<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Our brains are like palimpsests or computer memory: we continuously write over, erase, reconfigure and frequently forget what came before, and yet we are all of the above \u2014 we are what we can articulate, and what we may prefer to disremember. But how much of forgetting is in fact unavoidable, and how much is intentional?<\/p>\n
Traditionally neuroscientists believed that memory lives in the brain\u2019s temporal lobe, the hippocampus, and that fragments of experience linger in the prefrontal cortex. These could be activated by a sound, smell, color, even a touch. New research suggests memory is lodged in the connections or synapses between the cells. As memory forms, neurons in one region of the brain form, while neurons in another region are destroyed. A recent study on poor zebrafish<\/a> came across perhaps one of the early indications of where forgetfulness resides.<\/p>\n The essays and art in The Markaz Review\u2019s issue on forgetting rely on props, prompts, and ancient materials to conjure forth forgotten memory, sometimes obscured or erased, other instances hidden in plain sight. In creative nonfiction, in “Regarding the Photographs of Others<\/a>,” Nabil Salih considers the photographs of his own Iraqi family and is haunted by violence, both homegrown and foreign, that has laid waste to his country. In “Bloodied Dispatches<\/a>,” the award-winning, Mauritanian novelist Ahmed Isselmou passes by a commemorative tree every morning on his way into work at Al Jazeera\u2019s newsroom, which has on its leaves the names of the correspondents and cameramen who have been killed in wars, which have ravaged the region. His essay, translated from the Arabic by Rana Asfour, gives insight into the pressures faced by journalist-broadcasters in the field \u2014 many of whom have been targeted or their families targeted \u2014 and the news team in Doha, as they attempt to navigate graphically upsetting images coming in daily from Israel\u2019s war on Gaza.<\/p>\n It is a cotton flower that sparks the memory of young illicit love in the eponymous short story<\/a> by the Egyptian writer, novelist and film critic Areej Gamal, translated by Manal Shalaby. This is the first of in a collection of short stories in Arabic newly translated into English by The Markaz Review, which will be featured in a new anthology edited by the Markaz\u2019s Arabic editor, Mohammad Rabie.<\/p>\n Gabriel Polley\u2019s walk through Palestine\u2019s forgotten shines (“Not Forgotten, Not (All) Erased<\/a>“) unearths a forgotten landscape of Islamic maqam<\/em> before Israel marketed its version of \u201cthe Holy Land.\u201d Hazem Harb, this issue\u2019s Featured Artist<\/a>, has addressed the re-branding of Palestine in his Hollyland<\/em> collage series, where the letters of the artwork\u2019s title sits over ancient sites of Jericho and Mar Saba, like the Hollywood Hills sign in the Santa Monica Mountains. For the artist, now living in Dubai, the early materials he used while growing up in Gaza, charcoal and gauze, have been instrumental in helping him deal with Israel\u2019s arrest and torture of his father and family, in Gaza City.<\/p>\n There can be no more forgotten people than those left behind and routinely tortured in the Syria\u2019s extensive detention system. Surprisingly first-person accounts from Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad\u2019s Prison System<\/em>, by the former Syrian detainee Jaber Baker and Turkish academic Ugur \u00dcmit \u00dcng\u00f6r, capture both the lowest level of brutalization and the very best of unimaginable human resilience. And Reem Alghazzi, exiled from Bashar Al-Assad’s Syria, laments the loss of her country, trying to forget, in “Freedom\u2014Ruminations of a Syrian Refugee<\/a>.”<\/p>\n In \u201cForgotten & Silenced Histories<\/a>,\u201d Nathalie Bernstien and Mustapha Outbakat review Brahim El Guabli\u2019s Moroccan Other-Archives<\/em>, which remembers the country\u2019s lost Jewish community and reclaims Morocco\u2019s indigenous Amazigh heritage, while recounting some of the stories of prisoners of the Years of Lead. Novelist Saleem Haddad reviews My Brother, My Land<\/em><\/a>, an anthropological recovery of Sireen Sawalha\u2019s family history, fleeing the Nakba, only to return in 1967, while in \u201cA Proustian Alexandria<\/a>,\u201d a native of the city, Mohamed Gohar, contrasts the city\u2019s architecture and photographic imaging as he explores nostalgia for Alexandria\u2019s past. And Mischa Geracoulis has read Bethelehm chef Fadi Kattan\u2019s new book, Bethlehem: A Celebration of Palestinian Food<\/em><\/a>, at a time when Palestinians are under assault as never before.<\/p>\n In this issue\u2019s centerpiece, \u201cMemory Archive: Between Remembering and Forgetting<\/a>,\u201d novelist and short story writer Mai Al-Nakib relates deeply to the 1999 Wim Wenders film, Until the End of the World<\/em>, as she goes on a search for truth, meaning and memories that can comfort us in the face of calamity. Likewise, in \u201cThe Elephant in the Box<\/a>,\u201d Asmaa Elgamal uses her fondness for classic Egyptian black-and-white cinema to review her past and how she relates to the tumultuous events of the thawra<\/em>, Egypt\u2019s popular uprising that would reverberate for years afterward. In her review of Asmae El Moudir\u2019s The Mother of All Lies<\/em><\/a>, a film shot over a period of eight years in Casablanca and Marrakesh, Brittany Landorf also explores memory and forgetting in the media of cinema and photography.<\/p>\n In \u201cSargon Boulus Revisited: Encomium to an Assyrian Poet<\/a>,\u201d Egyptian novelist Youssef Rakha relates to the Iraqi poet as he riffs on Arab-Muslim identity, exile and genocide, and in “The Forgetting<\/a>” one of Turkey’s most admired writers, who is rarely translated into English, O\u011fuz Atay, invites the reader to roam the mind of a lonely married woman in both the third and first person. And finally, in her essay \u201cThe Art of Letting Go<\/a>,\u201d writer-translator Nashwa Nasreldin reflects that \u201cforgetting can be dangerous,\u201d but \u201cit can also be a force for good.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What shall we forget and what shall we remember, and can forgetting also be a force for good? The editors inquire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":33086,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,3511],"tags":[3042,555,3514,885,1119,1161,1288],"article-category":[],"article-type":[4659],"coauthors":[2023,2196],"class_list":["post-33031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorial","category-tmr-41-forgetting","tag-archives","tag-egypt","tag-forgetting","tag-iraq","tag-memory","tag-morocco","tag-palestine","article-type-editorial"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n