Not to Forgive, but to Understand

Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba: Memory, Remedy, & Meaning in Genocide Studies

• Sabah Carrim and Luis Gonzalez-Aponte

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In this episode we sit down with Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba, a scholar specializing in African and African/Black Diaspora literatures and the cultural representations of genocides. Arthur discusses his recent work, 'Memory/Remedy: Against the Soothsayer’s Practice,' and provides a thought-provoking critique of using memory as a solution for past atrocities. He challenges the notion that remembering alone can prevent future violence and emphasizes the need for addressing the underlying structures that perpetuate conflict. Join us for an in-depth conversation that rethinks traditional approaches to transitional justice.

For example, you see Schindler's List and you've never experienced the Holocaust, but somehow you are affected by that film in a way that wounds you and disturbs something about you as a human being that forces you to empathize with that experience. So it changes you essentially. This is Not to Forgive, but to Understand. With your host, writer and scholar of genocide studies, Sabah Carrim. I am your co-host, Luis Gonzalez-Aponte. Not to forgive, but to Understand. Not to forgive, but to Understand. Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba is an accomplished scholar with a deep expertise in African and African/Black Diaspora literatures, as well as genocides and mass atrocities. Anyaduba's work critically examines the ways in which literature and memory shape our understanding of historical and contemporary injustices. In this episode, we explore his insights on the limitations of memory as a remedy in post-conflict societies and the importance of addressing structural violence. Please enjoy our conversation. Hi, Arthur. It's nice to have you on our platform today. We would like to discuss. Well, I would like to discuss in more detail one of the papers that you published recently and this one

is basically titled Memory/Remedy:

Against the Soothsayer’s Practice, which you wrote together with Benjamin Maiangwa and it has been published in the Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice in September 2023. Now I have many questions on the topic of memory in general, and this is a statement you make in the abstract of the article. So I want to start with this question How does memory act as a remedy to historical injustices? First, thanks, a lot Sabah for this opportunity to chat with you and share some insights about my work. At the same time, I want to thank Luis, who is behind the scenes making this happen. Yeah. So to your question. So first is to be clear that we actually are arguing against in that case say that that you cited, we were arguing against the idea of memory as a remedy. Right. So just to have that upfront, but the idea of memory as remedy is something we observed that seems to be gaining increasing traction in the context of transitional justice or post-conflict situations. And we thought that that's remarkable and interesting also because of the context of interest in an African context and the ways that memory and by memory we mean what what is generally now known as collective memory. Now, what's the idea is not that you have the memory of an actress. I also have a memory. That's not generally what you mean. This is more of a group notion of memory, memory that a group shares in the context of mass atrocity, kind of social memory of an actress, and usually such kinds of social memory of atrocities come from cultural representations, the ways that an atrocity had been represented in cultural forms, through storytelling, through parts, but also through commemorative practices, monuments and so on. So we thought that increasingly many societies or post-conflict societies, if you like, are now activating the notion of memory practices such as Truth and Reconciliation Commissions or commemorative events and practices as a way to remedy past injustices or even contemporary or present forms of injustices. And so that was something that we found remarkable. Is the idea of the ‘soothsayer’ is a kind of metaphor that we use to grapple with that. And that I found very profound remarks from the Rwandan context. The work by Véronique Tadjo, a travel memoir in 1998, when she and a group of nine other African writers visited Rwanda to commemorate in writing the genocide. So in her book, she tells this fascinating story, the book is of different kinds of stories that she goes there as a collector story. So she collects different kinds of stories about the genocide and put it together in this fascinating book. And there's this particular story that we found really profound as an anecdote to what we described as memory as remedy. It's a story about a ghost that refuses to go after it has died. Someone has been brutally killed and beheaded and the ghost refuses to die. To leave the community and then goes about knocking on people's doors and people were afraid because the ghost refuses to leave. There's this disorder of the natural way things are supposed to be that costs torrential rainfall. So designing people in a society felt “How do we solve this problem of the ghost refusing to transit to that ascension?” So they call the soothsayer who says, well, let me try my best and enact this profound ritual of appeasement to beg the ghost to leave. But the nature of the ritual was to hear the ghost out. So he pleads with the ghosts to speak, and makes the context conducive for testimony, and the ghosts begins to talk and vent and speak to how he has been brutally killed. And that experience. After which the soothsayer appeases and apologizes to the ghosts on behalf of the community and then begs the ghost, to die and leave society. So the ritual essentially succeeds in getting rid of the ghost and the rain stopping and sort of social harmony, beginning of a new kind of social power out of that ritual. And we saw that story as a metaphor for how many societies attempt to deal with atrocities and mass atrocities past and present in Canada. In recent years. There was also a truth and reconciliation commission enacted in that form of bringing survivors of the Indian Residential School to tell stories about the experiences and the rituals of apologies and sorry and forgiveness kinds of narratives, all in the business of reconciliation, or socially some kind beginning of processes of healing. In Rwanda some aspects of what Tadjo narrated in that story also took place. Even in the Gacaca traditional court process. You also had that kind of social engagement, in testimony giving and leading to some kind of reconciliation as social healing that so in South Africa is a very good example of that. Many other societies tried that. Sierra Leone in the 2000’s after the long civil war also enacted a kind of Truth and Reconciliation commission. You founded on that kind of storytelling practice to bring about this issue right. So many societies. So and we felt there's something going on with these kinds of... ritual of healing versus what it does in terms of framing of atrocities. So if we take that story in its metaphorical garb. But what caused these ghosts beheading the very condition of ghostliness? What cost and how does that ritual address that in the ritual itself it doesn't address anything. It rather seemed to be designed to exercise the ghost