IN DEFENSE OF ANCESTRAL MEMORY

How the clash between the Guerreros and Benedict Anderson at the Frankfurt Book Fair frames the question of who owns the dead.

- AA PATAWARAN

Inscriptions to Noli and Fili editions given to First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy

At the Frankfurt Book Fair, surrounded by agents and contracts and clauses about rights, I began to see memory in the same grammar as property. Who gets to keep a life story? Who gets to revise it? Who gets to erase it?

I have lived the domestic version of that fight. Six years ago, I cut off a cousin who, with the devotion of a priest saying Mass, repeated slander about my parents. Both of them are gone, my father since 1989, my mother since 2015, and the cousin decided to supply me with new memories to replace the ones I grew up with. She declared my father an alcoholic. I never once saw him drunk, not even with a glass. I left that side of the family to preserve my version of the man.