THE USEFULNESS OF FORGETTING

Neelika Jayawardene review’s Were Were Liking’s The Amputated Memory

The neurologist, Dr. V.S. Ramachandran, tells a story on WNYC’s Radio Lab: a patient comes to his office, complaining that he had the uncanny feeling that the amputated portion of his arm was still in existence, attached to him, causing him excruciating pain. Ramachandran clarifies that the patient was not delusional or crazy: he didn’t “imagine” that he had an arm – he knew full well that it was removed, but…he “vividly” felt its presence.

Ramachandran learned that the man had suffered an injury to his spine 11 years prior, which resulted in paralysis to his left arm. Ramachandran postulates that the man’s brain then “learned” the paralysis, and even when the arm was amputated a year after the accident, the memory of that limb – as an attached, moving, temperature sensitive, pain-causing entity – remained.

Werewere Liking’s genre-defying narrative, The Amputated Memory, tells such a story of a series of sudden losses – deaths to vital limbs, and subsequent amputations so violent, so unbearable that the body and the mind cannot let go. Long after a loved one, a village, a riverbank, a nation, or a set of taboos and customs that helped establish dignified and respectful ways of living are amputated from one’s physical and psychological world, one continues to feel the spasms of that limb, so rudely was it wrenched out of the integrity of the living body.

Amputated Memory is a ‘story’ in name only: Liking includes songs passed down from one generation to the next, lullabies, praise poetry, personal letters, university lecture notes (taken by the protagonist as she snuck into her husband’s classes), history as it is lived on the familiar and familial level, and diversions into the gorges of the mythical and lyrical when an experience becomes so deeply wounding that it cannot be directly named. The story’s multiple threads are held together by the protagonist, Halla Njokè, who begins the narration when she is already “in her eighth decade,” identifying herself for the reader as a woman who has pursued many professions, but “more than anything”, remained “a singer”.

Because there are three aunts named Roz, two Mothers Naja, and a revelation, toward the end of the book that “all the mature men in [Halla’s] story have crossed [Roz’s] life in one way or the other”, we begin to wonder whether these shared names and experiences signal an experimentation with déjà vu – that uncanny sense of familiarity created by fragile threads of memory, giving us a (false) sense of return and re-visitation, of having “already seen”. But Halla encounters her life as something that has been actually lived by her female heroes: her Aunties Roz and her grandmothers Naja. In many ways, this is a story that explores the possibility of déjà vécu, in which we experience an evocative sense of having already “lived before”, where the complex connectivities between people and places pervades our experience. In this world connected by mythical returns in a cyclical history, Halla is often interchangeable with her aunts and her grandmothers, all women attempting to forge futures for themselves, despite the seeming impossibility of possibility.

When Halla asks her celebrated Aunty Roz, who “embodies the entire circle of women through whose solidarity Africa will be reincarnated and restructured” for Roz’s life story, her aunt instructs Halla to search out her own life story, interwoven as it is with the epic of their shared familial, village, district and national history. As Aunty Roz reminds us, “surely you know what a colossal joke, what a farce Africa’s history is, especially when they refer to ‘records’”. The massacres of “a hundred thousand Bassa and Bamileke men, women, and children”, deportations to ‘relocation camps’, systematic rapes of women, razed and burnt villages, cleared and ravaged forests are all reduced to an allusion encapsulated by one homogenising phrase: “The events of independence”. The story of remembering, for Halla, becomes a question of how to “convey Africa’s silences” which are, essentially, the silences of those whose narratives were obliterated in the face of power and conquest.

Liking’s re-collection of a personal story, informed by the collective story of Cameroon, is a simultaneous experiment, by the author, to interrogate the reason why forgetting – erasure – is, in fact, productive to memory-building and life. The woman who defies the edicts of the missionaries and the niceties mandated by the village church, Priestess Némy, tells Halla, “When our consciousness starts to be locked inside its walls, it creates oblivion, even of ourselves…our desires and contradictions, erasing all questions and answers in the name of survival…Blacks!…we thrive with such serenity that the world keeps talking about our fine childlike spirit.”

Such reminders about the ‘usefulness’ of forgetting challenge us to revisit our modern obsessions about remembering and record keeping. Imagine if we had a fully intact collective memory, one in which every detail of daily events remained retrievable. Most of us picture memory as an extensive filing cabinet or hard drive: when something happens, we imagine that we ‘file’ it away, lock up the memory cabinet, and there, in security and perpetuity, that information will remain.

Liking’s writing allows us to explore the possibility that we are all individual memory artists, much like those collagists who use available or disused material from their environments, reconstructing and building memory from existing pieces. In the act of re-creation, some things become sharper, and other experiences become dull. Out of such construction emerges memory: what feels like an exact recollection is, in fact, a (re)collecting, a structure built on connecting one experience to another.

A comprehensive memory, we realise, is probably as damaging as it would be a boon: if we remember every mundane detail, poor decision and agonising experience – this inability to forget would stultify and stunt, limiting our decision-making ability by the simple fact of remembering-overload. And yet, as Halla reminds us, while “[t]he power of forgetfulness is phenomenal,” especially for those who want to erase the past, “[i]t is the traumatized who have a hard time wearing the veil of oblivion”.

A final word of caution: don’t mistake Liking for a writer who dismisses all men as damaged, power-hungry lunatics, and women as their helpless and hapless mules. She finds soon enough that women of her clan are also complicit in “manufactur[ing] macho men” because they attempt to live through men’s feats and boasting of their men’s deeds. We find Halla’s grandfather to be a refreshing alternative, instrumental to her understanding of what great love, and being at peace with oneself can encompass: Grand Pa Helly “exuded freedom, nobility, and wisdom,” coupled with an intrinsic desire to avoid unnecessary riches, or be in the spotlight. Yet “[p]eople came from far and away to consult him, and his words were scrupulously heeded” He teaches Halla that there is no purpose to her desire to be a man (as a girl, she is “unhappy about not being a man,” because she recognises that men are “free”): she is “a complete being” already.

When she confides in him that she doesn’t like eating manioc leaves, he shows her a special magic trick: how to distinguish between those taboos that are meant to cultivate self-respect and respect for other life, and those that are meant to keep women ‘in their place’: he quietly passes her bits of those delicacies on his plate meant only to feed the desires of men. Since no thunderbolt of destruction strikes either of them, she concludes happily that “I am a woman, I know and do a man’s things, I am fine”. When she eventually meets a man who is powerful enough to accept her difference, intelligence, and desire to keep growing, one who includes her in his own journey of intellectual and emotional growth, she finally rediscovers the spirit of her Grand Pa.

Amputated Memory won the 25th Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, but I worry that the praise for it is still evocative of the belief that ‘Africa’ is so destroyed that this remarkable achievement by a woman – one who did not have an opportunity to have access to a formal education – is simply illustrative of the ‘potential’ of literature from those nations intensely devastated by colonial marches and an aftermath of chaotic governance.

I would argue that it is an epic that marries multiple literary traditions: those forged by Russian novelists about intergenerational conflict and thwarted desire; Indian writers’ narratives about dangerous romances involving both heart and nation, and the African tradition of exposing the intimacies of colonial barbarity, and the resulting cost to those on whom these horrors were unleashed.

Liking’s Amputated Memory is both a ceremony allowing those lifeless limbs in our past to be put to rest, and an attempt to re-member them: incorporate them in mourning, in order to maintain a place of honour for them. This here, she seems to say, is life: in reclaiming the erasures and being able to sprout life around a devastating loss.