The past is present

"Layer by layer by layer by layer by layer

I take it off, I set it down, as I become what I am

Layer by layer by layer by layer by layer

Every version of me that I've tried to be served a purpose…"

— Savanna

Citrinita I

I wish I didn’t have to talk about the past, as it holds so many pains and sufferings, and my goal isn’t to dwell on things that no longer serve me or define me.

However, the only possible way for the past to stop leading our present life, and the only way to find different paths for the future, lies in the references we find in our past.

It shows us where we went wrong and where we got it right. It reveals how we act in the face of life’s injustices and how, even temporarily, we repeat the cycles of beliefs we learned once.

Moreover, the past hides parts of ourselves that we’ve forgotten, parts buried under layers of suffering we’ve faced and countless layers of beliefs we once formed.

Therefore, we cannot strip away these layers and rebuild them differently without first becoming aware of their existence.

That is the sole importance of the past.

In historical terms, reparations have never fully arrived and likely never will.

Auschwitz, once one of the largest concentration camps used by Hitler to annihilate innocents, has now become a memorial. When I visited it, I saw a phrase at its entrance that has never left my mind.

The phrase stated that this memorial exists so people never forget the barbarity committed in the past and that such history is never repeated.

There was also a holocaust in my country. It hasn’t been widely portrayed in history, as history was always written and disseminated by those who had the power to tell it, emphasizing only the convenient parts and hiding the inconvenient ones.

However, Brazil was not an uninhabited land. Thousands of indigenous peoples lived in what we now call Brazil. Native peoples with their own beliefs, languages, and cultures had everything taken from them—their lands, their lives, and their identities.

Yes, it was a holocaust. Thousands and thousands were killed. The gold from my state can be found in churches in London because it was given to the English people as payment for debts owed by the Portuguese.

The Catholic Church was established as the only acceptable religion in our lands. Indigenous people who were not killed were enslaved and catechized. They looted our wood, our precious stones, and all our natural resources, occupying our lands and establishing a political carnival that persists to this day—a legacy of beliefs perpetuated because they remain unseen.

I find it ironically amusing that, nowadays, we have to be begging for a European passport, or that we face prejudice when we’re in their countries, or when they say we speak Portuguese incorrectly—a language that wasn’t even ours to begin with.

The truth is, they took everything we had, including our identity, and the "empire" they have today was built on the bloody, inhumane colonization and looting of our nations.

It’s strangely even more frightening how effective their brainwashing was and how deeply our identity was distorted. So much so that European culture is still the most valued, even though we now know we are a mixed people. This mix resonates even in my DNA, which is predominantly European but also proudly carries African, Andean, and Moroccan ancestry.

Despite all this causing me anger, I know I need to understand that I am no longer my ancestors, that my country is no longer the same, and that things have changed.

But I wish this could also serve as a kind of memorial with the same purpose that the past serves: so we never forget history—the true stories—so that some of them are never repeated again.

After all, my ancestor could have been a Portuguese scoundrel who plundered my country or an African who had his home and family in Africa and was then taken to Brazil to be enslaved.

Both are within me somehow. However, even though I carry all this ancestry in my genetic code, what will be expressed in my conduct will always be only what I choose.
After all, not every Portuguese person was cruel, just as not every German was.

Generalization categorizes and classifies us like numbers to serve the purpose of those who truly still wield power and, in some way, continue to control the masses—through media manipulation, through the failures of precarious education systems, through the manipulation and monopoly of the food industry that sells us poison, and the pharmaceutical industry that sells us temporary antidotes to the diseases that reflect the imbalance of the entire social system we live in.

They keep us distracted, consuming what they want to sell us. They keep us at the lowest level of the social pyramid so we can work for them endlessly. 

We feel happy with the year-end bonuses we receive in December—bonuses that are really just meant for us to buy gifts and cover the costs of the holiday celebrations they created to make us believe we have something, that we’re gaining something, while we work tirelessly for them like robots.

Meanwhile, they sleep, they rest, they live their lives, and they hoard the money we make for them. And we spend the bare minimum we earn just to survive, to pay taxes, or to fuel the wheel of consumerism they created through brainwashing and manipulation.

They distract us and drive us further and further away from our humanity, making us fight one another at the base of the pyramid while they, at the top, laugh at us.

Now, as a Brazilian immigrant living in the Republic of Ireland, I remember that before leaving Brazil, I knew very little or almost nothing about Ireland.

The first time I heard about Ireland was through one of my college professors. She talked about the Phytophthora infestans fungus, which decimated potato crops in Ireland, causing thousands of Irish people to starve.

