Reflections on Bir'im: History, Memory, and the Archive

Abstract This essay reflects upon the archival curatorial project surrounding the history and memory of Kufur Bir'im, a Maronite village in the Upper Galilee (near the Lebanese-Israeli border), through official documents, photographs, maps, diaries, poetry, testimonies, and the contemporary artworks of Hana Farah Kufur Birim, a Palestinian Israeli artist whose family roots lie in the Kufur Bir'im history. The essay reflects on how that project unfolded and its significance for the essay's author as an artist and art historian to examine the displacement of the village dwellers through a process of promises never fulfilled, and hopes to return never realized. By juxtaposing the official state discourse with the intimate registers of private letters, diaries, and artistic expression, the project resists the reduction of Bir'im's story to a single authoritative narrative. Rather, it foregrounds multiplicity and intertextuality, drawing on theoretical insights, especially from Jacques Derrida's reflection of his own Jewish background and heritage, to situate the archive as both a site of occlusion, as well as new insights. The article also draws upon Palestinian Israeli author Anton Shammas, whose language of writing is Hebrew, to call to “un-Jew” the Hebrew as a potential position to reexamine the politics of language as an example of decolonial practice. Ultimately, Bir'im serves as a metonym for contemporary struggles, demonstrating how the visual, textual, and material traces of the archive create spaces for mourning, survival, and political imagination.