“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” ― Marcel Proust

I'm really interested in memory and the way it works. The recollecting and retelling of the memory actually alters the memory - we smooth out the bits we want to and focus on others until it is more a story than a true detail of events.

I recently learnt of the Collective Imaginary in a course, and they gave the example of how if you ask people to visualise the Civil Rights movement, they will see images of the march on Washington, hoses and protests, Martin Luther King and so on. But ask them to see the Suffragette movement and they draw a blank, even though HALF the population won the right to vote, it spanned decades and it was photographed so there are images. It was big but slips by with little context in our visual memory. Some images are fed to us as iconic and some are not. In the course I did on Gender and Intersectionality on Edx with the University of Iceland, they said 'History is written by the victorious and the powerful; in most cases, men. Women, people of other genders, the weak, the vulnerable, the uneducated*, those without access to the corridors of power -these people are rarely included in the ways in which history is recorded, disseminated, or remembered' and I think that is probably what was in play here. Our historical memory (of events we weren't present at) are curated for us in a narrative that someone shaped as 'important history'.

I wrote of my own surprise at the difference in Collective Imaginary here and here, long before I knew what it was. This week I had another real life example of the fluidity of memory and how we can alter things without realising it. We are watching the Godfather of Harlem at the moment and I keep commenting how the actor playing Malcolm X looks EXACTLY like him. It's uncanny. Last night I decided to google the actor to see what else he'd been in. I discovered he also played Malcolm X in Selma and the penny dropped. I wasn't remembering what the real Malcolm X looked like, I was remembering the last time I saw Malcolm X depicted! I was actually remembering this actor as Malcolm X five years ago...

For the record, he does look a lot like the real Malcolm X too, but not as identical as I thought!

And so it goes with all memories, we shape our narrative, whether we want to or not.

“Memory is a few lines snipped from a larger story that we are privileged to tuck away between the pages of our minds.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

Have you caught your memory playing tricks on you?

*Note uneducated doesn't mean stupid but if you can't write your story down, it's very hard to get it preserved.

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