troubling society. So it's a very exhaustive practice not to contend with the very conditions or structures of violence that produced the ghost. But to kill society's conscience deals in confronting these ghosts that constantly reminds them of grave injustice done to it. So we thought that many of such practices are like this soothsayer’s exorcist ritual. Do not address the preconditions structures of violence. They are more invested in exercising the ghost of history in order to sort of obscure or conceal the very structures and conditions of violence that continue to produce violence. And they're very present for which is in fact present. And so yeah, that idea of memory as remedy, does have some intellectual grounding, it has psychological context for how people understand the project of memory as some form of healing. Freudian psychoanalysis is also founded on that idea. And some of that scholars have been traced to ancient philosophy, such as Plato's allegory of the cave, in that the idea being that for us to become something so for us to know who we are, to find some kind of healing of beingness, we need to recollect something about us. In the past or pull it out from the unconscious and exercise dangerous memories that we probably do not remember anymore. But you have repressed, in the unconscious and so on. And so in societies, how do you deal with that? You had to go back to the world of the unconscious where these ghosts reside from where they can haunt society constantly, right. So what you're doing is like basically you're questioning the truism that among which is of course accepted truth right by the scholarly community that the way to one of the ways of meting out transitional justice or transitional justice mechanism is through the confessional method, which is to go out there to encourage people to make a confession and to say this is what we did and to actually expect some form of healing through it. And I think that's the basis of truth and reconciliation commissions and committees across the world. That's also the basis of a lot of the projects of memorializations that exist. And I remember reading very recently this statement by one of a scholar who said, Well, statues are statues that are supposedly commemorative are only for the birds. Right? And I thought that was very amused by that. But the point is that I think there are a lot of people who are very skeptical about a lot of these projects of memorialization. On one hand, we want to keep the memory alive. We want to perpetuate this, of course, the adage of never again. And one of the ways in which we want to perpetuate it is by making sure we remember what's happened so that it is not repeated. But I think what you're doing by coming and questioning that truism is perfect because we should never accept anything. Right. The moment we accept it then thought is dead. There's dogma. And of course it will only lead to stupid results. So what you're doing here is that you are questioning whether memorialization of the projects of memorialization have been effective so far. Now, in your paper you speak about the importance of forgetting, therefore the opposite. And I want you to be able to tell us a little bit more about that. I mean, so first... you mentioned something about remembering in order not to repeat the mistakes of the past. And so on. That, in fact, is one of the myths that we addressed in that because it's not true. I did that very idea that if we do not remember the past, then we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past and the present and the future and so on. But in contemporary times we do have memories of of horrible, nasty atrocities in the past and we are still committing present atrocities. So those memories did not in any way prevent us from conceiving being violent. Right. So, that's in and of itself. I mean, is a myth, but that's one of the assumptions on which this idea of memory has remedies. That's right. But the very project of memory itself for those and we have to also acknowledge that are contexts in which memory is very useful. It does it for and for very good reasons. African context as a very good example of colonization, one of the violence colonizers attempted to do on Africa was to destroy memory. African's understanding of its past and to wipe out time in materially and metaphysically, culturally and in different forms. So it was important for different societies to attempt to recover something about their pasts through different ways in which that projects are was was enacted in different societies. So that that we understand why it made sense. But that as a remedy in and of itself is a different question. But projects of memory like mourning they actually address ‘to forgetting’. It's a way actually of forgetting, which is the argument some folks make that we should remember. We should aim much more to forget because the more we remember past injustices, the danger might be that we might get so overwhelmed. Like get very angry and then resort to violence means to redress what we are recalling so that the best approach should be to find ways to forget. Just let the past go and let's move on. After all, we don't have memory of our distant past. Of how societies came to be in different forms, and that not having such memories allowed us to invent new ways of living together, reinvent ourselves, and that for peace to rain, we in fact need to forget. However, the challenge that is that forgetting is in fact not really possible way in which it's proposed. And who forgets? And for what reason? Because, again, powerful systems, especially systems implicated in violence, actually weaponize amnesia as one way in which to cover up what they have done for which in fact memory of atrocities get repressed and thrown into these kinds of ghosts that return in different ways to punch sites. Right so yeah but those who propose memory as remedy I don't think they are against forgetting because the project of mourning for which the idea of memory as remedy is its activity is to mourn and then forget to manage the traumatic memory that, that ghost and gradually if we do it in such a way that you can forget it. I think I also like how you brought in the idea of transgenerational trauma into the picture where you spoke about in your paper how when you don't forget and you carry on that harm to the generations that come up to you, you're traumatizing them. And that's a form of transgenerational trauma, right? Or what we call intergenerational trauma, which is of course, a very big topic that keeps coming up in genocide studies. But also, you know, other areas of work, even in literature, as we know, there's so many people who've written about intergenerational trauma plays out in a whole family and across generations. So, yes, please go on I just wanted to mention this because I think this was very enlightening to me. Yeah. I mean, that could also be those ghosts that refuse to leave. And then they become they manifest in different ways and become trans-generational, inter-generational and in different ways, which that ghosts manifest. But our core argument is in fact, that we should jettison this notion of trauma and the way trauma is invoked in the context of mass atrocities. So the language of trauma, in the context of memory, as remedy and commemorated practices assumes that society is traumatized, giving this experience of mass atrocity and require some kind of reconciling that leads to killing, but also different ways