Will the apocryphal stories continue or will one day both sides acknowledge the other’s memories? For answers, I revisited the pages of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. “The city of Zora is like a honeycomb,” he wrote, “in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech.” And what if Shushi, too, were to become a honeycomb in whose cells memories coexisted without vitiating or privileging one over the other? What if we included in those cells not just the names of famous women, places, fictions, and nonfictions that we have been taught or lived and gotten to know, but other such signs, peoples, and meanings that can be acquired outside ourselves and communities? Can we not meet halfway in those liminal spaces to build new histories of inclusion?
[my emphases]
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