Woman and a Fish, Asma al Fayoumi, Syria 1993

by Najeeb Nusair. Translated by Christa Salamandra and Suhail Shadoud
from Artenews, October, 2007

However much we moan and groan, however much we lament, reminisce, mull over, write, dig up, represent, glorify, venerate—even if we use the entire vocabulary of literature and science to conjure it up, the past will not return. Even if we cry, kick the ground with our feet like temperamental children, beg people, societies and nations, even if we consult scholars, historians, doctors, and feminists… the past will not return.

Instinctively we remember, as we practice our everyday cultural life, lavishly praising the past, and seeking to retrieve it in any possible way. But the past is within us; it has not and will not leave us. Asking for it to return is asking for what has fallen away, is gone, because it no longer works and has expired. The past is a gigantic mass, some of which is relatively good, and remains within us, and much of which time has consumed and flung aside, like lines in an arcane, long forgotten book.

The past is like a brick in a wall, like a step on a ladder. It is impossible to destroy it or to retrieve it, unless we demolish the entire structure and admit defeat. We must see it in its place, not as the be all and end all. We must read it objectively, without embellishment. We should return to it with an ability to understand it without grief or longing. The world was not perfect in the past, and culture was not perfect. We are more aware than people were in the past. We cannot remain hostage to the burden of the past on our backs and in our minds. We must face the future resolutely, with no halo adorning us, and no ideology protecting us.

It is said that whoever shoots the past with a rifle will be shot back at by the future with a canon. This saying is both foolish and deluded because it is devoid of logic. Whoever does this severs the branch he is sitting on, as if the past was open for mockery or senseless infighting. Nobody wants to shoot the past, and the future is not cartoonish enough to fire a canon at anyone. It is a battle of illusions and fairy tales. The past exists in its time and place, no more and no less. We need an objective approach that treats the past as worldly human experience, a product of time and place, of culture and environment which are themselves determined by human action.

Culture and time are twin movements, propelling human endeavor towards an inevitable future. This process transforms things, names, words and expressions along the way. A thousand tears ago the word “travel” did not mean the same thing—does not remotely resemble—the “travel” of our day. The term “sea” did not correspond to what we think of as the sea today. Someone from the past would be unable to imagine our concept of the “nation”, as it exists today, or even find it on a map. These are completely different phenomena, conceived and understood in circumstances very unlike our own. Where is the intersection that expresses our desire and need to resurrect the past so that we can live in it, or it in us?

The call to revive the past reflects an inability to face the present. It suggests a failure to adapt to modern values. We seek refuge in nostalgia in an effort to prove our contribution to human civilization, clinging to it like a life raft, as evidence of our existence. But human civilization spirals ever upwards, waiting for no one. Whoever contributes to human civilization at any given moment in history should remain active, and not be content with having once been at the peak of human achievement.

There is no substitute for adjusting to the times, with all its pros and cons. We cannot separate the positive from the negative in reclaiming the past. Camels are safer than airplanes, as they are not susceptible to fatal accidents. But we cannot rely on them in the modern world. Telephones, however annoying, cannot be compared to passenger pigeons. The same is true for running water, electricity, the internet, and so many other human inventions that also transform value systems. Prevailing customs should not be relied upon and preserved, merely because they come down from the past.

The past is in us and around us, in our genes and in our values. It is part of a continual struggle with the present, which will one day be the past. We should let this struggle take its natural course, retaining what is useful, and leaving out what no longer suits. We should not, by resurrecting the past, live by bygone values. They will not return, even if we fire our cannons.

Originally published in Arabic in Baladna on 1 September 2007. The entire online October issue of Artenews is devoted to Arabic literature and is well worth examining.