in which people can be reconciled, live peacefully. And how do we arrive at that truth that you should know the truth and it shall set you free. A very good truism again. And so yeah those are the things we quarrel with, now is simply that something or a couple of things actually getting lost because of the emphasis on trauma, not because the there's no perspective for people fleeing from mass atrocity experiences or because of the ways in which the projects of memory that reframed our understanding of mass atrocity. So usually how do we keep those stories, and those stories that sort of help you grapple with the experience and heal and so on. And in the process, before we forge the very political structure of conditions of that, that continue to produce injuries and wounds and focus on the very symbolic culture of storytelling forms that we then deprive of the political value because of the emphasis on trauma and killing. So there becomes more moral, ethical, technologies for addressing some abstract ethics, but not the very structures of violence. So that was what we were more interested in, how storytelling of the kind addressed to the idea of memory as remedy distracts from the conditions of violence that remain present in the business of exercising discourse. So yeah, that was, that was our major goal. And if you look at specific context, South Africa that people hailed as a very success story of the TRC working in fact the very story of the TRC obscured the real victory in the apartheid or post-apartheid South Africa. It wasn't because people gathered and told stories and who collected all these stories on was commemoration and forgiveness and reconciliation and so on. The real victory was, in fact, the political enfranchisement of black South Africans that allowed black South Africans to go and participate in governance. Right. But that's not what people look at and remember what happened. What they focus on is the TRC and the project. So I'm not sure people got healed in the sense that there are traumas that you can heal I'm very drawn to this idea of how we're not focusing on the right elements that happened, the right things that happened when we set up these truth and reconciliation committees. Because I also remember the work of Alex Hinton, the one that is titled The Justice Facade, that was based on the Khmer Rouge tribunal, the ECCC that took place over a very extended period of time, and where Alex Hinton in that book talked about all the many ways in which there was a conversation, for instance, began about the genocide that had not been discussed for the longest time since it happened between, you know, in the seventies and the late seventies and how he basically hinted at the fact that, you know, although of course, setting up the tribunal was for the sake of furthering transitional justice, there were other things that happened on the side that we overlooked, for instance, just the fact of say a tuk-tuk driver driving someone to the tribunal in a very faraway place and sitting down with him and maybe having a cup of tea to say why are we here, and then to start that conversation and say we're here to discuss this genocide that happened many years ago was already a means of starting that discussion. Now, whether this led took that cathartic result, whether this led to healing is something we obviously don't know. And I think it's great that what we're putting forward here as a thought Arthur is the fact that in everything to do with human beings, to expect that there will be definite results out of a conversation is a little bit idealistic, a bit romantic even, you know, And so I think we have to be very grounded in realizing that as scholars, as people who are activists as well in the field, we can only hope for certain results to be produced out of all of these steps we take. Also to look at the very projects of TRC as grounded in the politics of power right? So there's the work they are doing but for whom are they doing that work for, right? In many contexts they do the walk of maintaining the status quo of power by alleviating or giving people a sense that the kinds of problems they have with the state, for example, are being alleviated. Right? So think of the word reconciliation generally evoked in these kinds of contexts. There's actually, in many cases, no basis for that vocabulary because to reconcile, if, for example, we have a war and we had this moment of conciliation before the war and we are being reconciled is to return us to that prior relationship of conciliation. But in many of these conflicts, there wasn't any kind of prior relationship of conciliation that would be reconciled. And so it’s in the context of colonization and genocide in the Americas that, for example, Canada, there wasn't a moment of conciliation between settlers and indigenous peoples, same as it was in South Africa. There wasn’t a moment of conciliation between our colonizers and black indigenous South Africans, and that's the same in many other contexts. So what happens is systems of power rely on these rituals to normalize the condition, distract from the very structures of violence and focus on healing trauma. You are broken so let’s facilitate that process, tell us your stories and they cannibalize people. These are the kinds of stories they try to get from, in order to exorcize the very ghosts that constantly charges society of injustice. Right. So those that exoticism, these these what we find, in fact very pernicious in this project of men. And also this stage theory, right. Whenever we hear about, for instance, or when you mourn, you have to go through denial, anger, depression, acceptance. And we all know that we can't rely on these as definitions. So even when we speak about healing or reaching a certain cathartic point in the process, it's not like somebody is healed and there's catharsis that he's going to go home and everything's going to be okay thereafter. He can get back those feelings of anger or violence or whatever at any point in time they can come back. So I think it's great that we're questioning the basis of, again, these truisms as we say. That we take for granted in everything that we are in, the material that's given to us. And so on one hand, just to summarize, whatever we've talked about so far, on one hand we have we do acknowledge the importance of remembering, right? So we think as as a basis we lay our assumptions on the fact, our assumptions are that we need to remember so as not to repeat. First of all, we know that we will repeat even if we remember. And then I also think a little bit of a digression here. I also think very often of how especially because we're talking of the elections here in America, and every time there's any talk about elections anywhere in the world, for that matter, there are always people who come up with statements about how people don't remember how such and such person did whatever in the past. And now they look at him, look at them. They're voting for the person again. They don't remember. Right. So on one hand, we want people to not forget, right? In this context, we blame people for the holes of memory, right in the system that stops them from making the right decision. So what happens is that there is an arbitrary, forgetting and remembering that's happening in every individual and every individual. We also, by the way, speak about how important it is to forget, for instance, birth pangs, because we say that if women remembered birth pangs, they would never