The Markaz Review:

Malu Halasa & Jordan Elgrably

Our brains are like palimpsests or computer memory: we continuously write over, erase, reconfigure and frequently forget what came before, and yet we are all of the above — we are what we can articulate, and what we may prefer to disremember. But how much of forgetting is in fact unavoidable, and how much is intentional?

Traditionally neuroscientists believed that memory lives in the brain’s temporal lobe, the hippocampus, and that fragments of experience linger in the prefrontal cortex. These could be activated by a sound, smell, color, even a touch. New research suggests memory is lodged in the connections or synapses between the cells. As memory forms, neurons in one region of the brain form, while neurons in another region are destroyed. A recent study on poor zebrafish came across perhaps one of the early indications of where forgetfulness resides.

The essays and art in The Markaz Review’s issue on forgetting rely on props, prompts, and ancient materials to conjure forth forgotten memory, sometimes obscured or erased, other instances hidden in plain sight. In creative nonfiction, in “Regarding the Photographs of Others,” Nabil Salih considers the photographs of his own Iraqi family and is haunted by violence, both homegrown and foreign, that has laid waste to his country. In “Bloodied Dispatches,” the award-winning, Mauritanian novelist Ahmed Isselmou passes by a commemorative tree every morning on his way into work at Al Jazeera’s newsroom, which has on its leaves the names of the correspondents and cameramen who have been killed in wars, which have ravaged the region. His essay, translated from the Arabic by Rana Asfour, gives insight into the pressures faced by journalist-broadcasters in the field — many of whom have been targeted or their families targeted — and the news team in Doha, as they attempt to navigate graphically upsetting images coming in daily from Israel’s war on Gaza.

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