Forgetting:

I finished reading Kundera a couple of days ago. It was really beautiful and very interesting. I don't have the actual book with me for now, so the quotes are approximate. He rails against Prague as the "city of forgetting," complaining about the Soviet practice of changing street names and conveniently editing people out of history. The question to me concerns whether this changes history. If enough people believe that someone didn't exist, did he exist? It makes the world of 1984 seem more real, more immediate.

In Atlanta this problem often manifests itself in public buildings and roads named for segregationists. The question is, should we change these names? I'm not sure. One part of me believes that the state should not be seen to endorse these people in any way, including in the names of its streets. I don't think that children should be forced to go to school in a building named for a Klan leader. But by changing the name of John B. Gordon elementary school, are we somehow lessening the state's culpability in a hundred years of Jim Crow laws? The legacy of segregation is still with us, and the government is still responsible. We should still be ashamed. It seems that by changing the names, we are trying to forget that segregation ever happened, and that I think is dangerous. People should know that in 1990 in Atlanta, supposedly part of the New South, an elementary school was still named for the man who brought the Klan to Georgia.

All of this name changing weakens the power of history. If we change things, we can edit out the unsanitary bits, we can forget that there's much in the past of the United States that we should be ashamed of. And that's what scares me.

Maybe my view of history and remembering is different because of my background. In both Ireland and the American South, history is edited to serve whatever the cause du jour is. Kevin Barry is changed from a scared medical student who couldn't run fast enough to get away from the soldiers to a revolutionary hero who died for his country. Plantation owners in the south are either hard-hearted men who beat their slaves at every chance (and slept with the female ones) or as benevolent dictators who kept their slaves in some sort of workers' paradise. We pervert history and use it to prove a point.

That's why I see changing the names of building to be dangerous. If we try to pretend that segregation and slavery has never happened, then we can pretend that we don't bear a large part of the responsibility for the black kid growing up in the projects who never had much of a chance. I think changing the name of John B. Gordon elementary school is a good idea, but it needs to be done with some acnowledgement that this school is part of our past. We shouldn't forget history just because it's unpalatable.

I dare not risk using that
loaded word, Remember,
for your memory is a cruel web
threaded from thorn to thorn across
a hedge of dead bramble, heavy
with pathetic atomies.
--Ulster poet John Hewitt