And that what I’m trying to do.
#
At the government station there was indeed paper from forty years ago, what the Europeans called “assessment reports,” and Moseby’s presence was sufficient to grant them access. They were written in the European language, which Jijingi couldn’t read, but they included diagrams of the ancestry of the various clans, and he could identify the Tiv names in those diagrams easily enough, and Moseby had confirmed that his interpretation was correct. The elders in the western farms were right, and Sabe was wrong: Shangev was not Kwande’s son, he was Jechira’s.
One of the men at the government station had agreed to type up a copy of the relevant page so Jijingi could take it with him. Moseby decided to stay in Katsina-Ala to visit with the missionaries there, but Jijingi came home right away. He felt like an impatient child on the return trip, wishing he could ride the truck all the way back instead of having to walk from the motor road. As soon as he had arrived at the village, Jijingi looked for Sabe.
He found him on the path leading to a neighboring farm; some neighbors had stopped Sabe to have him settle a dispute over how a nanny goat’s kids should be distributed. Finally, they were satisfied, and Sabe resumed his walk. Jijingi walked beside him.
“Welcome back,” said Sabe.
“Sabe, I’ve been to Katsina-Ala.”
“Ah. Why did you go there?”
Jijingi showed him the paper. “This was written long ago, when the Europeans first came here. They spoke to the elders of the Shangev clan then, and when the elders told them the history of the Shangev clan, they said that Shangev was the son of Jechira.”
Sabe’s reaction was mild. “Whom did the Europeans ask?”
Jijingi looked at the paper. “Batur and Iorkyaha.”
“I remember them,” he said, nodding. “They were wise men. They would not have said such a thing.”
Jijingi pointed at the words on the page. “But they did!”
“Perhaps you are reading it wrong.”
“I am not! I know how to read.”
Sabe shrugged. “Why did you bring this paper back here?”
“What it says is important. It means we should rightfully be joined with the Jechira clan.”
“You think the clan should trust your decision on this matter?”
“I’m not asking the clan to trust me. I’m asking them to trust the men who were elders when you were young.”
“And so they should. But those men aren’t here. All you have is paper.”
“The paper tells us what they would say if they were here.”
“Does it? A man doesn’t speak only one thing. If Batur and Iorkyaha were here, they would agree with me that we should join with the Kwande clan.”
“How could they, when Shangev was the son of Jechira?” He pointed at the sheet of paper. “The Jechira are our closer kin.”
Sabe stopped walking and turned to face Jijingi. “Questions of kinship cannot be resolved by paper. You’re a scribe because Maisho of the Kwande clan warned me about the boys from the mission school. Maisho wouldn’t have looked out for us if we didn’t share the same father. Your position is proof of how close our clans are, but you forget that. You look to paper to tell you what you should already know, here.” Sabe tapped him on his chest. “Have you studied paper so much that you’ve forgotten what it is to be Tiv?”
Jijingi opened his mouth to protest when he realized that Sabe was right. All the time he’d spent studying writing had made him think like a European. He had come to trust what was written on paper over what was said by people, and that wasn’t the Tiv way.
The assessment report of the Europeans was vough; it was exact and precise, but that wasn’t enough to settle the question. The choice of which clan to join with had to be right for the community; it had to be mimi. Only the elders could determine what was mimi; it was their responsibility to decide what was best for the Shangev clan. Asking Sabe to defer to the paper was asking him to act against what he considered right.
“You’re right, Sabe,” he said. “Forgive me. You’re my elder, and it was wrong of me to suggest that paper could know more than you.”
Sabe nodded and resumed walking. “You are free to do as you wish, but I believe it will do more harm than good to show that paper to others.”
Jijingi considered it. The elders from the western farms would undoubtedly argue that the assessment report supported their position, prolonging a debate that had already gone too long. But more than that, it would move the Tiv down the path of regarding paper as the source of truth; it would be another stream in which the old ways were washing away, and he could see no benefit in it.
“I agree,” said Jijingi. “I won’t show this to anyone else.”
Sabe nodded.
Jijingi walked back to his hut, reflecting on what had happened. Even without attending a mission school, he had begun thinking like a European; his practice of writing in his notebooks had led him to disrespect his elders without him even being aware of it. Writing helped him think more clearly, he couldn’t deny that; but that wasn’t good enough reason to trust paper over people.
As a scribe, he had to keep the book of Sabe’s decisions in tribal court. But he didn’t need to keep the other notebooks, the ones in which he’d written down his thoughts. He would use them as tinder for the cooking fire.
#
We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.
Before a culture adopts the use of writing, when its knowledge is transmitted exclusively through oral means, it can very easily revise its history. It’s not intentional, but it is inevitable; throughout the world, bards and griots have adapted their material to their audiences, and thus gradually adjusted the past to suit the needs of the present. The idea that accounts of the past shouldn’t change is a product of literate cultures’ reverence for the written word. Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don’t need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community’s understanding of itself. So it wouldn’t be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.
Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.