have more children. So there you go. You have moments when you have to remember and you don't. And there are moments when you have to forget and you don't. So my question then or, you know, as a means to find the juste milieu in this whole like confusion, this whole chaos of memory, of remembering and forgetting. My question is, as genocide scholars, how do we think ahead or how do we make sure that we establish a certain golden mean a certain sort of like proportionate way of approaching the project of memory, realization of remembering, which is important because it's not. But at the same time of making sure that we also implement means of forgetting. Because I don't think I know about active means of implementing to remember, but I don't think we speak about implementing means to forget, which obviously just by saying it right now, I can imagine how many people would be very upset that just the thought of forgetting anything at all. But as we pointed out in this little chat we have so far is it is important to forget because of, for instance, trans-generational trauma, trans-generational trauma, it's important to forget also for the very many other reasons of it's not important to forget, but we do forget and it's a natural part of our system. So back to you. My question is, how do we establish that golden, juste milieu? I mean, that's a very complex, but also a very profoundly important question. And I think it's to go back a little bit to understand that memory in the context in which we are we are discussing for me is the over representation. Right? It's not that is an exact thing that I remember about the past that remains, authentic, and true and unchanging. It's the case that projects of memory are works of cultural representations, the ways people tell stories and a lot of stories people tell, for example, in the context of testimony. There are testimony stories, atrocity testimonies. So they are telling these stories in order to testify to something, someone else could tell this story in a very different way. That is not to testify. It could be a tragic story. It could be a comedy. That might not necessarily be functioning as a testimonial, but doing the different kind of work. And you could also be a victorious kind of story. A story to legitimize or to mock to ridicule people who have suffered or to justify a particular violence in context where perpetrators of atrocities are victorious and remain victorious. Usually they tell stories about the atrocities as the right thing to do as a way of defending themselves and in ways in which they are still memories but represented in different ways. So it's how these memorials represent in the past for us generating different ways of engagement, different kinds of meanings that we are looking at here and we are saying in the context of memory as remedy they are often generally said as stories addressed to testimonials and trauma healing in a way that then reframes the understanding of atrocity what that past meant and how we are interacting or encountering that past in memories. So yeah, that's how again, you can't tell how to represent experiences. And even sometimes the interpretation or the parts of local representation differ in a way that different groups could use this same kind of story for different meanings, different interpretations and push towards different points, interestingly. So that's a very human condition, the complexity of what we are dealing with, the fact that nothing remains exactly anything. It's how we choose to frame and reframe that for which we think, in fact it's not in these ways in which the discourse on trauma and healing that we should find the answer as to correcting, redressing, and addressing some of these problems that has to be somewhere else. And because that discourse focuses on something that doesn't actually change anything about what has happened, it's just more of the symbolic, as against addressing the structural preconditions or conditions of violence. So if we ask, ‘what is postcolonial’ and I indicate postcolonial in quotes because there’s no 'post-colonial’ anyway. It's still a very colonial system we have in Africa. But let's use that in the post-independence African context known for mass violence. There’s rarely any decades since the 1960s that you don't have horrible mass violence producing thousands, causing if not millions of deaths in different African countries. All right. How do we deal with that? Using testimonials. Telling about what had happened and so on. Gathering people to share stories that are more or less familiar. I think, yeah. If you listen to the testimonies from Rwanda, they sound very similar to testimonies from Burundi. The testimonies in Liberia and Sierra Leone, in Nigeria, in Zimbabwe and so on across different parts of Africa. Those stories sound alike. What do we do with that? How does that heal anything. Does it rather distract us from asking what is actually producing these kinds of violence in Africa and how do we deal with that? What exactly is causing that? I'm apolitical. What kinds of structures are producing that violence in Africa? Why are we not thinking of how to deal with that in very serious ways. And questions about justice. How do we deal with situations of injustice that result from these kinds of mass atrocities that are experienced. By healing? Is that it from justice? What kind of justice is that, especially in societies where perpetrators continue to behave in the same community of victims, those survivors that was the case in Rwanda, that was the case in Sierra Leone, Liberia, the case in Nigeria. And there are very complex conditions in it, for example, where kids participated in killing. What do you do with the kids? Thousands of them. Do you jail them? Do you kill them? What do you do with it? So this is not easy stuff. But when we frame things around trauma, healing and memory as a remedy, I think we we distract from asking the right questions that probably will allow us to understand much more what’s good. I completely agree with you. So I think what is very clear from this conversation is that the value of testimony, the value of speaking about trauma, of the confessional in this whole sort like move towards transitional justice has to be evaluated for it has to be used for different reasons than just geared towards, for instance, healing. So by studying these patterns, these testimonies from I think you mentioned the patterns in Africa, I would see the patterns across the world as well. You know, all the the violence that suffered across different countries. So there is merit in using these testimonies to analyze patterns of violence. And also, I do remember one of the guests I had on the platform here spoke about how there is a certain if you for instance analyze patterns of violence, you notice that the patterns of violence against the same community repeatedly over a long periods of time and maybe therein lies also a merit in remembering, right. Whereby then we can record these acts of these atrocities against these populations to record this consistent attack over a long period of time. I mean, we are now also talking about Palestine and now we're turning back into history and looking at what happened during the Nakba and and we're also looking at how these patterns of violence are similar against all the different cities across Palestine. Right. So when you're looking at all of this, it's important to tap into the recurrence of these events. But at the same