Counter-Mapping the Archive

Counter-Mapping the Archive

Counter-Mapping the Archive

By : Zena Agha

[This article is part of a bouquet developed by the Jadaliyya Environment and Palestine Page editors to highlight the work of critical mapping initiatives and research on the role of mapping spaces in Palestine, Lebanon, and across the region. The authors highlight not only their own work and its methodologies, but also discuss how they hope it contributes to our larger understanding of space and popular conversations of the spaces we inhabit and study. Read the rest of the articles featured in this bouquet linked at the bottom.]

Tell us about your project. What times, places, and topics does your work cover?

My research concerns mapping and counter-mapping in Palestine, from British and Zionist (later Israeli) mapping to Palestinian and anti-Zionist counter-mapping. I have two main objectives in my work: to analyze the relationship of mapping and power in (and of) Palestine; and to assess the potential of counter-mapping as part of a project of decolonization. 

The Palestinian condition is such that any map is treated by Palestinians as a dubious object, capable of deceit. Maps represent more than just a physical image of place. They possess agency and should be read as texts just like paintings, theatre, film, television, and music; they speak of the world, disclosing and realising manifold spatial relations.[1] It follows, then, that a range of approaches are needed to make sense of maps. My work, as a policy fellow at Al-Shabaka; the Palestinian Policy Network, as an artist and filmmaker, and currently as a doctoral candidate at Newcastle University, has been to interrogate the possibilities and limitations of cartography in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea between 1870 and 1967. I begin in 1870 because the first large-scale survey of this region was produced by the British-led Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) between 1871-1877. The PEF produced by far the most precise and technologically sophisticated maps of the region to that point and paved the way for the British to assume colonial control over Palestine during the First World War, fifty years later. I stop at the Naksa of 1967 (the “setback,” or Six Day War as it’s known outside of Palestine) and the extension of the Israeli occupation to the entirety of historic Palestine as well as the Syrian Golan and the Egyptian Sinai. 

Simultaneously, I analyze (and produce) counter-cartographies of Palestine. Often termed “counter-maps,” these are alternative maps which attempt to recognize the past, critique the present and (re)imagine the future. As such, they are not bound by a timeframe. I include “traditional” and digital maps as well oral or memory maps, literature and poetry, tatreez (Palestinian embroidery) and visual and performance art. The nature of this work means that I have combined traditional approaches such as archival research with the deliberate subversion of colonial artifacts. This includes my own counter-mapping efforts through poetry, visual art, and documentary film – such as my 2021 experimental short, The Place That is Ours, co-directed with Dorothy Allen-Pickard (figure 1).  

Figure 1 Still from The Place that is Ours (copyright Dorothy Allen-Pickard) 2021

The ongoing genocide in Gaza has, in different ways, transformed the goals of my research, not least since many of the geographies depicted in historical maps of Gaza have been annihilated. But it has also called the specificity of decolonization in Palestine into question, because discourses around what constitutes decolonization in Palestine have irrevocably altered since October 2023.[2] Just as I seek to interrogate the archive – the ways it evades and conceals – so too have I found that my own research has become an archive of sorts: a survey of a landscape which has since been hit by a devastating earthquake. Making sense of this research, both the maps and the contextual frames that surround them, and asking what value (if any) they have is a painful preoccupation. These reflections are intended to contribute to a broader, more urgent, conversation around the politics of mapping Palestine and its role in the work of liberation in this current moment, when the very existence of Gaza is under threat.

How did you come to develop your project? What sources and analytics did you draw upon?

My interest in maps was sparked in 2017 when I used the iNakba app (since renamed iReturn) developed by Israeli anti-Zionist organisation Zochrot to find my destroyed village in the Tiberius region. The app’s interactive map has pins in the locations of 600 Palestinian villages destroyed in the Nakba of 1947-48 with otherwise obscure Google Maps and Waze coordinates. It also includes demographic information on each village (for instance settlement before and after 1948; what military operation, if any, destroyed it, and so on) in Hebrew, Arabic, and English – information synthesised from Walid Khalidi’s 1992 seminal work All that Remains.[3] I used the only image the app had–a grainy picture of the landscape with rolling hills and palm trees–to check we were in the right place (figure 2). The land did not lie, even after seven decades. 

