Algiers
The past does not stop. Over and again, we fail to recapture it in memory. Of course, we have history books and think that this is where the past is recorded as memory. But memory is the product of the present, and the present is not a station where memories pause, unchanging. This is why we often try to recall the past in other ways.
Goenawan Mohamad
March 29, 2021
ON March 19, 1962, the war in Algiers came to an end. After the almost eight-year-long savage armed conflict, Algiers emerged as an independent republic. France—angrily and reluctantly—relinquished this territory in northern Africa which it had colonized since 1830.
But the past does not stop. Over and again, we fail to recapture it in memory. Of course, we have history books and think that this is where the past is recorded as memor
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