Unremembered wounds still drive those who deny them

Evidence

Wherever the Negro face appears a tension is created, the tension is a silence filled with things unutterable. It is a sentimental error, therefore, to believe that the past is dead; it means nothing to say that it is all forgotten, that the Negro himself has forgotten it. It is not a question of memory. Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks they left testified to that doom toward which his feet were leading him. The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him as a child; nevertheless the hand and the darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 174

Categorization

• DEFINE: The Oedipus passage defines the mechanism of ‘the lie’ — trauma persists beneath non-remembrance — and is central to the reader’s thesis.
• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘sentimental error’ that forgetting the past is possible, plus the Oedipal image of marks testifying to a doom, is a top-tier formulation of why the lie cannot actually erase the after times.
• XREF: Directly echoes ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’ — Faulkner’s line appears in Baldwin’s ‘No Name’ — grounding the reader’s cross-textual argument. — connects to: Trauma wounds are temporal ruptures born of the nullified past — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 4370