“Memoria was the mother of the muses, the most important of the rhetorical offices. Now rhetorics of writing seem to go no further than invention, arrangement, and style; when delivery is still there, it’s the matter of ‘voice’. But memory is tied in as well, surely for people of color. It’s as if we have accepted Plato’s prophecy that literacy would be the downfall of memory, leading only to remembrance. We have to remember Plato, because his writing is significant by virtue of its genre, an attempt at representation of dialogue, of storytelling, of the play. Plato’s literacy took shape not as logocentric discourse but as a representation of discourse in action. Though folks like Volosinov have shown that all discourse, written as well as spoken, is dialogic, Plato is maybe the coolest of the philosophers because of the resonance of the dialogue, the possibility for humor, the clear presence of all three points in the rhetorical triangle and the often unspecified dimension which is context. I don’t mean to be waxing Platonic, really, only to suggest that there’s something to Plato’s notion of memory as more than recollection and to his leaning on a written discourse that approximates orality as a means toward arriving at Memory. The narratives of people of color jog our memories as a collective in a scattered world and within an ideology that praises individualism. And this is all the more apparent for the Latino and Latina, whose language contains the assertion of the interconnectedness among identity, memory, and the personal. There is a common saying among Puerto Ricans and Cubans: Te doy un cuento de mi historia, literally rendered as ‘I’ll give you a story about my history’: me, history and memory, and a story.”
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