Partition (تقسیم)

We often fail to realize how critically important sound is to archival documentaries. Partition demonstrates that in order to reach deep into the heart of memory, the limits of images must be surpassed. We see the recovery of the colonial archive of the British mandate of Palestine (from 1917 to 1948), pictures of an already oppressed people featuring an audio track that pulls from oblivion the testimonies, songs and poems of people who decades later would end up in refugee camps in Lebanon. Diana Allan, co-director of the Nakba Archive, an organization that collects the oral history of displaced Palestinian people, offers a harrowing essay showing the perverse cyclical dynamic that history has in store for the colonized. People who, despite the incessant attempts to silence them, will nevertheless always continue to modulate their poetics. (JHE)