-By Abdul Mahmud
Memory is a mischievous marvel, fleet-footed, capricious, and ever faithful only to its own whimsy. It ducks and weaves between time and consciousness, slipping out of reach just when you think you’ve grasped it. One moment, I am scanning the horizon of remembrance, combing the scattered debris of vanished moments while looking for things that have taken flight into the silence of disappearance or loss. And then, without warning or logic, a story appears. Insistent. Clear. Seemingly unconnected to the search I’m making.
This time, it is the tale Italo Calvino recounts in the closing section of Quickness, one of his Six Memos for the Next Millennium. He tells of the Chinese painter, Zhuang Zhou, who was summoned by the Emperor to paint a crab. But rather than reaching for his paint and brush, Zhou made an unusual request: a villa to live in, twelve servants to attend to him, and five years to contemplate the task. At the end of the five years, Zhou asks for five more. The Emperor, bemused but patient, grants the request. Then, in the tenth year, Zhou walks into the room, picks up his brush, and with the swiftness of lightning, paints the crab. One stroke. A perfect crab. Alive on the canvas.
This tale lives in me not because of its absurdity or its humour. It lives in me because it reveals something elemental about how memory works. About how nothing is ever truly lost. Not to time. Not to space. What appears to vanish merely sleeps. It waits in the folds of consciousness for the right light, the right silence, the right inward gesture to stir it awake. In that sense, memory is not a storage shelf or an archive. It is a living presence. An oracle that chooses what to reveal and when. For many of us, memory feels like a thing stored. A fixed cabinet inside the brain, with drawers and files, some in order, others scattered. This is how we’ve been taught to understand it. But, the neuroscientists of the early 20th century, as my Comrade, Daniel Ishaya, reminded me only recently, began to see memory differently. Not as a fixed structure, but as a process. A movement. An act of reconstruction.
In the 1920s, researchers, like Karl Lashley, who experimented on rats, tried to locate where in the brain memories were stored. Lashley in particular failed. No matter how much they removed from the rat’s brain, they still managed to remember how to solve the maze they had once learned. This led Lashley to a radical and, at the time, heretical conclusion: memory, he said, doesn’t live in one place. It resides everywhere. And nowhere. This insight set the tone for what memory studies would become: a field that increasingly acknowledged the fluid, unpredictable nature of how we recall, store, and retrieve experience. It isn’t a family photo album where you point to the deceased parents or long lost loved ones. It isn’t a hard drive. It’s something more subtle. More alive.
Professor Steven Rose, the British neuroscientist and neurobiologist who passed away last week, spent a lifetime thinking about this. For him, memory wasn’t simply about biology; it was about meaning. About culture. About history. He once said that memory is both a personal and a political act. That what we remember, how we remember, and what we choose to forget all say something about who we are. Rose, writing with his partner, Hilary, argued that memory exists at the intersection of brain, body, and society. That even though memory has a biological basis, which requires neurons and synapses, it is shaped by our relationships, our language, and our political environments. But, it was Antonio Damasio, the Portuguese-American neuroscientist and philosopher, who offered one of the most humanising views of memory in our time. In books like ‘The Feeling of What Happens’ and ‘Self Comes to Mind’, Damasio reminded us that memory is not a sterile archive. It is soaked in emotion and imprinted in the body.
According to him, our memories are encoded not just as images or facts, but as “somatic markers”; bodily feelings attached to lived experiences. When we remember something painful or joyful, we don’t just recall a picture, we have a feeling of the moment over again. The rush of blood, the tightening of the chest, the warmth or sting. For Damasio, this emotional echo is what makes memory so powerful and so central to identity. Memory, he says, is the basis of the self. Not just what we have, but what we are.
I know this to be true in my own life. I still remember my late dad’s voice. The rhythm of his humming Kenny Roger’s Lucille while polishing his black leather boots on the veranda of our house in Kwale. I cannot tell where in my brain this memory resides. But I know it lives. I know that when I smell the scent of the black Kiwi polish or hear Roger’s Lucille, the memory rises. Whole. Intact. Not because I summoned it, but because something did. That’s the mystery of memory. We don’t control it. We live with it, occasionally embarking on a voyage around it. Like an adventurer on a familiar path. It plays with time. It interrupts. It waits. And sometimes, it surprises. So, think of all the things we carry without knowing: the smells of childhood, the sting of a slap, and the trees that once seemed to journey alongside us in childhood, keeping pace as we gazed out of the windows of moving cars. These things sleep in us. Then, years later, they rise. In moments of joy. Grief. In dreams. In sudden laughter. In the way your child tilts their head, just like your father once did. Memory doesn’t die. It lingers.
It was that great French writer, Marcel Proust, who, in his In Search of Lost Time, described the moment he dipped a madeleine into a cup of tea; and suddenly, involuntarily, the entire world of his childhood in Combray flooded back. Not because he tried to recall it. But because memory chose that moment to return. As a voyage of return. As a gesture to the determinism of time. Every returns in time.
We live our lives imagining that the past is behind us. That it is over. Closed. Filed away. But memory reminds us otherwise. The past lives in the present. It shapes how we see, feel, act. In truth, there is no clean break between now and then. There is only continuity.
Though, it is not always a gift. Memory, that is.
For survivors of war, for those who have suffered abuse, trauma, loss, memory can be a wound that never heals. Neuroscientists now speak of “traumatic memory” as a different kind of memory etched deep in the amygdala, often immune to time and rationality. You don’t remember the trauma. It remembers you. But memory can also be redemptive. It can rescue us from oblivion. Bring back the voices of those long gone. Give us a sense of who we are and where we’ve been. I often think about this in relation to our country. A place with a fractured relationship to memory where citizens forget too easily. Rulers bury histories. Power silences witnesses. Our textbooks skip over massacres. Our Streets squares do not bear the names of our heroes and heroines. As citizens, we are asked to move on too quickly. To forget too much. And we wonder why our wounds fester. What a country remembers says everything about its soul. That’s why memory is not just personal. It is political.
Zhuang Zhou didn’t need ten years to study a crab. He needed ten years to enter the space where memory, imagination, and vision become one. And when the time came, he painted from that still place. One stroke. One breath. A perfect crab. In our frantic world of instant recall, Google searches, Artificial Intelligence, it is tempting to treat memory as information. As data. But true memory is something else. It is not just what we remember. It is also what remembers us. My late dad’s voice. The scent of the Kiwi polish. These are not echoes. They are presences. To voyage around memory is to sail across a sea without a map. The waters change. The shorelines shift. But if you listen carefully, something inside you still knows the way.
There are moments in my long voyage when I pause, seized by a quiet tremor, and ask myself: What is it you’re truly seeking, Mahmud? The question arrives like a knock on the door. And just as I begin to sink into the quietude of unknowing, memory drifts in like an old friend who needs no introduction. Recall the story of the emperor, the painter and the crab. Perhaps, like the painter, Zhuang Zhou, memory has been ensconced all these years in its silent villa, waiting. It lays a gentle hand on my shoulder and whispers, “Here I am. I’m what you were searching for all along”. It doesn’t so much answer the question as gently reminding me that the question itself was always part of the remembering. Here, it wasn’t speed that mattered, but the slow steeping of insight. It wasn’t the painter’s brushstroke that was miraculous, but the decade of unseen preparation.
And so I wonder: is that what memory does with us? Withdraws into its chambers, waiting until the question is properly formed, before returning with a simple and clean truth drawn in one swift line.