Political appropriation of memory in Melhor a menta que o cianeto, by Ana Margarida de Carvalho

Abstract

The maintenance of memory in the face of the policy of erasing collective trauma acts as resistance and prevention of the cyclical repetition of history. From another perspective, the alleged maintenance of memory can also be a way of legitimizing policies that deprive the status of subjects of memory to make them the object of a memory narrated by others. The character in the short story “Melhor a ementa que o cianeto” (in reference to the popular saying ‘The remedy is worse than the disease’) by Ana Margarida de Carvalho becomes the target of these policies. Published in “Uma terra prometida” (A promised land), 2016, the story has as its protagonist a resident of an institution for elderly refugees. At this institution, he is constantly questioned about his memories, to fill gaps in the narratives that European organizations have about their past. Narrated in third person, the story summarizes the institutional attempt to manage these memories as a reparative mechanism. Therefore, we seek to establish from the refugee character an understanding of the political use of memory that is not anchored in the stratagems of forgetting, but in remembering. To make these considerations viable, we will rely on the discussions by Jeanne Marie Gagnebin (2009) and Aleida Asmann (2011) about the indissociation between the movements of remembering and forgetting and by Judith Butler (2015) and Andreas Huyssen (2014) on the discourse of memory and the ethics of forgetting.