Image-Memories
On the memories that visit us in images
“It must be great. Not to miss things. Not to long to get back to something. Not to be looking back all the time. Everything must be so much more…”
– Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
“You shouldn’t always return to the past. It’s enough that we have to devote so much time to it against our will.”
– Milan Kundera, “Let the Old Dead Make Room for the New Dead”
Visions of Home
Ever since I moved to Amherst, in September 2022, I have been experiencing something strange. Almost everyday, several times a day, I am confronted with images, in my mind, of home, of Beirut, the city where I grew up.
It is something that I cannot control: visions of specific street corners, particular alleyways, and other beloved spaces and places of the city enter my mind and I am immediately flooded with a strong sense of nostalgia and of missing.
Months later, I met a Lebanese student, the first Lebanese person I’ve met in Amherst. He was a student in one of the classes I’m TA-ing. We spent time talking together in Arabic after each class session. It uplifted me ever so slightly, in my state of perpetual homesickness and nostalgia, when he walked in the class and said, “Hi, kifik?”
Once, during a random conversation we were having after class, he told me: “Sometimes I can see the streets and roads in Lebanon — I see them in my head.”
Kundera Explains
I was shocked not only when I heard my affliction described by another in this way – “I see the roads in my head” – but when I read it in a novel by Milan Kundera.
In Ignorance, Kundera wrote about a Czech woman living in France, in exile, after fleeing Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion. In the nighttime, Irena was tormented by “dream-nightmares” where she was entrapped in Czechoslovakia; but in the daytime she was conversely visited by beautiful “visions” of landscapes from her home country:
“These dream-nightmares seemed to her all the more mysterious in that she was afflicted simultaneously with an uncontrollable nostalgia and another, completely opposite, experience: landscapes from her country kept appearing to her by day. No, this was not daydreaming, lengthy and conscious, willed; it was something else entirely: visions of landscapes would blink on in her head unexpectedly, abruptly, swiftly, and go out instantly. She would be talking to her boss and all at once, like a flash of lightning, she’d see a path through a field. She would be jostled on the Metro and suddenly, a narrow lane in some leafy Prague neighborhood would rise up before her for a split second. All day long these fleeting images would visit her to assuage the longing for her lost Bohemia.
The same moviemaker of the subconscious who, by day, was sending her bits of the home landscape as images of happiness, by night would set up terrifying returns to that same land. The day was lit with the beauty of the land forsake, the night by the horror of returning to it. The day would show her the paradise she had lost; the night, the hell she had fled.”
Sometimes I find myself struggling to articulate a feeling or experience in words. Then I arrive at a passage in a book and I find that there is no need for me to articulate or express anything at all – the author has already done it for me. This is one of those times. Kundera explained it so perfectly. There is not much more to say, but I will anyway.
Interlude: Images, Broadly Conceived
In her ethnography about the Canadian Inuit, Lisa Stevenson suggests the “image” as a way of broadly referring to the “photographs, films, memories, sounds” that anthropologists often encounter during their research (11). I often add: smells, tastes, touch, emotions, ghosts, visions, hauntings.
Such disparate images have “a power over us that we can’t fully control” (11). This is demonstrated, I think, by the affliction that I share with the Lebanese student I encountered at UMass as well as Kundera’s Irena – that of being visited by landscapes and roads from our home throughout our days abroad.
It’s always difficult, writes Stevenson, to translate images into the “singular and incontestable facts” the world seems to demand. It’s hard to render images in words alone.
This is what Michael Taussig, another anthropologist, explores in his book I Swear I Saw This. More specifically, he writes about “that relentless drive that makes you feel sick as the very words you write down seem to erase the reality you are writing about” (13). Sometimes, “writing is actually pushing reality off the page” (Taussig, 16). Taussig encourages anthropologists to nurture a practice of drawing, arguing that drawing is one way of “addressing the absent and making it appear” – drawing “fills a ghostly absence.”
“To record this by means of a drawing is the desperation of the need to hold onto a memory as it flashes up only to die away” (Taussig, 272).
Taussig recommends drawing, and Stevenson deploys the “imagistic,” because of the potential of images to communicate contradiction without resolving it. Thinking through images allows us to “listen for the moments when the formulation of a fact does not satisfy.” This practice of “listening for uncertainty,” according to Stevenson, may help us be more open to that which is inherently and indisputably contradictory in our wide range of human experiences.
I’ve found images to be helpful in excavating my own memories; in trying to make peace with memory’s inherently faulty nature.
Image-Memory #1: Nostalgia
Journal Entry
February 14, 2023
Amherst, Massachusetts
When the weather is like this – blue sky, slight breeze, cold air – it reminds me of the sea in Beirut.
It also reminds me of my village, Dhour Choueir, in the mountains of Lebanon.
The trees, the sound of the wind,
And the scent of wood burning which I smell sometimes on my walks around neighborhoods in Amherst.
That smell instantly transports me to my childhood: to campfire gatherings with my family or bonfires at summer camp in “Schneller” in the Bekaa.
I’m a person who grew up loving to read and write as soon as I learned how. So it’s always a shock to me when I learn, time and time again, how memories are stored not in words as much as in images, sounds, and smells. Vague, abstract, and hard to pin down or contain.
I wonder if there will ever come a time when I will be content to live in the present rather than dwelling in/on the past and being filled with nostalgic longing at every turn of the road, even in a strange and unfamiliar town where nobody knows me and I know no one.
Image-Memory #2: The Explosion
Months following the 2020 port explosion, I tried to write down my experience of August 4 and its aftermath.
But the writing exercise felt dull and tedious, and nothing I wrote felt real.
An excerpt from that attempt at documentation:
I just remember images. Writing these memories down is exhausting. I wonder what the purpose is. Will these images always persist in my mind or will they someday fade away? Will it happen all at once or is it already happening, gradually – the fading?
Image-Memory #3: Spaces that Disappear
The most accurate memories, I feel, are those that consist of a feeling, when a wave of emotion comes over you and you remember something. The physical world around me cannot always be trusted to contain my memories, so when I walk through the buildings of my childhood world, they seem new to me. Was I really a child in this building?
Before my sister and I left Lebanon to pursue our graduate studies in the US, we visited our school together. It was the first time I visited my school in years.
The high school was mostly empty – it was June and all the students were studying for finals. The school looked different, it had been renovated. All the teachers and guards remembered us, they remembered our faces even if they couldn’t remember our names. “How’s your mom doing? Is she still practicing medicine?” We went to the libraries. The elementary school. The roof. The playgrounds. The gym. The auditorium. “Home is so sad,” wrote Philip Larkin, “it stays as it was left.”
But there were other places that we just couldn’t find, or maybe they are not there anymore. I wanted to see my fifth grade teacher, if she is still there. Then suddenly I remembered – the fifth grade classrooms were not part of the elementary school building. They were in what was called the “BD building,” which we didn’t fully explore. The playground for third graders was somewhere between the BD building and the middle school building, but we also couldn’t find it.
I remembered being in third grade, learning how to do the monkey bars with my Italian friend named Asia, and reading books about the Holocaust. Standing in front of the class, ordered by my teacher to solve fractions, stuttering and barely saying a word.
How is it that time so callously passes and erases the places we thought we had known and that used to be ours? Some things will persist only in my memory, cloaked by blurriness and haziness and arbitrary images. I won’t be able to find them in real life, even if the physical structures housing them still stand.