time, what I'm thinking about right now is on the issue of memory and forgetting and remembrance, I'm also thinking about some of the other terms you introduce into the article, which are relevant to me. I think even as a writer, as a creative writer, where use you employed words such as prosthetic memory. We have memory, which I think what you alluded to was when you borrow from the experiences of other people and you make them your own and you write about them, could you tell us more about that? I think we mention that a little bit marginally, because it wasn’t the at the heart of what were saying, but also because we, I believe, we were very critical of that. And again prosthetic memory going back to Landsberg’s work it functions again as culture representation. It's how people encounter or use other atrocity memories, prosthetic or vicariously true, all true representations through watching a film. For example, you see Schindler's List and you've never experienced the Holocaust, but somehow you are affected by that film in a way that wounds you and disturbs something about you as a human being that forces you to empathize with that experience. So it changes you essentially. and you go with that to engage subsequently. So that's part of what I think Landsburg was interested in. The empathy that atrocity experiences that we have not experienced by ourselves could cause in us, provoke for us in our encounter with culture representations. I prefer much more because again it came that that very interesting theory of memory but also very problematic way of thinking about atrocity memory as I see it, because it assumes that I have to identify in order to empathize the way in which I connect with that kind of memory that I haven't experienced is through this kind of prosthetic binding, not outwards, that's to commit. I have to, for example, I don't have the hand and you attached this artificial part, it has to become part of me in order for me to connect it. If for whatever reason it doesn't, then it has failed, empathy hasn't happened in the way she defines empathy. It means that it does not fully function in the right Otherwise there wouldn't be any problem when we watch roots, we will be happy, we will empathize with black people. But that's not true. We've seen a lot of films about black experiences we are still oppressing black people and killing black people, police shooting and so on. So it hasn't really achieved that prosthetic thing. Another theory is multi-directional memory that assumes that the kinds of meanings we come into, about one particular atrocity experience, usually it's the product of the entanglement so of that atrocity with other atrocities even the Holocaust is not on its own. We think it came into being through mixing and entangling. With other atrocities, especially atrocities in Africa, but also slavery. And other atrocity experiences across different parts the world. In Vietnam war and so on. That again is two different ways in which people are thinking about how atrocity memories work. How we interact with them, where we come into different kinds of meanings about them and the ways they are supposed to either affect us or not. And so on. The way in which prosthetic memory ignited, I mean, or rather marked me when I was reading your paper was because I immediately thought about, for instance, Wilkomirski, who was accused of writing a fake memoir. It was scandalous because he claimed to be a Holocaust survivor. And there was a whole discussion that began in the aftermath where the question was, Are you allowed to write a fake memoir about a genocide? And I thought when you mentioned the word prosthetic memory, I started to think about that because I was wondering if in this world where in the in the world of writing, for instance, we're now told over and over again that we can't, for instance, try to speak about somebody else's experience of life. If we're talking about a person of a different identity. For instance, because that amounts to stealing the person's narrative. And we may, for instance, represent the person in a you know, in a mistaken way. And therefore we are cautioned against doing that as creative writers. And I think there's a very big discussion about it that's still going on. And writers such as Zadie Smith, I remember her great essay called

Fascinated to Presume:

In Defense of Fiction, where she takes a contrarian view and and speaks about the importance of being someone else. So trying to empathize with different people around us in creating these different characters so as to actually, you know, engage with these other people's realities. And I'm completely for that perspective, for that, for that point of view in terms of writing. But going back to again, prosthetic memory, and maybe that's my reading of it, and it's probably entirely different from what it was meant, but I often imagine being both a creative writer and a genocide scholar, what it would be like if I were to write a fictional account of genocide and you know when Wilkomirski instance was accused, and I think he was called out by The New Yorker as being a memory thief for what he did. And then there was subsequent discussions where some commentators said that the very fact that people are creating fake memoirs such as him shows that there is an abundance of literature out there on the Holocaust that people can actually fake them, you know, So it shows how in fact, we have been very triumphant in documenting that atrocity that people can now reproduce it, you know, without having even experienced it. So I'm getting into many different branches of conversation here. But just to stick to the point just to go back to the point, the question that came to my mind when I read this term that you used in the article you wrote which is prosthetic memory is to what extent is it ethical? And that's, of course, a very subjective evaluation. But how difficult is it to write about another person's experience of genocide? How ethical is it or how possible Is it to empathize with another person's experience of genocide? You know, I think you and I have had a discussion previously also about how in many conferences across America, across many other countries, also not just America, but whenever the concept of the context, whenever the subject of genocide comes up, people often the local audience often starts referring to other examples of violence in the country and in America, specifically people. The audience largely relates to school shootings because that's something that's deemed relatable. Because it happens here so often, it is constantly in the news and also because it is, of course, a they are instances of extreme violence, and that's the closest an American audience can come to the can come to in terms of understanding genocide, the genocide that's experienced in other countries. Right. So, yeah, there are many questions here, but this is just a way telling you that the term prosthetic memory stirred up all of these thoughts. I mean, and you're very right. I don't think Landsberg would disagree with you on the way you read prosthetic memory, because I think part of the project was, in fact, to counter the criticisms of the commodification of atrocity experiences or memories and the fact advocate for the kinds of empathy and connection and these these ways of using other people’s memory. As something very positive. And politically admirable. But it's one thing to write about. I don't think I'm against writing about other