The word “resentment” refers to the bitter memory of an injury whose redress is desired. Its synonym is “rancor.” The resentful person cannot forgive or forgive himself. He is “possessed” by vengeful memories. He is overwhelmed by the memory of aspects of the past that he cannot keep at a distance.
Resentment is the result of multiple humiliations that have been experienced as frustrated rebellions that gradually prepare a “settling of accounts.” From resentment arises revenge through a repetitive, torturous, compulsive action, whether in fantasy or fact. It arises as an attempt to nullify the grievances and pathologically capitalize on the situation of the “privileged victim.”
It is worth remembering Freud, who used to say that the neurotic suffers not from memories, but from “reminiscences,” that is, from vague and unconscious memories, even when they are associated with a certain precise circumstance in the past. This leads the resentful person to privilege “resentment” over “feeling.” He reprocesses certain stimuli in a precise direction: revenge, which turns into self-destruction. Why “self-destruction”? Because in these matters, “what I am” is at stake.
The “memory of pain” is different from “resentment.” The memory of pain admits the past as an experience and not as a burden; it does not require the renunciation of the pain of what happened. It operates as a structuring and organizing non-forgetting, as an alarm signal that protects and prevents the repetition of the bad, and gives way to a new construction.
The “memory of pain” welcomes our past as part of what “we are.” We are “what we have been,” said Benedetto Croce. However, it is also true that “we are” more than what we have been. The present is not only the cumulative result of what has happened to us, but the constant opportunity for our freedom to rise above it, and inaugurate a new beginning, through an arduous but liberating action: forgiveness.
It is true that we have to revisit national history, as we have to revisit life itself. People and peoples have to give themselves the opportunity, not to change the past, but to re-signify it. This does not mean artificially sugar-coating things or reinventing them in a way. What we wish to point out is that the logic of domination, the colonizing zeal and the humiliation of the other as a method, inhabited both Spaniards and Aztecs. This is evidenced by the destruction of the great Tenochtitlan, as well as the despotic submission to which many non-Aztec communities lived in the years before the Conquest.
Likewise, in both worlds, there lived extraordinary virtues that we should not ignore. It is enough to think for a moment of men like the first twelve friars who arrived in our lands, or of the extraordinary humanism of the poets and humanists of the Aztec world. The “black legends” and the “pink legends” often overshadow, of course, the historical truth.
We all have to forgive ourselves in order to appreciate ourselves. First, forgive our own history. Forgive our “parents,” full of defects, who are our mysterious origin. Forgive in order to find ourselves again, forgive in order to be different, and forgive in order to take a step forward, more just and more liberating.