But that era is coming to an end. Remem is merely the first of a new generation of memory prostheses, and as these products gain widespread adoption, we will be replacing our malleable organic memories with perfect digital archives. We will have a record of what we actually did instead of stories that evolve over repeated tellings. Within our minds, each of us will be transformed from an oral culture into a literate one.
It would be easy for me to assert that literate cultures are better off than oral ones, but my bias should be obvious, since I’m writing these words rather than speaking them to you. Instead I will say that it’s easier for me to appreciate the benefits of literacy and harder to recognize everything it has cost us. Literacy encourages a culture to place more value on documentation and less on subjective experience, and overall I think the positives outweigh the negatives. Written records are subject to every kind of error and their interpretation is subject to change, but at least the words on the page remain fixed, and there is real merit in that.
When it comes to our individual memories, I live on the opposite side of the divide. As someone whose identity was built on organic memory, I’m threatened by the prospect of removing subjectivity from our recall of events. I used to think it could be valuable for individuals to tell stories about themselves, valuable in a way that it couldn’t be for cultures, but
I’m a product of my time, and times change. We can’t prevent the adoption of digital memory any more than oral cultures could stop the arrival of literacy, so the best I can do is look for something positive in it.
And I think I’ve found the real benefit of digital memory. The point is not to prove you were right; the point is to admit you were wrong.
Because all of us have been wrong on various occasions, engaged in cruelty and hypocrisy, and we’ve forgotten most of those occasions. And that means we don’t really know ourselves. How much personal insight can I claim if I can’t trust my memory? How much can you? You’re probably thinking that, while your memory isn’t perfect, you’ve never engaged in revisionism of the magnitude I’m guilty of. But I was just as certain as you, and I was wrong. You may say, “I know I’m not perfect. I’ve made mistakes.” I am here to tell you that you have made more than you think, that some of the core assumptions on which your self-image is built are actually lies. Spend some time using Remem, and you’ll find out.
But the reason I now recommend Remem is not for the shameful reminders it provides of your past; it’s to avoid the need for those in the future. Organic memory was what enabled me to construct a whitewashed narrative of my parenting skills, but by using digital memory from now on, I hope to keep that from happening. The truth about my behavior won’t be presented to me by someone else, making me defensive; it won’t even be something I’ll discover as a private shock, prompting a reevaluation. With Remem providing only the unvarnished facts, my image of myself will never stray too far from the truth in the first place.
Digital memory will not stop us from telling stories about ourselves. As I said earlier, we are made of stories, and nothing can change that. What digital memory will do is change those stories from fabulations that emphasize our best acts and elide our worst, into ones that—I hope—acknowledge our fallibility and make us less judgmental about the fallibility of others.
Nicole has begun using Remem as well, and discovered that her recollection of events isn’t perfect either. This hasn’t made her forgive me for the way I treated her—nor should it, because her misdeeds were minor compared to mine—but it has softened her anger at my misremembering my actions, because she realizes it’s something we all do. And I’m embarrassed to admit that this is precisely the scenario Erica Meyers predicted when she talked about Remem’s effects on relationships.
This doesn’t mean I’ve changed my mind about the downsides of digital memory; there are many, and people need to be aware of them. I just don’t think I can argue the case with any sort of objectivity anymore. I abandoned the article I was planning to write about memory prostheses; I handed off the research I’d done to a colleague, and she wrote a fine piece about the pros and cons of the software, a dispassionate article free from all the soul-searching and angst that would have saturated anything I submitted. Instead, I’ve written this.
The account I’ve given of the Tiv is based in fact, but isn’t precisely accurate. There was indeed a dispute among the Tiv in 1941 over whom the Shangev clan should join with, based on differing claims about the parentage of the clan’s founder, and administrative records did show that the clan elders’ account of their genealogy had changed over time. But many of the specific details I’ve described are invented. The actual events were more complicated and less dramatic, as actual events always are, so I have taken liberties to make a better narrative. I’ve told a story in order to make a case for the truth. I recognize the contradiction here.
As for my account of my argument with Nicole, I’ve tried to make it as accurate as I possibly could. I’ve been recording everything since I started working on this project, and I’ve consulted the recordings repeatedly when writing this. But in my choice of which details to include and which to omit, perhaps I have just constructed another story. In spite of my efforts to be unflinching, have I flattered myself with this portrayal? Have I distorted events so they more closely follow the arc expected of a confessional narrative? The only way you can judge is by comparing my account against the recordings themselves, so I’m doing something I never thought I’d do: with Nicole’s permission, I am granting public access to my lifelog, such as it is. Take a look at the video, and decide for yourself.
And if you think I’ve been less than honest, tell me. I want to know.
SYLVIA SPRUCK WRIGLEY
Sylvia Spruck Wrigley was born in Germany on the 7th of March 1968. She spent most of her childhood in Los Angeles but escaped at the end of the 1980s. After a few years of drifting, she moved to England where her accent was irretrievably damaged. She now lives on the south coast of Spain and writes full time. Her short stories have most recently appeared in Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction and Nature's Futures.
