| |
Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North
Africa Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North
Africa, by Ussama Makdisi and Paul A. Silverstein, eds. Indiana University Press, 2006. 236 pages, index to 243.
$32.00, hardcover.
Mary Ann Tetreault, Trinity University, San Antonio Texas
"This book explores the intersection of memory, violence and reconciliation," say the editors
at the beginning of this stunning collection of essays. The chapters focus on historical memory,
the collective narratives of heroes and villains, friends and enemies, composed to reconcile past
and present. Such "official" narratives of past conflicts are mostly painted in black and white.
They hang alongside the grey landscapes of individual memories in mental museums that also
come packed with material relics whose mute testimony seems to be clearer to outsiders than to
survivors and their descendants.
We can say that historical memories are full of lies, but, on a practical level,
composing historical memories that an entire people can accept to some degree is an integral element
in reconciliation, a destination where former adversaries and their descendants can live side by side.
How much "truth" they embody depends on many things, not least of which is the level
of confidence and legitimacy the winners of these conflicts enjoy in their own minds and in
their societies. In South Africa, quite a lot of truth was purchased in exchange for amnesty for
criminals willing to confess their deeds and ask for forgiveness. The trade wasn't entirely successful
_ caveat emptor must always be kept in mind _ but that heroic effort, with its risks and flaws, is
the bravest strategy for recovering the past. Its opposite is to deny and bury what the victors
don't want to remember. Regardless of the vigor with which any strategy is pursued, in the end
historical memory is plural, our stories and theirs, partial truths and self-serving lies whose capacity to
pierce the heart diminishes with time _ if we are lucky.
The chapters in this volume focus on three sites where violent conflict has left
contested memories: Algeria, Lebanon and Palestine/Israel. None even begins to follow the South
African example, but the pattern of memory and evasion differs across and within each one. In
post-civil-war Lebanon, denial is the preferred path of elites, as Anja Peleikis describes in her story of life in
a multi-confessional village. Saree Makdisi tells a similar story about Beirut, where "turning
the page" and "moving on" are mantras discouraging individual confrontations with losses of
family, friends and belongings while communities cope with memories of buildings and
neighborhoods that no longer exist. Peleikis shows exile communities playing a special role, both in their
absence, which disconnects the ecological community existing today from the one "everyone"
remembers, itself a melange of romanticism, loss and guilt.
Glenn Bowman shows the dynamism of historical memory as he recounts different versions
of a killing in the Palestinian village of Beit Sahour to show how iconic events are constructed
and reconstructed to conform to contemporary understandings of which groups rightfully belong
to "the community." Shira Robinson's report about a commemoration rite in another
Palestinian village tells how the winners expropriate the losers' individual memories along with the
cultural idiom in which they memorialize their past. Gabriel Piterberg takes this story to the national level
in his discussion of how both population transfer and discursive control of media representations
of 1948 allow Israelis to erase memories of the land when it was populated by Arabs.
Algeria's revolution generates equally dissonant memories. Benjamin Stora looks at
pied-noir exiles who romanticize their disappointment and loss by telling stories of betrayal and
comparing themselves to the old confederacy in the U.S. Civil War. This framing of their role as
discarded agents of French colonialism who were cheated of their birthright for the benefit of inferiors
leaves political space for "Arabicide," the murder of exiled Arabs by exiled colons in places where
both sought refuge. James McDougall finds another frame for the Algerian revolution constructed
by the victors. They project it as one more chapter in an epic conflict against "the West" by a
nation repeatedly called upon to struggle, resist and sacrifice against an enemy who can never be
fully vanquished. In both accounts, the heterogeneity of each side is submerged and denied,
destroying possibilities for reconciliation by survivors who might dream of finding common ground.
Israel also constructs memories of patriotic sacrifice that Yael Zerubavel identifies as
stories old men tell to young ones. These stories impose "burdens" on both, painful memories for the
old and anticipatory dread for the next generation. This is another set of myths that deny
human agency and the existence of difference _ in intergenerational interests, in the conflicting hopes
for their children dreamed by mothers and by fathers, and between patriotic dreams and
principled disagreements with the aims of the state. The state is the primary orchestrator of historical
memory in many of these accounts, highlighted in the final essay by Nadia Abu El-Haj which shows
how archaeology can be a tool used to justify expulsion, domination and denial.
The authors of these essays show why reconciliation remains a remote goal in these
three troubled lands. The partial truths and self-serving lies in the historical memories they describe
are imposed through repression, not simply of what some of those involved wish or need to
remember and forget but, even more, what the state demands that they forget and how it constructs
what they should remember. Only the state can find or obliterate the artifacts that compose the
material basis of memory, command and orchestrate commemorative spectacles, and enforce its will
through violence of its own. Yet, as the wise pursuers of truth and reconciliation in South Africa
firmly believed, to prevent wounds from festering, they must be opened, cleaned and anointed with balm.
A past buried under a historical narrative full of holes and lies can be little more than a
restless corpse in an unquiet grave.
|
|
|
|
|
|
