Sometimes We Must Remember. (Sometimes We Must Forget)

My Italian Diaries: 9

Since I ended my last post by talking about cycling, let me begin this one in the same vein. The image I shall start with is not one you expect in a travel journal: You see me sitting in my hotel room in Rome, connected via VPN to Australia so I can watch the free live broadcast of a race in France known as the Hell of the North.

Paris-Roubaix has been running for 130 years, and is that rare race that requires both great skill and great luck – or rather, the absence of too much bad luck. It is excruciatingly long – yesterday’s edition was 258 km – and contains long stretches of cobbled roads, which are hard to ride on and cause frequent punctures and crashes. It is a test of endurance, power, bike-handling skills, and mental strength, and is one of cycling’s five monuments – the annual races that are particularly prestigious to win.

Yesterday’s race was much awaited, and was supposed to be a straight-up duel between Tadej Pogacar and Mathieu van der Poel. Pogacar has four Tour de France wins to his name, as well as 12 monument wins – this is crazy versatility, because in the modern era, the kind of climber who wins grand tours is not the kind of rider who wins classic one-day races, which requires a different body-type. Pogacar, once considered a pure climber, has blown through that barrier, with Paris-Roubaix being the only monument he hasn’t won.

Van der Poel won the last three editions of the race, beating Pogacar to second place last year. So the big story at the start of the race was the battle between these two. But there were other great riders at the start line, including van der Poel’s great rival, Wout van Aert. Five years ago, these two were considered the great classics riders of their age, generational talents both. At one time, van Aert would be the favourite in every classic he entered, and the grammar of the race would be his rivals rolling attacks on him till he couldn’t chase down every one and someone would get away. But he suffered a horrendous run of crashes and injuries, and his career faltered. He won Strade Bianche and Milan-San-Remo in 2020, but the latter remained his only monument win – while van der Poel has won eight. In recent times, van Aert had become an also-ran, someone you might see on the podium, but not on the top step.

I’m a fan of all these three guys, with a special soft spot for van Eart, though I’ve given up hoping for his wins because it always ends in heartbreak for him and me. When the day began yesterday, I wasn’t even planning to watch Paris-Roubaix – why would I watch television while travelling? When in Rome, do as the tourists do, so I went off to the Jewish Quarter in the late morning, walked around, had lunch, crossed the road, crossed the bridge to the Tiber Island, and was chilling beside the water when the sun emerged, the delicious cool breeze receded, and I decided to see what was happening in the race. The live coverage over on Cycling News informed me that Pogacar was alone in the lead, van Aert was chasing 20 seconds behind, with van der Poel a further 40 seconds behind.

We had paid our tribute to the Goddess of Tourism, ticked some boxes, and so there was no guilt in going back to the hotel to watch the last hour of the race. By the time I made it back, van Aert and Pogacar were together at the front. They had suffered multiple punctures and fought back, as had van der Poel, though his punctures had come at a worse time. Pogacar kept attacking, van Aert held on – just barely, as he revealed later – and eventually, in the signature velodrome finish, van Aert sprinted ahead, and raised a finger to the sky as he crossed the line.

Then he collapsed on the ground in the winners area and sobbed uncontrollably, unable to speak to the fellow cyclists who came to congratulate him. Behind my macho demeanor, there is a softie, so I shed a few tears with him. Then he spoke to the press and revealed why he had pointed upwards.

It means everything to me. It’s been a goal since 2018, when I first did this race. It’s now 8 years ago, and in that race, I lost a teammate, Michael Goolaerts. Ever since then, it’s been my goal to come here and point my finger to the sky. This victory is for Michael, but especially for his family... and all my friends and teammates in my previous team.

Goolaerts died of a cardiac arrest during Paris-Roubaix 2018. For all these years after that, he became added motivation for van Aert to win here. For all these years, as he revealed later, van Aert visualised how he would win. “In my dreams and in my preparation I did the sprint so many times already so I knew exactly what to do.”