Figure 2 Photograph of my destroyed village on the app and in reality. Copyright Dorothy Allen-Pickard

In the years since, I have contemplated the clandestine cartographic practices I had to resort to in order to re-discover this place. Israeli maps deliberately obfuscate, omit, and ignore Palestinian localities, both populated and depopulated. Just as the Israeli state has been built on the ruins of Palestinian villages, towns, and cities, the Israeli map has been drawn to negate any Palestinian presence.[4] A map is well-suited for this task. The “duplicity” of maps, what critical cartographer J.B Harley calls their “slipperiness,” is the essence of cartographic representation.[5] This is in large part because mapmakers were, and in many ways, still are, presumed to be engaged in an “objective” or “scientific” project of knowledge creation.[6] From this perspective, maps are perfect, scaled representations of the world, based upon unbiased factual information and accurate measurements.[7] Scientific positivism has created the perception that maps are detached, neutral, and above all, accurate graphic representations of space. 

But how does empiricism (and its discontents) apply to Palestine as a site of contemporary colonialism, where indigenous land is confiscated and contested, where any map is out of date almost as soon as it is issued, and where the map acts as a prophecy for colonial intent? Most significantly, in what ways does debunking cartographic myths act as an important case for any designs on material change towards a decolonized world? These questions are the backbone of my work. My hope is that this research produces new knowledge on historical and contemporary practices of mapping in Palestine and will make conceptual and empirical contributions to debates in critical cartography, settler colonialism and decolonization.

 Can you tell us a bit about your methodology? What do you include in your maps and what do you leave out? Why? How do you see your methodological choices in connection with analytic and political questions?

The archive features prominently in my research; in many ways it acts as my point of departure, not because of what it contains, but because of what it does not. I have carried out research in eight archives across the UK and US including state, public, university, and personal collections and have found many overlaps, contradictions, and silences. But most maps of Palestine (along with their ephemera – explanatory notes, special volumes, sketches, registers, census data, field guides etc.) are held in archives broadly inaccessible to Palestinians. Whether in the colonial archives of London, New York, Washington DC, Tel Aviv, or Jerusalem, Palestinians have limited access to large parts of the history of their land and people, particularly as seen through the colonizer’s eyes. 

The importance of archiving cannot be overstated, as Jaques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz remind us: “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.”[8] How can Palestinians understand their relationship to the land and imagine return without full access to the archive? 

This is not unique to Palestinians. Indigenous peoples rarely have access to or exercise power over state archives, spaces often filled with documents and histories that instrumentalize the past to ensure settler presents and futures. Despite this marginalization of indigenous people and their relegation to a spectral presence in archival spaces, there has been a recent surge in the exploration and reclamation of archiving in indigenous, especially Palestinian, movements, many of these in the form of counter-cartographies. This might be understood as a reaction to the condition of exile. Beshara Doumani offers this interpretation: “I mention the attraction of archiving the present, not just the past, because Palestinians are still incapable of stopping the continued and accelerating erasure of the two greatest archives of all: the physical landscape, and the bonds of daily life that constitute an organic social formation.”[9]

It is perhaps for this reason that I find myself perennially drawn to the archive. The lacunae of the archive call for its subversion and reclamation. The archive has become a springboard for counter-mapping and alternative imaginaries. Saidiya Hartman, through her revolutionary “critical fabulations,” summarises this elegantly: “every historian of the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limit it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor.”[10]

In many cases, these limits are not only to be found in the contents of the archive – in my case, maps – but, importantly, also in the physical edifice of the archive itself. For instance, all maps of Palestine before and after the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, some dating back centuries, are labelled “Israel” in the vast collection of the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. (a practice shared with the Royal Geographical Society archives in London). It is not uncommon to find a folder initially labelled “Palestine” crossed out and replaced with “Israel” (figure 3).

