the axe forgets but the tree remembers

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a Zimbabwean proverb, popularised by the novelist Chigozie Obioma among others, expressing the asymmetry of memory between those who inflict harm and those who suffer it; the axe moves from tree to tree, each impact quickly forgotten as the next blow is struck, while each tree carries the wound permanently in its grain; the proverb speaks to the experience of repeated historical violence — colonialism, slavery, ethnic conflict — where perpetrators move on and construct narratives of closure while communities that bore the violence continue to live with its physical and psychological traces; it is a statement about the moral weight of historical memory and a challenge to any politics of forgetting that serves the interests of those who once held the axe