‘We speak of the virtues of memory, but forgetfulness has its own virtue […] [The ‘memorial cult’s’] favourite mantra, “Let us remember, so the same thing doesn’t happen again”, is unconvincing. A remembered massacre may serve as a deterrent, but it may also serve as a model for the next massacre’, writes Holocaust survivor Ruth Kluger.^[1] In 2017, recalling the massacres suffered by American Indians during the founding of the United States, Navajo activist and ceremonial leader Pat McCabe shared his reflection on the slogan ‘Never forget!’:

I began by addressing my ancestors. […] I said to them, that we would love them always, and forever, but that somehow we must forget, or let go of, all the violence that had come before now, or we ourselves would complete the job of genocide that the U.S. government began. I begged them, my ancestors, to let us go free. I told them they must find their way all the way home to the Spirit World. And then I prayed with all my heart, and all my tears, and asked for Creator to open the gate for them to travel, and to leave us in peace, and for them to find peace beyond the gate, and for each of us to travel in the correct way once again, each in our own world, me in this Earth Walk world and they, true ancestors in the Spirit World.^[2]

These two testimonies are collected by Lewis Hyde in his book with the suggestive title, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past, where he illustrates the complex relationship between heritage and self-awareness. Heritage is manipulable and it manipulates us, it is memory and invention, it is wall and bridge. Hyde, for example, began writing his book when he learned something unexpected: oral societies maintain their balance by getting rid of memories that no longer have relevance in the present. They also change the story, to the surprise of the English settlers in Africa, who, after recording many of the stories and myths in writing, saw how, over time, these oral narratives did not match what they had recorded years earlier. For Hyde, this ‘stirred my own contrary spirit, for I began to scrapbooks of other cases in which letting go of the past is at least as useful as preserving it’.^[3]

His book emerged as a result of this interest. It is an exhaustive compilation of quotes, aphorisms, anecdotes, stories and reflections divided into four central themes around forgetting: mythology (‘Notebook I: Myth’), personal psychology (‘Notebook II: Self’), politics (‘Notebook III: Nation’) and creativity (‘Notebook IV: Creation’). However, the author warns us not to neglect memory, since both memory and forgetting ‘are the faculties of the mind by which we are aware of time, and time is a mystery’.^[4]

Nevertheless, Hyde asks: ‘[i]f the arts of memory are rooted in blood, could there be an art of forgetting that puts an end to bloodshed?’ ‘We do not control the unforgettable; it controls us’, he writes after studying Greek mythology, where ‘the spirits of such unforgetting are called the Furies, the Erinyes. They cling to the memory of hurt and harm, injury and insult, wound and injury […] They bloat the present with the undigested past’.^[5]

How do we regain this control? ‘The word was the magic solution used against the incarnated violence of the unforgettable. In the courts of Athens, the amnesty – which is a legal form of forgetting – ‘worked in part because there was a way for grief and anger to be spoken even as everyone swore to forget about actual action’, explains Hyde.^[6]

When Juan Perón took over the Argentine presidency in 1946, he relegated the writer Jorge Luis Borges to a peripheral position. Later, when the famous author was asked if he forgave Perón, he said: ‘Forgetting is the only form of forgiveness; it’s the only vengeance and the only punishment too. Because if my counterparts see that I’m still thinking about them, in some ways I become their slave, and if I forget them I don’t’.^[7]

Is to forget to let go? In the 13th century, the Zen master Dogen taught: ‘To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to become one with the ten thousand things’. ‘The Ten Thousand Things’ was also the title of an album by John Cage, who understood music as a way to free ourselves from memory. However, as Hyde points out using these sources: ‘as much as we might value the spiritual practice of thinning out the self, of noticing its contingency and transience, of muting its fears and greed — there can be no forgetting the self until there is a self. […] “You have to be somebody before you can be nobody”’.^[8]

This brings us back to heritage as a tool for self-awareness. The Kenyan communications consultant Esther Kiragu defines internal self-awareness as ‘taking note of one’s habits, behaviour, emotions, strengths and weaknesses, and how these impact on others’.^[9] In this sense, heritage and our feelings towards different heritage elements can act as a mirror of what is important to us, and of who we are, giving us important clues about what parts of our past make up our lives today. Understanding why, what and how we choose to remember or forget the past is key to understanding our core position in our present life, both towards ourselves and towards others. Heritage is a tool at the service of this essential exercise of self and collective knowledge and awareness.

This is not about never forgetting, because this, physically, mentally and spiritually, as we have seen, is not healthy. Nor is the opposite better: living in an imaginary present where the past does not exist. What this is about is understanding heritage as a large map where we can find references that help us build more cohesive, peaceful, fair societies. To do so, we need to investigate tangible and intangible heritage through this prism. We use the heritage and let the heritage use us.

The debate is complex and there is no single answer. Let us take as an example the struggle of some anti-racist groups against certain statues in public places, an action that has taken on great relevance in the United States and that has also been extended to different parts of the planet. The goal is to ‘liberate’ the place from these racist symbols. However, erasing patrimony for political purposes is common in all kinds of ideologies, especially in a totalitarian context, which seek to eliminate any impure past in order to impose its ‘new’ present.

History does not always suit our present interests. Not only does it usually not fit with the vision we want for society, but the opposite is often the case. Heritage, both tangible and intangible, reminds us of that bond; that continuity of which we are a part. However, this does not mean that we should always read heritage in the same straightforward way. For example, keeping the statue of a slave-trader does not imply that we should agree with what he thought or with his actions, but it can remind us that such a historical episode will not disappear even if we destroy the statue. If we place elements that explain history in a more inclusive and egalitarian way next to this statue, we will be able to understand heritage in a more complex and pedagogical way.

Like ancient idols, statues retain a power and capacity to act on their viewers in each age. Sometimes, as in the case of anti-racist protests, they continue to be a symbol – a material place to express anger, or a pole of attraction to channel a demand for a more egalitarian society, in the same way that other monuments continue to function as poles of concentration of mass demonstrations beyond the original reason they were built.

In this sense, heritage never allows a linear reading, and much less any one reading. Uncertainty and change are intrinsic parts of any individual and, as such, of any society, and the heritage used also responds to these changes and uncertainties. In a way, manipulating heritage is inevitable, in the same way that heritage manipulates us, that is, it challenges us, suggests alternatives to us and speaks to us. Between forgetting and remembering, between a more equitable future and a radically plural past, we can understand heritage as a tool for self-awareness as long as we take into account all these ambivalences and complexities. As the philosopher Kierkegaard pointed out: ‘Having perfected the art of forgetting and the art of remembering, one is then in a position to play battledore [a forerunner of badminton] and shuttlecock with the whole of existence’.^[10]