"My
mother is ill. In August, she began testing for lymphoma
and by mid-October she was diagnosed with Stage IV lymphoma.
As it would be for anyone, it is terrifying to ponder the
prospect of losing my mother. We are extremely close. If
I was not her son, I would still want to be her best friend.
She is the reason I fell in love with poetry at an early
age, she is the reason I became an artist.
When I was six-years old, my mother read to me children’s
books about the American Buffalo and their disappearance
due to a century of over-hunting by the white settlers.
The allegory of these narratives spoke to the disappearance
of Native Americans, who themselves were hunted by the
white settlers, and displaced. My mother would weep while
reading the stories, and from this early age, I became
intimate with the profundity of invisibility in art. I
became committed to articulating absences and voids.
My mother’s family left Baghdad in 1946. They were
Arab Jews, who were proud to be Iraqi and proud of their
heritage. They kept their culture alive upon arriving in
the United States: their house in Long Island, where I
grew up, was furnished with Iraqi carpets, some small pieces
of art from Baghdad hung on the wall, Iraqi food was cooked
and eaten, and the family spoke the Iraqi Jewish Arabic
dialect. My grandfather even reopened in New York City
the import-export company he operated in Baghdad, primarily
as a way to stay in touch with colleagues and friends back
home.
I was 16 years old in 1991 when the Gulf War began. I grew
up in my grandparents’ house hearing enchanted stories
of the Iraqi capital: towers that “sang the time” (minarets),
scorpions in the basement, majestic date palms. When the
place my grandparents fled to went to war with the place
they fled from, I saw only green-tinted night-vision images
of destruction. My grandmother’s stories were threatened,
and in many ways, I have been working ever since to save
them.
My mother is the last link in our family to the Jews of
Iraq and was born shortly before her family fled Baghdad.
I have been preserving her recipes through projects like
Enemy Kitchen. In the midst of the terror and sadness one
faces in the midst of a threatening illness, I found myself
not just trying to save my mother’s life, but also
trying to save a dying culture. Like a museum jeopardized
during war, or libraries menaced by iconoclasts and fire,
I saw in my mother’s illness a culture’s past
and potential future in jeopardy. This year, I will commit
myself to learning and archiving the Iraqi Jewish Arabic
dialect, which faces extinction as only 4 Jews remain in
Iraq. Thus, I continue in my pursuits to rebuild disappeared
or threatened culture, to keep the last Iraqi Buffalo alive.
But right now, there is great sadness and I do not pretend
that a culture in exile or a displaced culture will survive
in the same way as it had back “home.” As with
all diasporas, it will be different, and will evolve. The
preservationist struggles with what is to be remembered
and saved and what is to be discarded or laid to rest.
Damaged torah scrolls, prayer books and other religious
material are required by Jewish law to be buried. A geniza
is a deppsitory, usually in a synagogue, for such religious
items to be stored before receiving a proper burial.
The Synagogue in Ostia is the second oldest in the western
world, and was excavated in 1961-62. To bury is to hide
underground, to lay to rest.
Over the years, I have collected fragments of centuries-old
torahs from Iraq, damaged siddurium, Hagadahs,, broken
Kiddush cups, and built what I thought was an archive of
Iraqi Jewish history. In reality, however, it seems I built
a genizah.
For Arte In memoria, I propose to bury my archive on the
grounds of the Ostia synagogue. It was a way of saying
farewell to the things that need to rest, which is the
hardest thing to do when tryong to stay alive."
Michael Rakowitz
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