Latin America │ DISAPPEARED

 

 

Elegy to memory

 

 

The authorities want to store memory away in an attempt to bury the wealth of rebelliousness it contains. They want to impose limits on when, what and how to remember.

 

On who is remembered and who is forgotten.

 

On who is named and who is shrouded in silence.

 

On which victims and which relatives the official memory will pay homage to and which will be ignored by it.

 

We live alongside those who want to suppress, crush and even domesticate memory, making the dreams the disappeared died for disappear with them.

 

There are those who, from their positions of power, seize memory to market it and sell a sanitized version of it, while presenting themselves as great defenders of human rights.

 

They suffer from a “selective memory,” so selective it becomes a “harmless memory,” a “transgenic memory,” too weak to fertilize the soil with the blood of those who died without ever sacrificing their convictions, holding on to what they believed in and what they were fighting for.

 

Others put memory on a fancy display, to decorate their personal ambitions and conceal their systematic second intentions.

 

We privilege the memory that spells out the utopias we believe in and are still fighting for, the kind of memory that tells it like it is.

 

It’s life itself, in its everyday aspects! That’s where we find a privileged space for rebellion!

 

It’s life with all its resistance, plans, actions and poetry!

 

The kind of life that picks itself up after every defeat and gathers the soiled flags that are left in tatters after so many battles.

 

Not to put them away in a museum of immaculate memories, but to raise them up again to fight another battle and continue the struggle…

 

We will not be an accomplice to the killing of memory!

from Porto Alegre, Jair Krischke

Rel-UITA

     August 30, 2011

 

 

 

 

Image: Elespectador.com / Agencia EFE

 

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   UITA - Secretaría Regional Latinoamericana - Montevideo - Uruguay

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