Healing the Memory

You have recently started a project called "Healing the Memory," workshops for survivors of human rights violations. What motivated you to launch this project to coincide with the TRC?

When I returned to the country in 1992 one of the first things that struck me was to see how South Africans of all races had been messed up by apartheid, whether they were a victim, perpetrator, beneficiary, or just a bystander. It became obvious that not all South Africans would appear before the Truth Commission. Those who would give evidence on human rights violations would mostly be those who had suffered severe maltreatment and torture. I kept asking myself, what about everybody else's stories?

I was also struck by the call that came out of the old regime, that the time had come 'to forgive and forget'. One of the things that I was convinced of was that we need not to forget, but to remember. And yet I was also conscious of questions about what kind of memory we were opening - naked wounds, or memories that were beginning to heal? At about the time that the TRC was established, an organisation emerged called the Healers Response to the Truth Commission. Within that body I began to popularise the idea of a parallel process to the commission that would give all those who desired it the space to tell their stories. And we began to talk about the importance of the healing of memories.

Are the workshops, then, for people who would not go to the commission, or for those who went, or will go?

For both. The Truth Commission has given us as a nation the jump start to wrestle with the past. We now need a much wider process to happen. A claim we make at these workshops is that it will enable those who participate to take one step in the long road to healing. It's a journey from being a victim, being a survivor, to being a victor.

How do the workshops work?

The workshops involve a community drama group whose members talk about their lives in the struggle. These dramas help people to talk about their past and start dealing with the emotions that the memory of the past provokes. This is when the journey of the heart begins. It's not an intellectual debate about the past, but a process that challenges each one to ask three fundamental questions: What have I done? What has been done to me? What have I failed to do?

Another art form we use involves giving people newsprint and crayons and inviting them to draw their experience of the conflicts they were involved in. Drawing gives people a very different way to access memory than, for instance, talking does. People also begin to understand the other's experiences through their drawings.

On the final day of the workshop we give people clay to create symbols of hope, symbols for the future. These clay symbols are then offered and explained to the rest of the group at the final celebration ceremony where we try to pull all the different elements together. It's a celebration that functions almost as a passage to the future - in a religious sense, a liturgical ceremony.

Would you have a perpetrator and victim at the same workshop?

We've had dramatic experiences like that. It's been a life-changing experience for people from the opposite sides to hear one another's stories. But we've also seen that you cannot always draw a straight line between them. There is often a situation where a person is partly 'perpetrator' and partly 'victim'. One might be a victim and remain a victim for most of his life, and yet also be a perpretrator. It's a situation where we do to others what's been done to us.

Through these stories of hope, pain, joy, anger, fear, we draw people's feelings into understanding issues of peace, justice, reconciliation and healing. This is how the human story of the heart unfolds. It becomes a universal story.

How do we actually heal memory?

One of the ways we heal memory is by putting it on the table and looking at it. It's the image of how do you heal a wound. The only way to heal it is to open it up, and clean it - let it see the light - and then the healing process can begin. The other alternative is that you can bury memory. But there is no evidence in the history of the world that societies were able to successfully bury their past. Evidence shows that what they've attempted to bury came back to haunt them. Look at slavery, or the experience of the Afrikaner in the British concentration camps. Those memories never healed. People that continue to see themselves as victims actually become the victimisers. For this generation, it is extremely important to confront the past and wrestle with it, to not be consumed by it in the future.

Our whole mindset needs to change. Our response to death has been more death, because our society was built on the values of death - and not on the values of life.

Hannes Siebert is a director of the Media Peace Centre.

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