Figure 3 Library of Congress Archive Copyright Zena Agha

Such a brash overwrite acts as a synecdoche of the broader Zionist imperial project and its logic of elimination. As Patrick Wolf reminds us, the settler’s impulse is first to erase and eliminate the native, and second, to erect a new colonial society on the stolen land.[11] The archive facilitates the former, the state (and its allies) execute the latter. 

And yet, Palestinians insist on imagining and creating a reality beyond the present. Whether in Palestine or in exile, academics, mapmakers, organizers, and artists have learned to destabilize the archive to conceptualize alternative realities. In my own case, I have used technologies and practices including Photoshop, Risoprint (best described as digital screen printing), collage, embroidery and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software to reinscribe Palestine in cartographic terms. For instance, I geo-referenced a British colonial map from 1935 to depict villages destroyed in the Nakba (figure 4) and the location of Palestinian refugee camps across the region (figure 5). 

Figure 4 Counter-Map of Destroyed Villages

Figure 5 Counter-Map of Refugee Camps Copyright Zena Agha

Since 1948, Palestinians have held onto the memory of destroyed homes and villages through the creation of atlases, maps, memoirs, visual art, books, oral histories, and websites. The right of return for Palestinian refugees and internally displaced people is not just a political solution but also the first step in a process of decolonization. Decolonizing maps involves acknowledging the experience of the colonial subjects (Palestinians) on the one hand, and documenting and exposing the colonial systems and structures (Zionist expansionism) on the other. It requires what David Harvey calls “the geographical imagination” – linking social imagination with a spatial-material consciousness.[12]

While there is valid criticism that counter-maps reproduce or embed existing exclusionary territorial and spatial practices, ongoing counter-mapping efforts demonstrate how Palestinians and their allies are creating a decolonizing cartography beyond simply (re)asserting lines on an existing map.[13] Rather, these efforts put personal and collective memories in spatial terms and incorporate them into a legal and political framework. This includes initiatives and projects such as Palestine Open Maps in 2018, the first open-source mapping project based around historical maps from the British Mandate period, as well as Decolonizing Art and Architecture Residency and Forensic Architecture. This is largely thanks to technological advances in GPS and GIS, which provide a foundation upon which to play, imagine and (re)build in spatial-cartographic terms.

Moreover, the work of artists enables Palestinians to oppose and subvert the hegemonic discourse and assert an alternative vision of liberation and return. Examples include works by Mona Hatoum (“Present Tense” 1996, “Bukhara” 2007), Larissa Sansour (“Nation Estate” 2012, “In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain” 2015) and Amir Zuabi (“Cold Floors” 2021). The current onslaught has seen a wealth of incisive work from younger artists and architects who are creating despite intense repression; see for instance Mariam Tolba (“Map of Palestinian Displacement: Behind Every Infographic is a Million Stories” 2024), Omar El Amine (“The Shahada of the Olive Tree” 2024), Zain Al-Sharaf Wahbeh (“The Image as an Archive” 2024), Tessnim Tolba (“Saharan Winds” 2024) and Nadine Fattaleh (“Materials of Solidarity” 2024 – image 6).  

Figure 6 Materials of Solidarity, Nadine Fattaleh

Crucially, these initiatives are often reinforced by, or juxtaposed with, Palestinian efforts to return to destroyed villages in reality. For instance, the internally displaced inhabitants of villages including IqritAl-Walaja, and Al-Araqib returned decades after their initial expulsion despite the risk of state violence and demolition, in addition to more coordinated events such as the Great March of Return in Gaza from 2018, the Unity Uprising in May 2021 or Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in October 2023. These actions lend credence to Edward Said’s assertion that geography may be “the art of war but can also be the art of resistance if there is a counter-map and a counter-strategy.”[14]

My work both within and beyond the archive examines maps not solely as visual artifacts of a bygone era; rather it is part of a search for blueprints. Clues remain for what a decolonized and liberated future for Palestine and its people could look like – and what beauty there is to find along the way.

