(Un)memory

One of the things about having an appallingly bad memory is that you are constantly ambushed by your past selves.

Sometimes it takes you by surprise, as they jump out at you from behind some innocuous-looking object. Sometimes you know you’ve brought it upon yourself by wandering down memory alley after dark.

What with one thing and another – joining facebook, trying to introduce some order to my memento-stuffed bedroom at home, looking through old photos – this has been happening rather a lot.

My child selves mostly induce in me a tender pity; they do not feel quite like myselves. But, I salt away the odd things I treasured then.

My adolescent selves make me wince. I am mostly quite glad to forget.

With my most recent selves, well, the relationship is more complex. I feel regret that I did not spend my student days better, that I wasn’t happier and bolder and more alive and less afraid, that I didn’t do more things. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that I hold that regret for each day I’ve ever passed.

So these selves make me sad. But there is happiness too, and fondness. There is a smile on my lips as I remember the day when we did that. And a longing for those days that will never come again (and oh they never do).

And oh I wish I didn’t forget so easily.

It is a very peculiar thing to look at old photos. To do so is to remember that I am not simply the sum of my most recent experience, of the last couple of years or so. That I run much deeper than that, that there is more to me. It is to discover a vast, forgotten hinterland.

It is to open a forgotten door in your house somewhere (and don’t we all have one of those, that hovers on the elusive edge of unsettling dreams?) and to find a whole room that has somehow dropped out of your consciousness, though now you find it you know you’ve always known it was there. The furniture, the pictures, the way the mirrors reflect the lampshades, the view from the window – they are all perfectly familiar. And yet they are another country.

More than that it is to open a door – and now you see it you know it’s always been there – and to find a whole house on the other side, and to realise that you’ve been living in one room all along. And to know that next time you wake you’ll have forgotten again.

Oddly enough, it is the photographs I took of my room in college that first affect me most. I look at my posters and pictures and plants and books in that year’s particular arrangement and remember the person who lived in that habitat. I firmly believe that we live in our surroundings, not just in the obvious way, but that we bleed into the shape of our forks and the colour of our favourite throw and the way the light slants across the wall.

And so I look at the photographs and I remember the things I did and the things I knew and the things I thought about, and how I felt about things, and what I hoped and dreamed and wanted. I remember that I was quite different, perhaps better.

And then I look at the photographs of my friends, and I remember forgotten punting trips, parties, days out… balls even. Some of them are still close friends, some I know are slipping away, some are no more than a name I used to know. I remember camaraderie, silliness, brilliant conversation, shared emotions, shared time. And I miss them.

And although it’s a destructive emotion that I try not to have, I regret what is lost. And I wonder who I am, and who I want to be.

Witches and whales

What filthy, monstrous, perverted faith can drive a human being to drive a three-inch nail into a little girl's head? To set their own child on fire? Bury them alive, chain them up, starve them, beat them until their bones break?

I just watched the Channel 4 Dispatches programme Saving Africa's Witch Children, and it has to be one of the most distressing things I've ever watched. In short, certain extreme pentecostal churches in Nigeria have people convinced that millions of their own children are possessed by Satan and responsible for any misfortunes that befall, and as a result these "witches" and "wizards" are ostracised, tortured, and killed.

It is disturbing how a powerful blend of traditional beliefs and Christianity has people completely convinced - such that it's an embedded, unquestioned certainty - that the bad things that happen to you are never just down to chance. Deaths, illness, crop failures, accidents, miscarriages and all such stones upon life's road must have a cause, which is where the witch children come in.

What their parents and other adults do to them is horrifying, but based on a sincere belief that is able to flourish in an environment of ignorance, fear, and profound poverty. The people in this film who I truly wish could burn in the hell that they believe in and I do not are the pastors. With a few easy words they condemn children by the dozen, perhaps to physical torture and death, or the lucky ones who they "cure" to the lifelong mental torture of being feared and stigmatised. The children who are cared for in the shelter featured in the programme, having been abandoned or rescued, seem like the lucky ones, but they have to be helped through beleiving that they are witches and knowing they have been rejected by their families and communities.

