“Nevertheless, we cannot take this as a reason to stay silent. We have to break the state of denial with which the world confronts us. We shall tell the tale the way it has to be told. We shall tell our personal histories one by one and shall recount our little stories as we have lived them and as our souls and eyes and imaginations remember them. We shall not let history be the history of great events, of kings and officers and books on dusty bookshelves. We shall recount what happened to us personally and the life stories of our bodies and our senses, which to the naïve will seem trivial, incoherent, and meaningless. The meaning is etched upon each individual woman, man, child, tree, house, window, and on every grave before which the national anthem will not be sung and which the historian’s blind pen will not describe. We shall retell history as a history of our fears, our anxieties, our patience, our pillow lusts, and improvised courage. As a history of the making of an evening meal, of stories of love, innocent and otherwise, of emotions hidden from the grown-ups. As a history of the goat bombed by planes in its field and of the heroism of the child who peed in his pants out of fear but suddenly felt brave and stood, wide-eyed, before the long dark line of tanks. As a history of our secret and public desires, of our jokes and our laughter, of “a wink from her eye at the wedding and the boy went crazy.” A history of all the journeys we have made and all the distances we have crossed or been forbidden to cross and of every straightforward, ordinary trip between two cities or two situations. A history of our making fun of our leadership and our mockery of their decorations, medals, and military ranks. A history of the obstinacy of our bodies and of our souls, no record of which is to be found in archives or registries. We shall make the two-hour electricity cuts to our houses important events because they are important events. We shall make the glance of the child at his friend’s empty desk in Class Four a chapter in his workbook on the living and the dead. We shall enter in the records a story of love destroyed by soldiers, or the head of the family, or the stupidity of the lovers themselves, so as to draw the world’s attention to the loss of a love story that concerns the world. I shall record our sitting on the wall of Acre and eating a meal of fish in Christo’s restaurant like any tourist who has come from far away. I shall record the history of this fish meal too, and here I am, writing it. I shall make of every feeling that ever shook my heart an historic event and I shall write it.”
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