How does an individual remember extreme violence when she or he is told to bracket this memory away? How does an individual subsequently interact in a social context—perhaps starting with the family—that does not acknowledge this suffering? And what happens when these conditions only open up in the encounter with comrades or former inmates, where victims find a space to talk about their past experience? Such are the questions we propose to deal with here when we discuss the “social life of violent memories.” The emergence of possibilities to engage personal experiences of violence and trauma and make them public has been one of the most important and imperative changes since the turn of the millennium in the Maghreb and Mashreq, in our view. This opening has basically become accessible through cultural and aesthetic productions: autobiographies, art works, documentaries, movies, photography, an abundance of novels, comic books, private collections, digital archiving, and novel practices of commemoration. A very pronounced rise in history pages in Arab print media, al-Jazeera’s history channel, various Facebook pages on historic events, and history magazines bear witness to a widely felt need for historical clarification, as we argue. In the Maghreb, these cultural works are often already available in Arabic and French, and many other significant contributions have meanwhile been translated and have entered world literature or the global art scene, for example, the various novels by the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury, the works of “The Atlas Group” started in 1989 by Walid Raad, a regular guest at the MoMA in New York, and the autobiographies by family members of the former Moroccan Interior Minister Mohammed Oufkir. Not least, the global live broadcast of the Tunisian Truth and Dignity Commission in 2016/2017 testifies to an increasing awareness of and concern to publicly address violence. It is thus all the more surprising that the extent as well as the existential bearing of these “present pasts” ( Huyssen 2003)  in the Maghreb and Mashreq has barely been recognized outside the region. Thus, gauging how personal memories of traumatic events gain public recognition is one of our main concerns in the following.

Zakaria Rhani, in Hespéris-Tamuda LVI, 1, 2021, 513-516