I have always carried stories of places I’ve never set foot in
Those cities feel familiar, though I’ve only known them through names, images, and news reports. Then, one day, there was an explosion. Or so the reports say. A car bomb. Its debris scattered across streets I have memorized but never walked. I know the number of victims, the color of the car, and the time of detonation. But do I know what it felt like to be there?
It’s October, and I am fixated on the barrage of images coming from war and massacre. I set my phone aside and left home without it, hoping to experience something tangible: tangible streets and the bodies inhabiting them. I see demonstrators and brutal police violence. I walk as a passerby, a witness, just a body taking up space. When I return home, I attempt to write everything down, but nothing comes to mind. Words have already escaped me.
I.
How do we internalize and remember events marked by extreme physical and psychological violence without actually experiencing them on our skin? Can we pass on anything, a memory, a bodily feeling, about a genocide we have witnessed in real time, but seen from the safety of far away? Who will tell this story if those living it are exterminated, and people like me are oceans and screens away? I wouldn’t dare to start my version with: “Once upon a time, on my phone screen, I witnessed…”
Before news defined our understanding of the world, people turned to stories to imbue memory with meaning and to share what they experienced in places far away. Unlike formal histories, memories were often passed down via tales passed from one voice to another. In oral traditions, a story is like a woven sack, holding the wisdom of ancestors; each retelling adds a new thread. These stories wove together generations and geographies, bearing the weight of collective experience, as seen, for example, in The One Thousand and One Nights (1), which spans centuries and regions: from India to Iran, to the Levant and the Maghreb.
In The Storyteller, Walter Benjamin portrays the storyteller as being similar to a weaver, entwining their own life with those of others to bridge past and future. Through this craft, wisdom is transmitted and preserved—not as static knowledge, which is compiled from facts, but as a living force, born of experience and reshaped as it flows from one teller to the next. This distinction is highlighted by Benjamin in his reflections on storytelling.
II.
How do we engage with facts without reducing them to their bare, raw truths? There is a form of violence in this reduction, much like when a catastrophe becomes just another flashing headline, or when a death toll turns victims into numbers, without names, without stories.
There is nothing humane about a reality understood only through facts, nor about a history that consists solely of events proven by those facts. Somewhere between the lines of history books, in the voids of their grand narratives, lie the stories of those who lived through the past differently—those whose lives were too insignificant to be remembered. These lives held countless potentialities that never became possibilities, of a future that could have been imagined differently.
III.
Freudian psychology contends that trauma is not fully experienced at the moment it occurs. It registers retroactively, often becoming traumatic only when revisited later. Trauma is defined by delay, reminding us that we relate to it in the present, not the past (2). Isn’t history the same?
In the Western tradition, history is often imagined as a straight line, predictable and set in stone. It appears deprived of possibility. But our connection to the past is shaped by our present circumstances. With this in mind, we can uncover hidden possibilities—those that only exist in the aftermath of disaster, events that may not be visible now but which are waiting to be recognized. This quality is called latency. Latency is not merely a matter of delay; it is a space where meaning is deferred, where events remain unresolved until another moment awakens them. To think of latencies is not to understand how we arrived at our present, but to recognize how we can move forward by acknowledging the alternate outcomes history once held. We must understand that destruction and war are not the natural progression of history. These outcomes have been imposed by erasing all the other possibilities contained in history. What would expand history into many histories?
There is no salvation in trauma; there can only be healing from it. However, there may be a form of salvation from collective historical trauma—not in the sense of redemption or closure, but in the capacity to re-engage with what has been repressed, forgotten, or deemed impossible. This is where the concept of latency becomes important. Latency invites us to revisit the unresolved, to listen for the echoes of suppressed futures within past catastrophes. By acknowledging what histories could have been—and what has been violently foreclosed—we reopen a space for imagining alternative trajectories. This is not a passive act of remembrance, but a transformative one. It allows those not directly affected to assume a responsibility: to hold the weight of the past without claiming it as their own, and to imagine futures not bound to the logic of inevitability. This sense of optimism does not emerge spontaneously; it must be reclaimed through the difficult work of attending to what remains latent, unfinished, and unspoken.
I remember watching Sharif Waked’s “To Be Continued...”
The Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri plays a suicide bomber. The setting is familiar—one of those jarring personal videos where militants preparing for “martyrdom” recite their last will before their deadly mission. But here, the moment of explosion never arrives. Instead of a final testimony, the actor reads from The One Thousand and One Nights. The narrative recited by Saleh Bakri, like Scheherazade’s own, unfolds in fragments, one tale leading to another, endlessly deferring an ending. If, for Benjamin, the storyteller borrows their authority from death, here, the Palestinian storyteller does something else—he surpasses death. He faces the history that has already sentenced him to die for his land, that has written his ending before he could even begin, and that has always expected him dead. This is a radical way to seize this history: by speaking to the past, not about it.
The value of experience lies in its resistance to being reduced to mere facts, to being erased by a history that overlooks lived moments. This mirrors the unease of witnessing a genocide through a phone screen, where a relentless stream of images and reports conveys a violence bent on annihilating every life, erasing bodies, voices, and memories that could tell of what has been. Yet, this flood of information leaves us grasping for understanding, disconnected from the wisdom of what has been lived through. But how do we tell these stories without appropriating their pain? Perhaps we cannot—not fully, not without fault.
To insist on storytelling is to push back against this erasure, to craft narratives that honor the fullness of those lives—their joys, their struggles—despite the distances separating us. What we can do is stay with what remains unresolved and hold space for what lingers. To stay with these stories is to listen for what those lives held—for the futures that were never allowed to unfold—and to keep their traces from disappearing.
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- Footnotes
(1) A collection of Middle Eastern folktales compiled during the Islamic Golden Age.
(2) Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, repeating and working-through,” trans. J. Strachey. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Vol. XII (London: The Hogarth Press, 1911-1913) 147-156.
Images: “Demonstration in solidarity with Palestine in Berlin on October 06, 2024. Photo: Hanif Shoaei”
