Re-visiting Re-memory: Beloved vis à vis one never remembers alone
By Eve Moeykens-Arballo
In 1987 Toni Morrison published Beloved, Morrison’s fifth novel and most “celebrated” novel to date. Inspired by the idea of a novel about the contradictory logic of parenthood under the conditions of enslavement, Morrison remembered a news clipping she had seen in a book she had published while at Penguin Random House, The Black Book, about Margaret Garner. After facing a return to slavery after escaping, Garner chose to murder of one of her children rather than let them be returned to the owner’s plantation was a jumping off point for Morrison in shaping Beloved. Set in Ohio after the Civil War, Beloved recounts the story of a mother, Sethe who is confronted with a ghost from her past. The novel unflinchingly examines the caustic legacy of slavery, taking the reader into the imprisoning nature of painful memories desperate to stay alive, and how they eventually find their peace.
Very early in our curatorial conversations about one never remembers alone, we knew as a group that the transmissions of memory from generation to generation would prove to be a vital vein in our conceptual process. As we also wanted to center our exhibition around the experiences of people from the global south and diasporas, we were quick to acknowledge that things could get heavy, quickly. We wanted to avoid reminiscing or cultivating nostalgia around painful and often traumatic memories.
Enter Beloved. While the novel is a dive into “the abyss of slavery,” Beloved shows the process of healing from start to finish. The way the ghostly personage of Beloved infects Sethe like an open wound undoubtedly hurts, however, the wound heals; Beloved leaves. The intervention of Sethe’s other daughter, Denver, snaps Sethe out of the spell of despair which was draining her life force. This intervention is followed by the healing presence of community, a community which supports and brings Sethe back to life. Beloved was initially introduced into our conversation as a text which exemplified the importance of remembering to process and heal from painful memories. As our conversations continued, it was Morrison’s notion of “rememory” which took hold as a critical lens through which to look at the exhibiting artists and their work. To quote the introductory curatorial text:
“As a corollary, one never remembers alone also explores ‘rememory,’ as coined by Toni Morrison in her novel Beloved. Rememory refers to the recollection of an obscured memory that can be similar to a haunting, an uncanny sensation of both familiarity and unfamiliarity.” ”
Revisiting this concept after the closure of the exhibition, the reason why rememory felt and continues to feel so right in thinking about one never remembers alone has become richly more complicated.
In Beloved, the concept of rememory is introduced early on. As Denver walks home, she remembers the story of her birth as told to her by her mother. For a moment, through Denver, we enter Sethe’s perspective directly. When Denver enters the house, she notices her mother speaking. Sethe is eventually convinced to explain:
“ I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.’ ‘Can other people see it?’ asked Denver. ‘Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.’”
In this context, Morrison emphasizes how a rememory is a singular and collective experience. A rememory can be experienced by the person whose memory it came from, and it can be stumbled upon. In the context of viewing artwork, as the content is in front of you, the space for encountering a rememory is more specific. It is difficult to describe the intangible impingement that is rememory. The best I can say is that the subject knows when they have come across one. A friend of mine approached me after having seen Boone Nguyen’s Landscape Memory. She very sincerely told me this piece touched her very deeply. As someone whose family disappeared during the Armenian genocide, she felt intimately acquainted with the search for family burial sites.
Still from Boone Nguyen’s Landscape Memory
Nguyen’s work opened a door for her to personally experience this search. Nguyen himself, by choosing film as his medium for this work, poetically creates the “thought picture” that Morrison describes. Landscape Memory is the documentation of a collection of feelings and experiences of a place, a thought picture impermanently permanent displayed on a screen. If we consider how rememory may interact with the artistic process of creating what can be called a memory work, a category which loosely captures all of the workin one never remembers alone, we see that a series of transmissions are taking place. At the first stage, the artists imagine themselves literally or metaphysically in the place of another, or as in the case of Beatriz Cortez Childhood Bedroom, in the place of a past self. In the space of the white cube, we as spectators have a not-so spontaneous interaction with these visual tokens of the past. In the case of my friend, Boone Nguyen’s piece triggered a rememory in her. For the rest of us, the precise nature of how what we viewed will stick with us remains to be seen, as it takes the passing of time to know what will just stay.