people’s experience as I that should in fact be done. And people are doing that. Or empathizing with other peoples experiences. That's of course, so many writer. In not most writers? Who write about these kinds of things. That's the goal. I think you want people to empathize with these experiences, but that's different from faking or lying about an experience, right? That isn’t yours. So that's like lying and that suggests a different kind of intentionality. Again, commodifying someone else’s experience and taking advantage of it because you wield some kind of cultural social capital to be able to do that. But there are also genuine reasons why people fight against these kinds of appropriations, if you like, giving again, history of colonization and the fact that we don't have an equal culture market. Right. If I say something and one white professor somewhere else says the same thing at the possibility that people will hear me is way lower compared to that guy. It could be institutional it could be race, it could be different kinds of things. Right. So we are dealing with something really complex, but also a history of oppression and denial of voice and agency to people that activated these kinds of gate-keeping. Who tells whose story. When white white Europeans kept telling African stories for example, for Africans, misrepresenting things, writing stories that normalize to violence. Europeans are did to Africans, continue to do to Africans. Then there has to be some kind of suspicion. It has to be gatekeeping of who writes about African experience and why and to what end? So that's I think part of why you have these kinds of agitations and people being worried and anxiety over that. But on the other hand I don't disagree that that people should engage with other people’s experiences in fact connect much more into in the context of trauma. It becomes very difficult. Trauma literatures deal much more with people's own voice, their own experience. They own it, it’s authentic when they tell it. You cannot tell my trauma because you don't know that trauma, as though I already know my trauma. In fact, traumatized people don't actually understand their trauma. That's because to understand it usually not to be traumatized. Right? So sometimes you need another perspective. Another gaze upon the subject of trauma. And it's not just one voice. And there are the Rwandan example. 1998, a group of African writers, ten of them, most of them, only two of them are Rwandans, the other eight of them were other Africans from different countries Kenya, Senegal, different parts of Africa, Chad and so on. And they visited Rwanda to write about the genocide. And the book and works they had produced out of that project remained very profound and helped to inaugurate a new way of thinking about the genocide different from our Western writers who were writing about what happened. So people had done that successfully, if you like, in some of that context. So it wasn't unethical, but this they had to grapple

with these kinds of questions:

are we qualified to write about this genocide? Whose memory, because the project was, quote, Rwandans writing as a duty to them. I'm also it's also starting to make me review what I've experienced living in different countries. When, for instance, in Malaysia when I was in Malaysia, there was a big critique about the omission of certain key events, historical events in Malaysian history, for instance, a Japanese occupation and the atrocities committed by them in the country, which are not mentioned overtly in history books and are not taught to students. So a lot of people feel they're that it's a form of like denial, right, of what happened. And then you also then, of course, in America, we speak about what happened to Native Americans. But now that has changed over the last few decades. So we're we're increasingly speaking about that and making it more obvious than it has ever been. So the question is then, you know, taking active steps to stop discussing a historical event that was violent and sorry, but a quick digression as well, because now I remember also these conversations with my friends from Iran would keep speaking about, you know, the attacks on the country, the bouts of violence of the country by the Muslims from the Arab, you know, the Arab world in, again, a historical event that transformed the country and robbed them from some of their very deeply ingrained practices, including their own religion at the time of Zoroastrianism. And how even 2000 years later, I remember documenting this in my diary, then this was still a conversation that very young Iranians who were my age then, we were all students in our early twenties we're still talking about. So how do some people go onto discuss this violence that may have happened thousands of years before and still make them worth remembering? Events Worth remembering. This is a very important subject. I also want to now if you don't have any other comments on this, but I want to discuss the details before the end of the idea of collective memory. What does collective memory mean for you? The idea that a particular experience, a particular event is experienced as a group or as a collective and then remembered as such. Right. So if, for example, there's a war. So the collective memory usually function in the context of events that affect groups of people in society like wars, mass atrocities, genocides, but also some good things in football games. We needed particular tournament championships and so. Right, so things like that. But well, what exactly is that memory? Where is it? Is it how specific individuals remember it? And then they come to get that to remember that would be impossible to connect. But what happens is over time, there are maybe cultural institutions out there that they see you and pick what becomes collective memory. Again this is all cultural representation it could be a few individuals who I interviewed and whatever they've said collected as a representative account of an event that becomes some kind of reference to that event that produces the collective memory. It could be a museum dedicated to something between that museum, you have different representations that all work together to form this thing we call collective memory. It could be works of art in stories, literatures and so on. But the thing about collective memory is that it's no one specific individuals memory an individual's memory, then functioned as an example for the collective. So that and collective trauma to extend that also functions in that. I think what's scary is the possibility that a lot of this could also be fabricated. What about fabricated collective memory? And the reason I say that is because I'm actually thinking about how when I was doing my research on memoir literature recently and this is ongoing, I think I've kept mentioning this on the podcast, but that's because I'm working on the paper right now for an edited volume on that. And one of the subjects that keeps coming up is how when people wanted to testify about what happened during the Holocaust, many of them and the director of Yad Vashem spoke about it. And this is why I came across that that mention in a book where there was this questioning of these confessions recorded and collected, right. Of what happened during the Holocaust. And There was and there was a tendency that was detected of, you know, borrowing accounts from other people and also borrowing accounts from facts, which were already mentioned in newspapers and things and making them your own. So, for instance, if you experience trauma in a certain area and you don't remember that area because you read that people were traumatized in that area, you sort of borrow that memory, you make it your own. And you see, I was there when the person was probably not there. So I'm not speaking about concocting violence or concocting traumatic incidents from scratch. I'm not going there at all. But what I'm seeing is how memory can be built over time based on it being borrowed from different people or different accounts. I think Schindler's List for that matter, because you mentioned the movie was of the most triggering pieces of art because it triggered, I mean, not in the conventional sense of triggering, but it triggered a wave of survivors who actually experienced trauma to come forward and speak about their stories. Because when you're given a form right to represent something, you finally know how to package it. And I think we know this both as creative writers, you and I, that sometimes all we need is the right kind of form to understand how it works and then what we go about doing is we package it with our own stories and our own experiences. So I think that's what Schindler's List triggered. And I think as I said, the idea of collective memory triggers this alarm because of this one reason I just mentioned how a lot of it could be concocted. One. And secondly, I also remember this incident, this or rather this account I read about Loung Ung, who is a Cambodian genocide survivor, and she is the author of Firstly Killed My Father, which was adapted to which was adapted recently and turned into a film directed by Angelina Jolie. And I remember reading two or three articles about how Loung Ung has been criticized because the title of her book is Firstly Killed My Father, and the subheading is Daughter of Cambodia. And people criticize her because first all she did not give a proper account about how old Angkor Wat the temples were. And she also gave the details of a recipe, a famous Khmer dish noodle dish. And she mentioned adding cilantro to it and you know, it triggered a wave of protest because some of the Cambodians said that we don't add cilantro to, that dish. And therefore obviously insinuating how dare she, you know, make up these memories or rather, how dare she call herself the daughter of Cambodia when she doesn't know the recipe for something that is so authentically Khmer? So when it comes to collective memory, I have these alarm bells ringing in my head because of these two reasons of how much pressure there is. For instance, on authors like Loung Ung, on survivors, like Loung Ung, and because they hold that responsibility to give a true account, and we all knew how the word authentic and true so politically charged, what is truth and who holds the truth? Who has the right to tell the story in the way they want and do we have to double check everything we see about something that we experience before we actually write it down? So that's what I'm saying. Any do you have any thoughts about all this? Yeah. So I think just to go back a bit, collective memory is fabricated and so we understand it clearly. There is nothing authentic about it. It's a fabrication. And I don't mean it in the negative sense that people are deliberately manipulating things. I mean, it's in the sense that it's constructed. It's a work of social construction and a work of the imagination. So it's not something out there that people reflect for what it is. Again collective, memories, is a concept from the 1920s see, used to challenge historiography, especially when history was written for the state official histories of the states account of how things, how the past was and so on. So people could then talk to specific individuals who lived through many photographs or letters written, could then challenge aspects of official history and so on. So that was part of how the concept evolved over time. But I'm saying that what becomes collective memory is a product of academic scholarship, as against what is out there in the real world.. So someone's story could become part of what is considered collective memory. And even that story itself the way its told, the context in which it's generated and so on is a work of fabrication, even if it's something that happened to the person, really. So again, testimonies let's use this. Truth and Reconciliation Commission you invite survivors of the past atrocity and they tell stories. You invite perpetrators, bystanders and all different groups, actors and players, they all tell stories. And we pull these stories together and say, well, these from the collective memory of that atrocity. But we know that these stories are told in a particular context with particular reason, different kind of kinds of things would have gone into that, I'm telling something we have to recollect it at that moment, which might be different. If you call me again and I start telling that story. So together the work, produced constructed within a particular historical moment, is a work of fabrication, essentially. We could look further and say, I would go on to say again, based on my reading, it's not just collective memory that's fabricated. That's a work of art. It's the act of remembering, therefore the act of just sitting down, not just necessarily to write, but to remember and to even orally transmit a story is actually going to be fabricated to something extent. Because you recall it from your imagination. So recalling is already fiction, right? So, even though it's based on what happened to someone, what they experienced in real life. Recalling it is a very different thing. So you're already writing and narrating it an organizing it in a particular way to make it meaningful. But experience wasn't organized or narrated in that sense, so it's not meaningful in that sense. But to recall it and narrate it, there's already that fictionality because you are plotting it, you are giving it a different life. So collective memory, this is a work of fabrication. I don't think that's a conventional approach. What is in convention, is the project. How it's being used in different ways and, and it's all always contested. Different groups always contest different aspects of what comes to be categorized as collective memory. Think of slavery. What is the collective memory of slavery? There's no one narrative about slavery, there are diverse aspects of the experience that you can then pull put together. It's always intention, with disagreements with different aspects of what we don't agree with. But the larger picture is that it’s a work of fabrication dedicated to different kinds of projects. And in our own work we are more interested in how it's being used as a way to remedy past injustices. And then obscuring questions about the structures that continue to produce violence. So we've talked about memory, we've talked about prosthetic memory, we've talked about collective memory, we've talked about the virtues of remembering and forgetting. But there's one more type of memory that I'm remembering right now, which I came across not in an academic, not in an academic work, but in a work of fiction. Recently, in a short story, and this was the idea of borrowed memory. And I like that. For me, it's different from prosthetic memory. Although it sounds the same borrowed memory for me is in the context that I was reading it, and I find that fascinating is when say, you hear your mother, say