Remembering, not commemorating, creates life

It is the 10th anniversary of the Arab Spring, and we can’t quite escape that substance called remembrance. Yet, eschewing facile modes of nostalgic remembrance and/or tragic lamentation, we opt for asking questions such as how the passing of time changes our understanding of the revolutionary event, what does this event and what came after tell of an Arab revolutionary tradition, and what sites of micro-politics emerged in the last 10 years, informing our conception of the broader polity of the region. In a dual invocation of the dead and the living, we aim to confront anew classical political questions on history and reckoning with the past, mobilization, organization, ideology and national identity. We also aim to explore specific areas of contestation that continue to radically redefine post-2011 politics and potentially point us to imagining certain possible futures.

Pregnant as it was of exuberant hope, revolutionary politics was also pregnant with boundless brutality, stirring a tired discursive loop of success and failure. In this series of short essays that followed a number of conversations organized by two media collectives — Mada Masr and Al-Jumhuriya — among the authors, we try to engage with the above questions, while challenging well-rehearsed and oft-repeated revolutionary or post-revolutionary narratives, eluding factional and/or national silos, and foregrounding hitherto unnoticed dynamics, themes and voices. As platforms produced in great part by the 2011 moment, we are particularly aware and wary of the fatigue and repetitiveness that Arab Spring discussions and mentions elicit among our communities of writers and journalists. This too is part of the brutal everyday that we experience as we attempt to reflect with the angel of history.

In the experience of Syrians’ dispersal and our diaspora — and before it, during the revolution, with its territorial shifts from one region to another in Syria — we were offered a paradox and a rare opportunity. This was for Syrian groups to enter into capsules differentiated in time and geographical space, yet converging simultaneously on social media; bound together by logos; that is, language, reason. The collision, through language, between two distant and discordant realities began to manifest for Syrians still under the hegemony of Assadist tyranny, in an everyday existence that grew ever worse, while at the same time it became ever “stranger” to speak about the revolution; the revolution as a moment still hot in the minds of those who joined it in 2011, but later left the country. This impression of “strangeness” is reciprocal, as both sides discover how the other side’s reality develops and transforms — or does not.

There are turns of phrase and expressions that acquire the strangeness of time when recalled. What enables this recollection process is the living sap that is the language, both written and recorded, that abounds to an unprecedented degree. What if we seek to recollect this in the Syrian context by examining and re-reading the language produced in 2011 and the following few years? What if we do so starting from the present, and from a pivotal question: What is necessary for life now in our countries? Such a question grants us respite from the grief and pain of commemoration, allowing us instead to start remembering as an act of thought and a continuation of change. It also grants us the right to forget, which is no less important than remembering, and is in fact organically linked to it. To forget, in this sense, is not to erase the event from history, but to be relieved of what is no longer relevant to our present.

In the process of dynamic remembrance, we contemplate the strangeness of distance, and are thus able to chronicle the development of the ideas, expressions and words we exchanged, to relieve ourselves of some of them by reading them retroactively. We refine fundamental ontological concepts that we still need in order to live now, re-defining them according to our experiences and immediate circumstances. This entails an invitation to affirm normative definitions, as though to say that dignity, justice and the liberties usurped by a regime of butchers whose only understanding of politics is the obliteration of bodies, remain wholly necessary and current concepts unchanged by time. As for words, their recollection offers an opportunity to remember the actors, the discourse, the audience and their impressions and transformations. It is also an opportunity to understand social relations — who is in control and who is subordinate — and to understand the emotions and sentiments associated with the word-event and the semantic mutations tied to the rapid change of reality. Words are thus small histories in which the individual is not erased in favor of the multitudes.

This historical exercise, built on recalling the 2011 moment, with all its emotions carried in language, but starting from the feelings of the present, is a history unburdened by the idolization of the revolutionary moment; or, by rendering it a “heritage” or identitarian folklore fixed in time, not interacting with the present; or by rendering history a heavy matter — what one philosopher termed “history fever.” By re-examining the history of the ideas, we free ourselves of repetitive “commemoration” as an exhibition of a bruised memory, immersed in the recollection of pain and trauma — a museum of the dead. Dynamic remembrance is the antithesis of static commemoration, and implies the right to forget and unlearn. This by no means involves a denial or revision of the true/real/historical event. To forget is not to claim there is more than one version of the truth.

I once came across this illustration that attempts to explain Walter Benjamin’s perception of history, that history gently strokes the walls of the tomb, then moves forward, while commemoration stays at the very center of the tomb, forever wailing at the piercing and painful memory. Perhaps language is the remembrance that allows the wailing memory to be nudged forward. The most revolutionary potential exists now, and it consists in reading the “now.” In which case, each reading of texts, discourses and documents must be tied to the possible now, and the relevant now. Likewise, determining the historical and circumstantial contexts of using a given language helps us understand whether or not it is still relevant, or is instead a purely empty, reactionary recollection.