Betraying Old Betrayals

Betrayal. From tender youth we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offense imaginable. But what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks. Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown.

And again she felt a longing to betray: betray her own betrayals.

-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I grew up in a very secular family, one plagued by feuds and fights among in laws, and violent quarrels between parents. I grew up in a home where thick walls and all sorts of barriers to loving and gentle communication were erected, but which, despite their thickness, failed to shield me from angry words, endless cursing, yelling and screaming. I grew up in a home that reeked of cigarette smoke and alcohol that makes one choke; where torn curtains and shattered pieces of nearly everything wounded not only one's sole but also, one's soul. I grew up where I love you and I'm sorry were almost unspoken.

I grew up during that time when older people ceaselessly fought in crossfires of their own making, in every corner possible, without entertaining notions of surrender better yet, attempts at making peaceful negotiations.

I grew up having to bitterly take these all in; I grew up having to teach myself to numb my senses to everything.

Hell on earth, I thought. At an early age, I was filled with the same hatred, bitterness and anger that surrounded me – something I did not think twice to absorb. At best, nonetheless, I was left with fragments of what I thought should have been. If perhaps, then, my parents and relatives were never acquainted with shame, I already was. We were supposedly regarded as a respectable family, but then I thought, nothing could be farthest from the truth.

Something to be ashamed of – I had what I saw other kids did not have. I had what they will surely never dream of having at any point in their lifetime.

It is this shame that compelled me to make those old betrayals of memory, hoping – albeit, unconsciously then – that such betrayals will eventually lead to forgetting. For a time I thought I succeeded. I thought I have deleted from my identity all memories I sought to betray, all experiences – truths – I desperately classified as falsehoods. One betrayal of memory on top of another, one on top of another, just so I would come up with a cleaner and more sanitised truth – something pleasing, something beautiful not only to myself but more importantly to others.

But nothing was ever deleted from an old chapter.

The smallest success I had in betraying these fragmented portions was that due to habituation, I temporarily forgot that my sanitised truths were not truths at all; that they were but foolish fabrications, products of betrayals – of rendering truths as falsehoods and claiming falsehoods as truths - born from a perceived need to escape.

I know I am not the only one guilty of committing such betrayals of memories, of sanitising truths. To those who cringe at the slightest mention of the world betrayal, I suggest that you momentarily suspend your judgment. Save your comments for later and also perform a similar autocritique. Perhaps later on, you, too, will learn to accept your own betrayals and to take responsibility for them even in their ugliness and horridness. I am not presuming that you have them, I am boldly telling you that you, too, have them. For your masks, your facade – great or small, new or old – are nothing but outward manifestations of your individual moments of betrayal.

We are all beings of memory. Our words, our stories and even our lies bleed from re-opened wounds of past pains, heartaches and sorrows. They are anecdotes of the best times: old joys, redemption and successes. Without memory, Augustine says, we could not even begin to speak of ourselves. Memory therefore, has much to do with identity.

But how much fidelity do we show our memories, especially those which before becoming so, were first experiences that broke our hearts to pieces and scarred our already aching souls? And precisely how are we supposed to be purely faithful to our memories – good and bad – given our nature, our limited minds that are bound to forget?

Remembering can never happen without forgetting, and forgetting, never without remembering. That is why even if we never intend to make fabrications or weave fictions about ourselves, we inevitably do them.

In her novel, A Woman of Salt, Mary Potter Engel writes:

Our memory is tangled with forgetfulness so that we can never know the truth about ourselves and we become problems to ourselves. The problem of the truth of ourselves runs deeper than the tangle of memory. Our memory, Christa Wolf argues, inevitably creates calming fictions of the self that do away with ambiguity, contradiction and pain. What we are in the habit of calling remembering is showing round our artistic self-creations as if they were genuine and expecting others to take them to be so.

The goal of my own betrayals of memory was to forget. Rather precisely, to escape something unwanted. And something unwanted is never often spoken of. Or if at all they are narrated, they are told only to closest friends who lovingly withhold judgment to fulfill their self-appointed task to understand.

But I realised that one does not forget by taking the closest detour of never speaking, never telling, rather, by coursing through the seemingly unendurable road of facing what once wounded you, accepting your past betrayals as your own, and making one more betrayal that would finally betray all past betrayals.

Perhaps, only those who are willing to be washed by an old pain yet again, to be fragmented and broken once more in every moment of recollection and re-telling of truths once betrayed, can be re-made.

Those who would not as much as admit even to themselves their brokenness and more crucially, the fact that they, too, have once betrayed this brokenness to present an illusion of a whole, run the risk of forever being stuck in trying to undo a past that can never really be undone. The past will forever be there – uniquely behind our backs.

Nietzsche, insisted that humanity should not waste the present and consequently, risk the future by always trying to undo the past. Similarly, Hannah Arendt argued that the past needs to be forgiven. But even before Nietzsche or Arendt could articulate these thoughts, Paul in his letter to the Philippians already saw the need to project ourselves to the future:

Philippians 3:13-14 - Just one thing: forgetting what lies behind but straining forward to what lies ahead, I continue my pursuit toward the goal, the prize of God's upward calling, in Christ Jesus.

I have forgiven the past – my family, which has greatly improved as well as myself for all past betrayals of memory. In doing so, I too have done one last betrayal – once and for all, I betray all my betrayals. No longer vengeful, no longer punishing truth.

Judge my past if you wish, but do not judge this transformed present, one that has evolved from a past completely different from yours. And do not persecute me for my metaphors, for they are only such. Beneath layers of them is a truth I have accepted, a past I have forgiven, something which I would have no way of speaking of otherwise.

Catch these metaphors. Chew these words and savor the bittersweet taste of their meaning.

I am telling you something.

Please do not busy yourselves trying to count my betrayals; I myself have forgotten. Account for your own, allow yourselves to bleed yet again, to weep in truthful admission of the countless times you also betrayed your own memories out of guilt, pain or shame. And from there, maybe experience one more profound moment of redemption.

Know that we have once and for all been forgiven. We too need to forgive ourselves.

Forgiving is the only reaction which does not merely re-acts

but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act

which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences

both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven.

-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition