Sterilizing Memory and Knowing in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Memoria (2021)
17 February 2022
British expatriate Jessica Holland’s auditory estrangement while living in Medellin, Colombia has to be an intentional equation. The variables can be distinct: her imperialist provenance and how it benefits her; Colombia’s neocolonial condition (export-oriented import-dependent economic relation with capitalist nations including the UK1); the oppressor’s friction with the assimilated geography; the sparse revisions in the oppressor’s memory that accumulate into clear conscience.
Jessica eventually meets old Hernan, a land-owning recluse secure in his ample resources, who can witness history — from primordial to recent — but opts to be dormant.
In examining Memoria, we can see that Jessica’s inquisitiveness, and old Hernan’s vast knowledge are wielded as complacent devices, as the film chooses to skirt around the inherently violent relationship between colonizer and colonized and romanticize inaction.
There were scenes critical of invasion, that imply and narrate its violence — the question of meddling in the affairs of an indigenous group with the premise of research (dining scene with Karen Holland and her family); the violation of land by heavy industrial machines; the severe damage of massive mining activities on communities; the alien spaceships leaving the forest — but this sharpness is rendered dull by having meditation and intentional dormancy and its Artistic permutations as the verdict.
When native land is too often soaked in the blood of its inhabitants by imperialist initiatives, thinking about it won’t suffice.
Class and Estrangement
Jessica’s class and citizenship merit an inspection, not to invalidate her ailment but to place it and perhaps determine a cause. It is also important if we consider that her character could be the filmmaker’s position in navigating the social, political, and economic context of present-day Colombia.
Jessica is a small enterprise owner of a successful orchid farm (timestamp 46:48) and retail business. Not once did the film show her toiling in her farm, or engaging in retail service; she consolidates wealth through minimal labor. Moreover, she can afford a new cooler with excellent features for her goods. She has the option to look at art in a gallery, to listen to a live musical performance in a university classroom, to explore a mining site, and to write poetry while seeking remedy for her ailment. Jessica has also consulted a sound engineer, an anthropologist, and attended a lecture on the physics of guitar-construction. This leisurely seeking for medical help is an option denied to most, and an affirmation of Jessica’s comfortable economic standing.
After making it clear that neither Xanax nor Jesus can help Jessica, the film was seemingly preparing to illuminate her on the complexities of her ailment. Both Xanax and Jesus are goods peddled to the constantly alienated inhabitants of a capitalist world. They address the symptoms, keeping the populace able to perform labor, thus sustaining capitalism. By saying that Xanax and Jesus are not the cure, Memoria was in a position to expose the root cause of Jessica’s pathology.
Her meeting with old Hernan has the potential to take the film into a revolutionary trajectory.
Old Hernan Remembers
In the last act of Memoria, Jessica stumbles upon an hermit and his modest mountainside property. Old Hernan remembers entirely. He can recall everything he has experienced — the events, the weather, and their sensations are recorded and ready to be recited anytime. Old Hernan also has access to the memories of the land — the stones, the flora and fauna. The forest, through him, becomes an archive of histories. What old Hernan can know should transcend epochal time and geographic boundaries, beyond the limitations of his milieu and senses. He could tap the collective experiences of generations.
Following the logic of his ability, old Hernan must know of Colombia’s colonial past and the ongoing economic and military intervention by foreign powers. He must be aware of the multinational corporations that extract cheap labor and raw materials off its land2, violating human rights and damaging its environment both in colossal degrees. He cannot miss the paramilitary forces that also serve the interests of the reactionary state and private corporations3. These must be embedded in the stones and trees and the wind.
The nails on his fish scaler must have told him of the violence forced upon the workers of steel industries4, their infinite hours and meager compensation. The earth must have told him that it is forced to nourish feudal settings, where farmers grow food yet remain hungry5. If he truly remembers, he must be aware of the multitude of systems perpetuating this oppressive condition.
And old Hernan cannot miss the peasants’ and workers’ active and organized resistance — a crucial variable the film has ignored, to its detriment. One can muster a thin excuse for Jessica as an uninitiated academic complacent with her nation’s expansionist history — like many academics from nations that export capital. But there is none for old Hernan because, again, he can remember.
The last act, which includes the forest as a setting, also shows the film indulging in that urban-rural, Xanax-Jesus dichotomy: the city as a gray, noisy territory and the forest as a slow, quiet green. It adheres to that comfortable notion that conflates industrial modernity with estrangement. It misses the violence equally ubiquitous in these regions, the violence of capital’s singular goal of wealth accumulation through the extraction of cheap raw materials and cheap labor power. The urban-rural demarcation can only be enjoyed if one has the time and money, like old Hernan and Jessica, to linger at, and consider only, the forest’s pretty surface.
