September 2024
This issue takes its title from the sabaar, a cactus that once grew along the borders of now-flattened Palestinian villages. Almost impossible to eradicate, the sabaar continues to reappear and grow along those same lines, demarcating where those villages once stood.[1]
Nothing is less clear than the word ‘archive’.[2] In its most basic and broadest sense, an archive is a place to store, to file, to log or to contain. Tracing the word back to its Greek origins suggests that the word relates to the intersection of power and information-collation: ‘there is no political power without control of the archive’.[3] I ask — whose memory, history, story, perspective is worth logging?
Many moments in this colony’s past (and present) demonstrate both the constructivism and power imbalance inherent in institutional information-keeping. Over the last eleven months of Israel’s well-documented genocide against Palestinians, we have witnessed in real time how record- and history-keeping can perpetuate the power dynamics already in place. Simultaneously, many people are subverting this process and contributing to a counter collection of information, ‘a counter archive’. We do this even in small ways: each time we use our online platforms to share information that would otherwise be omitted.
Thinking beyond the archive as a mere institutional or colonial tool, this issue considers how people and communities archive their own histories and what these alternative archives can look like. It explores examples of archiving that are explicitly articulated or implicitly evoked; intentional practice as well as personal cognitive efforts to catalogue or to observe. The pieces presented in this issue may add to ideas held within institutional archives or directly counter them – reaffirming that history-keeping is a malleable thing of utility and not simply a nostalgic exercise. It is a tool necessary to understand our present.
Sabaar and Other Counter Archives considers material culture, our built environments and cultural or familial practices as their own murky form of archive. A redacted treaty, a private dinner between friends, protest chants and gubare are some examples of the counter archives in these pages. The contributors guide us through a sonic visit to a colonial-era railway in the Congo; a parents’ living room; archives lost to invasion; childhood memories from a fishing village on Flinders Island, in which multiple generations of a family story are captured; and examples of cultivated and foraged plants and what they can tell us about the conditions, needs and beliefs of different communities.[4]
The works here demonstrate ‘archive’ — how our treatment of knowledge, information and objects can alter their meaning, significance, or purpose, or even assert a refusal to be knowable. They consider what the role of the artist is in all of this and how the artist’s impulse to archive can make lost or erased information physically present.[5]
The potential reach of this topic — if anything or everything can be an archive — could have taken 18.3 anywhere and is more than can be captured in one collection of writing. What ultimately shaped the direction of this issue were examples of — mostly incidental — counter archives that I have observed in my own life and my community, as we move further away from the structures of power (be it institutional or governmental) that have led us repeatedly towards genocide, climate crisis and inequality. I was thinking about how we approach information with a critical lens and resist hegemonic narratives — even in small ways. How every protest song, every toppled statue, our qahr, and the very communities that we form, are an archive.[6]
This issue is dedicated to the history-keepers, the storytellers and the resistance fighters of Sham, Libnan and Falasteen. May we uphold you in the present, may we remember you in the future, and may your courage free us all.
[1] Nasser Abufarha, ‘Land of Symbols: Cactus, Poppies, Orange and Olive Trees in Palestine’, Identities, vol. 15, no. 3, 2008, pp. 343–68
[2] Jacques Derrida & Eric Prenowitz, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, Diacritics, vol. 25, no. 2, 1995, pp. 9–63.
[3] Ibid
[4] The islands in the Bass Strait are known as tayaritja. Specifically regarding Flinders Island, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC) advised me that no traditional names are still known, one of the many losses from invasion and colonisation. Since the 1990s the TAC has conducted the important work of the palawa kani Language Program; palawa kani is the revived language of the Palawa/Pakana people.
[5] Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, vol. 110, 2004, pp. 3–22.
[6]Qahr قهر is an Arabic word with no English equivalent. It refers to a deep anger and sense of injustice, placed on a low fire, added to with oppression, racism and dehumanisation, and left to simmer over time, from generation to generation.