Alive, Alive Oh, by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley
Nebula Nomination for Best Short Story 2013
The waves crash onto the blood-red shore, sounding just like the surf on Earth: a dark rumbling full of power. It’s been seventeen years since we left.
Owen and I got married at the register office in Cardiff. We took a flat near the University, a tiny bedsit. I felt very cosmopolitan, living in the capital city, and only a little bit homesick for Swansea. Then Owen came home one night and asked me what I thought about going into space. I laughed because I thought he must be joking, but he wasn’t: They’d offered him a position in a new terraforming colony on G851.5.32 and of course he wanted to go. I was frightened, but it’s not the kind of opportunity you can say no to, is it? And it was only for ten years; afterward we could come back to a full pension. Fame and fortune, he said. I did like the thought of telling my friends. Oooh, hello Emma, how have you been? Yes, it has been quite some time, hasn’t it? You’ve moved to Mumbles Road, have you? That’s nice. We moved to an exoplanet eighteen light-years away. Oh well, we’re back now, of course . . .
That was back when I thought we’d return to Wales one day.
***
The water here is nothing like the salty sea of home. It’s acidic and eats into the flesh. I shouldn’t even be this close to the shore, in case the spray splashes across and burns me. Everything about G851.5.32 is toxic; I’ve been here so long, even I am.
Megan was born after we’d been here five years. My best friend Jeanine (my onlyfriend) was present for the birth. Owen started off holding my hand, but he couldn’t stand to see me in such pain. In the end, he paced outside until Jeanine went out to tell him that it was all over, that he was the father of a baby girl.
“She looks so fragile,” he said. “I’m afraid to touch her in case she breaks.” It’s true: Megan was a tiny little thing, ice-blue eyes peering at everything, curious.
I worried about her growing up in the colony dome; it was such a sterile environment. “Children need to get muddy,” I said. “They need to be able to explore and get out from under everyone’s feet and just burn up energy.”
“She’ll be running down the sandbars of Swansea Bay before long,” he promised, tickling under her chin. She stared back at him with a serious face.
When she was a baby, I sang Suo Gân to her, the Welsh lullaby. As she got older, I made her laugh with songs about a world she’d never seen: “Oranges and Lemons,” “The Bishop of Bangor’s Jig,” “Sweet Molly Malone.” I told her stories about day-to-day life in Swansea: the covered market, the sandy beach of the bay, Blackpill Lido, the rain. These were as fantastical to her as gold spun from straw.
Once Megan could walk, Owen had protective goggles made for her small face and we took to taking long strolls outside, around the edges of the dome. We went as far as the craggy coastline, where the dark waves crashed against red silt. She sang “Molly Malone” while I told her about making sandcastles and the mewling cries of the seagulls. She gazed at everything with curious eyes.
“Didn’t you get dirty, Mummy?” The colony has very strict rules about sterile conditions. The idea of playing in the sand was as alien to Megan as life in space would be to my school friends.
She grew up with constant warnings, having to wear three layers of protective clothing just to open a window. That afternoon, she clutched her favourite toy—a stuffed octopus I made from scraps of synthetic fabric—in one hand and held my hand tightly with the other. She was four years old and she had never been free. I did what I could, kept telling her the stories she loved, tried to explain what a child’s life should be like. It wasn’t the same. She knew it wasn’t.
“Yes,” I told her, “we got very dirty. And then we’d go home and our mummies would make us wash and we’d be clean again.” Megan looked dubious. “It was a different type of dirty, child,” I admitted eventually. “Dirt on Earth doesn’t hurt. In fact, sometimes pregnant women even eat soil.” She laughed at me, the idea so ludicrous, she couldn’t imagine it. When we returned to the dome, we left all our outerwear in the entry bay, where it would be collected and sterilised. The commanders weren’t very pleased with me taking Megan out of the base for walks, but once I found out they weren’t letting us return to Earth, I didn’t much care what they thought.
Owen and I were in the third wave of researchers to come to the colony; there were a few thousand of us at the peak. It was a long trip: five months’ travel and then ten years on the base and another five months home. Still, it seemed reasonable until a few years after Megan was born. The first return mission to California was a disaster. The initial researchers—including my friend Jeanine Davies—were so excited about going home. Jeanine stayed up all night in anticipation. She told me she was going to gorge herself on fresh fruit and vegetables and then go outside and enjoy the feel of the wind against her face. We made plans to meet in Cardiff once Owen’s time was finished. Her only regret was that she wouldn’t see Megan for a few years. She was full of energy, the picture of health. She was going home.
When the capsule delivered them to the space centre in the California desert, the occupants became violently ill. It took a while to get the news. Jeanine was dead. All of them, dead. They carried some unknown bacteria in their gut, which went malignant once they arrived in Earth’s atmosphere. Not just the homecomers, everyone: The bacteria spread with a virulence that hadn’t been seen since the plague. So G851.5.32 was put under quarantine and all further trips to Mother Earth cancelled with no clue as to when we could return.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 353
