Extract

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CHAPTER 1

Memory Matters: Towards a Definition of the Commemorative Site

The passage of time attenuates the bitterest of memories. —Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter1

They say time heals – but no, time does not heal, locura. Time doesn’t heal, it makes you crazy. —Santiago Mellibovsky2

Memory is undoubtedly familiar to us. Somewhat paradoxically, the extensive and often abstract usage of the term and its ubiquitousness in the aftermath of atrocity, tends to mask both its contentiousness and the distinct forms in which it is manifested and (ab)used in the present. There is, it would seem, considerable dissensus over its nature and evolution; on one hand, Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, political scientists writing about the aftermath of authoritarianism across a range of different contexts, suggest a sort of temporal decaying or dilution of memory, whereas Santiago Mellibovsky, whose daughter was forcibly disappeared during the Argentine dictatorship, stresses that memories and feelings associated with painful pasts intensify, not only in spite of the passing of time, but because ← 11 | 12 → of it. It is certainly true that legacies of repression may, in the immediate aftermath, remain ‘fresh in the memory of all’, forcing the issue onto the public agenda and guiding transitional justice processes in nascent or re-emerging democracies.3 However, as attested by the controversies that opened this study, memories do not predictably fade as the years pass, but wax and wane for many decades; for...