Archiving our life: my proposal

La storia siamo noi(history is made by all of us), says one of my favourite songs by Italian crooner Francesco De Gregori. To me, history is not only to be found in the national archives. It is also found in the memories of each one of us. And when memories are lost a piece of collective history vanishes forever.

When I was studying for my MA in history I identified with a school of historians who are more interested in the everyday life of peoples (note the plural) than in chronicles of battles and events. I had the opportunity to sneak through the peep-hole offered by that vast treasure contained in the Holy Inquisition archives which contain vital insights on food, sexuality, popular devotions and the history of domestic affections and abuse.

Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition but a few questions about the way we live today could be valuable to future historians.

It contains tales of ordinary domestic abuse perpetrated by husbands described by their wives as “bestial”; or the man who used his wife’s devotional pictures to clean his butt (!). It also depicts a contrast between brutal husbands and more refined confessors, who sometimes took advantage of their position of authority (sometimes making strange requests for samples of pubic hair or menstrual blood).

It also contains more extraordinary but forgotten lives like that of Anna Zammit, the unmarried daughter of a rock-cutter from Zebbug who had a reputation for sainthood, providing information on the destination of the souls of the departed. Her reputation was undone when she admitted to having sexual intercourse (with sado-masochistic overtones) with a priest, his slave, and the priest’s sister (a nun).

Sometimes even the creepiest individual thoughts can be found in this veritable vault of memories, like the woman who counted how many times she wished to descend to hell to have intercourse with the devil; or the man who wished to turn Muslim so that he would not have to confess his sins.

One even finds an idea of how people perceived the Muslim “others” who lived in their midst as slaves with whom ordinary people had daily conversations and transactions. It also gives us an idea of the mixture of ethnicities brought by the slave trade with people from distant central Asian lands (referred to as Tatars) finding themselves in Maltese households, sometimes providing illegitimate offspring. So don’t be so surprised when you see Maltese people with Asian features!

Surely the Inquisition was first and foremost a confessional tool which made people talk about their innermost thoughts. But it made them do this by expressing themselves in the discourse of power. My impression is that by the 17th century, women who used to confess their sins more than their husbands did were more assimilated in the dominant culture than their more worldly and often blasphemous husbands. The Inquisition archives provide us with a database of blasphemies: my favourite was “malavaggia le chiavi di san pietro nella merda” (damn St Peter’s keys in excrement).

In some ways the closest thing to the Inquisition in the modern world are reality TV programmes, where people make a show of themselves by confessing in public their secrets. I am sure that in the future historians will find any surviving archive of junk TV programmes valuable, even if it will provide a distorted account of history.

But surely a lot of information on daily life can be gathered without subjecting people to a power relation. In fact what distorts both Inquisition documents and junk TV interviews is that in both cases, the confession is a result of an unequal set-up where the inquisitor/presenter call the shots.

My proposal is that every person is interviewed on his or her 70th birthday on such basic things as his/her favourite food and entertainment, memories of personal and national events, political participation, courtship rituals, neighbourhood life, parish life, school memories and any insights on domestic and family life. Would it not be interesting to know which bars and discos were frequented in the 1970s, which drugs were consumed during the 80s ‘depression’ and what sort of shady nightlife existed in the 1960s?

In these interviews the role of the interviewer should be limited to that of a facilitator. All information provided should be exempt from legal prosecution. The interviewed person should have the power to decide when this information should be released. People should be given a choice whether this information should be released in 20, 50 or a 100 years’ time. Perhaps people should also be given the option of anonymity. This information should be collected and stored in an archive of historical memories.

One may well argue that all this information is already being stored by the tracks and profiles we leave everyday on cyberspace. Surely this is not the case for most of present day elderly people. But probably next century’s cyberspace will be haunted by the roaming social media profiles of the deceased of the 20th and 21st century. And this raises one very valid question: what happens to the tracks we leave on social network sites when people pass away? And who owns these random pieces of roaming memories before and after we die? Should we have a cyber cemetery where all profiles are stored for eternity? Or should we have cyber cremation where all such personal information is burned?