Archiving the alive: Our obsession with the past and the urgent need for futurism

It is understandable, our Arab needs to clutch tight and dig deep into what once was. On one hand, our Arab past was absolutely glorious, achieved, and cultured, especially when compared with a nonsensical today. On the other hand, to make sense of what feels nonsensical, we have to examine how we got here. How did we arrive? We assume the archives must hold the answer, any answer. 

In the Palestinian case, the need for archives becomes more urgent. To archive is to preserve memory, to resist erasure. However, the duality becomes undeniable, the more we archive our existence, the existence of living people, the more we participate in the notion of being erased. To archive, in the Palestinian case, begins by an acknowledgement of the erasure, and then, ironically, taking part in documenting what we believe will eventually be gone. Are we archiving alive people? 

This is the deal: archiving those who exist still, demands a covert, perhaps unconscious belief in their ultimate ceasing, an affirmation almost, even if not portrayed or intended; to deal, we aim, at the very least, to preserve what’s bound to vanish. We are archiving Palestinians as though they are already gone. It’s a western tale as old as time, internalised and played out in the name of resistance. A form of spiritual warfare that insists: “You have no future, forever haunted by a cruel past.” We are reenacting the very colonial logic that seeks to confine us to museums of the past—by placing ourselves there first. It’s a cruel realisation indeed, but our resistance is shaped by the very frameworks of the oppressor. Violence disguised as preservation. 

This is colonial logic: after it’s finished with the uprooting, it collects what remains in a white box, it tickets visitors, it writes anthropological studies. It preserves the natives for history books while erasing their political futurity. Colonised people become merely an ephemera, courses of study in western academia, and it’s happening in real time. The Palestinian Museum in Berziet, The Museum of the Palestinian People in Washington DC, Palestine Museum in Connecticut, now branching into Edinburgh, and hundreds more of well-meaning digital archives, exhibitions, and cultural projects following the recipe of white colonisers. There’s a growing tendency to frame Palestinian existence as memory, loss, and elegy, rather than an ongoing fight for freedom. People whose memories are bred into the hearts of younger generations through oral storytelling or grandmother’s tears, become artefacts institutionalised by white guilt. 

The late Walid Daqqa, Palestinian revolutionary and novelist who was imprisoned for 38 years, once said in an interview: “I do not want to return to the Palestine of the past, Mandatory Palestine, where the cactus, pomegranates, and water mills are, because simply it only exists in memory. When Palestine becomes romantic, the Right of Return becomes utopian, and this romanticisation of return distances us from return itself. I want to return to the Palestine of the future.” 

In reality, the Israeli occupation is not merely systematic apartheid and the demolition of land, but an occupation of time. It systemises you to exist only once, only at a point in time. It folds you up in a tomb and makes sure you build the tombstone. Futurism opposes the colonial project, it screams: the story is yet to be concluded, it screams: the future is thinkable. In the words of thinker Kodwo Eshun in regards to Afrofuturism: “It has been necessary to assemble countermemories that contest the colonial archive.” 

We must envision a future. Futurism is a demand to be considered, to be alive down the line. It is a refusal to accept loss as destiny. Futurism is possibility, and possibility is perpetual. The Palestinian cause, at its core, is the recognition of a future where we belong in real time and not just through the archival folders of history. We must resist the urge to historicize our struggle before it’s over. 

But we must be cautious, there is a second entrapment: a western future – technocratic, capitalist, alienated. We must imagine a future, not adopt one. A future specific to us, how and who we want to be. Not how we used to be or are used to be or how we would be in comparison to the rest, but our very own kind of futurism. We need to imagine a future, our future. What do we look like driving down our river towards our sea?