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| Teshome H. Gabriel (Dan Chavkin / UCLA) |
to run from. It burns and glows from inside, causing anguish, new dreams and newer hopes. Memory does something else beside telling us how we got here from there: it reminds us of the causes of difference between popular memory and official versions of history.
Official history tends to arrest the future by means of the past. Historians privilege the written word of the text -- it serves as their rule of law. It claims a 'centre' which continuously marginalises others. In this way its ideology inhibits people from constructing their own history or histories.
Popular memory, on the other hand, considers the past as a political issue. It orders the past not only as a reference point but also as a theme of struggle. For popular memory, there are no longer any 'centres' or 'margins', since the very designations imply that something has been conveniently left out. Popular memory, then, is neither a retreat to some great tradition nor a flight to some imagines 'ivory tower', neither a self-indulgent escapism nor a desire for the actual 'experience' or 'content' of the past for its own sake. Rather, it is a 'look back to the future', necessarily dissident and partisan, wedded to constant change."
Teshome H. Gabriel, 1989, 53-54
"Third Cinema as Guardian of Popular Memory: Towards a Third Aesthetics"
In Questions of Third Cinema, ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen
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