ABSTRACT
The Czech novelist Milan Kundera suggests that in the context of the Soviet control of formerly independent European nation-states, ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting/ This struggle is crucial for the replicants created by the future capitalist state in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner who, as commodities become human, are afraid that their memories, the traces of their individuality, will disappear like ‘tears in the rain’. Kundera mentions in particular the ‘organized forgetting’ arranged by the socialist state to create a wider unity under communism, through which a people and individuals lose contact with their national consciousness and sense of belonging. It appears, then, that nations can be forgotten, although they are recast through a new kind of remembering engineered by education, propaganda, secrecy and fear, and public ceremonial. This argument assumes the prior existence of the nation, raising the question of how memories of the nation first come into being. Can this question be answered, or even posed, for the decidedly non-European state of Papua New Guinea, with its manifold languages, cultures, and histories, formerly under Australian colonial control but independent since 1975? What sorts of conditions need to be in existence for the emergence of a Papua New Guinean nationalism, and does this suggest that the state must engage in acts of ‘organized remembering’ such as Independence Day celebrations? More to the point, what does the state require ‘tribal’ peoples to forget or consciously elide in order to create the nation?
