Dear friends,
Yesterday I heard yet another voice on the news, trying to plead with people who have not lived through war to resist speaking about war so callously. We hear this plea often from veterans and mothers of the victims of war. It feels as though we have a social amnesia when it comes to the dreadful memory of war. Conversations about dropping an atomic bomb on Iran, for example, are mentioned in the same thread as data centres, fusion cuisine, and Cristiano Ronaldo’s football career—as if they are all on the same level!
In her book The Mournable Bodies, celebrated Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga writes:
“As an urbanite, Pedzi does not know the horrors each person lived through, the kind of violence that not even my aunts have lived through. The kind that leaps from their bowels onto their tongues again and again.”
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela – psychologist on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and prolific academic – reflects on Dangarembga’s book and writes that although the women in the book may have escaped and left the violence of past wars, the violence resists banishment to the past. It has left an indelible imprint and is felt at the most intimate level of their bodies. This imprint is visible in how they narrate their lives and how the community makes sense of itself. Trauma of war sits in our bodies (in our bowels) – yes, also the bodies that were not involved in the war – and finds its way to our tongues.
Gobodo-Madikizela also points out a passage from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which is worth mentioning: “Someday you will be walking down roads, and you hear something or see something going on, so clear, and you think it’s you thinking it up. But it’s when you bump into a real memory that belongs to someone else. The picture is still there. And what’s more, if you go there—you, who never was there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again because even though it’s over, over and done with, it’s going to always be there waiting for you”.
Ironically, Gobodo-Madikizela does not hereby advocate for an avoidance of memory. Quite the opposite. Her whole body of work is in many ways thinking about remembering well. As we say on Remembrance Day, “lest we forget”. My hope is that our 2026 Remembrance service can be an opportunity to remember well: to lament war and the language and mechanisms of war; to name victims of war; and to resist the kinds of memories which leaps through our bowels and onto our tongues. Because memories that are not transformed are transmitted.
Marius