only our life, our life and its forgetting*

ephemere wrote Patalim, which is painful and gorgeous (and also triggering for descriptions of violence), even if I wish it weren't so necessary to say:

I don't want to erase this blood staining my legacy. I don't want to forget, as if it never happened. I don't want to keep coming across, "I didn't know the Philippines was a U.S. colony!" as if I do not bear the damage of American occupation written in my nerves and across my tongue. I don't want to see "deathmarching" used as a verb, the same way I deplore how "imeldific" is used as an adjective -- as if history were an erasable thing and words slipping into common parlance an apology or a healing of all these wounds. I don't want people to go on using this in a misguided attempt to remove the blood in it, because forgetting is what gives the evil behind this more power, by allowing the word to go unchallenged and slip under the veneer of acceptability, lightness, cheapening, banality. I don't want the atrocities of war to become equated with mundane things.

I don't want common use. I don't want a sanitized history. I want my stories, past and present, these stories of my people that we have lost and that we're on the verge of losing, held close to my heart and remembered. I want these stories told over and over again, because the need for them will never lift, not the necessity for memory and not the blatant spitting on the dignity of it. I want to claim them though I may choke on tears and tongue in doing so, though I surrender on so many other things daily and remain one frail and weak person still grappling with the fractures in her present and in her past. Because this, too, is part of who I am. Because every story told and every careless use challenged is defiance, is struggle, is me raising my head and saying, this happened, this matters -- is yet another blow against erasure, silence, the unmarking of graves.

(See also: megwrites with context, manifesta on "mythologizing".)

My two cents, modified from a comment I left elsewhere:

You know the thing about turning history into myth? It makes people believe that these things never happened, these things were never true. Take it one step further: suddenly we become replaceable, interchangeable, lives and memories and stories and histories (hair and skin and blood and bones) fodder for your plagiarism, convenient backdrops for your stories- a book of myths in which our names do not appear**.

Turning us into magical unicorns, orcs, a handy spice rack with which you can ~flavor~ your realities and imaginations, all while erasing ours- this is respect? Please. Look me in the eye. Say it again. I'll warn you right now, though: I am not that inscrutable.

*Li-Young Lee
**Adrienne Rich- yes, I am capable of appropriating right back.

eta: two more links while I'm on the subject of history;
- troisroyaumes on history and memory
- The Spirit of Hiroshima, a personal account of August 6th, 1945 by Matsubara Miyoko. Trigger warning applies.