What does it mean to keep memory alive?

We wrestle with this question regularly at CPT. Holding on to collective memory – of a comrade lost in the West Bank, a shipwreck in the Aegean, an evicted village in Iraqi Kurdistan – is one of the connecting threads running through our teams’ work across the world.

This week, the question of memory has been especially present in our minds. Our teams remind us of its sheer weight. Holding on to memory isn’t easy; it’s painful, it sometimes feels like it will drag us under, and it’s not always clear what good it does.

In the Aegean Sea, recent weeks have brought another spike in shipwrecks. As our Aegean Migrant Solidarity team keeps count, the needless loss of life – sometimes at the cold hand of European border policy, sometimes at the red hand of a border guard – feels relentless. “Do records truly matter?” the team asks. “Does the preservation of memory really matter? Can memory and history be a weapon in the hands of the powerless, for the present and for the future?”

In Palestine, Shahd Al Junaidi reflects on the toll of two years bearing witness to the genocide in Gaza and the escalating extremities of life under occupation in the West Bank. With loss and grief so close for so long, and freedom feeling “like a battleground,” Shahd asks herself: “Why must we die for our homeland? Why must survival itself be treated as an achievement?” And again: “If we die for this land, what will become of our freedom? For whom will it remain?”

Shahd reminds us that at the heart of commemoration lies a contradiction. As Iraqi poet Ahmad Matar writes, “I wish for silence so that I may live, but what I encounter compels me to speak.” It is precisely that compulsion – felt on an existential level – that keeps the custodians of collective memory going. The act of speaking out is, in Shahd’s words, “a claim on existence, in memory of those who have fallen.”

In Colombia, meanwhile, our team is also asking: “What motivates the urgency to rebuild, recover, or reclaim the past? Why remember? What do we remember, and how?” Bringing together social leaders from El Guayabo, they embarked on an exercise of recalling and recording their memories of struggle.

So, why remember? “So that other people and communities may learn,” they answer, “and know that ‘Yes, it’s possible!’”