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What do we know and remember about ourselves?

Last week, searching for some papers, I opened an old trunk almost forgotten in one of the least used corners of my house: in the basement under the stairs.

I did not find what I was looking for, but I did find many memories from my past, including a picture from when I was a child. I think it is the only picture of my childhood I still have with me.

Opening that trunk let me to reflect on how much we really know and remember about our own past, and how much we are allowed to remember. This is not a superficial question, because remembering the past is part of the present identity of each person and, therefore, of the future project of life for that person.

In other words, a person without a pass lacks a place in history and tradition to anchor his or her identity. That person has no future either and is doomed to repeat the same day over and over again (as it is seen in some sci-fi movies.) That person will never arrive to any destination because he or she lacks a starting point.

I think one of the most emotionally traumatic experiences for any immigrant is the pressure to adapt to the new country, pressure that many times (wrongly, in my opinion) means to cut all ties with the native country.

In response to that pressure (some times overt, many times implicit), many immigrants decide to keep their own past in a real or imaginary trunk, and put the trunk in a forgotten corner of their homes and their lives.

Other immigrants resist all attempts of abandoning anything connected with their native country. Neither completely forgetting about the native country nor totally rejecting the new one are good attitudes. In fact, both extremes are pathologically wrong.

Opening my old trunk led me to ask myself what had happened to me that I have forgotten so many things about myself. I think three thinks have happened. First, life itself. Life’s constant challenges and changes leave few opportunities to reflect and remember, except only in certain special occasions.

Second, the generational discontinuity. My grandparents told me stories about my great-grandparents. Now, however, with my parents long gone and living thousands of miles away from my native country, no “old person” is telling stories to my children.

Third, the routinization of novelty (to use a phrase from German philosopher Martin Heidegger.) We live in a time when we are always looking for “the new thing,” the most recent new, the latest gadget. Why is so? Because of the inability of postmodernity to perceive time in a healthy manner. Postmodern people live so obsessed with the present they “kill” their own past and traditions.

Perhaps it is time to open once again the old trunk of our memories to both remember and protract our own identity in a world growingly “destructured, decentered, and dehumanized” (Mary Klages). A world with no room for our trunks of memories.

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