Forgetting to Remember: 2020
Memory is a curious thing. The hippocampus on either side of our brains records events, both recent and bygone. But it is not a google drive with infinite capacity, so as new memories are formed, mundane experiences like what we ate for breakfast three days ago are forgotten. Many people, have said that they are happy to say goodbye to 2020. Part of what they are hoping for, is linked to the desire to forget difficult experiences. But what will we forget, and what must we remember?
Personally, as I write during the the Christmas holiday lockdown in London, one listless day folds into the next and I can barely recall what I was doing three days ago. I remember what I was doing on Christmas day or Boxing day but the remaining 10 days are simply hazy memories of quiet hibernation. Yet, there are moments from the last year that remain in my mind like vivid photographs. Empty shelves in the flour section of the super market, desolate motorways when driving to our new home, locked playgrounds. Difficult, tragic experiences, in the past year, like losing a loved one also keep recurring in my mind. But gradually the last traumatic moments sediment to my subconscious, and I recall a whole lifetime of memories together as I go through everyday tasks.
Memory is very personal but also very political. How will this pandemic be remembered, and what will be forgotten? I have for over a decade, studied the politics of indigenous people, and I have learnt that being able to have a continuous history is vital to establishing your identity in mainstream politics. Indigenous histories are punctuated with lapses because of state practices of consolidating one national identity by unimagining those whose histories have been subverted as a result . Indigenous resistance therefore, is to remember and celebrate those forgotten stories, because stories of losing land, losing children, losing heroes is integral to who they are and how they want to be seen in the present.
With this in mind, I ask how this pandemic will be remembered decades from now? The pandemic may be remembered through the journey of a vaccine from laboratories in rich countries to the rest of the developing world. A skewed culturalist account of a virus that came from China may also be told. Perhaps, political choices around austerity and higher taxation, may be explained through the memories of the pandemic. These are, however, dominant narratives. There are other stories that may be buried with time, and these are the stories I turn to here.
For migrant workers in India and Bangladesh the last year was one of negotiating and surviving through new risks as old ones like not having a tenured job, or a stable home exacerbated. For them, 2020 is not a year to be forgotten but what happened before 2020 that led to their exodus from cities and what followed after is significant to how they can position themselves in the new normal. My project on Urban Mobility and the Margins is tracing the changes to the workplace, homes and duties of care on migrant workers in India and Bangladesh, and soon I will share findings from the surveys on this blog.
For women, 2020 is the year that challenges their duties of care to children, elderly and their families in multiple ways. Gendered roles at home changed for both men and women in ways that were determined by what they were expected to do before the pandemic, but also what a crisis ultimately does to their choices and behaviours in the future. Some women may never return to work, others may have blended care and work in unprecedented ways. Still other, may have played vital roles in surviving multiple health and social crises for themselves, their families, their communities. Their stories most be remembered- not as sporadic episodes but as a feminist history of the impact and possibilities out of a crises.
Children stayed at home. Young people could not go to university. Not going to school or college is worrying in so many ways. This last year will have a fundamental impact on their learning, their relations with their families and their peers. Also the emotional experience of living through a crisis will have a lasting effect on young minds. Their stories, are the stories of our future. They are the possibilities and challenges our world will face, and thus must be told.
Finally, there are stories stigma, of prejudice of racialised bodies fighting for recognition under the rubric of Black Lives Matter. Their stories intersect so much with the pandemic, but they neither begin nor stop here. Race, today, is not a token word, it is consciousness, it is hope. The story of the pandemic must be told as a story of race- recognising the vital role that key workers played, the exclusions that are going on in vaccination campaigns in some of the most ethnocentric countries in the world (Israel), the contributions of immigrant scientists, of borders that divided communities as free insiders and imprisoned outsiders (Singapore, India).
2020 may have gone, but the issues that surfaced have not. This last year is a watershed in many ways, and how we remember it, as a continuous history is vital to how we rebuild our worlds!
