A History of Remembering: Memory, Identity, and War in Nada Awar Jarrar's Somewhere, Home (2004)

Memory has a striking amount of power in Arab Anglophone diasporic writing. This is due to the inextricable relationship between memory and place. As Mahmoud Darwich astutely states, "without memories you have no real relationship to a place."(1) Memory is thus important in constructing a sense of belonging and identity and in negotiating different experiences of displacement across geographical, cultural, and linguistic borders. In this sense, diasporic subjects thrive on memory, and diasporic texts are tools for collecting memories. This paper explores the role of memory in Nada Awar Jarrar's 2004 novella, Somewhere, Home, which ascribes a lot of value to memory. It seeks to understand the nexus between memory and identity construction by initiating a discussion of personal and collective memories. It also examines the role of war crimes and various other atrocities in the context of post-war diasporic memory. In short, it explores memory as a mode of knowledge which expresses the ferocious effects of the Lebanese Civil War in order to do justice to the war's victims.