I wrote about remembrance a few days ago, not knowing how to “deal” with that, in an intercultural or even holistic way. I didn’t mean I don’t respect the memories of people. It’s more about the way a government for example organises remembrance-events. And I am looking for approaches that don’t narrow down the memory to a static black-and-white picture, but which open the space and open it towards the future.
My favorite international press-translator Eurotopics wrote about the Belgian researcher Valerie Rosoux and her view on the guilt or non-guilt of nations and their past. She quotes a French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, who also has a very interesting view on guilt and appologies. I’m trying to get hold on his book about History and Memory, and will get back to you when I do and read it!
When I’ll get back to you, I hope to be able to say something about “giving a future to memory”.

For Valérie Rosoux, nations are not guilty of their pasts
[...]“For some philosophers, such as Hannah Arendt and Paul Ricoeur, forgiveness is not necessarily private and individual, it can also take on political proportions. From this point of view, forgiveness is the only way to reopen memory without triggering resentment or the desire for revenge. Its objective is neither to add salt to a wound that cannot be healed, nor to rub out memories. …
Far from wiping out the past, forgiveness acts upon it. It is an attempt to modify it by giving it another meaning. … Making official apologies cannot ‘repair’ damage suffered by individuals who have been affected in their flesh, or among their near and dear, but it can help relieve the pain of their wounds and in so doing give a future to memory.” (26/02/2008)    

An article on Eurotopics made me think about remembrance again.
I am a historian, but I´m not sure about the use of rememberance yet, as you may have read on this blog before.
Studying history is about understanding the past, and being aware that our understanding is coloured by the perspective from our own worldview. It will never really be objective, but it can be rational.
Remembering seems first of all to be about emotions. But there must be more than being `stuck in the past’ or bonding a group or nation through a collective memory. Can we unite with others, who don’t share the same memory and move ahead down a new road together? Can remembering ever be an intercultural activity?
When I google ‘remembrance’, I read about awareness. Is that the ‘outward’ purpose of remembering? And can it be inclusive?

this inner source

What is that place where we really connect, I have been asking myself before. And how do you move ahead from there?
This Theory U of Otto Scharmer might be an answer to my question. It’s a very inspirational way of working, because you have to connect to your socalled inner source of knowing.
If you are interested, please read this Facilitator’s guide, made by a wonderful woman, Sofia!

This moring I read a lecture of Ryszard Kapuscinski on Encoutering the Other. I just found the English translation on the internet. He starts with a historical overview of how the earliest human groups discovered there were other people in the world, and how to behave:

“The discovery that there are other people in the world! [...] Then it turned out that [...] other similar beings, other people, also inhabited the world! But how to behave in the face of such a revelation? What to do? What decision to make?
[1. war] Should they throw themselves in fury on those other people?
It might end up in a duel, a conflict or a war. Proof of man’s failure—that he did not know how, or did not want, to reach an understanding with Others.
[2. building walls] Or walk past dismissively and keep going?
This family-tribe decides to fence itself off from others, to isolate and separate itself. This attitude leads, over time, to objects like the Great Wall of China, the towers and gates of Babylon, the Roman limes and or the stone walls of the Inca.
[3. dialogue] Or rather try to get to know and understand them?”
There is [..] proofs of cooperation—the remains of marketplaces, of ports, of agoras and sanctuaries, of seats of old universities and academies, and of where there remain vestiges of trade routes. All of these were places where people met to exchange thoughts, ideas and merchandise, and where they traded and did business, concluded covenants and alliances, and discovered shared goals and values. “The Other” stopped being a synonym of foreignness and hostility, danger and mortal evil. People discovered within themselves a fragment of the Other, and they believed in this and lived confidently.”

It is so simple, but it really helps me to see how different countries deal with the fear for the “new unknown”, the islam, in the case of many westerners. The US choosing to fight, the Netherlands choosing to build walls around the country. And then the third option, the one I and many others favor.

The ideas of two other Europeans about our way of dealing with the other (person, group, country…) appeared in the newspapers over the last few weeks (and I read about it through Eurotopics again…!).

The French/Bulgarian Tzvetan Todorov in El Pais: “Reducing international relations to the concept of ‘allies or enemies’ by no means guarantees the victory of the ideals defended. And in the end, every population has a multiple and malleable identity. But wars oblige them to limit themselves to a single dimension, to become entirely engaged in a struggle aimed at vanquishing the enemy.”
t’s like the words of the American president not long after 9/11: “You are either with us or against us…”. Relations between countries or “parties” cannot be defined so easily, nowadays even less than pre-1989-wars. As if by voicing his threat to the world, to all the nations around the globe, Bush tried to create the image of an old fashioned war, where the two (or more) sides of the conflict are clearly defined, or even the image of a third world war, asking for his Allies to unite; as if ofcourse, but I suppose it was just to be able to deal with the shock of the attacks in New York.

People with the Muslim faith around the world raise their voice more and more, refusing to be seen as one with these terrorists. These terrorists committed the crimes in name of the Islam, of their prophet, but there is ofcourse more to their identity than just the Islam. We cannot put all Muslim people in the camp of the Enemy, the Bad one, the one Against us. We cannot make an old fashioned frontline war of this new type of war with clear boundaries, because borders in conflicts nowadays have a different meaning than 50 or even 20 years ago.

The Italian lawyer Gustavo Zagrebelsky is the other European I just mentioned, and he analyses the notion of ’foreigners’ in western society. “If social relationships were perfectly balanced, the word foreigner and its current synonyms would be neutral words deprived of discriminatory meaning … . In former societies the foreigner was the enemy by definition, the one who should be pilfered if not killed. Humanity functioned with the idea that it was divided into separate community, naturally hostile to one another.”