Read other articles in this boquet:


Paletine Open Maps by Ahmad Barclay and Majd Al-Shihabi

Settling Shadows: Cartographic Analysis of Settler Colonialism in the West Bank by Zaynab Nemr, Rami Zurayk, Jad Isaac, and Issa Zboun


[1]Puleng Segalo, Einat Manoff and Michelle Fine. ‘Working With Embroideries and Counter-Maps: Engaging Memory and Imagination Within Decolonizing Frameworks’. Journal of Social and Political Psychology,   3. (2015) 342-364. 10.5964/jspp.v3i1.145, 358 

[2] Zena Agha, James Esson, Mark Griffiths. & Mikko Joronen.  Gaza: A decolonial geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers,  49 (2024), e12675. 

[3] Walid, Khalidi, ed. All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948. (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992.) 

[4] Noga Kadman, Erased from space and consciousness: Israel and the depopulated Palestinian villages of 1948, (Indinian; Indiana University Press, 2015)1.

[5] J.B Harley, The new nature of maps: essays in the history of cartography (Johns Hopkins press, 2002) 36.

[6] Harley, The new nature of maps: essays in the history of cartography, 150-1.

[7] Harley, The new nature of maps: essays in the history of cartography, 35. 

[8] Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, Diacritics, 25 (1995), 9-63, 11.

[9] Beshara Doumani, “Archiving Palestine and Palestinians: The Patrimony of Ishan Nimr,” Jerusalem Quarterly (2009), 36.

[10] Saidiya V. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019), xv.

[11] Patrick Wolfe, "Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native," Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006/12/01 2006): 388,https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240.

[12] David Harvey, The 'New' Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession,” Socialist Register, 40 (2004), 63-87.

[13] Jess Bier, Jess Bier, Mapping Palestine, Mapping Israel, (MIT Press, 2017), 68.

[14] Edward W Said, Peace and its discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East peace process (Vintage, 2012), 27.

Special thanks to Scott Walker from the Harvard Map Collection for his assistance with the GIS counter-maps.

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • The Dis-Invention of Gaza

      The Dis-Invention of Gaza

      Traces of this dis-invention persist all over the landscape today. To travel around 1948 lands is to happen upon places that just eighty years ago constituted a civilization and today are levelled: the well crumbling and filled with stagnant water, the pastures overgrown and twisted with cacti, the mosque or school wall collapsed in on itself, on and on. Some people are able to see fragments of these remains, while others remain oblivious, as though they exist in another dimension. In the summer of 2023 in the Eastern Galilee, I would set off in search of one destroyed village, Al-‘Ubaydiyya or Sirin, and discover, quite by chance, others along the way, strung together like beads on a chain. Palestine was wounded but still there, breathing and growing patiently, in plain sight. 

Jan 27, 2025 Lebanon

Özge Yaka, Fighting for the River: Gender, Body and Agency in Environmental Struggles (New Texts Out Now)

Özge Yaka, Fighting for the River: Gender, Body and Agency in Environmental Struggles (University of California Press, 2023).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Özge Yaka (OY): After focusing on state theory and political economy in my formative academic years, including my PhD, I needed a change of orientation. I wanted to spend my remaining intellectual energy understanding and analyzing social movements that are challenging the hegemony I had been working on for a long time.

Environmental movements in general and the anti-HEPP (Hydroelectric Power Plant) movement in particular derived my interest for two main reasons. The first reason was that environmental movements were one of the few popular and effective movements (together with the feminist movement) in the increasingly authoritarian and repressive political environment of Turkey. I was also sensing the central importance of grassroots environmental movements not only against the “bulldozer capitalism” (see Erdem Evren’s Bulldozer Capitalism) that the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) was promoting with endless (and endlessly destructive) energy and construction projects—but also globally in the face of the ecological crisis the extractive-neoliberal capitalism accelerates (and hence, is unable to produce effective responses). This was my Marxist political economist self, making politically strategic research decisions. 

