This is a short passage from my introduction to “Place and Memory: Writing the ‘Iraqi Place’“, in: Conflicting Narratives, War, Trauma and Memory in Iraqi Culture, Wiesbaden 2012. ... Ive rembered it today after I had seen photos of political detainees in Egypti. ... a world that is always dark, during the day and at night. It is a world that is made by people or by “nightmares with ties,” writes Abbas Khider in his essay about the prison, a place, in his words, knows not the sun. Khider spent two years of his life (1993–1995) as a political prisoner in one of Baghdad’s most brutal prisons. There he tried to answer the question, ”How can the prison be conceived, not as institution, but in terms of space and time (makān wa zamān)?” Two years between coldness, darkness, wetness, hunger, parasites, rats, smells, jailers, interrogators, and torture are long enough to determine “that the modern human being, despite all his attempts to appear civilized, has not managed to move beyond the surface with his civility. The proof being that his primitiveness and barbarity reach their highest expression when he becomes a jailer.” Through the prison experience the captive establishes a new relationship to place, the body, and memory. “Could memory transform into two eyes in the dark?” The writer also discovers there the immense human ability to survive, to have humor and to laugh, even in the prison’s place of death. Thus, an archive of place emerges through collective writings and drawings on the prison wall, an archive that turns into an Iraqi memory, because it represents the prison experiences of people with diverse contexts, biographies and faiths. Like the place of war, the prison can be read as a documentation of unbelievable human barbarism. This is the real secret of its unique ugliness.
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 13:17:32 +0000
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