Os traigo hoy una parte de un texto escrito por Mireille Roselló (lo podéis leer entero aquí). El texto está fuera de contexto y hace referencia a Francia, pero creo que suscita muchas preguntas que resultan esenciales a la hora de reflexionar también sobre la situación en España en cuanto al debate acerca de la “recuperación de la memoria”.
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The question that seems to beg an answer, literally, like the beggar that religious or political ethics teaches me to honor, could be formulated as follows: how do we share mourning?
And “we” in that particular sentence, is obviously what needs to be constructed rather than what exists. Can we mourn for the dead when, between the dead, history and geography have placed the borders of nationality, ethnicity or religion. How can I think of a “we” that would grieve for “our” dead without resorting to a bland narrative of human mortality that makes Death the image of the great leveler of all differences. Even more specifically (but I take the apparently extreme case as paradigmatic rather than exceptional), how can we mourn our dead when the first “we” includes murderers and the survivors of their victims, and when “our dead” includes the victims killed by “our” executioners.
For a nation or a community to even agree on a day when “all souls” can be remembered, democratically so to speak, we need to have moved beyond other types of rituals, those for example, that would designate only martyrs, religious heroes, the “saints” as worthy of rememberance. Suggesting that “we” mourn one specific class of dead requires the type of identification that most often remains implicit and constructs the “we” by excluding all those who will not be invited to mourn “their” dead. All Saints Day implicitly disinvites not only those who were not martyrs or heroes, but perhaps more importantly, those who, in one way or another, identified or are identified as the people who killed the martyrs and the heroes. It also disinvites whoever does not believe in martyrdom, and all those who, as individuals, do not want their identity to be exclusively defined as members of a given community (whether their ascendants were victims of perpetrators).
France, like many countries today (and for a series of case studies I would refer you to Derrida’s text on “forgiveness”) the question of how “we” can mourn “our” dead is turning into a rather acrimonious debate about the role of history and, more broadly speaking, of any narrative that speaks in the name of history (and this includes cinema, literature and all the arts). Is it even possible to imagine a national discourse of mourning when the mourning in question reproduces, among the dead, the distinctions that originally led to the separation of the living between victims and torturers. When the dead that we want to mourn, and that politicians sometimes want to celebrate as national heroes, were killed not by “others” but by some of “us,” do we, fearfully, reconfigure the “us” so as to exclude either victims or executioners, either the dead or the living, from the common work of mourning, or do we face the immense task of finding a new national narrative of mourning that includes the history of slavery, colonization and collaboration? And if we choose that difficult path, doesn’t it mean that we must, on the one hand reconfigure the “we” that can mourn “our dead” but also find new genres, new types of stories that will allow us to represent the unthinkable object of our grief, the as yet unimagined shape of our loss?