LIT Review #4 - Ruins of Memory

Rebecca Solnit, “The Ruins of Memory ” in Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics, (California: University of California Press, 2008), 351-370.

In this essay in Storming the Gates of Paradise, writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit explores how societies remember, or deliberately forget, events marked by violence, injustice, and trauma. She contends that memory is inherently political, not merely personal, and is often constructed by those in positions of power. The choices societies make about what to commemorate and what to erase reflect the interests and influence of dominant narratives. As Solnit writes, “Ruins represent the physical decay of what preceded them, but their removal erases meaning and memory.”[1]

Solnit asserts that “everything is the ruin of what came before”.[2] Paper, chairs, and tables, for instance, are the transformed remnants of trees. Every ruin is evidence of an act of destruction: something has been cut, drilled, or extracted from the earth. She emphasises that the scale of this destruction is often far greater than the object ultimately produced. Yet, Solnit also recognises that creation and destruction are inseparable forces in the process of change, whether that change unfolds suddenly or over time. As she puts it, there is “the generative richness of ruins and the ruinous nature of all change”.[3] A fundamental rhythm within the cycle of life.

Constructing something for human habitation, no matter how small, requires a degree of eradication and disruption to the land beneath it, a fraught relationship. Scaling up, the building of a town or city involves extensive excavation, destruction, and displacement. In time, when that construction falls into disrepair or collapses, it becomes a ruin, an echo of what once stood. As the land slowly regenerates, it carries the imprint of what was built and lost, altered by the presence and passing of human activity. In her reflection on these cycles, Solnit turns to the example of San Francisco, tracing how its creation involved both the destruction of what came before and the layered, ongoing process of transformation. “… much of a windswept, fog-shrouded expanse of sand dunes and chaparral-covered hillsides were smoothed over, dunes removed, hilltops flattened, bays and marshes filled in, streams forced underground, endemic species driven into extinction.”[4]

Referring to San Francisco’s history of devastating earthquakes and massive fires, Solnit observes that the city has been ruined repeatedly, and each time, the remnants have been cleared away and forgotten. This cycle of destruction and erasure recurs throughout its history. She notes that earthquakes primarily devastate human-built environments, remarking that “architecture is the principal victim of earthquakes.”[5] Ruins can also be defined by absence. In both North America and Aotearoa New Zealand, indigenous peoples often built with organic materials, resulting in structures that blended with the land. As a result, their traces may be subtle or nearly invisible, ruins that whisper rather than shout.

Forgetting can serve as a tool of power - erasing the past helps preserve the status quo. Solnit writes that “forgetting is the ruin of memory, its collapse, decay, shattering, and eventual fading away into nothingness.”[6] We often rebuild and conceal ruins so effectively that it's difficult to imagine what once stood in their place. These dynamics of erasure and transformation are not unique to San Francisco. In Aotearoa New Zealand, similar processes have shaped both the land and the stories told about it. Ecologist Geoff Park reflected on the Hauraki Plains in 2006, observing: “Yet the recognisable combination of trees, pasture and human structures makes it seem perhaps as if they are all that was there.”[7]

Poverty and neglect often give rise to ruins, and paradoxically, can preserve history, allowing traces of the past to remain visible. Yet such remnants tend to survive only in remote or less desirable locations. In contrast, wealth, and the pursuit of it, typically leads to the removal of existing structures and communities, replacing them with more profitable, modern versions that erase what once was. Solnit writes, “Memory is often the spoils of the defeated, and amnesia may sometimes be the price of victory.”[8]

Solnit’s metaphor of ruins captures the fragmented and obscured nature of memory. Recovering what’s buried, she argues, requires deliberate and active engagement. She highlights the absences and omissions within historical records, the people, events, and viewpoints left out of dominant narratives, and calls for a more inclusive and truthful confrontation with the past. Confronting his country’s past is German artist Anselm Kiefer. Born in 1945, Kiefer grew up amidst the physical and moral ruins of his country. As a young artist, he recognised a national ‘collective amnesia’ surrounding Germany’s past and sought to confront it through his work.'[9] Author Simon Schama describes it well: “He committed to becoming a cultural nuisance, worrying away at the scabs of memory until they revealed open and livid wounds again.”[10]

Sudden acts of destruction capture immediate attention and are often etched into collective memory, while slow-moving crises, like global warming, may ultimately cause far greater harm. Solnit contrasts the widely remembered spectacle of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center with the largely forgotten, gradual devastation of the South Bronx through waves of small, deliberately lit fires during the 1970s and 1980s.[11]

Solnit interweaves examples of cultural and collective memory, from genocides and wars to colonisation, to reveal how narratives of forgetting often uphold systems of oppression. In contrast, acts of remembering become forms of resistance. To remember, she suggests, is an ethical act: one that affirms truth, seeks justice, and gives voice to those who were silenced. Looking back from a perspective that resonates with my own, author Richard Shaw unearths a long-suppressed family history: that his ancestors farmed land in Taranaki, confiscated from its original owners and sold to his great-grandfather, who had served in the Armed Constabulary during the 1881 invasion of Parihaka. He closes his book The Forgotten Coast with the poignant declaration, “Best I end the forgetting.”[12]

Solnit draws on the landscape of San Francisco, her home, to explore the layered stories held within its ruins. Similarly, my current project was sparked by the recent discovery of the vast, ancient Kahikatea forest and swamplands that once covered the Hauraki Plains, my childhood home. I was shocked not only by the scale of what had been lost, but by how little I had known. The transformation of the land into productive farmland was so widely celebrated that the histories of what had been, and who had lived there, were largely erased. We grew up proud of the fertile farmland, a pride still deeply held by many family and friends who continue to farm there. But memory is political: who tells the story shapes what is remembered. The stories of the Māori communities who were deeply connected to the Piako Swamp, as the Hauraki Plains was once known, were left untold.

I had also, without realising, lived near the Kopuatai Peat Dome, an expansive raised bog of nearly ten thousand hectares, the largest of its kind in Aotearoa New Zealand. Surrounded by swamplands and lagoons, and with remnants of the original kahikatea forest still visible at its eastern edge, it remains the finest example of a raised peat bog in the country and sustains a globally unique vegetation type.[13] It is not a ruin, though in the late 1800s, it was likely viewed as one - wasteland to be improved. Yet the bog holds memory: a living archive of what came before.

Ruins speak to both what has been lost and what may still be remembered or revealed. Solnit expands “Ruins stand as reminders. Memory is always incomplete, always imperfect, always falling into ruins; but the ruins themselves, like no other traces, are treasures: our guide to situating ourselves in a landscape of time.”[14]

In remembering, we not only honour what has been lost - we take responsibility for how we move forward. Prefacing the Introduction in Geoff Park’s writing on New Zealand ecology and history Nga Uruora is a quote from Frank Gohlke, American landscape photographer and writer, who elaborates on ruins and memory, and honouring those memories:

Landscapes are collections of stories, only fragments of which are visible at any one time. In linking the fragments, unearthing the connections between them, we create the landscape anew. A landscape whose story is known is harder to dismiss… At its best, telling the landscape’s story can still feel like a sacred task.[15]