Her classes and books on phytopathology taught me that it was a severe and necrotrophic fungus. Its severity stems mainly from its necrotrophic nature, which differs from milder fungi. Necrotrophic fungi kill plants and then feed or reproduce in their dead cells, unlike biotrophic fungi, which need the plant to stay alive to feed and reproduce.

Indeed, it’s a fungus that is difficult to control, partly due to its high transmissibility. But I kept wondering: Why was the Irish population relying solely on potatoes to the point where so many people died of starvation because of a single type of crop?

I thought the fungus was to blame, or maybe the lands weren’t fertile or diverse enough for other crops. These hypotheses didn’t fully satisfy my questions. Still, I accepted the theory that the fungus was to blame, and that answer stayed with me for a long time.

Years later, when I immigrated to Ireland, I came across a memorial that caught my attention. As I got closer, I realized it was the Famine Memorial—a reminder of the past again.

So, I began to research and realized that the Irish didn’t rely on potatoes out of choice and that the fungus wasn’t solely to blame.

The natural balance of things is only disrupted when some form of imbalance occurs.

In the case of potato crops, the imbalance began when diversity was replaced by monoculture. Consequently, fungi appeared and spread rapidly, wiping out all the potato crops that existed and extinguishing the only source of food for the Irish population.

This is what happens when we turn our backs on nature and disregard the value of diversity, which is part of its natural cycle—and curiously, ours as well, even though we often see ourselves as separate from everything else.

But at that time, there was another kind of imbalance happening—not about fungal or floral species, but about our own species.

I finally understood that Ireland, still part of the United Kingdom, starkly contrasted with Britain in terms of development and living conditions. The exorbitant agricultural taxes imposed on the Irish and the obligation to export most of their food forced the population to rely solely on what was left: potatoes. Consequently, as mentioned earlier, monoculture enabled the spread of pathogenic fungi.

Thus, the potato crops perished with the same severity as the population, who were nothing more than slaves to the British state, died.

The reflection of this is the chessboard itself.

Who is the front line? Who are the bait? Who are those who enter the battlefield already with a death sentence?

While the king, with minimal effort, hides in his shelter at the backline?

It’s the pawns, right? The majority.

What would happen if all the pawns refused to fight? What would happen if religion no longer controlled us, weakening the bishops’ attacks?

What would happen if the knights could no longer be bought with titles or land if they were no longer led by their ambitions and instead valued the lives of their families and their own lives over these gains?

What would happen if no one obeyed the whims and desires of the kings anymore?

Has no one ever noticed, or stopped to think, that the purpose of the game of chess is only to protect one’s own king and checkmate the opposing king?

Is this game really about the pawns?

I just wish the same mistakes wouldn’t keep happening. I just want the mistakes not to be the same.

But we use the past as a piece that fundamentally leads our present and, therefore, also our future.

These are beliefs passed down from generation to generation, now defining us and causing us to repeat them, passing them on to future generations and making this our reality.

The same thing happens with different characters, in different places, in different situations, yet the dynamics remain the same.

It’s no different in our family dynamics and our personal dark pasts.

We ignore the past, thinking it is now too distant, or we ignore it because we lack sensitivity toward those who suffer, those with stories different from ours, or the same ideals, because we are increasingly distant from our species, from the concept of humanity, from natural cycles, while all we have time for is thinking about how to survive.

Or we don’t ignore it, nor use it merely as a reference to identify patterns we don’t want to repeat, but instead live in it, condemned to daily anger and resentment, anxiously waiting for the day when vengeance will bring justice against those who are not our true enemies.

There was a time when I did the same with my personal past. I was consumed by anger and resentment, and so I relived it continuously, never truly tasting the present or having better hopes for the future. Or I simply ignored it entirely, thinking it was no longer relevant, and thus failed to see the mistakes I kept making or the reactions I had to the same injustices happening to me. Lamentations and repeated beliefs and cycles were the only things truly present.

It wasn’t wise to completely abstain from the past or incessantly relive it. The only truly wise thing was to visit it, just like visiting one of these memorials that exist today, so I could never allow the same stories to repeat themselves.

I finally realized it was also necessary to talk about it—that my Nigredo would be my memorial.

So that others who have gone through similar stories, or those who might go through them, can identify the same dynamic that insistently remains present in our current times.

And so that none of us, above all as human beings, will ever repeat the same mistakes.

The mistakes born of ignorance, of vengeance that poisons and sickens us, or the mistakes of failing to protect ourselves, becoming prisoners of the same cruel and unjust dynamics.

Thiara Màtos.