What had opened new horizons for me and forced me to write this book though was my curiosity toward the motivations of people—not of movement activists and professionals, the usual suspects that I closely associate with—but the “real people”, the villagers who are resisting HEPPs so effectively, especially the peasant women who are at the forefront of the struggle. I was truly curious about their reasons, determination, and commitment that empowers them to resist not only the private companies but also the state and its repressive apparatus. 

This second reason made me conduct extensive ethnographic research, something that I have not done before, in many villages and valleys in three different regions of Turkey in which the HEPPs are concentrated. In the end, what I observed in the Black Sea Region, especially my conversations with women, made me write this book. Why? Because as far as I was concerned, their voices—their narratives, their motivations to resist HEPPs and protect their rivers—were not heard in the ever-growing literature on environmental movements and environmental justice within political ecology, human geography, anthropology, or sociology. So, I had to come up with a way to make them heard, which took the shape of developing a novel body-centered, phenomenological approach that relates women’s everyday sensory-effective connections to rivers (and to non-human entities and environments in general) and their political agency. Establishing this relation, I conceptually engaged with the body, as well as emotions, memory, and place.

Non-human entities and environments are not only resources for us—we live with them, interact with them, and feel our “flesh” only in connection with them.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

OY: This book is about the resistance of Black Sea women against HEPPs in Turkey. But it is also about the environmental struggles of our age in general, and about what they reveal in terms of our more-than-human existence. 

It argues, very briefly, that grassroots environmental struggles cannot be reduced to purely economic motivations (sustaining livelihoods) or cultural and political contexts (struggles for political autonomy and sovereignty and/or secrecy, cosmology, and religious belief). These are, of course, powerful motivations for many struggles around the globe. I also observe these motivations in Turkey’s Mediterranean region (where subsistence agriculture is dependent on irrigation and hence river waters are instrumental for sustaining livelihoods) and the Kurdish region (where the struggle against HEPPs is embedded in the broader struggle for Kurdish autonomy), respectively. But this is not the whole story. That is why I focused on the Black Sea case—to demonstrate that our everyday, bodily, sensory, and affective connections with the non-human world function as media of political agency. This phenomenological connection, which is largely invisible, is the basis for our relationship with the place, engenders body memory, and conditions what we call selfhood and identity. What makes this largely ignored, flattened-out connection suddenly visible, and even vital, is the threat of environmental dispossession. In the face of such a threat, the routine becomes visible, the mundane becomes special—and the rivers become an urgent cause, so urgent that one puts her life on the line for it. In a way the threat of losing the rivers forces what Husserl called “phenomenological reduction”—the method of bracketing our positive knowledge and representations to return to the description of our lived experience.

I know that phenomenology is not normally the way to go if you study environmental movements and resistance. And I did not do it because I was a phenomenologist, or this was my chosen methodological standpoint when I started—not at all. I was neither familiar with phenomenology nor with the work of Merleau-Ponty and feminist phenomenologists who build on him. The whole framework emerged very slowly, and painstakingly, in relation to the empirical data. It was my conversations with the East Black Sea women, their stories and narratives, that forced me to engage with the literature on the body, and I arrived at Merleau-Ponty and contemporary feminist and eco-phenomenology through corporeal feminism. Grounded theorists would be proud. As a result, the book turned out to be a truly transdisciplinary venture that builds on and thinks with various fields and disciplines such as feminist theory, political ecology, social movement studies, critical geography, environmental humanities, affect studies, memory studies, actor-network theory, new materialism, posthumanism, phenomenology of body and water, theories of justice and environmental justice, indigenous studies, and Turkish studies, to name a few.  

I went in such a conceptual direction because the field had taught me that we cannot grasp the core of the grassroots environmental struggles of our age—which are, in my opinion, struggles for more-than-human coexistence—without grasping the ecological embeddedness of our social existence and the more-than-human character of our lifeworld (of our everyday lived experiences, practices and encounters). Non-human entities and environments are not only resources for us—we live with them, interact with them, and feel our “flesh” only in connection with them. They are central to our social existence and place-based lifeworld. This idea of a more-than-human lifeworld stands at the core of the notion of socio-ecological justice that I develop towards the end of the book. By introducing this notion, I aim to intervene in the environmental justice literature by framing human-non-human relationality as a matter of justice. In other words, environmental justice is not only about the just distribution of environmental goods and bads or about the recognition of certain cultures and identities—it is also about the ethics of coexistence and the relational nature of the social and ecological realms (as many Indigenous communities and struggles around the world have been teaching us).

