Time & Perspective Quote by Helen Dunmore

The line lands like a moral gavel: history isn’t clutter to be tidied up, it’s personhood. Dunmore, a poet steeped in memory, loss, and the long afterlife of trauma, frames “expunge” as an act of violence with bureaucratic polish. The verb carries institutional menace: records scrubbed, names removed, testimonies discredited, inconvenient facts “corrected.” It’s not just forgetting; it’s erasure with intent.

What makes the sentence work is its scale shift. “An individual’s history” sounds private, almost domestic - childhood, mistakes, reinventions. Then “a terrible violation” yanks it into the language of rights and bodily autonomy. Dunmore implies that narrative ownership is as intimate as skin. To delete someone’s past is to tamper with the only continuous thread they have, the one thing that makes a self legible over time.

The subtext glances at regimes and families alike. States rewrite archives; communities police reputations; abusers demand silence; even well-meaning institutions package lives into palatable versions. Dunmore resists the comforting fantasy that erasure can be cleansing or protective. It’s punitive, often disguised as “moving on.”

Context matters: Dunmore’s work repeatedly returns to how history presses into the present - personal grief braided with public catastrophe. Read against contemporary culture, the quote also needles our era of algorithmic memory and curated selves: when platforms, publishers, or mobs try to delete a person’s past, they’re not just moderating content. They’re asserting control over who gets to exist as a complex, continuous human being.