As it happens, watching an emotional van Aert was not the first time yesterday that I was hit by the power of memory.

October 16, 1943

That morning, I’d gone to the Jewish Quarter of Rome, one of the oldest Jewish settlements in the Western world. It has been around for around 2200 years, and this particular location became a walled-in ghetto in 1555, when Pope Paul IV instituted Cum nimis absurdum, a papal order meant to force Jews to convert to Christianity. Think of Paul IV like a Catholic Ayatollah – he was rigidly orthodox, and believed in the old doctrine, Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus: ‘no salvation outside the Church.’

The gates were finally torn down in 1870, during the Unification of Italy – but the worst was yet to come. On October 16, 1943, the Nazis came to the Jewish Quarter and rounded up over 1000 jews – despite the fact that huge amounts of gold had already been extorted from the residents there, in exchange for guarantees of safety.

Of those deported, only 16 people returned: 15 men and one woman.

The old ghetto was demolished but rebuilt, and retains its character. And I was struck by the attempts to preserve memory. There is a striking sign on a wall that reads, ‘Largo 16 Ottobre.’ Time passes; but that date remains on the wall.

We also came across the Stolpersteine: small brass plaques embedded in the cobblestones, each of which bears the name and lifespan of someone taken from there. You can’t escape the past – and all these commemorations seem to be saying, you shouldn’t.

Why We Must Remember

A character in Milan Kundera’s masterpiece, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, says, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” To not repeat the horrors of the past, we need to remember it. Eternal vigilance relies on remembering why we need to be vigilant in the first place.

I have done episodes with Urvashi Butalia and Aanchal Malhotra on their efforts to keep the memories of partition alive: Urvashi with the oral histories in The Other Side of Silence; Aanachal with her book Remnants of a Separation, and the Museum of Material Memory that she set up. These are important because the generation that remembers first-hand is gone, and soon, we will also lose those they told their stories to, if they told their stories at all. It’s important to rescue their memories from receding into the abstract haze of history, and preserve as many concrete memories as we can.

That is why it is important that Aanchal documents the specific things that survivors carried over, and the memories attached with them; why the stories told to Urvashi have the names and details they do; why the sign on that building in the Jewish Quarter has that precise date; why it is fitting that the Stolpersteine plaques have names and dates, and the Auschwitz Memorial Twitter account adds pictures to that. Perhaps future memorials will have the Instagram reels of the people who were killed, living normal lives like you and me.

At a personal level also, it is important to remember. Not for the sake of the dead, who are, after all, dead, but for our own sake. Our memories are not an icing on the cake of who we are, they are the cake itself. We are what we remember. In choosing to remember one thing over another, we not only reveal ourselves, we also shape ourselves.

One of the reasons I am a Wout van Aert fan is the prestigious Gent-Wevelgem race of 2023. Van Aert and his teammate Christophe Laporte left the field behind and rode together to the end, and technically, as van Aert was the designated team leader and the stronger rider, he should have taken the win. But he instead insisted that Laporte go over the line first, one of the highlights of Laporte’s career. Wait, wasn’t sport about bloodyminded alpha males wanting the win over everything else? Clearly not, and while that gesture made me respect van Aert more, I wondered what made him the man he was.

Maybe losing a teammate in 2018 was part of what shaped him? Maybe it gave him the early lesson that life is bigger than sport, that there are things beyond winning a race? The great cricketing allrounder Keith Miller, an Australian air force pilot during WW2, was once asked about feeling pressure on the cricket field. He replied: “Pressure is a Messerschmitt up your arse, playing cricket is not.” Memory gives perspective.

For what it’s worth, after van Aert won yesterday, Laporte was visibly emotional as well, and said, “I am just as happy as if I’d won it myself.” Think of the virtuous cycles that memory and behaviour can set in motion.

This is just one kind of remembering, of course. Our sense of identity is a story we tell ourselves. Think of the memories that make up that story. What if you discarded some and chose others?

