#fucking proust madeleines but make it postcolonial or whatever

[fursasaida]

I’m going back through my scanned files from the archives of the French Mandate to remind myself what the hell is in there and it’s so wild. like I’m looking at a map for a proposed electric tramway for Aleppo from 1919. and the map is beautiful, in a way that maps made today simply never are. and I have the sense memory of unfolding it and photographing it. I can see how the light from I know exactly which window is hitting it and surmise what time of day I scanned this file. and the documents about this proposal make it so painfully clear how colonial everything happening here is. and this is obvious, of course, but it still hits you in the details. and this is both useful and frustrating for me because I do not have access to the archives of the Syrian government, so I have to go via France and diaspora records and newspapers, and I don’t want to be writing a history of colonial relations--that’s genuinely not what my dissertation is about--but of course it’s unavoidable, and this too is obvious, as is the hunger for what isn’t there, and it doesn’t make it any less pressing as a feeling. and I am also at the same time thinking about my little crew of grad student buds from that archive in Nantes and how I should have slept with one of them when I had the chance and whether I should contact two of them next time I’m back in Boston.