, had probably celebrated that someone like me was tortured or exiled or executed by her dying hero? What possessed me? That’s what people keep asking.
That’s the right word. In effect, I found myself possessed. I was inexplicably, uncontrollably moved by that woman’s misery, unable to hold myself back, as if some deep turmoil or angel inside had welled up and overwhelmed me.
Psychologis
ts have discovered that a baby will cry more intensely and for a longer period of time when she hears the distressed cries of other children than if the doctor conducting the clinical trial plays back the baby’s own sobbing voice. Think about it: a baby is more upset by the voice of someone else’s agony than by her own troubles. The baby intensifies the cries in solidarity with the other, shares the pain, signals to the other child that she is not alone. For me, this is proof, if we ever required it, that compassion is ingrained in our species, coded inside the circuits of our brain. This is how we managed to become human, by creating the conditions for a social network where the suffering of others is intolerable, where we need to pity and comfort the afflicted. It is certainly not the only thing that defines us as humans: we are also characterized by cruelty and selfishness, indifference and avarice, but each of us can decide what defines our primordial humanity, and I choose the pre-eminence of empathy with others as our most important trait, the base for our evolution. What lays the groundwork for our search for language is the articulation and belief that someone else will accompany us through life. Compassion is at the origin of our species-quest for the imagination with which we can smuggle ourselves into and under alien skin. What possessed me, then, was quite simple: I felt sorry for that woman.
And yet, we also ought to interrogate my act. That hysterical woman, after all, rants against those who have “mala memoria,” literally, “bad memories,” targeting precisely people like that carpenter Carlos who remembers Allende and refuses to forget the crimes of the General. It is her memory against ours and there is nothing I can do in this world—or doubtless in the next one—to change what she recalls, what she has selected to recall in order to defend the identity she has built for herself. Her narrative, her most intimate story, the myth by which she has lived for decades, is that Allende was a socialist who threatened her peace and property, so if Allende’s followers were put violently in their place by the substitute father Pinochet it was in order to save that woman and her family from the hordes, to protect her from the barbarians. She starts from the same paranoia as that other woman in the film who, when I first arrive at the back of the hospital, insults me as she strides away, calling me a dirty communist. With this major difference: the mournful woman holding the portrait of Pinochet is willing to listen, is able to at least have a face to face encounter with me, recognizes me as a fellow human, perhaps because I approached her with gentleness and respect, perhaps because I broke down her preconceptions about the enemy. It’s hard to open a dialogue with a harridan who slurs invective and then shows us her back. But when her ally, that other woman who was wailing, ceased her tirade, I saw a crack in the barrier she had erected and ventured into the potential breech to tell her that though we disagreed on fundamentals, I could still understand her distress. In return, I asked that she try to put herself in my shoes, realize that I was not afflicted by a “mala memoria,” bad memories, but merely memories that did not coincide with hers, that might, in fact, be antagonistic to hers, but that this was not a reason to kill or detest one another.
Before that encounter, I had meditated extensively in my plays and novels on the walls that separate us from those who have done us grievous harm, I have compelled my characters to deal with their worst enemies and ask themselves how to avoid the sweet trap of victimhood and retribution. I had suggested that atonement was essential for any significant exchange of ideas to transpire, essential that he who had benefited from a transgression give up his privileges as proof that he was sincere. But when it came to real life I could not wait eternally for that repentance. In real life, I felt the urge, if only for a minute, to break down those walls myself, to leap across the divide, to imagine a different sort of world.
I was not offering reconciliation and most definitely not forgiveness to that Pinochetista fanatic. For a long-term ceasefire to exist some remorse would have had to bite inside, she would have had to be willing to inhabit my memories, to accept what Carlos the carpenter had been through during twenty-five years trying to keep alive his own river of memory in the midst of the conflagration. I would want her to recognize his right to show his portrait publicly, as she does, without fear. I would want her to acknowledge his right to exist, our right to mourn, our right to remember. She is undeniably very far from that state of grace. But we did create, she and I, some minimal space for a minimal understanding, a gentle interlude—and, as South Africa proves, those truces when ardent foes begin to speak to each other can be the start of something miraculous. You do not arrive at such armistices effortlessly, you often need to drive your opponents to the table through force and cunning, you cannot suppose that such meetings of the mind will simply happen—each small step is fraught with peril and false enticements and perverse illusions. Let me repeat this: each photo, each memory, does not emerge from its hiding place without struggle and suffering, without an immense social movement behind it, without some form of justice enacted.
It is also true, however, that far too frequently those magical instances when adversaries meet and reach at least a pact not to resort to carnage to impose their points of view close just as abruptly as they open and we often find ourselves yanked back to where we began. I can shatter that wall, open a splinter in time and reside there for the snap of a minute, but there will be no further progress unless the other side, people like that woman who insulted me, people like the woman who is closeted in her anguish over the impending death of a tyrant, like the soldiers who raided the shanty-towns in Chile, like those who profited from the suffering in South Africa, manage to take a step of their own, realizing that to admit their own complicity in these crimes is a way of liberating themselves from their own prison of prejudice and hatred.
As South Africa has proven, it is not impossible to make exceptional encounters like the one with that woman last longer than a minute, to become part of a country’s major reckoning with itself.
In 1997, on my first, and up till now only visit to your country, I was taken to District Six in Cape Town, that site of conscience that commemorates what happened in a multiethnic neighborhood torn apart by discrimination. As I toured the museum with one of its guardians, he told me about a recent hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A policeman of Afrikaner origin admitted killing the parents of a child and expressed regret for his actions. When the grandmother of the boy asked him what would happen when she was dead, who would care for this orphan, the policeman had answered, after a pause: “Then I guess I will have to take the child home with me.”
It is a wondrous story. So perfect, in fact, that as soon as I was invited to deliver this Lecture, I decided to make use of it here this afternoon. And in order to give that chronicle more historical heftiness, I tried to track it down through my friends at the Mandela Foundation, but in spite of assiduous research, no concrete reference was uncovered. Nor could curators from the District Six Museum evoke the anecdote nor could several journalists and writers. It was always the same answer: nobody could summon up that story. I cannot, therefore, offer a name now, or put flesh and blood on the protagonists.
Ultimately, however, it may not matter if such a policeman and such a grandmother factually exist, if one said this or the other said that in exactly the way it was recounted to me, it may not matter if my guide at the District Six Museum had heard a garbled version of the tale and then retransmitted it in a different form, because that is how memory often works. Communities give themselves the chronicles they need in order to understand the world just as individuals create for themselves the stories they need in order to survive with a sense of self. If a story is true in its core, if it tells us a higher truth, something unforgettable about ourselves, then it remains true even if it is partly invented.
Or can anyone deny that the policeman was expressing a model of behavior, was informing the grandmother and the eavesdropping world beyond her, that policeman is telling us all here, right now, today, that we cannot undo the damage of the past but
must strive instead to undo the damage to the future, we must prove in our actions tomorrow that we have learned from the terrors and sins of yesteryear? What other way to pay for the taking of the lives of a mother and a father than to bring back home the child whom you orphaned, what other way to pay for a life taken than to give a life back?
Homeland Security Ate My Speech Page 7