Collective Forgetting: Permission to Forget
The editorial tracks the dual axis on which the issue rests: remembrance and forgetting. When erasure will never be complete, and forgiveness is not possible, what can collective forgetting offer?
memory
On the Concept of Memory and the Dilemma of Forgetfulness
Have we ever heard anyone speak of collective forgetfulness? While the term "collective memory" exerts its power over us, it places a whip in our hands against our attempts at personal forgetfulness.
A Gazan Memory for Forgetting
For Mahmoud Darwish, while memory serves as a tool of resistance against the erasure of existence, it also represents another form of symbolic death for identity and history. This is because it enforces a kind of stagnation and immersion in old pain, trapping the individual in a cycle of grief and reflection on past losses. In his reading of "Memory for Forgetfulness," Ra'ad Abu Sa'ada questions, as a Gazan, the role of memory in the ongoing Palestinian struggle and in the collective Israeli identity, with a view toward the Holocaust, the besieged Beirut of 1982, and Gaza today.
Between Forgetting & Remembering
Imagine, dear reader, waking up each day without a memory of those around you. Amir Nassar’s literary navigations meander between the total recall of Borges’s Funes the Memorious and the complete forgetfulness of diving into Lethe, river of the underworld. Is a life where one never forgets worth living?
Palestinian Collective Memory: Present-Oriented and Forgotten
For Palestinians living in historic Palestine and for those referred to as "Palestinian refugees," the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948 never ended. This memory shapes Palestinian identity, but is it a lack of narrative that has existed for decades? Nour Saed analyzes factors inhibiting Palestinian society from investing in the arts while emphasizing the importance of storytelling and documenting a national experience versus forgetfulness.
Memory Pictures #9
Telling you, Salma, about many things that begin with the question of robbery and end with the question of the secret with God.
Lamees Khoury: The Ultimate Observer
Rula Jiryis spoke with the Palestinian artist Lamees Khoury about belonging and identity, memory and intuition, and how form, voice, and movement appear in her artworks.
Memory Pictures #8
Many questions arise when you think about memory, names, the absence of names, questions that essentially rest on senses and spontaneity, which determine our relation to love, hate, intimacy, abandonment, hunger, fear, memory.
Facing East
Rotem Rozental looks at the work of artists Zoya Cherkassky, Yevgeniy Fiks, Katia Grokhovsky, and Jenny Yurshansky, raising questions about the existence of a Soviet-Jewish narrative and offering new insights into the culture that has shaped daily life in the Soviet Union, the Soviet-Jewish narrative, and the possibility of the existence of such a narrative.
Memory Pictures #7
Hadeel Abu Johar offers a reductive view, fiercely poetic, of a surreal reality – the relationship of the colonialist with the concept of banality in the face of shame. Salma, the house, the memory, the universe, the reader, the ordinary viewer confronted with the colonialist, shameless to the point of banality. Surrealism is the name of the game here, and reality is ruled by countless questions that are no less surreal.