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

OY: It could be seen as a radical rupture if you consider my PhD thesis and first publications as my previous work. I remember sending a picture of my work desk in Paris to my boyfriend, who lived in Berlin. On my desk, you could see Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, Judith Butler’s Senses of the Subject, Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, and Rosi Braidotti’s Patterns of Dissonance. I added a note asking, “There was an orthodox Marxist doing political economy, what happened to her?”. He responded, “Old Karl keeping guard while simultaneously getting his beard queered,” in reference to the framed Karl Marx portrait with a glittery beard on my desk.

This research indeed transformed me drastically. My methodological perspective, conceptual orientation, and even my discipline have changed. I started as a Marxist political economist with a PhD in Sociology and ended up as a feminist geographer who works with phenomenology! But still, some things have not changed like the old Karl keeping guard. In the first chapter of my book, I analyze the political-economic (and political-ecologic) context in which the anti-HEPP struggles flourish. And I think this analysis is essential even when you mainly discuss the relationship between somatic experience and political agency. So, the basis is there, I just went on to build something else on it. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

OY: Scholars of political ecology, environmental humanities, and phenomenology. But also social scientists in general. And feminists. And, maybe even more importantly, students. Activist-minded young people who are interested in understanding and analyzing the world we live in and in the struggles that aim to change it.

The impact I would like the book to have is twofold. On the one hand, I want it to act as a vehicle to amplify the voices of the women I talked to. I want people to know about them, their grievances, their struggle, and their individual and collective stories. And also their more-than-human lifeworld. I want the book to transport people into the East Black Sea villages to make them feel what it means to live with a river—what sensations, bodily affects, and emotions such a life engenders. On the other hand, I want the book to have an impact on a more conceptual level in demonstrating how we can think about environmental struggles in a different way, as struggles for coexistence, and how we can put seemingly very different theories and approaches in dialogue to analyze activism and political agency. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

OY: I prioritize presenting my work in public settings these days while I continue working on the themes I discussed in the book in a different, more accessible language. I also aim to expand my focus to read and write about the environmental movements in the wider Middle Eastern geography.

I also am working on a personal project—a book on motherhood that discusses my own lived experience in close dialogue with feminist and psychoanalytical theories. Another project is writing a book on phenomenology and body in a more accessible language in the future.

 

Excerpt from the book (from Chapter Four, “Place, Body, Memory: River Waters and the Immanence of the Past in the Present,” pages 120 to 125) 

Memories of the Body, Memories of the Place: Retrieving the Past through Embodied Sensory Interactions with River Waters 

Everyday, even banal personal memories of persons, events, and places remain underrepresented within the field of memory studies, which is mainly occupied with collective-social memories. Memories of everyday life and experiences, however, are central to our sense of self and our attachment to place. When we talk about memory, we refer to a mental capacity—to remember and reclaim, to retain and retrieve. We mostly overlook the ways in which this act of recollection occurs within and through the corporeal-material interaction of our bodies with our environments. Bodies are not only central to how we experience the world; they are also fundamental to how we store and reclaim those experiences as memories. Memory, in this sense, can be defined as “a process of encoding and storing records of experience which can be retrieved or which re-emerge in subsequent practice”, which involves lived bodies, things, and environments situated in place. 

The concept of body memory, on the other hand, is largely associated with implicit memory, what Merleau-Ponty defined as “knowledge in the hands.” Body memory, however, is not limited to this habitual type, which is widely discussed through well-known examples of riding a bike or playing piano as implicit recollection of pre-reflexive knowledge that is embodied in and expressed through physical activities. Body memory entails a broader range of memories of “being bodily in the world” as “instances of remembering places, events and people with and in the lived body”. Casey is in line with Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body-subject when he defines body memory as a “trace,” as “a survival of the past, an enjambment” in his published course notes. The past, in other words, exists in the present in bodies, through body memory. In the case of the East Black Sea Region, corporeal survival of the past, in the bodies of people and in the waters of the river, is constitutive of their political subjectivities as they protest against hydropower plant development. 

