A few weeks ago I was emptying out my folder of WhatsApp videos and photographs. Making space for the next influx of digital content that would take its place. Nestled between the Russian viral videos and short clips of my family who I haven’t seen in almost two years, I stumbled upon the film. It was embedded there, this deep moment of sadness, this place, these people, that I recognise. My aunt kissing my grandfather’s head as he lay in his casket, everyone gathered around.

I first watched the video in the middle of the night, nervous to play it, waking up my partner to tell him I was going to watch it. That I was ready to watch it, to watch my grandfather being carried through the house in Cheldran, in the mountains, in Nagorno-Karabakh. To watch my aunts and uncles and cousins, mothers, fathers, children of distant relatives. To watch them gather in the garden, the garden where we sat as children, where chickens ran around, where a hot shower required first starting a fire. The garden where we were not present now. I wanted to see myself in that video. Where would I stand? How would I be?

It’s in that moment where you’re holding this little screen in your hands, this phone, this portal to another place. This portal to a moment that has already slipped, that is constantly slipping, by.

This year, more than ever, was mediated by screens. Death mediated by screens. Pain, crying, laughter, joy. Mediated by screens.

memory

mediated by screens

In the last year I started to understand, or maybe just to remember, that remembering itself is a radical act.

Who remembers?

I remember, many years ago, visiting the gravesite where my grandmother is buried up at the top of the mountains in Cheldran. We walked there together, slowly, my grandfather and my sister at my side. Curving along a path that traces the mountain. When we arrived I placed flowers on all the graves, including an unmarked one. My grandfather laughed and told me it was his. Seeing me get noticeably upset, he jokingly said “It’s the only way out”.

It’s the only way out.

That, I remember.

As a child of migration. Of long histories of migration. Of roots that are untethered. Of Jewish people, of the Armenians. Coming from lineages that have violently been erased, scattered, undone. I wonder what it means if all we have left are these memories. If the physical traces are gone. If my grandfather is gone, another piece is untethered. If Nagorno-Karabakh is occupied by Azerbaijani and Russian military forces, another piece gone. What will happen to the house in Cheldran? I hold its white porch in my memory, its musty cellar. The creaky drooping beds. Our family home in Belarus is already gone. We searched for it two years ago, wandering the streets together, trying to find a marker of recognition to steady our memories.

An artist, Veronika Babayan, tells me that she saw images of women making etchings of walls, of carvings, during the last war between Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh. This was a kind of archiving. A last moment to capture memories, fragments, something, anything, before having to leave their homes, their villages, their towns. An archiving of urgency. An urgent archive.

A week into the most recent violent attacks in Palestine, this poem from Najwan Darwish started appearing in my social media feeds:

“Who Remembers the Armenians?”

I remember them

and I ride the nightmare bus with them

each night

and my coffee, this morning

I'm drinking it with them

You, murderer -

Who remembers you?

Lina Issa’s A Space to Hold is entangled with memory, with the act of remembering as a radical act. The work asks how we hold space for others and for the relations between one another that have been made invisible. How do we engage with one another when we have been tethered and untethered from place? Is that the work of memory?

And while I write these words, it is images that I am trying to convey. To bring into being these fuzzy places that I carry with me, shifting, fading, coming back into view. Zarlasht Zia’s illustrations, her observations of the interior and exterior worlds we inhabit, resonate with these practices of memory. Perhaps you’re already holding her illustration in your hands.

As for me, I’ve been keeping Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ book M Archive next to my bed for the last few months. I was told that it could be read as an oracle—providing solace, opening up spaces for imagining otherwise. Thumbing gently through the pages, this is the place my fingers hold:

and now we are here. as who we are. ready to scream again.

Lina Issa

Zarlasht Zia