Memory as Rebellion: On Trauma, Time, and Collective Amnesia

Colonized Time, Fractured Memory, and the Architecture of Control

One of the quietest consequences of abuse is the way it fractures time.

I forgot. That’s how I survived.

When someone who hurt me is kind again—offers softness, attention, or the semblance of safety—I feel my memory loosen. I forget the sharpness. I forget the harm. I become someone with a very short memory, someone who lives from shaft of light to shaft of light, clutching at the temporary warmth as if it were a promise. As if the pain was an illusion and not a pattern.

This isn’t because I’m naive. It’s because I was trained.

Trained to prioritize peace over truth. Trained to adapt fast, to smile quickly, to forget deeply. Survival, in many abusive systems, looks like a kind of temporal amnesia.

In this moment, I can still feel my face and hands burn hot, my faith in myself eroding, just calling to mind moments where I tried to recollect a memory, only to be met with something along the lines of:

“But that was so long ago.”

“You’re still upset about that?”

Or worse:

“That’s not what happened.”

Abuse demands a short memory and a controlled narrative.

And this is where personal and collective trauma meet: because colonialism and supremacy culture ask the same of us.

Colonialism doesn’t just take your land or your language—it asks you to forget that it ever belonged to you.

Capitalism doesn’t just demand your labor—it pretends it’s always been this way.

White supremacy doesn’t just kill—it manipulates the archive.

Our very concept of time has been colonized.

Consider the 40-hour work week. Often perceived as a longstanding norm, it was actually popularized in 1926 when Henry Ford reduced his employees' workweek from 48 to 40 hours to boost productivity and consumerism. This practice was later codified into U.S. law with the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

The nuclear family, commonly viewed as the traditional family structure, gained prominence in the post-World War II era. Economic prosperity, suburban development, and a push for conformity led to the idealization of a household consisting of two parents and their children. This model was promoted as a cornerstone of American life, despite being a relatively recent social construct.

The role of police as the primary agents of community safety is another concept with a complex history. Modern policing in the United States has roots in slave patrols established in the early 1700s, designed to control and return escaped enslaved people. Over time, policing evolved to enforce racial hierarchies and suppress labor movements, rather than solely focusing on crime prevention.

They gaslight us at the level of history.

Even the portrayal of the Civil Rights Movement has been manipulated to seem more distant. Although color photography was available, many images were presented in black-and-white, creating a perception of the events as belonging to a bygone era. This aesthetic choice contributes to a collective amnesia, distancing contemporary society from the ongoing struggles for racial justice.

They don’t want us to remember because memory is power.
But our bodies remember.
Our dreams remember.
The land remembers.

Ancestral memory lives in us.
Sometimes it comes as flash—visions in a dream, a smell that ruptures the present, a grief that doesn’t quite belong to us. Sometimes it’s the sensation that a story is unfinished, that there’s something we promised to carry forward.

There are studies now—epigenetics, dream theory, intergenerational trauma research—that are beginning to catch up with what Black, Indigenous, diasporic, and colonized peoples have always known: that memory is not just cognitive, it’s cellular.

Exhaustion facilitates collective amnesia.

Fatigue doesn’t just steal our energy—it distorts our sense of time.
When you're constantly hustling for safety, grinding to survive, or drowning in emotional labor, you lose your grip on continuity. Your memory becomes patchy. Your internal clock? Scrambled. Weeks blur. History feels irrelevant. The future, unreachable. There's barely enough energy to process what is happening currently, never mind what has happened.

This too, is not accidental.
Capitalism depends on your forgetfulness. On the disconnection between yesterday and tomorrow. It relies on being able to tell you the same story they after day, while knowing you're too tired to contest it.
On the idea that now is all there is, and nothing else has ever been. On the inevitability of this world, made in this way.

But burnout is not a personal failure. It’s a social and political consequence.
A designed outcome of dominance culture.

And that culture shows up not just in systems, but in our relationships.

Colonial logic—dominate, extract, abandon—seeps into how we love, how we argue, how we negotiate space and need.
If we don’t unlearn it, we replicate it.

This shows up in attachment styles, in emotional labor gaps, in the demand for “rationality” over embodied truth, and the work of introspection and accountability.

It shows up in how queer people reject the inevitability of this world and are punished for challenging the binaries that offer false harmony.
It shows up in how neurodivergent people are gaslit or pathologized for sensing what others deny.
In how certain kinds of labor are invisible unless they mirror capitalism’s value system: productive, measurable, compliant.

We internalize this.
We learn to forget what hurt us.
We apologize for the time it takes for our loved ones to love us.

We focus on moving on.

As if the act of making us feel seen and heard and valued, is somehow a deviation from another human being, living their life fully.
We become fluent in dominance, and therefore submission without even realizing it.

This is why trauma can feel like dissonance. Like confusion. Like living out of sync with the moment you’re in. Because your body is storing the long memory, even when the dominant culture demands a short one.

Sometimes our hands shake and we don’t know why.
Sometimes a tone of voice cracks us open.
Sometimes we react too big or shut down too fast, and we can’t explain it.

But our bodies are time travelers.

They hold the weight of what came before. They carry the unspeakable. They pulse with the stories that were never written down but were never lost. They remember the loss of land. The tearing of kin. The betrayal behind a smile. The lie inside the promise.

If you feel stretched gossamer thin, or constantly on the brink of spilling over, you’re not alone.

You are holding more than this moment.

And remembering—truly remembering—is a kind of resistance.

Because when we remember, we reclaim the right to grieve.
When we remember, we name what’s been done to us, and ours.
When we remember, we loosen the grip of the present lie.

Our memory is not a flaw. It is a map. Most things, are in fact, that deep. Maybe deeper.

And every time we honor the body’s long memory—every time we speak it, write it, dance it, wail it, refuse to pretty it up for consumption—we become harder to dominate.

We become dangerous, we become connected, and we become free.

---

If something in this piece stayed with you — if my writing has ever made you feel less alone, more understood, or reminded you of your softness and strength — I’d be deeply grateful if you’d consider supporting my work directly and help keep it free for all.

Asking for support is something I’m slowly learning to do with grace. And receiving it with gratitude is something I’m practicing daily.

If you’ve ever wanted to say thank you for a piece of writing that held you — here’s a way to do that:

🌿 Venmo: @Jamila-Bradley
🌿 CashApp: $JBradley8
🌿 GoFundMe (for my sabbatical & health journey): gofundme.com/f/jamilas-writing-sabbatical-and-health-journey

Thank you for helping me make space to write, heal, and offer what I can to the collective body of work that is kinship.