Why We Must Forget

In his book The Husband of a Fanatic, Amitava Kumar writes of a village in Bihar called Logain:

This was a village where about 170 Muslims had been attacked by a mob of about several thousand Hindus belonging to the surrounding villages. The killings had gone on for nine hours. The attacks were directed by the police officer who was posted at the thana there. Some of the corpses of the Muslims who had been killed were first.dumped in two wells and a pond. Later, when the stench became unbearable, they were pulled out and busied in adjoining fields. The killers had planted cauliflowers in the soil above the decaying cadavers. In another report, the cauliflowers were changed to radishes. In the Parliament, one newspaper said, a legislator had spoken about the carrots that had been planted over the corpses. This lack of certainty about what it was that had really happened, made the events at once unreal and frightening.

Kumar visited Logain 12 years after the massacre and met a farmer named Sheikh Nazim, who had run away to a neighbouring village when the riots started. He returned after 22 days, and identified his wife and two children among 52 corpses found in a field. He recognised his wife by the yellow sari she used to wear. You’d think that Nazim’s life would be destroyed by this – but he got compensation money from the government, bought some land, married again, had kids again, was happy again. Sometimes, it is necessary to forget.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, writes:

Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. This is a hard sight for man to see; for, though he thinks himself better than the animals because he is human, he cannot help envying them their happiness - what they have, a life neither bored nor painful, is precisely what he wants, yet he cannot have it because he refuses to be like an animal. A human being may well ask an animal: ‘Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?’ The animal would like to answer, and say: The reason is I always forget what I was going to say’ - but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent: so that the human being was left wondering.

The larger point Nietzsche makes in his essay is that “it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting.” You cannot ever be in the moment if you are always in the past. You cannot ever be happy if you dwell on every sadness gone by.

Indeed, I would argue that it would be impossible for most relationships to survive if not for forgetting. We can be at our nastiest in the most intense moments, when there’s a lot at stake, when our wounds are raw. If we remembered every misdemeanour in a relationship, no relationship could sustain. There almost has to be an unspoken pact of forgetting between any two people who want to stay together. You should only make plaques out of the happy dates.

Equally, to get over grief, we need to forget – or if not forget, at least remember less. What I have learnt about grief is that the pain never reduces since the love never does – you just train yourself to think of the other person less and less. To live in memory would make it hard to live in this world.

Nations need to forget too. Remembering can be a toxic weapon, as David Rieff points out in his book, In Praise of Forgetting. Rieff, who reported from various conflict zones, pointed out that memory was weaponized everywhere, as indeed it is in India by politicians across parties. The only way to move forward was to leave the grievances of the past behind.

We’ve seen nations do this intentionally, such as with ancient Rome’s damnatio memoriae, Spain’s Pacto del Olvido, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation and so on. But can forgetting be enforced?

Tourism and Memory

Sometimes, an effort to commemorate can lead instead to commodification. Isn’t that what tourism is, I wonder, even as I wonder this as a tourist. The Stolpersteine plaques I saw at the Jewish Quarter were literally underfoot, being stepped on by tourists, and everything around me in this Eternal City is carefully curated to tell me a particular palatable story.

In his book, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, David Lowenthal talks about the difference between history and heritage. History is complex, and no single story can do justice to it. Heritage is a simplistic narrative of history with an agenda, which can sometimes be nationalistic, but often just veers towards what will attract more tourists. Tourism thrives on heritage, and reduces the world to fridge magnets. It uses selective memory, and reduces even that to kitsch.

I feel conflicted by this. I feel that learning about history, and sometimes learning from it, enriches me. But am I not fooling myself by touching only the surface of it?

A Deeper Lesson

When do we remember and when do we forget?

My takeaway is that we should try to remember when remembering helps make us better, and takes us closer to being the best version of ourselves. And we should forget when memory gets in the way of our growth, or paralyses us into inaction or keeps us in despair.

But these are judgements for the intellect to make, and we are emotional animals.

---

Images by Simahina.