Meanwhile, these pastors grow obscenely rich on the profits of torturing children to extract confessions and "exorcising" them - which a family will have to sell all it has to afford. So even if a child is successfully exorcised, it will be living in a family that has been pushed even more deeply into grinding, deadly poverty - something the programme didn't really explore so much, but every bit as pernicious as the other effects of these pastors' actions, I think. Oh yes, and at the top of the heap these operations are hardly unsophisticated - including making blockbuster gorefest films depicting exactly how possessed children eat human flesh and so on. Perhaps these pastors too are acting out of sincerely-held beliefs, but seeing them on the screen wealthy, complacent, and wilfully, happily ignorant or unmindful of the suffering of the children... At the very best they're guilty of failing to scrutinise their beliefs and the consequences of their actions, at the worst, well, there are no words strong enough.

It's distressing to see the terrible scars left on these children, worse to see their absolute, abject sadness. I swear it would melt a heart of stone to see Mary, five years old, cowering inside herself as an angry crowd beat on the metal walls of the shack she was sitting in with her eventual rescuers. They asked her name and what had happened, and then they asked if she thought she was a witch, and all she could bring herself to do was nod, once, slowly. They told her they didn't think she was a witch but a fine, beautiful girl, and they asked her what she wanted them to do to help her. It was a long time before she could find any words, and then she said she wanted to go to school.

There are many brave and good Nigerians trying to change the situation and care for these poor damaged children. There is a rescue centre and school, CRARN, where the children seem happy and full of life, able to smile again. There is also an English bloke called Gary, who went to Nigeria to do research on something else entirely and ended up founding a UK charity, Stepping Stones Nigeria, to support the centre. I have the sense of an ordinary person struggling with the chaos and horror of it all, maybe not getting everything right, but with immense courage and selflessness actually using his life to do something extraordinary.

At the end of the programme he took all 150 or so of the rescue children to the local state capital to protest directly to the governor that the state had not put the national children's rights act into law. At first it seemed like it was going to be a fiasco, but eventually he came out and the children sang to him and he spoke to them and seemed genuinely surprised that none of them lived with their families and had all been abandoned (and they are the tip of the iceburg), and he promised to enact the law, and visit them and see how he could help them. And so he did (at least on the legal side, they didn't say about the second). It's only a small step against the enormous problem of changing attitudes and culture, but it does at least mean that there is a valid legal means to prosecute abusers, and I don't think I've ever seen a more moving or a more effective example of the power of face-to-face protest.

I don't watch a lot of TV - I think this is the first time I've done more that flick through the channels since I got back from Mexico (yep, I do go for some upbeat viewing...). I was a bit startled by all the adverts that came up during the breaks for Chrismas foods and gifts and other crappy cut-price luxuries. The Stepping Stones website was down last time I tried, which I hope is because they're being overwhelmed by a deluge of donations. There are a thousand equally worthy causes, there always are, but as soon as it's up and running again I'll be donating the price of a few special seasonal gifts from WHSmith. If you happen to be wondering what to do with a few quid (and I'm sure you are, what with the economy being so outrageously healthy n'all), I think these people will make it go a long way. The Dispatches website has more information and more links, and you can watch some clips from the programme.

If you need cheering up after all that, I also caught some of BBC2's Oceans programme about the sea of Cortez. I found the programme itself incredibly smug and irritating and lacking in actual content (for the love of all that is holy, since when do wildlife programme's have a "cast"? Of people I mean, not animals), but the footage of a group of sperm whales socialising, taking time just to make physical contact, (an erect penis is involved, admittedly but only later when a male comes along to court them), is breathtakingly beautiful. You apparently have 42 days to watch it here (and if you're as easily annoyed as me you might want to skip to somewhere near the end).

Woohooooooo!