During refugee week there was an exhibition of art works made by asylum seekers. It coincided with further revelations about the collection of information by security agencies in Britain and the United States. The juxtaposition of these incommensurate events offers food for thought about the importance of remembering.
A highlight of the exhibition was a young Afghan asylum seeker's painting of a brilliant red flower. When asked what it represented, he said it recalled the flowers he used to pick for his mother on the hillsides near his village. As he shared this memory his hearers no longer saw him as an asylum seeker but as a person who was seeking protection from them. They now saw him in his freedom, connected with a rich world and making a claim on his hearers through their connection with him.
That is a small example of the power of remembering. When Polish Jews were herded into the closed Warsaw Ghetto, Chaim Kaplan kept a diary. He died but the diary survives to ensure, as he promised, that 'in our scroll of agony, not one small detail can be omitted'.
The Russia poet, Anna Akhmatova, recalls how during Stalin's purges she stood in a queue of women outside the Lubyanka prison, all seeking news of their disappeared husbands and sons. She was asked if she could describe all this. She answered that she could, and she did. The call to remember was a trust she held for the nation and humanity, not just for herself.
Remembering and recording, whether through words, paint or music, are the most personal and private of activities, requiring space and silence.
They are also a deep affirmation of human freedom. To remember says that you can rise above the things that are done to you, that the story of your life and destiny cannot be controlled, and that you are intimately connected to other human beings and to your world. You are a free person and not a thing to be manipulated.
In its effects remembering is also the most public of activities. That is why the powerful try to control the telling of history. In the Warsaw Ghetto and Stalin's Russia it uncovered the true character of a state that, in the name of security, tried to make people nameless and disconnected, with the value only that the state gave them. The freedom of remembering exposed the emptiness of an apparently all-controlling state.
Remembering