XI

To lose a home; to lose a homeland; to escape, barely, a genocide. Such things would be unimaginable if they were not recorded in word or image: in stories / in (family hi)stories / in(stagram) stories. Memory, history: these are not things that persist naturally, like stones. They survive (sur, beyond; vivere, live) only because people have tended to them. They are more like plants than stones, in that they must be kept alive, the seeds saved and replanted each generation. Each replanting is a translation.
 

XII

Once a thing is gone, it survives only in memory.

Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha writes of how his home in Gaza City was destroyed by an Israeli air strike in November, 2023. Mosab returned to the rubble a few days after the bombing, hoping to salvage practical items like clothes, shoes, blankets (‘It was autumn, and the ghost of winter was looming’). Only much later, after he and his family had left Gaza and found asylum in the United States, did Abu Toha remember something precious that had been left behind in the ruined house: an album of old family photos. He asked his family in Beit Lahia to look for the album, but it was gone, along with the room it had been in. ‘To this day, there is no visible trace of our beds, couches, closets, or even the walls of my bedroom and kitchen. Only our memories of them remain.’

XIII

clearing the man-made rubble
with their bare hands,
disfigured by dust
into ghosts.

(Fady Joudah, […])

XIV

Once a thing is gone, it survives only in memory.

In a place like Gaza, Abu Toha writes, ‘every destroyed house becomes a kind of album, filled not with photos but with real people, the dead pressed between its pages.’

XV

If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. […] even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.

(Toni Morrison, Beloved)