Why the Past Matters: Personal Reflections on the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life
By Zahiye Kundos. For the past hundred and fifty years or so (feel free to count differently), Arabs – whether Muslims, Christians, or Jews – have been dealing with relative loss of control over their lives in part due to living without self-sovereignty. Such collective experience is manifest in the feeling of being lost in history, exhausted from Sisyphean efforts to connect to that past and achieve radical changes in their present, moving in a circle between glances of hope and long periods of depression. The result is a stuttering tongue, a symptom of a bruise in their heart. Generation after generation, but this heart injury doesn’t get old; the bruise continues to be blue.