that, you know, my mother in law, your grandmother used to come to me and show me how to wear this sari and tie a knot, or whatever it is. And then this mother, your mother goes on to give the details about how that was done. And so suddenly, as you grow older, that becomes part of your memory because you remember that grandmother coming and showing your mother have to tie a sari and yet you were not there when it happened. And so that just becomes part of everything that is you and that you remember with the clearest imagination yet you were not there. I mean, that's fascinating. I haven’t heard of borrowed memory, but what you describe now is familiar. Right. And it's, again, part of culture, part of heritage, forms of memory, traditionalist aspects of memory as well. But very fascinating. And sometimes you hear people say things like, my grandma used to say. And so and I probably never actually heard it directly from your grandma, but from there mom. But the reference the grandma because this thing, this authority that is invisible with that allows for some kind of wisdom to be made. I mean that's very interesting well borrowed but to use borrowed then suggests that you are lending it and you return it right so. Yes. But I don't think I'd be too literal there because I don't see how in that sense that memory would be returned unless it's about by writing about it, you're returning it. It's not as though you borrowed from the future, from the children, and you learned from them to give to the children. In which again, it connects it to that notion of heritage. Or even to this transmitting a memory from inside your home. And you're putting it in writing and you're transmitting it to the world. So I think that's where you going forward or pushing that idea of borrowing a memory makes sense. But the other thing I want to say is you, know, we're both academics, we're both writers. I don't know whether you find this a challenge, but I personally find it extremely interesting whenever I hear or I learn about new concepts in academia, and then I want to use them in creative writing, but I don't want to become too technical so as not to lose my readerly Crowd, which is more diverse course in terms of the backgrounds and the knowledge compared to a more focused group of readers in the scholarly context because most people would be from a genocide studies background. So I'm just saying that sometimes even these terms like we talked about, as I said, I saw the term a borrowed memory. And to be more specific, the author I read from used it to quote “In my borrowed memory”. And then she went on to write whatever she had to write. But I'm just saying, if we have to use terms such as prosthetic memory and collective memory and these terms, which of course already have academic currency, if we were to use them in creative writing, how would we write them and how would we make sure that we wrote them in a way where our audience. I would diverse audience would be able to or varied audience rather would be able to understand what we really meant by them. I mean, while you were talking. I just remember the Toni Morrison’s,'re-memory’ right? Which is one of the most complex theories of memory I've encountered. And it’s in fiction. And re-memory, people have been scholars that have been unpacking that in different ways. And it keeps meaning different things, keeps reimagined in different context. But the ways described in the story, which I find really fascinating, is the idea of bumping into someone's remembering, and so an experience never in your life encountered. But someone else experienced it and is there and one day you just bump into that memory and suddenly realize.‘But this is not my experience’. How is it possible that I encounter an experience this way that I can remember it being in this to be like, what was that? And people have actually confessed to having that kind of experience of bumping into other people's memories of a particular encounter. Say slavery and so on. Or entering a house. I'm feeling that you are living someone else's memory in that house. You couldn't explain. What's that? You mean? That allows one to think about the aspects of prosthetic memory. But then you also have these theories about people believing that they are reincarnations from the past because they have these experiences. Right? So you have these different ways in which memory plays out in the lives of different individuals and you know, how it takes on these different forms. And it's quite fascinating. And what you're talking about is also the feeling of deja vu, you know. But the idea of re-memory in Toni Morrison's work is forever, right?. So the and that's the writer who picks on, coins this theory and uses it in writing in very interesting ways. And there are many writers who actually use very big ideas,. And write philosophical works, just essentially to explore those ideas stories. There are so many of them. I think Milan Kundera, for example, does things like that. I think Milan Kundera has a also one of his novels called Memory and Forgetting. And I'm also now remembering Nabokov, who writes one of my most favorite novels is his novel Speak Memory. But back to Milan Kundera very quickly. I remember being very marked by his work on memory, where he spoke about the experience of going back home when you left, and you've been away for many years and you go back and the first reaction of people is to speak to you as if you'd never left without them realizing that here is a different individual who's left and being in a different country and changed and becomes something else and has maybe different hobbies and different passions. But it's an interesting experience when you when folks speak to you as if you're the same person and you've actually never left. And that's something I find very profound and meaningful in this context of like memory and forgetting. Yeah, Yeah. So you're right. I mean, even when we speak about because we spoke about intergenerational trauma earlier, that's also a very common theme in many novels, Is it? Gabriel Garcia Marquez who writes about the One Hundred Years of Solitude and of course, treats the subject of intergenerational trauma as well in detail. And I think that's the canonical work on the subject. That's the most famous book on the subject. So, yes, you're right. In fact, fiction allows us maybe to have to explore these more complex themes more directly and effectively than academia that expect new terms to be generated immediately. Once you've identified something. And you have to justify and I think fiction, you are free to explore and, make mistakes, do whatever you want. There's more poetic license to doing stuff like that than academic writing that demands a different kind of engagement. You have to prove you have to make sense of things for your reader and provide very logical, coherent arguments. The rationalizations that are expected of you in academia. That's true. Well, thank you so much Arthur. We have spoken for the first time on the podcast, but this is not this is just one of the many conversations we've had, and I've always enjoyed every one of them. So thank you very much for being a guest on this platform. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to chat with you as always. This was Not to Forgive, but to Understand with our guest Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba. To our listeners, don't forget to like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions.