Oscar Espinosa/Demotix. All rights reserved.
There is so much loss and sorrow, writes Nicci Gerrard, author of The Twilight Hour, in a July piece for The Guardian about her advocacy work on behalf of dementia patients and their caregivers. Gerrard describes this suffering—the loss of an identity that’s rooted in mutual cognition, the erasure of history, the insidious, irreversible attack on knowing and being—as a “blasted landscape” that makes us ache. “Who are we when we no longer have our memories?” she asks.
Many of us know that familial ache, without ever thinking about archaeology and war. This existential erasure, though, is akin to the collective loss that Syrians—like Iraqis, Afghans and others before them—experience in the aftermath of Islamic State’s most recent attack on the Temple of Bel, or the week before at the UNESCO world heritage site at Baal Shamin. That “blasted landscape” in Palmyra is the latest hole in the Syrian narrative, and in our shared understanding of human history and civilisation.
