Sandra Laing can’t remember who took her away from the whites only school when she was kicked out. She can’t remember if her Dad was a dickhead who hurt her mother. She can’t remember the details around her mother’s threats of suicide. She can’t remember the names of girls she was friends with at the all white school–or even the name of the girl she was a roommate with. She can’t even remember the name of the black woman who helped Sandra’s mother around the house and who she felt most comfortable with as a child.

The classmates of Sandra, all grown up now, can’t remember anybody teasing her. Or the principal humiliating her or mocking her. They can’t remember even “seeing that Sandra was different.”

As the author notes, this “forgetting” what is right in front of your eyes–this ability to not see and/or relearn what is unchanging and completely visible–is a phenomenon introduced and encouraged by the nation/state. How long was interracial sexual relationships designated “illegal” by the nation/state–and yet there are millions of “colored” (the legal definition of mixed or bi/multiracial) people in apartheid South Africa.

The forgetting happened on both sides. The skill of forgetting has been forced and encouraged on citizen populations by nation/states for decades. For centuries.

It happens to people we know.To us.

And yet, the only ones who ever seem to be interrogated about “not remembering”–where the real investment is in remembering–is on the shoulders, bodies, minds of the people who are the most brutally harmed. The ones who were raped. Who saw friends and family murdered. Disappeared. The ones who sometimes have “remember” scarred into their bodies by people who “don’t remember” either.

Where did the broken bones come from? Why can’t 30,000 families find their loved ones? Why are all the babies being born without bones? Why won’t plants grow in the jungle anymore?

When survivors give the answers–they are not believed until a nation/state that is invested in misremembering finally agrees.

And oddly, the only thing that knocks that shaky memory of the nation/state back into place is the retraumatisation of survivors through forced “remembering.”

When was the last time a survivor ever got away with: every single person in my family has some type of cancer. As do all the people who live downstream from the local factory. I think the factory might be doing something to the water.

Don’t see what is right in front of your face. You’re not black. You’re white. You’re my daughter. No, we have no records of ” .” Are you sure you have the name right?

What would happen if every man woman and child who has been raped “remembered?”

And yet–I rebel at that question.

What would happen if every man woman and child who has raped–remembered?

And how would the shape of “activism” and “therapy” and “new world” change if the onus to “remember” shifted in such a manner?

What would change for survivors if the burden of “remembering” was shared or lifted from their bodies as much as possible?