The History Teacher's Lament

A Poem by T.S. Curtis

Did you know

The Victorians ate mummies

They crow

Laughing in the absurdity of history they know

and manage to remember

But: 

Did you know

There are millions of children

Who never went home

And never will again

Now I’m the gruesome one

Fun facts are great

For lifting the mood

Dropping tidbits of knowledge 

But the more I hold the burden of history

Inside me

The harder it becomes to contain

The horrors

Stolen from families

Faces disappearing into a country that once belonged to them

Stuffed onto trains

Into carriages

Into vans

To send across the ocean

Labour hands before childhoods

Blackboarded detention

Every day in my history class

Is a battle of disinformation

Within my expertise

And outside it

Gripping hold to what I know

Protecting fun facts

And true facts

Like the children that once became them

History

Has been skewed with each

Rewritten version

Built atop rewritten version

Archaeological digs searching for verity

Every victor clawing their way to the top of unsteady towers of

Half-truths as

A narrative to fit agendas

To grow empires

To feel better about what happened

So that even atrocities seem less evil

Reclaiming history books

Is not rewriting history

I get it

Having the whole story you thought you knew

That you memorized and spat out

Blow up in front of you 

Is scary

So is fighting mendacity

We are starting to recognize that

When a narrative fits us comfortably

There is something missing

I get it

I thought I was coming home

Into the stories I would know

Bedtime histories 

And family lines

To learn the skills I needed

To make sense of the narrative to others

Share the names of the philosophers

Put my timelines back in order

Silly dinner facts

And the epics I could tell

But it wasn’t that

I was given access

To the heartbreak of the reality

Of our forebearers

Learned the names of the cultures

Killed and altered in conquest 

But only some of the names of the faces that went with them

With the small percentage of stories we have left

Casualties and survivors of mass tragedy

Eugenics that killed pieces that feel like those I've seen

The problems we gave

But keep refusing to acknowledge

All the times we have repeated ourselves

The ill-forgotten stories

Coercion in languages they barely knew

The stereotypes created

And why they were perpetuated

Watched the faces of survivors who are still here

Who we let drown around us 

Wash out their stories

Call them heroes with no worries

Bury the reality with them

History that is not cold yet

The news alerts on my phone 

Getting dangerously close 

To repetition of the ones

Cited in my papers  

Ripped from old headlines

Watching our worst fears come true 

Three words historians do not say 

Locked away in a bunker

Behind a heavy vault 

But here we are spelling out the passcode for:

History Repeats Itself 

It only comes out when we have gone too deep

Being a historian is knowing that I will never

Be able to honour the name and story 

Of every person that was wronged

But maybe I can try

Read out the real history

Follow fun facts with a lesson

Build historians of tomorrow

And the people of today

With the whole story

Yell that we have been here before

I am saving news clippings

Writing down events

Printing out the photos

Writing down the lyrics

Saving all the names

We will be the history

This cannot be buried

History Repeats Itself 

History Rebuilds Itself

History Renews Itself

History Remodels Itself

History Repeats Itself

History Repeats Itself

History Re-