silencing the past – Yvy Truong

http://youtu.be/lnSgSe2GzDc

Okay, so the title for this blog post doesn’t make sense. I feel like I haven’t been making many blogs posts on the texts we have been reading so… Before I talk about Paine, I want to talk about Hacking. Later I’ll be making another post about Fanon, though we read Black Skin, White Masks quite a long time ago. But I think just recording my thoughts on the books are a good thing (even though, in my case, they’re late…*)

Before I begin talking about Hacking, above I shared the trailer for the movie Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind, which I would have to say is one of my favourite movies, and in some ways it does relate to Hacking! Briefly, the movie is about a treatment at this place called Lacuna, where they can erase memories. Things that remind you of pain such as the death of loved ones, heartbreaks, failures, etc., those memories can be erased. It’s as if they never happened at all. I would recommend everyone to watch it, I think it’s a lovely film and I know my summary doesn’t give the movie justice but that’s the general gist of what it’s about.

So on to Hacking.

Close to the end of Hacking’s Rewriting the Soul, he questions the idea of “knowing thyself”, the ability to be self reflective, to rely on narratives, and memory to understand who and what we are. But from Trouillot’s work that we read earlier in the year Silencing the Past, our narratives change the event. Hacking as well gives examples of instances where the narratives, how we speak of the past events that generates our identity, may be far from what actually happened (that to Trouillot would be how the two historicities affect each other). And what also stood out to be was in the case of Pierre Janet, how we may be able to base ourselves upon lies, a believe it so much so that we become and entirely new person. So the command of know thyself is a bit… Vague. I want to use the word trivial, but that wouldn’t be the right word. Absurd, maybe. Do we really know who we are and what we represent? And if so, what is it based upon? This also reminds me of Fanon when he wrote about “the Other”. That we know who we are because we are not “them”; the people we compare ourselves to. So, is it possible to know who we are? Well, the answer seems to be that… No, not really – haha. We are who we are in the context of society, in the context of history, and in the context of our narratives. That seems a little bleak, but here is where I think there is a silver lining! We are given so many narratives, so many interpretations, opinions, etc., The past will always be reinterpreted and will always be analysed in a new light. Because we are presented with a plethora of opinions, to know thyself is a challenge. And though we may never fully be able to know who we are, to strive to understand and to be self-reflective I think, is the more tangible thing to do.

*February New Years Resolution: (1) Stop procrastinating. (2) Stop taking naps in the evening after school.

A Note on Silencing the Past

From reading Silencing the Past from Trouillot… I can’t help but feel a bit nervous about all the things in history that we don’t know about and the things that we might perhaps never know about. One question – and I can’t remember specifically what the question was, but the gist of it was why and how those in power (be it kings, queens, royals, leaders, etc.,) alter the past in attempts to make themselves look better in the future. That makes me nervous for some reason because I think why people would try to alter the past to make themselves look better for the future is because, I think we all fear death and we all want to be remembered once we do die. And I sometimes think that whatever we attempt to do is out of the fear of being forgotten.

On another note, I raised a question on the role of social media in the role of history. Since we are actively involved in history and the way we are involved has certainly changed (for example: facebook, twitter, pinterest, tumblr, this blog, wordpress blogs, etc.,)… could it possibly detrimental? Not to discredit social media, I believe that we get to be involved in current events more so than before where information was limited and where information was restricted. I believe we have access to a fuller picture and where we are allowed to form our opinions rather than have major networks to form out opinions and I much rather this than having out view restricted with limited lenses. But I don’t want to give social media too much credit either. Yes, the way information travels is much faster than how it did before, but with that said, the speed of false information travels rapidly as well. What I worry about is that we might trust it more and not view it as sceptically as we should.

I think I’ll end this post with a little poem…

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.