Two Hernans
That old Hernan Bedoya the character is likely named after the actual Hernan Bedoya, Colombian community leader and activist6, confirms Memoria’s attempt to engage with the land and human rights situation of Colombia. A remembered scene (through Hernan’s narration at first, then through Jessica’s memory) depicting the violence of random strangers taking someone else’s lunch supports this participation. The memory’s contained violence is symptomatic of societies under imperialism — the inaccessibility of basic resources to the population, forcing the poor to compete with each other often through violent means. Memoria seems to miss this critical angle with its careless mishandling of violence as an isolated occurrence. It ignores who deploys violence, what makes it a recourse, and for whom it is being deployed.
Memoria’s engagement ultimately proves thin because of old Hernan’s decision to be paralyzed by his knowledge of, and access to, difficult histories. Contrary to providing a sober meditation on imperialism and the abuse that accompanies it, on the inevitable mass movement that continuously resists colonization, the character’s inaction does the opposite — a neoliberal approach that benefits only those who can afford the status quo, like old Hernan and Jessica.
While old Hernan chose to be incapacitated, the real Hernan Bedoya defended the Afro-Colombian territory of Pedeguita-Mancilla against agro-industries7. He chose to be part of the organized resistance against the repeated abuse his community suffered from state and private forces. Hernan Bedoya fought for the rights of farmers and local communities, repelling land grabbing initiatives by massive enterprises.
The dichotomy of the two Hernans exposes the sterility of the film. In the face of systemic exploitation, there is no space for inaction. Meditation in this context is a self-satisfying doctrine that only serves imperialism.
The struggles of the real Hernan Bedoya and his community shatter arguments of contemplation over concrete, organized, and collective actions.
​
​
Voluntary Exit
By having the partial resolution to Jessica’s confusion as alien spaceships blasting away from the mountains of Colombia, the film seems to convey a simple and naive solution to the pathologies it presented: the colonizer’s voluntary exit despite inaction from the colonized populace.
A clever hint at this position is shown early in the film, in the scene where Jessica dines with her sister and her family. Karen Holland tells Jessica about her research on the Invisible People, an indigenous tribe who refuses contact with outsiders. Karen narrates that the tribe had successfully prevented a road construction through their territory in the Amazon forest. The film intimates that her attempts to study the tribe was the cause of her recent sickness. Note that as Karen delivers her story, Jessica is twice interrupted by the loud booming sound — a symptom of her own illness. Upon learning the source of this noise towards the end of the film, we can look back at this dining scene and make a connection: Karen, the road builders, and the colonizers as the causal agents of the personal and social illnesses should choose to leave.
The film fails to understand that there is no voluntary exit for the foreign powers. The colonized must organize and move with the singular goal of cutting off the colonizer’s claws. Imperialist nations have to look outside to persist. And so, it is up to the subjugated populations to resist and evict them.
Memoria’s meditations informed by its sterile politics fail to yield to the material contradictions it brings up. If old Hernan truly remembers, he would not be content with contemplation, wielding his fish scaler and facile philosophy.
Appendix: The real Hernan Bedoya
A video remembering Hernan Bedoya and his efforts for and with the people:
In memory of Hernán Bedoya, Colombian community leader
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFMlRhNoSJY
Sources
1 [withdrawn], “Doing business in Colombia: Colombia trade and export guide,” GOV.UK. (n.d.), 12 February 2022,
2 Peter Bleckmann, “The role of multinational enterprises in Colombia's economic and social development,”. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325119514_The_role_of_multinational_enterprises_in_Colombia's_economic_and_social_development
3 I. M. van den Boomen, “Paramilitarism and Multinational Corporations in the Colombian Armed Conflict The nexus between the AUC and Chiquita between 1997 and 2004 in the Urabá region,”
https://studenttheses.universiteitleiden.nl/access/item%3A2659026/view
4 “Acerías Paz del Río workers in Colombia demand improved working conditions,” 22 January 2013,
5 J. J. Brittain, R. J. Sacouman, “ Agrarian Transformation and Resistance in the Colombian Countryside,” Labour, Capital and Society,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/43158324
6 “Acerías Paz del Río workers in Colombia demand improved working conditions,” 22 January 2013, Industriall-Union,
7 ibid.