Remembering requires an intermediary to obtain a form and a content. It might be a family or here a poet, it is unceasing as a task and not an artefact.

Remembering insists on an arc of happenings, this is connected to that, one day in October is connected to another, contemporary violence is connected to originary violence, January 26 to invasion, genocide to Nakba, this is to that, acts of remembering insist on it.

When Palestine, when Lebanon, when Syria, when. When they are bombed, as they have been bombed, more or less relentlessly this century, what I remember are the lamentations for artefacts of civilisational endurance that this or that actor has effected, after some millennia of preservation, now, instantaneously, evisceration.

What I remember is my office-mate distraught about the millions of body-bags in Homs while we wrote our dissertations.

What I remember is the day I first heard an archive poem, Footnote to a History War, which Tony performed, which commenced a lesson I am always recalling, and that I will always be learning.

What I remember is that it is the work of the living to remember. To treat memory as khazaaen (treasures) but not to hoard them.

What I remember is how I came to write to Mahmoud some years after Mahmoud first published a collective of Blak and Palestinian authors in a magazine he founded, as a triangulated act of solidarity between First Nations people, diaspora Palestinians, and the Palestinians who remained.

What I remember is there are responsible parties and that cultural artifacts (which I lament) are memories, but that lamenting human life is inadequate when you are staring at the forehead of a genocide.

When Mahmoud wrote to accept our invitation to contribute, he wrote a thing we will always be remembering:

I will indeed do my utmost to respond by January 30, if I am still alive by then. I hope to witness the end of this war and to reach that date, January 30, though it feels like an uncertain path into the future. In any case, I am investing my time and energy not merely in survival, but in living. This investment is rooted in the act of continuing to create: writing for memory, writing for the present, writing of attempts to build while the worlds we knew before this genocide continue to collapse. When will it end? It is not the timeline that matters, but that it ends—and that I am still here. “Being alive” has become its own form of time, in which we build a displaced life, a layer of existence that we will ourselves dismantle if the collapse is completed and the genocide ends.

Mahmoud Alshaer, November 4, 2024.

To this editorial Ani offers a whakataukī to conclude:

Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua

(I walk backwards into the future
with my eyes fixed on my past).