Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays, 1982-1999

by Ammiel Alcalay, Juan Goytisolo (Introduction)

Voted one of the Top 25 Books of 1999 by the Village Voice.

"An outstanding anthology of essays surveying the complexities of Mediterranean cultures; the diverse, changing space of the Balkans, Middle East, and North Africa—areas of diasporas, dislocations, and genocidal exterminations provoked by nationalism and religious fanaticism. Of special interest are his observations and analysis of the Israeli/Palestinian confrontation, Arab/Jewish poetics, and Jewish identity in America."—Midwest Book Review

Table of Contents

Local Politics: The Background as Foreword Ammiel Alcalay
Acknowledgments
Five Hundred Years After: What Was Left Unsaid about Sepharad
Juan Goytisolo

PRELUDES: AN OPENING
weighing the losses, like stones in your hand'
Atonement

OF BOOKS AND CITIES/ THE JOURNEY
My Mediterranean
The Quill's Embroidery: Untangling a Tradition
The Quill's Embroidery: Poetry, Tradition, and the Postmodern'
Paris / New York / Jerusalem: The Unscheduled Flight of Edmond Jabes and Jacques Derrida
Perplexity Index
Desert Solitaire: On Edmond Jabes
For Edouard Roditi
Behind the Scenes: Before After Jews and Arabs

FORBIDDEN TERRITORIES, PROMISED LANDS
On Arabesques
After the Last Sky
Who's Afraid of Mahmoud Darwish?
Israel and the Levant: Wounded Kinship's Last Resort'
Forbidden Territory, Promised Lands
In True Colors
Culture without a Country
Too Much Past
The State of the Gulf: Abdelrahman Munif and Hanan al-Shaykh
Our Memory Has No Future: On Etel Adnan
The war was ending, the diasporas beginning'

DISPATCHES
A Stitch in Time
Court Report: Prolonging a Farce
The Trial: A Real Farce
Ay, de mi aljama': Palestinians and Israelis Meet, in Spain!
Israel / Palestine 101: A Letter to Robert Creeley
Quality Control
Ushering in the New Order: Repercussions from the Gulf War Reflections at the End of 1992
Why Israel?

THE RETURN: VARIATIONS ON A THEME
Understanding Revolution
Exploding Identities: Notes on Ethnicity and Literary History
Speaking with Forked Tongues, or Parables of Eq

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

292 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1999

About the author

Ammiel Alcalay (b. 1956) is poet, translator, critic, and scholar who teaches at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of, among other books, After Jews and Arabs (1993); the cairo notebooks (1993); Memories of Our Future (1999); from the warring factions (2002); Scrapmetal (2007); and a little history (2012). He was one of the initiators of the Poetry Is News Coalition, and helped to organize the Olson Now project. He has recently launched Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a publishing venture whose mission is to retrieve and make available key texts falling widely under the rubric of the New American Poetry.