Thomas Fuchs maintains that corporeal experiences anchored in body memory “spread out and connect with the environment like an invisible network, which relates us to things and to people.” Body memories extend to spaces, places, and situations. They are very much entangled with the tangible materiality of our place-world. Memory is, then, like perception, not the act of remembering that occurs in an isolated mind; it is a complex intercorporeal and situational process whereby places, bodies, and things re-enact the past. It is not limited to a set of abstract recollections insofar as the past is not represented, but is re-enacted, as Bergson once put it, through body memory, through the everyday sensory relationship with river waters. Thus, we access the past not so much through images and words, but primarily through immediate experience and action, in place. 

The example both Thomas Fuchs and Hartmut Rosa invoke is the famous madeleine episode in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The episode, as is well known, illustrates how a piece of tea-soaked cake brings complex memories back. It demonstrates how familiar sensations aroused by certain spaces, places, situations, and bodily encounters can function as memory cores that recall and release enclosed memories under suitable circumstances. Fuchs discusses this in terms of “situational” and “intercorporeal” memory. I encountered various examples of situational and intercorporeal memory when I asked villagers about their motivations behind opposing hydropower projects. Particularly in the case of middle-aged and older residents, the memories of their childhood and their parents often came up. Those memories often involved their bodily-sensory connection with river waters. Semra explained to me how her memories and personal history are inextricably bound up with the river waters in front of her house:

I see my mother and my father by this [Arılı] river; every time I look at the river I remember them. …We are keen on our history. How could I give up on my river?

The first sentence of Semra’s statement clarifies how memory cores work. The visual memory of her mother and her father by the river is released every time she sees the river in the present. 

 ……

“Senses are powerful sources of body memory,” Susan Steward tells us, due to the body’s capacity to carry memories of senses somatically. Oftentimes our sensory memories, which are embodied registers of our encounters with the sensible world, involve more than one sense in complex interaction. As they are anchored in place, memories of senses are situational memories, to use Fuchs’s typology. And, as in the example of the madeleine, different senses participate in various combinations in situational memory. Situational memory emerges through the interaction of bodies, places, and things under certain circumstances, and reflects the multisensory character of those everyday interactions. Let us take the example of Selime, whom I mentioned above. Selime, who was around sixty years old at the time we talked, told me that she was ready to die to protect the river, and pointed to a spot several hundred meters ahead along the riverbed: 

Look, there is a waterfall over there. We used to take a break here with my parents when we were on our way to the plateau [yayla]. We would always eat and sleep next to the river during our journey.

Every time Selime sees that waterfall, or walks again along the river to the plateau, every time she sleeps and wakes up—as her house is located by the river—to the sound of it, she remembers her childhood, her parents, and the intimacy she shared with them, which are anchored in place and, most of all, in the very flow of the river. 

Memories of the past localized in the body become the present. For Selime, it is the multisensory body memories, as well as her embodied experiences of river waters in the present, that retrieve those memories, that connect her, now middle-aged, to rivers and to her long-gone childhood and ancestors. Ayten Aydın, from Arhavi (EBR), also talks about her childhood memories when she is asked about her opposition to HEPPs. Her memories are also multisensory body memories of river waters: 

Our mothers worked in the fields. We, the children, used to go down to the river and spend all day there. The river was our playground.  We used to drink from it, eat our meals by it, and wash ourselves with its waters. We will fight to the end, and we won’t give up on our river. 

 ……

The past leaks in to the present with the flow of the river, as childhood experiences are retrieved within the constant everyday interaction and sensory connection with its waters. The loss of the river might not mean the loss of memories per se, as mental constructs. But it means the loss of the “intimate relation between memory and place, realized through the lived body,” and the loss of the “immanence of the past in the present”.