Resisting Erasure

We are yet again navigating times where the powers that be seek to erase whatever does not suit their narrative, whatever escapes their control.

What often begins with the banning of books never ends there, but rather expands to erase speech, a culture, history, people.

While erasure may not always lead to full annihilation, its aims are, at the very least, to make a group of people invisible, isolated and powerless, and as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “when you are erased from the argument and purged from the narrative, you do not exist.”

Erasure takes many forms but almost always occurs in plain sight. The divide and rule strategy, so present in today’s political rhetoric, aims to erase community. Policies of integration are a form of erasure when an immigrant’s past is of no value. Indigenous children in Australia, Canada and the United States were stolen from their families to be assimilated into Western culture, their identities erased.

The Nazi Holocaust tried to erase Jewish people, as well as Roma, Sinti, and Black people, people with disabilities, gay people, anyone who was considered an ‘inferior race.’

Settler colonialism, which continues to this day, is one of the most violent and extreme forms of erasure as it often aims to remove people from their lands and disappear them, either through forced displacement or genocide.

Whether subtle or genocidal, erasure begins by targeting culture: Book banning, speech censuring, gagging orders, weaponization of language, prohibition of gatherings, defunding, cancelling, shadow-banning, punishing (at times, killing) the messengers. And because it initially only targets artists, writers, those on the margins, we don’t notice it is happening until its impact has taken root. 

The erasure of culture is the beginning of dehumanisation. Culture is what makes us human: our stories, our art, our movements, our experiences, our emotions; our history. So once we erase what makes a group of people human, they are easier to destroy.

However, we can all resist erasure. Because culture is not created by the powerful, the censors, the wealthy. And it is not created by legacy media or the big entertainment producers. It cannot be bought. It cannot be replaced by AI.

Culture is emergence. It is the pulse of our times. It appears from the edges, the margins, from the cracks. You cannot control it, manage it, or business-plan it. This is why culture is dangerous: it is where ideas are formed, it is where freedom is practised. As Coates says, the storyteller is a threat because through words, they can erode the claims of the powerful.

But what can we do when erasure is too far advanced?

Gaza is a prime example of what total erasure looks like: Bibliocide. Libricide. Scholasticide. Domicide. Ecocide, and finally genocide. Eyal Weizman, of Forensic Architecture, says the destruction we are witnessing is beyond anything we have seen. He calls it ungrounding, where every trace of life of a place has been removed and has been returned to a natural landscape. It is an attempt at erasing the past, the present and the future.

Forensic Architecture is responding to a call by Edward Said for a ‘counter-cartography,’ where cartography is usually the tool of the colonial or imperial powers, by inverting that cartographic gaze, and through the collection of data related to attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, they are constructing a new map of what has been unfolding in Gaza.

“Ungrounding requires us to understand that a genocide unfolds upon a specific territory, and it demands of us to learn about that territory and its history, its environment, its climate, and the kind of soil that exists within it,” Weizman says.

We must keep in mind that erasure cannot succeed unless it is accompanied by meticulously constructed myth-making and propaganda, held together by a system that includes politicians, editors, teachers and social media platforms. But this is hard to maintain, and it can never go on forever. As Coates says, lying is hard, but the truth is easy. 

And like water, it moves, shape shifts, and will eventually find its way out into the open.

We can all contribute to this process. And it begins by never settling for simple narratives and always looking beyond state-sanctioned truth. And we must celebrate those unsung heroes who are quietly working away to resist erasure, preserve memory, and record history: the archivists, the librarians, the storytellers, the oral historians.

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Words, Veronica Yates and illustration, Miriam Sugranyes.

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Resistance

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‘A Cartography of Genocide, Israeli’s Conduct in Gaza since October 2023’ by Forensic Architecture includes:
- An interactive cartographic platform: ‘A Cartography of Genocide’
- An 827-page text report: ‘A spatial analysis of the Israeli military’s conduct in Gaza since October 2023’.

The Banned Book Club, in the United States has made books that were banned available digitally: https://uniteagainstbookbans.org/banned_book_club_national/. Readers can now freely access over 1,300 titles that have been forcibly removed from schools and libraries.

Librarians and Archivists with Palestine have collected data about Israeli damage to archives, libraries, and museums in Gaza between October 2023–January 2024. You can read the preliminary report here: https://librarianswithpalestine.org/gaza-report-2024/‍
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Domicide: From Bureaucracy to Bullets: Research on Extreme Domicide and the Right to Home: https://www.domicide.org/.

The Beirut Urban Lab is a collaborative and interdisciplinary research space. The Lab produces scholarship on urbanization by documenting and analyzing ongoing transformation processes in Lebanon and its region's natural and built environments: 

https://www.beiruturbanlab.com/‍

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Syria / Yemen / Sudan and Ukraine: Mnemonic specialise in developing accessible and long term preservation strategies and open source tools to archive at-risk digital information valuable to journalists and human rights defenders. Their four standalone archives – Syrian Archive, Yemeni Archive, Sudanese Archive, and Ukrainian Archive have preserved over ten million records.

Gaza: Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit exposes Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip through the medium of photos and videos posted online by Israeli soldiers themselves during the year long conflict. The I-Unit has built up a database of thousands of videos, photos and social media posts. Where possible it has identified the posters and those who appear.View here: https://www.ajiunit.com/investigation/gaza/‍

Gaza: The Syria Justice and Accountability Centre has chosen to use this space to provide resources that can assist efforts to document violations of international humanitarian law and support any future accountability processes beyond Syria:  https://syriaaccountability.org/how-to-document-atrocities-in-the-gaza-war/‍

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‘The Children Speak: Forced Assimilation of Indigenous Children through Canadian Residential Schools.’ UNESCO. In 2007, the Supreme Court of Canada created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to investigate the history and legacy of Canada’s residential school system. The TRC’s six-year investigation created a unique body of evidence: approximately four million historical documents and almost 7,000 Survivor testimonies recording the systemic social indoctrination of Indigenous children.View the interactive map here.

References

The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

‘Erasing Palestinian Life in Gaza: Israel’s Genocide Exposed | Francesca Albanese & Eyal Weizman,’ Palestine Deep Dive. Watch here.

‘Searching for Truth,’ Eyal Weizman, World Economic Forum. Watch here.

'Genocide as colonial erasure,' Report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese. 1 October 2024, A /79/384. Available here.

‘Book Burning,’ Holocaust Encyclopedia. See here. 

Book Ban Data: https://www.britannica.com/topic/book-banning

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