The terrorists know that the international politics changed after 1989, they took advantage of the void. Their strongest weapon is the fear they manage to spread around the world.
So now it’s up to us, all those who don’t feel connected to the terrorists, to adapt to the new world situation. We are not suppressed or ruled by an enemy in a physical way, but we let them suppress us in our minds: the fear they spread around rules our lives (see what I wrote on this anti-terrorism-campaign, on September 11).
And what is the best antidote to fear? Hope, I suppose. (funny that many people find hope in their faith…) And more concrete, dialogue.

Again an article that I found through Eurotopics that made me think, this time by Cristian Campeanu:

“Multiculturality is a theory according to which all the cultures in a given society have the same rights – regardless of ethnic group, language or religion. .. In other words, there are no universal values; values are defined by the culture, race or ethnic group in question and cannot be imposed by an exterior force. … The most unfortunate consequence of this ideology is that it makes dialogue between cultures impossible. We live side by side in parallel worlds with parallel rules. The minorities flee to the ghettoes and ‘tolerance’ generally means nothing more than mutual ignorance.
Problems arise when limits are violated and two parallel worlds collide. This is what happened with the murder of Van Gogh, which was committed by an Islamist and culminated in mosques being set on fire.”

Do I ignore you, when I accept the difference between you and me, when I accept that neither my nor your side of the Story is the Truth?
Does it really end a dialogue between you and me? Or can we accept and respect our differences because of our cultures, but not limit ourselves and our dialogue by these cultural boundaries?

Through Eurotopics I found this article on Paul Auster in French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur (in the title of this entry I call it imaginative reading, but isn’t reading always about imagination?)

“Sometimes I have difficulties reading descriptions that are too precise: I cannot see anymore! [...] Fairytales enthral me because they give very little detail. The human mind dreads emptiness and automatically provides all the missing details. It is this implication of the listener or reader that contributes to forging the story and completing the storyteller’s work. The more that is eluded, the better the story.”
“Reading puts into movement the center of the brain that activates the memory. I wonder what really happens in the brain of a reader.”

I love the way he describes the fun of reading: the creation of your own imaginative world in your head. He also says how he “noticed as [he] read[s] that all the novel’s action was taking place in the house where [he] grew up. [He] had transposed everything into [his] own world, into a familiar setting.”

This reminds me ofcourse of all the stories I set in my own familiar surroundings, but also, if the book has been filmed, of the strange feeling when you have to see the same story through the eyes of someone else. A part of the magic of the story is lost.

I would like to know more about this mechanism in the brain: how does your memory influence the image you create when you read or hear a story? And not only your personal memory, but also a shared memory. How can we become aware of the fact that our brain “plays tricks on us” when we hear a story. Our created image of a story is ours, because of our personal or shared memory, but is not the true image. The image the other has of the same story, is influenced by his memory, and doesn’t make his version of the story less true. And this is all about intercultural communication, ofcourse! But also about history teaching: there is not one true version of e historical event: it all depends on the colour of your glasses!

source image

How do we make sure not to forget the terrible things that happened in the past, without making the generation of today a victim of it’s history? Its awareness of the past shouldn’t paralyse its identity today.

I spent the weekend in a youth hostel next to the Ravensbrueck memorial (participating in a congress of young interculturalists from all over Europe and beyond), and in discussions with Germans (in their 20s and 30s) I wondered how much of commemorating and feeling guilty about the past of your country you can deal with…

It’s Blog Action Day today: all bloggers around the world are invited to dedicate a post to the environment. I believe very much in the power of many people in different places doing the same thing at the same time, so I signed up. But I had second thoughts about the theme, not about its relevance, but more if it’s anything that has to do with me: I mean with my convictions or passion, where I write about in this blog.

I wish to “change the world”, but focus more on interpersonal/intercultural issues, than the environment. I am happy I can go to work by bike most of the days and do feel guilty when I think I need my car to go to a meeting out of town. Then I suddenly had to think of the book I wrote about in one of my first posts: Change the Word for a Fiver. If you go to the website of “We are What we Do“, you can check the list of Actions to Change the World.

Going down that list, I realised (again) saving the world is not just about switching off the light or not traveling by plane. A first step to make our world a better place is as easy as (#5) Smile and Smile Back or (#30) Bake something for a friend…
Or what about action #28: Seize the moment:
Mahatma Gandhi had it right when he said:
“Be the change you want to see in the world.”
It’s a pretty good vision don’t you think? Use your passion and energy to make things happen. Inspire others. Get on with it. You might not get another chance.

So saving the world in a environment kind of way is not seperated from wanting to change the world in an interpersonal/intercultural way: it’s all about being aware of the world around you, knowing you are as much part of it as anyone ar anything else, and being consious that your actions influence everything and everyone around you.

As a kid, my family was also making a fool of me, when I spent half my summer holidays working on my scrap-book/diary, full of clippings from tourist office brochures, museum tickets, post cards, pictures. As a kid, and still today, I love walking around “papeteries” (shops selling all kind op paper!). Whenever I was in France, I’d buy Clairefontaine: the best paper quality!

The most popular brand today is Moleskine, and recently I found a group on the photo-website Flickr with people from all around the world with the same addiction as me…! (I already wrote about this about a month ago in an entry on working out the creative muscle). It’s not only a relief to discover there are more papeterie-fetish people out there, but it’s also a great inspiration to see all their creativity!